for you. >> yeah. >> and democrats very often ofte new market is a race to convince a person to about who cares about you more picnics thank you to congresswoman alexandria ocasio-cortez but that is tonight's readout. you can follow me on instagram and follow our show accounts on instagram and tiktok, and also on bluesky. finally there, too. enjoy your holiday weekend, i will see you back here on monday. >> [ music ] . >> [ music ]

hi, everyone, we are so grateful that you are here and join us for this heschel edition of deadline whiteouts point with the election in the rearview mirror and what promises to be a turbulent year ahead, to put it mildly perhaps, now might be a good time to take a deep breath and get our bearings, to get really clear about what is coming and what we can do about it, what role we can play, however small. history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, and we have reason to believe that is probably going to happen when donald trump takes office once again in january. starting with immigration point the president-elect ran on a promise of mass deportations. heck, the republic called national convention was blanketed with signs that said mass deportations now! his vice president jd vance famously taunted undocumented immigrants, telling them to pack your bags, you're going home in six months.

this might also be a good time to remember what our dear friend rachel maddow likes to say, watch what they do, not what they say. and what donald trump did right out of the gate was to appoint two of the most unapologetic defenders of his troponin and even by trump's standards, controversial, family separation policy. stephen miller, who will be trump's deputy chief of staff for policy and john homan who will be trump's border czar. and when it comes to that, we don't have to guess what they plan to do. tom homan says it all out loud. >> it is so, you are carrying out a targeted enforcement operation, grandma is in the house, she is undocumented with does she get arrested, too? that depends, let the judge decide. >> is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families? >> of course there is point families can be deported together.

>> why should a child who is an american citizen have to pack up and move to a country that they don't know? >> because their parent entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally, so he created that crisis. >> they have it. all families, including grandma, deported with children potentially as collateral damage, as you said there. so, that's what they are saying in all likelihood is coming. but what can any of us do with that information? for that, we look to our friend and colleague, nbc's jacob, who is on the front lines of covering this humanitarian crisis during the first trump presidency. a reporting assignment that brought jacob face-to-face with the children, the kids who were ripped away from their families during trump's first family separation crackdown. >> i got home, i was home for a couple of days, it was at a kids birthday party.

when i got another call from katie, saying we are going to let you into the epicenter, and that place was called ursula, the central processing center in mcallen, texas. >> [ music ] >> i still remember that i was wearing a light blue, button- down shirt, i had my notepad. that was the time where i saw what had been talked about and rumored in the media, kids locked up in cages, sitting on these concrete or linoleum floors. >> [ music ] >> they thought that showing the world separations through the eyes of people like me, they would scare people that were attempting to come from coming and scare congressmen

into allowing them to have more strict immigration laws. >> so you are a tool. >> the bigley, as donald trump might say point >> it is so, as jacob reported, they thought showing this was the point. so, showing the cruelty was also a tool. and the voice you heard there interviewing jacob is filmmaker errol morris. he and jacob team up to turn jacobs searing body of reporting on the family separation crisis into a new film called separated. i was lucky enough to have jacob and errol morris join me on this program to discuss what inspired them to make this film and the urgency of recording for posterity, how unprecedented trump's family separation policy was. >> it is represents something different and something new, and it is important to remember and acknowledge that fact. when you are separating a two- month-old nursing infant from his mother, that is a big, big

difference. you can hear the head of the department of homeland security, the secretary, tell us that we are not doing anything unusual, we are just following the law. and why didn't they do this during the obama administration? obama deported lots and lots and lots of people. why didn't they do this during the obama administration? because they discussed it and decided it was immoral. >> discussed it and decided it was immoral. that's what stops obama and doesn't stop trump, that's a dividing line. and it is possible that it incentivized him. so, what happens now? joining us to help answer that question, none other than jacob, nbc news political and national correspondent, the author of separated: inside an american tragedy, the book on which the new film by errol

