ICE and Election Interference!

Hey all, Glen Kersner here. So friends, Donald Trump has all but announced that he will be interfering in the upcoming midterm elections. We only need to look back to January 6, 2021, when he virtually ordered an angry mob to attack the capital after lying to them, convincing them that their election was rigged, their vote was stolen, their favorite president was being wrongfully taken from them. He said, "If you don't fight like hell, you won't have a country anymore. Now go to the capital and stop the certification. Stop the steel." Yes. He tried to use an angry mob to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election win and his election loss. So, of course, he is intending to and preparing to interfere in the upcoming midterms. Why wouldn't he? He got away with it last time.

And we've been hearing some recent rumblings from some of Donald Trump's flunkies, his lap dogs, his sickopants about how Trump might try to use immigration officers like ICE agents to intimidate voters at the polls. Well, I just sat down with a former Border Patrol agent for six years, Jen Bud, and she shared her story about her journey from Border Patrol agent to immigrant advocate, which is what she's doing now, and the concerns she has about how Trump might try to misuse the powers of immigration enforcement agencies to try to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections. Jen is sounding the alarm, and I think we would all do well to heed the call. You know, you've heard me say before that justice is a team sport. We all need to be in the game, including in an effort to protect and promote free and fair American elections because justice matters.

Okay, welcome friends. I had an opportunity to speak with Jen Bud today. I know many of you already know who she is because when I told our community I was going to be interviewing you, the comments just kind of blew up. "Oh, Jen's great. I can't wait." So, um, let me give her a short but semi-proper introduction. So, Jen is a former US Border Patrol agent from 1995 to 2001. She left because of some of the the parade of horrors she saw and experienced on the inside of that agency. And I think this was before ICE technically was created in uh 2003, I believe. So, this is kind of the precursor to ICE. And she became something of a whistleblower. And she is a talking about the horrors that went on inside that agency. She is an immigrant advocate, and if ever that work is at its zenith of importance in our nation, it is now. Being an immigrant advocate, our community members have heard me say a thousand times, diversity is America's superpower. And as far as I'm concerned, it may be one of the few we have left these days. So, Jen, thank you for jumping on with us. Thank you for the work you did as a public servant and the work you're doing as an immigrant ad advocate, and uh, and I'm thrilled to kind of get into it with you.

>> Thank you. Thank you. I'm happy to be here with you, Glenn.

>> All right. I saw you on MS Now, my former home, a couple of days ago explaining to the viewers in layman friendly terms, okay, what legal authority do ICE agents actually have? Can they engage in traffic stops? Can they, this is going to sound stupid, ram vehicles for fun and profit? Can they run into somebody's home if they don't have a judicially issued warrant? I don't pretend to be an expert in this precise area of the law, immigration enforcement, but you were and you are. So, can you kind of just talk about um, as you were on MS Now, what is the lawful authority of ICE agents when they're out there involving themselves in immigration enforcement operations?

Okay. So, when we talk about the immigration enforcement agencies, there's three main ones. ICE, CBP, which is Customs, and then Border Patrol, which is in between the ports of entry. But right now, we kind of call them all ICE. It's like how the immigrants call us all migra, which is short for immigration. So, we're kind of all lumped together because we're all on this same mass deportation thing. So, when we say ICE, we're talking about these three agencies. kind, quite honestly, anybody that that is uh working with them. So the legal authority of these three agencies is immigration, customs, and um, and narcotics that are coming across our borders and into the United States. Uh, ICE has a little bit of more authority in that they are tasked with going to arrest people who have been uh, adjudicated as having committed a crime and then they're supposed to take them once they serve their time and then bring them into immigration custody and see if that then makes them ineligible to stay within the country. So, ICE is a little bit different. Um, but essentially they've kind of grouped all three of these together. They do not have the legal authority to stop you for a traffic violation. Not whatsoever. However, I don't recommend not stopping for ICE because we've seen what happens when you don't stop for ICE. So whether or not the stop is legal or not is not for, honestly, a safe thing for you to decide if you're the one being uh stopped. It is for an attorney later on in the courts to decide. I will say that I saw a stop this morning uh where the guy said, "Yeah, you know, one of your tail lights is a different color than the other tail light." And I'm like, "That is not a legal stop."

