On this episode of Newsworld, I wanted to discuss the recent ice raids and the protest in Los Angeles, what they mean and what I think needs to be done to move forward with immigration policy. So I'm really pleased to welcome my guests Joshua Travino. He is the Senior Fellow for the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the America First Policy Institute and a good friend. Joshua, Thank you, and welcome back to Newsworld.
Thank you, Speaker Gingrich, pleased to be here.
I'm curious in the wake of the recent unrest in California, many Americans were surprised to see Mexican flags waved as cars burned. Did you think this was merely symbolic or was it part of a deeper, coordinated political message, as is.
So often the case in human events. The answer is both, but it's more one than the other. A use of the Mexican flag that is symbolic in certain quarters, although I should note that as a Mexican American myself, you don't see it much in my native South Texas. It's not the case in California, and it's because you have
a different and differently politicized population there. The challenge for the United States at large comes in the reality that the existence of these flags and their deployment in civil unrest is not mere organic expressions of what I would
describe as legitimate cultural pride. There are specific political messages, There are specific attacks on American sovereignty coming from within the United States, and I think most consequentially for US, those attacks upon sovereignty are actively supported by the Mexican regime itself. And we can talk about the rhetoric that they've deployed as this unrest has gone on, but it's something that we need to notice and understand.
What do you think has the protest in Los Angeles and the way they spread quickly to places like Seattle, New York and Chicago.
The left has spent almost a generation now. I don't think it really came to the four until the protests against the Iraq War and the George W. Bush administration really alerted the mainstream American left to the reality that they had a mass mobilization potential that could slide into
violence pretty easily. And so you saw this develop over essentially the past twenty years, moving into the Occupy Wall Street movement and then really taking off in Barack Obama's second term with the unrested Ferguson and in other places, and I think culminating in what was to my mind genuinely an insurrection in summer twenty twenty in which the violent apparatus at the left was brought to bear against I wouldn't even say conservative governance, but simple American constitutional
governance at large. It is a movement that has really brought back unfortunately, political assassination to American civics has really made us in the street violence. And So to your question, what we're seeing, what we've seen in Los Angeles, what we saw in other cities is at a fundamental level, a reactivation of that network of violence, a resort by a movement that cannot win through persuasion, cannot win at the ballot box, to the fundamental pre political force, which
is force it self. And that's what we're seeing. In the case of LA You've got third party foreign state involvement as well.
Now what do you mean by that?
What I mean is that their underlying motives for the violence in Los Angeles, in particular, talking about seeing the deployment of Mexican flags and so on, and it's something that we have to understand because it's not mere humanitarian impulse. Right, it's not sorrow for the migrants, and it's not sorrow
for those being deported. What ice Wood President Trump is, i think correctly striking at and enacting these deportations, and specifically in the precipitating events in Los Angeles where they were going after apparently a human trafficking hub, is they're striking at a profit model that benefits both the cartels and their partners the Mexican regime. That's important to understand.
The business model for the cartel's visa v. Human trafficking, which characterizes one hundred percent of a legal migration these days and has for some time, can really be thought of as sort of an evil subscription service. They extort the trafficked people on their way to the border, but once the border is crossed, the expectation and it's enforced, is that these individuals will go to jobs in the
United States. Frequently they're already set up, and they will continue to fund the cartels and their partners in the Mexican state, in particular with remittances that come back. This is why, for example, you saw the President of Mexico essentially threaten protests and demonstrations in the United States if remittances were taxed. This is a big deal for them.
It's billions of dollars in revenue. It's no wonder that violence resulted when that model was attacked, But of course, for us, the answer is that we should keep attacking it.
From your perspective, do you think their effort is designed to try to make it so difficult for ICE to operate that the whole deportation system eventually just collapses.
Oh, without question, Without question, they want to raise the price tag of deportations. They want to raise the price tag of enforcement actions and make it not worthwhile, because, of course, the theory of action is that if every time you conduct a workplace raid, or you conduct a deportation, or it's a surprise apprehension that a mob's going to gather, then the operational calculus changes, and frankly, it will if taken to its logical extreme. It's an environment in which
two things happen. One is that deportations can't occur, but that's not the real goal. The real goal is that it becomes an environment in which law ordered governance can't occur, and that's the ultimate end state of the other side.
