Listen to Zooming In at The UnPopulist in your favorite podcast app: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS | YouTube
Landry Ayres: Welcome back to Zooming In at The UnPopulist. I’m Landry Ayres.
Immigration enforcement is the dominant focus of Donald Trump’s second term. He promised to get tough, and he has. Many who voted for him because this issue was important to them believed he would mainly crack down on criminal aliens.
On today’s episode, host Shikha Dalmia and guest David J. Bier of the Cato Institute dismantle that illusion. They discuss how in his second term, Trump has launched an all-out assault on all immigrants: Illegal and legal. Undocumented and documented. Criminals and law-abiding ones. Moreover, Trump is going about immigration enforcement in an unimaginably cruel and indiscriminate way. He is engaging in mass arrests without due process, sweeping in citizens as well as immigrants.
They point out how things are only going to get worse going forward as an agency that has no respect for life and a vast contempt for the rule law has been granted expanded funding by Congress.
This episode was recorded just before Christmas. As if to prove their point, this week an ICE agent killed Renee Good, a peaceful, natural born American citizen, in Minneapolis. Good was a 37-year-old mother of three and, according to her family, a devout Christian with not an unkind bone in her body. She was driving home after dropping off her toddler, when she encountered an ICE raid in progress. She was shot at point blank range as she tried to get away.
Mass deportation cannot happen without mass collateral damage. Good’s death was not a freak accident. It was the foreseeable outcome of a system that treats visibility as provocation and accountability as an obstacle.
This episode of Zooming In is about immigration policy, yes. But it’s also about the deeper logic of unchecked state power. As immigrants are targeted and lose their rights, Americans will not be spared. Freedom is not divisible.
A transcript of today’s podcast appears below. It has been edited for flow and clarity.
Shikha Dalmia: David, you and I have been working on immigration for a very long time, often together. In the interest of full disclosure, we both have been in favor of more generous immigration policies for this country. But we knew when Trump won his second term that it was a huge setback. What do you think of his record so far? Has he been better or worse than you expected in his second term? If you were to rate him on a scale of 1 to 10 of badness, with 10 being the worst, where would you put him?
David Bier: You have to leave some room on that scale—an 8 or a 9.
Dalmia: Because things can get worse.
Bier: Because, really, he could be doing El Salvador-style deportations of legal immigrants every day. I mean, it’s theoretically possible, right? So as long as there’s a theoretical limit here that he hasn’t crossed, then you have to say there’s some room for things to get worse.
In terms of whether he’s worse than I expected, it’s pretty close, actually, to what I expected. The reality is that the worst is yet to come because of the One Big Beautiful Bill. That was the one element that I didn’t really predict—that the Republicans would come together like they did to pass a bill that has $170 billion worth of immigration enforcement inside of it. And that money—a vast majority of it has not been spent yet. So when we’re looking forward, the level of arrests, the number of deportations, all of that is going to increase in a way that far exceeds the level that we’re seeing right now.
In terms of outcomes through almost a year in office, [it’s] really not [been] much different than what I expected. The level is obviously considerably higher than it was under Biden and even under the first Trump administration, but not astronomical, not something that’s an order of magnitude different than what we saw under the first Trump administration. It’s pretty similar in terms of the number of arrests and deportations.
When you look at the lines crossed—in terms of constitutional violations, judicial orders being ignored, and other elements—it is worse than what I expected. I expected that the enforcement wouldn’t be as extreme as we are seeing right now in the streets. He hired Tom Homan as border czar. Homan is kind of a career bureaucrat who is a believer in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its policies, which have a long tradition going back of targeting specific individuals. Now, it might not be the people that I want them to target, but they’re not going out on the streets just making random traffic stops and profiling people. Even under the first Trump administration, they didn’t. This time is incredibly different on that score. It didn’t happen initially. Ultimately, Stephen Miller stepped in in May and said, “You have to go out on the streets and start racially profiling people and stopping people randomly and doing checkpoints in the interior,” and a lot of other things that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers didn’t want to do. They wanted to focus on people who were higher priorities. And Miller said, “No, because it’s all about arrests and the number of deportations.”
So, on that score, it’s worse than I thought it would be. Tom Homan’s kind of been kicked to the side in favor of Gregory Bovino, a Border Patrol bureaucrat, who is very much willing to do Miller’s bidding when it comes to racial profiling.
Dalmia: We live in a very strange world when Tom Homan, the man accused of taking a $50,000 bribe from undercover FBI agents pretending to be businessmen looking for his intervention in landing lucrative federal contracts from the incoming Trump administration, is the good guy in our story.
“They’re spending a lot of money on recording their heinous acts and using them as propaganda. What you saw with the Salvadoran flights where they took Venezuelans and brought them to El Salvador’s worst torture prison, you had cameras on the ground. They wanted to get this out. This was not something that they saw as shameful or something to be hidden. This was something to be celebrated on their side.” — David J. Bier
But to me, the one thing that’s strikingly different from the first Trump term is the performative aspect of what they are doing. They are deliberately flaunting their cruelty and their brutality to the world and to Americans because they want to create a campaign of fear. It’s an effort to get immigrants to self-deport or not come to this country.
