CSPAN - Washington Journal 02/01/2026

All Episodes

Previous Next

Feb. 1, 2026 07:00-10:01 - CSPAN

03:00:53

Washington Journal 02/01/2026

Source

Participants

Main

jim antle

23:34

jim marrs

05:32

kimberly adams

cspan 38:36

Appearances

brian lamb

cspan 01:19

chuck schumer

sen/d 01:21

dasha burns

politico 00:32

donald j trump

admin 00:48

eric schmitt

sen/r 01:04

markwayne mullin

sen/r 01:11

tom homan

admin 01:57

Clips

barack obama

d 00:02

bill clinton

d 00:02

don bacon

rep/r 00:08

george h w bush

r 00:10

george w bush

r 00:04

jared moskowitz

rep/d 00:02

jimmy carter

d 00:11

joe biden

d 00:03

ro khanna

rep/d 00:02

ronald reagan

r 00:01

Callers

darletta in unknown

callers 01:07

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
Acceptable ICE Practices 00:14:58
unidentified		Coming up on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, James Antel with the Washington Examiner discusses campaign 2026 and political news of the week.
		Then the nation's Sasha Abromsky talks about President Trump's use of executive power and his book American Carnage, How Trump, Musk, and Doge Butchered the U.S. Government.
		Washington Journal starts now.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		It's Sunday, February 1st, 2026.
		There were more protests over the weekend in several cities, with Americans continuing to challenge immigration enforcement tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere, even as the government entered a partial shutdown due to Democrats forcing a halt to Department of Homeland Security funding to give time to review the money flowing to the nation's expanded immigration crackdown.
		This morning, we want to hear from you.
		What changes, if any, do you think are needed to immigration enforcement?
		Our phone line for Republicans is 202-748-8001.
		For Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		And for Independents, 202-748-8002.
		If you'd like to text us, that number is 202-748-8003.
		Please be sure to include your name and where you're writing in from.
		We're also on social media at facebook.com slash C-SPAN and on X at C-SPANWJ.
		Now for the latest on the shutdown, let's turn to Politico, which has reporting on this this morning, finding that the partial government shutdown that began early Saturday morning is on track to continue until at least Tuesday, which is the earliest the House is now expected to vote on a $1.2 trillion funding package due to opposition from Democrats and internal GOP strife.
		House Republican leaders have scheduled a Monday meeting of the House Rules Committee to prepare the massive Senate-passed spending bill for the floor.
		According to two people granted anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, the procedural measure teeing up a final vote would not happen until Tuesday, with final passage following if that is successful.
		That's one day later than GOP leaders had hoped.
		Their previous plan was to pass the bill with Democratic help under a suspension of the rules, a fast-track process requiring a two-thirds majority vote.
		But that plan was complicated by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries telling Speaker Mike Johnson in a private conversation Saturday that Democratic leadership would not help Johnson secure the 70 or so Democratic votes to get the measure over the line, according to the two people and another person granted anonymity to discuss the matter.
		Now, in terms of what the Democrats are demanding in order to move that funding forward, Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader in the Senate, was on the Senate floor last week talking about specific reforms to ICE that the party is looking for.
chuck schumer ▲ ● ▼		These three, ending the rolling patrols, enforcing accountability, masks off, cameras on, are common sense reforms.
		They are reforms that Americans already expect from law enforcement.
		Now, the onus now is on Leader Thun and Senate Republicans to work with Democrats to turn these goals into legislation.
		They are in the majority.
		The Republicans are.
		They're the ones who have responsibility to govern, and Democrats are ready to come to the table.
		If Republicans refuse to work with us to rein in ICE and to end the violence, they're telling the American people they're choosing to protect ICE over choosing to protect people's safety.
		Americans, by and large, support law enforcement.
		I do.
		And most people support border security.
		I do as well.
		But Americans do not support ICE terrorizing our streets, operating outside the law, killing American citizens.
		The madness and violence must end.
		Congress must act to rein in ICE and end the violence.
		Rein in ICE and end the violence.
		The American people deserve nothing, nothing less.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Just to recap some of those Democratic demands from Senate Democrats in particular, to end roving patrols, tighten the rules on warrants, and require ICE to coordinate with local authorities, along with enforcing accountability and a uniform code of conduct, and requiring agents to take their masks off, wear body cameras, and carry ID.
		Now, there's been Republican response to some of these Democratic demands, including from South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who says, to my Democrat colleagues, if you want to change the DHS bill to put restrictions on ICE to align them more with traditional law enforcement agencies, then I believe it would be right for me to insist that we get to the root cause of the problem, which would be ending sanctuary city policies.
		Therefore, I want to put my Senate colleagues on notice that I would insist this new DHS package include ending Sanctuary City policies forever, which is something the American people overwhelmingly support.
		Thank you for your attention to this matter.
		Texas Representative Chip Roy echoed a similar concern on X, saying, I have my own list if DHS is opened back up, beginning with no sanctuary city funding.
		Now, looking to some of the polling that we've had recently about the American people's perspective about ICE, there's coverage here in Pew, which has done some recent surveys on this.
		Amid ramped up immigration enforcement efforts around the country, Americans overwhelmingly say it is acceptable for ordinary people to record video of immigration arrests.
		A clear majority also say it's acceptable for people to share information about where enforcement is happening.
		Let's look at some of these numbers.
		By wide margins, the public says it is not acceptable for federal immigration officers to wear face coverings that hide their identity or to use people's appearance or language as a reason for checking their immigration status.
		74% say it's acceptable for people to record video of immigration officers while they make arrests.
		59% say it's acceptable to share information about where officers are making arrests.
		And then when it comes to the actions of federal immigration officers, 72% say it's unacceptable for them to use people's appearance or the language they speak for a reason to check their status.
		Now, if you look at some of the partisan views of actions by ordinary people, there are some differences.
		Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say it's acceptable for people to record video of immigration officers while they make arrests.
		However, Democrats and Independents who lean towards the Democratic Party are substantially more likely to say this than Republican and Republican leaners.
		The partisan gap is wider when it comes to sharing information about where immigration officers are making arrests.
		Eight in ten Democrats say this is acceptable compared to 36 percent of Republicans.
		A majority of Republicans say this is unacceptable.
		By contrast, Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to say it's acceptable for ordinary people to report those they think may be in the country illegally.
		77 percent of Republicans say this is acceptable compared with just 27 percent of Democrats.
		Now, Senator Mark Wayne Mullen was on the Brian Kilmead show last week cautioning against changes to current ICE operations.
markwayne mullin ▲ ● ▼		We're really interested in having reforms and accountability to DHS.
		Part of the DHS funding that we've been working extremely hard to work in a bipartisan manner included $20 million for every ICE agent to have a body camera on.
		You're talking about accountability.
		There you go.
		That's the best accountability you can have.
		When you start talking about reforms into DHS, okay, well, what is it that you're wanting?
		It's more than just saying you're going to vote no.
		What is it that you're wanting?
		Because there hasn't been a problem with DHS in any red states, any red cities where they actually have cooperation from local law enforcement or from the state and from the city mayor.
		There hasn't been any incidences like this.
		There hasn't been any shootings.
		There hasn't been violence and protests and riots.
		This is happening in blue cities and in blue states where you have no cooperation with DHS from, by the way, doing their job and you have no issues with rioting going on in the streets.
		It's poor leadership and rhetoric that's coming out of the left that's causing these problems to begin with.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Once again, we're looking for your thoughts on what changes, if any, are needed to immigration enforcement.
		Our phone line for Republicans is 202-748-8001.
		For Democrats, 202-748-8000.
		And for Independents, 202-748-8002.
		We're going to start with Edward in Kalamazoo, Michigan on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Edward.
unidentified		Yes, I wrote down some changes badly needed.
		I think they could say that ICE cannot be masked.
		In other words, they're all wearing masks now.
		They're hiding their identity.
		So there'd be no mask wearing.
		I would say they should drive in marked vehicles that say they're ICE, have them marked.
		I would have them wear some sort of identification on their uniforms because they just jump out of these unmarked cars.
		You don't know who they are.
		I mean, and then I would regulate the use of firearms.
		I mean, do ICE really have to have semi-automatic assault rifles?
		That's just ludicrous.
		It's dangerous.
		It's unnecessary.
		And then maybe they should regulate, what do you call traffic stops?
		So, in other words, like this one, the one incident where the woman was shot and killed in her car, they shouldn't be shooting into cars.
		They shouldn't be shooting into moving vehicles.
		I mean, that's a police regulation.
		Let's see, what else do I have?
		Marked cars?
		Oh, they should wear uniforms.
		Oh, and then warrants.
		They should have warrants when they arrest people.
		Did you get any of that?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I heard it all.
		All right.
		Thank you, Edward.
		Joe is in Georgia on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Joe.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Yes, love C-Span.
		Been calling you a great network 30 years.
		I am all for obeying the law the way it is.
		I think Trump's the best leader in history.
		I don't think there need to be any changes made.
		The left needs to obey the law.
		The law is passed.
		You have to obey the law.
		So I'm all with Trump and the administration, and I think they're doing a fantastic job.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Next up is Michelle in Montgomery, Alabama on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Michelle.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Good morning.
		You're so cute today.
		And thank you for taking my call.
		Listen, my changes would mirror the gentleman, my neighbor from Kalamazoo, who said that they need to unmask themselves and they need to have identifiable icons on their vest cameras, all of that.
		But I think my issue with all of this is, yes, ICE is in different states, but they are not presented or present.
		Thousands of them concentrated in one area, taking kids out of school and shooting our neighbors.
		I'm in Alabama, but I've been watching the news, and I like how Minnesota says they are fighting for their neighbors.
		So, ICE, why aren't they going to the jails to get the criminals and the murders?
		I've never known Minnesota to be a high criminal state.
		And my last point is this: stop dividing us.
		Blue state, red state, leftist, red, conservative.
		We are Americans.
		I am an American, and my neighbors in California to New York.
		And I don't want the federal government harassing my neighbors with AK-37s and ARs.
		We're Americans.
		This is not how we are supposed to live and love on each other.
		Thank you for taking my call.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Several folks have mentioned the issue of ICE agents wearing masks.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Republican Senator Eric Schmidt was on the Senate floor last week, pushing back on attempts to change how ICE agents operate, including specifically removing their face masks.
eric schmitt ▲ ● ▼		They demand we defund law enforcement agencies like ICE and CBP.
		They demand we force ICE agents to dox themselves so that their families can be harassed and threatened in their homes.
		They demand that we cripple federal law enforcement's ability to enforce our immigration laws.
		This is not about oversight.
		It's about paralysis.
		And the objective is mass amnesty.
		Rewarding those who broke the law and punishing the men and women sworn to enforce it.
		Law enforcement agencies like ICE and CBP.
		They demand we force ICE agents to dox themselves so that their families can be harassed and threatened in their homes.
		They demand that we cripple federal law enforcement's ability to enforce our immigration laws.
		This is not about oversight.
		It's about paralysis.
		And the objective is mass amnesty.
		Rewarding those who broke the law and punishing the men and women sworn to enforce it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Back to your calls and what changes you think may be needed to make to immigration in the United States or immigration enforcement specifically.
		Edward is in Jersey City, New Jersey on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Edward.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Good morning.
		I hate what we're doing with ICE and ICE enforcement in our country right now.
		I hate it.
		I'm calling on the independent line, but we caucus with Democrats more so from New Jersey.
		And yes, moderate Democrats still have faith in ICE enforcement, right?
		So they say they can't wear masks and they should have body cams.
		But on the progressive side, we would like to abolish ICE.
Increased Fines, Burn Cities 00:12:43
unidentified		So much is coming out about ICE being connected using Israeli intelligence spyware programming, the killing and the taking of migrants and human beings is so immoral.
		And I do have to say that sometimes people across the country, all we have, you know, sometimes all we have is to say no.
		You know, you have to disregard the law.
		I mean, you have to.
		Sometimes the law, even though it's law, it's immoral.
		It's wrong.
		And you can't follow it.
		So hundreds of years ago, there was a battle in our country over slavery and across the states.
		People could not, even though it was law, you understand slave catching and returning your property.
		You could not.
		So I am just totally against what the Republican administration is doing right now.
		And I pray that moderate Democrats can deliver for us across the country.
		You know, and just thank you.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Edward was referencing some of the surveillance tactics being used by ICE.
		There's a story about that in today's New York Times that a tech arsenal is assisting ICE in Minneapolis.
		There's concerns over REACH.
		Facial recognition tools track protesters and find immigrants.
		That story going on to say that facial recognition is just one technology tool that ICE has deployed in Minneapolis, where thousands of agents are conducting a crackdown.
		The technologies are being used not only to identify undocumented immigrants, but also to track citizens who have protested ICE's presence, said three current and formal officials of the Department of Homeland Security who were not authorized to discuss confidential matters.
		ICE is using two facial recognition programs in Minnesota, they said, including one made by the tech company Clearview AI and a newer program, Mobile Fortify.
		The agency is also using cell phone and social media tools to monitor people's online activity and potentially hack into phones.
		And agents are tapping into a database built by the data analytics company Palantir that combines government and commercial data to identify real-time locations for individuals they are pursuing.
		The current and former officials said the technologies are being deployed or appear to be deployed in a much more aggressive way than we have seen in the past, said Nathan Fried Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberty Union, American Civil Liberties Union, which has sued the Homeland Security Department over the immigration operation in Minneapolis.
		The conglomeration of all these technologies is giving the government unprecedented abilities.
		All right, back to your calls.
		Earl is in Reading, California on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Earl.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I am a three-time supporter and voter for Donald Trump.
		I'm a red, I believe, red Republican.
		Listen, ICE, you've gone too far.
		I volunteered for Vietnam.
		I suffer every day from the Agent Orange poisoning I got while I was over there.
		And I want you to know I'm not about to want to live in Red China.
		And what ICE is doing is completely off the hook.
		They need to have their budgeting cut back, not increased, okay, for starters.
		Penalties for illegal aliens that were let in to help support the Democratic ticket should be there.
		They should have fines increased and penalties increased for being here illegally.
		That's a starter, okay?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Earl, which tactics, oh, excuse me, go ahead.
unidentified		No, go ahead, man.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Which tactics specifically that ICE is using do you think go too far?
unidentified		Yeah, if I want to go out and protest, I don't want them taking my picture.
		Why do I got to go out without a mask or have them follow me around?
		And, you know, people, we already see what happens for some people who get involved with a camera, get shot to death.
		You know, why do I want to put my family or myself at risk like that?
		Why are they giving they want to wear a mask, but they want all us to be unmasked.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Poll that was published on January the 28th finding that 59% of voters say ICE is too aggressive.
		That's up 10 points from July.
		Again, this is a Fox News poll that says: while more than half of voters approve of the job President Donald Trump is doing on border security, a new Fox News survey finds a majority disapproves of how he is handling immigration, and a growing number view the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency's tactics as too aggressive, including significant portions of the president's coalition.
		In addition, there's disagreement about how well ICE is carrying out its core mission.
		29% of voters say ICE's enforcement practices almost always reflect Trump's pledge to focus on illegal immigrants with criminal records.
		25% say that I think that happens most of the time.
		19% say sometimes, and 27% not very often.
		More Republicans than Democrats and Independents think ICE is almost always keeping a pledge.
		Mark is in Hamilton, New Jersey on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Mark.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		How are you?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Fine, thank you.
unidentified		All right.
		This is very upsetting and depressing watching this on television.
		I'm in New Jersey, and there are immigrants here.
		They are hard workers.
		It's so sad.
		And I'm afraid the day that they start pushing all this into this state.
		There is a restaurant that I visit, and it's all young girls.
		One is a manager at this place.
		They are so nice.
		I am a cripple with arthritis.
		She makes sure that they bring my food to me.
		She says if I need anything, call her.
		I can't believe that they would treat people like this.
		Now, if you're a criminal, and I'm all for that, but you can't do it this way.
		You cannot haul an 80-year-old man out in the cold with no clothes on out of a house that you broke into with no warrant.
		You cannot do this thing.
		They can't do these things.
		It's un-American.
		It is so un-American.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And Patrick is in Fruitland Park, Florida, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Patrick.
unidentified		Well, thanks for taking my call.
		In South Florida, there's a check cashing store about every 10 blocks that allows illegal immigrants or undocumented people, whatever you want to say, to work.
		Then they go cash their check.
		I wish someone would sign an executive order saying that all commercial checks have to be cashed at the Bank of Origin or deposited.
		That would eliminate a lot of the workforce.
		I see that you let these Republicans keep saying, well, they're attacking ICE agents in their homes.
		Do you have a percentage?
		Do you have the arrest once?
		You know, you get on this thing of, well, we're a record of government.
