In This Episode
Leave it to travel delays during Spring Break to turn America’s focus to immigration again. This week, as Congress debates over funding and reforms to ICE, and Markwayne Mullin is sworn in as new Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Alex brings our attention back to the ongoing tactics the Trump administration is using to target immigrants and tear families apart. First she speaks to Stephanie Villarreal, whose husband has been detained despite being a DACA recipient. Then Alex speaks to Jonathan V. Last, editor of The Bulwark, about how to keep a spotlight on immigration, especially when they employ bureaucratic tactics to change someone’s status, and why Trump is trying to force a voting rights bill into the debate.
To help Stephanie and her family: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-keep-baby-and-father-together
TRANSCRIPT
[AD BREAK]
Alex Wagner: Hi everyone, much of the globe and this country has been focused on Trump’s war of choice in Iran. Thousands dead, markets in chaos, gas prices skyrocketing, fantasy diplomacy talks, and also mysterious presence.
[clip of Donald Trump]: They’re going to make a deal. They did something yesterday that was amazing, actually. They gave us a present, and the present arrived today. It was a very big present, worth a tremendous amount of money. And I’m not going to tell you what that present is, but it was a significant… Prize and they gave it to us and they said they were going to give it so that meant one thing to me, we’re dealing with the right people.
Alex Wagner: It’s all very confusing and it’s all very, very bad. But this is not the only war that Trump is fighting. In Washington, Democrats have been at war with the Trump administration for 37 days as of this recording. After the country witnessed the murder of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in January at the hands of ICE officers, Democrats, supported by two thirds of the American public, demanded reforms using the only leverage they really have at this point. Funding the agency that oversees ICE, which is the Department of Homeland Security. Republicans and especially their leader, Donald Trump, would not negotiate. And so the face-off began, February 13th, with Trump and his party betting that the longer this partial shutdown went on, the longer DHS employees, including TSA agents, weren’t getting paid, and the longer the security lines got at the airports, that Democrats would crack, and that the public would forget about what ICE did and is still doing in the name of immigration enforcement. Well, 37 days later, it is Republicans who are now worried. They are worried about how all of this, the unpaid workers, the nightmarish security lines, and oh yeah, the brutality of ICE goons, how all that is making them look. So negotiations have started up again. Here’s Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Tuesday explaining his party’s position.
[clip of Chuck Schumer]: We need reforms to ICE. We need to rein in the violence. We have never changed our position. This does not have any reforms in ICE, but they’ve sent us, negotiations are ongoing, and they’ve send us an offer, and we’ll be sending them an offer back. And I can assure you, it will contain significant reform in it.
Alex Wagner: For both Republicans and Democrats, the upper hand in these negotiations is gonna be determined by two things. How pissed off will American travelers get about hellacious airport security lines before they turn on everyone? And how much does the public continue to be outraged by the unlawful and amoral actions of ICE agents? Well, on that last part, Trump did Democrats a solid by deciding last week to send ICE agents to 14 major U.S. Airports to help fill in for absent TSA agents and maybe engage in some wrenching deportations while they were at it.
[clip of airport audio]: What is your badge number? We need to see your badge numbers! Show us your badge!
Alex Wagner: If that wasn’t a sufficient reminder about why this fight is happening in the first place. This week, Oklahoma’s Markwayne Mullin, amateur UFC contestant and US Senator, was sworn in as the new head of DHS. For an agency under scrutiny for its use of extra-legal violence and public murder, the choice of Mullin upset even some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate, like Rand Paul.
[clip of Rand Paul]: I just wonder if someone who applauds violence against their political opponents is the right person to lead an agency that has struggled to accept limits to the proper use of force.
Alex Wagner: I wonder too, Rand, because the reality is that even during this DHS shutdown, ICE has been operational, and the strategies its agents have been employing, the people ICE has been targeting, the crackdown on our country’s most vulnerable, well, that has only gotten worse. I’m Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, we’re taking a look at what ICE has really been up to since the headline killings of Renée Goode and Alex Pretti, and what that means for the current fight over reform.
Stephanie Villareal: I heard my husband panicking, telling them, you know, I’m active DACA, I have my DACA card, and they said, it doesn’t matter, you’re going to be detained.
Alex Wagner: That’s Stephanie Villareal, her husband, Juan Chavez Velasco, moved to the U.S. From Colombia with his family when he was just eight years old. Since 2012, Juan has been protected by DACA residential status or deferred action for childhood arrivals, or so he thought. On February 18th, Juan was targeted by ICE agents as he was on his way to deliver breast milk to his newborn daughter, Eliana, who was at that time and still is in the NICU, the neonatal intensive care unit. Juan still hasn’t gotten to hold Eliana. And it’s unclear when he even will. His DACA status expired while he was in detention, and there is no clear path for Juan’s release back into the United States. Later in this episode, I’m gonna talk to the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last, AKA JVL, about the fight underway, how Democrats and the public should think about all of this, and whether he is optimistic that we might clean this moral stain off of our proverbial American clothes. But first, let’s hear from Stephanie Villareal. Here’s our conversation. Stephanie, first of all, thank you for doing this. I know it has been an extraordinarily difficult time for your family. I guess let’s just start with what happened on February 18th. Can you describe what went down that day?
Stephanie Villareal: Yeah, so it was just a normal day, my husband, as he had been, you know, in the previous days, he had taking milk to our baby at the hospital. And on his way over to the hospital, he was driving up and he noticed there was a vehicle on the side. I stepped out of that vehicle and was attempting to pull him out of the car. He told him, basically, you try to identify himself, said that he was active DACA. And they said it didn’t matter. And since then, he’s been detained.
Alex Wagner: Okay, so he was, just to be clear, going to the hospital because you guys have a child in the hospital. Is that right?
