I think one thing to consider is — Michelle There’s two Michelles. We were waiting for you to do that. I know. Michelle C. I’m Michelle Cottle and I cover national politics for New York Times’ Opinion and I’m here this week with my fabulous colleagues, opinion columnists Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg. And we’re going to take a temperature check on the Trump resistance. And one of the key areas where it’s gaining ground, which is mass deportations. So, friends, Hello. Welcome. Thank you for doing this. Hi, Michelle. Hi, Jamelle. Howdy, Howdy. All right Michelle, we’re going to start with you because you have been out in La reporting on the local resistance movement to Trump’s deportation efforts there. So what drew you and what did you find out. Well, I think what drew me is that I’ve been wanting to write about maybe call it resistance 2.0, which I think looks very different than the resistance. The first time around, and has led some people to think that maybe there isn’t as much of a resistance to Trump as there was in his first administration. I think that’s probably true among elite institutions, but there actually is a huge amount of activism going on. It’s just below the surface, or in ways that are harder for outsiders to see. As I’ll explain. So earlier this month, I was going in New York to immigration court. So basically ICE used to not there was an agreement or a policy that ICE wasn’t going to go to sensitive places like immigration court, because obviously it dissuades people from following the law. So that’s changed. ICE is now you go to immigration court in New York. You go there and anybody can go there. They’re open to the public. And, you see these knots of men looking like foreign paramilitaries. Basically, they’re in of plainclothes with store bought tactical vests and balaclavas or Gator masks that come up to their eyes. They’ve got hats and they wait for people to come out of their hearings, and then they grab them. And when you talk to lawyers and volunteers, the rules or the norms change from day to day. So at first, they were only grabbing people when their cases were dismissed, which having your case dismissed is a good thing in Criminal Court, but it’s not a good thing in immigration court, because it basically means that your claim to asylum has been dismissed. So when that happened, they would take people. Then that changed. And the judge would in some of these cases, the judge would tell them to come back for their next hearing, but nevertheless, they walk out the door and people grabbed them, and sometimes they grab one member of the family and not the other. And you can’t really tell why, because their claims are conjoined. And you can imagine how terrifying this is for the people waiting in a waiting room to go into their hearing, seeing one person after another dragged off. And so what you’ve seen is kind of ordinary people in New York volunteer to just be there to do what they can, and what they can do is pretty limited. They can take down their immigration ID number to file so that somebody is following them through the system. They can get an emergency contact information so that they can call their loved ones and inform them that their person, that the person isn’t coming home, has been sucked into this system. They might be able to in some cases, connect them to lawyers. So anyway, so I’ve been reporting on this, but my understanding for what I was hearing was that these efforts in New York are far more widespread in L.A. because the deportation regime is just much, much more aggressive in L.A. And one of the things that really struck me being there, they have this kind of rapid response network where people are constantly patrolling their neighborhoods to see if ices and the area to alert their neighbors. And one of the things that really struck me, though, was when I was interviewing the mayor, Karen Bass, and she told me that she relies on the rapid response network to know about what ICE is doing in her city, because they’re certainly not telling her anything. And so, I mean, I think the ethos of this movement is that kind of no one is coming to save us. There’s nobody is kind of exercising power on our behalf with a few exceptions. And so people feel like they have to organize to protect their neighbors as best they can. And that was a moment when she said that really drove that home for me. Just listening to Michelle describe ice activity in courthouses. The mask that the snatching. My blood is boiling. Like I’m genuinely furious. Like very angry. Just like hearing it described. And it’s not like I haven’t been watching videos and reading descriptions. So it’s not new to me, but just thinking about it and thinking about what a profound violation it is. Like, whatever, you have to have immigration enforcement. Sure if you think that sure, we got to have immigration enforcement, whatever. But immigration enforcement that involves essentially kidnapping people. And I think I don’t want to but I think it’s important to just underline these are people who are doing everything they’re supposed to do. The people who show up for their immigration appointments are by definition, following the law. Yeah to your point, this discourages people from showing up to try to do the right thing because it’s the obvious target. They are following the law and are being kidnapped, stolen and whisked away by these public servants. ICE agents work for us technically, but who are behaving in an imperious and unaccountable way, hiding their faces, behaving like an actual secret police. And it’s just it is infuriating. And if Americans witnessed it in any other country, they would immediately clock what it is. The only reason why there’s any hint of a debate about what’s happening here is because of some perverse American exceptionalism. But if this were taking place in any other country, Europe, South America, Asia, it doesn’t