Elliot Williams
speaker
222 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 16 Jan
Elliot Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Trump adjacent or Trump curious people who did not really stop to think about what the kind of immigration enforcement he was talking about really was going to mean.
And it was going to mean, like I said, the sort of lowering the hiring standards and then just literally sweeping people up because you just can't find that volume of people who are unlawfully present in the country without that kind of hiring.
hyper aggressive and in many instances, just impermissible and sloppy law enforcement.
so elliot when you see that and the trauma and the pain that that caused this is a human being what do you think yeah it's a few things i think the human cost again uh sort of i was saying a little bit earlier i you know i just don't think people who maybe were swing voters who were skeptical of the president but still uh you know not happy with the direction the country was going under joe biden i don't think people really thought about what what was coming says point one
Point two, it's the power of the cell phone image.
And this time, this generation, you know, if the administration is not being fully transparent about how they are carrying out any sorts of law enforcement, particularly immigration enforcement, we just live in a time of people documenting everything.
And I think to some extent, that is what is highlighting a lot of some of what appear to be some pretty grave abuses by the administration.
uh with respect to immigration enforcement that's one two and then finally point three you know a lot of this comes down to accountability like how when a presidential administration or when any entity law enforcement entity steps outside the bounds of what it's allowed to do how do you hold them accountable um and really that way is congress the way our country has been set up since its founding is that you know when
an administration's either abusing a power, exceeding power, or even using its power lawfully, but in a way that Congress doesn't want, Congress ought to be the one having hearings, Congress ought to be the one asking the questions, and they're just not doing it.
I use the example from my time back in ICE.
I was an appointee under a Democratic administration working for ICE, but it was Democrats in Congress for those first two years that were the most aggressive about raising concerns and even threatening to suspend the funding of the agency
until some of these questions they had were answered.
You're really not seeing that right now.
I mean, there was a little bit, a moment with respect to Jeffrey Epstein in which Congress sort of in a bipartisan manner raised some questions to the administration about how to proceed.
There was a moment around Venezuela where some Senate Republicans seemed to break with the president, but for the most part, Congress, which ought to be, if not a co-equal branch of government, the first among equals
they just haven't been playing that role.
And it will be truly fascinating, I think, on a historic level, on a human level, whatever level, to see, should Democrats take a House of Congress in 2026, in the midterms, how this dynamic changes, if at all.
No, no, no, no, no.
I mean, now, certainly the qualifications for immigration officers were in some ways lower than the qualifications for customs officers, the other side of the ice house, which I'll be perfectly candid.
For the time I was there and just since the founding of the agency, the customs folks don't want to be a part of this agency, or at least for some time didn't, because they never wanted to be smushed with this immigration work that they regard as really radioactive.
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