Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s13e01 Episode Script
ICE
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight"!
We are back!
We've been off
for the last three months,
and we have missed a lot,
and I mean a lot, a lot.
Trump was awarded
the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize,
just weeks before kidnapping
the president of Venezuela.
The latest batch of Epstein files
got released.
Measles numbers exploded
across multiple states,
which I know seems bad, but to be fair,
not if you're the measles.
Trump repeatedly
threatened to take over Greenland,
or as he now seems to refer to it
about half the time, Iceland.
The Beckham family
went through some shit
and Trump said this while promoting
whole milk in the Oval Office.
It's actually a legal
definition, "whole milk".
And it's "whole" with a W, for those
of you that have a problem.
What? I guess he's right there.
It is actually "whole milk," with a W,
not "hole milk," which I know
sounds like nonsense,
but is actually the official beverage
of the absolutely real new
Netflix show "Detective Hole",
starring, and this is true,
Detective Harry Hole.
Apparently, it's based
on a Norwegian series of novels,
and is supposed
to be pronounced "hool-ah",
but respectfully, nah, Norway.
It's pronounced "hole".
And that was just the beginning.
Zohran Mamdani was sworn in
as New York mayor,
Eric Adams launched a meme coin
that he said would,
among other things,
fight antisemitism, and, okay!
And the Department
of the Interior announced
a new coal mascot called Coalie,
which really felt like an attempt
to bait us into coming back early.
It wasn't even the only time
that we were tempted to do that,
because there was also the headline
"Beloved Walrus Penis Stolen from
New Jersey Cheesesteak Icon."
"Owner Is Blubbering Mad."
You don't think
if we'd been on air back then,
we'd have tracked down
that walrus penis
and donated the proceeds to
Doctors Without Borders or something?
Are you new here?
And at Miss Universe,
one contestant did this.
Norway!
This salmon-inspired gown mirrors
both the delegate's movements
as a baton twirler and the essence
of Norway's leading export.
Yeah, that happened!
Miss Norway wore this as a costume.
And I guess, to be fair, it does sum up
Norway nicely in an image.
I mean, what else
was she gonna dress up as?
Detective Harry Hole?
But wait, I'm still not done.
'Cause the Winter Olympics
got underway,
and there's already been
lots of incredible action,
as well as some personal drama
like this.
It was a career-defining moment
for biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid,
but it's what he said next
that he'll be remembered for.
Six months ago,
I met the love of my life.
The world's most beautiful,
wonderful person in the world.
Three months ago, I made
the biggest mistake of my life,
and cheated on her.
That is usually not the kind of
declaration of love you see in public.
It is why stadium jumbotrons
generally say things like,
"Will you marry me?" and not,
"Sorry I fucked your sister,"
"are we cool?"
The point is,
that guy won a bronze medal,
then immediately begged
for his ex-girlfriend of six months
to forgive him, and seemed
optimistic that it might work.
He told his country and
the world he'd rather commit,
quote, "social suicide on live TV"
"if it meant a small chance
of winning her back."
Today, I made the choice
to tell the world what I did.
Maybe it can help, I don't know.
I hope there is a happy ending.
There's not, as yet.
There is definitely not, because
she's since put out a statement
declining to reunite,
and saying,
"We have had contact and he
is aware of my opinions on this",
a response that could only be
more brutal if she delivered it
after winning silver in his event.
And if you're thinking, "The biathlon
is surprisingly messy",
you clearly know nothing about it.
Because it's not even this guy's
first time causing trouble.
In 2023, he was banned
from the Biathlon World Cup
after accidentally, and this is true,
shooting his gun in the team's hotel.
Meanwhile, in the women's
competition this year,
Julia Simon competed for France
despite the fact that, last October,
a French court gave her "a three-month
suspended jail sentence"
"after she admitted to stealing
the credit cards of her teammate"
and an unnamed French staffer,"
and making 2,300 dollars
in online purchases.
She apparently said,
"I can't explain it."
"I don't remember doing it.
I can't make sense of it."
And I don't know how
this story could get any juicier,
unless she turns out
to be the woman
that that guy cheated
on his girlfriend with.
Because at that point,
someone please call Andy Cohen,
we have a hit new Bravo series.
By the way, Simone competed
at the Olympics this week,
and guess what?
She fucking won gold!
The French credit card thief
won gold!
And you think I don't want to talk
about the chaotic energy of Olympic
biathletes for the rest of this show?
Of course I do!
It's all I want to talk about.
But sadly, I can't do that,
because, and I think you probably
know where this is going,
we have to dive straight in
with our main story this week,
which concerns what's been
happening in Minnesota,
from the surge in immigration raids,
to the killings
of Renee Good and Alex Pretti,
to the massive protests in the streets.
For all this administration's
talk of "paid agitators,"
the protests there came
from justifiably furious locals,
like this almost
absurdly Midwestern man.
You know what really pisses me off,
is the fact that they detain people,
cuff 'em, and then
still beat the shit out of 'em!
They tell you it's immigrants,
only immigrants.
It's fucking anybody!
I have friends that got detained
and all they were doing was
fucking driving home from work.
What the fuck?
No, I'm not paid to be here,
like everybody fucking says.
What the fuck is that?
I gotta work in the goddamn morning,
just like everybody else.
I'm just here trying to stand up
for community, dude.
We're all human beings here.
I don't give a shit who you are,
where you came from, what color you
are, it doesn't matter. This is wrong.
Yeah. And you know you are
acting like a bunch of dicks
when you're provoking that
level of response in Minnesota,
a state whose whole thing
is being "Minnesota nice".
They put it on merch!
Other states couldn't pull that off.
Especially because "Florida nice"
sounds like a brand of pills
you buy from the gas station
that makes your heart explode.
And I will say, this does seem
like a turning point
for this administration
on immigration.
Polls show the majority
of Americans do not approve
of what's been happening.
And nor should they.
Because for all Trump's talk of
targeting "the worst of the worst",
that rings pretty hollow
when you see agents doing things
like dragging a U.S. citizen
out of his house in his underwear
through the snow, and taking
a five-year-old into custody.
It is frankly no wonder
anti-ICE sentiment has spread
to places that you might not
even expect, from Poptart the cat,
who posted a video
with "fuck ICE" on it,
to the subreddit "MassiveCock",
where users captioned dick pics
with things like,
"How hard I get when I think
about abolishing ICE",
to an AEW match in Vegas earlier
this month, where this happened.
Now the face
Fuck ICE! Fuck ICE!
Fuck ICE!
Excellent. Well done
to everyone involved there,
from the crowd getting their
point across in the perfect way,
to MJF going full Jim
from "The Office" into the camera.
The point is,
to the extent they ever had it,
ICE and Border Patrol have
clearly lost the public's trust.
And it frankly hasn't helped
to see grotesque clips like this one,
at Mar-a-Lago on New Year's Eve,
of Kristi Noem dancing
with Stephen Miller.
Look, there is so much weird
stuff going on in that clip
that you probably didn't even
notice the Ninja Turtle
dancing with Vanilla Ice
on stage there.
Here is a better angle of Michelangelo
being photographed
at the exact moment he seems
to realize just how many people
in that room were mentioned
in the Epstein files.
There've been some promising
developments this week.
Democratic leaders seem to have
finally read the public's anger,
and are currently holding up
funds for DHS as a whole,
as they push for new restrictions
on immigration agents.
And on Thursday, this happened.
Tonight, border czar Tom Homan
says the massive immigration operation
that's been going on for months
in Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge,
is coming to an end.
We've had great success
with this operation,
and we're leaving
Minnesota safer.
There were some issues here,
and we addressed those issues.
But I'm not going to sit here
and say anybody did anything wrong.
Really? First and least
importantly: you are standing.
Like, you're not gonna sit there
and say anything,
because you're a standing man.
I think it's pretty clear that a lot
of people did a lot of things wrong,
not least your tailor, because the suit
looks like you bought it off the rack
at Fancy Press Conference Clothes
for Uncharismatic Business Shreks.
I am glad for any drawdown that
takes place in Minnesota,
if it indeed happens.
But even if every agent leaves town,
much larger problems
are going to remain,
both there and on the national level,
because we are going to continue
to see this administration
pursue Stephen Miller's stated goal
of racking up 3.000 arrests a day.
So given that, we thought
for our first show of the year,
it might be worth pulling back a bit,
and talking not just about Minneapolis,
or even just ICE, but about
the massive agency it's a part of,
the Department of Homeland Security.
