Immigration Enforcement: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Immigration Enforcement: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

main story tonight, which concerns immigration, the thing that brought America the likes of Gloria Estfan from Cuba, Albert Einstein from Germany, and Elon Musk from hell. Specifically, we’re going to talk about immigration enforcement. Over the last few months, you’ve undoubtedly seen reports of armed masked police raiding areas like farms, parks, and home depots. And the White House’s social media has been cheering it on. From posts like this meme showing DEI standing for deport every illegal to this [Music] Goodbye. Look, we all know this, but sometimes it is worth reiterating. This White House is full of the pettiest little imaginable. And while while that video is obviously disgusting, on the plus side, I now know what song I want played at Trump’s funeral. I know it’ll be hard to get in, but you can throw a Bluetooth speaker pretty far. And it’s not just the White House. Others have been getting in on these ship posting with perhaps the most telling example coming from a regional border patrol office which posted this celebration of its agents in Southern California’s premier sector. Fire. [Music] [Music] Okay. If I may quote an insufferable man on a first Bumble date, have you ever seen Star Wars? Because that’s pretty famously the bad guy. Imagine how morally bankrupt you have to be to watch the most famous villain in cinematic history, murdering a bunch of people, some of whom are literally begging for help, and think he is so us. But for all the administration’s talk of targeting dangerous criminals, the reality is very different. As this LA neighborhood found out, an abandoned cart, the only sign that Enrique, the ice cream man, had been taken into custody. Enrique had been selling ice cream in the area for almost 20 years. He was a part of community events, and neighbors insist not a threat. I just don’t understand it. Like, go after a criminal. Don’t go after the ice cream man. Many can’t believe how he was taken. They say by unidentified men in unmarked SUVs. Doesn’t seem legal to me at all. I would think that uh you’d have to have paperwork and you know I mean it just seems crazy. Yeah, it does. And why the are immigration agents going after ice cream sellers anyway? In that video where brave hero Darth Vader was fighting bad guys like meth, fentanyl, fake news, and cocaine. I don’t remember one of those labels being guy who sells popsicles. But that woman saying, “Hey, this doesn’t feel legal.” raises a question that a lot of people are asking right now. So given that, tonight, let’s talk about immigration enforcement and try and answer a few things. What the is happening right now? Who are the people in masks grabbing our neighbors off the streets? And what are the actual rules here? And let’s start with what’s happening because as we’ve discussed before, immigration authorities have been given pretty clear marching orders by this guy. We are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day. We can’t take the risk of letting these Biden illegals roam around freely so that the next American daughter can get raped. The next American kid can get murdered. The next American family can get splintered and torn apart by people that came into this country unchecked, uncontrolled, unvetted, uninvited by the American people. Now, that absolute fire hose of xenophobic would be hard to hear from anyone, let alone Steven Miller, who looks like what would happen if Caillou smoked two packs a day for a thousand years. He looks like a Funko Pop of Lex Luthther, except his eyes are somehow more lifeless. Now, that 3,000 arrests a day number is part of the administration’s larger goal of deporting a million immigrants in one year, which it’s worth noting would be more than double the previous record of 400,000 when Obama was president, which was already very high. But notably, they don’t seem to be getting near their target numbers. They’re apparently at just over 280,000 deportations. So, getting to a million in just 6 months seems very unlikely. and they have backed themselves into this corner because promising to deport a million criminal migrants is one thing but once you’re in charge you then have to find that many of them which is going to be hard if they don’t exist in the numbers that you’re claiming which they don’t. It’s like promising to apprehend 10,000 Fred Dursts a day. There just aren’t that many out there. So either you have to admit that your target number was in the first place or you have to drastically widen your definition of what a Fred Durst is and Julia eventually arresting any Gen X are wearing a hat. But instead of conceding their numbers were inflated, the administration is trying to drive up arrests at all costs. Not only has Miller told ICE agents to target Home Depot and 7-Elevens, he’s giving them a lot of extra help. ICE has rapidly deputized a record number of local police to function as deportation agents. They pulled in border patrol as well as well as the National Guard, at least 25% of the DEA, up to 80% of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacos, and Firearms, and even members of the US Postal Inspection Service. And this cross agency collaboration is why at the sight of a raid like this one at a nightclub in Colorado, you can see personnel wearing gear with logos for the DEA, FBI, postal inspectors, FBI, again, ISIS enforcement and removal operations, and the IRS. And for what it’s worth, I can’t imagine the postal inspector’s love getting thrown onto the 3:00 a.m. shift. Nor can I imagine it’s much fun to turn up at the club and end up getting arrested by the mail. And this mass reallocation of resources means other crimes are going less police. At the FBI, for instance, agents have