Transcript - Simon Rosenberg And Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (2/10/26)

Simon Rosenberg:
Welcome everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with another great event today. Joining me is Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. I consider him to be an internet friend in this age. Somebody that I reposted, I mean, hundreds of times over the years. We’ve never actually met, which is kind of crazy. So Aaron, it’s great to have you here today. Thank you for joining us.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Simon. It’s good to get in touch with you as well.

Simon:
Aaron is a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council and one of the most thoughtful analysts and commentators about our border, about our immigration system, about this growing detention system that Trump and Miller and Vance are trying to build. And [Aaron] has just been very active in the last few days, writing very thoughtful stuff about this new kind of information we have about the detention center ambition of the administration. And Aaron, rather than me going too deep, why don’t I just turn it over to you? You’ve just written a big report. You’ve been on social media. Just talk to us about what we’ve learned and what people need to know about this very ambitious project of the administration.

Aaron:
Yeah. So, I mean, taking a step back, we’re looking at the immigration detention system, and that’s where people are held after they are arrested by ICE — either during any kind of removal proceedings or prior to the actual deportation. So right now, ICE is holding over 70,000 people in detention centers around the country, a record high. And that is up over 75% from [Trump’s] first term, as we chronicle in our report that we just put out a few weeks ago. That expansion has been fueled by the $45 billion that the Trump administration got in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Enough money that has to be spent over the next four years to give ICE an average annual budget of $15 billion just to use on detention centers. So the primary goal of the Trump administration is to spend that money as quickly as possible to ramp up the detention system so that they can expand detention while they have the money — because the money expires at the end of 2029. Last year, a lot of the effort went towards making and signing new contracts with pre-existing detention facilities. So, jails and prisons, some of them owned by private prison companies, some of them owned by state and local governments. And the creation of tent camps, which was the big effort that they were engaged in last year, including the infamous Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. But now it seems like they have a new plan, and that new plan is commercial warehouses.

Over the last month, ICE has purchased over half a dozen commercial warehouses. Now they are fully owned federal property. [ICE] intends to convert these warehouses into makeshift detention centers or camps, essentially, where in some of these warehouses, upwards of 8,500 to 9,500 immigrants are going to be held at any given time.

Simon:
And as you mentioned in your comments on your thread on Bluesky, you know, the bigger detention facilities they’re planning are bigger than any actual prison complexes in the U.S. today.

Aaron:
That’s right. The largest federal prison is Fort Dix. Fort Dix has a maximum rated capacity of 4,600 people. The largest of these ICE detention centers is potentially upwards of 10,000 beds. That is smaller than the maximum number of people that’s ever been held at Rikers Island. During periods of severe overcrowding, Rikers Island has fit more than 10,000 people, but currently holds less than 7,000. So… they’re planning on creating several mega detention center camps in these warehouses… [if either] gets above 7,000, they will be the largest jails or prisons in the United States. And up there with some of the largest ever operated by the United States in history.

Simon:
Why are they needed? Explain…why it is that if the goal of the administration…Donald Trump has been repeating again and again and again, [it’s] to deport criminals first, to focus on criminals…why is this vast expansion of the detention capacity needed?

Aaron:
Well, it’s not for criminals. I mean, that’s the easiest thing to debunk.

The detention system has been expanding dramatically over the last few months. And if you go back to last fall and look at what has the largest growth in detention been, it has been almost exclusively among people with no criminal record. You know, the U.S. is holding about 10 to 15,000 people more as of February than they were holding as of September or October last year. And virtually all of that growth in population has been among people with no criminal record. Now, the big question, though, is why detention?

Detention is in many ways the best way to guarantee deportation. And there are two main reasons for that. First off, detention makes it harder for you to win your case. If you haven’t been ordered removed yet and you are going through the immigration court process, going through the process in detention makes it significantly more difficult to win your case for a wide variety of reasons. One, oftentimes detention centers are in the South and where you’re subject to the 5th Circuit law or 11th Circuit law, which is structurally more difficult. But also the more obvious reason is that you’re away from your family, you’re away from your resources, you’re away from the evidence, you’re away from lawyers. And so simply being in detention… especially as you’re put through a more expedited removal court process, and you are essentially have the deck stacked against you because you are in detention. You know, contrast somebody locked up in jail trying to defend themselves against removal versus somebody who’s outside of detention, fighting their case, going home, you know, to see their family after each court hearing, working during the day with the money to hire a lawyer… and you can sort of understand why, when we look at the studies, the two biggest factors about whether somebody wins their case and gets to stay in the country is are they in detention and do they have a lawyer?

