News Brief: Trump’s Anti-Migrant Terror PR Strategy, Dr Phil’s ICE Reality Show & NYT’s MAGA Assist
Citations Needed | January 29, 2025 | Transcript
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Nima Shirazi: Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam Johnson: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: You can follow Citations Needed on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. We do these News Briefs in between our regularly scheduled full length episodes, and today, Adam, we are going to be talking about these kind of earliest days of the Trump 2.0 administration and the terror regime that is already being exacted on immigrant communities, on migrants, from the border to a number of different states all around the country. And we will be joined by a guest from the organization No More Deaths in a bit.
Adam: Yeah. We just wanted to sort of orient you with the current situation. I know there’s been a lot of, obviously, Trump has unleashed a full-blown attack on the liberal state, which is discombobulating to a lot of people. Specifically on the issue of immigration, there’s been obviously many outrageous legal claims that will probably be overturned by the courts, but there is a broader sense of just doing this constant stream of bullshit to sort of disorient people and throw them off. So we wanted to kind of clarify some things about what’s going on on the ground as it impacts immigrants, both at the border itself and also within the communities that they live, and talk about the ways in which the US media has really set the table for the moment of, unlike in 2017, there is really not any kind of meaningful partisan counterbalance. It is almost uniform consensus that migrants are sinister and bad and a cancer to society. And the debate is whether or not we need to deport 100% of them or 50% of them. That’s kind of the range of debate right now in our media, because the parties that the terms of the debate and the media follows from that largely and this kind of priming the pump for Trump’s crackdowns.
And again, high profile, and when we say terror regime, it’s sort of what it is explicitly, which is to say they want to scare people and make them frightened, to create an environment of fear and snitching that in their mind, deters immigration, but also gives law enforcement a very wide berth to kind of do whatever they want. And in this context, we saw the New York Times doing this before Trump even took office. The New York Times read an editorial to kind of prime the pump for liberals on January 10, 2025, called “A Big Idea to Solve America’s Immigration Mess,” which has some liberal bromides about humanitarianism, but accepts a lot of the premises, the MAGA premises, and then goes on to scold Democrats for being too far left by writing a sentence that is absolutely, 100%, factually false. It is just not true by any objective metric, especially in the last election, where they wrote quote, “in recent elections Democrats increasingly cast themselves as full-throated defenders of immigrants, regardless of legal status,” unquote.
Now, in 2024, the Harris campaign and Democrats in general, for both the House and the Senate, ran on explicitly a quote-unquote, “Republican immigration plan.” Chris Murphy, the White House, among others, adopted what they described as a Republican immigration plan that would have tripled the budget of ICE enforcement, that would have exploded, to the tune of billions, so-called immigration enforcement, increased raids, increased deportations. But the New York Times again, all for nothing, it seems, in terms of getting quote-unquote “credit” for it, The New York Times is still operating under this assumption that there’s this far-left open-border policy and this kind of semi-pragmatic Republican Trump policy. We need to kind of meet in the middle, or meet closer to the Trump agenda.
They published a poll before Trump took office that also deceptively gave the impression that Trump’s immigration policies were popular. The headline was, quote, “Support for Trump’s Policies Exceeds Support for Trump: A new poll found the public is sympathetic to the president-elect’s plans to deport migrants and reduce America’s presence overseas.”
The “reducing America’s presence overseas” question is laughably vague to the point of meaningless, but the immigration questions are fundamentally based on contradictions. Every single poll that’s been done about mass deportations has within it a total contradiction that is never reconciled by those promoting this idea that the people, the masses, sort of overwhelmingly want mass deportations. Recent polls show that 64% of Americans say undocumented immigrants should have a way to stay legally. 56% support mass deportation. But among those who support mass deportation, 43% say undocumented migrants should have a way of staying.
Nima: So it all depends on how you frame the question.
