Episode description

Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis.