Astead Herndon

How much of our current immigration system should we ascribe to this one man versus an infrastructure that's been built up over a long period of time?

Give it to me.

I mean—

Part of what is striking me from that answer, though, is there was kind of an accepted fact about a porous border.

You're saying before 9-11 and before the kind of anti-terrorism push became one-to-one with interior border enforcement?

In May 2025, Trump's immigration advisor, Stephen Miller, said that he wanted ICE detaining 3,000 people a day.

But it also seems as if the administration has kind of backed off since the public pushback they received in Minnesota.

How should we think about those kind of dual actions?

Is the worst of the Trump administration's crackdown in the rearview mirror?

That didn't work.

Yeah.

The public pushback shouldn't be seen as necessarily a moderating force, but for someone like Stephen Miller, an obstacle to overcome.

Exactly.

I wanted to ask about something you just mentioned, because it does seem as if Americans are sometimes fine with deportations as long as they don't see them happening in front of them.

And as we both know, President Barack Obama supported more than three million people, which by some estimates is even more than Donald Trump.

Is the lesson here that Americans are against deportations or are they against them happening in front of them?

Or the scenes that we saw in like El Paso and kind of like 2021, 2022, that was kind of universally seen as unideal at the minimum.

I want to ask about Senator Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, who we're going to interview specific to these questions.

And I want to use him as a proxy of where kind of the larger opposition to Donald Trump is on the issue of immigration.

Recently, he gave an interview with NBC where he said that calls to abolish ICE were, quote, ridiculous, adding that, quote, we need an immigration force that deports bad people.