New reporting on Musk's minions makes his government takeover team look even worse

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So naturally, we are going to start with this. Car sales in France are way down.
Year over year, car sales, for whatever reason, are way down in France, down by 6%. I don't know exactly why that's happening or what it means, if anything, big picture.
I presume it probably sucks for people who sell cars for a living in France. But you know who it really, really sucks for? It really sucks for Tesla.
because while car sales in France are down by 6%, sales of Teslas in France are down by 63%. Not 6%, but 63%.
Ooh, I wonder why that is. France is the second largest market for electric cars in all of Europe, So that's really bad for Tesla, down 63%.
The only country in Europe that is a larger market than France is Germany. In Germany, Tesla sales are down 59%.
In Sweden, Tesla sales are down 44%. In Norway, Tesla sales are down 38%.
In the Netherlands, Tesla sales are down 42%. Weird, right? I wonder why that is.
Here on this side of the Atlantic, new polling from The Economist and YouGov looks at how Americans feel about the CEO of Tesla, and specifically his involvement in the U.S. government now, after he spent so much money to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency.
Economist and YouGov took two polls, one right after the election, and another one this week, now that Trump's been in office for a couple of weeks. And look at this.
Among Republican voters specifically, the proportion of people who wanted Elon Musk to have, quote, a lot of influence in the U.S. government, since the election, it has plummeted by 21 points.
We're now down to only about one in four Republicans wants Elon Musk to have a lot of involvement in the U.S. government.
That has just dropped like

a stone in a very quick period of time. Among all other Americans who aren't Republicans, the proportion of Americans who like the idea of Elon Musk having a lot of influence in the government, that proportion among Americans who are Democrats is 6%.
The proportion among Americans who are independents is 6%.

6%. The proportion among Americans who are independents is 6%.

6%? I mean, he's polling at like tooth decay levels, right? That's like funny bone banged into something sharp levels. yesterday around noontime it was 15 degrees in waterville maine and it was breezy it's two degrees fahrenheit with the wind chill but you know what temperatures like that that's nothing for the good hardy people of the state of maine a number of whom felt inspired even in that weather to go down to one of the busiest intersections in waterville Maine, to go hold a bunch of signs and demonstrate at the Tesla charging station in their town.
The Waterville Morning Sentinel reported on the protest, including at least one local resident who saw the protest when she was driving by. She pulled over, parked, jumped out of her car, and decided to join them.
Around the same time that was happening up in Maine, down in D.C. at the Department of Labor, this was happening.
A short notice protest, and kind of a big one, at the U.S. Department of Labor at their headquarters building.
Now, you might remember yesterday, there was a lot of competition for your attention if you were interested in protesting. There were protests in all 50 states, all around the country, including really big ones at places like the Texas State Capitol and Sacramento, California.
Yesterday, even just in D.C., there was also a big protest in Washington, just outside the Capitol, for foreign aid and to stand up for USAID.

But in addition to all of that, there was also this one at the Labor Department.

And again, this one was scrambled together on really short notice.

And it was scrambled together on short notice specifically because Elon Musk was coming.