Because as you're about to see,
a discussion about it, its funding,
and the sweeping powers
that we've given it is long overdue.
So tonight, let's look at DHS.
And let's start with its origins.
Because while you might assume
DHS is a longstanding part
of American government,
it's just 23 years old.
It was founded as a response to 9/11,
and if you are too young
to remember 9/11,
I will pause long enough
for the rest of us to experience
the psychic gut punch
of that sentence.
Basically, in the immediate aftermath
of the most devastating terrorist
attack in its history,
America started screaming,
and didn't really stop for a decade.
And while thankfully,
the Riyadh Comedy Festival
has since healed
the world through comedy
and we don't need to be worried
about who or what
was actually responsible for 9/11,
at the time,
a major concern was that,
prior to the attacks,
there'd been a lack of communication
and information sharing
between federal agencies.
So, the Bush administration
agreed to combine a bunch of them
under a single banner
to improve coordination.
But even back then,
some felt that that was a bad idea,
to the point that it was openly
discussed in news coverage.
What do Secret Service agents
have in common
with animal disease researchers?
Nothing, except that in three months,
both will be working
for the new Homeland Security
Department,
an organizational chart that could
give a management expert nightmares.
22 agencies, 170.000 workers,
the third-largest
department in the government.
Okay, first, it is a little weird to
introduce a government agency
like it's a new sitcom.
What happens when an uptight TSA
agent and a laid-back FEMA official
have to move in together?
Find out in 'Homeland Security',
Thursdays on TBS!
But the larger point there,
that this thing
had been hastily cobbled together,
very much holds.
Because all of a sudden,
DHS contained everything
from the Secret Service, to the Coast
Guard, to FEMA and TSA.
But for everything that went in,
some key counterterrorism agencies
were left out,
because DHS had to operate "without
the investigative, intelligence"
"and military powers of the FBI,
CIA, and the Pentagon."
But don't worry!
'Cause remember,
they had those pig researchers,
so they were pretty much set.
As a result,
DHS tried to justify its existence
in a number of different ways,
including by "explicitly linking"
"immigration enforcement
with countering terrorism".
In fact, it was during the creation
of DHS that parts
of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service and U.S. Customs Service
were combined to form Customs
and Border Protection and ICE,
the two agencies that we know
and are being terrorized by today.
But oversight of all of this
was a nightmare,
as the members of Congress
that oversaw all of those agencies
didn't want to give up control,
so DHS found itself answering
to around 100 committees
and subcommittees.
Which, as the chair of the 9/11
commission explained, caused chaos.
Think of having 100 bosses.
Think of reporting up
this way and that way,
trying to do your job, and yet
you're reporting to 100 people.
It's crazy, 'cause it makes no sense,
and you could not do your job
under those circumstances.
Yeah, that does make sense.
Having an endless cavalcade
of rapidly changing bosses
would clearly be a distraction,
though I've gotta say, you do
eventually get used to it.
I don't even know
which of these companies
is going to be
my new business daddy yet!
It's like a "Mamma Mia" situation,
except less fun and way less sexy.
But incidentally,
if it is indeed Netflix,
sorry for all the times
I called your catalogue
a "who's who" of "the fuck is this".
Loved the ending of "Stranger Things",
by the way, very brown.
And good luck with "Detective Hole"!
It sounds great!
Now, complaints about
the unwieldy nature of DHS
persisted over the years and, despite
that, money kept flowing into it,
even as it became known for things
like its mass surveillance programs,
particularly of American Muslims,
and its widely mocked
color-coded terrorism threat chart,
which never dropped below yellow.
It also became notorious
for its willingness
to distribute billions of dollars
to state and local authorities.
In fact, on the 10-year
anniversary of 9/11,
one California news station
compiled just some of what that
money had been wasted on.
Marin County received 100.000
dollars in surveillance equipment
to protect its water treatment
system from terrorist attack.
Four years after the money
was handed out,
state authorities found 67.000
dollars worth of gear
still in boxes.
It had never been used.
Several counties and cities bought
Segway scooters for their bomb squads.
Each one cost 4.700 dollars.
Okay, first, I'm not sure anything
says "we have too much money" more
than buying a fucking Segway.
And second, that is just an
unfathomably dorky look.
Doesn't scream "brave bomb defuser"
as much as "beekeeper mall cop".
With expenditures like that,
it's no wonder that a 2015 report
from a Republican senator found
that despite spending
over half a trillion dollars,
"DHS was not successfully executing
any of its five main missions."
And its primary counterterrorism
programs were "yielding little value".
But because no one in power
back then wanted to break apart
something that had
"Homeland Security" in its name,
DHS remained the largest federal
law enforcement agency,
with massive funding,
sweeping surveillance authority,
and worryingly unclear checks
on its own power.
It was essentially a loaded weapon,
sitting on a president's desk,
only held back by their personal
sense of temperance and restraint,
all of which brings us back
to this fucking guy.
Because in his first term,
Trump and this sleep paralysis demon
used DHS to push everything
from his Muslim ban
to family separation
to his efforts to end DACA.
But from the very start
of Trump's second term,
it was clear they had
much bigger plans for DHS,
starting with the fact Trump put one
of his biggest allies, Kristi Noem,
in charge of it.
And even news stories
about her announcement at the time
contained some pretty clear hints
that she was a bad choice.
Tonight, President-elect Donald Trump
expected to name
one of his staunchest campaign
South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem,
to lead the massive
Department of Homeland Security.
Trump once considered Noem
as a potential running mate,
but her star dimmed
after writing in her memoir
that she had shot
and killed the family dog.
Yeah, not great! And even Trump,
who's been endowed by Satan
with an ability to survive
any bad press whatsoever,
somehow knew that picking a VP
who bragged about speedrunning
"Old Yeller" is a bad move.
No one wants to share
a ticket with John Wilkes Woof here.
In fact, Trump was so
turned off by Noem's dog news,
he apparently said
to Don Jr. afterwards,
"That's not good at all.
Even you wouldn't kill a dog,"
"and you kill everything."
Just another brief window
into a family dynamic
that a skilled therapist would
describe as "cha-ching".
And crucially,
Noem didn't bring a lot of non-dog-
murdering experience to the job.
She'd never worked
in DHS or indeed law enforcement,
but in a foreshadowing of things
to come, as governor of South Dakota,
she was a relentless self-promoter.
In ads for her state, she appeared
in various job-themed costumes,
including a dentist, a nurse,
an electrician, a plumber, a welder
and a construction worker, selling
each role with incredible charisma.
South Dakota has
the blueprint for success.
Recently, we led the nation
in new home-building,
but we're still growing so fast.
We need to hire more
builders to keep up.
So, I'm pitching in.
I know her performance
is pretty flat, but in her defense,
who's gonna tell her
that she can't act?
Not anyone who likes
their dog, that's for sure.
Also, I'm in a bit of a tough
spot here.
Because I refuse to comment
on a woman's looks.
But one of my female writers
has insisted
that I read something
that she's written,
and I also refuse to silence
women's voices.
A ponytail for practical
working purposes
is intended to keep hair off the base
of the neck and/or out of the eyes.
If you leave the front part
of your hair out
and keep the bottom part of your
"hair" down around your shoulders,
it's not a working ponytail,
it's a hairdo.
And, John, please do make sure
that you put that second "hair"
in air quotes,
because there is just no way
that Clydesdale tail is the real hair
of that dog killer
with the bad filler.
Her words. Not mine.
Her words. Believe women.
And the thing is,
Noem immediately brought to DHS
that same unrelenting
focus on PR,
from shooting a video
in the Salvadoran CECOT prison
while wearing a
50.000 dollars Rolex,
to cosplaying
as a law enforcement agent,
from wearing a bulletproof
vest on the streets of New York,
to putting on Coast Guard fatigues,
to dressing up like a Border Patrol
agent on Fox News.
And if it seems like she's got
cameras with her wherever she goes,
it's because she basically does.
Here she is with a camera crew
on the roof of an immigration
detention facility outside of Chicago.
And fun fact: these two men,
Kyle Frankovich and Juan Munoz,
were protesting outside that day,
only to be arrested.
And to hear them tell it, that seemed
to have less to do with their actions,
and much more to do with the presence
of Noem and her social media crew.
An agent grabbed me,
threw me down.
I was then zip-tied and detained.
I was pulled to the ground
and ordered arrested.
It felt very much like we were just
being used for this political theater.
Kristi Noem was able to walk past us
surrounded by photographers,
videographers, essentially getting us
in the background as she walked by.
Then look what happened.
