TONYA MOSLEY, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. Across the country right now, federal immigration agents are stepping up arrests as part of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown up and down east and west coasts and places like Laredo, Texas, where agents recently arrested more than two dozen workers at a construction site, prompting some to flee across a busy highway in panic. And in California, viral videos show ICE agents rounding up street vendors, day laborers and farmworkers before sending them to detention centers throughout the country. In Santa Ana, California, recently, someone recorded video of several masked men in tactical gear arresting a man named Narciso Barranco, who was working as a landscaper at an IHOP in southern California. His son, Alejandro, a Marine Corps veteran, described to NBC News what his father says he experienced.
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ALEJANDRO BARRANCO: My dad saw that a couple of guys - masked up, civilian clothes, no IDs, no warrant, big guns - came up to him. He got scared. I think it's a natural human reaction. And he ran away. He didn't know who they were.
MOSLEY: The video shows agents pinning Barranco to the ground and striking him in the head several times. And according to his son, Barranco has no criminal record but is undocumented. He was born in Mexico and has lived in the U.S. since the 1990s. My guest today, NBC political and national correspondent Jacob Soboroff, spoke to Barranco and has been covering President Trump's immigration crackdown. His latest reporting examines the gap between the administration's stated goal of targeting serious criminal offenders and the reality of who is actually being arrested.
And Jacob Soboroff, welcome to FRESH AIR.
JACOB SOBOROFF: Tonya, it's so good to be with you. Thank you so much for having me.
MOSLEY: Yes. So you have been to many of these immigration raids as recently as earlier this week here in Los Angeles.
SOBOROFF: Yeah. The day before you and I are sitting down here, in the Cypress Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, multiple vans of heavily armed tactical agents showed up at yet another Home Depot, which seems to be one of the primary targets of this now almost monthlong immigration enforcement effort, wide-scale - basically, what the Trump administration promised all the way back at the conventions in the summer of 2024 - a mass deportation effort modeled after Dwight D. Eisenhower's effort in 1954 that deported a million Mexicans and some Mexican Americans. And their version of it is playing out on the streets of Los Angeles at Home Depots, in agricultural fields, mostly in workplaces, honestly. And it has been an extraordinary thing to see unfold here in the home city of so many of us.
MOSLEY: Can you quantify this ramp-up in what you're seeing? You've been to several of these over the last few months, and I know that in the news, we've been seeing more of them. But just trying to wrap our heads around exactly what we're seeing, not only here in the state of California, but really across the nation.
SOBOROFF: I think what we're seeing is - most important to emphasize - not what they said they were going to be doing, which was going after the worst of the worst, the violent criminals, the rapists, the murderers, the drug kingpins, the cartels. They're going after working-class folks. And in Los Angeles, since the beginning of this operation, the number is approaching 2,000 people taken from the streets of the city, from fruit carts and flower stands and people's quotidian activities.
MOSLEY: And Stephen Miller has said that, actually, the goal is 3,000 a day.
SOBOROFF: A day. And so if they could fully execute and carry out what they want to here in Los Angeles, perhaps this number would be higher. And there's still days to go in the rest of this calendar month. I wouldn't be surprised if we see more large wide-scale operations here. You know, this is a continuation of it in the way that Trump promised he would do and many people, I think, didn't actually believe that he would carry out.
MOSLEY: Well, he said on Day 1, from Day 1, I am going to carry these out. And for a period of time, it seemed pretty quiet and then started to ramp up.
SOBOROFF: Yeah. I think that that's right. I was thinking about that the other day, that when you look at the chart, actually, now - and there's some reporting that indicates Stephen Miller wasn't happy. So this is when he went in and basically told people, directed people, go to the Home Depots. Go to the low-hanging fruit where undocumented folks hang out looking for work. That's when things started to change. And obviously, over the last four weeks here in Los Angeles, we have seen it play out every - I mean, there's a Home Depot not five minutes from where you and I are sitting talking right now that was the target of one of the raids, I think, just last week.
MOSLEY: I think we understand the low-hanging fruit - to go to some of those places where people are working. And traditionally, maybe some of those folks have been undocumented. But how is ICE operating? How are they finding people in other contexts?
SOBOROFF: Well, I think that, first of all, if they were to go after the worst of the worst, they'd be going after people who have outstanding criminal warrants against them or ongoing investigations. They - you know, you would be seeing multiple and massive large-scale operations that targeted the types of places that they said they were going to go after - drug houses, large-scale human trafficking operations, sex trafficking operations.
MOSLEY: Do you have any indication that they're doing that as well?
