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Alex Wagner: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another week of total mayhem. American Streets. Are a place of fear and violence, but we are also making inconceivably bad moves even beyond our borders.

[clip of reporter]: How far are you willing to go to acquire Greenland?

[clip of Donald Trump]: You’ll find out.

Alex Wagner: This week, President Trump’s plan to get Greenland has ushered in the end of the transatlantic alliance, the end to a rules-based international order, and the beginning of a European realignment towards China. The old rules are dead. Sovereign land grabs are now American foreign policy, and a homegrown Gestapo is our domestic policy.

[clip of Mark Bruley]: We, as law enforcement community have been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. Citizens. What we’re hearing is they’re being stopped in traffic stops or on the street with no cause and being forced to demand paperwork to determine if they are here legally. As this went on over the past two weeks we started hearing from our police officers. The same complaints as they fell victim to this while off duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them.

Alex Wagner: That was the police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. His name is Mark Bruley, announcing publicly that his own police officers are being targeted by the ICE agents who have invaded that state. The rest of the country has seen people being dragged from their cars, protesters being punched on the street, toddlers being hit with tear gas, and the public officials speaking out against all of this, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz. They are being targeted with subpoenas from the Trump Justice Department. But less seen in this terrifying new America, less known is what happens after that. And it is no less dark. People are dying in ICE custody. They are been sent to countries where they have never lived, where they don’t speak the language and where their lives are very much at risk. Most people have no idea what it means to actually get deported in Trump’s America. And Donald Trump very much wants it to stay that way. [music plays] I’m Alex Wagner. And this week on Runaway Country, what happens after the phone cameras stop rolling? What goes on inside ICE detention once nobody’s around to protest? And what can be done to resist a system that seems so fundamentally at odds with American values and the U.S. Constitution? To sort through all of that, I will be joined by MS Now political and national reporter, my friend, Jacob Soboroff, who covered family separation under the first Trump administration, who is on the streets of Minnesota this week and whose new book, Firestorm, about the devastating fires in Los Angeles last January makes connections to immigration that you might never have actually expected. But first, what happens when someone gets arrested by ICE? And can anyone stop this madness? I spoke with David Wilson, an immigration attorney based in Minneapolis. Here’s our conversation. So David, first of all, thank you for, you know, taking some time to chat. Give me a sense of how your law firm is managing the moment. I mean, what’s the caseload been like since ICE came to town and how many people are, is your firm representing who have been detained by ICE?

David Wilson: Um, since the first of the year, we have already filed, um, 100 habeas actions.

Alex Wagner: Wow.

David Wilson: Our, our call volume increased from maybe 80 to 90 calls a day on January 5th. It was 560 and it hasn’t been less than that since then.

Alex Wagner: Wow.

David Wilson: So, we’re struggling to keep up. We’re trying to help as many people as we can. But the number of people reaching out in pure panic is just overwhelming. And a lot of the people who are panicking are people who shouldn’t. They’re citizens. They’re residents. They’re people going to school. They’re just the presence of law enforcement in this scale is really just intimidating a lot of people and they’re making sure that… What do I do if I interact with someone? How, if they don’t believe I’m a citizen, for example, I get that call at least 10 times a day. Things, questions that I, I’ve been doing this for a long time. Questions that I never thought I’d have to answer.

Alex Wagner: Yeah.

David Wilson: I’m spending a lot of times answering and reaffirming for people, look, you’re okay. And if you have any risks, there’s someone who is gonna help you. But it’s, boy, it’s a lot. It’s a lots.

Alex Wagner: Can I just ask, when you say you’re getting 500 to 600 calls a day, like, what is that, how do you manage that? And what do you say to people? I mean, I’m assuming you don’t have the manpower or womanpower to to manage all those cases. How do you I mean? I guess how do let people down and say, we can’t handle your case.

David Wilson: Well, we saw some of this coming. We could watch what was happening in other cities, and so we thought through some of our strategies for how to screen for who we can help, who we can’t. Essentially like a triage, like an emergency room, you had to prioritize who you can help and who you can’t, and so, we’re pretty good at determining right away, all right, we can help this person, this person we can’t, let them know. You know, tell the family so they don’t spend money on someone, you know recklessly. We can’t, and we don’t think they should. We’re always very clear on that, whether they should spend money or not. But there is a limit. I mean, yesterday we had 15 calls at six o’clock that we’re still screening through, and so some of us were here until nine o’ clock at night getting back to people. I was calling someone at 10:30 last night to let them know that their family was going to get released in Oklahoma. Then I was. Dealing with the U.S. Attorney’s Office at 11:15 who are writing me because they’re still trying to keep up as well trying to resolve a case. So it’s been, I mean, it’s an important mission. We’re not shying away from it, but boy is it exhausting.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, and I would assume it’s both mentally and emotionally exhausting to be dealing with all of this.

David Wilson: It is. There’s so much pressure to, you know, help people, you know, who are, especially when, you know, people, it’s really hard to appreciate when someone just literally disappears. You can’t reach them, you can’t find them, you can maybe see for a little while where their phone is reporting where they are, if they’ve got phone tracking on or find my phone operating. But once that goes away and that you know that they’re somewhere flying around the country and it may take three or four days for them to show up. The families go into pure panic mode, and you feel for them because a lot of times, it’s fathers. A lot of fathers get detained, a lot are my age. Several have medical issues, and so we’re constantly asked, how can I get my dad’s medication to someone so he doesn’t have issues with his ongoing, I have one now, his ongoing prostate cancer treatment. We’re trying to get meds because they don’t want it to go backwards. They were close to the end of the, for a chem cycle. We’ve got diabetics, high cholesterol, heart medications, all kinds of medical issues that the family’s just desperate. Like they’re not even worried about getting someone out. They’re worried about just keeping them alive. And so there’s a lot of pressure to resolve that too, while trying to lawyer the moment, not social work the moment and move forward with litigating the release of someone.

Alex Wagner: You’re talking about this phenomenon that the administration is pursuing robustly, which is taking people from Minnesota out of state. Can you talk a little bit more about that practice and sort of what’s happening here? I mean, as a lawyer, I would assume you want to keep them in state where you know where they are, you can communicate with them, you can work with the judges that I’m sure you know in Minnesota. I mean talk to me a little about the implications legally. Of disappearing someone to another part of the country.

