Welcome to CMS On Air, the podcast on migration, refugee and population issues, brought to you by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. This is Rachel Reyes, CMS's Director of Communications. This episode features an interview with Ron Nixon, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times, who covers Homeland Security issues. Ron has reported from Rwanda, Uganda, South Africa, Belgium, Mexico, Malaysia, Senegal, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He also teaches investigative reporting and data journalism at the University of the Vitzivatres Rand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Ron is author of the book Selling Apartheid, Apartheid South Africa's Global Propaganda War. Among other topics in this episode, Ron and Donald Kerwin, CMS's Executive Director, discussed Donald Trump's executive orders, immigration enforcement at the US-Mexico border, and the Department of Homeland Security, which, at the time of this interview, was still headed by John Kelly, who just this week replaced Ryan's previous as White House Chief of Staff. Now, here is our interview with Ron Nixon.
Ron, thanks for being with us. We appreciate you taking the time to meet with us. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you cover at The New York Times and some of your background as well. Sure.
Thanks for having me. I am the Homeland Security Correspondent for The New York Times. I cover the Department of Homeland Security and all things border security, aviation security, counterterrorism, immigration, cybersecurity, cyber crime. All of those things, emergency management that fall within the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security is what I cover.
Well, we could start talking about the travel bans, I think, because there are a lot of people's mind right now, and the Supreme Court has come out with a little bit of a decision. The grandchildren and cousins are actually exempt from the travel ban, which I think is interesting. But I wanted to back up a little bit back to 9-11. The theme after that was that intelligence gathering, information sharing, screening, those had to be top national security priorities.
The U.S. was supposed to be at the point by now, actually was supposed to have already been here many years ago, of having sufficient intelligence and screening mechanisms in place, so that we wouldn't need to suspend immigration from persons of particular nationalities or religions. I guess my question is, are we at that point and if not, why not? Well, I think it depends on who you talk to.
You're talking to a lot of people in the intelligence community. They will tell you that our capabilities are much more refined than they were around the period immediately after 9-11, in that you don't have to target specific countries or things, but we have enough capacity to be able to screen people. So you look at the risk of people individually rather than saying, okay, well, these people are from this country, so we need to ban them until we can figure out if they pose a threat. There are a number of things that the U.S.
already has in place, like you've got the visa security system. That ICE runs, Immigration Customs Enforcement, their Homeland Security investigation runs a visa security system, where people get screened when they are applying for their visas. The same thing that the State Department, their diplomatic security special agents, these people, they do the bulk of the screening, your social media, all those things are screened before people actually get here. And just to throw in something, it's extremely difficult for people to get here from some countries anyway, even now.
If you are from certain countries, your chances of getting a visa to the U.S. are, in some cases, almost impossible. So what the Trump administration is saying is that, well, we need a pause so we can vet these places and see if the people who are coming out, who they say they are. But that's already in place in these countries.
And the question then becomes, well, if these things are in place, what more do you need? Because obviously, if people don't have credentials, then you're not going to let them in the country. They're not going to be able to get a visa. So what is the additional vetting that's needed at this point?
Because I thought we were already doing extreme vetting. Well, that's the question. I'm not sure that there is a, at least I have not been given a clear-cut answer on what extreme vetting means. Because in addition to all of those things that I mentioned to you before, national tracking system that's run by Customs Border Protection, when you book your ticket, they know a lot about you before you even get on a plane.
With some of the enhancement that was done to the visa waiver system under the Obama administration, with the Republican Congress, there's more information sharing between those countries that we have people who don't need a visa to get here. But there's more information sharing. There's a lot more information sharing from other places like Iraq. Iraq was originally one of the seven countries.
And now it's six countries because they were saying, well, Iraq agreed to do all of these different things. So again, I don't know what the additional steps that are needed. There is a report that has been done that has been given to the White House, but has not been made public. I was confused about Iraq, too, because if you look at the infiltration of terrorists through the refugee programs, I mean, the two cases that are documented over the last decade are Iraqis.
