Paco Alvarez: Tanvi, as expected, immigration has been a large priority for the Trump administration. What has stood out to you about how the administration has pursued its deportation agenda? And is there anything that you’ve been seeing on the ground in terms of immigration policy that you feel has been overlooked?
Tanvi Misra: So I think when we last spoke, one thing that I had been keeping my eye out for was the way that immigration raids and arrests would be used as a messaging tactic. And that certainly has come true, as we’re seeing the way that federal law enforcement has been deployed in places like DC, Chicago, LA, places where there is a significant infrastructure of service providers. Of course these cities have a long history of immigration and they have a lot of large undocumented populations, but they also have significant infrastructures, sanctuary laws and other mechanisms and tactics and boots on the ground that make the mass deportation agenda a little bit more difficult.
I think one thing that we discussed last time was that even with increased resources, ICE just does not have the capacity to carry out that kind of agenda. And so, local law enforcement and these street raids, getting people as “collateral” is the tactic that I had assumed that they would be using as they had last time. But of course, the scale to which it’s been happening — I think what has been, not like overlooked per se, but what has been difficult to comprehend or wrap my head around is the scale to which the division of labor in the federal government has broken down, in that so many federal enforcement agencies have been diverted to doing immigration enforcement. And so many agencies within DHS as well that were not primarily enforcement agencies are now doing enforcement.
And so that kind of force multiplier effect, I don’t think anyone really understood to what extent that would happen. And I feel like that has definitely the scale of that it has been hard to kind of wrap our mind around, and there’s been some good reporting around that, but yeah, that’s certainly I think more than anyone expected. So that’s one thing.
And I think the second thing I’ll just say as like sort of a top line point is the externalization, as academics often call it, of the border and border controls, which means striking all of these like very opaque and secretive agreements with both like regionally and across the globe in some cases, with countries to take in deportees that are not citizens of that country. We had seen a little bit of that in the last administration. There’s certainly precedent for that, but the scale to which it’s happening again has been really, really I think that’s been much more of a centerpiece of this administration than I think people had previously expected or understood.
Alvarez: Kathryn, in our first conversation, you talked about the potential damage the new administration could cause to education. What do you think are some of the most important stories coming out of the Trump administration’s education policy?
Kathryn Joyce: Yeah, there’s been so much happening on that front. When we talked last, I had just wrapped up a long piece kind of looking at how what had happened to the New College of Florida maybe was primed to kind of be the model for what would happen under the second Trump administration. And I think that has happened in spades. And it’s happened so quickly and so much has happened that I had to go back and look at some documents just from earlier this year to sort of refresh my memory of a small slice of the things that have happened. I mean, obviously, kind of the big thing is that they are trying to essentially do away with the Department of Education, offloading a number of its functions to other departments, probably where they’re going to be handled in a way that is much worse for many of the people who were protected under various programs that the DOE used to have. So that’s the big picture thing that they are doing.
In terms of some of the other stuff that’s been going on, I mean just about a month and a half into the new administration, the DOE, which incredibly is being led by a former professional wrestling CEO, but they they put out this guidance saying that the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action a couple of years ago needed to be interpreted much more broadly to ban basically anything that any policy, any procedure, any programming that touches on anything that could be cast as DEI, which is a huge number of things. And so you started seeing people struggling to figure out how to comply with this, lots of colleges and universities overcomplying. I think we’ve seen that across the board with many colleges and universities so far. But you saw the impacts of that – a black alumni organization that was going to have a reunion for black graduates from past years that got canceled. Just recently in Alabama State University banned a student magazine, two student magazines, one focused on female students, women’s issues, and one focused on black students and black issues. One college canceled its lunar new year celebration. So you’re seeing this happen in all of these radical different ways.
And then there’s kind of more subtle things that are happening as well. And I think we’ve been seeing this building on the right for some years. This pressure that they think too many too many people are going to college period, we need to cut that number way down. And so in very real ways, I mean there is this push to get back to a place where going to college or university is you know the privilege of the elite class. It’s something that only certain people can access or certainly a liberal arts education is something that only certain people, certain privileged classes should have access to. And then you’ve got kind of all these tiers that it really seems like they’re building below that that a lot more people need to be pressured to go into vocational training sorts of programs. There are moves now to try to redirect some Pell grants, which helped me to go to college, for one, to, you know, workplace training. There is big pressure coming from state legislatures on public universities to start cutting programs in the liberal arts. It’s not phrased that way, but that is the outcome, and to instead start tailoring the offerings that their university has much more explicitly to meet the state’s workforce needs. So money will still be there for nursing programs, obviously exceptionally important, but not for languages, not for history majors, not for anything in the humanities, a lot of the social sciences as well. So yeah, I mean I feel like there’s so much that has happened that you need you need a graph to keep track of it, which is part of the intentional kind of overwhelm strategy of of the Trump administration.
