Is Trump deporting record numbers of migrants?

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1:15Anthony Zurcher:BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Away from the big, beautiful bill, the Trump administration has ramped up another war this week. They are suing one of America's biggest so-called sanctuary cities, Los Angeles. And Los Angeles isn't the only place targeted. There have been similar lawsuits against Chicago and plenty of other cities as well. They are Democratic Party cities run by the Democrats and they are being deliberately singled out, as Donald Trump himself says. Biden allowed 21 million people to come into our country. Of that, vast numbers of those people were murderers, killers, people from gangs, people from jails.

1:56They emptied their jails out into the U.S. Most of those people are in the cities, all blue cities, all Democrat-run cities, and they think they're going to use them to vote. It's not going to happen. In this episode, Trump's war against sanctuary cities, so-called, and how achievable is his promise to carry out the largest deportation programme that America has ever seen. Welcome to AmeriCast.

2:22Anthony Zurcher:AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. You're gambling with the lives of millions of people. You're gambling with World War III. President Trump's message is very simple. We are done being taken advantage of. Mr. President, in the name of our God, have mercy upon the people. We're scared now. Are you supportive of these onesies? I'm supportive of vaccines. What is happening? Like, this is not America. This is a terrible nightmare. This is what victory feels like. Yeah!

3:00Hello, it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England.

3:04Anthony Zurcher:And it's Anthony across from Justin in what is now the worldwide headquarters, now that I'm here and happy to be here in London. We've got a really interesting pod coming because it's just the two of us, but it's the two of us joined by a real expert, and not just an expert, a practitioner, someone who is very, very recently involved in immigration policy. And more importantly, in immigration enforcement. So we've got an interview with PJ Lechleichner, who was director of ICE, or at least acting director of ICE, which is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. He's a career civil servant.

3:39He's not a political guy. But my goodness, he knows what was going on on the inside at ICE. And he only stepped down when Donald Trump came to power on January the 20th. And he didn't step down necessarily for political reasons. So if someone is going to give us a real inside take on what is going on, because it is really central. I mean, we talk about a thousand things, Anthony, and we keep saying we're missing stuff. But one of the things possibly we haven't talked about enough, actually, is the effort that the Trump administration is making to keep immigration and illegal immigration, particularly at the forefront of everyone's minds.

4:15Anthony Zurcher:This has been an issue that Donald Trump has been talking about since 2015, when he first came down that gold escalator in New York City and talked about the Mexicans who are coming across the border, some of whom may be good people, but others were really nasty. He feels like immigration is an issue that is strong for him, is strong for Republicans, and that whenever the debate is about immigration, it's a winning one for his side. So they want to push that. They've been pushing it since the start of this new presidential term. And they're trying to expand it out to more than just stopping people at the border, but the mass deportations that he talked about and crowds cheered for when Donald Trump ran for president just last year.

4:59Anthony Zurcher:Yeah. And we've had an email, which is worth starting off with, because it's from Tim in Glasgow. He says he really enjoyed the recent interview with Miles Taylor, who was, of course, a friend of the pod, former chief of staff at the Department for Homeland Security. And Tim says also your coverage of events in California more widely. So could you explain the sanctuary state laws and what these mean for federal law enforcement? enforcement. Miles said that Trump's actions, so this is sending the National Guard in particular to Los Angeles, were unwarranted because local authorities are trusted to enforce national laws in the first instance.

5:33So how do sanctuary laws fit into that equation, which is a question undoubtedly, Anthony, for you?

5:40Anthony Zurcher:And sanctuary laws, and it's not just state-level laws, there are some cities that are sanctuary cities and counties across the country. It limits the ability of the local governments to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement officials. Now, California has a statewide sanctuary law. And while there is some cooperation, particularly when an undocumented migrant is in a jail or is being prosecuted, it does limit some of the things that state officials can do, the communication between state officials and federal immigration officers. So the idea, the sanctuary part of the sanctuary city is that these are places where undocumented migrants can trust that they can interact with local government and state government and not have that reported to the federal government, have them deported.