		Well, let's see.
		The record of government on that.
		You know, this is, it sounds like the chant of Black Lives Matter.
		Burn down entire cities, burn down entire cities.
		There was an article in the Wall Street Journal saying that Texas, the constructionist slowed down or stopped because there's no workers.
		I don't see ICE going down there and demanding that they see any security footage from these work sites so they can track down these illegal immigrants.
		And one last thing, you do this self-congratulatory, oh, we love you, C-SPAM, from all these columns.
		There's a senator from Oklahoma, I can't remember his name, when you guys wanted to put cameras in the Supreme Court.
		And he came out three times that I don't even wish there was cameras on the Senate or House floor because it's basically performance art.
		They're sucking up to their either donors or this kind of fringe thing that keeps saying they're attacking us.
		Let's see it.
		Let's see the camera, the arrest warrants, and all that other stuff.
		Thanks for taking my call, C-SPAM.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Next up is Roland in Ryan, Oklahoma, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Roland.
unidentified		I enjoy your show.
		I appreciate what you're doing.
		I have a tough time understanding why people are at each other's throats so much.
		There's always a compromise.
		I understand that they won't mask unmasked agents on the ground.
		So if they take their mask off, would the Democrats be willing to, anyone who shows up at a ICE agent's house, their residence, they receive the death penalty.
		I think that would be an even off put, and everybody could get along.
		Thank you.
		Have a great day.
		I appreciate you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Dorothy is in Burlington, North Carolina on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Dorothy.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I think ICE should be abolished and they should take off the mask.
		These people are human.
		They're human beings.
		They just like us.
		They bleed red.
		I don't know why Stephen Miller and Donald Trump hate them so much.
		But I think Donald Trump and Stephen Miller just wants to be the boss of everybody.
		They just want to be the boss.
		But I bet you when they get down there, they won't be bossing the devil.
		Thank you very much.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Robert is in Mesa, Arizona on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Robert.
unidentified		Hey, I think they should change the law.
		Bounty hunters don't need a warrant to get into anybody's house.
		I think I should have that.
		They should be able to enter anybody's property without a warrant.
		You're illegal in this country.
		You're illegal.
		You should be deported.
		And they should start deporting these criminal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and good old Mr. Schumer and Mr. Schiff.
		They're all illegal, too.
		Have a great day.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Robert was referencing being able to enter people's homes.
		There's a story here from KUTV that a video shows a business door was shattered after Border Patrol agents detain two employees.
		This was in West Valley City, Utah.
		New video obtained by Two News has raised legal questions about federal immigration enforcement after Border Patrol agents broke through the glass door of a locked auto body shop in West Valley City to detain two employees.
		A witness said agents with U.S. Customs and Border Protection entered the business by force and told those inside they did not need a warrant.
		The video shows the aftermath of a shattered glass door at Viper Autobody, along with a heated exchange between agents and the witness.
		And he pointed out that they didn't have a warrant.
		A woman who asked to be identified was saying that this woman was married to one of the men detained and that they did not have a warrant.
		This is something that has come up several times in terms of whether or not the agents are able to operate without a warrant.
		Two News asked Customs and Border Protection what reasonable suspicion agents had to attempt a traffic stop, whether agents had a judicial warrant to enter the business, and if not, what exigent circumstances justified breaking a locked glass door as a publication CBP had not responded.
		All right, let's get back to your calls.
		Garr is in Decatur, Georgia, on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Garr.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		Thank you for taking my call.
No Warrant Needed? 00:15:59
unidentified		This is February the 1st, 2026.
		And 1965, President Johnson signed an immigration bill, we called the Heart Seller Act, October the 3rd, 1965.
		I don't hear Democrats or Republicans talking about that bill.
		Everybody talking about an immigration bill, but one was already signed in 1965.
		And another thing, too, February the 1st, 2026, I'm reading a book on the Ku Klux Klan.
		And if you read the Ku Klux, this book and what ICE is doing, they follow the same playbook.
		In fact, the head of the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan said, tell a big lie because a small lie make you look timid.
		His name was D.C. Stevens.
		This was in the 1920s, 24, 25, I mean, 1920, 24, 20.
		So it was 100 years ago.
		He said, tell a big lie because a small lie make you look timid.
		And he was terrorizing communities in Notre Dame.
		They talked about how they terrorized the University of Notre Dame and the students had to rebel against the Ku Klux Klan.
		I mean, they were on the Catholics, the Jews, and the same thing they're doing now, and just the name ICE, ice cold.
		It's winter and it's ice cold out there.
		Ice cold.
		Just tell you, they're cold-hearted, ice-cold.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		White House Borders are Tom Holman was in Minneapolis earlier last week and was speaking about changes that he's seeing on the ground in the city there and when ICE drawdowns could happen.
tom homan ▲ ● ▼		Well, look, the Board of Patrol, last 40% of Joe Biden, we had an open border where 10,000, 12,000 people a day are coming across the border.
		Board of Patrol got overwhelmed, which means we sent thousands of ICE agents down there to help deal with that humanitarian crisis, to help secure the border.
		Now we have millions of people released in this nation, many unvetted.
		Now we've got to find them.
		Before the big, beautiful bill, we had a total of just under 5,000 deportation officers to look for millions of people, many in public safety threats.
		So yes, we needed Board of Patrol to come and help on our mission now.
		And the reason for the massive deployment is because of the threats, because of the violence.
		Our officers need to be protected.
		If I'm on an operational arrest team, I'm going to a house, I've got to be busy with that guy, the dangerous guy, and I can't keep looking over my shoulder at what's happening outside the house.
		So we brought extra resources in to provide that security.
		And as I said, as we drill down in these great agreements, we got this great understanding we have means less.
		So we can draw down those resources.
		When the violence decreases, we can draw down those resources.
		But based on the discussions I've had with the governor and the AG, we can start drawing down those resources as far as those looking for public safety threats being released and doing it in jail with much less people.
		So the drawdown is going to happen based on these agreements.
		But the drawdown can happen even more if the hateful rhetoric and the impediment and interference will stop.
		So Border Patrol, I was a Board of Patrol agent.
		These men and women are patriots.
		God bless them.
		They're here to help us.
		And the drawdown will come soon, depending on when this actually, I see this in play.
		But the agreements have alone is going to cause a significant drawdown.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I question again this hour.
		What changes, if any, do you think are needed to immigration enforcement?
		Claude is in Charlotte, North Carolina on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Claude.
unidentified		Yes, I think the best way to eliminate a lot of the stuff going on is get rid of the sociopath that we have in the White House.
		Him and all his cohorts, all they're doing is just feeling like they can do anything they want to.
		And they're killing these people, and they're going to move on from them if they get their way.
		Eventually, they'll be doing that to blacks and everybody else.
		It's just crazy, some of the stuff that they're doing.
		And it all comes from fearing that eventually they're going to be a minority.
		And no matter what they do, eventually they will be a minority.
		These people just do anything with impunity.
		And even the people that support them, like the QAnon and all of them.
		Where's the QAnon at?
		With all these rapes and stuff with these little kids.
		Nobody said anything about QAnon because what they're doing is waiting around until a Democrat become president.
		Then you'll hear about the QAnon.
		It's crazy.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Next up is Mary in Austin, Texas.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mary.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		Can you hear me?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I can hear you.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
		I was hoping John would be there just because he's so adamant about, you know, anti-conspiracy theory.
		But he's not.
		And the question was.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		It's what changes, if any, do you think are needed in immigration enforcement?
unidentified		In immigration enforcement.
		I think it's okay.
		I don't love the procedure of the situation right now.
		But I do appreciate that he's trying to fulfill his duties.
		What was that?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Let's hear from Woody in Bowling Green, Kentucky on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Woody.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Could you hear me?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Okay.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm from Kentucky.
		You know, Daniel Boone came through the Cumberland Gap and he faced the Natives of American Indians.
		And now here we are.
		The only thing that bothers me, we've got to get the people that are not supposed to be here out of here.
		But what bothers me, the two shootings, it was too easy for them to shoot them people.
		That's what bothers me.
		And I don't know, there's nothing going to change.
		Just, I wish people would not put themselves in a position because they are just dying to pull that trigger.
		And I just wish people would stop.
		But this is real simple.
		You don't have to treat these people like this.
		I mean, my God, they're not supposed to be here, you know, acting like a normal person and show the papers if they got any papers.
		That's what I don't understand.
		Did they even have papers on these people?
		Are they just guessing that these people are not here?
		So that's basically all I got to say on that.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		A comment we received on Facebook from Michael that local governments need to cooperate as a response to what needs to change in terms of immigration enforcement.
		And then another comment from Facebook from Heather.
		Yes, I think the states need to work hand in hand with ICE.
		There haven't been issues in those areas, only the ones where states are refusing to work with ICE.
		Denise is in Delavan, New York, on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Denise.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I agree we have to have compromise, but maybe you can look this up.
		I heard that the funding for ICE is good through 2029.
		So even withholding this bill isn't taking funding away from ICE immediately.
		As for Trump supporters, we like immigration.
		That is a theory out there that we don't like immigration.
		We love immigration.
		We love immigrants.
		We love the melting pot.
		What we hated and we put up for for four years without threatening to impeach Biden or was the wide open border.
		And you didn't see us rioting.
		You didn't see us making a big stink out of it.
		We couldn't even get national news to cover it.
		As to what we can do to go forward, compromise.
		The mask is left on.
		You have to protect the people of ICE.
		However, cameras should be on.
		There should be no sanctuary cities, or at least they shouldn't be funded.
		Local police should have to work with ICE.
		It should be a law.
		And we only want the worst moved out.
		And the Trump administration, who I support, needs to let us know the protocol and policy that they're using to round people up.
		And we need to make sure that it is being done legally.
		I don't want to see anybody's civil rights impeded on.
		We need to protect everybody's civil rights.
		Even John Adams defended the British soldiers who shot somebody, you know, back in the day.
		He said everybody deserves to have that due process.
		And as a Republican, I agree with that.
		So there has to be compromise.
		And I don't think the Democrats want it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Denise, you asked me about funding for ICE in the shutdown, and I was able to find an article about what you referenced there.
		This is from CBS.
		This article came out before we entered the partial government shutdown this weekend.
		But it says that ICE and CBP would keep operating during the shutdown despite the DHS funding fight.
		Senate Democrats are threatening to block a package to fund major parts of the government this week, including the Department of Homeland Security, following the deadly shooting of a man by federal agents in Minneapolis.
		And they did indeed block that funding.
		But a partial government shutdown would likely have little impact on the administration's ongoing immigration enforcement operations since the relevant DHS agencies received a massive funding infusion in President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year.
		The immigration enforcement agencies would have the funds to continue operating uninterrupted even if other parts of the government shut down.
		So I think that's what you were referencing, Denise.
unidentified		Yes, exactly.
		So shutting the government down, the Democrats shutting the government down again, is not a good thing.
		Which is not going to solve the problem, but we do have to work on immigration.
		Thank you for your time.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Kathy is in Albuquerque, New Mexico on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Kathy.
unidentified		Hello.
		I just wanted to say I think it completely needs to be dismantled and taken apart completely because what they are doing is not right.
		I mean, it's obvious.
		They're not this ICE.
		I mean, everything that you see on your TV is not right.
		And the way they try to dehumanize these are human beings, and it just makes me really upset.
		And the way they also try to dehumanize the one that they shot, you know, he, you know, all I got to say, if they try to take apart his character, he dedicated his life to helping veterans, and that was who he is.
		And he actually died helping somebody.
		And that's what makes me upset when I see the way Trump, you know, I think he's morally bankrupt to do something like that to somebody.
		He's breathtakingly dishonest.
		He's legally incompetent and suddenly ignorant of anything related to government, history, geography, human events, or world affairs.
		I think just the way he's acting is just so horrible.
		And this ICE needs to be completely abolished.
		And maybe they could do something later, but to get a new one and build a new one up, but this is just wrong.
		And that's all I want to say.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Joan is in Bridgewater, New Jersey on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Joan.
unidentified		Hi, good morning.
		Happy Sunday, everybody.
		I think this is a crossroads for America where we can't continue with blaming the Democrats and the Democrats blaming the Republicans.
		I think this is a time for us to be Americans because what I see is a playbook of lie, distract, and normalize.
		Everything I see around us is normalizing us, and we're so distracted.
		It's just so much.
		When there's anything that happens in the news, the Trump administration, they flood the news with a new topic, and the media runs after the date.
		And it's just a cycle.
		We cannot even stay on topics.
		There are so many topics that we still need to be discussing that we're not discussing.
		So for immigration, yes, there should be immigration.
		We should not just allow people to come into the country undocumented, you know, and if they're criminals, they should go.
		But there's protocol to things.
		And so why is it being done in a terrorizing way?
		It's like terrorizing Americans and terrorizing the people.
		First of all, if a police pulls me over, I know it's a police officer.
		He does not have a mask on.
		He has a badge.
		He's in uniform.
		And he approaches me.
		And I know the protocol, your license, registration, whatever.
		Why is ICE allowed to run around the United States in a Gestapo fashion with their face covered?
		The uniforms they have on are not, they're not like everybody's not wearing the same uniform.
		Okay.
		Why are they allowed to address people in such an aggressive way?
		Why are they allowed to put their hands on you?
		Why are they allowed to bust your window of your car?
		Why are they allowed to kick the door down and come into your home?
		Like these are all constitutional rights that were being normalized to like not exercise.
		And so there is a way to do things, but why is this one specific branch of the government does not have to adhere to the Constitution and has the right to disrespect taxpaying Americans and take away their rights away from them?
		And that now we have to show people, show your papers if you're a U.S. citizen or not.
		I mean, how are we going to normalize that?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Joan, there's an op-ed in the Washington Post by Kathleen Parker that echoes some of those concerns that she raised.
		She writes, Americans now know what they're up against.
		They saw it in Minneapolis.
		Federal overreach and shooting deaths of citizens might finally unite a divided nation.
		Her op-ed going on to say, a proven antidote to political division is a common enemy.
		The greater the powers organized against people, the stronger the bond becomes among disparate groups.
		Think 9-11.
		Now turn your gaze to Minneapolis.
		Never did I imagine that the existential threat to America's Democratic Republic would be posed by our own government.
		Maybe I've been naive, but I've always believed that a constitutional commitment to moral principles, especially the rule of law, meant we were protected from the fates of less blessed nations.
Federal Overreach in Minneapolis 00:15:40
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		America was the exceptional country created by a confluence of great men and minds at a unique moment in history.
		But something has happened to the nation.
		We're not the same people we were as recently as 2016 when the norm-shattering Donald Trump came to power.
		He stepped into a role Taylor made for him at a time when the future seemed up for grabs.
		I'm going to scroll down a bit here.
		The Minneapolis chaos isn't random, but likely politically retributive.
		Note the preference from immigration and customs enforcement for blue states and perhaps tied to the midterms in the 2028 election, both of which Trump probably wouldn't mind canceling.
		By creating chaos, this unrestrained president can justify imposing stricter controls, potentially leading to more military occupation across the country.
		That's one way to obstruct the nation's electoral system.
		The January 6th storming of the U.S. Capitol didn't quite do the trick.
		Now, then, another op-ed that we have from the Washington Examiner laying out a different argument: Dear Democrats, enforcing immigration law is not fascism.
		This article going on to say: Victims of their own media bubbles, Democratic Party leaders across the country have convinced themselves that they are in the middle of a generational struggle against fascism in the United States.
		What is really happening is that proper enforcement of immigration law is being made widely chaotic and sometimes fatal by coordinated and well-funded provocations and obstruction, which has the explicit goal of ending all immigration enforcement entirely.
		The clashes have pitted those who believe in democracy within the nation state and those who reject both those things.
		Circumstances for confrontation have been created by state and local governments that, despite being elected by clearly defined populations, do not believe in such clearly defined populations and therefore refuse to hand illegal immigrants to federal officers for deportation.
		That in the Washington Examiner.
		Back to your calls on what changes, if any, are needed to immigration enforcement.
		Hank is in South Carolina on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Hank.
unidentified		Thanks.
		I just, you know, I support ICE.
		There was over two and a half, between two and two and a half million gotaways.
		They don't even know who they are coming to this country.
		They could be terrorists.
		They could be serial killers.
		They could be.