Adam: It all depends on how you phrase the question, and the New York Times asks a push poll where they don’t refer to the people as “undocumented,” they refer to them as “illegal,” or they’re sort of “immigrants who are there illegally.” Sort of they keep using this loaded push language. They don’t even mention the contradiction that a good quarter to 30% of Americans simultaneously support mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and want them to have a pathway to stay and become citizens. Because, guess what? A lot of people are super contradictory and have contradictory opinions, and there isn’t any kind of mass support for Trump’s policies. Peter Baker ran a similar article saying that while Trump may be not popular, many of his policies are. But that’s not true. If you actually run down a list of top 20 Trump policies, most of them are unpopular, depending how you phrase the question and the extent to which they’re popular or not, this is not why Trump is doing them, and it’s not why Democrats are doing them, and to the extent to which you can kind of manipulate and torture numbers until you get this broad consensus, is pretty much a textbook example of how you manufacture consent on the eve of Trump taking office. You give this impression that, well, Trump may not be popular, but increasingly people really want mass deportation, and that is not borne out by the evidence.
And there were so many weasel words in this article: “some,” “many,” “may.” Because they don’t really know what people want. And what Trump is doing, whether or not it’s popular or not, is of course, not why he’s doing it, and it’s not why Democrats are supporting it. There’s an emerging national security consensus that climate chaos, again on display recently with the LA wildfires, that will increase refugees from the Global South to the United States, and that there needs to be a heavily militarized border. And everything after that, this idea that they’re all kind of just responding to this organic upward anger from the masses, is totally reverse-engineered, because, again, party polarization plays a large part in this. And when the most famous, popular leaders of a party begin to mimic Republican rhetoric on immigration, you’re naturally going to see people veer to the right on immigration. But even within that veering, like we mentioned, there are so many contradictions. There are so many ways you could frame this in a way that is not dehumanizing and doesn’t present immigrants as inherently sinister or a cancer on society, but that’s just not the way the media has chosen to do this.
Unlike 2017, where there was more of a sense that Trump’s policies were fascistic, they were a veer from the norm, they were not necessarily popular, they were dehumanizing. And now what you have is this kind of bipartisan consensus that Trump, while his tactics may be unseemly or he may go too far, that the broad outlines of what he’s doing, the broad contours of what he’s doing, that there’s a mandate and it’s necessary and overdue. And so these extreme border policies are being presented as kind of normal policy. So he’s challenging birthright citizenship, which would have been unthinkable six months ago, is now presented by both the AP and NPR as, quote, “a sweeping new strategy,” unquote. This is just another sort of strategy the White House has taken. And in doing so, NPR quotes the Center for Immigration Studies to talk about why birthright citizenship is well within the purview of acceptable debates. The Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, is a eugenicist, anti-immigration think tank that NPR, I criticized NPR for citing them seven years ago for FAIR.org. They’ve been categorized since 2016 by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. They have tons of connections to antisemitic and white nationalist groups. CIS is just presented as this Washington think tank that deals in immigration, because the Overton window has been ratcheted so far to the right that we now have NPR, again, as they did in 2017–
Nima: Being like, well, I guess that is up for debate.
Adam: Well, going to white nationalist groups that have ties to antisemitic and far-right conspiracy theorists as a sort of sober–
Nima: As some kind of authority, right.
Adam: And this is the current environment with which we find ourselves, and nobody wants to own it. And so the New York Times and other liberal groups, and even ostensibly neutral reporters, keep laundering this far-right policy shift as something they’re doing reluctantly because the masses demand it. Which brings us to the biggest soulless hack in the world, Ritchie Torres, who represents the poorest district in the United States in Congress, but all he talks about is Israel and parroting rightwing talking points, is clearly running for Governor of New York from the right. He was asked about why he supported the Laken Riley Act, which, for those who don’t know, creates a system whereby, on the pure suspicion or arrest of a migrant, they can be deported. So you could basically just snitch on your neighbors, accuse them of a crime falsely, and by virtue of being arrested, not convicted, they can be deported.
And Representative Torres told reporters on January 22 why he supported the Laken Riley Act. You always know when it’s named after a dead white person that this is going to be a really good-faith and non-manipulative piece of legislation. He said, quote,
Most of my constituents feel if you are undocumented, but are contributing to the economy and to society, that you should be protected. Once you commit a crime, you become unsympathetic to most Americans…Public safety is the most important consideration.
Unquote. Now, of course, these are not people that have committed crimes. These are people who are accused of committing crimes. That is not the same thing. You have a presumption of innocence, supposedly, in this country. And again, Torres can’t say, I support this rightwing immigration bill based on demagoguery, fear and ignorance. So he has to say, Actually, my constituents want it. But of course, there’s no polling. It shows his constituents want it. No other representative in New York City supported this. And so this is a kind of cowardly, we call it Placebo Populism on the show. Placebo Populism we’re getting now to justify this far-right turn, because nobody wants to be supporting right-wing things. And so you say, actually, I saw a poll in the New York Times saying most people wanted it, so we just got to do it. And this is how you kind of maintain one’s liberal pretense while supporting what is objectively a far-right mass deportation strategy by Trump.
