I'm Lee Rowland. Welcome to At Liberty from the ACLU, a podcast where we discuss today's most

pressing civil rights and civil liberties issues. People coming across the U.S. border have been demonized as illegals and criminals.

Trump himself has referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and called undocumented immigrants animals.

But statistics show that immigrants, both undocumented and

otherwise, are actually less likely to commit crimes than the average U.S. citizen. And crossing

the border, even without documentation, is only a crime in specific circumstances. How did our American political conversation start to conflate

immigrants and criminals? And how has our immigration policy changed along with this rhetoric?

To help us answer those questions, we have with us Cecilia Wong, the deputy legal director

of the ACLU. Before that, she ran the

ACLU's Immigrants Rights Project and was a longtime public defender. We'll also hear from

Ravi Rugbyr, an immigrant and activist we spoke to during his deportation fight here from New York.

Cecilia, welcome, and thanks for being on today.

Thank you, Lee.

So let's start big picture.

I think the interaction between immigration law and criminal law can be really confusing, particularly

with the current rhetoric.

Let's start with folks crossing the U.S. border. I've heard a lot about

a zero-tolerance approach by the Trump administration. Can you tell us a little bit about how and

when border crossing became criminalized? I think the story that we are talking about currently is that President Trump,

Attorney General Sessions and Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristen Nielsen, have made a concerted

effort to buy into a restrictionist anti-immigrant vision that all immigrants, that all migrants, whether

they're asylum seekers or longtime green card holders, present a criminal threat in the United

...