Trump's ICE Tactics Draw Backlash: Ari Melber's Legal Report on Agents Causing Danger

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1:16We have watched the cozy links between Donald Trump and his own appointees. He's now run through more FBI directors than most presidents. and it's on display at the White House. What you're seeing here is a total change. And in concert with the revenge cases, it's a problem from a rule of law perspective. The president inviting the FBI Director Patel and the Attorney General Bondi, and they spoke about his agenda and going at only certain parts of the country, for example, cities and places that the president views as some sort of hostile territory because they happen to be governed by an opposition Party, which, remember, very recently he's threatened more charges, for example, threatening to indict in jail the mayor and governor of Illinois.

2:04And these are not idle threats when you see the many indictments we've already covered. Here's what it looked like today. And we're just at the start. We're going to go into other cities that we're not talking about purposely. We're going to have a surge of strong, good people, patriots, and they're going to go in, They straighten it all out. Somebody said, would we take would we think about taking the World Cup away from Boston if they don't straighten it out? The answer is yes, we have the right to do that with FIFA. So if we think that L.A. is going to be bad or we think that applies a little bit to the Olympics, too.

2:39President mentioned the Olympics there. There are people who've worked in Trump's orbit who've mentioned that he has already been eyeing the pending Los Angeles Olympic as a chance to use more federal power in the run up to other events where he wants to take more control over our civic life and even potentially elections. Again, not idle threats, things we have to take seriously. The ICE tactics are also on full display. In Chicago, protesters dealt with a shocking scene. Dozens of agents using tear gas and smoke grenades, a scuffle, that was sparked by a car chase on the south side of the city.

3:13And there's security footage from the Chicago Sun-Times that shows a white SUV driven by agents apparently colliding with this red car, which sent it into a parked vehicle, not exactly enhancing safety. The occupants fled on foot, though. They were arrested. DHS says they were undocumented or illegal. immigrants. But the Sun-Times reports, as the apparently intentional crash was a risky move by law enforcement, Chicago police, of course, quote, barred from causing a collision with another vehicle during a pursuit. Other police departments ban or restrict that maneuver. And this is not exactly isolated.

3:51Agents have repeatedly been seen, quote, releasing smoke bombs, tear gas, and pepper balls to dispense residents, including those who might be exercising their rights to try to just document it on video or cell phone. The Times reports that's happened repeatedly, and it's harmed Chicago police officers at one point. A community outraged in Oregon, where a woman was playing the Ghostbusters theme on a clarinet. This was outside a Portland Ice facility, and that was enough to get arrested. She was also tackled. That is the kind of force we are seeing routinely. Local news has a video of her pinned to the ground with the clarinet in the mud to her side.

4:29But Speaker Johnson is fine with it. Take a look. Where's the limit for you on what's acceptable conduct for federal law enforcement? And what is it incumbent on Congress to step up and demand oversight? To demand oversight on federal law enforcement? I've not seen them cross the line yet. And we have committees of jurisdiction who have that responsibility, but it's not risen to that level. Johnson saying it hasn't risen to that level. Later in the program, we will show you some conservatives who think it's way over the line, including a major MAGA voice, Joe Rogan, who hosted the president last year and now says ICE is way over the line and no one with a heart would support what Trump is now doing.

5:16So there is dissent. There are concerns and there is the raw evidence out there, as we showed you tonight, while some Republicans say everything here is just fine. In the context of both these raids and the ongoing weaponization of the Justice Department, I want to bring in the former head of the DOJ's criminal division, Leslie Caldwell, who's overseeing all the types of major cases here that we're seeing compared to the new Trump era, and Melissa Murray, NYU law professor, MSNBC analyst. Welcome to both of you. Melissa, those tactics, something as allegorical as a musical instrument falling to the side while this woman is manhandled, etc.

5:56And in some other cases, video that seems to suggest the federal officers were the source of danger, not there to fix it. Again, this is all really alarming. This goes beyond simply enforcing federal immigration laws. It's creating public safety problems. It's also, and I think this is the real point, chilling dissent. I mean, the idea that someone playing a clarinet with the Ghostbusters theme song, she's not there to obstruct the issue. She's there to call attention, to dissent, and she's not being permitted to do so. So we are seeing individuals who have First Amendment rights who are permitted to be there.

