State of the Union with Journalist Jacob Soboroff

Journalist and author Jacob Soboroff (MS Now) has spent the better part of a decade reporting from inside America’s fractured immigration system. He joins us this week, fresh off the plane from Minneapolis, where he’s been on the ground covering the ICE raids that continue to sweep across the city (and the nation). We discuss the evolving operations (3:00) and protests on the ground (6:00), the gulf between conservative media’s portrayals of unrest and the reality he’s witnessed (14:00), and the potential for accountability in the shootings of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti (23:00). Soboroff then offers an abridged history of immigration enforcement (31:00), dispatches from his 2018 visit to a family separation facility in Texas (38:00), and insights on ICE’s online recruitment campaign (46:00). To close, we unpack the next phase of ICE (1:01:00), Jacob’s reporting on the LA wildfires in his new book Firestorm https://www.harpercollins.com/products/firestorm-jacob-soboroff?variant=43816964096034 (1:05:00), and whether Bad Bunny’s call for unity will be heard (1:11:00). As always, our email— [email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Sam Fragoso?

  This is Talk Easy. I'm Stan Fragoso. Welcome to the show.

• 0:31Sam Fragoso?

  Today, journalist Jacob Soboroff. Soboroff is a senior political and national reporter for MSNBC and the author of the new book Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America's New Age of Disaster. Growing up in the Pacific Palisades, Soboroff watched his childhood home go up in flames while reporting on the story. And while Los Angeles continued to burn, he was on the ground interviewing Governor Newsom and, most importantly, displaced residents and workers searching for answers. In recent months, you may have seen Soboroff reporting from the streets of Minneapolis, where he's been on the ground covering the ongoing ice raids. It's a subject Soboroff knows intimately. During Donald

• 1:12Sam Fragoso?

  Trump's first term, Jacob was one of the leading reporters covering the family separation crisis at the border, resulting in his award-winning book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. His reporting was then adapted into a documentary of the same name by the great Errol Morris. Ahead of the State of the Union this week, I wanted to sit with Jacob to discuss what President Trump has recently been heralding as, quote, "the new golden age," an era marked by aggressive ice raids, expanding detention centers, and a sweeping and seemingly indiscriminate promise of mass deportation. We also discussed the complicated history of America's immigration policy, how both Democrat and Republican administrations have contributed to the

• 1:57Sam Fragoso?

  broken system we have today, and what, on the other side of Minnesota and the Super Bowl, we can do about any of it. That's coming up next with Jacob Soboroff.

• 2:22Sam Fragoso?

  Jacob Soboroff, welcome to the show.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Thank you, Sam. It's an honor to be here.

• 2:27Sam Fragoso?

  How are you doing?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  I'm doing good.

• 2:29Sam Fragoso?

  Is that true?

• 2:30Speaker 01

  It is obviously a crazy, crazy time for me as a reporter. It's been a very crazy year. As a human, on a personal level, it's been tough. Watched my hometown burn down, and then ICE came into town and terrorized not just my community, but our whole city. And then I've seen it sort of play out across the country, but I really mean it very sincerely. I have also never quite felt so hopeful and in community with so many people as I have at the beginning of 2026, and I wasn't sure it was going there during 2025. But I love people, and they're the ones that keep me going and doing all this.

• 3:08Sam Fragoso?

  You've spent the better part of the last year covering ICE in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte. Having just returned from reporting in Minneapolis, did you find that the story was the same from those other cities in this one?

• 3:24Speaker 01

  Kind of, but it's continued to evolve. And I would add to that list also 26 Federal Plaza in the hallways of Lower Manhattan, too. This is happening all over the place. And what I saw in the earliest days of June of 2025 has become more dialed in, I guess, for lack of a better phrase. And they have, both the government and the protesters and people engaged in this nonviolent resistance have evolved their tactics. And it's only gotten more brutal at the hands of the Trump administration, and it's only gotten more organized and more surgical in terms of pushing back on them. But I do think that, what does it mean to be in the middle of the largest mass deportation effort in American

• 4:08Speaker 01

  history? It is to watch family separation play out again, supersized to a degree that I think that they wanted to do when they covered this during the first term, but were unable to do, and now are trying to carry out in this way that is depraved.

• 4:22Sam Fragoso?

  What's different about what's happening in Minnesota?

• 4:25Speaker 01

  At the hands of the government, they seem to be sort of untethered or unchained. We saw they just killed two American citizens in broad daylight, Renée Nicole Good and Alex Preddy. And you saw the reactions. These are, and I'm paraphrasing, but essentially domestic terrorists, far-right agitators, leftist radicals, all of it, from the highest levels of the US government. And it is what they have telegraphed all along. Tom Homan told me on the second day of the raids when we stood in a loading dock in Long Beach that someone was gonna die. And it wasn't just someone, it's multiple migrants. Now it's two American citizens. It has gone to a level of violence, I think, that I, we knew the government was capable of.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  We knew that they tortured kids during the first administration, but the way in which they're going about it, the seeming lack of moral clarity that prevents them from doing these things, it's at a level that I have not seen and I think has sort of increased steadily since the beginning of the raids in June.

• 5:25Sam Fragoso?

  Is this the design of the Trump administration's immigration policy?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Oh, definitely.

• 5:29Sam Fragoso?

  Is violence what they wanted?

• 5:31Speaker 01

  Yes, and don't take it from me, take it from the governors of these states that I've talked to as I, you know, I spoke with Newsom in the Emergency Operations Center at the early stages of the LA raids. I talked to JB Pritzker standing in the middle of downtown Chicago as this was unfolding in the fall, and I just talked to Tim Walz in the state Capitol in Minneapolis. They all think that the idea is to provoke the protesters by the administration by using violence to beget more violence so that Trump can invoke the Insurrection Act and bring real, real troops to American cities like he did in LA in the early days. Again, from the beginning of this thing, they said that this was violent, that these were insurrectionists, that they were trying to overthrow the government in some way. The only violence I saw from the very beginning was law enforcement pushing back against

• 6:15Speaker 01

  the protesters outside of, you know, I'm sure isolated incidents that were happening. But this has always been an attempt, in my opinion and in the opinions of these governors that I've spent time with, to push it as far as they can to see when people will push back in the same violent way. And that's not what's happening because that's not what people want. And people see through what the Trump administration is trying to do.

• 6:35Sam Fragoso?

  At the time of recording, thousands of vice agents remain in Minneapolis, and the raids have continued to pace, at least to local news reports. Tell me about the organizational efforts that you've seen from activist groups on the ground. Who are these people?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just to underscore your point, just because Greg Bavino, this sort of cowboy guy in a made up job called commander of the operation at large, I just want to be really clear, it's a fake job.

• 7:02Sam Fragoso?

  I read a recent report that says he gave himself that haircut. Is that true?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  I don't have reporting on the haircut.

• 7:08Sam Fragoso?

  I feel like you and Rachel Maddow have been breaking that down. Is that not right?

• 7:11Speaker 01

  We've been, Rachel and I have been talking behind the scenes about it.

• 7:13Sam Fragoso?

  Oh, behind the scenes.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Can't confirm that reporting quite yet. MS now.

• 7:16Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  But he does look like Sean Penn in the Paul Tom Sanders movie.

• 7:19Sam Fragoso?

  He really does.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Isn't it unbelievable? And that, I was just talking to somebody who said, you know, that obviously, nobody knew who Greg Bavino was when they made that film, but that is Greg Bavino in that movie. Wow.

• 7:28Sam Fragoso?

  Eerie.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  It is. Just because he's out and Tom Homan is in, just because the military costume is gone and the guy's wearing a suit and a tie and standing behind a podium at the Department of Homeland Security in the Whipple Building, it doesn't mean, in my opinion, anything is going to change. Tom Homan is one of the architects of the family separation policy. He's one of the most extreme voices on immigration in the Trump administration, period, full stop. And unless or until Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Greg Bavino, Corey Lewandowski, and all this goes on and on, are no longer in charge of immigration policy, and frankly, Donald Trump is president, I don't think much is going to change when it comes to instituting mass deportation.

• 8:09Sam Fragoso?

  That's not going to change anytime soon.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  A softer touch, Trump said. What the hell is a softer touch?

• 8:13Sam Fragoso?

  Well, I want to get into that and more about Tom Homan, but the people fighting back on the ground.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:19Sam Fragoso?

  Look like what? What are their jobs? Like, who are these people?