SOBOROFF: I think that they certainly point to that, and there have been some operations. They say that that Fashion District raid that kicked all of this off was a targeted workplace enforcement operation. The issue is the transparency has been pretty limited, frankly. And under the Trump administration, that has always been an issue. It has been a - long been an issue in immigration enforcement to understand exactly who's being targeted, where they're being taken and why. But it seems here, you know, everything sort of is blurring together. The people taken off the streets, where they're actually going, who they are, how to find them - it seems to be getting increasingly harder by the day. And I say that based on talking to family members and attorneys for these families and people literally searching for their loved ones.
MOSLEY: Give us some examples of what people have told you.
SOBOROFF: Well, you played the sound of Alejandro Barranco, the Marine Corps veteran, whose father, Narciso, was taken off the street as he was literally cutting bushes outside of an IHOP. He's a landscaper. He also has two active-duty sons in the Marine Corps today at Camp Pendleton. And when he was taken down in the middle of the street in Santa Ana by those agents - violently taken down. It looked like he was being punched in the face by them after running away. You know, the DHS says - and I should say - that he tried to attack them with his Weedwacker. That's not really what the video shows, at least to my eyes. I'm one person, and maybe other folks would have a different opinion. It looks to me like he was running away. His son says he was terrified. He was scared. He was doing his job, and these agents rolled up on him, and, you know, obviously he didn't want to be taken. They don't identify themselves. They're wearing masks on their face. You know, you don't see on their uniforms what their names are. And so he ran. And it did appear that he, you know, put the Weedwacker kind of angled in between him and the agents. But, you know, everybody saw what played out in that video.
So with regard to where he is or the trouble finding him, he went first to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, and that was the location of the first protests after that Fashion District raid on the sixth. And he couldn't get in - Alejandro. He couldn't find his father for days or couldn't get in touch with him. And when he finally did, I spoke to him right after he got out. He came and joined us on NBC, on MSNBC, and he said that his father had been in a cell for days with 70 other guys. He said it felt like a cage - hadn't showered, had gotten minimal food, had - still had the blood on his clothes. His eyes were still stinging from the pepper spray that they had sprayed in his eyes as he was running away. And he didn't know where he was going to go next. And then soon thereafter, he got the answer, which was Adelanto, the ICE private prison in the high desert outside of California. But it's not like they're giving family members a call and saying, here's what's happening next. In fact, for a lot of people, I think, folks could very well end up being deported before you can even figure out where they are.
MOSLEY: We've been hearing, over the last few days, conditions in these detention centers.
SOBOROFF: Yeah.
MOSLEY: There are hundreds of them, including the one that Alejandro visited. What are you hearing about what is happening inside of those centers?
SOBOROFF: Those are not places anybody would want to be. Let me put it that way. I've been inside Adelanto myself. I went during the family separation crisis, and in fact, conditions were so bad there during COVID that a federal judge disallowed them, stopped them, prevented them from bringing in anyone else. Now it's at capacity again, I think around 1,900 people. When I was there, and I'll never forget it, I saw, I mean, all kinds of trauma, but in particular, something that sticks out to me is a man curled up in a fetal position, almost like in an isolation cell laying on the floor, you know, these concrete floors. They found nooses. An inspector general report famously reported - infamously, I should say - about Adelanto people attempted suicide inside these facilities. That's - and that's not an outlier. This happens inside these centers all across America.
I went at the height of family separation inside the epicenter, the McAllen Border Patrol processing center - Ursula is the name of it. And it's where I saw, you know, children sleeping on those mats on the concrete or linoleum floors under the Mylar blankets, being supervised by security contractors in a watch tower. These are not places that are designed, especially the processing centers, for people to be beyond 24, 72 hours by law, much less stay there for days and days and days because the system becomes so overcrowded. And actually, you know, that, too, is an important point for people to understand. None of these places are meant to be housing people for...
TONYA MOSLEY AND JACOB SOBOROFF: ...Extended periods of time.
SOBOROFF: And the government understands that, and they know when they pick up massive amounts of people, it will lead to backlogs and processing them through the system. Yet they do it anyway.
MOSLEY: Are you seeing parallels between the actions from child separation in 2018 to today in that tactic? Because one of the things you revealed in your book about child separation is the function of separating children from their parents was not just an outcome of the deportation efforts. It was actually a tactic. They wanted to send a message. Are you getting any indication that what is happening with these detention facilities, like it's purposefully this way as a means to send a message?