6:29They're not obstructing the law enforcement process. And yet they're being manhandled. We've seen this with journalists. We've seen this with bystanders, with family members. it's gotten to the point where the punishment seems to be the fact that you get manhandled by ICE no matter what you're doing, that this is just supposed to happen. No one is supposed to be a witness. No one is supposed to raise any objections to it. And if you do, then there are consequences. Yeah, and we're playing this up here and we'll leave some of this up because it is important that people see this. We all understand that what's happening in your block or your community tends to affect people more than something elsewhere.

7:04But the president's made it very clear. I'm showing this video on repeat for people to understand. The president is saying this is coming to a town near you. So if it's not in your town yet, it's coming. He's named off different towns. He's talking about different excuses like sporting events, international sporting events, which are quite common. Many countries have security for that and saying we'll either take it away or we'll do more in L.A. We're going to do more other places. This is happening. I think people have to understand that's the repercussions, and it's not going to be exempted from you just because you're in a farther away place that's not on the list yet.

7:36That's the background, Leslie, the use of force for what's going on at the Justice Department where you served. Jack Smith is incredibly careful. He's just spoken out in this interview with Andrew Weissman, who I mentioned is a former colleague of his and an MSNBC analyst. So in the news world, we don't look at it as the exact same as a completely independent conversation. but it certainly was newsworthy. And Smith is so careful. I mean, he's prosecuted people without fear of favor, war criminals, corruption cases. He went after John Edwards. People said, oh, that's a big Democratic politician.

8:05He said, well, I'm just going after the evidence. And that's what he says he did in the Trump case. Now we're hearing for the first time, and that's by way of introduction to him saying that the deal that the Trump administration blatantly publicly admitted to cutting with Mayor Adams was an exchange. And he says that's wrong. He's never seen anything like that. Take a look at this on Mayor Adams. Nothing like what we see now has ever gone on. This case in New York City where the case against the mayor was dismissed in the hopes that he would support the president's political agenda. One, do you share his view of the public evidence on that?

8:47And two, what do you think overall of what he's saying and how he is, I think, sounding an alarm, but doing it in his careful way? So, yes, I agree with him. I've never seen anything like that. I used to work, by the way, in full disclosure, with Jack and Andrew overseeing both of them. That was an extraordinary development, that whole Adams case. I'll jump in just to say, in your normal diplomatic way, you're mentioning you were their boss. Correct. Yeah. And I think, you know, I've never seen anything like that. I think Jack did discuss it in a very measured way, as he's wont to do. I think what's happening across the Justice Department with the Trump administration is there's a big meltdown of the process, the normal processes.

9:31So normally cases are investigated and then there's a decision made whether to prosecute. Here, it's the other way around. It appears that there's a decision made that somebody must be prosecuted. Jim Comey, Letitia James, and others must be prosecuted. And then there's an effort, sometimes more strenuously than others, to actually build some kind of a credible case. Yeah, it's striking. And have you seen him be this concerned in public before? I mean, he so rarely speaks out that I don't think we've seen this. I don't think he's spoken out until this, at least not that I've seen. And I've known Jack for quite a while, but I frankly have not spoken to him since he took the special counsel assignment because I just didn't think it would be appropriate.

10:20But this is not, Jack is not out to make a name for himself as somebody who, unfortunately, everyone does know now his name, but that's not the kind of person he is. I mean, he usually stays within his lane and within his lines. And so I think for him to speak out shows how strongly he feels about these issues. And frankly, I think he's right to feel this strongly because the whole Justice Department is being turned into a weapon against certain people. I'm sure it's functioning on a normal basis and name that U.S. Attorney's Office where they're arresting the local drug dealers and doing all the normal things.

10:52But this is a very different setup. Yeah. Professor Murray, he also talked about what's failing on the results. One of the annoying things about us lawyers sometimes is because we're steeped in law and rules, we talk a lot about those things and process, and it matters. But sometimes people listening say, process, process, process, what's happening? What is the result? And he made a very important point I want to play here. It's about 30 seconds, where he says, the way the DOJ is failing now means that our national security and our experts are actually compromised. And while no one's rooting to learn the hard way what that leads to, he's very clear on that.

