Dara Lind
Appearances
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Thank you. It is. I mean, I can't say it's great to be on. Right. But it's like it's certainly the kind of moment that people with my expertise are in demand, I guess.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
I think that the most salient thing, and this is not just the day one executive orders, it's a lot of stuff that has come out since then in the form of like departmental or agency memos or just in what people are seeing on the ground, is a really aggressive ramp up of interior enforcement against people who have been living in the United States, many of whom were given some form of protections under the Biden administration.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We know that The Trump administration has changed regulations so that anyone who is apprehended anywhere in the U.S. who cannot prove to an immigration agent's satisfaction that they've been here for more than two years could be deported without a court hearing. Huge change. We know that they are making an effort to strip parole protections from people who came under the...
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan parole programs, other Biden parole programs when they encounter them. Not that we don't know how broad that's gonna be, but that those people will be considered vulnerable for deportation and that there might be efforts to take people who are in immigration court, close the immigration court case, and try to deport them without a court hearing.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And we know that they're stepping up the use of agents from other agencies, whether that's DEA, ATF, that they're stepping up the use of military assets, including planes.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And so given that most of the biggest impediments to like deporting 11 million people were not legal, but logistical, that kind of force multiplier could be a very big difference in how many people they're ultimately able to deport.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Sure, absolutely. So there are essentially four major steps that are generally taken to take somebody who is in the U.S. without authorization. and move them to being somebody who's been deported. The first is arresting them.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
The second is finding somewhere to keep them in custody, given that this administration doesn't particularly like releasing people pending their court hearings or pending further action. There's the court case itself, which they're trying to kind of abridge by using this expedited removal provision more aggressively. So that's kind of an optional one. And then four,
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
you have to physically deport them. You have to have the seat on the plane and you have to have a country that's willing to accept them. So even if you look at what they've done over the last week and say, okay, in general, they're really trying to get rid of this third stage of the process wherever possible, that still leaves arrest, detention, and deportation.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
So the more agents they have on the ground who are not just ICE agents, but other agencies that are being tasked with immigration enforcement, And the more they're able to enlist state and local police to do immigration enforcement, the easier the first one gets. The more they're able to build temporary facilities, especially using military money, under control.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
the emergency declaration that was one of the day one executive orders, the easier the second of those is. And the more that they can both use military planes and bully other countries. And we saw some of this over the weekend with a, you know, a standoff, a very brief standoff with the country of Columbia over the use of military flights to deport Colombian nationals.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
The more they can bully other countries to take back military planes or to take back a lot of ice air flights, the easier the deportation part of that is. So those are kind of where I'm seeing the big variables right now. But ultimately, all of those are still resources. And even if you're tapping the DOD budget for a lot of things, Congress still has to, at a certain point,
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
you know, you're going to either run out of ICE budget or Congress is going to have to appropriate in the future the kind of money that anticipates that you're going to be running a Department of Defense that is also engaged in immigration enforcement.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And so while in the short term, they're acting really, really aggressively, how long they can keep this up is going to depend on whether Congress is writing them a blank check or whether they're going to start asking questions about just how much can be spent on it.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We're not quite to that point yet, because immigration law doesn't technically require you to deport somebody to the country where they came from. And this is where the diplomatic aspect of this gets very complicated and very important. In the recent past, under the Trump and Biden administrations, Mexico has agreed to accept some non-Mexicans, whether that's
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
temporarily while they await court hearings in the United States under the Remain in Mexico program, which the Trump administration is now trying to restart, or whether that's actually taking people who are essentially being deported, but deported to Mexico.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
whether and how many people they're willing to accept in that is going to be a very important variable because it's so much easier to deport people back to Mexico than it is to fly them other places.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
You know, it's just so much cheaper that not only is that going to be a help on the logistical end, but also, as you mentioned, for countries like Venezuela, where it's not really foreseeable that you're going to have some kind of breakthrough where the Maduro government is going to like say, yes, this is awesome. We love the US now.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Having other places you can return them to starts to become a really important variable. We've already heard rumors that the government of El Salvador is very gung-ho about signing an agreement with the United States that will allow people to be deported to El Salvador who aren't from El Salvador. That sort of thing.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
The more options that they have, the easier it's going to be for them to get around the recalcitrance of any one country.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
So I tend to think about this as like a, you know, coordinate plane, right? One axis is how likely is this to get a lot of headlines, to generate a lot of B-roll, that kind of thing. The other axis is how much does it increase scope? How much does it make it easier for them to put more people into the process and move them through the process? And you're right.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
A lot of the things, things like putting out a press release every single day can imply that more is being changed than actually is. That said, one of the reasons that we're not really seeing movement on the numbers yet is because Some of the authorities they're tapping into haven't really scaled.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
They haven't really been able to make plans for what does an ICE raid look like when everybody's getting put into expedited removal proceedings, that sort of thing. So I think that the biggest reason that picking fights with blue cities is...
