Welcome everyone to the Mona Charrin Show.

I'm delighted to welcome today, David Beer, who is the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute.

And I am so glad, David, that you could come on because I want to try to get our arms around so many of the stories that we're reading about what's happening

in immigration right now. As we are taping this, the president and Christy Noem and others have

gone to a place they're calling Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. Trump has since made noises about having such

facilities all over the country. He is saying, as usual, you know, things like, I say as usual

because, you know, he's, he's, he's, he's, he spews so many outrageous and horrifying things on a daily basis,

and it's impossible to keep up with them all.

But just for today, he's talking about deporting naturalized Americans and even American citizens.

He specifically said people who were born in the United States. So you had a

recent piece, which caught my eye, about the nature of the people that ICE is detaining right now.

Supposedly, Trump had told us it was going to be the worst of the worst. It was going to be

criminals. What's really happening? What ICE is trying to do is arrest and deport as many people as it

possibly can. ICE officers are subject to quotas. So they are supposed to be arresting as an

entire organization across the federal government,

about 3,000 people per day.

They're not reaching that goal

that the White House has arbitrarily set for them.

So basically what this means is that from the individual officers' perspective,

the most important goal is to increase the number of arrests,

its quantity over quality, and we're seeing that reflected in the data on who is actually being arrested.

If you look at what has happened really in the last few weeks, we've seen this dramatic increase in the number of arrests

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