Look what happened, this is crazy. We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in the history. Make America great victory. How can you be against it? It's day four of the second Trump presidency, and the new administration is continuing to move quickly on huge policy changes Trump promised on the campaign trail. Welcome to Sidebar from The Washington Post. I'm Rhonda Colvin. I'm here with James Holman, J.M. Rieger, and our special guest today to help us break things down when it comes to immigration, Nick Miroff, the post-immigration and homeland security reporter. We're going to start today with Trump's big moves on immigration and the flurry of activity that we're likely to see at the southern border very soon. We'll also dive into the ways Trump is telling the world he's back.
when it comes to early approaches he's taking on the global stage, plus his rampant unraveling of affirmative action and DEI policies. But first, we're going to dive in with Nick about all the actions that have been happening so far when it comes to immigration and the southern border. So if there is a way, Nick, to break this down in a nutshell, what are some of the major things that have happened with Trump policy, executive orders, and actions on immigration? Well, rather than going through a laundry list of all of the things that were ordered and announced and directed on Monday, which would take us half an hour, I'll go quickly over the sort of two places where we're going to see the biggest changes. And those are one at the border, right, where we know that the Trump administration is sending thousands of troops, that they have issued directives to Border Patrol agents basically to deny access to asylum on the grounds that...
migrants who are arriving at the border have passed through a country where communicable diseases are present. So there's like public health rationale, but they have not stated any specific disease. It isn't like during the pandemic when there was an actual public health emergency that everyone knew about. And so asylum access is shut off. All of the Biden programs that were creating so-called lawful pathways for people to apply to come legally through the ports of entry, those have all been rolled back and canceled. People who had appointments at the border to come seek asylum have had their appointments canceled and really a whole suite of other packages.
I could stop there and pivot to the interior or just let me know if you want me to talk about what ISIS is doing. One of the big questions I think we've all been having is we've heard Trump talk about immigration and the southern border specifically for the last few years, you know, as he's been on the campaign trail, made a lot of promises to people. Do you see these moves as going in that exact same direction as he laid out or did they go further? These are more extreme versions of some of the policies that he tried during his first administration. I think he's really testing the boundaries of what he can get away with. I think he is making these decisions not really based on operational necessity, as we have reported many times. The border crossings this past year have fallen to their lowest levels in four years. But what he is doing is delivering on the campaign promises that he made and creating very dramatic.
spectacles of, you know, American troops on the border, military hardware going down there and really wanting to project something definitive that, you know, the border is indeed closed and that no more people are coming in. I don't think we quite saw it to that degree the first time he was in office. James, I went back to look at some of the exit polling, to re-familiarize myself with the exit polling from the presidential election. Immigration closely followed the economy for most people. So this was a pledge that many people wanted to see, apparently.
Are you surprised that some of these moves have gone, you know, as far as they have? And what's been standing out to you? Trump wants a show of force. He feels like he has a mandate on immigration. He even said on Monday during that second speech in the Capitol Visitor Center after the inaugural address, you know, they tell me to talk about inflation. That's what people care about. But you can only talk about how apples cost more so much. That's boring. But what's exciting is migration in the border and the, you know, at the Republican convention we all covered in Milwaukee. They literally had signs, sanctioned signs on the floor that said mass deportations. Now, when Trump talked about removing all undocumented immigrants, not just.
you know, criminal, uh, aliens. And so I think he does feel like he has a mandate and he feels like this is what his base wants from him. He feels like this has been the animating issue going back to coming down the golden escalator in 2015. And he wants to, to, I think, especially this first week show that he's doing something. I think he knows the birthright citizenship executive order is going to get struck down, but this is about just showing that he's, he's leaving it all out there and being aggressive, being bold. And that that's what people want. You know, it's, it's no coincidence that, and I do want to talk about the interior. Nick mentioned the, the, the first.
ice raids coming on Tuesday and Wednesday. They have Fox News crews traveling with, you know, the officers as they're doing that. That's not, you know, that's very much by design. You know, they want the visuals of people being arrested and deported because that is what Trump feels like he was elected to do. Yeah. And, J.M., are there any...
parts of the executive orders or actions that have happened related to immigration that have been standing out to you? Because a lot of people often conflate immigration in the southern border, and that's not the same thing. Those policies aren't often the same thing, although immigration laws do apply to the southern border. But are there other ramifications you're seeing, too, when it comes to these immigration executive orders? You know, there's a broad theme here, which is he wants to reduce or eliminate zero out, basically, immigration into the country. It's slightly overstated, but the asylum stuff at the southern border is one part of that. And then another part of that is these refugee admissions, right?
