indifference. if you are looking at those stars, decide what kind of government you want to have. >> you have to come back before opening day and we'll have that hour-long conversation about baseball is the greatest game ever played. >> ever played. >> ever. ever. >> happy to. >> i love you so much and i love having all -- >> love you, nicole. boy, this was very special. >> thank you so much. >> thank you. thank you. thank you. >> you can navigate all of ken's films on ken's digital flat form, unum. we are so grateful to all of you for letting all of us into your homes for this very special edition of "deadline white house." with the election in the

rear-view mirror and a turbulent year ahead, to put it mildly, perhaps, now might be a good time to get our bearings and be clear about our bearings and what role we can play, however small. let's remember what legendary document taryn ken burns has said on this program, quote, 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 off once again in january. starting with immigration. the president-elect ran on a promise of mass deportations. heck, the republican national convention was blanketed with signs that read, mass deportations now. his vice president, j.d. vance, famously taunted undocumented immigrants telling them to, quote, 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 draconian and even by trump standards controversial family separation policy. stephen miller, who will be trump's deputy chief of staff for policy, and tom homan, who will be trump's border czar. when it comes to the two of them, we don't have to guess what they plan to do. tom homan says it all out loud. >> reporter: so you are carrying out a targeted enforcement operation, grandma's in the house, she's undocumented. she get arrested too? >> it depends. let the judge decide. >> is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families? >> of course there is. families can be deported together. >> reporter: 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 they were in the country illegally so he created that crisis. >> there you have it. whole families, splitting grandma, deported. children potentially as collateral damage as he said there. so that's what they're 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 sebrov who is on the front line of covering this humanitarian crisis. it 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 and it was at a kid's birthday party where i got another call saying we're going to let you into the epicenter of separations, and that place was called ursula, the central

processing center in mccallam, texas. i still remember i was wearing a light blue button down shirt. i had my noka. that was the time where i saw what had been talked about, rumored in the media. kids locked up in cages sitting on these concrete or linoleum floors. they thought that showing the world separations through the eyes of people like me they would scare the [ bleep ] out of people that were attempting to come from coming and scare congress into allowing them to have more strict immigration laws. >> so you were a tool? >> bigly as donald trump might

say. >> 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 erroll morris. he and jacob soberov team up on the family separation crisis into a new film called "separated." i was lucky enough to have jacob and erroll morris join me on this program to see what inspired them to make this program and the urgency for recording for postert this was. >> this represents something different and something new, and it's important to remember and acknowledge that fact. when you're separating a 2-month-old nursing infant from his mother, that's a big, big difference. you can hear the head of the department of homeland security,

the secretary, tell us that we're not doing anything unusual, we're just following -- >> the law. >> -- 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 the dividing line. it's possible that it incentivized them. so what happens now? joining us to help answer that question, none other than jacob soboroff. the author of "separated, inside an american tragedy" the book which the new film "separated" and lee gallarnt is here. lawyer with the aclu.

he argues the first class action suit. 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 the second term? what has been committed to on paper? the kinds of people that are in place. what with your expertise and knowledge you expect them to do on the family front separation. >> first of all, nicole, thank you so much for doing this special broadcast about this. i think what a republican-appointed judge called george w. bush 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 and what happened in the first and plainly and simply you mention the signs that we all saw at the republican national convention that i got

to see myself that said mass deportation now. i think the baseline thing that everybody needs to understand and remember and sort of internalize is that mass deportation is family separation. it's just family separation by another name. it's not ripping parents away from their children at the border, it's in their homes, schools, communities in the way that are orders of magnitude larger than the 5500 children who were deliberately taken away from their parents according to the aclu at the center there 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 said it was government-sanctioned child abuse. if we think about and i hope one day all 5500 of those children will be able to tell their story of what the trump administration deliberately did to them, and to be clear, what they deliberately did to them was harm them, put

