Trump's All Out Assault on Immigrants Continues in Incompetent but Horrifying Fashion

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:01 Aaron: In order to carry out a mass deportation operation, you have to engage in tactics that most people find un -American.

0:00:18 Aaron: There is no world in which you can round up 13 million people and not fundamentally change the kind of country that we are.

0:00:36 Matt: Well, we're very pleased to welcome to Open Air Arguments one of the foremost authorities on U .S. immigration policy working today and one of my favorite social media followers, American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reikland -Melnick. How is your Tuesday, Aaron?

0:00:47 Aaron: My Tuesday, like most Tuesdays these days, is not as great as it's been in previous years, but all things considered, could be worse.

0:00:54 Matt: You know, I don't think I know if there's anybody out there who has eyes on the entire immigration system the way you do, following you and watching your work, seeing your testimony before Congress and all the stuff that AIC is putting out right now. What's your typical day like before we get into anything else?

0:01:08 Aaron: Well, I will say thank you for that compliment. There definitely are other people, but they don't spend as much time on social media. And so you don't know who they are as a result. What I do a lot during the day is keep track of what's going on. If there's new court cases, I'm reading the court cases. If There's new regulations coming out, I'M reading the regulations, getting up to speed on what's going on there, talking to other people working in the field and working on a lot of the written products we do here at the American Immigration Council, which includes updating fact sheets, building some new reports that I'm really excited. They're going to be coming out later this year and making sure that we can have the facts and the data ready to educate the public.

0:01:46 Matt: Nobody does it like AIC, just as a practitioner. I know that at any given in time, there's some kind of development or something's coming down, I can find an AIC explainer within a couple of days, sometimes sooner. How do you guys do that?

0:01:56 Aaron: A lot of last second work when breaking news happens. So when the Senate bill dropped earlier this year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, we sat down. I think we got the text at 6 p .m. We sat down, we started reading through it, we started outlining it, we divided it in between our team. We've got an incredible team here on on our policy team and our legal team, mostly lawyers. And we made sure that we had it out and ready as soon as we could.

0:02:22 Matt: It's so valuable right now. I mean, it's always been this way. And certainly, you're doing this through the first Trump administration as well, when it just seemed like every Friday there was just some new massive thing that was being dumped on us. But you've been at this for a while. You're also a lawyer, of course, yourself, and you have a background. You've pretty much been doing immigration all your whole career, is that right?

0:02:39 Aaron: Yeah, that's right. I graduated law school in 2014 and immediately got my start at the Immigrant Justice Corps, which was a brand new fellowship at the time, putting 25 new lawyers a year into the ecosystem, new immigration lawyers, that is. And I was in the first class of that fellowship assigned to the Legal Aid Society in New York City, where I worked for two years doing removal defense, mostly for people who had prior criminal convictions. This being New York City, it was a lot of people with green cards or other kind of status who'd had drug problems in the past and a lot at the time gotten clean and then popped up on ICE's radar and gotten put into immigration court, cancellation of removal eligible in most cases, but sometimes there were more complicated factors involved.

0:03:22 Matt: Those cancellation cases for permanent residents and just for the non -lawyers is listening, obviously, the people that essentially it's like an immigration pardon, like a one -time, you can present your entire life and the judge can decide if what you did is worthy of deportation or give you a chance to stay. Of course, it's a one time thing. So it's a big, big opportunity. Those are some of my favorites. I'm sure there must've been some of yours too.

0:03:41 Aaron: Oh yeah, I loved a lot my clients. Many of them had done done things 10, 15 years in the past. And this was the era when a lot of older convictions weren't in the system. And so you had a lot of people who were traveling home for the first time ever in their 50s, 60s, not young men who, on their way back at the airport, would suddenly discover that something that happened over a decade in the past that they thought was long behind them was now a big deal and now something that could potentially lead to losing their green card, being detained and deported. And they'd come to us, you know, the Legal Aid Society only served people who couldn't afford a private attorney. So it was a lot of people who really needed the assistance. And we were able to at the time, New York City was the best place, I think, to practice immigration law with the most generous immigration judges, the highest grant rates in the country. So it was an rare situation when the time I practiced immigration law, where you were winning more often than you were losing, or at the very

0:04:39 Aaron: Least, it was closer to 50 % than in most other parts of of the country. It is no longer that way, unfortunately. Yeah.

0:04:46 Matt: I have to bristle just a little when you say that, of course, because there's no better place to practice than Boston, obviously. But what are you going to do?

0:04:51 Aaron: And the Boston court, of course, also a great place to practice. New York, it was, I would say it was a good place to be a immigrant in removal proceedings, especially if you couldn't afford a lawyer, because even 10 years ago, New York City had the highest concentration of nonprofits that could provide free legal assistance.

0:05:05 Matt: Right. Legal aid, especially doing incredible work. And just the guarantee of counsel that they've been able to, I don't know if it's a guarantee, but at least coverage they've been able To provide is like nowhere else. I know.

0:05:18 Aaron: Yeah, I actually, that's part of the fellowship that I got my start with was part ofthe understanding that we needed a lot more immigration lawyers. You know, this is coming out of what was known as the Katzmann Study Group from sadly now passed away, Chief Judge of the Second Circuit, Robert Katzman, who realized back in the 2000s that there was a crisis of legal representation in immigration court. And he helped really promote this idea of funded legal counsel for people facing removal. And the Immigrant Justice Corps came out of that. And I was one of the first class. Now they have put over the last decade more than 250 to 300 new immigration lawyers into the ecosystem. And then along with that came things like the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, which was a groundbreaking government -funded council project with a little bit of city funding, a little Bit of private funding. Now New York State also has the Liberty Defense Fund. Other states have taken the lead on that as well. And now the idea that you would have government funded or privately funded lawyers for people who couldn't afford someone to defend themselves against deportation is a common idea that has spread around the country, really all emerging out of a recognition from federal judges that the state of the immigration bar was dire. And there were a lot of people who had defenses who weren't able to bring them because they didn't have a lawyer.

0:06:40 Matt: No, absolutely. It's a model from everything I know about the way it's been done. And, you know, it is, I think, probably the single biggest misconception of an immigration court. And I get told this all the time that I'm being paid by the government, you Know, that they're being appointed attorneys in immigration court, which of course, as we all know, who follow this stuff, it's civil proceedings. You'd have no right to counsel. You have a right to counsel at no expense to the government, which is one of my favorite jokes in the INA. But yeah, no, generally it's so important to see those kinds of models. And other cities are, as you said, starting to pick it up. So what brought you to immigration out of all the things you could have done?

0:07:10 Aaron: Yeah, good question. In law school, it was either immigration or public defense. And I almost ended up as a public defender.

0:07:16 Matt: Same, same. Yeah.

