The Megyn Kelly Show - Stephen Miller on Biden’s Terror Response, the Border Crisis, and Trump 2024

00:00:00.500 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:12.460 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, Stephen Miller.

00:00:17.940 I've been looking forward to this discussion. You know him as the former senior advisor to

00:00:22.560 President Trump. He wrote speeches for Trump. He was on Team Trump very early on during the

00:00:27.940 campaign forward and kept getting elevated to newer and better positions because Trump

00:00:32.120 really trusted him. Now he has founded a group called America First Legal, which is taking

00:00:38.360 on some of the Biden administration policies when it comes to things like illegal immigration

00:00:42.300 and some of the racist policies that they've implemented. Like only farmers who happen to

00:00:47.660 be brown or black can get the COVID relief funds, right? The stuff like that. And he's taking it

00:00:53.260 on and he's winning. His group is winning. Every time it turns around, it wins another case.

00:00:57.940 So he's a great person to talk to about where we are right now. He's been completely pilloried

00:01:03.540 by the media. And I want to talk to him about that. And he gave some very thoughtful answers

00:01:07.940 on what it's meant to him as a person, as a man, as now a husband and a dad. And in really

00:01:14.120 what his life's work has been about, right? This is the first time I've heard him really

00:01:17.460 frame it up. And he will give you a different perspective on Afghanistan and the evacuations

00:01:22.180 of some of those who helped us in a way that really made me start rethinking the issue.

00:01:26.600 So anyway, a lot happening. On the day we taped this, we've just learned about casualties

00:01:32.120 now as a result of two bombs attack, two bomb attacks outside of the airport. And we got

00:01:37.780 his reaction on that as well. God, things are going from bad to worse there. And none of

00:01:42.120 this had to happen. None of this had to happen. It's a disgrace the way this has been handled.

00:01:47.560 The headline just crossing now that at least four Marines were killed. Good God. Why?

00:01:52.540 Why? It's just been so mishandled. Anyway, we're going to get to Stephen Miller in a great,

00:01:58.500 great, fascinating exchange in one minute. First this.

00:02:08.320 Stephen Miller, how are you?

00:02:10.100 I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on today.

00:02:12.320 My pleasure. OK, let's start with what you're doing, because I think this is

00:02:15.720 this is really interesting. America First Legal, which you have launched. It's a legal

00:02:21.540 organization, though you're not a lawyer, if I'm if I'm correct. But it's a legal organization

00:02:26.860 that's going to sort of do what the ACLU should be doing. And one of the things you've been doing

00:02:33.720 is going after some of the Biden policies. You've scored some major wins. Tell us. Tell us about the

00:02:38.280 most recent one. Thank you. Well, our most recent victory is one in which we are playing a supporting

00:02:43.860 role, which is we were advising and consulting with states that were suing the Biden administration

00:02:51.440 over its what I call abolish ICE memos. Basically, the Department of Homeland Security issued a series

00:03:00.260 of memos that made it almost impossible for ICE to conduct any kind of enforcement inside the country.

00:03:07.880 And primarily, this occurs in the context of picking people up from prisons and jails. So what most

00:03:13.280 people may not realize is about three quarters of ICE arrests are from law enforcement custodial

00:03:20.560 settings. So in other words, a sheriff's office or a police department, or a corrections facility

00:03:28.560 has custody of someone for some crime unrelated to immigration, you know, running the gamut,

00:03:34.860 DUI, assault, larceny, theft, battery, you know, up to and including, of course, very, very, very serious

00:03:45.880 crimes like sexual assault and murder. And when those arrests occur, or when those people are placed into

00:03:56.220 that custodial setting, they're run through a federal database that's controlled by the FBI. And that looks

00:04:03.420 for things like outstanding warrants, as an example. But one of the things that it looks for is

00:04:08.220 immigration status, if you are what is known as a removable alien. And the that flag then goes to

00:04:16.320 ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and they issue what is called a detainer. And that's basically

00:04:22.560 a request to law enforcement to say, we want you to hold on to this person. And if at any point,

00:04:27.220 they're released in their life cycle in law enforcement, so they're bonded out by a judge, they are sentenced to

00:04:36.920 jail, but then their prison term concludes, whatever it may be, instead of letting them go out into the street,

00:04:43.280 hand them over to us. And I want to underscore, this is the bread and butter of what ICE does. It really is the lion's

00:04:50.700 share of ICE's efforts. So when you hear about sanctuary cities, those are cities that when they

00:04:56.500 get the detainer request, they tell ICE to shove it. And what Biden did is he made America into the

00:05:06.840 sanctuary by not issuing the detainer in the first place, and in fact, revoking detainers on criminal

00:05:14.580 illegal immigrants that we hit issue. And we worked with states on litigation to say that this policy

00:05:22.300 is unlawful for a variety of reasons. Can I just jump in and ask you a question about that,

00:05:28.280 Stephen? Because Obama's policy when Biden was the vice president was, we're going to prioritize the

00:05:35.180 criminals. That's who we really want to go after, not just anybody who entered illegally, but the

00:05:39.100 criminals. So what, how did Biden's policy differ from Obama's, if at all, if he was removing the

00:05:47.340 detainers, even on the criminals that had been apprehended under Trump? Biden's policy was infinitely more

00:05:54.460 radical than President Obama's. President Obama looks like a member of, you know, the Freedom Caucus on

00:06:04.380 immigration compared to the Biden administration, in the Freedom Caucus being the group of conservative

00:06:12.520 members in the House. And it really is breathtaking how much the Democratic Party has moved

00:06:21.720 to the left on immigration. Really, it's not even left, it's nihilism, it's nullificationism,

00:06:29.520 basically saying that there are no laws, there are no borders, there are no rules.

00:06:32.760 So it is true that Biden issued, or sorry, Obama issued memos that significantly curtailed

00:06:40.860 immigration enforcement in ways that I would strenuously argue were unlawful. But he never had

00:06:46.680 anything like what Biden has in terms of a blanket prohibition on virtually all immigration and customs

00:06:53.700 enforcement activity. And so there are a handful of exceptions to that blanket ban, but they are so

00:07:00.860 small and so narrow that based on my years of experience, working with immigration and customs

00:07:07.300 enforcement, I would estimate that you're talking about freeing somewhere between

00:07:13.700 five to 6000 criminal aliens a month, as a result of these policies, every single one of them.

00:07:23.060 So under the Biden way, if they say, okay, we're not issuing the detainer.

00:07:29.320 What is Biden doing with those people? Right? Like somebody gets arrested for,

00:07:33.420 I don't know, a DUI, an illegal immigrant. Great example. They're just cut loose.

00:07:38.560 They're just let loose. And what's the accountability? Like, really hope you show up

00:07:42.940 to your immigration hearing by... There won't even be an immigration hearing.

00:07:46.180 The... So, I mean, to get very concrete about it. And I'm really glad we're having this conversation,

00:07:51.700 Megan, because the way that the media covers immigration is people imagine... And it's possible,

00:07:58.440 by the way, that Biden is so out of it, he might not even know what I'm saying either. But people

00:08:04.340 imagine that ICE, which has about 6,000 people, so not many, ICE, or should I say ICE deportation

00:08:12.240 officers. There's 6,000 deportation officers. ICE also does work in vetting and national security,

00:08:18.120 encountering narcotics, and things of that nature. But they have about 6,000 deportation

00:08:21.920 officers for a country of, you know, 330 million people. Not many. I mean, that's not even close

00:08:29.040 to the size of a large metropolitan police department. So the people imagine that what ICE does is they

00:08:36.500 just wake up in the morning, and they randomly go out to houses and see if any people are living there

00:08:40.960 who are illegal. And in reality, ICE follows leads on criminals. That's mainly what they do.

