Archon Fung | 00:33
Hey everyone. Welcome. You are listening to Terms of Engagement. I’m Archon Fung. I’m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer | 00:45
And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m a former attorney and I’m the former elected Maricopa County Recorder in Phoenix, Arizona. And I’m now a senior practice fellow in American Democracy at the Ash Center with Archon.
Archon Fung | 00:58
Great. We’re coming to you live from the Ash Center here on Harvard’s campus in, uh, very steamy Cambridge, Massachusetts. Right now, for those of you who don’t know, the Ash Center is Harvard’s hub for research and teaching on democracy. We’re home to an incredible group of scholars and fellows and staff, and students, and all of our programs are dedicated to fostering practices for more equal and inclusive, multiracial, multiethnic democracy and self-government here in the United States, but all around the world. This is our experiment in live streaming. This is the first episode of what we intend to be a weekly series. We’ll go on live at noon every Tuesday, and we’ll discuss the latest developments in democracy news. And there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world. Our intention here is to tie many of those events back to our central concern of democracy. Today, we’ve got some great things to talk about. We’ll be focusing on, uh, immigration and ICE and some of the protests against ICE. But before we dive in, I want to give folks a sense of who we are and why we started this show in the first place. And lemme turn it over to Steven. Uh, yeah, who originated the idea for this thing?
Stephen Richer | 02:09
How you foisted that on me in case it goes disastrously wrong, but, uh, no Archon and I were thinking about this because there’s so much that is exciting that is going on that’s interesting, that’s going on in American democracy today. And there’s similarly a lot going on at the as center regarding scholarship or research on American democracy. And increasingly, there’s an appetite for drawing a bridge between what’s happening in universities and what’s happening in the realm of public policy. And more than anything, I just thought it would be fun, and I wanted to have a space where I could disagree with Arcon in front of everyone. And I occasionally tee up some good public policy points. But on the, the note of disagreement, it should be said that I’m speaking in my individual capacity, Archon speaking, speaking in his its individual capacity. We are not representing the viewpoints of the Ash Center or the Kennedy School, or of Harvard University, or of any other entity.
Archon Fung | 03:09
We are merely speaking for ourselves. So we hope that this will be fun. We’re gonna be experimenting a lot in future weeks, which I hope you’ll join us next Tuesday. We’re gonna try stuff like bringing on guests. We’re gonna try different formats. We’re gonna try different, you know, question and answer sessions with the audience. And so if you have any recommendations, you can write to info@ash.harvard.edu. So info@ash.harvard.edu and you can give us some ideas for topics or things that you’d like to see in future weeks. But with that, let’s talk immigration. I think more than anything, this has been the centerpiece of the second Trump administration so far. And as Archon mentioned, when we talk about immigration, we’re talking about the border. We’re talking about immigration and migrant sweeps in the United States. We’re talking about court cases, we’re talking about protests in response to the administration’s immigration and border sweep and migrant sweep policies.
Stephen Richer | 04:15
And so all of those are really, uh, a prominent feature of the first few months of the Trump administration and something that scholars here at the Ask Center have been following closely. So, Archon, my first question for you would be, is this, is, is all the outrage simply a matter of form? Is it a matter? Is it, is the outrage predicated on how the Trump administration is going about this? Whether it’s the mask of ice agents, whether it’s the, um, inaccurate deportation of some people, whether it’s the lack of due process for other people, or is there sort of something more deep that’s underlying, but in some ways, this is a, which we discussed, uh, a form of democratic representation, because this is of course, what Trump campaigned on, and in some ways he’s delivering very effectively.
Archon Fung | 05:08
Yeah, that’s a puzzle. I’ve been trying to think about that. Like from the democracy point of view, you could view it from opposite sides, right? Like you say on one, this was immigration and controlling immigration was, uh, candidate Trump’s signature issue probably up there in one or two, top one or two concerns. And I think he and many others in the administration are saying, well, that’s what you voted for. We’re absolutely delivering on that. What could be more democratic than that? And on the other side, you’ve got, uh, many people who I talk to regularly saying, this is the least democratic thing ever, because you’ve got, uh, ice running around in communities, uh, in masks and in a totally unaccountable way operating close to what’s a secret police. And you can’t have a secret police in a democracy. So you’ve got those two like super different perspectives and like starting to unpack it.
