ICE Arrests Are Only the Beginning

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We, as law enforcement community, have been receiving endless complaints about civil rights violations in our streets from U.S. citizens. What we're hearing is they're being stopped in traffic stops or on the street, with no cause and being forced to demand paperwork to determine if they are here legally. As this went on over the past two weeks, we started hearing from our police officers the same complaints as they fell victim to this while off-duty. Every one of these individuals is a person of color who has had this happen to them. That was the police chief of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. His name is Mark Bruley, announcing publicly that his own police officers are being targeted by the ICE agents who have invaded that state. The rest of the country has seen people being dragged from their cars, protesters being punched on the street, toddlers being hit with tear gas. And the public officials speaking out against all of this, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Fry and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, they are being targeted with subpoenas from the Trump Justice Department. But less seen in this terrifying new America, less known, is what happens after that. And it is no less dark. People are dying in ICE custody. They are being sent to countries where they have never lived, where they don't speak the language, and where their lives are very much at risk. Most people have no idea what it means to actually get deported in Trump's America. And Donald Trump very much wants it to stay that way. I'm Alex Wagner, and this week on Runaway Country, what happens after the phone cameras stop rolling? What goes on inside ICE detention once nobody's around to protest? And what can be done to resist a system that seems so fundamentally at odds with American values and the U.S. Constitution? To sort through all of that, I will be joined by MSNOW political and national reporter, my friend Jacob Soboroff, who covered family separation under the first Trump administration, who is on the streets of Minnesota this week, and whose new book, Firestorm, about the devastating fires in Los Angeles last January, makes connections to immigration that you might never have actually expected. But first, what happens when someone gets arrested by ICE? And can anyone stop this madness? I spoke with David Wilson, an immigration attorney based in Minneapolis. Here's our conversation. So, David, first of all, thank you for taking some time to chat. Give me a sense of how your law firm is managing the moment. I mean, what's the caseload been like since ICE came to town? And how many people is your firm representing who have been detained by ICE? Since the first of the year, we have already filed 100 habeas actions. Wow. Our call volume increased from maybe 80 to 90 calls a day. On January 5th, it was 560 and it hasn't been less than that since then. Wow. So we're struggling to keep up. We're trying to help as many people as we can. But the number of people reaching out in pure panic is just overwhelming. And a lot of the people who are panicking are people who shouldn't. They're citizens. They're residents. They're people going to school. The presence of law enforcement in this scale is really just intimidating a lot of people. and they're making sure that what do I do if I interact with someone, how if they don't believe I'm a citizen, for example. I get that call at least 10 times a day. Questions that I've been doing this for a long time, questions that I never thought I'd have to answer. I'm spending a lot of time answering and reaffirming for people, look, you're okay. And if you have any risks, there's someone who is going to help you. but it's, it's, it's a lot. It's a lot. Can I just ask, when you say you're getting 500 to 600 calls a day, like what is that? How do you manage that? And what do you say to people? I mean, I'm assuming you don't have the manpower or woman power to, to manage all those cases. How do you, I mean, I guess, how do you let people down and say, we can't handle your case? Well, we, we've, you know, we saw some of this coming. You know, we could watch what was happening in other cities. And so we thought through some of our strategies for how to screen for who we can help, who we can't. You know, essentially like a triage, like an emergency room, you got to prioritize who you can help, who you can't. And so we're pretty good at determining right away, all right, we can help this person, this person we can't, let them know and, you know, tell the family so they don't spend money on someone, you know, recklessly. we can't and we don't think they should. We're always very clear on that, whether they should spend money or not. But there is a limit. I mean, yesterday we had 15 calls at six o'clock that we're still screening through. And so some of us were here until nine o'clock at night getting back to people. I was calling someone at 1030 last night to let them know that their family member is going to get released in Oklahoma. And then I was dealing with the U.S. Attorney's Office at 1115 who are writing me because they're still trying to keep up as well, trying to resolve a case. So it's been, I mean, it's an important mission. We're not shying away from it, but boy, is it exhausting. Yeah. And I would assume it's both mentally and emotionally exhausting to be dealing with all of this chaos and hard work. It is. There's so much pressure to help people who are, especially when people, it's really hard to appreciate when someone just literally disappears. You can't reach them. You can't find them. You can maybe see for a little while where their phone is reporting where they are if they've got phone tracking on or find my phone operating. But once that goes away and you know that they're somewhere flying around the country and it may take three or four days for them to show up, the families go into pure panic mode. and you feel for them because a lot of times it's fathers. A lot of fathers get detained. A lot of them are my age. Several have medical issues. And so we're constantly asked, how can I get my dad's medication to someone so he doesn't have issues with his ongoing, I have one now, his ongoing prostate cancer treatment. We're trying to get meds because they don't want to go backwards. They were close to the end of the Kim cycle. We've got diabetics, high cholesterol, heart medications, all kinds of medical issues that the family is just desperate. Like they're not even worried about getting someone out. They're worried about just keeping them alive. And so there's a lot of pressure to resolve that, too, while trying to lawyer the moment, not social work the moment, and move forward with litigating the release of someone. You're talking about this phenomenon that the administration is pursuing robustly, which is taking people from Minnesota out of state. Can you talk a little bit more about that practice and, you know, sort of what's happening here? I mean, as a lawyer, I would assume you want to keep them in state where you know where they are. You can communicate with them. You know, you can work with the judges that I'm sure you know in Minnesota. I mean, talk to me a little bit about the implications legally of disappearing someone to another part of the country. Well, so I call it the witching hour now. It's the hour where we think the flight is going to take off to El Paso. And so if someone's detained, you know, in the morning, we try desperately to file something before four o'clock. because we want to try to establish at least jurisdiction here over the case rather than having to chase the case around the country and end up with different judges that we aren't familiar with. Maybe the schedule will change three or four times in the meantime of the case. Sometimes someone will end up