00:08:47.940 And under Trump, they also did other important work, like visa overstays, like national security

00:08:52.940 priority cases, like worksite enforcement. But let's stay on criminals. So here's what happens

00:08:57.920 today in America in the year 2021, August. This is what's happening. So if you are arrested for,

00:09:08.780 let's stick with DUI. In the hypothetical case, if you're arrested for a DUI in New Orleans,

00:09:14.660 no priors, you run through the federal database for a background check, comes back to the federal

00:09:21.760 government that you're here illegally, the local field office will not issue a detainer. So the people

00:09:28.880 who conducted the arrest may not even know that you're here illegally, because ICE won't ever even

00:09:33.120 notify them and such. If the judge bonds you out, or sentences you to community service,

00:09:40.340 or time served, or 30 days in jail, or whatever it is, then that will be the end of it. You will not

00:09:48.420 be you will not be removed from the country, you will not face any immigration consequences of any

00:09:52.960 kind whatsoever. And when you get back behind the wheel again, in six months, even drunker than before,

00:09:59.000 and you plow into somebody in an intersection, and you kill a family, and the family finds out that

00:10:05.100 you were arrested prior and could have been removed, then the answer is, well, sorry, your

00:10:11.400 government didn't care to enforce its immigration laws. And that kind of thing happens all the time.

00:10:16.700 And the reality is that there's no reason why any US citizen, or any legal immigrant, or anyone

00:10:22.480 living in this country, for that matter, should ever suffer that kind of irreparable harm,

00:10:26.760 because we had a criminal in custody, we wouldn't remove them. So bottom line is we worked with

00:10:31.520 states like Texas and Louisiana and others who have litigation in different circuits, to file

00:10:38.300 lawsuits against these memos, and they have now been enjoined in federal court. And that is a huge,

00:10:45.680 huge deal. Now we're going to have to be very vigorous.

00:10:47.980 When you say to work against these memos, you mean Biden executive orders? Or what do you mean by memos?

00:10:52.960 Yeah, the Department of Homeland Security's memos functionally abolishing interior immigration

00:10:59.820 enforcement. And so the memos that basically say, except in a very, very limited number of

00:11:07.640 circumstances, that you're to stop issuing detainers. And that's why ICE rules are the lowest level on

00:11:12.920 record. And the southern border states like Texas that you represented have standing to bring such a

00:11:17.360 lawsuit because they say, guess who's going to have to deal with the consequences of these decisions

00:11:21.800 more than anyone? Yes. And so we were also the outside counsel for Louisiana, which was party to

00:11:28.400 the Texas lawsuit. And Louisiana, so it's fitting that I use the New Orleans example, Louisiana has a

00:11:34.560 very large population of illegal immigrants. Now, just real quick, two other very big victories that

00:11:40.900 America First Legal had was we obtained preliminary injunctions against Biden's program

00:11:46.760 to issue restaurant revitalization fund relief solely on the basis of race. And for the first 21 days,

00:11:54.700 by which point the program would be exhausted of funds. And we obtained a preliminary injunction

00:11:59.340 against his USDA debt relief program, which awarded debt relief to farmers, again, solely on the basis of

00:12:07.100 race. So those two programs are what I describe to people as critical race theory in action. We all know

00:12:13.280 about critical race theory workshops. That's critical race theory in action. That's the government using

00:12:19.680 its enormous powers to reward some and punish others because of what they look like. We've got two big

00:12:26.280 victories in those cases. And we've warned the Biden administration that if they continue down that

00:12:31.740 road, we're going to keep on suing them. I do want to talk about how the Trump administration

00:12:36.940 just had a win. Were you involved in this case where the Supreme Court just ruled that the Biden

00:12:44.600 administration has to revive Trump's remain in Mexico immigration policy? This is a policy you helped

00:12:50.320 push that requires asylum applicants to wait in Mexico while their claims are evaluated. We were

00:12:55.700 letting them into the United States and then lo and behold, they didn't stick around. And now the Supreme

00:13:01.120 Court for now has has said the Biden administration has to revive the policy. So it's it's a it's not

00:13:07.200 the permanent victory, but it's at least a temporary victory. And I guess you guys you were involved,

00:13:12.780 right? Didn't you represent Texas and maybe was it Missouri on this case? The 6-3 Supreme Court decision

00:13:18.920 that forces by upholding the district court injunction that forces the Biden administration

00:13:27.460 to resume remain in Mexico, also known as the migrant protection protocol, is one of the most

00:13:35.000 important Supreme Court decisions, even though it was only a paragraph that we've had in many, many years,

00:13:41.820 because this that the Biden administration is not able to rescind lawful policies

00:13:49.640 solely to advance an open borders agenda. There has to be a reasoned agency

00:13:57.440 analysis for doing something in everything that Joe Biden has done on the border is contrived. In

00:14:04.220 other words, the reasons for doing it have nothing to do with security, with efficient border

00:14:09.200 processing, with making the situation safer or more humane. It has everything to do with accelerating

00:14:17.240 illegal migration into the country. This lays out the predicate for how we can block each and every

00:14:23.320 one of these illegal policies. My organization, America First Legal, is not only working behind the

00:14:29.000 scenes to help out with the MPP litigation, but we're working hand-in-hand with the state of Texas

00:14:34.240 on both the ICE litigation that is ongoing with Louisiana and also lawsuits to stop catch release on the

00:14:42.100 border. And I'll make one other point about this. For all of the less statements and lies

00:14:48.940 about the humanitarian aspects of Remain in Mexico, let's be very clear. Open borders

00:14:59.140 is inhumane. Open borders results in tens of thousands of people being trafficked, being abused,

00:15:08.460 being raped, and many being killed. The profits from illegal immigration finance drug cartels that kill

00:15:17.660 thousands of thousands of our citizens and thousands all around the world. They finance the criminal

00:15:22.740 organizations that sell young women and girls into sexual slavery. I am tired of being lectured to

00:15:30.920 by people whose main function in life is to make this evil business model possible. The lure of being

00:15:40.860 able to get a lifetime pass into America is the core basis for the entire criminal enterprise of human

00:15:49.920 smuggling and human trafficking. And last year, when we had Trump's policies in place, we had the lowest

00:15:56.940 numbers on record in Border Patrol custody. That meant fewer women getting hurt. That meant fewer people dying in

00:16:03.540 the desert. That meant fewer people being trafficked. That meant fewer people being preyed on by cartels.

00:16:08.200 And it meant fewer people also because the pandemic getting sick. Law enforcement saves lives. Eradicating

00:16:16.980 law enforcement gets people killed. It's a good point because the ACLU has been jumping up and down

00:16:25.600 saying, oh, this policy of remaining in Mexico leaves vulnerable people sitting down there. They could be

00:16:31.980 attacked by criminals. They're attacked by gangs, kidnappings, rapes. They don't talk about what

00:16:36.840 happens as a result of an open border. It's essentially an open borders policy, which is,

00:16:42.040 you know, what you're talking about. And, you know, I want to raise something with you because

00:16:46.060 just today on The Daily, my audience knows I listen. This is sort of one of my left wing sources of

00:16:52.940 information because I do believe it's good to have a mix. The Daily is the New York Times podcast with

00:16:57.580 Michael Barbaro. And he, The Daily, okay, the New York Times was doing a report on the crisis at the

00:17:05.920 southern border. And they were talking about how Kamala Harris completely botched, you know, she's our

00:17:11.220 czar now. She's our new Stephen Miller. God help us. And she went down to Guatemala to try to, you know,

00:17:20.560 address the root causes. She was going to sort of, she stood up in front of the president of the country

00:17:25.600 and said, we're going to root out corruption no matter where it is and talk tough. And he,

00:17:30.060 he looked at her and said, has there been one allegation against me and slammed his hand down

00:17:34.020 and said, no, there hasn't. Well, sure enough, immediately after many allegations of corruption

00:17:39.200 have come up against him, he's completely in the mix on, you know, lots of allegations and,

00:17:44.240 and just corrupt behavior involving law enforcement and so on. And what are, what are we doing in response

00:17:49.900 to it? Nothing. So she went down there and talked a big game. Then when push came to shove,

00:17:55.880 she and we, the United States has done nothing to address the corruption because that that's what

00:18:01.520 they say is the root cause of folks. They're wanting to come to the United States. They don't

00:18:04.960 want to live down there. They can't get ahead there. Their government's corrupt. It's no way to live.

