Cristian Farias:
Hi there, Cristian Farias here with the Bully’s Pulpit. It’s been a rough week for the First Amendment. The lawlessness, the attacks from the free press. Another moves by Donald Trump and its administration continue to strain people and institutions committed to free expression and the health of our democracy. And one agency that’s key to our society’s slow descent into autocracy is immigration and customs enforcement, ICE. This entity who just got a huge boost from Congress and the so-called Big Beautiful Bill Act has been in a rampage and one practice during Trump 2.0 that has many of us alarmed is ICE courthouse arrests.
Brad Lander:
To watch people who are doing everything right, who showed up for their hearings. You leave the courtroom thinking you’re going to come back for your hearing a year from now, and then, lurking in the elevator lobby is a gang of people not in uniforms, not with any badges or identification in masks who grab you, who don’t present a warrant, who don’t give any reason for the detention, whose authority is not clear.
Cristian Farias:
That’s Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, who until recently was running to become its next mayor. He and Allie Schiele of the Knight Institute will tell us all about ICE courthouse arrests, about the First Amendment issues they raise, and about the advocacy being done to ensure that access to justice and people’s right to petition their government are protected. But before I speak to them, some good news and lots of bad news. Let’s begin with the good. After two weeks of riveting testimony in a courtroom in Boston, AAUP versus Rubio, perhaps the biggest First Amendment case of the moment came to a close.
As you may remember, that’s the case challenging the policy of detaining, arresting and deporting pro-Palestinian students. And the trial left no doubt that this policy involved agencies and officials at all levels of the executive branch from the White House all the way down to the State Department and ICE. It also exposed, they relied almost entirely on unvetted blacklists, provided by extremist groups to decide whom to target. Judge William Young who presided over the trial is expected to rule in the case in the near future.
I wrote a piece about it for the New Yorker and will put a link in the show notes so you can bring yourself up to speed. Now, the bad news. The full DC Circuit, that’s the Federal Appeals Court in Washington, declined to revisit the Associate Press’ request to be allowed back into the White House press pool. Last week’s episode was all about this dispute, triggered by the AP’s refusal to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico and its widely used style guide. Banning the AP from the pool has had devastating effects, not just on the AP but other journalists.
It’s unclear what’s next for the wire service, but the next legal stop should it go there, is the Supreme Court of the United States. And just as Harvard was in court defending billions in federal funding the Trump administration wants to take away, The Guardian reported that the Harvard Educational Review canceled an entire journal issue on Palestine and the war in Gaza. The move stunned editors and scholars, working on the long-planned publication, which was scheduled for release this summer. The authors, some of whom are Palestinian, called the move, a dangerous form of institutional censorship.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education, in response to the reporting, cited that “An overall lack of internal alignment around the publication.” Let’s hope that issue of the journal still sees the light of day in some form. Meanwhile, in our nation’s parks, the Trump administration is flagging signs, exhibits, and other artifacts that may “disparage” Americans. That’s shorthand for rewriting history or erasing materials on topics the government doesn’t like, including the reality of climate change or the horrors, our forebears visited our Native Americans and formerly enslaved Black people.
As one former superintendent at Yellowstone put it, “The national parks were established to tell the American story and we shouldn’t just tell all the things that make us look wonderful. We have things in our history that we are not proud of anymore.” Things this administration is not working hard to erase. And press watchdogs are protesting the continued ICE detention of an Atlanta reporter who was arrested while covering the No Kings Protests in June. The Spanish-speaking journalist, Mario Guevara had local charges against him dropped, yet he remains in ICE detention.
He has been in the US for more than 20 years, and according to his lawyer, has a work permit and a pending application for a green card. During a press conference this week, a rep for the Committee to Protect Journalists said this, “Let’s be clear, Mario is being punished for his journalism. He’s now the only journalist in prison in the US in direct retaliation for his reporting. Mario Guevara’s continued detention exemplifies the power and authority of ICE, a relatively small agency with a current annual budget of about eight billion dollars that just received 75 billion dollars in additional funding from Congress."
