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Jan. 24, 2026 07:00-10:01 - CSPAN
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Washington Journal 01/24/2026
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Future Of U.S.-Europe Relations 00:01:59
Coming up this morning on Washington Journal, along with your calls and comments live, Daniel Freed, former State Department official and Atlantic Council Distinguished Fellow, will talk about the future of relations between the U.S. and Europe amid rifts over Greenland and the future of NATO.
And then Council on Criminal Justice Senior Fellow Thaddeus Johnson will discuss the role that state and local law enforcement play in ICE operations.
Washington Journal is next.
Join the conversation.
Good morning.
It's Saturday, January 24th.
We're starting the program by asking for your top news story of this past week.
A lot of headlines to choose from, including President Trump and Davos saying that he's taking military action to acquire Greenland off the table and announcing a framework for an agreement with NATO on Arctic security.
The markets reacting to shifting signals after the president pulled back from new tariff threats on European countries.
Vice President Vance's trip to Minnesota during protests and controversy around ICE's immigration tactics.
And Special Counsel Jack Smith's public testimony before the House on his January 6th investigation.
This morning, we're hearing your thoughts.
What was the biggest story of the week for you and why?
Here are the phone lines.
Democrats, 202-748-8000.
Republicans, 202-748-8001.
And Independents, 202-748-8002.
You can send a text to 202-748-8003.
Include your first name in your city-state.
And you can reach us on social media, facebook.com/slash C-SPAN and X at C-SPANWJ.
Welcome to today's Washington Journal.
Before we get to your calls, a couple of news items that just happened yesterday evening to share with you.
The first is U.S. Southern Command put this posting on X.
U.S. Southern Command's X Post 00:03:15
They said this.
On January 23rd, which was yesterday, at the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by designated terrorist organizations.
Intelligence confirmed the vessel was transiting along known narco-trafficking routes in the eastern Pacific and was engaged in narco-trafficking operations.
Two narco-terrorists were killed and one survived the strike.
Following the engagement, U.S. Southern Command immediately notified the Coast Guard to activate the search and rescue system for the survivor.
And that's the video there on your screen that was released by the Pentagon.
The other is from Capitol Hill.
This is from Craig Kaplan, our producer, who said this.
President Trump today signed the three-bill spending package funding the Commerce, Energy, Interior, and Justice Departments, as well as EPA, NASA, and other agencies through September 30th.
That's the fiscal year.
Now, six of 12 spending bills have been signed into law, six more to be approved in the Senate.
That's the latest news.
Let's go to the events of Davos this week.
The president was there.
He spoke.
He also did an interview with Fox News on Thursday, and he claimed that NATO members stayed off the front lines in the war of Afghanistan.
Here it is.
I've always debated, we are always going to be there for them, but will they be there for us?
I've always said that, you know, if we ever needed them, because NATO has very much been a one-way street, we actually paid until I came along.
We were paying for, I think we paid 100% the cost of NATO.
They weren't paying and we were paying.
We have hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Germany.
We have 50,000 soldiers in other countries.
We have a lot of soldiers, not only Europe and other places.
And, you know, we want that to be reciprocal.
We want to be liked and respected.
So I've always said, and we get along very well with NATO, I think, but I've always said, will they be there if we ever needed them?
And that's really the ultimate test.
And I'm not sure of that.
I know that we would have been there or we would be there.
But will they be there?
And let's hope that that never happens.
We've never needed them.
We have never really asked anything of them.
You know, they'll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan or this or that.
And they did.
They stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.
But we've been very good to Europe and to many other countries.
And that phrase that the President used, they left the front lines, garnered a lot of negative reaction in Europe.
Among them is Prime Minister Kier Starmer.
This is what he said in response.
Let me start by paying tribute to the 457 of our armed services who lost their lives in Afghanistan.
I will never forget their courage, their bravery, and the sacrifice that they made for their country.
ICE's Detention of a Five-Year-Old 00:13:52
There are many also who were injured, some with life-changing injuries.
And so I consider President Trump's remarks to be insulting and frankly appalling.
And I'm not surprised they've caused such hurt to the loved ones of those who were killed or injured, and in fact, across the country.
And other news are the protests in Minnesota.
You can join us on the program.
You can give us a call.
The lines are: Democrats are on 202-748-8000, Republicans 202-748-8001, and Independents 202-748-8002.
We're getting your top news story of the week.
Here's the front page of the Washington Post: Anti-ICE protests escalate in Minnesota.
Thousands march.
Businesses close.
Show of dissent is largest versus immigration policies.
And you can see here the picture on the front page of the Washington Post of the protests, people out holding signs.
And the heading, the subheading says, a throng of protesters in sub-zero temperatures take part in a Minneapolis rally Friday against federal immigration enforcement.
The day of action pulsed through houses of worship and even the area's airport, where about 100 clergy were arrested at a peaceful sit-in.
That is the front page of the Washington Post.
And the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frye, a Democrat, he held a news conference Thursday following Vice President Vance's visit to the city.
Here's a portion of his remarks.
What's changed is that we have 3,000 plus ICE agents and border control that are on our streets without a clear plan.
What's changed is we've got this huge influx of what feels like an occupation in a city in the upper Midwest.
And what's changed is that they are arresting United States citizens.
They are detaining people that have done nothing wrong.
They're going after people exclusively based on the fact that they look like they're Somali or they look like they are Latino.
And no reason beyond that.
They've stopped law enforcement officers that are off duty.
They've stopped fathers that are on their way just to drop off their kids.
There are incredible people in our city that have come from a variety of different places around the country and around the globe.
And they've made our city a better place.
They're part of our family.
We love them.
We're proud to have them here.
So I get that they've got a messaging challenge here, and it's predominantly because anybody can see with their own two eyes what's going on.
You can't say with a straight face that pulling citizens off the street or going into a school is a targeted action when clearly it's not.
Clearly, what we are seeing on our streets right now is discriminating only on the basis of race and largely indiscriminate thereafter.
So yeah, in Minneapolis, we want to solve crime.
We want to arrest murderers.
Let's do it.
Let's work together to drive down crime.
Again, this is not that.
We have had relationships with a number of federal administrations to successfully drive down crime.
What we are seeing is this is more about political retaliation.
This is more about tragically terrorizing people than it is about safety, than it is even about immigration.
So the job of law enforcement is to keep the peace, to keep Americans safe, and that is literally what I signed up to do and what the federal government signed up to do as well.
And I urge that they do exactly that.
And another story out of Minnesota that has gotten attention this week is the detention of a five-year-old boy by ICE.
This is USA Today.
Vice President Vance defends ICE detainment of five-year-old in Minnesota.
It says that the vice president on Thursday defended the detainment of a five-year-old boy by federal agents, said the Trump administration does not believe the Insurrection Act is needed amid unrest over immigration enforcement in Minnesota.
It came as outrage swelled over ICE's ICE agents taking into custody four students under the age of 18 in the Minneapolis suburb of Columbia Heights.
School officials said Liam Ramos, a preschooler, and his father were detained in their driveway after school in Tuesday.
When an adult known to the family offered to take Liam, ICE agents refused and instead led the boy to his front door and ordered him to knock, quote, essentially using a five-year-old as bait, according to a news release by the Columbia Heights Public Schools.
And there's a picture there of Liam in ICE custody.
That's the USA Today story, and you could read it there if you'd like more information.
Start with Stacey in Chicago, Illinois.
Democrat, good morning, Stacey.
You're on.
Hi, good morning.
Thank you for having me this morning with you guys.
I appreciate it.
My concern is I'm very hurt, really, really hurt.
I am that liberty of New York.
I am the liberty of our people.
And with our president, I'm going to title him as our president, but he's not been the president for we the people.
And it's so sad that he's against we the people.
What's happened in Minnesota is like third war.
My heart hurts.
My eyes see.
I'm a believer and we the people.
It doesn't matter what color you are, that message of it.
It doesn't matter that we, the people, are going through this.
Please, I'm asking everyone, the so-called United States of our president is against we the people.
This war is happening because our so-called president.
If he was the president of our people, this wouldn't happen, whether it's a blue state or a red state.
This has to stop.
We have to get together and join in hand.
We have to stop this.
It's sad about the five-year-old guy.
It's sad ICIS are doing.
I know it's not ISIS.
I mean, I know it's not our military men.
My family and I are from a military family.
We do not run and just snap somebody down.
Our military men, I respect it.
They serve us, and I honor them.
He's bringing tears.
And I respect we, the people, as our military men.
These are the proud boys that he took off the street and pardoned them because he is corrupt.
He turned that, he tore up the East Wing.
I'm upset about it.
We, the people, seem to take the abnormal as normal.
All right, Stacey, got that.
Let's go to the Republican line, hometown, Illinois.
Bob, you're on the air.
Good morning, Mimi.
Love Case Pan.
I'm 180 degrees opposite of Stacey.
And I don't understand, are we to believe that all these protesters everywhere in these blue cities and beyond that they are in favor of leaving illegal alien criminals live among us and us to pay taxes to support all of them?
That's atrocious to me.
That seems like if they wanted to solve the problem, I mean, Mayor Fry would let ICE into his detention facilities and grab the people.
Our governor here in Illinois, Pritzker, just let out 1,700 people last month.
He could have just as easily invited ICE.
Hey, come and get these 1,700.
It's to me, it's so sad.
And there's two sides of every story, that story about the five-year-old boy.
ICE has a totally different story.
They say they pull the guy over and he ran and he abandoned his son.
So, I mean, you got to.
I know USA is very biased.
I used to subscribe years ago, but no longer.
And I think our president's doing a fantastic job, and he loves this country, loves the people, and he wants to make it safe for all the people in our country.
So, Bob, you there?
Yeah.
I want to show you something.
This just came out on CNN.
It says that Trump is privately frustrated that he risks losing control of immigration message amid Minnesota chaos.
What do you think of the ICE tactics themselves?
And do you think that they might have gone too far?
Because it seems that President Trump is, at least according to this reporting, frustrated with how the message is coming out, like maybe the optics.
President being frustrated because it does look bad, and the mainstream media doesn't help him.
And if he were to try to rein in ICE, that's like caving into the criminals.
No, you got to go full force.
You got to get all these bad people out there.
And the governors and mayors got to help.
We need help.
We don't need to be fighting amongst ourselves.
And all them people demonstrating must love paying taxes for criminals.
That's what I get out of bottom line.
All right.
Tony, San Antonio, Texas, Democrat.
Good morning, Tony.
Yes, I have a question.
Was that child handcuffed or shift-tied?
Was his hands in front of him?
Say that again.
Was that child had, did they have shit-top on that kid's hands?
He looked like he was handcuffed.
The five-year-old boy, Liam?
Yes, yes.
You know what?
I'm not sure.
Let me look that up.
So in that picture, it doesn't look.
Yeah, so I can't tell, actually, because we can't see his hands.
It's possible that...
He's a cute little boy, but he looked like he was handcuffed.
And ICE is out of control.
They're totally out of control.
What do you say to Bob that says we need to get the criminals out of the country?
Well, get the criminals out of the country or go after the criminals.
They're going after just regular people, people that have done nothing to anybody.
They're going after American citizens.
They're going after innocent people.
People that have done nothing to nobody.
If you want to get the criminals, go after the criminals.
I'm sure they know who the criminals are.
They're just going after people.
They're just terrorizing the country.
That's what they're doing.
So it says this.
So Snopes has an article about this, and it has his picture here.
It says that a claim spread online that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement used the five-year-old child as bait to lure in people to arrest them.
And it says this: School officials have, in fact, accused ICE of using five-year-old Liam Ramos as bait to lure people out of the boy's home.
DHS, which oversees ICE, has disputed the claim, instead alleging that Liam's father fled from arrest, thus, quote, abandoning his child.
DHS said in a statement that the father and his son were being held at Dilley's, which is the Immigration Processing Center, also known as South Texas Family Residential Center, the country's largest family detention center.
Like many ICE facilities, it has come under fire for alleged poor treatment of the families held there.
The family's lawyer said that they were following a legal asylum process.
We have not rated this claim because we do not have credible video or documentation of the incident that can definitively prove what happened.
It says, here's what we know.
Let's see.
The school board said that, told journalists that four students had been detained by ICE, and that a student called Stavinik said was used as bait.
So we'll read a little bit more.
It says four of the students have been detained by ICE, and it says two of our students were taken.
On the way to school, a 17-year-old high school student, a minor, was taken by armed and masked agents alone.
No parents were present.
The student was removed from their car and taken away.
In the afternoon, a five-year-old was apprehended with his father while in their driveway, just having arrived home from his preschool.
Another adult living in the home was outside and begged the agents to let them take care of the small child, but was refused.
Instead, the agent took the child out of the still-running vehicle, led him to the door, and directed him to knock on the door, asking to be let in in order to see if anyone else was home, essentially using a five-year-old as bait.
20 minutes after Liam and his father were taken, the middle school brother came home to a missing dad, a missing little brother, and a terrified mother.
Family is following U.S. legal parameters and has an active asylum case with no order of deportation.
I have viewed the legal paperwork with my own eyes.
Why detain a five-year-old?
You cannot tell me this child is going to be classified as a violent criminal.
That is the full statement from the school that Liam, the school system.
And here is Linda, Republican, Del Mar, New York.
Hi, Linda.
Hi.
Protesters Cooperating Peacefully 00:05:45
My big story is the snowstorm Fern, F-E-R-N.
And today I'm in the house.
It's minus two degrees.
We are getting unbelievable low temperatures.
And we're told fill our tires or they could pop, fill our gas station, or the gas line could freeze.
We're told work from home if you can.
Do not go outside.
And I believe that is also affecting Iceland.
Iceland's warming up.
The routes are opening.
There's more submarines up there.
There's less icebreakers.
Everything's changing.
And I think the big brouhaha over Iceland.
You mean Greenland, Linda?
Greenland, yeah.
Greenland.
Well, yeah, Greenland has ice and Iceland is green.
I get it.
Anyway, it's the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I was alive for that.
And this is the biggest thing I've heard of threats to the United States since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
So I just think climate change is affecting us all, the insurance companies and everything.
But my big story, as I say, is this snowstorm because that is definitely a big story.
Apparently, over 200 million Americans are affected some way by that storm.
DHS pauses cuts to FEMA as massive winter storm barrels in.
This is the Washington Post.
On Thursday night, DHS's head of human resources sent an email saying FEMA decided that the agency would halt their process of non-renewing dozens of federally funded employees.
So that is cuts to FEMA employees has been put on hold, according to their HR department.
Randy, Indiana, Independent Line, good morning, Randy.
Good morning.
Thank you.
My story that I want to talk about here is this protest going on in Minneapolis.