Stephanie Villareal: Correct. We have a premature baby in the NICU.
Alex Wagner: And he was delivering milk to the baby in a NICU.
Stephanie Villareal: Correct. My breast milk that I had.
Alex Wagner: And he’s and he’s been doing that regularly I assume right?
Stephanie Villareal: Yes, so she was born February 6, so for the prior 12 days, he had gone on a daily basis.
Alex Wagner: And ICE, I guess, had been monitoring him because they knew he was going to be there.
Stephanie Villareal: That’s what it felt like. It was the only day I wasn’t with him.
Alex Wagner: So he’s literally carrying breast milk to the hospital. ICE is waiting for him. And does he get on the phone with you when this starts happening?
Stephanie Villareal: Yeah, he called me on his way out. He usually does on his way when he’s driving out of the neighborhood. And he told me that there was a vehicle just kind of parked and wouldn’t let him drive through.
Alex Wagner: It was blocking his way.
Stephanie Villareal: It was blocking his way. And that’s when I heard the ICE officer in the background telling him he needs to get out of a vehicle. And I heard my husband panicking, telling them, you know, I’m active DACA. I have my DACA card and they said, it doesn’t matter, you’re gonna be detained. I immediately started crying. I was panicking. It was very hard hearing it and feeling so helpless. You know, I couldn’t do anything. I just, you know, didn’t know what to do. I was so confused. I was very confused. We assumed he had protection, with DACA.
Alex Wagner: Talk to me about your husband, Juan. When did he come over here and what was his status at the moment that he was apprehended?
Stephanie Villareal: So he was active DACA. He had actually renewed his DACA way in advance. He had been hearing about the delays. So in November, he actually had renewed and it ended up expiring March 10th. So he detained February 18th.
Alex Wagner: His DACA status had not expired or his you know, he was still lawfully here as of February 18th and then while he’s been in detention, it’s expired.
Stephanie Villareal: Correct. He would renew every two years. And one of the requirements in order to renew is that you have no criminal history. So he was doing everything right.
Alex Wagner: What’s he like your husband?
Stephanie Villareal: We miss him a lot, because he’s just such a good father, such a good husband. He always does the right thing. Like, that’s just his character. And it’s just, it’s just very saddening that this could happen to people like us. You know, if it’s happening to us, it could definitely happen, you know, to others. My husband is just a good person all around.
Alex Wagner: He has, I think it’s, was it two bachelor’s degree in biology and clinical laboratory science? He’s a medical lab scientist?
Stephanie Villareal: Correct. Once he applied for DACA back in 2012, that’s when he graduated and got those two degrees back in 2012 and 2013.
Alex Wagner: Wow. And so, in the meantime, you’re here, you still have a child in the NICU, and then you have children at home too, is that right?
Stephanie Villareal: Yes, I have a four-year-old and I have a 10 month old.
Alex Wagner: Where do they think their dad is?
Stephanie Villareal: So my son, we actually just broke the truth to him because for about a month we had been telling him he was on a work trip and he just, my four-year-old is very, very uh smart and he likes to question everything and he knew that my husband would have told him about you know if he was leaving. And I think it was last Saturday, we finally told him the truth because we’ve always told him, you know, only criminals go to jail. So we were kind of debating on whether telling him.
Alex Wagner: Yeah.
Stephanie Villareal: And so we basically just told him you know grandma had dad in another country and in the United States, you have to be born in the in the United States in order to be here. And he just couldn’t understand, you know, he couldn’t understand, but we told him that daddy was born in Columbia and he was not allowed to be here. And that’s basically all we told them. And because of that, he’s in jail now and we’re hoping he’ll get out soon. And luckily we took him to see him, but he took a little while to compose himself once he saw my husband.
Alex Wagner: What was that like for all of you guys?
Stephanie Villareal: Very emotional. Very, very emotional. It was my husband cried. I had never seen him cry before. It was extremely hard, very hard. He just kept asking, daddy, why are you back there? And can you play with me? Can we play soccer? You know, and can you take me to baseball, to my baseball games like you used to? And it’s just really hard. He just couldn’t understand.
Alex Wagner: Um, your husband was brought here when he was really young. He’s an American for all intents and purposes. He’s married to an American. He has American children. Where does his case stand now?
Stephanie Villareal: So he had a deportation order from 2004. That one we had attempted multiple times to reopen. We were trying to do things, you know, the right way. Through our marriage, attorneys kept advising us kind of hold off because they were afraid that this would happen. He would get detained or he would get deported. But we had our attorney, she, as soon as he got detained, she started filing everything she needed to do. Trying to reopen that same order that we had attempted multiple times to reopen. And where we’re at kind of now is just trying to wait to see if they respond to to reopening that deportation order so it could be closed and hopefully he can stay.
Alex Wagner: Just. To understand what the deportation order was that that was before he got DACA status, I assume.
Stephanie Villareal: Correct. He was 14 years old when that was issued to him.
Alex Wagner: Okay, and then he subsequently got DACA status once that was offered right in 20. Was it 2012?
Stephanie Villareal: 2012.
Alex Wagner: But presumably this deportation order from when he was really young is what the Trump administration is using as the basis for why he was targeted in the first place. And they’ve essentially kept him in detention until now he’s not his DACA status is no longer active. So I assume that counts against him, too
Stephanie Villareal: We’re working on trying to get that expedited, so it could be moved as well.