them in the cages that you're seeing on your screen for no other reason than to scare people away, from coming to the country, because they had some of the most desperate situations on planet earth. we're going to in a lot of ways save their lives and come here. none of this was an accident. the cruelty was the point and now they're looking at essentially sum err 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 erroll 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. only because of the work of the aclu, immigration attorneys on the front line who incidentally are as important as any first responder, they are life saving roles looking out for children and parents that are falling through the cracks really of the immigration enforcement sort of apparatus. if it wasn't for them, it would have been far, far worse. you have tom homan who caitlyn dickerson said about family separation was the intellectual father of the family separation policy and was pushing for it as early as during the obama administration. you've got stephen miller who as you'll hear in the movie was calling to non-senate confirmed political appointees, lower level people within the government, in order to sort of coordinate on immigration enforcement priorities of the first trump. 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 in what happens to parents and children who have come to this country in the second trump administration. and we're talking about literally hundreds of officials potentially that they'll 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 may be thrown out of government in a second. all of that is yet to play out. >> lee, the film -- this was something i had a chance to talk to both of you at a screening this week, and the film makes clear that even with what trump perceives to be a mandate, i think it's debatable whether that's what he has in the second term for what he's 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's judges who are looking at the legality or the public, i think they will push back. i think you're absolutely right that whatever mandate he has on immigration may be to reform policies, we want reform of policies, border policies and more generally, but when you cross a line the american public tends to say, well, wait, that's not what we meant. that's what we saw in family separation. >> yeah. >> 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'll see what happens going forward. the legal hurdles around family separation, we now have an ironclad dissent decree. it says no more family separation. we'll see if they try to get around it. as jacob pointed out, there are other ways to go about family separation at a mass scale and decide am i going to take my u.s. citizen child to a country they've never seen before or leave them behind? one of the things the immigration laws do is provide an enormous amount of discretion to a president. if the president wants to be harsh, they can be harsh. the 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. the trump administration is coming in saying, we're going to deport millions of people. we don't compare are if it's a grandmother. the whole country has to push

back and say, that's not what we meant. >> the first time he ran and won he ran on building a wall. to jacob's reporting over the summer, people waived around mass deportations, it's an applause line at trump and vance rallies. how far in sort of the othering and the fear of the illegal immigrant, asylum seeker or worker, how far do you think we've traveled as a country between '16 and '24? >> yeah, i think that's a right question. the i do think we've traveled far. there's more anti-immigrant sentiment. this is the worst i have seen, but i'm still hopeful there are lines the american public will not let be crossed. i think one of the things, the challenge for us is to talk about the human stories and not let this just be abstract principles or statistics. what we saw during the first

family separation period was just unconscionable. a little boy was taken away, a 4-year-old boy who had glasses, and they took him away and they didn't let him get his glasses case. all day long the mother was thinking will they let him get another pair of glasses? will they show him where to put his glasses? 18-year-old boy craning his neck. and even the families that are now reunited. little children just worrying about being taken away in the middle of the night. working with a 3-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 just not ak ggregate statistics or principles, let's have some amount of humanity when we deal with it. >> jacob, it's unbearable to hear what amounts to emotional

torture of children in the name of, you know, u.s. immigration policy. i wonder 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's an amazing organization here in california that takes people down to the border called this is about humanity so that they can see for themselves who's impacted y these policies. i can never forget reporting with you, i have the chills right now, in the summer of 2018 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 1,000 boys. they were there because they had been taken away from their moms and dads, or the facility in mccallam facility. they were lying on the floors

under mylar blankets supervised by security officers in a watch tower. i had never seen anything like that and i don't think the american people had been exposed to something like that 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. didn't matter 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's going on with our immigration system because of the way that immigration has looked during this 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're all fellow human beings and we should treat each other as such. we all did it. we did it together in the summer of 2018 and i know we can do it together again. that's 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 an inspirational positive sense of how people in the government fought back, people came out to the streets to fight back. it was the one significant policy reversal of the last trump term. he said, i didn't like the sight or feeling of those families being separated and sat in the oval office and with a sharpy signed an order with kirsten nielsen standing over his shoulder. and that kind of action by the american public is possible again. >> i am just lapping up both of your optimism and positivity, but you're right, the facts bear it out. i want to do two things. i'm going to ask both of you to

stick around. i'm going to show more of the film and the heroes, people like yourself who helped jacob and erroll tell the story. also 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's going to happen to their family if and when donald trump unleashes another family crackdown. something to keep your eyes on. all those stories and more when "deadline white house" continues after a fresh break. the don't go anywhere.

my moderate to severe crohn's symptoms kept me out of the picture. now i have skyrizi. ♪ i've got places to go and i'm feeling free. ♪ ♪ control of my crohn's means everything to me. ♪ ♪ control is everything to me.♪ and now i'm back in the picture. feel significant symptom relief at 4 weeks with skyrizi, including less abdominal pain and fewer bowel movements. skyrizi helped visibly improve damage of the intestinal lining. and with skyrizi, many were in remission at 12 weeks, at 1 year, and even at 2 years. don't use if allergic. serious allergic reactions, increased infections, or lower ability to fight them may occur. before treatment, get checked for infections and tb. tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms or vaccines.

liver problems leading to hospitalization may occur when treated for crohn's. now's the time to take control of your crohn's. ♪ control is everything to me. ♪ ask your doctor about skyrizi, the #1 prescribed biologic in crohn's disease.

