Trump’s Ex-Border Chief Ken Cuccinelli on Deporting 20 Million People
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If you're a fan of the inner workings of Hollywood, then check out my podcast, The Town, on the Ringer Podcast Network. My name's Matt Bellany. I'm founding partner at Puck and the writer of the What I'm Hearing newsletter. And with my show, The Town, I bring you the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. Every week, we've got three short episodes featuring real Hollywood insiders to tell you what people in town are actually talking about. We'll cover everything from why your favorite show was canceled overnight, which streamer is on the brink of collapse, and which executive is on the hot seat.

Disney, Netflix, Who's Up, Down, and Who'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again. Follow The Town on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Tara Palmieri. I'm Puck's senior political correspondent, and this is Somebody's Gotta Win. Can you really deport 10 to 20 million people?

Think about this. To deport 1 million people, you would need to stuff 50 jumbo jets with people and send them out of this country

Every single day for a year, 365 days. And that would only get 5% of Donald Trump's promise out of the country within one year. Part of his campaign promise, one of his biggest promises, was to get all the illegal immigrants out of the country. A massive deportation on day one. Needless to say, that will probably not happen on January 20th.

But that's the end of the process is getting them on the plane and out of this country. To even get there, you have to identify them. You have to get arrest warrants. You have to detain them, arrest, surveillance. Then you have to go through the immigration process, which could take years going through ICE lawyers, ICE agents, resources like beds, detention centers, buses, planes. It's very expensive. It's a logistical nightmare.

So how do you do it? Gotta deliver on some of your campaign promise, right? To figure it out, I talked to Donald Trump's number two at the Department of Homeland Security during his first term. That's Ken Cuccinelli. And he sort of walked me through the process and what is actually possible. He admits that some of Donald Trump's talk is a bit of hyperbole.

on January 20th, do not expect some sort of mass raid or deportation. But he explains that he can do a lot if he wants to and that he could have done even more during his first term.

He does admit, though, this would be the largest domestic undertaking by our government in our lifetimes, and it will probably be messy. And we got into some fights, like when I asked him about how it will impact our way of life, cost of living, our community, our friends. And I think it's worth taking a listen to. You can really find out how they might be able to pull this off.

Ken, thanks so much for joining the show. Last time we were together, it was in a very small box. We were on CNN, Laura Coates Live, talking about the last major natural disaster, and that was the floods in North Carolina.

And you were on the show talking about the Department of Homeland Security's response since you were the deputy at DHS. And a lot of people don't know this, but the Department of Homeland Security has a big role in disaster relief and response and releasing the funds for response. And I was just wondering, what do you make of the wildfires in California and the response from DHS?

and some of the kind of rhetoric that's been going on between the incoming president, Donald Trump, and the governor of California, who President Trump is calling new scum instead of Gavin Newsom. Yes, his classic approach. Well, I'll repeat one of the things I said back there on CNN, and that is that the states are the first responders. They are the front line in emergency preparedness and response.

And in North Carolina, we saw a subpar performance relative to the other five states that were affected by that hurricane. And yes, DHS, FEMA specifically, backs up states. There is a bit of over-reliance, frankly, on FEMA from a simple financial standpoint. You saw the debate at the end of last calendar year about them starting to run out of money at FEMA.

for disaster response. And surely something as large as the L.A. fires is, you know, would would raise that concern.

This is no small impact. I mean, literally, we've all seen the video. Entire neighborhoods literally burned to the ground with almost nothing left. And so I fully expect FEMA to be in there assisting with housing, for example, bringing temporary housing. But the scale of this

leaves even FEMA in a difficult position. FEMA has a few thousand

temporary homes, mobile homes they can move into place. And of course, they do have demands in North Carolina. And now out on the far coast, the West Coast here at L.A., it's going to very much stretch FEMA's logistics and capabilities. I'm not yet sure about whether it'll stretch their money because whether it's appropriate or not, there will be some politics that plays into how much federal money

flows into this response. And I would just note on that front, people should not want the federal government to pay 100% of any disaster recovery. If the federal government gets in the habit of ever doing that or people think that's a possibility,

States prepare even less. So you think they fall back on the government, assuming that... Yes, they kind of are being bailed out. Got it. What do you think about Trump possibly holding back support for California and its relief efforts right now? Because, you know, is it considered a sanctuary state when it comes to illegal migration and the removal of illegal immigrants? So...