The other big reason that they want to keep people detained is that they can just pressure people into giving up. The administration doesn’t want to even have to give people a day in court. They would prefer that once you are arrested, they take you to a detention center and then an ICE officer says, hey, you have a choice. Option one, you fight your case, in which case we’re going to keep you locked up here for the next six months. Or option two, you sign on the dotted line and we put you on the next deportation flight back to your home country. And a lot of people go with option two, especially because many of them have never been in jail. They’ve never been in prison. They’ve never committed a crime or have never been convicted of any crime. And so they sort of look at the situation in despair and just give up. So to a large extent, mass detention is about mass deportation because once you have mass detention, the possibility of remaining in the country plummets to anyone who’s ever encountered by ICE.

Simon:
And the people that are being detained who don’t have criminal records… talk about who they are a little bit.

Aaron:
So this is really anyone who’s taken into custody by the government.

Usually this is going to be undocumented immigrants, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve entered illegally. They may have come in on a visa and overstayed. The government alleges that they are removable. Of course, the government is increasingly making mistakes, taking people into custody who are not removable. We’ve heard many instances of people with temporary protected status being held in detention, despite that being illegal. People with active DACA being held in detention. But broadly speaking, in the lion’s share of cases, it’s people who the government is seeking to remove. And legally, under immigration laws that have been on the books for generations, the detention of those people is permissible.

But what the administration has done is something really dramatic. They have interpreted a 1996 law as saying that anyone who ever came across the southern border without inspection, so people who enter the United States illegally, is ineligible for bond, must be detained, can never ask a judge, an immigration judge, for release on bond. And that is a legal interpretation that hundreds of federal courts have rejected, but it has led to many people being held in detention who, again, have no criminal record. Until now [that] had been the primary reason that people were detained without access to bond. And the Fifth Circuit, unfortunately, just last week, endorsed that reading of the law, setting up what is going to be a Supreme Court case, undoubtedly, which may even be heard this term.

Simon:
Well, I just want to put an exclamation point on this because when you hear the administration talk, they conflate crime and immigration. Right, they talk about the criminals. And the justification for the extreme tactics for the extra money for this sort of huge escalation is to rid the country of these criminals. And as you know from the data, somewhere between half a million and a million of the immigrants in this country have some kind of criminal record. It could be a little bit more. You see various estimates of it. But there are 10 to 15 million undocumented immigrants without criminal records. There are millions of people here in various stages of being here legally, either through TPS or early, through refugee status or asylum claims. And what’s happening is that they are executing a campaign that is different from what they’re claiming. They’re claiming to be prioritizing criminals, which then justifies these extreme tactics we’re seeing on the ground in Minnesota. But what they’re really doing is executing a mass deportation campaign to get rid of between 10, 20, 25, 30 million immigrants in this country.

Even at a million a year, 2 million a year, You’re talking about a terror campaign, or I call it a terror campaign, that will be in place potentially for a decade because of just the sheer volume of people they want to try to get rid of. And so what ICE is contemplating here, and Miller and co., not just this vast increase in detention facilities for all the reasons you said, but it also allows them to be more expansive in their targets and who they’re going after… to remove a higher volume of people. And to go from just a few million up into the tens of millions of people who have jobs, who have families, who work in communities. And you’re talking about a level of upheaval in this country that clearly does not have the support of the public. And where I think the administration is basically lying every day about their intent. Homan, interestingly, talked about mass deportation in this press conference. The White House never talks about mass deportation. Trump himself always talks about criminals, and [how] that’s what they’re doing. But what they’re really doing is building something that is scary.

