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

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Speaker 13 So much to get to. to.
So naturally, we are going to start with this.

Speaker 13 Car sales in France

Speaker 13 are way down.

Speaker 13 Year over year, car sales, for whatever reason, are way down in France, down by 6%.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 But you know who it really, really sucks for? It really sucks for Tesla. Because while car sales in France are down by 6%,

Speaker 13 sales of Teslas in France are down by 63%.

Speaker 13 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%.

Speaker 13 The only country in Europe that is a larger market than France is Germany. In Germany, Tesla sales are down 59%.

Speaker 13 In Sweden, Tesla sales are down 44%.

Speaker 13 In Norway, Tesla sales are down 38%.

Speaker 13 In the Netherlands, Tesla sales are down 42%.

Speaker 13 Weird, right? I wonder why that is.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 government now after he spent so much money to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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%.

Speaker 13 The proportion among Americans who are Independents is 6%.

Speaker 13 6%?

Speaker 13 I mean,

Speaker 13 he's polling at like tooth decay levels, right?

Speaker 13 That's like funny bone banged into something sharp levels.

Speaker 13 Yesterday around noontime, it was 15 degrees in Waterville, Maine, and it was breezy, 2 degrees Fahrenheit with the wind chill. But you know what?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 The Waterville Morning Sentinel reported on the protest, including at least one local resident who saw the protest when she was driving by.

Speaker 13 She pulled over, parked, jumped out of her car, and decided to join them.

Speaker 13 Around the same time that was happening up in Maine, down in DC at the Department of Labor, this was happening,

Speaker 13 a short notice protest, and kind of a big one at the U.S. Department of Labor, at their headquarters building.

Speaker 13 Now you might remember yesterday there was a lot of competition for your attention if you were interested in protesting.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 But in addition to all of that, there was also this one at the Labor Department.

Speaker 13 And again, this one was scrambled together on really short notice, and it was scrambled together on short notice specifically because

Speaker 13 Elon Musk was coming.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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 the 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 It appears that that protest turned Musk and his little group of guys, turned them around.

Speaker 13 And they did not get into the labor department systems yesterday, even though they were scheduled to be there.

Speaker 13 At the same time that was happening, Democracy Forward went to court and filed a lawsuit to block Elon Musk and his freshman 15

Speaker 13 from accessing data and systems at the Department of Labor.

Speaker 13 So we had sort of a one-two punch yesterday.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 You know,

Speaker 13 in the great proverbial

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 You know what else got blocked today?

Speaker 13 The resign or else

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 They were going to get 200,000 people to voluntarily leave the government by being intimidated by this resignation demand.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 One example comes from the Department of Education earlier this week. They had a briefing on this resign or else threat.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Employees at the Department of Education were told at that point they would have no recourse. They would quote, waive all legal claims.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Yeah, and hope you don't want to resell that used car if it's a Tesla,

Speaker 13 because that market is tanked. Doesn't look like it's coming back either.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 A key component of that threat from Trump and Musk was this apparently unenforceable promise that if people quit because of this demand,

Speaker 13 they'd be paid their salary anyway for several months.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Know what else got blocked today? Another one.

Speaker 13 Again, this was Trump's day one declaration that he is canceling the constitutional provision that says

Speaker 13 if you're born here, you're an American. Today, again, we got yet another judge blocking that gambit by Trump.

Speaker 13 This was a judge appointed by Ronald Reagan, who was just blistering in his ruling and about what Trump is trying to do here.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 In these moments, the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.

Speaker 13 Again, a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan. He's been on the on the bench for decades.

Speaker 13 And with those sort of stirring words today, he ordered Trump's birthright citizenship gambit blocked. You know what else got blocked today?

Speaker 13 The Trump and Musk gambit that turned out these thousands of people at the Treasury building this week to protest.

Speaker 13 The news that Trump had let his top campaign donor inexplicably access the payment system at the U.S.

Speaker 13 Treasury that sends out everything from your Social Security check to your tax refund to everything else the government pays for.

Speaker 13 That news in particular had caused pretty understandable and pretty widespread freak out in this country.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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 freak out inside Treasury.

Speaker 13 It also caused a significant freakout among members of Congress. It also caused a significant freak out among members of the public.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 They'd never even had that in mind.

Speaker 13 Well, despite those assurances from Scott Bessant, 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 Bessant was either lying or wrong when he gave everybody those assurances that their access was quote read-only.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 On their own say-so. Funds they thought shouldn't go.

Speaker 13 So we're starting to get a sense, two and a half weeks into this new Trump term, about

Speaker 13 the fact that pushback definitely works, but the different forms that pushback can take.

Speaker 13 So, like in this case, with the Treasury payment system, we get

Speaker 13 direct action. We get a big, impressive, basically impromptu protest organized on very short notice at the Treasury.
We get Treasury officials

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 We get regular Americans calling their members of Congress and blowing their stacks about this.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 All these different forms of pushback.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Pushback works,

Speaker 13 but pushback also has a lot of different ways that it can work.

Speaker 13 And here's one that I think has pretty unpredictable implications in the days ahead.