I don't think there's a legitimate basis for any state or locality not to at least be cooperative. They don't have to offer their own people and resources, but to at least be cooperative in letting the federal government accomplish its role in enforcing immigration law ever.

I also don't think it's appropriate to make emergency support decisions based on other issues that are going on. So neither of those, sort of both sides in that discussion, I think are off base to a certain extent. And I'd rather that there weren't crossover on these things. But let's face it, President Donald Trump

writes his own rule book on these things. And sometimes that works to the advantage of people like Gavin Newsom. It did in COVID. And sometimes it does not, as it appears right now with respect to the wildfires. How do you think it helped Newsom during COVID? Well, I think that Trump was very solicitous of...

supporting the needs, perceived needs of California without, really without questioning them. And I would point out, I was on the original Coronavirus Task Force, so I was in the middle of all of this early on. But when the support started rolling in in March and April, I was back at DHS and

And this is just my personal observation. I don't know that anybody was mistreated other than California, but Newsom and Trump established a rapport on that issue that sped relief along, for instance, ventilators to California in numbers and at a speed that was probably just high.

higher than other areas at the time. And why do you think that was? Simply because they were talking more than others. And there's a reason for that. So they had a good rapport at the time is what you're saying. Okay. And now it's turned for the worst. No, not so good. Yeah. So we'll see what happens with the fires. I'll tell you, I was actually there in Venice and it felt like the winds were insane. It felt like a hurricane. Yeah, those Santa Ana winds are very scary when you mix fire in there.

Yeah, it was real. The whole house was shaking, the radiators. It was, yeah, it was it.

It was a crazy experience. I brought you on the show because I want to talk about something that we're all talking about. Day one, soon to be January 20th. We are just a handful of days away from election day promises. Donald Trump was very specific when he said on day one, I will conduct the largest deportation of all time. And I was wondering, do you think that that is possible? Can Donald Trump conduct the largest deportation of all time on day one, January 20th?

Well, I think what will happen on day one to implement that commitment is all of the presidential instructions that are necessary to commence large scale deportation will be signed on day one. Does that mean that ICE agents will, merely 5,000 ICE agents are suddenly going to deport 10 million people in one day? No, it doesn't mean that.

But it does mean that the presidential authority to commence that effort will happen on day one. And will there be refinements after day one? Absolutely. Of course there will. Nonetheless, I think he will undo the Biden restrictions and implement his own presidential instructions.

based on his lawful authority to commence large-scale deportation. So on day one, January 20th, you're not going to see raids in your communities. You're not going to see knocks on the door, you know, a boiler opening the door and then the whole family has to come out. You're not going to see detention centers, everyone packed up on a plane and shipped off to their states. I mean, do you think there'll be any activity on day one besides the implementation, which I would just say is...

I think the key activity will be at the border itself. So, yes, there will be actual activity on day one, but the day one activity will be the first steps, actual steps, not just orders of sealing the border.

And by sealing the border, I mean to illegal traffic, particularly between the legal ports of entry. We do have a nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico and, of course, only a few points of legal points of entry, ports of entry for legal crossing and entry into the United States. That doesn't mean it'll be closed on day one, but you will see actual deployment of

of individuals, the border patrol, from the moment Donald Trump is sworn in as president, you go from 20,000 greeters who are executing a catch and release plan by and large, that's been reduced a bit the last few months, to actual enforcers of the border.

under Donald Trump. So you do get immediate enforcement on day one, but it won't be so much seen in deportation as it will be seen in securing the border. Okay. So it's hyperbole when you say the largest deportation of all time. But

Who are these people that are going to be securing the border? Are these existing Border Patrol agents who are just sitting on the sidelines right now, sitting on their hands? Or is this like military force? I mean, you need money for people to go to the border and actually seal it off. So you don't need money for the Border Patrol agents because you've already budgeted it.

