Ex-ICE Insider Exposes Cruel Practices, It's Even Worse Than You Imagined

0:04Today, I'm joined by CNN analyst and author of the new book Five Bullets, Elliot Williams. Elliot, how are you doing today in 2.0 Trump's America. Uh, it's, it's a crazy, crazy time. You know, I, uh, last night was on television about the firing of, um, or, you know, the Supreme Court hearing around Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve Board Commissioner. today. I was just on, that's why for as viewers may not know this, but I literally was a couple minutes late to meet with you because I was just on television talking about this Jack Smith hearing in Congress. This is whiplash in a whirlwind time, certainly in legal news, my world, and it's just can't keep up.

0:49Okay, let's start with, I noticed that Brett Kavanaugh was the most outspoken about the Lisa Cook thing. And I'm wondering if some of this is a reaction to how badly he has been branded in public for what they're calling the Kavanaugh stop. And I read that this branding was really like, it really personally bothered him. And the Kavanaugh stop, of course, is that an ICE agent, because of the way you look and those of you that are listening, Elliot has a little more melanin in his skin than I do, that they could legally stop him. And so what is your take on Brett Kavanaugh? Oh, my goodness. It's, you know, he is the great story to come out of the Supreme Court over this generation, because we live in a world where Brett Kavanaugh is regarded as a moderate voice on the Supreme Court.

1:43No, it is. That's how the court has shifted so much, certainly in my lifetime of following the court. And there are circumstances where Kavanaugh does buck the party line somewhat. Now, let's be clear. It is an unabashedly conservative Supreme Court and Brett Kavanaugh for his entire career has been an unabashed conservative. And so this it is quite fascinating to watch the middle, what we think of as the middle on the Supreme Court, just just shift before our eyes. Now, with respect to this idea of stops of citizens and so on, that's quite profound. Now, obviously, we know, and going back to the history of law enforcement, law enforcement does have really broad authority to stop people for a host of reasons.

2:29But ICE has lost the thread here. And in the huge incentives that they've been given to carry out their immigration enforcement mission, my gosh, look at what's happening around the country. Okay, you served inside the Justice Department. Yeah. And you're sitting here watching it get completely dismantled. And you're watching really smart, competent people that believe in justice, that did not join the Justice Department to become rich because they could have. These people are so smart. They could have gone to work for a top tier law firm in Manhattan, Los Angeles, London, wherever. But they believe so much in the rule of law.

3:08And these people are gone from the Justice Department. They're going one by one. And so how vulnerable is the entire Justice Department from complete collapse as it pertains to the real rule of law? You know, it breaks my heart to say it, Jennifer, but, you know, I don't know. I really don't know. And it's because, you know, what people don't understand, and I not only worked at the Justice Department, you know, I worked at ICE for four and a half years. Really? Yeah, I was a senior political appointee at ICE under Obama, which, you know, talk about a volatile time. What people don't understand is that most of these, maybe not most of these folks, but a great percentage of these folks are actually political conservatives.

3:55This idea that it's this left wing, deep state behemoth out to take over America and ruin its values is simply not true. These are people who, particularly in the national security context, transcend or traverse Republican and Democratic administrations. And that's a good thing. And I'll be the first to tell you, having worked in all these agencies, that fine, policy is going to shift from one president to another. Things were different under Bush than Obama, than Bush 41, than Clinton. And in a way, that's good for America. It keeps us sort of thinking about what's truly important to us, evolving, working together, and so on.

4:34What we're seeing here is not a normal partisan shift. This is not the normal ebb and flow between left and right at the Justice Department. And this is the erosion of core values of how the organization ought to admit, and I think ought to exist. And I think, to me, the worst part of it is, if folks are following, the hiring of these U.S. attorneys who haven't been confirmed by the Senate at all. You saw it in New Jersey with Alina Habba, Trump's former lawyer. Again, some of the personal connection to the president. You see it in Eastern District of Virginia with Lindsey Halligan, also unfit for the role, not put in it by the president of the United States, not confirmed by the Congress.