Listen, I'm all for the fact that you don't want people who don't belong here criminals.
Yes, you want them deported and you want them taken out.
But they're American citizens that we need to be going after as well who are committing heinous crimes.
And yes, to use that little boy at five years old, I'm sorry, I don't believe what the government is saying about that.
That's deplorable what they did.
And as far as protesting concern, this would never happen.
But if you really want protests, the biggest sporting event coming up in America is the Super Bowl.
And if you get these athletes, these athletes, especially these black athletes, who, because ICE is targeting people of color, if you get these athletes to say that we're not participating in the Super Bowl and we're going to shut it down, then you would start seeing America, then you would get their attention.
We got to stop, if you're going to protest, these people protest peacefully and then take that anger to the ballot box and vote some of these politicians out.
But if you want that, but back in the 60s, when athletes refuse to represent the Olympics, and like I said, if you shut the Super Bowl down, then you would start getting some of these politicians' attention.
All right.
Well, here is a politician.
Here's Vice President JD Vance.
He traveled to the Midwest.
Here he is in Toledo, Ohio.
This is before he got to Minnesota, talking about questions about possible mistakes by ICE.
President Trump this week said that ICE has made some mistakes.
I'm curious what steps the administration is taking to rectify those.
And do you think your presence in Minneapolis today will calm the tensions there?
Well, certainly one of my goals is to calm the tensions, to talk to people, to try to understand what we can do better.
You know, when the president says that mistakes have been made, you know, my thought on that is that, well, of course there have been mistakes made because you're always going to have mistakes made in law enforcement.
I mean, we all know this.
Probably every single person in this room knows a police officer.
99% of our police officers, probably more than that, are doing everything right.
Some people are going to make mistakes.
That's the nature of law enforcement.
But the number one way where we could lower the mistakes that are happening, at least with our immigration enforcement, is to have local jurisdictions that are cooperating with us.
There are some very basic things that would make Minneapolis look like, look, Memphis, Tennessee, a blue city where you do not have this chaos in immigration enforcement because the local police and the local authorities are cooperating with us.
So when you look at Memphis, Tennessee, or Austin, Texas, or any other community virtually across the United States of America, and you don't see the same level of chaos in Minneapolis, the natural conclusion is that it's not what ICE is doing in Minneapolis, it's what Minneapolis authorities are doing to prevent ICE from doing their jobs.
And that's exactly what's happening.
We're getting your top news story of the week.
Here's CJ in Niagara Falls, New York, Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning, Mimi.
Yeah, the idea that anybody in any zip code in America wants 1,500, 3,000, name that amount of people to go into that locality, that's not having any extra problems.
As a matter of fact, if you believe Donald Trump, and the most believable thing about him is his haircut.
Best Age Debunked 00:05:15
But, you know, we'll take him at his word.
This is the best age America's ever been.
It was incredibly bad on Friday when Biden gave the reins over, and everything became perfect when Trump became on board on a Monday.
So if you have a child like that at the helm, these are the kind of things to expect.
I'm kind of proud that Minneapolis-St. Paul is reacting the way they are.
They're doing it peacefully and powerfully, and they're showing what Americans don't like needless federal interference.
You know, if my wife or my daughter wants to have a baby or not, that's not for some alderman in upstate New York named Ernie to overrule my women in my life's choices.
It's as simple as that.
And I want to just say a prayer for this next week because we are about to attack Iran for no other reason than Donald Trump has not gotten one thing right in this last year, with the exception of closing the border off, which is a big thing.
But everything else on tariffs and going around and waving the sabers around like we're going to invade any country we feel like.
Well, that's the way you know.
All right, CJ.
Let's move on to Rick in Pennsylvania, Republican.
Hi, Rick.
Morning, how are you doing?
Good.
Listen, just a question, not a question, but a comment.
I wish you would run some ice press conferences.
They had a great press conference debunking all these things that have been said.
The five-year-old is a total farce.
The agents actually took him for, I guess, a McDonald's or something and fed him because his dad wouldn't take him.
They took him to the mother's house.
She wouldn't take him.
There's so many things that are consistent with the lies that are going on.
I've yet to hear anybody from the government in Minnesota condemning what happened in the church, which is people use this frame nothing to stop.
Well, well, nothing could show it more than that.
I would ask C-SPAN to do a couple of things, if you could.
You could check how many interactions ICE has had over the last six months, because we hear there's 171 or whatever American citizens arrested.
And how many interactions led to those 171, maybe mistakes, maybe not, whatever the case may be.
And certainly, I think the last thing I'd like to say is if there are 3,000 people in Minnesota because the government will not cover the backs of ICE.
They don't let the police come out.
Therefore, they have to bring more in to protect the people that they're working with.
Is there a reason why?
Maybe because there's a major scandal going on.
Did you notice how this all popped up after the scandal with $5 or $10 billion, whatever the case may be at the Somalis?
And all of a sudden, now we have protests in the streets and distractions and things along that line.
Again, and yes, Rick, we do have a press conference on our website.
It was from Tuesday.
This is from ICE, and you can watch that whole thing on our website, c-span.org.
But this is a press conference given by ICE.
And also, you asked about the five-year-old boy and what ICE has said about it.
It says this: that DHS said ICE was conducting an operation to arrest Liam's father, who the department said was in the country illegally when the father fled and left Liam alone in a vehicle.
The agency spokeswoman said an officer stayed with Liam while others apprehended his father.
Officers made several attempts to get his mother, who was inside the house, to take custody of him, saying she wouldn't be detained if she did so.
Quote, our officers' primary concern during the entire operation was the safety and welfare of the child.
The board of Liam School District said she saw people begging ICE agents on the scene not to take the child and offering to care for him.
The board, the school board chairs, told reporters this week that the child's mother appeared to be inside the home, but that his father urged her not to open the door.
And that is on the Wall Street Journal, if you'd like to see more on that.
Here's Chuck in Gadsden, Alabama, Independent Line.
Hello, Chuck.
How are you doing this morning?
Chuck Engaged in Criminal Testimony 00:04:00
I'm doing okay.
Well, my top news story is one that's been going on for a long time: the absolute destruction of American journalism.
They have told so many lies in the last, oh, I don't know, seven or eight years, that it's ridiculous.
And it's getting worse and worse and worse as time goes on.
And I can give you some examples.
They did the hands-up thing.
You know, they proved that was a lie.
Hands up.
Sorry, hands-up.
Is that what you said?
Hands up.
Okay.
Shoot.
That was actually a lie.
They, you know, you remember all that and the riots that went on with that.
Then there was the BLM thing.
They wound up stealing billions of dollars.
That wasn't reported much.
Then the border was closed.
Remember, the border was closed, and all the journalists agrees with it.
Then they got onto Kavanaugh.
Then they whipped the people down at the border.
That was a lie.
And then good people on both sides.
Boy, that's the biggest lie of all.
That's what President Biden said he was running on.
And you know, that's a lie.
And C-SPAN has never come out and said that was a lie.
And it's been proven over and over again.
And Donald Trump was talking about the Dad Blame monuments.
There were good people on both sides of the monuments being tore down.
And then you had the Russian hoax.
And then, you know, all this stuff, the lies, lies, lies, lies.
And the press is causing the riots in Minneapolis because of all the lies they tell.
So that is what my big story is.
All right.
And Jim sent this on Facebook.
He said, The hearings this week really showed that Jack Smith conducted a partisan prosecution of President Trump.
He was exposed and will forever be known as a dishonest Democrat hack.
So let's hear from former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.
He was before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this week to answer questions about his investigations.
And here is a part of his opening statement.
This is from Thursday.
President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law, the very laws he took an oath to uphold.
Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions, as alleged in the indictments they returned.
Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power.
After leaving office in January of 21, President Trump illegally kept classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago Social Club and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents.
Highly sensitive national security information was held in a ballroom and a bathroom.
As I testify before the committee today, I want to be clear.
I stand by my decisions as special counsel, including the decision to bring charges against President Trump.
Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity.
If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Democrat or a Republican.
No one, no one should be above the law in this country, and the law required that he be held to account, so that is what I did.
To have done otherwise on the facts of these cases would have been to shirk my duties as a prosecutor and as a public servant, of which I had no intention of doing.
Why We Need Jobs 00:05:35
That full hearing is on our website, c-span.org, if you'd like to watch the whole thing.
Here's Ursula Democrat, Spring Lake, North Carolina.
Good morning, Ursula.
Well, good morning, Mimi.
It's good to hear.
Good to be on C-SPAN for a long time.
Mimi, I've got an issue.
These demonstrations in Minneapolis, they're not necessary.
What happened to this little boy is not right, but I'm sure it's going to be made right.
But my biggest thing, Mimi, is people calling the ICE agents, which I'm grateful they're on the streets, is unnecessary.
Nazis and Gestapo.
The people need to be educated on these names.
I'm coming from a country that I was under the Nazis and Gestapos.
And believe you me, what happens in Minneapolis would have been quenched so quick, their heads would spin.
If these are Nazis and Gestapos, that's what they're calling these ICE agents.
I think it's shameful.
And I wish the governor and the mayor, it's shameful the way they talk about those IS agents, maybe.
That's all I have to say.
Thank you for your.
All right, Ursula, let's talk to Tim next.
Republican, Syracuse, New York.
Good morning.
Good morning.
How are you today?
Good.
Great show.
You know, the thing that you look at all these headlines and everything is really about the headline that no one's talking about is government's careless spending is still going on.
We have a deficit.
We look at sanctuary cities, and we've used the federal government to subsidize states' payroll and pensions.
That's the biggest question that I have.
And I think at the end of the day, when you look at all the problems that we're having in Minneapolis and we're having across the whole country, is that our states need to stand on their own.
They need to be independent.
They can't rely on Medicaid and federal funding and E-rate and SNAP.
I'm not saying that people don't need it.
I'm saying that in my own state, when we have close to 7 million people out of the state of New York, we'll give them a few million, that we have $7 million on Medicaid.
Most states, this was meant for women and elderly.
I'm just saying it's abuse of the federal government.
The people that voted for Donald Trump may not, most of them probably don't like Donald Trump.
But what they do like, 70 million people voted for him because they are the middle class that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller.
And they're paying the bill.
And the biggest thing is when we want to talk about Democrats, my mother was a Democrat.
My family is not treated equally.
We're held to hold the bank.
That's the problem.
If everyone looks in their own city, I don't care if you're a Democrat-run city or a Republican-run city, sanctuary cities are to shore up the government to maintain the payroll and pensions that they have.
And that's the crime.
But no one is talking about that.
So, Tim, you know, we are going to be talking actually later in the program about sanctuary cities.
We've got a criminal justice expert and a former law enforcement officer to come and talk.
And I'm going to ask specifically about what does it mean to be a sanctuary city?
Because apparently it's more of a political label and not really a legal condition, if you will.
I want to add one more thing.
I want to add one more thing.
Go ahead.
And it has to do with the amount of people in these sanctuary cities to be able to use the term to shore up a particular party.
What's happening is we're taking over cities because they want the federal government to fund these sanctuary cities.
We can't lose people.
I had a congressman tell me, and I'm going to be frank, if we don't get federal funds to subsidize my city, my city, forget the rest of the country, Syracuse, New York.
If we don't get federally funds, we can't survive.
We're going to have to raise property taxes.
We're already the highest tax state.
That's the problem.
We have to get this people.
We need jobs.
We need jobs in New York.
We need jobs in Hawaii.
We need jobs all over the country.
We can't subsidize people.
My brother-in-law, one last point.
My brother-in-law works in construction.
He's 75 years old.
He paid for his wife's funeral and all her expenses.
He goes to work with 40 people in Syracuse, New York.
We have so many people, immigrants that are working, only working two days, because if they work one hour more than 16 hours, they don't get their Medicaid.
They don't get their housing.
They don't get their snap.
That's the problem.
People need full-time jobs, not part-time, to keep you on the dole.
Got it, Tim.
Let's talk to Eddie, Los Angeles, California, Independent Line.
Yes, good morning.
Good morning.
Thank you, my fellow Americans.
Good morning to you, man.
Jobs and Subsidies 00:03:35
Listen, this is my take on the whole thing.
After President Russia started to affirm his action, the war came on for the black employees, okay?
And so when we asked for getting the unions, that was over.
You've seen all the jobs leave out this country.
You've seen them go over to China.
China was the third brokest country in the world until America got tired of that, made them rich because they didn't want black folks working.
Excuse me.
The minute that we asked for reparations, the border opened up.
This is the problem.
Everybody's talking about Sanctuary City.
In order for you to get to a sanctuary city, you've got to go through what?
The federal borders.
That's a crime.
Now, you don't ever see none of our black kids working like fast food, markets.
It's not that we don't want to.
We're fine.
You know what I mean?
But it's a racist move because we asked for reparations and we still want our reparations.
I'm fourth generation out of slavery.
I don't want to hear that possession of 99% of the law, man.
All right, Eddie.
And this is Jeff on Facebook who said that his top news story was President Trump owning Davos, getting everything that he wanted to make the world safe.
And Kelly on Facebook says, Trump gets everything from Greenland, didn't even have to fire one single nuclear weapon.
Well, before that speech on Davos, our Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, was in London, and he addressed Britain's parliament, emphasizing unity between the two countries.
This is from Tuesday.
It is a profound honor to be speaking in Parliament today, to be the first U.S. Speaker of the House ever given this honor.
And I take it very seriously.
As proud Americans, it is as though we have returned to the spiritual birthplace of our own nation.
And the history here, the weight of it is palpable, as you know.
It gives you a certain sense of just being serious.
I was going to roll on with a bunch of jokes this morning, but it doesn't feel right to be in this place at this time.
We have returned at a pivotal moment, obviously, in the great histories of our countries, to mark this anniversary that we have in our nation and to celebrate what we've achieved together in the past.
And importantly, to face and overcome together the challenges of our present day.
And I want to tell you, my friends, we will do that together.
That's what I bring you that message.
When I met with Prime Minister Starmer at Downing Street yesterday, I told him that I thought his national address a few hours earlier was well done.
He noted, of course, that the U.K. and the U.S. are close allies and that our strong, constructive partnership all these years has been built on mutual respect and focused on results.
I thought that was exactly the right message and the right tone.
And because of that, we've always been able to work through our differences calmly as friends.
And we will continue to do that.
I want to assure you this morning that that is still the case.
I spoke to President Trump at length yesterday and I told him that I really felt that my mission here, even though we planned this back in the fall, we didn't know how the events would develop over the last few days.
But I told the President that I felt that my mission here today was to encourage our friends and help to calm the waters, so to speak.
And I hope to do so.
That was the Speaker of the House in London.