>> Uh, it is not even a legal stop for an a Border Patrol agent to stand on a checkpoint and somebody comes through whose DUI appears to be DUI, wreaking, maybe even sitting there drinking beer. I've had that happen to me as an agent. And if you pull them over and stop them, then then that stop does not count because you do not have that legal training and you do not have that legal authority. The problem that we have gotten into since 9/11 is that they've created these joint task forces and they call them joint terrorism task forces, JTTFs. And what happens is is the government has the Congress has allowed them to assume the authority of the other agencies when they work together in these joint task forces. So I, as a Border Patrol agent, if I happen to have a San Diego uh PD or San Diego sheriff with me, all of a sudden I I can assume all of their powers as well. And so they're kind of playing this game where they're like, "Well, technically, you know, we're all working on this mass deportation, so we can all assume each other's powers and this and that." But they do not have the power and um, your local police departments, your state and local uh uh law enforcement do not have immigration authority to be stopping people based on suspicion of what they would call illegal immigration, undocumented immigration, which is essentially racial profiling. They do not have that legal authority, except that now the government has been doing these things called 287G programs where they give them like four to eight hours of training and then go out there and let them all of a sudden become immigration officers. So what they've been doing, Glenn, is is they're combining their authorities and assuming each other's authorities without any proper training, without any kind of uh consent from Congress and so forth. Uh, and as far as warrants are concerned, there's a 100-mile rule around any uh land or water uh border barrier in which the Border Patrol and CBP can enter your property without a warrant. The outside of your property, they can search within 25 miles of the border. It's even more. They can go onto your property and search your barns and things like that for people that maybe have crossed recently. Uh, they cannot do that in domiciles. They are supposed to have a warrant in order to go into people's domiciles. So this this kind of, and what we see in ICE and in this mass deportation is where they they're taking administrative immigration subpoenas, which just means that a supervisor said, "Yeah, this person needs to be picked up and signed off on it." A supervisor. It's a the lowest level of management, to be honest. It's an admin. They call it a warrant, an administrative warrant as opposed to a judiciary.

>> Right.

>> It basically should be like a memo.

>> It's like a note from your mom. It's like a permission slip, which doesn't generally have the force of law, but go ahead.

>> Yeah. But then they internally are like, "Okay, now you can break down doors to get this person who is here on an im, you know, immigration violation, which is a civil civil violation. And it is not a crime like murder or rape or anything. It is you have created an infraction. It is like a speeding ticket. It is it is like the you know, stop cams catch you or something like that. It it is it it does not hold the same weight. But they internally put out these memos and then they let the agents do it, and then it has to work its way through the courts, and it takes forever. So that's kind of the game they play, whereas they're violating their authorities. They're going outside of their jurisdiction, and they're they're like, kind of like, "Well, what are you gonna do about it?" And part of the problem is is that both sides of the aisle have not done very much about it in the last 10 years because it was mostly aimed at people down here on the border, mostly aimed at black and brown migrants who were coming across illegally. And for the most part, that kind of satisfied uh many Americans, not obviously all Americans. Um, and what we have been saying down here for many years is that this is going to come home. This is going to come to middle America. If they can do that down here, if the United States Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, the 14th Amendment to due process and all that does not exist >> for uh undocumented migrants, which is not true. It it does exist for for them, but they're claiming that it doesn't. That's what they teach you in the academy is that they don't have constitutional rights like American citizens do. And that is not correct. But that is what they are teaching them. So if they've been getting away with that for for many generations, then why not just bring it into Chicago? Why not just bring it into the middle of Ohio and so forth? And that's what they're doing. And they're just basically, they know that Congress does not is not willing to stop it, unfortunately, and is not willing to uh, and and honestly, at the same time, right now, Democrats don't have much power, to be honest with you. But when they did have power, they were not stopping it. And that was problematic as well. So,

>> so something you said I want to follow up on. He said that ICE typically involved itself, I guess, before these, you know, out-of-control immigration enforcement operations in the age of Trump with, you know, trying to take into custody and deport people who had been convicted of a crime and perhaps had served their sentence and they were being released from a confinement facility and ICE would go take them and then begin the process to see if they were subject to deportation based on the crime for which they was they were convicted. Um, was that kind of the lion's share of what ICE was doing before they tried to sort of expand things to kind to where we are now on the deportation front?