Bier: Yeah, they’ve really embraced the idea that the more extreme their actions, the better it is. They are focused more broadly on just scaring people, trying to get them to leave on their own. And we’ve seen this in not just public statements by officials and really embracing the chaos and cruelty that we’ve been seeing, but also in terms of monetary investment. They’re spending a lot of money on recording their heinous acts and using them as propaganda. What you saw with the Salvadoran flights where they took Venezuelans and brought them to El Salvador’s worst torture prison, you had cameras on the ground. They wanted to get this out. This was not something that they saw as shameful or something to be hidden. This was something to be celebrated on their side. Secretary [Kristi] Noem subsequently made several visits to the prison, again, as a messaging campaign. And when you look at the raids and the arrests, you’ll often see cameramen hopping out of the vehicle right behind the agents to record and then use in propaganda videos on social media.
So it is a different world. They’re using a lot of the money that would have otherwise gone to feeding and clothing immigrants in their custody to instead be used for this propaganda effort about how horribly they’re treating the people in their custody.
Dalmia: You and I always expected that Trump 2.0 would be worse than Trump 1.0. But ordinary folks think fundamentally he just wants to go after criminal aliens. That’s what he emphasized in his first term. If you recall, he was talking about how Mexico is not sending us its best people—it’s sending us rapists and criminals. A lot of Americans did assume he was going to do targeted immigration enforcement against dangerous and violent criminal aliens who were gang members—the Laken Riley murderer, those kinds of people. But you’ve been looking at the deportation data, and that’s not what’s happening right now. What does your data show?
Bier: The data is from the agency itself. It’s not my data, but I have analyzed it. If you look at the share of detainees who’ve been booked into ICE custody over the course of the year, about 5% have violent criminal convictions. Even if you look at property crimes and you throw that in, it’s still less than 10% of the people that they’re detaining who have violent or property crimes to their name. So when you see every press release, every social media post, saying, “Here’s another murderer. Here’s another person who committed assault.” ... this is the aberration. This is not the norm for the people who they’re arresting. There’s actually more people with criminal convictions for immigration offenses, crossing the border illegally, traffic violations, drug possession charges, than there are for violent crimes. And it’s about three times as many in those categories.
So, even if you’re looking at just the people with criminal convictions, there’s not really prioritization on violent offenders. Overall, 95% are nonviolent; almost three-quarters have no criminal conviction at all. They like to throw in people with pending charges. I hate that they do that. And I hate that the media goes along with that because that’s a denial of due process to people who they’ve arrested and charged. They’ve never been convicted. Many charges, as we know, are dismissed. But even if you include all those people, in the last couple of months, about half of all of the people that they’ve been arresting have been people with no charges against them—no convictions of any kind. And certainly not violent crimes or other public safety crimes that [we] would be concerned about.
Dalmia: Didn’t you get into a tangle with the DHS where they started publicly naming you and attacking your data, claiming it was not correct, only to be shown that that was not the case?
Bier: That’s right. The Department of Homeland Security’s official accounts have on multiple occasions claimed that we’ve put out false information or reported something inaccurately, only to be shown this is the data from your agency, confirmed by multiple other data releases and sources that have come out since the time that they’ve attacked me for publishing that information. And, again, anytime there’s anything that would cast their deportation campaign in a negative light, they just accuse the conveyor of that information of lies or falsehoods. It really does show something disreputable about this whole campaign, that they’re so unwilling to be transparent about what it is.
Mass deportation means indiscriminate. So just own it and say, “We don’t care if they’re a public safety threat.” Sometimes they do ultimately admit to that and then they say, “Well, they’re all in the country illegally anyway”—which often is not true either. They are arresting people who are in the country legally as well. But the biggest part of their propaganda effort is around the idea that the people they’re arresting are violent offenders who are public safety threats and they’re making America safer by arresting our neighbors, our employees, our employers, our family members, and so on. And this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Dalmia: The other reason that [the idea that] they are only going after criminal aliens can’t be true is, as your own data showed, there were maybe 700,000 of them in all. And that’s back from 1970 or so. So many of those who are listed as criminal aliens are no longer alive. And many of them are already in prison. So there is no way that they can get to their target of 20 million that they want to remove from the country.
Bier: Yeah, that’s the number that JD Vance likes to throw out there. And look, there aren’t 20 million people who are in the country illegally right now—but of course they want to take people’s legal status away. They want to denaturalize people. They want to deport the U.S.-born children of immigrants, which is another way we can show that this campaign really doesn’t have any connection to legality or the rule of law in any respect. It’s really about purging parts of the population that they don’t like.
“If you look at the share of detainees who’ve been booked into ICE custody over the course of the year, about 5% have violent criminal convictions. Even if you look at property crimes and you throw that in, it’s still less than 10% of the people that they’re detaining who have violent or property crimes to their name. … [E]ven if you’re looking at just the people with criminal convictions, there’s not really prioritization on violent offenders. Overall, 95% are nonviolent; almost three-quarters have no criminal conviction at all.” — David J. Bier
They are deporting people in [the] country legally who never violated any laws. They are attempting to deport people with U.S. citizenship, U.S.-born children. That’s the big focus of the Supreme Court cases in the coming term. Obviously they never committed any crime; they’ve never violated any laws, but those babies will be eligible for deportation if the Supreme Court goes along with their interpretation of the Constitution. So this isn’t about illegality. It’s not about criminality. It’s not about public safety threats. It’s about getting rid of a portion of the population they don’t like for other reasons. And we don’t need to go into all the motivations for that. But that is the primary reason for the campaign: They just want to get rid of a large part of the immigrant community and their families. [This is] not about public safety.