Homeland Security sent out these
social media posts
showing Kyle in handcuffs.
This one said:
"We will not allow violent activists
to lay hands on our law enforcement."
And they also posted this
government promotional video,
and there's Kyle again. He and Munoz
were never charged with any crime.
That's true. Despite being
labeled "violent activists",
they were never charged
with anything.
So, it seems they were arrested just
for a photo op for Kristi Noem,
which is, if I may quote her
own dog's dying words, ruff.
But it goes way beyond optics.
Noem has been put in charge
of DHS at a moment
when it's experiencing
an unprecedented funding surge.
Trump's Big Beautiful Bill
essentially doubled DHS's funding
over the next four years.
And it's worth looking
at where all that money is,
and equally importantly,
isn't going.
Because DHS's resources are now
being pointed at immigration
more heavily than ever before,
to the point that it's being called
"a veritable
Department of Deportation."
ICE was handed an extra 75 billion
to spend over Trump's term,
tripling its annual budget
and leading to this startling fact.
Overnight, it became the highest-funded
federal law enforcement agency
in U.S. history.
If ICE was a military, it would be
the 17th richest in the world,
worth about the same
as Canada's entire armed forces.
It's true! And whatever
the appropriate budget for ICE is,
and they're making a compelling
argument for it being zero right now,
one thing it should definitely not be
is the same as the entire
Canadian military.
Though, to be fair, that's not
a perfect one to one,
as I'm pretty sure
the Canadian military
doesn't totally eat shit
on slightly slippery sidewalks.
A lot of that money is earmarked for
immigration detention facilities,
the conditions at which we have
talked about before on this show,
and which are unlikely to get better,
given ominous headlines like,
"ICE Begins Buying Mega Warehouse
Detention Centers Across the U.S."
But a lot is also going to hiring
thousands of new ICE agents,
with DHS planning to spend
100 million dollars
over a one-year period
just on advertising.
It's part of what it's called
"a 'wartime recruitment' strategy."
And those ads are everywhere.
Slickly produced
Televised ads targeting local police
and a celebrity endorsement.
These are all part
of a major multimillion-dollar
recruitment campaign launched
by the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency.
It's shared images using wartime
imagery, like Uncle Sam,
and slang, like in this post
with the caption, quote:
"Want to deport illegals
with your absolute boys?"
That's going to be on social media.
It's going to be through streamers,
so YouTube and other places
where user-generated content is,
but also large-scale broadcast
and streaming platforms
like Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime,
all of this sort of thing.
I'll be honest, I don't love hearing
my employer's name on that list.
Though I guess at least
I do get a reminder of what
the company's name is this year.
It's also slightly satisfying to know
that one place those ads have been
running is in front of AEW wrestling,
meaning that ICE is having to
pay money to appear alongside this.
It's still very good!
Now, DHS claims those ads
are working, they say they've hired
12.000 new ICE agents
and officers since last summer.
And while there are good reasons
to believe those figures are inflated,
we're still going to have a lot more
ICE agents on our streets this year.
And that should be a real concern,
especially because to hire
so many officers so quickly,
they've had to significantly lower
their standards for new recruits,
doing things
like waiving age requirements,
condensing the training period,
and ending requirements
like taking five weeks
of Spanish language training.
Which is a bad idea
for many reasons, including:
those agents won't get to understand
even a little bit of Bad Bunny's music.
Which is sad for them.
They're missing out on a lot of joy,
plenty of political commentary, and
a metric ton of blowjob descriptions.
It's a rich text!
And the thing is,
even with those lower standards,
one report found that more
than a third of new ICE recruits
had failed a physical fitness test
that required 15 pushups,
32 sit-ups, and running
one and a half miles in 14 minutes.
Which, and I do not say this lightly,
is a test even I could pass.
Also, and more upsettingly,
nearly half were later sent home
because they couldn't pass the written
exam, which covers things
like when officers can and can't
conduct searches and seizures.
And it gets even worse when
you learn that during that test,
they were allowed to consult
their textbook and notes.
Yeah, half of them failed
an open book test!
And as we all know,
that is the easiest kind of test.
Even easier than urine. That one
is actually harder than you think.
Mid-stream is a delicate dance.
And as the former acting director of
ICE points out, this is a very bad sign.
Some of these moves, frankly,
have resulted
in some embarrassing candidates.
ICE agents have tremendous authority
when they're out there on the streets.
We have to know that these people,
A, have that integrity,
are gonna-when no one's looking,
are they gonna do things the right way?
And, secondly, you know, are they
getting into this for the right reason?
Obviously, there's a tremendous
concern as well
that the administration is going
after individuals who harbor
some animus towards immigrants.
Right. Because it doesn't seem
unfair to assume
that some might've applied for that job
less out of a sense of public duty,
and more because they want to
"deport illegals with
their absolute boys."
And that concern has been compounded
by a disturbing pattern
of what sure seems
like white nationalist dog whistles
in these recruiting ads,
like this post, reading,
"Which way, American man?"
evoking a meme
associated with this antisemitic
book popular among neo-Nazis.
And this one, using the phrase,
"We'll Have Our Home Again",
the title of a song released
by a white nationalist band
popular with far-right groups
like the Proud Boys.
And if that connection seems at all
like a stretch to you,
you should know, the Proud Boys
themselves don't seem to think so.
On the messaging app Telegram,
one chapter reposted that ad
next to a picture of a literal
dog whistle, adding the line,
"Message received."
Cool.
Although, I do have to say,
the whole point of a dog whistle
is plausible deniability,
so saying, "We hear and
understand your dog whistle",
does sort of wreck
the whole agreement.
But I guess that is the risk that
you run when your secret master plan
has to rely on some of the dumbest
people alive.
I have to tell you, we reached
out to DHS for comment,
and they angrily denied
any dog whistles, adding,
"We will not apologize"
"for using patriotic messaging and
symbolism in our advertisements."
They also told us, and I quote,
"One could say
we are Homelandmaxxing"
"by removing illegal aliens
and defending our borders",
a sentence I genuinely feel
dumber for saying out loud.
That is where money and resources
at DHS have been surging to.
But the administration is also
pulling resources away
from other key parts of the agency.
Let's start with just the reallocation
of resources under ICE.
Because, for the record,
before Trump came along,
deportation was not ICE's sole focus.
It actually consisted of two branches:
ERO, or Enforcement
and Removal Operations,
which handles
detentions and deportations,
and Homeland Security Investigations
or HSI,
which is tasked
with complex investigations
into things like drug smuggling
and human trafficking,
with many of their targets
not even immigrants.
Diddy's case, for instance,
was run by HSI agents.
Many HSI officials have long wanted
to be formally separated from ICE,
and for obvious reasons.
If you need cooperation
in a human-trafficking investigation,
it's harder to get it from someone
who thinks that you might deport them.
But in Trump's second term, he has
gone hard in the other direction,
signing an executive order on day one
announcing enforcing immigration law
would be "the primary mission"
of HSI.
And that has had real consequences,
as highly-trained agents
who specialized in things
like money laundering
and counterterrorism cases
have now been sent to do things
like pick up people in parking lots.
Here is a guy in an HSI jacket
arresting people
at a Home Depot in L.A. last year.
And that is not good,
because there's probably
other important stuff he was
supposed to be doing that day!
In the first part of last year,
HSI agents worked
an average of 33% fewer hours
on child exploitation cases.
Which is just maddening.
There is a reason episodes of "SVU"
don't involve them abandoning
a case halfway through,
because they then have to go spend
the rest of the episode
harassing people outside
of a fucking Lowe's. People would riot.
But it's not just reallocations
within ICE.
Not only have CBP agents been
diverted from the border,
they've pulled in law
enforcement from outside of DHS.
According to one estimate,
last year,
one in five U.S. Marshals,
one in five FBI agents,
half of DEA agents,
and over two-thirds of ATF agents
had been reassigned
to help handle deportations.
I'm not saying everything
those agencies were doing
was a good use of their time.
For more on that, see any
number of episodes of this show.
But it is notable that, for all Trump's
justification of immigration crackdowns
to fight drugs and cartels,
as this former DHS intelligence
official points out,
that's exactly
what is being deprioritized.
If FBI agents are not working
on drug gang task forces,
then there are fewer investigations
into violent street gangs
and drug trafficking cartels.
And with such a large contingent
pulled from their duties,
he says drug cartels and bad actors
are watching.
I am 100% certain
that they are tracking
that federal agents are being
moved out of drug task forces
and seeking to determine ways
to exploit the reduced
resources on those task forces.
