The Lemon and Fort arrests ratchet up a trend by US officials, both local and national, to view reporters as accomplices to anti-government protesters.
The US president all but calls to end American democracy, Kristi Noem caves while on thin ICE, and the Epstein files pit Bari Weiss against her newsroom?
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the February 3 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. It’s now becoming clear that in the Trump MAGA worldview, ICE is supposed to function as far more than an immigration enforcement agency. It’s seen as an instrument of authoritarian state terror. We think this was neatly captured by a long monologue that Donald Trump unleashed about supposed vote cheating by undocumented immigrants, which he accompanied with a very dark threat. This moment comes, not coincidentally, as MAGA figures are ramping up their demands for a more vicious ICE crackdown. We’re working through what all this means today with reporter Gillian Brockell, who reports regularly on ICE and has a new piece arguing that the agency is getting more cruel in carrying out its basic duties. Gillian, nice to have you on.Gillian Brockell: Thank you for having me. Sargent: So let’s start with something that Donald Trump said to a right-wing podcaster about undocumented immigrants. Listen to this. Donald Trump (voiceover): These people were brought to our country to vote and they vote illegally. And the—amazing that the Republicans aren’t tougher on it. The Republicans should say, “We want to take over. We should take over the voting, the voting in at least … 15 places.” The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. We have states that are so crooked, and they’re counting votes. We have states that I won that Joe didn’t win. Now you’re going to see something in Georgia where they were able to get with the court order and the ballots. You’ll see some interesting things come out. Sargent: So there, Trump falsely claims undocumented immigrants are voting illegally, then calls on the GOP Congress to somehow take over the voting in numerous jurisdictions. And he says something’s going to be happening in Georgia. Gillian, just putting aside whether Trump can actually succeed in any of this—it’s pretty stark and lawless that he’s demanding it, don’t you think?Brockell: Yeah, of course. I mean, it was a huge scandal in 2020 when there was a secret phone call where he was trying to mess with votes in Georgia that the Washington Post reported at the time. The “find however many votes.” That was a massive scandal. Now he’s just doing it in public. Now he’s just sort of wish-casting about it, talking to Dan Bongino.Sargent: Yeah, and we should probably point out—who’s Dan Bongino again?Brockell: It’s funny because he’s been able to have a pundit career based on having been in law enforcement briefly—and then was, what, deputy director of the FBI in the second Trump administration, but couldn’t hack it and had to go back to podcasting. So I’m glad he’s back where he’s most comfortable, I guess.Sargent: And he certainly segued into it pretty effortlessly after being a very high-level law enforcement official for Trump. So note that Trump also ties this demand for Republicans to take over elections to a bunch of typical lies. One about undocumented immigrants voting; another about how he won states in 2020 that he lost.He’s talking in part about Somalis in Minnesota because that’s a state he sometimes claims he won, which he didn’t. But Gillian, I think you see here the ICE crackdown in Minnesota—the deliberate use of violence and terror to subjugate populations that Trump and MAGA hate—kind of dovetailing with Trump-MAGA authoritarianism on the electoral front. You take all this together and he’s clearly threatening to try to use ICE to disrupt the midterm elections.And of course, on top of that, you have the FBI investigating Georgia in some way, seizing a lot of 2020 ballots for some unexplained reason. And now, Gillian, the New York Times reports that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was on the scene of that FBI raid and set it up so Trump could talk to the FBI agents. Gillian, what’s the true nature of this bundle of threats here, do you think? Brockell: Look, I think that it’s terrifying because we have a bunch of fascist leaders who are trying to consolidate power. But I do tend to be more of the view of Jamelle Bouie about their actual ability to achieve what he would like—it’s just not there. I mean, if you just look at the number of ICE agents that there are, even if they are deployed as a secret police to sort of take over the midterm elections, there simply aren’t enough agents to be able to do that at enough of the polling centers.They just don’t have the manpower. As Jamelle also said, Trump can send something to a secretary of state saying, “We’re nationalizing the election in your state now.” And that secretary of state can just say no.There’s no mechanism for him to actually press a button and now: I’m managing those votes, I’m counting those votes. There’s no mechanism to do that. And as terrifying as these ICE agents are, there’s just not enough of them to actually take over an election.Sargent: Right. I think I absolutely agree with that. I think that