When ICE buys a warehouse in your town

0:00Rudy Cruz Jr.:Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design. MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.

0:17Danielle Kurtzleben:WBUR Podcasts, Boston. I don't want to see the resources of our residents and taxpayers being sucked dry by this operation. When ICE buys up a warehouse in your backyard, is there anything you can do? It's Monday, February 23rd, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:50Today on the show, tariffs are dead.

0:54Danielle Kurtzleben:Long live tariffs. The president doubles down on his favorite policy tool, despite the Supreme Court trying to rein him in. Also, Mexico's second largest city was almost completely shut down on Sunday, as cartels unleashed violence across the country in response to the killing of a drug lord known as Almencho.

1:15Rudy Cruz Jr.:The president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said this morning that things are starting to be under control. What happened yesterday was members of the cartels basically set fire to trucks and businesses and banks that were run by the federal government.

1:32Danielle Kurtzleben:But first, to news in this country. Cities are fighting back against the Department of Homeland Security's plans to convert warehouses into detention centers for immigrants. One building in a suburb of El Paso along the U.S.-Mexico border is so large that four and a half Walmart super centers could fit inside. Rudy Cruz Jr. is the mayor of Socorro, Texas. He tells Peter O'Dowd the city never got a heads up from the government about its plans to move in. You know, these transactions, they can always occur without municipal approval. They comply with existing zoning and federal authorities. So right now we're actively seeking clarification on the intended use of the facility and any projected operational impact on our community.

2:18Danielle Kurtzleben:This is happening all over the United States, from New England down to the Mexican border where you are. And people have packed into public meetings to implore local officials to do something about it. Ashley Sanchez is a local resident, spoke at a public meeting earlier this month. This is a place of culture and love, family, community, and it's no place for these camps that are inhumane and deadly in practice.

2:40Rudy Cruz Jr.:Sir, your people are fighters. We want the man who represents us to be a fighter as well.

2:45Danielle Kurtzleben:Do you want this warehouse in your community, Mayor? No, Peter, I'll be honest with you. A lot of folks, they tend to skip the fact that I'm probably the only Native American elected official in the entire county of El Paso. You know, these things right here, they raise concerns, and our concerns are typically rooted in transparency, infrastructure capacity, and community impact. And so Socorro being such a close-knit and diverse border community with deep binational ties, this is something that does raise questions about community trust and public safety perceptions, you know? Yeah. If it moves forward, it could mean more than 8 ,000 people coming to a town of 40 ,000, a significant jump in your population.

3:26Danielle Kurtzleben:How would you deal with that in terms of infrastructure, water, sewage, power, that sort of thing? So, yeah, just, you know, the strain on local infrastructure, the traffic and emergency service demands and probably, you know, potential effect on families and small businesses are some of the things that we're looking at right now. Our current water infrastructure and sewer is hanging on by a thread and just having multiple meetings with local utility service providers have told us this. And we're currently replacing, you know, infrastructure that's been laid in the ground years ago. And for a third of our population, you know, to be placed into a camp this size here would definitely, definitely cause issues with our infrastructure.

4:07Danielle Kurtzleben:And what does that mean? What kind of scenarios would you have to plan for? You know, so typically for a residential development, there's months and months of planning that has to take place. So they're planning and zoning department, engineers, and design teams. And this is something that I don't think DHS ever accounted for or even took into consideration. So I don't want to see the resources of our residents and taxpayers being sucked dry by this operation. What options do you realistically have beyond a PR campaign, essentially? Because the federal government, if it wants to do something, has broad powers to do it.

4:44Danielle Kurtzleben:How do you plan to fight this? Absolutely. So one of the things that we are looking at, there's just multiple things that we can look at, right? So, Peter, we're reading the zoning compliance and land use regulations is one of the things that we can do. We want to ensure strict adherence to building codes and infrastructure requirements. And at the same time, we are currently advocating at both state and federal levels. And we would also like to request maybe the consideration of an environmental and infrastructure impact assessment, similar to what we do with any type of development that takes place in my city.

5:14Danielle Kurtzleben:The Trump administration is making the point that it's trying to make its effort to deport people better and more efficient. And whether you agree with that policy or not, I'm wondering if these warehouses in places like your town would make deporting people easier and more efficient. And that might, in a sense, make it better for the people inside if they got moved out of detention sooner. I mean, I can agree with that. And if it was up to me, I deport all criminals, whether they're American or not. But that's not what the law is here in Texas or the U.S. It's very difficult for us to swallow something like this just because Socorro is just a diverse community with many ties across the border and an increased ICE presence.

5:57Danielle Kurtzleben:It definitely impacts our community. One of the questions, and we see it all the time on our social media pages, you know, people of this area, this region, they tend to applaud the multi-millions of dollars that are being spent on this ICE facility. And then I ask myself, is it really something to applaud, seeing our tax dollars being spent on non-Americans? Or should we have diverted all those monies into programs that are going to help fund Americans and get the homeless off the street? How about our veterans? And how about those families that are struggling, those families that are hardworking, taxpaying people?