Yeah, of course cartels
are gonna take advantage.
Drug kingpins,
by and large, aren't stupid.
Mostly because drug kingpins
who are stupid
tend to spend a very short time
as kingpins, and much longer
as a suspicious mound of earth
somewhere in the Mexican desert.
It's kind of a self-editing field.
And I'm still not done listing
misallocations of resources.
At the same time that Noem has
surged funding to some areas of DHS,
she's actively starved others.
For instance, CISA,
which handles cybersecurity,
lost roughly 1.000 staffers,
more than a third of the agency,
meaning it is now less equipped
to do things
like protect our electrical grids
or secure our elections.
But maybe the biggest example of
a department being hamstrung is FEMA.
It is the agency that handles
the federal response to disasters.
Many believe it never really
belonged in DHS in the first place,
and that its ending up there
contributed to its failures
during Hurricane Katrina.
And if you're too young
to remember Hurricane Katrina,
I'm afraid you're just gonna
have to fuck off.
Suffice to say that FEMA
did not have a "good Katrina",
perhaps best summed up
by this entirely fair question
in front of a flood-damaged
apartment complex.
Now,
soon after Trump took office,
FEMA lost about a third
of its total full-time staff.
And it's also been heavily impacted
by a new rule across DHS,
which states that every contract
and grant over 100,000 dollars
must now cross
Noem's desk for approval,
or, to put that in terms
that Kristi Noem can understand,
two wristwatches.
And that requirement is clearly absurd
generally, but especially at FEMA,
an agency that handles emergency
relief that needs to get out quickly.
At one point, "about 17 billion dollars
in federal disaster funds for states"
was held up for "an extra layer
of review by Noem,"
"causing unusual delays
in payments."
And I'd say that I can't even imagine
how chaotic that process must look,
but luckily, I actually can.
Because another of Noem's South
Dakota ads literally showed her
as an overworked accountant,
with ticker tape all over the place,
not exactly doing a great job.
We have close to 20.000 open jobs,
including accountants.
So I'm filling in.
South Dakota. Freedom works here.
Governor Noem?
You didn't carry the two.
Josh? Kiss my abacus.
Okay, it seems once more,
I find myself in a tough spot.
Because, again, I have been told
to read something to you,
and I don't feel like I can say no.
The precise way
for you to describe
what Kristi Noem has actively
chosen to look like there is,
"Mother of the bride who asked for
the exact same hair as the bride."
Also, John,
while I have your attention,
maybe it's time for you to be putting
a little grey in the eyebrow makeup.
You're not fooling anyone.
Let's be adults about this.
Those are her words.
She's brutally honest.
Brutally honest. She's a bad person.
The future is female.
The thing is, Noem delaying
funding approvals at FEMA
has already had
serious consequences.
When there were deadly floods
in Texas last year, two days after,
nearly two-thirds of the calls
to FEMA's disaster assistance line
went unanswered.
Now, I have to tell you,
Noem has disputed that report,
saying, "It's just false"
and,
"That report needs to be validified."
I believe that sentence itself could
benefit from being spellcheckerated.
And not for nothing, Noem's
100.000 dollar sign off rule meant
that, according to one former
FEMA official, the FEMA building itself
almost had its utilities shut off last
year because the bill wasn't paid.
And the truth is, so far,
we've been incredibly lucky
that there hasn't been
an even worse disaster
where FEMA's problems
were more fully exposed, as last year,
"for the first time in a decade,
not a single hurricane struck the U.S.",
but our luck
can only hold out for so long.
Last August,
over 180 FEMA employees
sent a letter to Congress warning
that Trump officials' actions
were risking a Katrina-level disaster.
Which is a haunting thing to hear.
And it's more than a little dispiriting
to realize
that the Frankenstein of an agency
that we cobbled together after 9/11
is now siphoning resources away
from things that actually protect us,
even as it floods resources
to a bunch of guys in ski masks
with questionable Reddit histories
who blast rap rock
out the window of their
government-issued kidnap-mobiles,
all for the benefit of Kristi Noem's
fucking TikTok.
So, what can we do?
Well, first, and most immediately,
with DHS in partial shutdown
over its funding,
Democrats have to use every ounce
of leverage they've got
to get major concessions.
Bernie Sanders has proposed
an amendment that would repeal
the 75 billion in additional
funding that ICE received.
And while I don't know if they'll
be able to get all the way to that,
they should at the very least
get as many hard, enforceable limits
on immigration
agents' activities as possible.
Now, second,
we need to get rid of ICE. Period.
Public trust in it right now
is hovering somewhere
between Purdue Pharma
and the Titan submersible.
It is just not salvageable.
And if you're thinking,
"Well, who will enforce
immigration law if ICE is gone?"
I dunno, maybe the agencies
that did it for decades before 2003.
As for DHS as a whole,
I would argue it's no longer
tenable in its current form.
And while maybe there is
an argument for having
a larger agency coordinating
different federal departments,
it should probably be redesigned
from the ground up,
and deliberately this time,
not by suddenly gluing together
org charts in a blind panic.
If I can make one last,
broader point here,
cosmetic changes
just aren't gonna be enough.
Because even if you get rid
of Kristi Noem, which you should,
Stephen Miller will still be there.
And even if you get rid of him,
this administration will remain.
But even if they are gone,
and we get rid of ICE and DHS,
we're still gonna be left
with the broken immigration laws
that gave them permission
to do what they have done.
Millions of people will continue
to be vulnerable because,
as we've discussed repeatedly
before on this show,
our current immigration system
makes it
somewhere from difficult to impossible
for many to "come in the right way".
That boy in the blue hat
and his dad were scooped up
despite being in the process
of seeking asylum.
And we've shown you multiple
videos of people being arrested
as they showed up for their
immigration appointments.
And that is actually
a bit of a tell.
That is clearly not this administration
targeting "the worst of the worst",
it's them desperately trying
to juice up their numbers.
And it is the law
that allows them to do that.
And that is actually something
that Tom Homan made a point
of reiterating to people when he was
sent to Minnesota two weeks ago.
For the people out there
who don't like what ICE is doing,
if you want certain laws reformed,
then take it up with Congress.
Again, ICE isn't making this up.
They're enforcing laws
enacted by Congress
and signed by the president.
The same laws have been
on the books
for the last six
presidents I worked for.
If you don't like what ICE is doing,
instead of protesting this building,
go protest Congress,
tell them you want changes.
Well, hold on there, Tom.
Why just one or the other?
People could absolutely do both.
"Por que no los dos",
if I may quote a phrase it seems
most new ICE recruits
will have absolutely
no chance of understanding.
But he is right, there.
Trump's policy of mass deportations
is built on existing laws.
And if America doesn't like
what that policy looks like,
now that they've seen
what it really means,
then it needs to fucking
do something about it.
To the extent that we are
all horrified by day laborers
and grandfathers and little kids
in bunny hats being terrorized
by men in masks,
then we need to elect people
who will commit to writing
laws that reflect that.
And I've got to say,
it does say something
that to the extent that anyone
over the last few months
has been protecting our
homeland and keeping it secure,
it has not been Kristi Noem
in her wide array of fun outfits,
or whichever 20-year-old
dipshit's been pumping out
Nazi-flavored content on Twitter,
it has been ordinary people
on the streets of Minneapolis,
blowing whistles,
delivering food to friends who
are afraid to leave their houses,
and marching in the cold
even though they've got
goddamn work in the morning.
If I may quote that gloriously
frozen Midwestern man,
they believe
we are all human beings here,
and that this is fucking wrong.
And now, this.
And Now: Local News Reacts
to a Florida Delicacy.
Welcome back. Recent freezing
weather in South Florida
left thousands of iguanas cold-stunned,
and some people have gotten creative
about what to do
with all the invasive lizards.
Fair warning, take a break from
breakfast for just a minute.
Iguana meat pizza.
Were the iguanas already
dead or were they dying?
They were already dead, I believe.
Yeah, they're cold-stunned.
They're still alive.
Well, you can't eat a dead animal.
Because that's like a sanitary thing.
So, they're killing 'em?
And they're eating 'em?
- That's legal?
- Yes?
Sanitized iguana meat.
The fact that you have to identify
that it has been sanitized.
This ain't dirty iguana meat,
this is sanitized iguana meat.
You missed
the iguana pizza yesterday.
Excuse me? One more time?
Yes, the iguana pizza.
Why?
That's our show, thanks for watching,
we'll see you next week, good night!
We are back!