And Secretary Kelly then comes out and says that it's because Iraq now effectively screens its own people for admission. And I wonder if that's valid. And I also wonder about that rationale. I mean, since when does the U.S.
seat its security to other nations? I wouldn't imagine that they'd say that for certain countries. It doesn't seat its security to other nations, particularly for vetting and screening people coming to this country. I'm not sure where that statement is coming from or even what he meant by that.
Because again, what you hear is that we need these extreme vetting. The U.S. has a vetting system that is unlike any other vetting system in the world. So I'm not sure how much more extreme you can get other than perhaps not letting anybody come into the country because you do have all of these things in place that should give if they are working, they should not allow anybody in this country who does not need to be here.
I think you may have reported on a government report that, security report that said that there are 26 nations whose nationals were, quote, inspired to carry out attacks in the United States. Is that true? Is that true? Yeah.
I think it was a report a few months ago that came out that did say that. And so you wonder why the six and not the 26 or actually I wonder why the six at all, since as you pointed out, there's already extreme vetting and they already know who's coming in generally. The Trump administration points to the, say the six countries where these were countries that were picked by the Obama administration, which is sort of true. It was, these were countries that were actually picked by Congress as supportive of terrorism.
And so the Obama administration signed the legislation putting us to effect. It didn't really pick them. I mean, it was a combination of Republican Congress and the Obama administration. So it's still a mystery as to why those countries and there are various theories that are floating out there.
When you look at a lot of terrorist attacks that have happened particularly in Europe, most of those people have been nationals of those countries and not, you know, people who are coming there to do the country harm through the refugee programs, but these are people who are national. Do you have any predictions or a sense of how the Supreme Court's going to come out on this case? You don't. You've got a new justice that more or less maintains the conservative balance, but presidents have been given wide latitude in the area of immigration.
So it's kind of hard to say which way that they will go. It's interesting though that their instruction was or one of the statements was that the extreme vetting measures ought to be in effect by the time that the case comes before them. Right, right. Which would render any decision moved then, right?
Because you've had this time and there was an injunction put in place, but now by the time the ruling actually comes down, you will have exceeded the time that you say you need it to actually do the extreme vetting. So you know, both sides sort of claim victory in the decision. Kind of going to the US-Mexico border. I know that you spend a lot of time there and are an expert on that.
And I wanted to talk first about the border wall and the reaction of the border patrol itself to some of the ideas for the wall. And as I understand it, some of them are opposing a certain kind of wall if you could talk about what their rationale is. So the border patrol, when they talk about what's needed, they talk about it in terms of legs and they talk about technology, physical barriers, and people. And so the technology are things like sensors and cameras and drones and what gives them situational awareness of what's happening.
In terms of physical barriers, they don't speak so much in terms of walls, but in terms of fencing, vehicle, anything that will impede the progress of people long enough for that third leg to happen, which is to pick them up. So if you're in urban areas like Nagales or Arizona or San Diego, California, then they are, yes, you do need physical barriers because you've got all of those people there, but physical barriers or walls don't make sense in some places. And so the border patrol is not advocating for a 2,000-mile long concrete wall that's 30 to 55. Because one, they do want to see what's happening on the other side of the wall or fence of the border.
But the border patrol suggests it's something that both Democrats and Republicans have agreed on when the Secure Defense Act of 2006 was passed. You have bipartisan support for that. So when you talk to the agents and the supervisory agents and the folks who are in charge, that's what they say that they need. But only in certain areas.
And they recognize that the congressional mandate of no unlawful entries or the aspiration. And that's one that the president picked up in his executive order, too, I think, that that that's not going to happen. And so how do you measure success then? That's a good question.
And it's a question that I've put to border patrol. I've put to other people who study this issue, former DHS people. What I've asked them is, what do you mean by a secure border? What does that mean?
What does it look like? Does it mean that no one will come across the border? Which obviously is impossible to do. Does it mean that you know what's going on on the border, like situational awareness, what they thought?
You get various answers as to what that means. And different administrations have different views of what that means. So I'm not sure that there is one particular answer for what a secure border would be for certain people. I mean, obviously some people said, well, no one should come across the border.