Alex Wagner: Kristi Noem, who’s no longer the secretary of Homeland Security last month, was, you know, asked under some sharp questioning, like, what are you guys doing with DACA recipients? Like, why are you going after them? How many have you detained? How many of you deported? And I think the number was that they had detained 261 DACA-recipients and deported about 86 of them. But what’s so stunning about that is given, you know, DACA, these are Americans, basically, who were brought here through no fault of their own. They’ve contributed back to society. They’ve gotten, in the case of your husband, higher degrees. They’re in, like, you know, in many cases, elite professions. They are talented individuals. They, you, know, the best of the best. I would assume it’s hard to come out and talk about what’s happened to your family if you’re DACA because you don’t want to risk, you want to get these people back into the country one day. Why? Talk to me about the decision to go public with your story. And I don’t know, how freaked out are you that this makes you more of a target for the Trump administration?
Stephanie Villareal: So. It’s just to reiterate the facts of the story, you know, a lot of the times there’s a lot of assumptions, you now, that my husband was a criminal. He was not, he had no criminal background at all. That he, that we were on welfare, which is not true. You know, just a lot of assumptions and the reason I am coming public with it is just because I really want them to know who my husband was, who he is. [overlapping speak] He is, yes. He’s just, he’s definitely not somebody that deserves any of this, you know. Like you mentioned, he was brought here at no fault of his own. His family tried to do the right thing, unfortunately. You know, not everybody understands immigration, you know. It takes many, many, many years in order for something to get finalized. And that’s kind of where we were before all of this happened. I just want people to know. There’s, we’re not the only ones in this situation. There’s a lot of good people out there that do not deserve any of it.
Alex Wagner: Have you guys like talked about what could happen to him? I mean, he’s from Columbia, right? What’s that conversation been like?
Stephanie Villareal: It’s been hard. We try to, you know, try to prepare, but we just, we’re staying hopeful that he’ll come home. We just purchased our home last year, so everything felt perfect and falling in line. And we really don’t want to leave. This is where we were raising our children and our children are here with family and we want to be here in the United States for our children. You know, the opportunities are here.
Alex Wagner: So you might, would you leave? Would all of you guys leave if that’s what it comes down to?
Stephanie Villareal: We can’t tell yet. I hope that it doesn’t have to get to that. Hoping that we can stay here and we can build our family and just go back to living life as normal as we were.
Alex Wagner: How can people support families like your own who have found themselves in this situation and how are you guys getting by?
Stephanie Villareal: It’s been pretty hard. I’m doing this all on my own now. And I was out on maternity leave at work. And it’s just, luckily, we have good jobs, good people that have come in and supported us. And his family, my family, they’ve just all been so supportive. But it’s getting really hard, it’s getting really hard.
Alex Wagner: I’m sure this is not how you thought you were gonna be spending maternity.
Stephanie Villareal: No.
Alex Wagner: How’s your baby doing?
Stephanie Villareal: She’s growing. She just recently went through a blood transfusion, so they’re monitoring her. I’m hoping that eventually she can come home too, which is just so broken—
Alex Wagner: She will. It is just like unfathomable what you’re going through. But what’s so astounding is how tough you are and how strong you are, you know? Like you’re not crumbling under the weight of it. You’re doing podcasts and media and you’re drawing attention to a moral stain on our country. And it’s through that perseverance that the good guys win, you now?
Stephanie Villareal: Trying, I’m trying to stay strong and for my children.
Alex Wagner: You’re doing it, sis. It is invaluable to have your perspective and it’s so important to hear these stories because people, you know, we were very attuned to the death of Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good and people have sort of forgotten that the detentions and the deportations and the brutality and the cruelty very much continue and you’re a living testament to that. And, you know, these are the stakes. So thank you of reminding us of them, and I’m sorry that you even have to, but you’re an impressive lady, Stephanie.
Stephanie Villareal: Thank you.
Alex Wagner: After the break, we will put all of this in context with the Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last.
[AD BREAK]
Alex Wagner: JVL, it’s my deep honor to welcome you to Runaway Country. I can’t, my eyes are a light, my soul is glowing. Thank you for being here, buddy.
Jonathan V. Last: The honor is mine. Huge, huge fan of yours. I can’t wait for us to be best friends.
Alex Wagner: Oh, my God. Me too. I mean, I feel like I’m like already halfway there.
Jonathan V. Last: Yeah, it’s like the John Reilly stepbrothers gif. Did we just become best friends?
Alex Wagner: Yeah, exactly. We did. Time is actually a dimension, so in the salami slice of like, you know, we’re already there. Anyway, I just needed to bring that in. I’ve been watching or thinking about Interstellar a lot. That has no bearing whatsoever.
Jonathan V. Last: I thought you were going to go with Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, no, I just went with Interstellar.
Jonathan V. Last: We’re in the hot dog finger universe.
Alex Wagner: Exactly. Well, hot dog fingers, small authoritarian. What is it? Short-fingered Bulgarian. That’s—
Jonathan V. Last: Yeah. Stubby, stubby fingers.
Alex Wagner: Stubby fingers.
Jonathan V. Last: Yeah. Graydon Carter. Thank you for that, Graydon.
Alex Wagner: It’s one of the gifts he gave us. Let’s talk about what’s happening right now, which is this kind of the battle at hand seems to be airport lines versus moral collapse. [laughter] Which is the more powerful incentive, politically speaking?
Jonathan V. Last: Because we live in the stupidest timeline, I just assume it’ll be the airport lines.
Alex Wagner: Right, that’s the thing.
Jonathan V. Last: That winds up being more powerful, right? In the same way that people are willing to tolerate a million dead Americans from COVID, but like the price of gas goes up and they’re like, what the fuck?
Alex Wagner: I can’t abide it, not on, yeah. That seems to be what happens, yeah.
Jonathan V. Last: So I assume that’s gonna be the airport line. How about you, what do you think?
