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Service along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy.
Coming up on Washington Journal this morning, your calls and comments live.
Then, all this week, watch Washington Journal's special holiday authors week series, featuring live segments each morning with a new writer.
Coming up this morning, journalist and columnist Jonathan Alter discusses his book, American Reckoning: Inside Trump's Trial and My Own.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal is next.
Join the conversation.
This is the Washington Journal for December the 26th.
On numerous occasions, President-elect Trump has promised to begin a mass deportation effort on his first day of his new term.
His top advisor on border issues, Tom Holman, said the effort would focus on deporting criminals and national security threats.
There are concerns by some on the effort's impact upon other U.S. migrants.
Also, about how the effort could upset the U.S. economy.
To start the program today, how do you feel about these promised mass deportation efforts by the incoming Trump administration?
If you support them, call and tell us why at 202-748-8000.
If you oppose them, call us at 202-748-8001.
For immigrants in the United States, if you want to give your perspective, 202-748-8002 is how you do that.
If you want to text us your thoughts this morning, you could do that at 202-748-8003.
You can always post on Facebook at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ.
It was in late November that Scripps News, along with Ipsos, took a poll talking about and asking people about their thoughts on mass immigration.
Here's the headline: support for those efforts drops when Americans consider potential consequences.
When asked generally about the idea of support for mass deportation for undocumented immigrants, those who participated in the poll saying they supported that effort, 52% said they support that effort, 42% opposing that effort.
Those numbers change slightly when certain factors are introduced that were introduced in the poll.
For example, support for those mass deportations, if it ends up in fewer paying into Social Security and Medicare, that support drops to 48%.
It drops to 47% if it leads to labor market shortages.
It drops to 43% if it results in prices to spike.
And support for mass deportations, if families are separated in the process of doing so, that support only drops to 38%.
Again, that's from the Scripps News and Ipsos poll that was taken in November.
When it comes to those deportations and the technicalities of what faces the incoming Trump administration, the Associated Press highlights this in a recent story of theirs, which you can find online, saying about 1.4 million people have final orders of removal, while about 660,000 under immigration supervision either have been convicted of crimes or are facing charges.
But only 6,000 officers within Immigration and Customs Enforcement are tasked with monitoring non-citizens in the country and finding and removing those not eligible to stay.
Those staffing numbers largely remain static as the caseload has roughly quadrupled over the past decade to 7.6 million.
About 10% of that workforce was pulled from their regular duties last year to go to the U.S.-Mexico border at times when immigration spiked.
Talking to the chief of staff of immigrations and customs enforcement in the Biden administration, Jared Hauser, saying the number of officers needed to pursue those deemed a public safety threat are at direct odds with the goal of deporting people in large numbers.
Quote, you're not going to be able to do these things without the resources you have, with the deportations officers you have.
Just the arithmetic, the time-intensive nature of those sort of arrests will overwhelm any ability to get to those large-scale numbers.
So, those are some of the technicalities that face the incoming Trump administration.
When it comes to this idea of mass deportation, if this is something you support or oppose, you can call and let us know.
Again, if you support those efforts, 202-748-8000, the number to call.
If you oppose those efforts, 202-748-8001.
And for immigrants in the United States, you can make your thoughts known too at 202-748-8002.
Social media available to you as well.
And texting us, you can text us those thoughts at 202-748-8003.
His most recent statements on the idea of mass deportation took place over last weekend at an event sponsored by Turning Point USA or Turning Point Act Gen. It was a conference they held.
And it was there where the president-elect talked about these efforts on immigration policy and mass deportation.
Here's some of those recent comments.
But I've informed Mexico that it just cannot continue.
We're not going to let it continue.
The United States has lost 300,000 people a year.
Think of that.
I don't know.
I mean, how many people, everybody you meet said, I lost my daughter.
I lost my son to drugs to fentanyl, mostly to fentanyl, but to drugs.
Families are being destroyed, and we're going to stop it.
We're not going to let that happen.
And we're also going to be doing something that's, I think, going to help a lot.
We're going to do very big advertising campaigns, just like a campaign for running for president.
We spend a lot of money, but it'll be a very small amount of money relatively.
We're going to advertise how bad drugs are for you, how bad they are.
They ruin your look.
They ruin your face.
They ruin your skin and ruin your teeth.
If you want to have horrible teeth, take a lot of fentanyl.
If you want to have skin that looks so terrible, take fentanyl.
We're going to do, we're going to show what these drugs are doing to you.
Nobody's done that before, and we're going to do it.
So those are some of the recent comments that the president-elect has made when it comes to mass deportation.
You can find others at our website at c-span.org asking you about your to the level that you support or oppose these efforts by the incoming administration.
We'll start in Port Crane, New York, support line.
This is Rob.
Rob, good morning.
Tell us why.
Good morning, Pedro.
Well, you don't have to look very far to see the guy that set the woman on fire in the subway this week.
He was already kicked out of the country, came back and lit this woman on fire, then watched her burn.
I mean, this has happened all over the country.
They're killing, raping people.
This is ridiculous.
And back before the pandemic started, I remember hearing the press say, well, there's 20 to 30 million illegals here now.
And what is it now?
It must be close to 40 or 50 million.
And these people aren't vetted.
Our government under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris has really ruined this country.
And it's going to take decades to get these people the hell out of here.
Nicole references that instance of New York.
It was the ABC affiliate out of New York City with this on their website Monday.
That 33-year-old man charged with murder in the death of the woman that he set afire on a subway train and the subhead, according to that spokesperson for immigration and customs enforcement.
The man who committed that was an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala.
That's from the ABC.
Another person on our support line, this is in Oklahoma.
We will hear from Guy on this idea of a mass deportation.
And if you support or oppose it, Guy, hello.
Go ahead.
Good morning, Pedro.
I just had second lookups.
I'm a little groggy still.
But yeah, I'm in support of getting rid of the criminals.
I mean, we've got to get rid of the criminals.
50,000 rapists, 12,000 murderers.
They've already committed 14,000 murders from these illegals being here in the last four years that the media doesn't talk about.
You hear about Lake and Riley and certain people.
And then 380,000 children.
The number has just been updated.
380,000 children missing.
I mean, my God, you know, 110,000 people last year died from the Sentinel.
We've got to secure the border, put the military, the National Guard, whatever it takes, and start with these hardcore criminals, gang members, and the people committing the crimes.
You know, if they're here, dreamers, let them stay.
If they're working, if they're good, if they want to be good citizens, let them stay.
But we've got to get rid of these hardcore people if the numbers are as high as you say.
What gives you confidence that the Trump administration is going to be able to do all that deportation?
Well, at least they're going to try.
They're going to try and do everything they can.
It's going to take more support, more money, obviously.
But they're going to do everything that they can.
And I believe that.
Okay.
That's Guy Bear in Oklahoma.
Again, you can call and support these efforts.
You can oppose these efforts.
And then, immigrants, if you want to give your thoughts too, special lines there for you.
202748-8002 is that line.
On our opposed line, that's 202748-8001.
That's where Vincent is there in Maryland on the opposed line.
Vincent, hello, you're next up.
Go ahead.
Yes, hello, Pedro and C-STAN audience.
Pedro, you, Mimi, Greta, John, et cetera, Peter, and that's NBC, CDS, NSNBC, et cetera.
Will you folks kindly just say the truth?
They are illegal.
They are not undocumented.
They are ill legal.
Why don't you news me to give it to us straight?
Stop trying to use euphemisms to sugarcoat a very horrible situation.
Well, if that's the way you characterize it, then why do you oppose their deportation or at least the mass deportation effort?
That has nothing to do with it.
You're not going to fool me with a trick question.
I stated in my statement.
That's not a quick question.
You called it on our opposed line.
I assume that you want to talk about why you oppose it.
Tell me why.
Ah, he's gone.
Let's hear from Rod.
Rod on our support line in Ohio.
Go ahead.
Good morning.
Good morning, Pedro.
Morning.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Yeah, I support deportation in any form, whether it be illegal immigrants or people here that are on a legal visa that's expired or get in some trouble where it should be rescinded.
But anyway, I'm going to keep it kind of short and sweet.
With the immigration problem, it's integrated into our society, our culture, and it's like become part of our DNA.
It's like with COVID, it came along, but eventually it'll get assimilated into the general population and then something else will come along.
Well, let's bring it back to immigration.
And why do you support deportation on a mass level?
Because you can get the biggest chunk of it.
I'm trying to get my thoughts collected here on this, but it's like cancer.
You can go out and cut out a big chunk of cancer, but a lot of it will remain.
So you have to start with the obvious.
Everybody streaming over the border, unchecked, people coming in.
You have to deal with that first.
And then you can work backwards, hopefully, and start collecting all of it.
Because for every illegal immigrant that comes across unchecked, there are probably 10 people that came across legally at one time that were lost track of or something like that to where they should have been sent back to their home country.
And, you know, it's like just going back to World War II.
You had so many spies coming over.
I mean, right now, I mean, it's crazy.
I mean, as bad as it was years ago with spies infiltrating, I mean, right now, you have people just coming over willy-nilly.
Okay.
So, I mean, I don't know how, I mean, it's really amazing that we're in as good a shape as we are right now.
Okay.
Broad there in Ohio on our support line.
Some of you posted when we posted this on the Facebook page not too long ago before the show started some of those comments.
This is from Susan Eastman saying, when it comes to dealing with the issue of those already in the United States, give them all work visas, adding that we need immigrants for our economy to function.
When it comes to the efforts, this is Timothy Crumb saying he totally supports those mass deportation efforts.
We can't afford the cost of a whole class of lawbreakers.
David Jenkins this morning saying oppose.
Besides, I've yet to hear any realistic plan to actually make it happen.
Just more big talk from a little man baby, he adds.
And then Darlene Knight saying, when it comes to these efforts, she supports them.
I'm not against immigration, but this invasion wasn't immigration or about refugees.
Again, that Facebook posting, facebook.com/slash C-SPAN, if you want to put those thoughts there, you can call us on the lines too.
I just picked one that best represents you on our opposed line from Maryland.
This is Elizabeth.
Hello.
Yes, I oppose the mass deportation of immigrants.
Immigrants coming into this country just want to work, and our economy depends.
The ranchers and the farmers of this country and the service industry in this country, I'm sure, is against the deportation of migrants.
They depend on migrants to fill all those jobs in the hotels, the restaurants.
Elizabeth, keep going, please.
The fast food places, the farms, the laborers on the farms in California, Florida, all the way across the country.
Immigrants are coming in this country just to work.
What's wrong with that?
Our country is based on immigration.
People immigrated from Europe and all over the world to build this country.
And what's wrong with having people from all over the world come to this country to work?
That's all they want to do is work.
And the mass deportation would break up families.
Children would be left here without a parent.
Kids in school would be left without a parent.
It would just be terrible.
I oppose it 100%.
That's all I want to say.
Thank you very much.
Elizabeth Fair in Maryland giving her thoughts.
The Associated Press adding, when it comes to this effort that will be made by the administration, how local law enforcement factors into that.
Their story highlights the fact that some cities and states work with the immigrations and customs enforcements to turn over people in custody who aren't U.S. citizens, but many left-leaning states and cities have so-called sanctuary policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
In New York City, for example, ICE used to have an office at the jail to easily take custody of non-citizens.
In 2014, then Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation kicking out ICE and restricting police cooperation.
His successor, Eric Adams, has shown willingness to revisit some of these policies.
He recently met with Tom Holman and told reporters they agreed on pursuing people who commit violent crimes.
It goes on from there.
Just some of these efforts.
By the way, if you're at Newsweek publishing a map on their site, if I can get it to come up, it comes up those who support this idea of mass immigration or at least mass deportation that's planned by the Trump administration.
The map is here.
Those in the green who are that are shaded green saying yes, they generally, those states going along with ideas or at least concepts of mass deportation, those in the no states that orange, reddish color, blue states are limited.
It's unclear.
If you tap the map and go state by state, it gives you the state if it supports deportations and the estimated undocumented population as of 2022.
Newsweek.com has that map.
If you want to take a look through that, you can call us about to the level you support or oppose this idea of mass deportation.
Let's hear from Cody in Kentucky on our support line.
Hi, Cody.
Good morning.
Cody in Kentucky.
Hello.
Let's go to Ben.
Ben's in Virginia on our opposed line.
Good morning.
Good morning.
You can hear me?
I can hear you.
Go ahead.
Okay.
I oppose this because I don't think it's possible to do it cost-wise, staffing-wise.
And people got to be educated.
There is a process for deportation already.
And the reason why it's not possible to do mass deportations is because, one, you need enough staffing to deport one person.
You need to follow law enforcement to escort that person out of the country to their country of origin.
And people are just thinking about, oh, you just drop them at the border of Mexico.
No, you have folks that are here from countries as far as China, as far as Iran, as far as Brazil.
You're going to need two to three law enforcement officials, air marshals to escort them out of the country.
It's very costly.
Number two, you have to process those criminals or you have to process those individuals, right?
They have to go through immigration judges.
Some of them have to go through the federal judge, the federal or state judge.
If they have any offenses, any crimes they committed, they have to go through that process, then go to immigration judges.
It's not possible to do it legally.
The easiest way and a foreseeable way is to impose laws that punish those who employ those individuals, right?
You need a seven-year background investigation to work for the federal government.
You can impose the same types of law to private sectors, right?
You can impose those laws and put the burden on them and say, look, if we find this type of individual in your entity, you'll be fined $1 million plus prison time or prison time of 10 years.
You know, making a harsh penalty.
That's Ben there in Virginia.
Ben mentioning those costs.
Doc Holliday or Doc Brian Holiday from Facebook as part of his opposition saying it's not a real plan.
It'll cost billions in the effort and to the economy.
When it comes to cost efforts, it was the New York Post two days ago in an interview with Tom Holman, who's been tapped by the Trump administration, the incoming administration to deal with border issues as far as a price tag to start these mass deportations.
Coming out of that interview, $86 billion as a starting price for that effort.
Again, let's hear from Steve, or we'll hear from Steve, Massachusetts on our support line for these efforts.
Steve, you're next up.
Hi.
Hey, good morning.
Hey, I just want to just say that, first off, your list that you have of callers.
I would imagine a lot of illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, are really upset that they're grouped in with illegal immigrants to call you because I think there's a lot of people that are immigrants that are not happy with what's going on in our country.
And what's happening is we're completely changing our culture.
And 20 million people coming into this country, we can't sustain it.
And like Biden changed the laws and made that Haiti, the 20,000 that went to Springfield were legal immigrants.
But how would anyone like that to happen to their town and have their culture completely changed by this amount of people coming from the government?
I thought we were the land of the people telling us what to do.
I just want to say that, you know, if it was in your town or in my town, I wouldn't be very happy.
Okay.