matter where if we’re happening any other country, we would immediately clock that what we’re witnessing is a disappearance program by an unaccountable secret police. One of the organizers in of the National Day laborers organizing network that I was spending time with is from Salvador and kept saying to me, this is familiar. I know what this is. So next to the economy, immigration was considered one of Trump’s strengths in the last election. And he was pretty harsh about it. He didn’t make any secret of what he planned to do mass deportations. So he campaigned on mass deportations, and he campaigned on removing 20 million people. Of course, there are not 20 million undocumented immigrants. There are around 10 to 12 million, tops. And so the 20 million number was always inclusive of a large number of people who are here legally and following the law. I think, and this is to some extent, Trump’s political superpower, I think that people just didn’t believe it. I think that’s really I think he would say we’re going to deport 20 million people. We’re going to have mass deportations. And what voters heard was we’re going to remove all the criminals and secure the border. But everything will be basically the same. And there’s this delta between what he Trump and Stephen Miller especially intended in what voters heard. That explains, in my mind the sharp decline in his standing on immigration and deportations. Because if you look at the polling, he is underwater on both. And I think it has everything to do with the fact that what voters heard was the status quo, except when they turn on the TV, they don’t see images of. People at the border, that’s what they thought. But what’s actually happening, of course, is kidnappings and renditions of people that most people know. I saw a recent poll that said a quarter of Americans are worried that someone they know loved one friend, whomever coworker is going to get caught up in this kidnapping program, this deportation program. And that just speaks to both the expansiveness of it and the fact that you can’t do this kind of thing without touching the lives of ordinary people, of citizens. I mostly agree with you, Jamelle. I think the thing that I maybe see it a little bit differently is that I think there was, in this case, two groups of Trump voters there. There are certainly Trump voters who look at those videos of say, a mother being ripped away from her screaming children and will post online, this is what I voted for, right. There’s people who eat up the sadistic kind of deportation porn that official White House sites are pumping out. And so I see Trump’s superpower a little differently. I see it as he was able he had the trust of both the people who said he’s going to do exactly what he said he’s going to do, and the people who thought that it was all just hyperbole, or that he just meant criminals. And so that was always a kind of fragile coalition, because you’re only going to make one of those two groups happy. Yeah, I’ll say that. I do think that the people who are like, this is what I voted for. I think that’s a little bit of saving face. I do think that’s a bit of well, this is I don’t I think there’s a sadistic part of the. No, there’s a sadism there. But I also think there’s a bit of like, this is unpopular. People don’t like it. It’s dragging down the president. And so they have to say, well, this is what I wanted. Obviously, this is what I like. Rather than having to reevaluate any of the choices that they made. I think that’s a more optimistic view than I have. It’s not optimistic. I mean, what I’m saying is that when confronted with any kind of divergence between what they may be anticipating and what’s happening, they’re doubling down on their. I just I do think that there are people who love it. Yeah, I think we’re talking about a question of degree. What percentage of people are the ones for whom this is their dream scenario, and they want to go farther. And then I do think a huge chunk of people were like, well, I didn’t think they were going to come after my kid’s soccer coach. That’s terrible. OK, so let me push back a little bit and say, when this first started in L.A., there was this huge uproar nationally. It got a lot of attention. Elected officials all over were standing up and bitching about it. It has not remained in the public eye quite so much. What are the odds of this activism activism gaining traction nationally, and what will it take for us to see what’s happening in L.A. take off broadly across the country. So I’m not sure that whether the media is covering protests is the best gauge of how widespread they are. Because again, these protests are of hard to cover in just like the gut of TV news, especially. If you have 12 people keeping watch on a Home Depot and that’s happening in 10 different places, it’s not a real spectacle. The reason I expect it to catch on nationally is because I think that the tactics we’ve seen in L.A. are going to spread nationally. I mean, L.A., I think was a demonstration project of what they intend to do. And ice has just gotten this unbelievably massive infusion of money in the tax bill that Republicans just passed and is going to be bigger than most countries militaries. And so they’re going to have to do something with all those people. And so I would expect what we’ve seen in L.A. to spread to other places. I mean, already in New York, they’ve talked about flooding the zone here in the last couple of days. And so as it spreads, I think you also just see a lot of people out there who are horrified by what’s happening, but feel powerless or don’t know where to I don’t know what to do about it. They don’t really think that kind of marching and chanting is necessarily going to have any effect. Obviously this is a generalization, but the resistance. The first time around, when Trump was first elected, was very focused on trying to shore up and influence institutions. So