Welcome to a Citation's Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled episodes of Citations Needed.

And of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Blue Sky at Citation Spot.

Facebook, Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show through patreon.com slash citations

needed podcast.

All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded.

Adam, we are joined today for this news brief by guest Matthew Cunningham Cook, a writer, researcher, and reporter.

His work can be found everywhere from the American prospect, Rolling Stone, to the nation,

to The Intercept.

He is currently an investigative journalist covering DHS and ICE and other such terror organizations

at the Center for Media and Democracy.

He is speaking with us today from Costa Rica. And Matthew, the last time we had you on was about two and a half years ago. So welcome back to citations needed. Thanks for having me on again, guys. Yeah, thank you so much for coming on. I want to talk about this issue. We oriented as a terror campaign in the traditional sense of the word. Obviously, terrorism is very loaded. It's not a term we use a lot for obvious reasons, but I'm sort of reaching for a better word and failing to come up with one,

because quite explicitly, by their own admission, the White House and the Department of Homeland

Security and their various borders are, are framing their strategy as one of, they don't

put it in those terms, but as sowing terrorists of people,

a self-deport, but also, of course, just as a matter of ideological rigor, they're pandering

to their kind of Nazi base. And so media is central to disseminating this campaign. And I know that

here in Chicago, just to talk personally, in my neighborhood, all throughout Chicago, really,

Albany Park, Rogers Park, various of the suburbs where more working class families live,

a lot of immigrant families live. Now they're in Millennium Park, sort of downtown,

trying to go down Michigan Avenue to look really tough. Yeah, they're like trolling the river.

...