Steve, again, we've set aside a line for immigrants: 2027-48-8002.
Bad number.
Let's hear from Mara in New York.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you?
Fine, go ahead.
Well, I came here from another country, and we've been here for 40-some years, and we were sponsored.
And it took my family over 10 years to become citizens.
My father had to go to night classes every week, twice a week.
We had babysitters, and they had to learn how to speak English.
They had to learn history.
And I think people should do it the right way.
My family had to come here and do it the right way.
And I just think.
What was their country of origin?
Italy.
Italy.
My father came here for work.
He didn't have any work in Italy, and he came here for a better life.
But he did it the right way.
So when I see what's happening, it makes me sick.
Indeed, as far as the deportation efforts that the Trump administration has, early the incoming Trump administration has talked about, to what degree do you support those efforts?
I think you have to be here legally.
I think they've all broken laws.
And unfortunately, I don't like what's happening to these children.
They don't know where they are.
And that's very sad, but they came here illegally.
My family had to do it the right way.
And it took us over 10 years to become a citizen.
And my dad had to, I mean, he had to do everything the right way.
I think that's.
Thank you for the perspective.
Let's go to Richard on our opposed line.
Hi there.
Good morning.
Thank you for having me on your show.
I oppose on mass deportation.
One, because I think that the lines, the lines stand potential to get jaded, and we don't know how far that's going to go.
Other words, you know, you have people here from Afghanistan, from Ukraine.
Are these laws going to spill over and apply to them as well?
I think we have to take a critical look at what Donald Trump is proposing, and we have to be very careful because, like I said, they can use this type of power.
The next thing you know, they may be rounding up American citizens under something like this.
So, I just think we need to take a more critical look at this and be more careful about how we go about trying to get these people out of our country.
May I ask, why would you think it would start with those not supposed to be here, but why would you think that would extend ultimately to American citizens, like you just said?
Well, because this country has a history of using things such as mass deportations, and then you will see it will start to ripple out and go out and start to affect American citizens or whomever they may wish to do it, you know?
That's Richard there in New York on our opposed line.
One of the people asked about deportation efforts and immigration efforts as the current Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.
An interview that he took on CBS earlier this week talked about the Biden administration's efforts on dealing with illegal immigration.
Here's a part of that interview.
In December of last year, border crossings were at record highs.
Now they've dropped to the lowest level of the Biden administration.
How much of that drop-off is because Mexico is now stopping migrants from even getting to that southern border of the United States?
That is critically one element of it.
It is not the only element of it.
The president took executive action in June of this year.
That has been a key driver of the low number of encounters at our border.
We are now delivering to the incoming administration a southern border at which the number of individuals encountered is well below the level experienced in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.
But the immigration surge into the U.S. since 2021 has been the largest in American history.
That is incredible.
It is.
Margaret, it is one element of the greatest displacement of people in the world since World War II.
This is a phenomenon that has not been unique to the southern border of the United States.
It is something that has gripped the entire hemisphere and the world.
I think you have said to me, one of the very first things the Biden administration did was ask Congress to act in the earliest days.
And then, fast forward, you had this bipartisan near-miss on a border bill.
All that time passed.
Why wait until five months before the U.S. election to put in place those asylum restrictions that did cut off the flow?
Margaret, remember that ended a crisis.
Margaret, remember where we were when the president took office?
We were in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The prior administration had imposed Title 42, which is a public health authority, and enabled us to expel individuals, to continue to expel individuals at the border as the prior administration had done.
There was tremendous pressure to maintain the workings of Title 42, which we did.
That held until May of 2023.
We then turned to Congress and we asked for supplemental funding that was desperately needed to make our administration of a broken immigration system work much better.
We were denied.
We went back to Congress a second time and requested supplemental funding.
Denied.
We then turned to the bipartisan negotiations, which proved successful, which were then killed.
The result of it, a really terrific solution, was killed by irresponsible politics.
Again, that full interview available at the CBS News website.
When it comes to plans for mass deportation by the Trump administration, the incoming administration, do you support or oppose those plans?
If you support them, call us and tell us why at 202748-8000.
If you oppose them, 202748-8001.
For immigrants this morning, if you want to give your perspective, 202748-8002 is how you can call that number and let us know in the time that we have.
When it comes to taking a look at enforcement efforts, that was the Department of Homeland Security.
They released a report that you can find online taking a look at their deportation efforts for fiscal year 2024.
And they'll show you as far as the administration, or at least what the Biden administration has done, how that effort has gone.
271,000 plus non-citizens removed to 192 different countries.
88,000 plus almost 89,000 had charges or convictions of criminal activity.
3,700 known suspected or known gang members, 237 known or suspected terrorists, eight human rights violators.
That's from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Let's hear from Martinez in Oklahoma, a supporter of this effort.
Go ahead, please.
Sir, sir, I'm with it to reporting legal immigrants because a couple of years ago, since I almost got killed by legal immigrants, my dad would drive me to work.
And in the legal immigrant store truck, I almost got killed.
And I went to the hospital and got out of hospital.
That's why I decided to with it.
You know what I mean?
Okay.
And that's why you support the effort?
Yes.
Yes.
And then I found out that little girl got killed in Texas.
And oh my goodness, we need to stop the legal immigrants coming into the United States.
You know what I mean?
It's too many of them.
That's too much.
We need to control it.
And then we pull to entry.
And then, you know, tell them who they are and everything.
You know what I mean?
Okay.
Martinez there in Oklahoma.
Martinez, you said we need to control it.
What does that mean to you?
To control it.
You know, like porter entry.
Who coming, let them come in and borrow in training, who they are, who you're coming for, and everything.
You know what I mean?
Okay.
Martinez there in Oklahoma.
Nikki is next up in New York State on our opposed line.
Hi.
Good morning.
First of all, it's ironic that in this day of peace throughout the world, we celebrate Christmas, that people oppose immigration, even illegal.
Jesus Christ was an illegal immigrant, for God's sake.
But the ridiculousness that you pointed out at the beginning of this show, 6,000, do the math.
Do the arithmetic.
6,000.
Let's say there are 12 million illegal immigrants that you want to deport.
6,000 ICE agents.
Do the math.
6,000 goes into 12 million.
How many times?
I mean, this is just me spirited.
And you are being promised something that Donald Trump is very good at.
Promising you buy in the sky the greatest economy and that he's going to solve.
He is your new Messiah.
So I hope you enjoyed this Christmas because the next one will be a MAGA Christmas.
Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your holidays.
Bye.
Doug, there in Chester, Pennsylvania, on our support line.
You're next up.
Good morning.
Hey, there.
I think there may be some confusion.
I actually was going into a pose.
Okay, well, then let me stop you there.
And if you would call in and pick the line, our opposed line, invite you to call right back on that line to make sure that we have people calling on the correct line.
Again, it's 202-748-8000 if you support this effort of mass immigration, the incoming Trump administration.
If you oppose it, 202-748-8001.
And for immigrants, 202-748-8002.
The number to call if you want to give your thoughts there too.
Elaine on our opposed line in Colorado.
Hello.
Hi.
Yes, I oppose it because Trump does things without thinking ahead or planning ahead.
And then he changes his mind later.
But the main thing is, is people do not have labels on their foreheads.
How is he going to be able to tell who's who?
There's a lot of people that have been, that are citizens of this country that he could just round up and then we'll have to figure it out later.
And he won't care about that.
So I'm opposed to it because of that.
And he got in there with money from Musk and all these other billionaires.
And he just bought his election.
So if anything's fake, that's fake because of that.
Do you think there, as far as the issues, specifically those here illegally and particularly those that prove a threat, do you think the administration has a point on that front?
Yes, yes, they do.
But they need to do it the right way and be able to identify that they're actually here illegally and that they're criminals.
And then that would be okay.
I mean, I'm not opposed to that.
I know you talked about the writing on the forehead thing, but how do you know that there's no sense of the ability to identify those who are not here, who are not supposed to be here, and yet prove a threat?
Why do you think that can't happen?
Well, if they're out running around now and they're illegal and doing crimes, which that's a low percentage, by the way, then how come they haven't gotten them already?
You know?
So I just don't think, I just think it's going to cause a lot of chaos like it did with the children locking up in cages.
And he's okay with that because that makes him feel powerful.
And, you know, this president or this incoming president is scary.
He's just, he's out of his mind.
And people are, I mean, half the country is going along with it, which is even more scary to me.
Okay.
Elaine there in Colorado.
This is Edward in New York, New York City on our support line.
Hello.
Good morning, Pedro.
Thank you for having me on.
Really, really great question.
I think Trump will do two things.
I think he'll tighten up the illegal immigration to the lady caller before who said her family took 10 years to come in.
And I'm helping someone right now with a green card application.
So I think the legal aspect is something that he'll tighten up.
But I think more importantly, right now, you know, I go to the monthly police community meetings here in New York and Manhattan, and we're given to understand that there are 58,000 right now criminal migrants here in the city.
58,000.
And that about 75% of the arrests in New York are of criminal migrants.
So, you know, New York City is a blue city, blue state.
I'm sure this is playing out in blue communities all around the country, you know, this pattern.
The last thing I'll say quickly is: you know, Biden, people don't, they don't talk about this for some reason, but Biden has enabled the travel business.
The cartels have two businesses: they have the drug business, about 50 billion, and they have the 25 billion travel business.
And the travel business is very well organized.
It moves people.
It takes advantage of all the experience the cartels have had over the years moving drugs through routes and what have you.
So, Edward, if I may ask, you listed off that 58,000 number in New York City.
Just taking a look at that number alone, what convinces you the Trump administration has the resources not only to handle the issues there in New York City alone, but the United States overall?
That's going to be very, very tough because ICE is not that large, you know, and it's going to take cooperation of local law enforcement, which in the sanctuary cities he's not going to find.
So, this is a real dilemma.
Edward there in New York City giving us his perspective.
You can continue to do the same on the numbers there on your screen.
Some of you deciding to post on Facebook when it comes to Lucy Howard saying, I don't support the mass deportation plan.
The only people I want removed from communities are violent offenders, including domestic abusers and those guilty of sexual assault.
This is Joe Ellen, Aribido, saying that in support of the plan, we are a republic, a land of laws, and obviously they did not adhere to our laws.
The left always cite fairness in their arguments.
Well, how is it fair to those who follow the rules and entered legally?
And then Loretta Knott saying also when our support saying deportation of the illegals harms our citizens, and it's what President Trump promised to do, and we should all support that.
Again, Facebook is facebook.com/slash C-SPAN.
X is at C-SPANWJ.
Text available too at 202-748-8003.
CJ on our opposed line in Virginia.
Hello.
Hey, good morning.
Excuse me.
Best of the holidays to you.
The reason why I oppose this, I found out some interesting information over the holidays.
Somebody in my huge family did a 23-and-me on our very own family.
And so it turns out we're all immigrants.
So the reason is, you know, forget about even the humanitarian part of this.
Let's just pretend nobody's a real Christian in this country.
Let's just pretend.
And think of like about four examples.
I know your audience is probably mostly even older than me.
So you have a cultural memory.
How much money did it take just to get one very rich Alleged murderer, probably a murderer, to go from Pennsylvania to New York State.
There must have been about 85 federal, local, state people to get that Luigi Mangioni or whatever his name is, just to go from one state to one state.
You could have put him in a Volkswagen and had one cop, you know, do the whole thing.
But no, that's not the way our country works.
You always have to have about 80 cops to do one job.
Think about Ilian Gonzalez, the little Cuban boy, five years old or whatever he was, back in the end of the Clinton years.
Federal, local, state, just to get the guy reunited, the kid reunited with his father, took like a military operation because of all the locals that were like up against, you know, against a reunification to his proper father.
Think of David Koresh hold up abusing kids.
The federal government allowed him to kill five of their own agents, and we had a whole army surrounding that compound for like 55 days or something like that.
That probably cost tens of millions of dollars.
Plus, it ripped our society apart because the heavy right wing, you know, it's like, whoa, you know, we've got like, you know.
So if I may, if I take those examples, then it's a manpower, our power and a resource issue.
That's what you're saying.
No, it's going to be a civil war issue if you allow this to play out.
If you don't like to accept essentially Native American, I'm sorry, you're fading out on me.
CJ, I'm just saying that what's the point then for all those examples, what's the final point as far as your opposition to these efforts?
Well, it's impractical to go and to think that, you know, like Trump says, you know, we're going to have the biggest mass deportation in history.
Did he ever hear about the Mexican Repatriation Act?
Okay.
That's CJ in Virginia.
Let's hear from Ronald in North Carolina on our support line.
You're next up.
Hello.
Yes.
Can you hear me?
You can.
Go ahead.
Okay.
I'm against these immigrants coming in, and the reason why they're taking most recently, Trump won, the election so good, they've taken all the black people's jobs on these meals I've been in.
They've taken all their jobs.
And it hard to Mexicans to do their job.
And that's wrong.
And I think that that's what's wrong.
That's how I want Trump warned over that part.
But Biden has shipped, he has shipped, they flew him in and plane loads and bus loads coming in from the border brought them down here.
That's wrong.
That's wrong.
And that's illegal.
We need to charge Biden for every one of them illegally shipped in here and flew in here, make him pay for them, plow them back.
And then the rest of them can't bargain their part.
That's my opinion.
Okay, our line for immigrants, this is Charlie in New York.
You're on.
Go ahead.
Yeah, back in the mid-80s, I left New York to do some construction work in California.
And I had a hard time finding work because a lot of the illegal immigrants, I was living in San Diego at the time, were taking a lot of that work.
So I've always been kind of opposed to immigration, especially illegal immigration.
But, you know, ironically, two years ago, I met a woman who was here illegally, and we fell in love.
And so my immigrant story has become more mixed, in my opinion.
As much as I oppose people entering the country illegally, there are times when it's necessary for persecution reasons, for religious freedoms.
And the immigrants I've met in the communities are hardworking, honest people and want no part of getting in trouble with the law because that's going to get them kicked out right away.
So this whole talk about Biden immigrant crime is really a bunch of nonsense.
You could find people committing these crimes that they amplify on Fox with any color of skin and any immigration status in America and paste them all over the news.
So that's my opinion about it.
I think people need to be open-minded about the situation and not just have a black and white opinion on this issue because it comes in lots of shades.
Okay, Charlie there in New York.
The Wall Street Journal, just to show you the headline of a recent story, they have taking a look at the upcoming plans for the administration.
Now private prisons industry are part of those plans.
That's the headline from a recent story, just to read you a little bit, saying private prisons and other companies that provide detention services are getting ready to cash in on what President-elect Donald Trump has built as the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.
That includes scouring for as many detention beds as possible with their network of facilities and scouting sites for new buildings to house migrants.
Some executives are considering whether to take up controversial work of detaining families or unaccompanied children.
Others are prepared to hire new staff and snapping up well-connected lobbyists.