in El Paso. Two days later, they'll end up in New Mexico. We've had them bounce to Oklahoma. They're kind of spreading out once they get to one location. Often it's temporary. And so for us, what we're trying to deal with is you have 3,000 plus agents here locally on a population that's pretty concentrated. The immigrant community in the Twin Cities is pretty easy to isolate locally. And they're just inundating them. You may even during this recording might hear whistles outside my window because I'm at a major intersection. You hear them sometimes. and the whistles for people who don't know are frequently blown by um citizens who are trying to protect people from detention by signaling ices in town using their whistle right and we have three or four daycares on our street um so there are a lot of parents who are you know really upset that ice is coming outside of their you know the schools and arresting their teachers in front of kids and, you know, kind of terrorizing them. So the parents are volunteering. They do essentially the equivalent of ICE school guard. You just see some phenomenal response from the community in response to it. But what we, you know, so the challenge really is first and foremost, keeping up with someone before they move. If they go to the local ICE office at Fort Snelling, that building is not designed as an ICE detention facility. It's a multipurpose government military building. The VA is in there. There's other military offices in there. So ISIS capacity to detain is really just two really large rooms. So they're just filling it to capacity. So their people are spilling over all day long. It's gotten to the point now where they can't even process people here. They're detaining them. They're taking them out of state to process them. And then sometimes bringing them back to possibly detain them here. if they're going to bring them back or they're going to leave them wherever they ended up being that day. So we had someone just in the last 24 hours go to Central California, get interviewed by a nice officer, but he put in the system and was flown right back. What? And now sitting in jail here. Yeah. It's so inefficient. I mean, there's so many things wrong with this. From a tax payer standpoint, people should be enraged at the waste in many respects. That's insane. Yeah. I mean, I'm enraged when I read. I want to talk about detention because you mentioned medical concerns. I mean, on NBC, on Monday, NBC reported that a third immigrant detainee, a third one has died at Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. Right. You're talking about trying to prevent people from getting deported down to or transferred down to El Paso. That is the third death at that detention center in 44 days. I'm new to the statistics of people dying in detention, but that seems like very high. And we know that one of those deaths has been ruled a homicide. Can you talk to me about what you've heard about the conditions inside these detention centers? People, I mean, so, yes, but the one in Montana, Camp Montana is special. It's a special, awful. People, you know, are essentially in a tent city in the middle of winter. It may be Texas, but it's not that warm. And there are just so many people down there. A person may get a phone call with a loved one, but they're capped at two minutes. And it may take three or four days in between calls. Attorneys are just desperately trying to reach their clients and have meetings with them. You can't get any communication in and out of that facility. we when we often have clients who are really ordered released by federal judges i have several today i'm tracking them down we're four or five days from when the judge had said release this person and u.s attorney's office here in minneapolis can't get someone in the federal government down there to release them what why because there's there's no communication chaos it's chaos there's just because they're just they're just putting so many people in one location so fast that they don't have time to process them. They don't even have case numbers yet. And they keep entering their information wrong. They often will miss, they'll get a spelling wrong in the name or they'll get the country of birth wrong. So it makes it very hard to find people. So the conditions there are terrible. The management of the facility seems to be just absent. There's just no rhyme or reason as to why the conditions are the way they are. Um, and, you know, the Senate can be says, well, that's part of the game. It's done by design. Yeah. And so I, you're not a bug. Yeah. It's well, it's, it's part of the, it's adding pressure in the crucible. Um, and this, what this moment really is meant to be is to squeeze people and to give them to surrender, um, and, you know, do what the administration wants. And that's, they're hoping people will crack. Um, and some people do, they, they were, they're desperate to get out of there. That's so awful. What happens if you have a medical condition? You mentioned people who have diabetes or they're going through the last round of chemo for prostate cancer. What's their, I mean, if they don't know, if they're not recording where they're from and they're not getting their names right and they can't even release them when they've been ordered by a judge to do so, I assume that means their medication gets lost in the mix as well. Oh, we're panicked about people with any serious medical issues because we have no way of knowing that there's adequate, is even adequate screening. Most of these detention facilities have very limited medical staff. The ICE does have an obligation to provide medical care. They're the custodian of the person. Just like any state facility, they're obligated. And if they don't, they could be medical malpractice by the physician who's ever taken care of that or has the contract. But given the volume and the unfamiliarity that these doctors would have with someone who's just showing up and suddenly having to give medication for someone who's got 20 years worth of history, that's just, it's not happening. There's no way it's happening. So we're going to see more deaths. I mean, it just seems like numerically, if you have no system by which they can get lifesaving medication and you have an excess of people and a shortage of doctors and no information and a completely chaotic dysfunctional system, that's a recipe for more people dying. I mean, this situation is frankly ripe for a human tragedy over and over again. What recourse do people have if they been mistreated in detention I mean I think the challenge is identifying who did the mistreatment and then if they get out because that part of the challenge you have to be here to do something about it, then they could always pursue a claim of the Federal Torture Claim Act. But the ICE officers, though, do have a very high level of immunity, not absolute immunity as necessarily as the government seems to suggest these days. But it's just accountability is always a challenge in detention facilities. And that's been the case for 30 years, is that, you know, you have an agency will say that, well, this person started the fight and they were just intervening. Or this, you know, there's always something that's put back on a third party, if not the person who's making the complaint. And the officers are just angels. That's how they portray them. And so they're doing some kind of biblical intervention, but really what they're doing is putting people in chokeholds and shackles and not letting them move for hours on end and terrible food and food maybe not appropriate either culturally or medically for people either. And so accountability is a big issue And I don't know that there's an easy answer for that I think at some point you'd hope Congress would start really supervising a little more But if it feeds the narrative of the current administration I don't know that accountability is going to