5:18and what supporters of the president aren't seeing is that this is actually screwing up. I was going to say a bad word, but you know, it's still early in the morning. The most fucking up cases that they want to bring. There you go. Okay, is that better? Is the audience better? Good, good. No, it screws up cases that they want to bring because the person at the top of the office, courts are seeing that person as improperly in the role. And so it's a problem, not just for partisan reasons, it's literally damaging the very work that apparently they put their folks in to do. Just mind blowing. I want to talk to you about kind of like the guardrails that are remaining.

5:58And I think this is really interesting. My husband's a criminal defense lawyer and he says the federal judges are doing their job holding up the rule of law. Like they are really doing their job. And then it gets kicked to the Supreme Court in the shadow docket. And they are completely in the tank for Donald Trump. And my question is like psychologically, I think about as a layman, a non-lawyer person. When I think about a Supreme Court justice, I think like Ivy League educated, uber intellectual. And then now I look at like Alito or Thomas, and I think, are they just radicalized just like Bubba is in rural Oklahoma by Fox News?

6:40Are they just like the flags that they're flying up, the Alito's wife? And are these people, are they just so radicalized by the Heritage Foundation? like can you lift the veil on any of that at all because it's fascinating to me from a psychological standpoint that somebody that has that much education is cannot critically think or is just so incredibly biased it's really interesting it's you know every president is entitled to put in people uh that share what he thinks is his uh philis the judicial vision or what he wants to put on the court all sorts of presidents have done it you know you you really touch on something important with the Samuel Alito flags issue, which is something I've commented about publicly quite a lot when it happened.

7:29The court's allowed to have conservatives on it. It's allowed to have people that have those views. The moment you fly a flag in front of your house, expressing a political view, you have tainted your ability as a Supreme Court justice to hear cases on that issue. And that issue came up. So Samuel Alito had flown a flag on his house that some January 6th folks were seen to have flown. And many observers thought, wait a second, that's endorsement of a side. Something I said, Jennifer, to your friend, Scott Jennings, on air around this issue is imagine two things. One, I am an Eagle Scout, proudly.

8:14If I were a judge and flew a Boy Scouts of America banner on my house, and the Boy Scouts had a case before me, and they were being sued or suing somebody, I could not be, even if I were fair in my heart, I could not be seen as fair by the public based on the public position I'd taken out and how I decorated my house. And the Alito thing was exactly that. So we've lost some of this veneer or notion that justices are or ought to be apolitical. And it just seems to have gotten more extreme in the past years. And actually losing that veneer, I had on last weekend authoritarian expert, Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the bestselling author of Strongman.

8:57And some of that flagrant behavior, like the rules that apply to everybody else don't apply to us and the Supreme Court's acquiescence to him is intentional. It's an intentional part of this whole autocratic play. You brought up Scott Jennings and you work, you know, I appear on CNN. Sometimes you appear on CNN. Sometimes how helpful do you think in the media landscape, having somebody, and there's a lot of Scott Jennings because Scott Jennings is not unique. You have this breed of men that support Donald Trump that are submissive. First and foremost, they get on the moral high ground as it were alphas and we're so tough and Donald Trump's our leader.

9:40Mind you, Donald Trump wears a full face of makeup every day. If he changes his mind in the morning, we're going to go to war with Greenland. And by the evening, he's been dog walked by NATO. They go, oh, brilliant art of the deal. I mean, I've never seen such, they talk about women needing to be submissive to men and their Christian nationalist worldview. The submissive nature of the Scott Jennings and others towards Donald Trump. Do you think that type of whiplash is helpful in media? Because I just, I kind of don't, like, I don't think his messaging helps us. Yeah. You know, it's interesting.

10:19It's definitely whiplash and all of media is figuring out who they are and what their voices are in this world. Now, on this idea of toughness versus submissiveness or whatever else, which is something fascinating that I've thought about quite a bit. And quite frankly, in the in just here, stay with me for a second in the immigration context to so much of what governs policy coming out of Washington right now is about the toughness and the masculinity and the aggressiveness. You know, if you look at ISIS, Twitter feed, or Instagram, I don't know if you do. I've seen it. And I'm gonna stay Oh, I can't imagine you're a loyal follower.

11:00But no, it's all about how tough and how mean you can be to people. And I get back to this point again and again and again. It's okay for there to be political differences, but cruelty and meanness is never okay no matter what the political party. And by way of example, the thing in immigration policy that I think is just of all the things to be mad about, removing people from the United States to countries that they're not from and don't live in. I wish folks would stop and think critical, even Trump-adjacent people would just stop and think about what that actually means. And we as a nation, the law says that we can remove people from the country if they're not here lawfully.