And now you're just cutting them loose to actually perform the mission of the border patrol, which is to patrol the border instead of being greeters, as I refer to them. So you do get that change, and that's a very dramatic change. You go from 20,000 helping people in to 20,000 keeping people out. It's a 40,000-person swing with no change in budget. I also fully expect

deployment of military members on the border very quickly. I think that'll be some of the orders you see issued on day one will be to deploy military members to the border between the legal ports of entry. And unlike the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, where they backed up the border patrol,

provided reconnaissance, etc., but didn't do any confronting of people entering the country, I think the military will be used in Trump's second term to actually stop people from entering in the first place and to turn them around at the border. Is that legal to use the military? Absolutely. Why didn't Trump do it during the first term then if it's legal? The question of its legality isn't, in my view, why it wasn't utilized earlier. It was...

the reluctance to use the military. And as you heard Donald Trump in the campaign, he is over that reluctance. But look, this is an invasion. But why was he reluctant in the first place? I think because of appearances. That's it.

And and he also wanted to be seen using them to some degree. So the compromise was just what Joe Biden did. They were brought down near the border. They could see the border. They brought certain tools of reconnaissance with them. And but that was as far as it went. They never in either administration did any interdiction. And I fully expect.

the military to sidle up alongside the border patrol and do actual interdiction. And you don't think that the courts are going to try to stop that, like a California injunction? They can't stop that. But they were able to stop the Muslim ban for a long time. I know they eventually won, but they were able to hold up a number of other orders. It is interesting that the second Trump term will benefit from a lot of that litigation having already happened in the first Trump term.

Um, that's the law of the land now. And, uh, the, the Muslim ban, as you referred to it, uh, of course involved more countries than just Islamic countries, but, um, that was the press name for it. And that was upheld. Took a year though of time being litigated in the courts. And now that's been litigated. And, um, at the Supreme court level, that is, um, uh,

an immigration law authority. And when you deploy the military, that's Article II presidential authority simply to provide for the security as the commander-in-chief. He doesn't have to let anybody in between the legal ports of entry under any circumstances.

And he can deploy the military to stop the invasion. Does he have to say we're at war at the border? Is that the way to do it? No declaration. OK. Hey, look, if Mexico doesn't declare war on us, but walks people up into the United States, that doesn't mean it's not an invasion.

We've been invaded here for years now, and the United States has the authority to defend itself. I'll flip it around. Mexico has long been in violation of international law, and specifically that it is a violation of international law to allow your territory to be used to harm a neighbor.

And the cartels in particular, the gangs who are running the human trafficking business across that border and probably making more money in the last four years with human trafficking than they made in drug trafficking and using that money to buy military grade equipment to militarize that border from the southern side. Mexico is in clear loss.

long-term violation of international law. We have the absolute right to defend ourselves against those violations and to block those people from entering this country, and the president doesn't need any additional authority than that provided by Article 2 of the Constitution.

OK, so I do want to get back to the promise of the largest deportation on day one. OK, Trump says that we have between 10 and 20 million people in this country who are here illegally that he wants to deport. His borders are Tom Haman. He's been on Capitol Hill, according to CNN, tempering expectations among Republican lawmakers who are excited for this deportation. Right. But he's now explaining to them like this is going to have to happen in tears.

That a bit of Trump's language was hyperbole, shock and awe, perhaps to initiate some self-deportation, as you might say. People who are here illegally don't want to deal with that system and leave themselves without being apprehended. And they just decide to go or to just sort of thwart the incoming potential immigrants that

see that this is not going to be a happy place to settle into. So essentially he's saying there are tiers and he's told lawmakers he wants to remove one to two million people and 1.4 already have orders of immediate removal. So I just want to talk about that. One to two million people with 1.4 orders of immediate removal.

