Have ICE protests cracked Trump?

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Since the beginning of June, the good people of Massachusetts have been sleeping easy.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a safer place today.

Thanks to the work and determination of the men and women of ICE.

This is ICE official Patricia Hyde outlining the success of what they had called Operation Patriot.

Throughout this enhanced immigration enforcement operation, ICE and our federal partners targeted the most dangerous alien offenders in some of the most crime-infested neighborhoods of Massachusetts.

Okie-dokie.

Well, let's take a look at one of those neighborhoods, the crime-infested hellscape that is Milford, Massachusetts.

In the last 40 years, they've had a total of seven murders.

The last one was in 2017.

And with Operation Patriot, ICE is trying to get rid of crime altogether by picking up guys like Marcelo Gomes de Silva.

Marcelo Gomes de Silva is an 18-year-old kid from Brazil originally, and he's been here since he was seven years old.

Okay, but he's like a teenage thug or something, right?

In a gang, probably.

He has glowing letters from his principal, from teachers, from his volleyball coach, from his pastor.

He has no criminal record.

This kid has never interacted with police until last Saturday.

Okay, well, he's probably from one of those terrible, dysfunctional, America-hating families, right?

My name is Jean-Paul, Marcel's father.

We love America.

Please bring

my son back.

Okay, so why was he arrested?

Well, he's 18 years old.

He's unlawfully in this country.

And unfortunately, we had to go to Milford to look for someone else, and we came across him, him, and he was arrested.

Okay, so not really a dangerous alien offender.

Still, the authorities didn't let Marcelo go.

He was kept handcuffed in a single room with one toilet, no shower, and 40 other men.

But rather than continue on with their lives, the people of Milford decided to do something about it.

The crowds grew grew until eventually, after nearly a week of legal challenges and protests, Marcelo was released by ICE.

The only thing I could do is thank God every day because that's all I would do.

I would pray there, I would talk about the Bible to them.

Now, scale that story up from a one high school town like Milford to a 183 high school town like Los Angeles, and you get this.

Angelinos take to the streets again, continuing to demand an end to raids targeting immigrants.

They could not kidnap people in our community today because the people came out to resist and Donald Trump is responding with force.

The U.S.

President has labeled these protesters insurrectionists, invaders, and directed his government to do whatever it takes to, in his words, liberate Los Angeles.

In the early months of the Trump administration, it seemed like everything was going the president's way.

But when it comes to deportations, America is learning that protests can work in small cases like Marcelo Gomes in Milford and in high-profile cases like Kilmar Abrego-Garcia.

And what started as a gentle simmer is starting to boil.

So, why now?

And what's going to happen next?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

When Donald Trump was running for president last year, he seemed to talk more about Hannibal Lecter than most presidential candidates.

Silence of the Lamb.

Has anyone ever seen a silence of the limbs?

The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man.

He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner.

Now, Hannibal Lichter is neither late nor great.

He is fictional, but he was helpful to a point that Trump wanted to make about undocumented immigrants.

They're taking people

from insane asylums and from mental institutions.

You know what the difference is, right?

An insane asylum is a mental institution on steroids.

Now, why is he saying this?

There is is one theory.

Trump definitely thinks they're coming from insane asylums because he heard they were seeking asylum.

Does he think that seeking asylum and being in an insane asylum are the same thing?

I've been thinking about this a lot, and this week I decided I'd find out if that is really what's going on.

And look, I hate to ruin quite a funny joke.

But Donald Trump does know what an asylum seeker is.

These migrants are not legitimate asylum seekers.

So I negotiated remain in Mexico, forcing fraudulent asylum seekers to stay in Mexico.

Deliberately misusing the word asylum feeds into a national stigma created by years of serial killer movies.

Trump isn't confused.

I'm pretty sure he's doing this on purpose.

And it's connected to a MAGA obsession with something that happened 45 years ago in Havana, Cuba.