Dalmia: Basically, what you’re saying is if they want to deport 20 million immigrants from this country, there aren’t 20 million illegal immigrants in this country—they actually have to create an illegal population and then unleash their deportation machinery against it. They’ve already started doing it. They have taken away the temporary protected status of a whole bunch of asylum seekers in the country. In other words, they have created a population of illegal people in America. They’ve created this large category of illegal immigrants from legal immigrants.
How are they going to go about deporting them? You said ICE’s budget has been increased now three times. It’s gone up from something like $10 billion a year to about $30 billion a year. Its budget is more than Canada’s defense budget. So what are they going to do with this money?
Bier: You really get it. The first part of this deportation campaign is involved [with] stripping people of their legal status to open them up for deportation, taking away their opportunity to request protection. The Pew Research Center looked at the “undocumented” population. About 40% of those had, at the start of this year, some form of legal protection, temporary protected status or parole, or some other means by which they can work and live legally on a temporary, renewable basis. And he’s stripping all of that away to open them up to deportation.
How are they going to target them? They’re going to use every means necessary. But one of the biggest means is just casting a wide net into industries where they work, neighborhoods where they live, and just increase the number of encounters with individuals to the greatest extent possible so you can arrest as many people as possible. They are using other means by which they can be a little bit more targeted.
If you look at what’s happening in the immigration courts, everyone going in removal proceedings is detainable and arrestable because they’re in removal proceedings. Therefore, their argument is they can at least be arrested and detained and then maybe they can have a bond hearing or not. There’s some contested claims about that. But the point for an immigration officer is, “My incentives are to make as many arrests as possible because that’s the measure by which I’m being judged.”
So they’re going to the immigration courts and they’re arresting people who are going through the process of requesting some relief from removal, whether it be asylum or withholding of removal or some other relief that’s available to them, including ... we have spouses of U.S. citizens going through that process who would be eligible for a green card. That is one way they’re targeting people more directly than just the racial profiling that we’ve seen. They’re using mass surveillance of the population in order to identify people who might be in the country illegally. They’re taking all of the information that applicants have submitted to them voluntarily. All these people with temporary protected status put their address in there. They’re using that information to find and identify people as well.
So they have a number of different methods. They’re pursuing all of them simultaneously. And as they hire more officers to go out in the field, that’s the real bottleneck at this point: boots on the ground, people to go out and make these arrests and bring people into custody. Once they have those people out in the field, you’ll see the arrests start to spike again. And we’ll see even more people being arrested who have not been convicted or charged of any crime.
Dalmia: Even if they manage to arrest millions of people, you can’t expel them immediately. There is some court they have to go through, and then they have to be housed somewhere before they are expelled from the country. We talk about the El Salvadoran gulag, where immigrants are being captured and tortured. But the stories that are coming out from our own facilities are pretty harrowing also. ACLU did a piece on Dec. 17th. It looked at the California City detention facility that has been repurposed as ICE detention. The detainees there have filed a class action lawsuit. What they are claiming is they are being kept in concrete cells the size of a parking lot where dozens and dozens of people are held for hours on end without water, food, or clothing. Basic medical care is denied to them. Diabetics are not getting insulin. They have no access to their loved ones or lawyers. Sewage is bubbling into shower trains. And those who speak up against these conditions are often thrown into solitary confinement, exactly as happens in El Salvador.
“[T]he biggest part of their propaganda effort is around the idea that the people they’re arresting are violent offenders who are public safety threats and they’re making America safer by arresting our neighbors, our employees, our employers, our family members, and so on. And this couldn’t be further from the truth.” — David J. Bier
ACLU did a previous story on Dec. 8th, and this was the Fort Bliss camp in Texas. This is the largest camp we have, which houses 3,000 people. Again, basic hygiene supplies withheld. There are reports of fetid food being fed to the detainees, causing widespread vomiting and diarrhea. They are being kept in tents. This reminds one of the days of Joe Arpaio in Arizona, where he was creating tent cities and keeping people in horrible hot conditions and forcing pregnant women to deliver in shackles.
In Fort Bliss, one detainee has reported repeated beatings by guards while their testicles are crushed. I mean, how does this work? Why is there not more outrage against this? And this, as you say, is only going to get worse as they arrest more and more people. They don’t have the detention space or the guards to actually take care of them. So what happens here?
Bier: When you look at accountability within the immigration system, it is incredibly limited. It’s difficult for you to challenge even egregious abuses by immigration enforcement agents because of the Supreme Court’s rulings that say there’s no private right of action to sue an agent who violates your constitutional rights. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t ever challenge a policy. So, in this case, the ACLU and others are trying to challenge the policy that’s in violation of the Eighth Amendment [that prohibits excessive bail, excessive fines, and cruel and unusual punishment], and try to get them to change the conditions. It’s really a deprivation of their liberty without due process under the Fifth Amendment.
