The Kristi Noem Show Is Cancelled

15:38Jonathan Blitzer:She will, I think, go down in history for whatever that's worth at this point for really embracing this idea of law enforcement as just a photo op.

15:47Tyler Foggatt:I mean, can we talk a little bit more about Corey Lewandowski because he was also fired alongside Noam. And you mentioned earlier that there was this alleged affair between the two of them. And I guess I'm just wondering like how that relationship or the appearance of that relationship might have affected Noam's ouster. Like how should we be thinking about that in terms of, you know, her kind of stature at the department? Since, you know, this isn't a podcast where we just talk about the affair. Just to talk about the affair. or there must be a political implication that we unpack.

16:18Jonathan Blitzer:Right, of course, of course. No, I mean, the appearance was bad, and the appearance was persistent enough to really suggest a pattern. You know, they were seen together all the time. They were seen as being virtually inseparable. DHS sources said Lewandowski was ubiquitous. He was everywhere around the secretary at all times. He wasn't technically a member of the administration. He was not a member of the Department of Homeland Security. He had kind of a special provisional status called a special government employee that basically allowed him to consult with the government for no more than 130 days a year.

16:52Jonathan Blitzer:It's a position that exists that predated his job, but he really seemed to try to maximize his influence for as long as he could be close to Noem. And, you know, every time there was a kind of controversial decision made by Noem, specifically inside the department, Lewandowski was always nearby. He signs documents as chief advisor to the secretary when they fly somewhere in a 737 jet that Noam pushed for the department to have. The two of them stay in a private cabin in the back of the plane. There were individual instances where he was reported to have fired a Coast Guard pilot because when they got off of an aircraft, the Coast Guard pilot forgot to give Noam her blanket.

17:39Jonathan Blitzer:And then, of course, they had to rehire the pilot when they realized there was no one else who could fly the aircraft home. So he's really everywhere in all of this. And I should say, like, I don't have any independent reporting on this. I've just sort of been following this.

17:53Tyler Foggatt:You've just been following the blankie story from afar.

17:55Jonathan Blitzer:The blanket story to me seems like one of the key plot points in the second Trump term. But we now know, now that the sort of smoke has cleared from Noam or is beginning to clear, let's say, from Noam's tenure in the department, that there were specific moves that she and Lewandowski took together that alienated rank-and-file officials inside the department. So for instance, some of the most notorious federal agent policing done under the auspices of the mass deportation campaign, specifically in Minneapolis but also in Los Angeles, in Chicago, in Charlotte. There were these roving teams of border patrol agents led by a guy named Greg Bovino who I think was widely regarded as a lunatic.

18:38Jonathan Blitzer:But for whatever reason, Lewandowski and Noem elevated him over other people who are quite conservative and quite serious. You know, people whose view of immigration enforcement differs pretty starkly from my own, for example. But they're qualified. Yeah, at least like had – were a little bit more steeped in kind of the DHS HQ kind of mentality who somehow were like cast aside. And when there were points of tension, Noam and Lewandowski frequently threw those people under the bus. So, you know, Greg Bovino, who's now kind of a known entity because we've seen him on social media. We've seen videos of him.

19:18Jonathan Blitzer:There are now investigations into him. When there have been instances where, for example, at the White House, Trump wanted to know, like, why are all these videos circulating? Well, it turns out that Noam wanted agents like Bovino and others while they made arrests to record a lot of it for social media. Of course, the irony of that was that these images went viral, these videos went viral and really, I think, actually managed to kind of pierce the consciousness of the public. And when asked how this happened, she blamed the faction of people at Border Patrol who were actually pushing against Bovino.

19:50Jonathan Blitzer:Someone like Tom Homan, the president's so-called border czar, who is no one's idea of a moderate or a pragmatist, although under the present circumstances, people kind of see him as somehow representing a kind of more sane approach, which is just the mark of the craziness of our moment. When he would appear on TV, Noam apparently took it personally and couldn't understand why he got booked and she didn't.