People who work at the Labor Department and people who support them and who wanted to stand up for them flooded down to the Labor Department to head off Elon Musk. When they got word that Mr.
Musk and his little band of teenage flying monkeys that he's been bringing around from government agency to government agency, ripping out the guts of computer systems, when people found out that they were on their way next to the Francis Perkins building to the Labor Department headquarters yesterday in Washington, people just ran down there, turned out in force, in person, on no notice, to go try to stop them. Now, this is interesting.
We don't know for sure if it was that, you know, Musk and his gang pulled up at the Francis Perkins building and saw the crowd outside. We don't know if it was some other reason, but that reported next stop on Elon Musk's itinerary yesterday afternoon did not happen.
It appears that that protest turned Musk and his little group of guys, turned them around, and they did not get into the Labor Department systems yesterday, even though they were scheduled to be there. At the same time that was happening, Democracy Forward went to court and filed a lawsuit to block Elon Musk and his freshman 15 from accessing data and systems at the Department of Labor.
So we had sort of a one-two punch yesterday. You had the physical direct action of people turning up for that protest at the Labor Department, which appears to have sort of physically turned Elon Musk back along with his folks.
But you also had a court order produced by that lawsuit later that afternoon, which kept them legally blocked from getting into the Labor Department as well. So the Labor Department appears thus far to have escaped what they've been able to do to lots of other agencies.
And they appear to have escaped that fate thus far by defending themselves. I mean, in the grand scheme of things, this is what's called making yourself a hard target, right? Making yourself as annoying as possible to go after.
You know, in the great proverbial circle of life here, don't be a mouse or a vole. Be a porcupine.
Be a poison frog. Be something that sticks in somebody's craw if they try to get you in their mouth.
You know what else got blocked today? The resign or else threat from the Trump administration to millions of people who work for the federal government. The administration and this weird and wildly unpopular effort led by his top campaign donor, they've been crowing about how using this gambit, they were going to intimidate 200,000 people who work for the government into quitting by tonight, right? It's going to be by midnight tonight.
They were going to get 200,000 people to voluntarily leave the government by being intimidated by this resignation demand. This gambit from the Trump administration and Elon Musk, among other things, appears to be quite illegal, in addition to just sort of clearly being a scam.
And I say it appears to be a scam because of what we've had reported, for example, from how people in various government agencies have been briefed about how it will work. One example comes from the Department of Education earlier this week.
They had a briefing on this resign or else threat. And at that briefing, employees were advised that if they took this offer and they resigned as Trump and Musk are demanding they must, if they took this offer and resigned as of midnight tonight, and then thereafter the Trump administration reneged on their part of the deal and just stopped paying people what they told them they'd get, employees at the Department of Education were told at that point they would have no recourse.
They would, quote, waive all legal claims. One person who was part of that briefing at the Education Department told NBC News, quote, it sounded like a commercial for a used car dealership.
Like, act now, one day only. Yeah, and hope you don't want to resell that used car if it's a Tesla, because that market is tanked.
Doesn't look like it's coming back either. But the resign or else deadline for people who work for the government, that deadline was supposed to be tonight at midnight.
It's now not, because that too has been blocked by a federal judge. A key component of that threat from Trump and Musk was this apparently unenforceable promise that if people quit because of this demand, they'd be paid their salary anyway for several months.
That promise itself appears to be illegal, pretty plainly, under federal law, because the government can't promise to spend money that it does not have allocated for that purpose. Well, it does, as I say, appear pretty plainly to be illegal, but now a federal judge will test it while the whole stunt is legally blocked.
You know what else got blocked today? Another one. Again, this was Trump's day one declaration that he is canceling the constitutional provision that says if you're born here, you're an American.
Today, again, we got yet another judge blocking that gambit by Trump. This was a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan who was just blistering in his ruling and about what Trump is trying to do here.

Quote, the rule of law is, according to him, meaning according to Trump, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain. The judge said in his ruling, quote, there are moments in the world's history where people look back and ask, where were the lawyers?

Where were the judges?

In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.
Got a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan. He's been on the bench for decades.
And with those sort of stirring words today, he ordered Trump's birthright citizenship gambit blocked. You know what else got blocked today? The Trump and Musk gambit that turned out these thousands of people at the Treasury Building this week to protest.
The news that Trump had let his top campaign donor inexplicably access the payment system at the U.S. Treasury that sends out everything from your Social Security check to your tax refund to everything else the government pays for.
That news in particular had caused pretty understandable and pretty widespread freakout in this country. first among treasury employees, including the acting Treasury Secretary, somebody who's been employed at the Treasury Department for decades, who's a career nonpartisan civil servant.
He tried to stop them from getting their hands on this payment system, and then he resigned when he couldn't stop them. But it caused a big freakout inside Treasury.
It also caused a significant freakout among members of Congress. It also caused a significant freakout among members of the public.
We know that in part because members of Congress have been telling the press this week that as the numbers of phone calls to House and Senate offices have skyrocketed over this past two weeks, with people complaining about Trump's actions and demanding that their members of Congress and their senators stand up and do whatever they can to stop Trump. A significant proportion of the calls they've been getting, according to members of Congress, are, quote, panicked calls from regular Americans, specifically about this thing at Treasury, about the payment system at Treasury being handed over to Elon Musk's little unsupervised playgroup.
And this was made worse, frankly, when Trump's newly confirmed Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, assured everybody repeatedly that the access that he had allowed Elon Musk and his team to this particularly sensitive payment system at the Treasury, he assured everybody that their access to the system was read-only, meaning that they weren't even trying to use their access to the system to cut off any payments of any kind. They'd never even had that in mind.
Well, despite those assurances from Scott Besant, reporting in The Washington Post and in The New York Times and in the Associated Press and elsewhere would now seem to indicate that Scott Besant was either lying or wrong when he gave everybody those assurances that their access was, quote, read only. In fact, according to this recent reporting, from the very outset, from their very first demands to get access to that incredibly sensitive system that partisan actors have never before had access to, Elon Musk's people made clear that the reason they wanted access to that system was specifically because they intended to use it to stop funds from going out.
On their own say-so. Funds they thought shouldn't go.
So we're starting to get a sense two and a half weeks into this new Trump term about the fact that pushback definitely works, but the different forms that pushback can take. So like in this case with the treasury payment system, we get direct action.
We get a big, impressive, basically impromptu protest organized on very short notice at the treasury. We get treasury officials doing what they can to stop what they're trying to do and then sounding the alarm