You can’t detain people for civil immigration enforcement violations in conditions worse than we hold convicted murderers. That’s really what’s happening. That’s what they’re challenging. But, again, when you have to go to the courts to vindicate your rights, and there’s no accountability when the courts find out that, yeah, your rights were violated, and the administration smirks and [says], “Oh, we’re so sorry about that” ... if that’s all that ever happens, then it’s very, very difficult to ever get change and protection of the rights of these individuals. So, unfortunately, I’m not optimistic about a significant change in policy and how this is being treated.
We have already on the record other cases under the first Trump administration challenging conditions of confinement at the border and elsewhere where they were doing the exact same things: holding people without showers, detaining people in inhumane conditions, having 30 people in a cell designed for 10 individuals. There’s nowhere to sleep. I mean, these are obviously violations of our Constitution. They don’t care. And they will go to courts and do everything they can to obfuscate about these conditions, lie about them, say that this isn’t really what’s happening.
Despite there’s independent reports, it’s not just these two locations. It’s all across the country that this is happening. They are using office buildings that were never designed to hold anyone as holding facilities and then refusing to allow lawyers or any outside observers, members of Congress, from having access to these places where they could document what’s going on. So, it is abhorrent. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court and the rest of the federal judiciary has really neutered itself of its ability to enforce constitutional rights over much of the civil immigration enforcement bureaucracy.
That’s a huge flaw in our system. But it’s also a flaw that Congress should be looking at correcting. We cannot have a system where there’s a blind spot where our rights can’t be enforced. That’s really what we’re seeing with immigration agents.
Dalmia: Last week, actually, a Trump appointee in a New York court issued a 24-page, very scathing ruling calling out the conditions in a detention camp in Long Island. He was considering whether to cite ICE for contempt because ICE was refusing to provide pictures as he had requested of the conditions of the cells that these immigrants were being held in. Are judges in some position to aggressively step in over here and demand some accountability?
Bier: Really, in theory, that’s the only way they can hold these people accountable: say the policy is illegal, and then hold them in contempt if they refuse to follow the ruling of the court. Unfortunately, that almost never happens. We’re seeing right now with Judge Boasberg’s contempt proceedings regarding the Salvadoran flights, which were in violation of his order, and there was direct contemplation of how they were going to evade judicial review at the outset by not announcing the policy publicly, and then by carrying out the deportations at night, and then ultimately in violation of the court order anyway.
“I can’t think of anything worse than what we saw with the Salvadoran rendition of Venezuelans, many of whom were in the country legally. As I documented, over four dozen Venezuelans had legal status in the United States, never violated any immigration law, and yet they were sent out of the country with no due process and imprisoned in a torture prison. Again, not allowed to access any attorneys, were never able to even seek their freedom until El Salvador and Venezuela eventually negotiated their release as if they were somehow prisoners of war. And all of that in violation of court orders. Even the Supreme Court said what was done to them was in violation of the Constitution, which is really unprecedented to have a decision that quickly from the Supreme Court that this is in violation of the Constitution and there was no accountability.” — David J. Bier
They continued on their way and ordered them to be disembarked. That whole episode ... I mean, it’s clearly documented that there was a violation of the court order, and yet we still have not had any accountability for anyone. Secretary Noem ultimately owned the decision on that, but we haven’t seen any accountability. They’re still contesting whether they even have the authority to hold individuals in contempt in that case.
So, again, it’s possible, but it’s unlikely that you’re going to see accountability through this mechanism. Really, Congress needs to assert itself and provide some remedies for people whose rights are violated, but obviously we’re very far away from having a Congress and a president willing to sign restrictions on what ICE and CBP can do.
Dalmia: I’ll put you on the spot here and ask you: In your view of everything you’ve seen so far, what is the worst atrocity this administration has committed?
Bier: I can’t think of anything worse than what we saw with the Salvadoran rendition of Venezuelans, many of whom were in the country legally. As I documented, over four dozen Venezuelans had legal status in the United States, never violated any immigration law, and yet they were sent out of the country with no due process and imprisoned in a torture prison. Again, not allowed to access any attorneys, were never able to even seek their freedom until El Salvador and Venezuela eventually negotiated their release as if they were somehow prisoners of war. And all of that in violation of court orders. Even the Supreme Court said what was done to them was in violation of the Constitution, which is really unprecedented to have a decision that quickly from the Supreme Court that this is in violation of the Constitution and there was no accountability.
It didn’t change any of the facts on the ground. They were still able to ultimately keep them incarcerated there for really as long as they wanted to, to send that message that they wanted to send. So that, to me ... you look at the details of the individual cases, there’s hundreds of individuals. These people were sent out of the country, lied to about where they were going, their families were lied to. Many of them, they never even knew where their family member was until they were released. I mean, it was that level of secrecy. Black site is really the name for it. Really reprehensible on many levels.