20:10Tyler Foggatt:And where is she going now? Like you mentioned in your piece that she was reassigned to a role as special envoy to the Shield of the Americas. What is that?

20:18Jonathan Blitzer:Well, the first I heard of it was when she was – when it was announced that she was going there. You know, the Trump administration has talked about consolidating control over the Western Hemisphere, bombing the so-called cartels. This has come to mean a range of things from boat bombings in the Caribbean and the Pacific to repeated threats of bombing cartel redoubts in Mexico, which would be a catastrophic and unspeakable policy for the U.S. to adopt vis-a-vis our ally in Mexico, which is our largest trading partner. But this has been a kind of a big part of the Trump ethos and kind of worldview for how the administration can throw its weight around in the region and in the world.

20:58Jonathan Blitzer:I don't know what this looks like concretely. I mean this seemed to have been announced in conjunction with a kind of regional summit held in Miami where basically right wing leaders all across Latin America gathered to sort of show their solidarity with the American administration. I don't know what Noam's role will actually be. This doesn't seem to have any governing authority. I don't know. I'm trying – I'm kind of going back and forth. Like is it worse to be banished to the UN or to the Shield of the Americas? You know, these are the two people who have fallen in the Trump administration. You know, the signal gate casualty who's now like having to report to the UN.

21:34Jonathan Blitzer:Oh my god, the shame of that. And now Noam reporting to this as yet untested, non-existent sort of pseudo-regional law enforcement body.

21:43Tyler Foggatt:Shield of the Americas seems like it might have more fashion opportunities. It's kind of giving like a Marvel, Avengers, you know.

21:49Jonathan Blitzer:I thought the same thing. I thought the same thing. I can already see her like in a special uniform.

21:54Tyler Foggatt:Yeah, the commercials they write themselves. Let's take a break and then when we come back, I want to talk more about the Department of Homeland Security and sort of what it's changed into over time and what it was initially meant to do when it was created not that long ago. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

22:18Jonathan Blitzer:Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Tiana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there too with two nominated short films, which you can watch at newyorker.com slash video. Two People Exchanging Saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabelle Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film retirement plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films at newyorker.com slash video.

23:14Tyler Foggatt:So I want to take a step back and talk about the DHS more broadly. Given how heavily it's figured into 21st century American politics, I feel like it's really easy to forget that it actually hasn't been around for that long. I think it's the youngest cabinet-level department. So I thought we could just maybe take stock of how it's evolved over its lifespan of like 25 years. So why was DHS created and what was its original purpose? Was it always so immigration focused?

23:40Jonathan Blitzer:It essentially was. It basically sprang up in the aftermath of 9-11 when, among other things, one of the points of policy failure in Washington was the fact that the 19 hijackers who were responsible for the terrorist attacks of 9-11 had actually entered the U.S. on temporary valid visas. And so there was this immediate question of how it was possible for those people to have entered the country. Four of the 19 attackers on 9-11, they'd fallen essentially out of status. Their visas had expired. And so there was a real push to create a single kind of unitary department that could pull together a bunch of different agencies, agencies that handled immigration, agencies that handled security, national security.

24:27Jonathan Blitzer:And what you saw in the creation of DHS, it was passed in legislation. The legislation responsible for its creation passed in the fall of 2002, and then it came into being shortly after that, was for the first time really a federal department that reframed the idea of immigration in terms of national security. And that was entirely a product of the fallout of 9-11. And there were people in the early days, back when there was this congressional debate about the future of that department, who said, this is a very scary prospect. We don't want to consolidate in a single federal department all of this power, surveillance power, policing power, all of this sort of artillery, but both literally and figuratively.

25:11Jonathan Blitzer:But for the most part, anyone who voiced skepticism or concern about what it would mean to have this kind of overweening national department overseeing law enforcement and immigration were basically cast aside and the bill to create DHS passed overwhelmingly. At around the same time that DHS was created, there were a few other things that are just worth taking stock of. I mean, to many people, this is old news, but it's just sort of worth filling out the landscape at the time. One was the Patriot Act in October of 2001, which basically vastly expanded the government's powers of surveillance. You had early the following year the creation of a national registry that basically required immigrants from 25 countries, almost all of them Muslim-majority countries, to register with the federal government.