Speaker 13 Because in the midst of that drama today over

Speaker 13 this treasury payment system,

Speaker 13 we also got

Speaker 13 this delightful advance in this story from the Wall Street Journal. which exclusively reported that

Speaker 13 the actual kid, the actual person who Donald Trump and Elon Musk had let into the Treasury payment system,

Speaker 13 the actual person is this person.

Speaker 13 Quote, a key Doge

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 A 25-year-old who is 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 After the Wall Street Journal inquired about the account, White House spokesperson Caroline Levitt said that the young man had resigned from his role.

Speaker 13 Again, this is one of the Elon Musk lieutenants, one of his like bad news bears,

Speaker 13 who specifically was allowed access to the most sensitive payment system in the entire U.S.

Speaker 13 government, the one that sends out more than 90% of all payments for all things from the United States Treasury. This was that specific kid.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity.

Speaker 13 Normalize Indian hate. After the Wall Street Journal turns up that stuff from this kid,

Speaker 13 the journal then does,

Speaker 13 there's then an interview, excuse me, with Bloomberg in which Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant, quote, defended the work of Doge employees appended to the Treasury Department, describing them as, quote, highly trained professionals.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 It's because he checked.

Speaker 13 They're highly trained professionals.

Speaker 13 Normalize Indian hate.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Here's from Wired.com tonight, quote, A young technologist known online as Big Balls,

Speaker 13 who works for Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Doge, has access to sensitive US government systems.

Speaker 13 Highly trained professionals.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Someone using a Telegram handle linked to the young man also solicited a cyber attack for hire service in 2022.

Speaker 13 At PATH Network, the young man worked as a systems engineer.

Speaker 13 PATH has at times listed as employees Eric Taylor, also known as Cosmo the God, a well-known former cyber criminal and member of the hacker group UG Nazis, as well as Matthew Flannery, an Australian convicted hacker whom police allege was a member of the hacker group Lulzek.

Speaker 13 So

Speaker 13 these are the highly trained professionals. That was the exact phrase from Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 government, including the ones that have your social security number, your personal identifying information, your bank account information, potentially your health information.

Speaker 13 They're highly trained professionals.

Speaker 13 Why wouldn't they

Speaker 13 be given everything?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 This despite objections from people in the Department of Energy, which controls access to information about U.S. nuclear weapons.

Speaker 13 I don't know if 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.

Speaker 13 I mean everybody has their own things that keep them up at night, right?

Speaker 13 Do you ever worry about like air traffic control?

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 This is the group to whom he's handing over the national system that we have in the United States for air traffic control.

Speaker 13 He's letting them, quote, plug in to the system to fix it.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 13 Anybody want to buy a used Tesla?

Speaker 13 Today in Washington, people 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.

Speaker 13 These folks blocked traffic in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 13 They told Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reverse the halt to PEPFAR, reverse the halt to this program.

Speaker 13 Now, Marco Rubio has tried to say that this particular program isn't being halted, but it absolutely is.

Speaker 13 Activists 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.

Speaker 13 This program is halted.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 It also includes a somewhat random overture

Speaker 13 from a billionaire.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 All different forms of pressure to try to push them back.

Speaker 13 And so is the new federal lawsuit that we can report is being filed tonight to stop the Trump administration from illegally closing USAID.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 But they are nevertheless trying.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 This fight is joined, and we're going to get some expert advice on the prospects for success.

Speaker 11 Next.

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Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 They've also gotten into the Office of Personnel Management. Here's the Washington Post on the seriousness of that today.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 They could export all that data about people who are currently or formerly formerly employed by the government.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 One cybersecurity expert tells the Post, quote, it's highly likely they are improperly accessing, transferring, and storing highly sensitive data outside the environments

Speaker 13 in which it was intended to be contained.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 So the president's top campaign donor

Speaker 13 and his little gang of interns have been blocked from some places, but they are still getting into lots of others.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 we're not totally clear those orders are being followed. Quote, sorry, not quote, two federal judges

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 that spending freeze legally is off, they can't do it.

Speaker 13 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,

Speaker 13 even though they have been ordered by a court to restart those funds.

Speaker 11 Big picture here.

Speaker 13 The thing I am worried about is that it is starting to feel like an afterthought or like a footnote

Speaker 13 that all this stuff appears not to just be bad and dangerous and damaging and unpopular, but patently illegal.

Speaker 13 If it is illegal, isn't it supposed to be stoppable?

Speaker 13 David Super is an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School. He told the Washington Post this week:

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 I appreciate your time.

Speaker 17 Thanks for having me.

Speaker 13 Your diagnosis of the problem is unsettling. Does it come with a prescription?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 Do you think the courts are capable of handling these things at speed to stop damage as it's being done?

Speaker 13 For example, the Office of Personnel Management personnel files for the federal government, that's a very, very, very damaging data breach.

Speaker 13 When you think about potential foreign adversaries, you think about the potential for all sorts of criminal or

Speaker 13 otherwise improper use of that material. Obviously, the courts have not been able to get in there quickly enough to stop that from happening.

Speaker 13 They may have acted quickly enough to, for example, save files at the Department of Labor.