I think ICE is a very interesting agency. It was established differently after 9/11 during the George W. Bush administration. It was actually not. So, in order for an agency to to exist, Congress has to create it. They have to create the law that creates the agency, and they and then they limit the powers and this, they say, "This is what you're going to do." After 9/11, they created a border enforcement agency that included what ICE was doing. But then George W. Bush administration said, "We don't like this. We're going to create this other thing called ICE." So, ICE technically is not legal. ICE was created by the executive uh branch of government by George W. Bush to replace what Congress had authorized. So, ICE doesn't actually have full uh congressional uh rights, but they they originally started out, you know, um, they created what's called NSEERS, which was the Muslim registry for men, I think I want to say ages 16 to probably up to to middle-aged men, where they were forced to come in and say, "Yes, I'm here." And so they so they were supposed, they were doing things like that. They were doing things like jail checks. So, they were supposed to go to the jails and and and and see who's getting out when and keep on top of that to be able to get them into the immigration system to decide, have they violated their immigration status and so forth. And then also, ICE officers do things like when you have an attorney and you have to make your appearances every so many months or so many years to renew your stuff, they do that. They did that that kind of stuff too, to make sure you were doing what you were supposed to be doing. It was and then it became more and more of a harassment. So as ICE gets bigger and bigger, I mean, we need to understand that ICE was heavily influenced by Border Patrol, and Border Patrol is the most poorly trained, the most corrupt, the most ruthless and brutal agency in immigration agencies. That's why we see their management has taken over CBP with Chief Rodney Scott's now commissioner of CBP, and also that we have replaced a lot of the directors of regional directors of ICE. So you see that brutality that that typically existed in between the ports of entry for those who were physically coming across in the middle of the night trying to sneak through and get around Border Patrol and stuff is now that attitude, that level of brutality is and enforcement is now across all the immigration uh agencies, and that's the problem that we see.

>> Yeah. And you know where of you speak when you talk about how, you know, Border Patrol um is kind of in many ways, it sounds like a rogue agency, a lawless agency, an abusive agency, both to its own employees sometimes, as and you suffered that fate when you were there, and and to the immigrants that they are encountering.

And I will say too, is like the Border Patrol has always been like that. All of our immigration laws are based in in racism and and and and were uh written by old uh politicians that believed in segregation and things like that. Um, so that's kind of where these agencies are come from. But the Border Patrol has always from day one been corrupt. In 1924, shortly after it it was brought online, within when within the first few years of the agency, they actually had to fire everybody because everybody was taking bribes and they were so corrupt. And so typically Border Patrol, you can have the least amount of education. You can barely read and write, and they'll give you a gun and a horse and a truck, and and you can go on out there. I was unusual. I mean, quite honestly, I I I tell people like, first of all, got in before 9/11, but second of all, being that I was a woman, it just meant that the guy that was interviewing was attracted to me. Honestly, that is the truth. Um, it's not to say that I wasn't a good agent or didn't deserve to be there, but it's just that's that's the way the agency has always run. They have always run cover-up teams, illegal cover-up teams. No agent has ever been convicted of killing anybody on duty in 102 years. And that is just absolutely insane. Um, and they have for a long time knowingly hired criminals, people under investigation for very serious crimes, people with ties to the cartel, and um, they get they get away with a lot. They get away with a lot because they're just considered, as far as Congress is concerned, they just consider them to be like, you know, you're there to control, as they would say, the illegal immigrants. And so they just let them do whatever they want. When you talk about nobody being convicted um for uh crimes they perpetrate against immigrants, I mean, that kind of brings us to the Renee Goods and the Alex Pies, and and there are I think eight total as of uh today who have been killed, and and others who have been shot but not fatally wounded. What is Lorenzo Salgato Rojo? We've got Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero. And then, you know, there there are people who have been shot and injured but survived. And when you look at incidents like Julio Sosa Celis, who is a guy who looks like had nothing to do with nothing, but you had some immigration officers chasing somebody else who ran into this gentleman's house. The gentleman ran into his own house and closed the door, and they shot through the door. Now, right, this old prosecutor who worked some police excessive force cases can tell you, you don't get to shoot people through the door. And then, of course, those agents ended up lying about the true circumstances. Shocking, I know. Um, they said, "Well, the guy tried to beat us with a snow shovel." The problem is, there was actually, I think, a city crime camera, surveillance camera that caught and nothing like that had happened. And, you know, it's interesting because when we saw the recent reporting that the feds have finally given over the evidence that the Hennepin County District Attorney needs to pursue a full, fair investigation of, I believe, both Renee Good and Alex Py's uh homicides. Apparently, the feds wanted evidence that the state authorities had in the Julio Sosatelis incident. And so it was basically like a a hostage swap. You know, "We'll give you yours if you give us ours." But but I want to ask you about when you were with Border Patrol.

