ICE kills again

0:02This is a global production. We've had these most recent killings and he has said it's not even a bump in the road, which I kind of think that if you're looking for the right language, when people have been killed sitting in a car on a traffic stop, they've been shot. That is not the right language to use.

0:22Miles Taylor:Washington, D.C. in the past 10 years has become something of a petri dish for cowardice.

0:28The News Agents Hosts:There's another issue, and I'm going to call it very loosely the gay thing. He consistently voted against trans issues. He voted against LGBT issues. How his private life and his political life just didn't dovetail.

0:41Miles Taylor:His face was bloody. His head was bloody. And I clearly heard the victim say I tried to stop. Clearly heard him say that. That is an eyewitness account of another fatal shooting involving ICE officers of an immigrant in a car stopped and shot dead.

1:05The News Agents Hosts:Yeah, a 26-year-old Colombian man in Maine, the second fatal shooting involving a vehicle stop in a week. And just after that happened, the same day, there was a pause to these road stops by ICE officials. Is this a sign things are out of control or are they about to double down? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Maitlis. And these latest incidents, two shootings, two fatal shootings of people sitting in cars, gunned down by ICE officers who alleged they were trying to get away, but have so far provided zero evidence of that, has again focused activity on ICE, on deportations of illegal immigrants, and a policy that, Emily, you saw firsthand in Minneapolis at the beginning of the year and which was seen as a failure and that we needed to tamp things down and calm things down has erupted again into flames.

2:13The News Agents Hosts:I mean, we should just say to begin with, just, you know, in terms of facts that we might as well provide because the administration won't. The 26-year-old Colombian man Guerrero, who was the one shot in Maine, was not illegal. He had two jobs. He had a visa. He had permission to work in the US. So just for starters, if they were looking for illegal immigrants, they got the wrong guy. And there is something about the ramping up of this level of violence, which I think has possibly spooked the administration itself. itself because late last night, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement put out an email which went to ICE supervisors around the country and it just said, effective immediately, vehicle stops are suspended until further notice.

3:02The News Agents Hosts:Now, presumably, you don't do that if you think everything is going well. It is an extraordinary directive to ICE officers on the street to say, stop doing whatever you're doing because it's not working. Do not attempt to pull over suspects in cars. Now, there is a lot of debate about whether that means that a terrible policy has stopped or whether it's just, as Tom Homan, the border czar would allege, just been paused. These were his rather unfortunate words yesterday. It was my understanding the officers involved in these students are well trained. They're not a part of that new horse.

3:40Miles Taylor:So, you know, I looked at the just before I did this interview, Griff, I asked ICE to give me the training curriculum for the Academy, and there's an extensive vehicle stop training, much like the Border Patrol has. So, again, we'll let this play out where it is, but I think ICE is going to continue doing record arrests, record removals, and this is, I wouldn't even call it bumping the road. I mean, this is going to be a short-term review, so ICE feels comfortable that their agents are safe, they're doing the right thing, and get back to, you know, doing what they do best, which is you know making vehicle stops but like i said i'll say it again but there are options during the short time period to arrest a land before he gets in a a moving weapon and arrest him after he stops yeah not even a bump in the road i mean maybe say that to the families of those who've lost loved ones as a result of these shootings and these apparently extensive training that they get before these vehicle stops are carried out.

4:41I mean, it's a really almost glib phrase. And the whole point of bringing Tom Homan in to be in charge of all of this was to sort of tamp everything down. He was meant to have the bedside manner. He was meant to be the diplomat. He was meant to be the person who would mollify people, who would show government working quietly, efficiently, unlike his predecessor, Greg Bovino, who was the guy who was performative and shouty and saying, we're going to get these people, we're going to round them up, and it was just all so kind of, it just alienated so much of American public opinion. The Trump administration recognised that if they're going to make a success of this policy, they need to do it more stealthily and more diplomatically, dare I say.

5:26And now we hear that there have been two more killings and we're back to square one.

5:30The News Agents Hosts:Look, what we do know, and you referenced the trip that we did to Minnesota in January. After that, after the two citizens, American citizens killed in broad daylight, in cold blood on the street by ICE officers, there was a sense that things had got out of hand. Things had become actually pretty tricky for the administration itself. I mean, let alone the citizens of Minnesota and beyond. and we started seeing not only that change of personnel at the top, but also the sense that this wasn't as popular policy amongst the American public as Trump had been hoping. And it seemed as if that had gone.