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It's a big PR showdown is because in jurisdictions that don't have a lot of local cooperation with federal law enforcement, where like if they call up the city and say, you got to give us the addresses of everybody, you know, who doesn't have legal immigration status in cities that have laws requiring that information not to be shared.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
it's a lot harder for them to arrest people, to identify who is removable and take them into custody. And so when they have these big raids on blue cities in the past, what we've seen is the numbers of actual arrestees they get out of them are very low.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
The biggest impact is in terms of freaking people out, getting people to not leave their homes, to not go to school, that sort of thing, which is a real harm. But it does mean that in kind of holding the line on lack of cooperation and
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
and lack of information sharing, and certainly not offering state and local resources to help with immigration enforcement, that the amount of money that's being spent and time that's being spent is going to be greater
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
proportionally than the number of people who they are getting out of it who can then be arrested and deported, which means that those resources are then being taken from other things.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
I mean, I have a general rule against engaging in Supreme Court punditry because I do think that to a certain extent, the law is whatever the judges say the law is. And heaven forbid they take that, they actually seize the reins of that power. But I do agree that, I think that the way that this executive order was done, which is just saying, as far as we're concerned,
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
this is not who birthright citizenship applies to. And we're not going to be honoring the citizenship of anyone who was born in the U S under, you know, to these two parents who like have these particular, you know, this lack of status or temporary status after February 19th, that that is, we've already seen one preliminary ruling against it.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
I would be very surprised if it goes into effect as planned, you know, like, in a few weeks.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
That's not to say that the Supreme court won't ultimately rule in favor of the administration on this one, but like it is worth noting that this is, there's a pretty explicit century old Supreme court precedent that even if the, you know, the parents of the child can not become us citizens, the child is still a citizen of the United States. And so they would be there. It's, it's not really a, um,
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
reasonable people have disagreed on this for decades kind of situation. It is an effort to innovate the law in a particular direction. And so there's reason to believe that the Supreme Court is going to be a little more skeptical of this than they would be of other Trump administration policies.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Yeah, he was steamed. And the other thing about that case is the plaintiffs were extremely ready to file a complaint. And the administration, despite the fact that it was their government, filed all of three pages in reply that were basically, nah-ah. So they're not doing, at least so far, they're not doing a tremendously robust job of
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
If they truly believe this is what the law says, they're not doing the most aggressive, like the best job of showing up in court and saying that.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Sure. So there are two fairly separate parts of the law, one of which is it expands immigration enforcement in a way that Congress often acts to expand immigration enforcement, and one of which is totally unprecedented and could unfold in very unpredictable ways. The first is that the Lake and Riley Act requires that the federal government
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
expeditiously take into custody anybody who is arrested or charged with or convicted of a certain set of crimes, including theft charges. Now, by saying you don't have to be convicted, you can just be accused, essentially, certainly does raise due process concerns. There are also prioritization concerns. If you're saying that
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
somebody that there's somebody in custody in rural Georgia and you have to get in your patrol car and go immediately to go get that person, there are other enforcement actions you could be engaging in.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
But the other part of Lake and Riley says that states can sue the federal government to force the federal government to deport somebody who they've chosen not to execute a final order of deportation against to detain somebody or to stop visas for a category of visa or a country that If they if the country is if they believe the country is being recalcitrant in accepting deportees.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
So because that there is on the books, you know, the federal government has the power to take sanctions. And so if the federal government isn't taking these sanctions, like the thing we're all thinking about is, OK, so what is stopping Ken Paxton?