On the 1st of April 1980, a man named Hector San Justis crashed the school bus he was driving into the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana.

He and the five other people on board ran into the embassy and asked for political asylum as enemies of the communist Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Within a week, a rather large number of people had followed Hector through the gates.

A revised Peruvian count shows that a total of 10,385 people jammed into the embassy grounds over the Easter weekend.

The Cuban government was slightly surprised at how many people were trying to flee their country.

Cuban officials have called them delinquents and criminals.

Some do have police records, but far more are escaping the government, daily shortages of food and necessities, and the economic chaos resulting from this year's tobacco and sugar blight.

After three weeks, Castro decided that he would allow anyone who wanted to leave Cuba to go.

The Cuban government has not placed any limit on the number of Cubans who will be allowed to go.

He said boats could come from foreign countries and pick up immigrants at Mariel Harbor, just west of Havana.

The Cuban port of Mariel is jammed with ships of all sizes.

At latest count, 1,300 boats have arrived here.

A massive migration began, with Cuban Americans chartering boats to bring their relatives to America in what became known as the Mariel Boat Lift.

22,000 have come so far in 700 boats shepherded by the U.S.

Coast Guards to landfall at Key West.

To avoid embarrassment, Castro flipped the script and boasted that he was actually using this as an opportunity to deport people he didn't want in his country.

Fidel Castro has been stripping his island of the Cubans he wants to get rid of.

Castro's message that most of the people getting onto the boats were criminal scum spread quickly into the American media.

Close to 1,700 U.S.

boats crossed the Florida Straits to pick up relatives.

What they brought back was a whole lot of trouble.

In the New York Times, the Cuban asylum seekers were dubbed dangerous criminals, intellectually disabled, or psychiatric patients.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinel published an article claiming that the people coming over from Mariol were 16,000 to 20,000 criminals and other misfits who have contributed to an alarming increase in South Florida crime.

Other articles suggested that Mariel Cubans were taking people's jobs in Miami, and those allegations really stuck.

Even in the movies, the Mariolitos were presented as criminals.

The Al Pacino movie Scarface is about a Cuban gang who came over with 25,000 other criminals in the Mariel boatlift.

But was any of that true?

Refugees bring stories of having been herded into camps, some of them sick, some of them beaten, of having been forced to confess to crimes uncommitted, then dumped onto unsafe boats for the Florida coast.

Most of the people Castro labelled criminals were in fact just dissenters, intellectuals, and gay people.

So-called anti-social elements, people who wouldn't fit in with the revolution.

In six months, 125,000 refugees crossed the Florida Strait and were processed in the United States.

Around 2,000 were found to have legitimate criminal records in Cuba and were sent to a U.S.

federal prison in Atlanta.

1,300 were sent for psychiatric assessment.

151 of those were sent to psychiatric hospitals.

75 were sent to shelters for people with intellectual disabilities.

and the rest were treated in the community.

This is the only proven instance of any psychiatric patients ever being deliberately sent to the United States.

98% of the Cuban refugees weren't criminals or mentally unwell.

They went into the community and became good, hard-working, tax-paying American citizens.

There's also no reliable evidence that they took anyone's jobs.

Instead, they filled gaps in the labor market.

And yet, in MAGA World, the Mariel Boatlift remains an example of a nefarious plot to smuggle criminals into the United States.

Out of the 125,000 migrants who came at the time, 16 to 20,000 were criminals.

And then we had the Mario Boatlift, and we had disaster.

Disaster.

This is a helpful narrative.

If what you want to do is argue that everyone who comes to America as an asylum seeker is a criminal, Hannibal Lecter, or going to take your job.

They're sending people that have lots of problems and they're bringing those problems with us.

They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.

Some are good people.

In fact, most Americans think that most undocumented immigrants are good people.

A poll published by the Cato Institute in 2021 says that 87% of Americans think of immigrants as family, friends, neighbours or guests, and only thirteen per cent think of them as intruders or invaders.