0:07:16 Aaron: And as to why, I don't know. I was born with a sort of desire to do public service or brought up with a desire to do public services. And certainly growing up, you know, looking at the crusading lawyers of the 1960s and the ways in which the law was used to protect the vulnerable, that was something that appealed to me when I went to law school. And so when I looked at options, I, in law school, did public defender work in my summers and immigration volunteering and clinics during the school year, and then somehow managed to luck my way into doing immigration public defense at a public defender organization, which sort of combined my interests. And it was a real blessing because I got very lucky that I was able to get that position. And that sort of kickstarted me in this direction.

0:08:04 Matt: That's awesome. Yeah, that's how I feel about my own career. Just right place, right time. And obviously wanting to do it it and having the passion. Do you have some kind of family background that brought you to this as well?

0:08:15 Aaron: No, other than the fact that certainly growing up, my parents always made me think about my immigrant roots. My grandfather is 101 today. He's doing really well, and he is himself a first -generation immigrant. I mean, he was born in the country, but his parents came here in the early 20th century. He was born 1924. four. So I felt through him and through others very connected to that part of my immigrant history. That's not my entire family history.

0:08:42 Aaron: I do a family dating back three, four hundred years that have been in this country. But I always grew up around other immigrants as well. I grew up in the town of Nyack, New York, which is a very diverse Hudson River town where our high school at the I think was only about 55 percent white, 50 to 55 percent White, very diverse immigrant immigrant community. About 10 % of the high school was Haitian. They had a very large Hispanic population. And as a result, I always grew up around people of other cultures. And that felt natural to me. And always been interested in other cultures, interested in another people, learning about other places and things. And so immigration felt like a natural fit. Yeah.

0:09:22 Matt: That's great. Now, I always love asking immigration attorneys how they came to it because obviously this is a subject that's been pretty hot since the first Trump administration, but it was actually, I think, pretty hard to find people to do this work before that. Certainly, that's where you're coming from. But very quickly, before we move on to talking about more policy things, just tell us a little about the American Immigration Council, what it is, what it does.

0:09:40 Aaron: So we are a DC and New York based, well, in the era of remote work, somewhat what nationally based organization that focuses on immigrant rights due process and ensuring that immigration is presented as something as a benefit to the American people, because we do believe that immigration is something that enriches the country and benefits us all. The council itself was founded in 1987, originally as the nonprofit arm of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Association we maintain ties with ala but are not an ala organization today we take different positions on things we do not they do not in any way direct what we do given our close connection to the immigration bar you know we do keep ourselves very rooted in the law and I think that's partly why our policy team is mostly lawyers actually our policy theme is entirely lawyers we've got a very strong legal team but we also a few years back merged with a group known known as New American Economy, which focused more on the research and economics arguments in favor of immigration. So now we do a little bit of everything. We do research, we do litigation, we do policy work. We even have a state and local network where we work with offices of New Americans to help them understand immigration and immigration law, help them have arguments to present about how to improve immigrant integration policies in various state and local governments. And we work with business communities who are also very interested in immigration and understanding how to better integrate a workforce, how to attract immigrants to move to particular areas that may need them, and how to build welcoming policies in areas that are desperate for workers, desperate for people.

0:11:21 Matt: Have really admired AIC's work over the years, and I don't think there's anybody anybody else that's doing, I mean, obviously you've testified before Congress a few times, and at the same time, you're putting out these amazing explainers and doing this community work and connecting people with lawyers and doing FOIA requests all over the place. I mean it's really quite an organization doing a lot for the bar certainly and for the common good.

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0:11:41 Matt: We have so many different things we could talk about today. Obviously we both think about this stuff all day. I kind of wanted to start with talking about the state of the courts because I see that you just in your conversations online that we agree on this point that we need to have faith in the courts right now because we have to, because the rule of law is all we've got at this point. And we've seen some incredible pushback, including as recently as the day that we're recording this, when Mahmoud Khalil's case is being reviewed right now. It seems like there's been a real trend since the first Trump term that when a lot of these policies are confronted with the reality of federal judges, that they don't work out. Is that still kind of how it feels?

0:12:17 Aaron: It does feel that way. Now that said, in the first Trump administration, sometimes we got lucky. And sometimes policies got struck down, not because they were necessarily unlawful, but because the government went about it the wrong way. And the A classic example of that is the DACA situation, where everyone agreed that the Trump administration had the legal right to terminate DACA, but they just did it by about a three -paragraph memo, and that was not enough. They needed to actually think it through and make a reasoned decision. And so what we've learned since then is that the trump administration has acknowledged that they made those mistakes the first time around, corrected for some of them, but in And others just decided to bulldoze through and dare the courts to stop them. And the big shifts since the first of Trump administration is the Supreme Court is now significantly more conservative. And the case law has developed such that I think the justices are just tired of hearing these immigration cases. And I think that has a large part of it. The era of nationwide injunctions arguably started with DAPA, Deferred Action for Parental evisals, the Obama era attempt

0:13:22 Aaron: To expand DACA that made it to the Supreme Court in 2014. And then Justice Scalia died and it was a split decision. And that was really the first major state immigration nationwide injunction. And since then we saw an explosion. And I get the sense that the justices just are sick and tired of dealing with immigration cases on these programmatic ones and have just let him run free.

0:13:45 Aaron: So you have a very bizarre situation where you have the Trump Trump administration repeating a lot of the mistakes he made the first time around. And you have the lower court saying, for the same reasons they did the first time around, for same reasons the Supreme Court stepped in the first time around saying, no, you actually have to go through the right process. And then by the, when it gets to the Supreme Court, they just say, eh, we don't want to deal with it.

0:13:45 Matt: Close enough, right? Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned, because I absolutely agree about DACA and DAPA, of course. And DAPА was such a heartache, because that was such a reasonable program that would have expanded a DACA -style protection to parents of people in that situation, of young people who'd been brought here. I think another really good example is temporary protected status, where in the first administration, they got slapped down because they did it in such a racist way, and such an obviously, and Trump made all these statements about it being in such an racist way. You know, the famous shithole country statement statement, I believe that was connected with that. And now we've got them doing, in my opinion, it seems like they're trying to do very similar things where they're just terminating it willy nilly in ways that they're juste daring the courts to. Does it feel like kind of the same thing?

0:14:45 Aaron: Not only does it feel like the same thing, it is the same thing and it's even worse. The statements, you know, the first time you had campaign statements from Trump about some of these TBS countries, this time you have multiple statements in office about why they're terminating. You had Secretary Noem saying, we need to terminate TPS for Venezuela because they're all Tren de Aragua members. And then you look at that and you say, you can't have TPS if you have a criminal record.

0:15:11 Aaron: If you are a criminal, you will lose your TPS. And so this idea that we have to end it for national interest is just ridiculous. They're ending it for political reasons. It's very obvious they're ending for political reasons.

0:15:22 Matt: No doubt.