Well, obviously that's not going to happen. You have 2,000 mile border with two countries that have no long history, and particularly those regions where people move back and forth for centuries. And most of the newly unauthorized, they're not border crossers anyway. No, the most of the newly unauthorized folks are people who overstay their visas, which is an issue that they have struggled to deal with.
There are a lot of reports that my grants, and I take it, others, drug smugglers, and others that intend to do harm in the United States or bad actors of different kinds, can simply enter by ports of entry if they pay the right people. The fear of corruption. Why isn't that problem more publicized? Why isn't it a greater priority?
That seems to me to be more of a threat than somebody trying to cross it a barren desert. Right. I think that there is a recognition that this happens. I'll be a small number of people within Department of Homeland Security.
Late last year, I did a story about corruption within basically over a 10-year period, about 200 people working and contractors working for DHS took 15 million bribes that we could track for everything for drug smuggling to letting people across. I do think that there has been a recognition that they do need to strengthen their public integrity, strengthen their internal affairs, the vision or OPR, Office of Personal Responsibility now. One of the things though, when you look at the proposed budget cuts, the Inspector General Office will have fewer people. But the Inspector General's Office is the first responder so to speak for corruption cases.
And there's a proposal to hire 15,000 more people. So you're going to have that many more people with fewer people to actually police what they're doing. I don't think it has gotten a kind of coverage that it has because one, it hasn't always been seen as a problem with the U.S. side.
It's been corruption has always been sort of thought of as being endemic with the Mexican force. But we never have, say we, we as a society here don't really think of our border security officials that way. Are you finding that there's a critical mass of border residents who are resenting and opposing the kind of surveillance that they're under, those that cross regularly, for example? Because obviously the President has touted the militarization of the border and this enforcement takes place in the United States and U.S.
communities. You know, it's tough to get a sense of that because I'm not there every day obviously. But just from people that I've talked to, you get the sense in some ways that it's just normal. But that, that, that's in the air, it's just there.
And so it just blends in the background after a while, the license plate readers and all those other things. It's just there. And so after a while it just becomes part of the landscape. You don't really, really notice it.
I mean, obviously there's been issues raised by like the Texas Civil Rights Project. I believe it's one of the groups that have talked a little bit about this, the ACLU in that region and specifically in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. It's talked about this. But just, you know, in talking to people just day to day, and again, you know, I haven't done surveys or polls or anything like that.
But just in the people that I've talked to, I want to speak for everyone. It's just something that's there that you just see it and it's just blends into the background. Because the searches of electronic devices, is that, is that raised particular issues for people? It seems that that's gotten a little bit more attention than it has.
But the thing about the, the search of the electronic device is that this is something that's been ongoing for years. I think if the awareness has been raised because you have a president who's talked more about border security and immigration and crackdowns. But when you look at the border searches in general, I mean, the last year for the Obama administration was, was fairly high. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it was fairly high.
But that didn't start under the Trump administration, obviously. This has been something that's, that's been in existence for a while. I think there is more awareness about it simply because you have someone who's made this an issue or the issue for his particular campaign. You reported recently on officials at the Port of Entry and Hidalgo that found $250,000 hidden in an outbound car.
And this is a big part of the border story that gets underreported sometimes, which is that the firearms and the drug proceeds are heading from the US to Mexico. And they ultimately result in terrorized populations in Mexico and the flight of migrants to the United States. So I guess the couple of questions. One is, are sufficient resources being devoted to the interception of drugs and money going south?
And the second one is, it seems like we've heard Secretary Kelly, you know, understand this dynamic and speaks about it. Do US enforcement priorities seem to follow suit? So the first thing that are we in terms of interdiction? Their priority, which I guess are both related, and you know, when I talked to CDP, Fernando Santos, who is formerly the New York Times Phoenix Correspondency and I did a story about all the money that's flowing south into Mexico.
As you mentioned, this fuels a lot of the issues that we deal with with the migrants coming here from Central America primarily because of the money and guns flowing to those areas. There are some attempts to interdict, but the priority actually is what's coming in, not what's going out. They do have these surges. I witnessed one in Luc'sville, Arizona.