about why they resigned when they weren't able to stop it. We get regular Americans calling their members of Congress and blowing their stacks about this.
We then get Democratic members of Congress blowing their stacks and going to the protest and calling press conferences and demanding answers from the administration. We get the press blowing up, the press doing reporting, and blowing up this calm down, calm down, nothing to see here, apparent set of lies from the administration about what, in fact, they have been up to with this scheme at Treasury.
All these different forms of pushback. And now, hello, as of today, we get a federal judge throwing down a court order and blocking them from doing anything inside the Treasury payment system.

Pushback works.

But pushback also has a lot of different ways that it can work.

And here's one that I think has pretty unpredictable implications in the days ahead.

because in the middle of that drama today over this Treasury payment system, we also got this delightful advance in this story from the Wall Street Journal, which exclusively reported that the actual kid, the actual person who Donald Trump and Elon Musk had let into the Treasury payment system, the actual person is this person. Quote, a key Doge staff member who gained access to the Treasury Department's central payment system resigned today after he was linked to a deleted social media account that advocated racism and eugenics.
A 25-year-old who was part of a cadre of Elon Musk lieutenants deployed by DOGE to scrutinize federal spending resigned after the Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account. The account posted in July, quote, Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.
The account wrote on Twitter in September, quote, You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity. In reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley, the account wrote, again in September, quote, normalize Indian hate.
After the Wall Street Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Caroline Levitt said that the young man had resigned from his role. Again, this is one of the Elon Musk lieutenants, one of his, like, bad news bears, who specifically was allowed access to the most sensitive payment system in the entire U.S.
government, the one that sends out more than 90 percent of all payments for all things from the United States Treasury. This was that specific kid.
And here's my favorite part of this reporting from the Wall Street Journal. After this, the Wall Street Journal uncovers what this kid has said.
I was racist before it was cool. You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity.
Normalize Indian hate. After the Wall Street Journal turns up that stuff from this kid, the journal then does, there's then an interview, excuse me, with Bloomberg, in which Treasury Secretary Scott Besant, quote, defended the work of Doge employees appended to the Treasury Department, describing them as, quote, highly trained professionals.
That's why he gave them access to the most sensitive payment system in the entire U.S. government that partisan political actors have never had access to before in the history of this country.
It's because he checked. They're highly trained professionals.
Normalize Indian hate. At Wired tonight, we learn about another of Elon Musk's JV team, these highly trained professionals that are very trusted by the U.S.
Treasury Secretary. It's from Wired.com tonight, quote, a young technologist known online as Big Balls, who works for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, has access to sensitive U.S.
government systems. Highly trained professionals.
However, his professional and online history call into question whether he would pass the background check typically required to obtain security clearances, according to security experts who spoke with Wired. Quote, one of the companies he founded, which is called Tesla.Sexy LLC, controls dozens of web domains, including at least two that are registered in Russia.
One of those domains, which is still active, offers a service called Healthy, which is an AI bot for Discord servers targeting the Russian market. Someone using a Telegram handle linked to the young man also solicited a cyber attack for hire service in 2022.
At Path Network, the young man worked as a systems engineer. Path has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cybercriminal and member of the hacker group UGNazis, as well as Matthew Flannery,

an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group LulzSec.

So these are the highly trained professionals.

That was the exact phrase from Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Besant.

