Get out
We talk to an investigative journalist about the animating cause behind so much of Trump’s chaotic destruction
Hey, everyone. Anand here. Today marks one month of Trump II. Which is strange, because I was 43 last month, and now I’m 86.
This has been a bruising and dizzying and heart-wrenching time. And I’m grateful to have this community to process it together. You all have made things not “better,” I would say, but more bearable. More clear. Thank you for belonging.
Today I’m really excited to share this deep dive into the big cause that threads through so much of what Trump has done or tried to do in these first days. Read on.—AG
First, a programming note: We’re going Live!
Today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern we’ll be speaking with messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio on Substack Live. To join us and watch, download the Substack app and turn on notifications. You’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device.
What was so important to Trump’s Justice Department that was worth forcing seven U.S. attorneys to resign and provoking a constitutional crisis that makes Watergate look like a minor kerfuffle?
Immigration enforcement, that’s what — specifically, getting New York City mayor Eric Adams to disobey his own city’s sanctuary laws and allow increased ICE enforcement, raids in the five boroughs, and immigration arrests at city jails. And Adams’s collaboration may well bring down New York City’s government altogether.
And that underscores just how central the wholesale revision of the United States’s immigration system — collateral damage be damned — is to the Trump administration. The Adams affair and Thursday afternoon massacre were just the latest volleys in the shock-and-awe campaign against immigrants that has been in progress since Trump’s first hours in office.
That campaign is well underway. Executive orders have called for everything from mass deportations to the elimination of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, an internment camp is under construction at Guantanamo Bay, asylum seekers are being deported to third countries like Panama, and the military might of the United States may well be employed to remake the country along the nativist, white nationalist lines people like Stephen Miller have dreamed of for almost as long as their families have been here.
Why is the degradation of immigrants so central to the thinking of the Trump-Musk-Vance administration? What does that focus reveal about the larger project?
To make sense of it all, we reached out to Felipe de la Hoz, an investigative journalist who has covered immigration for Documented, City & State, The New Republic, The Baffler, and is a co-founder of the immigration policy newsletter BORDER/LINES.
We talked with him about how the limited understanding most Americans have of the immigration process has driven the rise of nativist sentiment, a sharp right turn in immigration politics, and the imposition of ever more draconian policies — even though closing down immigration is at odds with the economic needs and demographic realities of how Americans live today. We also talked about the traps Democrats have fallen into as they’ve failed to build an alternative narrative on immigration to counter Republican demonization, and about what can be done to protect people and work for better policy, even during the Trump years.
Why do immigration and the fight over how to define citizenship have such a central place in the authoritarian transition that we're experiencing now, and why are the ways those things are seen and talked about so disconnected from any of the economic or social realities that Americans experience?
I think part of the problem with having any conversation about the immigration system is that it is so poorly understood. I make this point all the time: if you are anything from a policymaker to a casual observer to just a newsreader, odds are that you have interacted with many of the systems that form the framework of federal policy, right? You have health insurance, probably, or you don't. And that's a problem, too, for you. You've gone to school, you pay taxes, and you engage with public infrastructure. So even if you don't understand the ins and outs of all these things, you have some awareness of how they work. You've interacted with them.
Whereas I think immigration — unless you are an immigrant, unless there are people in your life that are immigrants, or at the very least, you live in a community where immigration is both prevalent and you're having constant contact or at least some contact with people who are going through the system — it's this abstraction, right? You don't really understand it.
And that's why people buy into these fictions like “wait in line.”
They don't realize how perversely horrible and broken the entire process is.
Yeah. I think there are some dissonances. It's almost a trope at this point that you have the person who says, "I voted for Trump, but of course, they're not going to touch my friend José who runs the local grocery store because he's one of the good ones."
It's tired to point these things out by now, but that really is, I think, the tension at the center of the American public's understanding of immigration.