• 8:23Speaker 01

  They're superheroes and they're everyday human beings. In LA, it started, I think, more informally, and I should say, like, none of this is new. Read Dr. William Lopez's book, Separate. It also had same title as my first book about interior enforcement. These raids have happened for a very long time in the US under Democrats and Republicans, but nothing to the degree of what we're seeing right now. And resistance has always existed. But the way that it's changed since, in this chapter, since June, is, you know, I went out at first with Unión del Barrio, an on the ground organization that would drive around Home Depot parking lots, looking out for, for the people, the day laborers that were there. But it was largely informal. I mean, they was, they would say it's very much. Amongst them, but it was not on the scale that we've seen as the time has gone on. It's almost like best practices have happened in the resistance.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  And so they went from, and there were teachers that I met, other people with day jobs, to Chicago was the first place I saw the whistles used. And that was on a street in Cicero, you know, most Latino neighborhood in Illinois, where they're literally chasing down a little old lady wearing a pink backpack, going to buy ingredients for a stew and leave her American citizen daughter behind. And then in North Carolina, on a Monday night at Siembra NC training session in a Methodist church, 300 people show up. It's the first time I saw the orange yellow vests that people were wearing. Another teacher, Jenny, I remember meeting her, telling me we stopped them from actually taking people. And then in Minneapolis, over the last couple of weeks that I've been there, it's like all of these things are combined. You know, they're using the tools that you've seen in each of these cities, using the group chats, taking the physical infrastructure, whether it's the vests or the whistles,

• 9:54Speaker 01

  or physically finding a way to stand together to stop people. It's now become quite a science. And as you've seen, I think, is what kicked Greg Bavino out of Minneapolis. And it's not over, but Trump backed down from family separation 1.0 because of the people, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people in the streets. We wouldn't be at the place we are today were it not for a movement that is developing that I think is going to be even far bigger than what we saw during the first Trump administration.

• 10:19Sam Fragoso?

  You think it's going to be bigger?

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Way bigger, way bigger. Look at what is happening spontaneously on Fridays after school. Kids are going out all across the country now, standing up to protest. It's not an immigration issue any longer. It's an issue about whether or not we're going to live in a free and a fair society. We're going to have heavily armed, masked, kitted up federal agents who don't identify themselves are smashing people's car windows, are taking them out of their vehicles, are throwing them into detention centers, are taking kids allegedly as bait to bring other parents out. I mean, people aren't going to stand for, they're not standing for this now. And I think that the movement that is developing is in its sort of nascent actual form

• 11:02Speaker 01

  in a way that has a lot of runway that's still built.

• 11:06Sam Fragoso?

  I think many people listening to this or watching are familiar with how you've described the protesters thus far. But I want to turn to how the protests are being described in the conservative media.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:18Sam Fragoso?

  Here is Ben Shapiro, first on his show, and then later in the clip we made on Fox News.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  There was, there was chaos on the street. Here's more footage from the street immediately afterward.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  And see again, people getting very pushy with the ICE agents, physical confrontations with ICE agents.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  In this sort of environment, is it particularly shocking if, God forbid, somebody gets shot? And the more you have these sorts of situations, the more you have these confrontations that are spurred on by, again, political actors claiming basic law enforcement function is somehow an act of evil, you're going to end up with more contentious operations, more contentious confrontations. Minneapolis protesters were burning the American flag in the immediate aftermath of this event, of course. And this sort of activity has been a long time in coming. And of course, we have seen multiple assaults on ICE officers over the course of the last year, up to and including an attempted shooting at ICE facilities, people attempting to ram ICE officers with their cars.

• 12:20Speaker 03

  Ben, that is sick.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  It absolutely is. And obviously, if you're talking about the broader agenda here, by an enormous number of celebrities and commentators to treat ICE like Nazis, the outcome of that is going to be people who treat ICE like Nazis, and that's unbelievably dangerous.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  First thing I'll just say is, obviously, any violence towards, whether it's a protester or towards a law enforcement officer, is abhorrent, and nobody is saying, nobody is saying that that's okay. But I watched that, and I think, who are the snowflakes, actually? Who are they? So often, in my social media thread and replies, you don't know the type of shit that I get, and I watch that, and I say, I was there. I, you know, those clips, I can't tell exactly, but I think one of them, I may have even been there after Greg Bavino threw the tear gas canister on the street in Minnesota. Seriously, what are they scared of? These are folks who are holding rainbow flags, they're holding American flags, they're out there blowing whistles as they're driving around indiscriminately picking up people off the street.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  They are not engaged in targeted operations, at least primarily going after the so-called worst of the worst. They are cruising around town. I saw it in Charlotte, they'd literally drive by you and make eye contact with you, and they like clock that you're passing them and that you're passing vice versa. And in Minnesota, just looking for people to grab on the street. I seen it in a home, I had the homeboat at Cypress Park by my house here in LA, pulling up as if they're going into theater, even that's the word Tom Homan used, a war zone? These are day laborers looking to rebuild houses that burned down in the Eden Fire or the Palisades Fire. What are they so scared of? What are they so scared of? What are they so scared of? People that don't look like them becoming their neighbors or their coworkers

• 14:02Speaker 01

  or their fellow parishioners, or maybe even their friends. That's what I think.

• 14:06Sam Fragoso?

  Watching that, it's hard to imagine that you two are technically talking about the same issue. How do you see the gulf between his understanding of what's happening and yours?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  A profound lack of awareness about the actual facts on the ground. And I don't know, maybe Ben Shapiro, husband, out at the protests and has seen who these folks are and met them and realized that they're literally mothers after school showing up or people leaving their day jobs to look out for people who are being literally rendered out of their vehicles and taken to a nondescript federal building and locked up without allegedly due process. Where is he? Why is he not coming out to see these folks and meet them? I've sat down with Narciso Bronco, the landscaper who was had the shit beaten out of him after cutting bushes at an IHOP who has three sons in the Marine Corps, raised his kids to be military fighters for this country.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  One of them, Alejandro, told me I'd be tried for a war crime if I treated a detainee in Afghanistan where I served, like those dudes treated my own father. Or Nori Sanz-Ti Ramos, who was a high school honor student, track star at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, deported to Guatemala after living here her whole life. Her mom died because ICE didn't give her the right medicine allegedly. Or how about Annie Lucia Lopez-Balozza, 19-year-old Babson College student, literally traveling home to see her mom and dad in San Antonio for Thanksgiving and was picked up by ICE agents at the airport and deported to Honduras. And the list goes on and on and on. I just did this story about Chloe, this two-year-old and her dad Elvis, who were taken after the window was smashed in Minneapolis.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  The guy had no criminal record. He was going to buy fruit. They followed him home. Is Ben Shapiro seeing these people? Has he ever met any one of them? I don't know him. I don't want to pick a fight with him. But it's just not based in the reality that I have seen and known on the ground. And that's why it's why I choose to pick up and leave my life and my kids and my wife and my family to go see this stuff myself, so I can talk about it from a position of having been there and actually understand it with my own eyes.

• 16:10Sam Fragoso?

  But his view of the situation, it's not a niche one.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 16:14Sam Fragoso?

  And the more conservative media that I consume, the more it's become abundantly clear that actually Ben Shapiro, this is going to be crazy for people to hear, is actually to the left. Of some of his conservative media members. So when he's describing those events, I still don't understand the gulf that we're talking about. Why does he see this, as he just described, in this sort of environment? Is it particularly shocking if someone gets shot? The more you have these confrontations that are spurred on by political actors claiming basic law enforcement function is somehow an act of evil, you're going to end up with more contentious confrontations.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Well, if you're playing the role of Ben Shapiro, define basic law enforcement functions for me. Is killing American citizens on the streets of the United States for attempting to protect other human beings a basic law enforcement function? Is when you say you're going after the worst of the worst and then you pick up college kids and two-year-olds and five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, are those basic law enforcement functions? It's a reframing of what law enforcement is and should be in this country, and he's just parroting the lines that this administration has been saying over and over. It's the signs that I saw at the convention, mass deportation now. This has actually never been about the worst of the worst. It's always been about getting millions and millions of people, kicking them out of

• 17:36Speaker 01

  the country to make more room for whomever their preferred class is.

• 17:41Sam Fragoso?

  I don't know anyone who doesn't want illegal immigrants who are creating violence and chaos to be deported. Why isn't ICE going after those people?

