America’s Deportation Obsession, Caught on Tape (w/ Drew Harwell)
Bulwark Takes
The Bulwark
4.7 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 24 February 2026
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sam Stein is joined by Drew Harwell of The Washington Post to talk about his reporting on one of the most disturbing viral stories of the year. Ben Palmer, a Nashville comedian, set up a fake ICE deportation tip line and watched as Americans flooded it with calls. The callers weren’t trolls. They were neighbors, coworkers, even a kindergarten teacher, calmly trying to get families deported. What began as a prank by Palmer turned into a horrifying window into people's worst instincts.
Read more from Drew's reporting: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/02/20/fake-ice-tip-line-viral/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bullwork. And I am pleased to be joined by Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, who has or had, I should say, because we got him a little late, an incredible piece last week about a comedian in Nashville, Ben Palmer, who has been pranking people, more or less, by setting up a fake ice tip line that has nothing to do with ice |
| 0:22.7 | or the government and we're going to get into that and then people call in and they're just |
| 0:26.3 | kind of rounding out and exposing the worst of humanity the piece is called he made a fake |
| 0:30.0 | ice deportation tip line then a kindergarten teacher called Drew thanks so much for doing this |
| 0:34.8 | really appreciate it let's start with um how did you get, like, tipped onto the story? I'm just sort of curious. Yeah. Well, I would love to say I was in, like, a smoke-filled room and meeting with secret sources, but I really was just procrastinating on TikTok, and he, you know, came onto my feed and he lays out the premise, like right off the jump. |
| 0:55.7 | He says, I created this fake guy's tip line. People call me. They think I'm legitimate. And then he |
| 1:00.5 | plays a call. And I was just horrified because the one that I saw had like a million views at the time, |
| 1:04.9 | but now is over 20 million. This is the kindergarten teacher call where, you know, there's a woman |
| 1:10.2 | who says there's this five or six-year-old |
| 1:12.7 | at her school. The parents seem like nice parents, but she looked them up in the school records. |
| 1:17.5 | They're from Honduras and El Salvador. Nice family, but they don't speak English. So we're looking |
| 1:22.9 | to deport the parents and leave the child. Right. Like I said, I don't know if they're here illegally. |
| 1:28.7 | I just think it's odd. |
| 1:30.3 | And it was just horrifying to me, and it was horrifying because, you know, this was not, |
| 1:35.3 | this guy, Ben Palmer is not like this ideologue. |
| 1:38.3 | He's just like a comedian. |
| 1:39.2 | And yet the video was really just like uncovering how just horrific some of these calls could go. |
| 1:47.5 | And just it really seemed like an interesting moment in 2026 to experiment and it was nice to talk about. |
| 1:55.0 | So who is this guy? |
| 1:56.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:56.8 | So Ben is a stand-up comic. |
| 1:58.7 | He lives in Nashville. |
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