come to the table anytime soon Feels like we're going to really have to have a truth and reconciliation committee in like 10 years To look through all the phone footage and get first-hand testimony because Lord knows it doesn't feel like there's any accountability right now. Let me just ask you one kind of big picture question because, I mean, you're a lawyer. You went to law school. You've been in this game for longer than the Trump administration has been engaged in a campaign of mass deportation. What does it feel like to be a lawyer and see the legal system so perverted or at least handicapped in this, you know, the firing of immigration judges? We talked to a newly fired immigration judge. of the system. They are trying to inject chaos into the system. They are trying to make the lives of the most vulnerable harder and maybe deny them constitutional rights. There's just a brutality in this hour that feels pretty unique. I wonder how you look at all of it and how you sort of go about each day. I think there's, I kind of take two, take a deep breath usually, But I take into perspective that as much as the administration has tried rewriting the rules on a lot of things, denying women who have suffered horrific violence related to their gender, trying to wipe out all their asylum claims in mass by changing the standards randomly, making detention much harder to get a release for someone secure because they keep changing the bond rules. Those things are incredibly frustrating, and it's completely so obviously political. And so there are days when, I mean, my colleague and I were just talking about we need to make a scream room in our office so we could just let it out. But as a lawyer, there are moments, though, too, I get reminded of the honor of being a lawyer, which is going into a federal court before a real judge who doesn't care about the politics but does care about the law not being followed. And when you see the judges react to what they can see is completely ignoring the letter of the law and then having an administration daring to not follow their direction. And then the rebuke that comes out of that, that's when I realized that's why I enjoy being a lawyer, because there's accountability. If we can't get it from Congress, there are so many federal judges who are more than willing to help. It just takes a lot of energy to get something before them, and you have to get enough momentum and examples of the same thing before the judges start reacting. Minneapolis having so many cases pending right now because of the number of arrests. When we had these initial bond changes starting back in July, the judges were very deliberate and very thoughtful in their approach to the cases and wanted to make sure they made the right decision. Fast forward six months later, now the judges are giving the government basically 48 hours to explain why they're doing what they're doing and then ordering them to fly someone back to be released here because they are so frustrated at what the government's doing and not acknowledging they've lost this issue in court. Just let it go. When 98% of the judiciary says the individual gets a bond hearing, maybe someone should take that to heart. But until there's the Supreme Court decision finally saying it, or maybe a circuit court decision, the agency feels unrestrained. For every case that we resolve, there are 10 we don't. But the judges at least give us something to hold on to, some faith that our government system does work. Sometimes you just have to ask one side to work a lot harder than the others to inject some accountability. Well, David, I know that there are countless people in Minnesota and beyond that are thankful that you're working extra hard and fielding phone calls until midnight. Thank you for, you know, taking time out of a busy day doing much more valuable things for the citizens of Minnesota, for the people of Minnesota. Thanks for talking to me and helping us understand what happens once people are spirited away. Because I think the fight obviously doesn't end on the streets. It continues in courtrooms across the country. And it's great to get the perspective of a foot soldier that's involved in that fight. So thanks for your time. Thank you. When we come back, I will put all of this into context with Jacob Soboroff. Are you annoyed with misleading healthy meals? 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I think of you because you've done such excellent and essential reporting on this. Thank you. So it's great to have you on the program, in addition to the fact that you have written an amazing book that we're going to get to momentarily. But let's just first start with where you are. You're in Minneapolis. I am. Yeah, I am. And, you know, every account that I've read, every tweet, every sort of social media missive that I've read from people on the ground say it's way worse than you can actually imagine. If not physically, in terms of safety, people are just so psychologically burdened by what has happened to their city. Can you just give me a sense of what it's like there right now? It feels like a supersized version of what I saw and have seen in L.A. this summer. And then I saw in Chicago. And then I saw in the Hall of 26 Federal Plaza in New York. And then I saw in Charlotte. I've been to all these places. And my mom's from St. Louis Park, Minnesota. So I grew up coming to Minnesota in the summers, going to the State Fair. I love it here. Man, I'm already getting emotional talking about this. I've never seen the people here like this. it's very, very sad. In a way, it's very inspiring to see people out. Yesterday, it was eight degrees and, you know, it was massive protest in the middle of government plaza in the middle of the day, in the middle of a work week. People are rightly, outrage doesn't do it justice. They feel like their community is being ripped apart, mischaracterized, abused. And just like we've seen in all these other cities, These people are being ripped off the street indiscriminately where in a place where there are more agents now than there have been in any of these other operations leading up until this point. And so it's we're basically in the middle of an ongoing, rolling collective trauma for the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul. And they're both reeling, but also fighting back in a really extraordinary way. Yeah. I mean, I will say one of the things that always strikes me in this moment is it's a leaderless movement. It's a leaderless resistance right now. And it's such a testament to the tenacity of the American public that people are just out there because they feel personally driven to do something. You know, it's not like they are there's obviously people who are organizing and I don't mean to undermine the tenacity of those efforts, but there's not one person saying this is what we have to do. This is the strategy nationally or even this is these are our options. It's just people who are so powerfully impacted emotionally or physically or financially, whatever it is, that they just got to get into the street and stop this. The thing I went to yesterday in the middle of the day was organized by I don't know the group. I don't know who they are or what their beliefs are. But I think the group was something party socialism and liberation. But there were like moms with little kids that showed up that had nothing to do with it. people are just showing up anywhere they can, wherever they can, where people are on the street, finding an opportunity to push back. People are going to Targets and buying salt, you know, that people normally pour on the street for ice and then standing back in line to return them to jam up Target, to protest the fact that Target hasn't spoken out. The same thing that they've done at Home Depot is buying ice scrapers and then returning the ice scrapers and waiting in line. People right now, as I'm talking to