• 17:52Speaker 01

  What's amazing is they already are and already were. And both Newsom and Walz made this point very specifically to me, that they hand over from their state prison systems, the so-called worst of the worst. And what this administration is trying to do is pretend that every undocumented person who may be in this county jail or a city lockup is a violent criminal on the, on the nature of whoever's in a state prison for murder or rape or drug trafficking or whatever. Some people would, under their preferred way of doing this, would be deported from the country because they made their way into a local jail, maybe pre-trial or even pre-conviction. It's how things were done before sanctuary policies were put into place.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  That's not due process. That's not giving people their day in court. What if they're on a misdemeanor weed charge? Or a minor traffic violation? Or somebody accused them of something and they were arrested for it? And they didn't get to even go before a judge? That's actually what this administration would like. And what they say is, oh, the reason we have to be out on the streets causing terror is because you won't let us into the city and county lockups to go pick off any undocumented person who ends up in there. I'm not saying every undocumented person or every person that ends up in county jail or a city lockup is innocent or hasn't committed a crime. But they're not the worst of the worst, and in many cases, they may be falsely accused.

• 19:16Sam Fragoso?

  So when it comes to warrantless searches, excessive force, rampant surveillance, on the ground, have you witnessed ICE agents in violation of Fourth Amendment rights?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  I mean, I'll just give you some examples. In Minneapolis, not last time I was there, but the time before, I was pulled up on a street corner and someone had been ripped out of their vehicle, the window smashed and taken within a matter of minutes. They left the car sitting in the intersection. They left the person's purse and wallet and phone in the car. And everything we know about that case, at least when I showed up in that intersection, is that that person was taken because they got in the way of an ongoing law enforcement operation. Same deal with Chloe and her father Elvis. On what basis are you allowed to break into a person's private property, whether it's their home or their vehicle, without a warrant? Without a criminal case? I'm not an attorney, but it sure seems like these are random indiscriminate stops

• 20:12Speaker 01

  without any form of judicial warrant whatsoever.

• 20:14Sam Fragoso?

  And the consequences?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  What could happen to any of us? If it can happen to them, well, who's to say it can't happen to any of us in any circumstance? These are agents from the border. That are not meant to be in the interior of the country. These are Border Patrol agents roaming freely around American cities.

• 20:29Sam Fragoso?

  And but I'm saying, is there any potential for those agents to face any consequences for their actions?

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Oh, well, that's what Walz is saying, that he wants to bring them back. He said he wants to do a truth and reconciliation commission, that he wants to hold Greg Bavino, and maybe even Stephen Miller, and all the way to the top accountable. But how you do it? I don't know. And this will be an interesting exercise in whether or not he can put his money where his mouth is, because he's certainly talking tough. But, I mean, family separation was torture, in the words of Physicians for Human Rights. It was government sanctioned child abuse, in the words of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Biden called it criminal in the final presidential debate. And yet, no one, not a single person, has been held accountable for that policy.

• 21:12Sam Fragoso?

  He suggested that he would offer restitution to some of those families separated.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  And then after a question by Peter Doocy on Fox News at a White House press conference, backed down.

• 21:21Sam Fragoso?

  Why?

• 21:22Speaker 01

  I think it was shameful, frankly. I don't know. Politics is my answer to the question. There isn't a good answer.

• 21:28Sam Fragoso?

  In 2026, what would consequences look like for ICE agents? How would that even begin to happen?

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Zorin Mamdani told me that, when he was mayor-elect, that if NYPD had evidence of ICE agents violating people's civil rights in New York, that they could bring a case against any particular agent that had done that. What it would look like to me, again, I'm not an attorney, is there are so many examples of the brutality of these operations being perpetrated upon these people. Where are the federal prosecutors? Where are the civil rights cases? In this administration, those same prosecutors that may normally bring those cases are resigning in places like Minnesota. And so, is it going to happen under this administration? Not at the federal level, very clearly. It would require the courage and the investigations and the ability to build a case against these agents

• 22:20Speaker 01

  on a more local level.

• 22:22Sam Fragoso?

  Again, it's almost impossible for us to imagine a future where any accountability occurs. When you have the president's deputy chief of staff, an advisor to Homeland Security, Stephen Miller, go on Fox News and say something like this. Here's Stephen Miller with a message to ICE.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you, or tries to stop you, or tries to obstruct you, is committing a felony. You have immunity to perform your duties, and no one, no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no leftist agitator, or domestic insurrectionist can prevent you from fulfilling your legal obligations and duties. And the Department of Justice has made clear that if officials cross that line into obstruction, into criminal conspiracy against the United States or against ICE officers, then they will face justice.

• 23:19Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I think the thing that's undergirding my line of questioning at the beginning here is that I suspect most people watching and listening to this show, they know at least bits and pieces of what we've talked about. And in some ways, it's related to the Epstein files as well, which is so many people have witnessed, acknowledged, mapped out all the indiscretions, all the ways in which laws have been violated. And yet, there doesn't seem to be anything happening from that witnessing. And so at some point, I guess I'm just wondering, what the hell is the point of bearing witness if we don't see anything else?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  I believe, in my experience as a reporter, that bearing witness works. And I said it before, and I'll say it again, during the first Trump administration, the famous separation policy, that same guy wanted to separate 25,000 children from their parents using a procedure called administrative separation.

• 24:14Sam Fragoso?

  And why did he want to do that?

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Because he believed, according to his wife Katie, said this to me directly, that it would scare people away from coming to the United States. By the way, side note, and we'll talk about it, deterrence doesn't work, it's never where people continue to come here. And because of, not just the hundreds of thousands of people who came to the streets, Democrats and Republicans, it wasn't just bipartisan, it was a universal condemnation. The Pope spoke out, not even just an English-speaking Pope from Chicago, he backed down. And you know what he said at the time? He didn't say, "Oh, boy, I'm so morally opposed to this policy, I'm so sorry. I didn't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated."

• 24:51Sam Fragoso?

  Donald Trump said that.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  He didn't like how it looked.

• 24:53Sam Fragoso?

  Stephen Miller didn't say that.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  No, I bet you Stephen Miller was grinding his teeth when Trump said that. Kirstjen Nielsen was standing over his shoulder behind, who had signed the same opinion memo that put the policy into place originally. But he backed down and it did work and it can and it will work again.

• 25:07Sam Fragoso?

  You believe that?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I do.

• 25:08Sam Fragoso?

  Back to Stephen Miller. He grew up in Santa Monica, just down the PCH from you and the Palisades.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Can you believe it?

• 25:14Sam Fragoso?

  Where you were raised.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  We did not know each other.

• 25:16Sam Fragoso?

  I feel like that's probably a good thing for you. And yet, the two of you arrived at very different visions for this country. How do you see his in this moment? Like, he sits around the table with Katie, and we'll talk about Katie later because the two of you have had a longstanding relationship that ties into your book Separated and also Firestorm.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:38Sam Fragoso?

  When the two of them are sitting around eating dinner, what do you imagine his plan is? How would he describe it amongst his family and colleagues?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  I don't think it's any secret. I think they want every undocumented person out of this country, less migrants coming into this country. And, I mean, basically, just definitionally, what happens when you kick out all the people who have come here as migrants, a whiter country.

• 26:02Sam Fragoso?

  This is the great replacement theory kind of stuff?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I don't know. What I know is, here's how I feel about it. When you look at it, I know who they're going after. And it doesn't need to be an intellectual exercise for me. It's a very practical one. They're going after non-white, vulnerable, working-class people who actually, in my opinion, make America what it is. And I think that if it was up to him, they would kick every single one of those people out of the country in service of an America that looks like the one that they sit at the dinner table and I guess in this hypothetical conversation, talk about.

• 26:31Sam Fragoso?

  You know, Tom Homan, who you mentioned earlier, has been hailed as the intellectual father of this policy.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:37Sam Fragoso?

  That Miller is behind. First it was zero tolerance, then it really became family separation. And so I want to play a clip from an interview you did with Governor Tim Walz, where you asked him about Border Czar Tom Homan, who Trump sent in recently to replace Greg Bovino in Minnesota. Can we take a look at that?

• 26:56Speaker 01

  Let's look.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  Do you trust Tom Homan? Well, look, this is a tough one. And what I said to folks here, and folks on the street were saying this, and I agree with them, is that I said Tom Homan is more of a professional. Tom Homan called me, not something Bravino or Noem would ever do. But the fear I have with that is, is it we going to get more of the same, but more efficient at this oppression? Well, he's one of the most extreme people when it comes to immigration policy in the federal government. That's right. And I think that's the fear. I think right now, though, that Tom Homan's taken his marching orders from the president. And what I understood, and the reason that I believe there's an opportunity for something to do here, because just to be very clear, what the White House wants is for these scenes on the streets to stop

• 27:42Speaker 04

  because it's tanking their approval ratings, and according to the president, it looks bad. If Tom Homan does anything here that makes that continue on, the president's going to be on him.

• 27:56Sam Fragoso?

  And so when Governor Walz says he believes, in regards to working with Homan, that, quote, "There's an opportunity for something to do here," what do you think the governor believes that opportunity entails?