Nima: Yeah, so you can see how the kind of propaganda piece of this, the politics plus media connections are being made explicitly and deliberately, because we saw in the past few days, Dr. Phil, daytime TV legend Dr. Phil, embedding with ICE, doing like, you know, ride-along anti-immigrant sweeps, livestreaming this violence against immigrant communities, as if it’s just sort of like, We’re doing a live COPS thing, and it has the authority of Dr. Phil, who a lot of people watch on daytime TV. And so this isn’t just about policy. This is about the narrative. This is about the propaganda. This is about how media is implicated alongside these policies, because without that kind of validation, then it may be harder to sell, but once you sort of do like a livestream ICE raid, with Dr. Phil narrating along the way, it serves to bring the public along in a way that maybe they wouldn’t have been otherwise,
Adam: Right. So Dr. Phil streamed these raids on his TV channel, Merit TV, and he got a bunch of second-, third-order writeups from credulous media, saying, Oh, isn’t it funny that Dr. Phil was confronting these migrants? So they framed it as these high-value targets, these as kind of Zero Dark Thirty speak to say, We’re not doing mass sweeps. We’re going after criminals. We’re going after sex criminals. “Sexual internet predators” is what Dr. Phil called them. Now this raises the obvious question, which is that if legal authorities know of the presence of someone who is suspected of sex crimes, then why are they not arresting them for that crime? Why are they using ICE as a pretext to arrest them? That doesn’t make any sense. If these are people that are on the lam or wanted for horrible crimes, then why are they not just arresting them for those crimes? It doesn’t make any sense.
Nima: But once you do it as an immigration sweep, it is giving away the actual purpose.
Adam: Right, that’s the whole point. Because it doesn’t make any sense. The whole thing’s based on a contradiction. And so what they did is they found two or three people who were undocumented who had previous offenses, right? The most egregious things you can think of, right, sex crimes or whatever, literally, two or three. And they use that as the spectacle, the kind of tip of the spear for Dr. Phil to go up to them and confront them so they could get credulous media coverage, like here in The Daily Beast. Quote, “A convicted criminal allegedly charged with sex crimes was spooked to see Dr. Phil after he was scooped during one of President Donald Trump’s turbo-charged ISIS raids,” unquote. This is the Daily Beast. And so it’s like, well, a) Do you know if he was convicted of a sex crime? Did you verify that? Who? What’s his name? What’s the legal status of that? Everyone’s just sort of assumed to be guilty, because the this is very similar to the high-profile, embedded with NYPD and federal authorities, the Bronx 120 raid, where they just kind of call everyone a gang member or gang banger, and the New York Daily News without any kind of, Well, were they convicted of anything? They’re kind of presented as all per se evil with the Zero Dark Thirty. So it looks like they’re going after all these, you know, sort of immigrant Bin Ladens spread throughout your neighborhood, when, in reality, 99% of the people they’re sweeping up are not these criminal masterminds. They’re just there without documentation.
But that’s not sympathetic, so they’re leading with this kind of we’re going after the evile criminals. And they even said that Dr. Phil spent five minutes at the beginning of his show talking about how, We’re not going after low-wage workers who clean your house. We’re going after the top, top elite criminals. And it’s like, Well, okay, sure, maybe at first, but then clearly the goal is to just deport everybody, because that’s what Trump keeps saying. And so you have this ridiculous media spectacle where Dr. Phil and then all the secondary media reporting, NBC, ABC, CNN, buys into this premise that these sweeps are going after these quote-unquote, “high-value targets.” And this is the kind of, again, just just prime the pump to get people to say, Okay, well, I guess that’s okay. So then for the other 95% of people they arrest, it’s it is your gardener or your person living next door, or the people who do the kind of unseen low-wage labor in our country, because that those people are broadly seen as being sympathetic, because their only crime, for the most part, is they just entered the US, quote-unquote “illegally,” which is, of course, a misdemeanor.
Nima: Not even a crime.