6:30Danielle Kurtzleben:That's why I want to see our taxpayer dollars being spent. Do you have a time frame briefly of when you might see people move in? We don't. Again, DHS has not reached out to us at all. We've tried reaching them, but we get diverted to speak to someone from the acquisitions department. I can tell you that they've given us a time frame of maybe September of when they want to be settled in and operation. But we don't know that because we haven't had any sit-down meetings or any formal information come through our office. Rudy Cruz Jr. is the mayor of Socorro, Texas, outside of El Paso. Thank you so much for your time.

7:05Danielle Kurtzleben:Appreciate it. Thank you.

7:13Danielle Kurtzleben:Coming up next. The Trump administration's tariffs were designed to provoke a response from global trading partners, whom Trump said were ripping off the country. But not so much the response that they got at the Supreme Court last week, when the justices said the White House went too far in imposing tariffs without congressional approval. Now Trump says he's raising taxes on imports from around the world anyway. Indira Lakshmanan helps us make sense of how after the break.

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8:28Rudy Cruz Jr.:All goods coming into the U.S. from anywhere in the world will face a new tariff of 15 % starting tomorrow. The Supreme Court on Friday struck down President Trump's previous sweeping tariffs, saying that the Constitution grants Congress, not the President, the power to impose taxes and tariffs. The president vented his outrage at the court and then cited a different law to impose a new global tariff of 10 percent, which he raised to 15 percent over the weekend. NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben joins us now to bring us the latest. Welcome, Danielle. Hey, good to talk to you. So the country's highest court ruled that according to the Constitution, taxes and tariffs are set in Congress and that under the international economic – well, you tell us more.

9:14Rudy Cruz Jr.:You explain to us what the Supreme Court was saying. Yeah. So the president had imposed a bunch of his tariffs last year, not all, but we'll get to that, but a bunch of them under something called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which we're just going to call IEPA here. That's how it's known. And what the president and his team had argued is that that law, while it doesn't explicitly say the president can tariff, that it allows him to regulate imports. The law uses those two words. So President Trump and his team said, great, that means he can regulate imports via tariffs. And the Supreme Court said, no, if Congress if Congress wanted to give the president the power to tax, they would have said so explicitly.

9:57Rudy Cruz Jr.:And they did it. And so this is Congress's power now. All right. Well, the new tariffs he's imposed come under a different legal authority, not AIPA. Are these going to be challenged as well? They could be. I mean, we're already seeing some commentary from the legal sphere. For example, Neil Katyal, one of the lawyers who represented the parties trying to fight against the tariffs at the Supreme Court. He has said that, you know, there are potential legal challenges. We'll see on that. But yeah, look, the president is imposing these new tariffs that he has put at 15 % globally under a law that is known for short as Section 122.

10:37Rudy Cruz Jr.:So that's what he's going to try. And there's a whole bunch of other laws that he has listed off that he said he might use as well. And so we're going to be hearing a lot of these numbers that these laws are known by in the next couple of weeks, like 201, 301, 338, et cetera. OK, so an alphabet soup of numbers, a number soup. Now, some of these tariffs will only last 150 days, and yet they have already caused major confusion. There are a number of countries worldwide that had negotiated separate trade deals with the U.S., and now those don't seem to apply if there's a global 15 percent tariff.

11:10Rudy Cruz Jr.:Explain to us what happens now. Well, that is the big question. And I think we're going to find out on a country by country or entity by entity basis, because those trade deals that the president worked out or in many cases was in the process of working out with other countries and the EU, those were being negotiated under the threat of tariffs with the U.S. essentially saying, please make a deal with us. us. Otherwise, the president has the power to impose the tariffs he wants under IEPA. So what for one thing we're seeing today, the EU has said they're not they're not entirely ending the trade deal they were negotiating with the president, but they're pausing it because now some tariffs are gone.

11:56Rudy Cruz Jr.:Some new tariffs are in. They want to review it. They want to know what the new tariff rates are and they want legal certainty. And right now we don't have that. We haven't had that for a while, quite frankly. Right. And Danielle, you're following this really closely with how it affects China as well. I mean, the president is planning a trip. Does this take away some of his negotiating power if he's now already said, OK, 15 percent when prior he was threatening even higher for China? Oh, absolutely, because China was one of the main targets. You could say the main target of his tariffs. At one point, he had tariffs of around 145 percent on goods from China.

12:33Rudy Cruz Jr.:Now, we should emphasize here, though, that the president's ability to tariff is not gone and the tariffs he imposed last year and this year are not gone. There is a whole swath of tariffs known as 232 tariffs. Those are tariffs that the president can impose for national security reasons. Those tariffs are sticking around. So while the country by country tariffs on China, you know, EU, et cetera, might be gone, tariffs on goods like steel, aluminum, cars, all of that, those tariffs are still here. So the president still does have those that are still in place and will keep going. Well, Danielle, tariffs were a big part of the president's campaign, his economic agenda, even though a lot of people from his own party support free trade, don't like the rising prices that come with tariffs.

