Radley Balko

speaker

278 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 28 Jan

Radley Balko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.

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The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart · The ICE Age of Surveillance and Enforcement · 28 Jan 2026 podcast

unjustly, you can sue, you can file a federal lawsuit under the Ku Klux Klan Act called Section 1983 suit, but they have qualified immunity, which is hard to get by.

But it can be surmounted.

If it's a federal officer, they have absolute immunity.

So it's another layer of protection.

It's almost impossible to sue them in federal court.

And Congress could change that tomorrow.

They could pass a bill tomorrow saying, we're going to give federal

police officers the same qualified immunity that state officers have, which is still pretty significant, but we're not going to make them completely and utterly above the law, which is insane.

Yeah, they're not.

I mean, that's what Stephen Miller, when he goes on and says you have absolute immunity, what he's saying is nobody can sue you in federal court civilly for damages, right?

We're not going to charge you criminally in federal court because we support what you're doing.

So it's not going to happen at the federal level.

The best that you can hope for is maybe a state prosecutor or an attorney general could criminally charge these people.

But those cases are going to get removed to federal court and then the DOJ is probably going to be defending those people against local prosecutors.

And so in terms of accountability, the only real thing that's left at this point is shaming and social stigma.

Well –

Why do you think they're all wearing masks now, right?

Because that takes away that last kind of vector of accountability that we have.

But the thing is, I guess what I'm saying, the hopeful part of this is Congress could change all this tomorrow.

They could pass a law tomorrow saying, here's a way that you could sue federal officers for civil rights violations.

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