00:18:08.680 So the other alternative is stop people from crossing the border, right? Like if you're,

00:18:13.340 if you're not going to crack down on the root causes and the people are going to keep coming here,

00:18:17.140 then you're going to have to crack down on the southern border because we, we do have to have a

00:18:22.000 country. It does have borders that need to be enforced for all sorts of reasons. And even the

00:18:25.880 New York times Steven was talking about how the Biden administration isn't doing that. There's

00:18:31.760 that there's a true crisis now with, with people coming across. And they even admitted that those

00:18:38.600 questioned say, they understand it's a new day that Biden won't be as tough as Trump. And that this is

00:18:45.940 their chance to sneak into our country because they don't believe that Biden will impose any penalty on

00:18:51.580 them for doing it. To understand the border, you only have to understand cause and effect.

00:19:00.160 If you let people into the country illegally, more will come. And the whole world witnessed this

00:19:06.660 with breakneck speed. When Biden removed the guardrails and the enforcement mechanisms that

00:19:14.520 President Trump had put into place, remain in Mexico, southern reform, safe third relocation,

00:19:21.960 in other words, send asylum seekers to an alternate location to process their requests, and the many

00:19:26.900 other reforms. When those were pulled away, the whole world descended illegally on our border.

00:19:34.060 And here's the other thing. It's not just the Northern Triangle countries who I have extensive

00:19:39.780 experience with over the last four years, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. It's all over the world.

00:19:47.140 160 countries in a typical month descend illegally on our border, not just from our hemisphere,

00:19:54.400 but also from Asia, from the Middle East, from Africa, from everywhere. One in three illegal immigrants

00:20:02.060 this point in time are coming from outside of Mexico and the Northern Triangle. The reality is,

00:20:08.720 is that most illegal immigration is driven by pure economic incentive. Hundreds of millions of

00:20:14.960 people around the world subsist on a dollar a day. They live in extreme poverty. Many other people live

00:20:22.660 in what you might call standard poverty, sort of the normal level of poverty in the world.

00:20:29.980 You add those two numbers up, you have billions of people who stand to economically benefit from coming

00:20:35.540 illegally to the United States. And so as long as people can afford to either pay a cartel to come

00:20:42.320 to the country, or if they're going to overstay a visa to afford a plane ticket, you're going to have

00:20:47.980 unending illegal immigration if you don't have enforcement, if you don't have consequences.

00:20:53.140 Congress enumerated very specific rules and conditions for entry. We could have a long debate

00:20:58.740 about what those rules ought to be, and how they ought to be changed. But those are the rules.

00:21:03.460 Those rules mean nothing. If there's a catch-all, get-around, if you just cross the border illegally

00:21:10.180 and you get in anyways, it degrades wages, it degrades living conditions, it depletes our treasury,

00:21:16.340 it undermines our public health, it jeopardizes our public safety. Illegal immigration in every

00:21:20.920 respect is a humanitarian catastrophe, both for the sending countries and the receiving countries.

00:21:27.280 You tolerate lawlessness, and you create only heartache and suffering. And that's what we're

00:21:33.840 seeing now in history's worst border crisis, because we've had surges in the past. We've never

00:21:40.220 had anything even approaching the scale and the scope of what we're having right now. Just one

00:21:44.920 dimension to illustrate the point. The single worst month for President Obama for unaccompanied alien

00:21:52.660 children occurred in 2014. We remember it well. The first year that Americans were really exposed to

00:22:00.040 large numbers of teenage and other migrants under the age of 18 crossing the border illegally in 2014.

00:22:07.920 His worst month that year was around 10,000. The last five months under President Biden

00:22:15.280 has been between 14,000 and 20,000 consecutively. In other words, every single month under Biden for

00:22:23.840 the last five months has blown Obama's worst month out of the water and almost doubling it in the last

00:22:30.320 month. And Obama's month was a deviation. It went up, it spiked, and it went back down. This is the new

00:22:35.500 normal to have 15 to 20,000 unaccompanied children crossing our borders, being delivered by smugglers and

00:22:42.640 cartels every single month. What Biden has wrought has no precedent, no precedent in the history of

00:22:50.100 our country, really probably any country. Up next, I'm going to ask Stephen about the most

00:22:55.140 controversial piece of Trump's immigration policy, which is the family separation policy, right, and how

00:23:00.720 families were separated in large numbers under Trump. And some kids have still not reportedly been

00:23:06.560 reunited with their families. What does he have to say about it? We'll get into it next.

00:23:12.640 Why are unaccompanied minors coming now, right? Because it's like, I understand when they come

00:23:19.000 with their families, parents are trying to create a new life. I get that. Why are the unaccompanied

00:23:24.920 minors coming right now in particular numbers? Very specific reason is actually one very singular

00:23:31.560 cause. And it's at the heart of a lawsuit that we are filing right now with the state of Texas

00:23:37.280 through America First Legal. Last year, when the pandemic hit, President Trump instituted

00:23:44.040 a public health authority that is known as Title 42. So anytime you hear the words or see the words

00:23:50.360 Title 42, that's what it's referred to. It's a public health statute that says that the Department

00:23:57.820 of Health and Human Services, the statute says the Surgeon General, but by regulation, it's evolved

00:24:04.020 to the director of the CDC that the Department of Health and Human Services through the CDC

00:24:10.780 can suspend the entry of goods or people if it threatens public health with a communicable

00:24:19.700 disease. So we triggered that statute when the pandemic hit in order to stop illegal immigration

00:24:27.800 because the process for illegal immigration usually involves extensive cohabitation, extensive contact

00:24:35.300 with border agents and law enforcement personnel, lengthy time in custody, and many other events that

00:24:41.600 lead to super spreaders, that lead to significant public health harms. And so we instituted Title 42

00:24:47.420 across the board, all demographics, all ages. And so in the case of unaccompanied minors who are

00:24:54.740 disproportionately teenagers, what that meant was that just like every other country in the world,

00:25:00.100 we would call their local government, we would contact their embassies, we'd contact their consulates,

00:25:05.080 we'd arrange for a flight of minors, hand them off to their health and human services and their

00:25:09.680 diplomatic and our diplomatic personnel, and then reunite them with their families or guardians in their

00:25:16.080 home countries, which is the humane thing to do. Within only a few weeks of doing that, the number of

00:25:22.740 unaccompanied minors coming into our country hit record lows for modern times. I say modern times

00:25:28.620 because this is a more modern phenomenon. It hit record lows, like nothing that Border Patrol had

00:25:33.680 ever seen before. And that persisted until there was some litigation over it, but I'll fast forward

00:25:40.860 through that. Biden comes in, the D.C. Circuit Court has fully upheld the authority to apply Title 42

00:25:48.340 across the board. And Biden decides to exempt categorically anyone traveling alone at the age

00:25:57.980 of 17 or younger from Title 42, instead opting for a 100% resettlement policy. And so that happened

00:26:05.800 only a few weeks into the administration. And so they said for this one specific demographic,

00:26:11.600 there's a guarantee of a settlement in the United States. Within a matter of weeks, they hit record

00:26:18.600 highs and have continued to set all-time records. Again, the last five months, the number of unaccompanied

00:26:25.660 minors arriving has exceeded every pre-Biden month in history. So no precedent for what's happening now.