[coughing] —sounds like you need to vaporize that cold. nyquil vapocool? it's nyquil plus a rush of vicks vapors. ♪vapocooooool♪ nyquil vapocool. the vaporizing night time, sniffling, sneezing, coughing, best sleep with a cold, where can nfl fans get a great deal that turns christmas day into game day? x marks the spot. the nfl is streaming christmas day games exclusively on netflix, and you don't want to miss a moment. gather round the game because nothing says holidays like family and football. now xfinity customers can add streamsaver including netflix, peacock, and apple tv+ for just $15 a month. stuff your stockings with tons of entertainment and tons of savings. bring on the good stuff. xfinity.

i hope if he's elected and does family separation again the outrage is the same. i hope the american public has not become desensitized to it. five years later we are still trying to reunite up to a thousand children. it's not over. these children are not all back with their parents and they're suffering, but he must believe that we're past the point of the public getting outraged again because he has said, i'll do it again. >> we'll have our answer to that question very soon. nbc's jacob soboroff is 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 policy as brutal and likening it to child abuse and trauma, there's reern -- all of those things are still in place. whether we're exactly the same country i think is another question, but we still have an ability if we see something that crosses the line to do something. back to the kinds of people who are on the board. there is homan and there is miller. there's also christy nome and matt gaetz at doj. none of those appointments have the ability to deprive the country of the breaks, which are independent judges, which is public outrage and reporters like jacob invited in to see the policy. what on a sort of logistical level ever they talking about in terms of having to display some

competence that we've never seen? how do you move millions of people around the country to send them anywhere? >> that's a good question. i think there will be logistical difficulties. whether they've been, working on it for four years and preparing, they say they have, we'll have to see. there will be logistical difficulties. one thing i would say is right now is a time for everyone to take stock of where they're going to be and not to despair. there are big things we can all do. i always worry, this is too big for me to do anything so i'm going to sit it out. tutor a young child who is trying to learn english. or something, or join a march. i think we need to not despair and there are serious judges on

the bench who will call out illegality. we are being clear-eyed about what we can accomplish in courts and we're going to try. 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're not going to stop and we're clear-eyed about that, but there are egregious things like family separation where we all need to come together and say, wait, that's not what we meant about immigration reform. >> 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, tender age, anyone below five. that's kind of unusual, right? because most often when you have a kid that young, they're traveling with a parent.

>> jim de la cruz was the supervisor of all the federal field staff. he had his team keep our spreadsheet. it was growing, growing, growing with the number of kids. >> one of the issues i raised to scott lloyd as a concern is we've run out of beds for babies. we were seeing so many babies, but the babies can't tell you they're 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. the families had made the

journeys together but the children would remain in the united states while the parents were returned to home country. >> these are state-created orphans. >> these 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 jonathan white had to send that email that said we're seeing so many babies that the babies can't tell you they were separated. how do you find the parents of a baby? >> right. i mean, so that's one of the problems is the judge commented that 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 -- well, we

think the parent might be in this country, maybe they're at this address. so we create a steering committee with three ngos, the women's refugee commission, kids in need of defense and justice in motion with a great law firm, paul weiss, they helped find all of the families. they did unbelievable work. sometimes it was on the ground going town to town looking for parents. now we have little children who have been without their parents for six years. they will not even remember their parents. and some of the parents are coming back now. there's no relationship anymore. that is so heartbreaking to see the parent trying to rebuild the relationship. and everyone talks about the children's trauma, and that's understandable and that's right, but also the parents. imagine a parent where the first thing the child comes back and says to you, mommy, didn't you love me enough to keep me? why didn't you fight to keep me? when i went to el salvador a child got off the plane and the first thing he said literally

is, poppy, why didn't you want me anymore? you know, and so there is so much to rebuild, but it was so gratuitous. the idea that the parents weren't going to come at all. that was the purpose, that we're going to make it so cruel that people won't come anymore. when i talked to families when i met them, would you have come anyway if you knew your child was going to be taken? what choice did i have? i couldn't let my child be killed. i couldn't be killed. people are here illegally if they are applying for asylum. we said after world war ii we would never again send people back to danger without at least screening them, and that is what people are trying to eliminate now. no screenings even. not even, you know, basic hearing. and so they're not here illegally, they're trying to apply for asylum. it was just a flat out gratuitous cruelty. the worst thing i have seen in my 30 years doing this work. >> did it take a toll on you?