		We have to get those people out of here.
		And the Democrats have, they've got on this thing about ICE.
		Now, you know, for three years it was Russia, Then it was Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.
		They run it in the ground.
		Now it's ice, ice, ice.
		When they get a hold of something, they just run it into the ground.
		They get these talking points and they say it enough.
		They think if they say it enough, people will believe it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		There's a comment we received on X from RR in terms of what suggestions they have for changes needed to immigration.
		First, ICE agents need to take their masks off and they need to carry badges.
		Second, they need to be properly trained for six months.
		They need to know how to de-escalate a situation.
		Third, they need city or town, town, the city or town needs to work with ICE to help remove violent illegal immigrants.
		Rose is in San Jose, California on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Rose.
unidentified		Yes, I just wanted to make a comment that I'm not so sure that the entire immigration problem is a law enforcement issue.
		I do believe that violent people, criminals, gang members who engage in violence and so on, I believe that this is a law enforcement matter.
		And it should be taken care of by people that are trained to conduct themselves properly as law enforcement officers.
		If they are ICE agents, they should be following the same protocol as our local police or state police or sheriff's offices in our counties and so on.
		But for the vast majority of the others who came into the country, who were given by an executive order by Joe Biden, could have been bad judgment.
		I'm not going to talk about whether it was right or wrong at this point, but it was done.
		He waived a lot of deportation policies from previous administration and allowed many people to come into the country and be paroled and have freedom to roam until their hearing came up.
		Now, many of them never made it to their hearing.
		Some did, and they've continued the process of coming in and reporting and having a job and so on like that.
		But then President Trump came in again, his second term, and canceled with his executive order Biden's executive order.
		Now, I'm not for executive orders, first of all, unless there would be something pressing as a civil rights violation, and an executive order could step in and help to enforce that.
		But other than that, these people, most of them, are victims of circumstance.
		That's why you see them being grabbed, driving a car, at work, and their restaurant where they're working.
		And so they're just going about their lives as they would have under Biden, although the law has changed under Trump.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Kathy is in Hanover, Massachusetts, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Kathy.
unidentified		Hi.
		I worked in a court for 40 years.
		I'm retired now.
		But here's the problem.
		ICE is notorious for not showing up and taking their people.
		So if they've lodged a warrant out of court, they don't show up.
		The court doesn't have the legal capability to move people around without warrant numbers.
		I was a probation officer that supervised sex offenders.
		On occasion, you would get an ICE officer that would call and say, an ICE agent, I should say, would call and say, hey, when are you going to see John Jones next?
		You know, we want to grab him.
		I'd make an appointment.
		I would have had made an appointment if the person was on probation and I'd say, they're coming in Wednesday at 10 a.m.
		They'd never show up, even though I would have made arrangements for them to come in and during my appointment with the person, pick them up.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Kathy, this is really interesting.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What you're saying is this tactic of ICE detaining people at their appointments at court is a practice that's been going on for some time.
unidentified		For a long time.
		And I'll tell you, some years ago, the people who came and grabbed folks like coming in to see me, for example, a lot of them were retired football players.
		They dressed in suits.
		There was no reason to look like the Gestapo.
		Somebody is in custody and has just resolved their case.
		If they're held in custody, they're transferred to a jail or a prison.
		And then put your detainer there.
		When they're finished their sentence, move them out.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Kathy, because you have direct experience with this, I'm curious as to your thoughts.
		You're talking about people being detained by ICE when they're checking in for, say, probation appointments when they've been convicted or accused of a crime or have some sort of criminal record.
		What do you think of ICE's tactic of going in when people are going for immigration-related appointments to detain people then?
unidentified		I've never, I've never, I myself, it doesn't make sense to me if people are doing what they're supposed to do, that that's the group that you'd go after.
		Go after the people who are in jail or in prison.
		You know that they're dangerous or convicts or they've been convicted of something, or if they're on probation.
		So, ICE has the same access to criminal records that everybody else has.
		And one of the things that a criminal record will have on it is a place of birth.
		But so, say somebody has a less controversial place, Canada.
		If they're place of birth of Canada, it only tells you that's where they were born.
		It doesn't say that they're illegal or legally here.
		And there's people who are here that went through the process and then may pick up a crime or not.
		The only ones that know who the folks are that are legal or illegal are ICE.
		So, you have to rely on them to do their job.
		And if they make an arrangement with a probation officer or a parole officer, that they're going to pick the person up.
		Pick them up.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mark is in Newport, Kentucky, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mark.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
		Yeah, I support ICE.
		I just wish they would have more shows of the victims of what the immigrants have done to American people.
		I think that would be a lot more justified for what ICE and the way they operate.
		I just wish you guys would come up with a program that would show victims instead of just what ICE does.
		I mean, there's so many victims out there that's not even being noticed.
unidentified		Thank you.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Have a great day.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We received a text message from Elaine in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who says, I think ICE needs to be abolished and reform is needed.
		The spyware is wrong on United States citizens.
		Masks off and respect for citizens.
		Miriam is in Texas on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Miriam.
unidentified		Yeah, I'm just worried that the Republicans are such like they're in a cult where they don't believe what they see.
		I know that it would be great if you would show those videos that are like stopping people and asking for documents like for papers.
		And they're asking Americans so that they can believe what is happening out there.
		There are actual anecdotes where Americans are being withheld without due process.
		I mean, it's on TV and so forth.
		But I see that you pick up on the journal, the journals, but you don't show the videos.
		Maybe the Republicans need to see more of that so they can believe what's going on out there.
		And the second thing is the budget.
		How much is the budget?
		How much are the Democrats in Congress?
		Why are they postponing the budget deal?
		What do they want?
		How much is ICE getting per year?
		And how much is it taking away from the Medicaid and all those programs that are really, really helping people?
		I see all of those agents in really nice trucks running into other cars.
		I mean, it seems like they don't even care because it's the government cars.
		So there's a lot of waste in ICE.
		And on top of that, they're taking our rights away with our own taxes because we're the ones that are funding ICE.
		So it's like stranger things.
		Everything is upside down.
		So those two things, the videos, so Republicans that are in a cult can believe what's happening out there.
		And talk about the budget.
		How much are the ICE agents getting paid on a yearly basis?
		What are their salaries?
		And so forth.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Kenny is in Tennessee on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Kenny.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, thank you for taking my call.
		I've got a good plan for ICE.
		ICE, if you're listening, what they need to do is go is pull away from these places where they've got a lot of people protesting and go to other places like, for instance, Dalton, Georgia.
		They call it Little Mexico.
		They can surround the carpet meals down there and they can get their quota in about two days for about a month worth of quotas.
		They can go to any housing development or where they're building schools or housing developments and circle the place, arrest the illegals, and also arrest the employers for hiring them.
		And then that way they can just move around, move around, go from Chattanooga to Ottawa, Tennessee, go to McMinnville, Tennessee, anywhere they're doing housing projects.
		Just ride around and look.
		And you'll see illegals building houses, roofing, pouring concrete slabs.
		They're taking our jobs.
		I don't have no problem with them.
		They're hardworking people as long as they're here legally.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So Kenny, just to follow up on two of the points that you raised, what you mentioned that they should go after the employers.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What sort of consequence do you think there should be for employers who are giving pe people these people jobs?
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Well, they should be have some huge fines and be maybe even do some brief jail time.
		That'll wake them up.
		They'll quit hiring.
		That's cheap paid slave labor, basically, is what it is.
		Because I know some illegals that work over here in the fields, and they're getting paid about a third or less than half of what normal people would, white people would be getting if they would do the jobs.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And Kenny, you also mentioned the idea of going to different locations and sort of isolating them to detain undocumented folks.
		One of those places you mentioned was schools.
		This has been quite controversial in Minneapolis, the idea of ICE detaining people near schools.
Cheap Paid Slave Labor 00:05:20
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What do you think of that strategy as it's been deployed in Minneapolis?
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		I'm not saying go to the schools where their schools are, I'm just talking about schools that are being built.
		Hospitals, housing developments, any place like that.
		Just move around the country, stay for a week, round them up in that spot, and go halfway across the country and do it again.
		Just hop scotch around and do it.
		Get the illegals out.
		Okay.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Next up is James in Holden, Maine, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, James.
unidentified		Yeah, thank you.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		I think it's interesting.
		You know, how did all these illegals come in our country to start with?
		I mean, who's funding it?
		What's the money trail?
		Why are all these people here that shouldn't be here?
		If they're illegals, they should not be here.
		I think ICE is doing a good job.
		You know, it's not an easy job to arrest these people.
		You know, it's the president's doing a great job.
		President Trump is doing a fantastic job.
		I just, you know, who's funding it?
		I'm just worried that the country is kind of going towards socialism, communism, which is not good for anybody.
		Nobody wants that.
		But, you know, it's my fear that if this problem persists and these illegals just keep coming into our country and nobody stops them, eventually we're going to be a socialist communist country, which is not good at all for anybody.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		How do you connect those two things, James?
		You said you're concerned about becoming a socialist or communist country.
		What do you think is the connection between immigration and socialism and communism in the United States?
unidentified		Well, I think it's, you know, some of these illegals are here.
		You know, hats off to the people that are here and they're working honestly, trying to, you know, my brother was telling me he knows of an illegal that, I mean, the guy's doing a lot better than I'm doing.
		He's driving a brand new car.
		He's got a nice house.
		He does not have legal status in our country.
		You know, how is this guy able to get by and make as much money as he is?
		You know, it's startling to hear stories like that.
		And, you know, I just read some books on communism, and, you know, they say that it is very similar to socialism.
		Socialism and communism are basically the same thing.
		And, you know, we have some of our politicians are kind of leaning that way, and it scares me.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		On X, Sandra says, one of the things that needs to be done is end the quotas for picking up immigrants.
		This is making ICE grab innocent people and hunt them like animals.
		Earl is in Canton, Georgia, on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Earl.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I'm white, and I live here in Canton, Georgia.
		And, you know, I'm probably the only Democrat here that I know of.
		But anyway, let's get to the border.
		The border crossing, 20 million people came when Biden was in here.
		They say, okay, and did Republicans continue on?
		They don't know who they are or where they're at.
		Okay, what about eyes?
		You know where they are, but we don't know who they're, who they are, who they are.
		And the same with this, you know, with Lincoln, if Lincoln had lived, in my opinion, I do not think we'd be seeing all this or that J-6 because Lincoln would have hung Jefferson Davis and put Robert Earl Lee against the, with his back and his post commanders against the wall.
		And that would have probably buried that star, the cross of St. Andrews, I believe what they call their battle flag.
		And then I was at the border.
		In 03, I had a small job out there.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		I was a union construction worker.
unidentified		I went down to the border.
		I just walked right into Tijuana.
		But when I came back out, on the Mexican side, they interviewed you.
		You had to prove your idea and everything.
		You can't just walk right into America.
		This was in 03.
		Okay, and then over the.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So we're just about in time, Earl.
		I want to get to one more caller.
		Let's hear from Maria in Macmillanville, Tennessee, on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Maria.
unidentified		Hey, good morning, everyone.
		Happy Sunday.
		I listened to all of the callers, and, you know, some of them have made some very valid points.
		I know one caller had said to go to the employers.
		I think that's a good point.
		If they're hiring illegals, if I'm not mistaken, there are laws on the books against doing that practice.
		Another caller mentioned maybe they should show how ICE operates, maybe how they are doing what it is that they're doing that people are so against.
Open Minded Insights 00:04:59
unidentified		Maybe there's procedures that they're doing that really is harmful, hurtful.
		I don't know.
		But I am open-minded to look at that to see if there is some validity to that.
		But I'll tell you what I am seeing.
		I am seeing people, government employees, a specific sector of government employees trying to do their job, however it is that they may do it.
		And I see a group of people.
		They're not peaceful protesters by any means.
		I look at peaceful protesters as walking with signs on the sidewalk, marching, maybe having their little, you know, a stage or something where they can present their speakers.
		I'm not seeing that.
		What I saw yesterday morning in Minneapolis is what reminded me of what a war zone could look like.
		I've never been in one, but I imagine it could look like this.
		A lot of smoke with tear gas, flash bombs, and they were coming at each other.
		There was somehow the protesters were lobbying them at ICE.
		ICE was trying to protect their perimeter and lobbying it back to keep the people back so they could do their jobs.
		They're screaming vitriol, literally vitriol, at these agents or police or whomever they are.
		And I don't know.
		Honestly, I really am open to trying to see what the other side is seeing.
		But what I am seeing is somebody put yourself in a workers.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So, Maria, we are out of time.
		I think we do have your idea, but thank you to everyone who called in this hour.
		We have more coming up on Washington Journal.
		Later, we're going to have a conversation with the Nation magazine's columnist Sasha Abromsky about his new book, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and Doge butchered the U.S. government.
		But first, after the break, Washington Examiner Magazine executive editor Jim Antle will join us to talk about this week in politics, including the brewing battle over ICE reforms.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, in his book Baldwin, A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs discusses the personal life and activism of American writer James Baldwin.
		Mr. Boggs, who spent more than 20 years working on his book, also talks about Mr. Baldwin's many writings, his life outside the United States, and his involvement in the 1963 March on Washington.
		And Baldwin had, in fact, written a speech to be read there, and he had written it in France.
		He'd gone over to France for a march over there.
		These were black Americans in France who were doing a march along the scent in support of the March on Washington.
		And then Baldwin brought this speech with him.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And the exact reasons and specifics of how this happened, we don't know, but somehow or other, he didn't end up reading it.
unidentified		But a very famous person, actor at the time, without saying that it was James Baldwin's words, read these words about black global liberation coming out of the mouth of, you guessed it or not, Burt Lancaster.
		Nicholas Boggs with his book, Baldwin, a love story, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
		You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
		Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, today with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author John Meacham, who has written numerous books chronicling American history.
		His books include And There Was Light, Thomas Jefferson, and the prize-winning American Lion, Andrew Jackson, in the White House.
		He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
		Watch America's Book Club with John Meacham today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
		Washington Journal continues.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back for a discussion on the week in Washington politics.
		I'm joined now by Jim Antle, who's the executive editor of Washington Examiner magazine.
		Welcome back to Washington Journal.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me.
unidentified		Good morning.
Shutdown Politics 00:15:19
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So somehow we are in the midst of yet another partial government shutdown as a result of Democrats really digging in on DHS funding.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What do you think of the fact that the White House and Republicans seem to go along with this?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, obviously, I think Republicans would like to avoid a lengthy shutdown.
		We had the longest government shutdown on record, and that was a full government shutdown late last year.
		So in an election year, there would be some desire, I think, to avoid the optics of a shutdown.
		This will be a little bit less disruptive than a full shutdown, but it still would be a political problem and a practical problem.
		I also think there is some desire for an off-ramp from the contentiousness of Minneapolis.
		I think we've seen the Trump administration has tried to shift gears a little bit in Minnesota, but also that creates some level of openness to some kind of reforms about the way ICE does business, but it still would need to be reforms that are compatible with fulfilling President Trump's campaign promise to remove large numbers of illegal immigrants from the country.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's talk about some of the demands that Democrats are laying out in order to advance funding for ICE.
		For example, ending roving patrols, tightening the rules on warrants and requiring ICE to coordinate with local authorities, enforcing accountability and a uniform code of conduct, also requiring agents to take their masks off, wear body cameras, and carry an ID.