Quote, this to us is an unprecedented opportunity.
That's George Zoli, the executive chairman of the GO Group, a private prison company, telling investors on an earning calls days after the election.
This story adding that pulling off a deportation on the scale that Mr. Trump has promised would constitute an unprecedented logistical feat for the U.S. government involving identifying, locating, arresting, detaining, adjudicating, and transporting potentially millions of men, women, and children.
It goes on from there, that story in the Wall Street Journal.
Back to our calls.
This is Doug in Chester, Pennsylvania on our oppose line.
Hi.
Hi.
Thank you.
Again, I'm glad I got back through.
I think this is a very, very serious issue, and I've been concerned about this whole Trump immigration thing since his first term.
It's only gotten scarier to me as I've listened to people's spirits sour in the aftermath of COVID, and everybody's memory has gotten very short.
You know, during COVID, when President Trump and Wilbur Ross intervened with Tyson and other meatpacking plants to ensure that those plants would stay open no matter what, as the virus began to intensify, many of those people who are our American countrymen were people who are of questionable documentation, who were making sure their food still stayed on our tables.
And similarly, in the tech industry with the H-1B visa, there were people who suddenly found themselves when Trump began monkeying with the visas during the virus without a definitive status, who basically suddenly found themselves instead of the best and the brightest in the service of almost like an indentured servitude kind of status.
I think what really alarms me the most listening to everybody this morning talk about this is that everyone keeps saying this as if it's not possible because it doesn't make sense logistically.
And I think that, you know, I agree generally, but what I'd like to posit here is that perhaps these people who we know feed on chaos are announcing us that what they intend to do is to allow people to take extrajudicial matters into their own hands should this plan not work the way that they anticipate.
It most certainly does sound logistically impossible to try to forcibly eject people from American cities and to try to employ even something like the National Guard, which would involve many, many proud Americans who were born here, but are parts of families that are immigrant in nature.
You're not going to have these people go and eject their own families from their own cities.
That's not going to happen.
But maybe what they're trying to say to us, man, is that they're ready to just let the brown shirts come out and do their thing.
That's what we should be concerned about.
These people have not demonstrated in the very last administration a monocum of concern for the dignity of human life.
They let a million of us die, and they will do it again.
Okay.
That's Doug.
That's Doug there.
Chester, Pennsylvania, on our opposed line.
And continue to call in again the lines there on your screen.
Don in Sacramento on our support line.
Hello.
Hello, Pedro.
Man, these people sound just like these old back in the cowboy days, how they used to treat them Indians and stuff.
And now they're trying to get them Mexicans the same way.
Same way they did the Jews over there in Europe.
Now they're going to be acting like the brown people, the only people that's doing all the crime here so they can send them out of America mass.
Well, Don, let's clarify something.
Do you support this idea of mass deportation?
Yeah, I support it, but are they just deporting brown and black people?
Or are they going to include Europeans in this deportation thing?
How are they going to tell the difference between a European white person and a regular white person?
Aside from the clarifications you're making, why do you support the effort overall?
Because, I mean, it's too many of all of them here.
The Arabs, the Mexicans, the white folks coming from Europe.
Okay, yeah, we'll leave it there.
Washington Times this morning, this takes a look at what Mexico is planning on doing, at least parts of it.
This is the headline, shelters to open in Mexico to prepare for Trump deportations.
It quotes the Baja California governor saying the Mexican government will open 25 new shelters to house illegal immigrants deported from the United States in preparation for that crackdown.
Baja California Governor Marina de Pilar Avella Omeida said in a meeting Monday that the country is taking Mr. Trump's threat of deportation seriously.
According to Nexstar's border report, five of the shelters will be in the city of Tijuana the others in the Mexicale of the capital city of Baja.
This story from the Washington Times adding that the migrants will only be able to stay in the shelters that can house up to 500 people for a few days before they will be sent back to their hometown.
Some people will hold men, some will hold men, while others will hold women, families, and unaccompanied minors.
There's more there on the international perspective on the plans of the incoming Trump administration.
When it comes to mass deportations, that's in the Washington Times this morning.
Let's hear from Mo, also a resident of California and San Diego on our opposed line.
Hello.
Good morning, Pedro.
Merry Christmas to everybody.
I just want to say that I don't think he's going to be able to do it.
Congress isn't going to give him the money to do this.
No way.
Economists estimate it's going to cost over a trillion dollars.
You really want to add a trillion dollars to our national debt?
And I'm afraid this is why he wants to lift the debt ceiling because he knows Congress won't give him the money.
Also, if he lifts the debt ceiling, he's putting it on America's credit card.
You know how credit card debt works.
We'll never get it paid off.
Besides that, we need these people to pick our strawberries and lettuce.
I'm here in California.
I see it every day.
No one's flooding across the border.
Just stop with all that and stop.
Please stop being so greedy with your freedom.
That's Moe in California.
It was at a recent Senate hearing that the Judiciary Committee's ranking member, Lindsey Graham, talked about the Republican control of the Senate next year in the 119th Congress as part of the judiciary plans when it comes to immigration.
He had some things to say about specifics.
Here's a portion from that hearing.
Most Americans are sympathetic, kind-hearted people who feel like the Biden administration was criminally negligent in protecting us by having a broken border and allowing drugs to pour into our country to kill tens of thousands of young people, allow people to come in our country who are convicted felons to do damage to families we'll hear from today.
That nightmare is coming to a close.
In January of 2025, the Republican Senate will make its top priority, a transformational border security bill that will be taken up and passed by budget committee, increasing the number of bed spaces available to detain people instead of releasing them, increasing the number of ICE agents to deal with people who should be deported, finish the wall,
and put technology on the border so we'll have operational control of the border.
That's going to be our top priority.
I want to cut Texas, we will cut Texas.
But as to the Senate, transformational border security goes first through reconciliation.
Over 8 million people were encountered during the Biden years, 4 million released into the country.
The non-detained docket that we have as a nation is over 7 million people.
There are 600 and something thousand people on that non-detained document that have criminal records.
We're going to start sending people out of the country that present a threat to us and should never have been here to begin with.
That's Lindsey Graham from that Senate hearing.
You can find that at our website at c-span.org.
By the way, on our companion network, C-SPAN2, at least for the time being, for 24 hours of hearing previous statements by expected members of the Trump administration, one of those, Tom Holman, which would be the border security expert for the Trump administration, Christy Noam, as far as the Department of Homeland Security, and others, we're showing you as part of a marathon, calling it Trump nominees in their own words.
And you have a chance to see on C-SPAN 2 just things they've said and in some cases about immigration and deportation.
You can follow along on that marathon today.
C-SPAN 2 is where you can follow along if you want to watch it.
Also on our campaign app at C-SPANNO and then c-span.org as always to see what these incoming members, should they be confirmed by the Senate, have to say about various issues including immigration and border security.
On our line for immigrants, this is Nina in Dallas, Texas.
Hello.
C-SPAN now?
Yes.
My name is Nina Montoya.
And my comment about the immigrant mothers, it's wrong to separate the children from the immigrant mothers.
Okay.
If they're going to deport immigrant mothers, they should not separate the children from them.
Should be able to take their children with them.
All right.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Nina, is there anything else you want to add?
And children of the immigrants should not be in cages, and they should not be separated from their mothers, the immigrant mothers.
Okay.
That is heartbreaking.
That is suffering to the children and the mothers.
Oh, Calvin is next in Alabama, a supporter of this effort.
Hello.
Hello.
The main thing that I'm against or oppose, not oppose, but are for the mass immigration is because the many people that are legally trying to come into our country and immigrate are being cheated upon.
They are all spending money and their time and doing everything that's legally possible for them to do to get into our country and become legal citizens.
And to me, it's like the ones that are just crossing the border, the millions that we've had that have come into our country that Biden has allowed to come in are cheating.
They're jumping ahead of the line.
They're not even taking the test.
They're like taking a test and having the answers provided to them.
And the others who are really studying to pass that test to get their citizenship are being downtrodden.
They're being cheated upon.
And I think it's wrong.
We have a young man in our neighborhood that is working for his citizenship.
And we've done all we can do to help him.
And many of the people in our community are helping him.
It is not an easy process and a cheap process to achieve this.
I think if our government is going to do anything, they need to revamp the whole process to where getting in here because of asylum reasons and those type of people need to be fast-tracked.
They need to find out who they are, where they come from, and their stories, but they need to change our system.
And with the new technology that we have developing now in the world, I can't but think that it would be much easier in the future, near future, for them to be able to do that, to be able to process people and make it faster because there are so many people that do need help and need the asylum of our country that would work and be great citizens.
And we know that we have many of them in our neighborhood.
Okay.
But they were legal, you know, and I just, they are all complaining that they did everything the right way.
Okay.
Got your point, Calvin.
Let's go and hear from Dorothy, Dorothy, Louisiana, on our opposed line.
Hello.
Hello.
Listen, Dorothy, you're on the air.
Go ahead.
Yes.
I was calling from Louisandus, Dorothy.
And I think it's wrong, people immigrants, the ones that live is not right.
And Joe Biden did all that he could to fix this.
Donald Trump is the one blocked it.
And we let one man dictate this country.
And it's not right.
And why would we sit still in America and let this happen?
Okay.
Dorothy there in Louisiana.
One more call.
And this will be from Thomas.
Thomas is in Georgia on our support line.
Go ahead, Thomas.
Hey, I'm tickled to death.
I finally got in here.
I've been waiting for quite some time.
Look, this illegal immigration is a real problem.
Just talk with our hospitals.
Talk with our schools.
We got teachers who are trying to teach class with a bunch of kids in there that cannot speak English.
Our teachers cannot speak Spanish.
It is a tremendous problem to our school system.
And if look at our education system today, we are probably number 35 or higher where we used to be number one in the whole United States, the whole world, excuse me, the whole world.
We used to be number one in education.
Look where we're at today.
And a lot of that problem is because of this open border situation that our liberal Democrats have allowed into the United States.
Okay.
Thomas there in Georgia, finishing off this hour of calls.
For those of you who participated, thanks for doing so.
If you've joined us during this holiday period, you know that we've been having a bit of a series, our authors series that we do year after year about this time of year, inviting people of various political stripes to come in and talk about their books and talk about the issues revolving around those books.
Coming up next, we're going to hear from Jonathan Alter, an opinion editor at Newsweek, who also talk about his book, American Reckoning, Inside Trump's Trial, and my own.
We'll hear those thoughts when Washington Journal continues.
American History TV, Saturdays on C-SPAN 2, exploring the people and events that tell the American story.
This weekend at 3.15 p.m. Eastern, author Stephen Puglio, with his book, The Great Abolitionist, discusses the career and life of abolitionist and politician Charles Sumner, who represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate from 1851 until his death in 1874.
Then at 4.45 p.m. Eastern, author Elizabeth Rees with her book Marquis de Lafayette Returns recounted the 1824-1825 trip Lafayette took through the young United States when he returned after the Revolutionary War.
And at 7 p.m. Eastern, lead up to Inauguration Day, American History TV looks back at famous inaugural speeches.
This weekend, speeches by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, Harry Truman's 1949 address, and Dwight Eisenhower's 1953 address.
Exploring the American story.
Watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history.
Witness democracy in action with C-SPAN.
Experience history as it unfolds with C-SPAN's live coverage this January as Republicans take control of both chambers of Congress and a new chapter begins with the swearing in of the 47th President of the United States.
On Friday, January 3rd, don't miss the opening day of the 119th Congress.
Watch the election of the House Speaker, the swearing in of new members of Congress and the Senate, and the first day of leadership for South Dakota's John Thune as the new Senate Majority Leader.
On Monday, January 6th, live from the House chamber, Witness Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the Electoral College vote, where this historic session will officially confirm Donald Trump as the winner of the 2024 presidential election.
And on January 20th, tune in for our live all-day coverage of the presidential inauguration as Donald Trump takes the oath of office, becoming the 47th President of the United States.
Stay with C-SPAN throughout January for comprehensive, live, unfiltered coverage of the 119th Congress and the presidential inauguration, C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered, created by Cable.
Washington Journal continues.
Washington Journal's Authors Holiday Authors Week series continues on.
If you've been joining us again, authors of various political stripes joining us for conversations about their books and other topics.
Eight days over the course of a total that we're going to talk about these public policy and political topics.
Today, we invite author Jonathan Alter on.
He is the author of the book American Reckoning Inside Trump's Trial and My Own, Jonathan Alter.
Happy holidays to you.
Welcome to the program.
Happy holidays.
So great to be here.
This trial that you highlight in your title reminds people about what you were writing about.
So the trial that I covered every day in the courtroom was the hush money trial that took place at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, and it resulted in the conviction of Donald Trump on 34 counts of business fraud.
And that conviction, as we speak, still stands.
He's a convicted felon.
We're waiting for the judge to determine sentencing.
It's pretty clear that he's unlikely to have to try to have President-elect Trump serve any of his sentence given that he was just re-elected president.
But he might freeze the case and return to sentencing in four years.
We're not sure exactly what's going to happen, but this trial was, I guess you could call it a bittersweet experience for somebody like me who I think feels very strongly,
and I think I speak for a lot of people, obviously not everybody, in believing that Donald Trump is a threat to our republic, a threat to our values, and that it was important to try to hold him accountable for the crimes that he committed.
You wrote in the book, just to read a little bit of what you wrote for our audience, saying, my own reckoning with my image of America and its commitment to democracy is still underway.
I have lost my claim to be as John F. Kennedy described himself, an idealist without illusions.
I'm still idealistic, but it turns out that I have more illusions about this country than I thought I did.
My aim instead to show how a tawdry trial about a hush money payments to a porn star became an inspiring, if provincial, a provisional locus of democratic accountability, a place where, for the first time since his father died 25 years ago, Donald Trump was forced to sit down, shut up, and face the consequences of his actions.
Can you elaborate?
Is that part of the trial of your own that the title of your book highlights?
And can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, so I grew up in an intensely political family in Chicago.
My mother was the first woman elected to public office in Cook County.
And I loved everything and continue to love everything about the presidents.
And I have Pez Dispenser presidents at home.
I have a collection of presidential spoons.
I revere the office.
I continue to revere the office.
As a journalist over the last 40 years, I've interviewed nine of the last 10 American presidents, either before, during, or after their time in office, including Donald Trump years before he ran for president.
The only one I missed was Ronald Reagan.
I was a little too young when I was at Newsweek to interview him.
And so I've studied the presidency, and I assumed wrongly, and these were my illusions, that the American people would not elect a con man as president of the United States.
And so I was, you know, I was wrong.
And people simply didn't care as much about his rather long record.
You know, this was only one trial.
The others are now being thrown out because he was reelected and he won't have his Justice Department obviously continue those federal cases.