00:26:33.680 So our lawsuit, in which we're outside counsel for Texas, is seeking an injunction to say that as long

00:26:43.200 as the pandemic conditions require Title 42, you are obligated to apply it evenly and universally,

00:26:50.800 and you cannot make non-medical, non-scientific, politically-based exceptions.

00:26:56.460 Right. And if you think about it now, look what's happening in our schools with teenagers. You know,

00:27:00.580 they're being mandated, American citizens who are in school right now, mandated to take the vaccine,

00:27:06.400 mandated to wear masks, mandated to have three to six feet between them and their classmates,

00:27:11.640 and not to mention the plexiglass. And, you know, you can't play certain sports and you can't sing

00:27:15.360 during recess and you can't. That's what American citizens who are teenagers are going through right

00:27:19.740 now. But if you are an illegal immigrant coming into the country across the southern border and you're

00:27:25.020 16 or 17 and you've got COVID, no problem. Come right in. Come right in. And by the way,

00:27:31.660 you're probably going to infect the other illegal migrants who are there and get them sick. And some

00:27:37.460 of them will be hospitalized. Some of them will get gravely ill. And you're also going to infect other

00:27:43.280 people living in the United States. And this is a very important point that should be obvious,

00:27:47.540 but it escapes people. A lot of people will say to me, they'll say, well, see, but why don't you

00:27:53.220 just say, well, let in all the illegal immigrants, but we'll test them all first. Right. So we'll let

00:27:58.920 them all in and we'll test them all. No, they're not even testing them. So let's be clear. In most

00:28:02.380 cases, they're not even testing illegal immigrants. But they are testing some because I just heard that

00:28:06.380 they have some 20,000 in custody down at the border who have COVID. Yeah, no, they're absolutely testing

00:28:12.340 some, but they're not testing all of them because you have to understand that they're over seven,

00:28:17.120 sometimes 8,000 new immigrants showing up per day. So the numbers are so overwhelming,

00:28:22.020 so beyond their capacity that many aren't being tested and just being released. But here's the

00:28:26.880 important point because illegal immigration is dynamic. That's what I always, when I try to teach

00:28:30.340 people about it, I always try to say it's dynamic. It's not static. Every action has an equal and

00:28:35.160 opposite reaction. So people would say, well, why do you need Title 42? Why do you need to just return

00:28:41.900 people who come during a pandemic? Why don't you just test everybody? And if they test positive,

00:28:49.460 quarantine them in the border for 14 days. If they test negative, release them into the country.

00:28:55.120 Now, aside from the fact that that would be illegal, here's why that would be a public health disaster.

00:29:01.240 If you announced to the world that you were going to get free medical care if you're positive,

00:29:06.020 and you get automatic release if you're negative. Well, what happened is, some version of what we're

00:29:10.440 seeing today, which is that you would see numbers arriving, many of whom are already sick, many of

00:29:15.300 whom are already infected, beyond your wildest nightmares. The numbers that would arrive would

00:29:21.140 increase so exponentially that the number of people infected arriving in our country would collapse the

00:29:28.580 whole system. And that's a version of what we've had right now. They wouldn't just infect each other.

00:29:32.280 They wouldn't just infect border agents. They would infect everyone they come into contact with.

00:29:36.720 And then here's the other thing. Everyone who tests negative is one, two, three days away from

00:29:40.800 a positive test. In other words, if you have a group of 50 illegal immigrants that have been traveling

00:29:45.460 together for three weeks, they show up at the border, and 10 of them test positive, and then you

00:29:50.720 release the other 40. Newsflash, the other 40 are within five days of their positive test. And during

00:29:55.480 those five days, they're going to infect 400 Americans. The, when you had Title 42 in place

00:30:01.640 uniformly, the numbers that came were so small, so controlled, so manageable, that we did not have

00:30:09.820 a single super spreader event along our southwest border for the entirety of the Trump administration.

00:30:15.800 Think about that. In the worst days of the pandemic, we don't have a single super spreader event at the

00:30:23.600 border under President Trump because Title 42 worked. And that's why we're suing, just like

00:30:28.040 the MPP lawsuit from Texas, that's why we're suing to say, you carry contrived, capricious,

00:30:35.800 and fake reasons, alter life and death public health guidance to suit your political agenda.

00:30:41.300 And just to, just to talk about some of the numbers, in July alone, it was the highest monthly

00:30:47.280 number of migrants detained in over 21 years, unaccompanied children, over 18,000 of them,

00:30:54.900 a 24% increase just from the month before, just from June. And so far this year, there's been over

00:31:00.660 1.5 million enforcement actions already higher than the full year, any full year since 2005,

00:31:07.720 just to, just to figure, you know, just to put some meat on the bones of how bad this is getting.

00:31:12.480 And for a while there, the media was covering it and then they seem to get tired of covering it.

00:31:17.320 Yeah, they've, yeah, they've moved on. And, and the, and the reality is, is that it's getting

00:31:23.400 worse by the day and the consequences are irreparable. But, but just on the numbers real

00:31:28.860 quick, one of the things I always say to people is that it's worse than even the numbers would

00:31:34.900 suggest. Because when you hear that it's the, the highest total in over two decades, basically going

00:31:40.240 back to the, to the turn of the century, around the year 2000, illegal immigration was about 95%

00:31:47.960 single adult males from Mexico. And so basically what that meant was that people cross the border,

00:31:54.600 border patrol apprehends them, they put them in a van and they drive them back to the port of entry

00:31:57.960 and Mexico takes them back. And that's pretty much the end of the story. Now, a lot of them get into

00:32:01.760 the country because they get, they evade detection entirely, but the concept of catch and release

00:32:06.440 didn't even exist in the year 2000. I won't go through the whole history of how we ended up with

00:32:11.660 catch and release, but suffice it to say, it didn't exist in the year 2000. Now we have illegal

00:32:17.580 immigration from 160 countries. So you can't just put someone in a van and drive them back across the

00:32:22.520 border that you have to manifest flights to, to India, to Nambia, to Brazil, to Russia, and so on.

00:32:32.540 You have to manifest flights all over the world. So when you have numbers like this, it completely

00:32:37.600 crashes the system. And the, um, and the other thing is that you have entire demographics that

00:32:46.320 are released categorically, um, unaccompanied alien minors and the vast, vast, vast majority of family

00:32:53.140 units are just released automatically into the country. Again, something that never happened,

00:32:57.240 never existed in the year 2000. So let's talk about unaccompanied minors. Cause that was a big

00:33:03.260 controversy when you were in the white house with Trump. Um, he initiated a zero tolerance policy

00:33:08.700 that meant any adult caught crossing the border was going to be prosecuted. Um, and the children

00:33:14.540 couldn't be jailed with their family members. And so the families were separated and they say,

00:33:18.980 we just checked with department of Homeland security over 1800 children have not yet been reunified with

00:33:25.700 their parents. That was a huge story. It was, you know, this is where we saw the kids in the cages.