you had indivisible that was formed by two former Hill staffers when Trump was first elected and organized people by congressional district. A lot of the work they did was trying to influence their representatives. People don’t necessarily have the same kind of faith that there’s any institution that’s coming to save us. And so people are looking for things to do. Can I say real quick, just on the question of national media coverage, that I think it’s important to remember that there’s CNN, there’s ABC, whatever. But there’s also local news affiliates and a lot of this stuff is being covered. Are there still local news affiliates. There’s still local TV news 100 percent. And local TV news actually does cover this stuff on the regular because it involves community members. It involves public spaces people are familiar with. So it doesn’t even necessarily have to catch on in the National media for people to be aware of this and aware of it in the sense that it’s pervasive. The one last point I want to make, I want to say on this is thinking about the huge amount of funding ICE has just received from Congress and the administration. Pre this ICE was having a hard time hiring and retaining people. It’s not like a great job in terms of things that make you feel good at the end of the day. And there are people in ICE right now who are like, well, this isn’t necessarily what I signed up for. I didn’t sign up to kidnap someone’s abuela. And I do wonder can shovel money at an agency, but I do wonder if they’re going to be able to hire the 10,000 people. They say they’re going to hire. Like, that’s actually not easy. And when you consider that local municipal police departments around the country are having a hard time hiring new people, when the U.S. military is having a hard time hiring people. The thing about the past couple years of a strong labor market is that a kind of job that requires a lot of psychological stress, is just not appealing to people and also not really necessary. See, I look at it from a darker perspective is that they’ve shoveled all this money into it. They’re going to hire all these people. They’re going to wind up hiring people who are really into it. And there are a lot of people out there who you just don’t want doing this. But I would think that if what you’re talking about is a kind of self-selection where the people who have moral qualms about this don’t want it, that just leaves more rooms for the people who the cruelty is the point for them. But it is. Oh, go ahead. I’ve heard some one day when I was at immigration court, there was a public defender who actually, I don’t know if she was a public defender, but a volunteer lawyer or who worked for a group that sent lawyers. And she was really, really good at engaging some of these ICE agents and kind of trying to draw them out and talk about the law and I mean, and it was fascinating both how little some of them knew about the law. They had been repurposed from the southern border. But also there was, as she drew them out, as she talked about the people that she represented and what they had been through, there was just this even just in that short amount of time, this kind of change in the vibe. They were still grabbing people, but there wasn’t the same kind of barking like aggro. It just – I had the sense that she had planted a tiny seed of unease in some of these people’s minds, which I imagine again, how much that is ultimately going to make a difference. I don’t know, but I do think that there is going to be, for some people, a moral injury. And I suspect that they’re covering their faces because it’s intimidating. But I also wonder if some of them are covering their faces because they’re ashamed. OK, so as we’ve noted, this is what the Trump administration campaigned on. Clearly, disorder at the border was a real issue and people wanted it under control. And fair enough. Draconian or not, the administration seems to have figured out how to slow the border flow. So do you think even with these, even with these harsh videos and protests. I mean, is it fair to say that this could still work for Republicans at election time. I mean, we’re also talking about a good stretch of time before anybody can make them can even think about making them pay for this. So, I mean, on the one hand, these are such egregious human rights violations. These are such egregious constitutional violations that he said he was going to do a lot of things. He said he was going to try a bunch of former officials for treason. That doesn’t mean that if he went out and put Obama in handcuffs, we would say, well, promises made, promises kept. That said, I also think that we can see in the polling that it’s not working for them. We could see that he’s way underwater on immigration enforcement in particular. It actually drives me crazy when people say, well, he figured out how to stop, how to stop chaos at the border. Yeah, he did that at the cost of ending asylum in America. And so that’s why previous presidents couldn’t do it, because they didn’t want to end America’s place as a destination for people seeking — They were following the law. Right. And so the only way that they could kind of get the border under control would have been with a massive surge of resources to have more judges and kind of officials to process people since they didn’t have that, they were unable to get things under control. But yes, by ending America’s status as a place that provides asylum and instead shipping people seeking asylum to foreign gulags and keeping them in the most degrading and sometimes deadly conditions, they have been able to get the border under control. I suppose that there’s people who are going to give them political credit for that, but I don’t see the need to join them in that. Or there’s people who just won’t be there. I know they won’t be there driving vote. But I think one thing to consider is Michelle. Michelle, we were