0:15:22 Aaron: And the best example of that That is the 2021 Venezuela TPS for Venezuela designation. So for those who aren't familiar, you know, in Trump's last days in office, January 19th, 2021, he issues deferred enforced departure for Venezuelans. Deferred enforced departures like TPS, but it's it's even more precarious and fragile and it's something just the president does. And he issued that in his last days. And then six weeks later, Secretary Mayorkas issues temporary protected status for Venezualans. And that population ends up covering 350 ,000 people. So that means that Trump's protections covered essentially, unless someone entered between those six weeks in between those two designations, it's the same population. And then you have the Trump admin now four years later coming in and saying, these people are gangbangers and criminals led in under Biden.

0:16:12 Aaron: And it's like, no, these are the people you personally, Donald J. Trump protected.

0:16:15 Matt: Such a good point.

0:16:16 Aaron: And yet they just go ahead The Supreme Court allows them to strip that, even though there were multiple legal reasons beyond just the discrimination, beyond just the rationales they offered as to why that was illegal. And yet, you know, despite very well -reasoned lower court opinions, the Supreme Court just steps in and says, sure, 600 ,000 people, let them lose their jobs, let him be deported.

0:16:37 Matt: No, it's sick. And I'm seeing the consequences, of course, in our office every day. And even just the timing, you know, from the I believe, I think it was a 2021. I can't keep up with all of this. But I know that the timing was was completely off, too. They did it within an illegal period of time.

0:16:48 Matt: The thing that really jumps out still to me is Haiti, is the idea that for temporary protected status to be revoked, to be rescinded, you have to be able to show, as I understand it, that conditions have materially improved, that the thing that you originally granted TPS for is no longer an issue. And you just can't look at Haiti in any kind of honest way and say that it's better off now than it was when TPS was originated, right? I mean, I just don't understand how they get there. They can. Right.

0:17:11 Aaron: They're not saying that. I think that's a really crucial thing to understand. And this is actually really interesting, because when you had them announced that they were ending TPS for Haiti, you had the DHS press release come out and say, the secretary has determined that conditions have improved. Then you actually look at the official legal notice terminating Haiti, and it does not say that. In fact, it says, as you say, correctly, conditions are worse. So what they argue then, therefore, is that there's really, you know, for temporary protected status to grant TPS, for this situation for an extraordinary and temporary circumstance, there's two prongs in the statute. There's one, the existence of an extraordinary and temporary condition. And two, the secretary has to determine that granting TPS is not contrary to the national interest, which is a very weird double negative built directly into the statute, you know, it doesn't say that you have to determine it is in the national interest, you have determine that it's not contrary the national interests. And so what Secretary Noem did is she said, I am not even determining that conditions are better. I am saying that now it isn't in the national interest to extend TPS because there are just too many Haitians here and TPS is a draw. That's not, again, not true. TPS has never been a draw for Haitians.

0:18:17 Matt: That's fine.

0:18:27 Aaron: There's no sign whatsoever that it increased irregular migration. So she says in the notice it increased a regular migration. Not true. Haitians, in fact, almost uniquely among the populations who have entered in recent years, entered almost exclusively legally at ports of entry or through parole programs and not across the border illegally. But of course, they basically copy pasted the same argument in that notice as they did in other arguments because they've fired all of the good lawyers at DHS.

0:18:53 Matt: Of course, we all heard Donald Trump say last year that they're eating all the dogs and cats at Springfield and going to cancel TPS. He promised to do it. That was a campaign promise.

0:19:01 Aaron: This was a foreordained decision, a very preordained decision. You know, they did not do any real analysis. Let's be serious.

0:19:04 Matt: Yeah. No. And they are technically required by law to produce a joint report, I think, with the state, Department of State.

0:19:14 Aaron: Yeah, there's required to be consultations with state and with DHS, and she says we did them and we've determined that it's not in the national interest. And that's basically where the meat of the legal argument lies.

0:19:25 Matt: And again, there have been so many TPS cancellations because, of course. Trump came in determined to cancel every single TPS program. I mean, so did John Kelly, the first DHS secretary under Trump as well. He said he didn't think that any of them should exist. I've been having a little trouble keeping up just as a practitioner with all the different rationales. We just have assumed from the beginning that we're not going to be seeing any of these TPS statuses through.

0:19:45 Aaron: I think TPS for Ukraine might survive. TPS for Ukraine may survive, but he canceled TPS for Afghanistan, which gives a sign that if you could say the Taliban is okay, and we're fine to send people back to the Taliban, he might also terminate TPS for Ukraine.

0:20:01 Matt: Well, even like the language about the Syrian TPS cancellation was so internally contradictory, right? Where she's saying that this is a country full of terrorists. And I don't remember exactly how she said it. No, she said something really offensive. This country is in terrible shape, but everybody here who is Syrian is a terrorist. We have to send them back to their terrorist origins or whatever. I don' t know. It's just very, of

0:20:20 Aaron: Well, in some ways, that's how this administration views immigrants. And I think on a personal level, you look at the president and you look look at the vice president, you look at a number of Trump's cabinet and his senior officials, they take a view that nationality determines character. I don't think they fundamentally believe that people are distinct from their cultures. So if you're Haitian, they view you as inherently suspicious because Haiti is a disaster. Therefore, if you are Haitian you must also be someone indicative of the conditions when in reality, you know, if You look at the Haitian diaspora, the people who have fled to the United States are overwhelmingly white collar. They're the doctors, they're the students, they are the people who had the money to leave the island, to get off the island and make it to the United States. It is not stereotypically laborers who are making their way to the united states, again mostly legally. Of course there are plenty who are, it's not exclusively white collar, but you know the immigration that comes from a lot of these countries, Syria as well, the people that can get out in these situations are often the the people with resources and the people who are able to flee, whereas the people who don't have resources, who are more vulnerable, are the ones who can't leave and end up staying and becoming prey to these gangs and instability. In the Trump admin's views, because there is a warlord in Haiti who allegedly has eaten someone, all Haitians are therefore cannibals.

0:20:23 Matt: Course. Right,

0:21:42 Aaron: This is what you saw with a lot of right -wing influencers last year. And it is really awful. And as I said, I do take some of this personally because I grew up in a heavily Haitian community and had lots of friends who were Haitian growing up. I went to school with them and knew them as wonderful people. And so every time somebody says Haitians can't integrate or, you know, the Haitian community is bad, I'd say like you're talking about the people I was friends with. You're talking About a vital part of my hometown. And I do Take that personally.