		What do you think about some of those democratic demands?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that the two big things are one, sort of local law enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities is one of the points of contention.
		You know, these sanctuary jurisdictions don't really allow local law enforcement to cooperate with immigration authorities.
		And so that's something that I think a lot of Republicans would like to see come to an end.
		So if some kind of compromise on that front delivers that goal, they'd certainly be open to it.
		I think the other question would be, would the changes to the warrants, a shift from administrative warrants to judicial warrants, would that make deportations functionally impossible?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Just to pause to explain to folk what you're talking about, right now ICE is using administrative warrants for their detentions and to ask people for access to different places.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		But many people are pushing back against that by demanding judicial warrants for entry into homes and businesses, which are signed by a judge.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		So there are still some rights in terms of access to private property, you know, getting on private property where you do need warrants, but in terms of being able to go out and arrest and set up for deportation, it would be very difficult to deport large numbers of people if they embraced the Democrats' current language on how the judicial warrants would proceed.
		So it would functionally make it very difficult to pursue the administration's goals on removing a significant number of illegal immigrants for the rest of their term.
		So I think that there would have to be significant give on that for there to be some kind of compromise.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You had a piece last week about the role of ICE in Minneapolis headlined Trump Shifts Tactics and Optics to Calm the Immigration Firestorm.
		A lot has happened in the last week.
		Can you lay out sort of what you were arguing here and maybe if your perspective has just shifted at all?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		So I think after the second shooting of an American during the sort of conflagration that's going on in Minneapolis over the ICE presence there, there was a desire on the part of the White House to kind of lower the temperature a little bit.
		And after initially using very strong language to describe the person who was shot as a domestic terrorist and somebody who is seeking to kill large numbers of law enforcement, they backed off of that rhetoric.
		They sidelined some of the people who were key to that messaging, particularly Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam, and they dispatched Orders Rom Holman, Tom Homan, to Minneapolis.
		And Homan has really tried to take a different tack.
		And the president has also had a lot of phone conversations with Minnesota Governor Tim Waz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frye, both people with whom the president has had a pretty contentious relationship on this issue in particular, but also just more broadly.
		Waz was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2024.
		So he was on the ticket with former Vice President Kamala Harris, which Trump and Vance ran against.
		So I think there's been an attempt to see if there is some kind of way in which they can cut a deal that will lower the temperature.
		And maybe some of the federal immigration personnel, Border Patrol, and ICE, the numbers of people who are there will start to get lower.
		So I think by and large that what they've sought to do is what they're still doing.
		You know, there does come a point, though, where they're pretty far apart.
		The Minnesota elected officials and the Trump administration are pretty far apart of what they would like to see happen in the state.
		So I think there is some room for negotiation on that.
		But there's also, you know, there are matters of principle for both sides that I don't think are quite so easily resolved.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi asked for access to Minnesota's voter rolls as a condition for ICE being withdrawn from Minneapolis.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's an appropriate strategy?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		I mean, there are a whole lot of other controversies involving Minnesota that are separate from the immigration issue.
		And I think that to have a successful resolution of the immigration standoff specifically, there's probably going to have to be some backing off of demands that are not really directly related to that.
		Otherwise, it seems pretty unlikely to me that there's going to be a resolution that the Minnesota elected officials are going to go along with.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I want to move to a different topic altogether, which is different state as well in Georgia, because last week the FBI searched the Fulton County, Georgia's election office seeking records related to the 2020 election, which the president still says he won, even though that has been disproven on multiple occasions.
		Now, they asked for ballots, tabulator tapes from the scanners, voter rolls.
		This was overseen by the DNI director Tulsi Gabbard.
		What's going on here?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, obviously the president still would like to see the 2020 election results contested.
		I'm not sure what he thinks or what people around him think they're going to find that will change anybody's mind about what happened in 2020.
		It seems to me that having won the 2024 election and nobody really contests that he won that election, you've made a pretty significant political comeback, not really comparable to anything, maybe Richard Nixon.
		I mean, but the greatest political comeback in history.
		I'm not sure why being so backward-looking would be to your benefit politically, particularly given that we're now in another election year, and I think most voters have moved on from this.
		But it's clearly something that's very important to the president.
		It's very important to some of the president's strongest supporters.
		I'm not sure that there's anything anybody could find that's going to really change anybody's minds about any of this stuff at this point, but clearly they're going to try.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Do you think there's harm in doing this?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think that I don't see a very good reason for looking backwards in this way.
		Even if you were to accept some of the things that the president thinks about that election, and I don't, you know, I don't see what, you know, you're the president now.
		So there's, you know, but obviously one of the things that kept him politically viable during his four-year hiatus from the White House was contesting these election results.
		So, you know, it's part of what maintained his strong bond with the Republican base.
		So, you know, to some extent, I can understand on a certain guttural level why this is important to him.
		But I think that the real election Republicans need to be focused on is the one that's happening this November.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		With that in mind, some of the pushback to this raid, Rob Pitts, who's the chairman of the Fulton County, Georgia Board of Commissioners, says every audit, every recount, every court ruling on the 2020 Georgia election results has confirmed what the people of Fulton County already knew.
		Our elections were fair and accurate, and every legal vote was counted.
		These ongoing efforts are about intimidation and distraction, not facts.
		Several folks on the Democratic side have said that moves like this, as well as sort of the demand for voter rolls in Minneapolis and Minnesota, are more about almost an intimidation tactic ahead of the midterms.
		Do you think that's a fair concern?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I don't know that anybody's behavior in the midterms is going to be significantly influenced by any of this.
		But I do think that, you know, number one, Trump won Georgia in 2024.
		And number two, there's a pretty important Senate race that's happening in Georgia this year.
		It's one of the Republicans' handful of actual pickup opportunities.
		You know, there's because Georgia is such a closely contested state, there's going to be a lot of emphasis on things that can happen at the margins.
		You know, should the voter rolls be purged?
		Are there people on the voter rolls who shouldn't be voting?
		So there's going to be some focus on that.
		But I really think that what mainly needs to happen for the Republicans is they need to be focused on the election that's about to happen and not the one that was concluded six years ago.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Looking at that election that is about to happen, I mean, the generic congressional vote polling, according to Emerson College polling, says about 48% of likely voters would support a Democratic candidate, 42% would support a Republican candidate, 10% undecided.
		You have another piece in the Washington Examiner.
		Is Trump's 2024 coalition coming apart ahead of the midterm elections?
		With the numbers that we have and everything else you're seeing, why do you think that might be a risk?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, there's certainly been some erosion of President Trump's support among some of the people who were key swing voters in the 2024 election.
		So he's not doing as well with younger voters as he was at that time.
		He's not doing as well with Hispanic voters as he was at that time.
		You know, a pretty important part of how he was able to not only win the Electoral College, but win the popular vote, was that there was a large shift of conservative-leaning non-white voters to support his ticket.
		And that is less evident in the polling that's going on right now.
		There are a number of voters who don't feel that the administration has yet delivered on some of the promises about the economy and affordability.
		And that really seems to be hurting the president and his party right now.
		Now, the reality of modern American politics is that generally speaking, the party that holds the White House does not do well in the midterm elections.
		The midterm elections are an opportunity for a course correction or a rebuke that voters who are unhappy with the incumbent administration can hand down.
		And that's generally happened to every president, regardless of political party, really since 1938.
		And the couple of exceptions that there have been kind of prove the rule.
		I mean, Republicans did well in the 2002 midterm elections, but that was in the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attack.
		So there was still a sort of rally around the flag, a sort of national unity moment behind President George W. Bush that was in effect at that time that made the midterms different than they normally would be.
		But we have seen most recent presidents have encountered serious political setbacks during the midterm elections.
		And we've also seen more recently an evolution in the two parties' coalitions where Democrats, having previously been more reliant on low-propensity voters, now have the higher propensity voting coalition.
		So their voters are people who are going to turn out in a race for dog catcher, right?
		They're going to vote no matter what's happening on the ballot.
		And they'll show up to protest President Trump regardless of whether he is personally on the ballot or not.
		Whereas Republicans have moved to a much lower propensity voting coalition.
		These are people who will show up to vote in presidential elections perhaps, but they're less reliable in terms of turning out for things like the midterms.
		And then some of these voters have been pretty reliable in showing up and voting when President Trump is on the ballot.
		But in elections where he's not on the ballot, they stay home or how they're going to vote is a little bit less reliable.
		And so Republicans are facing a challenge.
		Downballot Republicans, who are going to be the people who are running in this election, are facing the challenge of what do you do about that?
		How do you turn these people out?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's get to your questions for Jim Antel, who's the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
Voter Contradictions and Immigration 00:12:50
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We'll first take one via text from Steve in Tampa, Florida.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Does Mr. Antel believe that examining previous voting records to identify deceased individuals, people who live in different states, and illegal aliens who have voted in the elections?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I think, you know, there are some people on voter rolls who shouldn't be there.
		And I think that the laws in that regard should be followed.
		And I think there are some areas where they have, you know, people who are still on the rolls who shouldn't be there.
		And some states have better systems for purging those roles than others.
		And I don't have any issue with that.
		I think that I do, however, think that the focus should be on the law and on the elections that are going on right now.
		I mean, there are still people who contest the 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy.
		And, you know, that's interesting.
		And I certainly would be interested in reading more books about that or something.
		But it's not something that the modern Republican Party should be particularly focused on.
		And it kind of ruined when Richard Nixon did get into the White House.
		That focus kind of ruined his presidency.
		And I think we wouldn't want to see the same thing happen with Donald Trump.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Scott is in Ithaca, New York, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Scott.
unidentified		Good morning, Jim.
		I just wanted to make a couple of statements to set the record straight other than the kind of news feeds that everybody looks at, which is kind of stupid.
		But so local law enforcement is supposed to be in charge of crowd control for protests, not ICE.
		And as far as ICE goes, there's illegal and there's psychological things going on.
		The legal things have been going on for decades, and that is all law enforcement are held to things like administrative warrants for public property, but for private domain, it's always been judicial that was required.
		There's two exceptions that people need to know: there's consent, so if somebody consents to a warrant or to search their property, there's also this exigent circumstances, and that's what's possibly being abused by ICE in some circumstances, and all law enforcement sometimes in some circumstances.
		But there is a place for exigent circumstances for those individuals that have created heinous crimes or whatever that are illegal aliens to go after those people.
		I think the psychological component, though, is that the American public was not ready for the way that they were doing it now.
		They should have just gone after the hardest criminals that were illegal aliens and gone with the judicial warrants when necessary, but exigent circumstances when necessary.
		But as far as rounding up people just that are pure illegally to start with, I think the American public was not ready for that.
		I think they should have done it in phases.
		And I want your comments.
		I'll go up here.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, I definitely think that the public is more ambivalent about interior enforcement of immigration laws than they are about border security.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		And I think that's shown up in the polling regularly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		There's a Fox News poll that found that 59% of voters say that ICE is too aggressive, which is up 10 points from July.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So I think that when you're looking at getting people who are illegal immigrants who have already made it into the interior of the country, maybe they've been here for some time.
		The optics of some of the tactics that will be involved are not something that a lot of voters are ready to stomach, even though they say that they would like a lot of these people removed from the country.
		So, you know, it's some of that is the administration's administration not having really prepared people for what they're going to see, maybe assuming that people will share their zeal for these things in a way that I don't think is really supported by the public opinion polling.
		You know, and there's also, you know, voters, voters want, you know, a balanced budget, but they don't want tax increases or spending cuts.
		They want no illegal immigration, but they don't want to deport anybody.
		There is an element, except for criminals, beyond immigration violations.
		So there is sometimes the voters themselves have certain contradictions in what they'd like.
		But I think that, number one, there is a little bit of public ambivalence on that front that the administration, I think, is going to have to address.
		The other thing is, I think that maybe they ought to look more seriously at things like a more employer-centric approach to reducing illegal immigration.
		So, you know, obviously the jobs are the big magnet for illegal immigration.
		Do a little bit more work site enforcement, enforce the employer sanctions that are in the law, and also maybe tax and go after some of the remittances that are being paid back to the home country.
		And that would remove some of the economic incentive.
		But the Republican Party, even under President Trump, is still the party of business.
		And so there are a lot of donor relationships and political relationships there.
		And even the president has been sensitive to the labor needs of certain industries, which have become pretty dependent on illegal immigrant labor.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Paul is in Schneckery, New York, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Paul.
unidentified		Morning, how are you?
		Good, good.
		Good.
		I support ICE 100%.
		And if you're an American citizen, you have nothing to fear.
		Simple as that.
		And it seems that the news media and politicians forgot that this whole thing started with the Biden administration open border policy, letting murderers in, child molesters, killers, everything.
		So now you got Donald Trump, our president, has to clean house, and he's doing it the right way.
		These people that came into our country are all illegal, and it's millions of them.
		So I think it's time to clean house, and I support Donald Trump, and that's all I could say.
		Thank you.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		And when Sonny Bono, the singer, first started running for elected office, he was asked in a debate what his opinion was of illegal immigration, and he said, well, it's illegal.
		And then he sat down.
		And I think that's how a lot of voters feel about it.
		I think a big thing, and I take the caller's point on this, is that you do have to remember a bit how we got here.
		And the Biden administration tolerated a situation at the border that, one, at least during the election, made voters willing to accept or at least contemplate measures that they'd previously been unwilling to really entertain.
		So the support in polls for mass deportations grew past a point where we'd ever really previously seen it.
		There was also a lot of polling.
		There was the Gallup poll that showed more support for a reduction in immigration in general than we'd seen since 2001.
		That's cooled off substantially since we've seen the Trump administration get back control of the border.
		But there does come a point where just the sheer volume of illegal immigration becomes a problem, even if many of the illegal immigrants themselves on an individual basis are sympathetic people.
		So you can have, I think the most accepted estimate is that about 9 million people came in illegally during the Biden administration.
		That's a lot of people to have coming in who are totally unvetted and you don't really know who they are and what their intentions are.
		And so that is sort of the climate in which that, one, Trump was elected again, and two, that he has been charged with dealing with this problem.
		And so, you know, the administration is certainly not blameless in terms of why they're encountering the political backlash that they are at this moment.
		But they're also in a situation there are reasons why they find themselves in the situation that they do now that aren't really entirely their fault.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Sylvia is in Pennsylvania on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Sylvia.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		You can hear me?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we can hear you.
unidentified		Good morning.
		You already touched on this.
		Wasn't it making a law that for the companies, if they hire any illegal people, find them $1,000 for each one of them?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		You're saying companies should be fined $1,000 per each violation of hiring folks who are not legally authorized to work here, Sylvia?
unidentified		Yes.
		And what's a legal thing that take children out of schools?
		I want to hear about that, too.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		That has been incredibly controversial, the sort of immigration enforcement in Minneapolis near or around schools.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So on the employer front, there are employer sanctions for hiring illegal immigrants.