nature of the threat is it can take another direction as well, which is he’s just gonna try to use ICE in some sense to create the sort of disruption that potentially foments a crisis atmosphere—Brockell: Yeah, voter intimidation, absolutely.Sargent: Right, voter intimidation—and then also creating an atmosphere of crisis in particular jurisdictions, maybe where there are competitive House contests ... a crisis that sort of favors Republicans in some sense. Although I’ve gotta say, at this point, I think that they’ve overshot so badly that any sense of crisis that they create works against them, I think.Brockell: I mean, let’s not count our chickens before they hatch, but like the midterms are likely to be such an overwhelming win for Democrats that, even if they can disrupt a couple of congressional elections—probably blue districts in a red state—it doesn’t seem like they can actually really stop this wave that is coming at them that they created through their own cruelty, through their own fascist behavior.Sargent: Well, I want to bring in what some MAGA figures are saying because it’s not a coincidence that they’re saying this at the moment that Trump is making threats like this. This is documented by Media Matters. They’re being quite explicit in their calls for more ICE brutality. Here’s Laura Ingraham.Laura Ingraham (voiceover): So how do you defeat these well-funded, well-organized revolutionaries? Well, certainly not by caving, that’s for darn sure, but that’s exactly what people like liberal Republican Susan Collins wants. But we defeat the revolution by staying the course, by prosecuting criminal conspiracies to impede ICE, and also their funding networks. Sargent: In short, urging law enforcement to go after liberal groups. Here’s Tucker Carlson. He says Minnesota protesters want the chaos. Tucker Carlson (voiceover): This is proof that what you’re watching is not a series of protests about immigration. What you’re watching are the beginnings of a color revolution, of a kind of insurrection against federal authority. Sargent: He says that if this isn’t stopped, the result will be civil war and killing at scale. And here’s Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon (voiceover): In the fog of war, right? Just look through it. We have to hold the line. There can be no de-escalation at all. You don’t need to bring down the temperature. Raise the temperature. Sargent: Gillian, that’s pretty clear. They are absolutely saturated in bloodlust, and they’re not hiding it.Brockell: Yeah. And I think that for many years they may have been able to convince some people to go along with that. Immigrants have been used by the Republican Party and by conservatives for a long time as this sort of “boogeyman” to win elections. And Democrats have just sort of been like, “What if we just don’t talk about immigration at all?”And then they’ve totally avoided the issue instead of taking any kind of moral claim here by actually speaking honestly about what is happening—what people can see with their own eyes, in their own Home Depot parking lots—seeing just the abuse, seeing their neighbors disappear, seeing all these videos, seeing American citizens being shot, seeing American citizens arrested in boxer shorts and blankets in the middle of the winter. I mean, there’s an opportunity to make a moral claim and say, “No, you may have fallen for this boogeyman for a long time, but now you see it doesn’t exist.” Immigrants are not our enemies and we can vote to stop this right now. We just need Democrats to stop avoiding the subject of immigration.Sargent: Yeah. And I think that’s going to be changing. What do you make of the fact that MAGA’s bloodlust is right out in the open? They’re coming right out and saying, “We want more ICE brutality.”Brockell: My hope is that the people who have been, sort of, falling for this for a long time will finally see how morally bankrupt it is, how evil it is. And hopefully someday justice will come for the people who are calling for this. But I don’t think there are that many people who are buying this anymore.Sargent: I think that’s right. Well, let’s talk about your piece. You had a piece from Mother Jones that talked about how ICE deportation flights are getting longer and they’re getting crueler. I think it’s very clear at this point that Trump and especially Stephen Miller and MAGA see ICE’s role explicitly as a dispenser of authoritarian “sadism,” I guess, is one way to put it. Can you talk about what you found and about that broader role ICE is taking on in the MAGAverse?Brockell: Sure. So what I do is I track ICE flights, and this story in Mother Jones is about a company called Omni Air International. But the thing about ICE flights is that every single immigrant—every single adult, and some children—on ICE flights are shackled at the wrists and ankles, attached to a chain around their waists. This is incredibly dangerous. They can’t evacuate in an emergency; they couldn’t reach an oxygen mask if they had to.There are five to 30 ICE agents and ICE-contracted guards on every one of these flights. And something that we hear from the migrants on board is that they are physically abused—they are verbally abused. Omni has been doing these flights for ICE for years. What I found