We've been off
for the last three months,
and we have missed a lot,
and I mean a lot, a lot.
Trump was awarded
the first-ever FIFA Peace Prize,
just weeks before kidnapping
the president of Venezuela.
The latest batch of Epstein files
got released.
Measles numbers exploded
across multiple states,
which I know seems bad, but to be fair,
not if you're the measles.
Trump repeatedly
threatened to take over Greenland,
or as he now seems to refer to it
about half the time, Iceland.
The Beckham family
went through some shit
and Trump said this while promoting
whole milk in the Oval Office.
It's actually a legal
definition, "whole milk".
And it's "whole" with a W, for those
of you that have a problem.
What? I guess he's right there.
It is actually "whole milk," with a W,
not "hole milk," which I know
sounds like nonsense,
but is actually the official beverage
of the absolutely real new
Netflix show "Detective Hole",
starring, and this is true,
Detective Harry Hole.
Apparently, it's based
on a Norwegian series of novels,
and is supposed
to be pronounced "hool-ah",
but respectfully, nah, Norway.
It's pronounced "hole".
And that was just the beginning.
Zohran Mamdani was sworn in
as New York mayor,
Eric Adams launched a meme coin
that he said would,
among other things,
fight antisemitism, and, okay!
And the Department
of the Interior announced
a new coal mascot called Coalie,
which really felt like an attempt
to bait us into coming back early.
It wasn't even the only time
that we were tempted to do that,
because there was also the headline
"Beloved Walrus Penis Stolen from
New Jersey Cheesesteak Icon."
"Owner Is Blubbering Mad."
You don't think
if we'd been on air back then,
we'd have tracked down
that walrus penis
and donated the proceeds to
Doctors Without Borders or something?
Are you new here?
And at Miss Universe,
one contestant did this.
Norway!
This salmon-inspired gown mirrors
both the delegate's movements
as a baton twirler and the essence
of Norway's leading export.
Yeah, that happened!
Miss Norway wore this as a costume.
And I guess, to be fair, it does sum up
Norway nicely in an image.
I mean, what else
was she gonna dress up as?
Detective Harry Hole?
But wait, I'm still not done.
'Cause the Winter Olympics
got underway,
and there's already been
lots of incredible action,
as well as some personal drama
like this.
It was a career-defining moment
for biathlete Sturla Holm Laegreid,
but it's what he said next
that he'll be remembered for.
Six months ago,
I met the love of my life.
The world's most beautiful,
wonderful person in the world.
Three months ago, I made
the biggest mistake of my life,
and cheated on her.
That is usually not the kind of
declaration of love you see in public.
It is why stadium jumbotrons
generally say things like,
"Will you marry me?" and not,
"Sorry I fucked your sister,"
"are we cool?"
The point is,
that guy won a bronze medal,
then immediately begged
for his ex-girlfriend of six months
to forgive him, and seemed
optimistic that it might work.
He told his country and
the world he'd rather commit,
quote, "social suicide on live TV"
"if it meant a small chance
of winning her back."
Today, I made the choice
to tell the world what I did.
Maybe it can help, I don't know.
I hope there is a happy ending.
There's not, as yet.
There is definitely not, because
she's since put out a statement
declining to reunite,
and saying,
"We have had contact and he
is aware of my opinions on this",
a response that could only be
more brutal if she delivered it
after winning silver in his event.
And if you're thinking, "The biathlon
is surprisingly messy",
you clearly know nothing about it.
Because it's not even this guy's
first time causing trouble.
In 2023, he was banned
from the Biathlon World Cup
after accidentally, and this is true,
shooting his gun in the team's hotel.
Meanwhile, in the women's
competition this year,
Julia Simon competed for France
despite the fact that, last October,
a French court gave her "a three-month
suspended jail sentence"
"after she admitted to stealing
the credit cards of her teammate"
and an unnamed French staffer,"
and making 2,300 dollars
in online purchases.
She apparently said,
"I can't explain it."
"I don't remember doing it.
I can't make sense of it."
And I don't know how
this story could get any juicier,
unless she turns out
to be the woman
that that guy cheated
on his girlfriend with.
Because at that point,
someone please call Andy Cohen,
we have a hit new Bravo series.
By the way, Simone competed
at the Olympics this week,
and guess what?
She fucking won gold!
The French credit card thief
won gold!
And you think I don't want to talk
about the chaotic energy of Olympic
biathletes for the rest of this show?
Of course I do!
It's all I want to talk about.
But sadly, I can't do that,
because, and I think you probably
know where this is going,
we have to dive straight in
with our main story this week,
which concerns what's been
happening in Minnesota,
from the surge in immigration raids,
to the killings
of Renee Good and Alex Pretti,
to the massive protests in the streets.
For all this administration's
talk of "paid agitators,"
the protests there came
from justifiably furious locals,
like this almost
absurdly Midwestern man.
You know what really pisses me off,
is the fact that they detain people,
cuff 'em, and then
still beat the shit out of 'em!
They tell you it's immigrants,
only immigrants.
It's fucking anybody!
I have friends that got detained
and all they were doing was
fucking driving home from work.
What the fuck?
No, I'm not paid to be here,
like everybody fucking says.
What the fuck is that?
I gotta work in the goddamn morning,
just like everybody else.
I'm just here trying to stand up
for community, dude.
We're all human beings here.
I don't give a shit who you are,
where you came from, what color you
are, it doesn't matter. This is wrong.
Yeah. And you know you are
acting like a bunch of dicks
when you're provoking that
level of response in Minnesota,
a state whose whole thing
is being "Minnesota nice".
They put it on merch!
Other states couldn't pull that off.
Especially because "Florida nice"
sounds like a brand of pills
you buy from the gas station
that makes your heart explode.
And I will say, this does seem
like a turning point
for this administration
on immigration.
Polls show the majority
of Americans do not approve
of what's been happening.
And nor should they.
Because for all Trump's talk of
targeting "the worst of the worst",
that rings pretty hollow
when you see agents doing things
like dragging a U.S. citizen
out of his house in his underwear
through the snow, and taking
a five-year-old into custody.
It is frankly no wonder
anti-ICE sentiment has spread
to places that you might not
even expect, from Poptart the cat,
who posted a video
with "fuck ICE" on it,
to the subreddit "MassiveCock",
where users captioned dick pics
with things like,
"How hard I get when I think
about abolishing ICE",
to an AEW match in Vegas earlier
this month, where this happened.
Now the face
Fuck ICE! Fuck ICE!
Fuck ICE!
Excellent. Well done
to everyone involved there,
from the crowd getting their
point across in the perfect way,
to MJF going full Jim
from "The Office" into the camera.
The point is,
to the extent they ever had it,
ICE and Border Patrol have
clearly lost the public's trust.
And it frankly hasn't helped
to see grotesque clips like this one,
at Mar-a-Lago on New Year's Eve,
of Kristi Noem dancing
with Stephen Miller.
Look, there is so much weird
stuff going on in that clip
that you probably didn't even
notice the Ninja Turtle
dancing with Vanilla Ice
on stage there.
Here is a better angle of Michelangelo
being photographed
at the exact moment he seems
to realize just how many people
in that room were mentioned
in the Epstein files.
There've been some promising
developments this week.
Democratic leaders seem to have
finally read the public's anger,
and are currently holding up
funds for DHS as a whole,
as they push for new restrictions
on immigration agents.
And on Thursday, this happened.
Tonight, border czar Tom Homan
says the massive immigration operation
that's been going on for months
in Minnesota, Operation Metro Surge,
is coming to an end.
We've had great success
with this operation,
and we're leaving
Minnesota safer.
There were some issues here,
and we addressed those issues.
But I'm not going to sit here
and say anybody did anything wrong.
Really? First and least
importantly: you are standing.
Like, you're not gonna sit there
and say anything,
because you're a standing man.
I think it's pretty clear that a lot
of people did a lot of things wrong,
not least your tailor, because the suit
looks like you bought it off the rack
at Fancy Press Conference Clothes
for Uncharismatic Business Shreks.
I am glad for any drawdown that
takes place in Minnesota,
if it indeed happens.
But even if every agent leaves town,
much larger problems
are going to remain,
both there and on the national level,
because we are going to continue
to see this administration
pursue Stephen Miller's stated goal
of racking up 3.000 arrests a day.
So given that, we thought
for our first show of the year,
it might be worth pulling back a bit,
and talking not just about Minneapolis,
or even just ICE, but about
the massive agency it's a part of,
the Department of Homeland Security.