11:36And he gave the example that everyone remembers, which was the want and disregard for the security rules, which could potentially be illegal in the signal chats and extra. And he says at a minimum, you'd look into it. That's what you're there to do. There's a national security division for a reason. And he is saying he doesn't believe that the DOJ currently is allowed or is doing that if somebody's on whatever team, team red. Take a look at this moment for your reaction. If you think getting rid of the people who know most about national security is going to make our country safer, you do not know anything about national security.

12:10People in the Defense Department using signal to communicate with each other about war plans, clearly classified information. I can tell you, Andrew will tell you, there is no administration, Republican or Democrat, that does not open an investigation in that situation. He's saying from his expertise, these policies are only wrong, but running the DOJ this way will endanger us, will make us less safe. I think that's clear. I think a number of people have said this over the course of the last two months. The cuts in the federal agencies, the jettisoning of staff, career staff who had real expertise but are not perceived as being Trump loyalists has actually made us less safe than we should be in terms of national security.

12:57The fact that senior members of this administration continue to conduct classified business over an app that any of us could get on our phone is a real problem. It is something that should be investigated, not just by the DOJ, but probably by Congress as well. And we're not seeing that. I mean, there was a lot in this interview with Andrew. I would also note to Leslie's point about Jack's comments about Mayor Adams. There's also something deeply anti-democratic about the elected mayor of one of the largest cities in the country being perhaps beholden to the administration because of this overhang of criminal charges.

13:33And if that had happened the way the administration had tried to make it happen, then Mayor Adams likely would not have been particularly responsive to the needs of New Yorkers because he would have been responsive to the needs of the administration. That's anti-democratic. I mean, so there's so much going on here that erodes basic institutions of democracy at the local level, at the federal level, and also at a global level in terms of our national security. Yeah, I think you're breaking it down really clearly for people. And depending on how it's done, worded or explicitly threatened, it could be a type of blackmail, what you're describing.

14:03We also have the Supreme Court looking at a whole big issue today of voting rights and race in America. And Professor Murray, one of the arguments that was raised, and I know how careful and respectful you are, so I'm eager to hear how you do it on this one, is that maybe if you look around, some of the conservative members of the court said, maybe racism's not a problem at all anymore in this country. just look around, and therefore it's time to unwind what were the signal achievements of the MLK 1960s era. And these are laws. They're passed. So rolling them back is changing what is the law in the book.

14:38So I want to find out what you think about all that. We're going to take our shortest break and come back on that topic.

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16:19We're back with our Legal Eagles. Leslie Caldwell, Melissa Murray. Professor Murray, I just asked you about this hearing today. I want to play some of the oral arguments in the Supreme Court, where what the conservatives are considering doing is making it harder to have these sort of racially representative districts. Were Section 2 to cease to operate in the way that you just described, what would the results on the ground be? I think the results would be pretty catastrophic if we take Louisiana as one example. Every congressional member who is Black was elected from a VRA Opportunity District.

16:57We only have the diversity that we see across the South, for example, because of litigation that forced the creation of Opportunity Districts under the Voting Rights Act. She's exactly right in that exchange. jump is actually with Justice Kagan, not Justice Sotomayor. The impact of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act cannot be overstated. Part of the reason why we have such diversity in Congress is because these opportunity districts have been created that allow minority voters in states that have large populations to actually be represented by the kinds of candidates who are best likely and most likely to represent their interests.

17:35And this is something that the court seems poised to deal a death blow to. And it's not simply that they're saying that we cannot have majority-minority opportunity districts for congressional representation. They're asking a more particular question. Is the use of race as a remedy for racial discrimination in the form of a racial gerrymander a violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act? And so the core question is, would the framers of the 14th Amendment have expected race to be considered when they were restructuring remedies for racial discrimination. And it seems like, yeah, they probably did.

18:11The 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment were part of these reconstruction constitutional changes that were intended to address the problem of Black people not having civil rights. So they were explicitly race conscious and they were intended to allow Congress to craft remedies like the Voting Rights Act that would allow Black people to be brought into the political community as equals. And this is what the court, I think, has a problem with today. Well, I think it's fair to say that logically the argument is a reach. And it'd be the same if you have a corporate board and they look up and they say, oh, we've never had a woman CEO.