Armed with a budget now larger than the combined GDP of several countries, ICE will become the nation’s largest federal law enforcement agency. No other agency in Trump’s second term has been subject to more public scrutiny and outrage than ICE. And yet its power continues to grow. It’s almost as if no laws apply to it or that there are law unto itself. With us to talk about this perceived lawlessness, the problem of ICE courthouse arrests and what legal advocates are doing to counteract its harmful effects is Allie Schiele. She’s a legal fellow at the Knight Institute and she’s here to tell us all about an interesting Freedom of Information Act request the institute filed. Allie, thanks for coming on the pod.
Allie Schiele:
Thanks for having me, Cristian.
Cristian Farias:
So Allie, do you have a favorite episode of the pod so far?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, I think that that’s a tough question, but I really liked the episode on federal funding cuts. I thought that was my favorite so far. I thought that Katie broke down the issues so well and I thought that the guest speakers were really inspiring too.
Cristian Farias:
Wonderful. And for everyone else, that’s Katy Glenn Bass, she’s the research director here at the institute and she was with us on episode eight of the Bully’s Pulpit. So check it out if you get a chance. Now, before I ask you about this very interesting FOIA request at the Knight Institute filed, how about you tell me a little bit about FOIA, what it is and its relationship to the First Amendment?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, of course. So the Freedom of Information Act, which is also known as FOIA, allows the public to obtain records held by government agencies. So any person may request any record held by a government agency and generally, the government must respond unless it falls within one of FOIA’s several exemptions. So FOIA is connected to the First Amendment primarily because it provides a means for the public to be fully informed about what the government is up to. And through this transparency, the public is able to hold the government accountable for its actions and especially any misconduct.
This kind of transparency is essential feature of democracy and it allows for more well-informed public debate on topics in the public interest.
Cristian Farias:
Now having set the table with that, what’s this FOIA request about and what are you hoping to pry from the government’s cold dead hands?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, so there’s definitely an endless amount of information that I would love to pry from the government, but for this FOIA, we’re seeing large scale reports about ICE raids at immigration courts and even state courts across the country. And we found these reports to be particularly troubling just in part because access to the courts is so essential to the administration of justice. So what we did is we filed this FOIA request to understand what was happening and whether government lawyers have weighed in on the legality of these practices.
We’ve also read some reports about ICE agents even requesting or ordering closure of courtrooms during public immigration hearings, so we asked for some records related to that too.
Cristian Farias:
That sounds like a heck of a lot of information and I’m curious, has the government responded yet and if they haven’t or if they deny your requests, what are your next steps?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, so as it stands right now, we’ve started to receive a few acknowledgments from agencies, but we haven’t received any actual records yet. And also, in most cases, we haven’t even received a substantive response at all. And one powerful aspect of FOIA is that it provides a private right of action. So that means that if an agency fails to respond in a timely manner, requesters can sue on the FOIA request, and that’s definitely something that’s been on our minds as we wait for the agencies to respond.
Cristian Farias:
What are the main agencies or subcomponents of agencies that you’re targeting?
Allie Schiele:
We sent the request to four agencies, ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, the Executive Office of Immigration Review and the Civil Rights Office of the DHS.
Cristian Farias:
Now, this FOIA request focuses on bringing to light the administration’s kind of decision-making and instruction around these arrests by ICE in and around courthouses. But I want to talk about these arrests in a more general way. What do you think is so wrong about them from a First Amendment standpoint? Because for some people they see these images, if people get an arrested at courthouses. And obviously, you see the harm there because some of these images are truly awful to look at, but what’s the First Amendment harm in particular?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, so just like taking a step back, the First Amendment guarantees the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and that’s known as the Petition Clause. And that’s not just limited to say petitioning your elected officials. The Supreme Court has recognized that this also applies to filing lawsuits as well. And now, because ICE has dramatically escalated courthouse arrests, it creates this kind of climate of fear where immigrants might be afraid to appear in court and they’re faced with this impossible choice of appearing in court and risking arrests or abandoning their rights be heard in court at all.
This creates a chilling effect that raises significant concerns regarding immigrants’ right to petition under the First Amendment.
