Sargent: And Trump has been actually pretty direct about this, although I think it was in private. It was reported that during his first term, he said no more migrants from shithole countries, by which he meant developing countries, right? And he said something like, I want people from Northern Europe. So I guess we’re going back to the 1920s or earlier, right? How do we get out of this? I think at bottom, if the center of the country, if the middle of the country, if moderates and independents understood that these core concepts are really what’s driving Trump, they’d recoil. Now Trump and Stephen Miller know that, so they sell it all as we’re just going after criminals. But isn’t it true that if the center of the country understood what the real game plan here is—what’s really driving them, the real hateful, sadistic, ideological core of this—that it would be a lot harder for someone like Trump to get elected president? Wouldn’t it?
Sommer: Yeah, I would think so. And I think there would be a lot more opposition to these policies, and that’s why they have to bill it as we’re getting rid of the criminals. By the way, they’re all criminals or very many of them are. But if you actually are targeting criminals or even people they accuse of being criminals, often wrongly as we saw with the deportations to El Salvador, that’s not getting the numbers they want because I think they want full-scale ethnic change. And that’s why a few weeks ago, Stephen Miller had all the regional heads of ICE to D.C. and said, You guys are not getting your numbers. So rather than targeting, saying, Well, I think this guy who skipped out on a on bail lives in this house, let’s go deport him, we have to just be doing mass sweeps of day laborers at Home Depot. And that, of course, is what led to the unrest in Los Angeles. So there’s clearly this effort to really step up the numbers because targeting criminals or even supposed criminals isn’t working for them.
Sargent: I just want to underscore the point of what you said there, which is that when Stephen Miller shrieks wildly at ICE officials and tells them get out to a Home Depot or a 7-Eleven and scoop up three dozen migrants immediately, he’s consciously and deliberately saying go after the noncriminals, not just the criminals. And he’s consciously and deliberately shifting resources away from going after serious criminals and toward going after noncriminals precisely because it’s the only way to get the numbers up for his white nationalist purposes. Can you close out on that for us, explain it?
Sommer: Yeah. And to that effect, you can see the amount of the deliberate creation of the idea of terror. They’re saying, We want people to self-deport, and we’ll pay your ticket. But the implication is that if you don’t do that, maybe we’ll send you to either El Salvador and you’ll be lost in this legal limbo—or even people are being deported to South Sudan or Djibouti—and then you’ll be trapped in this shipping container in the middle of a military base. And certainly the other aspect of the terror is, of course, these random sweeps of people in areas that are popular with Latino immigrants. I was struck today; I was listening to Jack Posobiec’s podcast, and he was saying, We’re just trying to … These are not deportation. We’re just trying to help people. They’re lost. We’re trying to help them find their way home. They don’t belong here. It was very sinister. And that is definitely the vibe they’re trying to set.