SOBOROFF: Yeah, the - I mean, Adam Serwer famously coined the phrase the cruelty is the point, in The Atlantic. And I think with family separation, you know, don't take my word for it, objectively, the facts bear that out. In the film that I made with Errol Morris about family separations, I mean, you can see emails documenting that they knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it. And in fact, when children were starting to get released and reunited with their families, at that point, there are emails that literally say this undermines the whole effort. The point was to inflict harm to scare people away from coming to the country. Government officials told me that directly as well. And, you know, when I say that's been sort of the bipartisan punitive-based, deterrence-based policy of decades, it's true.
And, you know, you go back to Bill Clinton doing prevention through deterrence when he built the first wave of border walls, they knew people would die trying to come into the country. George W. Bush, you know, exponentially increased the size of the Border Patrol in the wake of 9/11 when they created DHS. Barack Obama deported more people than any president in the history of the country. And that's why with the snap of a finger, you know, Donald Trump was able to implement family separation. And Joe Biden, I should say, kept in place a lot of those restrictive policies of the Trump administration. I went to Haiti. I saw them deporting a record amount of people back to Haiti, knowing full well that they could face danger or death when they did that after they were, you know, all those migrants were under the bridge in Del Rio, Texas.
What Donald Trump is doing right now is what Stephen Miller wanted to do during family separation, which was separate not just 5,500 kids before he was stopped by a federal judge and the American public, but separate tens of thousands of families from each other using administrative tactics, separations. And so today, what he's carrying out, this mass deportation policy, is, I think, what they wanted to do back then, a supersize of family separation. And I've often said mass deportation is family separation, just by another name. It's not separating children from their parents at the border. It's taking parents away from their children in the interior at their jobs or in their homes, or you name it. And, you know, I would say that before I had real and concrete examples, but now look at Narciso Barranco as one. And if there's one Narciso Barranco that's on television and on video, I promise you that there are hundreds more, maybe even more than that of the nearly 2,000 people taken so far in the last 3 1/2 weeks.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jacob Soboroff. He's a national and political correspondent for NBC News. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. We're talking with Jacob Soboroff, a correspondent for NBC News. His latest reporting reveals that almost two-thirds of those arrested in recent ICE raids had no serious criminal record. Soboroff has also covered the family separation policy at the border, and his book "Separated" examines the human cost of that policy and the broader impacts of U.S. immigration enforcement.
You recently spoke with a son of Narciso Barranco, who was working as a landscaper at an IHOP in Southern California. And seven masked agents in tactical gear are seen tackling Barranco. They're punching him in the head before forcing him into an unmarked van. And you spoke with Alejandro, who is a Marine Corps vet, and here's what he had to say.
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SOBOROFF: The three of you all received training on use of force as Marines. When you look at the video of how those agents treated your father, do you agree with what Homeland Security said, that that was a minimum use of force?
BARRANCO: I think it's the complete opposite. I think it's the maximum amount of force, and I think unprofessional force. You see, in the video where my dad is running with a weedwhacker, there's a so-called agent running with his gun in hand, pointing it sideways at a vehicle. At what point in our training are we taught to hold our gun sideways? It's always both hands on the gun and your finger off the trigger. The most important thing - you're not supposed to put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to fire. The guys holding him down, a 5'7" guy, maybe a 150-pound man. It doesn't take four or five guys, 200-plus, beating him in the face, pepper-spraying him within inches, not even the appropriate distance. Like, that's just unprofessional.
SOBOROFF: You served in Afghanistan. What would have happened if you would have treated a detainee that way in the Marines?
BARRANCO: I promise you it would have been a war crime, and the situation would have been completely different.
MOSLEY AND SOBOROFF: That was my guest today, NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff, talking with the son of Narciso Barranco, Alejandro, talking about his father's detainment. Jacob, he says that this would have been a war crime.
SOBOROFF: Isn't that unbelievable to hear? He - this is a man who, along with his two brothers, have dedicated their lives to serving this country. In fact, Alejandro Barranco was deployed to Afghanistan as a Marine. And so it occurred to me that when you go into the Marine Corps, obviously, you go through these types of trainings. You're using weapons of war, and every day is life or death, especially when you're deployed. And so I wanted to ask him that question, and I did. I - obviously, I didn't know what he was going to say. And I'm still, I don't know, very moved by what he said there, because he would not say that if he didn't mean it. You know, I don't think guys that go into that line of work take those types of judgment calls lightly.
And so he's - you know, we're watching the video together. Remember, that interview's playing out on television. The interview's in front of our faces as we're talking. To give a play by - I cannot imagine what it must have been like to give a play-by-play on your father's own takedown by armed agents, using tactics that you never would in the Marine Corps, to - while he was cutting bushes at IHOP, you know.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: While he was cutting bushes at IHOP.
