LEMON DROP | A Former DHS Official on ICE's Crisis & Lack of Humanity
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Who is Elliot Williams and why did he write Five Bullets?
Elliott Williams is a senior legal analyst and the author of the new book, Five Bullets, The Story of Bernie Getz, New York's Explosive 80s, and the Subway Vigilante Trial That Divided the Nation. I want to talk to him about that. And I want to talk to him about what's happening in this world of ICE and Minnesota and all of that. And how did he decide to write a book on Bernie Getz? You're showing your age by doing that.
I'm showing my age by the fact that I look like a cadaver when I don't have TV makeup on. That's how I show my age, Don.
No TV makeup here, sir.
There's an expression for that. It's independent journalists don't crack. So that might be what people are saying.
Thank you. We'll talk about your book in just a moment, which I'm really thrilled to talk about. And congratulations on that. And it's good to see you. What is going on with ICE? And tell us, because you have, obviously, a history with ICE. Were you the former executive director?
Assistant director. So I was one of a bunch of folks helping to run the agency, yeah.
Yeah. And so what is happening with ICE? Is this the ICE that you work for?
Yeah, that's such a complicated question, Don, because ICE is always going to be radioactive. Just the very nature of immigration enforcement really is troubling to many people. And, you know, it's within the world of law enforcement. It's a particularly tough place right now. Even when I was there, ICE was controversial. And I remember for the first two years that I was there, Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And they were the biggest critics of ICE and even critics of Obama's ICE. You've heard about the term deporter in chief and going after meatpacking plants and so on, which changed over the years that I was there. So, yes, ICE has always been controversial and radioactive. That said, my friend, this is not what I remember, and it certainly is not the way it was carried out, both in terms of the level of transparency that ICE has, like a window into what exactly are they doing, number one.
And number two, just the math, Don. Just do the math. The president was clear, and God bless him for it. He told America what he was going to do on immigration enforcement and said, you know, we want to have the most robust deportation effort in history ever. We're going to remove a million people from the country. Okay, fine. If he wants to do that, that's a political choice that he's free to make and his supporters are free to make. But you can't take an entity that was doing 300,000 of a thing and and then move it up to a million of a thing, and then expect that everything's going to be okay. They necessarily were going to start violating civil rights or hiring people who were not fit for the job or acting in a way far exceeding their authority.
Just do the math. And my question to everyone is, well, what did you expect? Like, what did you think when you had the president talking the way he was about immigration before on the campaign trail? What did anyone expect? And I don't think anyone... should be shocked by what they're seeing right now.
Really? The cruelty of it? You don't think people should be shocked?
Only, again, I just think, I don't think people recognize what it truly meant. And I've been saying it for a long time, and you know you got a problem when someone who worked for ICE under Obama is saying, whoa, whoa, slow down, folks. No, I just think when the president was that forthright about what they were planning on doing, when Stephen Miller was talking about 3,000 arrests a day, I think were the numbers, that is a staggering number in the history of American law enforcement. And you know, yes, the president has his critics, always has had his critics and his critics were saying, guys, red flag, this is going to be really bad. But I actually think there were, 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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who is Elliot Williams and why did he write Five Bullets?
0:13–5:30
2
How has ICE changed and is this the same agency Elliot once worked for?
5:30–12:27
3
Why did ICE enforcement scale-up lead to alleged civil-rights abuses?
12:27–25:00
4
What are the human costs of recent ICE raids and tear-gassing incidents?
25:00–29:03
Speakers
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