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Frankly, I thought it was naive, and I said it to him. And I think he sort of changed his tune since then, not because I pushed back on him in that interview, but because so many people, I think, made very clear to him that, who did he think he was talking to? The idea that this guy is a, quote-unquote, "law enforcement professional" is the same framing, sort of, that we were talking about Ben Shapiro. What type of law enforcement are we talking about? The immigration enforcement apparatus of this country isn't your community-based policing that he's probably, in all seriousness, really familiar with in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the transformation of the Minneapolis, the police departments in the Twin Cities. You're not dealing with a community-based policing law enforcement professional in Tom Homan. You're dealing with a guy who's been a part of immigration enforcement, which has been based around a philosophy of

• 28:53Speaker 01

  cruelty and deterrence for my whole lifetime. And I was shocked when I heard it. It's why I wanted to spend so much time talking to him about it. And I do think that he's now focused on the practical realities of this, which is, are we going to have an independent investigation that allows the local government to participate? Are people going to be held accountable? Are you getting out of here? And I don't think he knows the answers to any of those questions yet.

• 29:15Sam Fragoso?

  Well, he's a governor, so I hope he finds him. Me too. Why don't we take a quick break? And when we come back, the how and the why behind everything that we've been seeing in Minneapolis and in other cities around the country. That's coming up next with reporter Jacob Soboroff.

• 29:43Sam Fragoso?

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• 30:59Sam Fragoso?

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• 31:43Sam Fragoso?

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• 32:27Sam Fragoso?

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• 33:09Sam Fragoso?

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• 33:58Sam Fragoso?

  Coming back, I wanted to talk to you about how ICE came to be because I think many see this current incarnation of ICE as a cruel vessel designed by the Republican Party. But the creation itself is actually pretty bipartisan with Democrats helping build, fund, and ultimately normalize the agency through decades of support. Can you give us an abridged history of ICE, starting with President Bill Clinton, I think in 1996?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  The modern era for me, which I didn't actually know about when I started covering family separation in 2018, many other people have covered this much longer and in much more depth and detail.

• 34:37Sam Fragoso?

  You didn't discover that on Y Tuesday?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  I did not discover it. You really did a deep dive. YTuesday.org, guys, it still exists. Why do we vote on Tuesday?

• 34:45Sam Fragoso?

  And remember your old reporting days on MTV?

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I definitely do. Nothing prepared me to be a political reporter more than being a red carpet correspondent for the AMC Channel.

• 34:55Sam Fragoso?

  You know, I didn't know that. I left it out of the research because I just didn't want to throw you under the bus.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  You did not want to humiliate me? So the deal, I'll come back around to the decades of bipartisan deterrence-based immigration policy, but I'll say about reporting from a red carpet.

• 35:10Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Nothing more humbling, nothing.

• 35:12Sam Fragoso?

  Very humble.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Nothing. AMC at the time, Mad Men was getting started to try to wave Jon Hamm over as a colleague, but also it was pathetic, actually. It was pathetic, but it did teach me how to bird dog people and yell obnoxiously to have them come over.

• 35:27Sam Fragoso?

  Well, did you have a tactic?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Hey, Jon Hamm, John, John. But it taught me how to bird dog people at places like the floor of the convention or chase Rick Grenell, the acting DNI at the time, Director of National Intelligence, into a waiting Sprinter van as he claimed that the election was stolen in the wake of the 2020 election in Las Vegas. It actually was the best job.

• 35:48Sam Fragoso?

  So just to be clear, trying to wrangle Jon Hamm on a red carpet prepared you for going to Minneapolis to cover the ICE raids?

• 35:56Speaker 01

  What Jon Hamm taught me is how to go after people like Greg Bavino. I really mean it. That quote is going to be on my tombstone.

• 36:02Sam Fragoso?

  It's going to be the pull quote from this. Podcast.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Great. It's true. To be a celebrity red carpet correspondent, you not only have to be prepared to be humiliated every time you stand on that line, but to get people's attention. And I never went to journalism school. That was my journalism. That and being an advance guy to Mayor Bloomberg when I was in college are the two things that taught me the most about the job that I currently have, about how to turn around and deliver news and how to stop people and get answers about stuff.

• 36:29Sam Fragoso?

  So when you discovered the news and the history of ICE and how this current immigration policy came to be, you landed where?

• 36:37Speaker 01

  That Bill Clinton instituted a policy called prevention through deterrence that built the first wave of border walls and sent people knowingly to die in the desert. And as the number of crossings decreased, conversely, the number of deaths in the desert relationally increased. Post nine 11, George W. Bush created DHS exponentially increased the size of the Border Patrol, had an operation called Streamline that deported people en masse. Barack Obama deported more people than any president in the history of the United States, largely by going inside the local county jails and lockups to take people who were inside those institutions.

• 37:12Sam Fragoso?

  How did that work?

• 37:13Speaker 01

  Here in LA, for instance, there was an ICE desk inside Los Angeles County Jail, which is one of the largest penal institutions in the country. And those ICE officers could find undocumented people, pick them up, and bring them into the ICE enforcement apparatus to deport them from inside the jail.

• 37:29Sam Fragoso?

  So there was a coordinated effort?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  Coordinated, and they were kicked out eventually. And that's where, that was the sanctuary city effort that developed in the wake of that type of enforcement that gave the president the nickname the deporter in chief. That's not a secret. He was coined that by many activists on the left.

• 37:43Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think that's a fair description?

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Well, just the numbers are clear that both because of people who were turned away at the border and deported from the interior, that's what Donald Trump is chasing. That's the record that he wants to set.

• 37:55Sam Fragoso?

  He wants to break President Obama's record.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Yep. And that's why when Donald Trump, the first time around, came into office, he was able to separate thousands of kids from their parents because the system was designed in such a way that a punitive based policy was not out of the norm. He had rejected, his administration had rejected out of hand, the family separation policy of the first Trump term. But when Tom Homan and others on Valentine's Day 2017 all sat in a room in the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC, this family separation policy was reborn in a way that Obama's administration wouldn't allow them to do.

• 38:26Sam Fragoso?

  You know, in terms of assigning blame, you write in your book, Separated, that both President Bush and Obama. Helped lay the groundwork for what Trump's zero tolerance policy would become in 2017.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:39Sam Fragoso?

  Do you still believe that?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  I do, and I think that Joe Biden didn't help either. He believed the separation policy was criminal, and he was going to institute a fair, safe, humane, and orderly system. You know, and he was criticized for allowing a record number of people to come into the country. He also was leaning on very punitive deterrents-based policies. I went to Haiti. I watched them expel a record number of people to Haiti during the, from under that bridge in Del Rio, Texas, to probably, if not sure death, definite danger. I went to Ukraine and I watched them let Ukrainian refugees in across the border at Tijuana, but keep black and brown and Asian people on the other side of the border. It was an incongruous immigration policy that was both criticized for being too liberal by,

• 39:24Speaker 01

  for letting too many people in, and for people on the left by leaning into some of the same policies of the Trump administration.

• 39:29Sam Fragoso?

  When you say incongruous, what do you mean?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  A large number of people were permitted to enter the country and brought into the interior of the country, yet without assistance to deal with them or figure out where to go or how to manage that number of people. But at the same time, embrace some of the policies that criminalized, that penalized, that punished people for coming here, that treated them like numbers on a bar graph or points on a chart, just like any of the other previous administrations had done, and not looking at them as the human beings that they were.

• 39:58Sam Fragoso?

  And so do you see any daylight between the policies of the Biden administration and the Trump administration? I mean, describe, describe that.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were definitely efforts made. The CBP One app, they tried to find an orderly way to get people to come into the country, and that was canceled immediately by the Trump administration. There were parole programs for people from countries around the world that were able to apply in-home country and come to the country in a more orderly way, so they didn't have to show up at the southwest border. We know that those were working.

• 40:24Sam Fragoso?

  Trump disbanded that app.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  All of it. Yeah, all of it. And so, no, there was definitely an effort. But there was also, as I said, a continuing political calculation. The bill that the Biden administration kept holding up during the campaign between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was one of the most conservative border bills in my lifetime, for sure. And yet they were proud of it. It wasn't some type of departure. The last time, and it wasn't me who pointed this out, it was Colbert actually pointed out to me. The last time that somebody did something that was a radical departure from the current way our immigration system does things was Ronald Reagan, who granted amnesty to people, a certain amount of people who had been here for a certain amount of time, who met certain conditions that contributed to American life. And it's not what I'm suggesting, but I'm just saying, when we talk about who was the last president

• 41:08Speaker 01

  to do something differently, it was amnesty under Ronald Reagan, not a particular Democrat or Republican since.