MOSLEY: Again, ICE has issued a statement to say they were defending themselves because Barranco had a weed wacker and they were fearing for their own safety. But you're hearing stories like this anecdotally throughout the country. One of the things that many people are questioning are the tactics. So ICE has been approaching people wearing masks...
SOBOROFF: Yep.
MOSLEY: ...And wearing all black.
SOBOROFF: Yep.
MOSLEY: And what are you hearing about the reasons why they are choosing to approach people that way versus being fully - it being fully transparent who they are?
SOBOROFF: What I hear is that they're worried about being doxed - you know, being outed by protesters, their private details being posted for the public to find. You know, I have - I - obviously, nobody wants anybody to be unnecessarily harmed. But when I hear that, and then I also hear the administration and law enforcement officials say the protesters should reveal themselves - they should take their masks off...
MOSLEY: Right. There are some city councils right now that are passing...
SOBOROFF: Yeah.
MOSLEY: ...Ordinances to require people to be unmasked.
SOBOROFF: So it seems like a double standard to me. Again, I'm not a law enforcement expert or analyst. But for these law enforcement agents to go in and hide their faces when they have an expectation of the public to show their faces to them, it sure seems like, you know, rules for thee, not for me.
MOSLEY: What have they said about their aggressive approach?
SOBOROFF: That it's necessary to protect themselves during sort of operational - when they're in an operational mode. The fact that they went out with what appeared to be BORTAC, which is the most elite tactical unit of the Border Patrol, to that Home Depot, the day before you and I are talking, in Cypress Park - you know, I haven't spoken to them directly about it. But my guess is what they would say is, we have been faced with so much protests on the streets. We have to protect the agents that are actually taking people into custody with a use of force or a show of force, a potential use of force or at least a show of force. That, too, is why I think the National Guard and the Marine Corps have been deployed to Los Angeles, at least nominally - to protect federal property and federal agents when they go out on these operations.
But from everything I've seen - and yesterday morning, I was with Union del Barrio, which is a part of the large community self-defense coalition that has sort of mobilized here in Southern California, dozens of organizations, hundreds of people that are going out, basically trying to spot immigration enforcement, ICE, Border Patrol, whatever the other federal agencies, DEA, FBI. Their goal is not to interfere with the operation. It's to document it so that there's evidence of what's happening when the next Narciso Barranco story happens, and to warn other people in the community to stay away. You know, their tactics are not to pick a fight. Obviously, they would lose. They're not showing up with armed agents. They're showing up with a bullhorn. They're showing up in sweatshirts of their organization, and they're being faced with military-style tactics and force.
MOSLEY: They're also being arrested, some of them. Have you received any word that any folks have gotten caught in these roundups who are not undocumented?
SOBOROFF: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There have been - I don't want to give you too high a number. I mean, I've seen several examples of U.S. citizens being detained and ultimately, obviously, released, which raises questions about racial profiling, clearly. That's - I think, you know, primary concern is, if you don't have a warrant and you're out on the streets, how are you picking people that you stop?
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, our guest today is NBC political and national correspondent Jacob Soboroff. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Tonya Mosley. And today, I'm talking with Jacob Soboroff, a correspondent for NBC News. Reporting by he and his colleagues reveal that almost two-thirds of those arrested in recent ICE raids had no serious criminal record. Soboroff has also covered the family separation policy at the border. And his book "Separated," now adapted into a documentary, examines the human cost of that policy and the broader impacts of U.S. immigration enforcement. Our interview was recorded Tuesday.
Attorney General Pam Bondi says that, quote, "sanctuary policies were driving the cause of violence, chaos, and attacks on law enforcement." You've been at a lot of these Los Angeles protests. What are you seeing? What have you seen?
SOBOROFF: The protests that I have seen and been at, particularly on No Kings Day on that Saturday, were peaceful protests. I stood on - literally on the front line, the skirmish line between the Los - well, I've stood on a lot of those lines, especially on that day. I stood between the Marines and the National Guard and the protesters - literally between. And, I mean, I think maybe the Marines and the Guard were 3 feet on one side of me, and the protesters were on another side of me. I was live on TV. You can look it up if you want. And it was tense. The protesters were screaming at the Guard and at the Marines, but it was definitely not violent.
