Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Focus Group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the

bulwark. And this week, I want to revisit what has long been Donald Trump's biggest political

ace in the whole and examine how much of an ace it really is. I'm talking about

immigration, the thing that launched Donald Trump into orbit in the first place. Even when Trump's

approval rating is several points underwater, as it currently is, his approval rating on immigration

is roughly even. Today we're going to listen to what it sounds like when people who voted for

Trump like his immigration policies and what it sounds like when they don't. More specifically,

for a lot of the show, we're going to talk to Hispanic voters who voted for Trump last year,

but say they disapprove of his job performance. If you've been watching the polling on this, you see that

there's been a big decline in Hispanic support for Donald Trump, so I want to explore some of that.

My guest today has been doing some excellent reporting on the immigration beat for the bulwark.

Adrian Caraschio, the author of the Bullwark's immigration newsletter, Huddled Masses. What's up?

Tara, thank you for having me. So it's been several months since you were last on the show,

and that was a great episode. That was your first go-round. But now you're like a seasoned,

grizzled, bullwork immigration beat reporter. And so as you've been out on the ground, you know, talking to the people making policy, those affected by the immigration policies, what events do you think have shaped this debate the most?

Like, what has had the biggest impact on the communities you cover?

I was just having the conversation with the producer right before this.

And it's like some of this stuff can feel like, okay, we want to do these check-ins maybe quarterly, or like, there's a similar shape to some of these conversations. And I'll never forget, the first time that I was hearing Latino Trump supporters was when I was doing the prep for the first focus group, and it was after Guantanamo Bay. And these were people saying like, hey, look, you know, immigrants take our jobs. We're using some of these talking points, you know, from Magar on the right. But then they were saying, but this Guantanamo thing's not cool. This is dictatorship. And they were using, you know, words like Nazi and stuff like that. And that was like, okay. and then we saw it again with Venezuela. And we saw them just shipping people without due process

and people being like okay and then we saw it again with venezuela and we saw them just shipping people without due process and people being like actually it's not okay to ruin someone's life just because of an administrative error so this is the stuff that i think is super important and now checking in a few months later as the summer's coming to an end folks are saying like delta border was Delta border was out of control. We needed to fix that.

But then the way he's doing it is so dramatic.

The way he's doing it is inhumane.

And they just go down the line because it's going into their communities.

...