00:33:31.720 And we found out that the cages had been in existence under Barack Obama, but there's no

00:33:35.800 question that the policy was tighter under president Trump by design than under Barack Obama,

00:33:40.980 who was only separating children from their families, from their parents. If the parents were

00:33:45.780 suspected criminals, uh, suspected of hurting the children and so on. Okay. So we had a different

00:33:49.660 policy under Trump. And that is something that bothered a lot of Americans, even, even a lot of,

00:33:57.460 uh, Republicans didn't like seeing the children separated from the parents. And even Trump,

00:34:02.940 even Trump came out and said, I did not like seeing those kids separated from the parents. So

00:34:09.020 what do you make now in retrospect, knowing that those 1800 kids are still separated from the parents

00:34:14.220 of that policy? Well, I, I certainly, first of all, I don't, I don't think that any of the numbers

00:34:20.680 that the ACLU has put out in litigation about any aspect of this is even remotely accurate. And so

00:34:26.520 I would take all of that. We got our number from DHS. They said they put it at 1841, still separated.

00:34:33.840 The, well, the current DHS is relying on the claims from the ACLU that is filed in the lawsuit.

00:34:40.160 Um, DHS under president Trump, uh, was quite clear in saying that, um, that those numbers were

00:34:47.840 deeply inaccurate and that as best they could tell, um, mostly involved cases of people who

00:34:54.400 waived reunification. In other words, for the same reason that people sent unaccompanied alien

00:34:58.620 to the country, you have cases in immigration every single day. I mean, take, for example,

00:35:04.620 ICE goes to a house and there is, which again, doesn't happen anymore, but

00:35:09.480 ICE goes to a house to carry out an enforcement action for a wanted fugitive. And they've been

00:35:15.640 living in the country for seven years and they have two children who are born here. And therefore,

00:35:19.920 because of birthright citizenship are decreed to be U S citizens. The, the parent in that case,

00:35:25.520 since the beginning of INS has always had the choice to take their children home or to leave

00:35:30.780 them with a caregiver in the United States. And so one of the things that people understand about this

00:35:35.300 and the ACLU purposely obfuscates is that according to DHS in every instance in which there was an

00:35:43.080 enforcement action with illegal families, um, they were all asked if they wish to leave their

00:35:49.120 children in the United States or if they wish to take them to their home country. And so much of

00:35:53.920 what the Biden administration is doing right now is not, not, they're not trying to reunite people in

00:35:59.640 their home country. They're going back to the people who waved, taking their children home with

00:36:04.800 them and saying, would you like to come back to America and you can all live illegally together in

00:36:09.480 the United States. Um, so I just say that by, but that's happening. So reunification under Biden is to

00:36:17.480 get the parents who we've already sent home to their countries of origin to come back here and live

00:36:23.480 permanently with their children. Right. Right. We did not have the authority to send minors back to

00:36:30.200 Central America, um, to be with parents who didn't want them to be there. Um, that, that, that, that

00:36:36.520 exceeded our authorities to do because at that point they were, they were declared to be unaccompanied

00:36:42.520 alien children domiciled in the United States without, without, um, available guardians. And they went

00:36:48.880 through a wholly different immigration procedure. That's very complicated. We don't have time to get

00:36:53.420 into right now, but the, but just to go, just to go back a step, cause this whole thing does get

00:36:58.780 very confusing. So the, um, under the Trump administration, you referenced, there was a

00:37:07.580 policy whereby if you committed felony re-entry or misdemeanor illegal entry, you would be prosecuted.

00:37:17.360 Some of the people who were prosecuted did have, uh, minor children that were with them.

00:37:23.420 They were prosecuted for the criminal offense. As you mentioned, it's impossible to house a minor

00:37:31.840 in a department of justice custodial setting, um, if you were incarcerated. And so they were sent to

00:37:39.240 HHS and the, and again, this would get to my other point, which is that the conclusion of,

00:37:46.220 of the incarceration, then people were asked if they wanted to buy ice, if they wanted to

00:37:52.300 go home together as a family unit, or again, to leave their minor in the United States.

00:37:58.060 And again, as we're seeing with unaccompanied alien children under Biden, the, although it may be

00:38:04.180 shocking to some that there is, you know, 15 to 20,000 minors a month that their own, that are

00:38:10.040 self-separated by their own families. Biden's policies have resulted in a number of family

00:38:15.920 separations that, that exceeds any number that has ever happened in the history of our country.

00:38:21.060 Now, from an enforcement standpoint, the, the, the, the preference of the Trump administration,

00:38:26.920 when we executed is what we were talking about earlier, which was MPP is obviously a much more

00:38:33.520 effective policy than across the board prosecution, but it took a lot of time to build that capacity

00:38:40.960 with Mexico to be able to keep all family units continuously together through the entirety of

00:38:46.560 their immigration proceeding. And, and just by one extra point of clarification on this,

00:38:52.260 the, you might say, well, why not keep them all together in a U S immigration setting? In other

00:38:58.880 words, instead of being in Mexico, why not keep them in the United States at ice?

00:39:02.900 The ninth circuit ruled and the Obama administration declined to appeal that you cannot hold parents

00:39:11.560 and children together for more than 20 days. And so then the U S government is in the position

00:39:16.120 of either having to release everybody or only maintain custody of the parents. And so that's the reason why

00:39:25.620 the remain in Mexico policy was such a positive solution to the conundrum.

00:39:30.860 Why was it so hard to, I mean, maintain records of which child belonged to which adult so that when

00:39:41.600 the legal process played out, reunification was possible?

00:39:45.520 Well, I don't, I don't concede that that was the case. I mean, I was not the person at HHS or DHS

00:39:51.680 that's managing the law enforcement process. But again, I don't believe that to be the case at all.

00:40:00.520 There's ongoing litigation about this. And under the Trump administration, all of those claims

00:40:05.180 were vigorously contested and continue to be. But I think that what people need to remember is that

00:40:11.600 illegal immigration is a extraordinarily confusing and complex situation. You have fake families,

00:40:22.840 you have people under fake identities, you have people who have fake passports, fake immigration

00:40:30.760 documents. It is an, I mean, it is, it is a criminal enterprise and it is an incredibly difficult and

00:40:38.060 complicated issue to be able to, um, have everything go as smoothly and as cleanly as say illegal

00:40:48.300 L E G A L immigration procedure. And people at ICE and people at HHS and people throughout DHS

00:40:56.300 worked as difficult, they worked through an extremely difficult period as vigilantly as they could

00:41:01.360 to try to maintain order at the border during the, the rush of family units that were taking

00:41:08.740 advantage of Obama's policies. But the important point is that that's the thing that, that, that I

00:41:14.040 get caught up on is as much empathy as I have for those kids that we all saw in those videos. And I

00:41:19.140 have tons of it. Um, at some point, a family made a decision to take these risks and to cross our

00:41:25.640 Southern border understanding what Trump was going to do. And that doesn't, that doesn't mean we don't

00:41:31.400 treat people humanely, but these parents are the ones who put their family in a very precarious

00:41:36.400 position. And it did ultimately deter other families from doing that. And then, and now we're

00:41:45.420 seeing under the Biden administration that without that deterrence, without that threat, the numbers

00:41:50.780 are starting to go back up. So we're in a very difficult position in trying to deter humanely,

00:41:57.220 right? It's almost like if you deter closer to inhumanely, deterrence works better. It's not the

00:42:02.560 goal. Um, but I understand it's a difficult, it's a difficult situation. I want to just put a, put a

00:42:08.360 capstone on a few of these points. I think it's important. Sure. The, the Obama administration

00:42:14.100 through a combination of incompetence and ideology assented to a completely insane ruling from the

00:42:24.620 Ninth Circuit that says that if you legally enter the country with a minor, if you smuggle a kid into

00:42:30.440 the country in violation of law, you can't be detained through the pendency of your immigration

00:42:35.960 proceeding. And this is where it gets complicated, but just stay with me here. It takes more than 20

00:42:41.080 days to conduct an asylum hearing for a family. They've all been coached to fraudulently claim

00:42:49.220 asylum, another crime, but they get away with it. The, the Obama administration therefore created

00:42:56.220 a massive incentive for people, an industry, a cottage industry to smuggle children into the country.