>> 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'm suffering. you know, that's not to minimize the advocates who are on the ground seeing it every day. they are really going through a lot, but ultimately what keeps you going is seeing these families trying to persevere and how much they're going through and you know you need to keep fighting. >> it's a lot simpler for anyone feeling disappointed about the election that there's someone hurting more than you or hurting more than you. >> right. right. >> thank you so much. >> thank you for having me. >> the film is incredible and you're incredible in it. >> thank you. >> jacob sticks around. when we come back, we're going to talk to jacob and two more experts about what trump's promise for the future of mass deportations is going to mean for families and the broader american economy. don't go anywhere. and bunches 25% less often than poise. try always discreet!

it's designed to protect. my moderate to severe ulcerative colitis symptoms kept me... out of the picture. now i have skyrizi. ♪ keeping my plans, i'm feeling free. ♪ ♪ control of my uc means everything to me. ♪ ♪♪ ♪ control is everything to me. ♪ now, i'm back in the picture. skyrizi helps deliver relief, repair, and remission in uc. feel significant symptom relief at 4 weeks, including fewer bowel movements and less bleeding. skyrizi is proven to help visibly repair colon lining damage, and help people achieve remission at 12 weeks and 1 year. don't use if allergic. serious allergic reactions, increased infections or lower ability to fight them may occur. before treatment, get checked for infections and tb. tell your doctor about any flu-like symptoms, or vaccines. liver problems leading to hospitalization may occur when treated for uc. take control of your uc. ♪ control is everything to me. ♪ ask your gastroenterologist

about skyrizi.

60% of women experience leaks with bladder protection pads. try always discreet! it has a unique core that converts liquid to gel and bunches 25% less often than poise. try always discreet! it's designed to protect.

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've exhausted all of the ordinary things the law permits, that all that's left for ose 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's what could possibly 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 "immigration in the hartland." also joining us is andrea flores. she served as an immigration policy adviser for both the obama and biden administrations. she is with a group that advocates to reform immigration policy. jacob is still here. 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, almost all republican policy ideas, bills that would have solved the problem or gone a long way towards solving it and trump killed that bill. it feels like this rages 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 democrats weren't actually 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 bussing asylum seekers into cities. the answer given by the white house is there's nothing to be done to these challenges because the law was broken. voters chose it once over trump because he promised to bring humanity and order, but those promises weren't delivered. and so when vice president harris campaigned on a bill that was a d.c. insider talking point, it didn't really address what communities had experienced when suddenly there were more immigrants in their communities and there was no federal plan to welcome them, house them, connect them with work permits. and that was one of the biggest strategic missteps of 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 what is -- and, you know, can you reverse the gains that republicans and donald trump made among people who have never voted for a republican in their life but they're so exasperated and frustrated that nothing has been happening? >> you can reverse the gains because some of the long-time policy goals of the democratic party remained popular. legalizing the long-time undocumented is a popular issue. 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 is the source of every policy problem. when j.d. vance talked about immigrants being part of the housing problem, where was the response to that? where was the narrative that the federal reserve was talking about, that the economists were talking about, that but for immy grargets 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, governors, making sure that the impacts on the working class, on people of color, on other immigrant communities who are already there, you can see tensions rising. good, moderate 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's what the electorate was choosing. i believe they're voting against the disorder they've seen under democrats. >> bill, let me ask you about what is ahead and how it will impact the economy potentially and workplaces. >> sure. that's 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 leave much of this work often undone. i think it's also important to know there is also an element of fear in what we call spillover effects of immigration enforcement. what it means is it's not only the deportations themselves that shape the lives of families in the u.s. but 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 the 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. >> i'm going to ask all of you to stick around. i'm going to sneak in a quick break. we'll be back on the other side.