How do you do that? How much does that cost? Because he's on the hill asking for money. He's saying, it's going to cost me a lot of money just to do that. And I was looking, I was doing a little online research and

They're saying it could cost $88 billion, the American Immigration Council, to deport 1 million people per year. That's $906 billion over a 10-year period. And there's just a recent report from NBC, Gabe Gutierrez. He reported on a raid in Chelsea, Massachusetts in late December, right before Christmas. And he wrote that it took 16 ICE agents to...

to arrest five immigrants who are undocumented, right? And then they had to be released on bail by local jurisdiction after, you know, they were arrested. And apparently it took 40 to 80 hours of surveillance before the agents could even make the arrests. So it just seems like logistically, this is a massive hurdle. So the logistics of this promise are massive. It is the biggest

logistical, domestic undertaking really of yours and my lifetime if they're going to come close to meeting the advertised goals of this campaign promise. No question about it. And, and,

That will take a lot of money. But if you're quoting a radical left-wing immigration group for the price, I think you're probably looking in the wrong place. Okay, so what do you think? I didn't know that the American Immigration Council, I guess from the name you could tell that they're pro-immigration, right? But what do you think the real price is to deport 1 million people? It'll vary by year because once you have built the infrastructure, which has costs

that are higher relative to the number of people you're deporting, then your cost per deportation is going to start to go down. So there's going to be a bit of a spike early and a drop later on a per deportation basis. Now, at the same time,

Those 1.4 million who already have deportation orders and another five or six hundred thousand who are criminals over and above their criminal entry of the United States. So they've committed a burglary or a homicide or a sexual assault or something else. Those come to just under two million. That's what I hear Tom Holman focusing in on as the first tier. But when you think about cost.

I was an engineer before I went to the dark side and went to law school. I'm an efficiency nut. And one easy efficiency you're going to get with the Hohman-led effort versus what you've seen in really any time before is that when they take your example of 16 ICE agents picking up five illegal aliens,

They probably live with others as well. And under the Biden administration, for example, if your name wasn't on the target list, even if you were an illegal alien and they came across you, they said, have a nice day. They didn't deal with you at all. That's inefficient.

And I have to think that that is going to end immediately under this administration so that the associations immediately in the proximity of targeted illegal aliens, including criminals and those already with deportation orders, will also be held and either processed out or that process will be commenced.

so that to speed along the next round with deportation orders. So on day two, can you get those 540,000 people who are in detention right now? I'm guessing if they have committed a crime, they're in prison somewhere. Can you just put them on a plane? They're not just in a prison somewhere. Lots of them have been released, especially the ones in jurisdictions that use cash bail, for example, like New York, L.A.,

Chicago, a lot of the urban centers. And so they've got to go be found. And as you alluded to, it is logistically challenging to find an individual. I mean, law enforcement does this all the time.

It can be done for every single one of them. But to multiply that by 10 million takes a lot of man hours and a lot of just time on the calendar and money. I think the 88 billion number is probably about four or five times too high to accomplish this. Not great at math, so I'm going to say that's 22 billion. Yeah, my guess would be that

across multiple years, you're going to be talking $10 to $15 billion. But the Trump administration is asking for a lump sum up front, but a big part of that is also to finish the wall. It's also to do other things associated with this effort. And though I think finishing the wall, if they had the lump sum and could do it,

in an orderly fashion could probably be done between $5 and $10 billion. And when I say finish the wall, I don't just mean the steel in the ground. I mean the roads built behind the wall. I mean the lights on the wall and the technology connecting the various sectors that minimize your need for manpower to be just as effective in keeping people out. So when we say the wall...

You know, we talk about a whole system, just to be clear. I also think that, as you also alluded to the self-deportation, a phrase, ironically, that Mitt Romney came up with,

many years ago. A lot of that will happen by the cracking down on the issuance of work permits and the use of Homeland Security investigators to do vastly more workplace enforcement of the immigration laws that don't just put illegal aliens at risk, but also put the American employers at legal criminal risk. And I

I think that the reality that that's happening at scale will lead many employers to be, shall we say, a lot more careful in making sure they're complying with employment law, including the employment of people who are or are not here legally.

Because so many people come here to work, that will lead a large number of people to return home because they won't be able to work anymore. And that's the federal government that would deal with that. Correct. Okay.