Archon Fung | 06:04
I think part of it is about the form and, uh, and the implementation, but I think part of it is also about what exactly was on offer, right? So during the campaign, I think what was on offer, at least what I heard was, well, we are going to go after and prioritize people, uh, who are criminals, MS 13, who are breaking up people’s communities. And then now part of the reality of it is that, uh, you know, you’ve got graduate students, you’ve got farm workers, you’ve got people being rounded up at Home Depots, and that feels like a pretty different, uh, reality from what was promised. And maybe, I don’t know, what do you think about that? Do you think it is different? Well,
Stephen Richer | 06:45
I think it’s just important to point out that this can’t in good faith be about deportations qua deportations, because so far I think the, the second term of the Trump administration has deported about 200,000 people. And those statistics vary a little bit, whether you look at the administration statistics or whether you look at MBC has this great tracker online, but compare that with the 3.1 million people that the Obama administration deported. And I don’t remember this level of outrage from 2008 to 2016. And so if it’s just about the deportations, I find that a little bit disingenuous. If it’s about the process, then I think that’s something that we can have a conversation about. But again, as you said, if there was one thing that Trump was crystal clear on when running as a candidate, you know, things like abortion, he would flip-flop ev almost every single day. Things about economic policies he would flip-flop on, on occasion. But immigration and people who are in the country unlawfully has been the cornerstone of really his candidacy even since 2015. And so, yes, in some ways this is the representation of, you know, simply the democratic process.
Archon Fung | 08:03
Yeah. So I think that is a bitter pill for people on the left and on the progressive side who, you know, simply lost the 2024 election as more Americans had a different policy preference on that question. And you may not like, you know, that policy preference, but it’s being implemented now for sure. You know, I think part of the difference in the reaction, obviously between Obama-era deportations and what’s happening now is the level of polarization. And so, uh, you know, you see something on the news, you don’t like Trump, you don’t like ice. It’s reform, uh, kind of confirming your biases and giving you more, um, ammo, uh, to, to, uh, be politically polarized. And so that’s what’s feeding some of the objections. Uh, but then, you know, it goes both ways, right? The immigration has been, uh, a, a fair amount of political theater as well, for sure.
Stephen Richer | 08:59
Well, certainly the Kristi Noem videos that show her in combat gear and the radio advertisements, I don’t remember that during the Obama administration. So part of this might just be the commercial packaging of it. But you know, I mean, again, we have to acknowledge that President Trump has been very successful in at least some of his promises. The border is more quiet now than it has been in any time in recent memory, the Arizona Republic, which is the main newspaper where I’m coming from Phoenix, it had re recently reported that the border was quiet, which was certainly not a term that we were using during the Biden administration, or even something we were saying as much with the Obama administration as far as how the public is perceiving this, Trump’s approval ratings have been going down over the past few months, and they’re quite low compared with other presidents at this time period in their second term.
Stephen Richer | 09:57
But consistently, his border policies and his immigration policies pull at a higher rate than does the rest of his presidency. Now, those have been going down as well, but I think it’s important that we disaggregate Trump’s actions and the administration’s actions on the Southwest border. Yes. Versus the migration sweeps. Because I think where we’ve seen more resistance and more anger has been going into American businesses that are in any place from Kansas to Boston, Massachusetts, where we are, and pulling people out of the workforce, then I think most Americans are supportive of putting more resources on the border and having fewer illegal crossings.
Archon Fung | 10:45
I think that that is, there are two different issues. I think, uh, part of what the administration is pretty vocal about, I don’t know, I, I don’t know if you agree, if this is the reasoning is, look, we’ve gotta make it really unpleasant for migrants of all kinds, all over the country in order to have the effect that we want to have at the border to make it, to reduce the incentives, to make it really unattractive for people, even if they get into the United States and make it to LA or San Francisco or Boston or Chicago or wherever. And then, so I think part of the, the overall strategy is what happens in the, you know, the outside of the border in, in all of these cities especially, is, uh, instrumental to achieving these outcomes of, uh, record low border crossing, infringements, et cetera. And then somebody like me would say, well, you know, that may be the case, but that’s still not right.
Stephen Richer | 11:43
But, but we, you can have a policy disagreement, but tell me, some people have presented this in the terms of we don’t want a king of this country, this is an, a threat to democracy, would articulate what you think the threat to democracy or the threat to American governance or the threat to American rule of law is with either with respect to the border policy or with respect to the migration sweeps.