And these are the things that professionals. That was the exact phrase from Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

This is the team that he's decided it's totally fine to give them complete access to the highest security systems in the whole U.S. government,

including the ones that have your social security number, your personal identifying information, your bank account information, potentially your health information. They're highly trained professionals.
Why wouldn't they be given everything? CNN reports tonight, quote, a 23-year-old representative from Elon Musk's Doge was granted access to the Energy Department's IT system yesterday by Energy Secretary Chris Wright. This despite objections from people

in the Department of Energy, which controls access to information about U you worry about nuclear weapons. I don't know.
I don't know if you worry about the safety of your social security number and your bank account. I mean, everybody has their own, you know, things that keep them up at night, right? Did you ever worry about air traffic control? Our nation's new transportation secretary, who until a few weeks ago was a weekend host on the Fox Business Channel, he announced today that this crew, operated by Elon Musk, this is the group to whom he's handing over the national system that we have in the United States for air traffic control.
He's letting them, quote, plug in to the system to fix it, because who among us doesn't feel better about having a 19-year-old with links to Russia and famous criminal hackers who goes by the online handle Big Balls in charge of American air traffic control. Anybody want to buy a used Tesla? Today in Washington, people protested against USAID cuts and specifically against cuts for the PEPFAR program that has literally kept tens of millions of people alive with HIV treatment.
These folks blocked traffic in Washington, D.C. They told Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reverse the halt to PEPFAR, reverse the halt to this program.
Now, Marco Rubio has tried to say that this particular program isn't being halted, but it absolutely is. Activists and journalists have proven that out, even as Marco Rubio and the Trump administration have tried to say that this is one of the programs they're going to let live.
This program is halted. And whether it is intentional by them or whether it is because they cannot tell which direction they are walking on an escalator and they can't figure out how to restart something they accidentally stopped.
It is now down to activists in the street who are using everything they've got to get that program restarted, including risking arrest today and stopping traffic in the streets. It also includes a somewhat random overture from a billionaire.
Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates was at the White House yesterday afternoon lobbying President Trump personally and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles personally to restart that program and to save USAID. All different forms of pressure to try to push them back.
And so is the new federal lawsuit that we can report is being filed tonight to stop the Trump administration from illegally closing USAID. The Congressional Research Service reported earlier this week that there is not a legal means available to Donald Trump to shut that agency down, with or without Elon Musk and his band

of juvenile delinquents trying to do it. But they are nevertheless trying.
And so now we see, with USAID and foreign aid and everything else, we see everybody else who understands the stakes here pushing back in every way, on every front, every day. this fight is joined

and we're going to get some

expert advice on the prospects for success on every front every day. This fight is joined, and we're going to get some

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So one of the things we've been talking about on the show here for several days, and particularly tonight, is all the different things that are coming together to block what Trump is trying to do through the courts, through direct action, people protesting, through exposés in the press. But even as, for example, Elon Musk's teenage demolition crew has been blocked tonight from the Treasury Department by one set of tactics and been blocked from the Labor Department by another set of tactics, they have been able to get through other places.
They have, for example, gotten into the Department of Education, where they have reportedly obtained access to personal and, we believe, financial information on every person who's got a freaking federal student loan in this country, which is millions of people. They've also gotten into the Office of Personnel Management.
Here's the Washington Post on the seriousness of that today. Quote, agents of billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, have gained access to highly restricted government records on millions of federal employees, including Treasury and State Department officials in sensitive security positions.
The records maintained by the Office of Personnel Management amount to a repository of sensitive information about employees of most federal agencies, including addresses, demographic profiles, salary details, disciplinary histories. Two OPM officials said the level of access granted to Doge agents means they could copy the social security numbers, phone numbers, and whole personnel files for millions of federal employees.
Quote, they could put a new file in someone's record. They could modify an existing record.
They could delete that record out of the database. They could export all that data about people who are currently or formerly employed by the government.
They could export it to some non-government server or to their own PC or to a Google Drive. Or they could send it to a foreign country.
One cybersecurity expert tells The Post, quote,