I watched as 20,000, or maybe more, people peacefully protested through the streets of Downtown Los Angeles. I was up on the Tom Bradley observation deck, 26 floors up in City Hall, looking down. It was really an extraordinary thing to see so many people come together in a peaceful way like that. And by the way, in one of the court cases, Newsom v. Trump, about the National Guard's deployment on the streets of Los Angeles, the federal government - the Trump administration - was arguing that there was a sustained and violent federal - a mob of a thousand people going after the federal building on that day that I was there.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: Just wasn't true - I mean, based on what I saw with my own eyes. And again, I'm one reporter, one journalist, one person from one perspective and vantage point. But it's just not what I saw. And so I think that - you know, look. On the first couple days of this - that Friday night and into Saturday - there was violence, and it was limited. And it was in a several-square-block area of Downtown Los Angeles. The mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, put into place a curfew. And we got a lot of cops here, whether you like it or not, in Los Angeles that handle all kinds of tenuous situations like that all the time - Lakers parade, Dodgers - I mean...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: ...Stuff happens...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: ...You know? And that's why the governor and the mayor both said, we don't need the National Guard. We don't want the Marines here. We have handled and can handle this ourselves, especially when the vast majority of people out on the streets are protesting peacefully.
MOSLEY: Let's talk a little bit about economic impact. I know it's anecdotal in the moment, but many of these people who are being swept up are foundational to the country's economy. Do we have a sense yet of how these detainments are affecting the economic fabric in local communities?
SOBOROFF: I'll give you one really concrete example that I saw with my own eyes - literally, strawberries sitting in a field, with no one picking them, at the height of strawberry season. They're going to sit there and rot. Maybe it seems small to some people, but that's one example that's playing out across Southern California every day now. People are not showing up at work. And the list is so long that I couldn't name everything about all the different industries that are being affected by this. Communities, vibrant communities and places of business, are dead quiet, empty. Drive around any part of Los Angeles, frankly, right now, and people aren't hiding. So anecdotally, what does it mean? It means that there are less people out on the streets, less people doing their jobs. I'm not an economist. But it's not hard to sort of extrapolate that eventually, when all these folks stay home or, in the worst-case scenario, get deported, what are you going to do?
MOSLEY: Have you talked to business owners or farmers about this?
SOBOROFF: Oh, yeah. I mean, the Ventura County Farm Bureau - and this is not just limited to Los Angeles County. We're seeing it in Orange County and Ventura County to the west, down in San Diego. The Ventura County Farm Bureau - someone got in touch with us, one of the farmers, to basically say, I'm happy to speak out. I'm willing to speak out. I want people to understand how critical these men and women are to get literally - literally getting food on the table.
MOSLEY: I want to go back to these detainment centers because this week, President Trump is visiting an opening of what is being called Alligator Alcatraz. It's a new center in the swampy Everglades.
SOBOROFF: Wow.
MOSLEY: And he has stated that part of security will actually be the wildlife in keeping people in. What have you heard about this?
SOBOROFF: It's the visual imagery - obviously, now, you know, operationalized - of the harm that would befall people if they cross Trump administration immigration policy. I mean, surrounding a facility with alligators?
MOSLEY: Is there anything comparable in history? I know you took us back at the beginning of our conversation, talking about some of those efforts to deport Mexicans in the '20s, '30s and '40s.
SOBOROFF: I know. I mean, it just brings to mind National Guard troops with dogs, doesn't it? I mean, it's hard to believe that we're having this conversation in 2025 about human beings. That's what I think gets so lost in all of this - is that so often, conversations about immigration become about numbers. How many people are coming in? How many people do we have to stop? How can we get the numbers to zero? Talk about it like it's a weather event - the flow, the surge. We look at bar graphs, but we're talking about human beings.
And that's where I feel really blessed to be in this job, because I get to be on the street and talk to people, to see them in their real lives. And when we talk about this from Washington, D.C., or from New York or whatever, we talk about it like it's some kind of phenomenon. But we're talking about - there are millions of people at any given moment in every part of the world, you name the hemisphere, on the move - migrants leaving danger, persecution, climate change, in a lot of instances.
I've been to Guatemala, Chiquimula and Zacapa, where I saw, in the Dry Corridor, literally, you know, fields, like I said, rotting for different reasons. People don't leave to go on the move because it's a walk - like a walk through Central Park, as Donald Trump once said. People don't go through the most dangerous, cartel-held territory in Mexico because this is easy. They do it because they feel like they have to, and we talk about them like they're a data point to be extrapolated.
MOSLEY: You mentioned a little earlier about this effort to get people to self-deport. And there's something called self-deport-and-forgive fines, because that is another part of this deportation plan - fining people actual money for being undocumented in the country. How effective have you heard this to be, where people will then - some of the fines are as high as $9,000. If they self-deport, then they won't have to pay that.
SOBOROFF: I haven't seen the data on this app. So they - what happened was there was an app called CBP One...