Alex Wagner: Well, no, I think it’s airport lines. I mean, it I will say the fact that Donald Trump has dispatched ICE agents to the airports has underscored this the sort of central. You know question in this fight, which is should this paramilitary goon squad be allowed to operate unfettered? But but really the thing that’s driving the negotiations on the hill and that it you know is the the source of all public outcries, the fact that people have to wait in a really long line to get onto their flights. And I, you listen, my heart goes out to travelers. I am one of them, but it says a lot about our society that the moral rot, which is at the center of ICE, is not the thing that’s pushing the White House to these negotiations and injecting new life in the question of ICE reforms.
Jonathan V. Last: Let me try to reframe this for you to help make the suffering a little bit easier for you and the rest of America. Yes, standing in TSA lines is a burden and is unpleasant and not fun and it can cost you time and all that, sure. On the other hand, all the people you hate most in the world are also standing in those lines. And today there’s a photo of somebody in a TSA line with Bill Barr. And you can see Bill Barr just standing there staring at his phone. And he’s not even in the TSA pre line. He’s in just a normal line.
Alex Wagner: Ooh, that’s just dessert, ain’t it?
Jonathan V. Last: You know what? Like, okay, I can, you know, what’s the old joke about like the Russians? You know, it’s not enough that I must have a nice cow, my neighbor’s cow must die too in order for me to be happy. And I feel like we can all live there.
Alex Wagner: We see ourselves in that adage. What’s your level of optimism that Democrats can get anything out of this moment that meaningfully reforms ICE? I was talking to Dan Pfeiffer, my colleague here at Crooked Media, about how hard they should push. And he said, meh, basically keep your powder dry for 2027 when Dems may have one or both houses of Congress, which is. You know, a bit cynical, probably strategically sound. I still, maybe I’m just a Pollyanna about this, but I think, I don’t know. I think they should push as hard as they fucking can.
Jonathan V. Last: I mean, I don’t see anything to be gained by not pushing as hard as you can, right? I mean what’s the cost to Democrats? Is it like—
Alex Wagner: Well, that people start blaming them for the airport lines.
Jonathan V. Last: If you can’t hang the airport lines around Donald Trump, then like you’re in the wrong business. You know, like this guy is at 36% approval in one of the polls I’ve just seen. I think his average is like 39, 38 right now. Gas prices, like everything else is going wrong. And if you can’t also blame him for the airport lines, then what are you even doing in politics?
Alex Wagner: Also, they run both. They run all of the government.
Jonathan V. Last: We had Trump saying like 48 hours ago, no, don’t any deal that the Democrats will agree to don’t do it.
Alex Wagner: Yes, yes.
Jonathan V. Last: So you’re like there. It’s. But I I don’t know where you guys are on this, but I firmly believe that if the next Democratic president, if we get another Democratic president. If the first thing he or she does isn’t feed DHS into the woodchipper, then what’s the point of them? Anyway, either way, I mean, I DHS is a totally corrupted agency at this point. And also it’s brand new. I mean DHS has still got the new car smell on it, right? It’s it’s five minutes old. Um, it’s been totally corrupted. It needs to be taken apart. It turns out it was a mistake. Uh, we shouldn’t have had it. And all of the, the various agencies, agencies of DHS need to be taking down to studs. It’s not like you can’t have somebody doing border enforcement. You can. But all of these agencies are totally corrupted and they need to be reassigned to other parts of the government and built from scratch. And so like, I’m, I am, the idea of reforming ICE is nice for right now, I guess, because you would like to keep, stop them from killing Americans on the streets. But long-term, like ICE has to be gone and it’s not enough for ICE to be gone, right? You know, CPB has to gone all. Everything in DHS. Take the entire department apart.
Alex Wagner: Total overhaul.
Jonathan V. Last: Push the thing, total overhaul, push it back. Again, we only just built this post 9/11. It’s not like it’s been there since 1950. So, you know, all of those functions existed before 9/11. They were just scattered in different agencies and it sure seems to have worked better then.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, and I actually, like another friend of mine, Ben Rhodes, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times basically saying these services need to be housed under different agencies. Like fuck putting them under DHS. I guess that means you’re not super optimistic about former Senator, current UFC wannabe, Markwayne Mullin coming in and cleaning house. I do want to draw your attention to Markwayne Mullin suggesting that maybe some marginal reforms at DHS would be possible as far as it concerns judicial warrants. This is Markwayne at his Senate confirmation hearing last week.
[clip of Senate confirmation hearing]: Will you commit to me and the chair and member, ranking member of this committee and the American people, that ICE will no longer instruct agents to break into people’s homes without a judicial warrant? / Sir, you’re using the word break into people’s houses very loosely. However, I have made it very clear to the staff and I think when you and I spoke that a judicial warrant will be used to go into houses in a place of businesses unless we’re pursuing someone that enters in that place. I have not mixed words with that and I haven’t changed my opinion about that.
Alex Wagner: Don’t call it breaking into a house when they kick door down.
Jonathan V. Last: I guess that’s a step up.
Alex Wagner: Is it? Is he destined for the Shield of the Americas?
Jonathan V. Last: I mean.
Alex Wagner: That’s where Kristi Noem is.
Jonathan V. Last: We can all only hope to make the Shield of the Americas First of all, just a question for you. Just as a matter of like, if you gave them an IQ test, who do you think is dumber, Markwayne or Noem?
Alex Wagner: Oh, there’s so many definitions of the word dumb. I mean, I think—
Jonathan V. Last: Straight IQ numbers.
Alex Wagner: I’m going to say, I actually think, I think that Kristi Noem is probably smarter as it concerns sort of shrewdness, but he is a little more than a, like my kids are really into Star Wars and there’s just like some of the clone generals that you know and then there’s a vast sea of like guys in helmets and he’s one of them. [laughter] That will just do whatever it is that the general wants him to do. And that then makes him—
Jonathan V. Last: Clone trooper 83-11 Mullin. Go out there and do—
Alex Wagner: Exactly, because in a way that makes him more of a long-term player in the Trump universe because he’s not going to spend $20,000 on horses to cut videos to support his, I don’t know, bid for governor of Oklahoma or whatever. So it’s a little complicated. His staying power is longer, not because he is smarter, but in part because I think he’s dumber and won’t leverage the power of the office for his own ends like she did.