been told to scale up immigration enforcement and deprioritize white collar cases. And even within ICE, their Homeland Security Investigations Unit, which usually focuses on major offenses like cyber crime and drug trafficking, has been redeployed onto lower level immigration cases. One agent there has even complained, “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation. It’s infuriating.” And I’ve got to say, for a guy who pandered so heavily to people convinced pedophile sex offenders and traffickers had infiltrated our government, Trump’s sure making the government a lot friendlier to them. Gilan Maxwell’s in a nicer cell now. Lawrence Taylor’s advising on kids physical fitness. it. At this point, if he’s willing to wear a MAGA hat, I really don’t see why Roman Palansky can’t come back. Still, officials like Borders Tom Hman insist that none of that matters because they’re catching a ton of hardened criminals. For those we arrest, 70% approximately 70% 70% of those we arrest are criminals. Who’s the other 30%? The other 30% are national security threats. Most national security threats don’t have a criminal history cuz they try to lay low until it’s time for them to do things bad. Okay, speaking things bad aside, Homie is getting a lot wrong there because under his logic, I guess anyone can be a national security threat. Even for instance, your local ice cream man. Sure, the worst thing he’s ever done was maybe give someone one of those Spongebob popsicles, Alice Salvador Darly, but don’t be fooled. According to this decaying corpse of a baseball umpire, he’s probably just lying low till it’s time for him to do things bad. But also, Homeman’s numbers there are nowhere near ICE’s own data. Because it turns out only around 40% of those arrested by ICE had any criminal convictions, which can include things like traffic infractions, and just 7% were convicted of any sort of violent crime. In fact, as of the end of June, people with only civil immigration violations, no criminal charges or convictions, made up the largest percentage of ICE arrests nationwide. And maybe the clearest sign that this is more about pushing up numbers than catching violent criminals on the run. Is that one of the key places they’re now fishing for arrests is immigration court, when people show up for their hearings. We captured the moment two men went from migrants for to detaineees. It happened last week at Dallas immigration court when nearly a dozen people showed up to have their asylum cases heard. Their cases were dismissed by the judge and when they walked out of the courtroom, plain clothed federal agents were waiting to take them into custody. ICE is asking immigration judges across the country to dismiss the court cases of certain migrants so the agency can arrest them once their hearings end and place them in a fasttrack deportation process known as expedited removal. Outside a Miami courthouse, this migrant in cuffs says in Spanish, “It’s a trap.” Look, that is all awful. Very much including the term expedited removal, which sounds less like a legal process and more like a phrase you’d see with an exclamation point on the packaging for a particularly powerful laxative. And and to be clear about what is happening there, generally you can’t be deported if you have an active immigration case pending in court. But if your case is dismissed and you’ve been here for less than two years, the government can move to put you through expedited removal, meaning you can be deported without any hearing at all. So, administration attorneys are asking for cases to be dismissed and immigration judges, all of whom work for the DOJ, have been told to grant those requests. It is the laziest possible way to juice up your numbers because you’re targeting people who are going through the system the right way and turning them into people that you can immediately arrest and deport. Trump is also working to to end programs that give temporary legal protection to certain immigrants from countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, and Venezuela. And by September, it’s estimated these changes will cause nearly a million people who’ve been vetted and given permission to live and work here to lose those protections and become at risk for deportation. But obviously, the most visible aspect of this surge in enforcement has been those raids that you’ve seen on TV. A term, by the way, that Tom Hman does not care for. I don’t like the term raid because when we go out, there’s a target enforcement operation. We know who we’re looking for and we have fusive operations uh uh operational sheets. At every arrest you you say here’s I’m going to go arrest. Here’s where I think I’m going to find him. Here’s his immigration history. Here’s his criminal history. We’re not going on the streets looking for people different. Unless we’re targeting enforcement operation. Oh, that’s reassuring. I’m glad that Homer’s not just arresting people different from him because that would be bad news for anyone who doesn’t sound like John C. Riley being actively drowned. Unfortunately, his claim there that I engaged in strictly targeted enforcement is at odds with internal emails showing immigration officials have been urged to turn the creative knob up to 11 when it comes to enforcement and that if it involves handcuffs on wrists, it’s probably worth pursuing, which in another context would obviously be very hot, but really isn’t here. One tactic suggested is interviewing and potentially arresting what are called collaterals. Basically, people just encountered while looking for someone else. That is something that this local station witnessed firsthand when it did a ride along with ICE. These ICE agents were looking for an MS-13 gang member, but spotted this man meeting up with a painting crew on his way to a work site. This guy’s been eyeballing