		And I think that is an area where the administration should do more.
		I mean, and it isn't just the Trump administration.
		Part of the immigration law that amnestied a large number of illegal immigrants in 1986 was to try to crack down on employers who hire illegal labor.
		And that has never really been enforced to the satisfaction of, I think, most people who follow the issue closely and would like to see more enforcement.
		And I think that going after the businesses, even though here there's also some risks of backlash, you know, if you hurt the business community, but I think that these are generally less sympathetic people.
		These are people who don't want to pay fair wages to Americans and to legal immigrants.
		And I think that's a good way to position yourself on the issue.
		But there's been hesitance to do that out of a certain amount of solicitude toward the business community.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		JD is in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, JD.
unidentified		Yeah, I was just wondering if we were going to see 3,000 agents, ICE agents, arrive in like Miami or like San Antonio to do the same thing they're doing in Minneapolis, where mostly the population is illegal.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Are you saying that in Miami and in San Antonio, most of the population is illegal, JD?
unidentified		Well, there seems to be more of a Spanish-speaking populations in those areas.
unidentified		Like in Oklahoma, like we're in, there's a lot of Spanish-speaking people.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So your question is about sort of how ICE is choosing the areas to surge its enforcement, yes?
unidentified		I think.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, so part of it is that Texas and Florida are not sanctuary jurisdictions.
		And so even if in some cases, maybe the people leading the cities are not super enthusiastic about federal immigration authorities coming into their hometowns.
		The state leaders are generally supportive of it.
		There are a lot more people being deported from Texas than are being deported from Minnesota.
		So that is a factor in why you're not seeing these ICE surges in those types of cities.
President Trump Sues A Lot! 00:08:11
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Now, there is a reasonable question to be asked.
		You know, are the administration's priorities in this area inflaming things without really achieving the most practical effects for what they're setting out to do in terms of removing illegal immigrants?
		I think that is an open question, but there are Minnesota-centric reasons as well for why this is happening in Minnesota and it's not happening elsewhere.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Alan is in Palantine, Illinois on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Alan.
unidentified		Hi.
		I'm calling.
		I wanted to know what you thought about the president suing the IRS.
		Personally, as a taxpayer, I'm offended by the notion.
		And it just really seems like a deeply corrupt act.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And I'll just give some context for folks who maybe aren't following this story that, and here's just reporting from CNBC, although this was widely reported, that Trump, his two sons, the Trump organization, sues the IRS and Treasury for $10 billion over the tax records leak.
		This is over alleged leaks of their confidential tax information.
		They seek at least $10 billion in damages.
		Quote, the IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically motivated employee to leak private and consular information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump organization to the New York Times, ProPublica, and other left-wing news outlets, a spokesman for Trump's legal team said.
		What do you think of the caller's concern that this is not a good use of taxpayer money?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Well, his tax records shouldn't have been leaked, I would say, number one.
		But yes, it does raise issues in terms of now he's running the executive branch, and the IRS is part of that.
		And now he is suing to potentially get $10 billion out of the IRS.
		And conceivably, there'd be some kind of settlement talks.
		And it does raise some conflicts given that he is the chief executive, and his attorneys, his agents would presumably be parties to those talks.
		Having said that, I mean, President Trump sues a lot of people, sues a lot of entities, and there's quite a variety in terms of outcomes as to how far any of these lawsuits actually go.
		There have been some cases, particularly lawsuits against media companies where Trump has begun to have some success, but there also are a fairly long list of lawsuits that the president has filed that have really not resulted in much of anything.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Siobhan is in Melbourne, Florida on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Siobhan.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thank you for C-SPAN.
		The country used to try to cultivate a community trust between the local and state law enforcement.
		Many migrants would not come forward as witnesses to crimes, or if a victim of a crime, they would not report it.
		The federal and local law enforcement working together has set back the security, the safety of our communities.
		I would like to state that I think federal and law enforcement should be separate and uh, the courts should not be used as a hunting ground for migrants.
		Um, that's about all I have to say.
		The states and the local law enforcement should not be working in concert with the federal officials over an immigrant law.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Thank you well, that is.
		The big argument that people make in favor of becoming sanctuary jurisdictions is that there's concern that that people will be afraid to come forward in terms of reporting crimes, in terms of cooperating with the state and local government, really on any issue, if they feel that they're at some risk of deportation.
		I and and I don't think very many people are actually calling on state and local authorities to be particularly involved in immigration enforcement itself, which is a federal issue.
		Um, but we are talking about, in some cases of people who are already incarcerated, and these are the people who I think the general public has supports most removing from the country, and so if you can't really get a certain level of cooperation on that status, you know, in that particular situation, I think that's unacceptable to a lot of people.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Joe is in Naples Florida, on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Joe morning.
unidentified		A couple of questions and then a comment um.
		Number one, is there interface between county clerks and the voter rolls, that when a county clerk records a death certificate, that it goes back to the voter rolls for removal?
		Uh, second thing, I used to farm 1200 acres of vegetables and I had about 212 migrant workers working for me.
		Under the law, any employer who hires someone has to fill out an I-9 form.
		When mr Antel and you got hired at CNN and uh the examiner respectively, you had to fill out an I-9 form, which you had to present, your proof that you are not an illegal alien.
		If you did not, then your employers are in violation of the law.
		We fill those out on everybody that walked in the door.
		I don't care if it's my next door neighbor's kid, and I remember when you were.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So Joe, just because we're short on time, I think we understand about your, your statement about the I-9, but what was your specific question for mr Antel?
unidentified		Um, is there correlation between county clerks and the voter rolls so that when someone dies they're automatically removed?
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, I mean different states and different local jurisdictions have different procedures on that.
		It it is true that people in practice.
		People have often lingered on voter rolls past their expiration date on this planet.
		That doesn't necessarily mean that somebody's voting on their behalf.
		I certainly can, you know, when I moved to DC, was on the voter rolls where I grew up after I was no longer living in DC.
		I don't think anything bad voting-wise happened as a result of that, but it is certainly something that happens.
		And states do need to exercise a certain amount of due diligence on that front.
		Yeah, in terms of the I-9, I mean, that's absolutely true.
		I mean, there are processes and procedures every business with every hire has to follow.
		Yet at the same time, clearly there are ways around that that people, both employers and employees, have found.
		Otherwise, we wouldn't have, you know, in excess of, you know, 10 million illegal immigrants in the country.
		Most of them are working.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, that is all the time that we have.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much once again.
Authoritarian Watch Project 00:11:28
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Jim Antle, the executive editor of Washington Examiner Magazine.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for coming by again.
jim antle ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, coming up next, the Nation Magazine's columnist, Sasha Abromsky, is going to join us to talk about his new book, American Carnage, how Trump, Musk, and Doge butchered the U.S. government.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We'll be right back.
unidentified		On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Jonathan Horn's latest book is titled The Fate of the Generals, MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
		The publisher, Scribner, explains the premise of Horn's book.
		For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received the country's highest military award, the Medal of Honor.
		One was the charismatic Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his troops and go to Australia.
		The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops, whose fate he insisted on sharing.
unidentified		A new interview with author Jonathan Horne about his book, The Fate of the Generals, MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
		BookNotes Plus with our host Brian Lamb is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
		Best ideas and best practices can be found anywhere.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		But we have to listen so we can govern better.
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Democracy depends on heavy doses of civility.
george h w bush ▲ ● ▼		You can fight and still be friendly.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		Bridging the divide in American politics.
don bacon ▲ ● ▼		You know, you may not agree with the Democrat in everything, but you can find areas where you do agree.
unidentified		He's a pretty likable guy as well.
unidentified		Chris Coons and I are actually friends.
george h w bush ▲ ● ▼		He votes wrong all the time, but we're actually friends.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		A horrible secret that Scott and I have is that we actually respect each other.
don bacon ▲ ● ▼		We all don't hate each other.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		You two actually kind of like each other.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		These are the kinds of secrets we'd like to expose.
ro khanna ▲ ● ▼		It's nice to be with a member who knows what they're talking about.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		Les did agree to the civility, all right?
don bacon ▲ ● ▼		He owes my son $10 from a bet.
unidentified		And he is never made for it.
unidentified		Fork it over.
don bacon ▲ ● ▼		That's fighting words right there.
unidentified		I'm glad I'm not in charge.
unidentified		I'm thrilled to be on the show with him.
george h w bush ▲ ● ▼		There are not shows like this, right?
jared moskowitz ▲ ● ▼		Incentivizing that relationship.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		Ceasefire, Friday nights on C-SPAN.
unidentified		Washington Journal continues.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back.
		We're joined now by Sasha Abromsky, who's the author of the book American Carnage, how Trump, Musk, and Doge butchered the U.S. government.
		Mr. Abromsky is also a columnist for the nation and does a segment called Authoritarian Watch.
		Welcome to Washington Journal.
unidentified		Good morning.
unidentified		Thanks for having me on.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I want to talk first about your column for the nation authoritarian watch.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		What is it exactly?
unidentified		So it's based on the premise that something unique is happening in American politics under Trump that hasn't happened in the past and that carries some really, really profound consequences for how our democracy functions.
		And it's based on the idea that you can sort of almost measure on a week-by-week basis democratic norms being placed under attack, whether it's universities or journalists coming into the sort of crosshairs, or whether it's the actions of ICE, or whether it's a foreign policy that's explicitly based on a mighty-right philosophy of the world.
		So a couple of months ago, my editors and I started talking, and I've been writing weekly columns for more than a decade now, but we started talking about how to quantify the democratic backsliding in a way that would be understandable and compelling to readers.
		And out of that came this idea that on a weekly basis, I would be looking for new ways in which the Trump administration was pushing back against democratic norms, or new ways in which Congress was failing to do its congressional duty according to the traditional divisions of power, or ways in which just on the ground, laws were being ignored or court orders were being undermined by an administration that seems more intent on results than on using constitutional means to get those results.
		And so that's the basis of the column Authoritarian Watch.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		In one of your recent columns for Authoritarian Watch, you have a piece, an open letter to Congressional Republicans of conscience.
		Conscience, for the good of the country, it's time to cross the aisle.
		What's your argument there?
unidentified		So the argument is that the Republicans in Congress have basically rubber stamped an authoritarian agenda and that actually it wouldn't take that much pushback from Congress to rein in large parts of the agenda.
		So my argument is that if four Republican senators, and I name them, and three Republican congressmen were to cross the aisle, because the majorities are so narrow in the Senate and in the Congress, that would be enough to flip Congress to Democratic control.
		Now, what I've said in the letter is, look, if you're Lisa McCarski, for example, you do not have to agree with everything or even most things that your Democratic colleagues are saying, but you do have to agree that the future of the democracy is at risk under Trump and there needs to be a congressional pushback.
		And the way you get congressional pushback is you control the purse again, because traditionally Congress controls spending, and you control the investigative leaguers of power.
		And the reason that's important is Trump's administration is committing manifestly illegal and impeachable offenses almost on a daily basis.
		Christy Noam is, Peter Hegseth is, Donald Trump of course is.
		We're seeing this explosion of cronyism, of nepotism, of corruption that is going to have profound consequences for how this country's political system functions, not just for a few months, but for many, many, many decades.
		If enough Republicans said, you know what, we can't stomach this anymore.
		We didn't enter politics for this vision to be imposed on the country.
		If enough Republicans of conscience said, we're going to cross the aisle temporarily to ensure that this out-of-control administration is held accountable, that would be a profoundly important historical gesture.
		And so I wrote it as an open letter.
		Now, I'm under no illusions that Susan Collins or Lisa McKowski or Rand Paul are reading the Nation magazine, but I do think that if my readers start calling and writing to these senators and congressmen, there is momentum here that could be built.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Along with authoritarianism, which you're highlighting there, another term that a lot of folks on the left have been using to describe this administration has been fascism, which has pulled a lot of negative responses on the right, including in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, America Doesn't Do Fascism.
		Trump is far more interesting than the dictator living in the liberal imagination.
		I want to read a bit of this op-ed and get your response, in which Barton Swain writes for the Wall Street Journal, in fairness to liberals who have mistaken Mr. Trump for a fascist over the past decade, that the president sometimes acts and sounds like a strongman.
		He understands constitutional limits when he wants to and doesn't when he doesn't.
		In his second term, he has used the Justice Department to target his foes, though in comically inept ways that diminish his polling numbers and turn those foes into heroes.
		He has chafed at constitutional limits, but hasn't declared himself exempt from them except in goading asides.
		He promised not to be a dictator except for a day.
		After that, I'm not a dictator.
		He likes to name buildings after himself, which is weird but doesn't hurt anything but sensibilities.
		He has complied with court orders, even if the administration's attorneys have required cajoling by district judges on matters of immigration.
		This is what makes Mr. Trump more interesting and more puzzling and exasperating than the latter-day fascist of liberal imagination.
		He has far more in common with Andrew Jackson than with Buzz Windrup, the fascist American dictator and anti-hero of Sinclair Lewis's novel, It Can't Happen Here.
		What do you think?
unidentified		You know, it's interesting.
		I've been speaking as part of my authoritarian watch project.
		I've been interviewing academics and historians of fascism and advocates and legal scholars all over the country for the last many, many months.
		And some of them agree with that op-ed and some of them don't.
		Where I tend to fall is I think that it is a kind of fascism, but it's not exactly the kind of fascism of mid-20th century Europe.
		It isn't an exact mirroring of Hitler or of Mussolini, though Trump does use their language and he borrows phrasing.
		And ICE in its recruitment strategy is very explicitly borrowing neo-Nazi phrasing in how it's recruiting young men to become ICE agents.
		There is a breakdown of law and order on the streets in places like Minneapolis when you have federal agents doing the breaking of the law.
		And that is where it gets really, really dangerous.
		The way ICE has been funded, the way it's been empowered, the way it's been essentially told both by Vance and by Trump that anything they do results in absolute immunity.
		That's a recipe for domestic bloodshed.
		When Trump pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists from the January 6th insurrection, that was a signal that justice would be partial, that if you were on Trump's enemies list, the full might of the state would be thrown against you.
		But if you were seen to be on Trump's side, you got a free pass.
		Now, that is extraordinarily dangerous because it begins the empowerment of street fighters and the paramilitaries.
		So yes, I mean, there are differences between ICE and the Gestapo, but there are also shocking similarities.
		And there are differences between Trump and Mussolini or Hitler, but again, at least rhetorically, there are extraordinary similarities.
		So I don't agree with the editorial in the Washington, in the Wall Street Journal, but I do think that history never quite repeats itself exactly.
		There's always a melodic variation.
		And we're seeing in 21st century Trump's America that melodic variation.
		It's a sort of fascism light.
		It uses propaganda tools that earlier fascists didn't have access to, especially around social media.
		But the idea that you can use the big lie, the idea that if you say something loudly enough and if the state propaganda machine amplifies it enough, it becomes a reality.
		That's a common thread that runs through all strongman government.
		And that goes from Hitler to Mussolini.
		It goes from Perron in Argentina in the 50s to Pinochet in the 70s and 80s, through to people like Donald Trump or Victor Orban or Modi in India today.
		So, you know, I think we can pass whether or not it's exactly fascism.
		But I think what almost every commentator at this point would agree with is it's a shocking departure from traditional American democratic norms.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's get back to the topic of your book, American Carnage.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Why did you choose that title?
unidentified		The title is based on a speech that Donald Trump made in 2017 in his first inauguration address.
		And he made this extraordinarily dark speech about how there was American carnage playing out on the streets of America.