26:02Jonathan Blitzer:And the idea, again, was to sort of make this connection between national security and immigration administration and enforcement. You know, one thing that's notable about that national registry, for instance, was in the first year or so of its existence, there was not a single terrorism link that came out of that registry. But there were at least 12 ,000 people who were put in removal proceedings because of this further scrutiny, because of how they had to come onto the government's radar and so on. And so really from the very beginning, you have this kind of original sin in the department of reimagining immigration and the power of the government to enforce immigration laws in specific reference to national security, which of course allows the government to do much more aggressive sorts of things.

26:46Jonathan Blitzer:And so in the early days of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, you had new agencies that cropped up. One of them was ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Before that, it was called the Immigration and Naturalization Service. And in the past, prior to the creation of DHS, Immigration Naturalization Service was basically in charge of all of U.S. immigration policy, everything from enforcement to the processing of legal immigration applications. The idea now was to break out into different agencies under the umbrella of DHS some of these different roles. And so immigration and customs enforcement was tasked primarily with the power to arrest and detain immigrants who were here unlawfully.

27:25Jonathan Blitzer:And almost from the earliest days of the creation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, you had teams that were known as fugitive operations teams, which again gives you a sense of the flavor of the thinking of the time. And the idea was essentially that for this fledgling agency to justify all of the appropriations that its leaders were repeatedly going to Congress to request, they had to show evidence that they were making a great number of arrests. And so almost from the beginning, you had this issue of the department needing to make arrests in order to prove to lawmakers that they deserve more money to make more arrests.

28:05Jonathan Blitzer:And the general political ethos at the time was so much in favor of the creation of this department that you basically had this real push toward making massive arrests so that these agencies could even beef up further. And so for instance, in 2003, something like 30 % of all of the people arrested by these fugitive operations teams at ICE had criminal records. And that, it turned out, would be the high watermark for the percentage of people who were arrested who had criminal records. Three years later, after the Department of Homeland Security issued quotas that basically mandated that agents make a certain number of arrests a year, It was basically 1 ,000 arrests a year per team at ICE.

28:51Jonathan Blitzer:And so you had maybe five people on a team. Take like a city like New York. You'd have five people on a so-called fugitive operations team. Their marching orders were, okay, 1 ,000 arrests a year, which actually I've spoken to people who were on those teams at the time, was a really tall order. And so what happens as a result of these kinds of quotas, a greater percentage of people who don't have criminal records get swept up. And within even a couple of years, by 2006, something like 17 percent of those arrested by ICE had criminal records. And that was a direct result of these quotas. And so what would happen is agents who were going to make a targeted arrest of an individual would make what were called collateral arrests.

29:30Jonathan Blitzer:Anyone they met along the way, they started to arrest because they were trying to bump their numbers up. And this has just been a reality of ICE from the very beginning. But kind of the longstanding legacy at ICE, at another agency called Border Patrol, which is part of Customs and Border Protection, has essentially been that they get lavish budgets from Congress, much bigger than other law enforcement agencies. I mean massive, massive, massive budgets. And there are fewer constitutional restraints on how they actually exercise their power. You know, the requirements they have for stopping someone, for entering a private residence, for arresting someone are different than typical law enforcement agents.

30:12Jonathan Blitzer:So you have an exceptionally well-funded department with fewer constitutional restraints and, you know, essentially unfettered or relatively unfettered power. And that's been the trend line from the very beginning.

30:26Tyler Foggatt:I guess what I'm curious about is just like how the public was responding even then. Like obviously the Patriot Act was super controversial, but in general, like George Bush and the war in Afghanistan did have early high approval ratings. And there was this kind of concern throughout the U.S. about combating terrorism. And so I guess does it seem like they had more of a green light from the public back then to do this kind of thing?