But in total, he was indicted across a few different cases on 91 counts of various offenses, not to mention the civil judgment a year ago for sexual abuse.
$83 million Eugene Carroll was awarded.
And then, you know, his university, Trump University, quote unquote, was shut down.
His charity was shut down.
This is a con man.
And so my disillusionment is connected to just disappointment that more people didn't see this the way I do.
I respect people who are for Trump.
I just think that they are not looking at the totality of his character in making a judgment.
But this experience was in some ways very inspiring in the courtroom because, as you mentioned in your excerpt from my book, this was a kind of a partial accountability.
No matter what happens eventually to this case, even if he doesn't serve in jail, even if he doesn't, which he's very much not going to, even if he doesn't end up getting probation, every day in the courtroom, he had to answer for really the first time in his adult life to Judge Juan Rashan, who controlled the courtroom.
And I got a front row seat on this accountability.
The trial wasn't televised.
So while it was highly publicized, the Stormy Daniels trial, nobody really got a good sense of what was going on in that courtroom if they weren't there.
And this is the only book about this case.
It was a fascinating case.
There was overwhelming evidence of guilt on Donald Trump's part.
So I walk the readers through.
I kept a very barbed, acerbic diary during the trial, and I start the book explaining what I brought to coverage of this trial, which was not legal expertise, but as I mentioned, a long history of studying and appreciating the American presidency and American politics.
Republicans, 202-748-8000, Juan.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Independents, 202-748-8000.
Two.
If you want to call in and ask questions of our guests, Jonathan Alter, if you want to text him your questions, 202-748-8003.
Mr. Alter, you listed those various legal fronts that the president had cases in.
You chose this one.
What stood out about this one versus the others?
Well, actually, I was originally credentialed for Jack Smith's case against Donald Trump for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the first time in the entire history of our country that we haven't had a peaceful transfer of power.
And or at least Trump attempted to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.
And so I was credentialed for that case.
And it was scheduled to open.
The trial was supposed to start in March of this year.
But then Trump's lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court on the basis of immunity.
And we all know what happened in that case.
The Supreme Court ruled that a president could not be held accountable for acts while he was in office.
And this delayed that case so long.
It didn't kill the case, but it delayed the case until after the election.
And now Jack Smith has canceled that case because Trump has indicated all along that he would not allow the Justice Department to move forward with either that or the Mar-a-Lago case, which related to his refusing a request to return classified documents that belong to the U.S. government.
So he was indicted on that.
Those cases are dead.
The Georgia case is probably dead.
So this was the hush money trial.
I thought of it as kind of the runt of the litter, you know, in terms of cases.
But it was nonetheless an important case, the first time in American history that a president of the United States has gone on trial.
And obviously, the first time a president of the United States has become a convicted felon.
Just to give you a quick sense, I know a lot of people out there are very interested as I am in the history of the American presidency.
So in 1872, Ulysses Grant was given a speeding ticket for driving too fast on 13th Street in Washington in his carriage.
And in 1953, Harry Truman got a ticket for driving too slow on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Nixon was pardoned.
Bill Clinton lost his law license.
That's it in terms of the interaction of presidents of the United States with the justice system.
So, you know, this was a truly historic set of circumstances.
And I wanted to write a book, and this is what I hope American Reckoning does, that gives readers a tactile sense of what it felt like to live through this historic circumstance and live, you know, through the disruption of our politics and our values that Donald Trump represents.
So I try to give voice to what that feels like.
Obviously, I'm not giving voice to the way conservative Republicans feel and others who voted for Donald Trump, but there are still tens of millions of Americans who I think share my views about Trump and might appreciate this front row seat to history and the way I, I hope in sometimes amusing ways, convey what happened in this case.
We'll ask you to highlight some of those as we go across the next 45 minutes, but we do have callers lined up ready to talk to you.
Let's start with Tim in Georgia, Independent Line.
You're on with Jonathan Alter, again, the author of the book American Reckoning Inside Trump's Trial and My Own.
Tim, good morning.
Go ahead.
Good morning, you guys.
I have two questions for you.
Well, really, one.
In the hush money trial, I think the majority, and I'm an independent, so I have, you know, I'm just an open-minded individual, but the majority of people that I talked to looked at it in two ways.
One, they looked at it as this is a man that committed adultery and was trying to cover it up.
They could not see where the government or any trial should be brought forth on him for that.
And two, a majority of them also saw it as the way of them trying to keep Trump from becoming president again.
So what I'm saying is that in most of the public's eyes, independents and conservative Republicans and maybe some Democrats, that this trial was basically a sham to keep him from becoming president again.
I want to get your opinion on that because that seems to be the going thing with the hush money trial.
A lot of people don't even count that as a conviction.
That's why they voted for him.
So I want to get your opinion on that.
Tim and Georgia, thanks for those two questions.
A lot of our guests respond.
Excellent questions.
So, you know, people say, well, this was selective prosecution.
You know, actually, there are more than 100 cases a year that just the Manhattan prosecutor brings, not to mention other jurisdictions, on falsification of business records, which is what this case was about.
And, you know, prosecutors, federal, state, and local, they have offices of public integrity because they do use more resources to go after politicians to send a message that no one is above the law and that politicians should not break the law.
So some people are going, and I think this was part of what you were hearing.
Oh, this is just a bookkeeping thing.
He was just trying to cover up, you know, this fling that he had with the porn star.
Interestingly, the people who were arguing that years ago with Bill Clinton, they believed that when he was lying to cover up an affair, that he should be impeached and removed from office from that.
So they now are on the other side of that issue, those Republicans who believe that about Clinton.
But just setting that aside for a moment, the problem with that is it's not just a bookkeeping error.
And I was made aware of this by a professor at the Harvard Business School who told me something I hadn't thought of.
He said, you know, the integrity of business records, the fact that you're not allowed to use fraudulent business records, just lie in your business records, is actually the foundation of our successful economy.
That if you just let people falsify business records, as Trump was convicted of doing on 34 counts in this case, then nobody can believe anything in business.
You have crony capitalism.
You know, it's all about just, you know, do you know the judge?
And business would become very corrupt.
People wouldn't be able to trust the courts to keep business records clean.
And we would have a much less successful economy.
That's the way it works in Russia and many other countries where they have crony capitalism.
So to say that these, you could have a legitimate argument about whether these charges should have been bumped up from misdemeanors to a felony, to felonies, that's something that you can kind of argue about.
But I don't think it's as easy to make an argument that he didn't do anything wrong because he was clearly breaking the law.
And interestingly, just last week, Judge Murshan ruled that the immunity decision by the Supreme Court, which protects presidents from being prosecuted for their official acts,
things they do while president, that it's true that there was important testimony by a woman named Hope Hicks about some things that Trump said about Stormy Daniels in the White House that you could argue would be protected by that immunity decision.
But what the judge ruled, I believe rightly, is that there was such, quote, overwhelming evidence of guilt.
So many witnesses who pre-corroborated and then corroborated Michael Cohen's testimony against Donald Trump.
There was so much evidence of guilt that they didn't even need what he did in the White House.
And that's why he hasn't thrown out this conviction.
So, you know, you have to look at it.
Should the president or former president be above the law?
If evidence is brought to your attention and the evidence kept coming in right up until the trial started in April, there kept being new witnesses, new evidence against him.
He didn't put out any case of his own except for one very unconvincing witness.
It blew up in his face.
There was so much evidence that for the prosecutor to look the other way and say, oh, yeah, just an affair.
You know, we're not going to enforce the law.
We're not going to prosecute this guy.
He was president.
We're going to be accused of trying to prevent him from being president again.
So we'll just look the other way while he violates business records laws that are prosecuted every day somewhere in the United States.
No, the president shouldn't be above the law.
And that's one of the issues that I deal with in this book is how did we get to a place where so many people, including many independents, believe that, you know, some laws, yeah, okay.
You know, if he's trying to overthrow the government, maybe, you know, prosecute him on that, but on other laws don't.
I agree that the Jack Smith case was more important, much more significant than the Stormy Daniels case.
But, you know, you want to bring the defendant to justice where you can.
Right.
Okay.
Let's hear from Edward in Michigan.
Democrats line.
Hello.
Yes.
The whole idea of this hush money to the two women, to Stormy Daniels and the playmate Karen McDougall, the whole idea was to keep those affairs out of the news so that the voters wouldn't have that information in 2016 because Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 to Hillary Clinton.
It was an extremely close, well, it was a close in the Electoral College.
It was, you know, a nail biter in Electoral College.
Trump lost the popular vote.
So the whole effort, the whole money payment, the whole using the National Enquirer or whatever, the David Packers thing, the whole idea was to keep this out of the news, to not lose votes.
I assume that Trump would lost more women's votes.
He would have looked more like a slanderer, a criminal.
And my guess would be that if those two news stories had come out, the Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels news stories had come out in 2016, Trump would have lost the election by even a larger margin, right?
It was an important thing to keep those out of the way.
Yeah, if you're interested in any of this, I really do recommend my book because this was an extremely important part of the trial.
Basically, what happened was you remember the situation with the Access Hollywood tape where he was talking on tape about, you know, you can grab them by the, you know, what if you're famous.
And this came out in October of 2016.
This whole case is about the 2016 election.
There's been a lot of focus on 2020.
This is about him affecting the outcome of the 2016 race in illegal ways.
And so the Access Hollywood tape comes out.
And at that point, if Stormy Daniels and Trump plummets in the polls, and he only recovers because the subject kind of changes to Hillary's emails.
And so people don't care that much about Access Hollywood after he says on Melania's advice, as I report in the book, oh, it was just locker room talk.
Well, if Stormy Daniels or Karen McDougall had come out just before the election, it wasn't locker room talk.
This wasn't locker room talk.
This is what he did to me.
He would have lost the election.
It's hard to see how he would have survived that.
So Trump was desperate to pay this hush money.
He got Michael Cohen to do it.
And then he covered up that he got Michael Cohen to do it by pretending, falsifying records that Michael Cohen was just working for him in other capacities and that this money wasn't going for hush money.
So a lot of the case was really a paper trail.
It wasn't even really reliant on Michael Cohen, who did lie about a lot of stuff.
It wasn't even that reliant on his testimony because there was such a paper trail and so much other evidence that Trump had engaged in this cover-up, which, by the way, covering up hush money is what Nixon did.
So, I mean, the cases are different, but there are also some similarities.
So hush money is not a minor thing, especially as the caller quite rightly indicated.
A critical presidential election, maybe the most consequential in our history, if you look at how Trump is changing the country, turned on this cover-up.
Let's go to Bruce.
Bruce is in Chicago, Republican line.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I would like to ask the guest, what is legal background?
As he's expressed a lot of opinions on Judge Murshan being the next great Supreme Court justice.
But anyway, I appreciate the American reckoning, and I just wondered if he's planning his next book on reckoning what happens with a person who's in the political office and taking money from our enemies abroad and distributing it through sham corporations and distributing it amongst his family.
And I just wonder if, you know, if he had an answer for that.
And I just wonder if that'll be your next book, if you're going to go and delve into the crime family of the Bidens.
Okay.
Thanks, Bruce.
So a couple of things.
First of all, I'm not a lawyer, but there have been many people who've covered many trials for many, many years who are not lawyers.
I had a retired judge who was a spectator in the courtroom who gives me a very nice blurb on my book, Retired Judge George Grasso, who I consulted with throughout the trial, as well as a number of other lawyers who were covering it with me and were in my group of guys hanging out in the courtroom.
And I'm plenty knowledgeable about the legal issues in this case.
As far as the Biden family goes, Hunter Biden was prosecuted, and I think it was wrong for President Biden to pardon him.
But the allegations that you just mentioned of this being a crime family, there's never been any evidence of that that has been presented anywhere.
That is all just right-wing spin and in some cases, lies.
And to just throw these charges around based on allegations, which in the case of some of the Russians have been retracted, these allegations of what Biden supposedly did in Ukraine, they've been retracted.
And to just assume that, you know, this man who I was very critical of President Biden for running for reelection, I thought that was a historically wrong decision.
And in American Reckoning, I tell the story for the first time about how Nancy Pelosi maneuvered him off the ticket in July of this year.
But to go from that kind of legitimate criticism to just assuming that the craziest conspiracy theories about Joe Biden are true when nobody has ever found any evidence to support them, I think does not contribute to our debate.
All right, if you're joining us, we're in the middle of our author series here on Washington Journal joining us, Jonathan Alter.
He's the author of American Reckoning Inside Trump's Trial and My Own.
Mr. Alter, the New York Post had a recent editorial.
It took a look at the recent decision to remove Founding Willis from the Georgia case, but it did make this point regarding Judge Murshon.
I want to read this to you saying, the once-packed mob of legal hitmen gunning for President-elect Donald Trump is down to two notable holdouts.
Man's Supreme Court Judge Juan Murshon is refusing to toss out the 34-count conviction in the bogus, quote, hush money case, while also refusing to sentence Trump so that he can finally appeal.
Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg wants to keep the case on hold while Trump serves a second term, effectively putting a ticking time bomb over the sitting president's head for four years.
As the last men standing at the witch hunt, Murton and Bragg ought to wake up, drop the pitchforks, and focus on actually serving the cause of justice.
What do you think of that assessment?
Well, needless to say, I don't agree with it.
It's a right-wing assessment.
They were not in the courtroom.
They did not see that Judge Murshon, well, I'm not suggesting, as an earlier caller, said that he deserves to be on the Supreme Court, but he did an excellent job in this case, very judicious, backed up all of his decisions.
And so this is not a ticking time bomb.
It's actually rather common for cases to be frozen when a criminal has been prosecuted in various different jurisdictions.
Sometimes sentencing is postponed in one of those jurisdictions, even for years.
There's no statute of limitation on sentencing.
So I hope that Judge Murshan does go along with Alvin Bragg, postpone the sentencing until after Trump leaves office.
That seems to me to be an appropriate response to this.
But to just throw it out, because an election went one way, that's very, very important.
And I do think that what I call the big jury, the electorate, that their view on this needs to be very much taken into consideration in the way we assess its historic importance.
So basically, the American people have decided, and I'm comfortable, I'm not happy about it, but I accept their verdict that this Trump's legal problems should not prevent him from being president of the United States.
But they didn't vote for a judge to dismiss a jury's verdict.
You know, the jury deliberated.
They were very, very attentive.
I looked at them every day, some cases through binoculars, which one of the jurors didn't appreciate me looking at him, checking him out through my binoculars.
I really wanted to see how they were reacting to the testimony.
They rendered not only their time, but in some cases, even possibly their physical safety.
That's why we don't know who any of these jurors are.
None of them have come forward to write a book like I did or something like that, because they're, you know, understandably afraid.
As Mitt Romney said, a number of senators were afraid of voting for conviction and impeachment for their physical safety.
So there's an intimidation factor here.
I mentioned that because the jurors, I think, were inspiring.
They helped restore my faith in our system and the way they handle themselves.
And to just say, oh, because of, you know, their verdict should be thrown out because the judge is a hitman and the prosecutor is a hitman.
How about the jury?
Are they hitmen and women?
Or did they listen to the evidence and decide that Donald Trump should become a convicted felon?
I believe it's the latter.
Let's go to David in Michigan.
Democrats line for Jonathan Alter.
Thank you very much for taking my call.
Jonathan, back in late September, early October of this year, the Supreme Court told all 50 states that it was okay for them to purge as many valid votes as they wanted.
144 million votes for president should have been at least 170 million votes because 30 million teenagers turned 18 years old by 2024.
And last voting 2020, 155 million voters voted.
This time, only 144 million voters voted.
And it should have been about 170 to 175.
That's how Trump won because of the Supreme Court telling all 50 states to purge votes.
I think Vice President Harris should not certify votes on January 6th.
And let's see what happens.
What do you think?
Thank you.
Thanks for the call.
I don't agree with that.
I think she very much should certify this election.
It was a legitimate election.
If people are interested in my views on why Donald Trump won, I wrote a pretty long article on my Substack newsletter, which is called Old Goats, because I'm an old goat.
And I believe in a multi-causal explanation.
I have 10 different reasons why I think Trump won the election.
And actually, the Supreme Court decision is not one of them.
There was dampened turnout for reasons that had to do way beyond the purging of certain voter roles.
There were two, I think, main reasons why turnout was lower than it was four years ago.
The first is that during COVID, during that COVID election, it was super easy to vote by mail.
And so really, like millions of people, they didn't have to do, including a lot of younger voters, they didn't have to, you know, do anything.
And a number of states sent them ballots automatically in the mail.
And it was much easier to vote in 2020 for reasons beyond the purging that you mentioned, which I'm not minimizing.
And then the second reason is that as canvassers in both parties found, there was just diminished enthusiasm on the Democratic side.
There was more enthusiasm for Trump ultimately than there was, at least at the margins, for Harris.
So some people were extremely enthusiastic about Harris, but not enough, particularly in the Latino community where there were huge shifts from Democratic to Republican, especially among male Latino voters.
So there were a number of factors that, because I'm talking about the trial today, I won't detail, but a number of factors beyond what you mentioned and I thought were decisive.
And I think the idea of imitating what Trump wanted in 2020 to have the vice president not certify the election, that is a ruinous idea.
This is what we really need to avoid in this country is after the Electoral College has met, and after it's clear what the election returns are, even if they are extremely disappointing, we have to accept them and then do what we can after Donald Trump becomes president again to hold him accountable for his acts that hurt the economy.
And they started just yesterday on Christmas where his tweet was like his Truth Social post was it was unhinged.
He's not saying, you know, Merry Christmas, everybody.
He's attacking his enemies and doing all kinds of very unprecedented things.
So we're going to be back into this.
It's going to be a very bumpy ride.
And I think we need to focus on that rather than looking backwards at this election.
On our Republican line, here's Bill in Connecticut.
Yes, clearly the DOJ, in my opinion, has been weaponized, and it's a Democrat DOJ against Trump.
If you just look at the DOJ, the DOJ that prosecuted Hunter Biden.
Mr. Alter, let me finish, please.
I'm sorry.
My apologies.
Yeah.
Go ahead, caller.
Just the fact that the charge was changed from a misdemeanor to a felony shows what a sham this is.
You know, it's for Trump.
This is the type of prosecutions done in third world countries.
And if you look at the hush money issue, Trump put it under legal expenses.
And I'm asking you, Mr. Alter, what did John Edwards and Bill Clinton put their hush money under?
Can you please apprise me on that?
That's Bill in Connecticut.
So in answer to your first question, you're talking about weaponizing the Justice Department.
This was the Manhattan DA, not the Department of Justice, that brought this case.
Now, it's true they did have one lawyer from DOJ who helped them out.
And I remember as we're waiting for the verdict, Rudy Giuliani's son pointed to this lawyer and talked about how wrong that was, never been done before.
In fact, it's quite common for DOJ to help out in a big case.
But this case was brought by the Manhattan DA.
So that's one thing to make clear.
The decision to bump it up to a felony, which Trump did not contest.
He made many motions, but he didn't make a single motion.
His lawyers didn't make a single motion against bumping it up from a misdemeanor to a felony, which is done in many cases involving business fraud.
This was not some unique case to bump this up from a misdemeanor to a felony.
There's certain aggravating conditions that apply and that have been upheld by higher courts.
And so, you know, a lot of the armchair legal analysts, many of whom didn't spend a day in the courtroom or in the overflow room, or maybe they spent one or two days there, didn't read the motions, didn't read the judges' decisions on the motions.
They're, frankly, not as informed as I am about the legal complexities of this case.
And I believe it will all be upheld on appeal.
As to what Bill Clinton, who was, by the way, impeached, you mentioned John Edwards.
He was prosecuted.
So you're making it sound as if Clinton and Edwards got away scot-free.
And by the way, there's not any evidence on them coding hush money payments as legal expenses.
Their cases differed somewhat from the Trump case.
So, you know, each of these cases, they vary a little bit.
This one was a very exciting case, quite fascinating, not just because of the legal complexities, but because of the testimony about basically a conspiracy to change the results of, to affect the results of the 2016 election, which, by the way, is illegal under New York state law, which also came into this case.
So there are a number of statutes that were applied, and it's why so many people agree with the judge, so many people who are in the courtroom agree with the judge that there was overwhelming evidence of guilt in this case.
Patty in New Jersey in Atlantic City, Independent Line.
Good morning, and thank you, Cease, for taking my call.
I so appreciate being able to ask a journalist this question, which is my theory, because I watch a lot of news and you don't really get to talk to the journalists.
And my theory, Mr. Alter, is I feel that the media kind of elected Donald Trump in an effort to be fair.
What the media, with the help of the Democrats who did nothing but bash President Biden for the last four years, focus on every little thing with him in a negative way, kind of normalized Mr. Trump.
I'm from Atlantic City.
I'm from Philadelphia, but I live in Atlantic City.
There's so much to write about Donald Trump, how he treated people, how he sued people, regular people.
He never shook the hands of a construction worker.
And the media should have been reporting things like his womanized him.
He got me at the sexual assault.
I don't understand how somebody could be elected, but I feel that the media kind of elected him.
I think of a Walter Cronkite moment where he would take the piece of paper and say what President Trump said and say, no, I'm sorry.
This is a lie and throw it in the trash can.
When you normalize somebody where starting with the CNN town hall, you just can't normalize somebody who's a salesman.
I think we got your point, Patty.
Thank you.
We'll let our guest answer.
Yeah, I think you're on to something.
I'm a little reluctant when we talk about the media as a whole, because there were a number of good stories and there were a number of bad stories.
And so going back to the days when I was Newsweek's media critic in the 1980s and 90s, which I write about some in the book, you know, you need to draw distinctions.
But I agree there was a tremendous amount of misinformation and normalization.
And the misinformation resulted from a kind of a new structure to our media, which is siloed now.
And so a lot of people didn't even get basic information because they were just, you know, following Twitter to have their views validated.
And they weren't getting some of the reporting that you mentioned.
In other cases, they were getting it, but getting it with a lot of spin.
There was spin on the left, too.
So we're living in a different media structure than we used to that contributed to this.
But I also think there's a numbing that goes on because, you know, with Trump, every time you think he's touched bottom, he crashes through the floor.
And there's something else.
And we've now been, you know, we've now been through this since 2015.
We're 10 years into what I think historians will call the Trump era.
And we just, I mean, take what he did, you know, in the last couple of days.
He called up Wayne Gretzky, the Canadian hockey star, and urged him to run for Premier of Canada so that he could have one of his people, like another celebrity, running Canada so that he could run Canada too.
And he's referring to Canada as a state, like he called Pierre Trudeau the governor.
He's trying to threaten Panama on the canal, which was legally turned over to them 25 years ago.
And they've done a great job managing it.
And they've said that they will always continue to manage it, not let the Chinese or anybody else take it over, including the Americans.
And so he's returning to issues that have been resolved and just acting in non-normal ways.
And so when the caller talks about normalization, she is really on to something.
And this is what we have to be on guard for in the next four years: is that certain, you know, he said that he would suspend the Constitution in certain cases.
He said that during the campaign and use the government to seek retribution, quote unquote, against his enemies.
These are unconstitutional things, and we shouldn't be normalizing them as we move forward.
Mr. Alter, I want to ask you: we don't have time to explore it all, but when it comes to that media criticisms and former President Trump, you wrote a recent piece taking a look at the Disney ABC News decision when it comes to that settlement.
Weave that into the conversation as far as how the media, as you see it, treats the former president, particularly in this case.
Well, you know, that case, the ABC News case, involved George Stephanopoulos interviewing Nancy Mace, who had been a victim, she said, of rape.
And Stephanopoulos said that there was a finding in this civil case in New York, not the case that I covered, a civil case in New York involving Eugene Carroll, who recovered $83 million because a jury believed that Donald Trump had committed sexual abuse against her.
The judge in that case said that you could, even though New York law defined rape very narrowly, that generically you could define it as rape.
So Stephanopoulos used that term and Trump sued.
And instead of letting it go to trial or otherwise settling for an apology, ABC News and Disney, which because of its experience with Ron DeSantis in Florida, very much needs to get on Trump's right side, they caved and they settled when they would have, according to almost most accounts, they would have very likely won this case.
And that was another act of what experts on dictatorship call anticipatory obedience, obeying in advance.
This is what strong men all over the world rely on, obeying in advance.
So they don't have to throw people in jail or do all kinds of things that we associate with dictators, because a lot of people will just bow down to them in advance so they don't get hurt.
Now, some of this has been, I think, wrongly portrayed, like giving money to his inaugural committee.
That's done with every new president.
That's not a big deal.
But when you fold your cards, if you're a news organization, when you don't really have to, you send a signal that people should censor themselves.
Not just be careful, as all journalists should.
You don't want to libel and slander people.
You need to have the facts on your side.
But what it does is sends a message to pull in your horns and not aggressively cover the president.
And going back to the 1790s, to the George Washington administration, we've relied on the press, which is the only industry that is mentioned in our Constitution, to aggressively cover the president.
And we can't, we really should not be doing things like folding our tents in advance that make it harder for us to do our jobs.
At WashingtonMonthly.com is where you can find that article from Jonathan Alter: Four Ways to Unbend the Media's Knee.
Let's hear from Robert in Florida, Democrats line.
Robert in Florida, hello.
Hello.
You're on?
Can you hear me?
Yep, go ahead, please.
Yeah, I wanted to ask Mr. Alter what his opinion is regarding why so many people of the electorate voted for an obvious con artist.
I think of Herman Geering.
waiting trial in Nuremberg when he was interviewed by an American journalist, an army captain, and asked, how did the Nazis, such a small group of Nazis, manage to persuade the German people to eliminate a major minority, the Jewish people, the handicapped and others and persuade them to take over Europe,
which obviously was a hopeless cause ultimately and cost the German people so much in life and reputation.
And the answer that Herman Gehring, who was of course appointed by Hitler to be his head of the Luftwaffe and the second in command of the Third Reich, he answered very briefly, lies.
If you tell the same lie often enough, time and time again, little by little, people begin to believe it.
And I'm wondering what your opinion is as to how this obvious con artist managed to fool such a major proportion of the electorate and whether or not technology, changes in technology, for example, the disappearance of small town newspapers that people used to rely upon and the replacement of this form of media with the social media run by billionaires, essentially,
such as the one that Trump has made his buddy buddy.
Gotcha.
Got your point, Robert.
Thank you.
And Mr. Alter, let me narrow the question a bit.
Why do you think people were willing to look past Mr. Trump's legal issues in order to vote for him?
You can answer the caller's question, but I'm interested, in light of your book, why do you think that is?
Well, I think that immigration and inflation just became more important for voters than Trump's legal situation.
And I understand that.
I mean, inflation hits everyone.
It's in some ways worse politically for an incumbent.
You know, and I wrote a biography of Jimmy Carter, which the cover is right there.
You know, and it destroyed his presidency because it hits 100%, whereas unemployment hits fewer people.
So inflation is disastrous politically, and it really hurt Biden and Harris.
And then immigration, you know, Biden didn't start soon enough on trying to address this problem.
And he and later Harris paid.
So those were more important for voters.
I get that.
I get that your pocketbook or your sense of what the United States should be in terms of immigration might take precedence over, you know, even choice or whether the president is a con man.
But I share the caller's puzzlement about this.
And I think historians will be grappling with this for generations.
And I do in American Reckoning, a good chunk of this book is about grappling with the exact question that the caller asked, including where the Hitler comparisons like don't make sense, because I don't normally like to go there, and where they actually make a lot of sense and where Trump himself has brought Hitler into the conversation.
And Mussolini.
So I try to put Trump in the context of these strong men and why, why do they succeed?
Because demagoguery works.
When you play on people's fears, it works.
Not all the time, but a lot of the time.
And what we had never seen before was a demagogue who told lies and played on people's fears at the very top.
We'd had Joe McCarthy and Huey Long, you know, one Republican, one Democrat, and other kind of local or state demagogues in our history, but nobody at the level of Trump.
And then the caller also raised a really important point.
So local news, and I made a documentary for HBO, two fine local journalists named Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill.
Local news are the lungs of democracy and have been since the birth of the republic.
Because if you're not informed, you can't make good decisions at the polling place.
And all over the country, local newspapers have closed and some have been replaced by local websites, but not at the same level.
And you can actually draw a map of news deserts where they don't have any weekly, much less daily local newspaper, and Trump country.
And it's almost a perfect fit.
Congruent, the Trump map on top of the news desert map.
And this is alarming because democracy requires at least a semi-informed electorate.
And I'm not saying that Trump voters were not informed.
In many cases, they were very informed, like a lot of viewers today.
They chose to vote on different issues as is their right.
But I do think that it's hard to convince people if they're not getting the news.
So there was a really amazing clip this fall of Senator Mark Kelly talking to a guy in a MAGA cap who's a veteran, as Kelly is.
And he says, the guy in the MAGA cap, the Trump supporter, says, you know, how can you oppose Trump?
He's the best.
He's the best for veterans.
And Kelly says, well, you know, General Kelly, no relation, who was his chief of staff, said that he was a fascist.
And his Secretary of Defense said he was terrible for veterans and that he would mock our war dead and say they were suckers and losers.
And this is firsthand testimony.
Senator Kelly is telling the guy in the MAGA hat.
And the guy in the MAGA hat says, he's been really on fire pro-Trump.
He says, I never heard that.
I never knew that General Kelly and General Mattis said this.
Never, because he's just in his silo.
He's not watching C-span when Democrats are on.