it's highly likely they are improperly accessing, transferring, and storing highly sensitive data outside the environments in which it was intended to be contained. Quote, if I were a nation like China, Russia, or Iran, I'd be having a field day with a bunch of college kids running around with sensitive federal government data on unencrypted hard drives.
So the president's top campaign donor and his little gang of interns have been blocked from some places, but they are still getting into lots of others. I should also point out, even where court orders have been issued stopping some of the things that the Trump administration is trying to do, we're not totally clear those orders are being followed.
Quote, sorry, not quote, two federal judges have now issued several orders, for example, directing the White House to rescind the spending freeze that Trump implemented as soon as he took office. Even though that spending freeze legally is off, they can't do it.
Nevertheless, there are multiple reports around the country of federally funded preschools and federally funded medical centers and federally funded infrastructure projects that still aren't being funded and that are starting to shut down. Even though they have been ordered by a court to restart those funds.
Big picture here. The thing I'm worried about is that it is starting to feel like an afterthought or like a footnote that all this stuff appears not to just be bad and dangerous and damaging and unpopular, but patently illegal.
If it is illegal, isn't it supposed to be stoppable? David Super is an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School. He told the Washington Post this week, quote, so many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they're playing a quantity game, a quantity game, and assuming the system cannot react to all this illegality all at once.
If that is what's happening here, what do we do about it? Joining us now is David Super, administrative law professor at Georgetown. Professor Super, thank you so much for being with us.
I appreciate your time. Thanks for having me.
Your diagnosis of the problem is unsettling. Does it come with a prescription? That people need to keep bringing these things to the courts, that the agencies that are being defunded need to pass that along, that federal employees that are aware of data breaches need to pass that along, and that this does need to be raised with the courts.
Do you think the courts are capable of handling these things at speed to stop damage as it's being done? For example, the Office of Personnel Management personnel files for the federal government, that's a very, very, very damaging data breach. When you think about potential foreign adversaries, you think about the potential for all sorts of criminal or otherwise improper use of that material.
Obviously, the courts have not been able to get in there quickly enough to stop that from happening. They may have acted quickly enough to, for example, save files at the Department of Labor.
What should we understand about the court system and its ability to move with alacrity when necessary for the safety of the country? Courts generally assume that the other branches of government are acting responsibly and show them deference. In this case, Mr.
Musk has shown that he doesn't deserve any deference, and I hope the courts will start acting much more quickly and be more willing to presume that where there is smoke, there's fire. Data breaches are a problem because once they happen quickly, they can't be undone.
Funding freezes and getting rid of valuable federal employees is a little bit easier to correct, but they're certainly hoping that the courts will get fatigued. I hope that's not true.
Let me ask you about one particular example.

President Trump today says he is going to fire. He's going to lay off basically all of the 10,000 workers at USAID.
There's also reporting today that tomorrow he may announce that he's laying off thousands of people at the Department of Health and Human Services. We have tonight just filed a new lawsuit by federal workers and foreign service unions asking the judge to halt the dismantling of USAID, let alone all of those firings.
What do you make of the prospects for these things in terms of stopping the short-term actions of the president, but also in the long term, whether or not he'll be enjoined from doing these things that we all thought would be illegal. Oh, they're openly illegal.
The very first Congress of the United States decided what departments we would have. They debated that.
George Washington didn't set up the State Department. Congress did.
There are statutes creating all of these agencies that Mr. Trump says he's going to get rid of.
He simply doesn't have the power to repeal those statutes. And I think the courts will recognize that most of these things they're doing aren't even plausibly legal.
The question is going to ultimately come down to the Supreme Court and whether they're willing to give up their legacy and buy these completely preposterous legal theories. I don't think they are.
Given that, Professor Super, is there anything legally, just as a matter of tactics, that should be done right now that hasn't yet been done? No, I think people are doing a very good job. I've been impressed with it.
The AID lawsuit says exactly the right things, that President Trump is trying to repeal a law which he has no power to repeal. These are decisions made by Congress and that he is being utterly arbitrary in taking these actions and has no grounds to do that.
I think this litigation is going well, but a lot of damage is going to get done until ultimately the Supreme Court sends a signal that the rule of law still works around here. Georgetown Law Professor David Super, thank you for your clarity on this.
I appreciate you speaking in non-lawyerly terms so that all the rest of us can really understand some of the process here. Thank you.
Thanks so much. All right, More news ahead here tonight.
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I'm really interested in talking with her, but there's just one thing I want to show you before we speak with the Congresswoman. There's something we're going to be talking with her about.
You may have seen that the Trump administration has been inviting hand-p members of the media and occasionally random like TV celebrities to ride along with immigration agents for exclusive up close looks at their supposed immigration crackdown and how tough they're being. Today, Fox News released footage from one of these exclusive ride alongongs with immigration agents in Aurora, Colorado.

It was definitely meant to depict a big, intimidating show of force.

I think it's safe to say it did not turn out as planned. Watch.

At a second Trendy Aragua Link complex, ICE was met by activists who taunted them.

You dumbassholes! What the f*** is wrong with you? Get out of our community! who taunted them. And others who used megaphones to coach those living inside.
DEA agents used flashbangs inside while serving a warrant. That led to a handful of arrests, but no TDA gang members.
A stop at another apartment complex netted no arrests. Now, where to start? This was a thing where they brought Fox News along.
They literally had several hundred agents from six different agencies. They told Fox News they were planning to net triple digit arrests of gang members as a result of all these very impressive rates.
They ended up arresting exactly one person who they claimed was a gang member. Also, that first woman in the parking lot holding her coffee cup and cussing them out.
They described her as an activist. I don't know.
Maybe she is. Looked to me like a super annoyed neighbor who was angry to see a bunch of ICE agents dressed up like the 82nd Airborne in her apartment building's parking lot.
I would quote to you what she screamed at them, but I can't. Hey, you dumb.
What the is wrong with you? Get out of our community. Their coffee cup.
Not all heroes wear capes. Today, after that footage was released, Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, announced that these media ride-alongs might be coming to an end because of operational security.
We're seeing communities mobilize across the country right now to protect immigrants in their neighborhoods from exactly what you just saw. Big, flashy, made-for-TV propaganda ICE operations.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is going to join us to talk about that here next. Stay with us.
On his first full day in office, Donald Trump scrapped a longstanding U.S. policy that says immigration agents can't enter public schools or health care facilities or houses of worship to go after immigrants.
Today, people protesting that change rallied at a historic Episcopal church in New York. Yesterday, the city council in Ithaca, New York, voted unanimously to bar local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE raids.
That's despite the Trump administration threatening to prosecute Ithaca public officials who don't cooperate with their crackdown. Yesterday, one school superintendent in Alice, Texas posted a letter alerting parents that ICE agents might board school buses to check citizenship of school kids.
According to information the school board had received, that letter went up yesterday. It has since been removed from the school district website.
From churches to schools to city councils to parking lots, people are pushing back against this administration's attempts to harass and arrest immigrants in their communities. Today, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett was part of a group of lawmakers that introduced legislation to protect immigrants in sensitive locations.
Congresswoman Crockett says in her district, kids are already missing school because parents are afraid of being arrested as they drop their kids off at school. She says families are also skipping doctor's appointments and even emergency care that they need because they're afraid of being arrested at the hospital.
Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett joins us live now. Congresswoman, it's really nice to have you here on the show.
Thank you for making time. Absolutely.
What should people understand about the rationale for protecting places like schools, churches, synagogues, hospitals from immigration enforcement actions in the past? Yeah, I mean, here, this is very simple. First of all, I don't know my country anymore, right? When we are looking at situations that are so disruptive to our communities, and again, as you talked about, the hero who wasn't necessarily wearing a cape, but instead had her coffee cup, when we think about the disruption to everyone because of something that really is a civil penalty—I want to get this across to your viewers, because I don't think that people understand that as Republicans oftentimes say things like, oh, they're illegal, they're illegal.

According to federal law, you literally can get a traffic ticket that is more serious than what

this is. It's a civil penalty.
And so to have these guys disrupting you as you are trying to

pray, whether you're an immigrant or not, you're disrupting a place of worship. Or tell me about

what type of liability—I mean, even if you don't care about the people themselves, but tell me

Thank you. pray, whether you're an immigrant or not, you're disrupting a place of worship.
Or tell me about what type of liability, I mean, even if you don't care about the people themselves, but tell me about the type of liability that we may face if somebody literally is trying to seek care and then you take them away from that care and into our custody, right? Like it doesn't make sense not to mention the disruption that it causes for everybody else that's seeking care. And now we're talking about the kids.
We're talking about parents not taking their kids to get the education that they need. And the kids may be enjoying something that we call birthright citizenship.
Yet they're missing out on school because their parents are too afraid to drop them off. And the final point that I'll say is I want people to understand that undocumented folk in this country contribute approximately $100 billion in taxes, and they pay into Social Security that they can't pull down on.
So you tell me how any of this makes sense, because the estimation is that it would cost us approximately $200 billion in the first year to try to effectuate this. And we know the Republicans are proposing that ICE be given approximately $350 billion.
And right now, that's causing a lot of consternation within the Republican caucus. And that is why we are headed to a shutdown on March 14th, because instead of cutting money, it looks like they are absolutely going to need more money.