Adam: Not even a felony. And so this is the kind of ridiculous spectacle we’re seeing. And mostly we’re not really getting much pushback. We’re not getting pushback from establishment Democrats. We’re not really getting pushback from the New York Times crowd. They’re kind of just letting Trump do his thing, and create the terms of the debate, and establish the narrative without any pushback, really at all.
Nima: So to discuss this more, we’re now going to be joined by Chris, media outreach coordinator for the Arizona-based humanitarian organization No More Deaths. Chris will join us in just a moment. Stay with us.
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Nima: So we’re excited to have a guest with us today, Chris, the media outreach coordinator for the Arizona-based humanitarian organization No More Deaths. Chris, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed.
Chris: Thank you so much for having me.
Adam: So I want to begin by discussing the kind of PR spectacle of what we’re seeing over the last week. We are a media-criticism podcast, so this is obviously central to that. And clearly, when the Trump administration is partnering with Dr. Phil, there is an element of psychological operation, if you will. Right? It’s not just a kind of ho-hum, straightforward law enforcement strategy. It is about scaring people and convincing frightened Fox News viewers that Trump is sort of on the case of the alleged evil immigrant hordes. And they also partnered with more corrupt media organizations like Bloomberg, who embedded with ICE and kind of did their press releases for them. They framed it as going after “high-value targets.” That was the term they used to kind of give it this Zero Dark Thirty feel like they’re going after all these kind of Osama Bin Ladens scattered throughout your neighborhood. Now, there’s an interesting dynamic going on where groups like Arise Chicago, who I’m familiar with, just by virtue of being in Chicago, and others and other community groups have emphasized this idea of, know your rights, but in a weird way, they kind of don’t want people to panic, because that plays into the terror element here, or the kind of fear element. My first question is, and obviously, No More Deaths has observed similar PR tactics, this kind of showy violence as PR tactic. What impact do you think this kind of Trumpian theater has? Because, again, as a matter of actual policy, it’s not thus far, I think this will change, but thus far, the actual numbers of arrests aren’t that different than a normal week, quote-unquote, “normal week” under Biden, but there is an element of terror. How do you think this terror PR plays into frightening immigrant communities, both potential and current, and what are groups like No More Deaths doing to kind of calm tensions and to keep people sober about the threat that is still very real?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely, good question. Well, what you described as a spectacle, that’s definitely a very on-point word. As we know, harsh immigration policies have really always been lucrative for people in power, right? And now we’re at this point where the topic of immigration has become just so sensationalized that we have lower-level grifters like Dr. Phil just trying to cash in on that. The public, the mainstream public right, have become so bloodthirsty, really, as to want that kind of content, that kind of Dr. Phil and Tom Holman doing, you know, doing raids on immigrant communities, to want that content for entertainment. It really exemplifies just how the messaging about, you know, why immigrants are supposedly a threat to Americans, has shifted so much. We used to have more of that trope of the immigrant stealing jobs, and that’s largely really been overtaken by this trope of the violent criminal immigrant. You know, this latter trope of the violent criminal, it’s not that it’s new, but the extent to how much this concept is really pushed in the media has grown just exponentially.
So you know, you not only have nativists who see the immigrant worker as their enemy in competing for jobs, but now just whole swaths of the population who are really ready to scapegoat immigrants as a cause for any rise in crime rates, whether real or exaggerated in the media. And so we have trash, really, like the Dr. Phil livestream, it’s consumed like crazy. Because the scapegoating has so much of the population in this country thirsty, not just for deportation of immigrants, but really for a very brutal retributive response towards people that they’ve already painted as criminals. Forget about any sort of due process in the eyes of the public. We’ve already reached this point of a really exacerbated dehumanization. And this dehumanization is scary, because, you know, the more a group of people is dehumanized, the less effort that’s needed to justify any sort of treatment towards them, no matter how horrific, right?
And so in our position in No More Deaths, where our work is really more focused, in lessening death and suffering of people who are in this active state of migration through the borderlands, we have been bracing for an increase of encountering people in distress in the desert, because we already know, after you know decades, right, that the stricter immigration enforcement becomes, the more people are pushed into remote areas, the more people are pushed into dangerous situations. And we are also preparing for, you know, possibility of some real, very real government repression of humanitarian aid, which we definitely saw an uptick in that during the first Trump presidency, with a couple of highly publicized court cases, which you know, of course, have have a similar kind of effect of being very much for show, very much, to try to set an example, whether that’s raids on undocumented people or whether that’s the criminalization of humanitarian aid.