They have these feelings about it, but they don't understand how it works. And I think people want it to be a choose-your-own-adventure thing where we get the best of the economic benefits, we get the best of the labor force benefits, and the cultural variance.
You were talking about the crisis of immigration as the inverse of how people understand it. The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that by 2040 the only thing that's going to keep us from complete population cratering is immigration. And we only have to look to other countries that are currently in the spiral to see the dire impact that has.
So people want all of the good. They want none of what they perceive to be the bad. Often, what they perceive to be the bad is very overblown. While we're having these immigration raids and whatnot, people keep throwing around these phrases, “criminal illegal aliens.”
And “invasion” beyond that, this language of emergency.
Right. The “invasion” — that had been a fringe term up until not too long ago. Now it's part of the official record of White House executive orders. But the statistics are clear. Immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born people. I'm not the first to point this out.
With these raids, they're going to have a hard time. I think the plan, is to justify all of this by trotting people out and saying, "Look at these criminals." And there really just aren't that many. And so I wonder with these arrest numbers, what the public response is going to be once people start to realize that most of these people do not have criminal contact or collateral arrests and if that's going to change their understanding of what's happening here.
People’s understanding of what's happening is informed by this very alarmist rhetoric around the few cases that could be pointed to, which don’t really have anything necessarily to do with immigration specifically. And this is expressed most painfully, I think, in the Laken Riley Act and the Democratic buy-in on it.
To my view, its passage will one day come to be regarded similarly to the 1996 laws that Clinton signed (the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act), which established the contemporary immigration system.
Those laws closed off avenues for regularization, made people more deportable more easily, and instituted these barriers that have become a self-fulfilling prophecy by not allowing people to regularize their status even if they are eligible. And there are a number of Republicans and maybe some Democrats that look back on those bills and could still defend them. But I think a lot of people have come around to the idea that this didn't achieve anything.
All that really happened was that it became more difficult to exist as an immigrant and the population of undocumented people increased, right?
A lot of anti-immigrant types or nationalist, nativist types decry irregular immigration and the growth of the population of the undocumented. But the easiest way to grow the population of undocumented people is to shut off avenues for people to attain status.
A lot of people would be surprised to understand when this consensus really emerged. I always ask my class on immigration reporting this question early on: There are two presidents, one of whom signed a mass amnesty that regularized 3 million people, and another one who signed these heavy penalties into law — who were they? One of them's a Republican and one is a Democrat — but maybe not the ones that you would think.
Reagan signed an amnesty in '86, and it was Clinton who signed these punitive bills in '96. And sometimes I play this clip of a Republican debate from, I think, 1980, where Reagan and George H.W. Bush are falling over each other to be the most immigrant-friendly.
I've written about this thing, the registry, which dates back to the early 20th century, the closest thing we have to what people understand to be “the line,” where if you've been in the country without incident since X date, right, you can regularize your status automatically, without much ado. And that's still on the books — it just hasn't been updated.
But the point is, the idea of preventing a large standing undocumented population through regularization was a pretty standard run-of-the-mill idea up until the last 30 years or so, after which it became much more controversial. But I think people don't understand that either, right? Now it's all captured by the politics, which is why even extremely popular groups like DACA recipients, who most polls show the bulk of the public supports and wants to have status, are under threat.
There's nothing that's moved legislatively on that in decades because it's like a third rail now, apart from going in the enforcement direction, which is what we saw with the Laken Riley Act. I have no way of establishing this, but I don't think that a lot of the Democratic legislators who voted for it really understood what it entailed.
If that’s true, it means that they're playing the same game that the Republicans are playing, where stuff only matters politically. It doesn't seem that they are really even thinking about it on the level of policy. Because if they did, they’d realize, "Oh, this is completely contrary to everything else I'm working for."
I think it's theater to some extent. I mean, obviously, it didn't help to call it the Laken Riley Act. It's very difficult to come out and say, "I am against the Laken Riley Act” because it's a horrible thing that happened.