morris, separated, is based. and lee is here, immigration rates aware with the aclu. he argues the national class action challenge to the first trump administration's family separation policy. jacob, i start with you, the book and the film are all done without knowledge that trump would be re-elected. he has been, and i wonder if you can just start with what you think your body of reporting will be in a second term. what has been committed to on paper, the kinds of people that are in place, and what, with your knowledge and expertise, you expect them to do on the front of family separation? first of all, nicole, thank you so much for doing this special broadcast about this. i think when an republican appointed judge called one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country, and i don't think that you can understand what will happen in a second trump term unless you

look back at what happened in the first grade and plainly and simply, you mentioned those signs that we all saw at the republican national convention, and i got to see myself in person from the floor there, that's an mass deportation now. i think the baseline thing that everybody needs to understand and remember and sort of internalized is that mass deportation is family separation. it is just family separation by another name. it is not ripping children away from their parents at the border, but it is ripping parents away from their children at their homes, in their schools, in their communities, a lot larger than the 5500 children who were deliberately taken away from their parents, according to the aclu, and are traumatized for life. physicians for human rights said this was torture, according to the u.n. definition of it. the american academy of pediatrics says it was government sanctioned child abuse. and if we think about -- and i hope one day off 5500 of those children will be able to tell their story of what the trump

administration deliberately did to them, and to be a bit really clear, what they deliberately did to them was harm them, was put them in the cages you are seeing on your screen right now, for no other reason than to scare people from coming to this country, because they had some of the most desperate situations on planet earth. in order to basically, in a lot of cases, save their lives and come here for a better one. none of this was an accident. as adam client and the atlantic, the cruelty was the point, and now they're looking at super sizing what they did in the first term in a second trump administration. >> jacob, if you look at the sort of players on the board, and with your knowledge of where their ambitions, for lack of a better word, were stymied, what is your assessment of how capable this new team will be in carrying out mass deportations? >> both errol morris and i learned in the making of separated and reporting the

book that during the first trump term, they wanted to separate maybe as many as 20 or 30,000 children from their parents at the border if they were able to do so, and only because of the work of the aclu, of immigration attorneys on the front line, who incidentally by the way, are as important as any first responder, these are literally life-saving roles that these people are doing, looking out for children and parents, their falling through the clerics really of immigration enforcement sort of apparatus. if it wasn't for them, it would have been far, far worse. and you have.tom homan, katelyn dickerson says was the intellectual father of the family separation policy and was pushing for it as early as during the obama administration. you have got stephen miller, who as he was here in the movie, was calling to non- senate confirmed political appointees, low-level people within the government, in order to just sort of coordinate on immigration enforcement priorities of the first trump

term. and when i say priorities, i mean ripping children apart from their parents. and the list goes on. you know, we don't sort of know the full staffing of all of these agencies, but there are many of them. the department of homeland security, the department of justice, the department of health and human services, all of them had a hand in what became the family separation policy, and all of them will have a hand again and what happens to parents and children who have come to this country in the second trump administration. and we are talking about literally hundreds of officials potentially, that they will have the ability to influence in this second term, who some of them may have been a part of the first one, others were a part of the first one and tried to resist and maybe thrown out of the government in a second. all of that is able to play out. >> lee, the film -- this was something i had a chance to talk to both of you in a screening this week, and the film makes clear that even with

what trump perceives to be a mandate, and i think it is debatable whether that is what he actually has in a second term for what he is talking about here, he was stymied, as jacob said, by republican appointed judges. just talk about the legal hurdles facing him as he starts with this plan, as jacob said, which is essentially family separation by another name. >> yeah, i think when people see really egregious stuff, whether it is judges were looking at the legality or the public, i think they will push back, and i think you are absolutely right that whatever mandate he has on immigration maybe to reform policies, we want reform of the policies, border policies and more generally, but when you cross a line, the american public tends to say, wait, that is not what we meant, and that is what we saw on family separation. we put the evidence before the judge and he called the policy brutal, as jacob said, a shameful period in our history.

