The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent: Angry Trump's Private Orders to Border Officials Grow More Unnerving [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent - (archived: https://archive.ph/d7zcB ) Angry Trump’s Private Orders to Border Officials Grow More Unnerving

January 28, 2025
PODCAST

As Trump seethes over deportation levels he considers too low, a former ICE official explains how his fixation on arrest numbers will divert resources away from violent criminals, making us less safe.

Already, Donald Trump is “disappointed” about the pace of deportations under his presidency, The Washington Post reports. Trump officials have instructed ICE to aggressively ramp up the daily arrests to assuage his anger, even setting quotas and threatening discipline on officials who fail to meet them. But here’s the problem: The pressure to meet those quotas also makes it more likely that ICE officials will sweep in noncriminal undocumented immigrants. We talked to Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior Homeland Security official, about why Trump’s obsession with removal numbers could divert the focus from serious criminals—and what all this says about the absurdity of White House/MAGA cult propaganda extolling Trump’s “strength” in combating the migrant “invasion.” Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.