So obviously, the anxiety that people are feeling, whether, you know, in immigrant communities, undocumented people and immigrants’ rights activists, it’s unfortunately inevitable that people are going to feel some extreme anxiety. I do think that activists can definitely prevent creating a panic by approaching this not as a new catastrophe, because it really isn’t, you know, but as an extension of a decades-long fight for immigrants’ rights. So this might be, you know, a small amount of reassurance to those of us who are a little more pessimistic, but honestly, knowing that we really have never had allies in the White House, can contextualize this phase we’re moving through. Unfortunately, none of this is new, and we’re just really at a point of rapid acceleration in this moment. And the preparation that activists are doing now are things that we’ve been doing all along.
Adam: A little bit of context here, because you mentioned the deaths at the border itself, which is obviously more in your domain. To edify our audience, this has been US policy since, at least, well, explicitly, since Operation Gatekeeper in 1994, which is to say, making the journey across the border so deadly it operates as some kind of deterrent. Now, of course, that is absurd, but basically, what it’s saying is it’s using violence, the threat of violence, the threat of dying of thirst, as a deterrent, explicitly. There was even a This American Life that did a kind of puff piece on this, on this dynamic. And in 2022, according to the UN’s International Organization for Migration, 686 migrants died or disappeared in the US-Mexican border. It’s, quote, “the deadliest land route for migrants worldwide,” unquote, just for some context. And so the policy since, especially since 2023, when Democrats went hard-right on the border, is to increase this deadly dynamic. And those numbers, no doubt, have gotten higher. I know that counting them is difficult, and so that’s just, part of US policy is to make the border as violent as possible. And so when people talk about so-called, you know, “securing the border,” they use this kind of anodyne language, what they mean is making it go from 686 to 1,000 or 2,000 or whatever sort of number becomes an acceptable death rate to, quote-unquote, “deter future migrants.”
Nima: Well, yeah. And to continue this threat, Adam, Chris, you had mentioned this focus on punishment, you know, not just law and order, normal, everyday, horrible fascism that we’ve seen and that you’ve been dealing with in your work for decades, but this idea of being especially cruel. That showing mercy to human beings is itself weakness. And I think that there’s part of this that goes hand-in-hand with something else we’re seeing, which is the kind of deputizing Trump supporters to exact this kind of violence on people themselves. So as one No More Deaths volunteer told The Guardian on January 19, quote, “The discourse on rightwing talk radio is chilling. Coming to the border as vigilantes is not just something people could do, but something they should do to prove that they are real Americans.” End quote. Right? That’s the mode that we’re seeing from the kind of Dr. Phil livestream, or from the language coming out of the Trump administration, this vigilante kind of promotion to, you know, deputize people to take their guns and secure the border themselves. So, Chris, if you could just talk about the increased popularity of this weekend warrior element, this kind of mentality, this propaganda, the vigilante MAGA crank that then is, you know, takes their AR-15 and goes to the border, and the dangers that this really poses to migrant communities who are already under threat from official forces but now also have to contend with this citizen army that has no accountability whatsoever.
Chris: Yeah, absolutely, it’s absolutely very disconcerting. As No More Deaths, we do usually try to avoid giving more attention to these types, because really, that’s just what they thrive on. But this increase in that kind of vigilantism is definitely related to the increases in framing migrants and immigrants as criminals, and this rise in sensationalized rightwing media, you know, both in the mainstream and on social media platforms. This kind of rightwing media, or even just people posing or deciding that they’re journalists and making a YouTube channel or making a Twitter account, right, has really driven this popularity of making a little trip to the border, messing with immigrants. It’s made it seem like it’s just a little fun thing you could do, right? I don’t know if it’s universal or if it’s something more that’s part of, you know, the American psyche. But some of these types, they love a bad guy. Playing the hero, maybe reliving a military past, or getting to playact, some military dream that they never got to realize, really seems to get these guys going. We’ve even seen it just in the kind of language that’s been popularized in this rightwing media, especially across social media. On one hand, we had people talking about asylum seekers, women, children, etc., and the push from the right wing was to frame, you know, people who were petitioning for asylum at the border as military-aged men, and regardless of if there’s many young guys in vulnerable situations who are also there petitioning for asylum at the border, the increase in that kind of language is just another increase in the dehumanization of people crossing the border and the preemptive attempts to, you know, justify any kind of violent action taken against them. But you know, when it comes down to it, what these guys really are doing, they’re destroying food and water supplies that’s meant for women, kids, young guys, in these vulnerable situations. And it is pretty pathetic, but scary.
