What, what's, what's going on here?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a cultural thing.

Um, you know, it really got going, um, under Secretary Noem's leadership, that they were going to have quick, rapid responses to any controversy, any criticism online would be responded to, and they were gonna have a very aggressive social media strategy.

And that leads to problems when officers are not honest after incidents happen.

And I, I do think that, you know, it's not Secretary Noem necessarily or the head of the DHS social media team that is making up lies about what happens in these scenarios.

They are actually getting this information from somewhere.

And m- in m- most of the time, some of the framing language I think is something generated, um, by, by the higher-ups.

Is that purposeful? How has the department been working under Mullen?

What was that case?

Yeah.

So Haiti was designated for temporary protected status, which means that Haitian nationals without permanent residence in the United States could apply to receive, uh, temporary protected status.

And, uh, over three hundred thousand had received, uh, temporary protected status under, under that designation under the Biden administration, which was based on, uh, effectively the fact that there's no, um, rule of law, there's, there's no, uh, functioning government.

Uh, we have an anarchic, uh, situation in Haiti, and it would be dangerous and irresponsible to send people back there.

The, the Trump administration was supposed to, according to the statute, review the country conditions and then only terminate temporary protected status if it determined there had been a change in the country conditions.

It, it didn't do that, and the Supreme Court said, "Well, it doesn't matter because Congress also said the decision by the secretary is not reviewable," and included-- That includes all the precursor decisions leading up to the decision.

How do Americans feel about immigrants, and what are the arguments for immigration that you have seen through your work that could maybe change people's minds on the issue?

Were you expecting this decision?

I was, based on the oral argument.

Look, the, the Supreme Court has made it clear they want to give the president significant discretion on its immigration agenda, but there are limits, and he hit up against the limits here with this birthright citizenship order, which itself just asserts the authority to, uh, limit birthright citizenship in this way and really didn't provide any kind of legal basis for it in the order itself.

They had to kind of work to come up with a theory under which they could, uh, claim this, this power, and the Supreme Court just said no.

Uh, this is a violation of the Constitution.

The plain text as well as the historical context, uh, would indicate that this is not, um, what, uh, the founders and the, the framers of the 14th Amendment would have understood is, uh, a, a limit on birthright citizenship.

And I must correct the president in your opening.

activities.And David, what did you make then of Justice Thomas writing in his dissent that the majority, quote, "repurposed the 14th Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights"?

Uh, so I'll pause there and pass it along to David.

Thanks, Tommy.

Uh, that was excellent.

Um, my essay, uh, on immigration has five basic, uh, sections or premises.

Uh, first, the, the Founders believed free immigration was central to the purpose of the founding of the United States.

And second, they understood the consequence of that view would be that people of all classes and nations and religions and political views would be coming to the new country in huge numbers.

And third, this belief was not merely aspirational.

Uh, another- a big-picture question from McKenzie asks, "Do you think future administrations would be likely to re-embrace the founders' original ideals? If so, what policy shifts would signal a genuine return to those constitutional roots?" Big question, but at least maybe to turn the tide, at least to start going in the right rather than wrong direction, what do you think might, either of you, could be a reasonable first step?

history.

My basic view here is that it is inconsistent with a free society, with limited government, for the state to conscript private people into carrying out its goals.

The left has for decades tried to eliminate the difference between public and private actors.

So we end up with woke mandates on businesses to micromanage their demographics.

divest from non-woke industries, mandate health care or vaccines, and on and on.

If the government wants to engineer society, it should have to do so without conscripting us, free people, in its efforts.

Targeting Americans isn't immigration enforcement.

until the point at which they did not have access uh you know to to the cheap labor um and so you know i think in the first instance just to answer your question um the immigrant population is uh the the lion's share of the problem but i think the analysis could then be applied to temporary visa programs such as the hua h2b um to the extent that employers have access to low cost foreign labor that will keep wages down or lower than they would otherwise be for domestic citizen workers and forestall the investments necessary to drastically increase the productivity of a sector that has seen rather stagnant productivity rates.

So what was the thinking? What was the stated thinking behind that?

Yeah.

So I, I mean, actually the, the 40 countries, it's pretty evenly split at, at this point, uh, between, uh, Muslim countries and, and, and other, uh, countries that, you know, fell in disfavor for whatever reason.

Uh, the 40 countries includes countries like Cuba and Venezuela.

Um, but you're right.

It, the, the broader ban, uh, encompasses, um, uh, a very significant chunk of Africa as well as, uh, many Central Am- and, and South American and Caribbean countries.

And the thinking with that ban was, uh, really, uh, these people, for whatever reason, are going to become a tax on the taxpayer.

We could have always shut down that border, uh, were we able to." So what would be your kind of response to that argument?

What specific policy changes are driving that gap?

Well, the biggest one by far is the suspension of immigrant visa processing for 75 countries around the world.