We're seeing now they've issued an edict this week that stops all refugees who were already cleared, screened and approved to come into the country. They've stopped their arrivals, their admittance. So now they are stranded, thousands of them worldwide at various locations, including roughly 1600 Afghans who helped us during the war in Afghanistan. These folks are all now in limbo, essentially. But if we go back to Trump's first term, we're talking about how he is kind of taking almost a more emboldened vision here on his actions on the southern border. And the same thing here, if this if he carries this through on refugees, he put refugee admissions in his first term at near historical lows. And the goal, including in his final year.
first term, was to basically zero that out, potentially. So we'll see, obviously, what happens here in the days, weeks, months ahead here on refugees. But I do think that's an entirely other but very crucial component of all of this. Nick, and let's go back to the interior. You wanted to dive in a little bit there, too. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that's incredible to witness is that the ambition in the EOs and the executive orders and actions isn't matched by the operational capabilities of these agencies, right? And so ICE, for example, is going out and ICE tells us that they are conducting routine operations. But you do see...
networks playing up the number of people that they arrest now every day. And what we've seen for the first few days is about, you know, 400, 300, 300, 400 people nationwide. I mean, that does not get you millions of deportations. That is a pretty routine day for ICE. They simply do not have the infrastructure to go out and deliver on so much of what Trump has promised and what his supporters are expecting. And so one of the things that was so interesting in the document we obtained and reported on yesterday is that the Border Patrol was telling its top commanders that ICE is building out like a temporary infrastructure.
with four detention centers with capacity for 10,000 each. So they're creating the architecture of a much bigger deportation system, but it's going to take them a long time. And the more images we get of people being picked up in neighborhoods, taken out of homes, that type of thing, the bigger I think we can expect the public backlash to grow. I know you've written also on the idea that there will be raids in places like Chicago. And we know that the border czar has said they were happening post-inauguration. And then there were some mixed messages from the administration saying not quite yet. A, what do those raids look like? And B, are they still going to happen? I'm glad you brought that up. We did not report that there would be raids in Chicago. We reported that they...
that they were reconsidering it because of the word that had leaked out. And indeed, we have not seen some sort of targeted operation in Chicago. That has not happened. It's not to say that it won't happen, but ISIS insisting that what they are doing is very routine. I am getting messages from people all around the country saying, ICE agents are in this neighborhood. ICE agents are doing this.
We haven't seen, always seen that actually backed up, you know, but if ISIS is going out and doing enforcement action, you know, enforcement operations around the country, that is what the agency does. What we'll be looking for is are they targeting specific cities like Chicago or New York, you know, where there has been more of a focus on the arrival of so many migrants and there are sanctuary policies in place that limit the cooperation of local authorities with ICE. So is this administration going to single those places out for more enforcement? Yeah, you were also mentioning how the infrastructure just isn't there with the border agents. And I was thinking about the Lake and Riley Act that passed Congress. That's the first bill that President Trump is signing, and that deals with federal detaining on certain crimes. But a lot of Democrats on the Hill and others who are concerned about that bill said it didn't have any funding attached to it. So is a lot of this just messaging, or is there really going to be a scramble at the border because of chaos that isn't backed up with government funding? Well, so the Lake and Riley Act is potentially going to create chaos in the interior of the United States. Why? Well, ICE currently has funding for about 40,000 beds.
meaning its capacity is to be able to hold about 40,000 detainees. These are people who ICE is trying to deport, essentially. Often they spend weeks in custody before ICE can actually get their travel documents in order and put them on a flight back to their native countries. So the Lake and Riley Act is basically directing ICE to detain anybody who is not only convicted of but suspected of property crimes, petty crimes, shoplifting, that type of thing. ICE has said they've already identified 110,000 people who have some kind of pending immigration process in the U.S. courts and have one of these accusations or one of these cases on their records who they would have to immediately take into custody.
That would boost their detainee population to 150,000. We simply do not have anything close to that. So that's going to create a major shortage for ICE, a very complicated challenge to build the kind of infrastructure that would hold all those people. And the Supreme Court has ruled that ICE can't just hold on to people indefinitely if there's no reasonable expectation that they can be deported from the country. Yeah, James, are you expecting a lot of court challenges? And there already are some, but this all sounds, you know, very, very chaotic in a chaotic scene. It's going to be messy. I mean, one of the things to watch in terms of when the backlash, if there's backlash, how much is the backlash? Obviously, family separation became a big issue in Trump's first term.