Aaron:
Yeah. You know, this is a really important point to make because mass deportation to the American public is a murky phrase. When Trump ran on mass deportation in 2024, a lot of people took that to mean… I’m just going to be tough on, you know, the “bad guys.” And that was even though Trump did say we’re going to get them all out. And he said all and he repeated it. But people sort of read between the lines because he also kept talking about criminals and the admin. kept talking about recent border crossers and, you know, all the awful parade of horribles that they were allegedly doing. And so I think a lot of people thought, well, he’s just going to focus on criminals. And I think a lot of people were rightfully frustrated with how the situation of the border was under President Biden for various different reasons. And certainly President Biden’s record on immigration is mixed. But they didn’t really anticipate that what they actually meant was, no, we’re really going to do this thing. And of course, the undocumented population is undocumented. They are technically present in violation of law and the US government can legally carry out removal proceedings against them. It’s just that Congress had never until the One Big Beautiful Bill Act actually taken a serious swing at doing that. For the last 20 to 30 years, really dating back to the 1980s, 1990s, you know, enforcement in the interior was much more minimal.

The focus was always the border. And the focus has been the border for the last half century since a large number of Mexican immigrants began coming across the border in the 1960s, leading to sort of the first big wave of migrants across the border in the 1970s, and it becoming a big political issue in the late 70s and early 80s. The focus was really always on the border and what happened to the people in the interior was always kind of an afterthought. But now the Trump administration is saying, no, we’re really going to do this thing. We are actually engaged in a campaign to find, identify, arrest, detain and deport every single undocumented immigrant. 14 million people, potentially one in every 24 people living in the country, one in every 10 people living in some areas, in some places and even higher percent of the population. And I don’t think the American public actually wants to do that because the amount of disruption that that causes, the amount of families ripped apart, the amount of businesses losing valuable workers, the amount of people whose friends are being deported, co workers, parishioners… all of that is so disruptive that a lot of people are recoiling in horror when the government is actually doing what it’s threatened to do for the last half century.

Simon:
Well, and Peter Navarro today was on Fox News and admitted that mass deportation is actually slowing the economy down and suppressing growth. And we know this has had unbelievable impact on small businesses and agriculture across the country. In addition to sort of the inhumanity, and I guess this is the next point I want to talk about.

What has been perhaps shocking to me as somebody who’s worked on these issues for a long time, for more than two decades, is just the permission structure for inhumanity and dehumanization that we’re seeing. And that’s manifesting by the way that ICE and CPP have been operating on the ground in communities, but it’s also manifesting in the way that they’re treating people in these detention centers. And if you can talk a little bit about that because I think that’s sort of the next thing. It’s not just that they’re taking in five year old kids and taking them a thousand miles away from their families… it’s that we now have a lot of evidence that when people go into these facilities, they’re being treated in a way that is below the standards of incarceration in the United States. And there’s a degree of inhumanity and dehumanization that we know is sort of a dangerous thing in any society when there are people who are seen as being less than human in the way they’re treated. Maybe you can reflect on that a little bit, Aaron.

Aaron:
Yeah, so I come at this from a perspective where at my organization, we’ve been fighting against immigration detention for many years, including during the Obama administration and during the Biden administration. ICE detention has never been phenomenal to understate it significantly.

There have always been issues. We filed complaints about inadequate medical care, about verbal abuse, occasional physical abuse, poor conditions, rotting food, black mold in the shower stalls, you know, really poor conditions inside detention centers. And the big difference now is the extent to which it’s clear that no one inside the government cares. And not only do they not care, but they seem to actively relish when situations are bad in these detention centers because, you know, from an officer level, that’s a way that they can use to pressure people to just give up.

You know, as detention gets worse, people want to spend less time in it and it’s easier for ICE officers to pressure people into giving up. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a deliberate plan, but it’s about a permission structure, as you said, that’s been created here. They’ve fired all of the people or almost all of the people whose job it was to conduct oversight. When Trump took office, there were two internal oversight bodies within the Department of Homeland Security, the DHS Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and a relatively new office called the Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman. Within weeks, the Trump administration sought to shut them down entirely, saying that they needed to get rid of CRCL, the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office, because it slowed down immigration enforcement. And that gives you some sense of things. So eventually they had to walk that back a little bit, but they’ve still had their capacity slashed. The Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman… 90% of their staff was fired. The DHS Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office… 85% of their staff was fired. And they’re the office in charge of things like investigating Prison Rape Elimination Act, PREA, complaints. And they’re basically gone. They’re not able to even do that work. So it’s not that the admin. is twirling its mustache evilly and saying, I want you to go in there and abuse people. It’s that they are very deliberately turning a blind eye to the abuses that are going on and have essentially told lower level officers, you can get away with anything. And people are getting away with anything because accountability to them just slows down the whole mass deportation thing.