0:22:13 Matt: Me too. I mean, Boston has a wonderful Haitian community here in Dorchester and other places, but it's It's Venezuelans too, very much in that category. You know, I represent a lot of Venezuelians and I love, I mean, everybody. I mean it's just, I really, honestly, one of my favorite things about being an immigration lawyer is I hear other lawyers in other fields complaining about their clients all the time and I genuinely love. Now, again, it's a customer service job. There's about 5 % of any given customer service job where you're going to have to deal with people that are just kind of hard to deal with. But we really do have such an amazing client base and a lot of Haitians, a lot of Venezuelans. But very much in that category you're talking about, I mean, essentially a lot the Venezuelan I've met would be members of the Tea Party in the United States, right? And they're coming with decent resources, but they're reasonably conservative people that are opposed to the government that you would think this government would welcome and would celebrate and would give asylum status. But like you said, what they see is failing countries. And when you're talking about a place like Haiti or Honduras, the reasons that those countries are failing don't have a lot to do with the people who live there right now. It's certainly many years of history, many years of U .S. intervention that we don't talk about nearly enough. It's such an important point that they can't separate individuals from their perception of countries and culture and how things are working. It said view of the world that I know none of us can really relate to, but it's what's running the country right now,

0:23:22 Aaron: And it's interesting you mentioned, you Know, with Venezuelans, of course, because Trump did protect them. And Secretary Rubio,

0:23:27 Matt: Right?

0:23:27 Aaron: Who is now crusading anti -Anti -Maduro, you know, potentially bringing us into an armed conflict with Venezuela, he has been one of the people pushing to terminate TPS. It's allegedly, you Know, it's him and it's Stephen Miller and it'S others. And I think it's classism involved as well, because the population that Trump gave DED to in 2021, those were mostly visa overstays, because there hadn't been a long history of Venezuelans crossing the border illegally. Legally. That wasn't something that happened very much until 2021, 2022, when the Darien gap opened up and pathways dried out. And so you had essentially a population that was mostly the people who had the resources to obtain a tourist visa to the United States or some other kind of visa, which made them more white collar, which Made them more stereotypically aligned with the, for example, the Florida GOP, you had a lot of support in the local conservative community there, As you said, because a lot of these people were fled what they believe to be a dictatorial socialist state and aligned with a lot of these conservative politics. But then eventually the Venezuelan diaspora, which had exploded the refugee crisis over the last decade, 8 million roughly Venezuelans have left the country in a decade. The people who started arriving at the border tended to be more standard, normal working class people. And the more working class People, some of them had their worst some, of course, criminal element embedded in that you get any group of large enough size, you will have some criminal element within it. You know, if you random sample 500 ,000 Americans,

0:24:58 Matt: Course.

0:24:58 Aaron: You are going to find someone in there who is a terrible, terrible person. But rather than saying, okay, let's spend our resources trying to figure out which of those people are those terrible people and let the rest of people just trying to live live their normal life, survive and deal with their collapsing country, the Trump administration on the campaign trail and, you know, basically said, oh, no, they're all criminals, which is just not true.

0:25:20 Matt: Yeah, no, that's so true about that difference. I remember seeing that initial wave when people people are coming with tourist visas. And just to underscore for people who don't think about this stuff very much, it is very hard to get a tourist visa in a lot of places in the world, an American tourist visa. You have to be able to show substantial resources, ability to return, desire to return. We just take it so much for granted with our passports that we can travel pretty much anywhere in the World.

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0:25:42 Matt: I wanted to ask you, since we're talking about Venezuela, have you kind of gamed out where the Alien Enemies Act might be going if things do pick up with Venezuela the way that it seems like they will?

0:25:50 Aaron: Yeah, I continue to believe that the Alien Enemies Act is somewhat of a dead end for the Trump Administration. You know, they've failed pretty miserably in their efforts to use it on Tren de Aragua. Of course, there was the one major deportation and then there were two flights after that with a few dozen people each. Since that point, they haven't ever successfully got a plane off the ground. They haven't successfully won any court case, brought challenging a designation.

0:26:18 Aaron: They did win one court case saying that they can use the Alien Enemies Act, but they didn't win it as to any individual person.

0:26:25 Aaron: No one who they have accused of being in Tren de Aragua and said, we're going to use the alien enemies act on who wasn't part of that initial wave of people has now been subject to the act. And I don't see them even winning in the Supreme Court. It's just such a ridiculous argument that this gang of honestly like a thousand people are invading the United States. But we'll see how that goes at the Supreme Court. The key distinction is if the United States on its own, without a congressional war declaration or anything, decides to attack Venezuela, that still wouldn't authorize the use of the Alien Enemies Act, because the Alien Enemies Act requires an invasion by a foreign government, not the United States invading a foreign government.

0:27:06 Matt: Declaration of war, I think actually completely it's in there

0:27:08 Aaron: Of course, that's why I said, like, at the start, you know, unless Congress steps in and declares war on Venezuela, which I do not think it is going to do, then you still don't satisfy the statutory prerequisite, which is a predatory incursion or an invasion by the foreign government. So it is us invading, it would be us invating them, not them invading us, and therefore I still think the Alien Enemies Act wouldn't apply.

0:27:14 Matt: First time yeah right

0:27:30 Aaron: And from the very beginning, I've always we thought the Alien Enemies Act is more of a propaganda tool than it is an actual legal pathway for them to execute removals. It's more something that they can use to hang over people's heads as a threat than it Is an actual viable pathway for large scale removals, especially when they were limiting it to gang members. Again, there just are not that many gang members in the United States who are part of these designated foreign terrorist organizations now.

0:27:30 Matt: Yeah

0:28:04 Aaron: Yeah, though that decision is en banc now,

0:28:06 Matt: I agree with you obviously in the legal analysis I'm just concerned about I mean and obviously you've got to the point where the fifth circuit had to stand up and say come on what are you doing yeah

0:28:07 Aaron: And they will probably overturn it, the en banc.

0:28:09 Matt: Oh that's too bad I hadn't thought that far ahead

0:28:12 Aaron: We'll see, but that's, you know, why else would they have taken the case en banc?

0:28:15 Matt: Yeah that decision gave me a lot of hope though because you know here you have the fifth circuit saying there's clearly nothing that meets the requirements here this can't be used but I guess yeah my concern was that you know and I completely agree with what you're saying about the actual text of the alien enemies act and about and of course we have very little little interpretation of it because it's hardly been used at all. And when it has been used, it's been pretty bad in World War II. But I guess I've just been concerned about what might happen if they say that there's a state of war and find some way to convince enough federal judges in the country that they can use it in a large scale.

0:28:43 Aaron: On that, I would say it's not, thank God the statute doesn't say state of war, it says declared war.

0:28:50 Matt: It should.

0:28:50 Aaron: And that has a very specific meaning to Congress declaring war. I just don't think Congress is going to do that.

0:28:55 Matt: Yeah. And unless maybe hundreds of sleeper cells of Trinidad and Argo rise up at once, once we invade Venezuela, that's the only way this could possibly actually get through. But no, I agree. And I appreciate as a voice of reason. You've always been very good at these kinds of statements of just like pointing out, and I'm trying to do the same thing here, just pointing out what the law actually is and when it's put in front of honest judges, what they're going to do with it.