Children, because of birthright citizenship, the children of who were born here are citizens. And so what Tom Holman, the relation the borders are said is that there will be they'll have the opportunity to all leave the country. You know, when you talk about people like from Venezuela, a lot of what Trump talks about is the Venezuelan gangs. We can't just send them back to Venezuela. There's not currently a mechanism to do that yet. And I mean, in terms of policy changes, one of the things Trump did is one of the orders allows.
raids of schools and churches, which I think is a policy shift, but we'll see if they actually do that. I can't urge people listening enough to read Nick's reporting. He owned the story in the first Trump administration and has continued to during the transition and every incremental development he's been so on top of. And I would also just add to that, that one thing that we're seeing here is Trump is trying to do as much as he can unilaterally. That's part of this reliance on the military, right, which is oversight over. But you especially, Ron, have done a lot of reporting on how much funding they're going to need from Congress. And that's going to be really one of the first big tests coming up. But the issue is their majority, especially in the House, is so thin, right, that this stuff could fall apart very easily. So when we're talking about bed space capacity, what the deportation stuff looks like, they need money for that. Congress has to give that. And again, if we rewind back to his first term, the government shut down at one point because he couldn't get money. He wanted money for the wall. And we don't have to relitigate that entire saga. But the point being that.
I think this is just the start of what will likely be funding fights to implement some of the immigration stuff once he starts to run into some roadblocks on the extent of his executive authority. Nick, do we have any reporting or any sense about how this is going to trickle down to just even local economies? You know, there is reporting that people who work in agriculture are concerned. They're not seeing workers come in because they don't, you know, if they're going to be a part of some raid. And even though you've laid out that we don't know if the raids will happen or what shape they'll take, people are concerned. Do we know what it looks like at the local level yet?
I mean, we don't see the effects yet, but this administration is embarking on a grand experiment, a huge economic experiment, right? If you really, really choke off immigration and you deport a significant part of your workforce, especially in very price sensitive parts of the economy, right? Agriculture, childcare, construction. What are the effects of that? And I suspect that a lot of Americans won't be happy if there is a major inflationary effect and they will have to.
recalibrate whatever policies that they're pushing out right now down the road if it starts to really weigh on them politically. Thank you so much, Nick, for giving us kind of a snapshot of what we know so far and really great reporting. Thank you. When we come back, we will talk about Trump's efforts to eliminate affirmative action and DEI programs within the federal government and how he plans to do that, what the policy violations are if they do take shape. And we're also going to talk about what Trump is doing on the world stage, at least his early steps on the world stage. We'll be back.
You're watching Sidebar with The Washington Post. And now we're going to talk about Trump at home and abroad. James, Trump has been making some early steps back onto the world stage. What has he been doing and what's been standing out to you? He moved pretty quickly. Marco Rubio got confirmed the same day he was inaugurated. His first phone call to a world leader as president again was to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. That is noteworthy because his first visit.
during the first term was to Saudi Arabia. He sold them hundreds of billions of dollars in military weapons. But remember, MBS, according to the CIA, ordered the assassination of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi. When Joe Biden ran for president, he promised to make MBS a pariah and said he would treat Saudi Arabia as a pariah state. Then he went to Riyadh, gave MBS a fist bump because we wanted the Saudis to produce more oil. And so it's sort of a change because Trump is a lot more comfortable with some of the dictators and authoritarians.
Marco Rubio, who has been confirmed as Secretary of State, is going on his first foreign trip to Panama, among some other places, which we heard Trump talk about Manifest Destiny, the first president to use those words in an inaugural address. And James, Trump has also been surprisingly critical of Vladimir Putin. In fact, we have tape of some of the words he discussed about Vladimir Putin. Let's take a listen. He should make a deal. I think he's destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia's going to be in big trouble. You take a look at their economy, you take a look at the inflation in Russia.
So I would hope I've been along with him, right? And, you know, I would hope he wants to make a deal. Mr. President, are you keeping U.S. sanctions on Russia until he gets a deal? Well, sanctions or tariffs. I think the word tariff is much better because it keeps your dollar stronger. In addition, he also did a truth social post with, you know, some all cap letters also being very critical of Vladimir Putin. And I say it's surprising because in his first term, he had, you know, some warm things to say about Putin. So where are we to make of this? There was a lot of concern coming in.