11:41That's been the law for quite some time. But we've got to make some effort to get them back to their own home. Just think about the intentional saber rattling cruelty that it is to take someone who's safe from Jamaica or Mexico or whatever else and put them on the plane to sub-Saharan Africa where they don't speak the language and don't have family ties or anything like that. That's all about toughness and fear and not about actually solving some of the political and policy differences that we have in the country. It's that of all the ICE things, and I say this as a former ICE person, of all the ICE things, that act among, well, I don't want to say of all of them because there's a lot that ought to break your heart right now.

12:22But that's really bad. And I agree with you that it's okay to have political differences. And those political differences should be televised. And we should have critical thinking conversations about these things. I do not see my differences with the Scott Jennings of the world as political differences. I see them as moral differences. He wakes up every single day, submits to the leader. As you see, the Speaker of the House who wields so much power, little Moses Mike Johnson. He has so much power. And he was followed by Manu Raju a couple of days ago, blaming Norway for keep preventing President Trump from getting a Nobel Peace Prize award.

13:09So I argue this. Yeah. We're going to have a conversation with a conservative. Let's get on Mitt Romney. Let's have a conversation with a conservative who hasn't sold his morals out. Let's get on the horn with somebody who is genuinely a conservative. But Scott Jennings does not represent a conservative point of view. Scott Jennings represents the moral collapse and the submissive nature of all of these triple Trumpers. And he gets on every day and provides a permission structure. These are our talking points. And I think it's really damaging because he doesn't humanize these people, these little kids that ICE is stopping and asking for their papers.

13:50There's no humanization on the other side. So for me, my differences with Jennings, not political, totally moral. Cosmic, you know, but where I think it's even more acute and you talked about it in the lead up there, it's with Congress. And let me explain. And let's use my personal example as somebody that worked at ICE with a Democratic and Republican Congresses. Right. Both times we had tremendous pressure from Congress over the actions the agency was taking and doing. Democrats did not like when ICE would go into workplaces like a meatpacking plant or whatever and just start rounding people up.

14:26And the policy very early on in the Obama administration shifted because of pressure from Democrats in Congress. Congress said, we don't like what you're doing. It's not who we are. It's not what we're paying you to do. And you got to stop that kind of activity. Right. Great. We were Democratic appointees. Democratic Congress held us accountable. Congress switched in 2010. When the Republicans came in, it was much more, you're not deporting enough people. You need to, you know, we need to. And there was a conversation about how ICE could better suit what the majority in Congress wanted. But in either context, there was at least an attempt to either defy the president or hold the president and the administration accountable.

15:07That is gone from this Congress right now. It is just gone. They have overwhelmingly bent the knee on every issue other than, I'd say, Jeffrey Epstein, where you did see some broad bipartisan bucking of the White House for a short time. It's not, you know, everybody's moved on to Greenland right now. But at least for that moment, Congress came together and held the president accountable on something as fundamental as ICE or who we are as a nation, how we enforce our borders. That's the kind of thing Congress ought to be weighing in on. And those Republicans in Congress have gelded or castrated themselves as a body and just chosen not to really engage in any meaningful accountability.

15:47Okay, I'm going to ask you this question, personal perspective. Having worked in ICE and seeing what the Trump regime has turned ICE into, do you think ICE needs to be abolished? No, I don't think it should be abolished because every entity around the country has some interior enforcement mechanism. Denmark, even countries that we would want to emulate or some in America would want to emulate. I think ICE needs tremendous oversight. It needs new leadership from at all levels, new guidance and all of the above. I think, you know, it does not have to be like this. We can enforce our laws. We can enforce our borders.

16:29We can enforce our immigration policies, but it does not have to be like this. And the Trump folks came in and said, well, because we ran on this necessarily, this is the way it has to be. We've got to get all these criminals out of here. Even that fact is a huge distortion of the truth. Of course there are people who are unlawfully present in America who have broken the law. Of course there are. That does not mean that nanny at the abuela at the bodega is of the same status of somebody who has committed a rape or arson or a homicide. And there actually aren't nearly as many of those folks that the Trump administration wants you to believe that there are.