Cristian Farias:
Now, this is happening at all kinds of courthouses. What are the forums that we’re seeing these arrests happening at?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, so far we’ve seen most of these immigration arrests are occurring at immigration courts, but there have been several arrests at courthouses and states and sometimes even states that have laws specifically prohibiting courthouse arrests. Colorado is one example where we’ve seen some arrests occurring in criminal courts and state courts, despite Colorado’s law against this very practice. So it’s happening all over. I don’t think I’ve seen anything in federal court yet.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, and that kind of strikes me because if this is truly a desire to enforce the immigration laws, you would think that they’re everywhere. But because they’re drawing this arbitrary line, it almost seems as if they’re trying to go after a particular jurisdictions that are not falling in line with what the administration wants. Now, some of these courthouse arrests have included masked ICE agents, and one interesting thing that we just learned from AAUP versus Rubio, which is this big First Amendment trial that just wrapped up this week in Boston, is that there is no policy for these agents to wear a mask while conducting these enforcement operations.
According to this testimony that we heard, it’s basically up to the individual, it’s their discretion to decide whether to wear a mask. And I was listening to the judge commenting on all of this and he sounded dumbfounded by this almost as if ICE operates in this kind of law free zone or a rule free zone that other agencies do not operate in. Can you tell me a little bit about this masking situation and how the secrecy is bad for the public and for democracy?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, so first of all, I definitely agree with Judge Young here. This is absolutely a horrible practice that ICE has been engaging in, especially in the context of courthouse arrests. I should be accountable to the public. And a large part of that accountability comes from the ability to identify the agents that are responsible for these arrests. So if ICE agents or any other law enforcement agents conceal their identity, holding them accountable for their abuse of power becomes even more difficult.
And it’s really hard to file a lawsuit if you don’t know the identity of the person who arrested you or harmed you in any way, and especially if you don’t know where they work. I think that these are kind of principles related to the FOIA context where essentially, it’s saying the government should not be allowed to operate secretly in the shadows and not to mention the chaos and fear that’s created when people who are arrested can’t even tell if those arresting them are affiliated with the government in any way. So this is completely inconsistent with democratic values and I think that’s why there have been comparisons of ICE and masked agents to the Secret Police.
Cristian Farias:
Recently, Democracy Forward, which is a litigation shop and other organizations filed a big lawsuit, challenging ICE courthouse arrests and looking at the complain, it was very interesting to me that they didn’t raise the First Amendment in the lawsuit. Now, can you tell me a little bit on what basis they’re challenging these arrests and why do you think that we should also be thinking about the First Amendment in these kinds of cases?
Allie Schiele:
Yeah, so Democracy Forward’s lawsuit challenges courthouse arrests under several provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act, also known as the APA. And APA lawsuits are great and can often be the fastest way to get the type of relief that immigrants really need in these cases, but I’m not particularly surprised to see that there’s no Petition Clause claim because it’s usually an underutilized means of vindicating First Amendment rights. But the First Amendment still has a role to play here.
I think one of the key purposes of the petition clause is to allow individuals to express their concerns to the government, which includes legal claims, and the Supreme Court has even said that litigation may be the sole avenue for marginalized communities to petition for redress. And so defending the right to petition in addition to these APA claims is really important because that highlights some of the access to justice concerns that we see present in the courthouse arrests.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah. One thing that I almost never see discussed when it comes to these arrests is that when you go to court, yeah, fine. You have civil courtrooms, you have criminal courtrooms, but courts are used for everything. Landlord-tenant disputes, small claims, family court, a ton of people are in court just doing all these other kinds of business, and all of a sudden you see all these agents showing up to arrest someone. That is a major disruption for everyone that’s there. Forget about the people who are trying to go to immigration court. Yeah, of course, those are the main people who are affected, but everyone in the ambit of that courthouse feels the impact, feels to chill in a way.