you, Alex, are chasing Greg Bovino through the streets in South Minneapolis, because that's where enforcement is happening today. Any way people can find to get involved, they are. And by the way, it has worked in all these other cities. Greg Levino left LA. He left Chicago. He left Charlotte in the face of all his opposition. He left New Orleans after just a couple of days. I'm not saying that it doesn't leave long-lasting damage, but I do think that they're afraid of the resistance. He said yesterday in this press conference that he hasn't seen a an opposition as strong and well organized. I think he was trying to paint them as the radical left and agitators and Antifa or whatever the bullshit is that he says. But I think that that means that it's working. Yeah. Well, but, you know, just for people who don't know, is the head of U.S. Customs and Border Patrol and is a villain who belongs in the pantheon of Trump villains and is a late arrival. I think people he's not as much of a household name, but is absolutely one of the main adversaries here as we talk about the destruction of our democracy. He has become the avatar of this whole thing. And what's amazing about it is the perception is that he is the big head honcho of the whole thing. But his actual job, he's got some title called Commander of the Operation at Large. And he's going around to these cities. I think it's a made up title. He's not the chief of the Border Patrol, actually. He's not the CDP commissioner. He's not the DHS secretary. On the org chart, he's relatively low down, but they found this dude who would do their bidding and they had put him out there and made him the face of this whole operation in a way that is both like totally puzzling to me and so obvious that they just central casting pick this guy because Donald Trump loves how he looks. He loves his haircut. He loves his face. He loves the way that he talks. And he's willing to do it. Yeah. And he's willing to do it. And he's willing to do it. Right. I mean, there is the you talk about the trauma that's being inflicted upon the citizenry. It's like you read these accounts and the Washington Post did a really interesting kind of like 24 hours on the ground in Minnesota where they look at people who are both activists. They're victims of ICE detentions. They're just it's a panoply of characters. But, you know, there are people who have nothing to do with any of this. I mean, we all have something to do with it since it's being inflicted upon our citizenry, but or our communities. But they're like 14 year old kids who are now going to high school and their classrooms are less populated, maybe even empty in some cases compared to what the attendance was last year because people are too scared to go to school. When you are a child and like you're going to school, but then you know that a sizable portion of your classmates are too scared to come, that's trauma that is visited upon you, regardless of whether you are at risk of detention or not. That's what I'm saying. And that's what we experienced in L.A. It is a it really is a collective trauma and like this rolling, ongoing trauma that's being perpetrated in a way where like family separation, when I covered it in 2018 was stopped after 5,500 kids were deliberately tortured in the words of physicians for human rights because of the outrage. And so that policy went from the early part of the Trump administration in 2017 to the pilot program in El Paso in the summer of 2017, but was stopped in June of 2018 in the face of all this public opposition. It had like a finite beginning and end. Every one of those 5,500 kids will be traumatized for life. I'm not minimizing that. But this is like there's just no end point to this insight. So it's this rolling thing where you're right. And I was in Columbia, Columbia Heights neighborhood yesterday where I met up sort of spontaneously because we had heard something was going on with these ice observer watchers like Renee Good was. And they said, you don't know how many schools are in this neighborhood and what it's doing to people here, even though they just targeted that one house on the corner and took the father and the kid and the mother is left behind. I think was the story that they told me. Think about all the collateral damage all around this neighborhood right now for people that might not even have seen or only heard the whistles blowing and not knowing what it meant or who was being taken from the neighborhood. That's playing out every day here. It is like a new world Gestapo. I will I just I mean, and I will say there are children across the country who hear stories about this and worry about it unfolding in their own neighborhood. And my kids, I try and shield them from too much of the news because it's all so terrifying. But they know that there are ICE raids happening in our neighborhood and in our community. And they're like, well, what if they get us? Because American citizens are absolutely swept up in all of this. And even if they don't get them, what if they get their friends? I mean, this is just, let's talk big picture for a little bit because you have been covering this for so long. I mean, you were one of the first reporters to get access to one of those family separation detention centers. and I we now you know, we just spoke with david wilson who's a lawyer Who's representing a lot of the clients who are in these detention centers and the reports from inside there are gruesome people are dying in unprecedented numbers And I wonder when you hear about what's happening in terms of deaths and ice custody and just the brutality and force with which people are being Apprehended and sent to places that were never their home or just ferreted away in the middle of the night without their families or their lawyers, knowing where they've gone. How does that square with what you saw in Trump one? And does it feel to you or does it appear to you to be more vicious? Or I mean, I guess just compare and contrast the two if you could. It's far more indiscriminate, but only because Stephen Miller was stopped by hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in the street all around the world in the summer of 2018. He would have separated 25,000 kids if he could using a process known as administrative separation, they believed in that policy. But Trump, remember, when Ginger Thompson's audio from Popublica leaked and you heard the kids crying and the Border Patrol agents on the inside saying, oh, we have an orchestra here. Trump didn't say, my God, I'm so morally opposed to what I didn't realize was going on. He said, I didn't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated. He didn't like what was happening on television, what he was hearing in terms of that audio. So this is what they drew up in the first term. And it's what Tom Homan told me was going to happen. He said to me on the second day of the raids in LA, when I met up with him in a parking garage in Long Beach California that he believed people were gonna die as a result of the operations that were happening on the streets the tone and tenor the level of opposition the tactics that were being used by his very own agents He saw these clashes being inevitable And not only by the way is this policy based on a 1954 policy that deported a million Mexicans and some Americans, It's now killing immigrants and American citizens, almost an echo of that 1954 program. Under Eisenhower, Operation We Will Not Even Say Its Name, but it begins with a W. That's exactly right. And that's what they wanted to do all along. It's what they promised they were going to do. As you and I both were on the floor of the Republican Convention, seeing signs that said mass deportation now, this was what they drew up and now they're executing it. And as far as what's going on inside the facilities, I've seen that too. I went in the Adelanto Ice Detention Center in the high desert outside of LA during the separation policy. And I saw people curled up in the fetal position. I wrote about it and separated, locked up in isolation. Inspectors general reports talk about people trying to hang themselves in these facilities. These are private immigration prisons, largely, mostly, all around the country. That network is vastly expanding. There are more people in immigration detention now, I believe, than any other time in American history. And it's, I hate to say it, but I'm not surprised one bit that this is what's happening on the inside. More of my conversation with Jacob right after this break. Runaway Country is brought to you by Miracle Made. Do you ever wake up sweaty, freezing, or just plain uncomfortable, the temperature in your bedroom can make or break your sleep. That is why I switched to Miracle Made Sheets. 