David Wilson: Well, so we, we, I call it the witching hour now. Um, it’s the hour where we think the flight’s going to take off to El Paso. And so if someone’s detained, you know, in the morning, we try desperately to file something before four o’clock because we want to try to establish at least jurisdiction here over the case, rather than having to chase the case around the country. And didn’t end up with different judges that we aren’t familiar with. Maybe the schedule will change three or four times in the meantime of the case. You know, sometimes someone will end up in El Paso, two days later they’ll end up in New Mexico. We’ve had them bounced out to Oklahoma. They’re kind of spreading out once they get to one location. Often it’s temporary. And so for us, what we’re trying to deal with is, You have three thousand plus agents here locally. On a population that’s pretty concentrated. The immigrant community in the Twin Cities is pretty easy to isolate locally. And they’re just inundating them. You may even during this recording might hear whistles outside my window because I’m at a major intersection, you hear them sometimes. And…

Alex Wagner: The whistles for people who don’t know are frequently blown by citizens who are trying to protect people from detention by signaling ICE is in town using their whistle.

David Wilson: Right. And we have three or four daycares on our street. So there are a lot of parents who are really upset that ICE is coming outside of the schools and arresting their teachers in front of the kids and kind of terrorizing them. So the parents are volunteering. They do essentially the equivalent of ICE school guard. You just see some phenomenal response from the community in response to it. But what we, you know, so the challenge really is first and foremost, keeping up with someone before they move. If they go to the local ICE office at Fort Snelling, that building is not designed as an ICE detention facility. It’s a multi-purpose government military building. The VA is in there. There’s other military offices in there, so ICE’s capacity to detain is really just two really large rooms. So they’re just filling it to capacity, so their people are spilling over all day long. It’s gotten to the point now where they can’t even process people here. They’re detaining them, they’re taking them out of state to process them, and then sometimes bringing them back to possibly detain them here, if they’re going to bring them back or they’re gonna leave them wherever they ended up being that day. So we had someone just in the last 24 hours go to Central California. Get interviewed by an ICE officer, be put in the system and was flown right back. And now sitting in jail here. It’s so inefficient. I mean, there’s so many things wrong with this. From a taxpayer standpoint, people should be enraged at the waste in many respects.

Alex Wagner: That’s insane.I mean, I’m enraged when I read, I want to talk about detention because you mentioned medical concerns. I mean on NBC on Monday, NBC reported that a third immigrant detainee, a third one has died at Camp East, Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, right? You’re talking about trying to prevent people from getting deported down to or transferred down to El Paso. That is the third death at that detention center in 44 days. I’m new to the statistics of people dying in detention, but that seems like very high. And we know that one of those deaths has been ruled a homicide. Can you talk to me about what you’ve heard about the conditions inside these detention centers?

David Wilson: People, I mean, so yes, but the one in Montana, Camp Montana is special. It’s a special awful. Um, people, you know, are essentially in a tent city, um, in the middle of winter. It may be Texas, but it’s not that warm. Um, and there are just so many people down there. People, a person may get a phone call with a loved one, but they’re capped at two minutes. And it may take three or four days in between calls, attorneys are just desperately trying to reach their clients and have meetings with them. You can’t get any communication in and out of that facility. We often have clients who are ordered released by federal judges. I have several today. I’m tracking them down. We’re four or five days from when the judge had said release this person. And U.S. Attorney’s Office here in Minneapolis can’t get someone in the federal government down there to release them.

Alex Wagner: What? Why? Because there’s, there’s no communication?

David Wilson: It’s chaos. It’s just because they’re just putting so many people in one location so fast that they don’t have time to process them. They don’t even know, don’t have case numbers yet and they keep entering their information wrong. They often will miss, they’ll get a spelling wrong in the name or they’ll get the country of birth wrong so it makes it very hard to find people. So the conditions there are terrible. The management of the facility seems to be just absent. There’s just no rhyme or reason as to why the conditions are the way they are. And, you know, the cynic in me says, well, that’s part of the game. It’s done on purpose.

Alex Wagner: By design. Yeah. It’s a feature, not a bug.

David Wilson: Yeah. Well, it’s adding pressure in the crucible. And this is what this moment really is meant to be, is to squeeze people and to give them to surrender. And you know do what the administration wants and that’s they’re hoping people will crack. And some people do they they were they’re desperate to get out of there. It’s so awful

Alex Wagner: What happens if you have a medical condition? You mentioned people who have diabetes or they’re going through the last round of chemo for prostate cancer, what’s their, I mean, if they don’t know, if they’re not recording where they’re from and they’re not getting their names right and they can’t even release them when they’ve been ordered by a judge to do so, I assume that means their medication gets lost in the mix as well.

David Wilson: Oh, we’re panicked about people with any serious medical issues, because we have no way of knowing that there’s adequate, even adequate screening. You know, most of these detention facilities have very limited medical staff. ICE does have an obligation to provide medical care. They’re the custodian of the person. Just like any state facility, they’re obligated, And if they don’t, it can be medical malpractice by the physician who’s ever taken care of that or has the contract. But given the volume and the unfamiliarity that these doctors would have a someone who’s just showing up and Suddenly having to give medication for someone who has got 20 years with a history. Well, that’s that’s just it’s not happening. There’s no way it’s happening

Alex Wagner: So we’re going to see more deaths. I mean, it just seems like numerically, if you have no system by which they can get life-saving medication and you have an excess of people and a shortage of doctors and no information and a completely chaotic dysfunctional system, that’s a recipe for more people dying.

David Wilson: I mean, this situation is frankly ripe for a human tragedy over and over again.

Alex Wagner: What recourse do people have if they’ve been mistreated in detention?

David Wilson: I mean, I think the challenge is identifying who did the mistreatment. And then if they get out, because that’s part of the challenge, you have to be here to do something about it, then they could always pursue a claim of the Federal Torch Claim Act. But the ICE officers, though, do have a very high level of immunity, not absolute immunity as necessarily as the government seems to suggest these days. But it’s just, accountability is always a challenge in detention facilities. And that’s been the case for 30 years, is that, you know, you have, an agency will say that, well, this person started the fight and they were just intervening or this, you knows, there’s always something that’s put back on a third party, if not the person who’s making the complaint and the officers are just angels, that’s how they portray them. They’re doing some kind of biblical intervention, but really what they’re doing is putting people in chokeholds and shackles and not letting them move for hours on end and terrible food and food maybe not appropriate either culturally or medically for people either. So accountability is a big issue and I don’t know that there’s an easy answer for that. Think at some point you’d hope congress would start. Really supervising a little more, but if it feeds the narrative of the current administration, I don’t know that accountability is going to come to the table any time soon.