Okay. I want to talk to you, though, about getting the money for the border wall, getting the money for the ICE agents. Another thing that Tom Homman said to Caitlin Collins of CNN is that he would need a minimum of 100,000 beds to detain undocumented immigrants that would more than double the 40,000 detention beds that they have right now that they're currently funded for. And that the agency has around 6,000 immigration officers, but he needs a lot more than that. So he's made it very clear.

Right now, what they're looking at doing is passing a major budget bill through the process of reconciliation. It includes Trump's priorities on tax, the border, like you said, and energy, but it has to be budget neutral. That means it either increases revenue or reduces spending. And Haman has said it's difficult for him to find ways, you know, to argue that this reduces spending, that this increases the budget. The other is energy production obviously increases spending.

You can make money off of that. Taxes, you can make money off of taxes, although they are arguing to reduce taxes. So that's going to be a difficult one as well. But it's hard to see how you increase revenue through cutting back on immigration. Well, when you talk about revenue, we're talking about the government getting money, not the economy. I understand. That's what I mean. The government making money, like the government can make money off energy. I know you understand it.

I'm just clarifying for people. Yeah, how can the government make money off of this process? So really, the people of the country indirectly are better off because wages go up. And I'll give you an example. At the end of 2019...

just before COVID, after an aggressive implementation of enforcement against illegal immigration, the economy did improve through 2019. But what was interesting and notable is that the sector of the economy whose wages grew the most was the bottom.

They grew by 6% if memory serves, which was much faster than any other quintile of the economy. And that wasn't just because of deregulation and tax cuts. That was also because the labor market was finally being protected for poor Americans who saw their wages go up and saw more job opportunities.

As we've seen through the Biden administration, when we see the jobs numbers every month, what we see is illegals are getting the jobs or people who they have waved the flag and said, we're going to parole you in even though you've entered illegally. And a lot of those folks are getting those jobs you see in the jobs report. Is that true? It's absolutely true. It's 100%. How do you know that? Because I've looked at the data and so have others. And when the Biden administration had to

admit that they had lied about a million jobs. An awful lot of data was made available. And suddenly these were illegal immigrants, not people on visas. Correct. So how do they track them then? Well, they're they're just tracking jobs. It's not they're not tracking individuals when you're. Why would you report a job that you're not paying taxes on? Let me go back. I think you didn't hear something I said. A lot of them are the parolees of the Biden administration.

So they let people in who are acknowledgedly have no legal basis to be here, and they parole them in en masse, where parole was intended to be used on a single case by single case basis. But when you look at jobs numbers, you're not taking down names about who has jobs. Those are economic statistics that are dealt with more by the Bureau of Labor Statistics than the Department of Homeland Security.

But as even the Biden administration dove into who was in those numbers, even they determined that there was massive increases of foreign illegal workers, some legal, some illegal. And my point is they legalized for temporary purposes, many illegal aliens using the parole power, for example.

And on the way out the door, the temporary protected status, TPS status for 800,000, if I recall correctly, El Salvadorans and Venezuelans for another 18 months. And which is a presidential authority that exists. And Biden used it after the election, of course, because it was too embarrassing to use before the election.

And and so we've got a system, a situation here in our economy where we're depressing wage and job opportunities for Americans, especially poor Americans. I mean, you might hear arguments from the hospitality, agriculture industry that rely on the arguments. And my counter to them is, well, then raise your wages.

pay Americans more money. Well, then Americans will all pay more for those products. So, you know, it's going to cost more for an avocado now or almonds or whatever. And then Trump also promised that he would lower the price of groceries at the same time. And that's a big part of the reason that he was elected. He was elected to reduce immigration, deportations, lower the cost of groceries. But, you know, without those workers...

we are going to pay more for our products. So it's going to be hard for him to manage that. Oh, and then the tariffs. I forgot about that. Now you're dealing with it like it's a zero-sum game. There is a large-scale legal work permit program

that deals with food production and so forth. And that's legal. It's just going to cost more money. It'll trickle down to the consumer at some point. I do want to get back though. No, no, no, no, no. I'm not going to let you get away with this. Tara, you're off base and you're wrong. You insist. Okay, why is that?