These are for, mainly for family members of US citizens who are coming to reunite with their family members here.

Many are spouses and minor children of US citizens.

In addition to that, they've also suspended all, uh, entries from about 40 countries, so 92 countries now face a de facto legal immigration ban, uh, by this administration en- encompassing about half of all legal immigrants to the United States.

In addition to that, he's banned almost all refugees except for white South Africans, but even them, even that group are, are being admitted at just about 10% of the rate that was previously, uh, being admitted before under the Biden administration.

So those are some of the main ones, but every category.

Who are these people that are getting turned away? And also, are they finding other ways to legally enter the United States, or are they just turned away completely?

I'm Senior Legal Fellow here at Cato.

And I'm David Bier.

I'm the Director of Immigration Studies and the Sell's Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy at the Cato Institute.

What happens after that?

Yeah, look, uh, from, from our perspective at the Cato Institute, you know, my, uh, predecessors in my position [chuckles], uh, were called to testify by Republican members of Congress, you know, throughout the 1980s, 1990s, on behalf of, uh, Bush administration and Reagan administration proposals to reform the legal immigration system, expand legal immigration, uh, legalize people who were in the country, uh, illegally, expand the high-skilled immigration system.

Uh, one of my immediate predecessors in the early 2000s at Cato was an INS administrator under the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration, and so the idea that there was this huge, you know, you know, uh, libertarians were not, uh, accepted as real, uh, you know, part of the coalition or, you know, people who couldn't have good ideas on immigration, I mean, this is... couldn't be further from the truth.

And from my perspective, I mean, I worked, uh, for a Republican member of Congress in 2013, 2014, and 2015, and during that period of time, he was openly working on bipartisan immigration reform.

He's a Republican member, uh, Raul Labrador from Idaho, Republican member of Congress, uh, deep red state, totally permissible, um, you know, for him.

He got reelected.

The, the...

Will you just explain to folks what that means? Because we talk about, like, profiling and, um, it, it wasn't that long ago when we thought racial profiling was bad.

Um, and in my view, I think it makes it more likely that, you know, mistakes happen, overspending happens, and waste happens.

Yeah, I mean, when I look at that part of it, it really explains why the Democrats' demands are so long because really at this point, there's no incentive to negotiate on the Republican side because they already have the immigration enforcement money that they want.

They have the policies that they presumably want or at least are okay with.

And so when you're looking at this negotiation, it's really one-sided.

You know, to the extent that there's implications here, it's for TSA, it's for the Coast Guard.

It's, you know, Coast Guard actually did receive money in the one big beautiful bill.

So to some extent, that is funded as well.

And I think a lot of the other, uh, reforms that you kind of point to are pretty, you know, sensible, common sense ideas.

Right.

I don't know, I never [laughs] listened to it.

But I do remember listening to that message as, you know, a senior or junior in college and thinking, "Yeah, that resonates with me.

That, that's my views on the matter, too." And so there was a first principle kind of basis to being pro-immigration in the Republican Party all the way up until really Trump killed it.

But that is, you know, that's the core, and it goes to Reagan, you know, carried on through Bush.

Even Dole, if you look at his, his speech at the Republican National Convention, it's the same message.

It was a message of inclusiveness.

Right.

They're treating them the same way as they would, like, somebody who's a drug smuggler that came across the Rio Grande.

Grande.Yeah, I mean, a-absolutely.

Uh, if you look at...

If you break it all down, I mean, we've had, we had, uh, about eight million people, immigrants total, legal and illegal, under the Biden administration over four years came to the United States, legal and illegal.

Uh, if you break it down, about three to four million of those were people who, uh, you know, came across the southern border.

About half of those, o-of the three to four million, were people who had entered legally, uh, through a, a, a process for asylum, through, uh, uh, requesting permission to enter.

Uh, they received something known as humanitarian parole, uh, or they were, uh, allowed to enter as a result of a, uh, an asylum claim.

You do not need to have your dick pat down by people at the airport, um, because you had your belt on still by accident, that we can go a different path." So let, let's hear a little bit more about the path you would, you would see, the, the crazy libertarian path here.

But it is [laughs] still.

I mean, it's a surprise to a lot of people, but, like, w- the first, uh, publication that I, I published under this administration in January of 2025 was a prediction.

And I don't like doing predictions, but the, it was a safe bet that they were going to cut legal immigration more than they cut illegal immigration, and that has already happened, and it's not even close.

I mean, if you look at, you know, border patrol arrests, they're down maybe 20,000, 30,000 per month.

The total number of people entering on, you know, a humanitarian statuses, refugee status, other permanent statuses, is already larger than that.

I mean, you're talking about on, in just the first month, they cut about 40,000, um, uh, entries through the parole programs that are, uh, a legal avenue for people to come to seek safety in the United States.

You, you had them, uh, completely eliminate [laughs] uh, the refugee program, except for white South Africans, so that was 125,000 over the course of the year.