is that they were bought by a private equity firm in the middle of April. And since then, their ICE flights have quadrupled and they’re getting longer—which is a huge problem since these people are shackled.I spoke with a forensic pathologist who is an expert on restraint, and she talked about [how] if you’re shackled for a couple of hours, you can experience bruising, chafing, you can get permanent nerve damage. Another huge problem is blood clots. How many times have you been on an international flight and you’re told, “Wear special compression socks and get up and walk around, make sure you’re hydrated enough”? Well, they can’t do that on these flights. They’re not allowed to stand up.If they stand up—I spoke to a man who was deported to Laos; he said every time anyone—people were crying out in pain from the shackling. And if they tried to stand up to stretch, the guards would just say, “Sit the fuck down,” and wouldn’t let them stand and move. And so it’s just extremely painful. So this man—he was shackled for more than 73 hours on his removal flight. They’re doing multiple stops now. I tracked a flight in September that did nine stops. And the people on the last stop—they’ve been shackled the whole time. Sargent: So what I get from this reporting and from the other stuff we’re seeing is the degree to which ICE deliberately dehumanizes people. I think we’d be kidding ourselves if we don’t face this squarely. This dehumanization is why MAGA media figures are so excited about ICE’s crackdowns.Beyond the flights, in a very general sense, these MAGA figures see ICE as a dehumanization force to be unleashed on the parts of America they consider to be “enemy territory” to be conquered. Isn’t that what ICE is becoming in the Trump/Stephen Miller/MAGA worldview?Brockell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, with these flights, too—a thing that I keep thinking about is with all the videos that we’ve seen from Minneapolis, from Chicago, from Los Angeles, of all their brutal activities—it’s like, imagine what they’re doing on the airplanes. Where there’s no cameras, where there’s no witness. And when people get deported, it’s harder to contact them and hear what happened to them.I just think we have a government of sadists right now, and they may have been able to trick enough people into winning the election, obviously, but I think they’re wrong that this many people are sadistic about their neighbors. I don’t know. I’m just trying to do my part by exposing what is happening on these planes. Sargent: Yeah. Well, I think that you’re getting at a paradox that we should kind of close on—or a tension, maybe. On the one hand, Trump, Stephen Miller, to a lesser extent JD Vance, and then the MAGAverse—they clearly thrill to the cruel and dehumanizing aspects of what ICE is doing. They like that. They think it’s good. They think it appeals to core constituencies out there in the Trump coalition.But the thing that they haven’t prepared themselves for is that there’s a far larger chunk of people out in the United States that absolutely hates this stuff. And they’ve set in motion this kind of machine of cruelty that can’t be contained anymore, that can’t be reeled back anymore. They’ve sort of unleashed these kinds of passions—these desires on the part of the MAGA base and these big MAGA media figures to see more of this—that can’t be corralled. And it’s kind of careening in a horrifying direction—albeit one that I think hits them with political blowback that could be enough to really win the elections in 2026 and 2028, I hope.Brockell: Yeah. I saw this incredible post this morning from this man named Tom Cartwright, and he’s a really interesting person. He’s a retired J.P. Morgan executive. And for about six years, he was tracking ICE flights and releasing monthly reports basically by himself, just out of concern for the migrants on board. And like I said, largely did this work alone.And then last summer, ICE flights increased so much—and he’s a retiree—he trained some people at Human Rights First to, sort of, turn over his project to them. And so now the ICE flight monitor there releases those reports. Well, this morning, Tom posted this photo of training in Springfield, Ohio. He lives in Ohio. He said there’s more than 600 people here to be trained on how to protect their Haitian neighbors. And there’s more people coming in. And it was just a packed room of a bunch of [what] looks like white retirees there to be trained on how to protect their neighbors. And I was just thinking how long Tom has done this work—trying to witness the cruelty being inflicted on immigrants by himself. And I hope that he was heartened to see all of his neighbors now engaged in the same work. Sargent: That’s a beautiful place to end. There really is a lot of absolute horror out there out in the country at what we’re seeing. On some level, we’ve got to be heartened by that.Brockell: I just don’t think there are that many people who are that sadistic. And I hope that one of the things that we can take away from this dark period that we’re going through is a renewed love of our real-life neighbors.Sargent: I agree 100%. Gillian Brockell, thanks so much for coming on with us. It was great to talk to you.Brockell: Nice to talk to you too.