18:44Let's develop programs to address that. Right. You can go on the attack and say, oh, does that mean that's the only reason you're hiring someone? No. But are you going to look at gender if you have a program designed to address historic disparities in gender? Yeah. Gender or race or whatever the thing is, is going to come up. So, Leslie, I'm curious what you think just about the Supreme Court wanting to get into this right now. There's other stuff going on. And, of course, whatever they rule will be the rule of law. That's the country we live in. But it doesn't seem that they had to jump into redistricting right now.

19:16So it seems, and I'm not familiar with that exact case other than what has been reported, but it seems that they've been feeling the need to jump into a lot of things that they don't really need to jump into. And they've been jumping into it in a way that is creating confusion in the lower courts. because they've been issuing rulings that are sent back to the lower courts and the lower courts don't know what to do with it. In fact, even I think as recently as last week, some judges, I forget if it was the New York Times or the Washington Post, but some judges were surveyed and they were kind of complaining, like, why is the Supreme Court issuing all these orders without explaining them?

19:50Yeah, judges were sort of saying to the Times, it's like this fast shadow docket, but they don't even know what the court's trying to say sometimes. Right. So I don't understand why, and this seems different than, and I defer to Melissa, But this seems very different to me, not as a Supreme Court practitioner, but as just an observer and a lawyer than what I remember from the past, where the Supreme Court would take very few cases and stay out of a lot of issues that they now appear to be jumping into. There's another breaking story out of Capitol Hill that also involves racism and hate and bigotry and anti-Semitism in our country.

20:24This is part of what we're dealing with. This is a Republican office first spotted by Politico where police were actually called to investigate what was seen sort of hanging on a desk in the office, just in that desk area, Republican office swastika that was inside an American flag. To be clear, we are going to show this image once. Politico reporting this out. It was during a virtual meeting where you can see the flag with the swastika inside it altered, and it's pinned to a cubicle. This is Republican Congressman Dave Taylor's office. This is his staffer. He has now responded to this news late today saying, I am aware of an image that appears to depict a vile and deeply inappropriate symbol near an employee in my office.

21:06The content of that image does not reflect the values or standards of this office, my staff, or myself, and I condemn it in the strongest terms. Professor, we show the image once because it would appear to be the kind of image that multiple people walking through that office would see, and it stayed up until now, until the press exposed it. Your view of this in the halls of Congress. So I guess it's great that Representative Taylor condemned it in the terms that he did, good for him. To connect this back to the court's oral arguments today in that voting rights case, again, as Janae Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund said, the reason why we have representation of all stripes in Congress is because of the Voting Rights Act, what it has done to bring people of color into the political community, to allow them to vote for candidates where they can actually have their interests represented.

22:01I can't imagine any person of color looking at that photo and saying, yes, that represents my interest in some way. So I think the fact that we've had this reporting, we had the reporting yesterday about the young Republicans' alleged text exchanges, like racism is an issue right now in this country. There seems to be an uptick in incendiary language, a coarsening of language. And this question that we have somehow turned the page and the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment have an expiration date, it just really beggars belief. It also is absolutely inconsistent with constitutional text, which has no such expiration date on it.

22:38Yeah, I think it makes sense that you're linking those together because the Supreme Court is up there talking about, as I mentioned, the idea that maybe these racism problems are over. And if that's a factual finding issue, as we say in court, then the response might be, maybe they're wrong and need to watch the news. Professor Murray and Leslie Caldwell on multiple issues, counselors, thank you so much. Tonight, we are going to turn later to a fact check because Speaker Johnson and Donald Trump have shown an anti-police agenda. We have the receipts. Also, I mentioned this. I'm going to play it for you.

23:12It's pretty interesting. Joe Rogan says, if you have a heart, you can't support some of what ICE is doing under Trump and why he is surprised about it. He's saying that to his large and influential audience. But up next, new calls for Chuck Schumer to step aside. The Democrats debate their future. Next.

23:34Closing community clinics. So Democrats have three words for this. No fucking way. There you have it. Chuck Schumer trying to show a little fight here in the shutdown. Many Democrats want even more fight, though, and are calling for new voices among the D.C. leadership of this party. There are now calls for Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer to step aside. The New Yorker has been in public office for about 50 years total, eight as Senate leader, and he faces this skepticism from some people, including younger activists in his own party. whether on the issue of politics itself, is he too cautious to be the most effective leader for this moment against Trump to ideological questions about whether he's lost touch.