Jonathan V. Last: Yeah, I don’t think he’s looking for a shot of the title, right? He wants a seat by the band, not a shot at the title. And Kristi, I think, was pretty ambitious. I think she really believed that she could potentially be one of Trump’s heirs.
Alex Wagner: Turns out no.
Jonathan V. Last: Violated the cardinal rule. Never make money off of Donald Trump. That’s the one thing he won’t tolerate.
Alex Wagner: The money goes one way.
Jonathan V. Last: He doesn’t tolerate anything else. The money goes one way, or if you’re getting it, he’s gotta get a taste, right? You can just be like, I gotta get my beak wet. Let me get my beak wet Kristi.
Alex Wagner: Oh god, I just hate the sentence, Trump beak wet. Like that just makes me very disturbed on a level that I don’t care to elaborate on.
[AD BREAK]
You sense a feeling that Markwayne Mullin isn’t going to be as bad as Kristi Noem, maybe because the little accessory known as Greg Bovino has been taken out of commission. But there’s just some, I guess, expectation based on testimony like that, that perhaps DHS, that Mullin and Tom Homan together could be less toxic than, for example, Lewandow—the trio of Lewandowski, Noam, and Bovino. But I got to say, man, we all saw Alex Pretti and Renée Nicole Good get murdered. And I think a lot of the country turned, like that happened. DHS funding was not approved. And we sort of took our eyes off of what ICE has been doing in the interim. And the beginning of the show, I spoke to a woman whose husband is a Dreamer, was an active Dreamer had active status and he was going to deliver breast milk. To his newborn who is in the NICU, ICE detained him, his DACA certification expired while he’s in detention and now he’s slated for deportation. They have arrested hundreds of Dreamers, they’ve deported scores of them, and it raises the question of like, okay, what exactly is happening at ICE and are these tactics, they’re not as publicly, viscerally appalling as what was happening before? But it’s still really fucking bad. They still have three quotas of deporting 3,000 people a day. And I think we have to be very careful. I mean, this is the work of like vigilance in the age of Trump, which is really hard, right? To stay maybe not as out like constantly outraged because they don’t think that’s healthy for your cortisol levels but the scrutiny that ICE deserves needs to be we need to uphold that both as people in the media and also American citizens for whom this is being done in our name.
Jonathan V. Last: Yeah. I mean, the problem is that I think Markwayne is probably likely to cut back on some of the illegal stuff that ICE and CPB was doing. But there’s a whole bunch of stuff which is legal, which is very bad. And one of the things the administration has been doing is changing people’s status, right? Removing protected status or doing administrative shenanigans and sleight of hand. To take people who were of documented legal status and render them undocumented, right? This was the thing they did with the, I’m forgetting her name, but the Tufts grad student. But the point is, why did they arrest her? They arrested her because she was here legally, but Marco Rubio went and revoked her status in secret to make her undocumented so they could. Which again, like, they create, they, they—
Alex Wagner: They create the criminals.
Jonathan V. Last: It is legal to create the criminal and to create the, and that’s a problem, right? And in a weird way, the blatant criminality of the Noem Lewandowski regime did make it easier for people to get outraged and see the things that were happening. Once this stuff becomes quasi-legal, I think it becomes harder to keep people’s [both speaking] eyes focused on, attention on it. I mean, the good news is we now have a war in Iran to focus people’s attention on. So, you know, I guess there’ll always be something. But yeah, in the meantime, this stuff is all going to wind up having real life, real world impacts on real people, thousands and thousands of them. And there is nothing to be done about it. We’ve got three more years of this.
Alex Wagner: You draw such a good point, which is they have learned lessons from Trump 1 and even from Renée Nicole Good and Alex Preti, which was like, make it less public, make it a bureaucratic affair. The camera phones is still a very useful way. There was a woman arrested at San Francisco airport over the weekend and you can’t around the visceral like reaction. That I think everybody feels when they see a mother and a child screaming, and crying, and being dragged out of a public place. I mean, that just does not feel like what we do in America. So I guess there’s that. But so much the administration has learned to bury in the shadows. Like, I mean even these detention centers, there’s a new court filing by attorneys that represent all the children in federal detention, and they say that conditions at the Dilley Immigration Center, which is where all the kids are sent to in Texas, the conditions are awful. And I’ve read sort of like. On a surface level, some of the, about some of these conditions, and it’s like they’re not getting put, there’s no teaching, there is no classroom, they’re not getting nutrition, they can’t sleep, there has been at least one documented case of someone trying to suicide and like. During family separations, it was that audio. Remember the audio of the children or the particular child that really became the inflection point. They do not let anything escape from the four walls of Dilley detention or any of these detention centers. So it’s like, and once there’s not a viral clip to be passed around with some audio or video, it’s not happening. And it is really, I mean, it is bad and it is happening in numbers that should stagger us.
Jonathan V. Last: I mean, this is nobody will ever care what is in a court filing, right? I mean that that’s just the world we live in now is that you can know. And I feel like this used to be different. I feel, like 15, 20 years ago, you could get a court filing and it would be on the evening news and the evening news still had, you know, 12 million viewers a night on each channel and. You know, they would do like the little, the little element where they would show the, with the highlighting over the, you know, you know, federal court filing it said, you know, he’d have Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings or somebody, Dan Rather reading it. You could get people to care about it. But now, I mean, if it’s not, imagine if Renee Good’s killing hadn’t been on video, right? I mean we, we know what they would have said because they said all the same things anyway. And it would be a, well, he says, he said, she said, who can say, who can’t say what really happened. And one of the things that ICE has done and CPB have done is they’ve started pushing enforcement away from high population density areas. Why do that? Well, you do that because with low population density, you reduce the chances that you’ll get a critical mass of people with cameras there quickly. That’s literally what it’s about. It’s just to prevent things from being captured on camera and I don’t know that there’s really a fix for that. We’re just going to have to take these body blows as a country for another three years.
