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Front Burner Transcript for November 18, 2024

Host: Jayme Poisson

JAYME POISSON: Hi, I'm Jayme Poisson.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. Gonna get the criminals out.

JP: For the past week, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has been assembling the team behind his second term. You have probably seen those headlines. Former Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, who was investigated for federal sex trafficking last year, for Attorney General. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal vaccine skeptic, for health and human services secretary. Veteran and Fox News host Pete Hegseth for defense secretary. There's a lot that we still don't know about what these appointments might mean for governing priorities, but there is one area of policy that we do have a clearer picture of.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: I will rescue every city and town that has been invaded and conquered, and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail. Gonna kick them the hell out of our country as fast as possible.

DONALD TRUMP: We're gonna have to seal up those borders and we're gonna have to let people come into our country. We want people to come back in, but we have to... We have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally.

JP: Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump's single biggest talking point was immigration. Heading into a second term, it's clear that it's a policy priority. And as we talked about on our show, it's an area that could have big implications for the U.S.-Canada border. For a look at what the next four years of American immigration policy could look like, I'm here today with Nicole Narea. She's a senior reporter covering politics and immigration for Vox.

[Music: Theme]

JP: Nicole, hi. It's great to have you. Thanks for being here.

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

JP: So as I mentioned, Trump has started naming his cabinet, including the people who will be implementing his border and immigration policies, which is what I really want to focus on with you today. And I think maybe a good place to start would be with Tom Homan, whom Trump has named his so-called border czar. Can you tell me a bit about Tom Homan and his background and his views on this file?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah. So, Tom Homan's been on the scene for a while now. Was a big figure in the first Trump administration, but, you know, started out working his way up through the immigration agencies. He was a border patrol agent in the '80s, then he actually headed up U.S. immigration and customs enforcements removal operations arm under Obama. And notably, Obama still holds the record for the president who has deported the most immigrants in a single year. [JP: Huh.] So, and that was under Tom Homan's purview. But then under Trump, he served as acting director of ICE. Was never confirmed by the Senate in that role, but-- and would not have to be confirmed in this new role that he's supposed to be taking on in the Trump administration.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM HOMAN: I've worked for six presidents, starting with Ronald Reagan. Every president I've worked for said they're going to secure the border. President Trump actually did it.

NICOLE NAREA: One of his most famous moments was when he was defending the first Trump administration's policy of separating immigrant families at the southern border. [JP: Mm-hmm.] There was a lot of sort of viral clips of him in Congress.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM HOMAN: You can't point out faults in the Trump administration when it happened--

CAUCUS CHAIR JAYAPAL: Mr. Homan. [bangs gavel]

TOM HOMAN: --under Obama administration. That's dishonesty.

[Jayapal bangs gavel]

TOM HOMAN: It's pathetic and it's sad.

CAUCUS CHAIR JAYAPAL: Mr. Homan...

SOUNDCLIP

TOM HOMAN: And you're the member of Congress--

REP. JESÚS GARCÍA: We agree on that.

TOM HOMAN: Fix it!

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: And so the recommendation of the many that you recommended, you recommended family separation.

TOM HOMAN: I recommend zero tolerance.

REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ: Which includes family separation.

TOM HOMAN: The same as it is with every U.S. citizen parent gets arrested when they're with a child.

SOUNDCLIP

CAUCUS CHAIR JAYAPAL: Please respect the chair's authority. The gentle--

TOM HOMAN: I respect the chair's authority, but the chair--

CAUCUS CHAIR JAYAPAL: [bangs gavel] Mr. Homan! Excuse me!

TOM HOMAN: But you work for me. I'm a taxpayer.

[Jayapal bangs gavel repeatedly]

TOM HOMAN: I'm a taxpayer. You work for me.

NICOLE NAREA: And now he's kind of taking on this sort of spokesman role for Trump in terms of talking about immigration. You know, he's been saying that mass deportations are going to be one of the first items on Trump's priority list when he is inaugurated.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM HOMAN: I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released in our country in violation of federal law: You better start packing now.

[crowd cheers]

TOM HOMAN: Another message to the criminal cartels in Mexico: You smuggled enough fentanyl across this country to kill 148,000 young Americans. You have killed more Americans than every terrorist organization in the world combined. And that's when President Trump gets back in office. He's going to designate you a terrorist organization and he's going wipe you off the face of the earth. You're done! You're done!

[crowd cheering]

NICOLE NAREA: But also has been sort of trying to narrow the scope of what that might look like. So he says that, you know, these are going be targeted, might involve workplace raids.