Alvarez: Adam, it feels like a lot of what the Trump administration has been doing with regards to climate change, public lands, and oil and gas development has been overlooked compared to other issues. What have you seen coming out of the administration that the past year that’s been lost amidst the chaos?
Adam Federman: Yeah, I was thinking about that a little bit as well, just in terms of the kind of attention that environmental issues and environmental policy got during Trump’s first term when there was I think less certainty about how the administration would handle climate change and climate science research in addition to environmental policy more broadly. And of course this time around there really was no secret in terms of what the administration was planning to do. So I think essentially from day one, they’ve followed the game plan of undoing essentially everything that the Biden administration had tried to achieve in terms of somewhat modest reforms to climate policy through legislation and also through the Department of the Interior, which is what I primarily focus on. We’ve essentially seen them adopt the same kind of playbook that they did under the first Trump administration. Except I think the biggest difference this time around is that they have far more competent people in positions of power to execute their agenda. And I think that sometimes that can get lost in the fog of sort of chaos and corruption that we see every day in headlines around some of the biggest stories that are taking up the attention of the mainstream media. But just like for example, the EPA and the Department of the Interior, which probably oversee the biggest sort of environmental policy agenda in the federal government.
They’ve been much quieter this time. The first go-around, you had Ryan Zinke at Interior, who created a lot of problems for the administration through a number of different scandals and IG investigations, took up a lot of oxygen. And similarly at EPA. So this time, they’ve been much more effective, I think, in advancing the administration’s agenda. In terms of policy, I don’t think it’s been hugely different. You know, we’ve withdrawn from the International Climate Accord and have pursued essentially a maximalist agenda on expanding oil and gas development anywhere and everywhere possible, even to the dismay of some very pro-oil and gas states and their delegations. For example, with this recent offshore oil and gas leasing plan, Alaska and and Florida have sort of pushed back against the department’s efforts to just open up everything in the Arctic and and off the coast of Florida.
Alvarez: Adam, you’ve done a lot of reporting on the repression of protest movements and especially like what it’s looked like under the Trump administration. And I think one of the ways, tying it into what Kathryn and Tanvi were talking about, one of the ways that the Trump administration has weaponized this repression is through things like higher education and immigration. And I guess I’m just curious if you guys have any thoughts on that.
Federman: Yeah, I mean I think clearly the administration’s sort of approach early on was to use immigration as sort of the guise under which it would crack down on protest, and we saw that most sort of obviously with the detention of student protesters. Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, I think some of the first to be detained in these sort of high profile ways. And you know those cases have since been challenged. But I think the administration was clearly using both its sort of disdain for higher ed and its attacks on immigrants to also go after voices of dissent. And I think that was sort of the opening salvo, and now we’ve watched as the administration has broadened out to go after you know essentially what they describe as – in the case of Antifa, for example, you know, the administration has declared it a domestic terror organization. And after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the administration also put out a national presidential memo which characterizes any sort of anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-American rhetoric as somehow at odds with you know what the administration’s project is. So they’re expanding their war on protest and dissent in ways that are truly terrifying and certainly something to watch as we enter year two.
Misra: Yeah, I can really quickly add into that. I was thinking about that as Adam was talking, responding to your first question, because I was like, that’s one of the overlooked things, this like increasing encroachment, and the national security presidential memo, and this like expansion of what is terrorism and who is a terrorist and what is a terrorist organization and what does it mean. This material support for “terrorism,” which is a very vague and nebulous sort of idea and can be and we’ll certainly see, I think, when applied, and as it has in the past, some litigation.
But yeah, I think that’s a a big sort of Venn diagram overlap where you’re already seeing it playing out, and now you clearly see it in that memo outlined as you know a priority or a signpost for where the administration wants to head with this, you know, and this might include we’ve seen again already seen this rhetoric. Anyone who’s tracking ICE, anyone who’s court watching has been – in New York, The Guardian came out with a story about how the FBI had an informant in a local court watching group. And this was a group of people, very like disparate people. They’re not all like militant activists or anything like that, not that they should be surveilled, but like just a disparate, sort of diffuse group of people that was being surveilled and their group chats were being recorded on Signal. So I just feel like that whole nebulous territory of tagging everything as terrorism is going to both become more and more consequential in the immigration policy field, and then through that have I think ripple effects in all of these different policy arenas. Like I think we’re gonna see it in academia, we’re gonna see it with a crackdown on dissent across the board. Yeah, and I I feel like it just reminds me of something that when I was starting to report on the speed, a source had said to me, which was that immigrants are used as the testing grounds or like the pilots for a lot of like authoritarian tactics and techniques, and then those things have a mission creep to the broader citizen and native population. So I just feel like we’re seeing that play out in very real terms.