And Rob is calling us from Jacksonville, Florida, Republican.
Good morning.
Good morning, Mimi.
Assuring Continued Collaboration 00:03:28
I'm Rob from Minnesota.
Minnesota?
Yeah.
Oh, sorry, we got that wrong.
Yeah.
Whereabouts in Minnesota are you?
St. Paul.
Oh, okay.
So you're right in the thick of it, huh?
Right in the thick of it.
And I just want to remind the Democrats that they want to talk about the love thing that we're supposed to have for everybody.
Well, ICE are also people, and they're doing their job to protect us.
And the Bible does talk about in Romans chapter 13 that we're supposed to obey governing authorities.
Whether we like it or not, they're above us, and we're to obey them.
So we can't treat ICE like they're lower class or anything like that.
They are human beings as well, and they're trying to keep us safe from illegal immigrants that came here unvetted.
That's the whole purpose of having ICE in the Twin Cities.
I wish they could please understand that.
That's the whole purpose of having ICE in the Twin Cities is to protect us.
Thank you, Mimi.
Wait, Rob, before you go, there has been reports of some boycotts like people shutting down businesses, not going to school.
Have you seen any of that?
This is Business Insider.
It says how ICE chaos and a boycott plan are turning Minnesota retailers into community spaces.
What are you seeing there as far as businesses?
Have things been shut down?
I've been hearing about it, but I haven't actually seen it.
I've been staying home in the cold.
Yeah, it is.
It's super cold right now.
We're way below zero, and I haven't been out since yesterday's morning.
All right.
All right.
Well, let's talk to Sarah, Independent Line.
Where are you, Sarah?
Yeah, hi, Mimi.
I am on the Greater East Side of St. Paul.
Okay.
And so I do know about the financial blackout that happened on Friday.
And I know people that participated in the blackout.
I did not participate in the blackout, though.
I do know people are impacted by ICE.
I know the students at a lot of schools in the St. Paul School District are also impacted by ICE.
I think that there is a lot of fear right now in the community overall, regardless of your status.
I myself am an ADOS person that is an American descendant of American slavery.
So my family has been here since the 1600s.
And so I just want to say that you guys do not deserve a United States.
You do not deserve it.
What do you mean by that?
I think that the errors in thinking that exists on both sides and amongst all generations of Americans right now is detrimental to your freedom and all the things you think you stand for.
Brenda's Call: Immigration Displacement 00:14:34
The fact that you have not lifted up your slip and acknowledged the exploitation that exists as a result of mass migration, the businesses and the state governments that benefit from these large influx of exploited labor and the exploitation of my community on top of that.
I think there's a lot of displacement because of immigration.
And I think that particularly, again, for my group, my group, we are harmed.
We are harmed by immigration.
Immigration, got it.
And this is Sharon Chester, Virginia, Democrat.
You're on the air, Sharon.
It is very hypocritical.
Well, first of all, good morning, Mimi.
It is very hypocritical for people to not want immigrants if they themselves are descendants of immigrants or they themselves came from another country.
The only people who are not immigrants in this country are Native Americans and descendants of Africans who were forced here because of the greed of slavery.
Trump has made it very, very clear that he only wants rich white people who are millionaires and billionaires to come into this country.
He let in last year rich white South Africans, gave them money, gave them houses, and he has said that he only wants whites from Scandinavian countries.
I want to ask this audience, do they think that Hispanics are the only undocumented immigrants in this country?
Trump is not only going after undocumented immigrants, and I want to speak to white people who are not wealthy.
Trump has no, no respect for you, and you will be the next that he goes after.
If he cared about you, he would not have taken your SNAP program.
He would not have taken your health care.
And he would not have taken the hospitals in your rural areas.
And you all need to realize that if you look at the Republican states and the Democratic state, the Democratic states have more that they can do for their constituents.
Trump is using you all as suckers, and you need to pay attention to what he is doing to you.
He only cares, if you watch the stock market, Trump only cares about the stock market because when he does something foolish and the stock market goes down, he reverses himself.
But when we are out trying to help each other, then he doesn't care about that.
And you all need to realize that Hispanics are not the only undocumented immigrants in this country.
Thank you.
And speaking of the markets, the Wall Street Journal on their front page has this geopolitical tensions unleash roller coaster week in markets.
It says, a week that began with renewed threats of a transatlantic trade war ended with the U.S. stock market finishing roughly where it began.
The topsy-turvy path to Friday's quiet close reminded investors of the many forces that have made markets' record-breaking run in recent months feel more like a high wire act.
President Trump threatened additional tariffs on some of the U.S.'s longest-standing allies in a bid to acquire Greenland and then promptly walked them back.
Investors momentarily revived a, quote, sell America trade by unloading stocks and bonds and quickly bought them back after the dip.
Here is Virginia in Dayton, Ohio, Republican.
Hi, Virginia.
Hey, good morning.
I would just like to say that, you know, being a Republican, I am very disappointed with the way that the Republicans are rallying around Donald Trump and his obviously crazed ideas.
He is nothing but about money.
And our people that are in middle income, which we are slowly disappearing, we're going to be in the ground just like the people that were poor back in the day.
We need to stand against him and get back our country.
We are made.
Our country is made of the melting pots of people from all over different countries.
And if we go against that, then what are we?
We've always bound together and made it come to a solution.
This man is insane, and we definitely need to get him out, or we're going to be just like Russia.
And I must say, I am embarrassed to say that I'm Republican.
Thank you.
Brenda, Denver, Colorado, Independent Line, you're on the air, Brenda.
Good morning, Mimi.
Okay, the two calls before me, right on the spot.
I have three things.
My first one is ICE, the sanctuary cities.
I want people to remember the Underground Railroad, and I want them to remember the safe houses in Germany.
I would like for people to stop using the word all for Republicans, all Republicans, all Democrats.
No.
People are people.
Not all Democrats or Republicans think and act the same.
My top story, though, is this peace, the group of peace people.
The Board of Peace?
The Board of Peace.
Thank you, Leemi.
Yep.
That's my top story.
Why?
Because it's an organization that is going to compete with NATO that is set on the Bitcoin people.
I'm thinking about the Bitcoin and the money that's behind Bitcoin and this group of peace people.
That's a lot of money, and there's no accounting for it, and Trump's going to be over it.
Trump has his own Bitcoin.
So that's my top story.
I think that is going to be the downfall for the United States of America.
And Brenda, yep.
And Brenda, we will talk about that with a former ambassador to Poland about that.
We'll drill in a little bit on the Board of Peace and what that means.
But the Hill has this headline.
Most countries on Trump's Board of Peace temporarily restricted from immigrant visas.
So their people cannot come into the United States, at least temporarily.
It says Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, etc. are among the 75 countries the Trump administration has deemed to have citizens likely to require public assistance while living in the United States.
Secretary of State Rubio instructed consular officers to halt immigrant visa applications from these nations earlier this year, given the likelihood that migrants from the nations could become public charges in the U.S. State Department said this, quote, President Trump has made clear that immigrants must be financially self-sufficient and not be a financial burden to Americans.
Here is Judy, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Democrat.
Good morning.
Hey, good morning, Mimi.
My top story is, of course, ICE agents and, you know, the main purpose of these ICE deportations, if anybody cares to remember, Donald Trump campaigned on getting out the worst of the worst.
The low-level street dealers, the drug gangs, that's who he was going to target.
And he was going to get out the worst of the worst.
My question is, if he's been targeting the worst of the worst and the drug dealers, where's the stuff?
FBI and DEA agents love to brag about how much drugs they've confiscated, the stacks of cash, the illegal weapons.
They love to show that on TV.
See what we confiscated?
But over the last eight or ten months, have you heard a single word about piles of drugs, millions of dollars in cash, illegal weapons being confiscated?
Have you seen any of that at all?
I have not, but they have been talking about, you know, we caught this many people that were charged with a violent crime, this many people that were charged with crimes against children, that kind of thing.
They have been putting those kinds of numbers out.
Yes, but he, right, but he campaigned on like the drug dealers, and he's so worried about drugs.
This is the second thing.
He's so worried about drugs coming into the country, but yet he pardoned the cocaine king from Honduras.
He's so worried about the drug epidemic in our country that he was bombing alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.
So what's the purpose of bombing alleged drug boats in the Caribbean when you pardoned a man by the name of Ross Albright?
Ross Albright was the proud owner-operator of Silk Road.
Silk Road was a website where people in this country could buy drugs right off the internet.
They didn't need boats coming from Venezuela.
And Donald Trump pardoned Ross Albright.
And I would appreciate it if you would look that up, Google that.
Silk Road, Ross Albright, and a Donald Trump pardon.
All right.
Yep.
And let's go to Ryan Orange, Massachusetts Independent.
Go ahead, Ryan.
Hi.
They talked about the political hyperbole of ICE.
The reason why they're bringing up all the little kids and all the sympathy of it is because they're trying to distract the fact that Tim Waltz and all his financial cronies committed fraud with the whole Somalian scandal.
Democrats are frequent in putting illegals first and citizens last.
Here in Massachusetts, Maura Healy just presented in front of her state of the state address.
And I hope you guys talk about this, about basically being a sanctuary city.
I don't want my tax dollars going to illegals.
These people are criminals.
They jumped over the border.
They violated federal law.
They should be rounded up and sent the hell out of the country.
And also, it raises our property taxes and income taxes to pay for these people.
So as far as I'm concerned, get the illegal the hell out.
And this independent, voting Republican, come fall.
Ryan, when you were making a connection between sanctuary cities and our taxpayers, what was that connection?
The sanctuary cities, what happens is people like Maura Healy go and advocate for sanctuary cities.
Then the federal government is going to respond by cutting our funding.
And then what they're going to have to do is raise our taxes to pay for their stupidity of representing illegals.
Because the federal government cuts funding to those municipalities.
That's what you mean?
Trump already talked about it, and I hope it happens, too, because it's going to expose the Democrats for their stupidity.
All right.
Here is Crystal, Franklin, North Carolina, Republican.
You're on the air, Crystal.
Good morning.
First of all, as far as ICE is concerned, I have three names.
I have Jocelyn Nungery, Lake and Riley, and how about Alian Gonzalez?
Does anybody remember the little boy in the closet in Miami from Cuba?
Under Bill Clinton's administration, they went in there, guns blazing, took him out of the closet with his uncle, and shipped him back to Cuba.
Nobody in the news is talking about that.
That was under Democrat leadership, Democrat leadership.
As far as that lady that wants to catch the attention of us white people, telling us how bad Trump doesn't care about us, lady, you're standing on the Democrat plantation.
Open your eyes.
Wake up.
Wake up.
I hope you have a great day, Mimi.
Bruce, a Democrat in Brant Lake, New York.
You're on the air.
Good morning, Mimi.
Good morning.
I got so much to talk about with this, but we'll stick with the Greenland deal with Trump over in Greenland.
Doc, if Joe Biden had said half of the things he has said, they would have put him in an insane asylum.
I mean, he called to Iceland four times in one little statement.
He doesn't even know what country he's talking about.
And as for immigration, has he ever married an American woman?
He's been married three times.
They're all immigrants.
No, one of them was an American.
Oh, what was her name?
The one in the middle.
So after Ivana, I can't remember her name, but before Melania.
She married with Marla Maples.
Yes, that's it.
Marla Maples.
She's American, right?
I don't know.
I mean, they're immigrants.
JD Vance's wife is an immigrant.
You know, what are they?
Are they next on the hit list, these people?
They're all immigrants.
Donald Trump is an immigrant.
He's German, of all things.
Immigrants Under Threat 00:04:42
All right, Bruce.
Let's talk to Patrick next.
Browns Mills, New Jersey, Independent Line.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yeah, us elderly people in the cities, we've been waiting for relief against these criminal invaders for decades, and we thank President Trump.
He's done so much for the people of New Jersey, but his casinos giving so many elderly people enjoyment.
Another thing that Caller mentioned was he went at reparations.
I think you sound like a convoy.
I'm an Irishman, third generation.
My ancestors built by hand all the canals around here and was brought over by slaves.
I'm wondering when the Irish will get reparations for the way they were treated.
And also, indigenous people, Native American, that term is a misnomer.
It doesn't exist.
My people, the Vikings, were here before the Mongo Asiatics that came that we know as the American Indians.
The archaeological record shows Viking man was here.
Look up Kennewick man in Washington State, the Kennewick River.
A skeleton was found with red hair and tattoos thousands of years dated before the Mongo Asiatics.
So this term Native American, get off it.
Oh, and that ICE officer, he shot to defend himself because that crazed woman was using her large car, truck, to try to run him down.
And when you're a pedestrian and have almost been run down by cars like we have, where I live in the cities here in New Jersey, you know what a threat a car is.
I wish they would rein in on these cars more.
It's not the guns, it's the cars that kill people.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Elizabeth, Las Vegas, Nevada, Republican line, you're on the air.
Good morning, Mimi.
Question.
I, you know, the last two callers I kind of agree with.
You know, it's not about him.
It's not about, everybody thinks everything's about racism.
And what's going to happen is it's going to be like the boy who cried wolf.
And it scares me because people need to take it seriously.
And I don't think that the ICE thing is about racism.
And I don't like to see, you know, Hispanic families that have been here for 15 or 20 years now who haven't, you know, kept their noses clean and done the right thing.
They should be given a pathway.
But I do agree with them going in and getting these.
It's not about drugs.
It's not all about drugs.
These are rapists and murderers, child molesters.
And we have our own we have to take care of after this.
They're rampant.
People's moral compass is just screwed up on both sides in some ways.
I don't have a racist bone in my body, but I'm also 65 and want to be able to walk outside when I'm 75 and not worry about being accosted by some perv or whatever.
And so, you know, these things need to be taken care of.
And the world is getting really scary.
I'm not growing up.
I'm not going to grow old in a clockwork orange environment.
Not happening.
If they want to have their money in their Bitcoin, cool.
Just keep us safe.
Go ahead.
You know, whatever.
I don't care about the money.
And Trump, you know what?
He has his faults.
He's got a big mouth.
But you know what?
I believe he loves this country more than a couple of those people who called saying, where's mine?
Where's mine?
Where's my reparations?
I'm half Irish, too.
All right, Elizabeth, got it.
Let's take one more call.
This is Charles in Lansing, Illinois.
Democrat, good morning.
Good morning, Mimi.
I've just been sitting here listening to a lot of the callers speak on behalf of the immigrants.
And a lot of these immigrants that's being targeted, you know, when they were in Chicago, they came to, you know, people that were just selling corn, trying to make money on the street.
And they were just grabbing them and taking them away for no reason.