SOUNDCLIP

TOM HOMAN: There's parallel priorities. The priority-- The president's been clear on stage and I've been clear. The priorities for the deportation operation are public safety threats and national security threats.

NICOLE NAREA: He's sort of deeply steeped in the world of how enforcement actually works.

JP: Yeah. Just tell me a little bit more about what he's saying specifically right now. You know, have you learned anything new since he's been appointed about the direction that this might go in?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, I think at this point, he's done a very famous 60 Minutes interview that's provided more insight than I think we've gotten from any other Trump official around mass deportations.

SOUNDCLIP

INTERVIEWER: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?

TOM HOMAN: Of course there is. Families can be deported together.

NICOLE NAREA: But I think nothing new since he's been named to this position necessarily. But I think it's worth sort of explaining what this position might look like because [JP: Yeah.] it's not something that's really existed in recent administrations. Um, you know, Republicans have kind of sought to label Kamala Harris as Biden's, quote unquote, border czar, which is the role that Homan's supposed to be taking on. But it's kind of overseeing immigration enforcement operations across the immigration agencies. So, you know, I think he's going to be presiding over this mass deportations policy, but also just sort of the day-to-day operations of the immigration enforcement agencies. It'll be interesting to see to what extent he's also perhaps implementing the Heritage Foundation's agenda around this.

JP: Yeah.

NICOLE NAREA: The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think-tank behind Project 2025. Much has been made of that along the campaign trail this season. His name is on Project 2025. He's a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. And he-- that kind of suggests that he signed off on the immigration-related provisions in there. So I think there's a question of to what extent he's going to be implementing that agenda in Trump's second term.

JP: Right. And just tell me what those provisions are in Project 2025.

NICOLE NAREA: It ranges from things like dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and creating something new in its stead. Which is... I don't even know how that would work. It would be, you know, expanding quick deportations well outside sort of the immediate radius of the border; deporting people in sensitive zones like churches; ending these kind of large scale parole programs that the Biden administration has relied upon to provide protections for people from Venezuela; ending programs that they consider illegal, like DACA. There's just a whole agenda around Project 2025 that goes beyond [JP: Yeah.] what even Trump has articulated and what the GOP has articulated in its platform. And I think there's a lot of questions around whether really this is just the guidepost here for the second Trump administration.

JP: You mentioned DACA. Just for our listeners, can you just remind us what that is?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah. So it's the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was implemented under Obama. Basically, it was designed for people who came to the U.S. without documents when they were really young, when they were children, and who have spent their entire lives in the U.S. So we're talking about a population of people that's, you know, upwards of 800,000 people living in the U.S. right now.

[music]

JP: Most of the attention has been on the southern border with Mexico, but I do want to ask you about one thing Homan said specifically about Canada. He said that the border between Canada and the U.S. represents:

SOUNDCLIP

TOM HOMAN: An extreme national security, national security vulnerability on the northern border, and it's one of the things I'll tackle as soon as I'm in the White House.

JP: First, what is the extreme national security vulnerability to him? Did he give any indication of what he and the administration might plan to do vis-a-vis our shared border with the United States?

NICOLE NAREA: You know, at the southern border, at least, we've seen people not just from Central America trying to enter the U.S. via that border, but also people from all over the world. So we've seen recently, under Biden, people coming from China, from Ukraine, trying to enter the U.S. via the southern border. And he may be looking to the northern border as a similar vulnerability where people are going to Canada and then trying to cross over from the northern border and then claim asylum in the U.S. I'd also say that it's worth mentioning that under U.S. law and international treaties, it is legal to claim asylum in the U.S. just by stepping foot on U.S. soil. So there's sort of a, a deliberate desire to sort of misunderstand that law.

JP: I also wanted to ask you about another person that Trump has appointed who will be overseeing, handling this file, and that's Kristi Noem, right? [NICOLE: Mm-hmm.] Trump has named her as his head of Homeland Security, which is the department that actually handles immigration enforcement, among other things. And what do we know about her stances on illegal immigration and the border and what she will likely bring to this role?

NICOLE NAREA: I think Kristi Noem was probably selected because she's been a Trump loyalist for years now. She's the governor of South Dakota, which is not a border state, but she has articulated support for Republican immigration enforcement policies. But that said, you know, she doesn't have a lot of experience on this topic. She is also sort of-- was thought of for a long time as a potential contender for Trump's vice-presidential pick. But she's been followed by sort of a series of scandals, including one that involves killing her dog.

JP: She killed her dog.

SOUNDCLIP

REPORTER: Kristi Noem is hitting back at the firestorm raging over her shooting her dog to death.

KRISTI NOEM: She attacked me, and it was a hard decision.