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
from suing the federal government to force it to stop issuing H-1B visas to China, because China doesn't take quite as many deportees as the US might like. That's kind of a real wild card. And We don't know how it's going to play out yet, but it certainly adds an interesting wrinkle to the dispute that we know is going on within the Trump administration over H-1B and high-skilled visas generally.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Because if the Trump administration goes in a more dovish direction than, say, the Bannon wing would like, they now have this legal tool that they can use to try to stop them.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
The fundamental thing you have to remember about immigration law is that deportation is not a criminal penalty. It is a civil penalty. And it's one you incur potentially simply by being in the U.S. without authorization. You don't have to have committed any other any crime or anything else in order to be deportable. So what this does is say this person's already deportable by getting arrested.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
They're now an enforcement priority. which is not something that you really have a due process claim against. Now, if you're not, in fact, removable, you can try to get yourself out of ICE custody. And yes, of course, there are due process concerns in the sense of you're saying this person's a priority because you're classifying them as a criminal.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
But they're not concerns that are legally actionable, right?
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It absolutely could be unworkable. This was originally part of the bill when it was introduced under the last Congress, which is to say under the Biden administration, which might go some way in indicating why it was added to the bill to begin with. I think that the assumption to a certain extent is that
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
you know, state AGs are going to not necessarily want to embarrass members of their own party. But I think the other part of the assumption is that judges are not necessarily going to be super eager to weigh in on this stuff. Judges tend to have a pretty narrow construal of like this sort of their ability to weigh in on this sort of thing.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And so that, that would, you know, I think that there's a certain kind of adults in the room understanding that this, that that would prevent it from being too entirely disruptive. I don't know that that's merited, but I think we'll see what combination of kind of political pressures and, you know, just, and, and judicial professional pressures exist to check this.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Well, so the way that usually ICE has operated over the last several years is they keep spending the money, which is usually faster than they're budgeted to spend it. And then they write Congress letters of increasing alarm of tone saying, if you don't give us more money before the end of the fiscal year in a supplemental, we're going to have to start releasing criminals.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And usually Congress says, fine, fine. Here's the money you asked for in the supplementals.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
This is where we get into some really uncharted territory, both legally and policy wise, because the Trump administration said in one of its executive orders that it is going to review grants of TPS given under Biden. So
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We don't know whether that means they're going to say that some of these 11th hour TPS grants shouldn't have been issued to begin with and try to argue that they shouldn't be forced to honor them or not. That's something that's not clear.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We don't know what happens to people who have applications for TPS who, you know, if you were paroled in under the CHNV, Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan parole program, But you were here as a Venezuelan when the Venezuela TPS extension was issued and you've applied. What is that? Can you be removed once your parole expires, even though you have this pending application?