The Democratic leader in the House made a comment the other day that ICE agents should not wear a mask because eventually you're going to figure out who you are. And I thought, thinking back, for example, to the Italian tradition trying to deal with the mafia, in fact, you put their wives and their families and their children at risk if they become known. And I think people don't realize how elaborate and how intense the opposition can become.
I think you're completely right, and I guess two observations on that. One is the exactly to your point. This is something that characterizes law enforcement in places that are stricken with organized crime, Italy being one example, Mexico being another. Actually, there's a reason that when you see anti cartel operations, really anti cartel operations, the agents the military law enforcement are masked, and it's because people do go after families.
But there's something else that's even more portentous for us as Americans buried in that, and it's that this Democratic comment indicates a fracturing of what used to be sort of a criminal code. I don't want to ascribe honor
to thieves. But it is the reality that rewinding back to the nineteen forties is a very famous incident in which there was a member of one of the Five Families in New York and the New York City mafia wanted to kill Thomas and you probably know about this, so he proposed it, and in response, the other mafioso has killed him because that was a line that wasn't crossed. You didn't go after law enforcement, certainly not their families.
If that's changed in modern day America, then it's a very very dark passage for us, and it's one to which we should spare no effort to reverse.
To what extent are we seeing behaviors that have been relatively normal in Mexico as the cartels fight to take control of the country. To what extent have we seen them starting to come across the border and also begin to be part of the operating reality we have to deal with in the US.
That's a great question. Those of us who followed the cartels and the breakdown of Mexican civics and the Mexican state partnership with the cartels over many years have known for some time that a lot of the features of Mexican cartel violence have been present in the United States for a while. I was in Laredo, Texas, my father's hometown actually about a year ago, and we talked with some security personnel, and there's kidnap houses in Laredo where
people or kidnapp they're tied up. The only thing that doesn't happen in the United States is the murder. They're taken across the river and then killed these victims. But you go to a place like Phoenix and they do have operational sites where people are killed. The personnel, the methodologies, the expertise is all present in the United States. The only thing that we have yet to see is mass
attacks on law enforcement. I would say, prior to two weeks ago, mass attacks on law enforcement, actual seizure of territory. Those would be the two phenomenon in Mexico that we haven't seen in the US yet. But again, going back to la you can argue that both of these are increasingly in evidence. I think the seal is broken and we need to look for more of this. Unfortunately, as one goes on, because that expertise is not here in
the United States. Just to enjoy the weather, it's here for a purpose to what he said.
With us almost inevitably draw us into fighting the cartels in Mexico itself.
That's a great question. It depends on which section of the executive apparatus you talk to. There is I think it's fair to say, and most of it's occurring in public, some of it's behind the scenes. But there's a debate underway within the Trump administration as to how much to do. I'll be circumspect in naming who, but there is a cohort that genuinely believes that the path forward is as much cooperation as we can get with the regime, with
this cartel affiliated regime. I happen to disagree with that, but it's a real position, and it's one that is going to point toward and what they see is the superseding interest in trade between Mexico and the United States.
And there's another cohort from public reporting you can characterize as based more around the Defense and National Security apparatus that really does believe that American hard power needs to be brought to bear and that we need to be willing to do things that the Mexican state itself will not No surprise. That's where I'm aligned. I think that happens to be a correct analysis of the nature of
the Mexican state. But the debate is unfolding, and I'll tell you, Speaker Gingrich, that we're going to see who wins. The debate is in the conversations on reauthorizing USMCA, which are opening this fall and need to be completed by July first, twenty twenty six. If you see US asking for security concessions from the Mexican's real ones, then you'll know that the security side one. But if you see it just tracked on the trade and commerce lines, you'll know that something else has happened.
I mean, it's reported that Stephen Miller issued it directed from the White House, that I should make a minimum of three thousand arrests a day. Is that kind of mathematically oriented model a sustainable approach to deportation.
It's impossible to evaluate on my end because I don't know the rationale behind it, and I also don't know the timeframe behind what's been reported on the three thousand a day. How I interpret the number which I can't read Stephen Miller's mind, And I think this is probably correct given his public record, I interpret the number is really sort of along the lines of build the wall, which is not going to be a physical wall in every single spot on the border, but it's demand for
meaningful action, and I think that's right. So if the numbers three thousand, if it's five thousand, if it's two thousands, what he's asking for is more, and he's asking for a meaningful dent in the illegal population, which again I'm of the school that it's in the tens of millions and not in the single digit millions, and so the
need for haste is evident. And I think that accentuates if you think I'm not saying Stephen Miller thinks this, because he probably doesn't, But if you think that the midterms next year will go poorly for the Republicans, when.