>> Were there times when you had to work and or wanted to work productively with local law enforcement? And in your experience, did that work well? Did it not work well? Because I can tell you as a as a federal prosecutor for 30 years, I worked with the local state authorities. Whether it was across jurisdictional lines up in Maryland for me because I was in DC, across the river in Virginia, we worked with the locals productively and and civilly and cordially and professionally all the time. And now we are experiencing just the opposite.

I would say during my time, so before uh 9/11, we call that the old patrol, and after 9/11, we call that the new patrol. So, in the old patrol, Border Patrol agents um and immigration officers in general were thought of as a joke. Not real law enforcement officers, were just the immigration police. We didn't have as much authority and this and that. And they also were the ones that we are required by law, states so sew in our use of force manuals, states so today that when we get into a use of force incident, we are required to call everybody with jurisdiction in that area. So that means if I'm in San Diego County, I got to call San Diego Sheriffs, and I also have to call them the federal agencies involved that would investigate as well. And then after 9/11, things changed. And the reason why things changed is, even though it was the immigration agencies who failed to do the proper screening and allowed the terrorists to come in and commit 9/11 crimes um, they were given, there was no accountability for anybody in the management, and they were given billions and billions of dollars. And what we have seen since 9/11 is that what DHS and the immigration agencies have done is they have bought off our police. Not all police departments, of course, but certainly the majority of ones down here on the southern border. And so on the southern border, over the years, what I have seen in the studies. So the Renee Good shooting and Petty shooting and all those look just like everyday Border Patrol shootings down here that I see all the time. The covering up, the evidence, the attacking the witnesses to make them run away, the taking uh keeping evidence from the investigators. So what the Border Patrol did is they created these critical critical incident teams. And I want to say that if you want to understand these teams, HBO documentary right now called "Critical Incident: Death at the Border." It just won an Emmy, and it's about my work, and it's about how the current commissioner of CBP managed to cover up crimes and murders from 2010 and is now somehow the head of CBP, and not even Democrats will talk about that. But you can understand that if you watch that film, "Critical Incident: Death at the Border." So what happened is is they get this influx of money, and they start allowing these joint terrorism task forces. And so what you see is the rhetoric, the anti-immigrant hate rhetoric um, and and the invader rhetoric and stuff, which did not exist in the patrol until after 9/11. Um, asylum seekers were just asylum seekers in my day. They weren't invaders. Um, but but then they changed that. Then they start giving them grants, and and my latest book is a um an ebook called "ICE: What Everyone Needs to Know." And it talks about this. There are so many grants that your state and local police can get, whether they're holding holding immigrants for ICE or whether they're getting training from ICE. They get money, they get resources, they get guns, they get trucks, and our police departments cannot work at the same level that they're they have been working at in the last 20 years without this funding. At the same time, a lot of their training has been given by these immigration agents, whether through their own private companies. Once they retire, they then create these private police training companies that then train them according to how DHS wants them to think of immigrants and immigration. And and so it it just keeps growing and getting bigger. And so the problem we have now is is that a lot of our law enforcement is bought and owned by these agencies. And they are getting paid lots of money. Lots of money to bring in anybody who they consider to be an undocumented person or somebody who shouldn't be lawfully here. What we see in Minneapolis is those are police departments where the immigration agencies are not 100% on board or or assured that they're going to give them the type of investigation that they would want. So they don't trust Minneapolis police. They don't trust Chicago police because they don't have as big of inroads as they've had down here. You'll see the same shootings. So even though those shootings were going on down here, there's shootings going on where they have no problem with Texas DPS investigating, they have no problem with uh Cochise County, Arizona investigating, and they have no problem with that because their sheriffs and their bosses take a ton of money from these agencies, and they know that they own them. Um, unfortunately, like down here on the southern border, even though I saw today that there there was an article saying that the FBI is now saying that they're not going to investigate any killings of migrants. That ICE can do it. ICE HSI does not have the authority to bring charges for human rights violations. So, I'm not even sure what they're going to do with the investigation if they're going to investigate that. And they don't have the same kind of uh forensics and ballistics and things like that. What I what they're going to do is use these cover-up teams that have been rolled into CBP's Office of Professional Responsibility, that now Rodney Scott is back in charge of, and he's going to use those those agents to do the evidence collection and all that. So, they're going to control the scenes. Um, and and I don't, part of me was like, "Oh man, this isn't good." But then another part of me is like, "You know what though?" Like I have cases after cases after cases that I've analyzed, and they're here on Substack on these on how Border Patrol and CBP do this. Is that it's gotten so bad that even if the FBI investigators are involved, what happens down here is they notify the FBI. FBI, okay, there's an incident, an agent shot a migrant out in the middle of nowhere. And the FBI forensic analysis, the evidence collection teams will go, "Okay, well, send out your critical incident teams, which are illegal, and gather all the evidence, and I'll be there when I can get there." So, they're allowing the teams to control the evidence. So, even when the FBI is doing the quote-unquote independent investigation, they're only using the evidence that is gathered by these teams. So, the cases are compromised from the very get-go. That's how it's done.