MOSLEY: Yep.
SOBOROFF: ...Which was the Biden administration's effort to create legal pathways for people to come who are and, in some cases, have been sitting on the other side of the border for a long time trying to get into the country 'cause the Biden administration - even though a lot of people got in, it was restricted for certain populations and a lot of people couldn't. And so either from home country or from the other side of the border, people were able to sign up and try to get in line. It wasn't easy. There were a lot of problems with the app, but they had it.
And the Trump administration turned the app on its head and basically said, for people inside the country, why don't you sign up and we'll help you get home? I don't know how many people - the data may be out there. I don't know how many people have signed up for the app. But again, what they're trying to do is scare people in some form or fashion by saying, if you don't and we find you, and we're coming for you - look what's happening in LA - it's going to cost you a lot of money, and you'll be barred from reentering the country ever again. If you go home, you can apply to come, quote-unquote, "the legal way," which, honestly, is a near-impossible task for anybody, given the amount of people that want to come into the country. I'm not saying it's impossible to come to the United States legally. Of course, you can. But it's not easy, and the so-called line that people say you should get into, it just isn't as simple as that, and that's the truth.
MOSLEY: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jacob Soboroff, a correspondent for NBC News. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
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MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I'm talking to Jacob Soboroff, a correspondent for NBC News, about his latest reporting on immigration and the Trump administration's border policy. We recorded this interview on Tuesday.
Your previous reporting on the child separation policy and the outcome of that really laid this out for us because in your book, you really dig deep into some of the places that people are coming from - these unaccompanied children, in particular - during that time period, 2018. One of the things that came out of your reporting and the reporting overall during that time period was public outrage. That was sort of what dialed back these efforts from the Trump administration during that time period.
SOBOROFF: Unquestionably. Hundreds of thousands of people came out into the streets, maybe millions, not just across the U.S. but around the world, and it wasn't a bipartisan outrage. It was a universal outrage. The pope spoke out. Pope Francis spoke out about it. And when President Trump, at the end of June of 2018, stopped the family separation policy, he didn't say, I'm morally opposed to it. Oops, I realized this was really bad. He said, I didn't like the sight and the feeling of the families being separated. He was responding to images of people on the streets, of the tours that some of us journalists were getting and I think, most notably, audio from Ginger Thompson of ProPublica, who obtained that haunting, chilling recording of children in Border Patrol custody crying and the Border Patrol agents saying, oh, it seems like we have an orchestra here. I think after that moment, the tide turned, and President Trump realized the public was against him. And when the public was against him, he said, this is not in my interest, either. And I wouldn't be surprised to see some version of that happen again, given the images that are out on the streets.
MOSLEY: You know, one of the things you pointed to was the power of Congress back then in 2018 - its power to protect the children. What's your assessment on how they're using their power today with these ICE detainments?
SOBOROFF: I think one of the current flash points is that Congress has the right to show up and inspect these facilities without any notice - that happened in the wake of family separation - by statute. And the Trump administration and the Department of Homeland Security is challenging that. They've now put into place a weeklong process that legal observers say is potentially sort of a dubious move to prevent members of Congress from exercising their legal right to oversight at these facilities. I think that that's the way that we've seen them mobilized first and foremost to show up.
You know, the big question is - and they still haven't done it with regard to family separation - is ban that practice outright. If they wanted to, they could say that the practice of family separation categorically is unacceptable, and we won't do it as a part of U.S. immigration policy. But they haven't. And I think under this political climate, certainly, it seems like a very high bar.
MOSLEY: I just want to go back to your child separation reporting and also the documentary, which really lays out from several officials who were working during that time period what they saw inside of the Trump administration and how they navigated what was happening in real time. And this clip I actually want to play is from ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt. He is actually talking about once he started to learn about what was happening. Let's listen.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SEPARATED")
LEE GELERNT: I have been doing this work for three decades. This is the worst thing I have ever seen in the immigration context. This was just blatant, gratuitous cruelty. And one of the strategic decisions that I had to make in the beginning of the case is, do I call this child abuse? Do I call it torture? And a lot of people were saying, you need to use those words. You need to label it that. I decided that ultimately the country was too polarized, and it could produce backlash. It was better just to tell the stories of these children and let the facts speak for themselves.
MOSLEY: That was ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt in the Errol Morris documentary "Separated." And it's based on my guest today, NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff's book, "Separated." One of your arguments in the book - and we've touched on this, but I want to go a little bit deeper into it - is that the harm to the children was actually the point. But also, what I thought Lee said was really interesting about using language to describe and kind of backing down from real harsher language because of the political climate. Where do you think we are today in describing what's happening now?