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Are they going to try to do that? There are so many open questions about this, and it's really... It's concerning because frankly, a lot of these are folks who are not the most tapped in to high information news sources anyway. And so the uncertainty that they're facing and the potential legal complexity of what they're facing is really difficult to predict.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
But we absolutely could be seeing a pretty aggressive clawback front on TPS. And You know, it's just going to depend on what they decide to announce from here and how much effort they're willing to spend on the USCIS side in sending, you know, individualized, no thank you, you don't have status anymore notifications and defending it in court.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
Yeah. And this is I mean, it's worth underscoring, even though we've been discussing it, that there is a difference between saying that somebody is legally vulnerable to deportation and actually taking the effort to deport them. And with TPS, you know, it is there. There is a certain extent to which the Trump administration has made it pretty clear that.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
people who arrived under Biden are in their crosshairs. But in general, it is not necessarily true that somebody who had legal status and is going to have it sunset is going to become a target. But even just putting them in that pool puts them more at risk.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And it also makes it harder for them to plan their lives with TPS in particular, because so many of these people have had, you know, so many of these countries have had TPS for years and decades. These are people who have been making their lives in 18 to 24 month increments to begin with. And now you're giving even that assurance away from them.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
So it's a fairly profound change for the circumstances in which these people are living.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We absolutely do not know. When Russ Vogt got caught on a hot mic last year, well, it wasn't a hot mic. It was essentially a sting operation. The now, again, head of OMB who was running Project 2025, he said that,
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
you know, there were a lot of things that they were working on that were very close hold, that they weren't putting in Project 2025, a lot of memos and policy guidance that they were pre-drafting. And so we just don't know what the volume of those is.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
We've continued to see things going out that almost certainly were developed before inauguration because it would just be a tremendous amount of effort to get them done after that. But we don't know how much there is. And it is, you know, there are some things in the executive orders that kind of hint at future action.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
There is, for example, one executive order that says that within 90 days, there should be a review of whether the Insurrection Act is necessary to invoke. So that is something that they've actually flagged could be coming. But for the most part, the MO of this administration is and was during the, you know, the end of the first term,
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
defined places in federal law that can be used to ramp up immigration enforcement that have kind of lain dormant for decades. So we don't know how many of those other places they've found.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
The primary way that they would be going about this would be just engaging in enforcement. Usually when there are large-scale workplace raids, those are associated with some form of prosecution or sanction or something against the employer who they're raiding. That's a... kind of stochastic thing, right? You're not like, you're not auditing an entire sector.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And so the extent to which it's going to really shape employer behavior is unclear. But yeah, the biggest tool, the biggest thing that kind of hasn't been done on employer sanctions is legislative. It's mandatory nationwide e-verify. And that has not been as much of a priority of this generation of immigration restrictionism as it was like a decade ago, in part because
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
There are employers who would who are willing to stay quiet even as it becomes harder for them to hire people legally. But if you try to go after their workforce, then or if you try to prevent them from hiring anyone who doesn't have authorization, then they'll get mad at you. Um, so, you know, I think it's, it's still to be seen.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
It's certainly not a, it's, it's not a rhetorical priority for them unless you start talking about the economic benefits of immigration, in which case they start talking about how exploitative employers are. But there hasn't been a whole lot of effort to make it, you know, for example, Department of Labor priority to go after employers for exploiting unauthorized labor. Yeah.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
I think that, you know, for one thing, the thermostatic effect, you know, of public opinion swinging in favor of immigrants under Trump and then swinging against under Biden is really, really hard to, it's hard to overstate. And it's also hard to disentangle anything else from that kind of basic oh, the government is doing some things I don't like. I'm going to make this more salient.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
In general, immigration isn't salient for a whole lot of people. And so it's very easy to kind of swing them from one direction to the other based on opposition to who's in office, based on seeing B-roll of people coming in, that sort of thing. I don't think that... I think it's kind of not clear...
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
whether what we're seeing is an increase in the number of people who are really, really activated against unauthorized immigration or against immigration generally, or whether what we're seeing is the culmination of the fact that this is the signature policy issue of the man who's been the standard bearer of the Republican Party for a decade.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And so anyone who's affiliated with the Republican Party has decided that this is a more important issue to them. But I think the other side of this is a lot of people who were in solidly blue jurisdictions saw strains on state and local governments responding to recent arrivals.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
And so we're forced, or, you know, I think, I think we're like put in a space where they were considering that actually there was a certain amount of zero sum trade-off between investing in people who are already here and investing in new arrivals and the Biden administration by kind of not being
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
doing a whole lot to ensure that new arrivals were coming in an undisruptive way didn't necessarily help with this. But whether that was something that's going to really change a whole lot of people's opinions permanently or whether it was a reaction to a moment under an administration that is no longer in office is something that remains to be seen.