30:49Jonathan Blitzer:Yeah, I mean it was controversial by turns. I mean, typically what would happen is there would be a horrible arrest of someone that seemed completely unjustified, someone who had longstanding ties to the community, a father, a mother, and it would seem senseless. And there'd be a public reaction. And sometimes that would affect the government's policy. Sometimes it wouldn't. But, you know, it's interesting. Through the early years of DHS, comprehensive immigration reform was still a conversation that members of both political parties in Washington entertained. And so the other thing that started to happen was these big enforcement pushes started to coincide with moments in Washington in which the two parties seemed to get closer and closer to forging some bipartisan consensus on massive, you know, comprehensive immigration reform, which would consist by and large in legalizing a large portion of people who are undocumented and been living in the United States for years and years and making it tougher at the border and elsewhere.

31:46Jonathan Blitzer:on people who didn't have as much of a claim to legalization. And of course, as we know now, there was never a legislative solution. It's just it was too controversial an issue. There was too much cynicism on both sides of the aisle, although I would say particularly on the Republican side of the aisle. And as a result, what remained was basically the enforcement apparatus without any of the corresponding kind of legal reforms or modifications. And so also a precursor, a prerequisite for every so-called legislative debate about comprehensive immigration reform was that both sides had to agree that DHS needed more money for enforcement.

32:23Jonathan Blitzer:So simultaneously to all these legislative failures, you also have members of both parties keeping even more money on the enforcement apparatus at DHS. So it grows out of proportion with the dysfunction of Congress in actually trying to legislate on the immigration issue. And so I don't think in some ways the issue really broke through in a public way, in a kind of massive way. I mean, there were some moments, sometimes around right-wing bills that absolutely shocked the conscience. But, you know, for the most part, it was Obama, really, on Obama's watch that people started to, I think, fully grasp the scale of how much mass deportation was a fact of U.S.

32:58Jonathan Blitzer:immigration policy. And so that's kind of when I think the issue really kind of crested, at least, in terms of public consciousness.

33:06Tyler Foggatt:Yeah, let's talk more about Obama, just because I think we've had two presidents from each party running DHS since its creation. So we talked about George W. Bush and what that looked like. We, of course, know what it looked like under Trump. But, of course, Obama and Biden also ran the country during this period that DHS has been around. And so, you know, Republicans often frame Democratic rhetoric around border security as being much softer than the conservative side. But I'm curious to know more about how DHS has operated under the Democrats, especially compared to Trump, especially since like you will see, you know, a lot of activists referring to Obama as the deporter in chief because of his record-setting rate of deportation.

33:45Tyler Foggatt:So like have we seen the department become like less abusive under certain presidents or has it kind of just been like the same trajectory over time?

33:53Jonathan Blitzer:To answer that, let me start at the present moment and go back because, you know, one thing that's important to know, even just before we get into some of the nuts and bolts of the Obama years is the department had, in theory, you know, internal offices that were meant to provide some sort of check and monitoring power over the activity of agents. And the current administration has basically dismantled all of that oversight, all of that internal oversight, which is a profound shift. And then what's also happened, and again, I'm going to kind of back into the Obama years. One thing that Democrats have typically done is recognizing the fact that, OK, obviously there seems to be no legislative possibility of comprehensive immigration reform that would give people a path to legal status.

34:35Jonathan Blitzer:And by the way, the legal immigration system hasn't been reformed in any concrete or meaningful sense since 1990. So there's also like all of this just sort of basic administration that has to happen that hasn't happened. And so Democrats, by and large, have bought into the kind of rough logic of the existence of DHS, the need to enforce the immigration laws harshly, particularly at the border and so on. But what they've tried to do over the years, and Obama really started it and Biden carried that torch, was to build in essentially different forms of discretion to try to temper enforcement. And so one way of thinking about the Obama years – and the Obama legacy is very complicated and very mixed on the immigration question, which we can talk about.