Another thing, a point I want to make, they constantly talk about all the illegal immigrants, but they don't talk about how Governor Abbott of Texas was throwing people in on buses and busing them to Chicago.
I just don't understand that.
And for all these Republicans that's letting Donald Trump do what he wants to do, some of those same Republicans doing the Capitol rioting was up under the benches with their oxygen masks, scared to death.
And it's just really sad because they is allowing Donald Trump to predict a political future because ain't none of them Republicans gonna gain their seats.
Illegal Immigrant Inequalities 00:03:20
And that's all I have to say.
All right.
And coming up later on the Washington Journal, we've got former police officer and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice Thaddeus Johnson.
He'll join us for a discussion on the relationship between ICE and local law enforcement as the Trump administration's immigration crackdown continues.
But first, after the break, conversation with Daniel Freed, former ambassador to Poland and distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, about that framework deal on Greenland and the freight relationship between the U.S. and Europe in its wake.
We'll be right back.
Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere.
We have to listen so we can govern better.
Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility.
You can fight and still be friendly.
Bridging the divide in American politics.
You know, you may not agree with the Democrat on everything, but you can find areas where you do agree.
He's a pretty likable guy as well.
Chris Kins and I are actually friends.
He votes wrong all the time, but we're actually friends.
A horrible secret that Scott and I have is that we actually respect each other.
We all don't hate each other.
You two actually kind of like each other.
These are the kinds of secrets we'd like to expose.
It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about.
You guys did agree to the civility, all right?
He owes my son $10 from a bed for the first time.
He'll fork it over.
That's fighting words right now.
Glad I'm not in charge.
I'm thrilled to be on the show with him.
There are not shows like this, right?
Incentivizing that relationship.
Ceasefire, Friday nights on C-SPAN.
Book TV, every Sunday on C-SPAN 2, features leading authors discussing their latest nonfiction books.
Here's a look at what's coming up this weekend.
At 3 p.m. Eastern, finance and tech reporter David Morris, in his book Stealing the Future, covers FTX and Sam Bankman Freed's crimes.
Then at 5 p.m. Eastern, political science professor Theoria Franco with her book Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism, an in-depth analysis into green technologies and the environmental industry.
After that, at 7 p.m. Eastern, it's America's Book Club.
Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Rita Dove joins David Rubenstein on America's Book Club to discuss her work.
And at 8:30 p.m. Eastern, Philip and William Taubman talk about the life and career of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his leadership during the Vietnam War in their book McNamara at War.
Watch Book TV every Sunday on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org.
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Rupture In The Rules-Based Order 00:15:25
Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back to Washington Journal.
Joining us now to talk about tensions between the U.S. and Europe is Daniel Freed.
He's a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council, former U.S. Ambassador to Poland, and also former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe.
Ambassador Freed, welcome to the program.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So start with Davos.
The president traveled there to Switzerland this week.
What would you say is the current relationship between the United States and European countries?
The Europeans feel burnt and bruised by President Trump having made a crisis for no good reason.
That is, President Trump threatened to attack Greenland and attack our NATO ally Denmark so the United States could take possession of Greenland against the apparent wishes of its people.
And there was no good reason for this.
The United States does have interests in Arctic security and Greenland security, for sure.
So does NATO.
It's also true that NATO could be doing more for Arctic security.
But all of those things, the United States could have advanced, all those interests the U.S. could have advanced without the drama over Greenland.
We have the right to put basic military bases in Greenland.
We have that right.
We've had it since 1951.
So the Europeans simply did not understand why the United States was making a claim against Greenland, and they were alarmed when the United States and President Trump seemed to threaten war against a NATO ally, Denmark, for the purposes of territorial aggression.
They were horrified.
Now there seems to be a deal of details to be worked out, I suppose.
Yeah, well, let's talk about that deal, Ambassador.
What do we know about what was gained for the United States in that deal?
We know that outright ownership of the island seems to be off the table at this point.
Right.
Well, President Trump, after he backed down from his threats to go to war, said that the United States is going to get military access to Greenland and do so without a time limit and do so without paying for it.
Those are three reasonable objectives.
But we had those rights already before this whole crisis started.
We've had them since 1951.
So it's not clear to me what this new framework will accomplish.
Of course, if it does provide for greater Arctic security and greater European investment in Arctic security, that is arguably a plus for NATO.
So, okay, we could come out of this modestly ahead in terms of security, but at a very big and unnecessary price.
The European Commission President Ursula van der Leyen said this at Davos.
She said, quote, that it was time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe.
What did that mean to you?
What's a new independent Europe?
Well, the Europeans have been talking this way for decades.
I've heard the French for a generation saying that Europe needed to be more strategically independent, more strategically autonomous.
But the Europeans have failed to build the military capacity needed to match their rhetoric.
If this time the Europeans decide to build up their strength so they can operate independently, that's actually a good thing for the United States.
If you step back from this current crisis, it is in U.S. interest that Europe be stronger.
And at the other side of whatever it is we're going through right now with Europe could be, best case, a stronger Europe and then in a more equal partnership with the United States to deal with our true adversaries, the aggressive Russia and the ambitious China, both of which are autocracies.
We ought to be working with our European democratic allies and other free world countries.
And if Europe wants, comes out of this with the desire to be stronger, great.
I hope, though, that President Trump hasn't sacrificed the United States' greatest asset strategically, which is our alliance system.
I don't think he has.
I think we will emerge from this bruised but okay.
But this was an unnecessary crisis.
You say bruised but okay.
I want to drill down a little bit on that, especially regarding Prime Minister Mark Carney's comments.
Obviously not European.
He's Canada's Prime Minister.
But I want to invite our viewers to go ahead and call in if you've got a question for Ambassador Daniel Freed.
Those numbers are Democrats 2027-8,000.
Republicans 202-748-8001.
And Independents 202-748-8002.
We will take your calls shortly, but Ambassador, I wanted to ask you about that speech by Mark Carney.
It drew a rare standing ovation at Davos, and he talked about a rupture.
So I'm going to play some for you and then get your comments on it.
Countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.
We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability.
And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false.
That the strongest would exempt themselves, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.
And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful.
And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So we placed the sign in the window.
We participated in the rituals.
And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct.
We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied-the WTO, the UN, the COP-the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem-solving are under threat.
And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions: that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance, and supply chains.
And this impulse is understandable.
A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options.
When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads.
A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.
Ambassador, the Canadian Prime Minister there uses the word rupture, implying that this will not be fixed and this is not fixable.
What do you make of that?
The speech by Prime Minister Carney was powerful, well received for understandable and good reasons, and he makes a strong case.
However, I do disagree with him on a couple of points.
First, I'm old enough to have lived through previous periods of U.S.-European tensions that were called ruptures, like the split over the Iraq War, and we got past them.
So I would hesitate before calling this a permanent rupture.
Secondly, he criticizes the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the U.S.-led free world system.
I get that.
His list of inconsistencies and hypocrisies is apt to be accurate.
However, I would compare American leadership of the free world not to perfection and not even to our own exaggerated rhetoric.
I would compare it to the competition, European imperialism of the 19th century, the Nazis, and the communists.
Against the competition, American leadership looks pretty good.
And I think Donald Trump is wrong to challenge the basis of the free world order.
And I think Prime Minister Kearney is wrong to be so cynical about it.
A second point where I disagree with the Prime Minister is when he calls for greater European and other middle power strategic capability, he might take a look in the mirror because Canada has been underinvesting in defense for a very long time.
So I hope it means that Canada is going to step up.
A third area is that Prime Minister Kearney has renewed some strong trade ties with China.
Now, what does this mean?
That the Europeans and the middle powers will start working on improving a free world order and a rules-based order and defend it against American hypocrisy?
Fine, I get that.
But if it means that they're going to reach out to predatory powers that are a lot worse than anything the United States has done, does that mean that they're just going to act transactionally?
I thought that was his criticism of President Trump.
So the speech was important, and it contained a great many valid points.
But I read it carefully and wanted to think of it critically.
Not because I think Prime Minister is wrong.
He makes a number of valid points.
But because I am not as cynical about American leadership, nor is certain that the rupture will be permanent.
Had we invaded Greenland and conducted, started for no good reason, an aggressive war, that would have been a rupture.
There would have been no turning back from such a step.
And Ambassador, we've got a bunch of people waiting to talk to you, but I did want to touch on the Board of Peace and your response to that, your reaction.
What do you think?
Well, the Board of Peace was set up as a way to implement the Gaza peace deal.
If the Board of Peace is effective in implementing peace and a broader peace in the Middle East, it will have credibility.
If it doesn't do anything on Gaza, it doesn't matter what Donald Trump says about it.
It will have no effectiveness.
I'm not worried about, you know, I don't share the views of people who say, oh, Trump is trying to set up an alternative to the UN.
That's an abstract complaint.
The question is, will the Board of Peace be effective in the job it has set out to do?
If it does, let's talk about next steps.
If it doesn't, well, then we'll know.
All right, let's talk to callers.
Ted is up first, a Democrat in Raymond, New Hampshire.
You're on the air with Daniel Fried.
Yes, my concern is that we're focusing a lot on Greenland, but Ukraine seems to be on the side at the moment.
And that kind of worries me because, see, if you're focused on that, you're all focused on Greenland, Putin is having a field day.
He's enjoying everything he's seeing.
And my concerns is the security of Ukraine.
My grandparents came here from Poland, 1900.
And I had an idea that if Poland's border was moved way into Ukraine, that the protection of the UN would be a deterrent, provided, of course, the UN degreed and the Ukrainians agreed, because right now they're sitting ducks and have nothing.
Ambassador.
caller is spot on.
Okay.
Um, the Trump was talking about, President Trump was talking about threats to the Arctic from Russia when there's a real threat and more than a threat.
There's an actual war of aggression being waged by Russia against Ukraine.
And we should be focused on pushing back and defeating Russia's aggression against Ukraine.
And here's the additional point.
Trump's plan for peace in Ukraine could work.
That is a ceasefire, hopefully in place without giving the Russians any more territory and security for Ukraine.
If that works, that's a win for the U.S., vindication for Trump, good for Ukraine.
But instead of pressing Putin to stop the war and agree to a ceasefire, we've been running in circles for no good reason about Greenland.
So the caller is absolutely right.
Now, right now, there are talks going on in Abu Dhabi between Russian-Ukrainian and U.S. negotiators.
I think it's pretty safe to say the Russians are not going to give anything.
They are currently demanding that Ukraine give up territory that Russia has been unable to win in war for almost four years.
There's no good reason the Ukrainians should do this.
The U.S. needs to put, with Europe, needs to put additional pressure on Russia, and we can do so.
We have a whole bunch of leverage sitting on the table and we can use it.
If we do, the chances of a decent solution for Ukraine and for the free world go up.
So the caller is spot on right.
U.S. Needs to Pressure Russia 00:15:26
And Ambassador, I wanted to ask you about NATO expansion being a cause of the war in Ukraine or causing the Russians to invade Ukraine.
What do you think of that?
Do you think that that's a valid point that NATO expansion threatened Russia and so Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to that?
It is absolutely wrong.
Now, full disclosure, I'm one of the architects of the policy of NATO enlargement during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.
So, you know, full disclosure is required here, right?
That's complete nonsense.
Had NATO failed to enlarge, had we left Poland and the Baltic countries and Romania in a gray zone of insecurity, we would in effect have been putting a sign around those necks, around their necks, property of Russia to be reclaimed when convenient.
The fact is, we were right to enlarge NATO, and that's why we don't have a war of Russian aggression against the Baltics and Poland.
We've got one against Ukraine, and had we brought Ukraine into NATO, we couldn't for various reasons, some good, some less so.
Had we brought Ukraine in, there wouldn't be a war now.
NATO enlargement did not threaten Russia.
The war in Ukraine was started because Putin wants the empire back, and he will commit, he will start wars to get it back.
Besides, Putin didn't object to NATO enlargement to the Baltic states.
What turned him against the United States was his view that we were responsible for pro-Western, pro-democracy movements in Georgia and Ukraine.
He thought we started them.
We didn't, but he thought we did.
And so he figured he had to use force to regain the empire.
And he started wars because of that.
Let's talk to Dylan, Independent Line, Knoxville, Tennessee.
Good morning, Dylan.
Good morning.
I just wanted to kind of maybe pivot the subject a little bit.
I've been reading a lot about European divestment in the U.S. bond market.
I feel like, especially in a time when a lot of Americans have been struggling against inflation, what would the repercussions be of a large-scale European divestment in the U.S. bond market?
And how real do you think that threat is in response to tensions with our allies?
Thank you.
Well, first, I'm not a financial expert.
Secondly, one of the reasons that President Trump stepped back on Ukraine was that the market reaction was beginning to be severe.
And there were signs stocks would drop, and there was even the threat of European divestiture of Europe dumping American bonds.
So I think the fear was real, and I think the Europeans were thinking about that as one pushback against Trump's threats against Denmark and Greenland.
The larger question, the step back, is that the United States is much better off if we are working with our European allies and not against them.
We have great economic strength.
We have certain economic and financial vulnerabilities having to do with our deficit.
So we need to address those and not simply act as if we are invulnerable and can bully anybody we want.
Moreover, to contend with our true adversaries, aggressive, dangerous Russia and ambitious China, we need to work with our natural allies, which are the European democracies, the Asian democracies, Latin American democracies.
We have a natural advantage in that countries want to work with us, or at least they used to.
President Trump isn't helping that.
But we have advantages.
The callers is right that the U.S. has certain financial vulnerabilities.
So we should be working to make sure our friends don't turn against us as we work to reduce those vulnerabilities.
Polly is a Republican in Panama City, Florida.
Good morning, Polly.
Good morning.
You know, we've had hearings on naval aviators having films of UAPs flying over the ocean around naval bases and especially nuclear bases.
And you've got this ice sheet up there.
And I'm trying to say, well, if it was a Clinton or an Obama who insisted that we needed to own as opposed to lease Greenland and push so hard and to threaten war.
And I'm trying to think of why they would do that, you know, in talking about China and Russia.
You're asking, Polly, about the importance, the strategic importance of Greenland to the United States?
I'm saying with climate change, you know, maybe something has been exposed in Greenland.
Let's get a response.
Go ahead, Ambassador.
Well, the caller makes a good point.
That is, the U.S. has security interests in the Arctic, and as polar ice retreats because of climate change, the Arctic will become more, not less important.
Secondly, although President Trump dismissed it, if the ice sheets in Greenland retreat, mining might become more practical.
It isn't really practical now.
But the caller is right that we have legitimate security interests in the Arctic.
My point, though, is that those interests can be addressed using the existing security treaty between the U.S. and Denmark.
That treaty is in force.
It's very generous to the United States.