Alex Wagner: Look, I mean, I think the reason this conversation is important and I think the reason the sense of doom is not for nothing is because this is how you inject urgency into the fight. If Democrats take back the House and maybe even the Senate in 2027, there needs to be continued sense of urgency about doing something about this. And the only way that happens is if people remain outraged. And this is part of that.
Jonathan V. Last: My nightmare, Alex, is that we make it out of this. I mean, my real nightmare is that we don’t make it of it and like Trump just decides he’s gonna stay and do another term and there’s nothing to be done. But my other nightmare is that like we claw our way back into the light. We get president, pick your favorite Democrat. Like whoever your dream Democrat is. And he or she gets to the White House and what they say is, yeah. We gotta, you know, gotta look forward, can’t look back. We’re not here to do recriminations. We’ve gotta deliver real things for the American people. And so we’re gonna, we’re going to try to do universal healthcare or something like that. And I, I am sorry, but the Biden administration tried to deliver real for real people and not do recriminations. That turned out to be a huge fucking mistake.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, well, there’s a poison, it’s like.
Jonathan V. Last: Right?
Alex Wagner: If you have molds that’s taking over your bathroom, you don’t just shut the door and like turn on a, open a window in another room.
Jonathan V. Last: So, you know, this is what I say, there are big structural reforms which have to take place because if you don’t do that, you’re just leaving the door open so that the next time 40,000 voters in Wisconsin decide that they want to take a gamble on an authoritarian, you’re right back where we are now.
Alex Wagner: More with JVL right after this quick break.
[AD BREAK]
Alex Wagner: Okay, well, you’ve given me a good segue here in terms of the next election, because throughout all of these debates, like as he’s fighting, not fighting, negotiating, not negotiating a war of choice in Iran, as he is, I guess, overseeing a spending fight on the Hill, Trump has been trying to inject the Save America Act into all of this saying like, don’t do anything, don’t do anything until you wedge my voter suppression bill, cram that down Democrats throats or nuke the filibuster and get it done somehow. This is my favorite. I mean, of all the things Trump said this week, he told Republicans not to go home for their scheduled Senate recess and, and Easter break and to make this one for Jesus. WWJD.
Jonathan V. Last: The late great Jesus.
Alex Wagner: What would Jesus do here?
Jonathan V. Last: On the third day, I would have risen a little bit faster. Think we could have done that a little faster. [laughter]
Alex Wagner: What would Jesus do right now? I don’t know that he would pass the Save America Act.
Jonathan V. Last: All right, you know what, let me red team this for you. My friend.
Alex Wagner: Please.
Jonathan V. Last: What if passing the Save America Act by nuking the filibuster is good, actually?
Alex Wagner: Wait, wait, wait. Break that apart. Like passing the Save America Act is good and nuking the filibuster is good?
Jonathan V. Last: So what if the outcome in which Republicans kill the filibuster and then pass the Save America Act turns out to be good? The thing which I think is obviously good is that I have no confidence that Democrats will have the institutional spine to break the filibuster in 2029, which they will need to do. And so, if somebody else has done that and taken the political hit for it already, great. I think that frees up, it makes all of the reforms that I was just talking about a minute ago much easier to accomplish. Secondly, the Save America Act has all sorts of bad shit in there, right? [both speaking] and it’s like, you know, all the trans people are bad. Voter rolls—
Alex Wagner: Voter rolls to DHS, what could go wrong?
Jonathan V. Last: On the other hand, the coalitions of voters for the two parties have shifted a lot.
Alex Wagner: I know. Okay, I know where you’re going with this.
Jonathan V. Last: Right. And I like, I don’t know, like, does making it harder for people to vote really benefit the type of people who vote for populist nationalist candidates?
Alex Wagner: Okay, wait now I was I follow your line of thought. For people who have not [both speaking] this is an argument that is very taken up taken wind this week, especially, there’s been some writing in conservative publications that things like the Save America Act are not good for Republicans because low Republicans increasingly have non-college educated low propensity voters. The kind’s of people [both speaking] right the kinds of people who don’t have passports or access to documentation and so this would inadvertently benefit higher educated globalists with passports like democrats. In addition to the moral stain that I think would be on anybody who supports a bill that makes it harder for people to vote, there is the point that I’m quoting Dan Pfeiffer a lot here. What if those coalitions of 2024 aren’t permanent, right? Like you see Hispanics Latinos, non-college-educated workers looking out at what Trump is doing, immigration dragnets, tariffs, inflation, cost of living, and like there’s no guarantee that the Trump coalition of 2024 is not actually more up for grabs than we think it is. So like, is it really wise to say, you know, based on the trend lines of the last four years, Democrats should be okay with a voter suppression bill like the Save America Act. Do we worry about that?
Jonathan V. Last: So, yes, yes I do is the short answer. And I don’t think anybody should support this.
Alex Wagner: Right.
Jonathan V. Last: Because I think it’s a bad bill. What I’m saying is that if it wound up getting past, and especially if it was passed by destroying the filibuster, I think at least in the medium term, the outcomes might be okay for Democrats.