Allie Schiele:
One thing to add there is that I think that you’re exactly right that the courthouse arrests have been deterring non-citizens from seeking redress from the courts. For example, they might hesitate to seek a protective order in a domestic violence dispute, and immigrants might be hesitant to pursue any employment discrimination or housing discrimination claims. So I think that really underscores the chilling effect that these courthouse arrests have and why it’s so important to address this issue.
Cristian Farias:
Allie, you said at the top of the show that FOIA is not just for lawyers. Anyone can file one. Can you give a quick tip for a person who might wish to file one of these requests?
Allie Schiele:
Yes, happy to contribute any wisdom. My main advice would be to be as specific as possible when making the request. I think a lot of times FOIA requests that are too broad will be interpreted by the agency in a way that’s just too unreasonably narrow. So if you’re able to have more specificity about the documents you’re seeking, you’ll have a better chance of receiving the information you’re looking for and without as much back and forth with the government.
Cristian Farias:
That is a perfect note to end on. Allie Schiele. She is a legal fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute. It was wonderful speaking with you.
Allie Schiele:
Thanks Cristian. I had a great time.
Cristian Farias:
Video news footage of ICE agents arresting people showing up for their court hearings and how these agents are cracking down even on friends and advocates who accompany them have sadly become commonplace. Our other guest today is an advocate who is the main character in some of the most widely circulated footage. New York City Comptroller, Brad Lander has been raising awareness about ICE courthouse arrests in the greatest city in the world. He’s here to tell us why his office cares about this issue, and hopefully offer some insights into how the rest of us can also bear witness and link arms with the people most affected by these deplorable practices. Comptroller Lander, it’s always an honor to have a public official on the show. Welcome.
Brad Lander:
Thank you so much. It’s great to be here.
Cristian Farias:
What does the New York City Comptroller do and what have you been proudest during your own tenure?
Brad Lander:
New York City Comptroller is the chief financial officer and chief accountability officer of New York City, so we manage the 295 billion dollar pension fund that is the retirement security of teachers and cops and firefighters. And we’ve done that in a way that makes sure they’ll have their retirement security, but also has divested fossil fuels, had the backs of workers when their companies were cheating them, invested in affordable housing for New Yorkers who need it. We audit all the city agencies and have created a new public housing NYCHA resident audit committee to help NYCHA residents.
We’ve been able to cancel corrupt contracts by Eric Adam’s administration, of which there have been way too many. So it’s been a busy term and I feel proud of a lot of the work we’ve done. I started doing these courthouse observations because I thought, “All right, this is a place for elected officials to show up. I did not imagine at that time it would become something I would feel called to do essentially weekly,” but once you start seeing families separated and people abducted, you feel like you’ve got to do everything you can to raise your voice.
Cristian Farias:
Absolutely. Now, last year, you announced you were running for mayor and it was during your primary campaign that you were arrested by ICE. It’s been a little bit of time since, and I wanted you to reflect on that experience. How did it come about, what you learned from it and why did you make it a campaign issue at the time?
Brad Lander:
I’ve been comptroller now for four years. Before that I was in the New York City Council. I announced about a year ago now that I was running for mayor, distressed by Eric Adams’ failures to deliver for New Yorkers on the core issues that matter, affordable housing and protecting our city. And then, a big thing that I have been critical of him about for several years now is scapegoating and failing to protect immigrants in what is, in my opinion, the greatest immigrant city the world’s ever known. That’s just a core of what New York City is.
Mostly what I was focused on in my run for mayor was affordable housing and good jobs and great schools for our kids and safe neighborhoods. But I was very clear all along. I mean, 40% of New Yorkers are immigrants, 50% of New Yorkers live in mixed status households, including a million kids. Anytime you’re in our public schools, anytime you’re at a city University of New York campus, you’re seeing an extraordinary number of immigrants, and that’s the past president and future of our city.
And just seemed to me an important part of saying the way that we stand up to Donald Trump and secure the future of New York is insisting on the role of immigrants in our city, and then of course, especially on the rule of law. Now, I will say I didn’t think of it as a campaign issue when I went down to 26 Federal Plaza for the first time. I thought of it as part of my duty as chief accountability officer for the city. We have these sanctuary city laws that say New York City doesn’t allow our resources to be used, our police officers, our school receptionists.
