The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump’s lawlessness is getting worse, but the public is now clearly rejecting it. Trump gave a new interview in which he made some striking admissions about the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia that only demonstrate how reprehensible his treatment of this whole saga has become. Meanwhile, new polling shows a large public backlash to Trump’s extra-legal tactics. We don’t think that Trump and Stephen Miller anticipated this public response. We think they thought they had successfully acclimated voters to their lawlessness. The opposite is happening. Yet all signs are that they’ll continue plunging us into this abyss. Today we’re talking about all of this with Chris Newman, who’s one of the lawyers for Abrego Garcia’s family and is general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Chris, good to have you on.
Newman: It’s my pleasure. Thank you.
Sargent: Let’s start with what Trump said in a new interview with Time magazine. To catch people up, Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador and the Supreme Court has said this is illegal and that the administration must facilitate his return. Trump and his people keep saying that this is not their issue anymore, that they can’t make El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele release him. So Time magazine asked Trump, Have you asked Bukele to return him? Trump admitted, I haven’t, and said his lawyers have not told him he has to. Chris, that’s an astounding admission. Your response?
Newman: Like everything, it’s difficult to interpret. On the one hand, it appears that Trump is softening and indeed backing away from the position of Stephen Miller, who appears to be higher on the organizational chart than his own vice president. On the other hand, it seems to be an admission as well that he’s violating the Supreme Court order because the order clearly said that he was supposed to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. And the fact that he hasn’t tried seems to be a dead to rights admission that he is not complying with the order. From a political lens, it appears to reflect what is actually happening, which is public opinion is turning against Trump on this issue, and on immigration broadly. But as a legal matter, again, we continue to inch closer and closer to the proverbial constitutional crisis that people have been afraid of and some would even say—potentially rightly—that we’re already there.
Sargent: Well, he is currently defying the Supreme Court, which has again ordered him to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return and he’s not doing that. To your point, Chris, the Time magazine interviewers actually did press Donald Trump on the thing you raised. They said, Well, OK, if you haven’t asked Bukele to return him, then aren’t you violating the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return? Trump stammered and said something like, Well, the lawyers aren’t telling me I have to do that. They don’t really want to do that at this juncture. That strikes me as pretty damning. Trump is admitting it’s an option, but he’s not taking it.
Newman: Yeah, and it makes you wonder which lawyer, if any, he’s talking to. For example, is he talking to Erez Reuveni, the Department of Justice lawyer who admitted that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported and then subsequently fired—seemingly because of that admission? Or is he talking to Pam Bondi? Or in fact, is he just making it entirely up and he hasn’t spoken to any lawyers at all? The fact is that we don’t know. And also the fact is that this is also part of this trick mirror thing where Trump is trying to make it seem like he ultimately is all three branches of government. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s spoken to lawyers or not. His administration must comply with the Supreme Court order.
Sargent: Right, and he was actually asked during the interview whether generally speaking he thinks he has to comply with the Supreme Court. And of course he said, I greatly respect the justices and so forth. I think that they may be moving toward compliance. I want to flag another moment from the Time interview. Trump was asked why he won’t just bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States and retry him for deportation through lawful channels. Trump answered: “It’s something that, frankly, bringing him back and retrying him wouldn’t bother me.”
But then Trump adds again that his lawyers “don’t want to do that” at this moment. To be clear, Chris, the administration does have the option of bringing him back and recontesting his withholding of removal status or seeking to deport him to a third country. Trump now just said flat out that he’d be OK with this. Well, what the hell are we waiting for then? How is this not a big deal?
Newman: Again, I don’t know. All we’re asking for is for Kilmar Abrego Garcia to get a fair hearing and due process that is entitled to all of us in the U.S. And then the chips can fall where they may. The fact that he’s being deprived of that and they continue to double down is not just something that’s putting Kilmar’s life at risk. It’s putting all of our rights at risk because, again, this is the proverbial test case as to whether or not Donald Trump can suspend core elements of the Constitution whenever he wants. And if he gets away with it on this case—because maybe the political winds are going this way or that way—there’s no question that there will be an erosion of constitutional rights for every single person in the country.
Sargent: I think there’s no question about it. I want to bring up this new poll from The New York Times. It finds Trump underwater on immigration with 51 percent of voters disapproving versus only 47 percent approving; 63 percent opposed deporting legal immigrants who have protested Israel, 73 percent say a president shouldn’t be able to send American citizens to prison in El Salvador, which Trump has threatened to do; 76 percent opposed defying the Supreme Court. Chris, I don’t think Stephen Miller and Trump anticipated that. They went into this thinking that people would get so seduced by their propaganda that they’d broadly rally behind extra-legal tactics against immigrants. Your thoughts on that?