Adam: I know what’s Trump doing is its own uniquely dangerous thing. I want to talk though a little bit about the change in the partisan counterbalance with respect to immigration, such as it existed, with the full understanding that it was always a little bit superficial. But 2025 is different than 2017 in key ways, which is to say, Trump’s first term, there was more, you know, ‘kids in cages,’ ‘Trump’s a fascist,’ ‘concentration camps at the border.’ This is rhetoric you heard from mainstream Democrats. Now that’s not the case at all. In 2022 and 2023, Democrats made a deliberate choice to adopt what they themselves called the Republican immigration plan. It was this cutesy-wutesy, trying to call their bluff, but in doing so, they reinforced a lot of the basic premises of nativists, the sort of MAGA nativist framework, which is that immigrants are a burden on society. They’re sort of inherently draining our resources.
Obviously, at the same time, governors like Abbott and Ron DeSantis were sending migrant buses to communities, so-called liberal cities that were not equipped to handle the influx of migrants in a way that was, of course, sort of by its own open purpose was a psychological operation. It was meant to kind of erode liberal sympathies for migrants. And many of these mayors responded by repeating MAGA talking points about, again, them being inherently criminal or being dangerous. So it doesn’t matter how many studies that show that that’s not true, that migrants commit crimes at a lower rate, for the obvious reason that they’re too busy trying to survive and they’re not going around, starting large mafias in these cities.
And this kind of eroded the liberal sympathy for humanizing migrants, at least from our perspective, it’s not it’s difficult to quantify, but I think it’s pretty clear the tone has shifted in part because Democrats wanted to triangulate on the issue, either because they thought it would be electorally advantageous, or because they simply agree with it. I typically think they just kind of agree with it, especially with climate chaos expediting. I think the consensus is that we need a hyper-militarized border, because refugees will only become greater each year. I want to talk a bit about the environment for groups like No More Deaths. I’ve asked this question or posed this question to other groups that deal with it on the other end, but I’m sort of curious the extent to which this seemingly bipartisan consensus, where we’re kind of debating the number of people that should be deported versus the kind of basic humanity of migrants, how it shifted from 2017 and how it hasn’t really changed.
Chris: Well, you know, as they say, politics makes strange bedfellows, right? And many groups such as ours have long had this uneasy sort of proximity, association, occasionally, maybe alliances with this political party, which has produced politicians who have created much of the horrible situation that we’re in today with respect to immigration, and I’m referring to Democrats here, while also, you know, occasionally producing others who may have helped in some way to mainstream a more compassionate rhetoric of immigration reform that was able to, yes, influence the average US citizen’s perception of this issue, right? Those images of children being kept in cages did become something of a cause celebre for affluent, well-meaning liberals, right? And it is disconcerting to no longer have that balance of even a relatively compassionate perspective in the mainstream. But at the end of the day, we know that compassionate perspective that some Democrats did offer in terms of immigration reform is really, it’s always just been rhetoric. You know, the Democratic Party has failed to put forth anything, any sane reform of this country’s extremely bizarre immigration system, and it’s because it doesn’t serve their interest to do so. And this definitely isn’t the first time that we have seen this appeasing of, you know, the right wing by Democrats on immigration enforcement, right? You know, in 1996 when Bill Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, that was just another example in a long line of Democrats really contributing and creating this situation. Again, because it doesn’t serve their interests to change the system, the immigration system in this country.
Nima: So, before we let you go, Chris and I know that you all are really in it right now. I mean, obviously the communities that you work in, the communities that you serve, the communities that we’re all part of, are really in it right now. And so we’d love to hear about how folks can support your work and support No More Deaths and other organizations that are doing really, really vital work to protect people. How can folks get involved? How can folks know their rights, both at the border and in communities? What can people look out for when it comes to the work that you’re doing and hopefully support you all?