You think about deportation, in your mind, what scale is sustainable and necessary.
Part of this is a prudential question as to what the apparatus at hand is. I don't think there's much more important in American governance right now than mass deportation. That's not a position I would have held a decade ago in full candor on the South Tech and we're accustomed to cross border movement. But as conservatives, we follow prudence in reality, and one of the realities is that the nature of crossing has changed. It's trafficking, it's cartels,
it's got state backing. So rooting that out is almost existentially important at this point. I'll say this too. In the past six to eight weeks, we have seen not one but two incredible examples of strategic blows landed at both the Russians and then the Iranians by what all describe archly is alien populations within. And that's not a complaint about American diversity. I'm Mexican American. My sons are Chinese, so we're beneficiaries this catholicity of American identity that we have.
But we also have a duty to secure ourselves and to secure our homeland and our way of life. And an illegal population in the tens of millions is by its nature a threat, because it takes a sliver of one percent of that population to be antagonistic toward us to constitute a true strategic threat to the United States.
Numbers seventeen million. How would you go about finding and deporting seventeen million people?
Oh gosh, I can give guidelines to it, which I'm sure has already been thought of by mister Miller and the folks at DHS. You know that they cluster in particular sectors. You know that they cluster in particular communities. You know that they cluster in particular geographies. This is where in the United States it gets a bit complicated, because, of course we have nothing like a national ID card.
The closest we have to it is kind of an ad mixture of Social Security numbers and driver's licenses, neither of which are totally secure. But you've got to have an apparatus that's capable of discerning and adjudicating at that scale. It's not clear to me that we have everything that we need. I think our friends at DHS would agree that they could do with more resources, So we ought to properly resource it to that end.
Don't you all only need some kind of administrative procedure that somehow identifies and checks each person.
Probably, yeah, you probably do. And there's attempts at that HE verify being one, normal employment verification, whether it's a ten ninety nine or a W two being another, and so that just needs to be enforced. Probably too, there needs to be I'll venture into a little bit of an area of ignorance for myself which will make me like every other public commentator on all topics, which is that there probably needs to be more employer's side enforcement as well.
In your mind, is that done with the active cooperation of the employers or is it done by operating raids.
It's got to be both. You can't assume a single prong approach for this kind of thing. I guess, no, it's more than a guess. I think the truth is that most American employers will want to cooperate. There will be a subset who don't. Those are the ones that you maintain the capacity and practice of raids.
For One of the groups have been called dreamers, and they've been identified several different times by Obama and by Trump. Do you carve them out or just deport them?
The category of dreamers, it's unfortunate because it's such a tough one from a perceptual stand point, But we have
to understand why these categories exist. The category of the dreamer was specifically created to make from a communicative perspective, a cohort of what i'll put in quotes acceptable illegal aliens in the United States, the conservatives and also rule of law oriented liberals and Democrats, of whom there are many would find it politically impossible to deport, and then having established that precedent, then you could move outward because then,
of course the point is conceded that you can't deport everybody. It's tough, but you have to have the law of the law, not in a mindless fashion, but in a fashion that displays the prudential wisdom of understanding why it is that the other side created this category to start with.
So no, I wouldn't create a carp for dreamers. I would establish the same standard for each Here's the thing, though, that you know, for those wanting a prudential individual level applications of the law and justice and individual cases, you can actually do that once you've cleared out the tens of millions who've come in. You can actually do that
once you've solved the major problem. Tactical solutions become possible only when the strategic challenge has been met, And we still have to meet the strategic challenge.
How many million do you think you have to be deported to have met the strategic challenge?
That depends upon your theory of how many are here, which nobody really knows. I am of the school of thought that it's between twenty and thirty million, which is a titanic number. I've heard Obviously, either are those who go much lower than that the high end that I've heard. I don't adhere to this, but I have heard of incredible peoples that it's in the thirty to fifty million range. I find that strange mycadriulity, but it could be the case.
You have to deport enough. We can't get into macnamara solutions. There's not a body count of the day that's going to be adequate. We have to look to change behaviors. We should deport enough to break the business model that facilitated the deportations period full stop. That could be five million, that could be two guys. We don't know, and it's the unknowability that militates toward us having to apply all
efforts to get to it. I think we'll know when we see, and until then we keep it going full speed.