REPORTER: The South Dakota governor tells Sean Hannity she had to put her dog Cricket down after the animal ate the neighbour's chickens and tried to bite her.

NICOLE NAREA: Ugh. Yeah.

JP: Uh, can't do that.

[music]

JP: So now that we've gone through these people who have been appointed, I want to talk to you more about what this could actually look like on the ground. So, how do you think that this could start rolling out? Like, just paint a picture for me.

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah. So, I think there's a lot of questions about what this looks like starting out. It is something that Trump has said he wants to start on day one, in terms of mass deportations. But, you know, right now we're looking at a population of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. But it's also worth noting that this wouldn't just affect those immigrants. You know, it's also their family members. We're looking at 5.5 million U.S.-born children who are living in households where there are undocumented immigrants. [JP: Right.] So...

JP: Like, what would happen to them?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, and it is a big question because, you know, if their parents, for example, might be deported under this kind of regime, would they stay in the U.S. or not? I was speaking to somebody from a think-tank in the U.S. who was suggesting that conservatively, he thinks that maybe a third of those children would remain in the U.S. if their parents were deported. But then there's a question of like, who takes on the responsibility of caring for them? For those children, this is sort of a form of potentially family separation. And from the first Trump administration, we know how disastrous that policy was when it was implemented at the border, and sort of the lifelong trauma inflicted on those children who were impacted.

JP: Right. Yeah, who were ripped away from their families and, you know, held separately. And there's still many, right, that still have not been reunited with their families.

NICOLE NAREA: Yes, there are still, you know, I think, hundreds, if not more than a thousand children that have never been reunified with their parents. And, you know, at this point, if we're taking vice president-elect J.D. Vance at his word, we're looking at an initial goal of a million deportations.

SOUNDCLIP

J.D. VANCE: You cannot have a border unless you're willing to deport some people. I think it's interesting that people focus on, well, how do you deport 18 million people? Let's start with one million. That's where Kamala Harris has failed. And then we can go from there.

NICOLE NAREA: So the scale of the potential family separation here could be much larger than what we saw in the first Trump administration, where there was, you know, over 5,000 families who were separated. I will caution, we don't know how this policy is going to play out. And it is so predicated on what resources are available for these agencies to actually carry out deportations.

JP: Yeah. Well, let's talk about that a little bit more. Like first, in theory, how might they go about finding... I mean, let's put aside the 11 million number for a moment, but even just the one million number, how would they go about finding these people and then removing them from the country? Like, what would that process have to be?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, so it would first involve probably the cooperation of local law enforcement agencies who may know undocumented immigrants who are here in the U.S. You know, like if they've ever had contact with law enforcement, be it just through a traffic violation or something else, that would be a potential way that these immigrants could get flagged. But there's also historically been a lot of sanctuary cities in the U.S., and I don't think that the politicians in blue states would necessarily want to cooperate with federal immigration authorities on that point. There is a question of to what extent the federal government's going to try to force their hand, because they are threatening to sort of take away grants and aid to these states who don't comply with federal immigration law. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

JP: Right. To try and force, what, the states and the cities to hand over names?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, basically. [JP: Yeah.] And to enlist, you know, their local police, their state national guards in this process of trying to identify people. It first involves their cooperation, which, again, big question mark. But then, you know, it's, we're talking about getting sort of ICE detention facilities ready to receive these people; the immigration court staff to levels that we haven't seen before...

JP: Right, because like a judge would have to hear each case, right?

NICOLE NAREA: So, yeah. Again, another question mark around this is, is to what extent Trump is going to try to use powers that allow him to bypass that process. So it's worth mentioning here that the legal authority that Trump is supposedly relying on is this 18th century law that's been on the books for a long time called the Alien Enemies Act, which would allow sort of the president to detain and deport non-citizens from countries at war with U.S.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. You hear that, Mr. Speaker? Get ready.

[laughter from crowd]

DONALD TRUMP: To target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operated on American soil. And there are lots of them. We don't have the same country anymore...

NICOLE NAREA: Obviously, we are not at war with any of the countries, sort of Central American countries, where Trump is trying to target these immigrants. So there would have to be legal arguments made there. But there is a notion that he might be able to bypass the requirement to go through the immigration courts to get these people out of the U.S.

[music]

JP: I feel like it's just probably worth noting here. I have heard Republicans certainly say that their first order of business would be to target criminals, people convicted of crimes, either in the countries that they come from or who have committed some sort of crimes in the United States while they're there, right? Like, that's where their focus is initially, not necessarily on, you know, a grandmother.