>> Bleak. It's a little bleak.

>> I'm sorry. It is bleak. But I'm glad that people want to know about this because I've been talking about this for so many years. So,

>> well, we we we can't address and hopefully reform and repair what we don't know about. So,

>> let me just follow up on one thing that made my blood pressure spike when you said it, even though I I we know it to be true. And that is that, you know, law enforcement will sometimes intimidate the witnesses who were present when law enforcement agents engaged in excessive force. They'll kind of run the witnesses out, which is nothing but plain old obstruction of justice and witness tampering, quite frankly. But it made me think back to my days as a homicide prosecutor. You know, we did just the opposite. When we had witnesses without legal status, we would get them U visas, which allowed them to stay and participate in the investigative process as witnesses, appear before the grand jury without being, you know, afraid that they're going to be swooped up and deported. We would let them stay here until the trial so they could comfortably testify without fear of retaliation. And then we would often, after they did the hard work of helping us um hold killers accountable, we would try to find them pathways to being able to remain here lawfully. And just, you know, when I hear the kind of perversion of the work, you know, that I I know we did honorably and have government agents run witnesses out only to cover up their own misconduct, it's just >> mindblowing.

Another thing they like to do is, and I'm kind of seeing this in um in some of the most recent shootings, especially with Lorenzo's, is is they, you know, they run to the press. Like we've seen that that's standard practice down here on the border when it comes to immigrants uh being abused by uh agents. Is one of the things that they really like to do, Glenn, and you'll love this, is uh they like to take all the migrants or all the witnesses and put them in the same transport vehicle or put them into the same cell. And then by the time 5 years later when it finally goes to court, they're like, "Well, we can't trust their testimony because they've talked to each other and how they co-mingled. You can't co-mingle the witnesses." But they do it on purpose, and they do it on purpose all the time. And then what I've seen recently in Lorenzo's case, too, is there they're claiming now that they found small little packets of white powder, and they think they think it could be meth or fentanyl, but they're not sure. They do this over and over. In this case that I was talking about with the critical incident movie "Death at the Border" on HBO, they did the same thing. They said that the man that it was ICBP and Border Patrol killed this one man, and they said, "Oh, he uh tested positive for meth." He didn't test positive for meth. He tested positive for amphetamines because they were trying to start his heart. That's what he wasn't on drugs. They were trying to start his heart. So, you know, and but they put that out, and then everybody goes, "Oh, he is a mess. He was crazy." So, this is just, I mean, it's just it's obnoxious. And I will tell you, as a former agent, I when I realized what these teams were, because I realized in the field, I wrote about it in my first book about how I came upon these teams and realized what they were because they're even secret in the Border Patrol. That's how secret they are. I was like, you know, the thing is is when you do get injured, because I have been hit and dragged by a car by a smuggler before on the I-8 checkpoint and stuff, people don't believe you. People don't believe us because y'all are lying all the time. So, it's not to say that that the job can't be dangerous, but the majority of people coming across, 98% of them, 99% of them are not criminals. And and you know what I've seen over the years is instead of accepting the fact that they