Alex Wagner: You’re not worried about the requirement that states hand over voter rolls to DHS? That’s very much—
Jonathan V. Last: Totally worried about it. Yes. Yes, worried, worried about all of it, all the anti-trans stuff, all again, terrible. This is why I’m saying like, I wouldn’t vote for it. If I was a senator, I would not vote for this thing. I would no counsel anybody else to vote for. I’m just trying to think through here. It’s like with the Texas redistricting, you know, like it seemed like it was a really good thing for in the moment. For Republicans, but it’s turned out to be not good, right? I mean, it’s gonna, they could actually wind up losing some marginal seats there and with Virginia and who else swapped California? It’s at least a wash, because they also—
Alex Wagner: Yeah, Missouri is an ongoing fight.
Jonathan V. Last: Missouri is ongoing fight, so I’m just saying that of all the things there are to worry about, I worry about the SAVE Act. I’d say that’s pretty far down my list because I can also see a world in which it backfires a little bit. For Republicans or not, right? I mean, maybe they get everything they want.
Alex Wagner: They could, they are saying to Trump, this is my favorite thing to say this week, hush little baby, we’ll pass it through reconciliation. Hush little baby, don’t say a word, we will pass everything you want through reconciliation.
Jonathan V. Last: Can they do that?
Alex Wagner: I mean, the Senate makes the Senate rules. So like, I’m not a parliamentarian, we’re not going to go down that rabbit hole. But they could in which case you still have the filibuster and you still then you get the Save America Act. Let’s just let’s just put that on ice for a moment I do think you know the Trump’s reliance focus on this and his you know while he craters the party and Destroys republican chances ahead of the midterm suggests to me that he’s not trying to win this fair and square, right? And he’s taken he’s taken suggestions from anybody about what to do. You could be a caller in on Fox News and say, hey, put ICE at the airports. And he’s like, good idea.
Jonathan V. Last: Literally what happens. Yes. That’s the world we live in.
Alex Wagner: Likewise, Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast, in a semi-joking manner, which I think everybody by this point knows is not semi-joking. The two collars, the three collared shirt, that’s not joke. That’s a choice. This is not a joke. He suggests that ICE Agents at airports are test runs. Let’s take a listen to what Trump’s ousted consigliere had to say about employing ICE to steal elections.
[clip of Steve Bannon]: We can use what’s happening with these ICE helping out at the airports, we can use this as a test case to get really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterm election, sir. / Yeah, I think we should have ICE agents at the polling places, because if you’re an illegal alien, you can’t vote, right? It’s against the law. It’s a federal crime for you to vote in federal elections. And so if you are an American citizen, you should be happy that ICE is there because you’re not going to have illegal aliens canceling out your vote. / Pick em out of a line starting today and maybe the lines get shorter.
Alex Wagner: Okay. Just to be clear.
Jonathan V. Last: I’m sorry, I gotta just pause this here for a minute. What’s the point of all the layers if they’re the same color?
Alex Wagner: It’s just insulation.
Jonathan V. Last: Why go three deep, all black?
Alex Wagner: It’s like, uh—
Jonathan V. Last: That’s a weird, weird choice.
Alex Wagner: Okay I mean it’s like why did Kylo Ren wear a mask if he didn’t need a breathing apparatus like Darth Vader? It was just to seem particularly maleficent.
Jonathan V. Last: Isn’t that what the kids call it? The kids call it a fit.
Alex Wagner: Like powerful and scary. It’s like, you know, a shawl collar would be too cuck. Don’t take that suggestion lightly, JVL, that’s what I’m saying. They don’t get Save America Act passed fine, or they do get Save America Act pass, and they have DHS has all the voter rolls and that DHS, TSA, ICE, all these agencies go out on a hunt for voters who aren’t here in the country legally, who don’t exist, by the way. I think the incidence of illegal citizens, illegal residents voting is like 0.00000. I can’t say the number of zeros. It’s, there’s so many. It’d go past our normal podcast time. It’s vanishing. But it is a great way to terrify Black and brown people and keep them away from polls and otherwise create chaos and suggest to the public that whatever happened in Fulton County or Maricopa County was. Not on the um level and therefore those results should be discounted and Mike Johnson don’t seat anybody from those districts and keep the gavel in your hands so—
Jonathan V. Last: Yes. So that’s the thing, right? And what it’s really about is about seeding winners, right? So you can send ICE out to polling places. You can do it strategically and go to areas where you think you can depress democratic turnout by like 1%, right? Or 2% where in swing seats, that might be enough. But the real game is to try to get to a point where, hey, if we keep it close enough, where we’ve only lost X number of seats, right, we could maybe make a play to have Mike Johnson or have the state secretaries of state not certify results in certain place, right? You can see that that’s in the more chaos you have, the more room to maneuver you have if you want to do that sort of thing. And that worries me, worries me more about 2028 than 2026. But because I think, I don’t think 2026 is likely to be close enough for anything to, I mean, I think the Dems could wind up with 60 seats in the house. I mean, you just look at all of the data that you normally see in off years running up with like retirements and special election seats. Like it’s so unambiguous. It’s, I mean it just looks like Republicans have taken 15 points off the top.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, they have.
Jonathan V. Last: They’re just gone, you know, and at that level, if you then have macroeconomic conditions moving in the wrong direction on top of that stuff, like, I mean, you know, Alaska and Texas are kind of in play, which is crazy. I don’t know. I don’t know about the Senate. I think the Senate is probably a coin flip, but it’s possible. But the House could be really bad for Republicans. Don’t you think? What do you what do you do? Do you think like, oh, 25 seats or do you think this could be like Hulk smash?
Alex Wagner: I get lulled into the, you know, I guess when we break apart the maps and we look at how closely they’re just, it’s hard to have a landslide. I mean, you’d really, it would have to be. Like districts that went 24 points for Trump would have to be flipped. Maybe that’ll happen. We’re seeing strange, abnormal things happen in the universe, so perhaps that’s possible. I don’t know, but I think it will be a solid enough majority that chicanery like Adelita Grijalva not being seated for 10 years is going to be very hard for even a morally compromised person like Mike Johnson.