Alex Wagner: Feels like we’re gonna really have to have a Truth and Reconciliation Committee in like 10 years that to look at through all the phone footage and look at get firsthand testimony because Lord knows it doesn’t feel like there’s any accountability right now. Let me just ask you one kind of big picture question because I mean, you’re a lawyer, you went to law school, you’ve been this game for longer than the Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign of mass deportation. What does it feel like to be a lawyer and see the legal system so perverted or at least uh handicapped in this you know the the the firing of immigration judges we talked about newly fired immigration judge the system they are trying to inject chaos into the system they’re trying to make the lives of the most vulnerable harder and maybe deny them constitutional rights there’s just a brutality in this hour that feels pretty unique. I wonder how you look at all of it and how you sort of go about each day.

David Wilson: I kind of take the deep breath usually, but I take into perspective that as much as the administration has tried rewriting the rules on a lot of things, denying women who have been suffered terrific violence related to their gender, trying to wipe out all their asylum claims en masse by changing the standards randomly, making detention much harder to get. A secure or release, excuse me, for someone secure because they keep changing the bond rules. Those things are incredibly frustrating and it’s completely so obviously political. And so there are days when, I mean, my colleague and I were just talking about we need to make a scream room in our office so we could just let it out. But as a lawyer, there are moments though too, I get reminded of the honor of being a lawyer. Which is going into a federal court before a real judge who doesn’t care about the politics, but does care about a law not being followed. And when you see the judges react to what they can see as completely ignoring the letter of the law, and then having an administration daring to not follow their direction, and the rebuke that comes out of that, that’s when I realize that’s why I enjoy being a lawyer, because there’s accountability. If we can’t get it from Congress, there are so many federal judges who are more than willing to help. It just takes a lot of energy to get something before them, and you have to get enough momentum and examples of the same thing before the judges start reacting. Minneapolis having so many cases pending right now because of the number of arrests. When we had these financial bond changes starting back in July. You know, the judges were very deliberate and very thoughtful in their approach to the cases and wanted to make sure they made the right decision. Fast forward six months later, now the judges are giving the government basically 48 hours to explain why they’re doing what they’re going and then ordering them to fly someone back to be released here because they are so frustrated at what the government’s doing and not acknowledging they’ve lost this issue in court. Just let it go. When 98% of the judiciary says the individual gets a bond hearing, maybe someone should take that to heart. But until there’s the Supreme Court decision finally saying it or maybe a circuit court decision, the agency feels unrestrained. For every case that we resolve, there are 10 we don’t. But the judges at least give us something to, you know, hold on to, some faith that, like, our government system does work. Sometimes you just have to ask one side to work a lot harder than the others to inject some accountability.

Alex Wagner: Well, David, I know that there are countless people in Minnesota and beyond that are thankful that you’re working extra hard and fielding phone calls until midnight. Thank you for, you know, taking time out of a busy day doing much more valuable things for the citizens of Minnesota, for the people of Minnesota. Thanks for talking to me and helping us understand what happens once people are spirited away because I think the fight obviously doesn’t end on the it continues in courtrooms across the country. And it’s great to get the perspective of a foot soldier that’s involved in that fight. So thanks for your time.

David Wilson: Thank you.

Alex Wagner: When we come back, I will put all of this into context with Jacob Soboroff.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: Jacob Soboroff, every time, which is to say all the time, I read about something relating to immigration, detention, or the forceful removal of people from these United States, I think of you because you’ve done such excellent and essential reporting on this.

Jacob Soboroff: Thank you.

Alex Wagner: So it’s great to have you on the program in addition to the fact that you have written an amazing book that we’re gonna get to momentarily. But let’s just first start with where you are. You’re in Minneapolis.

Jacob Soboroff: I am, yeah, I am.

Alex Wagner: And You know, every account that I’ve read, every tweet, every sort of social media missive that I read from people on the ground say it’s way worse than you can actually imagine. If not, physically, in terms of safety, people are just so psychologically burdened by what has happened to their city. Can you just give me a sense of what it’s like there right now?

Jacob Soboroff: It feels like a supersized version of what I saw and have seen in LA this summer, and then I saw in Chicago, and then saw in the hall of 26 Federal Plaza in New York, and then, I saw it in Charlotte. I’ve been to all these places. And my mom’s from St. Louis Park, Minnesota, so I grew up coming to Minnesota in the summers, going to the state fair. I love it here. Man, I’m already getting emotional talking about this. I’ve never seen the people here like this. It’s very, very sad. In a way, it’s very inspiring to see people out. Yesterday, it was 8 degrees, and there’s massive protests in the middle of Government Plaza, in the mid of the day, in the middle of the work week. People are rightly outraged doesn’t do it justice. They feel like their community is being ripped apart. Mischaracterized, abused, and just like we’ve seen in all these other cities, people are being ripped off the street indiscriminately where in a place where there are more agents now than there have been in any of these other operations leading up until this point. And so we’re basically in the middle of an ongoing rolling collective trauma for the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul. And they’re both reeling but also fighting back in a really extraordinary way.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, I will say one of the things that always strikes me in this moment is it’s a leaderless movement. It’s a leaderless resistance right now. And it’s such a testament to the tenacity of the American public that people are just out there because they feel personally driven to do something, you know, it’s not like they’re there. There’s obviously people who are organizing and I don’t mean to undermine the tenacity those efforts, but. There’s not one person saying this is what we have to do. This is the strategy nationally, or even these are our options. It’s just people who are so powerfully impacted, emotionally or physically or financially, whatever it is, that they just gotta get into the street and stop this.