In 2024, The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank responsible for Project 2025 and so many guiding principles for President Donald Trump’s second term, published a white paper bemoaning the low birth rate among married women in the United States. It blamed a surprising culprit: higher education and federal policies that support students, such as subsidized loans. “If the government provides excessively generous subsidies for higher education, women and men are being artificially pushed away from work and into more years in school because they do not want to leave those tax dollars on the table,” argued the paper’s authors, Jay Greene and Lindsey Burke. Pursuing college meant that young people delayed marriage and starting a family, and, for women especially, that meant a decrease in fertility overall.The white paper’s solution was simple: trash federal support for higher education. “Policy changes can help to stem the tide of declining fertility rates by ending governmental inducements to delay entry into the workforce,” it proposed. No longer would people be “staying in school longer, getting trapped with debt, and postponing family formation.”Trump has spent his second term following that advice. He has threatened funding for colleges and universities themselves over curricula he deems too “woke,” and his Department of Education has dismantled student loan repayment programs that made it easier for working- and middle-class borrowers to repay. This year, it plans to bring back wage garnishment if they fall behind. While those changes will affect almost every college student and student loan borrower, they will hurt women and Black and Southern students the most.The right’s blatant attacks on higher education are intended to undermine “the gains and progress women have made in the economy,” said Aissa Canchola Bañez, policy director for Protect Borrowers, a student debtors’ advocacy group. “All with the intention of bringing women back into the home.”If that is the aim, the Trump administration has found the right target. Higher education has been an engine for women’s equality since it became more fully accessible during the rights revolutions of the 1970s, when women began enrolling in college in higher numbers than men; soon they became more likely to earn a degree. A host of cultural factors likely contributed to that shift, but the biggest is that between the birth-control pill and new anti-discrimination laws, it grew possible for women to go to college and hope for a career after in ways unattainable before. At least in theory.Although women soon surpassed men on college campuses, men with bachelor’s degrees still outnumbered women with bachelor’s degrees in the labor force until 2019, according to federal data. Women made up more than half of the college-educated labor force from the pandemic to today—which is likely one of the reasons that, in recent years, conservatives have been wringing their hands about the loss of the traditional family.Women are often breadwinners and heads of households. Women do well in academics and continue to work, because they have to and because they want to. Women are no longer compelled to stay home and raise children while career pursuits are left to men.Commentators—typically but not always conservatives—have often portrayed this as a problem for, and a loss for, men. Young men are in crisis, and there’s a crisis of masculinity. Men suffer from a loneliness epidemic. Many liberals, most notably Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, who is also a front-runner for the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nomination, have expressed as much concern about young men as conservatives like the late Charlie Kirk.But this line of thinking ignores the reasons women pursue higher education in the first place: It’s the only way they have a chance at parity in the workplace. Without college, women are much less likely to work at all. Almost two-thirds of men over 25 with only high school educations are working, while less than half of women in the same age group with the same level of education are, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. For those with some college or an associate’s degree, just 56 percent of women are working, compared to 67 percent of men.The median earnings of a man with only a high school education are 26 percent higher than those of a woman in the same bracket. That’s partly because many of the high-skilled, high-paying trades in fields like construction and manufacturing are still overwhelmingly dominated by men, and remain less friendly toward women who want to pursue them. Women tend to dominate in the pink-collar health, education, and administrative fields that typically pay less.In fact, one of the recommendations from the Heritage Foundation was to remove the certification requirements for the women-dominated field of public school teaching, making it less likely that teachers could earn the wage premiums often associated with bachelor’s degrees and specialized certifications.“Research has shown us for a very long time that higher education is a pathway to economic mobility,” especially for women, said Jennifer Turner, a senior research associate at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “It’s been critically important for a very long time, especially for people that come from lower-income families, to help them achieve economic mobility that they wouldn’t necessarily have had the opportunity to achieve without education.”Of course, even with college educations, women still struggle to gain equity in the workforce, where men still outearn them. The pay gap remains even higher for Black, Latina, and Native American women.Of course, even with college educations, women still struggle to gain equity in the workforce, where men still outearn them. The pay gap remains even higher for Black, Latina, and Native American women.Women are much more likely to be burdened with student debt they struggle to repay; they hold two-thirds of the nation’s total