since he pulled up. So, just trying to figure out what’s going on with him. He was arrested also without a prior criminal record and now sits in a holding facility in New Orleans. Yeah, that is absurd for many reasons, including that eyeballing should never be a pretext for arrest, unless that is you’re a tacia, the nocturnal Asian primate that always looks like you just caught it cheating on its wife. There should probably be consequences for eyeballing someone like that. So, so clearly enforcement is nowhere near as targeted as this administration likes to claim. But the scary thing is it doesn’t have to be. And it’s worth taking a minute to talk about the rules governing these arrests, which are a lot looser than you might think. When ICE sets out to arrest someone, they don’t need a criminal arrest warrant, which are issued by judges. They can just do it with an administrative warrant, which can be signed off on by an agency staffer. Those don’t entitle ICE to go into someone’s home, but they don’t have to tell you that. Officers can also just stop and question people on the street. And as Homeman will tell you, they don’t need much justification for that. They just need to totally the circumstances, right? They just got through their observation, you know, get our typical articulable facts based on their location, the occupation, their physical appearance, their actions. No, agents are trained what they need to uh detain somebody temporarily and question them. It’s not probable cause, it’s reasonable suspicion. Okay, setting aside that stumbling over the word articulable is objectively very funny. Reasonable suspicion is a low bar. I have reasonable suspicion to believe that Tom Hman was doing that interview on about 12 Tylenol RPMs, but that is different from me having proof, isn’t it? And I should note the administration is currently fighting a court’s ban on them stopping people based solely on their ethnicity, language, occupation, or presence at a particular location. And it’s unclear if that’ll ultimately be allowed. But other things the administration’s doing that sure feel like they’re breaking the law often aren’t. Take the dystopian visuals of agents wearing masks. It turns out no federal law forbids federal law enforcement personnel from wearing masks. So they can do it. But why are they? Well, the administration claims it’s for their own protection, arguing early last month there’d been a 690% increase in assaults on agents from the year before, which does sound alarming. Although, you should know first, it turns out that that meant there’d been a total of 79 assaults at that point, up from 10 the previous year. But also, they seem to be applying the word assault very loosely. Here’s Christy Gnome defining what she sees as violence against federal agents in extremely broad terms. And I will tell you that violence is anything that threatens them and their safety. So, it is doxing them. It’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles, um to we’ve seen Molotov cocktails thrown at them. Wow, that is quite an escalation from videotaping to Molotov cocktail. Those aren’t remotely the same thing. I know that because one of those things is happening to me right now. And and we’ve seen that standard in action. In June, when New York City mayoral candidate Brad Lander locked arms with an immigrant in a courthouse as ICE agents tried to detain him, he was arrested for impeding and assaulting officers, which sure isn’t what this looks like. Looks more like something you see in the chapter of a history book titled How It Started. And and for what it’s worth, ICE agents wearing masks and not being identifiable, makes everyone less safe, including them, especially in states withstand your ground laws. One law professor pointed out, “Somebody’s going to get shot or killed, and it may well be an officer.” And I’m hesitant to even point that out since imagining a crime against an ICE agent currently seems to be enough for this bird’s nest of a human to count it as one. And it sure seems like all this, from the drive to hit numbers to the removal of safeguards, is a perfect storm for trouble. Perhaps best encapsulated by the sheer number of videos out there of US citizens being detained or in some cases even arrested by federal agents. Witnesses capturing a traffic stop involving ICE and Border Patrol agents on Brown Street in Rochester Tuesday. What’s your name? My name is Jose Castro. I’m a citizen here. I said, brother, I’m American. I’m American. and I’m American. He says the agent asked him what city and hospital he was born in. I said, “I don’t know.” I said, “I don’t know.” And because I didn’t know, he threw me to the gate and he twisted my arm. This was the moment Border Patrol and Florida Highway Patrol officers detained a US citizen while conducting immigration enforcement. I got rights to talk, bro. You got no right here. I do. Brother, get up. Okay, that is all obviously terrible. And while this is by no means the most important thing, who the even knows what hospital they were boarding? I mean, I do happen to know mine, Her Majesty’s Royal Cumber Bunch Hospital for Children and Pa adults, but that’s only cuz I lived there until I was 30. But it’s also pretty difficult to hear Tom Holman say people aren’t targeted based on their race when you see an officer tell an American citizen who happens to be a Spanish-sp speakaking brown guy on his way to a landscaping job say you got no rights here you’re an illegal that feels like the most naked racism you could possibly see on camera at least until Steven Miller starts an only fans and if you want to see this whole story in one place just look at this incident in LA us out. Are youing serious, bro? Pope Garcia was capturing a raid on camera when he suddenly became the target as well. Get him down. The 37year-old US citizen tackled and