• 41:14Sam Fragoso?

  So to give context to these ICE raids, I want to talk about the zero tolerance policy in Trump's first term. That's kind of around the time you also start reporting on immigration for NBC News. Tell me about your first trip to one of these detention centers. This is in 2018. How did you get there and what did you see?

• 41:32Speaker 01

  I took a plane from here in Los Angeles and I landed on June 13th, 2018 in Brownsville.

• 41:39Sam Fragoso?

  And whose idea was this?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife. At the time, her name was Katie Waldman.

• 41:44Sam Fragoso?

  Did you like her more when she was Waldman?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  She was nicer to me then. She was definitely nicer.

• 41:49Sam Fragoso?

  So she invited you down to Brownsville?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  She did.

• 41:51Sam Fragoso?

  Why would Katie Miller, then at the time Waldman, husband to Stephen Miller, why would she invite you to an immigration center?

• 42:00Speaker 01

  She told me this and it's in the book Separated, it's in the Erin Morris film. She wanted what was happening on the inside to be seen on the outside to both deter people from coming. The cruelty was the point, as Adam Serwer coined in The Atlantic, and to force Congress into passing more restrictive immigration laws. The ability to hold kids for more than 20 days with their families, to amend, overturn something called the TVPRA Trafficking Victim Protection Reauthorization Act, in order to make it more difficult for kids and families to get out of custody, basically, if they came here, because they thought that that would be a way to stop other families from coming here. And so instead, they couldn't do that. And so they instituted the separation policy. They invited people like me into that facility. That was a 250,000 square foot former Walmart.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And on the inside, there were over 1,000 boys, 10 to 17. Many of them were there for no other reason than they had been separated from their parents when they crossed the border. It was in 10 For unaccompanied children who came into the United States by themselves. And instead, as my colleague Chris Hayes said, they were rendered unaccompanied.

• 43:01Sam Fragoso?

  Those are either kids who came with their parents.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yep, and were stolen from their parents. And in that facility, I sort of saw it in the reverse order. First, they go to the Border Patrol Processing Center, which I'll tell you about in a minute. And then they go to this facility, which is run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement within Health and Human Services. But I went there first. And I was surprised because I had been hearing all this conversation about kids in cages. And that's not what was in this facility. But what was in this facility were 1,000 plus boys who were living five beds to a room. Because there was a variance, it was overcrowded from the state. They were getting haircuts. They were watching Moana in the loading dock, like in a movie theater. They were allowed outside, I think, a couple hours a day, if I remember correctly, to play sports in a dirt field. They were going to school, they were standing in like a chow line. I had been in prisons and I had been in jails.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  And to me, this place was called the shelter, but effectively, these kids were very clearly incarcerated and they're against their will and against their choosing. And several days later, on Father's Day, 2018, I went into the epicenter of the policy, also at the invitation of Katie Miller, Katie Waldman at the time. And that was the McAllen Border Patrol Processing Station. And that is where I saw kids in cages, laying on the concrete or linoleum floors, under those space blankets, supervised by security contractors in the watchtower. This is where they were actually separated from their moms and their dads. And what I remember most about that facility is how eerily weirdly quiet it was. You could hear the rustling of the blankets. The Border Patrol agent said things to me like, they're stressed and they're struggling. They're not trained social workers, they're not here to change diapers and they don't even, they're not prepared to do that.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  They thrust the system into chaos to effectuate this policy, which is actually exactly what they're doing right now, too. None of these people are trained to do what they're doing, to be roaming through the streets of the US. Not no more than Border Patrol agents were trained to change kids' diapers when they were ripped apart deliberately from their mothers and their fathers. For me, it was an awakening to look back and learn more about the policy, the things that we've just talked about, the policies that led to this point. But for so many, this was an obvious extension of what America had been doing to people for years, which is why the book separated. I call it Inside an American Tragedy, because it is a chapter in the ignoble parts of our history. And it will be remembered, I guarantee you, with slavery and Native American genocide and Japanese-American incarceration

• 45:14Speaker 01

  and the turning around of the St. Louis back to the Holocaust and on and on and on.

• 45:18Sam Fragoso?

  Were there ever murals in these facilities?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Murals of different presidents with inspirational, you would think, quotes. But Trump's in the facility in Brownsville said something like,

• 45:29Sam Fragoso?

  Sometimes losing a battle, you find a new way to win the war.

• 45:33Speaker 01

  To win the war, exactly. My jaw dropped when I walked into this place and I saw it. Yeah, that's the image that these kids are staring at when they walk into this, to this facility. And it's still happening. You know, I just read all these letters that ProPublica published, Michael Rosenberg, of all these kids in the Dilly Family Detention Center today in Texas, who are not actually kids that were apprehended, put there crossing the border, but taken from the interior. So these are kids that speak perfect English, are reminiscing about their classmates in fourth and fifth grade, talking about how sad they are to be on the inside. If you think that that chapter, what the Republican-appointed judge who stopped the policy, Dana Sabra, called one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country, is over, it's only just beginning.

• 46:16Sam Fragoso?

  Seven years later, are there still families that have yet to be reunified?

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, maybe as many as a thousand, according to the ACLU. And that's because many of the parents were deported without the children, and the children may be living with a family member here in the interior of the United States. And there are some families, according to the ACLU, who are being affected by the current deportation. I don't know, I can't tell you offhand who they are or where they are, but who are being affected by the current deportation policy, like a double, it sounds flipped to say, but like a double dip within the immigration system, traumatized once, traumatized again. And frankly, I think that that deserves further reporting and attention from people like me.

• 46:52Sam Fragoso?

  In 2019, you were given the Cronkite Award for your reporting on this zero-tolerance policy and the families that were separated as a result of it. Quote, "His coverage had an impact," the judge has shared in a press release, "and it helped push the Trump administration into a rare policy reversal." And I read that this morning and I thought, I wonder, do you still see the coverage as having the impact it did then now?

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Well, let me take the focus off of me and that citation from the Cronkite and put it on to people like Julia Lomi-Creel or Ginger Thompson from ProPublica, who put that audio out there when the Border Patrol agent said, "Oh, we have an orchestra," as the kids were crying in that detention center in South Texas. I think that that's what informed the people that went to the streets. I think ultimately it was the people that went to the streets that reversed that policy. And I think it was reporting from all of those folks and more. Jean Guerrero, who was at KPBS at the time, who witnessed the case of Ms. L, who became the namesake of the court case that stopped the policy. A lot of these people and many, many more. How about LA Taco here in LA today, doing just an un- I had lunch with my motorist the other day. The way in which the tactics of journalists have evolved, actually, is inspiring. I think it's sort

• 48:03Speaker 01

  of different than the first Trump administration. I think it's the street-level journalism, actually, that's going to make the difference this time. The LA Tacos, some of the journalists on the ground in Chicago that I met in North Carolina, because they are the closest to this every day. And people like me, we show up and then we leave. LA Taco has been doing the work here in LA of documenting that these raids haven't actually decreased, but they've continued to pace and then some months have actually increased from the early months of the raid. So you think that Greg Bavino's out, what's happening to the people in LA, were it not for organizations like LA Taco, I don't think we would actually know. So I believe that they're as important as ever, maybe more important than ever.

• 48:41Sam Fragoso?

  Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025 and declared a national emergency, encounters with migrants at the US-Mexico border fell to their lowest level since 1970. The administration also shut down the Biden-era app that we talked about earlier, that previously let migrants apply for asylum, which brings us back to the story of the interior of the country. And ICE, which is now the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government, thanks to Trump's big, beautiful bill from last summer. One question I've heard a lot of people have is, where are they recruiting these agents from? And I'd like to talk about how they've been enlisting these men through some of the promotional materials that I brought here with us today. For those listening, can

• 49:26Sam Fragoso?

  you describe this first ICE advertisement? Everything you're about to hear comes from the Homeland Security Twitter page.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Okay. There's a dude on the left, wearing a bulletproof vest, Kevlar vest, but actually no identifying information on it. And that guy's got sort of a close-cropped, high-and-tight haircut, I might say? Uh, the guy on the right's wearing some shades, has some facial hair, maybe like a two buzzcut. This seems like a older guy. The guy on the left seems younger. It says, no age cap, join ICE now. So the point of this one is, there's a young dude on the left, an older guy on the right. They're both kitted up and they're all welcome. Uh, it says, we're taking father.

• 50:06Sam Fragoso?

  My eyes are bad.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  We're taking father-son bonding. Oh, wow. I missed that. To a whole new level.

• 50:10Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Isn't that nice?