student debt. That’s because women rely more than men on help paying for college, said Gloria Blackwell, chief executive officer of the American Association of University Women. Limiting financial aid and changing the rules will harm women first, especially women of color and those who are taking college classes with young children at home. “More women are parents and students at the same time than men, and more people of color are student parents as well,” she said. For those already stretched by the competing demands of school and parenthood, it matters even more “when the policies take away their ability to fund their education.”That so many women are already parents by the time they begin pursuing education is one of the ironies of the Heritage Foundation’s position. “Almost a quarter of undergraduate students are parents already,” Turner said. “So it’s kind of like, why is there this idea that education is the problem?”The answer is that it’s of a piece with the anti-feminist arguments—about women in the workforce being a problem for men and their children—that conservatives make elsewhere. In fact, the idea that women’s college attendance damages their fertility has persisted for more than a century, Blackwell said. But she also noted that “one of the first research reports that AAUW actually did was research on individuals who had received higher education, and it turned out that those women indeed were able to also have children.”The Department of Education had said the first letters warning student borrowers in default—those more than nine months late on paying their loans—that they would see their wages garnished would go out in January. It temporarily delayed that plan late in the month, but it remains on the table. Many student borrowers may hear nothing else before their paychecks shrink. This is the first time garnishment has been threatened since before the Covid pandemic, and students who want to try to settle their accounts will have fewer options than they did under President Joe Biden, because the Trump administration has eliminated many of the programs intended to make repayment easier.Borrowers most likely to be in default are the working- and middle-class Americans who have little room in their budgets. As of September, the Education Department warned that 5.3 million borrowers were in default. A survey by the Institute for College Access and Success found that 42 percent said they were making trade-offs between paying for their student loans and paying for necessities. Black women, especially, are disproportionately debt-burdened. “It feels like punishing the people that those programs were meant to serve,” Turner said. “We’re taking steps back as opposed to taking steps forward.”Turner pointed out that defaults and garnishments will have a wider impact on local and national economies, as families can afford less and pull back on spending to be able to cover the basics. But there will be even longer-term damage if the administration succeeds in making it harder to access college in general, and harder to pay back student loans for those who do: Fewer women will be able to participate in the workforce. That will exacerbate the affordability crisis and have a bigger impact on fertility rates than women not attending college, Turner said. “A lot of people aren’t having as many children because children are expensive and they can’t afford childcare,” she said.In the short term, Blackwell added, the changes to higher ed will mean fewer women will attend college at all and many more will struggle once they get there, especially as diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are attacked. “Black and Latina women really need that sense of belonging,” she said. “If they don’t feel safe or supported, that could be the difference between their staying enrolled and dropping out.”The result is that low-income students will be more likely to opt out of college altogether, making everyone less well-off and undermining the kind of economic security people feel they need before they get married and have children. “I think we’ll see a bifurcation in the economy,” said Canchola Bañez. “And an exacerbation of poverty and economic inequality.”Of course, that may all be the point. The Heritage Foundation released another report early this year about “saving the American family,” which revived an argument that social safety net supports discourage marriage and should be ended. One of the first things Vice President JD Vance said in office was “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Instead of making it easier for women to choose to marry and have children, conservatives have focused on removing those choices—and many others.
Donald Trump is making it explicit. In an angry diatribe to a right-wing podcaster, Trump told his usual lies about vote-cheating by undocumented immigrants, but this time he explicitly called on Republicans to “take over the voting.” He also darkly promised something new out of Georgia, where his FBI is investigating an election center. He singled out supposed fraud in Minnesota, lying that he won the state three times. And he said he’s not backing down there. Taken all together, the threat is clear: Trump may try to use federal forces to interfere in the midterms, in part by using ICE to intimidate voters and foment crisis. Notably, this comes as MAGA media figures are loudly calling on Trump to escalate the ICE crackdowns, as Media Matters documents. We talked to reporter Gillian Brockell, who regularly scrutinizes Immigration and Customs Enforcement and has a new piece detailing how ICE is getting more cruel. We discuss what Trump can do to interfere in the elections, how far his threats can really get, and how MAGA conceives of ICE as an instrument of authoritarian state terror. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
The Director of National Intelligence is accused of stalling a whistleblower complaint that her office calls “politically motivated,” but another official says could pose a national security risk if revealed.