35:18Jonathan Blitzer:But just speaking strictly in terms of like ICE activity, in some ways, I think about the Obama administration vis-a-vis ICE as basically two presidents. Because Obama in his first term and Obama in his second term were really much different in terms of how he thought about and people in his administration thought about kind of reigning in the powers of ICE. But essentially, what started to happen, what started to get kind of more clear shape, beginning really in 2012 and then picking up until 2014, was to create so-called enforcement guidelines for ICE officers, essentially laying out kind of rough profiles of who ICE should be going after.

35:57Jonathan Blitzer:And really the intent behind that was by targeting the profiles of who ICE should go after, it was meant to give a wider swath of the undocumented population relief from getting targeted and arrested. So in other words, if you hadn't committed a crime, if you've lived in the US for a long time, you were essentially going to be left alone. The Obama administration didn't start this way. The Obama administration, very much with an eye toward trying to craft some sort of comprehensive immigration reform push in Congress, basically inched toward this recognition that they needed to really radically pull back immigration enforcement.

36:36Jonathan Blitzer:But the first Obama term, there was none of that. And really the first time Obama ever made a move, a kind of overt move in this direction was with the creation of DACA in 2012, which was basically a form of prosecutorial discretion that shielded from arrest and deportation a population of people known very broadly and sympathetically as dreamers, people who came to the United States as children and who were basically American in everything but legal status, who had gone to American schools, who had jobs, who had friends. families here. And in 2012, on the eve of Obama's reelection, he announced this policy that basically was aimed to shield about a million people from arrest and gave them a kind of, this is slightly overstating it, but a kind of provisional form of legal status that allowed them to apply for financial aid, to apply for mortgages, to make car payments, and to begin to formalize their role in daily American life.

37:35Jonathan Blitzer:That was increasingly the direction that the Obama administration went in. It took them, I would say, probably too long to come close to that line of thinking. But that was essentially where they went. And so one of the things that people say in the Biden administration would tell you, and the secretary of DHS, Alejandro Mayorkas, told me this personally back in 2024 was, look, You might have issues with our border policy. But, you know, when was the last time – and Mallorca has asked me this very pointedly. He said, when was the last time you read a story about a grandmother or a grandfather getting arrested by ICE?

38:11Jonathan Blitzer:Not during our administration. And the thinking there was very much that, OK, we are going to hone the enforcement priorities for this agency such that sympathetic people aren't going to get arrested. The only people who are going to get arrested are people who have criminal records. Obviously, there are all kinds of exceptions. These are agencies that I think have all kinds of problems and have always had systematic problems. But that was the rough thinking. And so when you get an administration like Trump's, the first thing Trump did during his first administration was to eliminate those priorities.

38:43Jonathan Blitzer:The irony, of course, was that that led to fewer arrests because insofar as there were no priorities, agents didn't have as much clarity on who they should go after or how. But what the Trump administration has essentially done from Trump 1 to Trump 2 has been to strip away any of the policies or regulations that temper immigration enforcement. And now, of course, we're in a situation where ICE is operating with a level of impunity that – I mean I have to be honest with you. I didn't expect it to be this ugly. I didn't expect there to be masked agents driving unmarked cars, whisking people away regardless of whether or not they have legal status.

39:21Jonathan Blitzer:I mean that's one of the – I think the most concerning trends that we're seeing now are ICE officers arresting people at immigration court hearings or at administrative interviews. People who are saying, look, here are my legal documents. I have work papers. I have temporary protected status. And ICE is saying we don't care. You know, all of that. We've now gotten to a point where basically some of the people who warned us early on that DHS could become all-powerful and could start to become essentially a president's personal army going after political opponents. We're now entering that territory.

39:50Jonathan Blitzer:So we've slid farther and farther and farther right and toward this kind of authoritarian outcome on a spectrum that Democrats also have had some place on.

40:01Tyler Foggatt:We'll have more of the political scene from The New Yorker in just a moment.