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That's BetterHelp.com slash Runaway Country. you mentioned Stephen Miller the architect of our national despair who is running roughshod over I don't know the constitution and anything else that stands in his way but it's also the difference between Kristen Nielsen the former DHS secretary under Trump 1 and Kristi Noem the what are we what is she being called the ice Barbie can you compare it like there is a zeal for there is and I want to play The president yesterday in a meandering sundowner of a press conference, in the words of my friends at the Bulwark, exhibited some version of, I guess, I'm not going to say contrition, but like it's a he is aware of the fact that people are not OK with brown people being terrorized in this country. And he is also someone somewhere must have shown him some polling numbers around in the Latino community because he knows he has some work to do. And let's play Trump's comments about Hispanic, singular, singular. Can we play that sound? Border Patrol is incredible, too. I mean, Paul Perez and that group is incredible. Mostly Hispanic, by the way. They're like 60% Hispanic. You know, they talk about Hispanic. They're mostly Hispanic, right? And they're unbelievable people. And then they say, oh, we discriminate against. I love Hispanic. Like, they are unbelievable. Entrepreneurial. They have everything. I did great. I did the highest. Nobody ever got numbers like I got from the standpoint of being a Republican. Okay, just, I mean. Oh, boy. Singular Hispanic. That'll win him over. That'll win him back. Just calling him Hispanic. I love Hispanic. You know, he also expressed, he expressed, you could say, contrition about the killing of Renee Good. Renee Good. But really what he seemed to focus on most is that he was under the impression and might be true that her father was a Trump supporter. Yes. Right. Which is a problem, right? Like it's not a problem for him. It is Kamala Harris. But for him, if you voted for Don, we actually have that. Let's play. This is Trump offering. I don't know. Words of caution. What does this even qualify against ISIS brutal tactics and also expressing support for Renee Good's father who voted for him in 2021? for apparently. And you know, they're going to make mistakes sometimes. ICE is going to be too rough with somebody or, you know, they're dealing with rough people. They're going to make a mistake sometimes. It can happen terribly. I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who was, had the tragedy, it's a tragedy, it's a horrible thing. Everybody would say, ICE would say the same thing. But when I learned her parents and her father in particular is like, I hope he still is, but I don't know, was a tremendous Trump fan. He was all for Trump. Loved Trump. Oh, man. Oh, boy. Where do we begin with this? The first is like he begins to say ice can sometimes be too rough, but these are rough people. I mean, there might be some rough people, but the majority of the people I've seen are, you know, fathers, brothers, mothers, sisters, grandmothers in some cases, high school students, not rough people who are being thrown to the ground. Some of them are American citizens that are being put in banned chokeholds. And he reserves most of his words of regret or contrition for the fact that a Trump supporter might have had to deal with the loss of his daughter. not the actual daughter or her widow who's being investigated by the feds at trump's direction correct but the but the father of the daughter who voted for trump that's where trump's sympathies lie i didn't hear him say anything when masked armed federal agents beat the crap out of narciso barranco the landscaper in santa ana with three sons in the marine corps u.s citizens when he was cutting bushes outside of an IHOP. I didn't hear him express any contrition when Annie Lucia Lopez Belosa, 19 years old, was coming home from Babson College to go visit her mom and dad in San Antonio and was deported to Honduras by federal agents waiting at the airport. I didn't hear him express any contrition about the U.S. citizen who was ripped in his underwear from Minneapolis from his house and put into a vehicle and interrogated for an hour until he was returned to his home without, I don't even know if he got an apology. And the list goes on and on and on. How many stories of this type of injustice that we continue to hear over and over, if you really are out there and you think that they are going after the so-called worst of the worst, I got a bridge to sell you, as they say. It is absurd and outrageous that they still use the language criminal, illegal, alien to talk about the people that they are taking off the streets. Movino gave a press conference here yesterday and said they have taken 3,000 people since the start of this Operation Metro Surge, or whatever it is that they're calling it, and 10,000 people in the Minneapolis, St. Paul area since the beginning of the year. You really think that those are violent criminals because they use the word illegal criminal alien. They're people who are undocumented, who come here, who are just as you said, our neighbors and colleagues and friends and fellow parishioners and classmates. Same thing we've seen everywhere in L.A. We'll talk about the fires, the people that are picking off the streets in Los Angeles are largely people who are standing in Home Depot parking lots looking to engage in the rebuilding effort of the largest, most costly wildfire event in American history. That's who he's going after. Meanwhile, he's saying about the fires, that it was a mystical tap that wasn't turned on. And that's the reason that LA burned. And that's the reason that LA is not recovering because Donald Trump's idea of how to fix that was not the solution. Actually, it's his own immigration policies that are ripping people off the street who all they want to do is show up on a construction site and help out. Literally to rebuild the country. Yep. So when we talk about the way in which this is all unfolding, the man at the top is certainly more addled and more, I would say, unhinged than he was in Trump one. He is surrounded by or in his first administration. He Miller is still there. But to go back to the other stooges who make all this possible, there's people like Bovino. But I mean, I do think the fact the difference maker here and you maybe you can talk a little bit more about this is Kristen Nielsen was not drinking as perhaps thirstily from the same fountain of hate that which isn't to excuse her behavior and family separations at all. But she is a different character and of a different slightly different stripe than christy noem is that accurate is that fair to say i do think it's fair to say i too don't believe you know i'm not going to absolve her at all and in fact she you know she's the one that signed option three in the decision memo that basically effectuated the family separation policy back in in the spring of 2018 and she is solely responsible and responsible alone for being the s1 the secretary of