In 2024, a poll found that most Americans want undocumented immigrants to have the ability to become citizens if they pass certain tests.

They're particularly supportive of that option being available to people who came over as children, like Marcelo Gomes.

But what most Americans also want is a secure border and the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are really criminals.

So, with all that in mind, let me take you to mid-March 2025.

Donald Trump was re-elected partly on the promise that he would deport millions of people from America.

Deportation started just days after he was sworn in.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, posted videos of their agents rounding up undocumented migrants and putting them in detention or onto planes almost daily.

Hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members have been deported from the US to El Salvador.

The key word here is alleged.

These men had not been given a court hearing before they were loaded onto three planes in Texas.

The Trump administration justified the deportation by invoking an obscure 18th century wartime law giving the president extraordinary powers to detain or remove foreigners.

When they landed in El Salvador, the men were taken into a specially designed prison for terrorists called Seacot.

Video released by El Salvador's government showed men shackled and struggling to walk as they were transferred to a notorious Supermax prison.

They had their heads shaved, they were dressed in white and sent into their cells.

And all the while, were filmed and photographed by the Salvadoran government.

Meanwhile, in the state of Maryland, a woman named Jennifer Vasquez-Sura looked at one of these photos and saw her worst nightmare.

Her husband was among the detainees.

Her husband, who is not a Venezuelan gang member, in fact, he's not even Venezuelan.

His name is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and he fled his home country of El Salvador as a teenager.

The local chapter of the notorious Burrio 18 gang was relentlessly threatening his family and he was sent to the US to escape them.

He arrived in the United States in 2012.

US law requires refugees to file an application for asylum within one year of their arrival.

Kilmar says he was not aware of this and didn't file his application until 2019.

While he therefore couldn't be be officially granted asylum, a judge did grant him a protection order preventing him from being deported to El Salvador, which meant that he was able to live a relatively normal life in the U.S.

until he was snatched up by ICE.

So, if he wasn't a Venezuelan gang member, why was he snatched up by ICE?

Well, first of all, it was an administrative error as to why he was deported.

Sorry, before you get to the end there, Attorney General Pam Bondi,

isn't that the end of the story?

Shouldn't you be doing everything in your power to get him back, considering that he was deported due to an error?

And we believe he should stay where he is.

What has followed since his deportation on March 15th has honestly been bizarre.

A mixture of Kafka's The Trial and Heller's Catch 22, two books that I like to pretend I've read.

His original deportation was ruled illegal by a judge, but the judge was told by lawyers the planes were already in the air and over international waters.

Once he landed, the Trump folks said that he was El Salvador's problem.

That's up to El Salvador if they want to return him.

That's not up to us.

Because he is a citizen of El Salvador.

That is the president of El Salvador.

Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him.

That guy talking there is Donald Trump's top immigration advisor, Stephen Miller.

But the president of El Salvador says.

How can I return him to the Atlantic?

The question is preposterous.

So the U.S.

can't go get him,

and El Salvador can't return him.

How can I return him to the Atlantic?

Seems like a catch-22, I think.

Probably.

I really should read that book.

How about this?

I promise I'll read Catch-22 when Stephen Miller reads the U.S.

Constitution.

See, if you're a person in the United States, the US Constitution applies to you.

Even if you're not a citizen, even if you're an undocumented immigrant, even if you're a criminal, even if you are the late great Hannibal Lecter.

The Bill of Rights, that's towards the back of the Constitution, by the way, Stephen, that protects everyone against illegal searches, self-incrimination, being locked up without a speedy and public trial, cruel and unusual punishments, having soldiers live in your house, etc., etc.

There's no argument.

If you're in America, you get all of that.

You can't just be grabbed off the street and put on a plane to El Salvador.

But Stephen Miller thought he'd found a loophole.

Once someone's out of our country,

that becomes the problem of their host country, not our country.

If you can get someone out of the country before the courts can stop you, it's not your problem anymore.