we educated him about the cases, and i think that's what the public learned, and they took to the streets peacefully, but took to the streets and said not in our name. so, we will see what happens going forward. i mean, the legal hurdles on family separation, we now have an ironclad consent decree that says no more family separation. we will see if the trump administration tries to get around it, and as jacob pointed out, there are other ways they can try and go about family separation on a mass scale and for his parents to decide, am i going to take a u.s. citizen child to a country they have never seen before or leave them behind? and wanting the immigration laws do is they provide an enormous amount of discussion to a president, and if the president really wants to be harsh, they can be harsh, but in the past, both democratic and republican administrations have said we don't need to tear families apart. we don't need to go after non- criminals who are working hard. and the trump administration is coming in and saying we are going to deport millions of people, we don't care if it is

a grandmother, we don't care if they have u.s. citizen children. so, i think the whole country is going to have to push back on that and say that is not what we met. >> you know, the first time he ran and won, he ran on building a wall, which doesn't put the family or the family member here illegally in the mind of the voter. to jacob's reporting over the summer, people waved around mass deportations, it is an applause line at trump and vance rallies. how far in sort of the other ring and the fear of the illegal immigrant or asylum seeker or worker -- how far do you think we have traveled as a country between '16 and '24? x yeah, i think that is the right question. i think we have traveled farther with anti-immigrant sentiment and i'm depressed about that. i have been doing this three decades and i think this is the worst i have seen, but i am still there are lines the american public will not let be

crossed, and i think the challenge for us is to talk about the human stories and not let this just be abstract principles or statistics. you know, what we saw during the first family separation period was just unconscionable. a little boy was taken away, a four-year-old boy, who had glasses, and they took him away, but they didn't let him get his glasses case. all day long, although mother was thinking about was well they let him get another pair of glasses if they break, will they show him where he can put his glasses at night? an 18-year-old little boy being stuffed in a car and the mother could see him craning his little neck to see her as the car drove away without him. and even the families that are now reunited, little children just worrying about being taken away again in the middle of the night. we were just working with a three-year-old boy who stands by the window every day to look to see if men are going to take him away again. that's what i hope the american

public will realize. these are not just statistics, abstract principles, they are beyond human lives. that doesn't mean we don't reform the system, but let's have some amount of humanity when we deal with it. >> i mean, jacob, it is unbearable to hear what amounts to emotional torture of children in the name of, you know, u.s. immigration policy. i wonder, um, what your hopes are for the impact of this film now on the eve of a second trump presidency? >> i think lee said the operative word, nicole, humanity. there is an amazing organization here in california that takes people down to the border called this is about humanity, so they can see for themselves who is impacted by these policies, and i will never forget reporting with you, i have the chills just saying this right now. in that summer of 2018, those days between june 13th and june 20th, from the moment i walked into that 1500 -- excuse me, 250,000 square-foot former walmart where they were holding over 1000 boys, who were there only because most of them had been taken away from their moms

and dads when across the border, or when i went into the facility in mcallen, texas, you show the video earlier, shoulder and locked up in cages, laying on those linoleum floors, laying under blankets, supervised by security contractors in a watchtower. i have never seen anything like it, i don't think the american public had ever been exposed to anything like that, certainly not to the degree of the family separation policy. and what it led to was not even a bipartisan outrage, it was really a universal outrage, where people all around the world came out into the streets , it didn't matter your political party or persuasion, sort of no demographic barrier mattered, the pope spoke out about this, in a way where everybody, no matter if you were far right or far left, absolutely condemned what the trump administration was doing to those children, and i think that sadly, people have wanted to know less about what is going on with our immigration system because of the way that immigration has looked during the last four years of the biden administration. and my hope is that we can come

back to a place where we can have a common sense, clear eyed conversation about who the people are that are coming to this country, why they're coming to this country, that we are all fellow human beings, we should treat each other as such. we all did it, i know we did, we did it together in the summer of 2018, and i know we can do it together again, not as part of the reason why we made this film, to remind people in this moment of what happened, what was possible sort of in the negative sense, but also sort of in the inspirational, positive sense about how people within the government fought back, people came out to the streets to fight back, and it was one significant policy reversal of the last trump term. he said i didn't like the site or the feeling of those families being separated. he sat there in the oval office and with his sharpie signed an order reversing the policy with kiersten standing over his shoulder, the same person that finds the policy in the first place. and that kind of action is possible by the american public again.