Newman: My sense is that Trump’s approval ratings have been declining steadily since he took office again. And unfortunately, they haven’t been falling as quickly and as far as they should be, probably because the way he has demagogued and handled immigration has served as a public opinion life preserver—first and foremost for his core supporters and then for some of, I think, the confused middle voters. So unfortunately, since he came down the escalator, his ticket to legitimacy has been by dehumanizing immigrants. It’s been working for a long time, and it does appear that the tide might be turning now.
Sargent: The new Washington Post poll also finds Trump sinking fast on immigration, but crucially, he’s taking a big hit among independents on the issue. Fifty-six percent of independents disapprove his handling of immigration; 62 percent oppose removing foreign students; 52 percent oppose renditions to El Salvador; only 21 percent want Abrego Garcia left in El Salvador. Those are really striking numbers. These are, again, independence. This is the middle of the electorate—majorities, solid majorities against Trump on all these things. What do you make of that? Did you expect that?
Newman: I’ve hoped for this. I’m always bewildered by the seductive allure of Trump’s dehumanizing of immigrants. But the fact is that pretty much everyone in America now knows who Kilmar Abrego Garcia is. Now, they don’t know him. They don’t know if he’s a good guy or a bad guy. They don’t know anything about his life, but they know that he’s entitled to the same due process as everyone else. And what’s so fascinating is that when you listen to like Stephen Miller talking to the carnival barkers on Fox News, they make it sound like they know the guy. They’re judging him, Oh, he’s this guy, the bad guy. People don’t know him. They want the guy to have a fair hearing.
Now, I think, to the incurious, they’re just going to listen. If Donald Trump says he’s a gang member or terrorist, they’ll just take his word for it. But I think for the vast majority of Americans, people are saying, Well, maybe he’s a terrorist, maybe he’s not. That’s why we have courts. And the only courts that we’ve had looking at this case so far have not found him guilty of anything. And we have a Department of Justice attorney admitting that he was removed essentially to a black site in El Salvador mistakenly. So like I said, I think this is causing people to reconsider basically trusting or going along with just the overall racist defamation of immigrants that Donald Trump has been engaging in for a decade.
Sargent: Chris, I want to bear down on the big point you’re making there, which is that it doesn’t matter if he’s MS-13 or not, he’s still entitled to due process. Now, to be clear, the evidence that he is MS-13, as Trump and Miller and all of them have said over and over, is extremely thin. As we reported at The New Republic, it’s based largely on a Gang Field Interview Sheet filed by a Maryland cop who was subsequently suspended and indicted for serious professional misconduct. And even so, the evidence is almost nonexistent that he provided. But again, it doesn’t matter if he’s guilty or not of being an MS-13—because he still gets due process. That’s how due process works. Chris, you went to El Salvador with Senator Chris Van Hollen. Can you tell us a little bit about that? What went through your mind as I believe you were encountered by some armed police with fairly heavy weaponry? Can you talk about that a little? And did it go through your mind that the U.S. might be headed in that same direction?
Newman: No question about it. First, I just, again, want to express praise and gratitude for Senator Van Hollen, for his courage, for entering into the unknown, for clearly understanding that this is a test case for due process for everyone, for taking the trip there without the normal accoutrements that travel like that come along with for senators. It was clear to him after the first day that roadblocks were being put up in his way.
We were just down there to try to do three things. Number one, to make sure that Kilmar was alive; number two, to make sure he was healthy; and then number three, to get access to his counsel and family so that he would be apprised of his rights. It was clear after day one that that wasn’t happening. And Senator Van Hollen decided to take matters into his own hands and drive to the infamous CECOT prison, which is—I don’t even know the whole acronym—the newest and potentially the biggest prison in the entire hemisphere. I had been there before, had offered to serve as a guide, had obviously had the same mission. So we were driving on the highway and encountered a roadblock with armed soldiers who momentarily detained us, even as they were allowing hundreds of other cars to drive through unimpeded. Senator Van Hollen and I engaged with the soldiers. We requested access. Little did we know at the time, by the way, that Kilmar wasn’t even at that prison anymore.
Later that day, when Senator Van Hollen and I parted ways, I went to the airport and then very quickly Kilmar was brought to his hotel. And then we had learned that Kilmar had been transferred, I think, approximately a week before to another prison in El Salvador. But yeah, incredibly grateful to Senator Van Hollen for asserting the initiative and for leading through action. Up until then, there had been lots of statements of support—I wouldn’t even say solidarity but statements from politicians saying, Hey, this is terrible. Trump shouldn’t do this. But Senator Van Hollen jumped into action, and he got results. At least as of that day, we knew that Kilmar was OK. We knew where he was. And I think we were one step closer to securing his eventual release and return into what should be a fair hearing for all the claims being made against him.