0:29:18 Matt: It's a scary thing though. I mean, it was supposed to be scary. It was shocking to see it used that way.

0:29:22 Aaron: Extraordinary shocking. Really terrifying, especially because of how sloppily it was done. It is bad. When you you look at this historically, when you go and say the United States government during World War II at a time when we interned a large portion of the United states population, over a hundred thousand Japanese sent to internment camps, gave people more due process than the Trump administration did in 2025 when we shipped people off to a torture prison. And we know that they made egregious errors. Now, crucially, the start of those errors did not begin with the Trump administration. One of the most famous people sent to SICOT was Andres Hernandez Romero, the makeup artist.

0:30:06 Aaron: He was first tagged as a member of Tren de Aragua in November 2024 by CBP officers at a port of entry along the southern border because of his tattoos. And a lot of these intelligence documents claiming, oh, if it's a Venezuelan who has this tattoo, they're probably part of Tenderagua, predate the Trump administration. Those are being issued in the Biden an admin.

0:30:28 Aaron: But the worst thing that could happen with one of those designations when it was an error being made in the previous administration was somebody would be held in mandatory detention and or not even mandatory detention, just held discretionarily. And if they tried to get bond, the government would say, this guy's a gang member, don't release him on bond. But that was really it. It would just be a factor in immigration court proceedings. It was never something that could have you put on a plane and sent to be tortured, Without any due process.

0:30:57 Aaron: And the Trump administration very obviously was not interested in a searching analysis of who was and who was not a gang member. When you look at how the operation was planned, it does seem that most likely at DHS, somebody sent out a message through all the various field offices, find everyone who's tagged in the system as Trenderagua, round them all up, we're going to deport all of them. And so they didn't actually do any independent investigations. They had a Tren de Aragua validation guide, an Alien Enemies Act validation guide that was a points -based system, and you could get genuinely enough points to have you quote -unquote validated as a Tret de Araua member for having a tattoo that they thought linked you to the gang and wearing certain clothing that they taught linked you. To the gang.

0:31:45 Aaron: So if you were a young Venezuelan man who likes the Chicago Bulls and had a tattoo of a clock, that would validate you as a member of the gang, even if you had absolutely nothing to do with it. Because of course, plenty of people like the Chicago Bulls and plenty of people have tattoos that are pretty standard. You know, one of the things they said as a tattoo that identified you as member of Tren de Aragua was stars, nautical stars, the kind of thing that a lot of people get when they're 19 in college and drunk and just want to get a first starter barter tattoo. That's the kind of tattoo they were saying was proof that you were in a gang.

0:32:19 Matt: No, that takes me back because I've been working with the Salvadoran population for my entire career and we saw all of that with MS -13. And And of course, MS -13 was the big bogeyman for the first Trump administration. And that point system you're talking about, as I'm sure you know, has been used in immigration court. And as you said, it's not mandatory, but it might as well be. If the judge is seeing evidence where DHS is providing, we've got contacts in his phone, which again, could be somebody went to high school with 10 years ago, right? We've got a CD in his car of MS -130 raps or whatever. I've heard all this stuff, right. And it's just the culture that they live in. And it's the community that they're in is what they're being punished for, basically. And I've seen it again and again. And just to see it happen this way with the Own Enemies Act is so much worse even than what they were doing to young Salvadoran kids that I was working with, who I knew for sure. I've been to their houses. I know their families. They're not gang members, right? But it's just so easy for the government to come in with this thing. And they know for sure that that's the one way that they can really get a judge to, for somebody with no record, it's easiest way to get a Judge to hold on to somebody if they can do that. Right.

0:33:18 Aaron: Well, I think with the gang stuff, as you said, the key distinction is that in the past, you know, yeah, the gang staff always came up, but there was due process. You could go to the judge, you could rebut the arguments, you Could present evidence, you can bring the families in, you can have them testify, you You could attempt to undermine the government's allegations. But with the Alien Enemies Act, there was none of that. It was, we are going to deport you to El Salvador. Sorry, they told these people they were going to report them to Venezuela. And then they they put them on a plane 12 hours later to El Salvador. So it was deportation by surprise to countries they didn't even know about with the cameras rolling as part of a propaganda operation with real consequences to the people who were the targets of that because they ended up tortured. And so I think that is what makes me as a lawyer and as an American citizen so outraged about this is it was purely an act of power done for the cameras. It was not done for national security reasons. They didn't bother trying to get it right. They cared more about the optics than about the lives of the people that they were playing with.

0:34:28 Matt: It was so sloppy that there was at least one woman on the flight from what I remember.

0:34:32 Aaron: More than one. There were almost a dozen women on the flight, even though else, you know, Seacott doesn't take women. And not just that, there was also a Nicaraguan man on the fight, even though the deal was only for Venezuelans. And Kilmar Abrego Garcia got on the plane, even though he wasn't on the initial manifest and it was illegal to send him to El Salvador. So the entire thing was done amateurishly with a clear desire to get the planes off the ground for the cameras, no matter what a court ruled. And that's why you had Emile Bove being accused of telling his other lawyers that we may have to tell a court to F off because the goal was not to follow the law and do something in close alignment with American principles of due process and justice. No, the goal Was Donald Trump and Marco Rubio want a photo opportunity here to show how tough we are on gang members, just round up a bunch of people who we could put on this plane and get them sent off to El Salvador, who cares what happens to them afterwards. Ones.

0:35:32 Matt: The Abrego Garcia thing was so floppy, and I don't want you to speculate on this necessarily, but you've read more of the records than I have, but it just seems like it was such sloppy that they had to have known that this man had withholding removal and that El Salvador was the one place in the world you couldn't send him.

0:35:45 Aaron: They did. It was in the database. The problem is it's clear nobody checked the database at the time. And in the last minutes of the flight, all records indicate that there were people being pulled off the plane as the court orders came in. The plaintiffs got off the plane. They were trying to figure out how to fill the seats. They wanted a full plane. And he was at that detention center. It wasn't clear exactly why he got on the plane. He He was not on the initial manifest. The most likely scenario is some deportation officer or coordinator in charge of getting the flight manifest done just said, well, we've got two empty seats on this.

0:36:23 Aaron: Do you have anybody in the detention center who's Salvadoran who's got a final order? Oh, that guy? Yeah, put him on the plane. No one bothered to open his file and take a look to see whether there were any obstacles to that.

0:36:35 Matt: Not even if you don't open his file, you can just run his A number through a public check. And there's an online site. You can just look it up and see the last thing that happened in his case, and you'd see there was a withholding order. It absolutely blows my mind that they didn't see that and that it wasn't. I mean, in the back of my mind, I still think that they were pushing it to the point that they just wanted to see what would happen.