13:24Rudy Cruz Jr.:It's an election year. Tomorrow is the State of the Union. What do you expect the president's message to be to his own party and to voters in a midterm year? Honestly, I don't know, because the president has been also trying to make the case that I care about the cost of living. Well, tariffs raise the cost of living. And here he is doubling down, imposing new tariffs where some of his tariffs were struck down. So the big question for me is if you're a Republican running for, say, the Senate in a farm state like Iowa, Ohio, Nebraska, Minnesota, if these tariffs were struck down, if these tariffs didn't exist, they'd have less to defend.

14:02Rudy Cruz Jr.:But with Trump doubling down, they're going to be asked, well, how do you feel about this? And that puts them in a hard spot. Tariffs might hurt their constituents, but also Trump owns the Republican Party. Danielle, we're going to have you back to talk about it more. NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben, thank you so much. Of course. Thank you.

14:31Danielle Kurtzleben:coming up next mexican cartels have retaliated for the killing of a drug lord over the weekend with a wave of violence forcing schools to close and people to shelter inside across much of the country. Tourists are also stuck in some beach destinations. Peter O'Dowd gets an update from NPR international correspondent Eder Peralta in Monterrey after this break.

14:59The U.S.

15:00Danielle Kurtzleben:State Department is urging Americans in Mexico to take precautions after Mexican authorities killed one of the country's most powerful drug lords. The man known as El Mencho was the leader of the Jalisco New Generation cartel, and his death yesterday triggered violence across large parts of the country. NPR's Eder Peralta is on his way to one of those spots now. He's on the line from the airport in Monterey. Eder, who was this man?

15:28Rudy Cruz Jr.:Yeah, so his name was Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, but he was widely known as El Mencho. He was 59 years old, and within the past years, He has built one of the most powerful organized crime groups in the world. He started in the western Mexican state of Jalisco, but he oversaw this massive and very violent expansion of territory. And now the Jalisco cartel operates from north to south, and even in many countries internationally. The U.S. accuses him of trafficking billions of dollars worth of cocaine and fentanyl into the U.S. And Mencho has been indicted several times in the American courts. There was an arrest warrant out for his arrest here in Mexico.

16:08Rudy Cruz Jr.:And the U.S. had a$15 million bounty on his head.

16:13Danielle Kurtzleben:And I see there is some new information out today about how he was captured and killed. What are you learning?

16:18Rudy Cruz Jr.:So the Mexican military says that the way they found out where El Mencho was was when they tracked down one of who they called his sentimental partners. They found that El Mencho was meeting that person in a cabin in a small town in the state of Jalisco. And then, of course, they found that El Mencho was there too. They sent their special forces there, and there was an intense firefight. El Mencho was injured, and the Mexican military says he died while he was being transported by air. 25 members of Mexico's National Guard were killed, and 30 members of the cartel were killed. So this was a very costly operation for the Mexican military.

16:58Danielle Kurtzleben:My goodness. It also triggered a huge backlash. We've seen images of cars on fire, people panicked running through an airport trying to get out of the country. What's the security situation right now in these states where the cartel is now fighting back?

17:12Rudy Cruz Jr.:The president, Klaudah Sheinbaum, said this morning that things are starting to be under control. What happened yesterday was members of the cartels basically set fire to trucks and businesses and banks that were run by the federal government. And they set these cars on fire to try and block roads, which is actually a thing that they do here very often. But this was spread across more than 20 states here in Mexico. So the breadth of it was something that Mexico hasn't seen in recent memory.

17:48Danielle Kurtzleben:And again, you're at the airport right now traveling to Guadalajara to cover some of this violence. So that's what we're hearing there in the background. The United States has pressured Mexico to get tougher on cartel crime. What does this mean for the drug trade in Mexico? Is it a major blow?

18:03Rudy Cruz Jr.:Well, I mean, it's a major blow to the cartels in Mexico. El Mencho was the most powerful drug lord in Mexico. But experts I've spoken to basically say, look, beheading these organizations will not stop the flow of drugs up north. And it won't stop these organizations from moving forward. They will reorganize. And in fact, what they warn is that what usually happens here is there's a power vacuum, and that power vacuum is filled by more violence. And in fact, I mean, that's kind of what we've seen in Sinaloa. That's exactly what we've seen in Sinaloa, because, you know, a little more than a year ago, El Mayo Zambada, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel, was kidnapped and taken to the U.S.

18:46Rudy Cruz Jr.:where he's facing charges. And that power vacuum led to an all-out war between factions of that cartel. And since then, thousands of Mexicans have been killed in that fighting.

18:58Danielle Kurtzleben:All right. NPR's Ader Peralta reporting from Monterrey, Mexico. Ader, thank you so much. Appreciate it.