Joyce: Tanvi and Adam said such smart things. I don’t have a lot to add on to that. But listening to them made me think, and I’m not usually the Pollyanna in any conversation. But how amid all of these attacks on protests, and I’m I’m thinking of, you know, all the videos that we’ve been seeing from Portland shoving protesters who are clearly outside of you know a no trespassing line, shoving them across the line and then swarming them and grabbing them. Things like that that look so egregious. And then kind of in comparison, like looking at how many you quote unquote normie people seem to be being mobilized by that. I remember seeing some fairly uplifting footage from suburbs of Chicago where you had there was one where some guy wearing sports pajamas came out and you know, just absolutely berated ICE and made them leave. And so I don’t know. I mean, I maybe just looking a little too hard for silver linings, but I think amid this crazy crackdown on the right to protest and kind of this expanding definition of terrorism. And as Adam noted, like the really bewildering way that they are defining this, that they are including anti-Christian, anti-American, what vague concepts those are in this weird kind of effort to label things domestic terrorism. I think amid all that, you know, there is some backlash happening in corners that you might not have expected.
Alvarez: What has been what has been like reporting on the Trump administration, this go around compared to Trump’s first term? Are there challenges that you see journalists facing or that you’ve faced yourselves in your own reporting that you didn’t anticipate?
Federman: Well, one thing we haven’t touched on yet is just the assault on the federal workforce and sort of shock and awe tactics that the administration has used from day one. And I think for every journalist, or I’ll speak for myself, that has meant losing a lot of sources, both because they’ve been furloughed or fired or because they’ve left voluntarily. So I think on the one hand it’s become more difficult to find individuals in these agencies who are able to tell you what’s really going on. And then I think the level of fear is so much greater this time around. I mean I had sources early on who just said I can’t talk this time. I’m just keeping my head down and and you know, I don’t want to lose I don’t want to lose my health insurance benefits, so I’m hanging on until I retire at the end of the year or whatever, or they’re on administrative leave, so they’re not even working, but they’re still more or less unwilling to talk about what’s happening for the same reason. So I think it’s hard to convey to people just how terrifying it is to be an employee in these agencies right now. So I think the reporting’s gotten considerably harder than it was before.
Misra: Yeah, I’ll co-sign that. I have a number of sources at USCIS, for example, that have taken the buyout or have voluntarily retired. And a lot of that is because the agency’s mandate basically is changing now. And of course, so it’s becoming much more enforcement oriented when these were folks who came in to administer, they were career people who came in to administer, like give out visas and give out green cards and do things like they wanted to sort of be a part of the processing machinery. They didn’t really sign up to do enforcement. So there’s that sort of moral shift and that reckoning among those employees, but then also just the actual workplace has become so much more difficult to navigate with all the flexibility being taken away and all of these, you know, confusing messages. It’s really hard to know who’s in charge, who’s navigating all of this.
There’s also people at CBP and ICE that would be much more responsive even if they weren’t like, you know, all that forthcoming. And now they’re just there’s such a tight clamp at HQ that it’s been really difficult to get even just a response. And this might be also to do with the fact that I’m like a freelancer and so I don’t have an institutional email that they might be more likely to respond to. But I used to get responses pretty regularly, I’ve been you know on this beat for like a decade at this point. And I’ve I’ve noticed a marked shift in that kind of response. So I would totally agree with that.
The one other thing I would say which has been a very sort of shifting away from the sourcing aspect of it to like more just like navigating borders as a journalist who writes about borders and about immigration has definitely been a topic of much discussion among the sort of immigration reporting and border reporting press corps. There’s been a lot of anxiety around I think the thing that the people that people are most anxious about is device searches, and we’ve seen those sort of go up in frequency. Device searches because they compromise not only their personal networks, but all of their sources in their devices. And so, but then also like it’s impossible not to travel sometimes. I mean, especially those of us who like those reporters who live along the border, who do go back and forth pretty often. But all of us, like I was in Panama for an assignment earlier, talking to third country deportees there. And you know, just going back and forth, those are the hotspots where the rights to cease are even if as a US citizen, they’re just so compromised. We don’t really have much say in what they can and cannot do. So you can refuse, but then they might take it anyway. Like there’s just not a lot of choice there. And so I think that’s been a real point of tension and anxiety for not only how it allows us or what assignments we’re taking and how we’re, but like just resources spent on digital security, digital security training, insurance and things like that, like actual material costs. And then in addition to that, the additional anxiety of like if you are compromised, then you are the first in line with defense and then you know your entire network personal and then your sources, more importantly your vulnerable sources are maybe also jeopardized as a result. So that’s the other thing.
Joyce: A lot of what I report on is more like movement conservatism rather than you know a lot of sources in the federal government. So kind of I don’t have the same experiences that Adam and Tanvi do. But I think I don’t know, I’m just kind of speaking a little bit more abstractly. It’s a weird time to be reporting on this when you’ve got an administration that is like governing towards Twitter. Like we saw just last night, that Pete Hegseth responded to one of the officials at Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s organization, who said he’d like to see more boats blown up in the Caribbean. And Pete Hegseth was like, “Your wish is my command. We just did another one.” I mean, so just you know reporting in that context, where it’s just kind of such an absurd level of rhetoric that is coming from officials, two people, or you have JD Vance constantly sparring with all kinds of people, including reporters, right in public. That is a new level of that, that there was some of that during the first administration, but it seems much more apparent now, including from the spokespeople, Karoline Leavett and people like that. I don’t know. I think that there’s also, you know, the deniability thing that they go for all the time, where an administration official makes an incredible claim or asserts something extremely illegal. And then the spokespeople will claim that it’s a joke, or claim that it’s made up. So I think that those kind of reporting in this age of just vast information warfare is a kind of continuing thing that everybody is dealing with.
Misra: Can I just add something really quick to that? I think a really good example of that is also this recent like journalism offenders thing that they have put up in the White House. This doesn’t affect me or my work personally, but this again, like just speaks to like the shitposting culture and like the war on journalists and journalism, more generally, and and just like shaming journalists and kind of redirecting your supporters for like larger amounts of online harassment than we’ve seen before.I just feel like yeah, it’s sort of coming from not only is our work a little bit is more difficult. I mean, you know, another thing we didn’t mention when we discussed the workforce is FOIA offices are not as well staffed anymore. Everything is taking longer to be processed. I mean, we were just having trouble getting any kind of information out of the government. And then on top of that, there’s like this onslaught of making our jobs difficult and making that access, the stuff at the Pentagon, where now there’s of course a lawsuit around that. But yeah, just this like larger, like multi pronged disdain and yeah, just assault on individual journalists and journalism as a whole.
Alvarez: It’s only been a year and we have at least three left. Looking back on the past twelve months, how would you sum up this first year of the second Trump administration? Is there anything that surprised you and where do you and where do you see things going from?
Joyce: I did not expect that we would have a fully overt white nationalist government that you know was saying everything extremely explicitly this quickly. I feel like so much of my reporting for years has been trying to pull together all of these threads and be like, look, this is what it adds up to. Like they are saying you know, they need more white babies, or they are saying the only legitimate culture is white Christian Americans. And now it’s like the famous tweet, like they’re just tweeting it out, literally. You know, like the level of overt racism, the level of overt Christian supremacy. I mean, that now it is written into just about every speech or order, it seems, that comes out is the idea that the United States has a specific mission to protect Christianity. Not religious liberty writ large, Christianity specifically. I am surprised that we are hearing this out loud this quickly. I’m surprised that, you know, we have members of the administration who say things like, yeah, I’ve got a bit of a Nazi streak. And they just get transferred from one role in the federal government to another leading role in the federal government. Yeah, I that feels quick and kind of partly leaves me wondering, like, God, where can it go next?
On the other hand, I will say, it’s a bit of a tangent, but I think related right after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I had a really sinking feeling. And not just because political assassination is, of course, a horrible thing and a horrible direction for a country to go in, where violence will will just spiral from there. But, you know, tracking the reactions to that online, I at first thought, they’ve got their moment that they’re going to kind of use. And for a time for a week or so, it did look like they were pretty ready and coordinated to move together to use that for oppression. But then they fell into infighting in quite a severe way that I think we’ve been continuing to see for the last, I guess it’s close to two and a half months now. And so I think I ended when we talked about this stuff last year with a bit of a silver lining to say remember that there are intense divisions on the right. And you know that’s not an Achilles heel, but it is something that makes it hard for them to achieve everything that they set out to do. And I do think that we are seeing that. So as much as you know people like Nick Fuentes are just becoming absolutely mainstream parts of the conservative conversation, you’re also seeing you know the most the the largest, most kind of powerful conservative institutions sort of falling into disarray in response to that. I don’t think they’ll stay in disarray but they are not, they’re not all powerful. It’s not inevitable that they’re going to win.
Federman: I think there’s a couple of things that have surprised me and and that I think are as yet unresolved and and sort of one one of which I already touched on and that that’s the deployment of National Guard troops to American cities, and and essentially the speed with which the administration sort of went that route without really any reasonable provocation. And sort of trying to understand what the end game is as we look ahead to midterm elections and sort of questions surrounding those elections and as the administration sort of ramps up its attacks on left and left leaning organizations. How will the military, National Guard, FBI, and other agencies be used to sort of suppress civic institutions, protest, et cetera? And the one detail I think we didn’t mention regarding the deployment of troops was the bizarre you know meeting that Trump and Hegseth held in Quantico with top generals and admirals flown in from all over the world to basically listen to Trump deliver one of his rants. Although he did mention the fact that the military should treat American cities as sort of testing grounds for whatever it is they may be doing. So the war on terror sort of coming home or coming full circle, I should say.
And the other thing that we haven’t touched on in this conversation, but I think is obviously a huge sort of shift, I guess, in many ways, is the administration’s foreign policy. And you know, I can’t remember if we talked at all about Greenland during our previous conversation, but obviously that was a hot topic before Trump even took the oath of office. He dispatched his son to the capital for a dog and pony show. And everyone’s kind of been waiting to see what the follow-through is on that in terms of what the United States decides to do vis-a-vis Greenland and Denmark, but it also applies to our relations with Canada. Trump has talked about annexing Canada and obviously our foreign policy south of the border in not only Venezuela, which has been getting a lot of attention with the completely horrifying and and likely illegal blowing up of these boats, et cetera, but also in terms of you know how the United States will approach foreign relations in in other Latin American countries and sort of this new focus on on on the Western hemisphere and sort of consolidating our interests here you know i in in North America and sort of what that means going forward for the Trump administration and and its foreign policy. So that’s certainly something I think we’ll be hearing more about.
Misra: Yeah, I’ll just maybe echo some of those points and then maybe try to end on a hopeful note. But I feel like domestically something that I’m watching for is the further encroachment of basically other arms and divisions of the government with immigration enforcement, given the exponentially larger amount of funding that has been dispatched for this process, like billions and millions of dollars over the next couple of years. We’re already seeing the IRS be involved. I saw a headline today about I believe it was the Parks department somewhere also helping with some arrests. But yeah, I I think just this idea of all of these different agencies that have nothing to do with immigration now getting involved in it. I’m sort of watching for what that looks like. And how that sort of breaks down these like maybe never completely solid firewalls, but firewalls on paper nonetheless. That’s one thing. And what that looks like in very visceral and visual and you know, like ways on the street, right? So yeah, so that’s sort of one thing I’m looking for for next year.
And the other thing that I want to sort of highlight on that front is the international breakdown of asylum norms. I mean, this is a system that was created in the you know post-World War era in response to the displacement caused by the Holocaust. And that was the time when everyone agreed, or I guess I shouldn’t say everyone, but there was general consensus that, you know, this is a shared responsibility. And not only has this administration really taken the unraveling of that to its extreme, but you know, Trump also spoke at the UN against the UN around its assistance of migrants and sort of attacked the entire system. So I do feel and and because the US is such a leader on this, I do feel that the kind of tactics of you know externalization, the third country deportations, the suspension of asylum, those kind of tactics are now going to be followed elsewhere around the world, leading to a full breakdown of those norms, which then means there’s going to be more and more stateless people, there’s going to be more and more irregular migration because it’s a positive feedback cycle. So those are the bad things.
I think one thing that I was surprised by, and then is that’s a good thing, is sort of an echo of what Kathryn said earlier, which is that I do think that with this like shifting, very quickly shifting realities and constraints on you know freedom of expression and other and and just like stability and security in many ways. I have been surprised to see some of what Kathryn you were talking about, which is the local level, very even hyperlocal networks and systems that people have set up, people who have no like experience of this necessarily, some may have. But yeah, just building on sort of the mutual aid next networks that have come up since the pandemic, building on some of the stuff organizing that came up maybe under the first Trump administration, just these networks that have been set up now to on a very, very local level, like defend basic rights and and defend, you know, immigrant neighbors and and things like that. I think I have been surprised by the extent to which that has been effective, I will say, at a local level. Does that structurally change the deportation policies we’re seeing? No. But in many individual cases, ICE has walked back its arrests of people. People have been released from detention, lawsuits have been filed, and you know, people have even won protections for themselves. No, again, like those protections are very there’s all sorts of caveats all along the way, but I do think that that’s not nothing.