SOBOROFF: What's interesting about what Lee said there is that, you know, should he call it child abuse? Should he call it torture? He made the judgment call early on that maybe that wasn't the way to capture the nation's attention, but I do think that ultimately, and I wonder if I or Errol Morris asked him this now, would he feel differently about describing it that way? Because ultimately, the American Academy of Pediatrics did call family separation government-sanctioned child abuse, and Physicians for Human Rights - which won a Nobel Peace Prize actually - said it met the United Nations definition of torture. And I do think that that did capture the attention of the nation in some way. Dana Sabraw, the judge in the Southern District of California who ended the policy, I believe, cited both of those characterizations and called family separation one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country. This is a Republican-appointed judge who stopped the policy in this district in San Diego.
And, you know, when I look back at it now, I do think I understand why initially people were hesitant or reluctant to call it what it is. But ultimately, when the facts were sort of laid out for everybody to understand, it's exactly what it was. Same thing now. There's a lot of people on the streets who are calling the federal agents kidnappers or that these are renditions or that - you know, you hear a lot of stuff tossed around. It's sort of - I hate to say it, but it's sort of "The Fog Of War" - pardon the pun - to use the title of another Errol Morris film, where people are just so confused about what's going on. And I think that eventually, when the dust settles here, when we can look back at it, some folks will say some of those characterizations were correct, and others weren't.
MOSLEY: As a student of history, I'm just wondering how you're assessing this because I've always wondered when we hear about atrocities of the past, when we learn about them in school, what were people doing at the time? What were they thinking?
SOBOROFF: Yeah.
MOSLEY: What did they know?
SOBOROFF: It gives me the chills when you say that, actually. Yeah, I think that Judge Sabraw sort of called it like it was, that family separation will be one of the most shameful chapters in the history, certainly the modern history of our country. We will remember it with all of the ignoble chapters - genocide and slavery and Japanese American internment, turning the St. Louis back and sending Jews back to the Holocaust.
I mean, it's part of the reason why I wrote the subtitle of "Separated," my book, was "Inside An American Tragedy." It is sort of a uniquely American story, and it fits into our history. And we're watching the first draft of this chapter play out right now in real time. And so how will we look back? Will we look back and say Donald Trump was successful in emulating Dwight D. Eisenhower's operation with a name so racist that I'm not going to say it here, that deported a million Mexicans and some Mexican Americans? Was this Part 2? Was this the sequel?
There are experts and scholars who have studied this as their life's work, much more than I have. But the parallels are very obvious that today, as children who are in the Los Angeles Unified School District schools ended their year, their parents were afraid to show up at their graduation because they didn't know if ICE would be there to take them away. That's what's played out, and that's what's playing out again now.
MOSLEY: Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Jacob Soboroff. He's a national and political correspondent for NBC News. We'll continue our conversation after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF "HOLT VAUGHN'S "BITTER SUITE (FEAT. PHIL KEAGGY)")
MOSLEY: This is FRESH AIR. Today, I'm talking to Jacob Soboroff, a correspondent for NBC News, about his latest reporting on immigration and the Trump administration's border policy. We recorded this interview on Tuesday.
As a journalist, you know, we're taught to try to be as objective as possible to look at all sides of it. And in this case, I mean, the argument for many will be, well, these people are here illegally. They're undocumented. And so the ways that our administration is trying to fix that because previous administrations have not been able to solve what is perceived to be a problem in our country, President Trump is taking direct action that may hurt a lot of people, but in the end, may be effective. How do you reconcile that with your reporting and trying to stay objective in reporting out what you're seeing in real time?
SOBOROFF: I spent a lot of time - and I do every election season - on the road across the country, talking to all kinds of people from all walks of life. And immigration was certainly a big issue this time around, again, especially with President Trump running, you know, for his second term. And I don't discount people's lived realities that a picture has been painted that makes them very scared of undocumented people that are living in this country, see images and stories and hear numbers about during the Biden administration, how there were so many people that are here. And from Chicago to New York to whatever, you name it, there are scenes playing out where it seems like municipal governments are overwhelmed, and people feel like it comes at their expense as citizens of the United States of America.
I think that the Trump administration has been very effective in creating a message of fear and a feeling of fear, and I think that people really are scared - some people - and I understand why. But I also believe that they haven't seen and lived in or walked in the shoes of the real lives of so many of these people. And when it comes to policy, you know, I'm not a policymaker, I'm a reporter, but it sure seems like for decades under Democrats and Republicans, this punitive deterrence-based policy - punishing people for being, quote-unquote "illegal" hasn't worked. People still come into the country, no matter how harsh or how punitive it is. And Donald Trump might say today, well, it's the lowest number of people ever crossing the border ever, Jacob, you know, you're full of it. We released zero people into the interior last month, the first time ever that that's happened.