0:36:51 Matt: But I can't prove that, of course. And who knows? Who knows?

0:36:51 Aaron: Yeah, well I think it's indicative also of how this administration views removal. And of course, as you and I know, the immigration removal system in the United States has never been particularly friendly to due process, and it's never been a system that cared deeply about correcting its errors. But at the very least, there has always been, at least for the last 20, 30 years, a veneer of due process in a sense that the officials try to get things right, even if they sometimes screw up and sometimes officers on the ground make mistakes, either good faith or bad faith. But there wasn't the sense that they just wanted to toss the law aside and just act purely out of power. Hour. But this administration does act that way. They view the immigration courts as an obstacle to their mass deportation agenda. They review federal judges as an obstacle to their desire to round up as many people as possible and deport them. And fundamentally, they view lawyers as obstacles, not just external lawyers trying to stop them, but internal lawyers trying to tell them, hey, you have to follow the law.

0:38:03 Aaron: And that is new to the system. And you are the one who's practicing every day. I know when I practiced, there were plenty of judges who were great conscientious judges trying to get things right. Trial attorneys at ICE, I had my disagreements with them, but I found many of them to be highly professional. And I know that a lot of that's shifting. And I'm curious, I want to turn this around in you a little bit and see what you are seeing differently under this administration than even the first Trump administration in the court system.

0:38:31 Matt: Well, of course, all of the immigration judges in Boston and Chelmsford are living saints. I have nothing bad to say about any of them. And truly, I mean, we really are fortunate to have a very good immigration bar and IJs here. But I've been appearing in immigration courts around the country, obviously, for quite a while now by video. And I am shocked, frankly, at what I'm seeing, the stories I'm hearing from my clients, even just talking to somebody in Louisiana yesterday about the actual reality of sitting through. And because she understands English very well. She understands the system. She grew up here and she's just telling me about what it's like to watch these proceedings. I've logged in and certainly watched and every citizen can and should through the DOJ website, find the links to every single immigration court in the United States you can watch. But I am very concerned about the state of the system and the pressures, the external pressures from above that are being put on these judges. So again, just remind everybody, I know this is every opening arguments listener should know this, but these are administrative judges through the Department of Justice. These are not federal article three I guess you have a better sense of the sort of the statistical state of the system, but it does seem like we have lost quite a few immigration judges and they're being replaced very quickly by Trump ideologues, essentially. And my biggest concern as a practitioner actually right now, just on the global scale, is the Board of Immigration Appeals, because I think you might have the numbers, but they're mostly now Trump appointees, right?

0:39:46 Aaron: Yeah, when you include temporary immigration judges, temporary appellate immigration judges or temporary board members, 75% of the BIA was appointed by President Trump. So when Trump took office, there were 26, 27 Board of Immigration Appeals members, including a dozen appointed by president Biden. And what the Trump administration did was they issued a new temporary final rule saying we're reducing the the size of the board from 28 on the books to 15.

0:40:18 Aaron: And wouldn't you know, conveniently speaking, the people who are getting laid off are going to be every single Biden appointee. So every single Biden appointee is gone. And along with that, they've also pressured a number of Obama appointees to leave. So as of this date, there are two Obama appointees left, two Bush appointees left, and everyone else is a member who was appointed by Trump, either in his first term or his second term.

0:40:45 Matt: And we're seeing it. We're seeing that.

0:40:46 Aaron: You know, one of the reasons that's particularly bad, it's not just bad because for those not familiar, the BIA, like many circuit courts, issues its decisions by three member panels. So you could still draw a panel of, you know, some of these Trump appointed BIA members are also reasonable jurists who I may disagree with, but I don't think they're fundamentally trying to get one up on the law or don't care about the law. But the key distinction now is that to get a decision rendered as precedent in immigration court, sorry, in the Board of Immigration Appeals requires a majority vote of the BIA members. So as of today, more than a majority of the bia has been appointed by the Trump administration. And that means that the system has been biased in favor of this more conservative viewpoint of immigration law. And who can even vote on these decisions, to disagree. And that means that everything has been skewed away from one particular view of immigration law and towards a different one. And that one is one that is far more punitive, far more harsh, where exceptions that have been built into the law are gone, and where the BIA is even willing to overturn 30 years of precedent on bond

0:42:01 Aaron: Just because the Trump administration asked them to do it. Yeah.

0:42:04 Matt: To get to that in a minute, but I wanted to mention in practice, just seeing in the last few months, and be careful not to mention any specific details, but something as simple as it is now a crime in that country to be gay, right? That should be changed country conditions, I think, by any definition to reopen an old order to get an asylum case going, right, for somebody that previously was not comfortable talking about any of this to be able to come forward and say within the past year, which is exactly the standard we're talking about, right that you should be able do that something as simply as that, right. That I think pretty unquestionably constitutes changed country conditions, just to give you one example of a recent denial I've seen. And also just no discretion whatsoever is what we're seeing. And DHS is appealing things in ways that we haven't seen them appeal before. So even an immigration judge's grant, so people can understand this, even if you're granted status, it's a rare kind of thing, obviously, because in a criminal system, obviously, if you were acquitted, you're acquitted. The government doesn't get to appeal. But if the judge relieves your deportation, it can still be appealed by DHS and it can go up to the Board of Immigration Appeals. And that's why I'm concerned about this blockage at that level.

0:43:01 Ad: [Ad break 3 — ad music]

0:43:01 Matt: The bond issue you mentioned, we've talked about this a few times on the show, and it is one of those things where you just look around and you just wonder. And we've had quite a few of these. I know that everybody who's paying attention to the news has had things like this where they've looked around and said, well, how can they just say this is how it is? But to understand, and I want to point out too, when you say appointed, just for listeners, Board of Immigration Appeals members are hired, essentially. Appointed kind of makes it something to go through. I mean, I know you know that, but I just want to make sure it's very clear to everybody that we're not talking about Senate confirmation. We're talking about Pam Bondi handpicking people and putting them in a job, hiring them essentially as DOJ employees, which is fine. That's the system, but it's very different from getting somebody through confirmation. So you have this board really flexed on this and took an argument that was considered to be a fringe argument that nobody had really thought to make in any serious way in 30 years since the IRA -IRA passed. It became Law 97, as far as I know. I know there was some talk about it in some federal register or something, I don't know, some 30 years ago at some point, but this was not something, thing as far as I know, the idea that people that came over the border without permission who are in INA 236 proceedings are somehow now magically in IANA 235 proceedings. And I'm going to mangle this because I'm not the best at this kind of thing, and I don't want to bore everybody with it. But the short version being that the law as we knew it, as everybody understood it, as the government had argued it for many years, as judges had interpreted it, and as nobody else had ever seen it, suddenly we're saying that these people are completely ineligible for release on unbond. And as just an absolute sea change, just seeing the earth move underneath you in that kind of way, it's still disorienting to me. It's been more than a month now, I can't get my head around it, that

0:44:38 Matt: The BI actually went there.