He's not, you know, watching anything except FOX and maybe listening to talk radio and whatever.
Whatever his sources of information are, he didn't even hear that Trump had called our war dead suckers and losers, and that's not an allegation, you know.
Do you believe that Trump's longest serving chief of staff just made that up?
You have to be pretty far in the Trump tank to believe that Trump never said that and never disrespected our our veterans.
So I just mentioned that to give some sense of how siloed our our information has been.
And I deal with this in American Reckoning.
Uh, one more call.
This is from Jay in Florida, Republican Line.
Go ahead yeah hi, how are you?
I'm kind of glad i'm the last person that called, because now i've gotten to hear what you've had to say in between all the callers and I want you to know that if you do a little research on this particular author, you'll see that his bias is worn out on his sleeve and it is on the show here.
It's extremely uh, disturbing to see that what I guess they call Trump derangement system syndrome has been kicked up a notch or two by this author.
You're man.
You have quoted a lot of things that are not true, but what the worst thing is is, since i've been here listening to this entire program, you have called him a rapist, you have called him a con artist.
You have compared him to Hitler.
These are the things that divide America and if you want to continue to divide America, keep writing books like this and keep having C-span promote this for the last month since he's been elected.
This is ridiculous, C-span.
Stop the hate caller.
Check our, check the record.
Check the record on what we put on air as far as mr Trump is concerned.
But, mr Alter, go ahead, yeah.
So a couple of things.
First of all, i'm paid to express my opinions.
I've been a columnist for 40 years okay, so i'm not like a reporter for the Associated Press.
You can call that bias.
I call it opinion backed by reporting and fact.
And you talk about hate and you say that it's people like me who are introducing hate.
I write in my book about my too close relationship with John Mccain, Republican.
Okay, the idea that people like me are introducing hate when we've had a hate monger in our politics for a decade, you know, this is not really, I don't think, a fair-minded assessment of who the major divisive figure in our politics is.
Donald Trump yesterday, on christmas, had an opportunity to have a unifying message, say, we're one country.
Wish everybody merry christmas.
Instead, what did he do?
He nursed his grievances on Christmas day, spitting out the hate.
So, really honestly, and with all due respect to the caller, it takes a lot of nerve for Trump Supporters to say it's the critics who began the hate.
That's not an underranged assessment of the last 10 years of our politics.
But in terms of being biased against Donald Trump, I plead guilty.
Yeah, I have thought for a long time that he's a con man.
Going back to when I interviewed him in the 90s, he threatened to sue me for something true I said about him in a documentary.
So, yes, I've thought this man is a danger for a very, very long time.
Jonathan Alter's book is called American Reckoning Inside Trump's Trial and My Own, part of our holiday authors week.
Mr. Alter, thank you for your time.
Thanks so much for having me.
We will return to the question we started off with this morning when it comes to the president-elect's plans for mass deportation, whether you support or oppose those plans.
If you support those plans and you want to tell us why, 202748-8000, if you oppose them, 202748-8001.
If you're an immigrant in this country and you want to give your perspective too, 202748-8002 is how you do that.
We will take those calls when Washington Journal continues.
Sunday on C-SPAN's Q&A, Don Scott, Virginia's newly elected Democratic Speaker of the House of Delegates and the state's first black speaker in 405 years, talks about his life, including spending almost eight years in prison.
I had never been in trouble before.
I had served my country, and I was hoping that I would get a little more grace and maybe get the judge has some latitude to go before it.
And he probably could have given me even more time than he did.
But I remember hearing my mother, when he said 10 years, you know, she couldn't believe it.
And that yelp of pain.
It always stays with me.
And it's always motivating.
And it always lets me know how fragile our freedom is and how perilous it is.
And if you make one wrong move sometimes, it could be literally the end of your life as you know it.
Virginia's Democratic House Speaker, Don Scott, Sunday night at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app.
This week, C-SPAN digs into its archives to present President-elect Donald Trump's nominees in their own words, discussing policy, politics, and their relationship with the president-elect.
On Friday, President-elect Trump's nominee for Education Secretary, Linda McMahon.
Our marathon continues on Monday, December 30th with Tulsi Gabbard.
And then on Tuesday, December 31st, we'll hear from Dr. Mehmet Oz and Mr. Trump's nominee for FBI Director, Kash Patel.
Watch Trump nominees in their own words this week at 8 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 2.
Democracy is always an unfinished creation.
Democracy is worth dying for.
Democracy belongs to us all.
We are here in the sanctuary of democracy.
Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies.
American democracy is bigger than any one person.
Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected.
We are still at our core a democracy.
This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.
Washington Journal continues.
The incoming Trump administration has promised that on day one, mass deportation efforts will take place in the United States.
We're asking you in this hour if you support or oppose those efforts.
If you support them, you can call and tell us why at 202-748-8000.
If you oppose them, 202-748-8001.
We have set aside a line for immigrants in the United States.
And if you want to give your perspective and thoughts on this effort by the Trump administration, the incoming Trump administration, 202748-8002 is how you do that.
Text us at 202-748-8003.
And as always, you can post on Facebook and on X.
It was recently at that turning point action event that took place in Arizona that the president-elects person to handle border issues, Tom Holman, talked about warnings that he gave so-called sanctuary cities when it comes to efforts of mass deportation.
Here's a portion of what he had to say: We will not let you prevent us from saving the American communities from illegal alien crime.
It's not going to happen.
We're going, we're coming.
So, even though I say we're going to prioritize criminal threats and national security threats out of the gate, that's a fact.
However, when sanctuary cities won't let us into the jail to arrest a bad guy in the safety and security of that county jail, which means they're going to release that criminal back into the immigrant community, which puts the immigrant community at risk of crime.
It puts our officers at great risk rather than arresting a guy in the safety and security of a county jail where he don't have weapons.
Now, we got to go to the community, find him.
We ask access to who knows what weapons.
You're putting the community at risk, you're putting officers at risk, you're putting the alien at risk.
And I'm going to give you exactly what you don't want.
You don't want to put us in jail?
All right, so I'll send a whole bunch of agents into your community, and we'll find the bad guy.
And when we find the bad guy, he's probably going to be with others, others that aren't a priority apprehension.
But guess what?
They're getting arrested too.
So you're going to get exactly what you don't want: more arrests in your communities.
I don't want to do that.
I'd much rather be safe with the agents to arrest a guy in the county jail, but they don't let us in.
Fine.
You're not going to stop us.
We'll go to the community and we will find him.
You're not going to stop us.
Put all the roadblocks you want.
It's not going to work.
We're going to do this because American people demand it.
You gave President Trump a mandate and we're going to make sure that mandate's held up.
On the front page of the New York Times story taking a look at local officials and the role they may play in any mass deportation effort by the Trump administration, they highlight the San Diego region.
Like many communities that hug the southern border, saw a sharp drop in migrants entering the U.S. after the Biden administration made it harder to apply for asylum.
But thousands of newcomers who had crossed the border haven't been forgotten.
And even as many of them made their way to other corners of the country, some remain in and around San Diego.
Now, with President-elect Donald Trump pledging to carry out mass deportations, leaders in San Diego have been weighing how far to go in trying to protect people vulnerable to deportation and how much local law enforcement should cooperate with federal agents.
Such discussions are unfolding around the country after Mr. Trump won back the White House, promising to curb immigration and tighten up border security.
There's more there.
The New York Times website is where you can find that story asking if you support or oppose these mass deportation efforts.
Let's start with Mike.
He's in Florida on our support line.
Mike, good morning.
You're first up.
Good morning.
Yes, I-1000 support the deportations.
They broke the law.
Breaking the law has consequences.
Why would we reward them with taxpayer benefits for breaking the law and put our national security at risk?
This is common sense.
If they break the law, there's consequences.
That's true in my life.
That's true in all of our lives.
The safety of the American people comes first.
This is a no-brainer.
And we need to start spending our tax dollars more wisely.
It is ridiculous that this is even a debate.
It should never be a debate as to the fact that there are consequences for breaking the law.
So kudos to President Trump.
Kudos to his administration for tackling this head-on.
It is now time that the media reports the murders and the rapes and all of the destruction that this has caused to our great country.
So I am 1,000 in support of this.
That's Mike in Florida in a follow-up interview with the New York Post.
The headline that you can read online elsewhere is about $86 billion that Mr. Holman says that he would need to start the efforts of mass deportation, should that be approved by Congress.
Let's go to Herman in Dallas, Texas on our opposed line.
Hello.
Yeah, how are you doing, Pedro?
I'm going to start off with the maxim: those whom the gods would destroy, the old grit maxim, those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
And that's what I think of this idea of mass deportation.
And I look around here in Dallas and I don't see the people, these Mexican Americans running or being nervous about this or anything, just going about their business.
And I think it's because they know that they're so integrated into our society that what Trump is proposing is impossible.
It's just nearly just practically impossible.
And that if he tries it, I think he's smart enough to know that if he tries it, he'll probably be out of office in six months.
So what he's probably going to do is, being as smart and wily as he is, is he's going to deport some people and make a big slash about it.
And if supporters will swallow anything, they will, you know, they'll go to bed saying, yeah, he did it.
Yeah, he did it.
He did it.
He mass deported all of these millions and millions of people.
Well, isn't he great?
And so because he can, you know, convince people of anything.
And that's been demonstrated.
So, okay.
Jeff, Jeff, in Missouri, on our opposed line, your next stop.
Hello.
Yeah, I oppose.
This is just another Trump stunt.
If he was serious about immigration, he would have kept what Obama had in place, which he basically crashed that, which is probably the reason why we had a lot of the issues with migration.
So it's just another, you know, smoke and mirror that Trump does, you know, play into his base and the people that are, you know, off in these bubbles that they don't hear the normal news.
I mean, they would have heard the record amount of people that Obama deported, and they would have been asking, okay, well, why didn't Trump keep that in place?
Instead, they just follow along with whatever he says.
So it's just smoke and mirrors, another lies, and his being a bully, which is, you know, what bullies do.
They, you know, harass people and, you know, come up with reasons to make life meritable for.
On our support line, Tina calls us from Canada.
Oh, yes.
Now, you Americans have really pissed us off.
You have let the northern border open and your border guards in from Quebec, from America to Quebec.
Your border guards walked them up and let them cross into our country.
Now, not only that, your New Yorker government gave them bus tickets, airline tickets to fly them into our country.
Now, this has got to stop.
Before you guys shoot your mouth off that we didn't protect our northern border, you guys should have been protecting it because on Fox News a year and a half ago, they mentioned that.
So, do you think your prime minister has done a good job in protecting the northern border himself?
Hey, why should we have your immigrants come over when your border crossers that are there, let them come over?
Sure.
Your country has a border policy in itself, and he's recently the prime minister has pledged more money to strengthen the northern border.
What do you think of that?
That's what it did say.
Let's put it to say we have an idiot running our country.
Okay?
Him and Joe Biden should be together in the loony bin, as far as I'm concerned.
Okay, let's go to Jim.
Jim in New York on our support line.
Go ahead.
Yeah, hi.
Let me just first say that, you know, I got a lot of our news from the newspapers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
So you're not talking to some local yokel.
I support it because there's a lot of things people aren't talking about.
People don't read the graves of arrests and find out who used to do the farm work, okay?
Stop saying that we don't do these jobs.
We don't do these jobs because they don't pay, okay?
So we got slavery here.
So what I got here is I call all the time.
I got the house.
Let's start with the basics.
Do you support this mass deportation or effort?
Of course, we're steeped in it.
I'm steeped in it here.
I'm going nuts living here.
I don't have enough money to move out of here, even though I'm a retired lab instructor from the Roche Marine Academy at Kings Point.
It's just the quality of life here is terrible.
You got as many as nine adults in the house plus kids, and these are single-family houses, and they're not paying the taxes on that because of the sixth, what is it, the fourth or sixth amendment.
They can't go in the houses and check to see how many apartments are in them.
They slice up these houses into small sections and they're overcrowded.
And let me bring up another point here.
Prior to the 1930s.
Well, Colin, let's stick with the topic.
Ahem, why do you think that the president elect will be successful in this effort?
I don't know if he's going to be successful.
I don't know.
This place, this place alone, Central Island and Brentwood.
Look, I belong to the civic community and I go to the town hall meetings and I bring this up all the time.
They've got cars on the sidewalks, entire blocks.
There's no respect at all for Lord Order here.
On Christmas Eve, I had fireworks going on all night and parties so loud you could hear them miles away.
They have no respect for our way of life.
They're not assimilating.
Okay, that's Jim in New York.
That's Jim in New York.
The Washington Post this morning takes a look at mass deportation, but also takes a look at the topic of family detentions and a story that you can find online.
This is by Nick Mirnoff saying that Tom Holman, the person who's been tapped by the administration to handle border issues, will not be directing ICE operations as part of the White House role, but he will work closely on border and immigration issues with Governor Christy Noam of South Dakota, Mr. Trump's pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, as acting director of ICE during Mr. Trump's first term.
Holman drove the, quote, zero tolerance policy that separated more than 4,000 children from their parents soon after they crossed into the border into the United States.
He said Mr. Trump's new enforcement campaign will seek to deport families together, but he acknowledged that the government cannot remove children who are U.S. citizens, leaving it to parents to decide whether they would split up the family.
More there at the Washington Post.
And when it's mentioned, Governor Noam, she's one of those profiles on C-SPAN 2 that you can watch today.
A 24-hour effort taking a look at these nominees by the Trump administration, the president-elect, and those he would like to see in various positions within his cabinet, including Christy Noam.
An all-day marathon taking a look at their own words and things they've said about various topics over the years that our C-SPAN archives have taken in.
And if you're interested in finding out what these nominees, where they come from, their philosophy, things they talk about, stay tuned to C-SPAN 2 all-day.
You can follow along on C-SPAN now.
And C-SPAN.org is also a way that you can see this all-day marathon of the Trump nominees in their own words.
We've set aside a line for those immigrants in the United States.
This is where Ed's calling in in New Jersey.
Ed, hello.
Ed in New Jersey.
Hello.
No, I already spoke.
You're on, Ed.
Go ahead, please.
Okay, let's hear from Loretta.
Loretta's in Connecticut on our support line.
Hi.
Hello.
Loretta, you're going to have to stop listening to the television and just go ahead, please.
Okay.
My question is: these people from all over the world want to come here because we have the best country in the world.
We have freedom, we have democracy, and I want people to know this isn't a freebie for them.
They have to work on getting here.
They have to have papers or somebody that they can come and be with.
We can't open our doors to the world.
We don't have enough to give the world.
A freebie to them.
Okay.
Loretta there in Connecticut.
Some of you on our Facebook page.
This is Janet saying, I'm not a Trump supporter, Janet Willis.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but my opinion is we need better border controls and illegals should be deported on a case-by-case basis.