taken into custody. You want to go to jail? Fine. You got it. He says he was first taken to a holding area at Dodger Stadium where he heard the agents boasting about how many people they had grabbed. Like, how many bodies did you guys catch today? And one of them said 31. and they started like, “Yay!” Like, “It was a good day today.” And they were like high-fiving each other. He says the officers also debated about what they could charge him with. At first, it was assault of a of a federal agent, but only later, the narrative started switching because the video was out. Yeah. He’s actually seeking damages over that incident. And I should say we contacted DHS and they maintain he assaulted and verbally harassed a border patrol agent only one of which is even a crime and neither of which they’ve charged him with. Also, while DHS ignored most of our questions when we asked about that Darth Vader video they said not to spoil the plot but as any Star Wars fan knows Darth Vader is also Anakin Skywalker. I don’t think DHS needs to regail the American public on the heroism of Skywalker. They know, which is just an incredible, deeply shitty response. I’d honestly love to know their disingenuous takes on other movie villains. Actually, if you think about it, Thanos was the real hero of the Avengers movies because, as any Marvel fan knows, Thanos used to be a baby, and babies aren’t evil. And all of this gets even more worrying when you remember that Trump’s big, beautiful bill contained a massive surge of funding for immigration enforcement. Roughly 170 billion over the next few years, some of which is being set aside to fund the hiring of 10,000 more ICE agents. And for what it’s worth, massive rapid hiring sprees never tend to work out well. As we mentioned before, when Border Patrol surged hiring under Bush, they struggled to hit their numbers and wound up hiring cartel members and an actual serial killer. And it’s not a great sign for who ICE is appealing to. That they’re currently posting gross recruitment ads like this fake minivan ad tagged, “Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy.” And they seem more than a little bit desperate already as they’ve removed age limits for hiring agents. And this week, they shared this video starring their newest recruit. Hey everybody, Dean Kane here. And for those who don’t know, I am a sworn law enforcement officer as well as being a filmmaker. I felt it was important to join with our first responders to help secure the safety of all Americans, not just talk about it. So, I joined up. You know, there’s an old saying in Hollywood, if all you can get is Dean Kaine, you are Now, I’m I’m not saying I’m not saying that ICE isn’t finding people. I’m just saying when you are reduced to pinning a badge on the 59year-old star of the dog who saved Christmas, the dog who saved Christmas vacation, the dog who saved the holidays, the dog who saved Halloween, the dog who saved Easter, and the dog who saved summer, maybe you are in trouble. Although on the plus side, no need for that guy to wear a mask because the chances of anyone recognizing are zero. So, so what can we do here? Well, as powerless as this can feel, as individuals, there are still actions you can take. Experts say if you personally witness an ICE arrest and are able to safely record the interaction, you should do so. You you’ve seen what a difference that can make tonight. For more guidance on how to do this and what to do with your recording, go to this address. And if you are approached by an immigration enforcement uh while out in public, whether or not you’re a citizen, attorneys told us the only things you should say to them are, “Am I free to leave and I want to speak to a lawyer?” That’s it. You have the right to remain silent. And I recognize that in some cases, you may be unable to help yourself from saying, “Didn’t you used to be Superman? I thought you died. I can’t believe I’m meeting a filmmaker.” But that really is it. For more specific information about your rights, which may be slightly different depending on where you are, you can visit this address. And while I know this is all very bleak, it’s worth remembering that supporting immigrants is actually the majority stance in this country. And people witnessing the brutal reality of these raids has had an impact. Trump’s approval on immigration has dropped sharply in the last few months with 55% now disapproving of what he’s doing. Meanwhile, support for a pathway to citizenship for long-term undocumented immigrants has climbed to nearly 80%. Look, don’t get me wrong, we are still in a very grim moment. But the right-wing narrative is that most people are rabbid to punish anyone trying to become new Americans. But that is just not true. Nor are there claims about who’s being targeted and arrested. And I’m not saying that everything I is doing right now is illegal. What I’m saying is a whole bunch of it feels like it really should be and we need to change that at our earliest opportunity because the fact is despite this administration’s claims, the majority of people they are sweeping up are not drug dealers, human traffickers, or violent criminals. Instead, they’re ice cream vendors, immigrants who show up to court hearings, and even US citizens. Although, I will give immigration enforcement agencies one thing. The way they seem to view themselves is sadly increasingly spot-on. And that is violent, cruel, and hiding behind a mask.

John Oliver discusses the Trump administration’s promise to deport one million immigrants, what the follow through on that promise looks like in practice, what the actual rules are about masked police arresting civilians across the country, and some stuff about filmmaker Dean Cain. It’s ok, you can Google him, we don’t expect you to recognize the name.

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