I witnessed one in Hidalgo, Port of Entry where they were at the far Port of Entry in the same region in South Texas where they were actually looking at money going out, trying to find money going out, the car that you mentioned hidden in the bumper. But that's not the bulk of the resources are to track things coming in, drugs coming in. So yes, Secretary Kelly has grasped with this. He was one of the reasons that we did that particular story because he had mentioned it so many times.
But again, you don't see a shift in making resources available to interdict that money going out. Now, there are some things that are in place. Like Joint Task Force West was set up by former Secretary Jay Johnson based on the military so in a task force where you have all the military components, but in one place where they utilize what they do best. So things aren't stovepike.
Same thing with these things where they're looking at tracking, to try to destroy the networks. Not so much go after people, but destroy the money launderers and all the other ways that people get money there. And then ICE has the bulk cash transfer center in Vermont that tracks this stuff. And there's a number of other things.
For the most part, the priority is to stop things coming into the country. I wanted to just talk a little bit more about the corruption because you have, as you pointed out, major hiring that's being proposed in the budget. I think a thousand new ICE personnel, 500 new Border Patrol agents. And I guess a preliminary question before we get to the corruption question is, are they going to be able to do that given the attrition?
I mean, are they going to be able to bring that money on? And then they're talking about actually waving the polygraph for some of the corruption tests that they do. And isn't it predictable that there's going to be more corruption down the road then? I mean, haven't we been down this path before after fast hiring, large-scale hiring?
Well, let me jump back to the, well, the first one that's going to be a high. I'm not sure that they will be able to because they do struggle to do this because there are a couple of things that happen with the hiring. One, unlike ICE agents, right? ICE agents could be in Los Angeles.
They could be in DC. They could be in New York City. There are no Border Patrol agents in New York City. So you're going to be in places that are probably not where a lot of people want to be.
Border Patrol is actually on the border and these are little small towns and a lot of places not much to do. So they have that going forward. It's pretty demanding in terms of being out by yourself and to be perfectly honest, it's really dangerous, too, because you are out there by yourself for the most part. And then they have competition from other agencies where, why would I want to do that if I could go and be Secret Service agent or if I could go be FBI or something?
Or even ICE, I mean, Border Patrol loses people to ICE. Why? Because ICE doesn't have that polygraph test that you mentioned. Now, this test was mandated back in 2010 because the growing awareness about corruption within the Border Patrol in particular.
And so what they have done now is shift it towards, they're still giving a polygraph, but it's a different polygraph. Now the guy who actually set up this program, James Tomchak, set up the program at Customs Border Protection when he first came in and said that is dangerous because the new test is a test for espionage, not a test for corruption because that's not really espionage. If you help somebody smuggle cocaine across it, that's not really espionage. So, and he has shown where these tests have actually caught people who were purposely trying to infiltrate the Border Patrol and they mentioned we, those people out.
So he thinks that it could be dangerous since they've changed the test. He thinks that they're a greater possibility that that that's going to happen because, again, to drug cartels, these people have billions of dollars at a disposal. And obviously, if they can corrupt someone, they will. And given the numbers that you're talking about, the last time we saw a surge like this, you did see, in result, was there were lots of cases of corruption.
So I think that that is a concern. I think there's a concern within CBP, Customs Border Protection. But they seem to think that they made some modifications to this new polygraph, that it will still be able to weed out people but speed up the process for hiring people. I don't know if that's going to be the case.
I know Mr. Tom Shag, again, the guy who set this whole thing up, is really concerned about that. Yeah. And I was surprised to see, I think, in Secretary Kelly's report that the process takes 400 and something days.
Yes. And that they're starting with a bit of a deficit in terms of numbers. I mean, it's 19,000 something. It's not what's budgeted.
Right. Well, it's budgeted is 21,000. And so they're already in a deficit. And if you hire these, you're only, in some ways, catching up to what the, what Congress is mandate as you're sealing.
And plus, you still don't have attrition of people. And a lot of the Border Patrol agents just go and work for a customs. They change the green for the blue because it's a bed hours. And you do your ship and you get to go home.