00:43:01.960 So you would see many fake families taking advantage of Obama's policy. You would see children being

00:43:08.760 recycled is the term law enforcement uses where they would literally, an adult would grab a kid

00:43:13.780 across the border, get into the country. The kid would get sent back across the border. Another

00:43:18.780 adult would grab them and then keep going. That's what that policy has wrought. The Trump administration

00:43:25.440 working with career law enforcement professionals at ICE and DHS made clear the law would be applied

00:43:34.080 consistently and uniformly across the board so that child smuggling would no longer be a free ticket

00:43:40.760 for automatic entry into the United States of America. That saved countless children from the

00:43:45.740 horrors and deprivations of the journey into the United States. The, the Trump administration,

00:43:51.260 though more importantly, through our diplomacy with Mexico and Central America and through our asylum

00:43:55.800 reforms, were able to adopt the gold standard in immigration enforcement, which is that all families were kept

00:44:02.100 together either in Mexico or in a safe third country or returned to their home country. And we had a

00:44:09.580 secure border. We drove child smuggling to record lows and we shut down the entire network of child

00:44:17.820 trafficking that had become so standard across our border. What you're seeing now under Biden is not

00:44:24.280 just a resurgence of child smuggling. You're seeing child smuggling brought to a level that again, as I've said

00:44:29.840 before, has never been witnessed in the history of our country. Trump's policy, the policy that I had

00:44:36.500 the privilege of working on, was extraordinarily humane and life-saving. The Biden policy is totally

00:44:43.400 depraved, morally indefensible, and every cartel, every child trafficker, every child smoker, every coyote on

00:44:50.960 the planet is the biggest fan in the world of Biden's policy because it makes their business model possible and

00:44:57.000 profitable. After this, I'm going to ask Stephen about Afghanistan and how the Biden administration

00:45:03.000 has completely botched the withdrawal. And he's got some really interesting insights on it. Plus,

00:45:07.760 80 some odd percent of Americans are in favor of bringing these translators and others back to the

00:45:14.080 United States. I have to tell you, I was one of them. And then I listened to Stephen Miller defend

00:45:20.220 the reticence, some of the reticence. And really, I'll let him describe it to you, but really

00:45:25.660 a push to maybe redirect some of these guys to countries other than the USA. And he gave me

00:45:30.620 reason to rethink some of this. So I think you're going to find this interesting. Stay tuned.

00:45:40.000 Let's shift gears. Not entirely, not, but a little bit to Afghanistan, because there has been an attack

00:45:48.780 outside of our outside of the airport. And there are several casualties. Now the headline on drudge

00:45:55.220 is that ISIS is claiming responsibility. This was a known risk. And now we have it's unclear exactly

00:46:01.960 who has died. But the early reports are possible U.S. military and civilians up to maybe then he's 13

00:46:09.640 dead. It's early now in the reporting. So we're going to find out more in the days to come.

00:46:14.020 This didn't have to happen. Biden has obviously botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

00:46:21.680 And one of the big debates going on in our country and elsewhere in our NATO ally countries is why we

00:46:29.540 didn't foresee the difficulty in getting our people out of there, why we took too many military out

00:46:34.860 before we didn't before we got all the civilians out, which we haven't done. That's exactly, you know,

00:46:38.980 bass backwards, as they say, and why we didn't make provisions for the Afghanistan people who

00:46:45.240 helped us, people like translators and so on, who undoubtedly are going to turn up in the dead.

00:46:50.840 So the reason that you're a good person to ask this of is that people in the Biden administration

00:46:55.460 have pointed to you, even a person who worked for Vice President Pence has pointed to you saying,

00:47:00.680 this is really Trump's fault because they slow rolled and and even capped, but they slow rolled

00:47:08.880 the number of basically permission slips or visas for for people like the Afghanistan translators to

00:47:17.160 come in. They call them SIVs, that they couldn't get these tickets into the country, even though they'd

00:47:23.960 filled out all the proper paperwork and so on, because Trump wouldn't let them in. And now, even though

00:47:29.920 Biden didn't fix it, they're basically saying not all the fault is on Biden, because most of these

00:47:33.640 slow rolling incidents happened when you guys were in the White House. Your thoughts on all of that?

00:47:38.640 Well, there's a lot to cover there. First, our prayers are with the victims, with the wounded,

00:47:45.920 with the families, the survivors, and with our troops. Obviously, details are still coming in about

00:47:53.040 what happened. But it is profoundly heartbreaking and anguishing. And we just hope that those who

00:48:02.560 have survived will make a full and complete recovery. But as you mentioned, it certainly didn't have to be

00:48:13.200 this way. And it all begins with what history will surely record as the most inexplicable decision

00:48:25.920 in the global history of foreign policy, not just in the world today, but in the world ever,

00:48:34.920 for as long as history has been recorded, which is why did Biden pull out our troops before conducting

00:48:41.840 the evacuation? And then, after evacuating everyone, then had to surge in even more troops

00:48:46.840 than were there at the first place. Nobody has ever explained this. Nobody has ever said

00:48:53.200 why it was done. Did Biden just come up with that idea all by himself? Did he come up with it jointly,

00:49:01.360 along with, who knows, Susan Rice, Lloyd Austin, and who knows? But it is, I mean, aside from everything

00:49:07.360 else, that decision will go down in infamy as arguably the greatest unforced foreign policy

00:49:17.020 air. And the air doesn't really come close to capturing it. It's a deadly catastrophe.

00:49:27.360 But the greatest mistake in the history of foreign policy, because it was so needless and so

00:49:33.340 preventable and so unexplainable, that then led to, of course, everything else that you've seen.

00:49:39.240 It led to the surrendering of our embassy and our air base and all of our assets, all of our military

00:49:47.040 equipment. But then that air was compounded continually at every step of the way when Biden

00:49:52.160 had a chance to change course who didn't change course. In other words, before we evacuated the

00:49:56.900 embassy, when it was clear that Kabul was imminently going to fall, Biden could have easily issued a

00:50:04.240 threat that said, if you touch our embassy, if you touch our people, if you touch our air base,

00:50:11.000 if you touch our assets, we're going to decapitate your organization. Because we 100% had the capacity,

00:50:17.660 now that you're out in the open, now that you're organizing your leadership, now that you're organizing

00:50:21.540 your government, now that you're marching on the city, we could issue a decapitation strike on the

00:50:26.520 whole organization. So after 20 years of hiding out, waiting to take over, now you're out in the

00:50:30.520 open, now we can kill you all. Absolutely, we have the capability to do that. But at every turn,

00:50:36.260 Biden chose to compound his mistake and lean into his weakness instead of reversing course and letting

00:50:42.540 the Taliban cinch their grip tighter around the United States and lose ever more strategic

00:50:50.020 flexibility, ever more leverage, ever more operational flexibility. So you pull out the

00:50:54.520 embassy, you abandon the air base, you abandon the equipment, and you strand all of our citizens

00:50:59.320 behind enemy lines. So now you've given all the leverage, all the operational control,

00:51:05.220 all of the negotiating power to the Taliban. Now you're operating out their sufferings. And again,

00:51:11.000 Biden doesn't change course. He beams into the state of affairs, says that we're just playing

00:51:15.220 mother, may I, with the Taliban. We are. And just to update the audience, he literally just said,

00:51:20.660 well, you know, we want to make this August 31st deadline. You know, it's possible. I need

00:51:26.820 scenarios for if we're going to go beyond that. And the Taliban said, no, you can't go past August 31st.

