What is it like to live in fear of a knock on the door rather than in hope of a better future?
It’s not something most of us would want to think of as the American way of life, but it’s the reality Donald Trump wants to impose on millions of immigrants — themselves victims of a broken system — who have become integral parts of the communities across the United States.
It’s a “solution” that offers nothing of substance, not for those looking to build on the American dream, not even for those who voted for Trump out of a deep-rooted sense of defenselessness that they felt only a strongman could address. It can only intensify the chaos and collapse that drove that emotion in the first place — a distraction that lets Trump and his cronies rob us all the more easily.
Anand talked on “Morning Joe” about the impact of the first week of Trump’s expanded ICE raids in cities across America, and what it might mean to live in the country those raids usher in.
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MIKA BRZEZINSKI: A federal agency stepped up immigration enforcement operations in cities across the country again yesterday. That included Dallas, Denver, Seattle, and Honolulu. In Chicago, approximately 10 separate teams of federal agents fanned out across the city to conduct operations there.
NBC News rode along with one of the teams in Chicago and was granted rare access to the ICE processing facility where detainees are being taken to be photographed, fingerprinted and held until there are deportation flights.
At the same time, the number of undocumented immigrants rounded up by authorities on Sunday was much higher than first reported. NBC News has learned immigration authorities made close to 1,200 arrests on Sunday, up from the 956 reported by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement on social media. And nearly half of those detained do not have criminal records. That's according to a senior Trump administration official.
President Trump and administration officials have repeatedly said they would prioritize the detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes. Anand, your thoughts on this?
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: I think there's always this gap between what they say they're going to do and what they do. And that is because what Donald Trump is interested in is using genuine public concerns that are out there and weaponizing them to then do, you know, much more sweeping things for which there is no mandate.
So in this example, I was on with you last week when we were talking about polling that shows there is support in the country for deporting undocumented people with criminal records. There is support for that. So Donald Trump will talk about that and then kind of run on that.
And then, as you're seeing in the reporting just now, what they actually do behind the scenes, they trust will not really get out. And it's part of a different agenda they have, which is really to make America white again, which is part of their attack on everything from birthright citizenship to any number of programs, aid freezing, various forms of aid that real people depend on. They have an agenda to make it harder for regular people to live in this country and for immigrants to have to live in worry about whether they have their papers.
We are going to become a kind of check-your-papers society in the blink of an eye. And there's no mandate for that, but that is what folks like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and others around the president actually want. They want to change the very fabric of this country, something for which there is not that same mandate.
JONATHAN LEMIRE: So, Anand, we know there's a showman part of this. We know that this is partially a spectacle for political points. How do we know it? Well, the latest evidence is newly confirmed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem right now is live tweeting. She's live tweeting an immigration raid in New York City, right here in New York City, right now. She's posted a few times. this morning, landing in New York, and now they're carrying out this raid.
She is saying the person that this latest clip shows is someone who does have a criminal record. But there's also been reporting that Donald Trump is unhappy, actually, that these numbers aren't higher in the first week of his term.
And that raises that tension point. If this does go, and more and more, we've already seen it happen some, but more and more people who do not have criminal records are indeed rounded up. Do you think that's the flashpoint for some sort of real pushback, public outcry, the sort of protest movement, at least to this point, we haven't seen in this second Trump term?
ANAND: Here's what I think the real tipping point is and will be. The thing that I would say Donald Trump deserves most praise for is that he intuited in 2016 and then again in ‘24, that there was an emotion out there among many, many people of feeling undefended, of feeling unseen and unheard by the system, of feeling defenseless against chaos and entropy.
And that political emotion was underserved, was underrecognized by those of us in the media, was underserved by the Democratic Party, was underserved by his own different flavor of Republicans. And he was able to see that. People wanted to be advocated for.
Now, I have every quibble with every actual thing he wanted to do to advocate for them, but he won for a reason. He won because he was able to see that. When you start having Gestapo raids in America, and we start becoming a country where, as in East Germany, a knock on the door is the thing people are thinking about instead of the brilliant idea they want to go create, then we are moving very, very far from the president worrying about what regular people need.
He is distracting people with this flurry of activity. But none of this, none of these images you're seeing are gonna make your life better. None of these things — contrary to popular belief — have anything to do with the still high price of eggs. None of these things will make it easier to start a business. None of these things will make it easier for people to get the education they need, change their lives, leave their kids better off. This is all a distraction shock and awe as you said earlier so that Donald Trump can do one thing — and you saw at the inauguration, telegraphed to you — enrich his billionaire cronies enrich his oligarch friends.
That is what he is actually doing when he's not busy releasing his crypto coins, and all of this is sort of bread and circuses for people to stare at while he's robbing you from the back.
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