Trump had promised he was going to end the war in Ukraine in his first 24 hours as president. That obviously hasn't happened yet. But there was fear that he would kind of cut off Ukraine and be like, Ukraine needs to just like give the land that Russia has taken and end the war. But instead, it appears that some of his more hawkish advisors have convinced him that you want Ukraine to have leverage against Russia. So if you support Ukraine and maybe even impose tougher sanctions than Biden did, you force Russia to come to the table and maybe make some concessions to Ukraine so that you can get a deal. I think this is a positive sign that Trump is.
going to engage constructively in the Russia-Ukraine conflict rather than just sort of like chop Ukraine's legs out from underneath it. James, is there anything that stood out to you about some of these early moves on the world stage? And do we expect any of this to last? How he's appearing now? Do you think that's how he'll be appearing, you know, months from now or halfway through his term? Well, both of these are kind of crucial countries when we talk about things he said he wants to do, right? Saudi Arabia, because...
They are sort of a linchpin of Middle East peace and the relations that Trump wants to establish. And it's also notable because in his first term, he touted all these deals with the Saudis in terms of both the investment, but also the jobs created. And it was usually wildly inflated from what it actually was. On the Russia front, I think it's interesting because to James's point, this is a little bit of a shift on the issue of Ukraine. And you also have some hawks or conservatives to the right of Putin in Russia who are actually pushing him to.
push the war further to up Russia's hand in that. So it's a very dynamic situation. And I think it's interesting and notable that Trump, to James's point, is reacting this way at this point. But as with Trump, stuff can kind of change on a dime. Yes, and so we'll all be watching. I know we have to move on, but one of the things that's been most upsetting about the first couple days of Trump is vis-a-vis the Middle East in Iran. He wants to be really tough on Iran. Iran reportedly was involved in potentially plotting to assassinate Trump before the election. Donald Trump pulled back the Secret Service details for three different people who worked for him during the first term, who were tough on Iran, who U.S. intelligence believes Iran wants to retaliate against for the killing of Qasem Soleimani. And that is Mike Pompeo, Trump Secretary of State, John Bolton, the National Security Advisor, and Brian Hook, who was sort of the envoy for countering Iran. All three of those gentlemen have lost their Secret Service protection.
on Trump's order, basically because Trump is angry at them for unrelated things. And I can tell you when I'm talking to Republican sources, that is the thing they have been most upset about during the first couple of days of the Trump administration, because they feel like Trump has essentially left these three guys who served him during the first term as sitting ducks for potential Iranian assassination. Yeah, thank you for bringing that up. That is a very good point. One that I think gets lost in all of the flurry of activity that we've covered in the last few days. But that is a very important point. OK, so moving closer to home, there has been a lot of concern that Trump has immediately unraveled DEI policy throughout the federal government, laying off people who worked with DEI.
programming throughout the federal government. A lot of concerning moves there. What are we to make of it? And let's first break it down, of course, what it is and why are people so concerned about this jam? Yeah, so these are hiring protocols and protections for federal workers, right? We're talking gender, we're talking sexual orientation, gender identity, protections that have some...
were put in place by Biden, but some of these have been in place for decades, right? And Trump is rolling these backs. This is a notable shift. But broadly, the through line here is Trump is trying to reduce the federal workforce, even though we're already at a historical low in terms of a percentage of employment nationwide in the federal workforce, right? The number of federal employees right now are roughly where it was in the 1960s. So if anything, you could really make an argument that a lot of these agencies are kind of understaffed and maybe need more staffing to actually do some of these things. Because as we're talking about how Trump wants to take executive actions on all these different things, he needs people in government to implement those things, right? So the through line here.
Whether it's the DEI rollback, whether it's the Schedule F executive order, whether it's the return to office policy, these are all things that are geared at reducing the number of employees in the federal government and giving them more leeway, sway, oversight over who is working at these various agencies. Yeah. What do you think is behind the move here? Because this was, you know, somewhat of a campaign promise. You often would hear Trump as well as Republicans talk about DEI programming as being woke. And I know we heard a lot about it during, you know, the mask battles during COVID, that people were upset that, you know, there were DEI programs in their place of work or schools. Is it all ideological? Or like JM is saying, there is, you know, some more to it when you get behind the scenes. And the irony is that Donald Trump has been bragging.
