The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 17 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s illegal deportations are running into more trouble. A federal judge just gave him a serious brushback. He declared there’s probable cause to find the administration in criminal contempt of court over their removal of dozens of Venezuelans to the maximum security prison in El Salvador. Meanwhile, a Democratic senator went to El Salvador to check on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was also sent to this prison illegally by Trump, and got a shocking answer. On top of all that, a good new polling analysis shows that on immigration, Trump actually isn’t on firm ground. We’re going to unravel all of this with New Republic staff writer Melissa Gira Grant, who has a piece arguing that for the Trump administration, the sadism driving the deportations is the point. Thanks for coming on, Melissa.
Melissa Gira Grant: Thanks, Greg.
Sargent: This new ruling comes in response to the Trump administration’s removals of dozens of Venezuelans pursuant to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—a grotesque absurdity in and of itself. Judge Boasberg excoriated the administration for defying an earlier ruling against them by continuing to deport the Venezuelans in defiance of a court order—and he threatened to hold contempt proceedings if officials don’t give these people a chance to defend themselves in court. Melissa, what did we see here exactly?
Gira Grant: If you remember, there was a court hearing in which the judge verbally told the Department of Justice, the Trump administration, You cannot deport people right now to El Salvador. If there are planes in the air, turn them around. And lo and behold, there were planes in the air, and they didn’t turn them around. In fact, [they] joked about how they didn’t do that, made various excuses that don’t really hold any legal water like, Well, once the planes were in international waters, we can’t do that. None of this is credible. We’ve been waiting for the judge to weigh in because this was a pretty flagrant abuse of power. They came back and tried to say, Well, an order given verbally is not as strong as an order given in writing. I’m not surprised that this judge went as hard as they did in saying, We could actually hold you in criminal contempt, you have to comply with this court now, because what the Trump administration did here was so flagrant; [it’s] just treating the entire thing like it was a joke.
So I’m glad to see some pushback. The question is ... This hasn’t happened very often. Steve Vladeck, legal expert, said that this is something that’s done “once in a blue moon.” I don’t really have a map here for what we can expect. Are we going to get depositions? Are we going to see Trump himself or someone from the Department of Justice held in contempt? I don’t know what this will look like, but it’s important that they did it.
Sargent: For sure. And I think part of this is that the judge is commanding the administration to allow these Venezuelans a chance to defend themselves in court, correct?
Gira Grant: That’s another thing that’s completely unprecedented. First of all, the way that our immigration court proceedings work in this country is that it’s outside the context of criminal court. It’s treated as a separate administrative court; that’s why folks don’t have access to the right to counsel that anyone else would in a criminal court setting. We already have situations [where] some of the people who have been picked up as college student activists are now flown to places like Louisiana—very far from where they live and where their lawyers are—and are doing these remote court hearings. So I don’t know if that’s what they imagine: that we’re somehow going to have a remote link up from this prison in El Salvador as people in immigration detention in the U.S. have right now to defend themselves. I don’t know if it looks like bringing them back, given what the administration is saying about other people they’ve been told to bring back. I don’t know. I don’t want to be a pessimist, but I think it is very difficult to imagine what their day in court looks like right now from where we are at.
Sargent: This all strikes me as a fiasco for Trump. You have the Supreme Court, which essentially ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. The Supreme Court, however, is leaving itself a little wiggle room by saying, We don’t know whether this requires them to effectuate his return. Some people think the Supreme Court is setting itself up with a way to essentially let Trump get away with breaking the law at the end of the day. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but here James Boasberg—the judge who excoriated the administration—is clearly trying to force the issue, if somewhat carefully. He’s trying to force the administration to choose between open and outright defiance of the court and following the court. And neither of those options is good for Trump. Can you talk about that?
Gira Grant: Yeah, you would think it would have been so easy—just speaking about the Abrego Garcia case for a moment—to bring him back, right? They’ve made a mistake. They weren’t contesting that they made a mistake. Now they’re trying to pretend that they were justified—but for a moment, it looked like there was no contest coming from the administration. We made a mistake here. That they chose not to do that, that they chose to dig in on that makes me think that they are probably just going to keep digging in across the board. I don’t really see an alternative for them. They do not admit that they’re wrong; they are just pushing this very single narrative that these are all criminal terrorists. And where do you go from there? Once you said that about someone, do you accept that person coming back into the United States? I don’t see them being able to get out of this keeping up that rhetoric.
I feel like the courts are the last gasp here—and perhaps people pushing on the courts to get something that looks like an administration official admitting wrongdoing on the record, an opportunity to hold someone in contempt and potentially face charges for that. The hearing on Tuesday in Maryland in the Abrego Garcia case where you had enough people outside that the people inside the courtroom could hear them cheering for him and supporting him—that’s really important right now. Also, [it’s important] that the courts know that people are watching them, that the courts know that we expect this of them: to hold this administration accountable with whatever tools they have. Those things have to go hand in hand right now.