6:08The News Agents Hosts:It seemed as if it was dying down, but actually it hasn't. ICE has been ramping up immigration arrests across the country in recent weeks. It's now roughly at 2 ,000 a day. That nearly doubles the number of people it takes into custody compared with what we saw in the spring. And many of those arrests did occur during these stops by ICE officers traveling in unmarked cars. Now, the trouble with unmarked cars is clearly they're meant to be more surreptitious. So you don't alert people. You're not turning up in a police car. You haven't got the sirens blaring. And because more people now understand that it is illegal for ICE officers to enter their home without a warrant, they cannot go into the homes of people they suspect so they wait for them they wait for them to appear on the streets and that's where you have these you know essentially sort of traffic arrests shootings because they are starting to realize that they have to trap the people that they're trying to get as they come out the houses well you know you can tell how much of an issue this has become because Donald Trump has woken up this morning and the first thing he's done is he's posted about ICE and the importance of them being able to do vehicle stops.

7:23Let me just read you a part of what he's posted. And this is in the last few minutes. We cannot give up on one of ICE's most important and effective crime fighting tools. In brackets, in capitals, the traffic stop. Once we do, we're playing right into the criminals' hands. The radical left Democrats would like to see this done, but it won't happen on my watch. ICE, be judicious. fair and smart and go back and do your very important job. Keep those crime stat numbers coming down. Remember, you are loved and respected in America. So Donald Trump has weighed in.

7:58The News Agents Hosts:So thoughts and prayers with the ICE officers. Exactly. So Donald Trump's concern is with ICE officers. And because he wants this, he wants this to be his signature hallmark policy of deporting illegal immigrants. He thinks that is that has support across the political divide, even if the tactics sometimes of ICE officers do not win that support across the political divide. We're joined now by Miles Taylor, author, commentator, former chief of staff at the US Department of Homeland Security during Donald Trump's first administration, friend of the podcast. And it's great to have you with us, Miles.

8:33Look, we've just been talking about what's happened at the Department of Homeland Security over the ICE, the latest ice killings and the fact that traffic stops are going to be temporarily halted while body cam cameras are worn by all officers to cut the risk of kind of controversy. What do you think has happened?

8:55Miles Taylor:Well, look, let me let me first say I'm I'm glad they got to this point. I did not think that the Department of Homeland Security was going to make that concession, which perhaps is the cynic in me lately, because we have not seen this administration easily make concessions. And I'll tell you, after the news of this shooting broke, I was over here in the States on U.S. media, and I was asked, if you were still chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, what should be done right now? And my answer was they need to pause enforcement operations like this until the body cam rollout is finished.

9:35Miles Taylor:A Democrat in office, a Republican office, either of them in normal times would easily make that decision. Now, I didn't expect them to do that because that's the good government thing to do. But within hours of that shooting, within 24 hours of that news, we had the administration making that choice. Now, here's the thing. It's also far too late because that could have been done before more individuals had been killed. We've had three ICE deaths in just the past 10 days out there outside of the detention facilities to say nothing of people dying in detention facilities. That said, it's the right move right now.

10:20Miles Taylor:Whatever confidence there's left to shore up in the immigration administration's immigration enforcement actions, this may help do that. But there are still going to be a lot of questions swirling about why these episodes and past episodes of ICE killings have not been met with an immediate and full scale federal investigation into the involved officers. There are some preliminary investigations right now into these two shootings. But what Americans remember most is that you've got ICE agents out there still on the job who have carried out on camera other killings and still not been held accountable.

10:58Miles Taylor:And that has deeply dented the public confidence in this agency.

11:03The News Agents Hosts:I think we've been quite naive about this, actually, Miles, because we were in Minnesota, as you know, in January, just around the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretty. And it did seem after that that Trump and his administration had massively walked down the operation, that they'd taken out Bovino, that they'd put Homan in as a sort of more palatable figure, and that they'd kind of gone off the whole idea of these ICE roundups. But they haven't, right? I mean, we just we haven't been looking, but it sounds as if in numbers terms, they've been ramping up.

11:39Miles Taylor:Well, I can tell you what they've changed. What they have changed and what the American people have kind of been lulled into a false sense of security from is that ICE agents have been told to back off from the protesters. They've been told from on high by my former colleague, Tom Homan, now the administration's borders are. They've been told, stay away from American citizens as long as you know they are American citizens. Stay away from protests about ICE as long as they're not turning violent. And that has turned down the temperature. For better or for worse, a lot of Americans tuned in to what was happening in Minnesota because their fellow Americans were being attacked for exercising their First Amendment rights.