And in fact, I'm in contact with the Danes and have been for some time.
And I'd asked them at the beginning of this crisis whether there were any U.S. requests for additional basing that they had refused or any U.S. requests with respect to security at all that they had refused or had not answered.
And the answer is zero.
The U.S. could ask Denmark to do more.
And the Danes, at least before the U.S. was acting like a bully, were in a mood to say yes.
So this little crisis over Greenland had no good reason.
It wasn't.
There was no basis for it, which is frustrating.
And the caller is right.
We have security interests in the Arctic, and they can best be achieved by working with, not against, our allies and friends.
Let's talk to John Brea, California.
Democrat, you're on with Daniel Fried.
Well, thank you so much.
Well, what I wanted to say was that Trump's first term, I could not get over how many times I was surprised by his actions.
Just to conclude it all with January 6th, pretty much summed it up.
This term being unhinged and the directions in which the administration is taking the country, I have not been surprised.
Full me once kind of thing.
Seems like the press is always chasing the story of their true intentions that just recently happened with Venezuela.
So with this in mind, I once again would not be surprised if Trump cuts a deal to get real estate, just a section of real estate, since he's a real estate mogul, in Greenland that would be an American sovereign land and utilize it for detention centers and create America's Siberia, especially since American cities are fighting back on them to be created in their locality.
The budget's enormous now, and the people behind the scenes, such as Stephen Miller, would use it for indecent measures.
The old adage, out of sight, out of mind.
To me, it even transcends back to the Republican administration during Iraq.
Anyways, I just wanted to state my fears regarding this more innocent suffering.
All right, John, any response, Ambassador?
I think the Danes would not at this point agree to any transfer of U.S. sovereignty over Greenland.
Whether or not the U.S. would use its military bases in Greenland for the purposes of detention is another matter.
That's very expensive.
It costs a lot of money to build facilities with adequate heating.
You know, the electricity isn't there.
You have to bring in the generators.
You have to bring in the food and water.
So it's an expensive proposition.
I understand the caller's concerns, right?
He's not making this up.
But I don't think that that's terribly practical.
And it's not a practical idea, even if someone in the Trump administration were entertaining it.
And just to note, the Danish prime minister had said that sovereignty over Greenland is a red line for them.
And the Danes mean it.
During the height of this crisis, Denmark sent soldiers to Greenland.
They were prepared to fight.
The Danes made it clear.
They were prepared to fight the Americans.
They were prepared to fight anybody who attacked them.
And this was a shocking development, especially for the Danes.
I want to add one more thing.
The Danes sent forces to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight alongside the Americans.
And whatever you think of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Danes were there when we called.
And some of those soldiers didn't come home.
I will add this.
When I was in the Bush administration, I was working with the Danish government, encouraging them to send forces to Greenland.
It is dishonorable to disparage the sacrifice of an ally that stood up when we called.
Christina Yudaka, Michigan, Independent Line, you're on the air.
Thank you.
And Jean Dobre, I am third generation born in this country.
All my people came from Poland.
I have agreed so much with what's been saying.
My biggest problem is the way President Trump talks.
He name calls, he talks to our allies as if they're stupid, and he talks to everybody that doesn't think he's wonderful as we're stupid.
And yet, when it comes to Putin or any of the dictators, he calls them geniuses.
And it really, really bothers me.
I've never seen this kind of diplomacy.
And I've been around for a long time.
I just think that he might not permanently damage our relationship with Europe, but it's going to take a long time to heal those boozes because he is a bully, and bullies do not use diplomacy.
So he is getting us nowhere but into deeper trouble.
And expanding NATO, when has a NATO country ever attacked Russia?
Never.
And what he's teaching Russia is to keep going.
And as President Trump says, we're not spending a penny in Ukraine.
No, but we're making money selling Europe all the defense products.
So he's always about making money, but mostly for himself.
And this, he's damaging our democracy because he's encouraging the dictators.
Thank you very much for listening to me.
Well, I appreciate the eloquence and the strength of that last statement.
I would say this.
In the years of American wisdom, we understood that we needed to resist working with our allies.
We needed to resist aggressive tyrants.
That was a lesson of the 20th century, World War II and the Cold War.
And Putin is an aggressive tyrant.
And it is in America's interest.
It's not charity.
It's in America's interests to help the Ukrainians fight and defend their country because a freer world is apt to be a more prosperous one.
America set out to make the world a better place and get really rich in the process.
It's not charity.
It's in our own interest.
An orderly, peaceful, rules-based world is going to be good for American business, and it's also going to be good for the other countries, part of that world.
And the sort of the positive side of what the caller was saying is that if we rally our allies and get them to do more, Trump's right about that, they need to do more.
But to push back against the aggressive tyrants, we're apt to come out ahead.
Lauren in Minnesota, line for Republicans.
Hi, Lauren.
Hi.
This war in Ukraine could be ended right now if NATO and the United States would blow the hell out of Moscow.
It should have been done four years ago.
Trump's first term, Putin said he's going to invade Ukraine.
And Trump said, if you do, I'll hit Moscow.
And Putin said you wouldn't.
And Trump said, try me.
And he never invaded Ukraine as long as Trump was in.
And that January 6th thing was staged by Nancy Perls.
She's the Democrats and the FBI.
Go ahead, Ambassador Freed, on Lauren's proposal to blow up Moscow.
Well, that's not very practical.
We're not going, the U.S. is not going to attack Moscow.
However, the premise of that point is that the U.S. should do more to push back on Russia's aggression, and I agree with that.
Can't Go Back? 00:14:09
There is more we could do.
We could send Ukraine anti-aircraft systems it needs and missiles it needs to take the fight to Russia because Russia is the aggressor, and we should increase economic pressure on Russia, and we have the ability to do so.
We have leverage lying right on the table.
We need to do that.
If President Trump used the tools available to push back on Moscow, he could get a win.
He could have the war settled on terms favorable to Ukraine and the United States, and then he'd be able to say, hey, I won this.
I helped Ukraine settle the war in a way that Joe Biden didn't.
Now, I might not agree with the politics of that, but he could say it.
And if he helps end the war on favorable terms, well, he gets to say whatever he wants, pretty much.
But he needs to do it.
He needs to do it.
Dan in Birdstown, Tennessee, Democrat, you're on the air, Dan.
Good morning, Mimi.
I have a couple comments I'd like Professor Freed to comment on.
With all the shiny objects floating around this week, the one thing that stood out to me was Putin on the board of board of peace?
Really?
Need I say more?
But I will.
I will say more.
Do these MA people know that that's an oxymoron?
And Professor Freed, before you comment on that, did you have any regrets being the undersecretary under George W. Bush?
Did you help perpetuate the myth of WMD that cost our country so much blood and treasure?
And finally, Mimi, they're still eating the dogs here in Birdstown.
All right, Dan.
Go ahead, Ambassador, on those first two points.
Well, I think that the I've thought a lot about the record of the George W. Bush administration.
I was in the White House on 9-11.
I know what a shock that was.
The Bush administration made a lot of decisions after that terrible day.
Not all of them were good.
But they acted in what they thought was the best interests of the country after a genuine shock.
And there are other things that George W. Bush did that stand up rather well.
PEPFAR, the assistance program in Africa, or enlarging NATO to bring in the Baltics.
President Bush has a record that he can stand on.
And that administration made mistakes that it has to live with.
I don't regret my service, though.
I served honorably.
I'm proud of that.
And in life and in policymaking, you're going to get some things wrong.
But I think, in retrospect, George W. Bush appears as an honorable servant of the country and the Constitution, despite all the mistakes.
So that's it.
Ambassador Freed, his other point was about the Board of Peace, and I wanted to...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'll add to that, that the chairman is Donald Trump, not the American president.
So how does that work?
I mean, he would still be the chairman of the Board of Peace after he leaves office.
Well, the caller is right that having Vladimir Putin on anything called a Board of Peace is a glaring inconsistency.
The Board of Peace has an uncertain future.
Let's see if it can get anything useful done in Gaza whatsoever.
And after Trump is no longer president, well, we'll see what the future of the Board of Peace is and what his role is, if any.
On the independent line in New Jersey, Bill, good morning.
A gentleman expressed it about NATO expanding, and it's a good thing.
You've got to remember that when Clinton was president, the Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons.
And they had an agreement with Russia.
And Clinton made an agreement with Russia that NATO would not expand and that we would protect the Ukraine.
Well, we didn't live up to that and not expand NATO.
Now, I'm not justifying Russia going into Ukraine.
They had no business doing that.
But you've got to remember that the politicians make promises, and then the people that come in after them don't fulfill those promises, and it creates turmoil amongst our adversaries.
All right, Ambassador, you were shaking your hand at that.
The caller is half right.
That is, President Clinton in 1994, with Britain, Ukraine, and Russia, signed an agreement called the Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for some unspecified security.
Those security promises in the Budapest Memorandum turned out to be empty, useless.
So the caller is right.
That was a problem.
The caller is wrong, however, that the U.S. promised never to enlarge NATO.
We never did.
We never did.
That story keeps going around, but uh-uh, no such promise existed, but you don't have to take my word for it.
Mihail Gorbachev, last president, you know, last leader of the Soviet Union, said that there was no promise by the U.S. not to enlarge NATO.
Never happened.
Ambassador, we've got a question for you from Stephen Illinois, who wants to know who you think is the closest NATO ally to the current administration.
Where does Germany or Poland stand?
Ah, well, closest ally, there are a lot of categories, but Germany and Poland.
Germany has the strongest economy, the largest country in Europe.
They have underinvested in defense.
They need to do more.
The current German chancellor has emerged as a strong leader on Ukraine and has a decent relationship with the United States.
The United States, you know, the Trump administration sometimes pushes Germany, but Trump seems to get along better with Chancellor Mertz.
Poland is an emerging European power.
I lived in Poland for many years.
Their economy is in excellent shape.
They're not a small country.
Their military is growing rapidly and is quite capable.
Their politics are interesting.
They have a conservative president who's politically more or less aligned with the Trump world, but is also pro-Ukrainian security and certainly pro-NATO and anti-Putin.
The Polish government is centrist, and they also are pro-NATO, pro-U.S., but very pro-European.
So we get along great with the Poles, and we should.
Our relationship with Germany is more complicated, but we sure should be working with Germany.
And we have another, there are many other NATO allies with whom we're close.
The British, the Italian prime minister is aligned with Trump politically, but is also staunchly pro-NATO and pro-Ukrainian.
So it's complicated, but we have friends.
The U.S. has friends in Europe, and we should use them, not alienate them.
On the line for Democrats, UCAP of California.
Barbara, good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, what I wanted to say was, look, allowing Mr. Trump to get Greenland, you might as well sell it to Putin because that's who it ends up with.
You know, when you're in real estate, you sell as well as you buy.
And Putin is the last person that needs to be sitting up over the top of us.
Putin needs to keep himself over on the other side of the globe as far as we can get him over there.
And I hope Europe don't take their eye off of Putin because Putin is the dictator of all this.
Putin has outsmarted all of our good heads up here.
Leader.
It's really, really a sad thing.
And Mr. Bush, he was a great president.
I really enjoyed him.
He didn't scare the poop out of us, that's for sure.
All right, Barbara.
And what do you think, Ambassador, is animating Vladimir Putin?
What's his major goal?
He wants to restore the Russian Empire.
And he will do so through force, fear, and war.
This is not a hard one to figure out.
He has said so.
He is obsessed with history and the way that Russia attained imperial status.
And one of the ways Russia attained imperial status is by conquering Ukraine, which it did in the 1600s and the 1700s.
He wants it back.
The idea that Russia could be a normal nation working with other nations, that's not part of his worldview.
So he has started a war, a war he hasn't won, and he is impoverishing Russia to win this war.
If he fails, Russia may have another chance at some reforms.
That's the way it works in Russian history.
When they start aggressive wars and lose, sometimes there's reform.
We'll see this time.
Bruce, Kingston, New York, Independent Line, you're on the air.
Yeah, good morning, Mimi, C-SPAN, and all America.
I want to tell Mr. Freed, Dr. Freed, that, first of all, I think he's a wonderful example of our finest ambassadors and diplomats.
I think he's got a very balanced perspective between realism and idealism, which he manages to communicate very well.
I would say he might be a little bit entrenched in the Washington Consensus a little bit, having been in it for so long in that world order, and maybe he thinks that we could bring that back.
But I would suggest to him that under a rogue president like Trump, that pretty much has a realist interpretation.
He's turned the Washington Consensus on his head for his own purposes.
I'd like to make two comments.
One about Greenland.
The reason he wants ownership is because it would give him property rights to exclusively exploit any resources that are there.
Putin would be the only one who really gets an advantage from taking over Greenland because it would dissemble NATO.
And frankly, he would just dismiss a small population of islanders, which would be typically in his history.
As far as the Board of Peace goes, I agree 100% that the world should be shocked about him offering a position to Putin, but not too surprised.
The fact is that without the world court being involved in that, and frankly, Trump, if he was an honest man, would dismiss his own interests and back out of it and allow the rest of the world to decide what people might get in there to help arbitrate a new state there.
And I'll hang up and ask Mr. Freed for his comments.
What a lot of useful and thoughtful observations.
And I agree with just about all of them.
The caller made a comment that we can't go back to the way things were.
And that's a valid point.
The system that I was defending also, well, a lot of problems rose up, including deindustrialization, the rise of China by exploiting the system.
Lots of problems in the United States.
So how do you deal with that?
Do you deal with it by enforcing the rules so China doesn't game it?
Do you stop trying to impose or advance a global trade system and instead have different rules for dealing with your friends who obey the rules and respect the rules and different rules for countries that don't?
I don't know.
But the caller's point that we need to examine, my words, not his, but I think this is sort of the direction he was heading, that we need to examine what went wrong and fix things and change things, not try to go back to the way things were.
Well, that's a very valid point.
And I wish that the Trump administration, which came to power partly because Americans felt things weren't working out right, would actually try some creative ideas rather than showy forms of depriving Americans of their rights at home and draw endless drama abroad.
We need to fix things.
Disrupting Establishment Consensus 00:04:34
And that doesn't mean defending the way things were.
And disrupting an establishment consensus can be a good thing.
And that may be what we do with the next administration.
So I thank the caller for those points because they were serious and thoughtful.
All right.
And that's Daniel Freed, Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council, former U.S. Ambassador to Poland, and former Assistant Secretary of State for Europe.
Thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Thanks for having me.
Coming up next, we've got former police officer and senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice Thaddeus Johnson.
He'll talk about the relationship between ICE and local law enforcement as the Trump administration's immigration crackdown continues.
We'll be right back.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series.