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, that's a good flag. Because I think, at this point, the GOP is saying that, you know, they're going to go after criminal gang members that are continuing to commit crimes in the U.S. -- for the most part, people who are [indistinct] either known or suspected gang members as one of their first priorities. However, it's not clear that they're going to stop there, especially given that J.D. Vance has set a goal of a million deportations a year. And also the fact that Republicans do consider it a crime to cross the border without authorization. It's not clear to what extent they will consider that going forward if they are able to sort of move past the initial priority of criminals.

JP: I just want to note for our listeners, we talked about how there's, you know, potentially going to be quite a bit of pressure on Canada to clamp down on people crossing from Canada into the United States -- something Homan has talked about, as we discussed. It cuts both ways, though. For us, too, there's also a concern that there will be a lot of folks who may want to try and escape what could potentially be coming for them and may be trying to make their way across the border into Canada. What might the fight to oppose these policies look like?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, I think that is an interesting question, because during the first Trump administration, we saw a lot of people mobilize against the Trump administration's immigration policies. There was a lot of protests around family separations, around the travel ban. And mass deportations promises to have sort of the same adverse human impact as those policies, but perhaps even on a larger scale. So a question I have going forward is to what extent the public is going to react to that. And it's interesting because the-- U.S. attitudes on immigration have changed pretty vastly over the last four years under Biden. You know, Biden came into office really running on a progressive platform that involved rolling back many of the policies that people considered to be inhumane under Trump, like the 'Remain in Mexico' policy, like the travel ban. And in four years -- partially because of a changing reality at the southern border, where we did see record levels of apprehensions -- people have turned against immigration in the U.S., um, with some level of confliction on their part. Because while we do see growing support for mass deportations, we see people say now a majority want less immigration to the U.S. We also see them say we support a pathway to citizenship for people who've been here for a long time. So I do wonder to what extent when confronted with the reality of these policies, when implemented, is the public going to lash out at this, at the Trump administration and stop what's happening. But in terms of-- one thing I worry about is, you know, to your point about migrants seeking to escape to Canada, is whether just by talking about it -- and I am very cognizant about not wanting to fuel this -- it is creating fear, and that people will, you know, self-deport in some respects. Because [JP: Right.] we've seen this in previous iterations of sort of mass deportation programs in the U.S. You know, in the '50s there was Operation Wetback.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: Dwight Eisenhower. Good president, great president. People liked him. I like Ike.

SOUNDCLIP

[archival clips]

DWIGHT EISENHOWER: It is the manifest right of our government to limit the number of immigrants our nation can absorb.

NARRATOR: Guards round up Mexican workers without identity cards and start them on the road back home.

SOUNDCLIP

NEWS PRESENTER: Hundreds of thousand Mexicans were packed onto busses, trucks and boats and dumped into obscure areas of Mexico with little in the way of possessions. No way to get home, and in many cases, without resources to survive.

NICOLE NAREA: Just knowledge of the program was enough for some people to say, Maybe I should just go back now. Or leave. And that may be deliberately part of what Trump is trying to do here. You know, even if there aren't the resources to deport immigrants in the numbers that he's planning to, maybe he's relying on the fact that some of them will leave anyway.

[music]

JP: These 11.7 million undocumented people living in the United States. I know it's a very unlikely assumption, but assuming that Trump and his administration actually accomplish a decent chunk of what they're promising here, what kind of impact could that have to remove that many people from the country? We talked about the familial impact, but also, these are people, many of whom are working in the United States, right?

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, financially there is a potentially huge impact. So I was speaking to some researchers who are estimating the cost of even just having to raise the U.S. citizen children who may be left in the U.S. at over $110 billion. And then there's also the sort of the loss of their parents’ productivity. These people are contributing almost $100 billion in taxes annually, which could hurt the U.S. economy and budget. And then there's also a lot of industries that rely on undocumented work. That includes agriculture, construction, food services, hospitality, personal services. And it's worth noting that these are some of the same industries that saw major labour shortages in the pandemic, and these people were considered, you know, essential workers. So in the event that these people are deported en masse, then you would see potentially a huge hit to the U.S. economy and to employers that rely on these workers. So definitely a huge economic impact. But it would also be a huge disruption to the social fabric depending on how this plays out. I mean, if we're talking about immigration agencies raiding workplaces and finding people at their homes and forcibly removing them from their families and their work, that creates images that I think a lot of people would be uncomfortable with, including their neighbours. So-- Their U.S. citizen neighbors. So I think the human impact of these kinds of policies can't be understated.

JP: Nicole, I want to thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it.

NICOLE NAREA: Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Music: Theme]

JP: All right. That is all for today. I'm Jayme Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.

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Trump's day one: mass deportations? - Transcript

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