		And the thing about Trump's presidency, both in Trump 1.0, but more especially this current incarnation, is Trump's people and Trump's rhetoric and Trump's inflammation and polarization of the political process, that is creating the American carnage.
Financial Carnage 2025 00:15:19
unidentified		And so when I started researching the Doge purges, which basically defined the first several months of the Trump presidency, it struck me that that was an extraordinarily apt title for the book.
		Because what Trump was doing and what Elon Musk were doing, they were essentially shredding, not the entire federal government, but key parts, the parts that had to do with the environment, the parts that had to do with education, with public health, with overseas aid, with workplace protection.
		And they were doing it in a way that harmed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of federal employees, public civil servants, and their families and the broader communities that they were part of.
		And they were leaving a catastrophic legacy in the wake of these purges.
		And I started interviewing people.
		I ended up finding 11 federal workers from eight different agencies who were willing to talk to me over the first several months of 2025 as all of their life certainties were upended and as they found themselves being described by Russell Vogt and by Donald Trump and by Vance and by Elon Musk as the enemy within.
		And it was creating an absolutely extraordinary stress on the functioning of the U.S. federal system and the federal government.
		And so again, it seemed to me that if I was going to be writing about and describing the Doge purges with Elon Musk and his chainsaw and everything else that went with those purges, there was no title more apropos than Trump's own words, American Carnage.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Now then, how did the employees you profiled find out their jobs were in jeopardy and later on that their jobs were going to be terminated?
unidentified		I mean, oftentimes it happened on the same day.
		So for example, one of the women that I focus on was an NOAA scientist, a National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration climate researcher called Natasha Miles.
		And she had just gotten this job.
		She'd been in academia for 20 years.
		She'd just gotten this job.
		And it was in Boulder, Colorado.
		So she sets off from the East Coast.
		She drives west.
		It's a 2,000-mile drive, and it takes her five days.
		And she gets to Boulder, and literally an hour outside town, she gets a phone call from her boss saying, you've got to check your email.
		And when she checks her email, there's a message there saying as of five o'clock that day, Natasha Miles was no longer a federal employee.
		I mean, that's an extraordinary way to treat a worker.
		It's an extraordinary way to treat a fellow human being.
		There was another woman also at NOAA I interviewed called Kelsey Hendrix and she was blind.
		She wasn't a scientist.
		She worked in the sort of clerical area of NOAA.
		And she had the same thing happen.
		She's in work one day in Washington, D.C., and she gets an email saying, later this afternoon, you're being terminated, your work email's being cancelled, you're being, I mean, she was essentially frog marched out of the building.
		I interviewed people at the CDC working on vital public health programs.
		And same thing happened.
		They just get these emails saying you're being fired.
		And some of them got emails saying you're being fired for poor performance.
		And this was something Doge basically made up out of thin air.
		If you're fired for poor performance in the federal government, you can't get rehired by the federal government.
		It's almost impossible.
		You've gotten a scarlet letter against your name.
		So people were getting these fallacious emails from Elon Musk and his henchmen saying you're being fired for poor performance.
		And then they had to go through all this legal rigmarole to try and get that reversed.
		And some succeeded, some didn't.
		But this is what I found again and again and again.
		Russell Vogt, who was one of the architects of Project 2025, he's sort of the thinking man's MAGA person.
		He's the ideologue behind a lot of what Trump 2.0 is doing.
		Russell Vogt was caught on camera in October 2024 saying that their ambition if they got into power was to quote unquote put the federal workforce into trauma.
		And they succeeded.
		On a daily basis, people were absolutely traumatized in the federal government.
		I spoke to one person after another who said, yeah, I had to go on antidepressants.
		I spoke to several people who had been prescribed drugs that are normally reserved for veterans suffering from PTSD.
		But their daily work experience became so traumatic under Elon Musk and under Russell Vogt and under Donald Trump that they were having to go onto these powerful drugs simply to maintain their equilibrium and be able to do work.
		That's something no employer should be imposing on their workforce and certainly not the federal government, which employs 2 million or did employ before the purges, 2 million civilian employees.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I want to give some numbers as to the scale of the cuts that you're talking about between the Doge cuts and people who took buyouts or early retirement and things like that.
		More than 322,000 employees have left the federal workforce.
		Every federal agency has been impacted.
		Department of Education, HUD, and Treasury saw the most cuts in terms of the percentage of the workforce.
		In raw numbers, though, the Department of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Treasury, and HHS were impacted the most.
		Can you talk about sort of where all of these people went and how that rippled through the broader economy?
unidentified		It had a massive impact.
		And when you say 300,000 workers, that's about one in seven, one in eight, one in seven federal workers who just disappeared off the payrolls.
		So it had a profound impact on communities, especially in Washington, D.C., but also in places like Atlanta, Georgia, which is the headquarters of the CDC.
		And you mentioned different agencies were impacted differently.
		Look, if you're a taxpayer and you're trying to get answers about your tax return and you're phoning the IRS at this point, good luck, because so many IRS telephone workers, including one of the people in my book, were fired and told they were no longer necessary.
		If you're an overseas person and you're looking to get vaccinations or medications that USAID provided, good luck because USAID was absolutely eviscerated.
		It's gone.
		But it's not all aspects of government that were shredded.
		So, I mean, you know, Donald Trump and Musk portrayed this as a way of saving hundreds of billions of dollars for the American taxpayer.
		Well, that never materialized because actually what happened was large parts of government simply became utterly inefficient and caught in red tape.
		People who used to be able to do workplace inspections if they were workplace safety inspectors, now they have to jump through hoops to get that funded.
		So things that used to run smoothly no longer run smoothly.
		But there are parts of the government that have been turbocharged.
		If you're working for ICE, you're in the golden age because tens of billions of dollars are flowing towards ICE and the CPP, the Border Patrol.
		So it's not that it's a sort of equal opportunity shredder.
		It's not that Elon Musk's chainsaw just worked equally across the government.
		They picked and chose, and they chose parts of the government that didn't align with Trump's ideological vision.
		So Trump doesn't want anything to do with the environment and government, so they shredded all of the agencies and all of the employment opportunities connected with environmental research.
		Trump and Kennedy don't really like a sort of scientific vision of public health.
		So the CDC has been relentlessly hammered.
		None of them, none of the new oligarchs who are governing this country, like laws that protect ordinary Americans in the workplace or ordinary Americans against financial predators.
		And so they went after NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health.
		They went after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which helps prevent predatory lenders from exploiting ordinary Americans.
		So this was a very, very programmatic effort, not to make government smaller, but to reduce the parts of government that stood in the way of this extremist political agenda.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		We'll be taking calls with questions for Sasha Bromsky of the nation.
		Our phone line for Republicans is 202-748-8001.
		For Democrats, 202748-8000.
		And for Independents, 202748-8002.
		Quickly, before we get to our callers, Sasha, last November, the Department of Government Efficiency disbanded, still with eight months left in its mandate.
		What is Doge up to now?
		Are any of these employees still in government?
		Where do things stand?
unidentified		I mean, here's the sort of horrifying thing about Doge.
		Doge became a political commissariat.
		And basically, Doge embedded its commissars in key agencies, in key branches of government, and looked over the shoulders of the people who were normally running operations in those agencies.
		And they became this sort of political and financial commissariat that made it impossible for agencies to make independent decisions.
		And those embedded employees are still there.
		They're speckled all around government.
		But perhaps the biggest legacy of Doge, the most destructive long-term legacy, is they hacked the financial and the information pipelines of government.
		And that should shock anybody, Democrat, Republican alike.
		They went outside of Congress.
		They didn't seek congressional authority for what they were doing.
		And all of the information that's kept by the Treasury, kept by immigration authorities, kept by the Education Department, kept by the Department of Health and Human Services, kept by the Housing and Urban Development Department, all of this information, which for good reason has been compartmentalized, the barriers broke down.
		And they used that information ruthlessly over the past year, especially in the anti-immigrant crackdowns that have gone on all over this country.
		They used that information to work out where people were living, where people were working, what status they had, whether they could revoke that status.
		All of that is the indirect legacy of Doge coming in and hacking the government's information pipelines.
		Now, you know, I'm sure some of your callers are going to say, well, Abramski is just this left-wing person, blah, blah, blah.
		Look, it doesn't matter whether you're left-wing, right-wing, or any other wing, you have a stake in protecting privacy.
		You have a stake in having your information treated fairly and honestly by the United States government.
		And when the United States government comes in and says, we don't care about congressional authority and we don't care about constitutional limits, but we're going to use an agency like Doge to bulldoze our way into all of those information databases.
		That's big government at its very, very worst and most terrifying.
		And my audience, whether they're left-wing or right-wing, should be horrified at what Doge did with no congressional oversight.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, let's go to Rick in Homestead, Florida on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Rick.
unidentified		Good morning, my friends.
		Listen, I'm a moderate Republican, so by no way am I a MAGA fan and not happy with a lot of things they're doing.
		But where you lose me in the Doge argument is when you have, you know, $22 billion with programs aiding illegal immigrants through resettlement.
		You have $26 billion higher education in Egypt.
		Have $11 million Middle Eastern version of Sesame Street in Iraq.
		When you have those things, I'm off for a surgical approach, but come on, some of these things are just ridiculous.
		We should have no business funding some of these things.
		And that's where you lose me in this argument.
		If you were to say, okay, let's do a surgical approach, let's get rid of some of these ridiculous programs that don't help America at all, then I'm on board.
		But come on, don't say that all doge is terrible because that's just not what's needed in America today.
		Yeah, Rick, I appreciate your comment.
		And if you'll bear with me a minute, I'll answer it.
		So, part of the problem around USAID was a matter of perception because for decades and decades, people like Rush Limbaugh and then later on Elon Musk and right-wing social influencers told the American public that up to 25% of the federal budget was going on US aid on foreign assistance.
		Now, if that was the case, that should and would have raised alarm bells.
		But it was never the case.
		America never, ever spent more than 1%, and in most years, way less than 1% of its federal budget on overseas aid.
		USAID was $40 billion a year.
		And that $40 billion was one of the best investments that America has ever made on the global stage because it was a massive demonstration of soft power.
		What it said to people all over the world was, we aren't all about military might.
		That's a part of who America is, but a large part of who America is, is generosity.
		We work out where there is need, and then we help fill that need because we have resources and we have expertise.
		What USAID did was they went around the world preventing starvation.
		They injected vaccines to people who would otherwise get polio or die of other preventable diseases.
		They distributed medications for things like tuberculosis and malaria.
		And here's the other thing, which is a matter of self-interest.
		They worked out where emerging pandemics were likely to be and they worked out ways to get medical interventions in before those pandemics jumped the shark and became global.
		It was a massively effective way of investing money.
		But here's what I am going to do.
		I did a few back-of-the-envelope calculations when Elon Musk was in the middle of his Doge purchase.
		Now, you said you're a moderate Republican, and I believe you.
		And I believe that you're also a very decent human being who cares about other people, especially children.
		So I'm going to talk about a medication called Plumpy Nut.
		It's got a bizarre-sounding name, but it's a really important medication.
		It was developed by French scientists in the 1980s, and it's a very high-nutrient package that helps children on the brink of dying of starvation, and it brings them back to life.
		And each packet costs about 35 cents.
		A child, once the doctor puts them on it, needs to be on it four times a day for about eight weeks.
		So it comes to ballpark about $50 to save that child's life.
		Now, in January and February of 2025, when Elon Musk was at the height of his powers and was saying, we can't afford overseas aid, he kept saying this.
		And he said, he quoted, he tweeted once that too much empathy results in civilizational death.
		So I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation because in January and February, Elon Musk's personal wealth was going up not just by a few million dollars a day, but by several billion dollars every day.
		So I thought, all right, we can't afford to give plumpy nuts to kids anymore.
		How much would it take to be able to afford it?
		Let's say we say to Elon Musk, why don't you give up one day of your wealth?
		Not one month, not one year.
		Why don't you give up one day of your wealth, Elon Musk?
		What could we do with that?
		And it turns out that in January and February of 2025, if Elon Musk had been willing to give up one day of his wealth, we could have distributed Plumpy Nut via USAID to 12 million children at risk of starvation.
		So when you say that you're not a MAGA Republican and that you don't like some of this stuff, I'd ask you to think very, very hard.
		Because when Musk was telling you we couldn't afford all this stuff, he was feeding you a propaganda line.
Elon Musk's Unfulfilled Promise 00:09:09
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So we have a lot of other callers I want to get to before this.
unidentified		That wasn't what was happening.
unidentified		We were saving children's lives.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's go.
unidentified		And now we're not saving children's lives.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And that's a horrific message on our line for Democrats.
		We're going to go to Rick next.
		Go ahead, Rick, in Codkill, New York, on our line for Democrats.
		Go ahead.
unidentified		Hi.
		Thanks for taking my call.
		Love Z-SPAN.
		This is a little out of my general crane of mind, but I have a question, a serious question.
		Is it possible for the governors of our country to call out the National Guard to protect the U.S. citizens against ICE?
		You know, Rick, that's a great question.
		And I've been thinking a lot and talking to a lot of people about this.
		Look, when Waltz in Minnesota last week put the National Guard on alert, he very carefully didn't say why he was putting the National Guard on alert.
		But there was an underlying implication that at least in part, it might be necessary to protect Minnesotans from a rampaging ICE that was clearly out of control and was being told by the federal government that they had absolute immunity to inflict harm, even up to death, on people protesting their actions.
		So we're seeing stresses developing, especially in Minneapolis, but not just in Minneapolis.
		We're seeing in cities all around the country, as ICE goes in, and as people like Gregory Bovino go in with this sort of flamethrowers mentality, that governors are trying to work out ways to protect their populations, and mayors are trying to work out ways to protect their populations, and local police forces who hate this stuff because it totally messes up their relationship with ordinary residents in their neighborhoods.
		All of these organizations and political leadership structures are trying to work out what can be done within the constitutional system to rein in an out-of-control ICE backed up by a federal government that clearly does not care if bloodshed, if blood is shed.
		So your question is a great one.
		I'm not a legal scholar.
		My colleague Ellie Mastahl at the Nation would probably have a far better and more in-depth answer than I do.
		But it's certainly something that seems to be increasingly on the books.
		And that in and of itself is extraordinary.
		Because what that means is Trump is pushing the federal system, the constitutional system, to the absolute breaking point by unleashing these armed groups onto civilian populations in major urban areas.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Ahmed is in Morgantown, West Virginia on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Ahmed.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		I wanted to go back to your open letter and ask you, are there things that you're seeing in the Republican ranks in Congress that triggered you to write this open letter?
		And as an independent who tries to influence my local or my state officials, I was curious, what are signs to look for to see if a particular lawmaker would be willing to go against the party line?
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		You know, Ahmed, again, that's a really, really good question because it's asking a lot of lawmakers.
		Lawmakers get elected on a party platform and they're generally extraordinarily reluctant to cross the aisle.
		It has happened before.
		Senator Jim Jeffords in the early George Bush years, he switched parties and in doing so handed over control of the Senate.
		It has been done a few times in American history, but only when those senators think my party is so far out of whack with my core beliefs, I can no longer stomach it.
		The reason that I wrote this letter is it seems to me there are some senators and a few Congress members who are reaching that breaking point.
		There are people who've been willing increasingly in recent months to very profoundly critique the rationale for what happened in Venezuela, for what's happened in the Eastern Pacific and the Caribbean around the bombing of boats that may or may not contain drug smugglers.
		It's happened with the behavior of ICE.
		It's happened with Trump going after Jerome Powell and threatening to prosecute Powell, who's the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
		There are these sort of breaking point moments where people like Senator Rand Paul or Representative Tom Massey or Representative Bacon, there are these breaking moments where those senators look increasingly not just uncomfortable with individual policies, but increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of what MAGA stands for as a whole and what it's doing to the country's democratic structure.
		So my appeal to them was a very simple one.
		It was that in a moment of national crisis, when the very pillars of the democracy are under threat, follow your conscience because your conscience always ought to transcend your obligation to party.
		Follow your conscience and do what you know is morally right.
		Now, I don't know if my open letter will have any impact at all, but I do know that if millions of Americans from moderate brands of the Republican Party, from Independents, from Democrats, if millions of Americans contact those representatives and senators and say, look, we are at that breaking point.
		We are seeing the United States government do things in our name we never thought we would see the United States government do.