on me agreeing with you that this is going to cost more money. No, you don't have to agree with me. You don't have to. Because I'm not going to. And the fact of the matter is that ordinary Americans, especially poorer Americans, are going to financially benefit

in the middle and long term because they're paying jobs and more of them. Some will. And at the same time, they might make more money, but they may also have to pay more for products. So in the end of the day, there are a lot of arguments that go both ways. If you have a job versus not having a job,

or your wages are, that's the problem we see right now is that people's wages are going up and they can't afford their costs of living. So it doesn't matter how much it can make a hundred thousand dollars a year, but if it costs you $15 for an apple, it doesn't really matter. So your view is that we have to let illegal aliens flood the nation. That's not my view. I actually, I don't have a view on this. I'm not trying to get information. I'm just trying to offer another perspective. I would suggest to you, uh,

in a journalist critique that you are projecting that perspective. And that might be very comfortable for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They love that perspective, even if they won't admit it.

because it helps their bottom line of their very big corporations, but it doesn't help ordinary Americans. Okay. Implementing immigration law, by which I mean enforcing it, protects Americans, protects their opportunities for work and employment and wage growth. I think that there should be more legal immigration. I think that there should be more legal immigration. A lot of people have waited to have that debate to get control of the illegal situation.

I do want to get back to the logistics of what you had said was one of the largest logistical maneuverings of our government of our lifetime. I spoke to an ICE agent who was there for 20 years from New Jersey. That's where I'm from originally. And he said when he was there at DHS for 20 years, it used to be about $150 a day per detainee to keep them. They didn't necessarily have relationships with the local jails. You know, they have to deal with local governments, which made it difficult. Then you have to talk about

the cost of deportation. And it's not that easy. You can't just put someone on a plane and are you going to use a government plane? Do you have to use a commercial airliner? If you use a commercial airliner, you have to send them to a country that's not in South America. You have to put ICE agents on the plane with them on the commercial airliner. That's another big cost. And, you know, he was saying that you have to also make agreements with the countries to make sure they'll actually take their people back. We have...

in some cases like Cuba, Venezuela, they won't take their people back. So where do we, what do we do with these people? It's not like Mexico is going to take them back. I mean, I've heard that they may bring them to possibly Guatemala, that there may be some sort of arrangement with a third country that they might take some of these asylum seekers back. But like, it just seems to me that there are so many steps. And here's the other thing. We have immigration judges, right? We have immigration lawyers. Every detainee or every immigrant is,

given an immigration lawyer. We don't have enough of them. I know that the court system is totally backlogged. People can stay here for six months. They're told to return for another six months, another six months. Ten years later, they're on their asylum claims. They're not technically here illegally because they're here on asylum waiting for their asylum claim to be granted. So, like, how do you even deal with that?

And then say they don't get the answer they want, then they just exist without being documented and they live for maybe the rest of their life in the United States. So, of course, the point of those proceedings is to reach a final order and and then to deport them. So let's just so viewers know the details of what you've gone through. Let's use an example. So to to deport.

about a million people a year is probably about 50 plane loads a day. Wow. What kind of plane are we talking about? 747? A regular old passenger plane. And is this going to be commercial or government? What do you think they'll end up doing? No, I think they'll end up doing government. I think when you're doing it at that scale, it makes sense to buy and own the plane.

Um, ice frequently rents charters all the time, all the time. So you, you described another situation where ice agents use a commercial flight to return someone to their home country. That also happens. That is not, um, that is not an at scale approach.

An at-scale approach to drive the costs down and to drive efficiency up will mean that they are using U.S. government planes. Those could be military planes. They could buy the planes themselves. There could actually be a mix of that. They could buy planes that after they're done with them get turned over to the military or National Guards, for example. And large companies

what you think of as a cargo plane for the military, they have passenger arrangements. So those planes can be used for the dual use. It's also a way the military can support DHS in doing this, performing this function. They can use military bases just as the Biden administration did. The Biden administration used them to import Afghans, just by way of one example among others.

And the Trump administration could use those facilities as staging areas to remove people. But as you pointed out, the traditional way that deportations have worked is the country you're deporting someone back to knows they're coming, has effectively agreed to them coming by validating their citizenship.