00:51:32.600 No, the answer is no. And honestly, all we seem to be doing is saying, oh, okay, master. Okay. All right,

00:51:37.920 got it. The Taliban's clearly in control. And we are asserting absolutely none of our might in order

00:51:43.200 to advocate on behalf of and protect our American citizens over there. Yeah. And ISIS is reading

00:51:50.000 the signals being sent that America is weak and America is reckless and America won't strike back.

00:51:56.220 And that's what H.R. McMaster just said. Same thing. I want to be very clear. This has nothing to do,

00:52:02.380 nothing to do with your views, anyone's views on the war in Afghanistan and the decisions that have

00:52:08.820 been made over the last 20 years. This has everything to do with the decisions that have been made over

00:52:14.660 the last month. And again, Biden keeps compounding it by leaning into it, by continuing to be a

00:52:22.860 supplicant to the Taliban. And so you have this spectacle playing out for the whole world

00:52:28.300 of a medieval band of radicalized fundamentalists dictating to the most powerful nation in the

00:52:39.820 world. And Biden seems totally unable, unwilling, incapable of projecting American power into the

00:52:47.940 situation. But let's roll forward. So then the evacuation operation itself, because the United States

00:52:55.280 agreed to carry out the evacuation from the extraordinarily fragile position of only controlling

00:53:03.880 the airport and no other territory at all, it meant that we had no operational security.

00:53:12.220 You have this dangerous spectacle of thousands of people coming up to the airport every day

00:53:19.160 to get themselves onto these planes and to leave the country. So you're creating an extraordinary

00:53:25.240 volatile, unsafe situation. We already know people are dying of heat exhaustion and being

00:53:29.120 crammed to death and everything else. But in other words, you are, because the Taliban controls

00:53:35.040 every checkpoint, every street, every exit, every route of egress in the city, and all you have

00:53:40.720 is the airport, you are creating a situation that is profoundly unsafe and profoundly dangerous

00:53:47.960 for everyone involved in all sides of the equation. Instead of expanding the perimeter out and

00:53:52.440 saying, God damn it, we're the United States of America. And we are going to create an operational

00:53:58.180 safe space to conduct these evacuations or you, the Taliban, are going to die. Your leaders will

00:54:04.100 be killed. They will be taken out in their homes, in their places of dwelling. Next time you're in the

00:54:09.620 palace, the palace will be turned into a heaping pile of rubble. So congratulations, you'll all die in the

00:54:16.840 palace. But we're not doing that. And so we're creating it. Again, it's nothing to do with your views on

00:54:21.580 Afghanistan. You can be the most ardent opponent of the war in Afghanistan. And I've long been a critic

00:54:26.860 of the war in Afghanistan and still understand that in this moment, American strength and deadly force,

00:54:34.280 if necessary, is required, not only to preserve our prestige, but to preserve the lives of our citizens.

00:54:40.540 And this is going to lead to so many more attacks around the world because people are going to see

00:54:44.300 how weak and reckless we are. Now, let's talk about the translator issue that you raised.

00:54:49.280 So I know the, I've read some of the stories that you're talking about. There isn't much to say

00:54:54.400 about it because I've never once participated in any meeting about the subject of special immigrant

00:54:59.420 visas with this person, nor has there ever been a cabinet meeting, which is what she alleges that

00:55:05.960 I'm even aware of.

00:55:06.560 This is a woman who went on Rachel Maddow, who she had worked for Trump or for Pence,

00:55:10.720 and she had gone on Rachel Maddow to complain about you, to blame this in part on you in the ways I just

00:55:15.820 outlined. Go ahead. Right. No, I've never, to my knowledge, participated in any cabinet meeting

00:55:20.680 with her on this subject. I don't think there's ever been a cabinet meeting on the subject of

00:55:25.380 special immigrant visas, to be honest with you, which are handled by DOD and the State Department.

00:55:31.660 And the reality is, is that again, whatever your view is in the special immigrant visa,

00:55:36.660 the number of special immigrant visas, and we've issued about 100,000 special immigrant visas to Iraq

00:55:42.740 in Afghanistan since 9-11. And it is a controversial program, and I'll explain why in a minute. But

00:55:48.620 under President Trump, the bottom line is, we issued more special immigrant visas in his four years

00:55:56.240 than Obama did in the four years immediately prior. It's a fact. And so people can have all the

00:56:01.340 political agendas they want, and this person's been a critic of President Trump. But as they say,

00:56:08.040 facts don't lie. And that's just the honest truth. And that also includes, by the way,

00:56:12.660 the pandemic happened to occur during the middle of all this. And so that actually, of course,

00:56:19.400 slows down, as you might imagine, visa processing. But it's a distraction, though, for a very simple

00:56:24.800 point. You don't engage in a mass evacuation of special immigrant visa holders just in the middle

00:56:31.000 of the Trump administration just because. In other words, we are in the process of trying to plan an

00:56:38.520 orderly exit from Afghanistan to show our strength and firepower to the Taliban, which tried to create

00:56:44.920 circumstances where the government has a chance to survive. In that context, there's no reason,

00:56:53.660 pre-withdrawal, to start pulling people out right and left, right? That is supposed to happen in the

00:57:01.880 context of the withdrawal, which was carried out by Joe Biden. And for reasons that no one understands,

00:57:06.980 again, he didn't do that. Now, there's a legitimate disagreement, a public policy disagreement in this

00:57:14.060 country between whether or not the special immigrant visa holders should be resettled in the United States

00:57:20.900 or should be resettled in alternate third-party nations like Qatar, like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan,

00:57:29.100 et cetera. But again, the only reason why they are stranded and continue to be stranded

00:57:34.480 in Afghanistan is because of Biden's horrendously botched withdrawal. And one other point on this,

00:57:44.660 the people that Biden is evacuating from the country right now at the airport are not special

00:57:50.460 immigrant visa holders or would-be special immigrant visa holders in the vast, vast, vast,

00:57:55.480 vast majority of cases. All of my sources at DHS, they've evacuated about 100,000 people now,

00:58:00.960 say that these are just Afghan nationals who don't want to live in Afghanistan anymore

00:58:04.460 for any number of reasons. So Biden has, let's just be blunt, Biden has no operational control of

00:58:12.420 the situation in Kabul or Afghanistan at all. The Taliban does. The only people who get onto those

00:58:18.500 planes are the people in the Taliban, let's get onto those planes. And that's the end of the story.

00:58:23.960 So the people that we want out for any reason, regardless of where we would like to relocate them,

00:58:30.720 aren't the ones getting out. Not U.S. citizens, not people that members of Congress believe performed

00:58:37.540 a valuable function for the U.S. military. The ones that are getting out by and large are just the

00:58:42.640 people who can get past the Taliban checkpoints and force their way onto the tarmac. And once you're

00:58:47.860 on the tarmac, there's no vetting, you get a putt down, you get on the plane, and you get flown to

00:58:52.900 Doha or somewhere else and put in the queue to come to America. Once you're there, they do a perfunctory

00:58:58.040 background check, but most of them have no documentation. They have no passports. They

00:59:01.800 have no records. Some of them do, in fact, hit red flags on terror watch lists, and that's already

00:59:06.660 happened. Others, most of them, just have no records at all. We have no idea who they are, but we know

00:59:13.240 they haven't, in most cases, performed any services to the U.S. government. So what Biden is doing,

00:59:18.400 not only is the most dangerous evacuation that you could imagine, but it's also a misdirection

00:59:23.320 play. They're touting the numbers of people that are evacuating. This is some sort of achievement.