Jacob Soboroff: The thing I went to yesterday in the middle of the day was organized by, I don’t know the group. I don’t know who they are or what their beliefs are, but I think the group is on. Something party socialism and liberation, but there were like moms with little kids that showed up that had nothing to do with it. People are just showing up anywhere they can, wherever they can where people are on the street, finding an opportunity to push back. People are going to Target’s and buying salt that people normally pour on the streets for ice and then standing back in line to return them, to jam up Target, to protest the fact that Target hasn’t spoken out. The same thing that they’ve done at Home Depot buying ice scrapers and then returning the ice scrapes and waiting in line. People right now, as I’m talking to you, Alex, people are chasing Greg Bovino through the streets in South Minneapolis because that’s where enforcement is happening today. Any way people can find to get involved, they are. By the way, it has worked in all these other cities. Greg Bovino left L.A., he left Chicago, he left Charlotte in the face of all this opposition. He left New Orleans after just a couple of days. I’m not saying that it doesn’t leave long-lasting damage, but I do think that they’re afraid of the resistance. He said yesterday in this press conference that he hasn’t seen an opposition as strong and well-organized. I think he was trying to paint them as the radical left and agitators and antifa or whatever the bullshit is that he says, but I think that means that it’s working.

Alex Wagner: Well, Greg Bovino, you know, just for people who don’t know, is the head of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and is a villain who belongs in the pantheon of Trump villains and is a late arrival. I think people he’s not as much of a household name, but is absolutely one of the main adversaries here as we talk about the destruction of our democracy.

Jacob Soboroff: He has become the avatar of this whole thing and what’s amazing about it is the perception is that he is the big head honcho of the whole thing, but his actual job, he’s got some title called Commander of the Operation at Large, and he’s going around to these cities. I think it’s a made-up title. He’s not the Chief of the Border Patrol, actually. He is not the CBP Commissioner. He’s not the DHS Secretary. On the org chart, he is relatively low down, but they found this dude who would do their bidding, and they have put him out there and made him the face of this whole operation in a way that is both like totally puzzling to me and so obvious that they just central casting picked this guy because Donald Trump loves how he looks. He loves his haircut. He loves this face. He loves the way that he talks.

Alex Wagner: And he’s willing to do it.

Jacob Soboroff: Yeah. And he is willing to do it.

Alex Wagner: And he’s willing to do it, right? I mean, there is the, you talk about the trauma that’s being inflicted upon the citizenry. It’s like, you read these accounts and the Washington Post did a really interesting kind of like 24 hours on the ground in Minnesota where they look at people who are both activists, they’re victims of ICE detentions, they’re just, it’s a panoply of characters. But, you know, there are people who have nothing to do with any of this. I mean we all have something to do with it since it’s being inflicted on our citizenry, or our communities. But they’re like 14 year old kids who are now going to high school and their classrooms are less populated, maybe even empty in some cases, compared to what the attendance was last year because people are too scared to go to school. When you are a child and like you’re going to school, but then you know that a sizable portion of your classmates are too scare to come, that’s trauma that is visited upon you, regardless of whether you are at risk of detention or not.

Jacob Soboroff: That’s what I’m saying. And that’s what we experienced in LA. It is a, it really is a collective trauma and like this rolling ongoing trauma that’s being perpetrated in a way where like family separation when I covered it in 2018 was stopped after 5,500 kids were deliberately tortured in the words of physicians for human rights because of the outrage. And so that policy went from the early part of the Trump administration in 2017 to the pilot program in El Paso in the summer of 2017 but was stopped in June of 2018 in the face of all this public opposition, had like a finite beginning and end, every one of those 5,500 kids will be traumatized for life. I’m not minimizing that, but this is like. There’s just no endpoint to this in sight. So it’s this rolling thing where you’re right. And I was in Columbia Heights neighborhood yesterday where I met up sort of spontaneously because we had heard something was going on with these ICE observer watchers, like Renée Good was. And they said, you don’t know how many schools are in this neighborhood and what it’s doing to people here, even though they just targeted that one house on the corner and took the father and the kid and the mother is left behind, I think was the story that they told me. Think about all the collateral damage all around this neighborhood right now for people that might have even seen or only heard the whistles blowing and not knowing what it meant or who was being taken from the neighborhood. That’s playing out every day here.

Alex Wagner: It is like a new world, Gestapo. I will, I just, I mean, and I will say there are children across the country who hear stories about this and worry about it unfolding in their own neighborhood. And my kids, I try and shield them from too much of the news because it’s all so terrifying. But they know that there are ICE raids happening in our neighborhood and in our community. And they’re like, well, what if they get us, you know, because American citizens are absolutely swept up in all of this. And even if they don’t get them, what if get their friends? You know, I mean, this is just. Let’s talk big picture for a little bit because you have been covering this for so long. I mean, you were one of the first reporters to get access to one of those family separation detention centers. And we now, you know, we just spoke with David Wilson who’s a lawyer who’s representing a lot of the clients who are in these detention centers and the reports from inside there are gruesome. People are dying in unprecedented numbers. And I wonder when you hear about what’s happening in terms of deaths and ICE custody and just the brutality and force with which people are being apprehended and sent to places that were never their home or just ferreted away in the middle of the night without their families or their lawyers knowing where they’ve gone. How does that square with what you saw in Trump One? And does it feel to you or does it appear to you to be more vicious? Or I mean, I guess just compare and contrast the two if you could.

Jacob Soboroff: It’s far more indiscriminate, but only because Stephen Miller was stopped by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the street all around the world in the summer of 2018. He would have separated 25,000 kids if he could using a process known as administrative separation. They believed in that policy. But Trump, remember, stopped when Ginger Thompson’s audio from ProPublica leaked, and you heard the kids crying and the border patrol agents on inside saying, oh, we have an orchestra here. Trump didn’t say, my God, I’m so morally opposed to what I didn’t realize was going on. He said, I didn’t like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated. He didn’t like what was happening on television, what he was hearing in terms of that audio. So this is what they grew up in the first term. And it’s what Tom Homan told me was going to happen. He said to me on the second day of the raids in LA when I met up with him in a parking garage in Long Beach, California, that he believed people were going to die as a result of the operations that were happening on the streets, the tone and tenor, the level of opposition, the tactics that were being used by his very own agents, he saw these clashes being inevitable. And not only, by the way, is this policy based on a 1954 policy that deported a million Mexicans and some Americans. It’s now killing immigrants and American citizens, almost an echo of that 1954 program.

Alex Wagner: Under Eisenhower operation, we will not even say its name, but it begins with a W.