And I think with a Trump presidency, you'll see things start that way. I also think with respect to, say, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, there may be some cooperation, whether it's from Guatemala or Mexico, in returning people back to those countries. But do not discount the possibility that a President Donald Trump...

If he thinks any of these countries are dragging their feet, he may not wait or ask for their permission. He may literally just give them these people and drop them on their doorstep.

And with the kind of numbers we're talking about, it's hard for me to imagine that not happening. Can they just then like take them on a plane and then drop them off back on our doorstep? How does that work? Well, they'd have to get in and we have a better ability to get in there than they have to get in here. Okay. So that's the one thing I believe that at a port of entry, which is like

Obviously, we're using planes. You then get to their port of entry. You hit their Department of Homeland Security. You hurt their border patrol. They can say, hey, you can't get in here. And so what do you have a standoff going on in an airport or on a tarmac? Actually, I think you don't have standoffs. You have the planes emptied and leaving. But what if they are literally we will not let you empty people? You can't just drop off in North Korea and empty people out.

We don't have a lot of North Korean. OK, fine. I'm just saying like maybe I'm choosing the most hostile nation. But let's say, OK, Cuba, for example, you can't just land there and let people out. Well, you can take them to Guantanamo Bay and walk them right out the gate. All right. OK, we do have a base there. Let's talk about a place where we don't have a base like Russia. Venezuela, for example. You can't just land there and let people out.

I'm not sure that couldn't be arranged. Because the air traffic patrol as well, like you have to tell people you're about to land. Are you going to land in the middle of a farmland? There's logistics. You have to have cooperation with the people on the ground. No, you don't.

That's just the way it's been done. What if you collide with another plane that's landing at the same time? I mean, I'm just playing devil's advocate with you, but it just seems like you need to have some cooperation. Well, and my point is that if adequate cooperation doesn't happen, I do not think Donald Trump will concede that he has to have cooperation to execute any of these goals on any of these goals. And I as a as a practical matter, he's correct.

You know, the United States, perhaps not for every single country in the world, but for what amounts to well over 90 percent, 95 percent of the people who are coming here illegally, that these options are possible.

real and executable. But this prospect of going to a third country like Guatemala, for example, probably makes more sense. Make an arrangement with them to take the people. Yes. And part of how I think the arrangement succeeds is the knowledge of Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua,

that Donald Trump is willing to entertain other options. But also then you have to provide resources to Guatemala because they're not going to take people for free. Well, right. You know, so, you know, Tom Homan recently talked about the Darien Gap. The Darien Gap is in the southern border of Mexico. And of course, Mexico has a much smaller southern border than we do. And Mexico has historically let people cross that border so long as they were going to the U.S. border.

Now, they started enforcing it during the first Trump administration, and it is entirely plausible that we would assist them in doing that again and assist Honduras and Guatemala and El Salvador and Panama and so forth all the way. You can work your way down the it's mist there.

that we would assist those countries in protecting their own borders to avoid northbound illegal traffic, both of drugs and of people. So I fully expect that kind of cooperation. We had that in the first Trump administration. And frankly, that was very effective, very efficient. Are you going to go into the administration and help with these efforts? I don't expect to, at least not at least not.

early on. I'll root for them from the outside. I'm sure an easy way, though, to find people, although, again, they are detained and then released, is when you raid plants like the chicken plants in the South that were raided. And like you said, the employers were the ones that were that had to pay the damages. Right. And this might be an incentive to no longer hire illegal immigrants, to hire Americans, to help the wages of lower workers. Yeah. If you remember in that raid the week after

They held job fairs because suddenly they had 680 openings and it was Mississippi, poor, black and white Americans showed up. And I mean, interview after interview, they were grateful to have the jobs at the rates the illegals had previously been being paid. They were glad to have a job. They were happy to get to work.

And I think you're going to see that more across the country. And I think the result will be once the working world knows that Donald Trump is determined to actually use law enforcement against Americans who are exploiting this system, that the frequency of that happening will drop substantially significantly.