It's part of the co-optation of “say her name” and similar language by the right. And that’s been well played by those forces, but poorly responded to by people who should know better.
I think if you cornered a Democratic senator and you said, "Hey, do you think that Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General, is somebody who should have a much more direct route to setting federal policy across a crucial area?" They'd say, "Absolutely not. That's insane." Nonetheless, that is the policy impact of that act.
And I just don't know if that registered or, not to be too blase about it, but the electoral consequences of the midterms, where a lot of people were freaked out by Long Island Democrats getting wiped out because of the so-called migrant crisis. And then, of course, the election last year, the presidential election, which was by no means a sweep if you look at the popular vote. But a lot of Democrats have decided that this is a losing battle, that they've lost effectively on a pro-immigrant side of things, and that they simply have to conform to the anti-immigrant consensus. And again, this is a thing that reinforces itself.
I think part of the problem is that there has not really been an effort to make a counter-narrative, right? Democrats keep talking about this on the same plane that has been laid out by their political opponents. And I think an entirely separate messaging scheme that said, "Look, here are the benefits. We are lucky to have immigration. We've been lucky to have it this whole time. We'd be lucky to have more,” I don't know that you could snap your fingers and make that a winning argument, but nobody's even tried, really, for some time.
That's the frustrating part. It's almost as if they accept the notion that convincing people, educating people, and distributing information is not part of politics, and vice versa. At least for them. If you ask them on other topics, "Hey, is Republican messaging having an impact?" They would probably tell you, "Yeah, it is." But then if you look at the way they respond to what they think voters want, they don't seem to accept the fact that they have any influence over that.
It's a very reactive way of doing politics. I've heard people say they're the perpetual opposition party. They never seem to understand that they have power or they have a say in messaging. There have been many, many, many post-mortems and explanations for that. But the upshot of it is that we have this situation where — barring civil society groups and pro-immigrant organizations, legal organizations, and advocacy organizations — there's not really an organized political messaging push, nationally, to lay out the virtues of immigration, the benefits, and also the catastrophic consequences, I think, of what would happen if you really pursued an agenda aggressively along the Trump administration's parameters.
The economy would collapse if we just didn't have immigrants across various labor sectors… and I don't just mean food production and construction. That's a big one, but health and technology and all these things. We have this dichotomy — I remember this during the first Trump term — people saying, "Well, we want the legal immigrants. We don't want the illegal people." That was the messaging.
And that's evaporated too now, right? Because they're going after whole categories of legal immigration.
It's just gone totally in the direction of nobody. We don't want anybody. And I think of TPS also, a pretty widely accepted program that addresses a much wider swath of people in terms of skills, and has more of an effect geographically. H-1Bs are of interest to coastal elites. You can see the opposition there.
It’s like an extension of JD Vance’s cat-eating immigrant slander during the campaign. We’re seeing attacks on refugee resettlement programs that have been successful and legal for a long time.
Yeah, I think it's a flattening of things. The executive order that suspended refugee entry, it begins with this whole spiel about the invasion. And it just completely conflates the refugee program with the asylum system, which is an understandable error, I think, for a casual commentator — but for the White House, I don't think it's an error. It's intentional.
It's erasing all boundaries that exist between different types of immigration and just making it this all-encompassing, never-ending battle between us and them and the American public and these people who are invariably going to harm us or take advantage of us, right? A lot of the language that Trump uses about, "Oh, they're making us look like fools and suckers," right? The whole, "Oh, they're emptying the prisons into the country." Just a completely inane notion that nonetheless, he keeps repeating. It isn't a groundbreaking idea, but it's a very emotional thing, right? It's very much like they're playing us for fools. Everyone is in some nefarious plot.
The invasion language just frames things in a militaristic way, and advances this notion that this is coordinated in some way, that these aren't just like various groups of people who individually decided to make this trek, that have individual cases. No, it's all this mass of people who are almost like a foreign army.