>> i am just lapping up both of your optimism and positivity, but you are right, i want to do two things, i'm going to ask both of you to stick around. i'm going to show more of this film and of the heroes, people like yourself, who help. also ahead when we come back, what does this mean right now for the more than 4 million children who are u.s. citizens living with a mom or dad who is undocumented, wondering what is going to happen to their family if and when donald trump unleashes another family separation crackdown? and a tool that each of us has at our fingertips right now, the role of outrage and public outcry, this inflection point, something to keep your eyes on. all those stories and more when deadline white house continues after a quick break, don't go anywhere. >> [ music ] ywhere. >> [ music ] ♪♪ over 600,000 usps employees working in sync

to ensure everything sent on its holiday ride ends with a moment of joy. ♪♪ the united states postal service.

♪ you gotta give the people ♪

♪ you gotta give the people ♪ ♪ you gotta give the people ♪ ♪ what they want ♪ wait till you see this. i hope if he is elected and does family separation again, the outrage is the same. i hope that the american public has not become desensitized to it. five years later, we are still trying to reunite up to 1000 children, it is not over. these children are not all back with their parents and their suffering. but you must believe that we are past the point of the public getting outraged again, because he has said i will do it again.

we will have our answer to that question very soon. jacob and lee are back with us. lee, because so much of it hinged on what you're talking about, the public response, judges appointed by conservative republicans, describing the policies brutal and likening it to child abuse and trauma, there is reason -- i mean, all those things are still in place, right? whether we are exactly the same country i think is an open question, but we still have an ability if we see something that crosses a line to do something. um, back to the kinds of people who are on the board, there is homan and there is miller, there is also kristi known who has been tapped to lead and matt gaetz of the doj. none of those appointments have the ability to deprive the country of the brakes, which are independent judges, which is public outrage, which is journalists like jacob who were invited into the facility to see the policy.

but what, on a sort of logistical level, are they talking about in terms of having to display some confidence that we have never seen? i mean, how do you move millions of people around the country to send them anywhere? >> i think that is a good question and i think there will be logistical difficulties. you know, whether they have been working on it for four years and preparing, they say they have, we will have to see, but there will definitely be logistical difficulties. one thing i will say is right now is a time for everyone to take stock of where they are going to be and not to despair. and you know, there are big things we can all do, but i think people need to just think, i can do one little thing. i always worry, especially with the young people that they think this is too big for me to do anything about, so i'm just going to sit it out. just do any little thing. if you are a lawyer, young lawyer just take one case one person who has faced removal back to danger, or tutor a

young child who is trying to learn english, just something, join a march. i think we really need to not despair, and there are serious judges on the bench who will call out illegality. you know, we are being clear eyed about what we can accomplish in courts, we are going to try, but it is also going to take that national effort. i think any civil rights lawyer throughout time will tell you the courts are one part of it, but it takes a national movement. and so, there are going to be harsh things that are going to happen that we are not going to stop and we are clear eyed about that, but there are egregious things like family separation where we all need to come together and say, wait, that is not what we meant about immigration reform. that's i mean, the other piece is that there are people in the government who come face-to- face with people impacted. let me play another clip from the film and show folks a couple of them. >> when did you become aware of separations? >> our field staff started to notice very young kids, anyone below five, that is kind of

unusual, right? because most often when you have a kid that young, they're traveling with a parent. jim delacruz was the supervisor of all the federal field staff. he had his team keep our spreadsheet. it was growing, growing with the number of kids. >> one of the issues i raised to scott light as a concern is we have run out of beds for babies. we were seeing so many babies, but the babies can't tell you they were separated. we were very concerned that some children's separations would be permanent because the

parents would be removed from the united states through deportation, so the families had made the journey together, but now the children would remain in the united states while the parents would return to home country. these are state created orphans. >> it is are families separated by action of the federal government as a tool of immigration policy. >> it boggles the mind that government workers had to take that tragic reality and send an email that said, "we are seeing so many babies, but the babies can't tell you they were separated." how do you find the parents of a baby? >> right, i mean, so that is one of the problems. the judge commented it seems like the federal government keeps better track of property than children. that was one of the major parts of this, is that we had no