Sunday with our guest, Christopher Buckley, best-selling satirical author and son of conservative writer William F. Buckley.
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He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
You have written 20 books, many of them satires.
Satire is a lost art a bit.
I don't see that many satirists that are best-selling authors.
There are.
Carl Heisen, Dave Barry, although they might be more classified as humorists.
The difference between a satire and a humorist, you would say, is hundreds of thousands of sales.
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Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere.
But we have to listen so we can govern better.
Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility.
You can fight and still be friendly.
Bridging the divide in American politics.
You know, you may not agree with Leonard on everything, but you can find areas where you do agree.
He's a pretty likable guy as well.
Chris Koons and I are actually friends.
He votes wrong all the time, but we're actually friends.
A horrible secret that Scott and I have is that we actually respect each other.
We all don't hate each other.
You two actually kind of like each other.
These are the kinds of secrets we'd like to expose.
It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about.
You guys did agree to the civility, all right?
He owes my son $10 from a bet.
Fork it over.
That's fighting words right there.
I'm glad I'm not in charge.
I'm thrilled to be on the show with him.
There are not shows like this, right?
Incentivizing that relationship.
Ceasefire, Friday nights on C-SPAN.
On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
Ann Marshall is Associate Professor of History and Executive Director of the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library at Mississippi State University.
Her book is Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of an Anti-Slavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform.
Clay lived to be 92, had two wives and 11 children.
Kentucky was his home state.
As an anti-slavery reformer, Cassius Marcellus Clay is often remembered as a knife-wielding rabble-rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries.
Abraham Lincoln made a ministry to Russia, and yes, the boxer Muhammad Ali was originally named after him, but decided he wanted his own original name.
Ann Marshall will discuss all this with us.
A new interview with author Ann Marshall about her book, Cassius Marcellus Clay, The Life of an Anti-Slavery Slaveholder and a Paradox of American Reform.
Book Notes Plus with our host Brian Lamb is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We're joined now by Thaddeus Johnson, Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice.
Shooting Moving Vehicles 00:15:47
Thad, welcome to the program.
Yeah, thank you for having me.
Indeed, great to be here.
Now, your background is in law enforcement.
Can you give us a little bit of an idea of kind of the things that you've done in your career?
Yeah, absolutely.
I worked in the city of Memphis as a law enforcement official.
I worked as a supervisor.
I've trained officers in terrorism, dealing with critical incidents.
I've also trained officers in use of force when it comes to deadly force, firearms, and debtly force or things of that nature.
So I have patrol tactics, officer survival.
So I have quite the swath of experience when it comes to law enforcement and training law enforcement officers.
Now, before we get into the actions of ICE and the tactics, I wanted to ask you about sanctuary cities because it did come up earlier in the program with some kind of, there's some confusion about what that means.
How does a city become designated as a sanctuary city?
And then what does that mean as far as local law enforcement and their interaction with immigration enforcement?
Yes, absolutely.
That's a great question.
And you're right, there is some confusion around it.
You know, sanctuary cities, it's not a single legal status.
It's a political label for a city or county or state that locally adopts policies to limit how much local governments help with federal civil immigration enforcement, especially when you're talking about the day-to-day in policing and jails.
You have most sanctuary policies focused on a few concrete areas.
One being limiting compliance with ICE detainers, another being limited when local police ask about immigration status when they're stopping and dealing and interacting with citizens and civilians.
And then they also set rules for when the jail would notify ICE about release dates or share certain information.
And so I think, you know, that's what it does.
And one more thing is important to know what a sanctuary policy is, what they do not do.
They do not stop ICE from operating the city.
They just mainly limit local participation.
And they also do not make it legal to be undocumented or actually block federal immigration law.
And I'll say this, many sanctuaries, jurisdictions, they still cooperate in specific circumstances, whether it's like a serious crimes, warrants, or certain type of investigations.
But that really depends on the local law and policy design.
So what are local police supposed to be doing when it comes to interacting with ICE?
Are they supposed to stand back?
Are they supposed to help?
Are they supposed to be there in case something goes wrong?
How does that work?
Well, there's a couple of ways that this works.
So you have both a formal and an informal pathway.
And so they have this thing called the 287G, these agreements where ICE delegates like limited federal authority, immigration authority to train state and local officers, right?
And there are three main models.
You have the jail enforcement model, and this kind of focuses on people who are already in custody.
So screening and processing and working with local authorities to share their information.
You have the warrant service type of model where it's a little bit narrower, where they have local personnel who are trained to serve as to serve these ICE administrative warrants and custodial sessions.
And then you have the most controversial is going to be the task force model.
And that's what we've kind of been seeing in the streets and what's in making the news as happens during routine policing encounters like traffic stops and things like that.
Now, mind you, that's the formal agreement.
You also have it informally where you have some information sharing.
You also have where ICE will ask for agencies to hold people 48 hours longer than normally would just so ICE can come and take them into custody.
And you also just have the informal sharing.
The officers on a call, they may be on the same radio connection, sharing cell phones, working together.
They're part of this group where they can work together like that.
If ICE is on a call, perhaps you will have local police pull down to provide security for them to make sure they can do their job without dealing with any protesters or any other types of danger.
So it's not one model.
It works in a few ways.
And again, both formally and informally.
I want to ask you about the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis and what was your initial reaction to that?
How have you thought about it since then?
Yeah, these incidents are really hard because I will say this.
You know, even policing, when policing is done entirely correctly, it can look ugly, particularly to the untrained eye.
And so the first thing when I see an officer involved shooting, the first thing I think about is what was the actions of the officers?
What was the action of the particular citizen?
And so the first thing, of course, we see is a vehicle.
So one thing that we train officers is not to walk in front of vehicles, right?
We also train officers when it comes to deadly force to try to remove away from it and make deadly force the last option.
Now, mind you, sometimes things happen.
It's very fast.
It's chaotic.
It can be fluid.
It's emotionally charged.
And so things don't play out cleanly oftentimes.
But the main thing I ask is, what was the officer thinking in the moment?
Was he in imminent fear of threat or bodily injury?
All right.
And also, what was the purpose of the stop?
Could it have been avoidable?
And this is the thing that I'll say.
When we look at these shootings, we often focus on the time that the trigger was pulled.
But that didn't happen in the vacuum.
You had to get to that point.
So did the officer de-escalate?
Did they escalate it?
Was the citizen, what was their intent?
Were they afraid?
Were they trying to injure the officer?
Trying to get a full picture of what's going on.
And oftentimes, when we just focus on the actual shooting itself, that's tend to be where the legal standard comes in of objective reasonableness.
And so when that happens, it tends to say it doesn't necessarily judge on what happened before we got to the moment of the shooting.
Was the shooting in that moment not hindsight justified?
And so when you look at a vehicle coming toward an officer, just in general, those are deemed to be legally justified.
However, because things are lawful under the books does not mean that they can not also be awful.
And this is one of those categories there.
And hopefully this death doesn't go in vain.
And this can be a learning experience on how to avoid these situations.
Do we know if DHS ICE has changed their procedure and their rules of engagement as a result of that killing?
I haven't heard anything about it.
And this is the thing.
The one thing that has been coming up is about shooting at moving vehicles.
Well, DHS and DOJ, their policies discourage that because of the dangers, because they ricochet, they may miss their target.
If the driver is hit, that vehicle becomes an unguided missile.
So it can actually be more dangerous to stop a threat in those moments than to actually try to figure out, do investigation, and find that vehicle and find that person.
So they're still wearing masks.
All of them still are not wearing body worn cameras.
The training, from what I hear, hasn't changed on the turning of a dime.
And so it does not appear as if their rules of engagement has changed.
However, the rules of engagement, according to policy, align with many other law enforcement agencies across the U.S.
And NBC News has this headline: Trump's DHS has shot 11 people during immigration enforcement operations since September.
And it says, ICE and border patrol shootings show a pattern that policing experts say is alarming.
Officers firing into cars and injuring and killing drivers.
I also want to show, before I do that, I want to invite people to call in.
If you've got a question about ICE and local law enforcement or state enforcement, that number, the numbers are Democrats 202748, 8,000, Republicans, 202748, 8,001, and Independents 202, 748, 8,002.
Thad, I want to show you what the Homeland Security Department has put out as far as numbers go.
This is from January 20th.
ICE and CBP have conducted operations in cities nationwide, resulting in hundreds of thousands of arrests.
70% of those arrested by ICE are convicted criminals or have criminal charges.
During President Trump's first year, ICE arrested 43,305 potential national security risks.
ICE has arrested 1,416 known or suspected terrorists, that's KSTs, and has removed 1,392 KSTs and more than 7,000 gang arrests.
What do you make of those numbers, Thad?
Well, one thing that we know about many people who have been in ICE detention, that the vast majority, they don't have a criminal conviction.
And this is the main thing that I'm talking about when you're talking about transparency.
My thing is where are the numbers coming from?
These numbers are being reported, but researchers like myself and many other citizens are not able to go on and have a data tool where they can go and pull down for themselves.
So this transparency creates a lot of uncertainty and distrust.
And so with that, you know, it not only delegitimizes the federal government and their authority, but also the local authorities as well.
And so it makes it appear as if the local authorities have no control.
And so I hear these numbers.
I've been fighting in Memphis and other places to try to get my hands on this actual Data to see things.
You even heard things in Memphis talking about child trafficking and children actually being rescued and recovered.
I still haven't personally seen the data.
And so the one thing is that I need to see the data.
And some of the things where you're saying that most people have a criminal conviction, that it kind of runs counter to some of the information and evidence that I've seen.
I've seen some numbers, whereas in November of 25, that about 74% of people in ICE detention had no criminal conviction.
And you're going to, and if you cast a wide enough net and you're not doing targeted type of enforcement that is shown to increase and improve public safety, you're going to catch some bad characters and actors in there, but you're also going to catch people who are otherwise law-abiding, except for their status inside of our country.
And Thad, you wrote an opinion piece for USA Today.
The headline is: almost anyone can be an ICE agent now.
That's a problem.
What do we know about the requirements to be employed by ICE?
And then, once employed, the training process that they go through?
Yes, so the hiring and how you train.
I mean, that sets the standard for your organization.
And so, again, it's kind of behind the black box.
We're being reported things and we're not seeing actual numbers.
We can't see the actual curriculum.
But this is what we know.
We know that they've reduced the age down to 18 from 21 of what it used to be, right?
We know research shows that experience matters, right?
It shows that we have the level of discretion that's used on the street, that more experienced officers use force less, and also more experienced officers are less likely to draw misconduct complaints.
So we know that.
We also know that they're shortened not only their, they totally disrupted their Spanish module.
Now, mind you, two-thirds of undocumented people in the U.S. are from Spanish-speaking countries.
And what we've turned to, reduce the five weeks to a translational action, which can be prone to error, and particularly in the heat of the moment, there's not really time for that translation with fear and adrenaline is rushing.
So that can be an escalation point in those moments of just uncertainty and confusion.
We also know that they made some changes to the field training where from weeks that I've seen that is a little bit shorter than what it has been.
Field training officers are a vital part of who an officer will be in the field, a vital part to the type of policing that the public gets.
If you're making changes to that, we don't know what the qualifications are of those people who are in those positions to be field training officers.
Those can be real big issues.
What about the escalation training?
And also, generally, ICE is not trained for the urban policing mission in which it appears and which they're taking on right now.
And so you have oftentimes a mismatch of the training.
And then you're bringing in people who we find that after they're already well into training, that they should not have been eligible in the first place with criminal records from domestic violence to DUIs and things of that nature.
And this is the thing that I was really concerned about.
The cohorts of these lesser trained officers are now hitting the streets as we're talking right now.
It's probably since November and all of these things.
How will this carry out?
And then you also think about who you're recruiting.
You're recruiting in a very aggressive way with messaging that is very hard-nosed types of enforcement.
And it's going to draw a certain type of people.
And if you don't have the level of public transparency, you have issues with training, and you have a mismatch in mission design and how you're trained, it's no surprise that many of the issues and the protests that we see right now are coming to bear.
All right, let's talk to callers and start with Donna East Brunswick, New Jersey.
Democrat, you're on with Thad Johnson.
Go ahead, Donna.
Good morning.
Michael, I have a comment.
The ICE agencies, I think they are out of control, especially when they drag people out of the cars.
They're breaking windows.
They're taking people from schooling and things like that.
But I have a question.
Has anyone ever asked Christy No or Steve Miller, has anyone intimidated their family?
Someone needs to ask them that if they would like if something happened to their family like that, because this is unreal.
And another question I have, another comment I have about Miss Goode.
The cop should have known if anything was going on, he couldn't shoot a tire out.
He had to shoot her.
I think that's unacceptable.
And then for them not to.
Yep, go ahead, Thad.
Yeah, no, no, thank you, first of all, for those questions.
You make really good points.
So to your first point, when you're asking, if we asked our leaders how they feel about someone treating their family like that, I mean, that's a big reason why reform and policing needs to be with the local authorities.
When the federal authorities partner with local police, there can be great outcomes for the public, and you don't have this mass fear, and you don't have these types of issues.
That's one reason why we want officers to reflect and live in the communities that they police.
And when you have the federal government come in, you need that liaison.
You need that trusted partner in this.
Look, under President Obama, over his years in office, about over 3 million people were deported, right, and process, right?
But it was done in a different way.
So it's not about whether you agree with this or not.
It's about how it's done in a democracy.
And so that's point one.
Supporting Ice Enforcement Democratically 00:09:53
To point two, how we train police officers.
People say, why are they shooting in the leg?
Why are you shooting in the hand?
These things.
Officers are not trained like that.
They're not snipers, right?
We get basic training.
And what we do is we train when there's a deadly threat to go center masks because it's the larger part of the body, right?
Also, when you're under stress, your fine motor skills, they change.
So you may score 100 in qualifications in the paper target in the field that accuracy will drop lower and lower if you think about the physiological aspects that go on.
And we also train for center mass neutralized threat simply also because we have to think about our backdrop.
We have to go for the largest target simply because what if you miss and you hit that kid down the street?
You miss and the bullet goes into their church.
And so those are why we train officers in that regard.
We don't train officers generally to shoot tires, to shoot limbs and things of that nature.
So they're just not trained that way.
And I'm not sure if that would be safer or not.
But I definitely understand your concern and what that means.
And Thad, about the officers asking Renee Goode to get out of the car and other people to get out of the car.
Is that what they should have done at that time?
Because there was the argument made that, you know, she's a woman.
These are these three masked armed guys and she was afraid to get out of her car.
What do you think about that?
No, I think that's a very valid point.
You have mass agents.
You have a lot of verbal commands coming along for everybody.
And there's a lot of emotion.