Simon:
And it’s been amazing to watch the effort they’ve gone to prevent legal congressional oversight in to these facilities. I mean, that was another check that has been significantly weakened. And they even went as far to arrest Congresswoman, who was trying to make sure that the facility in her own area in New Jersey was up to standards. Because the thing that you raised, and I want to just return to this before we go, is that the difference in kind now that we’re seeing with the purchase of these buildings that are warehousing stuff and not people. And I found Senator Wicker’s comments that he made… who came out against the building of a large facility in Mississippi. He talked about how the infrastructure that went into building these structures… [it] didn’t have the plumbing and the stuff that allows human beings to live in them… and that the retrofitting of the buildings to create the ability to warehouse people as opposed to Amazon packages or whatever was in these places is not how these any of these buildings were actually built. And so the question about the cost, time ability to retrofit these buildings that they’re buying en masse with incredible speed now that they want to try to turn on as fast as possible… the notion that this is going to be done with some kind of basic standard of care, that they’re going to staff this up at a level of having the medical care that’s required to house 10,000 people…

I mean, Wicker’s statement, I thought about sort of the impracticality of executing on this idea was really powerful. Because he basically dismissed it out of hand as being something that was that we could achieve, right, given the the restrictions of these buildings and the way that they’re zoned. You know, you have this town of 2,000 people that’s going to have all of a sudden in a few months a detention facility with 9,000 people in it. How does the food get made and who staffs it? And where do they live? I mean, this stuff… there’s like this manic… to your point, they know there’s a clock and they’re operating with incredible speed which means the likelihood that this is going to be done in a humane fashion is very, very low.

Aaron:
Yeah. And that’s such a good, important point to emphasize. And again, I go back to the one other facility they’ve thrown up on a short notice which is Camp East Montana in El Paso. That’s currently holding about 3,100 people. The facility opened in August when it only was holding about 800. And they were building it as they were bringing people there. It’s a series of tents. So, they built one tent and shoved people in there as they were building the others. And as the facility opened, inspectors went there from the Office of Inspector General, one of the few DHS oversight bodies which hasn’t been completely destroyed, even though it has its own concerns, and they found 60 violations of detention standards, really basic stuff. They had no adequate medical staffing. And I’ve talked to people who’ve been to that detention center, people who have been to many detention centers in the past and who know what they are like and who I don’t trust to be hyperbolic. And they told me it’s some of the worst conditions that they’ve ever seen inside of a detention center because they were building it as they went.

And this is another thing — they sent it to the lowest bidder possible. You know, Camp East Montana… the contract went to a Virginia company, a small Navy contractor, that had never had a contract more than a few million dollars and got a 1.2 billion dollar contract to run and build and operate this facility for two years. Again, these are staggeringly high costs. And that’s a facility that allegedly has a max capacity of 5,000 people. But again, it’s about 3,000 right now. So they’re paying about $200,000 a bed per year to run the facility. And when you look at what’s going to happen in these warehouses, the costs are going to be astronomic. You know, again, the sewage is going to be a huge issue because a lot of these places simply won’t have the sewer capacity. So they’re probably going to have to do what they’re doing in so called alligator Alcatraz in Florida, truck human waste in and out of these facilities. You’re going to have to find the food to feed that many people. And we hear in Camp East Montana that it was a major problem in the initial months as it opened up. People were being baloney sandwiches because they just didn’t have the food contract ready to go.

Medical care is going to be a huge problem. Three people have already died in Camp East Montana — one because of a medical issue, one allegedly beaten by guards whose death was ruled a homicide, and one allegedly a suicide. But we’ve heard terrible things about the medical conditions.There’s already a shortage of prison health care providers. So the US government is going to pour billions, if not tens of billions of dollars into these warehouses to try to get them up to capacity. And they will cut every corner possible and sort of say, damn the consequences. And that is going to get people killed.

Simon:
I wrote about at Hopium the other day about [how] in Minnesota, a man who had just had a transplant and had transplant medication….. I think this is incredibly illustrative of the challenge of facing what’s going to happen here with these guys and the lack of medical care and the lack of concern about the health of people….. so his car was rammed. They smashed the window. They pulled him out. They brought him down to Whipple in Minneapolis, which is the federal facility they’re using as a temporary holding place in Minneapolis. And he said to them, by the way, like, I’m on these life-saving medications that I need to take in order to stay alive. And what you realize is that at that point, there are guards and ICE agents talking to them who have no idea whether this guy’s telling the truth. He doesn’t go through any kind of medical intake so that he’s being seen by nurses or doctors.