We should not give them a handoff for coming here illegally.
Andrea Prowell, also on Facebook, saying that she opposes the effort, adding it's expensive and will go against our right to privacy as citizens.
They will have to ask every person for identification and identify undocumented.
I want my privacy from being searched, and this goes against my constitutional rights.
Again, Facebook is an outlet.
If you want to post your thoughts there at facebook.com/slash C-SPAN on X as well at C-SPANWJ.
On our line for immigrants in Texas, this is Wilbert.
Wilbert, hello.
Hello.
You're on, go ahead.
Yes.
What people fail to understand is this: immigration is hurting our school system.
When you have a school system with kids in it, and you got four or five different languages in the school system, in the classroom, how in the world can the teacher teach our kids when she got four or five other kids that speak four or five different languages that she don't understand?
It affects our school system where our kids can't learn because the teacher is spending more time trying to understand what the other kids are saying.
Okay, Wilbert, before we go too far, you're calling on our line for immigrants.
What's your story as far as your immigration story?
Well, I live in Northeast Texas, and I see people hauling on buses from Houston.
Caller, Color, let me clarify.
Are you an immigrant yourself?
No, sir, I'm not.
I am an immigrant.
Okay, you're calling in on the wrong line, and I apologize for that, but I'm going to let you go.
I'm going to give you a chance to call it on one of the lines that best represents you.
Again, they're on the screen.
If you support these efforts by the administration, it's 202-748-8000.
If you oppose them, 202-748-8001.
And for those immigrants, 202-748-8002 is how you can call and give us your thoughts on these efforts on mass deportation by the incoming Trump administration.
Let's hear from Sandy.
Sandy's in Ohio on our support line.
Go ahead.
Sandy in Ohio.
Hello.
Hi.
Yes, I'm sorry.
You're ongoing, please.
Yes, I support the deportation plan.
When Biden was running for election, he said I would surge the border.
His job as president was to protect the main job is to protect the American people.
And he has let this border come.
Everybody from everywhere come in, and they're committing crimes.
They're throwing away their IDs before they come in the country so they can't be easily removed.
And that's against the law.
They're breaking the law when they first come in.
And a lot of these gangs are coming in, and they're taking over different states, different cities in different states a lot.
They're gangs, and they're going to be, they're killing people.
I mean, I don't know how, and why do you have a thing saying immigrants?
Of course, an immigrant isn't going to say, I want to be deported.
I mean, why you even have that there is silly.
Well, it gives them a chance to express their perspectives on the issue, just like we've had a chance to hear from you.
Let's hear from Liz in New Jersey on our opposed line.
Hello.
Good morning.
I'm on the opposed line because what's being offered here is just concepts of a plan of deportation.
The president has no idea how he could rid the country of 12 or 15 million illegals.
I mean, let's get a grip here.
That is not going to be possible.
And I think we do need a new immigration bill to task the Congress and sign into the law of our land.
But it has to be given with some degree of forethought as to who we need to immigrate and focus on those groups coming in.
But we're not getting any sensible plan.
We're just getting Trump stirring his bucket of hatred against immigrants.
And yet he married two immigrants.
His mother was an immigrant.
So there's absolutely no logic here.
So I think we could get a bill through Congress, but he stopped the last bill that was heading through Congress.
So he doesn't want to correct the problem.
He wants to have the issue and keep stirring that bucket of hate.
We're going to have four years of that ahead.
Nothing to look forward to.
Okay, Liz, there in New Jersey.
The Wall Street Journal this morning has a profile of so-called dreamers in the United States.
They offer a picture of a gentleman named Oscar Silva, a graduate student who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child, and his American wife, Natalie Taylor, who's a teacher.
This story highlights the fact that Silva is one of more than 400,000 students in American colleges without permanent legal status whose futures hang in limbo as they await what Mr. Trump has pledged to be the largest deportation program in U.S. history.
Transition officials, including incoming borders arc Tom Holman, have publicly started to narrow the effort scope to focus primarily on gang members, fugitives, and those with criminal histories.
Still, Holman recently has reinforced his intention on mass arrests.
Quote, if you're in the country illegally, you've got a problem, he said in a recent CNN interview.
And the Wall Street Journal is we can read more from that story.
On our support line, this is Paul in Alabama, Mobile.
Go ahead.
Yeah, just on your comments, sir, you've referred to our president as Mr. Trump.
I would like and ask that you respect his office and his position and call him what he is, president-elect or President Trump.
I fully back his deportation because nobody is above the law except Biden's son, who gets a pardon.
So, yeah, kick him out.
Okay, Rosemary, Virginia, on our opposed line.
Hello.
Yes, thanks for taking my call.
I'm opposed to all of this mess that's going to take place.
I don't think it's going to happen.
It's just another boogeyman that he used to get elected.
But I want everybody out there to think about the food prices.
When and if this does happen, are you going to get out there and do the work that these immigrants was coming in here to do?
All they wanted to do was to work.
So I can tell you, put on your shoes because you're about to get out there.
Thanks for taking my call.
One of the people in recent days talking about his perspective on mass deportations is the Democratic governor of Illinois, J.B. Pritzker.
He spoke about the Trump administration's plans for deportation and how he plans to respond to it.
He made these comments earlier this month.
We have really three groups of immigrants who are in the state of Illinois today, right?
We've got documented immigrants, people who are here legally, and they have documents that allow them to work or allow them to be here.
They've been put in a position of fear by what the Trump administration has threatened.
They have relatives who are undocumented.
And these are often, the documented folks are often hardworking people following the law.
In fact, almost all.
And so I'm going to protect them.
We have migrants who've come to the state since August of 2022, sent here, as you know, by the governor of Texas.
Those folks are also legal to be in the United States.
They are awaiting asylum hearings.
And it's my obligation to protect them as well.
Anybody that's here in this country that's here and has documentation is here legally.
Of course, I'm obligated to protect them just as I would anybody else, any citizen of the United States.
Law enforcement, the government, et cetera.
The third group is our people who are undocumented.
And let me be clear up front.
Violent criminals who are undocumented and convicted of violent crime should be deported.
I do not want them in my state.
I do not think they should be in the United States.
But there are an awful lot of people who have lived here, and I think we run into them every day, who have lived here for a decade or two decades or more, who are undocumented still for a variety of reasons.
By the way, often they've tried very hard to become documented, to use the levers that are available to them.
But they're here and they're holding down jobs and they're paying taxes that they don't get any benefit from.
And I believe it's my obligation to protect them too.
are residents of the state of Illinois.
Speaking of Governor Pritzker, he came up in a recent opinion piece by Ken Cuccinelli.
He served as the acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security in the previous Trump administration.
Mr. Cuccinelli writing that Governor J.B. Pritzker threatened Mr. Trump's efforts saying, if you come from my people, you come through me.
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero promised to protect illegal immigrants from Mr. Trump's deportation efforts.
Denver Mayor Mike Johnson fantasized about a quote Tiananmen Square moment with local police and citizens fighting off federal enforcement officials seeking to remove non-citizen lawbreakers from his city, going as far as saying he's willing to go to jail.
As incoming borders are Tom Holman bluntly stated in response to Johnson, if he's willing to go to jail, I'm willing to put him in jail.
Specifically, if Pritzker wants to make federal officials go through him to enforce the law, then along the way, those federal officers can arrest him for violating Section 11324 of Title VIII of the United States Code.
Under this provision of the U.S. Code, individuals facing federal prison time for knowingly concealing, harboring, shielding, or attempting to conceal illegal aliens from federal authorities.
That recently was in the Washington Examer.
If you want to read more of that, let's go to Jerry on our support line.
He's in Kentucky.
Hello.
Hello, Pedro.
I'd like to talk to the American people.
This is a lawmakers problem they put on the American people because they're not doing their job.
Yes, I do support sending the illegal criminals back.
There's no way you can send everybody back.
The money that has been spent on people coming in and all the other stuff, trying to get them back across is going to cost billions and billions, which should have been spent on American veterans and the homeless.
So it's time to start getting the lawmakers out of office and get the American people take control of the government that works for them and not their self.
Thank you, Pedro.
From Steve on our opposed line, this is in Ohio.
Hi there.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My thing is this.
I think that if you want to deport the illegals or whoever, I think everybody needs to be looked at.
Everybody in the United States needs to prove that they're American citizens, no matter who you are.
And that's where we need to start.
And once you do that, I think everybody in the United States will see how this actually will work.
What's the philosophy of casting such a wide net that way?
Because that's the only way we can tell.
You can't look at somebody and tell their illegal alien.
I mean, hey, I'm a person of color.
You're a person of color.
You should have to prove who you are.
I have to prove who I am.
I've been here my whole life, so I don't have a problem with it.
Nobody should have a problem with it.
We're a country of immigrants, I believe.
So that's my reasoning.
Okay.
Let's hear from William on our support line in Atlanta.
Hello.
Hey, I support it because the Hispanic population supports it.
They supported Donald Trump's policies.
They voted him into office.
So I guess that's what they want.
And I'm sure they know who are the criminals that are around them.
And I guess they want to, you know, to tell on them.
And I guess they may be in kind of in fear of them.
I had to look at it in their eyes.
I'm like, all right, if they're here, some of them are forced to smuggle drugs.
Maybe they don't want their family to be harmed back in Mexico or wherever they're from.
So I'm just going to support them because they supported the president.
And that's what they want.
They want mass deportation.
So give it to them.
William in Atlanta.
Again, we'll continue on.
And again, if you want to give your thoughts on these deportation efforts that have been promised by the incoming Trump administration, 20274880000, if you support these mass deportation efforts, 2027488001, if you oppose them.
If you are an immigrant in the United States, 2027488002 is how you can make your thoughts known.
The American Immigration Council's Dara Lind in a recent piece takes a look at this mass deportation policy by the incoming administration and writes in parts the following, saying, who gets targeted first?
Who is most at risk in the days after a second Trump inauguration will depend in part on which of these problems the administration tackles first.
If Trump officials get a diplomatic breakthrough with a country previously deemed recalcitrant, expect large numbers of people to get arrested at their ICE check-ins and deported under existing removal orders.
If they don't, expect deportations to be limited to countries that are generally already willing to take in U.S. removal flights, like Mexico, Guatemala, Peru.
People with prior contact with the criminal justice system are politically appealing targets.
But if they haven't already been deported, it may be because their cases are complicated and will need to be worked out in court.
Again, that was in the New York Times last month, taking a look at these policies.
Let's go to Chase on our opposed line.
And Georgia, go ahead.
Good morning.
One of my main questions was, if he wants to deport everyone who's here illegally, how do they identify who's here illegally?
Because in the state of Georgia, we don't have a stop and identify law.
The police officer has to suspect you've committed a crime before they can stop you and ask for identification.
And so are they just going to stop everyone on the sidewalk?
Because this has been litigated in the 10th Circuit and the Supreme Court who said, no, stop and identify laws are not legal in the state of Georgia.
So I don't really understand how they plan on finding out who's here illegally and who here isn't.
And I haven't seen anything addressed on that.
I didn't know if you had more information.
There's the Associated Press a little bit before on this, but it kind of runs through some of the ways that this policy works, deportation policy.
Under the section of how immigration removals work in the field, it highlights a recent operation.
About a dozen officers gathered before 5 a.m. at a White Castle parking lot in the Bronx after putting on their body armor, checking their equipment.
They circled around for a briefing.
Besides the 23-year-old Ecuadorian man they were going for, they were going after a 36-year-old Mexican man convicted of forcibly touching a young girl and another Ecuadorian convicted of sexual abuse of a minor.
The first target, the 23-year-old man who pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old girl, was believed to be usually leaving the apartment building around 7 or 7.30.
Sometimes he was with a woman and child.
Light came on on the first floor of the apartment, an officer waiting outside over the radio.
And later, someone came out of the basement.
It's not our target.
They finally spotted him, swept him into the back of a vehicle, and quickly left the neighborhood.
Under the section of working with local law enforcement on these issues, this is what the Associated Press writes, saying some cities and states work with ICE to turn over people in the custody who aren't U.S. citizens, but adding that many left-leaning states and cities have so-called sanctuaries policies that limit that cooperation with federal immigration authorities.
In New York City, for example, ICE used to have that office at the jail to take custody of non-citizens.
It was in 2014 that Mayor Bill de Blasio signed legislation kicking out ICE.
His successor, Eric Adams, has shown willingness to receive some of these policies.
APnews.com is where Morse is there about mass deportations and some of the ways, the technical ways that it works.
And you can find that online if you want to read more for yourself.
Let's hear from Teddy, Teddy in South Dakota on our support line.
I'm on.
You're on, go ahead.
Hi.
This is Teddy.
I like to wish you a happy new year and everybody out there in Turtle Island.
I am in support of President-elect Trump on the mass deportation because, I mean, we're getting a lot of immigrants that are coming over here.
And then they, especially if they're like teachers or somebody coming from a different country with their visa card.
And next thing you know, the women end up pregnant and then they're automatic United States citizens and that gives them a visa green card to automatically be considered United States citizens.
And I feel that this incoming whoever Congress that's going to be in Washington right now in January, they all need to start changing that United States Constitution.
If it only took 39 people to change this Constitution way back in September 17th, 1787, then these people can change that constitution where we do not allow any more of these immigrants into our Turtle Island and where they have a kid and then end up being considered United States citizens, you know, and then pretty soon that kicks.
Let's hear from Bob.
Bob and Maryland, our line for immigrants.
Hello.
Yes.
My family immigrated from an Asian country 52 years ago.
And, you know, I'm no big fan of Donald Trump, but I do have to agree with his deportation policy.
And although we cannot, you know, deport all, I don't know, 12 to 20 million all at once, it can be down over time when we, if we do it slowly, little by little, starting with the criminals, of course.
And I mean, but my question to all those who support immigrants of any type, I mean, when does it stop?
I mean, when are we going to, you know, when are we going to prevent illegal immigrants and secure our border, you know, before, you know, the population grows to that of China or India.
Because I do not like to, I do not want to live in America that has 1.4 billion people in short time because of people from all over coming in to America illegally.
And while I'm at it, I'm also against the automatic birthright citizenship by birth because I can't think of any country in the any other country in the world that just does something like that.
At least one of the parents has a biological parent has to be a citizen of the country for some time before.
Bob, thank you.
Thank you.
Let's hear from Tara in New Jersey opposed line.
Yes.
Hi.
Good morning.
I oppose the policy because I think, first of all, Trump as a messenger is problematic.
He has his own history of hiring undocumented workers, both while in New York and in New Jersey.
And it is documented.
And then also with the busing of immigrants, Governors Abbott and DeSantis, when these Republican states the rising or the threat of rising crime, of course, they omit their responsibility in their actions when they bust migrants on false pretenses from their state to New York, to other states or cities like Chicago,
and then want to say, hey, your crime is out of control, without, of course, stating that they helped the situation.