Because as you're about to see,
a discussion about it, its funding,
and the sweeping powers
that we've given it is long overdue.
So tonight, let's look at DHS.
And let's start with its origins.
Because while you might assume
DHS is a longstanding part
of American government,
it's just 23 years old.
It was founded as a response to 9/11,
and if you are too young
to remember 9/11,
I will pause long enough
for the rest of us to experience
the psychic gut punch
of that sentence.
Basically, in the immediate aftermath
of the most devastating terrorist
attack in its history,
America started screaming,
and didn't really stop for a decade.
And while thankfully,
the Riyadh Comedy Festival
has since healed
the world through comedy
and we don't need to be worried
about who or what
was actually responsible for 9/11,
at the time,
a major concern was that,
prior to the attacks,
there'd been a lack of communication
and information sharing
between federal agencies.
So, the Bush administration
agreed to combine a bunch of them
under a single banner
to improve coordination.
But even back then,
some felt that that was a bad idea,
to the point that it was openly
discussed in news coverage.
What do Secret Service agents
have in common
with animal disease researchers?
Nothing, except that in three months,
both will be working
for the new Homeland Security
Department,
an organizational chart that could
give a management expert nightmares.
22 agencies, 170.000 workers,
the third-largest
department in the government.
Okay, first, it is a little weird to
introduce a government agency
like it's a new sitcom.
What happens when an uptight TSA
agent and a laid-back FEMA official
have to move in together?
Find out in 'Homeland Security',
Thursdays on TBS!
But the larger point there,
that this thing
had been hastily cobbled together,
very much holds.
Because all of a sudden,
DHS contained everything
from the Secret Service, to the Coast
Guard, to FEMA and TSA.
But for everything that went in,
some key counterterrorism agencies
were left out,
because DHS had to operate "without
the investigative, intelligence"
"and military powers of the FBI,
CIA, and the Pentagon."
But don't worry!
'Cause remember,
they had those pig researchers,
so they were pretty much set.
As a result,
DHS tried to justify its existence
in a number of different ways,
including by "explicitly linking"
"immigration enforcement
with countering terrorism".
In fact, it was during the creation
of DHS that parts
of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service and U.S. Customs Service
were combined to form Customs
and Border Protection and ICE,
the two agencies that we know
and are being terrorized by today.
But oversight of all of this
was a nightmare,
as the members of Congress
that oversaw all of those agencies
didn't want to give up control,
so DHS found itself answering
to around 100 committees
and subcommittees.
Which, as the chair of the 9/11
commission explained, caused chaos.
Think of having 100 bosses.
Think of reporting up
this way and that way,
trying to do your job, and yet
you're reporting to 100 people.
It's crazy, 'cause it makes no sense,
and you could not do your job
under those circumstances.
Yeah, that does make sense.
Having an endless cavalcade
of rapidly changing bosses
would clearly be a distraction,
though I've gotta say, you do
eventually get used to it.
I don't even know
which of these companies
is going to be
my new business daddy yet!
It's like a "Mamma Mia" situation,
except less fun and way less sexy.
But incidentally,
if it is indeed Netflix,
sorry for all the times
I called your catalogue
a "who's who" of "the fuck is this".
Loved the ending of "Stranger Things",
by the way, very brown.
And good luck with "Detective Hole"!
It sounds great!
Now, complaints about
the unwieldy nature of DHS
persisted over the years and, despite
that, money kept flowing into it,
even as it became known for things
like its mass surveillance programs,
particularly of American Muslims,
and its widely mocked
color-coded terrorism threat chart,
which never dropped below yellow.
It also became notorious
for its willingness
to distribute billions of dollars
to state and local authorities.
In fact, on the 10-year
anniversary of 9/11,
one California news station
compiled just some of what that
money had been wasted on.
Marin County received 100.000
dollars in surveillance equipment
to protect its water treatment
system from terrorist attack.
Four years after the money
was handed out,
state authorities found 67.000
dollars worth of gear
still in boxes.
It had never been used.
Several counties and cities bought
Segway scooters for their bomb squads.
Each one cost 4.700 dollars.
Okay, first, I'm not sure anything
says "we have too much money" more
than buying a fucking Segway.
And second, that is just an
unfathomably dorky look.
Doesn't scream "brave bomb defuser"
as much as "beekeeper mall cop".
With expenditures like that,
it's no wonder that a 2015 report
from a Republican senator found
that despite spending
over half a trillion dollars,
"DHS was not successfully executing
any of its five main missions."
And its primary counterterrorism
programs were "yielding little value".
But because no one in power
back then wanted to break apart
something that had
"Homeland Security" in its name,
DHS remained the largest federal
law enforcement agency,
with massive funding,
sweeping surveillance authority,
and worryingly unclear checks
on its own power.
It was essentially a loaded weapon,
sitting on a president's desk,
only held back by their personal
sense of temperance and restraint,
all of which brings us back
to this fucking guy.
Because in his first term,
Trump and this sleep paralysis demon
used DHS to push everything
from his Muslim ban
to family separation
to his efforts to end DACA.
But from the very start
of Trump's second term,
it was clear they had
much bigger plans for DHS,
starting with the fact Trump put one
of his biggest allies, Kristi Noem,
in charge of it.
And even news stories
about her announcement at the time
contained some pretty clear hints
that she was a bad choice.
Tonight, President-elect Donald Trump
expected to name
one of his staunchest campaign
South Dakota governor, Kristi Noem,
to lead the massive
Department of Homeland Security.
Trump once considered Noem
as a potential running mate,
but her star dimmed
after writing in her memoir
that she had shot
and killed the family dog.
Yeah, not great! And even Trump,
who's been endowed by Satan
with an ability to survive
any bad press whatsoever,
somehow knew that picking a VP
who bragged about speedrunning
"Old Yeller" is a bad move.
No one wants to share
a ticket with John Wilkes Woof here.
In fact, Trump was so
turned off by Noem's dog news,
he apparently said
to Don Jr. afterwards,
"That's not good at all.
Even you wouldn't kill a dog,"
"and you kill everything."
Just another brief window
into a family dynamic
that a skilled therapist would
describe as "cha-ching".
And crucially,
Noem didn't bring a lot of non-dog-
murdering experience to the job.
She'd never worked
in DHS or indeed law enforcement,
but in a foreshadowing of things
to come, as governor of South Dakota,
she was a relentless self-promoter.
In ads for her state, she appeared
in various job-themed costumes,
including a dentist, a nurse,
an electrician, a plumber, a welder
and a construction worker, selling
each role with incredible charisma.
South Dakota has
the blueprint for success.
Recently, we led the nation
in new home-building,
but we're still growing so fast.
We need to hire more
builders to keep up.
So, I'm pitching in.
I know her performance
is pretty flat, but in her defense,
who's gonna tell her
that she can't act?
Not anyone who likes
their dog, that's for sure.
Also, I'm in a bit of a tough
spot here.
Because I refuse to comment
on a woman's looks.
But one of my female writers
has insisted
that I read something
that she's written,
and I also refuse to silence
women's voices.
A ponytail for practical
working purposes
is intended to keep hair off the base
of the neck and/or out of the eyes.
If you leave the front part
of your hair out
and keep the bottom part of your
"hair" down around your shoulders,
it's not a working ponytail,
it's a hairdo.
And, John, please do make sure
that you put that second "hair"
in air quotes,
because there is just no way
that Clydesdale tail is the real hair
of that dog killer
with the bad filler.
Her words. Not mine.
Her words. Believe women.
And the thing is,
Noem immediately brought to DHS
that same unrelenting
focus on PR,
from shooting a video
in the Salvadoran CECOT prison
while wearing a
50.000 dollars Rolex,
to cosplaying
as a law enforcement agent,
from wearing a bulletproof
vest on the streets of New York,
to putting on Coast Guard fatigues,
to dressing up like a Border Patrol
agent on Fox News.
And if it seems like she's got
cameras with her wherever she goes,
it's because she basically does.
Here she is with a camera crew
on the roof of an immigration
detention facility outside of Chicago.
And fun fact: these two men,
Kyle Frankovich and Juan Munoz,
were protesting outside that day,
only to be arrested.
And to hear them tell it, that seemed
to have less to do with their actions,
and much more to do with the presence
of Noem and her social media crew.
An agent grabbed me,
threw me down.
I was then zip-tied and detained.
I was pulled to the ground
and ordered arrested.
It felt very much like we were just
being used for this political theater.
Kristi Noem was able to walk past us
surrounded by photographers,
videographers, essentially getting us
in the background as she walked by.
