In order to carry out a mass deportation operation, you have to engage in tactics that most people find un-American.

There is no world in which you can round up 13 million people and not fundamentally change the kind of country that we are.

We're very pleased to welcome to opening arguments, one of the foremost authorities on U.S.

immigration policy working today and one of my favorite social media followers.

American Immigration Council senior fellow, Aaron Reiklin-Melnick.

How is your Tuesday, Aaron?

My Tuesday, like most Tuesdays these days, is not as great as it's been in previous years, but all things considered could be worse. You know, I don't think I know if there's anybody out there who has eyes on the entire immigration system the way you do, following you and watching your work, seeing your testimony before Congress and all the stuff that the IIC is putting out right now. What's your typical day like before we get in anything else? Well, I will say thank you for that compliment. There definitely are other people, but they don't spend as much time on social media. And so you don't know who they are as a result. What I do a lot during the day is keep track of what's going on. If there's new court cases, I'm reading the court cases. If there's new regulations coming out, I'm reading the regulations, getting up to speed on what's going on there, talking to other people working in the field and working on a lot of

the written products we do here at the American Immigration Council, which includes updating

fact sheets, building some new reports that I'm really excited that are going to be coming out later

this year, and making sure that we can have the facts and the data ready to educate the public.

And nobody does it like AIC just as a practitioner. I know that at any given time there's

some kind of development or something's coming down. I can find an AIC explainer within a couple

of days, sometimes sooner. How do you guys do that? A lot of last second work when breaking news

happens. So when the Senate bill dropped earlier this year the one big beautiful bill act we sat down i think we got the text at six p m we sat down we started reading through it we started outlining it we divided it in between our team we've got an incredible team here on our policy team and our legal team sure uh. Mostly lawyers. And we made sure that we had it out and ready as soon as we could. Yeah, it's so valuable right now. I mean, it's always been this way. And certainly, you know, you're doing this through the Trump and First Trump administration as well. When it just seemed like every Friday, there was just some new massive thing that was being dumped on us. But you've been at this for a while. You're also a lawyer,

of course, yourself. And you have a background. You've pretty much been doing immigration lawyer your whole

career. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I graduated law school in 2014 and immediately got my start at

the Immigrant Justice Corps, which was a brand new fellowship at the time, putting 25 new lawyers a

year into the ecosystem, new immigration

lawyers, that is. And I was in the first class of that fellowship assigned to the Legal Aid Society

in New York City, where I worked for two years doing removal defense, mostly for people who had

prior criminal convictions. This being New York City, it was a lot of people with green cards or

other kind of status who had drug problems in the past it was a lot of people with green cards or other

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