Yeah. I mean, it goes back to blood libel arguments. And this goes hand-in-hand with this wave of attacks on birthright citizenship. And you've seen a few people, JD Vance, for instance, talking about birth tourism. They are almost suggesting that everything is connected and planned to attack the U.S. in some way. Whatever way that is is unclear, but it's to provoke that limbic, emotional response.
Sure. Which goes hand-in-hand with the whole great replacement thing. Ultimately, if you really boil this down to its very, very bare bones, it's white resentment, fear about the loss of status. And that's what it comes down to every time.
We have to remember that this isn't new. It's been, at various stages, more and less present in the American political mainstream. We had a respite for a while from this type of rhetoric. But for a long time, it was pretty run-of-the-mill, right? I mean, starting with the first-ever really broad-based federal immigration system that we had was the Chinese Exclusion Act, right, which is pretty self-explanatory.
And I think we sometimes do ourselves a disservice in pretending otherwise. It's just always been counterbalanced by the understanding that we needed this immigration. Now I think we're very much leaning in one direction where the nativists are winning, on the political front and on the policy front, and there isn't as much of a counterbalance anymore.
I guess one big question is what would an effective counterbalance look like and how could it happen? I mean, you're someone who is a veteran communicator on immigration issues, I would say, not put too much in your lap, but how has the opposition such as it exists failed to communicate these points?
It's frustrating. I think I'm frustrated sometimes because, look, I can't pretend that I have the silver bullet, but some of these things to me don't seem especially complex messaging-wise, right?
One point I want to make is that some of this is just for the shock and awe, right? The politics of fear. ICE can't really ramp up its operations to the degree they are suggesting. I mean, they've been ramping them up. But in any case, arresting 10 million people is not possible. It's not going to happen. But they can certainly make 10 million people fear that they're going to be arrested. And that has consequences too, right? People don't show up to work. People don't show up to school and church. And so that starts having impacts right away, socially, on the economy.
And so one relatively easy message that I can envision here is, "Yeah, do you like having food that's affordable? Do you like your Social Security and your Medicaid and your Medicare? Do you want those things to remain solvent? Because if you do, I've got some news for you. It's impossible without immigration. We've seen the numbers. We've read the tea leaves. We've seen the writing on the wall. If you want Social Security to continue to exist 30 years down the line, perhaps when you might need it, there is no path to that that doesn't run to some extent through immigration.
Messages like that are not that complicated to communicate. I mean, they'd have to be hammered in, I think, with some diligence, but I don't even see them being made at all.
And there's a really good argument that we haven't gotten to, which goes back to something that got floated by Biden at the beginning of his campaign and brought up again by Kamala Harris, this idea that we needed to build a care economy somehow. That ended up as Harris’s proposal to have Medicare pay for elder care. But care is supplied by women, mostly immigrant women. And it’s a very high percentage of undocumented immigrant women. That's the backbone of care.
No, that's a great point. I think that's part and parcel with the larger Democratic abandonment of that principle of a care economy. And not to get too esoteric about it, but a certain coarsening of society that happened post-pandemic, where maybe it was the isolation and maybe it was like just the ways in which we prosecuted that response to the pandemic that put some of those things out of political reality.
I think establishing that we have a problem with childcare in this country right now. It is a substantial cost and it is in and of itself a disincentive to people starting families. We know this from the research. Who is going to take on those roles, right?
I mean, to a large extent, it's going to be immigrant workers, like you said, immigrant women in particular. And so these are tangible things out in the world that people can relate to that they can understand. And I am all for the message that we're a nation of immigrants. It's about human dignity. Don't drop it. I think that that messaging should remain. But there are other much more nuts-and-bolts, practical positions to be taken here and from a pro-immigrant side that I think just aren't being coordinated centrally and done with enough diligence or at all by the Democrats and just liberal civil society writ large.
