Hello and welcome to Background Briefing, available 24-7 at backgroundbriefing.org.

I am Ian Masters, and today we'll look into a number of stories and issues in the news.

We'll begin with Trump's reality TV theater of cruelty underway, as Fox and other right-wing

media are embedded in ice raids with Dr. Phil showing up at a raid in Chicago as migrants are

arrested, many with no criminal records, and some U.S. citizens or green card holders.

We will discuss how Trump is devaluing American citizenship with this bread and circuses

spectacle, at the same time planning to strip away Social Security, Medicare and Affordable

Health Care that U.S. citizens rely on. Joining us is Michelle Garcia, a journalist, essayist, and former Soros Equity Fellow at the

Open Society Foundations, a former Texas correspondent for the Columbia Journalism Review,

and a former columnist for the Texas Observer.

She is the director of the PBS documentary Against Mexico,

The Making of Heroes and Enemies, and is currently working on a book about borders

and their powerful influence on US identity, politics, and culture of violence.

Then we'll examine whether Trump's deportation TV show will be a fraud like everything else he does

as he uses expensive military aircraft and rounds up the wrong people in what will end up hurting

the construction industry now in demand to replace homes destroyed by recent hurricanes and

wildfires. Joining us is Sam Canyanis, a journalist, author and storyteller,

whose two acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction about Mexico and Mexican immigration,

True Tales from Another Mexico, and Antonia's Gunn and Delphino's Dream,

made him, according to the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, the most

original writer on Mexico and the border. His books include Dreamland, the true tale of America's

opiate epidemic, and most recently, The Least of Us, True Tales of America, Hope in the Time

...