• 50:12Sam Fragoso?

  That's the first one. This one says, which way, American man?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  He's standing at a, what do you call one of those things? It's sort of a directional.

• 50:20Sam Fragoso?

  Crossroads.

• 50:20Speaker 01

  A crossroads.

• 50:21Sam Fragoso?

  Intersection.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Sign, exactly. And one, in his hand, this is Uncle Sam, one says, law and order. One says, so opportunity, invasion, service, homeland.

• 50:33Sam Fragoso?

  Cultural decline.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:35Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah. Now, this, for historical context, which way, American man? Which they released this in August of 2025. The caption appears to be a reference to a white nationalist book published by the National Alliance, which was a neo-Nazi hate group from the 1970s. That's what they're referencing. It was admittedly a pretty subtle, deep-cut reference on their part. But, um, there's been a lot of good people who've done reporting on this and have cited the historical precedent. Um, I have one more for us. Uh, and this one is, I assume, appealing to young men?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Think about how many criminal illegal aliens you could fit in this bad boy.

• 51:14Sam Fragoso?

  Ah, this is a truck.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like a.

• 51:17Sam Fragoso?

  It's a van.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Or like a vintage van.

• 51:19Sam Fragoso?

  Yeah, a van called the King of Clubs.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  On the bottom, it says, want to deport. It's gross. Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys. Look, if it wasn't so despicable, it would be laughable. But this is the same, exact, operating philosophy, attitude, carelessness with which you sort of see these operations play out in the field. And the consequences are devastating. People are dying, not just Renée Nicole and Alex Preddy, but migrants trying to run away from the Border Patrol, crossing the 210 freeway in LA from a home. falling off the roof of a building in Oxnard.

• 51:57Sam Fragoso?

  But that messaging doesn't seem careless to me. I mean, that's a calculated bit of promotional material. I mean, there was a choice in making that, a choice in that copy, there was a choice to tweet it.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Just like there's a choice in putting Greg Bavino out front as your guy.

• 52:13Sam Fragoso?

  And by the way, they haven't deleted these tweets either. They have no problem with what they've posted here.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Because I think that frankly, I think that in part this is what they want us to talk about instead of Nurses of Bronco and Ani Lucilla Lopez-Balozza and Nori Santay Ramos. Because they, I don't know, they think it's funny, but they want people to. And when, when people understand it's deadly serious, when they understand that it's two-year-olds and five-year-olds and college students and high school students and fathers with three kids in the Marines, it's not so funny to them anymore.

• 52:45Sam Fragoso?

  I actually don't think people have seen these promotional materials. I showed it to at least 10 people.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Actually, to be honest with you, I hadn't.

• 52:51Sam Fragoso?

  You hadn't seen it?

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:52Sam Fragoso?

  And you've been reporting on this?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:54Sam Fragoso?

  I think seeing these images, for those watching this episode, and for those listening, I hope our descriptions have been sufficient. It's clearly a joke to them, and it clearly has real-world consequences to all the people you've talked about today. But I want to hold something specific here. You know, the Southern Poverty Law Center, they do great work over there. They wrote, "The use of the term invasion suggests immigrants are inherently harmful and undesirable and must be met with, quote, 'military response.'" But the word invasion is now in the recruitment copy that's coming from Homeland Security. The fringes of the internet, the dark corners of QAnon, are not just being given oxygen, they appear

• 53:37Sam Fragoso?

  to be the lifeblood of this administration's immigration policy. And so, in your reporting on the ground, whether it's in Minnesota, or Illinois, or California, when you're talking to Trump voters, do you get the sense that they see this iteration of ICE as being what they voted for? Is this what success looks like to them?

• 53:58Speaker 01

  For some it is, if you believe the replies on social media, and I don't know if those are even real humans.

• 54:04Sam Fragoso?

  The ones that come after you?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:05Sam Fragoso?

  They call you snowflake.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:06Sam Fragoso?

  Is it because you have long hair?

• 54:08Speaker 01

  Probably.

• 54:08Sam Fragoso?

  Okay.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  It's graying.

• 54:09Sam Fragoso?

  It's, I don't see a lot of gray.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Because I'm sweaty, it kind of blended into the rest of it.

• 54:13Sam Fragoso?

  You think they're jealous if you're good looks?

• 54:14Speaker 01

  No, I think they think I look like Al Franken's son.

• 54:17Sam Fragoso?

  Not the worst thing to be called.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  No, it's true. No disrespect to Senator Franken.

• 54:21Sam Fragoso?

  But I'm, I'm serious, like when men, when they see this, do they go, yeah, that's what I voted for?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  I don't think so. And I think that I'm, some of my colleagues have done some amazing interviews with, particularly in Minnesota with Republicans who, what I think is, that what, they see this for what it is. The invasion is happening by the federal law enforcement showing up on the streets of American cities. And there is not a Republican or Democrat who watches it as they roll down your street that says, this seems like a proportionate use of force in my neighborhood. It's why they're not doing this in mainly Republican areas, because I think that it's obvious what they're doing. And anybody would react in the same way. It's no coincidence that this has happened in LA, Chicago, Charlotte, Minneapolis.

• 54:59Sam Fragoso?

  So this coincidence, I mean, I, I, is jarring to me, but I still have to ask you, are the millions and millions of people that voted for President Trump, happy to see that he is keeping the promise that he made on the campaign trail?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  I was, as I said, on the floor of the Republican convention while they were waving those mass deportation now signs around. And do I think that those, if the question is, you know, do I think that those people understood what those signs meant as they waved them? I think some of them did and some of them didn't. But I think that when I talk to people about what they're seeing on the streets universally, people are disgusted by the tactics. And as I said, the only way to know is to try. And why don't they, I'm not suggesting it, but I mean, what do you think would happen if they did this in a Republican area, rolling down the streets of people's circling schools, using parking lots, showing up and taking the local fruit stand vendor that everybody knows and loves?

• 55:54Sam Fragoso?

  What, what, what do you think would happen?

• 55:56Speaker 01

  You know, I'm not a real polls guy. I actually don't like polls at all. But if you look at them, you know, he's underwater on immigration policy. And he wasn't before, and he wasn't during the campaign. People don't believe in this strategy. It's too aggressive, it's violent, it's indiscriminate, it's racist. And people are starting to see that that's what they voted for, whether they knew it was what they were voting for or not. I can't go back in time, I can't get in the head of those, all those people. It definitely is what they voted for, whether or not they knew this was what they were voting for, I don't know. But we know how they're reacting now, especially in public opinion polling.

• 56:31Sam Fragoso?

  I hate to harp on that word invasion, but it's been parroted by right wing commentators, it's been parroted by Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and most importantly, for people who want a historical context, the assailants responsible for racialized mass shootings, I'm thinking about Pittsburgh, El Paso, they left behind a digital footprint.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:52Sam Fragoso?

  Citing, quote, so-called migrant invasion to justify their deadly violence.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  I was there in El Paso after the shooting at the Walmart.

• 57:00Sam Fragoso?

  There was another one, like I said, at the Tree of Life synagogue.

• 57:03Speaker 01

  In Pittsburgh, yeah.

• 57:04Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, this is the question I wrote a week ago, and it's the one I didn't want to ask you, and I don't even want to put it out into the world, but given how this culture has not just been tolerated, but stoked by Stephen Miller and ICE, shouldn't we expect more shootings like the ones we saw at the Tree of Life synagogue and in that Walmart in El Paso? I mean, why wouldn't this happen again? If those at the highest echelons of government are parroting terms and phrases from people who believe in the great replacement theory?

• 57:37Speaker 01

  It's scary to me, as someone who was out there covering this and sees the impacts of it up close. And I would be lying if I said to you that I thought that another El Paso shooting or Pittsburgh shooting would not happen again. You know, when you, as you say, when you hear this stuff from the highest levels, I'm just talking about as a reporter now, of American government and power, how does one think that? I mean, doesn't it sound like a permission slip to believe in all of this? And to act on it, and to watch federal agents in the streets effectively doing it? Yeah, it's terrifying, but again, I just always go back to, and maybe I'm naive, or maybe I'm too hopeful, or I just look at the nonviolent peaceful protesters that.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands far outnumber any of these folks who are modeling the total opposite of this dehumanizing, dangerous rhetoric that we hear out of the White House.

• 58:31Sam Fragoso?

  You covered that shooting in El Paso?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I showed up afterwards, but I was there between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez every day. You know, he was describing at the time the border as a war zone. But there are people that cross that border every day to go to school, kids in school uniforms, people that work on both sides of the border just for the jobs and go back and forth. The way he described it was nothing like what I saw. And it's why I think people were, it just ripped apart their entire way of life after that shooting and targeted people who were so central to that community.