Pod Save America
Has Anyone Seen the Democrats?
I am entirely on board with this, if and only if we can at least start talking to a venue in Stockholm. Because if I have to talk about Swedish administrative data one more time without being in Sweden to do it, it's going to be very upsetting.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So I don't think so. And, you know, the reason I don't think so is because, yes, we've never had a big political controversy around people on student visas having children. But there has been political controversy around people on temporary visas having kids in the United States.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
You know, when Trump was running for president the first time in like 2015, 2016, there were a couple of news cycles about birth tourism. Hmm.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And the practice of getting a tourist visa, often spending that time at like a designated resort for this purpose, having a child during the time you're on the 90-day tourist visa, and then that child who is not necessarily raised in the United States but is raised in, you know, whatever their parents' home country is, has the benefit of U.S.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
citizenship at some later point should they choose to act on it. And that was a very big target of the kind of ban and wing of the MAGA movement, which is very concerned about the lack of assimilability of, in particular, Asian highly educated immigrants who are, you know, taking jobs that could otherwise go to disadvantaged Americans.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So I think that it's not obvious to me that if you bisect that and say, well, we really only care about children of unauthorized immigrants, that that really does satisfy everyone because the question of birth tourism has been tied up in the question of birthright citizenship as, like, Trump world has understood it over the last decade.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So it is surprising to me that this has continued to exist because there's so much discretion to the State Department in denying visas. Like in theory, you could have an enforcement-based approach to that that doesn't change the law. There is like an entire regime in place that is designed to prevent people from being issued visas that are going to abuse the terms of those visas, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And so I am surprised that there hasn't been more of a crackdown on, you know, excluding countries from the visa waiver program if they have a history of birth tourism, more aggressive interviews at consulates about like, gee, I noticed that this 90-day window, it seems like pretty definite. Are you really staying for the whole 90 days? Can you talk more about what you're doing during that time?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And like, so that's, you know, I think what we're identifying is a policy problem. I like, I see where you are. I just think that it's reasonable to talk about like a solution on the scale of the problem. I take that point.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
What we see here is a body of orders that are pushing the federal government to take a much, much, much, much, much more aggressive approach on immigration enforcement, especially in the interior of the United States, especially integrating the military into border enforcement in a way we haven't seen. But...
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I mean, it is the arbiters on how much Calvin Ball we're playing with constitutional law are the people in robes. And I agree with Matt that they would have to be playing a whole lot of Calvin Ball in order to side with the administration on this.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
without really prescribing a whole lot in terms of specifics because they understand that that's going to have to happen at the agency level. That's going to have to – you know, that requires the actual machinery of the federal government to work itself out to figure out what that looks like on the ground. And so a lot of Biden-era enforcement priorities got rescinded.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But, you know, I think the other question here when we're talking about the kind of broad politics of how do we talk about unauthorized immigrants is that we have A wave of new arrivals of people primarily entering through the asylum system over the last decade.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
The growing population of people with temporary protections such as TPS, such as these Biden parole programs, who are also more recent arrivals. And you still have the unauthorized immigrants that you had 10 years ago who have been here 10 years longer and who, for the most part, still haven't had any point of access into the immigration system.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And so as we've talked for the last 10 years about immigration as being a border asylum issue, you know, and I think Matt was calling this out years ago, that that like created political problems for Democrats because it – took a population that had been here for a long time and made them feel like they were being shunted aside in favor of more recent arrivals.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
But it also means that they're now in danger of getting lumped in as like invaders. And I think that the invasion, like the legal aspects of the invasion argument are really hard because they're primarily military and I'm not an expert in that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
It is currently – and this is actually as of Tuesday night – The U.S. has the legal authority to deport people without a court hearing if they're arrested anywhere in the U.S. and cannot prove to an ICE agent's satisfaction that they've been in the U.S. for at least two years, which is something we're going to have to see how that plays out on the ground. And there is...