have you always had trouble with your weight? same. discover the power of wegovy®. with wegovy®, i lost 35 pounds. and some lost over 46 pounds. and i'm keeping the weight off. i'm reducing my risk. wegovy® is the only weight-management medicine proven to reduce risk of major cardiovascular events such as death, heart attack, or stroke in adults with known heart disease and obesity. don't use wegovy® with semaglutide or glp-1 medicines, or in children under 12. don't take if you or your family had mtc, men 2, or if allergic to it. tell your provider if you plan to have surgery or a procedure, are breastfeeding, pregnant, or plan to be. stop taking and get medical help right away if you get a lump or swelling in your neck, severe stomach pain, or any of these allergic reactions. serious side effects may include pancreas inflammation and gallbladder problems. call your prescriber if you have any of these symptoms. wegovy® may cause low blood sugar in people with diabetes, especially if you take medicines to treat diabetes. call your prescriber about vision changes,

if you feel your heart racing while at rest, or if you have mental changes. depression or thoughts of suicide may occur. common side effects include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, stomach pain, flu, or upset, headache, feeling tired, dizzy, or bloated, gas, and heartburn. some side effects lead to dehydration, which may cause kidney problems. with wegovy®, i'm losing weight, i'm keeping it off, and i'm lowering my cv risk. ask your prescriber about wegovy®. i need to get me a new phone. you need to trade-in that busted up phone and get you a brand new iphone 16 pro at t-mobile. it's on them. families save 20% every month. what a deal! new and existing customers, trade in your busted old phone, and we'll give you a new iphone 16 pro with apple intelligence on us. go-friends, gather! keke! chris! jason! boop! friends. let's go, let's go, friends! hold onto your dice. woohoo!! -nice frosting, pratt. -thank you! how we doin', keke? tastes like money to me.

i can't go back to jail! wait, did you rob my bank? -hehe. -are we winning!? -ha ha ha! -oh boy! yeah! money, power, friendship. let's go! when you're a small-business owner, your to-do list can be...a lot. ♪♪ super helpful. ♪♪ [ cheering ] what are invoices? progressive makes it easy to see if you can save money with a commercial auto quote online so you can get back to all your other to-dos. absolutely not. get a quote at progressivecommercial.com. (♪♪) from celebration moments... ...to joyride moments. your moments are worth protecting against rsv. rsv is a highly contagious virus if you're 60 or older with certain chronic conditions, you're at higher risk of being hospitalized from rsv.

and there are no prescription rsv treatments. you know how to protect against covid and flu. so ask your pharmacist or doctor about scheduling pfizer's rsv vaccine, too. because moments like these matter. our right to reproductive health care is being stolen from us. i can't believe this is the world we live in, where we're losing the freedom to control our own bodies. we need your support now more than ever. go online, call, or scan this code, with your $19 monthly gift. and we'll send you this "care. no matter what" t-shirt. it is your right to have safe health care. that's it. go online, call, or scan right now. during the obama administration the idea had come up in dhs and secretary johnson

had said they would 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 office of refugee resettlement capacity. it would lead to a backup into border patrol because i know that was something that had persuasive value, and the answer i got in the room was only at first, 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 that much time on that as it would be to the program. because harm to children was part of the point. they believed that it would terrify families into not coming.

>> we're back. i wonder, bill, if you can just talk about the asymmetry, right? there are drawbacks to these policies that at a humanity level, at an empathy level are ally abhorrent but there are policy levels that rely on that a vulsion. how do you still protect people if that makes sense? >> yeah. i think this is an excellent point. what we saw during the trump administration is absolutely the cruelty was the point and that much of the immigration enforcement tools selected by former president trump were meant to be visible and were meant to be deterrents. we saw this on the texas-mexico border and we saw that on the work site raids in the summer of 2017 at the same time. meant to be visible spectacles

that changed the behavior of immigrant communities at the same time as gathering energy among his base. trump originally proposed the border wall but found that to be too expensive and laborious. he found ways he could engage in child separation and raids in smaller momentary 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, right, on the other side of this, jacob of course and erroll did a great job of this in their documentary, "separated" which shows the separations on the southern border. we also need to continue having these discussions engaging in our research that shows what the harms of this immigration enforcement is with individuals and families and across communities regardless of race