homeland security at the time But when it was stopped and he tried to restart it on I wrote about this and separated on a on Marine One with Melania flying there to go survey some natural disaster, you know, devastation. You know, he brought it up and she did push back about whether or not to reimplement the policy. I give her no credit. She hasn't got any flowers from me. But what they implemented during Trump one, they just didn't get there. what they wanted to do. And they're now doing it in Trump too. Would Nielsen take the job today? I don't know. You'd have to ask her. But I can tell you what he does is he finds people who he can twist and turn. She insists that she didn't want family separation to happen. She was pushing back all along. Ultimately, it happened. They find their ways to make happen what they want to happen. And they've got in Kristi Noem, someone who'll go stand in front of people at this El Salvador prison as if it's a green screen backdrop in a Hollywood movie while they are incarcerated there. Many of them, you know, sent there illegally, as we now know, obviously. You know, when you talk about this operation and how it's different from operations of Trump administration's past, there's also Minnesota stands apart in being more of a sort of dragnet than than we've seen in any other state. Right. Like there there are things that are happening that are going down exclusively in Minnesota that were not going down in other states, right? Like Operation Metro Surge, these are all the dumbest fucking names ever. But anyway, Operation Metro Surge is similar to what happened in cities like LA and Chicago, right? But then there's another component that's being executed in Minnesota that's different, which is Operation Paris. And I'll let, I feel like you have more intel on this than I do, but that's the Paris is P-A-R-R-I-S, post-admission refugee re-verification and integrity strengthening. Sounds very Orwellian, Jacob. What the fuck is that? Their dream for a long time has been to dismantle the refugee resettlement system, which is a number that has always been designated by the president. And it's a number that fluctuates. It goes up and down at the discretion of the executive branch. And these are people that have been lawfully admitted to the country. And what they want to do is go back and look at the refugees wherever they come from. And I guess, I guess, ostensibly re-vet them to figure out if somebody slipped through the cracks or whatever. But I would bet, I'll bet you a nickel, I'm not sure for sure, but I bet you that some of the people that they're re-vetting now came in during the first Trump administration. I talked to a guy, actually, an Ethiopian guy who said to me, he was an Uber driver that took me from the airport and I was asking him about what was going on. And he was saying, yeah, man, I came here and became a citizen during the first Trump administration in 2017. And thank God I didn't get here any later because look what would have happened to me now. Those are the types of people that they're going back and looking after and trying to kick out of the country. Now they're talking about kicking US citizens out of the country. That's the kind of stuff that they're talking about now. Denaturalization. Yes, yes. Where does it stop? Where does it stop? I think where it stops is people showing up in the streets in doing to Greg Bovino in Minneapolis what they did to him in L.A. and Chicago and Charlotte and New Orleans. And eventually he will leave here. Yeah, eventually he will leave here. And eventually the 2026 midterm elections will happen. And Donald Trump is going to face the consequences of this. This is unbelievably unpopular. Everywhere I have been, as I've been talking about this book, as I've been going around the country, people want to talk about the raids and people want to talk about ICE and people want to talk about what it means to have federal troops. Immigration, the conversation around immigration is no longer about immigration. It's about our freedoms. It's about our freedoms being taken away. It is about armed, masked federal agents showing up without identifying themselves on the streets of cities across the country, in red states and in blue states, terrorizing communities. And that is the intent. It's been the stated deterrence, punitive, criminalizing policy, immigration policy of the United States for decades under Democrats and Republicans. and Trump believed by supersizing it that that he would, I guess, make his base happy. I don't know what he what he believes. I I I don't want to be the person that goes inside Donald Trump's head to figure out what he actually believes. But we know what he's doing. We know what the facts on the ground are. And they are taking this to a level that we have never, ever seen before. Yeah, I mean, I don't actually think he's thinking about politics and all of this. I think occasionally it kind of like comes across his radar as when he says in a press conference. I love Hispanic. I mean, he obviously like, again, I think someone was just like, this is somehow he's realized that the American public is projecting the Gestapo-ification of our immigration system. But as far as this being in any way politically convenient for him or his party, I don't think it is. I do think it's just, I want to get the brown people out. I like cruelty directed at people who are weaker than me as, or as seen as are weaker or more vulnerable than me. and this is a great way of executing on my sadistic impulses. We'll leave the psychology to the psychologists and the people who actually get to peer in the dark chasm. But you mentioned, you know, the after effects of all of this. And I want to talk about L.A. and the ways in which we don't even think that, you know, these immigration raids happening all over the country have a chilling effect, even if people aren't directly impacted. And Los Angeles has a lot of rebuilding to do, which is something you explore, you know, in your new New York Times bestselling book, Firestorm. Let's talk a little bit about how you've seen. I mean, you started to you started to touch on this, but the people who are charged or volunteer to rebuild a city like Los Angeles are largely brown and black people, immigrants in many cases or targets of these raids or terrorized by these raids. How have you seen those two issues dovetail in your hometown? Oh, I think that they're inseparable, actually. And I think that, you know, often when so just to back up, I watched my childhood neighborhood, January 7th, 2025, incinerate in front of my own eyes. I appeared with you on your broadcast. We talked about this live as it was happening. Um, it became the costliest wildfire event in American history. 16,000 structures were destroyed. 31 people died. 400 people, if you look at the excess mortality numbers in terms of people who shouldn't have died around that time, um, three times the size of Manhattan burned in, in the most populous County in America, two distinct neighborhoods, dozens of miles apart were virtually erased, literally wiped off, um, the map. And I did not have any mental capacity to process in real time, like what I was experiencing. I could tell you hey I from this neighborhood it a beautiful neighborhood I know what over that ridge But then when I rolled up on my childhood home which I hadn lived in 35 years but I had burned to the ground every sort of hallmark of my youth and Altadine on the other side of town where my son had his ninth birthday and we live closer to today, gone. I knew I had to understand what this was and what the ramifications were. So, you know, I set off on this thing to figure out how did it happen? Why did it happen? Who's to blame? Will it happen again? And what are the consequences? One of the most profound consequences when these things happen is you can see the fissures underneath society in these mass casualty events. And inequality is one. People are having a hard time building back because it's so expensive in L.A. Forty percent of the houses that are being sold are being sold to corporations, not to Californians because people can't afford to come back. But the other the other huge, massive one, probably the biggest one for me is the impact on the undocumented community in Los Angeles. 