Let me ask you also about the impact. As a representative from Texas,

who's been right in the middle of the culture war over this, but also who represents a very

diverse district, it strikes me also that with some of these changes, not just saying we're

going to go after people wholesale and not just making it into a big propaganda spectacle and

Thank you. it strikes me also that with some of these changes, not just saying we're going to go after people wholesale and not just making it into a big propaganda spectacle and inviting celebrities and handpicked media to go along to make it look like an episode of Cops.
But in addition to that, by going after saying we want to go after people in schools and in places of worship and in health care facilities, the cruelty there and the impact there is to really isolate immigrant families or families that have mixed status so that they can't participate in the fabric of culture the way they do right now and in the basic fabric of services that we all avail ourselves of so that they are more isolated, so they are more afraid, so they don't feel supported by their fellow Americans and the other people who live among them. I wonder if you think that is the aim, and if so, if there are other things that Americans who are not in immigrant families, people who do not face these same kind of threats, what they can do to kind of bridge that distance.
Yeah, you know what? I think it's that, but I think it's even deeper than that. What we've seen out of this administration is nothing but chaos and confusion.
That is how they, quote-unquote, lead, right? And so here's the deal. Whether it's legal or whether it's not legal, it has the same effect, right? So he decides, you know what, I'm going to make a big spectacle out of getting rid of this executive order, and then next thing you know, we're having to file legislation to try to protect—but who's keeping up with all of this drama that's happening? At the end of the day, it's whatever news headline they saw last or first or whichever one they feel most comfortable with.
And so, right now, what we have is that they have been able to inflict fear. This is why you brought up Texas, and this is going to impact Texas a ton, as well as the rest of the country.
But even when we start to think about the farms that we have in Texas, or we think about the fact that he even tried to do his little tariff war with Mexico, Mexico and Texas, we share a very special relationship for a lot of different reasons. But one is because they are our biggest trade partner as well.
So now we've got all of these farmers that are saying, hey, my farm workers are not showing up. It's not just the schools, the hospitals and the religious institutions.
It's actually everywhere. They are afraid to go to work.
And that's only ending up causing more issues for us as Americans. And that's what I need people to understand.
This isn't a matter of, oh, well, that's over there. This impacts all of us, because again, we are a country of immigrants.
And the fact that we have so many people that either don't know our history or want to ignore our history, or as we know this administration, especially in Black History Month, they want to delete our history. The reality is that immigrants have always been what made this country great, not this white supremacy agenda, which is what we are dealing with.
And this is what they are doing. They are instilling fear, whether you are Black, whether you are brown, whether you are someone who just wasn't born here, it's kind of like the birthright citizenship.
That is something that we find in our Constitution. And he decided—he probably knew that with the stroke of a pen, he couldn't do anything about it.
But guess what? He caused confusion, and he caused angst. And that is what we're going to see more of.
Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, anytime you want to come on this show, you just send up a little bat signal and we will make space for you. I'd love to have you back here anytime you want to talk about what's going on in Washington, anytime you want to talk about what's going on in your district.
I really appreciate your time tonight. Thanks so much.
All right. We'll be right back.
Wow, this hour felt like it was about 30 seconds long. I feel like I'm just getting going.
But that's going to do it for me for now. I will see you again tomorrow and every weeknight at 9 p.m.
Eastern. I'll be here five nights a week for the first hundred days of the Trump administration.
In the meantime, when I'm not on TV, you can find me on Blue Sky. I should tell you, the social media platform Blue Sky launched one year ago today.

Happy first birthday, Blue Sky.

It also just seems like you've only been here a blank.

My Blue Sky account is at matto.msnbc.com.

What's poppin', listeners?

I'm Lacey Mosley, host of the podcast Scam Goddess, the show that's an ode to fraud and all those who practice it. Each week I talk with very special guests about the scammiest scammers of all time.
Want to know about the fake errors? We got them. What about a career con man? We've got them too.
Guys that will whine and dine you and then steal all your coins. Oh, you know they are represented because representation matters.
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