The Border Patrol, that's not the case. We're hearing, and there's a lawsuit that was filed over the last couple of weeks, about violations of the requirement that border officials are supposed to be referring people who request asylum or express a fear of violence or persecution in their home countries to a credible fear interview by the asylum officers that can then put them into removal proceedings or they can ask for a political asylum. But that's being disregarded wholesale in certain places. There's been commissions that have reported on that happening as well.
So that is happening. But it seems like one effect of the creation of DHS has been that the immigration enforcement agents have less of an appreciation of the benefits, the immigration benefits and the protection side of the agency than they used to when it was in the Immigration and Naturalization Service and everybody was together. And if that's true, I guess the question is they're given more protection responsibilities. That is one of their responsibilities.
How can you change that culture? And if you can't, does it make sense to invest any protection responsibilities in CBP and ICE agents who don't view their jobs is involving that? I mean, it's a difficult question because, you know, again, I know of this. I haven't seen it myself, but I do know and have heard reports of this happening.
I think that ICE agents and Border Patrol agents have been given more power in a lot of ways than things have been seated to them. Whereas in the past, it was referred to attorneys at ICE or something, so what kind of time men make the decision where now it's the agents that sort of have the prosecutorial discretion to do whatever, you have a president who's laid out in an executive order what his priorities are and did a piece on the DHS being largely focused on immigration. But one of the things that Leanne Panetta, the former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense said is John Kelly's falling orders. He was a Marine and he's just following orders.
So I think a large part of that is simply coming from the president himself and people aren't clear if they can do things like, I guess what they would think would contradict with what the president's priorities are. Are you seeing any signs of decreased cooperation at the border from Mexico as a result of some of the rhetoric or some of the enforcement policies? There's grumbling, but I haven't seen decreases. You know, I was down in Mexico City in March, I believe, and was talking to some former intel people there who still have ties with the government.
They grumble privately about the U.S. not dealing with the money and guns flowing into Mexico. But on some levels, these are relationships that have been established over years of working together and even if the people at the top may have issues, there is this tendency for the people who are on the ground to work together because there are like a task force down in El Paso where the Mexican authorities have people there working with the U.S. authorities.
So I think that those closer to the ground relationships endure even as their tensions at the top. Right now, you do see Mexico pretty much continuing to do what it has done in the past. There's been a sense, and I think historically there's been a specific memorandum called the Sensitive Locations memorandum within ICE that enforcement actions shouldn't take place at or near a sensitive location. It basically places where people's well-being or their conscience requires them to be.
And yet there are increased reports of fact that that's happening. You know, they're waiting outside schools or shelters or other sensitive locations, hospitals, courts. Is this a new policy from on high or? ICE says that it's not because they're saying they've always gone into courts.
So courts are not listed as a sensitive location. Schools, churches, those places are, and the way that they're interpreting the policies, that they're not going into those places, but there's nothing that keeps them from being outside this homeless shelter or being outside the church. As long as they're not on a property, but if you're across the street from it, then their interpretation of it is you're not violating that directive. The head of ICE enforcement is directing agents to arrest all undocumented persons with whom they come in contact.
That does seem it on, with the administration's priorities. That's a change from the previous administration, which said that priorities was going to be people who posed some type of risk to the US. And that was a directive that was issued by the head of ICE to agents in the field. For two reasons.
One is the grandma who had tent on her windows that was too dark and you get pulled over and you're found that you're undocumented. The Obama administration felt that's not really what we want to have ICE agents go and track these people down. The M13, the folks who smuggled drugs and the human smugglers, those people, those were the priorities. And so the residuals, as they call them, if you went someplace and somebody had a deportation order and you went someplace and you encountered other people who were undocumented, then you simply got the person who you had to order for.
The other person didn't post a threat, so kind of let them alone. That's changed where Mr. Holman, who is the ICE director, says, look, I mean if you run across them, they're a fair game. So that is definitely a change from before.
I wonder if there's, as I listen to Secretary Kelly, he regularly says that ICE actions are about protecting and serving the public. That's their mission. But you also have police chiefs around the country saying that they're not able to protect and serve the public if they perform immigration enforcement and they're increasingly being pressured and they feel in some places forced to take on this as a priority. How can that paradox or conflict or whatever you call it be resolved?