Speaker 13 What should we understand about the court system and its ability to move with alacrity when necessary for the safety of the country?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Data breaches are a problem because once they happen quickly, they can't be undone.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 Let me ask you about one particular example.

Speaker 13 President Trump today says he is going to fire. He's going to lay off

Speaker 13 basically all of the 10,000 workers at USAID.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 We 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.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 from doing these things that we all thought would be illegal?

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 17 Most of these things they're doing aren't even plausibly legal.

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 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?

Speaker 17 No, I think people are doing a very good job. I've been impressed with it.

Speaker 17 The AID lawsuit says exactly the right things, that President Trump is trying to repeal a law, which he has no power to repeal.

Speaker 17 These are decisions made by Congress and that he is being utterly arbitrary in taking these actions and has no

Speaker 17 grounds to do that. I think this litigation is going well,

Speaker 17 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Thank you.

Speaker 17 Thanks so much.

Speaker 13 All right. More news ahead here tonight.
Stay with us.

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Speaker 16 As President Trump continues implementing his ambitious agenda, follow along with the MS Now newsletter, Project 47.

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Speaker 18 The American people are basically telling the president that they are not okay with any of this.

Speaker 16 Sign up for the Project 47 newsletter at ms.now/slash project47.

Speaker 13 So, we've got firebrand Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett standing by tonight to join us in just a moment.

Speaker 13 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. This is something we're going to be talking with her about.

Speaker 13 You may have seen that the Trump administration has been inviting hand-picked members of the media and occasionally random TV celebrities to ride along with immigration agents for exclusive, up-close looks at their supposed immigration crackdown and how tough they're being.

Speaker 13 Today, Fox News released footage from one of these exclusive ride-alongs with immigration agents in Aurora, Colorado. It was definitely meant to depict a big, intimidating show of force.

Speaker 13 I think it's safe to say it did not turn out as planned. Watch.

Speaker 19 At a second Trendy Aragualink complex, Ice was met by activists who taunted them.

Speaker 19 And others who used megaphones to coach those living inside.

Speaker 19 DEA agents used flashbangs inside while serving a warrant.

Speaker 19 That led to a handful of arrests, but no TDA gang members. A stop at another apartment complex netted no arrests.

Speaker 13 Where to start?

Speaker 13 This was a thing where they brought Fox News along. They literally had several hundred agents from six different agencies.

Speaker 13 They told Fox News they were planning to net triple-digit arrests of gang members as a result of all these very impressive raids.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 I would quote to you what she screamed at them, but I can't.

Speaker 13 Hey, you dumb, what the is wrong with you? Get out of our community

Speaker 13 with a coffee cup. Not all heroes wear capes.

Speaker 13 Today, after that footage was released, Trump's border czar Tom Hohmann announced that these media ride-alongs might be coming to an end because of operational security.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is going to join us to talk about that here next. Stay with us.

Speaker 13 On his first full day in office, Donald Trump scrapped a long-standing U.S.

Speaker 13 policies that says, policy that says immigration agents can't enter public schools or health care facilities or houses of worship to go after immigrants.

Speaker 13 Today, people protesting that change rallied at a historic Episcopal church in New York.

Speaker 13 Yesterday, the city council in Ithaca, New York voted unanimously unanimously to bar local law enforcement from cooperating with ICE RAIDS.

Speaker 13 That's despite the Trump administration threatening to prosecute Ithaca public officials who don't cooperate with their crackdown.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 According to information the school board had received, that letter went up yesterday. It has since been removed from the school district website.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Today, Texas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett was part of a group of lawmakers that introduced legislation to protect immigrants in sensitive locations.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett joins us live now. Congresswoman, it's really nice to have you here on the show.
Thank you for making time.

Speaker 14 Absolutely.

Speaker 13 What should people understand about the rationale for protecting places like schools, churches, synagogues, hospitals from immigration enforcement actions in the past?

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, here, this is very simple. First of all, I don't know my country anymore, right?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Yet they're missing out on school because their parents are too afraid to drop them off.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And we know the Republicans are proposing that ICE be given approximately $350 billion.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 Because instead of cutting money, it looks like they are absolutely going to need more money.

Speaker 13 Let me ask you also about the impact.

Speaker 13 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

Speaker 13 With some of these changes, not just saying

Speaker 13 we're going to go after people wholesale and not just making it into a big propaganda spectacle and inviting celebrities and

Speaker 13 hand-picked media to go along to make it look like an episode of cops.

Speaker 13 But in addition to that, by going after, saying we want to go after people in schools and in places of worship and in healthcare 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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?

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 And so right now, what we we have is that they have been able to inflict fear. This is why you brought up Texas and this is gonna impact Texas a ton as well as the rest of the country.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 This impacts all of us because again, we are a country of immigrants.

Speaker 14 And the fact that we have so many people that either don't know our history or 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 14 But guess what? He caused confusion and he caused angst. And that is what we're going to see more of.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 14 Thanks so much.

Speaker 13 All right, we'll be right back.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 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 blink.

Speaker 13 My Blue Sky account is at matto.msnbc.com.

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