0:44:38 Aaron: And I think one thing to really emphasize for people just who we're talking about here is oftentimes we're talking about people who've been in the country for 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, who are undocumented. Yes, but they don't have any other disqualifying factor. They don't have any criminal record that would bar them from bond. And you have to also look at the history of this. And you have to look at the fact that historically for the first really century and a half of immigration law, if you were arrested in the interior for violation of immigration laws, you had a right to seek bond. And in 1996, Congress first passed laws limiting that right to seek bond, but limited it pretty clearly to people with serious criminal records. And then it said also to people who are arriving at the United States. And it uses that verb, the gerund, arriving. And then they also separately in that law said applicants for admission are ineligible for bond. And they said that, you know, if you do enter illegally, you're kind of permanently an applicant for admission. But they also said, again, the only people who are ineligible for bond are those arriving. And so the government's arguments now are that someone who's been here for 25, 30 years is permanently arriving in the United States because by law, they are an applicant for admission still. And that just doesn't make sense. And I think one federal judge had a good analysis of this is they said, if the law says that everyone who is arriving at a movie theater must purchase a ticket, well, if somebody snuck into a movie and was caught halfway through, would you say that person was still arriving at the movie theater halfway through the movie? No, they're sitting and watching it. Even if by law, they would still be deemed as an applicant for a ticket. They're an applicant for a ticket, they still have to purchase a ticket, all applicants for tickets must purchase the ticket. But when you're halfway through through the movie, you're no longer arriving at the movie theater. You're in it. You'RE watching it. And that's sort of what the government has done here.

0:46:18 Matt: It was a good analogy, right? Yeah.

0:46:39 Aaron: They've sort of taken something in the law that I think was very clearly intended to address some weird legal quirks of pre-1996 immigration law precedent and trying to find this bizarre argument that someone who's been here for 25 years is still arriving in the United States.

0:46:55 Matt: A bizarre argument that the board was... I mean, and immigration judges, many of them were happy to pick up, not around our area, but generally speaking, immigration judges in many places, and then and the board was happy to pick up itself. And just when you're asking about what it's like as a practitioner right now, that has been, of the many heartbreaks that we're facing right now that is the biggest one, is literally the day after that decision, having to say, yesterday, before the decision came out, you would have had an incredible bond case. We would have been talking about getting you out on minimum bond, potentially. We're talking about somebody with a pending asylum application, no arrests, young kids, married, here for many years. And that's a lot lot of our cases. And suddenly having to tell somebody like that, that they are completely ineligible and that there is no argument we can make to have them released on bond. It was very hard for me to be able to say out loud. I was getting emotional while I was thinking about, you know, just complete reversal. And, you know generally our clients trust us when we say these things, but I could tell there was skepticism of how could that be? How can that possibly be that I don't get a chance to tell the judge why I need to be back with my family?

0:47:52 Aaron: And I think that's something that the American public, you know, when people hear that, they get outraged because it's not how they think the the system should work.

0:47:58 Matt: And of course they should.

0:47:58 Aaron: If you are someone who has extensive equities, who's been here for so long, you have family here, you've never committed a crime in your life, you haven't done anything violent, you maybe even entered the country legally on humanitarian parole and yet can be held without a bond hearing. Now, of course, again, if you entered legally, it's a totally different decision, matter of QLE, that they decided earlier this year to also strip those people of their right to a bond hearing. So I think when I talk to my friends who are still immigration lawyers, you know, people who I started with and came up with, also what I hear about this is just the ground crumbling from people's feet is also impossible to represent somebody or significantly harder to represent somebody in a world where what you tell them as legal advice on Monday might be false by Wednesday. And what you tells them with legal advice on Thursday in response to what happened on Wednesday might be false by Friday.

0:48:56 Aaron: And how do you as a lawyer navigate that world in which the policy landscape is shifting dramatically, constantly, and with very little rhyme or reason? And also when you have federal judges saying, yeah, you're right, this is illegal. And then the Supreme Court with no explanation whatsoever coming in and saying, yeah, we'll just let it go ahead anyway for now. Yes.

0:49:19 Matt: No, that's a pretty good summary of where we're at. I do have have historically low blood pressure and marijuana has been legal in Massachusetts since 2013 without further comment, I get through. I've been doing okay, but it is hard. It is a difficult time. And of course, it's nowhere near as difficult as what our clients are going through. I certainly never want to compare our struggle to the chaos and just the anxiety. And I'm sure you know, but the absolute overwhelming anxiety that we're feeling from these communities that we work with, that we serve, that our staff really have been trying to do what we can to support because I think there's a lot of very effective psyops going on right now with ICE and with ICE detention. And I mean, obviously there's, I'm not saying it's fictional, there's certainly a lot behind it. It's really happening, but they've done a very good job of convincing everyone that they're just around the corner and that ICE is going to be everywhere.

0:50:02 Aaron: And this is actually an interesting point that I want to touch on really quickly. The goal of the Trump administration is to scare people into leaving. You look at their press releases, you look at the things that they say. So one figure they cite is a sort of, I think, likely false estimate that two million people have left already, either been deported or chose to voluntarily leave. I don't think that's figures, right? But it's definitely some people have chosen to leave.

0:50:26 Aaron: And if you look at the math of mass deportation, right now, this year, there may be on track to 300 ,000 to 400 ,000 deportations in 2025. That would be a historic number, higher than any previous administration. But it would also be something that would require them to keep up that pace for 20 years in order to actually deport everyone who's in the country without status, 15 to 20 years at that rate. And that's not something that they want to brag about because they claimed they'd hit a million deportations a year and that by the end of Trump's first term, everyone would be deported, which of course is not going to happen. And if you look at Chicago, Operation Midway Blitz, their numbers now are, they say, 15 to 1 ,800 arrests. Well, Chicago has 150 to 160,000 undocumented immigrants. So in a month, they have managed to arrest about 1% of the undocumented population. And some of those people are sort of semi-documented people as well, not even necessarily being even counted in the undocumented population. So they would have to keep up the pace of that operation for 100 months, for seven, eight years. And that's not doable. So you're looking

0:51:41 Matt: Really

0:51:41 Aaron: At the reality of the numbers that they're hitting is that they would still have to be doing this for 15 to 20 years or more before they were able to actually deport the entire undocumented population. They want communities to be afraid. And even if, because of course, even if your individual chance of being arrested is low, if you're a stand, you know, just a random garden variety undocumented immigrant in the United States, you go to work every day, you care for your family, you don't get into trouble with the law, you're not driving illegally, you are doing, you now, everything you can to stay off the radar, your individual change for being apprehended in one of these operations is still pretty low, statistically speaking, but it's high enough that I think a lot of people are worried. The administration wants people to be afraid because the math doesn't work in their favor. In four years, even if they manage to double the rate of deportations that they have now, there will still be millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. But of course, no one wants to have that specter hanging over their shoulder at any given time. And so they they use propaganda, they use these aggressive enforcement actions like Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, the Alien Enemies Act, these things that play out on TV very aggressively to send the message to people that you could be next. Even though statistically, the chance is still fairly low on an individual basis that someone is going to be picked up. It's hard to say how well this is goingto work because most undocumented immigrants have been here for over a decade. They have ties to the community. They've got family here. They're got jobs here. They've friends here. Their whole lives are here. And that's having a very significant impact on communities.