Wouldn't it be in the Trump administration's best interest to actually, I don't know, hire more immigration judges rather than firing them so that the cases can be appropriately and speedily adjudicated?

Who is this affecting right now, and has the United States seen policies like this before?

Well, we absolutely have seen policies like this before.

During the first Trump administration, when he basically shut down almost all visa processing in 2020, that was- created a huge backlog of people who had to be processed under the Biden administration for, uh, put people in very similar situations.

I, I encountered people who had to actually move out of the United States to be with their loved one in another country, and we're seeing similar decisions being forced upon people today.

If you look at the totality of it, about half of all legal immigration, permanent immigration from abroad, has now been banned by these policies, so one out of every two immigrants.

If you look at African immigrants, in particular, legal immigrants, again, it's almost 70% of legal immigrants from...

You're looking at the statistics from 2024, have now been banned, uh, by this administration.

What do you make of the legality of the government's blanket pause here?

January 28th and they were already moving quite far away, it seems like, from, uh, violent criminals as an overwhelming priority.

Yeah, absolutely.

If you look at what the President did on his first day in office, he signed executive orders that rescinded the requirement for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to prioritize people with serious criminal convictions or public safety threats, national security threats-... to really open up the population of people who they want to deport.

If you look at how this campaign has been prosecuted and carried out by this administration, they have not focused on the violent criminal convictions and- and- and the people who are public safety threats.

They have made it easier to target the people who've gone through vetting, who've gone through processes to get legal status.

The people who are going to immigration court hearings are not the people with violent criminal histories who are trying to evade detection by Immigration and Customs Enforcement because they know they're not gonna be eligible for anything.

And so, you can go down the list.

ICE is completely out of control and the administration likes it that way." Um, so before we play these- these Tom Homan clips, which seems to expand the definition of who's a public safety threat, what were you thinking listening to those callers or hearing those texts I read out?

What's your reaction to that?

Well, first of all, this was a horrific attack.

Uh, no one condones it.

This is an individual who should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Unfortunately, what the president has taken away from this ta- attack is that all of the 53 million, as he says, immigrants to the United States, legal or illegal, are now, uh, seen as suspicious, as people who should be driven out of the United States, even denaturalized.

If you look at the rhetoric in that post, he can't find a single good thing to say about any of the immigrants from any country in the world.

And that's really what's different.

happens.What trends have we seen in immigration recently and what impact could these changes that we're seeing from the President being proposed, what could those have impact on these immigration trends we're seeing?

And now, this bill will dramatically increase ICE's capabilities on top of that.

Under this bill, it... by 2028, you are talking about spending... effectively, 80% of all federal law enforcement dollars will go to immigration enforcement.

And so, when you think about the scale that we are prioritizing this type of, uh, of enforcement, um, over all other types of crimes, you know, everything you can think of is being deprioritized to focus on deportations, and primarily, eh, it's going to be deportations of people without any criminal record, without any arrest record.

Can you walk us through how all that works? And is it relevant that Trump keeps calling Mamdani a communist?

Yes and no.

The, the- It's not relevant in the sense that, uh, you know, he should prevail in any, uh, attempt to denaturalize him.

But unfortunately, it's not the kinda situation where you're just gonna get laughed out of court and, you know, this is not something that you should be concerned with at all, because the requirements to naturalize include some very vague language that President Trump is undoubtedly going to latch his attack on these, uh, political opponents under.

And, and the main one we're talking about here is the requirement that you demonstrate that you're attached to the principles of the Constitution and well-disposed to the good order and happiness of the United States.

And there's also a provision for revocation that interprets that language as having membership in the Communist Party or another totalitarian party of, uh, that is, you know, opposed to the principles of the United States.

And so, this is where you kinda get that hook of, "He's a communist.

When Trump says, "Some people say Mamdani is here illegally," and that, "We're gonna look at everything," as, as in that video clip that we just played, that he's got all the levers he needs to stop Mamdani, it's very plausible that his people might already be exploring denaturalization as an option, right?

So, 100 days in, what do you think defines President Trump's immigration agenda?

His immigration policy is really driven by the overarching goals of this administration, which is to consolidate as much power over the US economy and society as possible.

So, if you look at it, it's not about legal versus illegal or arresting legal residents or arresting people who never violated any immigration law or any other laws.

We're, we are targeting US citizens, taking away citizenship from babies born in the United States, we're eliminating due process for people, uh, charged as removable in the United States.

So, now your birth rights, your birth certificate is no longer going to be a defense for you if you are being targeted by ICE, and then you're not gonna get any due process by this administration either.

They're gonna, uh, deport you even to a foreign prison without any due process, and we're already explicitly hearing from the president plans and considerations to target US citizens for removal to El Salvador.

Do you expect an escalation between federal agents and state and local authorities?

We're already seeing the escalation with the t- uh, with the arrest of a, of a state judge.