and immigration status. >> jacob, it comes back to the body of reporting ahead for you, my friend. 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 on to what is promised, what is a head whih in human history has had very few chapters to even turn to. 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 dozen 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 there's a duty, i think we have a duty to do exactly what we did in the first trump administration and actually what we did during the biden administration as well, which is hold a mirror up for society to show them exactly what's happening, whether or not they want to see it themselves. i do think that people have wanted to know less over the course of the last four years of what this all looks like. i have to say, it's a profound honor to be on here with dr. lopez and a both. they know more about this than anybody i know can tell you about it in ways far beyond what i can tell you. you heard jonathan white refer to it in the clip in the movie, deterrence. deterrence has been the underlying philosophy of 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 increased exponentially the size of border patrol. barack obama deported more people in the history of the united states which is why donald trump was able to separate 5500 people from their parents like it was nothing. the system was set up in that way. and while, as andrea said, president biden promised a fair and safe and orderly system, 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. haitians. i went to haiti to watch haitians deported back where many of them could be at risk of being killed themselves. i watched the biden administration deport more people to haiti than ever before. i think when we look at what's the next four years going to be like for folks in our line of work, nicole, it's 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're looking for and what that would actually look like. >> we'll continue to call on you. thank you for spending time with us today. we're going to sneak in one more break. jacob and i will be back on the other side. i won't let my moderate to severe plaque psoriasis symptoms define me... emerge as you, with clearer skin. with tremfya®, most people saw 100% clear skin... ...that stayed clear, even at 5 years. serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections may occur. before treatment, your doctor should check you for infections and tb. tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms or if you need a vaccine. emerge with clear skin. ask your doctor about tremfya®. ♪♪ big news for mahomes! i'm switching to iphone 16 pro at t-mobile! it's built for apple intelligence. that's like peanut butter on jelly... on gold. get four iphone 16 pro on us,

plus four lines for $25 bucks. what a deal. ya'll giving it away too fast t-mobile, slow down. mom where's my homework? mommy! hey hun - sometimes, you just need a moment. self-care has never been this easy. gummy vitamins from nature made, the #1 pharmacist recommended vitamin and supplement brand. i'll be honest. by the end of the day, my floors...yeesh. but who has the time to clean? that's why i love my swiffer wetjet. it's a quick and easy way to get my floors clean. wetjet absorbs and locks grime deep inside. look at that! swiffer wetjet. (sneeze) (hooves approaching) not again. your cold is coming! your cold is coming! thanks...revere. we really need to keep zicam in the house. only if you want to shorten your cold! when you feel a cold coming, shorten it with zicam (revere: hyah)

60% of women experience side leaks with bladder protection underwear. try always discreet! it's rapiddry core absorbs up to 25% faster than depend

and fits up to 95% of body shapes. try always discreet! designed to protect. what if your mobile network wasn't an just built to5% work out here... ...but was designed differently to also give you blazing fast wifi where you are most of the time? reliable 5g, plus wifi speeds up to a gig where you need it most. xfinity mobile. xfinity internet customers, ask how to get a free 5g phone and a second unlimited line free for a year.

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 won the popular vote and swept the swing states, and after taking in all of your reporting at the convention with the mass deportations, now signs. i wonder if you can just contextualize sort of our marching orders as a public? i know you feel like you have yours, you have your era and you have your bead. but as a country, what is our marching order? what is our obligation to keep our eyes on this space as rachel maddow might say? >> more than anything to 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 your stomach or understand, and that's why i wanted to do with this errol. the film is a forensic examination of the policy under the trump administration by an academy-award-winning director with an academy-award-winning team, but it is also a reminder of what this all looked like and how everyone came together in order to stop it. i think unless folks are paying attention, i know there's 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 redouble, to open our eyes. i talked to lindsay last week from the immigrant defenders 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 front lines preparing for the type of deliberate cruelty. again, that's me as a journalist saying, not my opinion. the deliberate cruelty of the trump administration, and if you turn away from it you won't be able to react to it the way they wanted to do it the first time around. >> it is two things. people want to know how they can help. jacob soboroff, thank you so much. bringing this film to all of us. thank to all of you for letting us into your homes during these truly extraordinary times. we're grateful. ♪ ♪ happy holidays. i'm ari melber. i hope you are having a wonderful holiday season tonight. we have a special edition of "beat." we are calling it the egot edition. that, of course, famously stands for emmy, grammy, oscar, tony, one of the most