Jonathan V. Last: Let me ask you a question. Do you think they’d try to push through one or two Supreme Court replacements?
Alex Wagner: Well, interesting you’re asking me that, because I’m just writing a book that’s coming out this fall about the Supreme Court. I think we can pretty much be guaranteed Thomas or Alito or maybe both retirement at the end of this term. They’ll go out with a bang. They’ll gut the rest of the Voting Rights Act and God knows what else. Maybe they’ll return Obergefell. They’ll go out big.
Jonathan V. Last: Why not, right, yeah.
Alex Wagner: Uh, but yeah, I absolutely think they’re going to give Trump two more appointments and he’s going to choose like—
Jonathan V. Last: Aileen Cannon.
Alex Wagner: Right. I mean I but but but actually in the way that we can see bad things On the margins being good for democrats maybe in the medium to long term Having you know, reinjecting the urgency around the court onto the ballot in 2026 is going to be important. Right. Because there are also liberal justices who are getting older too, I’m not gonna name names [coughs] Sotomayor. But like it’s a live issue.
Jonathan V. Last: Doesn’t matter because we’ve got to expand the court anyway.
Alex Wagner: Well, there’s that. Get rid of the filibuster, expand the court. Here we go. The JVL administration.
Jonathan V. Last: I mean, this is a thing that I’ve really flipped on and come to believe over the last decade.
Alex Wagner: Look at what’s happened to you, bulwark people. It’s like, it’s like crazy. You’re crazy like foxes.
Jonathan V. Last: I mean, maybe, maybe it’s nuts. Wait, where do you…
Alex Wagner: No, I’m not opposed to it. I just feel like, like I sometimes listen to Tim and I’m like babies come so far.
Jonathan V. Last: So here’s the thing, right? So expanding the court would not be the best reform, right. The best reform would be to like regularize the appointments so that it’s like every two years you have another one. And so that’s the best way to do it after. But that’s not achievable under the Constitution. You can’t do that. You can expand the court. And so do you take the reform that is… Like, OK, and pretty good and it’s helpful, but isn’t perfect? Or do you like pretend that you are wedded to doing it the perfect way, even though that’s technically impossible because we can’t do big constitutional amendments like that anymore? And I feel like the answer is obvious. You got to expand the court. And I just don’t. I guess I don’t really see at this late date a serious reason not to.
Alex Wagner: Yeah, I think it just, it’s about how much sort of you accept that things have changed.
Jonathan V. Last: Yeah.
Alex Wagner: And that we’re in an entirely different universe. And I think that there’s some people, and I get this, there’s a desire to think that the unknown future can also be a return to the glory days of the past. Like that we can, that you can go home again. And I mean, I understand the impulse towards that, but I’m more in agreement with you, which is. Donald Trump changed everything. And what’s most, I think, permanent about that is that he was re-elected and that the American public chose him. And that means we are a different country than we thought we were 10 years ago. And therefore, the people who are the opposition party.
Jonathan V. Last: And Biden tried to reset to normal.
Alex Wagner: And it didn’t work.
Jonathan V. Last: Right. I mean, say it was a theory, right? I mean he could have he could have been a reform minded guy who decided we’re going to Trump proof the federal government. But instead he was like, Nope, we’re gonna all hold hands and fake it till we make it. We’re going do legislation and we’re going to spend money on rural broadband for red state voters and infrastructure. And, you know, we’re going to try to let the poison go away. Yeah. And it just didn’t. That just isn’t where America is anymore. In all sorts of constitutional mechanisms, it turns out, don’t work.
Alex Wagner: It’s an alarming time.
Jonathan V. Last: I do not understand people who aren’t alarmed.
Alex Wagner: It’s to our point earlier about like, if you’re not alarmed, then it doesn’t matter. If you don’t see the audio and video, if your cortisol levels are not like elevated, then it’s not, it’s gonna not gonna move people. And so therefore, you know, what do they say? Desperate times call for desperate measures and keeping up desperation, I guess, is the key to political change, which is a dark as fuck assessment. But what did I expect when I invited the brilliant Jonathan V. Last on this program?
Jonathan V. Last: That’s what I’m here for.
Alex Wagner: This is what we love. This is what we need. We need a dose of dark wisdom. And that’s why we ask you to come on the show. And may I say, you did not disappoint.
Jonathan V. Last: Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate that.
Alex Wagner: I, uh, I like when friends from the Bulwark come and visit us and hopefully one day we can do this in person and break bread.
Jonathan V. Last: I can’t wait I can’t wait.
Alex Wagner: JVL—
Jonathan V. Last: If people aren’t subscribed to this, what the fuck are they even thinking? This is like one of the best shows in the world.
Alex Wagner: Please guys please. Oh, my God.
Jonathan V. Last: Come on. Come on people.
Alex Wagner: Thank you for saying that.
Jonathan V. Last: Ride with Alex.
Alex Wagner: Jonathan V. Last, thank you so much for your time and just the pep you put in my step today, even though it’s a dark pep.
Jonathan V. Last: Thanks for having me, bye.
Alex Wagner: Um, please let’s do this again.
Jonathan V. Last: 100%. [music plays]
Alex Wagner: That is our show for this week. Please don’t forget to check out the show and our rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. We have a bunch of YouTube exclusive content up there like this week’s rapid response video with The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos.
[clip of Evan Osnos]: This is the world of the jungle. And this is the word that Stephen Miller thought they wanted when he said that it was gonna be the iron law of strength, the way the world has always operated. Well, congratulations, gentlemen. This is the world you’ve got.
Alex Wagner: Also, if you’re not tired of hearing from me yet, please check out my Substack, How the Hell with Alex Wagner. And last but not least, if you have been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, 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. Thanks for listening. 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.