40% of the construction industry in California, I think Gavin Newsom told me, is undocumented. And they are the primary targets of the mass deportation effort of the Trump administration because they're low-hanging fruit. They hang in Home Depot parking lots around the corner from my house, all over LA. They're out there. They're so vulnerable. For an honest day's work. They want to come before the fires, do a handyman job at your house, anything you could possibly want. today it's literally rebuilding in a city by the way in a county where i think of the 16 000 structures 10 or 12 have been rebuilt want to show up and be active on these construction projects and instead there there's one example of one of them literally running for their lives getting hit by a car on the 210 freeway from a home depot parking lot because they were being chased by greg bovino's agents on the streets of la and so i i don't you can't quantify it but there's studies. UCLA has been talking about this. There is no doubt the pace of the recovery has been stymied by these immigration enforcement policies. And it's why the book, it might read like a sci-fi thriller or some dystopian future, but it's like the lived reality that we are all experiencing right now. This is now. This is this shit that's all burning, both figuratively and literally. This is our country now. More from Jacob in just a minute. But first, Crooked Media's newest book, Hated by All the Right People, Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind is getting released next week on January 27th. It is written by one of our favorite political journalists, New York Times Magazine writer, Jason Zengerle. Why a book about Tucker Carlson and why now? Well, because the key to understanding our current political moment is the value increase of moral outrage over truth. And no one has done more to accelerate that cultural shift than Tucker Carlson. In Hated by All the Right People, Jason Zengerle gives a fascinating and informative look at Tucker's political evolution and how his rise traces the rise of the MAGA movement. Tommy just interviewed Jason on Tuesday's Pod Save America, and it is a great episode, so make sure to check that out. You can pre-order Jason's book at a discount right now and see his book tour dates at crooked.com slash books. This is the last week to take advantage of the discount, so take advantage of it. Runaway Country is brought to you by Helix. Have you ever gone to a mattress store? You know, you think you're innocently going to just jump on a couple beds and figure out the one you like, and then all of a sudden someone's trying to upsell you on the latest in supine technology. No? Yes, you have. Come on. Well, fortunately, with Helix mattresses, you can leave all those salespeople behind, except for me. I'm still here. The Helix Sleep Quiz matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. It makes buying a mattress easy and stress-free and actually takes into account what you are looking for and how much you want to spend. Helix is the most awarded mattress brand. It has been tested and reviewed by experts at Forbes and Wired. 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You kind of touched on this for a second, but I was still hosting the 9pm hour of MSNOW at that point and you came on and katie tur who you grow up with was also also came on a couple times and i remember thinking how the hell is he able to report this without crying like i didn't have as many gray hairs as i do now oh please you're watching us on video whatever as i did after a couple it was a crazy just like a 42 year old to say that or however how old are you 42 you But just like talk to me about having the collision of the personal like a personal history collide with the national news story and what that was like. I had never experienced balance it or or did you put one in a box? You can't. You can't. And that's why it's so overwhelming and why I knew I wanted to write this book. I think it's the most important assignment I've ever had because it is such a mix of the personal and the professional. I was definitely grieving, you know, in real time as I was reporting in a way that I felt vulnerable during family separation because like you have little kids and I was in there and I'm seeing these children and I was honest about how it felt, but they weren't my own children. This was my hometown. I was there four days earlier or something with my little sister, Hannah, and her brand new baby boy and sitting in the park chilling that burned down days later. Not only that, covering fires was the last thing that I wanted to do. I literally said to our mutual friend, Sam Falls, sitting around a campfire on New Year's Eve 2024 into 2025, the last thing I want to do is put on that stupid yellow jacket and go cover a wildfire in California but I have a feeling I'm going to have to do it this year. Yeah baby you sure did. And 10 days later there I was and so it was so many things colliding. I sat at my desk on that morning after walking out the house and my son said dad look how windy it is and I was like okay. I got to my desk I saw I saw a text from my brother who still lives in the Palisades saying big Palisades fire we have to evacuate. I got up and I walked in the bureau chief's office and I said, I have to go. And then for two weeks, I just covered this thing straight without any real capacity. The thing that was most nuts about it is normally we in these places, you and I interview other people, but nobody was there. Everybody had gone. My friends were gone. My neighbors were gone. The people I grew up around were not there. It was firefighters and reporters. And so. Yeah, you were narrating it for us. I became the resident, the Palisades resident, even though I hadn't lived there since I was 18 years old. And it was, I thought it was a time machine into my past in a way. Like fire is a remarkable, right? Fire is a remarkable time machine. It's like a curious form of teleportation into your past and future all at once. I didn't know then that that was true. Then I thought it was just my past burning up. Now I know, in talking to experts, that this was the fire of the future. And there were so many things that I witnessed that I didn't fully get. Our infrastructure falling apart, the reservoir was empty in the Palisades, the steel towers that electrified in Altadena were dormant and shouldn't have been in there, possibly. Changes in the way we live, electric car batteries exploding all around us, potentially giving firefighters cancer, they say to me, you read in the book. They were worried about that. Misinformation and disinformation, massive, massive, massive one. Trump, in that same press conference yesterday, Trump is talking again about the conspiracy theories about the water flowing down from the Pacific Northwest. They were pouring figurative fuel on the literal flames of the fire in real time. And all of this stuff is happening as I'm just trying to process that my favorite restaurant is gone. My pediatrician's office is on fire. The two supermarkets in town are gone. And so that's what this project was. It was a real excavation of myself and of other people, which, as you know, is why I think I have the best job in the world. I get to spend time with people in their lives. Like me. Like you, yes. Obviously, we don't do this enough. You do a great job at your dream job. You do your you do a great job. I will also just say, you know, as a colleague and as a as a as a fellow, I don't want to like a field reporter