12:28Miles Taylor:As soon as the administration resumed simply focusing on people they say are in the country illegally, a lot of ordinary Americans tuned out. And I think over the past few days and in the days to come, you will see folks say that was an error. We should not have been lulled into this false sense of security because even though they're not coming after Americans protesting ICE, they are still very much carrying out an immigration operation that is rife with constitutional errors. And I want to really footstomp that point. I want to footstomp that point of constitutional errors because my friend Kyle Cheney over at Politico has continued to document how many times federal judges have said the administration's enforcement actions on immigration are illegal.

13:15Miles Taylor:That number is now north of 15 ,000 arrests and detentions that have been ruled unconstitutional. Just for context, there is nothing like that in American immigration history. No comparison to that many federal judges and rulings on constitutional grounds against a presidential administration.

13:38The News Agents Hosts:You mentioned, Miles, that Tom Homan's a former colleague of yours. It'd be really nice to try and understand what he's like, what he's like as a person, because something happens to people, doesn't it, within inside the Trump administration? Homan worked for Obama. He was kind of recognized for the work he'd done in a very similar role in previous Democrat administrations. I mean, do you think he's do you think he's like the good guy in a pretty terrible job or do you think he's becoming a Trump guy in a pretty terrible job?

14:10Miles Taylor:Well, you know, I haven't sat down with Tom in a while, so I can't in good conscience say that this is the full description of him. But we can go all the way back to antiquity if we want to get a sense of what happens when people gain power. Power tends to corrupt. And that's why even when you design a system where you elect good public servants, you still hem them in, you still stitch them in with a vast array of checks and balances. I knew a different Tom Holman back when I was at the Department of Homeland Security. I knew a Tom Holman that was willing to work with us in the office of the Secretary of Homeland Security to curb the Trump administration's worst excesses.

14:59Miles Taylor:I knew a guy who saw the line in the sand of the rule of law and was unwilling to cross it to satiate masters in the White House. At least that's the man I sat in meetings with, because on a lot of issues, not all of them, some of them Tom and I disagreed on very fervently. And he sided with the White House. But on a lot of issues, he saw that the things that the president wanted to do on a monthly basis, on a weekly basis, were often immoral or infeasible, but but more often than not illegal. And Tom was central in saying no to those things that were unlawful. There are policies that Tom Homan in the first term said he would not move forward with, that in the second term, he appears to be not only comfortable with, but presiding over as the White House borders are.

15:49Miles Taylor:And if I had to speculate, I got to say, making that jump from ICE over the top of the Secretary of Homeland Security and into the White House seems to have influenced Tom Homan and his behavior. I'm going to add an asterisk to this, though, because you can say that in the wake of what happened in Minnesota, you have seen at least visibly the Department of Homeland Security dial back some of those egregious actions like going after people purely for First Amendment protected speech, like having ICE agents walk up to people filming protests and saying we're adding you to the terrorist watch list.

16:29Miles Taylor:I suspect Tom is the reason why we haven't seen as much of that. But with bodies still in the streets, killings that are obviously unnecessary because they're not the targets of ICE enforcement. I can't give him a whole lot of credit because it does seem like the underlying immigration blitz without regard to the law appears to be well underway. And it was so interesting that exactly as you described, that there was a guy who's been brought in to lower the political temperature, to take it out of the headlines, if you like, of what ICE officers are doing. And we've had these most recent killings.

17:06And he has said it's not even a bump in the road, which I kind of think that if you're looking for the right language, when people have been killed, potentially legal migrants sitting in a car and a traffic stop, They've been shot. That is not the right language to use.

17:24Miles Taylor:It's even worse, friends, because yesterday we had another individual, apparently the target of an ice enforcement operation at a gas station in Florida, who was being chased by agents into the road and was hit by a truck and killed. Real bad choice of language. Now, I don't think Tom did that intentionally to rub salt in the wounds of dead bodies, but it goes to show you that this administration has reduced this problem to numbers and not to human beings. And I say that knowing full well what it's like to be on the receiving end of those orders. Stephen Miller in the first Trump administration wanted us to run immigration enforcement based on targets, based on quotas.