Archon Fung | 12:10
Yeah, so I think with respect to the migration sweeps, I think what some people are quite concerned about is the perceived lack of accountability of, uh, immigration, customs, and enforcement of ICE. And you know, on the extreme rhetorically, people say ICE is the creation of a secret police that’s unaccountable. And in the big beautiful bill we see the budget, uh, spending for ice increased to, I think 28 billion with, uh, 10,000 officers, uh, promised to be hired, uh, somehow quickly vetted the creation of additional immigration courts, et cetera. And I think some evidence for that lack of accountability, number one is, um, the, I would think the, uh, I put it as kind of the lack of forthcoming, uh, the, the lack of candor of DOJ lawyers when they’re, uh, trying to explain what they knew and when they knew it about planes, going to a couple planes, going to El Salvador and a couple other places.
Archon Fung | 13:12
And then also, early on in this before the ramping up, uh, one episode that really shook me was the the arrest of this graduate student at Tufts, Rümeysa Öztürk. And I remember feeling really kind of nauseous when I saw the street cam video of her, uh, arrest there. And then a couple days later, I think you and I talked about this, this was back in March, maybe Marco Rubio, uh, comes on, uh, maybe just the next day, justifying that arrest. And, uh, if you could play the clip from Marco Rubio’s presser on the Öztürk arrest.
Reporter | 13:51
…In Boston was detained and handcuffed on the street by plainclothes agents a year ago. She wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza War. Could you help us understand what the specific action, uh, she took, led to her visa being revoked? Yeah. And what was your state department’s role in that process?
Marco Rubio
Oh, we revoked her visa. She’s a, it’s an F1 visa, I believe. Um, we revoked it, and here’s why. And, uh, I’ll say it again. I said it everywhere. Let be abundantly clear, okay? If you go apply for a visa right now, anywhere in the world, lemme just send this message out. If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just ’cause you wanna write op-eds, but because you wanna participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not gonna give you a visa if you lie to us and get a visa and then enter the United States, and with that visa participate in that sort of activity, we’re gonna take away your visa. And once you’ve lost your visa, you’re no longer legally in the United States. And we have a right, like every country in the world has a right to remove you from our country.
Stephen Richer | 15:02
I think it’s very, it’s very interesting that by his own admission, it is not just about writing an op-ed that he says it’s participating in this ruckus, participating right in uncivil, uh, discourse. And I, I, I think he’s contemplating, you know, some of the, the occupation of college campuses, college buildings, harassment of students. I think in particular, he is probably contemplating the harassment of Jewish students. That happened at a number of universities, definitely. Um, but he said not just the writing of an upend. And I think that’s important because I would imagine that the median American would be very uncomfortable with the notion that you would be deported simply because of something that you wrote that expressed a political opinion. Even if you are here on a visa status, I think that the average American would be much more sympathetic to the United States government deporting somebody who has participated in any sort of, uh, anything that sort of, uh, gives off the impression of violence or, uh, gets in someone else’s face. And so that’s from a popular opinion standpoint. Sure. I will point out that though, that the allocation of resources to ice itself surely is not undemocratic because federal administrations make budget allocation decisions every administration. Um, and, and, and so it can’t be that, that we’re talking about. And also the president has broad latitude with respect to non-citizens who are in this country. And so for me, I think it’s more about sort of process and sort of the manner in which it’s being done, or what is it for you.
Archon Fung | 16:54
So for me, a big part of it is accountability, right? So one of the central problems of any democracy is how to hold the hard edge of government accountable, whether it’s an urban police force or a military. And for the US military, the way that we preserve our democracy, or one principle, is that the military can’t operate domestically, right? So people have recognized for a long, long time that the state has to be able to have a lot of power and violent power, but that, that power poses a fundamental danger to, to democracy. And why I showed the, why I thought the clip would be interesting to discuss is what Rubio is doing is explaining to us, we the people, why what the administration was doing was justified in arresting ozturk. Right? Now the accountability problem is he says, look, it wasn’t just for an op-ed, it was for all of this other stuff.
Archon Fung | 17:48
But the problem is none of that other stuff has been substantiated. And now my union, the A A UP, the American Association of University Professors has sued the Trump administration for chilling speech. And in open court, some of the evidence has come out about what the dossiers on what these students were. And in hers, evidently all there is is writing an op-ed, right? And so he was either misinformed or intentionally misinformed us. And if it’s that latter, either of them, it really, um, inhibits our ability that is we the people as citizens to hold Marco Rubio and by extension ice accountable to what we want them to be doing, right? And so here, this is a point about, well, we need to have the facts about what’s going on in order to exercise our democratic function. And so it’s the, lack of accountability is a huge concern that people have about eyes.