Stephen Miller thought that he'd figured it all out, but the US public disagreed.

Tell me what democracy looks like!

This is what democracy looks like!

And so did the US courts.

A man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador has been returned to the United States to face charges of people smuggling.

After months of the Trump administration making allegations that Kilmar is a gang member, a human trafficker and a domestic abuser, he has been returned to the US to face court.

Bring him back, show everybody how

Now, this isn't necessarily a victory for him personally.

He is still in custody.

But for the US Constitution, it's massive.

Kilmar may or may not be a criminal.

I have no idea.

But the way that you figure that out is in a courtroom.

And now he's due to face trial in an American courtroom.

That's a victory.

One of many that protesters and judges have won over the Trump administration.

Something that Stephen Miller isn't isn't particularly happy about.

Tyranny.

Judicial tyranny.

This is a judicial coup by communist Marxist judges against the laws, constitution, and democracy of the United States.

But the greater threat to Trump's authority is the people in the streets.

So how's he responding to that?

I want to say a few words about the situation.

In Los Angeles, California.

Have you heard of the place?

The protests in Los Angeles began after ICE agents began picking up undocumented immigrants at the Home Depot hardware store.

The focus of the protests was a two-block area in downtown LA near the city hall, next to a federal government complex.

The Department of Homeland Security released a statement claiming 1,000 rioters had surrounded a federal law enforcement building and assaulted ICE law enforcement officers, slashing tires and effacing buildings.

The amount of rioting was in fact quite minimal.

Many of the people attending were protesting for the first time in their lives.

I never felt the need, but you know,

I'm starting to feel the need to go out there and start organizing and doing anything you can.

But Donald Trump went to great lengths to demonize the protesters and the immigrants they're trying to protect.

They came from prisons, they came from jails from all over the world, they came from mental institutions, they were the leaders of gangs, they were drug lords allowed to come into our country.

Their countries threw them out.

Their countries would bust them or drive them right to our border.

And now, Trump has deployed the military to try and make people too frightened to go out into the streets.

We will use every asset at our disposal to quell the violence and restore law and order right away.

And we will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy.

Peaceful people who were attending their first protest were met with rubber bullets.

But so far, Trump's threats haven't worked.

The message to Tono Trump is to stop breaking families apart.

We are here, we are here, hard workers, Mexicans.

We are not illegal.

When I spoke to you last, it was extremely peaceful.

We were down at the Federal Building, and not long after that, police and National Guards started moving people along very suddenly, completely without warning, and then all of a sudden started opening fire with what we believe were pepper pellets.

Even Marcelo Gomes, who spent a week in detention in Massachusetts, wants to get out there and help the 40 men he was detained with.

I want to do whatever I can to get them as much help as possible.

These people have families, man.

Like, they have kids to go home to.

The second Trump administration began like a runaway school bus at full speed.

It took about three months or 100 days for everyone else to figure out how to slow it down.

The Trump administration has been conducting massive deportation raids since soon after Inauguration Day.

Many of the deportations were done unconstitutionally without giving the detainees due process.

It's taken about four months for it to be clear that the courts won't allow this to happen anymore.

It's also taken about four months for the public to realise that protest really seems to work against this administration.

The courts and the public are getting in Donald Trump's way.

They're not buying his Hannibal lecture, these people are all psychopathic criminals rhetoric.

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are unlikely to give up, though.

So the question is what they will do to keep their runaway school bus moving.

If You're Listening is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Kara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nipard.

Next week, well, look, it's going to be something about the escalating situation with Israel and Iran.

This story is moving so fast that I think that rather than give you an exciting preview of something that I might just end up shredding, it's probably better if you just wait till next week to find out specifically what the episode will be about.

It will be good though, I promise.

By the way, if you have any questions you'd like answered about what's happening in America at the moment, send them to ifyoulistening at abc.net.au and Emma Shortis and I will try to answer them in our Tuesday episode.

I'll catch you then.