Transcript: Trump Blurts Out Awkward Truth about ICE as MAGA Seethes
Sargent: Well, there was a second MAGA person who really put it out there in a way that really underscores your point. It’s from MAGA media figure Michael Knowles. Listen to this, again, courtesy of Media Matters.
Michael Knowles (audio voiceover): I think this could be a perilous objective for him. I don’t think this is necessarily the right course to go down. I see why. I see why he is going down it, because he’s got friends, especially in the business community who say, I’m losing all my workers. Go after the illegals who aren’t workers. Go after the illegals who are just sucking off welfare. Go after the workers who are criminals. Go after the workers with the face tattoos. Go at 11 million to 16 million illegal aliens in this country. If you want to actually start to rectify that situation, you can’t just deport the ones with face tattoos. You do kind of have to deport abuela.
Sargent: Note that Knowles openly declares that Trump is going after people who are not gang members. They’re grandmothers. Knowles just says, Well, that’s good. This is exactly what MAGA wants: deporting grandmothers. I guess, points for honesty or something, Garrett?
Graff: Yeah. And this is also the challenge of what we have watched ICE unfold and as it has turbocharged immigration. ICE is an agency that is coming up on 20 years old at this point. And in both Democratic administrations and Republican administrations, it has done good work. In the Obama years.… Obama’s ICE actually deported more people than George W. Bush’s administration, but what you saw was ICE focusing on actual legit criminals. Gang members, cartel members, people who were actually here doing bad things. And the honest answer is that’s not a huge number. I’m not saying ICE was absolutely perfect in the Obama years. I’m not saying it was absolutely perfect in the Biden years. I’m not saying there weren’t hard and emotional cases during either of those years—but there were frameworks of prosecutorial discretion that really saw people, and leadership and officers focused on deporting actually bad people. But those people are hard to find and locate, and there aren’t that many of them. And so the moment you begin to turn this dial up to say, We need 3,000 people a day, 4,000 people a day, 5,000 people a day that we’re arresting and deporting, you need to get into deporting exactly the people who have been making headlines over the last couple of weeks: people who have lived in the U.S., made lives in the U.S. for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years in some cases, and have paid taxes, have raised families, have worked hard at their jobs, had careers, and are the people who the business community is really worried about targeting.
Sargent: So Garrett, I want to underscore the importance of what you said there, because I still think people miss it. The second Stephen Miller starts to shriek internally that he wants 3,000, 4,000, 5,000, a million arrests a day, they have to go after the grandmothers. There’s no other way to get the numbers up there. You cannot get the numbers up there unless you go after the grandmothers and all that they represent. You can’t get the numbers up by going after criminals for two reasons. One, there aren’t enough of them. And two, it’s incredibly resource intensive to go after the criminals. It’s less resource intensive to go after the abuelas and to deport day laborers from a parking lot at Home Depot. And that is the fundamental box that Trump is in here and others around him who recognize, unlike Stephen Miller, that deporting every last migrant in this country is a political disaster for them.