Sargent: Chris, it looks to me like Donald Trump is actually trying to import Bukele’s style of authoritarian leadership into the U.S. He met with Bukele in the White House and the two of them were very, very friendly with one another. And it was overwhelmingly clear that Donald Trump sitting next to Bukele really felt like this guy is someone that he should be emulating. And Trump went through this little routine. He abused the press in front of Bukele, which was a way of saying, Hey, look, you can knock around all your vermin opponents, so can we here. We’re stomping on them right on national television. This is an effort to import Bukele-style leadership into the U.S.
Newman: Greg, I’m so happy you asked this question. It’s something that I don’t think enough in the media are focusing on. Because frankly speaking, the fate of U.S. democracy and the fate of Salvadoran democracy right now, they’re intertwined in a common story. And yet I don’t think nearly enough people in the U.S. know about the history of El Salvador, nor do they know about the history of the involvement of the U.S. in El Salvador. I’ve been going there for 10 years, and I have witnessed with my own eyes El Salvador’s descent into fascism. And I think it’s worth noting that President Bukele, while autocratic, dictatorial—I think he refers to himself as the world’s coolest dictator—is quite popular in El Salvador because in the short term he has decreased street crime.
But the way he’s done it has been by implementing something that he refers to as a “state of exception” in El Salvador. I’ll refer to it as a state of deception. I think, for your listeners, it could be understood as martial law, where approximately 75,000 people have been arrested, imprisoned, put into these black sites where their family members don’t know where they are without any access to a trial, any counsel, any indicia of who their accusers are or what evidence is being used against them. Bukele’s popularity rose by politically demagoguing the exact same people that Donald Trump—quite literally, the exact same people, MS-13. So if you’re Donald Trump, you’re sitting here going like, Wow, I need to copy what that Salvadoran dictator is doing.
And unlike in El Salvador, we still have checks and balances in this country. And that’s, by the way, what Senator Van Hollen, Congressman Frost, and Congressman Garcia—that’s what we were all told in all of our meetings in civil society. They were saying, Hey, listen, you guys have got to stop this now because you still have checks and balances in your country. We don’t anymore. We’re part of the 20 percent and growing of people resisting Bukele. But again, that raises another point, which is that every single—and I don’t want to speak for the congressman and certainly not for Senator Van Hollen on some of the things that we learned in our travels—but everyone we spoke to in El Salvador said, Hey, listen, this situation with Kilmar is a tragedy. It’s terrible. We’re going to help you. But you have to understand that there are tens of thousands of people in El Salvador living in the exact same situation right now. And there’s been efforts to help in El Salvador to liberate Kilmar, but there have been requests from human rights lawyers in El Salvador for people from the U.S. who are learning about El Salvador to get involved in helping them as well.
Sargent: Well, let’s try to close this out on an optimistic note related to your point about how we may be in the process of preserving checks and balances and the rule of law in a way that unfortunately hasn’t happened elsewhere. What do you think’s going to happen? Do you think that Donald Trump is now quietly backing away from this position on Abrego Garcia? Is there a scenario where they get commanded a little more directly by the Supreme Court to bring him back? They do that, and then they undertake a process by which they either contest his withholding of removal status or try to remove him to a third country? By the way, we should point out that if that happens, if he is deported through lawful channels, it’s horrible—but it’s better than being left for life in the El Salvadoran gulag. Is there a scenario here where something like that happens?
Newman: Let me say a couple things. Number one, Kilmar’s wife and U.S. citizen children are in the U.S. and Kilmar needs to be home with them in the U.S. And I and his legal team, his union brothers and sisters, people from CASA Maryland are going to work until he comes home, period. And we’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen, however long it takes to make that happen.
When you ask me to speculate as to what Trump is thinking, that’s the last thing I’m going to do, Greg. I don’t want to try to put myself into that addled mind and figure out what he may be thinking. But I will say, on an optimistic note, that the good news is that neither Donald Trump nor Stephen Miller get to have the last word on this case. The Supreme Court of the U.S. gets to have the last word, whether they like it or not. So I’m not going to speculate about their political calculus or motivations or what they may or may not do. I am very confident that we will prevail at every stage in court, as we have up until this moment.
Sargent: Well, Chris Newman, I want to thank you so much for all the work you’re doing on this case and on the issue more broadly. It was really great to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Newman: It was truly a privilege to be on the show, Greg. Thank you very much.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.
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