17:06And they've used this national security crime, racially coded, if not boobuzela shouted racism to drum up support for what they're doing. It does not have to be like that. We can still enforce our laws and not have it be like that. So I don't think that's scrapping the entire, like undoing the entire agency, because what do you, what do you replace it with? And if someone has a good idea for what to replace it with, I'm all ears for it. But I think you just start over, maybe even break the whole Department of Homeland Security up because it's just such a behemoth that no one person can manage effective, manage effectively.

17:43You heard me. Do you think it needs that kind of budget, the increased budget that Trump? Yeah. And that's really problematic. It is. And that's a great question. When we talk about this idea of abolish, it has that budget because what they're talking about is removing or deporting a million people a year. That's the budget they've given them. You don't need to do that, right? You can still have a robust immigration enforcement policy without the civil rights enforcement and 3 ,000 people a day and a million people a day. Because necessarily, when you have those kinds of numbers with the kind of personnel that the agency has right now, you're going to end up with the civil rights violations and nanny from the bodega and the guy who's, whether it's whatever.

18:30I don't want to generalize about who immigrants are, but those are the folks who are getting rounded up. Like, let's have an honest conversation about the brown folks at Home Depot who are getting rounded up, right, who aren't necessarily, you know, with criminal records. And so that budget, they plussed up that budget to be able to do that, which does not need to happen. And if it's all about safety and national security and the folks who are killing our livestock or people, get them out, right? Or just figure out. We know it's not about that. We know it's about racism. We know it is. We know that Stephen Miller has said that he wants to deport 100 million people.

19:14And interestingly, the data lines up that that's the amount of people that are not white. And Stephen Miller, we've all seen Trump. pudding boy. His brain is total mush. We've seen how cooked he is. I mean, it's just he confusing, you know, Greenland and Iceland and he's in his Marie Antoinette era obsessed with his ballroom. And this guy is so mentally cooked. Stephen Miller, they call Mr. Prime Minister. And this man is diabolical. This man intentionally uses Nazi language, Nazi propaganda, Nazi fonts. And And he wants this to be a white country and America is for Americans and Americans only.

19:53That's what he said, which is what Goebbels said about Germany. Yeah. And so this is about racism. And I just, I don't know, you're smarter than me regarding this because you've been in government. I haven't, I'm a podcaster. My impulse is to say we need to abolish ICE, but I'm always open to be an evolutionary in my thoughts. And I do believe we have to have, you know, some sort of border enforcement. I feel like this agency is so cooked. Yeah. And I feel like the type of people it's recruited are so broken. This murderer was a 10-year veteran, a firearms instructor, three lethal shots. The first two weren't lethal.

20:32An autopsy is coming out right now. The third was, and afterwards he called her a fucking bitch. And this whole group, you know, like my black friends were like, dang, if they're killing white women like that in the street? Who's we're next? I mean, that. Yeah. Yeah, no, it's, yeah, I think, you know, there's a few things there. I think, yes, if it's just a question of, you know, when I'm asked the question, do you think we should abolish ICE? My response is, okay, well, but then what would you replace it with, right? And the answer can't be nothing. I think both as a policy and practical matter, but also as a political matter, you know, for, it's probably Democrats coming with the argument.

21:11You have to have some answer as to what's next. Now, there might be a really smart answer to be had of just reframing our whole thinking about immigration and our whole immigration apparatus. But not unlike the whole concept of defunding the police, the term means - It's the worst name. It's the worst name. And it means more things. It's the worst name. And it also means more things than just that one phrase said. So abolish ICE, sit star. And then, you know, beyond that, I want to respond to the Greenland, Iceland thing that you noted. And let's play this game. I hate playing this game, but we're going to play a game called What If Obama, right?

21:50And it's just, you know, I, it's okay, man, you want to have an imperialist policy. Okay, that's you will, you know, a new president will come in soon and not have that, right? Right. If Joe Biden or George or George W. Bush had with that frequency. And that consistency, not even mispronounced, got the name of the country wrong of an entity that was ostensibly his main focus right now. The world would be America would be going bonkers. The media would be going bonkers. And again, it's just another instance of something on which Donald Trump really was allowed to have a free pass on something that other presidents would have been eviscerated for.