18:16Miles Taylor:I want 2000. I want 3000 arrests a day. Here's the problem. A layperson listening to this might think, well, sure, if you have a huge illegal immigration problem, then maybe you need to set quotas to make sure that you deal with the problem. Here's what happens when you set quotas. Everything else falls by the wayside. The incentive all the way down to the line officer on the street is get as many people as humanly possible in handcuffs as quickly as possible. So what ends up on the cutting room floor in their minds? The rule of law, the Constitution, whether this person actually is the person in the warrant that we are pursuing.

19:01Miles Taylor:Corners get cut. Innocent people end up getting harmed. That's what happens when you do quotas. And this administration has very, very the second term of Donald Trump has been very focused on hitting the quotas to get the arrest figures that Stephen Miller and his boss, Donald Trump, want to see. And Tom appears all too willing to make sure that they get those numbers, that they get these huge arrest statistics that they can serve up to the White House. And that has meant to them, killings like this are a literal bump in the road.

19:41The News Agents Hosts:Miles, great to have your thoughts. And in a moment, I want to talk to you about another man you know well, the former senator for South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, sometime friend and sometime critic of Trump who died at the weekend. We're going to be talking about the legacy and the personality of what happens to those around Trump.

20:16Miles Taylor:The News Agents USA. I want to talk to the Trump supporters for a minute. I don't know who you are, and I don't know why you like this guy. I think what you like about him, he appears to be strong when the rest of us are weak. He's a very successful businessman, and he's going to make everything great. He's going to take all the problems of the world and put them in a box and make your life better. That's what he's selling. Here's what you're buying. He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn't represent my party. He doesn't represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.

20:51Miles Taylor:I've been in the Air Force for 33 years. I retired this year. That was Lindsey Graham back in the day, back before the 2016 presidential election, when Senator Lindsey Graham was seen as the old-school Republican with John McCain who would stand up for the traditional values of the grand old party, the GOP. And his death was announced last weekend, a shocking announcement that not many people had seen coming. But in that time, Lindsey Graham had become a Trump whisperer, one who was regularly playing golf with Donald Trump and apparently very close to him politically as well.

21:34The News Agents Hosts:I mean, not many people had seen coming is an understatement. And he hadn't seen it coming at all because he was due to appear on Meet the Press, the Sunday morning show on the Sunday. Apparently, he had just got back from Kiev on a long flight seeing Zelensky and pushing for Russian sanctions on the Saturday. Saturday night, he was going to go and call the doctor, but he said, I'll do it after Meet the Press. And later on that evening, he was pronounced dead of a cardiac arrest. Essentially, his heart stopped. and we should just bring in Miles at this point because I guess, Miles, on the one hand, he is this kind of the extraordinary American story, isn't he?

22:12The News Agents Hosts:He's this kid from the sort of central, the back end of nowhere, whose parents die when he's very young. He looks after his kid sister. He goes to law to try and find his, you know, pull himself up by the bootstraps, find his way out. And he becomes this sort of figure who is remarkably bipartisan. certainly for the first, what, sort of 20 years of his legislative life. And he gets on well with Joe Biden. And there were very nice tributes to him from Hunter Biden. And he worked closely, as you say, with John McCain in Arizona, with Joe Lieberman. And then something happens. And I guess it sort of talks to the Homan conversation we were having earlier, doesn't it?

22:55The News Agents Hosts:Is it the sort of periscope of a man who could see how long his career could be in U.S. politics as long as he keeps the right people on side.

23:09Miles Taylor:Washington, D.C., in the past 10 years has become something of a petri dish for cowardice. You've had all of these test subjects thrown in, a lot of us that worked on Capitol Hill in the same time period together as Republicans and sort of tested. What are you going to do amidst the rise of Donald Trump. And back when Lindsey Graham made that quote that we played earlier, I was working with him on Capitol Hill. I was over on the House side working with House Republicans and then House Speaker Paul Ryan. And I remember being very heartened to see Lindsey out there on the campaign trail speaking lucidly about Donald Trump.

23:49Miles Taylor:Why? Well, among House Republicans, among Paul Ryan and team, Trump was the person we were most worried about. We didn't think he would win the nomination. We certainly didn't think he would win the presidency, but we thought he would do generational damage to the GOP brand simply by rising in the polls in the race. We didn't want people in the future to say, this is the party that let Donald Trump be a nominee. Well, we all know how that story ended, but the part that surprised me was Lindsey flipping sides because Donald Trump did not change an iota from the man that Lindsey described. Lindsey Graham changed.