You know, again, that's a tough question and I know I don't have the answer for that, but it is an issue because for the local authorities, they're saying, look, once a person has been in their time, we can't hold them. ICE is saying, well, you need to hold them because, one, the best place to get those people is when they're already confined and it doesn't pose a threat to the public or to the agents at ICE. And so these are these detainers, but detainers aren't legal documents. Several courts have sent that.
They're not. And so the city's- They're voluntary requests. It's like you saying, me saying to you, hey, can you do this for me? That's not really legal.
In terms of a legal document, ICE is determined that, look, it's legal for us to do that because you want to get these people off the streets. And when I say legal, I meant that it's not a legal document like a warrant. And so a lot of jurisdictions will say, look, if you have a warrant, well, gladly handed person over to you, that's fine, because they are afraid that they could be sued for violating that person's constitutional right, by holding them for eight hours beyond the time that they have served their time. And that is the issues that cities don't want to open themselves up to lawsuits because, again, courts have ruled that the tainer is not the same as a warrant.
And then I think ICE put out this report for a time, purporting to show jurisdictions that didn't honor the taters and myself and a colleague, Liz Robbins, did a couple of reports on the flaws in those things because some of those, I know in particular Minneapolis and my hometown, the Hennepin County Sheriff took offense to that and actually held a press conference and showed a steal of him handing off people to ICE, even though I used to say he wasn't being cooperative. And so it's ongoing. I mean, there are some police chiefs and sheriffs who are like, hey, we're going to do this. There are others who are saying that we're not going to do this for the reasons cited before, but also because we're not immigration.
That is a federal responsibility that does not fall on local people. We had the former head of the executive office for immigration review. We want to sue him here yesterday and we're doing an event with him and interview and we asked him about what do you do about that immense case backlog issue that you have? It's almost 600,000 cases now.
And part of his answer, it's a complicated problem, but one of the main contributors to it is the fact that their resources just haven't kept up with the kind of resources of the enforcement agencies that are putting people into the removal proceedings. I wonder if you have any thoughts on that? Any kind of what's the solution to that problem? You know, again, I don't know what the solution is.
I know that it is a problem that there simply aren't enough judges to hear these cases. And as a result, you have a tremendous backlog at the same time that you want to do more internal enforcement, build capacity to detain more and more people, but where are they going to go and how do you resolve the problem of giving them their day in court? I think going back to the point before was something that I think the Obama administration recognized and probably the Bush administration and the administration before that too, is that ICE is always going to have a finite amount of resources. You can increase it and you can increase the size of that.
A couple of thousand more, but ICE has about 8,000 and you're talking about an undocumented population in the millions. You know, the math on that just does not favor the courts because you know, you've got all these people detained, but not enough judges to actually hear their cases. You know, another thing he said I wanted to ask you about was that it's his sense that is the Trump administration faces increased difficulties related to some of its agenda, like passage of health care, tax reform, whatever, that it's likely to focus more on immigration legislatively, that they have a clear sense of what they want to do and that will come to the fore more legislatively. I mean, do you think that that's an accurate projection of what might happen?
I can see that because as I said, the article that I did last week was about how the DHS was focused a lot on immigration, even though it has this broad portfolio of thing that immigration, if you look at the proposed budget increases, CBP and ICE, 21% and almost 30% respectively, everything else was either barely moving or cut because again, it's something that you can show, you can see and when the president ran on these issues, that was the top issue was build a wall and talk about getting the, you know, the rapists and other people out of the country. So I think it's something that it's easier to get the Republicans and the whole on, health care is much more complicated because, you know, I was listening to this thing yesterday about health care in Kentucky. Oh, people have it and they like it, the fact that they can go and go see a dentist. That's hard to take, and even some of the, you know, the Republican legislators don't want to mess with that.
Immigration is a little different because there is a sense in a lot of places that, well, you know, immigrants have just taken these jobs and that, you know, they're here and they're soaking up all the, again, the data doesn't show that, but there is that wise right, belief that, and I think that's an easier target than health care, taxes, foreign policy, all these other things. I mean, immigration is actually complex too, but I think it's an easier sell than those other issues are. Do you have any thoughts on kind of the administration's ultimate plans for the DACA recipients? I don't.