0:53:27 Matt: Is. And I know that there's been some research done on this, that at some point, if there is enough of a mass deportation campaign, there is like a significant number of people who will leave voluntarily. Obviously they won't feel welcome and they'll feel completely unsafe. Just in our final minutes here. Is there anything that gives you hope about any possibility past this time that we're in right now for immigration policy and immigration reform?

0:53:46 Aaron: We are reaching a moment where people realize we have to change the laws. And the backlash against the Trump administration on immigration is significant. That does worry me to some extent because we have seen acts of violence against ICE officers and ICE officers against people. And my concern is that things may get worse before they get better. But the average American looking at what Trump administration is doing and how they are targeting immigrants, how they're carrying out this mass deportation operation is not happy about it. And I think that's because in order to carry out a mass deportations operation that aims to remove 4% of the US population, you have to inherently engage in tactics that most people find un -American. You have to adopt police state tactics. There is no world in which you can round up 13 million people and not fundamentally change the kind of country that we are in a way that Japanese internment fundamentally changed the United States in a a way that so many of the serious civil rights abuses that this country has done in the past all changed this country. And so I think when I look at how people respond to the Trump administration, when you see well -meaning people who have never really thought about this topic very much, even those who might support deportation, for many people, taking a look at masked agents, grabbing people off the streets, shoving screaming families into the backs of cars and then driving off and smashing into other vehicles on their way away, they

0:55:24 Aaron: Look at that and they say, this isn't what I want. And that really shows the way in which we go forward. Enough people say, This isn't the country we want to be. And we have to change things. And maybe eventually Congress gets off his act and does something.

0:55:41 Matt: That's where I'm at with it too. And I mean, just seeing ICE's numbers right now, popularity, just in terms of people thinking they're doing the right thing, going the right direction, it's something like 34 % or something even now. AndI hope that people continue to see it. We are going to about to see a massive false force multiplication here within the next year or so, right?

0:55:57 Aaron: Yes. So one major thing to keep an eye on is the funding from the so called One Big Beautiful Bill Act. ICE got $45 billion for for detention, which has allowed them to expand the detention system to an unprecedented level. And they also got $29 .9 billion for enforcement and removal operations. And that includes hiring. They say that they've had over 100 ,000 people apply for these jobs already, and they want around 10 ,000 new ICE officers on board. That would be unprecedented. It would double the size of the the ICE workforce. And that's going to change how things operate because they have loosened recruiting standards. They're explicitly recruiting people on claims of protecting the homeland from invaders and on culture war issues. And so you're going to get a lot of people who take the job because they want the money because they're offering $50 ,000 signing bonuses to people who who stay on the job for three years, and you're going to get people who take the job because they believe in this vision of eradicating, you know, as Trump says, the enemy within.

0:57:04 Aaron: And I think that that will further shift the ICE workforce away from professionalism. You're goingto have a lot of the more typical law enforcement officer types pushed out or at the very least sidelined. We've seen things like this before in the Bush administration. They doubled the size of the Border Patrol in four years, And there's a phenomenal article in Politico from a decade ago called The Green Monster that really documents how that changed the culture of the agency, because you had at one point one senior employee who'd been there for more than a few years for every like four new recruits or some some crazy ratio like that, where you essentially institutional culture sort of disappeared because everyone knew suddenly you had as many new recruots as you had veterans. Ends. And that changes an institution. Now, that means that in the next three years, the Trump administration is going to have more resources for immigration enforcement than any previous administration in history. But it doesn't make them invulnerable. It doesn't mean that they can suddenly do everything that they want without obstacles. For example, a lot of reporting suggested they wanted to have 100 ,000 detention beds online by the end of the year. They're not going to hit that number unless they get an additional 30 to 40,000

0:57:27 Matt: The green Green monster. Great piece. Yeah. And

0:58:19 Aaron: Beds online in the next two months, which I don't think that they can. So they are running into obstacles. There just aren't as many detention centers and jails as they hoped, building new ones, putting new soft-sided facilities. So tent camps online is harder than it seems. Finding land to do that, personnel, all of that takes time. And there's a real possibility they hit the end of the four years that that money is available for because that $75 billion is only available through September 30th, 2029, and they haven't spent it all. You know, it's like Brewster's Millions, if you remember that movie, where the idea is you have so much money, can you spend it all in a short amount of time? And the answer is they might not be able to, even though, yes, three and a half years is a long time they've got, or sorry, a little bit more than four years they have to spend that money. But $75 billion is just a crazy high sum of money for an agency whose normal budget was $10 billion a year.

0:59:18 Matt: Totally agree that I think the more people see this, the less they're going to like it. I really have to believe enough in the integrity of American people to that degree. But I know that whatever happens at the American Immigration Council will be watching, and I know you'll be keeping us updated. So anything you want to plug in the way, any way we can support what you're doing? Great.

0:59:36 Aaron: Yeah, so I would say go to our website, AmericanImmigrationCouncil.org. You will find resources there if you're a lawyer or if you'RE just an average person. We write our fact sheets for people who don't know a thing about immigration law. So if you want to know how the system works, what are the basics of it, what does it mean to be put into removal proceedings or immigration court, we have fact sheets for you. We also have practice advisories for lawyers who want to dig into specific topics. We have a litigation page where you can learn what we're doing. And we also have a weekly blog where we post three or four times a week about breaking issues in immigration, helping explain what actually happened. And if you are a lawyer or if you speak Spanish, we also have the Immigration Justice Campaign, which is a project that we co-run with AILA, where we help get volunteer lawyers who have never done immigration before, usually, and help place them with cases to represent an individual person. Or if you're not a lawyer, you can help in some other way. You can act as a translator or an interpreter. And we have a wide variety of volunteer opportunities. And that's the Immigration Justice Campaign at immigrantjustice.us.

1:00:44 Matt: We'll link to all that. And I can say in both of my jobs, I've really appreciated all of the resources you just mentioned between the fact sheets and practice advisories you guys are just putting out an amazing volume of just thorough and very well researched and put together work like you said it's quite a team of lawyers you got there so uh keep it going really appreciate this and just love talking to you today thanks so much for coming on

1:01:01 Aaron: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.