Should Biden have ordered 1500 troops to US-Mexico border?

KCRW's Left, Right & Center

KCRW

352865, News

4.2 • 4.8K Ratings

🗓️ 5 May 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Biden seemed to take a page out of Trump’s playbook this week by ordering 1,500 active duty troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. He stated it was meant to help the National Guard and Border Patrol deal with the surge of migrants as the pandemic-era Title 42 expires. But were soldiers the right response to a humanitarian crisis?

Then, fighting in Sudan has created a humanitarian disaster after only two weeks. Did the U.S. overestimate the situation by pushing for democracy? And did we embolden the two military leaders behind the fighting — by treating them as legitimate players?

And finally, television and film writers went on strike this week after failed negotiations with producers and studios. Will they succeed in getting higher pay in a streaming age where the old rules don’t apply?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hey everybody, it's David Greene here, the co-founder of Fearless Media and your host here
0:06.5	on Left Right and Center. Welcome. President Biden has, I think we could say largely,
0:12.3	defined himself as the opposite of former President Donald Trump in almost every way. So,
0:18.6	it was a surprise when he announced this week that he was going to send active duty US
0:23.9	troops to the US-Mexico border. The president cited something called Title 42 as the reason.
0:30.0	The public health policy passed by the Trump administration in 2020 is set to expire next week.
0:35.9	This ruling allowed US officials to expel migrants quickly and easily to prevent the spread of COVID.
0:43.0	The lifting of this ruling has government officials really worried that a surge of illegal
0:47.2	immigrants at the border could take place. In an effort to try and manage this potential crisis,
0:52.3	the president ordered 1,500 troops to supplement the existing 2500 members of the National Guard
0:58.4	who are already at the Southwest border supporting customs and border patrol.
1:02.3	The Biden administration is saying that this is only temporary. They're also saying that
1:06.2	they're sending them to assist border patrol, who they worry could be seeing up to 10,000
1:10.9	migrants a day applying for asylum. They are being instructed, these forces not to perform
1:15.6	law enforcement duties or to interact with migrants who are in custody. So, let's talk about this.
1:21.5	Regular panelists, Moelathe, is out this week, but we have another longtime friend of the show from
1:25.6	the left. With us, Elizabeth Brunig. She's a staff writer for the Atlantic and a contributing writer
1:30.8	to the New York Times in Washington Post. And we have Sarah Isgerback, she's senior editor at the
1:35.1	dispatch, a lawyer, and also a spokesperson at the Department of Justice under President Trump.
1:40.0	Welcome to you both. Thank you so much. Great to be here.
1:44.5	So, Sarah, in your previous job during the Trump administration, you probably thought about
1:48.0	what's happening at the border in moments like this quite a bit. And I just wonder, I mean, in 2018,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from KCRW, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of KCRW and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.