One of the side problems here is the White House on February first, issued a fact she that says, quote, the Mexican drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico, and the Mexican President, Claudia Scheinbaum, strongly opposed designating the cartels as foreign terrorists. Has she largely been not helpful?
Oh, that depends on who you ask. The State Department will tell you that she's been the most helpful person of all time.
Of course, that could be a very limited description.
Indeed, it could. Yeah, yeah, that's right, that's right. No, but unfortunately they really are cooperating and selling her and her regime as a genuine partner, which they're not. First of all, the Mexican state is in partnership with its cartels. There is a Mexican state cartel alliance. It has existed
for years. And what changed in twenty eighteen the arrival of the current Mexican regime under the Morena Party, is that it rose from becoming sort of an opportunistic partnership to one that really was essential to the advancement of this leftist Venezuela's style ideology that Morena is using to transform Mexican society. So it is an existential partnership for them. They need it and they require it for the maintenance of their rule. What President Claudia Scheinbaum in Mexico has
done very smartly, I think. I mean, she's a very intelligent and cunning person, not like her predecessor at all, who was much more of a blunt instrument. She understands that so long as she can provide what I'll call the tactical window dressing to the Americans, sending over individual narcos, sending over criminals, sending over cartel bosses, that most of our governing apparatus is going to interpret that as sufficient cooperation.
It's not. And this is something that we've said at the America First Policy Institute and also at the Texas Public Policy Foundation for some time now, which is that real change comes not when the handover cartel members, but
when the handover politicians. When you see political actors, officeholders, governors, cabinet secretaries, senators, congressmen, and even the former president of Mexico himself under indictment and handed over to the Americans, then we'll know that they're serious about breaking the cartel alliance. But we haven't seen that yet, and I don't think we're going to and until that happens to a meaningful
degree from within their own party. It is a signal to us that they are going to maintain that partnership with their cartels.
And in March twenty twenty five, Fox News up ed you wrote that the Mexican state quote establishes Marina Party, sells throughout the United States, and activates someone desired. What does that mean?
We have to understand that the Mexicans, even prior to Morena's arrival at national power, has always regarded its nationals abroad and it's illegal migrants abroad as its own. Now, in a sense, that's not unusual. I mean, we regard Americans abroad as our own as well. But what's different about the Mexican regime's attitude toward Mexicans in the United States is that they're essentially active participants in the corpus
of Mexican civics. So, for example, if you are a Mexican national in the US, whether you're here illegally or not is irrelevant to them. In fact, they think it's virtuous if you're here illegally in some way. Some of the ideologues will say that. But if you're a Mexican resident in say California or Texas, or Nebraska or Iowa. You actually have a congressman representing you in the Mexican Congress. You actually have a liputado who you can vote for
the Mexican Consulate. You actually have allocated votes for Mexicans abroad in the presidential races. It's very different than what you see in the United States. I mean, it's unthinkable that Americans in France would have electoral votes for themselves, so but the Mexicans do that. And it's because this this ideological belief that wherever the Mexican population is, there
too is Mexico. And that goes double for essentially the southwestern quadrant of the United States, everything from California all the way over to Texas, which in official Mexican discourse you see this over and over and over, is still regarded as fundamentally Mexican land. I'm personally offended by this. As a descendant of them. Thank God for Zachary Taylor's army. It's the best thing that happened to my lineage. That's
something that they operationalize. And so to your question about the Morena party, cells Morena has followed this to the logical degree, and they do have party sales in the United States, and these party cells, we've seen them activate
from time to time. I have personally seen Morena posters, not even election related, but just posters affirming loyalty to the leader on their s manuel in Laredo, Texas, an American town, when the New York Times reported accurately on the Mexican president's ties to the sin Lower cartels and the fact that he's likely been taking money from them since two thousand and six, the Morena party sell in New York City organized a quote unquote spontaneous protest to
pick at the New York Times. Same thing when they wanted to welcome undrestmen will to Washington, d C. When he traveled there. I have had conversations in Mexico itself with senior Mexican officials, advisors to the current president, who have told me directly. I was astonished to hear this said that if need be, they will activate the Mexicans in the United States to defend their country because, in
their words, there's thirty million of them. Look, I'm one of them, and I'm sure not going to defend the
Mexican regime. But this is sort of a very dangerous hubris that they have, and I think it is absolutely unthinkable that that phenomenon is not at play somehow in Los Angeles, given the rhetoric, and given the interest at play emanating from Mexico City, and if we had certainly local and state law enforcement, which you don't in California, with any responsibility, this would already be investigated.