Jacob Soboroff: That’s exactly right. And that’s what they wanted to do all along. It’s what they promised they were going to do. As you and I both were on the floor of the Republican Convention, seeing signs that said mass deportation now. This was what they drew up and now they’re executing it. And as far as what’s going on inside the facilities, I’ve seen that too. I went in the Atalanta ICE Detention Center in the high desert outside of LA during the separation policy. And I saw people curled up in the fetal position. I wrote about it and separated. Locked up in isolation. Inspectors general reports talk about people trying to hang themselves in these facilities. These are private immigration prisons, largely, mostly, all around the country. And that network is vastly expanding. There are more people in immigration detention now, I believe, than any other time in American history. It’s, I hate to say, but I’m not surprised one bit that this is what’s happening on the inside.

Alex Wagner: More of my conversation with Jacob right after this break.

[AD BREAK]

Alex Wagner: You mentioned Stephen Miller, the architect of our national despair who is running rough shot over, I don’t know, the Constitution and anything else that stands in his way, but it’s also the difference between Kirstjen Nielsen, the former DHS secretary under Trump One and Kristi Noem, the, uh, what are we, what is she being called? The ICE Barbie? Um, can you compare it? Like there is a zeal for. There is, and I want to play, the president yesterday in a meandering sundowner of a press conference in the words of my friends at The Bulwark exhibited some version of, I guess, I’m not going to say contrition, but like, it’s a, he is aware of the fact that people are not okay with brown people being terrorized in this country. And he is also, someone somewhere must have shown him some polling numbers. Around in the Latino community because he knows he has some work to do. Um, and let’s play Trump’s comments about Hispanic, singular, singular. Can you play that sound?

[clip of Donald Trump]: Border Patrol is incredible, too. I mean, Paul Perez and that group is incredible. Mostly Hispanic, by the way. They’re like 60% Hispanic. They talk about Hispanic. They’re mostly Hispanic, right? And they’re unbelievable people. And then they say, oh, we discriminate against. I love Hispanic. They are unbelievable. Entrepreneurial. They have everything. I did great. I did the highest. Nobody ever got numbers like I got. From the standpoint of being a Republican.

Alex Wagner: Okay, just I mean.

Jacob Soboroff: Oh boy.

Alex Wagner: Singular hispanic, that’ll win him over, that will win him back just calling him Hispanic, I love Hispanic.

Jacob Soboroff: You know he also expressed. He expressed, you could say, contrition about the killing of Renée Good.

Alex Wagner: Renée Good.

Jacob Soboroff: But really what he seemed to focus on most is that he was under the impression and might be true, that her father was a Trump supporter.

Alex Wagner: Yes, right. Which is a problem, right? Like, it’s not a problem for Kamala Harris. [overlapping voices] But if you voted for Donald, we actually have that. Let’s play. This is Trump offering, I don’t know, words of caution. What does this even qualify against ICE’s brutal tactics and also expressing support for Renée Good’s father, who voted for him in 2024, apparently?

[clip of Donald Trump]: And you know, they’re going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody or, you know they’re dealing with rough people. They’re going make a mistake sometimes. It can happen terribly. I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who had the tragedy, it’s a tragedy, it’s horrible thing. Everybody would say, ICE would say the same thing. But when I learned her parents and her father in particular is like, I hope he still is but I don’t know, was a tremendous Trump fan, he was all for Trump, loved Trump.

Alex Wagner: I mean. Where do we begin with this? The first is like, he begins to say ICE can sometimes be too rough, but these are rough people. I mean, there might be some rough people, but the majority of the people I’ve seen are, you know, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, grandmothers, in some cases, high school students, not rough people who are being thrown to the ground. Some of them are American citizens that are being put in band chokeholds. And he reserves, most of his words of regret or contrition for the fact that a Trump supporter might have had to deal with the loss of his daughter not the actual daughter or her widow who’s being investigated by the feds at Trump’s direction correct? But the but the father of the daughter who voted for Trump. That’s where Trump’s sympathies lie.

Jacob Soboroff: I didn’t hear him say anything when masked armed federal agents beat the crap out of Narciso Barranco, the landscaper in Santa Ana with three sons in the Marine Corps. U.S. Citizens when he was cutting bushes outside of an IHOP, I didn’t hear him express any contrition when Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, 19 years old, was coming home from Babson College to go visit her mom and dad in San Antonio and was deported to Honduras by federal agents waiting at the airport. I didn’t hear him expressed any contrition about the U. S. Citizen who was ripped in his underwear from Minneapolis, from his house, and put into a vehicle and interrogated for an hour until he was returned to his home. Without, I don’t even know if he got an apology. And the list goes on and on and how many stories of this type of injustice that we continue to hear over and over. If you really are out there and you think that they are going after the so-called worst of the worst, I got a bridge to sell you as they say. It is absurd. And outrageous that they still use the language criminal, illegal, alien to talk about the people that they’re taking off the streets. Bovino gave a press conference here yesterday and said they have taken 3,000 people since the start of this Operation Metro Surge or whatever it is that they are calling it and 10,000 in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area since the beginning of the year. You really think that those are violent criminals because they use the word illegal criminal alien? They’re people who are undocumented who come here who just as you said are our neighbors and colleagues and friends and fellow parishioners and classmates same thing, we’ve seen everywhere in LA we’ll talk about the fires. The people they are picking off the streets in los angeles are largely people who? Are standing in Home Depot parking lots looking to engage in the rebuilding effort of the largest uh, uh, most costly wildfire event in American history. That’s who he’s going after. Meanwhile, he’s saying about the fires that it was a mystical tap that wasn’t turned on. And that’s the reason that LA burned. And the reason that LA is not recovering because Donald Trump’s idea of how to fix that was not the solution. Actually, it’s his own immigration policies that are ripping people off the street who all they want to do is show up on a construction site and out?

Alex Wagner: Literally to rebuild the country. So when we talk about the way in which this is all unfolding, the man at the top is certainly more addled and more, I would say, unhinged than he was in Trump One. He is surrounded by, or in his first administration. He, Miller is still there, but to go back to the other Stooges who make all this possible, there’s people like Bovino, but I mean, I do think the fact, the difference maker here, and maybe you can talk a little bit more about this, is Kirstjen Nielsen was not drinking as perhaps thirstily from the same fountain of hate that, which isn’t to excuse her behavior in Family Separations at all, but she is a different character and of a different, slightly different stripe than Kristi Noem. Is that accurate? Is that fair to say?