Dalmia: Yeah, even the 9-11 suspected terrorists who were renditioned to other countries didn’t face some of the torture that these detainees have been describing. The New York Times actually just interviewed 40 of them who were sent back to Venezuela after their exchange with the United States, and it’s a harrowing account.
At one point, one of the released detainees mentions that they got so frustrated, they were so upset, that they started cutting themselves and using the blood to put messages in protest of their treatment on bedspreads, hanging them from their cells. It’s just astonishing that [it] is our country which is responsible for this. America is supposed to be the refuge, the safe haven, and we are throwing these people into worse conditions that they escaped from.
Moving on from how the administration is going after the allegedly undocumented population to the legal immigration aspect of it ... as you pointed out, they have some idea of what they want the demography of this country to look like. And that’s not going to be accomplished by simply throwing out 15-20 million people. You have to go far beyond that. So they are actually attacking the legal immigration system as well. Walk us through some of what they are doing to suspend and halt legal immigration into this country.
Bier: Yeah, if you look at it, this was a Day One project. They eliminated parole programs for people who were from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. This was a humanitarian, legal pathway that allowed people to sponsor Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, or Venezuelans to come in and receive a work permit and live here legally, temporarily, under those programs as an alternative to illegal immigration. It’s a very successful program—take my word for it. Even the conservative Manhattan Institute published research suggesting that it was responsible for a significant decline in illegal immigration under the Biden administration. That was eliminated on Day One.
“[T]hey have imposed a ban on legal immigration for about 40 countries. About 20% of all legal immigrants from abroad are covered under this announcement. This even includes the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens; they are banned if they’re from one of these 40 countries. And it’s the most aggressive and egregious abuse of presidential authority when it comes to immigration that we’ve seen, at least on legal immigration, ever. I mean, this is unprecedented.” — David J. Bier
Also eliminated was the right to seek asylum at ports of entry—again, a legal pathway to enter the country. That was eliminated. Again, this is in statute; your right to request asylum at a port of entry is guaranteed by law. They eliminated that. They eliminated the CBP One phone app, which allowed people to register their desire to seek safety and legal entry at a port of entry. They eliminated that as well. If you look at the refugee program, which is for people applying for protection abroad, they’re outside of the United States; they’re seeking to come legally to this country. That was due to admit 125,000 people, about a 10th of all legal immigrants to the United States were going to enter through this program. It was eliminated, basically entirely overnight. This program was not a Biden administration program. This has been in place since 1980—and there were even predecessors in the ‘70s for Vietnamese and others. This program was a long part of our immigration system, eliminated overnight by President Trump’s executive order. The only people now who are being admitted are white South Africans and only a few dozen or so have been resettled under that program.
Most recently, they have imposed a ban on legal immigration for about 40 countries. About 20% of all legal immigrants from abroad are covered under this announcement. This even includes the spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens; they are banned if they’re from one of these 40 countries. And it’s the most aggressive and egregious abuse of presidential authority when it comes to immigration that we’ve seen, at least on legal immigration, ever. I mean, this is unprecedented.
A remaking of the legal immigration system by executive order builds on things that happened under the first Trump administration, but never at this level of extreme ban covering even immediate relatives, spouses. Causing family separation for Americans, I would have thought was a bridge too far.
Back in June, they had a ban that they announced on 19 countries. And even in that, just a few months ago, it was a bridge too far to ban the spouses and children of U.S. citizens. In December, we [moved] so quickly that we’re doing that for 40 countries. So I would say it’s the most aggressive anti-legal immigration administration in history.
Dalmia: What is the pretext for banning people from these countries? That you can’t do sufficient vetting of the people coming out of them because the governments are not sharing background information?
Bier: On its face, the argument is that there is insufficient ability to vet these individuals. That’s what they claim in the preamble of the proclamation. But there’s almost no details provided that would prove that or demonstrate that for the vast majority of these countries. The only information that’s really provided for any of them is that there’s higher than average rate of overstays on temporary visas.
For every single country under this proclamation, you’re banning permanent legal immigration because there’s some overstays for some temporary visa categories. [That] doesn’t even make sense. I don’t really think they are trying to justify it. The main motivation here [is] the distinction between the countries who are willing to play ball, so to speak, when it comes to taking deportations from the United States, looting people from other countries that they’re not even nationals of the country—they’re sending people from Mexico to South Sudan. That is one of the main criteria that they’re focused on: your willingness to [support them to] do whatever they want in furtherance of this deportation campaign.
Dalmia: Yeah, one of the countries on the banned list was Bhutan, which is so arbitrary because it’s one of the safest, most peaceful [countries]—a very tiny country that poses really no threat to anybody.
Bier: If you look at our research on terrorist attacks committed by immigrants in the United States or people who weren’t born here, 99.5% of all of the deaths caused by terrorism did not originate from any of these targeted countries. Over the last 45 years, there has not been a threat from these places. So I just think it fundamentally has nothing to do with security and has everything to do with other foreign policy objectives, namely the deportation campaign itself.
Dalmia: So in legal immigration, there are three main categories. One is humanitarian means. One is family reunification. And then the third is work visas for high-skilled immigrants that can then become a path to green cards and permanent residency. We’ve talked about the attack on the humanitarian system. Tell us about the work visa, the legal category, the ones that high-skilled immigrants have used historically to come to this country and then live here. What are they doing to that aspect of our immigration policy?