Then look what happened.
Homeland Security sent out these
social media posts
showing Kyle in handcuffs.
This one said:
"We will not allow violent activists
to lay hands on our law enforcement."
And they also posted this
government promotional video,
and there's Kyle again. He and Munoz
were never charged with any crime.
That's true. Despite being
labeled "violent activists",
they were never charged
with anything.
So, it seems they were arrested just
for a photo op for Kristi Noem,
which is, if I may quote her
own dog's dying words, ruff.
But it goes way beyond optics.
Noem has been put in charge
of DHS at a moment
when it's experiencing
an unprecedented funding surge.
Trump's Big Beautiful Bill
essentially doubled DHS's funding
over the next four years.
And it's worth looking
at where all that money is,
and equally importantly,
isn't going.
Because DHS's resources are now
being pointed at immigration
more heavily than ever before,
to the point that it's being called
"a veritable
Department of Deportation."
ICE was handed an extra 75 billion
to spend over Trump's term,
tripling its annual budget
and leading to this startling fact.
Overnight, it became the highest-funded
federal law enforcement agency
in U.S. history.
If ICE was a military, it would be
the 17th richest in the world,
worth about the same
as Canada's entire armed forces.
It's true! And whatever
the appropriate budget for ICE is,
and they're making a compelling
argument for it being zero right now,
one thing it should definitely not be
is the same as the entire
Canadian military.
Though, to be fair, that's not
a perfect one to one,
as I'm pretty sure
the Canadian military
doesn't totally eat shit
on slightly slippery sidewalks.
A lot of that money is earmarked for
immigration detention facilities,
the conditions at which we have
talked about before on this show,
and which are unlikely to get better,
given ominous headlines like,
"ICE Begins Buying Mega Warehouse
Detention Centers Across the U.S."
But a lot is also going to hiring
thousands of new ICE agents,
with DHS planning to spend
100 million dollars
over a one-year period
just on advertising.
It's part of what it's called
"a 'wartime recruitment' strategy."
And those ads are everywhere.
Slickly produced
Televised ads targeting local police
and a celebrity endorsement.
These are all part
of a major multimillion-dollar
recruitment campaign launched
by the Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency.
It's shared images using wartime
imagery, like Uncle Sam,
and slang, like in this post
with the caption, quote:
"Want to deport illegals
with your absolute boys?"
That's going to be on social media.
It's going to be through streamers,
so YouTube and other places
where user-generated content is,
but also large-scale broadcast
and streaming platforms
like Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime,
all of this sort of thing.
I'll be honest, I don't love hearing
my employer's name on that list.
Though I guess at least
I do get a reminder of what
the company's name is this year.
It's also slightly satisfying to know
that one place those ads have been
running is in front of AEW wrestling,
meaning that ICE is having to
pay money to appear alongside this.
It's still very good!
Now, DHS claims those ads
are working, they say they've hired
12.000 new ICE agents
and officers since last summer.
And while there are good reasons
to believe those figures are inflated,
we're still going to have a lot more
ICE agents on our streets this year.
And that should be a real concern,
especially because to hire
so many officers so quickly,
they've had to significantly lower
their standards for new recruits,
doing things
like waiving age requirements,
condensing the training period,
and ending requirements
like taking five weeks
of Spanish language training.
Which is a bad idea
for many reasons, including:
those agents won't get to understand
even a little bit of Bad Bunny's music.
Which is sad for them.
They're missing out on a lot of joy,
plenty of political commentary, and
a metric ton of blowjob descriptions.
It's a rich text!
And the thing is,
even with those lower standards,
one report found that more
than a third of new ICE recruits
had failed a physical fitness test
that required 15 pushups,
32 sit-ups, and running
one and a half miles in 14 minutes.
Which, and I do not say this lightly,
is a test even I could pass.
Also, and more upsettingly,
nearly half were later sent home
because they couldn't pass the written
exam, which covers things
like when officers can and can't
conduct searches and seizures.
And it gets even worse when
you learn that during that test,
they were allowed to consult
their textbook and notes.
Yeah, half of them failed
an open book test!
And as we all know,
that is the easiest kind of test.
Even easier than urine. That one
is actually harder than you think.
Mid-stream is a delicate dance.
And as the former acting director of
ICE points out, this is a very bad sign.
Some of these moves, frankly,
have resulted
in some embarrassing candidates.
ICE agents have tremendous authority
when they're out there on the streets.
We have to know that these people,
A, have that integrity,
are gonna-when no one's looking,
are they gonna do things the right way?
And, secondly, you know, are they
getting into this for the right reason?
Obviously, there's a tremendous
concern as well
that the administration is going
after individuals who harbor
some animus towards immigrants.
Right. Because it doesn't seem
unfair to assume
that some might've applied for that job
less out of a sense of public duty,
and more because they want to
"deport illegals with
their absolute boys."
And that concern has been compounded
by a disturbing pattern
of what sure seems
like white nationalist dog whistles
in these recruiting ads,
like this post, reading,
"Which way, American man?"
evoking a meme
associated with this antisemitic
book popular among neo-Nazis.
And this one, using the phrase,
"We'll Have Our Home Again",
the title of a song released
by a white nationalist band
popular with far-right groups
like the Proud Boys.
And if that connection seems at all
like a stretch to you,
you should know, the Proud Boys
themselves don't seem to think so.
On the messaging app Telegram,
one chapter reposted that ad
next to a picture of a literal
dog whistle, adding the line,
"Message received."
Cool.
Although, I do have to say,
the whole point of a dog whistle
is plausible deniability,
so saying, "We hear and
understand your dog whistle",
does sort of wreck
the whole agreement.
But I guess that is the risk that
you run when your secret master plan
has to rely on some of the dumbest
people alive.
I have to tell you, we reached
out to DHS for comment,
and they angrily denied
any dog whistles, adding,
"We will not apologize"
"for using patriotic messaging and
symbolism in our advertisements."
They also told us, and I quote,
"One could say
we are Homelandmaxxing"
"by removing illegal aliens
and defending our borders",
a sentence I genuinely feel
dumber for saying out loud.
That is where money and resources
at DHS have been surging to.
But the administration is also
pulling resources away
from other key parts of the agency.
Let's start with just the reallocation
of resources under ICE.
Because, for the record,
before Trump came along,
deportation was not ICE's sole focus.
It actually consisted of two branches:
ERO, or Enforcement
and Removal Operations,
which handles
detentions and deportations,
and Homeland Security Investigations
or HSI,
which is tasked
with complex investigations
into things like drug smuggling
and human trafficking,
with many of their targets
not even immigrants.
Diddy's case, for instance,
was run by HSI agents.
Many HSI officials have long wanted
to be formally separated from ICE,
and for obvious reasons.
If you need cooperation
in a human-trafficking investigation,
it's harder to get it from someone
who thinks that you might deport them.
But in Trump's second term, he has
gone hard in the other direction,
signing an executive order on day one
announcing enforcing immigration law
would be "the primary mission"
of HSI.
And that has had real consequences,
as highly-trained agents
who specialized in things
like money laundering
and counterterrorism cases
have now been sent to do things
like pick up people in parking lots.
Here is a guy in an HSI jacket
arresting people
at a Home Depot in L.A. last year.
And that is not good,
because there's probably
other important stuff he was
supposed to be doing that day!
In the first part of last year,
HSI agents worked
an average of 33% fewer hours
on child exploitation cases.
Which is just maddening.
There is a reason episodes of "SVU"
don't involve them abandoning
a case halfway through,
because they then have to go spend
the rest of the episode
harassing people outside
of a fucking Lowe's. People would riot.
But it's not just reallocations
within ICE.
Not only have CBP agents been
diverted from the border,
they've pulled in law
enforcement from outside of DHS.
According to one estimate,
last year,
one in five U.S. Marshals,
one in five FBI agents,
half of DEA agents,
and over two-thirds of ATF agents
had been reassigned
to help handle deportations.
I'm not saying everything
those agencies were doing
was a good use of their time.
For more on that, see any
number of episodes of this show.
But it is notable that, for all Trump's
justification of immigration crackdowns
to fight drugs and cartels,
as this former DHS intelligence
official points out,
that's exactly
what is being deprioritized.
If FBI agents are not working
on drug gang task forces,
then there are fewer investigations
into violent street gangs
and drug trafficking cartels.
And with such a large contingent
pulled from their duties,
he says drug cartels and bad actors
are watching.
I am 100% certain
that they are tracking
that federal agents are being
moved out of drug task forces
and seeking to determine ways
to exploit the reduced
resources on those task forces.