We were talking earlier about the conflation of legal and illegal immigration by the Republicans. Could that be an opening because if someone's looking to make a case for immigration, they can point to how immigrants are what power these huge sectors of the economy — and to how the system has been made untenable and mostly unusable over the last few decades?
I mean, it's a minefield. And I think one of the most common retorts that we hear, right, is, oh, well, I came the right way. My grandparents, they came the right way. And I think that's a natural response if you don't really understand how things work. Actually, we can even look at Elon Musk, right? As some people pointed out, he all but admitted that he had worked unlawfully in the '90s. He had overstayed his student visa, I believe it was, and was in a liminal state there for a little while.
This was in the era before ICE had implemented the higher education monitoring program that automatically alerts them if somebody is out of their academic program and out of status, right? And so I don't think anyone is out here saying, "Oh, Elon was an illegal immigrant and he should have been deported." I mean, certainly not any of the people who are on this agenda right now.
I think that's just one example, but I think people also have these very clean lines, as you say, in their heads between what is legal and illegal. And it's really more of a gradient. There are so many midpoint statuses. There's so much uncertainty. There's people who are in these long-winded processes where only at the end will they be declared one thing or another. There are people in the endless H-1B residency line, in non-immigrant temporary status for 20 years before they can receive residency.
There's a communication failure there too, in that people just don't understand that you can’t just toggle between one and the other.
I think a lot of people just don't comprehend that not only is it difficult, but oftentimes it is just not possible. There is no path to regularization, beyond it being expensive and complicated and full of pitfalls.
So there needs to also be messaging that there are not these bright lines between legal and illegal. And that if people are without status, in many cases, it's a choice that was made at a policy level. It's not just a fact of life. And a different policy choice can be made. There's nothing that prevents it. It's about political will.
And there's a negative feedback loop there where those choices then drive the resentment which drives worse political decisions and policy choices
Absolutely. And voters are caught in this loop here. Everyone is caught in it, really.
The next question is how do you communicate that? What does it even begin to look like to your mind to change that?
That's a tall order, but for example, there was a messaging push; it hasn't fully succeeded but has gone a long way toward changing attitudes. And that was on the criminal justice front, where we’ve moved from the three strikes, war on drugs policymaking and messaging of the '80s and the '90s, which at the time seemed like a consensus position that wasn't going to change.
But it did change. Not totally; we still have a lot of that on the books — but you're not going to find a lot of people today who are going to defend three strikes. You're not going to find a lot of people, especially in the Democratic Party, who are going to get behind mandatory minimums and things like that.
And on immigration, you can look back at the impact of Reagan’s amnesty. 1986 wasn't that long ago. Regularization happened roughly over the next two years, three years. And millions of people obtained status. And guess what? The sky didn't fall. The country didn't cease to exist. Its sovereignty wasn't impugned. There was no invasion or subjugation of the government. None of that happened.
And so I think showing that the results were greater participation in healthcare that safeguarded public health as a whole, right, because people weren't afraid to go to the doctor, safer streets when people were able to obtain driver's licenses and get car insurance, all these practical things that were a result of that, not to mention just general civic participation that went up and the growth in economic activity that resulted.
You can point out that this isn't an unprecedented notion, that this has parallels, that this has precedents, and that it can be done.
I produced a film Garden City Kansas ( can be viewed on Apple TV and Prime Video) that came out 2023 that tells the story of three men who plot to blow up a housing project, home to new arrivals in western Kansas. Most of the people were Muslim. Garden City has welcomed hundreds of immigrants from Mexico, Vietnam and Africa. They come to work in the meat packing industry. The community understood the city would dry up blow away if they did not welcome the world. The schools have children that speak 30 different languages. They make it work. It is not a perfect place but it is a place we should all try to understand. I hope you watch and share.
Refreshing to read an informative interview about immigration. There’s so much misinformation out there. Another example of how Democrats have dropped the ball on messaging.