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41:14Tyler Foggatt:I guess I'm wondering what your sense of like the short and long-term future for ICE is in particular. The Times recently reported that ICE is focused on conducting more targeted enforcement operations rather than indiscriminate street sweeps. and that arrests have fallen to their lowest levels since September. I mean, what does that signal to you?

41:34Jonathan Blitzer:Personally, I'm very skeptical that the administration is meaningfully changing course. I mean, these arrest patterns are going to ebb and flow. We have seen periods when the arrest numbers seem to drop, and then they surged again. So, for example, in June, when there was this massive federal operation in Los Angeles and arrests spiked, July then calmed a bit. And then in September, there was another operation in Chicago and we saw even harsher treatment and even more arrests. So I'm reluctant to take the kind of current dip in arrest numbers as a sign that there's kind of a deeper rethinking that's happening inside the administration.

42:12Jonathan Blitzer:You'll recall that Stephen Miller back in – what was it? Last May laid out as a goal for ICE agents to be arresting 3 ,000 people a day nationwide, which is an insanely high number. And it should be said, not a number that agents can reach. But when you have someone of that power and that influence inside the White House giving that kind of target, what you're really doing is you're incentivizing agents to do anything and everything they want while they're carrying out their jobs. And of course, since then, Miller has also said, and this is in the wake of what happened in Minneapolis, he said explicitly, publicly, that ICE officers doing whatever in the course of their work have immunity.

42:54Jonathan Blitzer:Those are his words. And so when he sets a number like 3 ,000 arrests nationwide, that is more than anything else a kind of call to arms. Right now, the numbers have dropped a bit to like I think a little over 1 ,100 arrests a day. When Trump took office, just to give you a point of comparison, you were roughly between 300 and 400 arrests per day. So, you know, the fact that right now we're seeing a little north of 1 ,100 arrests a day when in January we were seeing closer to between 1 ,300 and 1 ,500 arrests a day, I just think what's been unleashed is not going away anytime soon.

43:31Tyler Foggatt:One thing that I'm just curious about, given our discussion earlier about how the roots of DHS really are in this kind of effort to root out terrorism from the United States. I mean, do you think that we're going to see kind of a change in DHS priorities as the Trump administration continues this war in Iran? You know, the concerns about Iranian sleeper cells in the United States and just whether we might kind of see like a return to form for DHS where that becomes like a big part of sort of what they're doing. And it might even be a way of gaining back, you know, support for people who have been kind of like alienated by what they're doing.

44:08Jonathan Blitzer:You know, I was just talking to my editor about this. I've interviewed a number of DHS secretaries over the years and each one of them with varying degrees of credibility has essentially said some version of you have to be careful as the head of this department seeming to embrace overtly political agendas. because in theory, you were presiding over a department that is tasked with overseeing national security, from everything from like cybersecurity to Coast Guard to the Secret Service and so on. And that's one thing that has fallen away completely. There isn't even a kind of idea of lip service being paid to the fact that DHS is operating kind of impartially now as an assessor of national security threats.

44:54Jonathan Blitzer:So in answer to your question, no, that doesn't seem far-fetched to me at all. And in fact, already congressional Republicans are trying to push back on Democrats who currently have frozen further funds going to DHS on the grounds that if they're going to appropriate more money to DHS, there have to be some basic safeguards against agent abuse. And already congressional Republicans are pushing back and saying, really? During a time of – they can't say war because then it raises questions about whether or not Congress was consulted. But, you know, during a time of conflict, international conflict, you guys are going to defang this important department that's tasked with national security.

45:28Jonathan Blitzer:No, I think all of these things are in the mix.

45:31Tyler Foggatt:You mentioned the fact that the government is still partially shut down because Democrats have been withholding support for funding DHS without any changes being made to ICE tactics. Do you think that this is like an issue that the Democrats can win on? Like how do you see that conflict resolving?