Jacob Soboroff: I do think it’s fair to say I too don’t believe, you know, I’m not going to absolve her at all. And in fact, she’s the one that signed option three in the decision memo that basically effectuated the family separation policy back in the spring of 2018. And she is solely responsible and responsible alone for being the S-1, the Secretary of Homeland Security at the time. But when it was stopped and he tried to restart it on a, I wrote about in Separated, on Marine 1 with Melania flying there to survey some natural disaster, you know, devastation, you know, he brought it up and she did push back about whether or not to re-implement the policy. I give her no credit. She hasn’t got any flowers for me. But what they implemented during Trump One, they just didn’t get there what they wanted to do. And they’re now doing it in Trump Two. Would Nielsen take the job today? I don’t know, you’d have to ask her. But I can tell you what he does is he finds people who he can twist and turn. She insists that she didn’t want family separation to happen. She was pushing back all along. Ultimately, it happened. They find their ways to make happen what they want to happen and they’ve got in Kristi Noem, someone who will go stand in front of people at this El Salvador prison as if it’s a green screen backdrop in a Hollywood movie while they are incarcerated there. Many of them, you know, sent there illegally as we now know, obviously.

Alex Wagner: You know, when you talk about this operation and how it’s different from operations of Trump administration’s past, there’s also, Minnesota stands apart in being more of a sort of dragnet than we’ve seen in any other state, right? Like there are things that are happening that are going down exclusively in Minnesota that were not going down in other states, right. Like Operation Metro Surge, these are all the dumbest fucking names ever. Anyway, Operation Metro Surge. Is similar to what happened in cities like LA and Chicago, right, but then there’s another component that’s being executed in Minnesota that’s different, which is Operation Parris, and I’ll let it, I feel like you have more intel on this than I do, but that’s the Paris is P A R R I S Post Admission Refugee Re-verification and Integrity Strengthening. Sounds very Orwellian, Jacob. What the fuck is that?

Jacob Soboroff: Their dream for a long time has been to dismantle the refugee resettlement system, which is a number that has always been designated by the president, and it’s a number that fluctuates, it goes up and down at the discretion of the executive branch. And these are people that have been lawfully admitted to the country, and what they want to do is go back and look at the refugees wherever they come from. And I guess, I guess ostensibly revet them to figure out if somebody slipped through cracks or whatever, but. I would bet, I’ll bet you a nickel, I’m not sure for sure, but I’ll bet you that some of the people that they’re re vetting now came in during the first Trump administration. I talked to a guy actually, an Ethiopian guy who said to me, he was an Uber driver that took me from the airport and I was asking him about what was going on and he was saying, uh, yeah, man, I came here and became a citizen during the Trump administration in 2017 and thank God. I didn’t get here any later because look what would have happened to me now. Those are the types of people that they’re going back and looking after and trying to kick out of the country. Now, they’re talking about kicking U.S. Citizens out of the country! That’s the kind of stuff that they are talking about now.

Alex Wagner: De-naturalization.

Jacob Soboroff: Yes, yes, where does it stop? Where does it stop? I think where it stops is people showing up in the streets and doing to Greg Bovino in Minneapolis what they did to him in LA and Chicago and Charlotte and New Orleans and eventually he will leave here. Yeah, eventually he would leave here and eventually the 2026 midterm elections will happen and Donald Trump is going to face the consequences of this. This is unbelievably unpopular. Everywhere I have been. And as I’ve been talking about this book, as I have been going around the country, people want to talk about the raids and people want to talk about ICE and people wanna talk about what it means to have federal truth. Immigration, the conversation around immigration is no longer about immigration, it’s about our freedoms. It’s about our freedoms being taken away. It is about armed, masked federal agents showing up without identifying themselves on the streets of cities across the country in red states and in blue states, terrorizing communities. And that is the intent. It’s been the stated deterrence, punitive, criminalizing policy, immigration policy of the United States for decades under Democrats and Republicans. And Trump believed by supersizing it that that he would, I guess, make his base happy. I don’t know what he what he believes. I I I don’t want to be the person that goes inside Donald Trump’s head to figure out what he actually believes. But we know what’s he’s doing. We know what the facts on the ground are. And they are taking this to a level that we have never, ever seen before.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, I mean, I don’t actually think he’s thinking about politics in all of this. I think occasionally it kind of like comes across his radar, as when he says in a press conference, I love Hispanic.

Jacob Soboroff: Hispanic.

Alex Wagner: I mean he obviously like again, I think someone was just like, this is somehow he’s realized that the American public is rejecting the gestapoification of our our immigration system. But as far as this being in any way politically convenient for him or his party, I don’t think it is. I do think it’s just I want to get the brown people out. I like cruelty. Directed at people who are weaker than me as or as seen as are weaker or more vulnerable than me. And this is a great way of executing on my sadistic impulses. We’ll leave the psychology to the psychologists and the people who actually get to play—

Jacob Soboroff: Amen.

Alex Wagner: —in that dark chasm. But you mentioned, you know the the after effects of all of this and I want to talk about LA and and the ways in which we don’t even think that you know, these immigration raids happening all over the country have a chilling effect, even if people aren’t directly impacted. And Los Angeles has a lot of rebuilding to do, which is something you explore, you know in your new New York Times best-selling book, Firestorm. Let’s talk a little bit about how you’ve seen, I mean, you started to touch on this, but the people who are charged or volunteer to rebuild a city like Los Angeles. Are largely brown and Black people, immigrants in many cases, or targets of these raids, or terrorized by these raids. How have you seen those two issues dovetail in your hometown?