Bier: The main policy there is imposing a $100,000 fee on people who want to receive an H-1B visa. And, of course, this $100,000 fee is just the right to apply for an H-1B visa. It does not guarantee that you will be approved. If the H-1B worker comes over, the employer pays the fee. But if the worker wants to go to some other company, he’s free to do so. The whole system is set up in such a way that you incur this huge cost with no guarantee of any benefit, which obviously is designed to just shut down the system and prevent anyone new from coming here.
“I was in transition meetings with Biden administration officials where I said, ‘You need to be aggressive on legal immigration. You’re going to face a wave of illegal immigration as the economy recovers. You need to get out there and send the message that we’re going to let people come, but they’re going to come legally.’ And they refused to do it. They didn’t open the borders.” — David J. Bier
There is an exception that they’ve allowed, at least for now, for people who are already in the United States. If they’re international students and they’re seeking to transfer over to an H-1B visa, they’d be exempt from this policy for now. Of course, we can all project in the future and see how that would be criticized as a loophole in the system and so on, that they’re getting away without paying this fee. But for new people coming in the future from any country, a $100,000 fee, and it’s likely to shut down almost entirely new visa issuances for H-1Bs abroad.
Dalmia: Astonishing. They are even attacking tourist visas. I was talking to a cousin of mine not too long ago, who lives in India, and I was encouraging him to come and visit us here in the United States. He’s a senior citizen. And he says [that] if you are over 70 years old or something, right now, the consulate is requiring you to provide a medical certificate. And if you have high blood pressure or diabetes, they refuse your certificate. They refuse you a visa. Just the application fee is a few hundred dollars. So the idea that anybody who has any kind of health condition after a certain age will not be allowed to enter this country just for tourist purposes, we are literally building a fortress America. Is there any precedent for this, trying to scale back on tourism and tourist visas?
Bier: No, not really. We’ve never seen such a broad-based attack. The historical record is we want to continue to encourage tourism. It’s essentially free money for the United States. That people want to come here and spend their money here, that is a benefit to our country, to our economy. And it would be crazy to think that an administration would intentionally impose a policy against that.
But you’re right. There [are] so many policies happening simultaneously that attack every single aspect of our immigration system. It’s death by a thousand cuts. You look at the social media vetting—they’re even making children now set their social media to public so that anyone can look at it, including consular officers, so they can investigate their thoughts. What are they posting about America? Are they pro-America or not? And if they’re not, then they’re going to be refused a visa.
Unless you’re inculcated with this worldview, it’s going to look bizarre to you. But this is the reality of how our immigration system is actually operating. They’re trying to make it so that anyone they don’t want to come to the United States, which is most people, they’ll have a way to deny them a visa or the right to enter legally.
Dalmia: What’s really dismaying to me about our current moment is how much the window has shifted in the restrictionist direction. It really is a triumph of right-wing restrictionism. They have been hammering away for a long time that there needs to be a moratorium on immigration in this country, like we had after 1930, when we pretty much almost stopped all immigration because of the idea that we need some time before the current wave of immigrants is assimilated in America and allow new immigrants to come in. This idea has become so pervasive that a number of center-left Democratic friends are beginning to regurgitate this notion that the rise of populist authoritarianism in the world is due to progressive policies that have allowed unfettered immigration and open borders. It has become absolutely normal, even in non-MAGA circles, to claim that Biden lost the last election because of open borders.
Just recently, a New York Times report, “How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration,” rattled off a litany of Biden’s lapses on immigration. This is what it said:
Soon after being sworn in, Mr. Biden issued a 100-day pause on deportations. He drastically narrowed the categories of unauthorized immigrants targeted for arrest. He directed his government to stop building the border wall, a centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s agenda. He suspended Remain in Mexico. He sent draft legislation to Congress to create a citizenship pathway to people in the country illegally. He kept Title 42 in place, but stopped using it to turn back children who crossed the border alone.
Did Biden really throw open the borders and invite mass immigration into this country? What exactly is the Biden administration’s record on immigration?
Bier: It’s so divorced from reality, what you just described. I was in transition meetings with Biden administration officials where I said, “You need to be aggressive on legal immigration. You’re going to face a wave of illegal immigration as the economy recovers. You need to get out there and send the message that we’re going to let people come, but they’re going to come legally.” And they refused to do it. They didn’t open the borders.
That can actually give you a specific moment to look at. When President Biden announced that he was going to end Remain in Mexico, there actually was some confusion among the people who were in Mexico at the time. “Does this mean that the border is open and I’ll be able to enter legally at a port of entry?” In fact, what he meant by that was only the specific people who returned to Mexico under the first Trump administration, under this specific policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols, will be allowed to enter legally. Everyone else, the only way to cross the border is illegally. And they went out there and sent that message in mid-February, said, “The border’s closed.” The only people getting in were previously under this policy, and only a very small number of them—a few dozen a month—were let back in in February.