Our shelters, our jails, our libraries, any of it with ICE when it is overreaching and looking to detain or deport people who have not been convicted of any crime other than coming into the country. And that’s so that people will feel safe reporting crimes when they see them sending their kids to school. And so that’s why in that role as Chief Accountability Officer, when I heard that it looked to me like the NYPD resources were being misused to back ICE officers up as they were pursuing arrests without due process, it felt important for me to go down there and the first time I went, I really was flabbergasted by what was happening to watch people who are doing everything right.
Who showed up for their hearings, who have it seems to me, a reasonable case, that they’ve got credible fear of persecution if they’re deported to watch ICE agents essentially trick them. The judges had said, you have a hearing in this building, and then they come and then judges give them an opportunity in many cases, schedule a hearing and say, “Okay, come back in a year or two or three to have your case heard or I’ll give you a few more months to get a lawyer.” And then right there in the elevator banks and hallways of the building outside the courtroom, this is not like the bailiff comes over to you in the courtroom, the judge dismisses you.
You leave the courtroom, thinking you’re going to come back for your hearing a year from now. And then lurking in the elevator lobby is a gang of people, not in uniforms, not with any badges or identification. In masks who grab you, in some cases, separate families who don’t present a warrant, who don’t give any reason for the detention, whose authority is not clear. That just really rang a lot of alarm bells for me. And so I started going. I went a first time, I went a second time. I now have been seven or eight times. I’ve probably seen 20 or 25 cases.
The third time I went, I walked out of a courtroom with a asylum seeker named Edgardo and linked arms with him in order to try to walk out of the building, and that was when the agents descended on us and not only detained Edgardo but also arrested and detained me.
Speaker 4:
Show me the judicial warrant. Where is it?
Speaker 5:
I have it my hand.
Speaker 4:
I would like to see the warrant. I would like to see the warrant, and then I will let go. I like to see the warrant and then, I will let go.
Speaker 5:
Take him in. Take him in. Take him in. Take him in.
Cristian Farias:
That was really chaotic and scary and it’s in a public building. That was obviously something that made a lot of news at the time and reading the coverage from it, it seems like you were supposed to hear back from federal prosecutors.
Brad Lander:
Well, it wasn’t important to me to hear back from them. They have not brought charges against me now. They haven’t reached out to tell me they are not going to bring charges, but they did not bring charges, so I was detained for about four hours. They allege some things in tweets online, which anyone could see weren’t true, right? I mean, department of Homeland Security tweeted that I had assaulted officers, but the video was out there circulating all around. Anyone could see that I didn’t lay a hand on anyone.
So I have not heard from them. I’ve been back in immigration courts four or five times since then. Unfortunately, if anything, the situation has only gotten worse, there are many more people being detained. They’re running even more roughshod over what the courts are supposed to be. For a while, the government would at least make a motion Department of Homeland Security to dismiss people’s cases, therefore strip them of their status as asylum seekers and at least in some theoretical way, render them eligible in the eyes of the government for expedited removal, which I don’t think would stand up to scrutiny, but at least was a legal argument.
Now they’re not even bothering with legal arguments. Last week I was with this gentleman, Carlos Lopez. And the judge basically said, you’ve got grounds for a credible fear hearing. You’ve submitted an asylum application. I’m going to grant you a hearing on your asylum application. It was scheduled for July, 2029, but you could see the ICE agents lurking out in the hallway. And I actually stood up in that case and said, “Your Honor, I mean I don’t have any standing. I’m not his lawyer, but Your Honor, you can see that there are ICE agents in the hallway. The government, the Department of Homeland Security does not intend to honor the hearing date that you just scheduled."
"Can you at least ask the Department of Homeland Security whether they intend to honor the order that you are making?” But the judge basically shrugged and as soon as he walked out, he was with his sister and relatives and they threw his sister to the ground very roughly. Now, we learn that the city is reporting really horrific conditions on the 10th floor of 26th. Federal Plaza is not designed to be a detention facility. People are staying there 10 to 15 days. There aren’t adequate bathrooms or showers or food. So that’s what we’re up against.