They inflated the situation by busing migrants under false pretenses, okay?
Also, this proposition of taking our jobs.
First of all, I'm a black woman, okay?
And so when folks say taking jobs, I'm like, what kind of jobs are you saying they're taking?
Because migrants or undocumented workers, first of all, they don't hire themselves.
Okay?
Someone hired them.
All right.
So are we going to go after the employers as well?
And we saw how that worked out in the first administration of this man because many industries were affected once ICE rolled in, took crucial workers out of whatever, you know, situation of work they had, and it was stopped.
Okay, so how is it going to be any different?
Gotcha.
That's Tara there in New Jersey.
She mentioned Governor Abbott of Texas recently, the governor himself unveiled a new campaign designed to stop illegal immigration into Texas.
Here are some of his comments from last week.
We're here to expose the truth.
The truth to immigrants who are thinking about coming here.
The truth about the traffickers who assault so many of the women and children along the way.
We are launching a new campaign to deter illegal immigration into Texas.
Yesterday, we began putting up billboards, dozens of billboards, in Central America and in Mexico.
They inform potential illegal immigrants about the reality of what will happen to them if they try to enter Texas illegally.
These billboards, some of which you can see behind me, they tell the horror stories of human trafficking.
One says, many girls who try to migrate to Texas are kidnapped.
Another sign says, your wife and daughter will pay for their trip with their bodies.
One asks families thinking about sending their kids here, how much did you pay to have your daughter raped?
This is tough medicine.
Don is on our support line.
He is in Idaho.
Go ahead, please.
Yeah, I'd like to comment on the categories you have listed.
Suppose, support, oppose, and immigrants.
Immigrants is the wrong category.
Try illegal aliens.
Nobody has a problem with legal immigration.
It is illegal aliens that are coming here from every country.
Tens of thousands of Chinese, tens of thousands of Russians.
It is out of control.
They all need to be rounded up and taken out of this country.
There's 330 million legal Americans that could call ICE and say, I believe that's an illegal alien and let ICE take over from there.
And that's my opinion.
Thank you.
Down in Idaho there, 271,484 non-citizens removed 192 countries in fiscal year 24.
That's done by Immigrations and Custom Enforcement, according to a new report from them.
88,000 plus had charges of convictions for criminal activity.
3,700 plus known for suspected gang members.
237 known suspected terrorists.
And then eight human rights violators too.
Again, they put this out there.
You can find the information at the Immigrations and Custom Enforcement website.
This mass deportation effort by the incoming Trump administration is the topic.
If you support it, if you oppose it, call and tell us why.
202-748-8000.
If you support it, 202-748-8001.
If you oppose it, let's go to Carolyn.
Carolyn is in Flint, Michigan on our opposed line.
Hello, you're next.
Hi.
I definitely oppose it.
Yes, we need to work on our immigration and our laws, whatnot, the border.
Talking about the drugs, most of the drugs come through in vehicles.
It's not people carrying them in backpacks.
And the crime that happens, I mean, you know, we have criminals right here, regular citizens committing crimes.
The immigrants and people that cross the borders, yeah, they might have a crime, but they do a whole lot less criminal acts than, you know, regular citizens.
And when they do something, it gets blown out of performance, exaggerated.
And you'll see it over and over and over again, you know, in an ad.
I think it's just sad that they've been exploited so bad that, you know, they come here because they're starving or they, you know, yeah, they want to not be raped or they don't want their kids, you know, forced into gangs from wherever they came from and whatnot.
But we just have to have better laws.
And I believe that Harris was trying to get, you know, something going on.
And of course, Donald Trump, you know, nicks that at the last minute.
And he's the guy that hires illegal immigrants.
It's just terrible.
I think we just have to enforce the laws that we do have and let these people do what they do.
Let's hear from another Michigander.
This is Tim on our line for immigrants.
Hello.
Good morning.
Yeah.
I'm an immigrant.
I was born here, though.
Since everybody's talking about immigrants and all that stuff, you know, the problem is that I have.
Wait, let me clarify this.
How are you an immigrant?
Yeah, you were born here.
Well, that's what everybody's saying.
Is that immigration is important?
Caller, Carla, let's clarify.
Are you an immigrant or not?
Are you an immigrant or not to the United States?
Yes, I am.
How so?
What country from?
What country from?
I'm from the United States.
Okay, let's go to Lanita, Lanita, and Alabama on our support line.
Hello, you're next up.
Thank you for taking my call.
First of all, the lady, I think, from Michigan, she needs to get her head out of the sand.
This is only going to affect you if it's your child that has been raped and mutilated and chopped up and all that.
Until it rakes around your own doorstep, you're going to support them staying here.
Let me tell you a quick story.
I live in Fort Payne, Alabama.
It was the SOC capital of the world, okay?
Our jobs left here and went to Mexico, Honduras, and all these other places.
So why are they not staying where they come from and do our job that was sent to them?
Instead of coming over here and taking from us, They get everything free.
The senior citizens are suffering, and I am appalled.
And I encourage everybody to call their state representatives and complain about our benefits being taken from us and gave to them.
It's time it stops.
And yes, I support Donald Trump.
And it ain't about what Donald Trump done.
It's about Donald Trump now.
Okay, Lenita there in Alabama.
One of the people having concerns about the incoming administration's plans for deportation was California Senator Democratic Senator Alex Badilla.
In a recent Senate hearing taking a look at mass immigration policies, he spoke about what could happen with the Trump administration on this effort.
Here's a portion from that hearing earlier this month.
I can already hear some of the rebuttals from Republican colleagues to suggest that, well, he doesn't really mean all immigrants.
He's only talking about violent criminals.
Well, I wish I could believe that he's only committing to targeting violent criminals because we agree on that front.
But pardon me if I'm skeptical.
We've seen him.
We've seen Donald Trump in the past and how he operates.
Do you remember the Muslim bans he imposed early in his first term and the family separations at the border that we witnessed for years?
So I've seen enough to know that while he may plan to prioritize, in effect, he will be targeting all undocumented immigrants, which will inevitably include those without criminal convictions of any type.
Now, previous administrations of both parties, you saw some stats being presented, it's been the policy of previous administrations to prioritize the deportation of those with criminal convictions.
But what we're hearing from incoming President Trump isn't that.
And look at who he is putting in these pivotal roles to help him execute.
A loyalist and Christian Ohm at DHS, extremist Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, and Tom Homan as border czar, who told undocumented immigrants through the press, quote, you should be afraid, end quote.
Dreamers, farm workers, that's the message.
And he promised worksite raids to prosecute anyone who stands in their way.
That Senate hearing was earlier this month.
You can find it if you go to our website at cspan.org and search in Senate and immigration and other things when it comes to immigration policy.
Just to show you this headline from the Baltimore Sun just coming across not yesterday, yesterday, early, late morning, saying it's the American construction industry on its edge as President-elect Trump's promise of mass deportation looms, potentially impacting builder costs and labor availability.
Just to show you that headline, read more in the Baltimore Sun if you want to see more specifics there.
Let's hear from Patrick on our opposed line.
He's in Illinois.
Hello.
Yes.
Hello.
How you doing?
I just want to say that the major argument I hear is you broke our law.
You must go back.
All right.
I mean, nobody follows a bad law.
Look at prohibition.
The national 55 mile an hour speed limit law.
You think anyone just went 55?
You don't pick and choose a pot laws.
Oh, you get sent to prison 20 years ago for what's legal now.
I mean, immigration is broken.
We have to make a new law.
We had one, but as it is now, no one, I mean, we argue amongst ourselves it's bad.
It's bad.
So, I mean, we need a new law.
That's all.
Line for immigrants from Brooklyn.
This is Omar.
Hello.
Hi, I just wanted to point out the perspective that, you know, before we can address any of these crazy mass deportation plans, we need to fix the legal immigration system.
And I think that the only people that actually understand the legal immigration system and how it works, you know, when people say, oh, stand in line or do it, you know, wait your turn or whatever.
Nobody actually knows how this works.
And the people that know how this works are people like me who've been waiting, not waiting, but like navigating the system legally for 16 years.
How so?
Through different variety of visas.
And I bet you, not a single person on your support or opposed line can name any one of those visas or understand how they can stand in line or how they can obtain a green card or what the first step is.
And if they knew what it took, they would understand how grossly unfair it is.
What visa are you currently under?
Now it's a work visa.
And what country are you from?
Egypt.
And where's the status of your, I mean, you talked about the various visas you work on.
What's the current status that you're as far as I assume that are you trying to become an American citizen or maybe I'm assuming too much, but tell us your story.
No, I'm saying people can stay here for 15 years and not even obtain a green card.
It's extremely difficult.
And particularly for people from India or China, because they can only allot 7% of green cards to any one particular country.
So some people, you know, they may have the opportunity, they may get sponsored, but there's a 50 to 100 year wait.
Okay, let's hear from Miriam in Texas on our opposed line.
Hi there.
Yes, I oppose massive deportation because I truly believe that when there's a when people come over here and they work, they work the jobs that a lot of people don't want to work.
I'm going to use the analogy of like a household when a person, a household member has like a maid working in their house.
The reason a person wants a maid in their house is because the head of household wants to prioritize a job that is going to be paying well.
So she's focused on getting money for the household like with a good job while the maid gets paid.
And in return, she goes to her house and she supports her family.
And in return, she probably ends up sending her kids to school.
And the cycle of production continues.
So that's what happens when people come over here to our country.
It's just a cycle of production.
And a lot of people, I think that because they don't like Mexicans or they're racist, they use that as an excuse to create mass deportation.
But in the long run, when we have people from a lot of, well, not a lot of countries, but a diverse set of people that are willing to do those jobs that people don't want to do, they're just going to continue with the American economy.
Okay.
This is Tuck in Kansas on our support line.
Hi.
Good morning, Pedro.
I've been in the military for 40 years.
And actually, I retired at age 60.
But when we stand up and swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, military members should know that they give up most of those rights.
We give up rights to habeas corpus, search and seizure, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and most importantly, our criminal law is given over to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
We form a separate society from the American civilian populace, those citizens that we swear to protect.
It seems to me that people that have not yet sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States shouldn't have those constitutional rights quite yet.
They can work towards those, but they should have a separate society, much as the military has, with their own rules, and not be given all the constitutional rights of an average American citizen.
That's what I have to say.
One more call.
This will be from Carmen in New York, our line for immigrants.
Yes, my name is Carmen Leca, and I am a refugee from Cuba.
I came here in 1971 with my family, my parents, and my brother and sister.
And the government apparently paid for our flight from Cuba to Miami, and from Miami to Washington, D.C., and to Maryland.
That was my mother's cousin, was our sponsor.
And he wrote a letter to Cuba to the family, saying everybody who wants to come to the United States can apply for, you know, to come here.
And we fill out our papers.
And then seven years we waited in Cuba from 1964 to 1971 to come to the United States.
And when we got here, as soon as we got here, we started going to school.
And what I say is that when you say that those of the legal aliens don't pay, you know, don't pay taxes, they pay taxes.
And they spend not only the, you know, the money that it costs the government to bring us over, it also, we go to school for free.
And so it does cost money until those children are grown up.
But without family, we have health.
And within five years, my sister and I have gotten married.
I was 21.
My sister was 19 when we came.
We got married.
We became citizens.
And we have been productive.
My sister is a nurse.
I am a nurse.
I'm 74 now.
Not a nurse anymore.
Retired.
But we became citizens of this country.
And we are productive members of the society.
But that was a plunged way.
And it worked fine.
They have to have something like this.
Okay.
Okay.
Carmen, I apologize.
I apologize.
I have to stop you there.
Thank you for sharing your story with us.
Thank you to all who participated in this hour.
A couple things to leave you with.
Again, we've been telling you about the various nominees that the president-elect has chosen to be part of his cabinet.
Should they get through confirmation, you can hear what they had to say about things over the years in an all-day marathon, which we're calling Trump nominees in their own words.
Speeches and events featuring people like Kevin Hazett, like Chris Wright, like Christy Noam, who's been hopeful, if it goes through, the Trump administration hopes to put her as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.
Again, that takes place on C-SPAN too, all day long.
You can follow along on C-SPAN now, c-span.org if you want to go that route.
Also, this week, C-SPAN's airing a series of interviews with departing members of Congress and showing lawmakers and showing how lawmakers are giving their farewell speeches on the House and Senate floors.
Tonight, you're going to hear from Senators Debbie Stabenow, Bob Casey, and Mike Braun, as well as Representatives Derek Kilmer and Corey Bush.
That will be on C-SPAN at 9 o'clock tonight.
Again, you can follow along on the app and the .org as well.
That's it for our program today.
Another edition of Washington Journal comes your way tomorrow at 7 a.m.
We'll see you then.
The genome is basically the entire DNA instruction book of an organism.
All living organisms have a genome, including us.
Ours is this 3 billion letter script, A, C, G, and T, in just the right order.
It's a lot of information, to be sure.
If you tried to print out that information, which you have inside each of your cells and stacked it up on pages to try to see how tall it would be, is about the height of the Washington Monument.
That's a lot.
But when I was first getting interested in genetics, there was no reference copy of the human genome.
We had little bits and pieces of it scattered around, islands in the midst of a sea of ignorance.
And it became more and more clear by the late 1980s that if we were going to really make any progress understanding human genetics, we needed to have that reference copy of all 3 billion letters.
And it needed to be done right so you could trust it.
And that was the proposal for the Human Genome Project.
All this week, we're showing encore presentations of our weekly interview program, Q Day.
Tonight, former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins discusses his book, The Road to Wisdom, on his work on the COVID-19 vaccine and the Human Genome Project.
He also talks about his Christian faith, the importance of engaging those with whom we disagree, and the current distrust of science and government in the United States.
Watch this program and other episodes of Q&A all week at 7 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at cspan.org.
During Christmas week, each night at 9 p.m. Eastern, C-SPAN will feature interviews with departing members of Congress, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents from both chambers.
They'll discuss their careers, key legislative achievements, the state of Congress, and American politics, and their farewell speeches.
Tonight, Michigan Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow and Pennsylvania Democratic Senator Bob Casey.
Friday, Delaware Democratic Senator Tom Carper and California Democratic Congresswoman Grace Napolitano.
Watch our interviews with departing members discussing their careers in Congress this week, starting at 9 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-SPAN.org.
Witness democracy in action with C-SPAN.
Experience history as it unfolds with C-SPAN's live coverage this January as Republicans take control of both chambers of Congress and a new chapter begins with the swearing in of the 47th President of the United States.
On Friday, January 3rd, don't miss the opening day of the 119th Congress.
Watch the election of the House Speaker, the swearing-in of new members of Congress and the Senate, and the first day of leadership for South Dakota's John Thune as the new Senate Majority Leader.