waiting for you to do that. I know Michelle C. you said the words you used for chaos at the border. And I want to lob off the border and focus on the chaos part, because I think that the thing that was actually driving the dynamic in favor of Trump last year was his sense of chaos. Voters do not like chaos. One of the things that drives me a little crazy is whenever people talk about the 2020 protests and they say, well, the 2020 protests, contributed to Trump, blah, blah, blah, wokeness, blah, blah, blah. But when you actually look at what happened, in terms of public opinion, the 2020 protests were a huge drag on Trump that if they didn’t happen, Trump would have been in better standing for reelection. And the mechanism there is not so much broad public sympathy with every single message coming out of them, but that people don’t like chaos. They saw all the protests and they were like, this is disorder. And I don’t like it. And they blame the incumbent for the disorder. People blame whatever disorder and chaos was at the border on Biden. What Trump has done is traded one form of chaos and disorder for another. He’s taken whatever may exist at the southern border and then just plopped it into American cities. And so if he’s just trading one form of. Chaos and disorder for another, there’s actually, I think, a good amount of evidence to suggest that this is going to be harmful actively harmful to him because he isn’t getting rid of the chaos, he’s just redistributing it. So here’s my question to you, which is that, yes, that is true. But what it’s going to come down to is a PR war, because what his argument is that, as you note, he’s transporting it into Democratic led cities. He’s pitching the idea. I get it in my feed. I’m sure you do all the time. Lands in my inbox. Look at the chaos in New York. Look at the chaos in California. He’s intentionally targeting blue areas. So he can plant the idea that Democratic run cities are a mess that need to be overseen. So it comes down to in part, who can work this issue the best. So my question for both of you is, so how could the Democratic Party have shaped the narrative better on immigration instead of being reactive to it. And do you think are you optimistic that they’ll be able to do this going forward. So I mean, on the one hand, obviously, I’m not a political strategist. I don’t think that there’s any signs, again, that what Trump is doing is working for him politically. I mean, it’s interesting if you listen to say, Joe Rogan on some of this stuff. Because him being aghast at what he’s seeing is, maybe a more important, much more important indicator than a bunch of New York Times’ columnists being horrified by what they’re seeing. I think that part of when I speak to activists, they feel so profoundly abandoned by the Democratic Party and so disillusioned by the Democratic Party, because the Democratic Party, I think, has internalized the idea that this is a good issue for Trump. But we need I think, Democrats who have a positive vision of immigration who aren’t just talking about how we can control, who are pushing back on the idea that is increasingly prevalent in MAGA world, that immigration is just a kind of net loss for this country, and that we have given up something important about our heritage and are turning into some kind of third world shithole. Which, by the way, it’s bizarre to me that if your real concern is America’s devolution into a third world country, that you want to elect the white Idi Amin. But I also I just I think that you need. How do I put this. Public opinion on immigration, you see, is really thermostatic right. And it’s really kind of reactive to whatever the people in power are doing. So you actually see in polling much more support for immigration than we’ve seen in years. And Democrats, I believe, and I think I can’t tell you for sure if this is the right thing to do. Politically, I can tell you for sure. It’s the right thing to do morally is that they should be picking up on some of that energy and making a positive case for the role of immigrants in our society for what they for the way that they enrich and revitalize this country. And the way that what Trump is doing is an attack on not just their rights, but our rights, foundational principles of what at its best, it is meant to be an American. Yeah I think Michelle is absolutely right to say that the issue here. Part of the reason I think Trump gained this advantage with immigration is because Democrats ceded it to him. They said, oh, well, the polls seem to be moving in his direction. And these are big applause lines for him. So we also need to adopt this tough on the border language by adopting kind of the framing of this all Democrats did was further cede the issue space to Trump, gave him space to mold it and dominate it and shape it even more. If you want an especially dramatic example of this, look across the pond to what’s happening in the U.K. where Labour has adopted basically the kind of Brexit-ish migrants are harming the country language of Nigel Farage. And what it hasn’t done is brought those immigration skeptical voters back into Labour’s camp. What it has done is expanded, ferocious and minded figures, political standing in the country. So here I think Democrats need to as Michelle said, have a positive vision for immigration and not just a kind of well, we’re going to protect the border, but also immigrants are nice and we love them. But a full throated, this is a nation of immigrants. Immigrants contribute to this country that iPhone you’re holding in your hand is the product of immigrants like the things that you love about this country are in large part a product of immigrants. I just wrote recently today about JD Vance’s vision of citizenship, and how he cites the Civil War all the time. The Civil War, a war won by Union Army filled with immigrants. Like it’s a part. It’s a deep cut, but it’s I mean, right, but it’s