records. so, we are still searching for some families now, six years later. the trump administration gave us just these records. we think the parent might be in this country or maybe they are at this address. so, we created a steering committee with three ngos, the women's refugee commission, a great law firm, paul weiss, and they helped look for all the families and did unbelievable -- but sometimes it required just on the ground, going town to town, looking for the spirits. so now, we have little children who have been without the parents for six years. they will not even remember their parents, and some of the parents are coming back now, there is no relationship anymore, and that is so heartbreaking to see the parent try to rebuild the relationship. and everyone talks about the children's trauma that is understandable and that is right, but also the parents, imagine a parent, the first thing the child comes back and

says to his mommy, didn't you love me enough to keep me? why didn't you fight for me? when i went to el salvador, i met a man who said his child got off the plane, was sent back to el salvador after months, and the first thing he said is literally popular, why didn't you want me anymore? so, there is so much to rebuild, but it was so gratuitous. and the parents weren't going to come at all, that was the purpose, we are going to make it so cruel that people won't come anymore. when i talked to families, when i met them, i said would you have come anyway if you had known your child was going to be taken? they just said what choice did i have? i couldn't let my child be killed there, i couldn't be killed. and there's this idea that people are here illegally, if they are applying for asylum, asylum has been in our law forever, and we said after world war ii we would never ever send people back to danger with out at least screening them, and that is what people are trying to eliminate now, no screenings even, not even a basic hearing. so, they are not here

illegally, they are trying to apply for asylum, and it was just flat out gratuitous royalty. the worst thing i have seen in my 30 years doing this work. x does it take a toll on you? >> you know, i think it takes a toll on everyone who does this work, but ultimately, you see the clients and you can't really say, well, i am suffering. you know, that is not to minimize the advocates who are on the ground, seeing it every day, there really going through a lot, but ultimately, what keeps you going is seeing these families try to persevere and how much they are going through, and you know you just need to keep fighting. >> i mean, it is a lesson for anyone sort of feeling disappointed about the election, that there is someone hurting more than you or more scared than you. that's right, exactly. but thank you so much. the film is incredible, you are incredible in it, thank you for talking to us. jacob sticks around. when we come back, we're going to talk to jacob and two more experts about what trump's promised for the future of mass deportations means for families and for the broader american economy. don't go anywhere.

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if you believe that immigrants are an existential threat to the american way of life, and i do think that is how some of these folks think, then once you have exhausted all the ordinary things the law permits, then all that is left

for those people for whom anything is possible is to do something extraordinary in its cruelty. and that's what happened here. >> extraordinary in its cruelty, that's what happened here. and that is what possibly could happen here again. joining our conversation is dr. william lopez, he is a professor at the university of michigan school of public health, author of the book separated: family and community in the aftermath of an immigration raid. his forthcoming book, ice in the heartland, focuses on the community-wide impacts of immigration raids at work sites but also joining us as andrea flores, she served as an immigration policy adviser for both the obama and biden in ministrations. she is now a forward.com, a bipartisan group that advocates for reforming immigration

policy. jacob is still here as well. andrea, let me start with you. some of this is made possible by the fact that immigration animates voters to vote for politicians that advocate the harshest policies available, and the facts in the november election are that kamala harris was the one who backed a very, very tough -- all of her policy ideas, bills that would have solved the problem, or gone a long way toward solving it, and trump killed that bill. but it does feel like the debate in this country revolves around emotional axes, not facts like that. what is the policy solution that gets at the emotional rage people feel around this issue? >> one of the biggest issues in this election is actually democrats were campaigning on a policy solution that voters could understand, because what voters had seen for the last four years was that president biden had promised to, one,

keep families together, fix our immigration system, pursue immigration reform, what they actually saw over the last four years was gross mismanagement at the border and an inability to respond when governor abbott started busting asylum-seekers into cities, and the answer that was often given by the white house was there is nothing to be done about these challenges because the law was broken, but voters chose president biden's immigration agenda once over trump because he promised to bring humanity and order, but those promises weren't delivered. and so, when vice president harris hand on a belt was a d.c. insider talking point, it didn't really address what communities had experienced when suddenly there were more immigrants and their communities and there was no place to house them, connect them with work permits, and that was one of the biggest strategic missteps the last four years, so democrats need