as someone who believes so strongly in the utility of having someone or lots of people, ideally out in the field, you do such a great job. And it's so it's I mean, I'm not out like you are, but I really I'm so admiring of your work and you do such an excellent job of contextualizing it in the most human terms. I I got to ask you when you just touched on that topic of disinformation and that's kind of how I want to end this, because it's just that's the work of journalism. Right. I mean, it's just is to tell the truth. And yet we live in a moment when everything is up for grabs and we have someone sitting at the top of our political power structure who is a liar and who is very interested in creating alternative narratives and spreading only facts that are useful to him or maybe not even facts. I was just going to say. It's just alternative facts. We really should have listened when Kellyanne Conway like floated that concept in whatever year it was. But, you know, you had to tell the story, for example, of, I mean, on all these things, you often find yourself telling the hard truths about how the fires start. Like, what were the fires really? Or even what's happening behind the four or four walls of this detention center where you can't see, you're going to have to believe that what I'm telling you is the truth. You're going to have to believe that the people I'm talking to are not paid actors. Again, since Trump is doubling down on, like, you know, the notion that these are somehow paid agitators in Minnesota and elsewhere, or standing outside of ICE raids and trying to protect fellow citizens. Like, how has that work of trying to tell the truth and trying to establish the real narrative of what has unfolded behind the scenes? Like, how is that job more complicated and sort of in reporting out the book? How was that challenging? I guess you're living in the in among the consequences of this disinformation age. So what's that like? I think that my guiding philosophy is always it's like military and diplomacy. They use this phrase facts on the ground. It's like I always just try to present the facts on the ground as I see them, which is why I've always wanted to go out and experience things for myself. I'm not a subject matter. I mean, I've covered immigration for a long time or whatever, but I wouldn't consider myself a subject matter expert on anything. I'm a guy who likes to go out and learn and let people learn along with me. And I've never actually said or been a big believer in like I'm some model of objectivity or neutrality. On the contrary, I'm going to tell you how I feel, actually, and tell you what I see. But I'm going to be honest about what I see. And I'm going to be fair to the people that I talk to. And I'm going to let and I tell you the truth. And you can make up your own mind as to whether or not you believe me. I can't convince you one way or another. And And so in the fires, that's what I did, too. It's why I told the story of Gavin Newsom watching in his in his operation center in L.A., Elon Musk, basically prodding the local firefighters about the water pressure with conspiracy theories. And Newsom using that moment as his like light bulb going off, saying, I'm going to start pushing back against this guy and these guys in this way. And that's like the origin story of his current social media persona. Newsom's, not Musk. possibly could use. Civil engineers will tell you that there's no way that the hydrants would stay pressurized. And they didn't in Altadena, just like they didn't do in the Palisades. And there wasn't an empty reservoir in Altadena. It's why I included the story of Katie Miller calling me in the middle of the fires and asked me to go to Stephen Miller's parents' house. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. And I felt bad because their house did burn down and I did go check on it. And I did say, I'm sorry. I feel bad for Stephen Miller's parents, even if their house had survived because they have to be Stephen Miller's parents. But anyway, I said the reason I included this story is that they, too, were victims of the misinformation and disinformation from her own son and daughter in law's boss. This is the reality of the new age of disaster that we live in, where information is being weaponized even during natural disasters, which is why I don't think I did the best job of it. The people that did the best job of it during the fires were the local news, like Channel 4 in LA, definitionally a public service. This is what's happening on this street. This is what's happening around the corner. Here's what's house burned down. At a time when federal politicians were given bullshit, when local leaders were having a hard time getting out accurate information, when emergency alert systems were not actually working properly and resulted allegedly in deaths of a lot of people, including in West Altadena, it was the facts on the ground that were being presented by local reporters more than anything that I think was the most sort of heroic other than the first responders effort during during the fires. That's all we can do. And that's all I can do is show up. So that's why I'm in Minnesota. That's why I've been to all these places. That's why I decided to go out to the Palisades. Why I decided to write the book. Boom. I mean, I love that you're making all the right decisions each and every time, my friend. Oh, you don't know how many wrong decisions I've made in my life. You didn't want it. You told Sam Falls, I don't want to be out there in the yellow jacket following the fire. And you sure did. And we would not honestly have understood the emotional weight in the same way had you guys not been there. And it was such a service in the same way that you guys at the, you at the detention center, you being tenacious and curious and inquisitive and trustworthy and all those things makes these stories live and resonant in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be. So we owe you a debt of gratitude, my friend. I'm actually a huge asshole in real life, just so you know. Well, that is true. But we're going to judge you by your work, not your personality. Okay, fine. Anybody knows you knows Jacob Soberoff is a colossal dick. Just kidding. He's not. No, you never know. You never know. Anyway, I really mean it. I really have so much admiration for you. I think it's really totally unsurprising that you wrote another New York Times bestseller. And I think it's fucking really important that you're in Minneapolis. And I can't wait to watch more of your reporting on MSNOW. And I hope you will come back to this podcast and give us some more truth serum. I really appreciate you, man. It's an honor to be here. You're the best. And now I'm going to go chase Greg Bovino on very snowy streets. Go get him, bro. See you later. Thanks, Jacob. That is our show for this week. And as always, if you have been impacted directly by the Trump administration or its policies, please do send us an email or a one-minute voice note at runawaycountry at crooked.com, and we may be in touch to feature your story. A huge thank you to everyone who has written in already. We read these things. We listen to them. We appreciate you. Last but not least, do not forget to check out the show and our awesome rapid response videos on our YouTube channel, Runaway Country with Alex Wagner. Runaway Country is a Crooked Media production. Our senior producer is Ilona Minkowski. Our producer is Emma Illich Frank. Production support from Megan Larson and Lacey Roberts. The show is mixed and edited by Charlotte Landis. Ben Hethcote is our video producer and Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Audio support comes from Kyle Seglin. Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Adrienne Hill is our head of news and politics. Katie Long is our executive producer of development. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.