45:46Jonathan Blitzer:It's a really good question and I credit Noam with this, with pulling together Democrats on an issue that generally scatters them to the winds. Democrats have been terrified of taking on the immigration issue in any sense and it's been kind of heartbreaking to watch from a moral and political standpoint because I think it's a losing proposition to try to shy away from one of the biggest issues of our time. But I think Trump gives Democrats – for all of the differences that Democrats have inside the party, this level of abuse and unchecked power does give Democrats the space to unify around some commonsensical forms of oversight.

46:25Jonathan Blitzer:And so actually in that sense, I was pretty struck by the idea that congressional Democrats held the line on further funding. Now, granted, the Department of Homeland Security right now is – and specifically ICE and Border Patrol are flush with money as a result of Trump's big domestic spending bill passed last summer. But I think it's an important political stance for Democrats to take and I'm curious to see if they can hold the line. This is one of the big questions leading into the midterms or sort of what are the issues the Democrats are comfortable really kind of drawing the line on? Obviously, healthcare was one in the last shutdown effort.

46:56Jonathan Blitzer:I mean, look, my view and my view is colored by the fact that I cover this stuff is you can't win if you don't stand for something. And this is the most obvious thing you have to stand up for against the absolute abuse and mistreatment of people in this country, the lawlessness of this campaign, of this mass deportation detention campaign and so on. And to me, that is a winning proposition whether you're a Democrat running in a purple district or a Democrat running in a solidly blue district. And I think now, particularly in the wake of what happened in Minneapolis, the abuses were so over the top that I do think Democrats can push for certain measures that won't change any of the big substantive policies coming out of ICE or coming out of this administration.

47:37Jonathan Blitzer:But for instance, think about the fact that it's taken this long for Democrats to line up against the idea that ICE agents can be masked all the time. You know, ICE agents were not masked during the first Trump administration. They were not masked during the Biden administration. They were not masked during the pandemic. So the idea that like politically it's somehow seen as risky or controversial or anti-law enforcement to demand that law enforcement agents who are armed, who can make arrests without having to offer any justification, who the government is claiming have total immunity against consequences from their actions, can just be completely unidentifiable by the public.

48:14Jonathan Blitzer:That seems crazy to me. And that puts the US in the company of repressive society. It took a while for Democrats to even mark out a position on that. And so one of the striking things when you saw the list of congressional Democrats' demands for oversight related to this particular partial shutdown, some of the items on that list are things that are basically facts of US law. Like one of the negotiating points was US citizens can't be arrested by ICE. No shit. I mean that's the definition. You know, in order to enter a private residence, you need to have a judicial warrant. Yeah, that's the Fourth Amendment.

48:53Jonathan Blitzer:And so, you know, Democrats, if they shy away from these fights, I don't know what they're left trying to defend. I don't know. There's also so much happening. It's such a surreal moment. I mean, here there's this partial government shutdown. I don't know. You have to remind yourself that that's going on given everything else that's happening. And so I don't know kind of how to game that out as a matter of political strategy. You know, like part of the idea of shutting down the government, whether partially or fully, is to try to attract attention to an issue. And now there are so many other things.

49:20Jonathan Blitzer:How do you get anyone to pay attention?

49:22Tyler Foggatt:I mean, given how long it's taken for Democrats to rally around what seem like almost like low stakes reforms, I mean, low stakes in terms of the stakes for asking for them are pretty low, even though they're high stakes for the people on the ground who are kind of having to confront them. I guess I'm just wondering, like, these rallying cries of abolish ICE and just like this progressive dream of there being a future in which this isn't how we go about immigration policy. Is that just not ever something we're going to see? Let's say that the Democrats take back the White House and the whole country is just sort of like disturbed by what they've seen during the second Trump administration.

49:57Tyler Foggatt:Do you see any path forward for getting rid of ICE or drastically weakening it? We've seen a lot of other, you know, agencies get destroyed during the Trump administration. It makes you wonder.