are immigration agents and the majority of the people are not criminals um and they need to be adjudicated in whatever civil way and and and given, you know, inspected and then given status and so forth. It's like the agents get so offended that people will not see them as as heroes, as people who are out there supposedly stopping crime. But it's like, but it's not a crime to be an immigrant. It's not a crime to claim asylum. If you want to go get criminals, then go join ATF or go join. But you can't because you have problems in your background. And so what they've done is they've criminalized the asylum seeker. They've criminalized the immigrants so that they can feel better about themselves. And that is what all of this is about. And this doesn't even get us to the conversation about DACA that I thought we might have, because that again is a special kind of depravity that's going on. I mean, DACA with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. These are children who were brought here and no no other home, no other country. And we were talking before we went live about how now they're trying to, you know, basically criminalize them, deprive them of continuing to either enjoy the status they have or seek the status they're entitled to enjoy, just so they can put more heads in, you know, private for-profit prison beds. And, you know, we just I feel like we have so much that we have to tackle when the rule of law comes back into the light of day. Immigration enforcement is is certainly one of those areas where, you know, we've done so poorly for so long that I think it's going to take heroic efforts. But when people say to me, because I say we have to hold all the criminals accountable who are committing crime, and I mean government actors who are committing crimes against the American people, well beyond the immigration front, and people are like, "Well, it's just too much for our arms to to get around." That I just say, "It's too much for our arms not to get around if we care about, you know, running a civilized country and a civilized government, which we are just kind of dropping the ball on." And let me just add, you know, I'm a rule of law guy, and I I would never say nobody should be deported. In fact, when I convicted folk primarily of murder, I was a homicide prosecutor for 22 of my 30 years, and they were undocumented, we would try them, convict them, the judge would sentence them, they'd go to prison, and then we put on them what's called the deportation detainer. So, they weren't released after 10 or 15 or 30 years in prison. They weren't released back into the streets of the US. They were picked up by, you know, immigration agents and officers, and they were deported. And and that's the way it ought to work. Not criminalizing people who have been here for 30 years under DACA or other programs and and, you know, just to just to fill a quota that Stephen Miller has set. I I mean, this this is a it's a special kind of insanity.

Let me let me end with this, and I know we don't have a crystal ball, but as we head toward the midterms, and we saw Donald Trump's election lies pulooa a couple of days ago, the speech he gave, how concerned are you that they might try to send, for example, ICE agents to the polls in blue states to try to interfere in and suppress the vote?

Well, I've been saying since mass deportation started, I I look at it from an operational standpoint. So, I'm watching what they're doing in the cities that they're choosing or cities that they're going to contest. Um, they'll say, "Oh, they're blue cities and this and that." But there are areas where they're going to contest things. They're rationing up the violence right now. Um, you saw the violence was high when uh Chief Bo was running the show because he's flamboyant, likes to be on TV. We call him the Liberace of the Border Patrol. Uh, Chief Liberace. And and

>> with apologies to Liberace. Yeah. Go ahead.

>> And then and then when he got he got in trouble, then everybody got upset. They're like, "Okay, okay. Well, back up. We won't be that bad." So, wait a minute. You can just stop the violence anytime you want to because you're saying that the violence is like you can't control it, you know. But what you see is they can control it, and it's because of their own actions and so forth. What I see is, so what people need to understand is when they go into these cities, when they do these deportation raids, they're not just going into these cities and running around. They're creating infrastructure, and they're creating connections with local police, military, and they're setting up things to then come back to. And so what I anticipate, and I hope I'm wrong. I would love to come back here on here and say I'm wrong. What I anticipate, and what I'm seeing, is that wherever DHS Secretary Mullen decides uh they need to be to enforce election integrity, which ICE does not have the legal authority to do, let's just be clear about that. Um, uh, and Border Patrol and CBP do not either. Is that then they will go up to people who they look at racially profile. They're not going to be looking at me or you, Glenn. They're going to be looking at people of color, and they're going to walk up to them and say, "I don't think you have the right to vote. Snatch you up." And this is why they've been like during these whole 18 months, what they've been doing is when they do their uh immigration inspection, when they walk up to people, usually you go, "Are you a United States citizen?" That's an immigration inspection, pretty much. Instead, they're not asking them. They're not asking for their IDs. They're grabbing them and taking them away. And that is a that's unusual. That is a setup so that now on election day, they can walk up and go, "Yoink," and take you away. And they're gonna take you miles and miles away, and they're going to destroy your phone and throw it out in the street like they do most people, and then you won't be able to call anybody, and you're going to have to figure out how to get back over there, and by the time you get back over there, the polls are closed. But it's to create a lot of fear. And and I know people said, "Well, he's already turned them on to Americans and attacked Americans." That is true. But he they've been targeting Americans who have been doing ICE protests. And I'm not saying that's okay, but that's where they're targeting. This is going to morph. This is going to expand into Americans for the sake of election integrity and things like that. So, everything is a national security issue to them. And and honestly, it just, what they're creating is a national security issue, and they're making us less safe, and and and we're going to pay for all this. We're going to pay for for a lot of this of of what we're doing. But yeah, I expect I see the increased violence is leading into the election, and then the with the election lies and this and that, and then Mullen coming out saying ICE is going to be enforcing this. I'm like, based off of what?

>> Based off,

>> which of course violates federal law, no troops to the polls, and that means military and civilian officers with guns. I am somewhat uh heartened by the fact that we've heard lots of blue state leadership, governors, and attorneys general saying, and they've been saying for many months, "We are preparing." And this sounds like a crazy dystopian sort of statement. "We are preparing to safeguard our polls, our voters, our election uh machines, and our ballots against the federal government." And, you know, I take them at their word. I think they are um I know there are a lot of great organizations that I think have probably already prepared applications for temporary restraining orders. All they need need to do are fill in a couple of blanks in the days leading up to the election. And, you know, we do know courts can act very quickly on election day. So, but it's going to be tough. It's going to be dangerous. It's going to be volatile. I still believe that we're going to have free and fair elections. They're going to be messy. Um, they're going to be abuses for sure, but um, and then, you know, assuming the Dems take control of the House and maybe even the Senate. The way I see it, and I am not a political expert, really, all they're going to be able to accomplish in the next couple of years are running investigations into the, you know, unchecked crime and corruption of the Trump administration because they're not going to be able to get legislation passed, right? We're not going to have a a veto-proof majority. So the way I see it, let's get our investigations on. It was one of the things um in the aftermath of what Trump did on January 6th, congressional investigations, the House Select Committee into January 6th was one of the only things that got DOJ off the dime to begin to pursue the suits of the insurrection, the hierarchy of the insurrection. So, you know, at least that's something. That ain't nothing if we can get those investigations up and running after the midterms. And then I'll tell you, Jen, come January 2029, if we don't go scorched earth after accountability for what Trump is doing to the people today, shame on us. We don't deserve to keep our republic. But I hope we have finally learned our lesson. But

>> listen, tell everybody where can they find your great work? Where can they get your book? Border Talk, is that the uh your

>> Borderland Talk? Yeah, that's Substack uh newsletter. And I also have JimbenBud.net. You can get it there free as well. My podcast also from Substack. Go to YouTube, Borderland Talk. My first book was "Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist." And then my second book is "ICE: What Everyone Needs to Know." And you can get those anywhere, anywhere online. So, yeah.

>> Jen, thank you for your voice in this fight and this madness, but we have to keep calling it out, exposing it, and then eventually when we can start to reform and repair, that's the mission that has called us as far as I see it. So, thank you for what you're doing.

>> Thank you. I appreciate it.

>> All right.