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
It's odd. Can I step back a little bit? Because like... I think that one of the things that really strikes me going into this Trump administration as opposed to the first one is the first time around, it was very clear that Donald Trump was a politician without a constituency. He had not been made by anybody.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
And so there was nobody who was going to haul him into a room and say, we brought you here. If you don't listen to us, we will end you. And that made it much harder to predict what he would do. It made like The kind of White House intrigue stories of who he was listening to much more important because you couldn't use that standard political calculus.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
A push toward building more capacity for detention, which is going to be very important if they're going to scale up enforcement efforts. A push toward punishing other countries that refuse to accept deportation flights by putting visa sanctions on them, which is going to be extremely important if you're going to succeed in deporting people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
This time around, he's coming in with what looks much more like a traditional political coalition with various people feeling they have claims on him, which includes both in this case, the like Musk and company industrialist policy, crony capitalist. It is very important for the government to affirmatively subsidize the things that we want.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
and the, like, Russ Vogt and company massive deregulatory, there's absolutely nothing the federal government should be doing to support electric vehicles. And, like, it's weird for Trump, but it's very normal for politics. And it's going to be interesting to see how this, like, very traditional inter—
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
factional divide plays out when the person making the decisions is still Donald Trump, a man who pretty famously doesn't really hold on to anything consistently enough to make it very predictable which way he's going to fall.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So, like, on the interior side, there's a very big shift toward both the kind of expanded legal authority and the expanded capacity, which you can't do immediately, but which they're building toward.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
I was wondering where the tariffs were.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
One of the questions on tariffs has always been… Does Donald Trump really, really, really want to find a way to get to yes on tariffs? Or does Donald Trump love the ability to come into a negotiating room and say, if you don't give us everything we want, we'll tariff the hell out of you?
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
Like, this is arguably the signature policy win of Trump's first term on immigration was getting Mexico to agree to accept large numbers of people saying, across the border who were waiting for asylum hearings in the United States, which he accomplished by threatening Mexico with really punitive tariffs for months and months and months.
The Ezra Klein Show
Let’s Get to the Marrow of What Trump Just Did
So, like, I think that this is all consistent with we're using tariffs as a big stick. And now that Marco Rubio is actually secretary of state, he gets to play good cop and go in and tell Claudia Scheinbaum, here is the way that you can avoid these tariffs that the president really wants to put on you, but I have your back. But I'm actually not sure.
The Ezra Klein Show
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There also really does seem to be a belief among Donald Trump himself and at least a professed belief among some conservative intellectuals that tariffs are affirmatively good for America. So if he ends up saying, oh, we've suspended all tariffs because we're taking the win with Canada and Mexico and China, does that leave a constituency unsatisfied?
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Like the question of predictability is what like I cannot get my head around though because like in economics as it's understood and I didn't think this was particularly controversial. Like the fundamental insight of law and economics is that firms require predictability from the government in order to make internal decisions.
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Not knowing whether there are going to be tariffs on your products or whether you're going to have to – devote a tremendous amount of attention capital to flattering the president and having your CEO do that instead of a lot of other things your CEO could be doing. Like you can imagine that being a problem.
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It does seem to me that like at a certain level, there should that like the inability to know whether there are going to be these massive tariffs has to have some kind of knock on economic effect.
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Yeah. And I also have questions about who exactly it is who did that realizing, right? Like, it is clear that whoever on the transition team was responsible for drafting executive orders related to Doge had that realization. Yeah.
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Has Elon Musk come to that conclusion that he can't just waltz into, you know, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and say 50% of you are fired and the other 50% have to show me 20 pages of code?
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I think that... Everyone is very comfortable with the equilibrium we've seen over the last like 10 years or so of instead of policy originating in Congress with legislation, policy originates in the executive branch. Then via litigation, it gets punted to the judicial branch to issue a thumbs up or thumbs down on. And half of Congress is responsible for turning the judge machine on and off.