Stephen Richer | 18:45
What, what would the exercise of the democratic function be at this point? You, what would holding Marco Rubio accountable if you had been better equipped with the facts look like at this point
Archon Fung | 18:56
To say, no, no, your administration, uh, is, uh, <laugh>. Well, the extreme version of it also that’s come out in the news, is a huge source of information, evidently for this initial string of, um, arrests and detentions of students, especially foreign students, is Canary mission, right? So then the accountability effort would be to say, Hey, ICE and Marco Rubio and Department of Homeland Security, what you’re doing is basically, you, you’ve been outsourced. You, you’re a contractor for Canary Mission in, uh, providing, they’re providing you target lists. And that’s not the way that immigration enforcement should occur in a democratic society.
Stephen Richer | 19:40
So, so is this all just a due process question, just that these people need to be going in front of immigration courts. They need to have their situations adjudicated. Now, I would point out that these are not normal Article three courts, and that these are immigration judges that are appointed by President Trump that only serve for the period that the president wishes them to serve. They’re not like normal Article three judges that serve their entire life, right? Or however long they want. Um, and so is that really all we’re asking for? And then this becomes a pretty democracy per usual, and it’s just maybe a policy difference that we don’t like.
Archon Fung | 20:20
I wish that’s all it were. I hope that’s all it is. I hope that’s all. It’s, lemme put it another way. I think that two things need to happen on the process side, right? One is more due process for people going through this, the immigration courts and then eventually other courts perhaps. But then also on the Democratic input side, I think that it’s a constant decision about how to execute policy that requires feedback from we the people at All Points, right? And so initially, you know, in November of 2024, a lot of people might have thought, oh yeah, we really need to expel every single immigrant in the United States who came who for whom there’s some flaw in how they got here. But then by March you realize, well, it’s gonna be hard to pick a lot of those strawberries, or a lot of those people are, uh, doing construction work or whatever, or work that other people don’t wanna do. And the consequences become more clear, and the democratic process needs to have some ability to adjust and say, Hey, look, we’ve kind of changed our mind a little bit on this because we didn’t realize exactly what we wanted in October of 2024.
Stephen Richer | 21:38
And I think the Chinese government has had fun making some propaganda videos of <laugh>, what they perceive to be normal Americans now doing, um, jobs that have been now outsourced because of migration policies and because of tariff policies that have been taken away, I guess, from China. Those are kind of, they’re kind of cute out there. <laugh>. Let’s talk about the, um, let’s talk about the response to this, because obviously it has been perceived as something that is either problematic from a policy standpoint, from a rule of law standpoint, or from a democracy standpoint by a large number of people. There have been protests in all 50 states in response to President Trump’s migration sweeps and border policy, and the public opinion is going down on this. So does that mean that these protests have been effective? Does that mean that just President Trump is losing popularity generally? Does that mean that we just get tired of presidents after a few months, and we get tired of politics <laugh>? What, what do you think’s in play here?
Archon Fung | 22:48
I think it’s a big, big question about what it means for a protest to work or a whole set of protests around, you know whole episode here. I think at minimum what it’s doing is raising the issue. So a bunch of people who aren’t paying much attention, who haven’t thought about it much are seeing all these people in the streets. There are news cameras on the five o’clock news, there are clips, and they’re saying, Hey, you know, what’s going on here? What do I think about what ICE is doing? How people in communities in LA and other places are responding? So it, um, elevates the debate, and I think that’s just like flat out democratic democratically positive now. It hasn’t reduced funding for immigration as we just talked about. And I don’t know politically whether it will be, uh, better for the Trump administration or better for opponents of the Trump administration to have these videos and all of the, the, um, kind of, uh, footage of protestors clashing with, uh, law enforcement all over the place. I mean, I think that’s an open question. What do you, what do you think? Is this weighing into the administration’s hands?
