Trump’s Mass Deportations Are Decades in the Making
Reveal
The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX
4.7 • 8K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2025
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This past weekend marked a major escalation in the Trump administration's mass deportation efforts, with the dramatic detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who played a prominent role in the protests against Israel on Columbia University’s campus last year. Khalil, a Columbia graduate student, is a permanent legal resident in the US. The Trump administration says it detained Khalil for what it described, without evidence, as his support for Hamas, and President Donald Trump promised “this is the first arrest of many to come” in a Truth Social post. In the meantime, a federal court in New York prevented the federal government from deporting Khalil while it hears his case. He’s currently being held at an immigration detention facility in Louisiana.
Khalil’s arrest—and the Trump administration’s reimagining of immigration writ large—are in many ways a product of decades of dysfunction within the US immigration system itself. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Reveal’s new weekly interview show, host Al Letson talks with The New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer about the 50-year history of the country’s inability to deal with migrants at the southern border and why the Trump administration’s approach to immigration is much more targeted—and extreme—than it was eight years ago.
- Support our journalism at Revealnews.org/donatenow
- Subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get the scoop on new episodes at Revealnews.org/weekly
Producer: Josh Sanburn | Editor: Kara McGuirk-Allison | Theme music: Fernando Arruda and Jim Briggs | Digital producer: Nikki Frick | Interim executive producers: Brett Myers and Taki Telonidis | Host: Al Letson
Dig Deeper/Related Stories:
Did the US Cause Its Own Border Crisis? (Reveal)
https://revealnews.org/podcast/did-the-us-cause-its-own-border-crisis/
Immigrants on the Line (Reveal)
https://revealnews.org/podcast/immigrants-on-the-line/
The Forgotten Origins of a Migration Crisis (Mother Jones)
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | It's only a matter of time before you start to see how much, you know, mass deportation, for instance, impacts the economy. |
| 0:10.2 | You know, my fear is just that kind of a huge amount of suffering that's going to happen getting to that point. |
| 0:16.6 | If, in fact, you know, the administration sticks to its agenda here, it's inevitable that we're going to arrive at a point of extreme conflict. |
| 0:26.7 | I'm out Letson, and today on more to the story. |
| 0:30.2 | I talk with New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer about why the Trump administration's executive actions addressing immigration look far different than they did eight years ago. |
| 0:41.3 | Stay with us. |
| 0:48.8 | Hi, my name is Lou, and I have donated to reveal for the last 10 years because they deeply research important stories that no one else covers, |
| 0:58.4 | and they report them with clarity, style, personality, and musical backup. |
| 1:03.4 | To support the next 10 years of Reveal, please donate today. |
| 1:06.9 | Just visit RevealNews.org slash anniversary. |
| 1:14.5 | That's RevealNews.org slash anniversary. That's RevealNews.org slash anniversary. |
| 1:15.8 | Thank you. |
| 1:30.3 | This is more to the story. I'm Al Letson. Immigration is one of those issues that's so complicated it can feel impossible to untangle. It seems to lie at the heart of our political debate like a black hole. |
| 1:35.3 | It's gravitational pull sucking every other issue in with it. |
| 1:39.3 | Race, the economy, job growth, globalization, crime, and even who gets to be considered American. |
| 1:48.2 | The debate generally focuses on the 1,954 miles that separate the U.S. from Mexico. |
| 1:55.8 | But in his book, Everyone Who Is Gone is Here, New Yorker staff writer Jonathan Blitzer argues that to fully understand |
| 2:03.5 | what's happening, you have to zoom out and rewind. He says that many of our immigration problems |
| 2:09.8 | today are in fact self-inflicted, a direct result of Cold War foreign policy that led to a failure |
| 2:17.1 | of domestic policy. And it all began |
| 2:19.6 | about a half a century ago. Jonathan, how you doing, man? I'm good. How are you? Good, good. So you start |
| 2:28.4 | in 1980. Why 1980? Like, how was immigration to the U.S. changing then? |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.