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Like, that is the equilibrium we have. Congress has not been super interested in legislating under presidents of either party. And so it is not that surprising to me that an administration that is very focused on areas where there is a lot of executive leeway in terms of trade negotiations and immigration enforcement has the general attitude that they're going to
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See how far they can get with the executive branch and know that Congress isn't going to stand up for its prerogative as the legislative branch and, like, try to stop them from doing things that might have been seen as quasi-legislative action in the past.
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This is like the most good government normie take to have on this particular week. But I think that The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis is probably a good book to revisit if you have it and to skim if you haven't checked it out yet.
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Just for a reminder of the innumerable things that the federal government does that a like broad based attack on the civil service is going to end up degrading in some form or another.
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Demon Copperhead was the only novel I read twice last year, and I think that it is the rebuttal to all of the pseudo-sentimental hillbilly elegy debate in terms of what really happened to the rural poor over the last 25 years. And if I don't say an immigration book, I'm probably going to be fired.
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So Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here by Jonathan Blitzer, specifically the first half, which talks about the 80s and has really great archival material as a reminder that government is made of people and people make decisions.
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So as far as self-deportation, the immigration hawk theory of self-deportation has never really been about fear of deportation will lead people to self-deport. It's the inability to work is going to lead people to self-deport. And as far as that is concerned, there's a provision in these executive orders that says that the agencies shall ensure that no unauthorized immigrant has a work permit.
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Now, that's actually not current regulation. Current regulation is if you have a pending application for asylum, for a green card, et cetera, and it's been pending for a you can apply for a work permit and work in the U.S. legally.
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If they're going to change those regulations, that takes people who are currently working legally, puts them into the illegal labor pool, and potentially removes what would be an impetus for them to stay. So that's definitely something to watch for. And there's this noise about
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restricting all federal funding from any sanctuary jurisdiction, which was followed up with a memo sent by the Department of Justice to attorneys saying that they should investigate state and local officials who refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration.
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So the question of whether places that would be resistant are going to be bullied into cooperating and places that are enthusiastic are going to have the full support of the federal government behind them, if you do both of those things, then you really ramp up the ability to do this more frictionless thing.
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The extent to which E-Verify, and I was noticing this even under the first Trump term, like that it had just fallen out of the top tier of the list.
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I mean, I think it's because the kind of Traditional immigration hawks, the Center for Immigration Studies folks who put together the intellectual framework of attrition through enforcement, which is what got called self-deportation, aren't the people who are running the show. They're a different flavor of immigration hawks who are much more concerned about cultural threat.
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The Stephen Miller approach is what are all of the other parts of the U.S. code that we haven't been looking at that can be used? You know, there's a provision in here that cites a little used provision of U.S. law that says aliens have to register and says, OK, so the federal government's going to publicize that people have to register.
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And then we have to do as much as possible to criminally enforce failure to register now. people who entered the U.S. without papers have not had an opportunity to register in many cases. And so there's a certain bit of paradox for like punishing people for failing to do something you never let them do. But it's that sort of thing. It's identifying unused tools.
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You know, the big question for Congress is really a budgetary one, is how much money are they going to throw at enforcement? Because, you know, as Matt pointed out, like, We've never done anything close to the scale of what they are threatening to want to do.
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And the more that Tom Homan and company want to spend on, you know, getting headlines by sending a bunch of ICE agents into California, the less money there is in theory for stuff like building soft-sided detention facilities and other unsexy things that you're going to need to do to get your capacity.
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Just laying out what it does. The Birthright Citizenship Order declares that it is the position of the U.S. government that anyone born after February 19th of this year whose mother is... either someone who does not have legal status in the United States or who has some form of temporary visa or other temporary protection in the United States and whose father is not a U.S.
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citizen or green card holder, is not a citizen of the United States by birth. Most of the text of the executive order is a defense of a very novel legal theory that is not only is the 14th Amendment of the Constitution not as it has been interpreted by the Supreme Court for over a century, etc., but that we can change that interpretation via executive action and simply declare it by fiat.