Jacob Soboroff: Oh, I think that they’re inseparable actually, and I think that, you know, often when so just to back up, I watched my childhood neighborhood, January 7th 2025, incinerate in front of my own eyes, I appeared with you on your broadcast, we talked about this live as it was happening. It became the costliest wildfire event in American history. 16,000 structures were destroyed. 31 people died. 400 people, if you look at the excess mortality numbers in terms of people who shouldn’t have died around that time. Three times the size of Manhattan burned in the most populous county in America, two distinct neighborhoods, dozens of miles apart, were virtually erased, literally wiped off the map. And I did not. Have any mental capacity to process in real time, like what I was experiencing. I could tell you, hey, I’m from this neighborhood. It’s a beautiful neighborhood. I know what’s over that ridge. But then when I rolled up on my childhood home, which I hadn’t lived in in 35 years, but had burned to the ground, every sort of hallmark of my youth and Altadena on the other side of town, where my son had his ninth birthday and we live closer to today, gone, I knew I had to understand what this was and what the ramifications were. So, you know, I set off on this thing to figure out… How did it happen, why did it happened, who’s to blame, will it happen again, and what are the consequences? One of the most profound consequences when these things happen is you can see the fissures underneath society in these mass casualty events. And inequality is one. People are having a hard time building back because it’s so expensive in LA. 40% of the houses that are being sold are being sort of corporations not to Californians because people can’t afford to come back. But the other huge massive one, probably the biggest one for me, is the impact on the undocumented community in Los Angeles. 40% of the construction industry in California, I think Gavin Newsom told me, is undocumented. And they are the primary targets of the mass deportation effort of the Trump administration because they’re low hanging fruit they hang in Home Depot parking lots around the corner from my house all over LA looking—

Alex Wagner: They’re out there they’re so vulnerable.

Jacob Soboroff: For an honest day’s work. They want to come before the fires, do a handyman job at your house, anything you could possibly want. Today it’s literally rebuilding in a city, by the way, in a county where I think of the 16,000 structures, 10 or 12 have been rebuilt, want to show up and be active on these construction projects. And instead there’s one example of one of them literally running for their lives, getting hit by a car on the 210 freeway from a Home Depot parking lot because they being chased by Greg Bovino’s agents on the streets of LA. And so I, I don’t, you can’t quantify it, but there’s studies UCLA has been talking about this. There is no doubt that the pace of the recovery has been stymied by these immigration enforcement policies. And it’s why the book, it might read like a sci-fi thriller or some dystopian future, but it’s like the lived reality that we are all experiencing right now.

Alex Wagner: This is now this shit that’s all burning both figuratively and literally this is our country now.

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Alex Wagner: You kind of touched on this for a second, but I was still hosting the 9pm hour of MS Now at that point, and you came on, and Katy Tur, who you grew up with, also came on a couple times. And I remember thinking, how the hell is he able to report this without crying?

Jacob Soboroff: I didn’t have as many gray hairs as I do now.

Alex Wagner: Oh, please.

Jacob Soboroff: If you’re watching us on video.

Alex Wagner: Whatever.

Jacob Soboroff: As I did after it was over. It was a crazy year in L.A.

Alex Wagner: Just like a 42 year old to say that are however old.

Jacob Soboroff: Uh, 42, you got it. [laughter]

Alex Wagner: Talk to me about having the collision of the personal, like a personal history collide with a national news story and what that was like.

Jacob Soboroff: I had never experienced anything like that.

Alex Wagner: Balance it, or did you put one in a box?

Jacob Soboroff: You can’t. You can’t, and that’s why I was so overwhelming on why I knew I wanted to write this book. I think it’s the most important assignment I’ve ever had because it is such a mix of the personal and the professional. I was definitely grieving, you know, in real time as I was reporting. In a way that I felt vulnerable during family separation because like you have little kids and I was in there and I’m seeing these children and I was honest about how it felt but they weren’t my own children. This was my hometown. I was there four days earlier or something with my little sister Hannah and her brand new baby boy and sitting in the park chilling that burned down days later. Not only that, covering fires was the last thing that I wanted to do. I literally said to our mutual friend, Sam Fall is sitting around a campfire on New Year’s Eve, 2024 into 2025. The last thing I wanna do is put on that stupid yellow jacket and go cover a wildfire in California, but I have a feeling I’m gonna have to do it this year.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, baby, you sure did.

Jacob Soboroff: And 10 days later there I was. And so it was so many things colliding. I sat at my desk on that morning after walking out the house and my son said, Dad, look how windy it is. And I was like, okay, I got to my desk. I saw, I saw a text from my brother who still lives in the Palisades saying, big Palisade’s fire. We have to evacuate. I got up and I walked into the bureau chief’s office and I said, I have to go. And then for two weeks I just covered this thing straight without any real capacity. The thing that was most nuts about it is… Normally, we in these places, you and I, interview other people, but nobody was there. Everybody had gone. My friends were gone. My neighbors were gone, the people I grew up around were not there. It was firefighters and reporters. And so.

Alex Wagner: Yeah, you were narrating it for us.

Jacob Soboroff: I became the resident, the Palisades resident, even though I hadn’t lived there since I was 18 years old. And it was, I thought it was a time machine into my past in a way. Like fire is a remarkable, I write fire as a remarkable time machine as like a curious form of teleportation into your past and future all at once. I didn’t know then that that was true. Then I thought, it was just my past burning up. Now I know, in talking to experts… That this was the fire of the future. And there were so many things that I witnessed that I didn’t fully get. Our infrastructure falling apart, the reservoir was empty in the Palisades, the steel towers that electrified Altadena were dormant and shouldn’t have been in there possibly. Changes in the way we live, electric car batteries exploding all around us, potentially giving firefighters cancer, they say to me to read in the book. They were worried about that. Misinformation and disinformation. Massive, massive, massive one. Trump, in that same press conference yesterday, Trump is talking again about the conspiracy theories about the water flowing down from the Pacific Northwest. They were pouring figurative fuel on the literal flames of the fire in real time. And all of this stuff is happening as I’m just trying to process that. My favorite restaurant is gone. My pediatrician’s office on fire. The two supermarkets in town are gone, and so that’s what this project was. It was a real excavation of myself and of other people, which, as you know, is why I think I have the best job in the world. I get to spend time with people in their lives.

Alex Wagner: Like me.

Jacob Soboroff: Like you. Yes. Obviously, we don’t do this enough.

Alex Wagner: You do a great job at your dream job. You do your you do a great job. I I will also just say, you know, as a colleague and as a as a fellow, I don’t want to like a field reporter as someone who believes so strongly in the utility of having someone or lots of people ideally out in the field, you do such a great job and—

Jacob Soboroff: Likewise, ditto.

Alex Wagner: It’s, I mean, I’m not out like you are, but I really, I am so admiring of your work and you do such an excellent job of contextualizing it in the most human terms.

Jacob Soboroff: Thank you.