• 59:02Sam Fragoso?

  And how did they carry on?

• 59:04Speaker 01

  That's such a good question. I don't know. How do you live in a world that is painted and depicted to be something that's so different and so foreign from what you understand it to be? I think about that a lot, whether it's here in LA or any of these cities across the country where the reality is so different from the way that they've operationalized these aggressive immigration tactics. Same thing for El Paso. I don't know how they move on. That stuff always lives with you forever and it will live with every one of them. Every kid that was separated at the border, every family member that was affected, every person that was in that Walmart that day or in that parking lot outside or saw the videos of people who were killed. I don't think that there is a way to actually move on from any of this. It lives within all of us forever.

• 59:46Sam Fragoso?

  Do you see your job as an attempt to, I don't know, lessen the gap between those two worldviews?

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:54Sam Fragoso?

  At this point, it just feels like we're not seeing the same story. And algorithmically, we're not seeing the same story. How do we go about beating back against that?

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  The algorithm is something that I don't know how to overcome and it is very scary to me. I know the part that I play in this, which is, I used the phrase before, but it's a military and diplomatic term, facts on the ground. And all I can do is show up in these places and reflect back to people what I'm seeing. And I think people are smart enough, once they see this stuff, if they see it, and that's the big challenge, to make up their own minds. And I've experienced it as a reporter, people saying to me, I didn't know X, Y, or Z until I watched this, or until I heard you say that, or I read some story by somebody else. And that's why I think, again, particularly on a local level, definitionally, what the hyper-local journalists are doing as a public

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  service, because whether it was or is in the immigration raids or in the fires, when I was in the middle of fires, it's telling people what is really happening from a street level perspective. And that, I think, is what is missing so often. You get, you showed the Ben Shapiro clip, how many people are just talking about stuff and not going to see it? So many. And so it's why I am so grateful to have the opportunity to do the job that I do, which is to go see things and relate back to them what it looks like there.

• 1:01:17Sam Fragoso?

  All right, we're gonna take one last break, and when we come back, the end of my conversation with Jacob Soboroff.

• 1:01:40Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:02:20Sam Fragoso?

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• 1:03:07Sam Fragoso?

  So let's talk about the future of your job and also these policies that we've spent the last hour outlining. At the time of recording, Congress is currently negotiating possible new restrictions on immigration enforcements. Democratic leaders on the Hill have laid out a list of 10 reforms that they want to see within homeland security, including prohibiting federal agents from entering private property without a judicial warrant, adopting a standardized use of force policy, banning agents from wearing masks during enforcement operations. Do you think those measures are worth $11 billion, which is the amount DHS will receive if and when this is brought to a vote?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  I think that the underlying question is, will it change a system that is designed to criminalize and harm and punish people for coming here to seek a better life? And the answer I have for now is no. If the system stays the way that it is, and there isn't a new approach, and what it is, I know not, I am not a policymaker, but I can tell you what I've seen in covering immigration from Obama to Trump to Biden to now Trump again. It's a lot of the same. And do I think that the idea of de-masking and identifying and putting body cameras, I mean, do I think that they will serve a purpose? Of course. But do I think that it's like saying Tom Homan showing up in a suit is better than Greg Bavino in a military costume?

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  The system is still the system, is still the system, and that won't change until somebody decides to put forward a truly new approach or go back to an old one that predates all of this.

• 1:04:43Sam Fragoso?

  There's an activist I like on this Ricardo Gambo, I think it's that's their name. I believe they're from Chicago and they write Democrats don't fail to resolve immigration because they are weak or incompetent. They refuse because irresolution is politically useful. Immigration, like abortion and policing, has become managed contradiction. It's a crisis kept permanent because permanent crisis generates donations, turnout and moral identity. Do you think that's a fair description of the Democratic Party?

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  I think it's a fair description of the last Democratic immigration bill during Joe Biden, that it didn't change much, that it was leaning into some of the same deterrents and punitive based policies because they believe that it would prolong their tenure in office, that it would help first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris become the president as Donald Trump ran again in his third election. I think that there is a profound fear on the part of the Democrats, unfortunately, to take on a new and different approach. And if you want any evidence, all I have to do is look at the Biden administration's promises in the wake of family separation and compare them to the reality of ultimately what they did.

• 1:05:52Sam Fragoso?

  Remind people of the promises.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Literally, the words were fair, safe, humane, orderly immigration system. And as we talked about, they did make some significant efforts to try to find new legal pathways for people to come to the country and not have to stand there and enter unauthorized at the border. But ultimately, it became such a political liability to see so many people coming into the country. And I don't want to discount how people felt. People in these cities, I think, were uncomfortable with what was happening, that they, the pendulum swung totally back in the other direction. And at the end, they were arguing about who could be tougher on immigration in the 2024 campaign.

• 1:06:29Sam Fragoso?

  I mean, exit polls from the election, and again, take them with a grain of salt. The top two issues were, one, the economy, and two, immigration. Do you see those two as being inextricably linked?

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  To me, the issue of immigration is, of course, part of the economic conversation, but I also think more than anything, it's a conversation about humanity. It's like, how do we deal with any of this, including the economic impacts of it, without realizing that we're talking about actual human beings at the same time? And until we do that, I think any policy conversation around immigration as it relates to the economy is misguided because we're talking about humans and how we handle them and what we do with them. And these are, again, neighbors, coworkers, friends, parishioners. They're not just data points on an economic graph.

• 1:07:13Sam Fragoso?

  You know, speaking of human beings, ICE has purchased industrial warehouses in Georgia and Pennsylvania that will be converted, according to reports, into detention camps for captured immigrants. What should we expect from these centers?

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  The same conditions that we've seen inside them, that I saw during family separation, that I've seen inside the Adelanto ICE detention facility here outside LA, where people are curled up. I saw a man curled up in the fetal position in solitary confinement. These are really dark, really difficult conditions for any human being to live in, largely private prisons for profit. Inspector's general reports say people try to kill themselves. I mean, it's not, this is not news to anybody, but Adelanto specifically, people try to hang themselves. They found nooses within these facilities. Look at the recent reporting from ProPublica and other outlets that people are getting sick. And what they want to do, as I said earlier, is supersize this system to hold more people than ever, when they're already holding more people than ever. There will be deaths in custody.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  There will be cases brought about the violation of due process rights of people inside these facilities. The same things that we have always seen, I'm sorry to say, just on a much larger scale.

• 1:08:21Sam Fragoso?

  ICE presence outside of polling places? Do you foresee that happening during the midterms?

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  It's certainly a worry that these Democratic governors have said that they believe, whether it's ICE or federal troops, if he exercises the Insurrection Act, which it seems like for now, he might not do, but now that I say that, you know, maybe he will. Not because of me, but because who knows what happens in the next chapter? Newsom says to me from the earliest days of the raids in LA, and as did Pritzker and as did Walz, I think that they all believe ultimately that this is as much about the election as it is about anything else. I wouldn't be surprised, I guess, is what I'm trying to say, is if, look what he's doing raiding the Fulton County facility in Georgia. We know he's always put forward unfounded conspiracy theories about election fraud. And what's to say he's not going to do it again?

• 1:09:07Sam Fragoso?

  Do you think he'll do it again?

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  I saw him do it in Las Vegas. He sent his former acting director of national intelligence to prop up the conspiracy theory. I chased him into a waiting Sprinter van and he ran away. If past his prologue, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:09:23Sam Fragoso?

  You've called this new book of yours Firestorm, which was about the LA fires. We've covered on this show a couple of different times, including an episode we did with Mayor Bass.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I listened to it.

• 1:09:32Sam Fragoso?

  The most meaningful professional endeavor of your career. Katie Miller has been part of this episode, a through line throughout our conversation. Tell me how, once again, the two of you intersect during the fires of 2025 here in LA.

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  So I mentioned I grew up in Pacific Palisades. And at the beginning of 2025, I was tasked with being what's called a coverage correspondent. And literally 10 days after saying to one of my good friends, while ironically sitting around a campfire, the last thing I want to do is put on that silly nomex yellow jacket and go cover a fire, not only my hometown, but my childhood home, you know, exploded in flames. Largest, most costly wildfire event in American history. 16,000 structures destroyed, 31 people died, maybe as many as 400 if you look at excess mortality data. But I found myself in the middle of it, watching my hometown carbonize before my eyes. And so many things were happening that I didn't know how to process, including watching all of this in real time, having friends call me to check on their homes.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  And one of them was a phone call from Katie Miller. As I stood there delivering a special report on January 8th, the morning after the fire started in the Palisades with Lester Holt on NBC, my phone rang and I looked down at the phone and it was Katie, it said Katie Waldman still on my phone. And I picked up and she said, hey, it's Katie Miller. And I said, I have to call you back. And I put my phone in my pocket and before I could call her back, I looked at the phone again and she had texted me an address and said, it's Stephen's parents' house. And like my friend Jake Levine, or like my brother Miles, she asked me to go check on the house.