“[W]hen you look at what is happening with immigration, immigration enforcement right now is primarily about racial profiling in the streets, targeting people because they’re Hispanic construction workers. You can’t think of a more abhorrent policy that degrades citizenship for millions and millions of people who are being harassed and targeted and arrested and detained and being told to prove they’re a citizen because of their race and their background and their occupation. It’s so un-American. And it’s unpopular. It’s not something that the American public at large is saying, ‘Yeah, this is what we should be doing’ and cheering them on. They’re against it.” — David J. Bier
Immediately after that, you saw this huge increase in the number of people crossing the border illegally because they sent the message that the only way to get in was to get in by crossing the border illegally. It’s not true that he opened the border to illegal immigration. It’s almost like a footnote in that New York Times article that he kept Title 42 in place. Title 42 was a complete and absolute ban on asylum for people crossing the border. It enabled the Border Patrol to, without any hearing, without even recording the details of the people who they were arresting, immediately expel them back to Mexico or to any other country that they wanted.
He [Biden] did a lot of tinkering around the edges. He changed this Migrant Protection Protocol business and allowed a few people back in. But the main policy of the early Biden administration was the same policy as under the end of the Trump administration, which was Title 42, a complete ban on asylum, rapid expulsions back to Mexico. And it didn’t work. The reason it didn’t work is because demand for jobs was so high in the United States that people were desperate to get out of horrible conditions in these countries to the south, and they had the ability to fund their migration to the United States because of all of the jobs that were open in the United States.
As soon as you got across the border, they overwhelmed the Border Patrol facilities, which resulted in people being released. But it wasn’t because Biden said, “Throw open the doors of the Border Patrol facilities.” Just the opposite. They only released people when the facilities were overflowing. And there were lawsuits about conditions in Border Patrol facilities under the Biden administration as well, because they were detaining people until they had absolutely no choice, which led to the chaos of illegality and people being dumped on the streets of Texas and so on. So I completely reject the narrative.
I was talking to these officials in the Department of Homeland Security in 2021, 2022, saying, “You’ve got to change this policy. You’ve got to get rid of Title 42. It’s not working. You’ve got to allow people to apply for asylum at ports of entry.”
Just to give you another anecdote: In Sept. of 2021, you had that huge Haitian encampment. It was probably the worst image day for the Biden administration immigration policy, this huge number of crossings by Haitians. Then they had Border Patrol rounding them up on horseback. It looked terrible from everyone’s perspective. If you’re pro-Biden or anti-Biden, it was a horrible image. And the crazy thing about it was all of those people had crossed next to a closed port of entry. If you look historically, Haitians had always—99% [of the time]—crossed the southwest border to request asylum at ports of entry, even under the first Trump administration, until they closed the border entirely and shut down the asylum system completely under the first Trump administration. In 2019 and 2020, you had Haitians going to the ports of entry, requesting to enter, waiting long periods if necessary to enter legally. And the Biden administration didn’t reopen the ports of entry. They ended up with this horrible scenario.
I argued that they need to get rid of this policy and start letting them back in. They eventually did in 2022. And then after they started letting them back in, Haitians— again, 99% [of them]—entered legally and it wasn’t a problem anymore. Most of the chaos was caused by the anti-immigration opponents within the Biden administration who are now trying to rehabilitate their image through these selective leaks and other articles that they’re feeding to The New York Times and other outlets who are reporting that it was all Biden’s fault that he didn’t want to do these things that they said that would be even more of a crackdown than it already was. It’s just totally divorced from reality.
The entire Biden administration had more restrictive asylum policies than under Trump in 2017, 2018, even 2019. It wasn’t until 2020 that Trump imposed a blanket ban on all asylum. So, [it] really couldn’t be more divorced from reality. The Biden administration acted too slow to allow people to come legally and “open” the borders, which resulted in the illegal immigration that we saw.
Dalmia: So here is where I despair. You have The New York Times saying that if Biden had continued Trump 1.0’s harsh interior enforcement policies and deported people at the same rate that Trump was doing, built the Great Wall of Trump, let asylum seekers languish in camps in Mexico in horrible conditions, not push a path to permanent legalization for Dreamers, and even force children back to Mexico, what hope is there that the next Democratic president will just not be Trump-lite?
Before Trump started fueling the fires of nativism and xenophobia, the rhetoric in this country about immigration was night and day. There was widespread consensus that immigrants were a boon to this country. And the conversation was about: How do we fix our broken immigration system and make it more rational, sane, humane? The idea was that if you created more legal pathways to immigration, that would cure illegal immigration because the root cause of why people come here illegally is there are jobs in this country. But migrants don’t have a way to come here, take those jobs, and live in the country legally.
Two presidents, one Republican and one Democrat, actually tried to pass comprehensive immigration reform that was not perfect from your or my standpoint. There were lots of problems with it. But at least it was an effort to fix the horrible Kafkaesque immigration system that we have and put something rational and create some legal pathways.
But now that conversation is completely gone and Democrats are saying we need to cut back on mass immigration. We need time to assimilate those we already have over here. How do we wrest this conversation back to the pre-Trump, Reagan era? Reagan’s rhetoric on immigration was wonderful. He said they were good for our country. They helped our country grow and enrich our country. How do we get back to that?