And one thing that I'm often confused about is, you know, why is ICE, why am I seeing ICE involvement and so much traffic enforcement?
They're not a traffic enforcement agency.
And oftentimes you will see this without the support of the local police.
So it's not as if the police are doing it and they're pulling down.
So that's a first big issue.
Like, should that trigger have even been there in the first place?
Should we have even had the interaction?
Why did the individual go and grab her door?
She didn't appear to be a threat.
Didn't appear to seem like she was obstructing.
What it appeared was you could have given a verbal command and could have been gone on the way.
And when you're an officer and you're approaching these vehicles, if the road is icy, if there are different things that may impede how you can respond, you need to be mindful of those particular issues because we are trained on how dangerous vehicles are and we're trained on how dangerous traffic stops can be.
I'm not sure how much training, if that's a big part of a training like local police, of getting traffic enforcement and traffic stops on state and local jurisdictional highways and streets.
I'm not sure if that's really a part of the job, particularly when most of these warrants are administrative warrants.
These are not criminal warrants signed by a judge.
And so I can definitely see why and have some feelings that perhaps the traffic enforcement can be those shocking points.
That same officer was dragged by a vehicle a year earlier.
When you see many of these other shootings that have happened involved in ICE, even in Portland and things like that, it generally involves a car.
When it started in LA, these things generally involve the vehicle, and that's not necessarily their cup of tea.
And so already we're in a disadvantaged situation when officers who are not trained in traffic enforcement are making traffic stops and dealing with people in the traffic.
Well, Patricia is in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Republican, good morning, Patricia.
You're on the air.
Yeah, good morning.
Well, thanks for having another person on that's going to stir the pot and anger uninformed leftists.
Minneapolis police aren't helping the ICE.
The mainstream media puts out a false narrative that paints the ICE agents like this man as not doing it properly and overreacting and all this kind of stuff.
And then the audience hears that and gets enraged.
And then we have trouble in Minneapolis again.
The last time the leftists decided to riot, and it's not peaceful demonstrations, they're riots, the city got burnt down.
300 businesses were ruined in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Police station was burnt down.
People were killed.
So I hope Ms. Thaddeus realizes that some of the blood is going to be on his hands by doing this negative reporting on ICE.
We had millions upon millions upon millions of people pour through the border.
Undocumented children, tens of thousands of children being trafficked.
And it's out of hand and it's got to be fixed.
And you should be supporting ICE.
Everyone should be supporting ICE instead of making it more difficult.
It's already difficult.
And the other thing is, they may not be convicted of a crime, but where is all this federal aid and Medicaid and fraud coming from?
And how come crime has gone down so much in the last year?
It's because of our dear ICE agents.
Sorry, Patricia.
We got that.
Go ahead, Ted.
So, Patricia, first of all, thank you for your call.
And I hear you, right?
And by no means am I trying to enrage people.
I'm just trying to get the facts out of there so we can be safe and have a conversation where we can get to these things.
These are hard conversations.
And you're in Minneapolis, and you're right in the heart of it.
And so I can definitely appreciate that.
And you're right.
You know, the citizens, we have a hand to play in this, right?
You know, when ICE and other police are trying to do their jobs, we shouldn't be interfering in what they're doing.
But we do have a right to protest.
This is part of being a democracy.
And again, this is not about how you feel about immigration enforcement or not.
But this is about how we do it.
This is actually a democracy.
And we have to do it in a way that people feel safe and can trust the actual system.
I feel that many people understand that we have to deal with immigration enforcement, but it's about how we do it.
And we've done it before and done it at a greater scale without seeing things in the street that actually happens like this.
And I know Minneapolis is still hurting because George Floyd happened not so many years ago.
And so I definitely understand that.
But we have to train the officers.
We have to support the officers.
And we have to make sure that they are doing the job that they've been trained to do and doing it how they're supposed to actually be doing it.
So when I'm talking about just democratic policing in particular, whether it's ICE or whomever.
And I guess just to the last point that you made about crime, I can't say that these efforts weren't part of it, but in places that ICE and immigration has not been nationwide, we have actually seen crime go down.
And so there are many facets.
And we can have a whole nother show that we're talking about these things.
And I think, you know, oftentimes too, that we tend to think that because we're making arrests or we see these high-profile things, that police are only part of it.
Police are a big part of it, but the courts have to work through things and process people.
You have to love on these communities, make sure that these communities have everything that they have so this thing does not become a generational issue.
So it's very complex.
It's a lot of emotion.
And just know that I'm just trying to tell the truth.
And I'm trying to figure out ways for us to be able to enforce the law with people being safe and also with our officers being heard.
If you read things that I talk about all the time, I talk about how right now we're in a moment that even though crime has gone down on the streets, conflict between citizens and police are going up.
That police are being assaulted at almost record numbers over the past couple years.
I talk about these things in rural policing.
So this is not an attack on ICE.
And I'm sorry and apologize if it comes across that way.
But this is simply truth-telling on how we can police in America and also make what the federal government be more legitimate and be more credible and do it in a way in which both local police and local leaders are not rebelling against each other but can continue to work together.
So thank you for that call, Patricia.
In Canoga Park, California, Independent Line, Lupe, you're on the air.
Hi, good morning.
I've got a couple of comments and then some one question.
The comment that I have right now that Christy Noam, they keep showing this one guy that's tattooed and everything, he came out, he's an actor.
He came out in the movie Scario.
All right.
And every time they keep showing the guys cutting their hair and being marched and off-white, that's part of the movie.
So they're going by a script.
And the other one is: my nephew works for the U.S. Marshals.
And they will ask, Do you want to participate?
A lot of them put their thumbs down because they said, This is not right.
So, if anybody out there is listening, and if you have any other comments on what I just said, I have the video, I have the CD player or the DVD, whatever they call it now.
But there's a lot of things that they're doing there.
And these guys that are dressed like if they are ICE or not, you notice the hoods that they're wearing, or their bonnets or whatever it is, or their vests.
And the real guys that are all doing the right thing and correcting.
And Lupe, did you say you had a question as well?
Minnesotans Pushing Back 00:04:33
Yeah.
How does this keep going on?
And Trump just laughs and nobody calls Trump on what he's doing.
And he's doing all this rioting and lying.
When he's questioned, he says, well, I didn't know about that.
Somebody should call him on that.
Todd, any comment on that?
Yeah, I think we have to hold our leaders accountable.
And I think oftentimes when we have issues with police, even with Derek Chauvin, we tend to focus on the actual officer.
I think we have to focus on the leadership that put them in this position and ask ourselves, are our leaders, whether mayors or the president in this case and there's officials, putting our officers in positions where they can be successful, where they can be safe, and are they putting them in a position where they keep our citizens safe as well?
So that's really important.
The legitimacy of how we do these things is important.
Again, this is a democracy, and everybody here is afforded certain rights to be treated a certain way, regardless of the color skin, regardless of their background or status.
And so this is what we're getting at.
And this is how we have to hold our leaders accountable because it sets presidents for the next thing, whether locally or federally, on how we respond to this and how we hold them accountable.
Jane, St. Paul, Minnesota, Democrat, good morning, Jane.
Good morning to you, and good morning, and thank you very much to Mr. Johnson.
I think you've attempted to make it clear to the audience that you're not simply trying to say that the ICE people were wrong.
I'm a Minnesotan.
I'm very pleased to see that so many Minnesotans, and especially people from here in the cities, have been calling.
You notice that if you talk to people who are Minnesotans or live in the cities, live in the state of Minnesota, they'll usually refer to the two cities as the cities.
They don't usually say, I'm going down to St. Paul.
They'll say, well, I'm going down to the cities because we're thought of as a community.
This is one of the best places.
I've lived in four states, five cities in those four states.
And I have never been anywhere for the last 45 years that I could be, could consider that people would come to my attention.
I happen to be African American.
I have a nephew who is in journalism and has been a reporter for about 30 years.
He was shocked when about 10 years ago he was in the Twin Cities in downtown and he was looking around trying to find a particular building.
He had three people, he told me that day, come up to him and say to him, are you looking for something?
Can I help you?
That happens here.
And the people that are coming out and are accused of being agitators, outside agitators, it's the same thing that was used against African Americans and other people of goodwill during the civil rights struggle.
They were always called outside agitators.
When you're trying to be free, trying, well, actually, I'm thinking back to those days of civil rights.
I don't mean to say to be free.
But when you're trying, yes, and that is so true, to be left alone.
I have several friends, young women, who right now are not able to go to work.
They're Latinos, Latinas, rather.
They are not able to go to work because they're afraid.
Both have been under the kind of situation where they've been waiting to get a green card, and now they know they'll probably never get them.
So I appreciate the way he's talking.
As for the woman.
Sorry, Jane, I've got to move on because we are running short on time.
Any comment there, Tad?
No, just thank you.
I do think I've been to Minneapolis and St. Paul area several times.
The people are wonderful.
I think they are one of the smarter cities when it comes to police reform and understand that what's going on.
Even when everybody was talking about the Fonda police, the voters in Minneapolis said, no, this is not what we're asking for and not the type of reform.
And so unfortunately, it's happening in there.
But absolutely, we're at a flashpoint in how we respond.
Minneapolis, again, is unfortunately going to be this mecca of the justice movement moving forward.
We're thinking about communities and policing, and now this time is federal.
We've got one more call for you, Thad.
Gigi is in Fairfax, Virginia, Independent Line.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I was wondering if it's true that ICE officers receive additional funds above and beyond their salary for each individual that they detain, even if that individual is later released.
And that is my question.
Open Forum Bonuses Debate 00:04:06
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
I haven't heard of that.
Now, I know if they have these recruitment and bonuses at the higher-end bonuses that they are doing, I also know that they have things like student loan forgiveness for signing up and things of that nature.
I haven't heard of what it sounds like you're talking about, some type of bounty of sorts.
I have not heard about that, but I definitely will start digging and investigating and seeing if that's happening because that by no way should be happening.
That is not democratic policing, and that is not how you make the public safer.
If anything, you make them more fearful and less trusting of law enforcement and our government.
All right, that's Thaddeus Johnson, Senior Fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice.
You can find out more about his organization at counciloncj.org.
Thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Thank you for having us.
I appreciate you.
Coming up next, more of your phone calls on Open Forum.
Whatever you want to talk about, you can start calling in now.
It's 202-748-8000 for Democrats, 202-748-8000-1 for Republicans, and 202-748-8000-2 for Independents.
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In his book, Retribution, ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl gives a behind-the-scenes look at Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign win.
Mr. Carl also talks about his longtime relationship with the 47th president and the contrast between President Trump's public and private sides.
You're not a wonderful person.
Frankie, you're a terrible reporter.
You know it, and so do I.
Okay, so as we were leaving, which was right after that, he took maybe one or two more, and we're told to leave, Trump motions to me to come towards the resolute desk.
And he does this kind of emotion.
He's like, we're okay.
You basically say, we're okay.
We're okay.
Don't worry about that.
And I turned to him and I just said, I said, that was tough.
And he goes, oh, you were tough.
No, you were tough.
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Washington Journal continues.
Welcome back to Washington Journal.
We're in open forum now.
We'll get to your calls very soon, but wanted to show you this article from Axios.
Trump Escalates Carney Feud After Davos dust up.
It says that President Trump rescinded Canada's invitation to his Board of Peace for Gaza, deepening the feud with Prime Minister Mark Carney.
It says that this is what Carney said: quote: Canada doesn't live because of the United States.
Why People Call Trump 00:15:44
Canada thrives because we are Canadian.
And President Trump has just put out a Truth Social about a half an hour ago.
He said this.
If Governor Kearney thinks he is going to make Canada a drop-off port for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken.
China will eat Canada alive, completely devour it, including the destruction of their businesses, social fabric, and general way of life.
If Canada makes a deal with China, it will immediately be hit with a 100% tariff against all Canadian goods and products coming into the USA.
That was about half an hour ago on Truth Social.
Here is Alton Greenville, North Carolina, Republican.
Hi, Alton.
morning. Good morning. Good morning.
Yes, you're on the air.
Don't listen to your TV.
Just listen to your phone.
Okay, listen to my phone.
Okay.
Okay.
When it comes to the immigration and ICE, I think the source of the problem is sanctuary cities.
If it weren't for sanctuary cities, the process could be done in a civil cooperative manner between local police and ICE.
I can't understand why a sanctuary city like Chicago, Portland, Minneapolis, why, if they've got someone that's in their control,
in their system, or they've got someone, they have someone that's a rapist or some level of murder, whatever the crime, where it's a felony, why won't they cooperate with ICE and turn it over to ICE?
Just turn it over to ICE in a cooperative way.
Then you are going to diffuse, then this process will be the firewall come out of it.
But I don't really think that that's, I think, I don't think they want a solution.
I think they want to fight.
I think they want to continue to fight.
It's the Trump fight that they want.
I think it enhances the Democratic Party, protects the young people.
They don't want Trump to be successful in taking criminals out of these sanctuary cities.
And, Alton, do you believe that it should only be violent criminals that are deported and that are subject to immigration enforcement?
Or do you think it should be anybody that came into the country during, I guess, during the Biden years?
No, I think it should be criminal.
I think it should be the ones that have at least a felony, a felony level of crime.
Yes.
Okay.
Here's Larry Sliddell, Louisiana, Democrat.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Hi, Larry.
Hi.
Listen, listen.
I'll just listen to the gentleman talk.
My particular opinion is we're always looking at this shiny object.
What I mean by that is, as long as we're divided, we don't see how much money is being stolen from us.
Trump is stealing millions of dollars.
His whole family is stealing millions of dollars, but nobody's talking about it because we keep focusing on the little guy, you know, the criminal.
Sure, they should have some enforcement.
Well, we have that with local police.
But why in the world are we so divided on this?
A house divided will not stand.
And as long as we treat these immigrants as all criminals, it'll always be that way.
Now, my last word is, I believe we need to keep our eye on the ball.
And that's Donald Trump.
Because if he wants to get rid of criminals, I'm really sure he should go ahead and resign from office right now.
Thank you for taking my call.
So, Larry, this is Financial Services Committee.
This is the Democrats on the Financial Services Committee have put this out in July.
It says, crypto has made Trump 1.2 billion richer and counting.
That is according to a Forbes investigation that the Democrats on the Financial Services Committee in the House are citing.
Over nearly 50 years, Donald Trump expanded his father's real estate empire into a 2.5 billion fortune.
Then in less than five years, he created a crypto kingdom worth even more.
That's from Forbes magazine.
And you can see that at Democrats-financialservices.house.gov.
And Bubba in Memphis, Tennessee, Republican.
Good morning.
I just got a question.