Yeah, of course cartels
are gonna take advantage.
Drug kingpins,
by and large, aren't stupid.
Mostly because drug kingpins
who are stupid
tend to spend a very short time
as kingpins, and much longer
as a suspicious mound of earth
somewhere in the Mexican desert.
It's kind of a self-editing field.
And I'm still not done listing
misallocations of resources.
At the same time that Noem has
surged funding to some areas of DHS,
she's actively starved others.
For instance, CISA,
which handles cybersecurity,
lost roughly 1.000 staffers,
more than a third of the agency,
meaning it is now less equipped
to do things
like protect our electrical grids
or secure our elections.
But maybe the biggest example of
a department being hamstrung is FEMA.
It is the agency that handles
the federal response to disasters.
Many believe it never really
belonged in DHS in the first place,
and that its ending up there
contributed to its failures
during Hurricane Katrina.
And if you're too young
to remember Hurricane Katrina,
I'm afraid you're just gonna
have to fuck off.
Suffice to say that FEMA
did not have a "good Katrina",
perhaps best summed up
by this entirely fair question
in front of a flood-damaged
apartment complex.
Now,
soon after Trump took office,
FEMA lost about a third
of its total full-time staff.
And it's also been heavily impacted
by a new rule across DHS,
which states that every contract
and grant over 100,000 dollars
must now cross
Noem's desk for approval,
or, to put that in terms
that Kristi Noem can understand,
two wristwatches.
And that requirement is clearly absurd
generally, but especially at FEMA,
an agency that handles emergency
relief that needs to get out quickly.
At one point, "about 17 billion dollars
in federal disaster funds for states"
was held up for "an extra layer
of review by Noem,"
"causing unusual delays
in payments."
And I'd say that I can't even imagine
how chaotic that process must look,
but luckily, I actually can.
Because another of Noem's South
Dakota ads literally showed her
as an overworked accountant,
with ticker tape all over the place,
not exactly doing a great job.
We have close to 20.000 open jobs,
including accountants.
So I'm filling in.
South Dakota. Freedom works here.
Governor Noem?
You didn't carry the two.
Josh? Kiss my abacus.
Okay, it seems once more,
I find myself in a tough spot.
Because, again, I have been told
to read something to you,
and I don't feel like I can say no.
The precise way
for you to describe
what Kristi Noem has actively
chosen to look like there is,
"Mother of the bride who asked for
the exact same hair as the bride."
Also, John,
while I have your attention,
maybe it's time for you to be putting
a little grey in the eyebrow makeup.
You're not fooling anyone.
Let's be adults about this.
Those are her words.
She's brutally honest.
Brutally honest. She's a bad person.
The future is female.
The thing is, Noem delaying
funding approvals at FEMA
has already had
serious consequences.
When there were deadly floods
in Texas last year, two days after,
nearly two-thirds of the calls
to FEMA's disaster assistance line
went unanswered.
Now, I have to tell you,
Noem has disputed that report,
saying, "It's just false"
and,
"That report needs to be validified."
I believe that sentence itself could
benefit from being spellcheckerated.
And not for nothing, Noem's
100.000 dollar sign off rule meant
that, according to one former
FEMA official, the FEMA building itself
almost had its utilities shut off last
year because the bill wasn't paid.
And the truth is, so far,
we've been incredibly lucky
that there hasn't been
an even worse disaster
where FEMA's problems
were more fully exposed, as last year,
"for the first time in a decade,
not a single hurricane struck the U.S.",
but our luck
can only hold out for so long.
Last August,
over 180 FEMA employees
sent a letter to Congress warning
that Trump officials' actions
were risking a Katrina-level disaster.
Which is a haunting thing to hear.
And it's more than a little dispiriting
to realize
that the Frankenstein of an agency
that we cobbled together after 9/11
is now siphoning resources away
from things that actually protect us,
even as it floods resources
to a bunch of guys in ski masks
with questionable Reddit histories
who blast rap rock
out the window of their
government-issued kidnap-mobiles,
all for the benefit of Kristi Noem's
fucking TikTok.
So, what can we do?
Well, first, and most immediately,
with DHS in partial shutdown
over its funding,
Democrats have to use every ounce
of leverage they've got
to get major concessions.
Bernie Sanders has proposed
an amendment that would repeal
the 75 billion in additional
funding that ICE received.
And while I don't know if they'll
be able to get all the way to that,
they should at the very least
get as many hard, enforceable limits
on immigration
agents' activities as possible.
Now, second,
we need to get rid of ICE. Period.
Public trust in it right now
is hovering somewhere
between Purdue Pharma
and the Titan submersible.
It is just not salvageable.
And if you're thinking,
"Well, who will enforce
immigration law if ICE is gone?"
I dunno, maybe the agencies
that did it for decades before 2003.
As for DHS as a whole,
I would argue it's no longer
tenable in its current form.
And while maybe there is
an argument for having
a larger agency coordinating
different federal departments,
it should probably be redesigned
from the ground up,
and deliberately this time,
not by suddenly gluing together
org charts in a blind panic.
If I can make one last,
broader point here,
cosmetic changes
just aren't gonna be enough.
Because even if you get rid
of Kristi Noem, which you should,
Stephen Miller will still be there.
And even if you get rid of him,
this administration will remain.
But even if they are gone,
and we get rid of ICE and DHS,
we're still gonna be left
with the broken immigration laws
that gave them permission
to do what they have done.
Millions of people will continue
to be vulnerable because,
as we've discussed repeatedly
before on this show,
our current immigration system
makes it
somewhere from difficult to impossible
for many to "come in the right way".
That boy in the blue hat
and his dad were scooped up
despite being in the process
of seeking asylum.
And we've shown you multiple
videos of people being arrested
as they showed up for their
immigration appointments.
And that is actually
a bit of a tell.
That is clearly not this administration
targeting "the worst of the worst",
it's them desperately trying
to juice up their numbers.
And it is the law
that allows them to do that.
And that is actually something
that Tom Homan made a point
of reiterating to people when he was
sent to Minnesota two weeks ago.
For the people out there
who don't like what ICE is doing,
if you want certain laws reformed,
then take it up with Congress.
Again, ICE isn't making this up.
They're enforcing laws
enacted by Congress
and signed by the president.
The same laws have been
on the books
for the last six
presidents I worked for.
If you don't like what ICE is doing,
instead of protesting this building,
go protest Congress,
tell them you want changes.
Well, hold on there, Tom.
Why just one or the other?
People could absolutely do both.
"Por que no los dos",
if I may quote a phrase it seems
most new ICE recruits
will have absolutely
no chance of understanding.
But he is right, there.
Trump's policy of mass deportations
is built on existing laws.
And if America doesn't like
what that policy looks like,
now that they've seen
what it really means,
then it needs to fucking
do something about it.
To the extent that we are
all horrified by day laborers
and grandfathers and little kids
in bunny hats being terrorized
by men in masks,
then we need to elect people
who will commit to writing
laws that reflect that.
And I've got to say,
it does say something
that to the extent that anyone
over the last few months
has been protecting our
homeland and keeping it secure,
it has not been Kristi Noem
in her wide array of fun outfits,
or whichever 20-year-old
dipshit's been pumping out
Nazi-flavored content on Twitter,
it has been ordinary people
on the streets of Minneapolis,
blowing whistles,
delivering food to friends who
are afraid to leave their houses,
and marching in the cold
even though they've got
goddamn work in the morning.
If I may quote that gloriously
frozen Midwestern man,
they believe
we are all human beings here,
and that this is fucking wrong.
And now, this.
And Now: Local News Reacts
to a Florida Delicacy.
Welcome back. Recent freezing
weather in South Florida
left thousands of iguanas cold-stunned,
and some people have gotten creative
about what to do
with all the invasive lizards.
Fair warning, take a break from
breakfast for just a minute.
Iguana meat pizza.
Were the iguanas already
dead or were they dying?
They were already dead, I believe.
Yeah, they're cold-stunned.
They're still alive.
Well, you can't eat a dead animal.
Because that's like a sanitary thing.
So, they're killing 'em?
And they're eating 'em?
- That's legal?
- Yes?
Sanitized iguana meat.
The fact that you have to identify
that it has been sanitized.
This ain't dirty iguana meat,
this is sanitized iguana meat.
You missed
the iguana pizza yesterday.
Excuse me? One more time?
Yes, the iguana pizza.
Why?
That's our show, thanks for watching,
we'll see you next week, good night!