And so he went that night without his medicine. And the next morning, there was communication that happened with his lawyer, his family and him, which doesn’t always happen right away, right, as you know, because they can be sent on a plane or they can just disappear for days. And ICE told him that he needed to get proof from his doctor that the giving of the medicine itself in an Rx was insufficient for him to be able to access the medicine. And he needed a letter from his doctor. So the family not only drove the meds down to the facility and were denied entry of the meds, they then had to call the Mayo Clinic to get the Mayo Clinic to write an additional letter. And God knows who’s actually reviewing any of that, right? Because it’s not being reviewed by doctors and by nurses and people who are qualified. It’s a bunch of guys who were beating the crap out of protesters a few days earlier, and they just happened to be inside.

And the thing is — imagine if he had been taken to Texas. Your point about the immediate whisking away to make it far harder for them to contest their holding… if he had been put on a plane and brought to Texas, he almost certainly would have died, and there’s no accommodation. As they go deeper into these populations, and older people and people with medical conditions, there’s no actual process really are capable of taking the medicine that’s required for them to stay alive. Some of these people can’t reach the outside world for three weeks, depending on what happens. It’s creating a medical nightmare. We’ve all been talking about this — there was a measles outbreak in Dilley, in Texas, because there’s people who are thrown into these horrific conditions. They’re all sharing space. They don’t have good hygiene and everything else. So they’re breeding grounds for disease.

I just want to tell you, as somebody who’s not spent as much time as you have on this, I’m f****** horrified by this. I am angry. I am like, you got to be kidding me. The sort of racial anger and, you know, animus to sort of crush and punish these people, you know, who live in our society, pay taxes and raising their kids here. It’s inhumane. And it is something that… we’ve been slow, I think, as a family to really stand up, the way the people of Minnesota has, for their neighbors. But I think we’re at an inflection point now. And I think that the Democratic Party has made a really important stand.

And this 10 part plan is real. I don’t think it does enough on the detention facilities. That’s more that we have to do. But just give me your assessment of what happened in the last few weeks, and then we’ll wrap up here, Aaron, because I know you’ve given us a lot of time today, is that you’ve seen the Democrats stand up on their 10 part plan. The Republicans don’t seem to have any interest in negotiating. Any thoughts about what you think is going to happen in the coming weeks?

Aaron:
Well, I’ll say I’ve learned a long time ago not to predict what Congress is going to do. [Simon laughs.] Because you’re just occasionally grasping at straws. But I think the big picture is that the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good really shocked America and broke through in a way that a lot of things hadn’t. And have really shown the way that rhetoric and propaganda only works to a point. And performative cruelty has a splash effect. And I think the administration wanted to have its cake and eat it too. They wanted to send the message — undocumented immigrants, be afraid, we’re coming for you.

But you can’t target fear like that.

It has a splash effect. It hits everybody. And it hit all these communities. And people responded because they saw people who lived there being dragged out of their cars, their homes without warrants in ways that were just shocking. And deliberately shocking. And the administration suddenly realized that they’d overreached and realized they had to negotiate somewhat. But as anyone in Minneapolis will tell you, they’re still there. They’re carrying out their arrests. Maybe they pulled back a little bit on some of the more outrageous tactics, but it’s still ongoing. You know, it’s still a tinderbox.

And I think, you know, this is really a time, not just for Democrats, but just for anybody who believes in sort of basic humanity and the idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants to say, you know, we actually do have to have these bigger conversations about what do we do with the undocumented population? Yes, obviously ICE needs dramatic reforms. There’s no doubt about it. And certainly some of the things in the Democrats’ list of demands [start] down that direction… acknowledging that they have limited tools in front of them and that they don’t control really any levers of power in Washington right now. But we have to start talking about not just what’s happening in 2026, what’s happening in 2027. If Democrats retake the House, what legislation could happen? What compromises could we reach? Mass deportation is a bad idea. It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for Americans. It’s bad for our society. It will transform us into a police state in ways that we cannot anticipate, in ways that will fundamentally reshape our relationship to the government, to law enforcement. And rather than head down that path, we really have to think through what the better way forward is. And that’s not an easy conversation to have, but we have to be having.