to get back to talking about an affirmative vision for immigration reform and one that connects to what voters are concerned about today. >> what does that sound like, andrea? what is the message and, you know, can you reverse the gains that the republicans and donald trump made among people who have never voted for a republican in their life, but they are so exasperated and frustrated that nothing seems to be happening? >> you can absolutely reverse the gains, because of the longtime policy goals of the democratic party remain popular and they remained popular in this election. keeping families together and protecting them from separation is a popular issue. but you didn't hear democrats campaign on that. you saw them attempt to mimic what republicans have been saying consistently for eight years, which is that immigration [ inaudible ] when jd vance talked about immigrants being

part of the housing problem, where was the response to that, and where was the narrative that the federal reserve was talking about, that economists were talking about, that but for immigrants coming to the united states in the last four years, our economic recovery would have been much worse? however, democrats do have to re-center the interests of american communities and those that receive immigrants, because if there is not a plan for when we welcome immigrants, if we are not working with mayors and governors and making sure that the impacts on the working class, on people of color, on other immigrant communities who are already there, then you can see tensions rising. and good, modern immigration policy that allows people to come in in an orderly and predictable way is far more popular than what president trump is promising to do, which is potentially remove the parents of 4 million u.s. children. those extreme policies have not been popular, and i do not believe that is what the electorate was choosing. i believe they were voting against the disorder they had seen under democrats. >> yeah. bill, let me ask you about what

is ahead and how it will impact the economy potentially, and workplaces. >> sure, that is a great question. as we all know, immigrants are an important and critical part of this economy. we see that the removal of immigrants will make much of this work often undone. it is important to note that there is also this element of fear and what we call spillover effects of immigration enforcement, and what that means is it is not only the deportations themselves that shape the lives of families in the u.s., and also the fear of these deportations. when families are scared of the possibility of deportation, they go to stores less, they drive less, they engage in a normal finance and commerce of their community less. and they certainly use social security -- excuse me, social support services less, impacting their health, and ultimately costing the economy more later, too. >> am going to ask all of you to stick around, i have to

sneak in a quick break. we will all be right back on the other side. the other side. to 60% off gift say i get you. etsy has it.

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during the obama administration, the idea had come up in dhs and secretary johnson had said they were not separate children from their parents, it was inhumane. it was very clear to me that i was not going to win any arguments. i did say these policies would have the effect of overwhelming refugee resettlement capacity. it would lead to a backup into border patrol, because i know that was someone that had persuasive value, and the answer i got in the room was only at first, and then there will be a deterrent effect. i took that back to my superiors at the department of health and human services. i spent a little bit of time talking about how it would be harmful to children, but frankly, i didn't spend as much time on that as i did on how it would be harmful to the program because harm to children was

part of the point. they believed that it would terrify families into not coming. >> we are back. i wonder, bill, if you could just talk about the asymmetry, right? there are drawbacks to these policies that -- at an empathy level, at a humanity level that are universally abhorrent, but there are policy levels that rely on that revulsion, and i wonder how you outmaneuver policies designed to have the emotional impact they are having and still protect people, if that makes sense? >> yeah, i think this is an excellent point. what we saw during the trump administration is that absolutely, the cruelty was the point, and that much of the immigration enforcement was selected by former president trump were meant to be visible and were meant to be deterrence, and we saw that certainly in the family separation crisis on the texas-mexico border, we saw

it also in the worksite raids that happened in the summer of 20 18th at the same time. they were meant to be physical spectacles. at the same time as gathering energy among his base. trump originally also proposed the border wall, but saw that to be too expensive, so saw types of immigration enforcement that he could engage in that were smaller, smaller pockets throughout the country, this was certainly part of the point. to your question, what do we do about these policies that are meant to be visible? we can often combat them by telling stories and doing what we can to be visible about their impacts rate on other side of this, jacob, of course, and errol did a great job of this in their documentary, separated, which shows the impact of these separations on the southern border. we also need to continue having