just key to his mythology. right. I don’t know, to me, I mean, I totally take what everybody’s saying. To me, this just smells like the Democrats approach of. We just got to explain to you why we’re right. Well, this isn’t explaining. I mean, well, you do actually do have to explain to the public why we think we’re right. But also I would make the I would make the argument. I would make the argument that it’s when Democrats have been, for lack of a better term, this woke on immigration that they’ve done better. Joe Biden did better in 2020. Hillary Clinton, we’ve had three Trump elections. Hillary Clinton now we can say did second best against Trump with this explicitly like pro-immigrant kind of rhetoric. And she reached a standing with Hispanic voters that no Democrat since has been able to match. So maybe it is simply the case that what’s missing in the political environment are just national political figures willing to say for can we curse on this. Like, oh, you can curse. I encourage it. Come on willing to say like, f–, we’re going to have immigrants here. All right, so before we end this, do we think this energy is going to be sustained long enough to make Republicans pay a price for it. Because as long as everybody’s mad right now, they don’t give two shits. Again, I just think that I feel like there’s such a disconnect between us, Michelle, because I feel like you’re talking about the next election. I understand how important it is believe me. But I also think that the framing of a lot of people I’m talking to and I don’t think it’s wrong, is that we’re in a kind of situation of authoritarian breakthrough where these aren’t the kind of things that can necessarily get fixed in the next election. And I don’t know that there is I mean, I think we should demand and assume that the next election will be free and fair. But I also just think that we’re not in the kind of system that we were in a year or two before. And so the question, I mean, this is a problem for the Democratic Party and that there is this a huge disconnect between this activist energy and the party itself to make sure they understand elections have consequences. And we’re in this mess because people thought, oh, it doesn’t really matter who we vote. I think that that’s right. But I also think that you’re talking I think that the way a lot of people feel is like their communities are under a hostile occupation of people who hate them, and they want to know how they can defend their neighborhoods. And so it’s just a step away. You’re going to see this energy spread, I think, again, because there is just a kind of, among millions and millions of people, a very deep horror over what’s going on and a desperation to do something, even if they don’t know exactly what, whether that in turn. I mean, I think that my guess is how that will manifest immediately politically is in a demand that the Democratic Party change. You see that in Mamdani. I wouldn’t be surprised if you see a lot more primary challenges, the anger out there towards, a Democratic leadership that people feel is feckless and they feel like is not fighting for them and is not defending them is just so profound that I think that we will have a kind of a Democratic Tea Party. The political consequences of that, I think, are hard to predict. Although, I don’t even know if it’s necessarily a question of moving to the left. Because Elissa Slotkin has articulated this really well, that there is, there’s the left right divide, but there’s also the divide between people who think that Trump is an existential threat. And people who think that kind of fixing this as an election away. She’s often touted as the moderate future of the party, but she’s also in the first camp. And I think that Democrats want to see more people like that. Yeah I would say that as far as maintaining any kind of anger or momentum going into the next election. I Michelle’s right to suggest that if the administration continues along these lines, it’s kind of spread organically. But I also think that this is part of the role for political education. I think we have a habit as Americans just in general, of thinking of political parties only in the context of an election year. But it’s like, well within the capabilities of the Democratic Party as fractured and decentralized as it is, individual state Democratic parties, local Democratic parties to begin working first with community groups to do this kind of vigilance work to reference the antebellum America again after the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, you had what were called vigilance committees in lots of Northern cities that worked often with maybe northern Whigs or the Republican organizations that were coming to for at the time to basically watch out for slave catchers. Entirely possible for local Democratic parties to do that kind of work. It’s entirely possible for state, the state Democratic parties and National Democratic parties to basically, do maintain a kind of media presence devoted to disseminating these images of these ICE kidnappings and these ICE assaults. That’s a thing they can do. So my advice, and this has been kind of my advice for some time, is just for Democrats to think more creatively about what they can do. And there’s a lot you can do. There’s no rule that says that you have to wait until the summer before an election to do messaging. You can engage in this stuff year round all the time. And if I were talking to people who funded Democrats, I would say that should spend less time looking for a liberal Joe Rogan, whatever that means, and more time funding the kind of information dissemination and community groups that are actually going to be able to activate when an election comes. OK I like this. You have an action plan. I’m always about creative action plans, so we’re going to leave it there. I thank both of you. Thank you so much for all of this. Thank you. Happy to be here.