		That if enough people contact those politicians, there is at least a chance that some of them will follow their conscience.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I want to read a few messages that we've received via text.
		One is more of a comment and that you can elaborate on, but then two questions that relate to each other.
		So first from Renee and Marietta, Georgia.
		Mr. Abramski, please explain that Musk got rid of programs he personally hated, like USAID, who he blamed for ending apartheid, Department of Education, who he blames for his trans child, etc., etc.
		And then the next two are related to each other.
		David in Baltimore says, can the guest please clarify the catastrophic results of these cuts to the federal workforce?
		I've noticed no difference whatsoever, and I'm convinced that every agency, including the Pentagon, could easily cut 10% and do the same mission.
		Along the same lines, Chris in Durga, Pennsylvania, says, it's funny, Doge got rid of all these government workers and the government is still running.
		Perception works on both sides, sir.
		How many days of wealth have you given up?
unidentified		Okay, so there are a few points there.
		Let me answer Kristen and Davids first.
		Look, oftentimes what government does is behind the scenes.
		We don't see it.
		If the weather forecasters aren't working as effectively as they were, if the environmental modelers aren't there to do their job, we may not see it on a daily basis.
		But if there's a major hurricane or a major outbreak of wildfires in the American West or a major drought and farmers don't have access to all of that information, they can't plan their crops accordingly.
		Emergency responders can't get on the scene effectively to prepare for an outbreak of extreme weather or to prepare for the cleanup after that outbreak of extreme weather.
		A lot of this stuff on a daily basis, we don't notice.
		If government is running smoothly, we don't give it credit.
		When government suddenly stops running so smoothly, then we get very, very angry.
		When the IRS fires a whole bunch of telephone operators or Social Security fires a whole bunch of telephone operators, we don't end up in a situation afterwards where government is working as well.
		We wait hours and hours to get an answer on a tax question.
		An old-aged person waits days to try and enroll in Social Security because they can no longer get the services effectively that they used to get.
		So you can talk to people all over the country and you're hearing that government services are more creaky and more unreliable than they used to be.
		Now, that's not saying they were ever particularly brilliant to begin with.
		And you're absolutely right.
		There was bloat in the system.
		And you're absolutely right.
		There could have been some surgical trimming of parts of the government.
		That wasn't what happened with Doge.
		What happened with Doge was these young guys came in, they hacked the systems and they fired people by and large indiscriminately, including tens of thousands of veterans.
		Now, here's the thing.
		The easiest people to fire are what are called probationary employees, people who've been on the job for less than two years.
		A huge number of veterans, when they transfer out of the military, go into the civilian federal workforce.
		And many of those veterans in middle age found themselves on the wrong end of Doge because they come in, they're new hires in the civilian workforce, and they're easier to fire.
		So they were fired indiscriminately, not because they weren't needed, not because their job was a part of bloat, but they were fired simply because they had less workplace protections.
		And that's just wrong.
		That's not the way for good government to function.
		Now, coming to Rene's question about Elon Musk getting rid of programs he didn't personally like.
Veterans Without Protections 00:09:50
unidentified		Look, this is overwhelmingly the case.
		If Musk didn't like a program or if Trump didn't like a program, if social media influencers on the right had targeted those programs, especially around the education system or public health or overseas aid, those programs met the Elon Musk chainsaw, or they were fed into what Musk called the wood chipper.
		There's no doubt about that.
		You can look at which programs survived Doge and which programs didn't survive Doge.
		And at least in part, this was a personal vendetta campaign by the world's wealthiest man against ordinary public civil servants and their agencies.
		It wasn't about saving money.
		It didn't save money.
		There's a whole bunch of reporting now saying the Doge idea that it would save hundreds of billions of dollars was always a pipe dream.
		It didn't save money, but it did restructure and remodel government in a way that was favorable to Elon Musk and the oligarchs who surround him.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Mark is in Kingsland, Texas on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Mark.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, first-time caller.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		I'd just like to say this.
unidentified		The TDS is rampant.
		It all started with the fake news, the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, and it's continuing on.
		The ICE issue right now that's going on is because of the 12 million unvetted, unverified, uneducated, and undocumented illegals that were allowed into our borders.
		I think this is just a reason for all this turmoil is for them to continue their power struggle within themselves and here in America and abroad.
		This is a globalist situation here that this man is talking with.
		And I agree with everything Donald Trump is doing.
		And I say, God bless America.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And did you have a question for Mr. Bramsky, Mark?
unidentified		Not really.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		I just believe this is all hoax.
unidentified		This ICE issue is working to the Democrats' welfare, Chaos, chaos, chaos, and they love it.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		And otherwise.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, then let's hear from Tony in Salisbury, North Carolina on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Tony.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		Thank you, sir.
		I really don't have too many comments.
		I just have some questions for you, if you could answer them for me.
		What's happening in Georgia?
		Could you tell me what the Trump, you think the Trump administration is doing and what they're trying to do throughout the nation?
		And could you tell me if anybody in the Trump administration can be held accountable for what they're doing after Trump leaves office, even Trump, because then they gave him immunity, but not total immunity, because most of what he's doing.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Tony, your line is breaking up.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		So hopefully Mr. Bramskin can respond to just those first points that you raised.
unidentified		Absolutely.
		Tony, it's a great question.
		There are two major things I'd like to talk about in Georgia.
		First of them is what happened when Doge went in and started decimating the CDC.
		Look, Georgia hires, has thousands upon thousands of public health workers attached to the CDC.
		Those workers were receiving income from the federal government.
		That income was then spent in local communities, at cafes, at restaurants, at bookshops, whatever it might be.
		Now that income has disappeared because nearly one in four, I believe, I may have the number slightly off, but a huge percentage of the CDC staff have been fired or placed on administrative leave because of the Doge purchase.
		Well, that's shocking.
		And, you know, again, it doesn't matter if you're a Republican or Democrat.
		There were entire communities that were based around the CDC and people took pride, again, Republican, Democrat, independent alike.
		They took pride in having the CDC and the CDC staff as part of the community.
		And that's been gone.
		And there are reports that it's cost Georgia hundreds upon hundreds of millions of dollars of lost income.
		That's an incredibly tangible outcome of the Doge cuts.
		Now, the second thing that's going on in Georgia that isn't Doge related is the recent FBI raid of the Fulton County elections offices.
		Now, again, you can be Democrat, Republican, Independent.
		That should send chills down your spine.
		Because what that means is an election six years ago nearly that was investigated time and time again and it was found to be no credible fraud.
		You don't have to take my word for it.
		You can take Secretary of State Brad Rathensberger's word for it.
		He's a Republican.
		There was no credible evidence of fraud.
		But the FBI went in looking for nebulous evidence of fraud and looking to seize ballots.
		Well, if they can do it about an election years in the past, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone in the FBI is thinking about how to do the same thing in 2026 in the midterm elections.
		So what happened in Georgia last week ought to send chills down the spine of anybody who believes in the integrity of the election process and the democratic process.
		Now, your bigger question, who can be held accountable?
		Look, the Supreme Court came up with that inane ruling last year that a president can do almost anything they want.
		And as long as they tagline it in the line of official duty, it's almost impossible to hold them legally accountable.
		I disagree with that ruling.
		I think it came out of thin air.
		There's no legal precedent to back it up.
		But that's the ruling at the moment.
		But that doesn't mean that other people in the Trump administration can't be held accountable.
		It doesn't mean that Christy Noam can't be held accountable for clearly illegal orders given to ICE.
		It doesn't mean that the people who've ordered the destruction of these boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean with no legal justification whatsoever.
		Again, you don't have to take my word for it.
		You can take Senator Rand Paul's word for it.
		Those people are ordering their service members to commit illegal acts.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's hear from the family.
unidentified		I profoundly hope that when this nightmare is over, when we resume a more normal, more democratic, more accountable form of politics, I profoundly hope that people who have issued orders that have resulted in this sort of bloodshed, that they are held to account and they are brought before courts to have to justify their actions.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I do want to pause you because I do want to get you one more comment.
unidentified		When you slander an entire group of people as being uneducated, I mean, that doesn't make sense.
		There are millions and millions of undocumented people in this country.
		People don't come to this country without documentation on a lark and a whim.
		They come out of desperation.
		They come fleeing economies that have crumbled.
		They flee wars.
		They flee.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I think we understand your point.
		Let's hear from Paul in New York City on our line for individuals.
		Welcome people into that.
unidentified		The Statue of Liberty says, I bring you poor, the tired, the huddled masses yearning to be free.
unidentified		That is a better place to be.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Excuse me.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Let's let our caller get our question in really quickly.
unidentified		Terrorizing communities.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Do you mind?
		We want to get in at least one more caller, please.
		Go ahead, Paul, in New York City.
unidentified		Thanks so much.
		Yeah, a couple things, Sasha.
		First of all, you know, you talk about the disruption to the federal workforce, et cetera, from these layoffs.
		And I agree that they seem somewhat haphazard and not particularly well executed.
		But being laid off and having your life disrupted is an extremely common experience for the vast majority of Americans.
		You mentioned that, oh, these guys were, they laid off the people who were probationary employees.
		Guess what?
		Most Americans don't even have that classification because they don't get protections after two years.
		That's a very common experience.
		And it's very problematic when you have a portion of society that's protected in that way, where the rest of society isn't.
		Likewise, with immunity and ICE, most police have immunity, whether it's by law, which is many cases like New York City here, or just de facto.
		They don't get punished when they beat people up.
		I've seen it in just regular policing, not necessarily demonstrations.
		But again, when we see it done with ICE and people who are demonstrating and they're upset about this because they're just so rough on them and they pull them out of cars, obviously killing is outrageous, but whatever.
		These things happen around America all the time.
		And somehow, you, Sasha, feel that if it's special people, like people in the government or heaven forbid, academia experience this, it's outrageous.
		But when average people experience it, Sasha, I don't hear you guys crying about it because it happens all the time.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, Paul, we're going to let Sasha respond because we're about out of time for this segment.
unidentified		Paul, it's a great question.
		And two things.
		You're right about police officers having some immunity, but it's not absolute immunity.
		It's qualified immunity.
		There's no local police force in the country that has absolute immunity to do whatever it wants with no accountability.
		Here's what I'd say about your comment on ordinary other workers not having those protections.
		You're absolutely right.
		And it's outrageous.
		Most other Western democracies give their workers in the private sector far greater protections than the American workforce has.
		And I absolutely agree with you.
		We shouldn't have carve-outs for one group over another, but rather than reducing the quality of life and the job security of one set of employees, we should raise it for everybody else, like other countries have done.
		Look, we've been spending the last few months beating up on Denmark and saying Denmark's this terrible country and we're going to have to invade Greenland.
		Denmark provides extraordinary workplace protections for its workers and it's a very, very prosperous country.
Agree Carve Protections 00:04:07
unidentified		So Paul, I entirely agree with you.
		We shouldn't have carve-outs for federal workers, but rather than making their experience worse, let's make other workers' experience better.
		I've written about this for many, many, many years.
		In my book, American Poverty and my book, Breadline USA, I focused on exactly these issues.
		So, Paul, I thank you for bringing them up.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, thank you so much, Sasha Abromsky of The Nation magazine, and also the book American Carnage.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Thank you so much for joining us.
unidentified		My pleasure.
unidentified		Thanks for having me on.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, after the break, we're going into open forum.
		It's your chance to weigh in on any political topic on your mind this morning.
		You can start calling in now.
		Those numbers are on your screen.
		We'll be right back.
unidentified		Tonight on C-SPAN's Q&A, in his book Baldwin, A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs discusses the personal life and activism of American writer James Baldwin.
		Mr. Boggs, who spent more than 20 years working on his book, also talks about Mr. Baldwin's many writings, his life outside the United States, and his involvement in the 1963 March on Washington.
		Baldwin had, in fact, written a speech to be read there, and he had written it in France.
		He'd gone over to France for a march over there.
		These were black Americans in France who were doing a march along the scent in support of the March on Washington.
		And then Baldwin brought this speech with him.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		And the exact reasons and specifics of how this happened, we don't know, but somehow or other, he didn't end up reading it.
unidentified		But a very famous person, actor at the time, without saying that it was James Baldwin's words, read these words about black global liberation coming out of the mouth of, you guessed it or not, Burt Lancaster.
		Nicholas Boggs, with his book, Baldwin, a love story, tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN's QA.
		You can listen to Q&A and all of our podcasts on our free C-SPAN Now app or wherever you get your podcasts.
		Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, today with our guest Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author John Meacham, who has written numerous books chronicling American history.
		His books include And There Was Light, Thomas Jefferson, and the prize-winning American Lion, Andrew Jackson in the White House.
		He joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein.
		Watch America's Book Club with John Meacham today at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
		On this episode of Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb.
brian lamb ▲ ● ▼		Jonathan Horn's latest book is titled The Fate of the Generals, MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
		The publisher, Scribner, explains the premise of Horne's book.
		For the doomed stand American forces made in the Philippines at the start of World War II, two generals received the country's highest military award: the Medal of Honor.
		One was the charismatic Douglas MacArthur, whose orders forced him to leave his troops and go to Australia.
		The other was the gritty Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, who became a hero to the troops, whose fate he insisted on sharing.
unidentified		A new interview with author Jonathan Horne about his book, The Fate of the Generals: MacArthur, Wainwright, and the Epic Battle for the Philippines.
unidentified		Book Notes Plus with our host, Brian Lamb, is available wherever you get your podcasts and on the C-SPAN Now app.
Sanctuary Of Democracy 00:08:06
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼		Democracy is always an unfinished creation.
ronald reagan ▲ ● ▼		Democracy is worth dying for.
george h w bush ▲ ● ▼		Democracy belongs to us all.
bill clinton ▲ ● ▼		We are here in the sanctuary of democracy.
george w bush ▲ ● ▼		Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies.
barack obama ▲ ● ▼		American democracy is bigger than any one person.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected.
joe biden ▲ ● ▼		We are still at our core a democracy.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom.
unidentified		Washington Journal continues.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Welcome back.
		We're in open forum, ready to take your calls.
		We're going to start with Miles in San Angelo, Texas on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Miles.
jim marrs ▲ ● ▼		Hey, good morning, Kimberly.
		Yeah, I was going to talk about President Epstein's ballroom, but I changed my mind.
		You know, the thing about it is that people are dying, and people have died because of President Epstein.
		And the thing about it is there's supposedly a story where he was on a boat that someone threw a baby off of the boat.
		And I can't think of any other subject that shouldn't be discussed.
		You know, a guy called in and said, I agree with everything President Trump doing.
		Well, I'm the exact opposite man from Texas.
		I serve my country and I know what fascism is.
		And y'all are trying to decide if this is fascism or fascism light.
		Listen, baby, this is true danger we're in.
		I'm going to get off because I'm getting too flustered.
		Thanks, Kimberly.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Just to give some folks some context for what you're referencing, this is some information that was included in the allegations that are apparently part of some of the released Epstein files.
		This is a story that I found online, but just very quickly reference in some of the Epstein files to an allegation that Trump witnessed a killing of a baby.
		But again, these are allegations, and Trump has not been criminally charged or charged with anything related to Jeffrey Epstein.
		Let's hear from Moses in Lake Elmo, Minnesota on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Moses.
		Moses, go ahead.
		All right, let's go to Rich in New York on our line for Republicans.
		Good morning, Rich.
unidentified		Yeah, good morning.
		Thank you for taking my call.
		I just want to make a comment about how the United States has become a country of radicals.
		It doesn't matter if you're right or left, conservative, Democrat.
		Once you're radicalized, you just don't see the forest for the trees.
		And I think the mainstream news media is driving this because they're not in the business to report the news.
		They're in the business to sell advertising and controversies, what sells.
		And that's really all I have to say.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		Next up is Leland in St. Paul, Minnesota on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Leland.
markwayne mullin ▲ ● ▼		Yes, good morning.
unidentified		How are you?
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Fine, thank you.
unidentified		Yeah, my comment is: I live in the Twin Cities and the Maple, you know, and St. Paul.