Sargent: That’s such a crucial point. And by the way, I think someone else is listening to those crowds. It’s Democrats who are also being told, You know what? You’ve got to stand up here too. So you have Democrats finding their spine a bit on this issue. Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland went to El Salvador on Wednesday to check on Abrego Garcia, who was, again, removed illegally due to what the administration calls an “error.” Van Hollen was denied access. The Salvadoran vice president told him that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to keep Abrego Garcia in this prison—and that’s it. He wouldn’t allow the senator to speak to him on the phone. Listen to this from Van Hollen.
Chris Van Hollen (audio voiceover): So I asked the vice president: If Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime and the U.S. courts have found that he was illegally taken from the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CECOT? And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador, the government of El Salvador, to keep him at CECOT.
Sargent: Melissa, what do you make of what Van Hollen was told by this Salvadoran?
Gira Grant: It’s so honest it’s almost refreshing. It’s not that different than what we heard from Bukele, honestly, in the White House a few days ago. No one is pretending this is anything but the El Salvadorian administration doing [it at] the whim of Donald Trump. No one’s contesting that.
One of the other important things that Van Hollen said in his press conference was that JD Vance, vice president, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Trump himself have been lying to you about this man. They lied to you when they said he was charged with a crime; they lied to you when they said he was an MS-13. All of that is a lie and everything that has followed is a cover up of that lie. And they’ve abducted his constituent. I think there’s a lot of power behind him going to El Salvador and demanding that they produce his constituent or least let him talk on the phone with him to see if he’s healthy.
A lot of people are really scared, honestly, that something has happened to him, that that’s why he’s not being made available to people at the same time as we have Republicans going to that prison and posing for selfies—much as Kristi Noem, the DHS head, did in that horrible, horrible video. It’s telling that they are getting access to the prison to engage in that kind of propaganda, and the senator, when he just wants to know if this constituent is well, is being shut down.
Sargent: Yeah. Just to clarify for people, Abrego Garcia was picked up in Prince George’s County, Maryland. That’s the suburb just outside D.C. in Maryland, and that’s what it means to say that he’s Van Hollen’s constituent. I want to add here that when the the Salvadoran official told Senator Van Hollen that, Oh, the Trump administration is just paying us to do this, he actually accidentally admitted how weak the Trump administration’s position really is. The Trump folks are just going through this show of saying, Well, look, Bukele is just telling us he’s not going to release him and so we can’t do anything either. So essentially, the Salvadoran official admitted there that this is all at the pleasure of Donald Trump, which is the whole point of it all. Bukele—one dictator doing another dictator a solid—is holding him so that Trump doesn’t have to give him due process and [deal with] all the awful press that would result from that.
Gira Grant: We can’t forget, just a couple of days ago, Bukele pushing back on the idea that he could return Abrego Garcia, saying, What am I supposed to do? Smuggle him into the United States? and telling press that the question they were asking him was “preposterous.” “We’re not fond of releasing terrorists into our country,” Bukele said. It’s theater up and down. I don’t know how much stock to put in where the vice president might be breaking from the president of El Salvador; I am not an expert on their internal politics. But just to have an American senator also delivering that news, I think, is really important right now.
I don’t know if people are really following this all that closely. And I got to believe that a member of Congress actually going to El Salvador is going to draw some attention to the reality of what’s happening. And him just saying that these are lies and that this is not what Trump is telling you—that matters, too, right now. I don’t think it’s just a stunt on his part. Not at all.
Sargent: Right. A hundred percent. And that’s where some of the data comes in. Analyst G. Elliott Morris looked closely at some recent polling, and he found something interesting. While there’s public approval for Trump’s general handling of immigration, when you drill down into the specifics, you find something else. In a Reuters/Ipsos poll, large majority say Trump should follow court orders on these matters; 56 percent oppose continuing to deport people in defiance of courts. And critically, according to this analysis, poll also shows broad opposition to deporting undocumented immigrants who have lived here for more than 10 years or who haven’t broken any other laws or who have jobs here. This is striking stuff, Melissa. What’s at issue is whether we can get the public to see that those unpopular things are the stuff that Trump is doing. Can we talk about that?
Gira Grant: Yeah. It’s interesting that this is still being seen as through the lens of immigration when what we’re really seeing right now is the fundamental undoing of due process in this country—or attempted undoing; I hope they are not successful. We are seeing the possibility open up for this to happen to American citizens as well. This is Trump very deliberately going after a community that he believes are unpopular enough that no one will defend them.