Just practically almost every day, you'll have at least one Democrat caller to call in and call President Trump a pedophile.
And not one of y'all have ever asked these people where they're getting that information from.
I noticed that if a Republican calls in and says something and y'all are not sure about it or whatever, y'all are pretty quick to try to find it somewhere so you can correct them or get it a little better than what they're coming up with.
But I have never once heard y'all ask people that's calling the president a pedophile where they're getting that information from.
You have a lot of Democrats out there that are, they don't think for themselves.
They don't look for this stuff.
And they think that President Trump is a pedophile.
So my question is, why do y'all not correct Democrats when they do something like that?
But y'all are really quick to correct Republicans.
Okay, Bubba, I'll take that feedback.
And the next time somebody calls the president a pedophile, I will ask, where did you get that information?
I will do that.
Angela, in California, Independent Line.
Silmar is.
Good morning.
Is it Silmar?
Good morning.
I would like to say that for the young gentleman who was just saying that people are calling Trump tapped pedophiles, you can't have pictures of kids in bathtubs anymore.
You can't have pitch kids in in in subductive ways on pictures anymore.
There are pictures with him with young kids.
The Congress and the DOJ need to release them so everybody can see it.
So I'm through with that.
I want to talk about what's going on with ISIS and the way they're performing their duties.
A lot of Americans want immigration to be controlled.
We want immigration and people to come here legally.
What is happening right now is more on a Gestapo gang type of way.
We have never seen this in the United States before.
I'm just wondering: is this a test that when Trump is supposed to leave office and he don't win, that he has his own private militia that we will be fighting?
My third point is: everyone calls in here and they're making this a Democrat and a Republican issue.
So, what you all trying to tell me is you all want to have a civil war.
So, what are you going to have a civil war about?
Donald Trump talking about going and helping the people in Iran because they're doing a regime change.
Look like to me, we're having a regime change going on in the United States, and you all are not paying attention to it.
And my question is: who's behind it?
Russia?
Because it's sure not China, but Russia, and China, and Korea and Iran is all in bed together.
But we look like we're using stuff out of the Russia paper.
It's like Putin has wrote Project 2026.
All right, Angela, let's take a look at Democratic Whip Catherine Clark.
She was on the floor of the House on Thursday explaining her no vote on ICE on DHS funding.
Here she is.
Today is not about ICE funding.
Republicans already gave ICE $75 billion.
Today is about the fact that we have a mass paramilitary force terrorizing our communities.
Republicans had the opportunity in this bill to enact common sense checks on ICE operations.
They refused.
First, they refused to ensure ICE abides by the same laws and procedures as our local and state police, that they're unmasked when on duty, that they actually wear the body cameras, that they wear a nameplate identifying who they are, and that they are held responsible for excessive force.
Second, the GOP refused to join us in upholding the Constitution.
Not only are these arrests warrantless, ICE has now determined they have the right to search your home without a judicial warrant.
That is illegal and it is unconstitutional.
Third, they refuse to make sure that the use of deadly force is always thoroughly investigated.
When Renee Goode was shot to death, Christy Noam declared her a domestic terrorist within hours.
The only investigation Noam was interested in was an investigation into Renee Goode's widow.
That is not justice.
That is not security for the American people.
Fourth, Republicans refuse to agree to the simple concept that American citizens should not be detained and deported.
That people going about their business should not be kidnapped because of the color of their skin or because they're engaging in peaceful protests.
And this is what the Congresswoman was talking about as far as warrants go.
Here's ABC News ICE memo allows agents to enter homes without judicial warrant, according to a whistleblower complaint.
It says that this memo was issued in May.
It authorizes agents to enter the homes of those suspected of being in the U.S. illegally with an administrative warrant, not a warrant signed by a judge, in order to make immigration arrests, according to a whistleblower group, which says it has shared the quote secretive memo with Congress.
That's at ABC News.
Let's talk to Mary, Lancaster, California.
Democrat, good morning, Mary.
Hi, how are you?
Good.
I have several things.
I'm going to try to make it fast.
I can short phrases as possible.
I'm going to try to use them.
Number one, I believe that ICE are the January 6ers.
I just feel I feel like they should be charged with state crimes when they go, when they harm citizens.
But also, you had several callers earlier who I try to write notes on what they said, and I forgot what Rob said, but there was Sarah, Eddie, Tim, Ryan, who all had, and Larry even had things to say.
And I agree with Larry about the divide and congress thing, but I also have mixed feelings about what's going on.
I don't think the way ICE is handling it is shit is right.
But I do think that immigration enforcement is important.
I live in LA County.
The LA County Jail does not allow, they do not honor ICE detainers.
And this was, and I wouldn't honor it now because of what I see ICE doing.
But before that, I always had a problem with it.
It's been like that for years.
Why wouldn't you, they won't, like if they're in jail and ICE requests them to hold them for 48 hours after a crime case is done so that ICE can take custody, they won't do that.
And I do have a problem with that.
Someone earlier mentioned Iglion Gonzalez and how Democrats didn't have a problem with it.
I actually supported him being sent back to Cuba because his dad was in Cuba and his dad wanted him back.
His mother was dead.
His mother was fleeing Cuba.
There was no reason for him to be here if his dad wanted him.
We're not going to separate a father from his child.
Also with refugee status for South Africans, I don't really hear the Republicans complaining about that.
They complain about having to pay for refugees and immigrants.
But if they're getting refugee status, we have to pay for that.
And I'm already struggling to pay for my own stuff.
So why am I paying for only white South Africans to have refugee status and have to pay for them?
I have a problem with what's going on with California, having to pay a penalty for not having health insurance, but then that money is used for refugee help.
And so I do have a problem with that.
And can I just say also with all the people who had, that I mentioned earlier, Tim, Eddie, I guess Ryan, Sarah, and I think some people had called in.
They were complaining about reparations, but it's restitution or compensation to victims of human trafficking, you know, aka slavery.
I don't know why they would have a problem with that when that was something that the federal government promised and didn't.
All right.
Now to Shiner, Texas, Republican line.
John, you're on the air.
Good morning.
I really, really, really don't understand how we come to this point where we're so divided.
The logic of the left, where you actually allow in sanctuary cities bad guys, criminals who have done, you know, murdered, raped, job molestation to let them back out on the street to prove what?
What are they trying to prove?
And all the reason, if you come to Texas, any other place where we don't have sanctuary policies, like the lady just said right now, if you go down to the jail, you pick them up and it's nice and clean.
But for some reason, I don't know why, the Democrats, the far left, has chosen to protect the worst to the worst.
Can you explain that to me?
So you said that murderers and rapists would be let out in sanctuary cities.
Explain that.
Why would they be let out back on the streets if they're already convicted of those violent crimes that you mentioned?
Wow, you really don't understand.
They've been let out after they serve this sentence and they should be deported.
These are illegal aliens who've been convicted, served a sentence, and when the time is up.
They do.
My understanding is they would have a deportation order.
Deportation Orders Explained 00:10:52
So you're saying that they would be the federal agents wouldn't know about them that they're there unless the government knows everything.
But the Democrats refuse to hold them.
They turn them on the streets.
So now we have to go out in the streets and look for them and get them instead of handing them over to jail.
I can't believe that you're actually trying to defend the policy of this.
I'm not trying to defend anything.
I'm trying to ask and understand so other people can understand as well.
Everybody knows.
Everybody knows what sanctuary politics do.
Don't try to make this into something new.
Everybody knows that the Democrats are letting the bad guys out.
They refuse to hold them for ICE deport.
We don't have this problem anywhere else except in sanctuary cities.
It's really simple.
Democrats made this problem.
They're defending bad guys.
And we're going to end up with a civil war.
I hate to say this because these guys don't do nothing.
I mean, I don't know.
It's insane.
Okay.
That's all I got.
All right.
Sounds like he hung up.
And this is Marissa Elkgrove Village, Illinois, Independent Line.
Good morning, Marissa.
Good morning.
I live in Cook County, and I would just like to talk just a little bit, two things.
One, I'm not sure that everyone who's in their silo of news radio or whatever it is, we've demonized, Trump has demonized mainstream media, and all of that side of the world doesn't fact check things that are happening.
So someone in a smaller town in another state, like that, you know, the guy in Texas gets misinformation.
What I don't understand for the whole country is, yes, Chicago's a sanctuary city, but these are not criminals that ICE is going after.
Not in Minnesota, not in LA, and certainly not in Chicago, firsthand knowledge.
My children have seen it.
They live in the city.
What it causes is this extreme fear if you're married to a brown person who may be a citizen or may be in that seven-year process of getting citizenship.
People that have owned businesses and paid taxes and sent their kids to school are not coming out of the house because some guy in a mask is going to crack open their car window and pull their loved one out of the car and disappear them.
This is definitely Gestapo tactics.
We have a Constitution that says you have to have a warrant to go into somebody's house.
This isn't debatable.
This is America.
I'm sure every FBI agent and local Chicago cop or Texas cop or whatever would love to just break into some house where they suspect somebody.
But in America, you have to have a reason.
You have to have a judge.
We're losing our law because people listen to not facts.
And mainstream media no longer says at the end of any speech or whatever, these are the facts.
The problem is, we don't have facts anymore in America, and people are watching things and don't believe them with their own eyes, like their own eyes.
Sam, Ocala, Florida, Democrat, you're on the air, Sam.
Oh, hi.
Thank you so much.
My brain is like for clump.
Two things.
Number one, the gentleman that just called about sanctuary cities letting out criminals back out in the street, murderers, pedophiles, so on and so forth.
If you look at statistics, if you look, if you read, if you understand this fucking word, you will see that the same thing happens in the court system with white American pedophiles, murderous out on the street, too.
If they can afford the bond, if they can afford the lawyer, they're out on the street too to recommit.
So it goes for everybody.
Okay, just let's wipe all that.
Number two, I am a descendant.
I am a firstborn American citizen from New York, retired in Florida.
I am from my father's side, Puerto Rico and Venezuela.
My mother's Spain and Puerto Rico.
I have been, in my lifetime, people have asked me because of my blackness of my hair, because of my color, if I was Indian, Bangladesh, or Native American, or Mexican.
Okay, am I going to carry around my birth certificate, my marriage license?
Because if I get pulled over because of what I just said, jet black hair, the color of my skin, am I going to be pulled over, dragged out of my car or whatever, whatever, and I'm going to have to show my documents.
That's eerily, eerily, not reminiscent, but for lack of a better word, that was done once before.
You have to carry around your documents.
All right.
Let's talk to Noreen in Bronx, New York, Republican.
Good morning.
Morning.
I have three things I want to say.
One, the lady that just called say that she got to walk with people.
I'm an immigrant.
I came over here 50 years ago.
If you drive on the street and the police stop you, the first thing they ask you, give me ID, insurance.
That's the first thing.
She doesn't know what she's talking about.
Two.
Wait, but your driver's license doesn't prove your immigration status.
Your immigration status, but the actual ID.
Yes.
The actual ID.
That's the most important thing, the actual ID.
Okay.
What was your second step?
If you don't have an ID, are you illegal?
If you're illegal in this country, I came over here as I'm in Ranta.
You got to follow the law, no?
Two.
This country is God bless.
Okay.
I think Joe Biden bringing about 20 million people over here from everywhere.
The TV, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, all of them, they is very unfair.
They cry when Trump wins.
They cry.
I see that in my face.
They cry.
C-SPAN is the same thing.
They didn't like it.
The people vote.
The people who vote for what?
The people vote for Get Read All illegally, close the border, and fix the economy.
The price for eggs and everything was very high.
Everything is very high.
A lot of people don't understand what is economic.
When things go up, it's very hard to come down.
If you were now, the price was about five, six dollars in New York City.
Now it's two dollars and something cents.
Everything comes down, but you just you need to come down a little more.
Nobody say you need to, but economically is very hard.
This syndrome is very hard.
The third thing I want to say more: you see span hire a Negro, I don't know if I use the right word, a new person on C-SPAN.
This is a very democratic socialist person.
That's why I don't watch C-SPAN no more.
I watch it for 50 years or 60 watches put on the air.
I like it because you get back and forth, a democratic debate, which is very good.
Okay.
Scott, Gainesville, Florida, Independent Line.
Go ahead, Scott.
Yeah, just a couple quick questions.
You know, I was as growing up, I was taught when a police officer pulls you over or any kind of law enforcement, you listen to them and you obey them.
So there's no conflict.
That's going out the window.
It's called trust and respect.
You don't see that anymore.
And that's what causes a lot of problems.
The next thing I have to say is that it doesn't matter who you are.
If it's fraud and abuse, they should all be taken to the, you know, they should all go to jail.
It doesn't matter whether you're Democrat, Independent, or Republican.
We don't have that kind of justice in the world anymore.
And that's where the problems come.
Everyone should be taken to task if they do wrong.
And if we had that, it wouldn't be near the problems we have today.
That's all I've got.
All right, Scott.
Al in Missouri, Democrat, you're on the air.
Yes, I thought, can y'all go back on the clip on the inauguration, Trump's breakfast inauguration, when Mary Bishop Mary Ann Buddy was speaking about the deportation?
Oh, my God, the way she spoke on it.
It was such beautiful and piercing, like a two-edged sword.
Oh, it was miraculous the way she spoke on it.
And Trump, I know, well, it got under his skin.
I just wish people could see that clip of how she spoke on it.
Trump was not, I expect him to hear that.
And the way she spoke was such an angel and angelic-like voice.
Oh, it was so beautiful.
And you can see JD Vance's wife.
I know it kind of bothered her.
I know it bothered them.
I know it bothered them.
Because she, because she, because J.D. Vince was listening something back to her, and you wish I could play that clip, just I could play that clip.
Oh, I wish I could play.
A lot of people have to see that pop inauguration breakfast, but I'm so glad that I. Yep, that was the day after President Trump's inauguration.
You're talking about D.C.'s Episcopal Bishop, Mary Ann Buddy.
And I believe we have that on our C-SPAN archives if you'd like to take a look.
Rudy On The Jack Smith Testimony 00:00:49
Rudy Moringo, Ohio, Republican.
Quickly, Rudy.
Hi.
Yeah, I just wondered if anybody watched the Jack Smith testimony there the other day.
If you didn't see it, you really missed something.
That four Capitol Hill police that got beat up during January 6th, they got the one Bernard or whatever, he made a real big scene, should have been ejected, should be in prison, probably.
He assaulted a guy almost right on live TV.
And Rudy, we are out of time, but yes, everybody can watch that on cspan.org.
The full hearing.
That's it for us today.
Stay safe, everybody, especially if you're affected by that storm.
Please ask about your neighbors.
We will see you tomorrow morning, 7 a.m. Eastern.
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