		And, you know, let us have our country, our state back.
		You know what I mean?
		These riots or whatever they got going on here, we need peace up here.
		You know, and I don't know, Joe Biden, hey, you know, Joe Biden, he worked at both red states, blue states.
		You know, he was an American.
		And this division is crazy.
		And we don't need that.
		And I listen to different people, Fox, the various people, and stations.
		And who elects the president is the media.
		Always have.
		Okay.
		Now, right now, an example, I listened to the Spinster Sisters, okay, on YouTube.
		Now, we had a governor, Jesse Ventura, and he's really, really, he has some points there.
		And we need more people like him, independents that can walk the line both sides.
		That's all I got to say.
markwayne mullin ▲ ● ▼		And please give us our state back.
unidentified		Thank you.
		Have a good day.
		Bye.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Deborah Lee is in Black Mountain, North Carolina on our line for independence.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Deborah Lee.
unidentified		Yes, good morning and good morning, America.
		First off, I love C-SPAN, and I'd like to say thank you so much for having on Mr. Sasha Abromsky this morning.
		He is the very voice of reason.
		This truly is what is happening in our country.
		But one thing, a little quick little story I'd like to tell, I'd like to remind America about in the 90s in Rwanda, this some little politician that had money bought up all the radio stations and started broadcasting about from the Tutsis that the Tutsis and the Hutus,
		they were telling one side that the other side was horrible, horrible cockroaches.
		They weren't even human.
		They were horrible.
		And then he started after that for a little while, he started saying, now they're coming to kill you.
		So you better go and kill them right now.
		And within six months, a half a million of their fellow citizens lay dead at bus stops, bodies hacked with machetes.
		Now this was over-the-air propaganda.
		And I want to say that the very richest, I don't like to put them on sides, but the very richest are on the right side.
		And for decades, going all the way back to Reagan, they have been saying how inefficient government is.
		That has been BS from the beginning.
		Our government serves us wonderfully well.
		And they are destroying it.
		God bless America.
		But I want to say on the other side of this, there's a beautiful new world that's being born right now.
		So keep the faith and be of good cheer, America.
		Blessings.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Donna is in Raymond, Maine on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Donna.
unidentified		Yes, I have a question.
		I just don't understand why MS Now and CNN, when Mr. Trump, the president, is on TV doing a, you know, standing up and talking about what's going on, they don't hardly ever show him standing up and talking to the people.
		I'm just wondering why they don't do that.
		And I do believe immigrants that came across the border illegal should go back.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
		Next up is Louise in Columbus, North Carolina on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Louise.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		Yes, happy February.
unidentified		Groundhog Day tomorrow.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		I wonder what it's going to tell us.
		Anyway, I'm relocated.
		I'm in North Carolina, but for 30 years I lived in South Fulton, right?
		I'm a Democrat, but I'm not any longer.
unidentified		I'm sort of like independent.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		I'm a Democrat registered, but I'm changing.
unidentified		I'm going to become an independent.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		I voted for John Lewis.
unidentified		I voted for Weitz Fowler.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		I loved my job, federal employee, and I do not see anything wrong, anything wrong with going back and checking what's going on in Fulton County.
unidentified		I have family there still.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		We want to know what happened to our vote.
unidentified		We voted for Trump.
Sudden Release of Epstein Files 00:02:50
unidentified		We want to know what the heck happened.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		We sat there one day.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		All of a sudden, all these votes, the Phillips Arena, I mean, I'm sorry, not the Phillips Arena, I'm sorry.
unidentified		The State Farm Arena, I call it Phillips still.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		All of a sudden, we have a waterman bust.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		All of a sudden, everything's going to Biden's straight ticket.
unidentified		We want to know, we have the right to know.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		As a Democrat, I have the right to know.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		And as far as Don Lemon, Don Limon is nothing but a media hack.
unidentified		He's no good.
unidentified		He needs throwing his ass in jail.
darletta in unknown ▲ ● ▼		If he had come down to a black church, they would not have tolerated Cascade United Methodist Church by throwing his butt out.
unidentified		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		One of the other big stories this weekend has been the release of another tranche of the Epstein files.
		Here's a story in CNN: what 3 million new documents tell us about Trump's ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
		The story going on to say President Donald Trump is mentioned more than 1,000 times in the 3 million Jeffrey Epstein documents released Friday after the president initially resisted the effort.
		While some of the references are benign, others include newly disclosed unverified sexual assault claims against Trump, as well as fresh details about how some of Epstein's victims describe their interactions with the future president.
		Most notably, the newly released documents contain a list of unverified assault allegations against Trump compiled by FBI officials last year.
		There are also FBI notes about a woman who accused Trump in a lawsuit of raping her when she was 13, an FBI interview with one of Epstein victims, who stated that Epstein's accomplice, Zane Maxwell, once presented her to Trump at a party.
		There's no public evidence that any of the allegations against Trump contained in the new documents were deemed credible by the FBI.
		And the Justice Department said on Friday that the allegations against Trump and the documents were false.
		Trump has long denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein or any allegation of sexual misconduct.
		Last night on Air Force One, a reporter asked President Trump for his reaction to the latest release of the Epstein files.
		Here's what he had to say.
unidentified		What did you think of the latest release of Epstein files?
unidentified		And do you think your critics will be satisfied with the police?
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Well, they should be because it looked like this guy Wolfe, who's a writer, was conspiring with Epstein to do harm to me.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		And I didn't see it myself, but I was told by some very important people that not only does it absolve me, it's the opposite of what people were hoping, you know, the radical left, that Wolfe, who's a third-rate writer, was conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to hurt me, politically or otherwise.
Epstein Files Revelations 00:13:04
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		And that came through loud and clear.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		So we'll probably sue Wolf on that.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Sir, did you speak?
unidentified		Did you have any knowledge?
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Maybe the Epstein estate, I guess.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, but we're going to certainly sue Wolf.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Back to your calls in Open Forum.
		Guy is in Jacksonville, Florida, on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Guy.
unidentified		I voted for both on the left and the right over the years, and I'm over 80.
		And I think the thing that bothers me the most is we were promised a government that was going to save money and reduce the national debt.
		And everything that I see going on, between $4 billion being spent on rebuilding a 747, which may or may not be available while Trump is in office, and then he gets to keep that.
		And then the billions of dollars on the White House, which I don't understand how he could do without some approval from Congress.
		And now, now this new Trump arch to match the one in Paris, I can't conceive of why he would have that ability to create this new structure that he's proposing and who's going to pay for it.
		Is this his economy that we're supporting?
		It's just mind-boggling.
		Why does the Congress do not pull some of the strings back and control what they should be controlling on how our tax dollars are spent?
		That's nothing to say, of course, with what we've had destroyed with our health care and the millions of people, including my daughter, who is now going to lose her health care because she can't afford it.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼		And I think that's a pretty sorry situation in this day and age.
unidentified		So anyway, again, thank you, C-SPAN.
unidentified		We keep watching, and I watch 11 news channels here and abroad.
jimmy carter ▲ ● ▼		So I'm much too involved in the news.
unidentified		But have a good day, and let's keep looking at everything that's going on.
unidentified		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Diane is in DeSoto, Kansas, on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Diane.
donald j trump ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		It has occurred to me after listening to the viewers for days on this situation when they want ICE out of Minnesota and they want just to leave them alone with regard to the immigration story.
		It occurs to me, what if the federal government did?
		Why not hand Minnesota over as a sanctuary state, a sanctuary city, and pull out?
		Let Minnesota handle their own, including their own money to support it.
		No money for illegal immigrants, no housing money, no money to take care of law enforcement like California does.
		They give all their immigrants illegal everything.
		Health care, and then they build a federal government for it.
		No, no, not that.
		Pay for yourself.
		Live the way you want to live.
		And just remember this.
		There are thousands of women and children who have been raped and murdered.
		I don't hear anything about them.
		Nothing.
		By violent illegal immigrants.
		But if that's what you want, why not?
		That's what I say.
		You can do whatever you want, but not with my tax money.
		Thank you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Bob is in New Jersey on our line for Democrats.
		Good morning, Bob.
		Just make sure to turn down the volume on your TV, Bob, and then go ahead with your comment in open forum.
unidentified		Okay.
unidentified		My comments are that I believe that Trump is a communist, and him and Musk should both be brought up on treason charges and both should be put to death.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		All right, we're not going to call for violence.
		Lydia is in Aurora, Illinois on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Lydia.
unidentified		Well, why not violence?
unidentified		It's getting very close to it.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Did you have a different comment, Lydia?
unidentified		Yes.
		As a matter of fact, look at this C-SPAN.
		Look who founded C-SPAN, Brian Lamb, a man who fawned over Ronald Reagan Inside Out and Upside Down.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		John is in Independence, Kentucky on our line for Republicans.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, John.
unidentified		Yes, good morning to you.
		I guess first let me give you a little of my background.
		I was the last elected superintendent of education for the state of Kentucky, former commissioner of motor vehicles for the state of Kentucky, and former field representative for Congressman John Breckinridge.
		Most all my positions were when I was a Democrat, but now I'm a Republican, and why am I a Republican?
		Because I'm 82 years old, and I've studied government and taught government at the high school level.
		And I have my own YouTube channel and own Facebook page with 5,000 friends and YouTube channel with 400 subscribers.
		The reason I do that, even at the age of 82, is because it's very important for people to understand that you can be for Barack Obama, which I was in his first race.
		I was not for him the second time because of his actions in the first race.
		But I was for Donald Trump.
		And I stayed for Donald Trump again this time.
		And the reason for it is because he is a doer, and he is a real thing.
		Now, is he a perfect man?
		No.
		There are no perfect men or perfect women.
		There are only human beings.
		And we need to stay on top of everything.
		But look at the people that Donald Trump has appointed.
		The quality of every one of his appointees is superb, superb.
		And I highly recommend people stick with Donald Trump and the team that he's put together for democracy because red, yellow, brown, black, or white were all precious in Jesus' sight.
		I taught the very first black history course in a public school in Kentucky in 1969.
		So I have some knowledge on these subjects.
		And I received an award from the Kentucky Education Association, not as the outstanding teacher in the state, but as the outstanding citizen in the state promoting public education.
		So I'm very for public education.
		But we need to go back to the Ten Commandments and teaching the Bible and the New Testament and Old Testament as a history lesson.
		We forgot our history.
		And when you go back and study the history, you'll see that you've got to have leaders that lead, and you can pick them out by their history.
		But I just wanted to say to you, God bless you all, regardless of where you stand and who you're from.
		We're America.
		Learn to love each other and respect each other.
		And I respect you here at C-SPAN and all the other media people.
		I think they all have a job to do.
		But look at yourself.
		Ask yourself the question, am I doing the right thing?
		Am I saying the right things?
		And am I being fair?
		But don't forget, Donald Trump is a human being.
		Look at his family, hard workers, all of them.
		And Epstein, forget Epstein.
		That's a bunch of junk.
		We don't need that in our system.
		And I'll tell you something else.
		When they go in to get these crooks out of, and these guilty people out of the city of.
		You've got to look at the governor there and this mayor there and the terrible things they said to bring these riots on and they were doing that intentionally.
		Don't think they weren't for a minute and look at the fraud that's going on there in Minnesota.
		It needs to be stopped.
		We need to stop it.
		Somebody asked me, said, John, how do you tell the difference between an honest politician and a corrupt one?
		I thought for a minute or two and I said, well, I can tell you one thing, the honest politicians probably broke all right.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Diane is in St. Paul Minnesota, on our line for Democrats.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Good morning, Diane.
unidentified		Good morning.
		I'm calling today because I want, I've been listening to C-SPAN for a long time, and I've only called twice.
		This is the second time.
		And the reason I'm calling is because I've listened to everything that's been happening here in Minnesota.
		And I specifically say Minneapolis, because we have not had the kind of trouble that Minneapolis has had.
		But what I want to say is that I've been an activist here in St. Paul.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Diane, it's a little hard to hear from you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I just want to make sure you're speaking directly into your phone.
unidentified		Okay.
		I said, I have been an activist for rights, for people's rights here in Minnesota for the last 40 years.
		I'm 76 years old, so I know what it is to have people who do not consider everybody being human beings.
		But the one thing we've done here in St. Paul is I like the policy has changed.
		And I for one, if I was able, my family said, no, you can't do it.
		If I was able to go and do the marching for rights, that's what I would do for anybody's rights.
		Anybody.
		I don't care who they are because we're human, we're all human beings.
		And I've been raised to believe that the root of all evil is the love of money.
		And so that don't go for just one race of people.
		That's for all of us.
		Because if we look at what's been going on here in America for so long with all we have done all over the globe, because I follow all of that.
		But here's the one thing I haven't heard from my fellow Americans and everybody's been marching.
		I have heard nobody say that ICE is wrong because that's what we had to look at here in St. Paul, that the police was wrong before they were willing to change.
		And we don't have that kind of stuff.
		There's no four or five people putting people down in the street because if they did that, they would probably lose their jobs because we changed the policy.
		The government here in St. Paul, I don't care what you say about it, the Republicans, because it was Republicans in our houses of representatives here in Minnesota that helped change.
		They all worked to change the change the real policies here.
		And you have to give here in Minnesota, if you stop somebody, you got to give them a card.
		You got to show them your ID.
		And I have known people who have been disciplined by the police department for not giving people their IDs.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		I think we have the idea, Diane.
		Let's go to Taria in Atlanta, Georgia on our line for independence.
		Good morning, Taria.
unidentified		Greetings, everyone.
		First, I would like to just thank C-SPAN so much for providing this forum to have good, you know, constructive dialogue for the most part.
		I am, as you said, a Georgia resident and a Georgia educator and a Georgia voter.
		And this is with respect to the recent raid on Fulton County offices.
		I just wanted to make sure that our viewers and the rest of Americans are actually doing their research.
		Fulton County, Georgia has not won a Democratic primary since the 1970s, 1972, if I can, if I can be exact.
		And you can fact check that.
		But they have not come within 200,000 votes since the 70s in the Democratic election.
		So, and of course, we know that it's been recounted three times, Fulton County.
		In addition to that, judges, a plethora of judges have thrown it out.
		So we just need to see this for what it is, an intimidation tactic, to probably scare voters during these midterms.
		And I also just wanted to say, as an educator, my last point, just for all of us to really come together, I'm a middle school teacher, and we have a generation, the Gen Zers and the, excuse me, the alpha generation and Gen Z, they're watching this.
		And one thing I know about students and children, they'll never forget how you make them feel.
		And a lot of our students right now are seeing this.
		They're very highly adept.
		They're paying attention to their parents.
		And they're talking and having very meaningful dialogue about how they feel, what's going on, and how they're going to make sure it's different.
		So we do have a whole new generation of voters that are watching all this.
		So take heart, America, and let's get this thing back on track.
		But our youth is here, and they will, I promise you.
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're going to end it there.
		Thanks to everyone who called in for this segment and the rest of the show.
		We're going to be back with another edition of Washington Journal tomorrow at 7 a.m. Eastern Eastern, excuse me.
New Generation Voters 00:00:48
kimberly adams ▲ ● ▼		But coming up next, we have Ceasefire.
		Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, who's a Republican, and San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, Democrat, and the chair and the vice chair of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, have a bipartisan discussion on the top issues facing American City.
		That's up next on Ceasefire.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		Welcome to Ceasefire, where we seek to bridge the divide in American politics.
dasha burns ▲ ● ▼		I'm Dasha Burns, Politico White House Bureau Chief, and joining me now on either side of the desk, two guests who have agreed to keep the conversation civil, even when they disagree.

Chapters

00:00:03 Acceptable ICE Practices
00:15:02 Increased Fines, Burn Cities
00:27:46 No Warrant Needed?
00:43:46 Federal Overreach in Minneapolis
00:59:27 Cheap Paid Slave Labor
01:04:47 Open Minded Insights
01:09:47 Shutdown Politics
01:25:06 Voter Contradictions and Immigration
01:37:56 President Trump Sues A Lot!
01:46:08 Authoritarian Watch Project
01:57:36 Financial Carnage 2025
02:12:55 Elon Musk's Unfulfilled Promise
02:22:05 Veterans Without Protections
02:31:56 Agree Carve Protections
02:36:03 Sanctuary Of Democracy
02:44:09 Sudden Release of Epstein Files
02:47:00 Epstein Files Revelations
03:00:04 New Generation Voters