MOSLEY: That's true.
SOBOROFF: Yeah. They send them to ICE instead of releasing them into the interior to be deported.
MOSLEY: Interior, meaning, like, into the country.
SOBOROFF: Yeah...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: ...Into the country. But I promise you, people will come again because what this administration and others have done historically is deal with the people who are inside, not the people who are continuing to come. And if we don't understand why and how and who they are, none of that will ever change. And by the way, I'm not advocating for this, but the last person to have a significant departure from this was Ronald Reagan, and he gave amnesty to people who were here and met certain criteria, understanding that they had contributed to the society of the United States. And so what I see is a failed immigration policy, in my - you know, and other people have reported on this for decades and decades. I've been at it for about 11 years. It just seems obvious - the way that this is happening is not working - to everybody, Democrats and Republicans. And I just - I'm - so I just want people to know this is what I'm seeing through my own eyes.
MOSLEY: You were born and raised in Los Angeles. And you are working on a book about the wildfires and the devastating impact, based on your reporting. What made you want to write the book?
SOBOROFF: Just like with family separation, you know, you experience something so massive in scale that you can't fully comprehend it, actually, in real time. I watched my childhood home carbonize, you know, before my own eyes - my whole neighborhood, the Palisades, that I was from, and also Altadena, where I spend a lot of time today. I live literally almost equidistant between the two at this point.
And it's about so much more than being the most costly wildfire in American history. It, like family separation, gives - it gave me, in retrospect, having reported it out, almost X-ray vision into some of the issues that we face as a society, as a city - some of the same issues that we're grappling with today. The same day laborers that are being picked up off the street of Los Angeles are the ones rebuilding LA after the fires. The same inequality, I think, that underlines some of who is being targeted in the raids separated, literally, different sides of town, with different responses to the fire and its aftermath. The federal government - same people in the federal government. The Trump administration and the policies of the administration - and, frankly, misinformation and disinformation about the fires - affected actual response and the recovery.
And so it's amazing how many parallels there are. I think as a reporter in real time, you really don't have the ability to unpack these massive experiences, especially as other people watch around the world.
MOSLEY: Yeah, you're the first draft.
SOBOROFF: Yeah, it's crazy. And so, man, I'm so grateful to have been spending the last six or so months actually unpacking what happened during the fires, and to write it during this moment, especially during this month.
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: Whoa.
MOSLEY: Yeah. Yeah.
SOBOROFF: You know? There's a lot that runs between them.
MOSLEY: That connective tissue there.
SOBOROFF: Yeah.
MOSLEY: Does it make you concerned for our city?
SOBOROFF: Makes me love our city more than ever. It really does. I'm so proud to be a native Angeleno. I love the people of this city more than ever, and resilience is a word that keeps coming to mind. This is a resilient city with resilient people from all walks of life, one of the most diverse cities on Planet Earth. And what a special place. I hope people continue to come and love it like I do - like we do.
MOSLEY: What a moment we're in, though - I mean, you know, when you bring that truth that many of the people who are rebuilding the city are...
SOBOROFF: Crazy.
MOSLEY: ...Being swept up.
SOBOROFF: Yeah. It's - the National Day Labour Organizing Network - I came to know them during COVID because these are a lot of folks that were working in the industries where people were scared to go...
MOSLEY: Yeah.
SOBOROFF: ...But without the protections of the federal government, because they were undocumented. And now I see them all the time - you know, everywhere in all these big incidents - that they're the second responders, they call themselves, during the fire. They're - after the first responders go, they come in, and who's looking after them? And the answer is, a lot of times, not many people.
MOSLEY: Jacob Soboroff, thank you so much for your reporting, and thank you for taking the time.
SOBOROFF: I'm so grateful to be here. Good to be with you. Thank you.
MOSLEY: Jacob Soboroff is a political and national correspondent for NBC News. Tomorrow on FRESH AIR - life as a failed child star. We talk with Tamara Yajia about growing up Jewish in Argentina, at age 11 performing an imitation of Madonna and becoming a popular singer and dancer, later realizing that she was sexualized as a child. In her memoir, she also writes about emigrating with her family to California and nearly getting deported. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at @nprfreshair.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAYLOR HASKINS' "ALBERTO BALSALM")
MOSLEY: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.
(SOUNDBITE OF TAYLOR HASKINS' "ALBERTO BALSALM") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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