And the attractiveness for illegals to be here will go down because they won't be able to work. Okay. If we're really talking, though, about a tiered system, we have four years in office. What tier, what level do we get to when, you know, you're going to the homes of people who have lived in this country for a long time, law-abiding people, families are here, some of the children were born in America, some of them might be DACA. What year...

do we get to when ICE officers are knocking on their doors and telling them to pack up and leave? So I think that some of that will happen right off the bat, but they won't be priorities. Why will that happen off the bat? Because of the efficiency of it. So if you're going to pick up someone who has a deportation order already and they live with, you know, five or 10 other people who are here illegally, then you're

Unlike the Biden administration who ignored those five or 10 people,

In an effort to achieve efficiency, the Trump 2.0 administration would immediately begin processing those folks. And the ones who are, for instance, under expedited removal authority could be removed immediately, will be removed immediately. And so you will cross into some of those categories you described who are not, who don't today have removal orders and who haven't committed another crime.

They may not be the targets, but they can easily be swept up while those targets are being picked up, whereas previously they had been ignored while the targets alone were focused on. Okay, so some of them are on immediate removal, but for the most part, the first year is going to be people who are here permanently.

in prisons or being detained already? And do you assume that there'll be more raids of these facilities, like these agriculture plants or hospitality? Like, do you think that they're going to go to the back of a kitchen in like a, you know, a major restaurant and do raids in that situation? I'm not prepared to describe the types of employers that would be targeted because it won't be so much by type of employer.

as it will be where the evidence leads to suggesting there are larger numbers of illegals being employed. I've worked in restaurants and it does seem that there are a lot of people that work there that are undocumented. Okay. Are there 680? No, there's a handful usually. Right. So my point is that, you know, it's going to be more efficient to go to the place where there's 600 plus

than where there's where they may be a high proportion of who's in the kitchen, but there's only 10 people back there. Again, I'm speaking of it from an efficiency standpoint rather than a culpability standpoint. And if you're Donald Trump and you want to get as high numbers as you can on in actual deportation and actual removal, you're going to try to focus on the more efficient approaches and locations.

And he's going to want to create a perception of force, right? So he's going to try to conduct like with the raids that you bring media in there. You let them watch it. You play it out on TV. I mean, I'm not so sure that's correct. I think the key factor for deterrence is the belief by all parties, employers and illegals, that deterrence

this is going to happen on a determined regular basis and they're going to follow through on it once they've begun. I don't think seeing it in media is going to be particularly critical to that. It's the reality of the occurrence of it. It's the same thing that deters someone in another country from attempting to come here in the first place is their belief.

that they're not going to get in. Oh, yeah, it costs a lot of money. That's exactly right. Are they going to spend their life savings and give it to some coyote for a small percentage chance of getting into the country? Some will, but not many and not at the numbers we've seen over the last 10 or 15 years. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. I think you've kind

kind of made it clear as to what we as Americans will feel at least in the first 100 days of its presidency. I mean, what do you think we'll feel in the first 100 days in terms of immigration? Well, I think it's going to feel fast. And I think in terms of what you see, you're going to see the quickest approach to 100 percent of a campaign promise kept at the border because it is the fastest place it can be kept.

And because the president needs no additional authority or funding to do it.

And that is to secure the border between the legal ports of entry and, I presume, to start turning people away who don't have a legal basis to enter the country in the legal ports of entry. And by the way, you'll also see that effect on, for example, the street price of drugs, because it'll be harder to get illegal drugs into this country that the price for those drugs is going to go up. It's a real world measure of what's happening at the border.

And, you know, that I think is what you'll see fastest, certainly in the first hundred days as they begin at that time to ramp up the largest deportation effort of our lifetime. The ramp up. Okay. We will look out for that. Thank you so much for your time. This was very interesting and I learned a lot. So we'll see what happens.

That was another episode of Somebody's Gotta Win. I'm your host, Tara Palmieri. If you like this podcast, please subscribe, rate it, share it with your friends. If you like my reporting, please go to puck.news slash Tara Palmieri and sign up for my newsletter, The Best and the Brightest. You can use the discount code Tara20 for 20% off a subscription at Puck. That's uppercase T-A-R-A 20. See you again this week. ♪