• 1:11:04Sam Fragoso?

  Pause here. I've heard you tell this story in the exact words you just used on maybe eight other podcasts. Here's the part that I want to change. Here's the part I want to deviate from.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  Okay, go.

• 1:11:16Sam Fragoso?

  She asked you to check on Stephen Miller's parents' home in the Palisades. Why did you go do that? Given everything you've just outlined for the last hour, policies that this man, this family, they have wrought.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  Because, two things. One is Katie and I, I actually appreciated Katie letting me into those facilities because I wouldn't, even though I was a tool of the administration, I never would have seen or learned or been able to share the things I did about the cruelty of the fam separation policy. And she knew that. And even though we had an adversary relationship, she hated separated the book because I put in some other conversations that we had about her feelings about the policy, how it didn't change her, the way she felt about assimilation and things in her native South Florida, and she cut off communication with me, I remembered the conversations that we had that allowed me to learn about my country in a way that I needed to for myself. And the second thing is, no matter

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  how much her and her husband are responsible for the suffering of other people, I don't think I have it in me to deliberately try to make someone suffer in the same way. And not that not going to the house would have been torture or government sanctioned child abuse, but I, I was doing it for other people. And I thought, the first thought I had was, as you've heard me say in these other interviews, am I really being asked to go to Stephen Miller's parents' house? I didn't even know they lived in the Palisades. I knew he was from Santa Monica. But I thought to myself, if I don't go, what a hypocrite I am in preaching humanity about even the people that they have affected. And so, after I cleared the special report with Lester, I got in the car and I drove to their house, and the house had burned down. And I took a picture and I sent it to her. And you know

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  what I said? I said, "The Palisades is stronger than politics." And I sent a heart emoji. And I really, truly, honestly felt devastated for them. But, within minutes, Trump is tweeting about this mystical bullshit tap that would have stopped the fires from happening. He's railing on new scum and Karen Bass. And Elon Musk is down at the command post, basically pushing firefighters into endorsing a conspiracy theory about what the water pressure was. So was the Palisades stronger than politics? No. No. I don't regret going. I don't regret going. I feel guilty about telling the story in public because it's real pain for real people. I don't know his parents. I don't know all of his family. Some of them believe that his policies and the way that he's behaved and her too are

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  abhorrent. But it was, but it's my duty as a reporter, I think, to include this story because that story is part of the fire of the future as much as anything else. How do you mean? Because misinformation and disinformation are as devastating as climate change and our infrastructure falling apart and changes in the way we live, like a thousand electric car batteries that are potentially going to cause cancer in the firefighters that fought the flames. What they were doing was pouring rhetorical fuel on the real flames of the fire in real time, only for political gain. And we've seen it in Argentina, there were wildfires and they were blamed on the Jews or Israel or something recently. It is not limited to the United States. Politics has seeped into the natural disaster in a way

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  that I fully didn't comprehend until I covered the great Los Angeles fires. And no one is absolved. Karen Bass isn't absolved. There's all this reporting now that maybe she even doctored after action reports that she denies this, but about the cause of the fire in the Palisades. Gavin Newsom promised the Marshall Plan 2.0 in the wake of the fires. That never materialized, at least the name. I don't think it has been a lesson or a profile encouraged by any leader in Los Angeles. Do I think that any one of them could have stopped the fires? Do I think that if the reservoir was full in the Palisades, it would have stopped the fire? I don't. I don't. And whether or not the fire and that spark that was the holdover from the Lockman fire, like if there were more people prepositioned in the Palisades, that's a leadership question for LA City. Would it have mopped up that

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  earlier fire and not reignited? It's possible. Will we ever know? I'm not sure. But what I can tell you is, on the other side of town, dozens of miles away, a fire equally, actually more destructive and more deadly, broke out at the same time. And it wasn't a surprise. It was, it was predicted and warned by the Dr. Ariel Cohen and Dave Gomburg at the National Weather Service in Oxnard. They knew it was going to happen. And so, yeah, I don't think, I mean, I don't feel any more confident in our local leaders here either. I think that's a part of the conversation about what does leadership look like in an era, America's new age of disaster, as the book says.

• 1:15:44Sam Fragoso?

  It definitely hasn't been a profile in courage. I do think it has been a lesson in the value of journalism. And I think your work has kept these local officials accountable, not to the degree that we would like them to be, but you have to start somewhere. And I wanted to end on, under one last thing for us. This Super Bowl performance, I've been thinking about it nonstop since it happened.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:16:08Sam Fragoso?

  Bad Bunny went up there and I'm certainly not an expert on his work, but shouting out Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, there's so many places he shouted out. And there was a celebration of a husband and wife getting married. It's

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  A taco stand from LA.

• 1:16:25Sam Fragoso?

  Which is amazing, by the way.

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Vias Tacos on Figaro, if you're in town.

• 1:16:29Sam Fragoso?

  So good. It's a pretty clear celebration of this country. And yet, members on the right have described it in all kinds of unkind and unfair terms. And so I want to just hold this together as we go. Do you think his performance is an inflection point for this country?

• 1:16:47Speaker 01

  I hope so. I cried. And I think I said this on TV the other day, and the comments were, were not kind to me, as you might expect. But the reason I cried is that I was sitting there with Nicole, my wife, and my two kids. My son is 10 and my daughter is six. And that is the America that I hope that they understand that they can grow up in. That, you know what he said before he called out the names of all of the countries in the Americas is God bless America. And then proceeded to call out the names of the countries across the Americas in just a symbol of like, unbelievable to me, hope and unity and modeling of what we could be in this moment. Is it an inflection point? I hope so. I think he's so extraordinary. And I think that what my, my son and my daughter watched together with us, and the

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  reason I was so emotional, is because, just aspirationally, that's where I hope. We can all be one day, and he showed us what it looked like on the floor of the Super Bowl.

• 1:17:42Sam Fragoso?

  But in the live reality, if the Republican Party, aided in part by the lack of Democratic resistance, if they have it their way, isn't this immigration policy that we've seen played out over the last year, isn't it designed to make the people we saw on that field, the people who come from those countries he shouted out, isn't it designed to make them extinct in America?

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  That seems to be the intention, but if you watch that performance, it doesn't seem like any of those folks on that field are going anywhere.

• 1:18:12Sam Fragoso?

  I hope you're right.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Me too. Me too.

• 1:18:15Sam Fragoso?

  Jacob Soboroff, thank you for the time.

• 1:18:17Speaker 01

  Thanks, Sam.

• 1:19:16Sam Fragoso?

  And that's our show. If you enjoyed today's episode with Jacob Soboroff, be sure to share the program on social media, tag us at Talk Easy Pod. Special thanks to speak to Maureen Cole and Harper Collins. I also want to thank Ava, Marcus, and Nicholas at the ACLU, David Villar, Sophie Buhi, my father Miguel Fregoso, my cousin Leo Ramirez, and of course, our guest today, Jacob Soboroff. To find links to his reporting and books, visit our website at TalkEasyPod.com. You can also follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok at Talk Easy Pod. If you want to purchase one of our mugs, they come in cream or navy, head over to talkeasypod.com/shop. As always, you can find episodes of this show on YouTube now.

• 1:20:01Sam Fragoso?

  Just head over to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso on YouTube. Again, we've included that link in the show notes of this episode. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Reebok, our executive producer, Shanixza Bravo. Today's talk was edited by Finn Mallon and Chris Hines. It was mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was taped out of Operation Podcast in Los Angeles, California, with music from Dylan Peck, illustrations from Chris Shanoi, photographs today come from Simi Malik, with production assistance from Neil Mulaney. Research assistance comes from Callie Saringas. This episode was made in partnership with Higher Ground Media, and I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back

• 1:20:41Sam Fragoso?

  here next Sunday with filmmaker Ryan Coogler. Until then, stay safe and solo.

• 1:20:55Speaker 05

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• 1:21:03Speaker 06

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  I mean, how many rats would you guess were back there?

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  There were 32,000 pounds of them.

• 1:21:11Speaker 05

  32,000 pounds of frozen dead rats.

• 1:21:17Speaker 05

  Find out what it's like to be a long haul trucker, a couples therapist, or an FBI agent, all on the podcast, What It's Like to Be.

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