these discussions, engage in our research which shows ultimately what the harms of this immigration enforcement does to individuals and families, but also across communities, regardless of race and regardless of immigration status. >> you know, jacob, it comes back to the body of reporting ahead for you, my friend, and i wonder if you look at sort of the deployment, both of the cruelty, not even sparing children, and the revulsion of the public, projected onto what is promised, what is ahead, which is mass deportations on the scale that in human history as very few chapters to even turn to, i mean, are they planning on using trains, are they planning on using buses, who drives them? are they planning on using planes? when abbott and desantis moved a few thousand people around, it had a paralyzing effect. the idea of moving millions of people around has sweeping, sweeping societal and economic

impacts, and i wonder if you're seeing any flickers of objection from the business community, business leaders? >> i think that there is a duty, i think that we have a duty to do exactly what we saw in the trump administration and actually what we did in the biden administration as well, which is hold a mirror up to society, to show them exactly what is happening, whether or not they want to see it themselves. i do think people have wanted to know less over the course of the last four years of what this all looks like, and i have to say, it is a profound honor to be on with dr. lopez and andrea both, they know more about this more than anybody that i know and can tell you about it in ways that i am not capable of, but you heard jonathan white refer to it in the movie, the obama administration, deterrence, i think we have a duty as journalists to point out that deterrence has been the underlying philosophy of the united states immigration enforcement apparatus for

decades. under democrats and republicans both. bill clinton built the first wave of border walls. george w. bush created dhs, as you know, in the wake of 9/11, but also increased exponentially the size of the border patrol. barack obama deported more people than any president in the history of the united states, which is why like that, donald trump was able to separate 5500 children from their parents like it was nothing. the system was set up in that way, and well as andrea said, president biden promised a fair and a safe and an orderly system, a humane system, what we ended up seeing under the biden administration was almost anything but. anybody can close their eyes and remember del rio, migrants under the bridge, the horses there, the haitians. i watched haitians deported back to a country where many of them, in all likelihood, could be at risk of being killed themselves because of the gang violence there. i watched the biden administration deport more people to haiti than ever before. and i think when we look at what are the next four years

going to be like for people in our line of work, nicole, it is a duty to show people that policies like this haven't stopped people from coming to this country and they probably never will, which is why as andrea said, a new approach is what we are all the workmen and what that would actually look like. >> dr. lopez and andrea perez, we will continue to call on you, thank you for spending time with us today. we are going to sneak in one more brick, jacob and i will be back on the other side. >> [ music ] >> reporter:

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jacob, i think i said this to you after the election, when i first saw the film, it was before we knew the outcome of the election. i watched it again after trump prevailed and when the popular vote swept the swing states, and after taking in all your reporting with the convention, with the mass deportations, now signs. i am wondering if you can just sort of contextualize our marching orders as a public? and i know you feel like you have got yours, you have got

your mirror, you have got your beat, but as a country, what is our marching order, what is our sort of obligation to keep our eyes on this space, as rachel maddow might say? >> more than anything, keep our eyes open. i really feel like in the last four years, the general public, a lot of us who were very invested in what was happening to the children during the trump administration, decided that we wanted to know less, it was too complicated, it was too messy, it was hard to see or stomach or understand. that's why i wanted to do this with errol. the film is both a forensic examination of the policy under the trump administration by an academy award-winning director and a team, but it is also a reminder of what this all looked like and how everyone came together in order to stop it. and i think in less folks are paying attention, i know that there is a desire to tune out, to turn away, to walk away from something people feel that is scary or dangerous or a reminder of a very traumatic four years for a lot of people

out there, now is not the time to do that, now is the time to double down, open our eyes. i talked to lindsay from the immigrant offenders law center, she said we had 30 lawyers under the first trump term, we have 200 ready to go. right now, there are people on the front lines that are sort of preparing for the type of deliberate cruelty, and that is me as a journalist, this is not my opinion, the deliberate cruelty of the first trump administration, they are saying that it will come again, and if you are turning away, you're not going to see it, you're not going to be able to react to it in a way that will stop them. >> those are the two things, people want to turn away, but they want to know how they can help, they can help by not turning away. jacob, thank you so much for spending this hour with us and for bringing this film to all of us. and thanks to all of you for letting us into your homes