Chris: Yeah, absolutely. Well, people can find us at NoMoreDeaths.org. We are an organization that provides direct aid, so monetary donations are always helpful. We work in alliance with many different similar organizations such as la Coalición de Derechos Humanos, the Florence Project, Kino Border Initiative. These are other organizations that work here in the Southern Arizona borderlands. Community involvement is going to vary from place to place, but many cities have groups that are organizing to build solidarity with and protect the rights of undocumented people in their communities. So I would just advise people to seek those out, keep informed. It could be overwhelming when things change so rapidly, so people shouldn’t feel like they have to keep on top of you know every little change that’s happening, but just know that this is a continuance, and knowing your rights and organizing with others in your community is going to go a long way.
Nima: Thank you so much for joining us today. We’ve been speaking with Chris, media outreach coordinator for the Arizona-based humanitarian organization No More Deaths. Chris, thank you so much again for joining us on Citations Needed.
Chris: Thank you so much. Take care.
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Adam: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of people sitting around kind of frozen, not really sure how they can be of use right now. I do know that helping out with local undocumented communities, because they’re the first, clearly, on the list to be attacked, in an escalatory manner, to be clear, they were still being attacked by ICE raids with the Democrat, I don’t want to, I don’t want to downplay that, but what Trump is doing is not just that, it’s that, as the Daily Beast says, turbo-charged. But also the violent rhetoric has downstream effects to incite violence against undocumented people, especially Latino people. So there’s groups in every community one can be involved in to assist with that. The Trump “border czar” and Dr. Phil were openly complaining about Know Your Rights campaigns, because they were going to these homes and people, they were like, Open your door. And they were like, No, fuck off. Where’s your warrant? And they were openly complaining.
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Tom Homan: Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult to arrest the criminals. For instance, Chicago, very well educated. They’ve been educated how to defy ICE, how to, how to, how to hide from ICE. And I’ve seen many pamphlets from many NGOs. ‘Here’s how you escape ICE from arresting you. Here’s what you need to do.’ They call it Know Your Rights. I call it how to escape arrest. There’s a warrant for your arrest, and they tell you how to, how to hide from ICE. ‘No, don’t open your door. Don’t answer questions.’
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Adam: So getting involved with Know Your Rights campaigns, whether it’s funding or direct volunteering, I think is really effective. It does matter. Knowing people’s basic rights is, you know, while they still exist, are important. They’re important counterbalances. So there’s a lot I know that people can do, and it’s like tackling any big project. You just take it one little piece at a time, rather than being overwhelmed with the enormity of the task at hand. And groups like No More Deaths are, you know, they do it on the more the front end, and groups like Arise in Chicago and their community and coalition partners. I know the Quakers, again, are suing the White House, a bunch of other groups you can get involved in. And so there’s groups in every community that are working to push back against these forces. And to a great extent, the law is on the side of the migrants and the migrant activists, that you can’t just arbitrarily round people up and ask for their papers, at least for now. And so there’s plenty of ways I know people can get involved. And we’ve been citing No More Deaths for years, and they’re really great too. So there is not nothing one can do, especially when it comes to the mass deportations, there’s actually quite a bit of work to be done on a local level.
Nima: Right, because part of the propaganda that we’re seeing here, the point is to have a chilling effect, right? The point is to have people think that this is, you know, totally fatalistic, that there’s nothing we can do. The Trump administration and his supporters are totally powerful. We have no recourse. And that is simply not true. But that is the point of, you know, bringing Dr. Phil McGraw on a ride-along. It’s the point of downplaying of how egregiously violent this administration already is by corporate and liberal-leaning, you know, Democratic Party-aligned media. The point is to have a chilling effect to say, Well, there’s a mandate here. There’s really nothing we can do. And I guess you just kind of cross your fingers and hope for the best, that there’s some acceptable number of deaths in the desert, or there’s some acceptable number of deportations that destroy people’s lives and communities and families. The point is to have a chilling effect. The point is for this to seem completely unavoidable and inevitable, and so we just encourage everyone to follow groups like No More Deaths, to not feel like you are totally helpless. There are things we can do together, and that alone pushes back on some of the deliberate propaganda that we’re seeing some of these narratives that are supposed to push the kind of inevitability of this violence.
But that will do it for this Citations Needed News Brief. Thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded. But that will do it for this News Brief. We’ll be back very soon with more full-length episodes of Citations Needed. So thank you all again for listening. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. We’ll catch you next time.
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This Citations Needed News Brief was released on Wednesday, January 29, 2025.