6:31Anthony Zurcher:And the argument behind this is that these people still need government. They live in the United States. They need access to health care and to government services because you don't want to create an underclass of residents who are totally alienated, who are living in the dark, who can't turn to law enforcement if they see a crime or are the victims of crime. Yeah. The counter argument, I suppose, is that America is one nation, albeit a federal nation, and it ought to be able to enforce really important laws. I mean, you think, is there a kind of logical issue here that, hang on a second, the left now think that they should be able to do what they want in their own places.

7:10They didn't used to think that. Right.

7:12Anthony Zurcher:I mean, there is a conflict there and you can see arguments on both sides. This is the law of the land. If you're in this country and you don't have a normalized immigration status, then you shouldn't be in this country. The question is what do you want to do to enforce that and the costs that you bear to enforce that. So you have instances where children are being sent back to their home countries, children who are getting medical care here in the country because they're undocumented. You have a group of people who are so fearful that they will get deported that they don't, you know, they could be the victims of crime and not report it because they're afraid of coming out of the shadows in this country.

7:50Anthony Zurcher:So there are arguments on both sides. And presidents, Democratic and Republican, have done things to try to address undocumented migrants. Of course, the Democrats have tried to provide some normalized residency to certain undocumented migrants, like the children who came over here of migrants who have lived in the United States for a long time, for instance. But Donald Trump won last year, promising a much harder line on this. And not just deportations at the border, not just stopping people crossing the border, but finding people all over the country who are here, millions of people, and getting them out of the country.

8:27Anthony Zurcher:Because he says that will be, in the end, a boon to the American economy because these people, in his view, are taxing social services, are a burden on social services. If I quote him here, I want ICE Border Patrol, our great and patriotic law enforcement officers to focus on our crime ridden and deadly inner cities and those places where sanctuary cities play such a big role. You don't hear about sanctuary cities in our heartland. This is a truth social post just a couple of weeks or so ago. So what can he do? I mean, we heard that he's suing L.A. Along what lines? That it's unconstitutional or what?

9:05Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, that violates federal law, that they can file lawsuits like this. And also they've been threatening to withhold government support, government funding. You could really punish a state like California if you wanted to by withholding, say, disaster aid, for instance, conditioning the wildfire aid that's been promised that is needed to rebuild Los Angeles, withholding that until California or Los Angeles or wherever changes their laws. He's threatened to do that, hasn't he? He hasn't actually done it. He's threatened to do it. He hasn't done it yet. And so it would be a big step. But it's something we've seen with Donald Trump.

9:40Anthony Zurcher:I mean, in other instances, right, what he's doing with colleges, institutions of higher education, withholding research funds to Harvard and to Columbia. He's he's starting to in his administration is starting to kind of use the muscle, the power of the federal government in ways that past presidents have. And even Donald Trump didn't try to do in his first presidential term. It's a new use of power, and you're seeing it in different instances, and he could do it for immigration as well. What's interesting there, you've got some of the universities have caved, basically, haven't they, and have said, OK, lay off.

10:13We'll do pretty much what you want. Interesting, and I suppose predictable in a way, Los Angeles at the moment absolutely not caving. Let's listen to the mayor, Karen Bass. This is essentially an all-out assault against Los Angeles. The lawsuit is an attempt to overturn the will of the city,

10:32Anthony Zurcher:calling for a halt to long-standing policy to protect immigrant Angelenos. We are a city of immigrants. We know that Los Angeles is the test case, and we will stand strong. And we do so because the people snatched off city streets and chased through parking lots are our co-workers, our neighbours, our family members, and they are Angelenos. I'm interested in that line about snatching people because there is a suggestion, isn't there? Americans voted for this in many respects, but did they also vote for some of the tactics that ICE seem to be using, particularly when they're doing things in plain clothes and particularly when people are being chased around?