50:07Jonathan Blitzer:Yeah, it's a really good point. You know, that was always – the abolishized stuff always seemed like a red line that, you know, sort of moderate Democrats were never comfortable even approaching. I have to say that one of the patterns in this administration has been such systematic, unconscionable abuse that I actually think people are much more alive to the idea that, OK, these agencies in this department cannot go on existing as they currently exist. And I do think that there are very serious questions, by the way, about, OK, you know, let's – I don't want to get – I don't want us to get ahead of ourselves.

50:45Jonathan Blitzer:Like let's assume that, you know, Democrats retake Congress, say, or let's assume that a Democrat wins in 2028. You know, what does that mean for an agency like ICE? I mean how do you then build back up legitimacy or safeguards that have been systematically gutted? What do you do with a workforce where – I mean we haven't even spoken about this. Where like they've gone and hired 10 ,000 agents or they're going out to hire thousands of agents and there aren't even background checks that they're doing on some of these agents. And, you know, there have been reports from an ice whistleblower that, you know, in the training academies, they're like not teaching basic constitutional principles.

51:19Jonathan Blitzer:And so that's how you get the idea that like these agents feel like they can go into someone's house without a judicial warrant. Like, oh, there goes the Fourth Amendment. How do you begin to claw that stuff back?

51:26Tyler Foggatt:You have to like purge the entire ice deep state.

51:28Jonathan Blitzer:Yeah, exactly. I mean I really – so I don't – from an institutional perspective, I don't know what you build out of the rubble of all of this. And politically, that's such an open question. And I – you know, it's funny. Like from my perspective, I watched Democrats – I mean we all watched Democrats in 2020, but more specifically I would say in 2024, really building the presidential race around the idea of the rule of law and the future of democracy. And I think it was widely seen that the immigration issue was a point of weakness for Biden and for Harris. And as you can imagine, I have all kinds of thoughts on that.

52:04Jonathan Blitzer:And I actually think that like the kind of political read on that is a little bit off. But there was this idea that, OK, we have to separate these. We have to keep these issues as far away from each other as possible. We have to talk about our kind of key issue, which is like the future of democracy, which is like a little bit of an abstract issue to build a campaign around. And the immigration stuff, like let's just kind of hope that we can kind of weather the storm. Sure, voters don't think we're trustworthy on this, but we'll roll the dice. If there's one thing that the current administration is showing, it's that those two issues are inextricable.

52:33Jonathan Blitzer:And I think to people who have followed this – and this isn't a novel interpretation of mine. But to people who follow this, the administration's consolidation of power, its desire to just carry out authoritarian policies in this country has run through the immigration space. That has always been the laboratory for this administration for all kinds of reasons. I mean it's axiomatic in history to obviously identify an other, to identify a kind of villain and to make people scared of that population and so on. But also the president has typically enjoyed wider latitude in terms of his power on immigration policy.

53:16Jonathan Blitzer:So it's like the lines are a little blurrier and democrats have typically been on their back foot when it comes to this issue. And so for all of those reasons, the immigration space has always been ground zero for this administration's authoritarian takeover of the country. And so Democrats, it seems to me, should have some vocabulary for describing that nexus, whether it's the idea that a Blackhawk helicopter is landing on an apartment complex in Chicago while ICE agents are making arrests inside. Maybe that's the image the Democrats need to campaign on. But the idea is that, you know, when you have people who are getting arrested without due process, who have legal status and who are being held incommunicado in, you know, prisons far away from their home state, I mean, it's ringing all of the bells.

54:08Jonathan Blitzer:And so there's got to be some political language for connecting those two, despite Democrats' general allergy to talking about immigration.

54:20Tyler Foggatt:Well, thank you so much for being here, John. I've really enjoyed talking to you about, you know, some really dark stuff, although I was glad that we got to focus on Gnome's outfits for just a little bit.

54:29Jonathan Blitzer:Me too. Thanks for having me.

54:31Tyler Foggatt:Yeah, thank you so much. Jonathan Blitzer is a staff writer for The New Yorker. You can find his latest piece, Christy Gnome's Fireable Offenses, at newyorker.com. This has been The Political Scene, from The New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggett. This episode is produced by John LeMay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman, and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday.