00:00Well, let's talk now to Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the U.S. think tank, the Migration Policy Institute.
00:07Welcome, good to see you. And the White House describing these protests as an insurrection, is it?
00:16Well, I think the White House is trying to begin laying the groundwork for invoking the Insurrection Act.
00:22I think that's part of what the standoff is about. Insurrection Act requires either an invasion or a rebellion within the country.
00:33So they're trying to, I think, create the feeling that there's a rebellion going on off a scale that warrants Insurrection Act's invocation.
00:42This is this is going to likely happen.
00:46I think it's happened sooner than later, once the Trump administration decided to notch up their ambition of arresting 3,000 people a day.
00:57That had to be put on a war footing. And I think that's sort of we are seeing a display here.
01:03The administration was disappointed that they couldn't get the numbers and they're doing everything now to get the numbers.
01:10Is this response heavy handed or the rightful enforcement of the law?
01:17Well, I think it's the problem with this is that even if it's lawful, it's overreaching.
01:23And because the numbers that you get with a mass high profile rate like this is very small, like with all the operations that took place on Friday and Saturday,
01:34with all the world media attention that has gone with the political standoff between the governor and the and the Trump administration, they arrested about 150 people.
01:44So when you look at the yield compared to the resources that are put to display and the political and the social costs, it seems like a low yield to me.
01:55We're all brought up to think of America, the United States is a country of immigrants.
02:01And how does this particular chapter fit into that history?
02:06Well, we we knew that the Trump to administration was not going to be pretty with respect to showing ourselves as a nation of immigrants.
02:16He believes that he won the reelection. He believes he won the first election on the basis of the immigration as a calling card.
02:24And he is keeping his word is obviously is not a good optics, either for our own domestic scene and certainly not on the international scene.
02:34But it should not be a surprise. Will this crackdown work?
02:40I think it will probably work in notching up the numbers.
02:45I think we have seen that already in the last month or so.
02:49But arrests do not equate deportations, which is mass deportation is finally his ambition,
02:55because to move from arrest to deportation, there is this big obstacle called due process.
03:01People who are arrested have to be given hearings. They have to be given hearings before immigration judges.
03:06That court system is backlogged. We are running out of detention facility.
03:12So there's a lot between the cup and the lip from arrest to deportation.
03:17So I think that's one of their problems.
03:20Thank you very much indeed for coming on the program.
03:22Muzafo Chishti, the senior fellow at the U.S. think tank, the Migration Policy Institute.
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