Cristian Farias:
Yeah, truly a terrible policy. Now, 26 Federal Plaza, which you mentioned is massive, and my understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that there are also some city tenants there. I’m curious what you’ve heard from folks who work there and how ICE has had an effect on actual people who go there to work and just do city business.
Brad Lander:
Yeah. Well, and mostly what it is a federal office building. So the Environmental Protection Agency is there. So many federal workers just going about their business or doing their job are now seeing their building overrun by ICE agents. One time, I got in the elevator and just went up to the floor to watch, and as soon as the doors opened, there was a gang of ICE agents with a detainee. And so, it has become a very frightening place to work for government workers just going about their business.
Cristian Farias:
These are New Yorkers, by the way.
Brad Lander:
Correct. I mean, I’ve told this story before, but the two agents who detained me took me to the 10th floor. I didn’t see the quarters where other people are sleeping. They just put me in an interview room. And in this case, there were two arresting officers, one of them a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who lives in Brighton Beach in New York City and the other an Indo Guyanese immigrant who lives in South Ozone Park in New York City. So in New York City, even the ICE officers are immigrants in many cases.
These two guys in particular, they had been ICE agents under Biden. They don’t seem like the kind of people who were, let’s say, inclined to be brown shirts, but here, they are acting like brown shirts. I mean, if you participate in a system that abducts people without authority, acts without the rule of law, holds them in holding cells that don’t have adequate food or showers or facilities and then renders them in many cases without their families even knowing where they are to detention facilities like the one that’s getting built in Florida.
Recently, there were two 20-year-olds, a young woman and a young man who after about a month in detention, were returned to their families, thankfully, but have just told harrowing stories about what’s happening. And of course, in some cases, they’ve detained the wrong person, detained people who were US citizens. Most of these folks don’t have lawyers. They don’t present warrants. They do very little to make sure they even have the person that they’re alleging. And in all of these cases that I’ve witnessed, even if they are carrying a warrant, it doesn’t reflect whatever just happened in the courtroom.
They’re just using the courts as a fishing expedition, a place to find people in order to abduct and detain them.
Cristian Farias:
As we speak, the Trump administration has reportedly making plans to hit New York City hard in the same way Los Angeles was hit just last month. I believe the words Tom Homan used was to flood the zone. What can US comptroller, besides public awareness do to resist some of these actions?
Brad Lander:
Part of what they want is for New York City to partner with them in this campaign of mass deportation to give them access to Rikers Island where people have been arrested, but for the most part are awaiting trial. So Rikers is mostly not people who have been convicted of a crime, and it would be unconscionable for New York City to turn people over who may have been arrested but haven’t yet had their day in court, to turn them over to ICE to be deported to El Salvador or South Sudan or put in that camp in Florida would violate New York City law.
But yes, what Tom Homan is saying is if we don’t start collaborating with them, then they’re going to send ICE agents, and I guess I suppose possibly also National Guard or other federal law enforcement throughout our communities as a way of trying to stoke fear into immigrant families themselves. Part of what they want is for families to be afraid and therefore, perhaps to leave of their own volition rather than exercise their rights to safely seek asylum and to terrify people like me and communities into complying. I think that was part of why they arrested me and why they arrested at Senator Alex Padilla and Mayor Ras Baraka.
They want people to see, okay, if you’re going to arrest elected officials, or in my case, a 50 something White guy who carries a US passport, nobody is safe. Even in one case, Kristi Noem said, they’re looking to “Liberate democratic cities from their elected officials.” They are using authoritarian or proto-fascist language and tactics. Why are these ICE agents in masks lurking in the elevators in the hallways? Their point is to stoke fear and make clear that they really don’t respect the rule of law. So what do I think we can do?
First, I really urge many more people to come down and observe in court. You have a right to do it. You don’t have to be an elected official or a faith leader, although I urge other elected officials and faith leaders to do it. The more people who show up and see for themselves what’s happening and raise your voice, like we have not persuaded any of these ICE officers, not to comply, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. Every one of those ICE officers is making their own decisions and they should not proceed, and they should hear from their neighbors that what they’re doing is carrying our country toward fascism.