And to be brutally honest, I think that that was not necessarily a bad call on his part because what were the Democrats saying in the lead up to the election? There was this sense that a harder line had to be taken on immigration, that the right thing to do is to lean into some of the things that Trump was saying about things being dangerous and needing to close the border. That’s a whole separate conversation on just where the Democrats have been out on immigration—but I think a way through this for them is like, Please just step that aside.
Look, when people are asked how people’s rights are being violated, this is how they feel. When people are asked, “Should the president follow the courts, including the Supreme Court?” they realize that he should. I think it’s very important to frame this in a way that gets us out of whatever stories Democrats are telling themselves about how people feel about immigration as an issue. It’s a dead end.
Sargent: A hundred percent. This is not about being tough versus not being tough. This is about an administration which is engaged in world historical levels of lawlessness, and Democrats can and should prosecute the case against that. This is why, by the way, it’s something of a fiasco for the judge to be forcing Trump’s hand on this. If he does push Trump to the point where he may decide to plunge us into the abyss and start defying the courts, it’s a catastrophe for them in the realm of public opinion. And that does matter because we are going to have an election next year, no matter what Trump has to say about it.
Gira Grant: It makes me think of another way that the court’s decisions, or the court’s orders now, could be very useful in terms of building resistance to Trump. Trump will lie about what the courts have told him to do. He and Stephen Miller, earlier this week, were misrepresenting the Supreme Court’s decision, saying that it was 9–0 in their favor, as if everything they did was fine and that they hadn’t been given any constraints at all to work within. And I think that what gives meaning to these orders and gives meaning to the judges’ attempts to restrain the administration from just lying to them [is that] we have to narrate for them. That’s part of our job, obviously, in the press—but if there are Democrats who are looking for something to sink their teeth into and turn into a story, give people an update on what’s going on in the courts.
In the Abrego Garcia case, there are supposed to be daily updates being made in that court about what the administration is doing to bring him home. I don’t think that that is going to make the news unless we make it a huge story. Also, that is something that a resistance to Trump could seize on to keep that in the front of people’s minds: the lawlessness and the abuse of power. You can take for granted that’s probably going to be the story, unless we see a huge reversal. I don’t know.
Sargent: I agree. I want to talk about your piece. You wrote—essentially, to make this really simple—that the sadism is the point. It’s basically deportation TV that Trump and Stephen Miller and JD Vance are engaged in. I think there’s some hubris going on here with them where they’re absolutely certain that they can’t lose on this issue in the minds of the voters. Can you talk about this idea of deportation TV? And is there the potential for them to really go too far here, given what we just looked at in terms of the polling showing broad opposition to removing people who aren’t criminals and have been here a while and have jobs here?
Gira Grant: The way that Trump and the Department of Homeland Security, whether that’s Kristi Noem, DHS head, or the “border czar” Tom Homan, who officially lives within the realm of the executive branch, though, for all intents and purposes; he’s basically a one-man ICE show ... The two of them have gone out and personally appeared at ICE operations. It is very unusual, and I think the only reason that they are doing this is because they are being charged by Trump with producing the appearance of mass deportations whether or not they are capable of actually carrying out mass deportations.
I did a big story before the election about what it would really take to carry out mass deportations, and it’s clear that it would take them some time to ramp up toward that. I think we’re seeing that. They currently lack the facilities to detain as many people as they imagined they would like to detain—I think they could fix that, but we’re not there yet—so they’re reliant on producing propaganda like these big splashy raids that they can then use to essentially create fear within immigrant communities, to get people to stop going to work, to stop sending their kids to school, to fear going out to the grocery store, to fear taking the subway. All of those things are happening.
Homan likes to talk about using the local police as a force multiplier for ICE agents because they don’t actually have enough manpower to go out and conduct mass deportations. They need other law enforcement on board. I look at this raid propaganda as a force multiplier on their plans for mass deportations. And just as importantly, people are turning the camera around on them. To your point of, Have they gone too far? what I immediately thought of was these videos we’re seeing now of ICE agents with balaclavas smashing the windows of people’s cars and yanking them out of their cars; or the video of the student in Boston who was taken away by masked men in an unmarked van. At a certain point, the power of images can also be very effective at putting the scrutiny back on them.
Also, some of these raid videos haven’t really worked out very well for them. They show up in all their gear and arrest one person. I think it’s important to show that they are not all powerful. A lot of this is them having to make what they’re doing look bigger and scarier than it is. And it is scary. [I’m] not denying that. But they’re not all powerful, and they don’t actually have the juice to do what they want to do.
Sargent: So well said. I think the bottom line here is that the floor underneath their feet on this issue is a lot less secure than they think. Melissa Gira Grant, thanks so much for a great conversation.
Gira Grant: Thank you, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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