that he made big inroads in building a multiracial coalition. He overperformed previous Republicans among African Americans, Latinos, Asians. And so there is some irony that he's then coming in and trying to slash all these programs. He definitely feels like he has a mandate. But what is striking is that he has gone beyond just stuff that Joe Biden did. He's not just rolling back things that the Biden administration did. In one case, as Jan was sort of alluding to, he rescinded an executive order.
that Lyndon Johnson signed in the 1960s. So he really is rolling back what has been a half century of practice in the federal government to promote diversity. We'll see what the implications are, but I think it is pretty dramatic. He also, he could have reassigned people who worked in various DEI offices. It's a new name, but these programs, these diversity promotion programs have been there for a long, long time. But instead of reassigning them to different roles, he's just getting rid of them altogether. He's putting them on unpaid leave. I think he is trying to create this culture of fear in the government. A lot of the agencies have been asking people to basically snitch and email this address that they put out there for any reports of DEI by other names or trying to conceal it as something else. And he wants, just like some places want people to report to the government if they know of undocumented immigrants, they're also trying to create this environment where people are reporting on their colleagues in the government who are promoting diversity.
equity and inclusion and accessibility. You know, DEIA, a lot of Trump's been calling it DEI. A lot of the programs in the government are DEIA for accessibility. So I think that Trump does feel like this is what his base wants him to do. Ultimately, this is one of those things where...
you know, he risks overplaying his hand, he risks going too far. And I think people, no one is in his orbit is really saying, whoa, it's one thing to say, let's get rid of like the mandatory training. It's another to get rid of like vital protections against discrimination. So we'll see how much they overreach and what the backlash is to that. This is also just part of a broader shift over the last few years in the country, right? This follows the Supreme Court for an action decision. And this also follows companies under political pressure, rolling back their own DEI initiatives. Again, this is about workplace protections, promoting diversity in the workplace, right? And this often gets kind of...
put out there as a scapegoat, right, for different issues, arguing that it's not a meritocracy, right, that folks are being put in to these positions, these roles weren't qualified, that broadly has not panned out to be the case, although there are individual cases that folks have pointed to when these things get rolled back. But I do think what we're seeing, whether it's the workplace stuff, whether it's immigration stuff we were talking about earlier, Trump is ushering in sort of a new era here, there is a shift, or he's trying to at least there is a shift underway in terms of how And some people in the country are thinking about this and how he wants people to think about this. Yeah. You know, one of the things I was thinking of in reading the coverage of how people are feeling about the rollback of these DEI programs is that, OK, there's the micro level stuff of it kind of pushes people out, obviously, who will be laid off. They are laid off with pay, but they're laid off and may not feel included in helping run the federal government. So there's the micro level. But there was also, you know, big picture.
If you look at it, how is this going to play when it's corporations? I know part of some of the orders say to also tell on any companies from the private sector who have DEI programs. So is there going to be this chilling effect within the private sector as well or less emphasis on diversity? I just wonder if that's the direction that it might go in as well. And it's been sort of a mixed bag on the corporate front so far, right? We've seen a number of Fortune 500 companies roll back or eliminate their DEI program. But we've also seen companies like Costco, for example, maintain their program in place. I do think that this is going to be.
So much of what Trump talked about it is inaugural address and the address that followed was culture war, right, which was a really striking departure from what we're used to hearing at inaugural addresses. And a lot of this DEI rhetoric coming from Trump and from the White House is rooted in this culture war stuff. Again, they want to show, especially to their base, that they're taking action on this. I think a lot of people think of the Republican base as people who are members of country clubs and want lower taxes. And a lot of the Trump base is not that. A lot of the Trump base doesn't really care about taxes. They're not particularly affluent, but they do care deeply about DEI and getting rid of it. It used to be called political correctness, but DEI has become a stand-in for a lot of the Trump base. It is a scapegoat. And so I think this is also for show. It's a show of force. Trump wants to show that he's taking an axe to this thing that his base hates.
Well, thank you, James and JM, for another good discussion. And I think we'll have more to talk about next week. No shortage, no shortage. I'm Rhonda Colvin with The Washington Post. And also, I want to remind those who follow us regularly or just jumping in and hearing us for the first time, we are now on two times a week. That's Tuesday and Thursday. And of course, we will have a lot more news to break down for you. Thank you for joining us and have a good day. Did you know you can play The Washington Post's games for free? Find the crossword, keyword, ridges, and on the record in The Washington Post app or at WashingtonPost.com slash games. No subscription required.