11:16People who maybe have lived in the US for quite a long time. And there's a kind of queasiness, isn't there, which you can pick up. What do you pick up about whether or not what is being done at the moment, just politically, never mind whether it's right or wrong, just politically, is kind of not quite as popular as the administration hoped? Right.

11:35Anthony Zurcher:And in some cases, it's anecdotal evidence. You hear from people who are Trump supporters who said, yeah, I wanted Donald Trump to go after these immigrant criminals, but not the gardener across the street, not the person who I sit next to in my church. Or everyone in my farm. Yeah, everyone in my farm, everyone, all the people who are cleaning hotel rooms across the country. I mean, this is, they're saying, and there are people who have said this publicly, that this is not what they imagined, not what they thought Donald Trump was going to do. There's also evidence from polling that shows that support for Donald Trump's immigration policies has been declining.

12:12Anthony Zurcher:I mean, this was, as I mentioned earlier, this was an area of strength for Republicans and Trump. And he was, he had a majority support, even when you ask, do you support mass deportations? But those numbers have gone down in the polls I've seen recently that approve them. And I think part of that is because they're starting to see the very real consequences. You can't deport millions of Americans. You can't detain millions of undocumented migrants. You can't deport millions of undocumented migrants without going to where they are in the cities and where they live and finding places. You know, there was actually an interesting Washington Post story a few months ago about Stephen Miller, who is we've talked about in the past.

12:51Anthony Zurcher:He's the deputy chief of staff in the White House and kind of the mastermind of Donald Trump's immigration policy. And he was having a meeting with ICE officials telling them that they needed to do more to deport people. And he said, according to this article, you know, I could go down to a street corner in Washington, D.C. and find a dozen undocumented migrants that you could deport. It's almost like that Al Capone line, you know, when they were when the FBI wanted to crack down on Al Capone. Everyone knows where the booze is. Everyone knows, you know, but no one has the will to take it on. And so he was kind of issuing his own demand, like we know where they are.

13:29Anthony Zurcher:Go get them, even if it makes people upset. But then they conduct these raids and they conducted quite a few in Los Angeles, didn't they? And exactly as we've just been saying, people start to get a little bit leery about it and say, oh, is that the right sort of thing? Including, crucially, some people who kind of are very much part of the Trump wider orbit. And I'm thinking, and we should listen to a bit of him, of Joe Rogan, the podcaster, who isn't necessarily a Trump person, but he's certainly involved in a lot of the publicity that Donald Trump had before the election. and you'd expect him to be pretty tough on illegal immigration.

14:06But listen to what he's being said specifically about the raids in L.A. I don't think if the Trump administration, if they're running and they said, we're going to go to Home Depot and we're going to arrest all the people at Home Depot, we're going to go to construction sites and we're going to just like tackle people at constructions. I don't think anybody would have signed up for that. They said, we're going to get rid of the criminals and the gang members first. Right. And now we're we're seeing like Home Depots get raided. Like, that's crazy.

14:32Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, that shows some of the unease. And it's particularly the way, as you mentioned, this is being done, where you have masked law enforcement officers with no real identification. It says maybe law enforcement or it says police on it, but that's it. So you don't know exactly who they are or where they come from. And they're in unmarked vehicles. Oftentimes they come out and they do. They can grab people off the street and put them in a van. And then the loved ones, the family members of these migrants, sometimes takes them days or weeks to figure out where they are. And that is a kind of a disturbing scene for even people who are in favor of immigration enforcement.

15:16And where are they? I mean, because that's the other thing that are these people being sent straight off somewhere? They're being held in camps, which was one of the things he promised. And everyone said, do you remember he was talking about camps before the election? And people said it's not very American to have kind of huge camps full of people who've been arrested around the place. But is that what is happening?

15:35Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, that's where they're ending up before they're being sent out of the country. But they're ending up in places like Louisiana or Texas or soon Florida and this alligator Alcatraz that Donald Trump just earlier this week went down and visited this mass detention camp that is being set up and then process them quickly to give them their their hearing, their immigration hearing so they can be deported to whatever country will take them. I mean, there's their home country or now they've opened a pathway to deportations to third countries where these people aren't even from and they'll be they'll be sent there.