I don't know if the administration has an ultimate plan for the DACA recipients. The president said, hey, you know, these kids, they're great and, you know, we don't want to be harsh and I don't think that they have given it a lot of thought. I do know that Secretary Kelly did tell the Hispanic caucus that according to his talks with lawyers that they thought that if DACA was challenged in court that it wouldn't survive, I don't know if you can say that that's policy other than his view based on his talks with lawyers, but as a whole, I don't think there is a strategy for what to do. Meaning that the Department of Justice certainly won't defend it?
You know, I think that that's the implication is that they won't defend it if it does reach the courts. And what about the temporary protected status for some of the larger groups? We've done a statistical portrait of TPS recipients from Haiti and El Salvador and Honduras. And what do you think of the long term viability of those programs in the Trump administration?
For those populations? Right. Again, I think it's in some ways the same boat as DACA. I don't think that there's been a lot of thought given to it, given all the other stuff that is happening with the rest of the investigation and all of those things.
I don't think that there's a long term strategy for it. I think people are aware of it. I think some of the his aides, even Miller in particular, Steve Bannon, I've probably given it more thought than others. But there's been a lot of focus on health care recently and, you know, again, the bogged down and the Russian.
So I don't think it has gotten their attention to the point where someone has sat down and said, hey, this is what we need to do. I do know that there's some talk of doing more criminal backgrounds and things like that on people within the temporary protective status. But again, I don't get a sense just based on my conversation with people that there's a long term strategy. If you were to prognosticate, given all of the campaign promises of the president on immigration, what do you think is likely to happen and what isn't?
All of the things that he's... Well, I think that one, something will be built. There's not going to be a wall as Secretary Kelly and as the president recently said from the Sea to Shining Sea, there's just not going to be a wall. I think that they will build out in places like Rio Grande Valley and San Diego region.
But I don't think it's going to be as fast as they think it will be. Some of the timeframes that they were getting were pretty optimistic 24 months. You know, there's a lot of the land that you need to build the wall on, particularly in Texas, which has like, you know, or a thousand miles off the overall border. It's in, privately owned.
And so that condemnation process takes forever. There's still cases pending from the wall in 2008. I think something will be built though and they will show that we're building these physical barriers. I think at some point you'll see the immigration policies, particularly ICE, probably become similar to the Obama administration's, simply because of resources.
There simply aren't enough people and there isn't enough money to do all of these things. And because of also pushback from more conservative members who they came to Congress not to spend a lot. So they don't want to go and re-nig on that promise. I think that the, by the time that the Supreme Court ruling gets around to this whole vetting, that report will be dot-and-nary, they will have to act on that and not try to wait to what the Supreme Court says one way or the other.
Because you're already starting to see bits and pieces of that. You see an expansion. It was the Hawaii judge, the grandparents are obviously close family. And now you see even a more expansive view of that.
Close family is difficult anyway. We tend to look at this in an American or more American European point of view. But in a lot of cultures, that's just not the way family structures are set up. Everybody's a close family.
I mean, heck, even people from the south, everybody's our cousin. I mean, I have so many cousins. I can't even count. I was like, who was that person?
I was like, right. I mean, I'm not sure. But it's like what's level of cousin, you know, first cousin, second cousin, third cousin. Those things complicate the ability to try to do, because it's not clear cut.
None of this is clear cut. And I think that that's the problem when you try to simplify a very complex issue. I do think that there will be a push to do some type of immigration reform. Yeah.
Including a legalization program. I'm not sure it will get to that point. But I think that there will be something, because you have to. The immigration system, the way it works now, is just ineffective.
And I think most people will say that. And it can't continue the way that it is. It will collapse under its own weight. And when you can't just keep kicking a can down the road, you're after you're, I think that they will have to do something to do it.
Now, we're the base, support that, unlikely. But I do think that they will at least try to tip something. Well, we thank you for being here. Is there anything else you want to say?
Great. Well, thank you guys. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
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