And they should refuse to comply with these immoral orders or quit their jobs. We have to find ways that are nonviolent in the peaceful tradition of nonviolent resistance, but also in ways that are insistent. We are not going to allow the rule of law and kind of people’s basic First Amendment and constitutional protections to be eroded as though it’s normal. That’s what they want, and we have to come up with more than that. I want to be honest. It doesn’t feel good to say that, but then the judge doesn’t do anything.
And when we’re there, we can at least make sure we follow up and people get lawyers. So I mentioned Carlos Lopez. We were able to connect him and his family to a lawyer to file a habeas motion and contest his unlawful detention. And it’s important to do that as well, kind of provide all the support and help we can. And I think we are going to have to find stronger ways in that nonviolent resistance tradition. It was great that several million people came out for the No Kings marches a few weeks back, and that’s necessary.
And just like in the civil rights movement, some people are going to have to find ways to ratchet that advocacy up again in the nonviolent tradition. What they want in some ways is an excuse to ratchet up a force like they did in Los Angeles, and they’re threatening to do here. But there are things that we can do for starters, come on down and witness for yourself. Learn a little bit about how to do the court watching, and as we move forward and think about ways that we can more strongly exercise the rights that Americans have, we’ll be in better position to do it.
Cristian Farias:
Look into our elected officials or elected representatives, is there a structural reform you can think of perhaps that they can take action moving forward?
Brad Lander:
Well, one thing that both the state legislature and the city council did was to vote some money in their most recent budgets to dramatically expand legal representation. So people don’t have a right to a lawyer when they’re facing deportation and immigration proceedings. But if cities and states will pay for them, people could have lawyers. We actually have something called the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project that was begun a few years ago, and it has traditionally waited until later in the process because people weren’t facing abduction and deportation.
Now, we need to make sure these folks have lawyers. So I would urge state legislators and city council members and also the governor, and not that urging the mayor won’t do much good, but I’ll urge him anyway. Get that money flowing to legal service providers so that folks like Edgardo and Carlos and the other people that we’re talking about here have a lawyer so that if they get detained, there’s someone to file a habeas motion and get them out of illegal detention and to navigate this system.
So that’s one thing that I hope cities and states around the country will do is put more resources into legal representation and make sure that our neighbors have lawyers before they’re facing illegal detention or deportation or rendering to a foreign country.
Cristian Farias:
Brad Lander, Comptroller of the City of New York, thank you so much for coming on The Bully’s Pulpit.
Brad Lander:
Thank you for doing this.
Cristian Farias:
Comptroller Lander ended on a hopeful note, but the reality is grim. Over the next four years, ICE will receive an unprecedented amount of money that will almost double their immigration detention capacity. In recent analysis from the Brennan Center for Justice, $45 billion is earmarked to build new detention centers. 14 billion will go towards deportation operations and 3.5 billion to reimburse state and local governments that aid ICE and immigration-related enforcement and detention. There’s a lot of work ahead.
And that’s our show for this week. We’ll be back next week with more First Amendment news and the actions people, public officials, and those who elect them are taken to defend what remains of our freedoms. The Bully’s Pulpit is a production of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. I’m your host, Cristian Farias. This episode was written by me and co-produced by Ann-Marie Awad, Candace White, and Matt Pyken. Our associate producer for this episode is Kushal Dev. Fact-checking by Kushal Dev, Ellie Fivas and Alice Sohn. Our sound engineer is Patrick McNameeking.
Candace White is our executive producer. Our music comes from Epidemic Sound. The art for our show was designed by Astrid de Silva. Thanks to Allie Schiele and Comptroller Brad Lander who joined us for this episode. The Bully’s Pulpit is available on Apple, Spotify and wherever you listen to podcasts. Please subscribe and leave a review. We’d love to know what you think. To learn more about the Knight Institute, visit our website KnightColumbia.org. That’s Knight with a K. And follow us on social media.