From your perspective, are we almost inevitably going to have some kind of collision with the Mexican government.
It's going to come sooner or later. And I say that with tremendous regret as somebody who is fundamentally from Mexico. The Mexican regime people don't think that of me, but I actually am. I want Mexico to prosper and flourish and be the best place it can possibly be. But right now we have a choice as Americans. We have a choice from a strategic perspective. We can accept the confrontation now and demand real cooperation and real partnership that
frankly they owe us. There's no other way to put it, or we can wait a decade until Mexico is fully Venezuela ezed and has Venezuelan Cuban Russian Chinese personnel swarming over it, which is a process that's already begun. Then we can deal at it from that position, which is going to be far more fraught and dangerous than before. I'd rather do it now, and I'd rather do it well. It can still be handled in the realm of diplomacy, because the alternative is much worse.
As you look at this, would you say that Trump has turned the corner on this.
Issue on Mexico itself? Yes, he's done something very important. What President Trump has done is introduced reality into it. The fact that there was a day one executive order designating the cartels as foreign terror organizations, which, as you noted before, Mission Speaker, the Mexican President opposed, and the reason she opposed it is because it can sweep up
the political partners of the cartels as well. The fact that he did that, the fact that he explicitly reoriented the national security apparatus the defense of the southern border, the fact that he talked about an Article one, section ten constitutional invasion in its proper sense. All of that
is transformative. And so you know, one of the things that I said to a variety of colleagues the day after inauguration day was that God forbid, if his presidency had ended after twenty four hours, he still would have done more good to this relationship than any president of the preceding fifty sixty years. And I still think that's true. As in all things, you know, with governments setting the predicates,
only part of the battle. Execution is the next and what remains is to execute according to the precedence he set. I think the jury is still out on that, and that's not because of the president. It's because of the biocracy, which is the eternal foe of the American interest, and we've got to make sure that that bureaucracy carries out the president's wishes.
In this respect, I was frankly startled by the speed with which they closed down the border and the decisiveness. Do you think that's sustainable?
We have to understand that there's two reasons the border is closed down. One is superior enforcement on the American side, which the President deserves full credit for, as does the DHS apparatus for at large, as does the DoD And that is sustainable. I mean, that's a permanent mission for American governance. But there's another reason that the border was shut down, and I think that's one that gets missed is that the Mexicans chose to shut it down. The
Mexican state cartel partnership chose to pause trafficking. And I want to emphasize pause because it is not permanently solved. The Mexicans are waiting for two things. They're waiting for USMCA reauthorization, which, as I mentioned, is due no later than July first, twenty twenty six. They need that to sustain their economy. And then the second thing that they're waiting for is the midterm elections in twenty twenty six.
If USMCA reauthorization is implemented without security concessions, and if the Democrats take control of the Congress after the midterms in twenty twenty six, then those long attention spans can come back in twenty twenty seven. I believe, and we've said this to many people, that twenty twenty seven will see a resumption of human trafficking from the Mexican side in full. So we're not out of the woods yet. We're at a pause right now. They're trying to wait.
Us out, and in Mexico itself are the cartels gaining or losing ground vis a vis the Mexican State.
I guess it depends on the metric that one's interested in. There are some cartels that are on the wayne. There's been a civil war in the Sala cartel for the past several months. I think in sinal Low in particular, which has been an epicenter. There's a temporary increase in
all described as army control, not state control. But we have to understand that the army itself is a trafficking organization in Mexico, and so to say that there's a dichotomy between state control and cartel controls is to subscribe to a false premise about the situation. I think what I would say is that the state is exerting more control over its cartel partners and more control over the cartels that are not in partnership with it than it
has previously. But we've seen this cycle before this too. We're not out of the woods.
I want to thank you for joining me. This is clearly going to be an evolving issue, and I hope that you will come back again as it evolves. Our listeners can follow the work you're doing at America First Policy Institute. By visiting your website at America First Policy dot com, which we will have on our show page. And I really appreciate you spending time with us.
It's always a pleasure. Thank you, sir.
Thank you to my guest Joshua Travino. You can learn more about America First Policy Institute on our show page at newsworld dot com. Newsworld is produced by Game of three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team
at Ginglishtree sixty. If you've been enjoying Newtsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of newts World concern up for my three freeweekly columns at ginglistre sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich.
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