Alex Wagner: I got to ask you, when you just touched on that topic of disinformation, and that’s kind of how I want to end this because it’s just, that’s the work of journalism, right? I mean it’s just, it’s to tell the truth and yet we live in a moment when everything is up for grabs and we have someone sitting at the top of our political power structure who is a liar and who is very interested in creating alternative narratives and spreading only facts that useful to him or maybe not even fact.

Jacob Soboroff: I was just going to say…

Alex Wagner: It’s just alternative facts. We really should have listened when Kellyanne Conway like floated that concept in whatever year it was. But, you know, you had to tell the story, for example, of, I mean, on all these things, you often find yourself telling the hard truths about how the fires start, like, what were the fires really? Or even what’s happening behind the four walls of this detention center, where you can’t see, you’re going to have to believe that what I’m telling you is the truth. You have to have believe that the people I’m talking to are not paid actors against Trump is doubling down on like. You know, the notion that these are somehow paid agitators in Minnesota and elsewhere, or standing outside of ICE raids and trying to protect fellow citizens. Like, how have you, how has that work of trying to tell the truth, of trying establish the real narrative of what has unfolded behind the scenes, like how is that job more complicated and sort of in reporting out the book, how was that challenging? I guess you’re living in the… In among the consequences of this disinformation age. So what’s that like?

Jacob Soboroff: I think that my guiding philosophy is always, it’s like military and diplomacy, they use this phrase, facts on the ground. It’s like, I always just try to present the facts on the ground as I see them, which is why I’ve always wanted to go out and experience things for myself. I’m not a subject matter. I mean, I’ve covered immigration for a long time or whatever, but I wouldn’t consider myself a subject-matter expert on anything. I’m a guy who likes to go and learn and let people learn along with me. And I’ve never actually said or been a big believer in like I’m some model of objectivity or neutrality. On the contrary, I’m gonna tell you how I feel actually and tell you what I see, but I’m going to be honest about what I and I’m to be fair to the people that I talk to and I tell you the truth and you can make up your own mind as to whether or not you believe me. I can’t convince you one way or another. And so in the fires, that’s what I did too. That’s why I told the story of Gavin Newsom watching in his operation center in LA, Elon Musk, basically prodding the local firefighters about the water pressure with conspiracy theories and Newsom using that moment as his light bulb going off saying, I’m gonna start pushing back against this guy and these guys in this way. And that’s like the origin story of his current social media persona.

Alex Wagner: Newsom’s not Musk.

Jacob Soboroff: Yeah, no, Newsom’s exactly Newsom realize in that moment if I don’t serve up the version of the truth that I know, what am I doing? You’re going to let these people run all over you. And in the case of the fires, Trump’s saying there’s a mystical tap. Elon Musk is saying that the water pressure is due to incompetence or whoever the hell knows. We’re flowing more water than you ever possibly could use. Civil engineers will tell you that there’s no way that the hydrants would stay pressurized. And they didn’t in Altadena just just like they didn’t do it in the palisades, and there wasn’t an empty reservoir in Altadena. It’s why I included the story of Katie Miller calling me in the middle of the fires and asked me to go to Stephen Miller’s parents’ house. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it, and I felt bad, because their house did burn down, and I did go check on it, and I said I’m sorry.

Alex Wagner: I feel bad for Stephen Miller’s parents even if their house had survived because they have to be Stephen Miller parents. [laughter]

Jacob Soboroff: I said the reason I included this story is that they too were victims of the misinformation and disinformation from their own son and daughter-in-law’s boss. This is the reality of the new age of disaster that we live in, where information is being weaponized even during natural disasters, which is why I don’t think I did the best job of it. The people that did the best job of it. During the fires were the local news, like Channel 4 in LA, definitionally a public service. This is what’s happening on this street, this is what is happening around the corner, here’s what’s house burned down. At a time when federal politicians were given bullshit, when local leaders were having a hard time getting accurate information, when emergency alert systems were not actually working properly and resulted allegedly in deaths of a lot of people, including in West Altadena, it was the facts on the ground that were being presented by local reporters more than anything that I think was the most sort of heroic, other than the first responders, effort. Uh during during the fires that’s all we can do and that’s all I can do is show up so that’s why I’m in minnesota that’s what I’ve been to all these places that’s why I decided to go out to the Palisades um why I decide to write the book.

Alex Wagner: Boom. I mean, I love that you’re making all the right decisions each and every time, my friend.

Jacob Soboroff: Oh, you don’t know how many wrong decisions I’ve made in my life. [laughter]

Alex Wagner: You didn’t want it. You told Sam Falls, I don’t want to be out there in the yellow jacket following the fire. And you sure did. And we would not honestly have understood the emotional weight in the same way had you guys not been there. And it was such a service in the way that you guys at the detention center, you being tenacious and curious and inquisitive and trustworthy and all those things. Makes these stories live and resonate in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise be. So we owe you a debt of gratitude, my friend.

Jacob Soboroff: I’m actually a huge asshole in real life, just so you know.

Alex Wagner: Well, that is true, but we’re going to judge you by your work, not your personality.

Jacob Soboroff: Thank you. Okay, fine.

Alex Wagner: Anybody who knows you knows Jacob Soboroff is a colossal dick. Just kidding, he’s not.

Jacob Soboroff: No, you never know. You never know.

Alex Wagner: Anyway, I really mean it. I really have so much admiration for you. I think it’s really totally unsurprising that you wrote another New York Times bestseller and I think its fucking really important that you’re in Minneapolis and I can’t wait to watch more of your reporting on MS NOW and I hope you will come back to this podcast and give us some more truth serum. I really appreciate you man.

Jacob Soboroff: It’s an honor to be here. You’re the best. And now I’m going to go chase Greg Bovino on very snowy streets.

Alex Wagner: Go get him, bro. Thanks Jacob.

Jacob Soboroff: See you later.

Alex Wagner: That is our show for this week. And as always, if you have been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, please do send us an email or a one-minute voice note at runawaycountry@crooked.com and we may be in touch to feature your story. A huge thank you to everyone who has written in already. We read these things, we listen to them. We appreciate you. Last but not least, do not forget to check out the show and our awesome rapid response videos on our YouTube channel Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Alyona Minkovski. Our producer is Emma Illick-Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacy Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landes. Ben Hethcoat is our video producer and Matt DeGroot is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adriene Hill is our Head of News and Politics. Katie Long is our Executive Producer of Development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writer’s Guild of America East.

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