Bier: It’s an excellent question. I laugh at the idea that, once 15% of our population is foreign-born, we slashed immigration [in 1924 with the passage of the Johnson-Reed Act—the so called national origins quota law]. The only reason that the share of the [foreign-born] population is increasing very much [right now] is because we’re not having any more kids and we’re not growing as a U.S.-born population. So, any immigration, of course, is going to result in an increase in the foreign-born share just because the American-born population isn’t growing at all—which is actually an argument for immigration. We need people to fill these jobs and expand our economy and innovate and be entrepreneurial and all the other things that immigration and immigrants do to contribute to our economy and society.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party really is run by a lot of people who are at heart restrictionists, who buy the Republican Party narrative. That’s why they didn’t fix the asylum system under Biden. It’s why even Obama expanded family detention centers. That was his big idea to fix the border. So, I don’t have much optimism, frankly, for the Democratic Party establishment coming in and saving us.
Even right now, when you look at what is happening with immigration, immigration enforcement right now is primarily about racial profiling in the streets, targeting people because they’re Hispanic construction workers. You can’t think of a more abhorrent policy that degrades citizenship for millions and millions of people who are being harassed and targeted and arrested and detained and being told to prove they’re a citizen because of their race and their background and their occupation. It’s so un-American. And it’s unpopular. It’s not something that the American public at large is saying, “Yeah, this is what we should be doing” and cheering them on. They’re against it.
And yet what you see in Congress from Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries in the House, they’re not focused on it. There’s no concerted effort to make this a significant point of contention in the midterm elections. And I don’t understand it because that’s where the energy is. On the Democratic side, people are just absolutely shocked that we can have masked agents just grabbing people off the street at random, demanding that they prove their citizenship. And yet we don’t see a political focus from these party leaders precisely because of this type of analysis that, “Oh, Biden lost because of immigration.”
Maybe that had some marginal effect. I tend to think it was mainly inflation that cost them, as opposed to immigration. I would say immigration probably was a result of the bad policies imposed by the anti-immigration group that caused most of the chaos of the border, as opposed to the good policies that he adopted later on in his term to allow legal immigration and expanded options for people to come legally. Those were not bad policies. And yet those are the ones that are being attacked.
Unfortunately, I do think that it’s going to take someone outside of that Democratic leadership to say we don’t want to see these kind of unaccountable mass ICE raids in our streets.
Dalmia: Just to share a personal anecdote, I’m a naturalized citizen from India and I’ve got several Indian American relatives similarly naturalized. And the topic of conversation in our family gatherings is, “Should we carry our passports on us at all times?” I mean, I walk my dog every morning and we have the National Guard roaming around in Lincoln Park. I live in D.C. And I sometimes think maybe I should be carrying my passport on me. We have already become a, “Your papers, please” society.
But my hope is that there is so much public anger now building at the draconian nature of immigration enforcement that the Trump administration is engaging in. It is laying bare what the logic of immigration enforcement is. If you want a restrictionist regime, you can’t have a halfway house—you will go all the way and start truncating the rights not just of immigrants, but of citizens too. Because I have to now think about carrying my passport and I am a citizen of this country. There will be those who are supporting immigrants—people like you—who are so vocal about it. You will be targeted too. The logic of immigration enforcement is becoming clear that I hope that if we get the Democratic president, they can build on this horror that’s been building up to push us in a more sane, sensible, rational, humane direction. Am I being too optimistic?
Bier: Well, it certainly can’t get much worse than what we’re seeing under the Trump administration. So I do expect that we’ll see some dialing back in terms of the racial profiling and some of these street arrests in the interior under any Democratic administration.
What I’m most concerned about is whether the Democrats, when they get control, actually take affirmative steps to prevent this type of disaster from happening again. Because people will not come to this country and trust our government—whether it be Afghan allies, refugees, people coming for work or otherwise—if they think there’s a chance, even a small chance, that they might be rendered to some Salvadoran prison when the mad president decides that they’re not wanted anymore. I mean, this is the type of behavior that leads people to give up on the United States, give up on the American dream, give up on [being] part of our society and our economy. That’s the exact opposite message we want to send.
We want people to come and contribute to this country and make our country a better and more prosperous place. And yet it doesn’t matter what the formal policies of the next administration are unless they can credibly say, “We’re not going to allow this to happen to you again. We’re going to protect your rights. You’re going to have due process. You’re going to have a way to stay in this country and defend your rights, even against a hostile administration who wants to get rid of you.” There’s no program, there’s no agenda, there’s no one leading that effort right now, either in Congress or outside of Congress, [who is] saying, “Here’s the way forward that will protect the rights of people who come to this country and not allow for arbitrary abuses of authority based on whatever the whims of the president are.”
So that’s the most important agenda right now for Congress, for people who care about non-citizens and immigrants in this country. How are we going to protect the rights of those people who want to come in the future? We fix the system, we take over, we want to expand legal immigration. That’s great. But unless you have a policy and procedures and accountability, if those policies and procedures are violated, then it’s all for naught. People will not trust us. And so that’s what we need to do. We need to reestablish trust in our immigration system.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
We welcome your reactions and replies. Please adhere to our comments policy.