Stephen Richer | 23:58
No, so, so I think there’s a few things in play here. So one, we should point out that funding for ICE, which has been greatly increased in the bill that was recently passed is not funding for the border. So that’s Customs and Border patrol that’s actually on the border ICE is the organization that will go into communities, go into pockets of the United States, and remove people that they think are here unlawfully. So just making that distinction, I will tell you that I think the protests have gotten more effective. You know, that I have a certain amount of skepticism and wariness of all protests. I’m not a big protest person myself. I will tell you that I think Los Angeles initially very much played into the hands of the Trump administration. I think it looked like the type of lawlessness that many people said, I voted for Trump for this very reason. I think it was ironic that at the same time that people were complaining about ice agents wearing masks, many of the protestors that were captured in these photos were also wearing masks. I think any sort of burning of Waymo’s is very destructive. Um, and so, but I think since then, and some of these no Kings protests have looked more, quite frankly, like sort of the rah rah America that, um, that maybe is more appealing broadly.
Archon Fung | 25:23
Yeah. And so I think it’s an open question about whether or not, uh, that positive spirit, I mean, some of the, I did go to some of the big pro the hands-off protests, and they felt a little joyous to me, right? It was kind of happy, it was a little bit rah rah, it wasn’t the ones I saw were not full of anger. But, you know, these things can get violent pretty quickly. And so I think the protesters do better if they maintain a stance of non-violence, a positive, uh, stance that’s community oriented. Um, yeah.
Stephen Richer | 25:58
So, so let’s turn it to Ash for our remaining few minutes. And we can’t talk about protests without talking about some of the work that happens here at Ash, especially, I’m thinking of Erica Chenowith, who has very famously said that, uh, you, you try to hit a certain capacity, you try to hit a certain percentage of people who participate in popular protests. She’s put that at 3.5%. I think she’s currently revisiting that and saying, is that still the number? And she has a book coming out on that. And then she said that nonviolent protests are 10 times more effective than many violent protests. Um, so it’s been interesting to see some of that pop up. And I do think that some of the organizations that have been involved in this have been taking cues from social scientists like Erica and saying like, we gotta play it by the straight and narrow, because otherwise we’re gonna turn off a large part of our audience. But is there anything else that’s going on at Ash that’s sort of informs or response to some of these, these protests?
Archon Fung | 27:02
Well, uh, Erica and her colleagues are doing great, great work. And I think contributing to the, our knowledge about this in the public debate, one of the main things that they’re doing is just counting the sheer number of protests based on open source material journalism reports and so on. And so, it may be news to some people that the number of protests and the protest activity, uh, since this inauguration in Trump two, is way, way higher at a much higher rate than in Trump one. So in the initial months, people are, a lot of people are wondering, well, maybe it’s just fine, you know, nobody’s out in the streets. But it turns out that a lot of people are out in the streets and very different, and it’s much more decentralized than it was. It’s not, you know, just a few big marches in Washington. It’s in, you know, thousands of communities all across the United States. And so they’re doing great, great work in tracking that information. Um, and yeah, go ahead.
Stephen Richer | 27:56
Do you think it’ll keep up?
Archon Fung | 27:58
It’s a question. I think that’s one of the things to keep our eyes on is a lot of things could happen, right? The, the protesters could get exhausted. One thing that I’ve been really worried about, although this seems to have ebbed a little bit, is that there could be a really forceful response from National Guard, from, uh, uh, local law enforcement, et cetera. And you saw a bunch of that in la. Um, and I think, you know, I’m looking back to university protests from last year, and I think the, the level of, uh, it wasn’t as much force, but it was expulsions and student discipline, in some case, police, I think was successful in quelling protests in the next round. So that would be another dynamic. Um, and then the third dynamic is that, um, the protesters don’t listen to Erica, and it takes a violent direction. And the democratic point of these protests is not what the protestors do, but what all of us looking at the protestors, and nobody wants to be on the side of chaos and violence. And so that would also alter, you know, what happens.
Stephen Richer | 29:05
So think I’m reading that as stay tuned, which is a perfect segue, because we’re gonna be doing this next Tuesday again at 12 o’clock noon eastern time. And when Archon and I said we wanted to do this, we said we wanted to have fun because, uh, we should be having fun. We wanted to keep it interesting because there’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in the world and happening here at Ash. But we also wanted to keep it short because we don’t wanna bore you with a long-winded lecture. And so we are gonna keep it at right around 30 minutes, which is what we’re coming in at right now, and we wanna encourage your participation. So if you have any ideas for future shows or for future topics or for future formats, again, you can email info@ash.harvard.edu and then Archon, I’ll let you close it out.
Archon Fung | 29:59
Well, thanks a lot for joining us, everyone in this first experiment, and I hope that you’ll join in next Tuesday at noon. Thanks, Stephen.
Stephen Richer | 30:07
Thanks, Archon.