16:10Anthony Zurcher:And this bill, the big, beautiful bill that Donald Trump talked about contains tens of billions of dollars for new detention centers. So you're going to get over the next several years an immigration enforcement infrastructure that is much bigger than the one we're seeing right now. That's a really interesting point because that bill and the money in it, and it may well have passed by the time people listen to this. The money in that bill is really crucial, isn't it, in a way that you can't overemphasize. Because I was back in the Obama years, and Obama deported quite a few people, didn't he, in raw numbers, kind of similar to what Trump is achieving or possibly even more.

16:50But that was as a result of money that had been appropriated by Congress to do those deportations. It really does matter, doesn't it? Either the money is there to have the whole system of finding people, sending people out. It's quite labor intensive, isn't it? It's quite expensive, basically, to send people back.

17:09Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, absolutely. And what you hear from inside the current detention camps is that they are at capacity. We hear stories from sometimes even tourists who have come over here who have been kind of caught up because of some sort of immigration issue that get put into a detention camp. I was talking to one British tourist a couple of months ago who went into Canada and got detained because of work, questions about whether she was there to work or not. And she was detained for several weeks. And she told stories about how sometimes she wouldn't be fed dinner until after midnight just because the staff was so small, so limited and stretched that they didn't have enough hands to take care of all of these people.

17:50The wider politics of it, when you think of the Trump victory and you think of how it was built, he reintroduced class in a sense to US politics and garnered the votes of those in Britain. We would call them the working class and a working class that was multiracial, particularly when it comes to men, black men, young black men, but also really crucially Hispanic people. I mean, they're just a whole new way of looking at the way that Americans vote. I would just wonder the extent to which there is any polling evidence at all that these actions have damaged that.

18:30Anthony Zurcher:Yeah, there is obviously in these larger polls, they aren't broken down quite as much by race because there's a higher margin of error. But I think you are seeing instances where American citizens have been accidentally detained. And it's not white American citizens who are getting swept up in this. It's people of color. It's Hispanics because when they're doing these immigration enforcement, they're identifying people that they think look like immigrants. And so there's a chilling effect that could go on with this type of action. And I think there is very real concern in the Hispanic community that the enforcement is casting too wide a net.

19:11But that's a political disaster for them.

19:13Anthony Zurcher:It's a really, really foolish thing to do. Again, never mind the rights and wrongs. It seems incredibly foolish to have this new group of people who've never really backed you before, not in recent years, and you do something that takes their support away. That's the thing. Trump campaigned promising on deporting millions of undocumented migrants. He said, you know, 10 million, 20 million undocumented migrants in this country that Joe Biden was letting flood in. If you're going to hit millions rather than hundreds of thousands, then it's going to be farm workers. It's going to be the family who has lived here for decades.

19:50Anthony Zurcher:And now the husband, because of some interaction with law enforcement or interaction with a government that is cooperating with immigration enforcement officials, gets picked up and detained and deported. And the family is left behind. Maybe the kids who were born in America, U.S. citizens at this point, they're left behind. Yeah. Just to get the numbers in context and true or as true as we can be sure. Trump says 20 million or so. We heard from him right at the beginning of the podcast. Joe Biden did not let in 20 million people, but he did let in millions, didn't he? Yeah. I mean, there were hundreds of thousands a month who were coming across the border, and a lot of them were contacted, were detained temporarily by immigration enforcement officials.

20:38Anthony Zurcher:There are ones who had claims of asylum. They were on American soil. They said they were claiming asylum because of political prosecution, persecution in their home countries. And when they claim asylum, then they're allowed to stay here temporarily and be processed. And it's that processing time that could take years sometimes. And so these were people who were, you know, these are the people that Donald Trump's identifying who are over here in the country and came over in this flood of people after COVID. And of course, there have been some high profile. And again, Trump said right at the beginning, we had that clip where he was saying lots of them are murderers and all the rest of it.