Simon:
Yeah, and I think that it’s a great way to end, Aaron. And I think that for me, you know, as somebody who is a student of history and has been a student of people like Timothy Snyder and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the great teachers that have been teaching us through this moment, for me, this all became much more urgent. I would add that in addition to the killings of Renee Goode and Alex Pretti, the other thing that should have created an equal level of alarm was the arrest and detention of journalists and political opponents of the regime. Because the thing is, when these beds get built, they’re going to get filled. And they don’t have to only be filled with immigrants. They can be filled with others. And it’s why, for me, I have made a decision at Hopium that blocking, that I’m pushing very hard for the national pro-democracy movement in the United States to make the blocking of the building these detention centers sort of a critical thing that we do together.

I mean, there’s a piece of it that has to happen in Congress. But as you know this is also going to happen in the states and communities. There are limits given that the federal government, the Supremacy Clause, there are limits to what communities can do to block this stuff. But, you know, you saw it in Mississippi… there was pressure put on this facility in Mississippi and the senior senator from Mississippi said, no way, we’re not going to do this here. And so I think that we should be heartened by what has been bipartisan opposition on the ground. You’ve seen a lot of the opposition to these centers be led by Republicans and Republican elected officials. This hasn’t been a partisan issue because nobody wants these camps in their communities. They don’t want these facilities to be used to house people. They want it for economic development and for things that will better, you know, their communities. And they don’t want the darkness, and the stain and the danger, brought into their community.

I think we have a big opportunity here around the blocking of the detention facilities to be something we do together over the next couple of years that puts further pressure on the regime, that makes it clear about their ill intent and their malevolent intent, and to put a lot of pressure on them to not only you know, rein in ICE, but to end the mass deportation campaign, which to me is also this really critical thing. The country doesn’t support it. It’s going to do enormous harm to the social fabric of America, to our economy, to communities all across the country. And the country doesn’t want it. I mean, you know this from polling. You and I have been working on this stuff for a long time and you know… polling has been consistent for 21 years — between 55 and 65, 70 percent of the country wants the undocumented immigrants in the country to stay and not to go. And you’ve seen that number kind of return to its historic place in recent weeks, as people have been forced to think about this.

The country doesn’t want mass deportation. They’ve seen what it is, and they don’t want it. And we’re on very firm ground to continue to fight this fight, I think, in the coming months. And I’m proud of our leaders for stepping up and getting us to this place where we are having this debate. But this is a fight we have to win. It’s really about who we are as a country, about our values, our beliefs, our liberties, and our freedoms. And as three of my grandparents were immigrants in this country who came here with nothing, this is very personal to me. And I’m gonna be fighting as hard as I can with the Hopium community to do what we can to block all this in the coming months. So, thank you for your continued thoughtful leadership in this critical moment. I want to make sure… how do people find you, Aaron, if they want to read your work and stay in touch with you?

Aaron:
Well, you can read the reports we put out on detention and so many other things on our website, which is AmericanImmigrationCouncil.org. We have a lot of fact sheets that are written for a person who doesn’t really know much about the system and really wants to learn. And we’ve got expert resources for lawyers and others. And we do a ton of really great work there. So I encourage you to check out our website and you can find me on X and Bluesky at @ReichlinMelnick.

Simon:
Any parting words for folks today?

Aaron:
I think you really nailed it. This is about the soul of the country. You mentioned your grandparents. My grandfather is 101, turning 102 later this year. He was born in 1924, the year we put in place the national origin quotas that first locked off immigration for nearly 40 years. And he tells me all the time, had his parents come a little bit later, he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t have formed a family of proud Americans. And immigration is what makes us strong. And I think we have to just keep telling that message to the American public because they’re with us on this. And this is something that we can defeat.

Simon:
Okay, brother. Listen, thank you for all your remarkable work and for staying in the fight every day. And for those of you who follow me on Bluesky, you may note that I post Aaron virtually every day [laughs] because it’s so fact-based and thoughtful and timely. And so thank you for your continued hard work. And everybody, listen, we got to muscle up and fight this one. This one really matters. There’s a lot in front of us… thanks, everybody. Thanks, Aaron.