22:35And again, look, I'm in public life. I speak. I just wrote the book Five Bullets. I'm out there a lot. I misspeak all the time. The Internet lets me know when I misspeak and say something wrong all the time. You, oh, my God. You might have haters. I don't know. I don't really check the Internet. I don't know. But needless to say, there but for the grace of God go we, right? And sometimes, you know, I said things I shouldn't say and had to walk them. Okay, I'm human. That's a biggie. And that's a biggie from an 80-year-old man. And that's a biggie from an 80-year-old man whose critics were quite successful in piling on another 80-year-old man who was president of the United States a few years ago.

23:17So I just, I was, I've been so struck by the Iceland Greenland flub. But all of these things, in my opinion, are connected to everything we've spoken about. So his misspeak, and it's so obvious that he, the standards that democratic politicians and presidents are held to are completely different for the, these delicate childlike standards that we have for Republicans. I mean, that's abundantly obvious. But as a commentator, a podcaster, I criticize both Republicans and Democrats. Oh, yeah. And taking it back to Scott Jennings, and again, he's an example of the one that hits the news the most, of this group of hive mind, submissive men towards this tyranny that Donald Trump is wanting to impose on the United States.

24:13And that's what he wants more than anything. He wants it to just be ruled by him. But all of these things are connected because if anybody inside that Death Star, inside this submissive - It's fully operational. Yeah. If anybody would say, you know what? He does seem like a pudding brain. He does seem cooked. Then that starts putting pressure on the Congress people and the constituents. But when they provide a permission structure for this batshit stuff to go on and on and on, that's where I think mainstream corporate media gives an assist. And think about how hard they were on Obama, that tan suit.

24:57Think about how hard they were on Joe Biden. You know what? I think that's healthy. I think if you're going to run for president, you're a big boy, you've got to have thick skin, and they're going to come after you. You can't play victim and have a bunch of sycophants fluffing you on CNN all the time. You've got to be ready from your own party, from everybody, every which direction. But this guy, Pitting Boy, he's so thin-skinned, but nobody inside his movement, except for much to my surprise, Marjorie Taylor Greene. I know, man. Was that on your bingo board? Of course, criticism. No. And so all of those things are connected.

25:35The obsequious nature of corporate news in enabling liars, people that get on TV every night and lie and lie to the American public and say, oh, no, he really meant it was just a bit of ice. Or maybe he got it wrong. But what's the big deal? They're lying and gaslighting the American public. And corporate media is betraying their customer base by allowing it to happen. What I am genuinely curious about, Jennifer, I like and I think about this all the time. And let's use Scott as an example. But but every person in the Trump ecosystem, and that includes members of Congress, 2026 election and 2028 election.

26:16They have to look to the future at some point. Yes. All the saber rattling about Donald Trump being president forever in three terms and all that. They have to look to the future at some point. At some point, there will be some fight over who the standard bearer of that movement is. And what are they going to do? Like, are they going to continue to sort of follow a movement that really is modeled around a man, a figurehead, right? It's not, you know, it's, I don't think if you could take Donald Trump out of MAGA and have this, or MAGA, somebody corrected me on air for saying that once. You could take, literally, I got a DM, it's MAGA.

26:52from, I don't think you can pluck Donald Trump out of MAGA and just put somebody else in and have the same movement, right? You can't. It's a charismatic figure, whether you like it, it's a cult around, if you want to call it that, around one person. So one, what does it look like in 2026? And two, someone has to run for president, somebody, and someone can, whether it's J.D. Vance or Marco Rubio or whoever else and can purport to be carrying the mantle of MAGA, right? But what's that going to look like? And it's going to like, will it be factional? It's going to be worse. It's going to be right.

27:25So because George W. Bush, Reagan, corporate democratic policies incubated this and what MAGA is incubating is going to be worse. Look no further than Nick Fuentes growing popularity and the Groypers. Look at J.D. Vance, who becomes more psychopathic by the day. I mean, he is a man who has a woman whose parents were immigrants from India. He has mixed race children and he echoes white nationalist talking points. So what comes after Trump is worse. What this is incubating is far worse. Yeah. But I also think the electorate is getting smarter throughout all of this. I think getting off of the propaganda from corporate media is making people smarter.