00:59:28.020 They're evacuating people at random, Megan. They're evacuating people indiscriminately,

00:59:34.500 with no hierarchy, no preference, no demonstration of need, just at random. That is what's happening.

00:59:43.140 And if you happen to live far outside Kabul, forget it. You're not getting anywhere. That's

00:59:48.560 what's happening. So we can have a public policy debate about special immigrant visa holders

00:59:52.900 and where they ought to go. And I can promise you, under President Trump, if you've been overseeing

00:59:59.200 the withdrawal, every single person who won an out would have an out before the troops were out,

01:00:04.240 period. Biden stranded them there. But the point is, what people don't realize is that those are not

01:00:09.580 the people that Biden is evacuating. Well, and just in case our audience thinks this is just a

01:00:16.020 Stephen Miller point, Richard Engel of NBC News just reported on August 23rd, and I quote,

01:00:22.760 the United States only wants to evacuate American citizens and Afghan translators and contractors,

01:00:28.040 but a State Department memo obtained by NBC News says every time they open the gate,

01:00:34.220 150 non-approved people get in. And so while the American people are overwhelmingly in favor of

01:00:41.680 helping Afghan translators not just get out, but the question as put to them by CBS News polling was,

01:00:47.300 enter the U.S. Do we want to help Afghan translators enter the U.S.? Yes, 81%. And that includes 76%

01:00:54.140 of Republicans. Those numbers are likely to change when they realize that these are not all

01:01:00.380 approved translators. Of course, we want to help the people who helped us. You know,

01:01:04.460 Marcus Luttrell was on the show last week saying there was no difference between us and them. Those

01:01:08.140 guys were like brothers in arms. But the question is, what does the vetting look like under these

01:01:14.100 rushed emergency circumstances created by Vice President or created by President Biden,

01:01:18.760 such that we can ensure that it's only the good guys who helped us and not bad guys,

01:01:23.680 as you point out, who have to be approved by the Taliban now to even get into the airport

01:01:27.000 so they can get on these planes? Yeah. And the situation is worse than anybody can imagine.

01:01:32.280 And I've talked to people, again, who are inside government, and they just seen the total,

01:01:38.940 total chaos and just a mass of humanity. And there's just no, there's no meaningful

01:01:49.400 sorting mechanism whatsoever. People just, they open the gates, you know, because an American

01:01:53.540 passport holder is about to get trampled. And they just let on everyone who's around that

01:01:57.400 passport. And so what does it mean for the United States? Let's have some, let's have some honest,

01:02:04.240 blunt talk. Let's not beat around the bushes. What does it mean for the United States?

01:02:07.580 As you and I talk here today, the Biden administration is planning to resettle

01:02:13.600 at least 100,000 Afghan nationals in the United States, because he has not made any deal with

01:02:19.540 any third party nation to take any of them. So these people run the gamut of reasons why they're

01:02:24.100 leaving the country, right? Any reason you can imagine will be covered here. Most of whom, again,

01:02:29.840 have never provided any meaningful service to the U.S. government whatsoever. And they're going to be

01:02:35.660 moving to the United States of America. We are going to do to ourselves what France did after its

01:02:41.960 decolonization period, where it had an open-ended immigration from its former colonies. And that

01:02:47.240 allowed people radical views, some of whom were terrorists, but others who just had radical views

01:02:53.220 or had jihadist sympathies, to move into France. Now, in this case, move into America. And that creates

01:03:00.900 an internal hotbed of radicalism. That creates the conditions for situations where you draw a cartoon

01:03:07.980 of the Prophet Muhammad, and someone walks into your office and shoots everybody, right? That's what

01:03:12.560 we're going to do to ourselves. This is real. This is happening. 100,000 people coming into our country

01:03:18.140 in a matter of days or weeks, many of whom, again, have no relationship with the U.S. government

01:03:24.700 whatsoever. And then once here, on a path of citizenship, so they can bring in their relatives,

01:03:29.560 and their relatives can bring in their relatives, and their relatives can bring in their relatives,

01:03:32.700 pretty soon, in a matter of years, you're 300,000 to 400,000 to 600,000, you know, onwards up to a

01:03:39.980 million. You're creating, within your own country, the very conditions that we've seen in Afghanistan,

01:03:46.080 but it's in America. This is deadly serious.

01:03:50.220 This is, I mean, this is one of those issues where if you talk about it, and you take that stance,

01:03:54.680 and I don't hear you saying that we shouldn't allow a way for the actual Afghan translators and people

01:04:00.940 who helped us, like, if they can be determined, and they can, because our military, they know who they are.

01:04:06.900 Do you have an objection to them coming in?

01:04:08.500 My view on that is that if you're statutorily eligible for a special immigrant visa, which Congress

01:04:16.160 has authorized, we have to abide by the terms of the program. My general view is that because we've

01:04:23.220 seen instances of violence directed against U.S. troops, and because vetting, even in those

01:04:29.080 circumstances, is so difficult, my preference would be third country resettlement. But I also,

01:04:35.140 again, underscore that it's such a slim fraction of the population, and tragically, the people who

01:04:42.020 are under the greatest actual threat, who provided the most assistance, aren't getting out anyways,

01:04:47.560 right, because the Taliban's in control. So, again, that conversation is almost theoretical now,

01:04:52.840 because the people that we'd want to get out, regardless of where we'd put them, can't get out.

01:04:58.140 And the people that we are getting out-

01:04:58.960 And the Taliban, by the way, the Taliban did just say two days ago, no more. No more Afghans are leaving.

01:05:03.780 They said, you know, our doctors, our scientists, all of them, you stay here now. Only Americans

01:05:09.280 get to go to the airport. So it really has become rhetorical at the moment, again, because of the

01:05:14.560 way this was handled.

01:05:15.140 Yeah, so it's a purely, unfortunately, it's a purely theoretical debate. But just, I want to be

01:05:19.440 very clear on this, because it is such an important point, and it gets so emotional, and it gets to be

01:05:23.280 such a hot topic. And my primary concern as a citizen, and as someone who's worked on homeland

01:05:32.940 security for many years, is that if you bring in anything close to 100,000 people from Afghanistan

01:05:40.220 all at once, you're going to create the recruiting ground and the conditions for domestic terrorism,

01:05:47.300 radicalization, and extremism. You're going to have integration problems, and you're going to have

01:05:52.000 relation issues, and you're going to have a lot of difficulties, because not everybody who's on those

01:05:57.060 planes necessarily thinks that Thomas Jefferson had everything right. Okay? And that's just the bottom

01:06:05.160 line. That's just the truth. It's a tough, tough part of the world. It's a tough, tough place. There's been a

01:06:09.880 lot of failed societies, a lot of failed countries, and a lot of violence, a lot of sectarian skirmishes.

01:06:16.900 It's a rough, rough place. Very, very different from where we are. That's just my number one concern.

01:06:23.460 I get that. But we made promises to people who helped us over there and risked their own lives.

01:06:29.940 That's why the numbers are so strong in support of living up to the word that our men and women

01:06:35.560 in uniform gave to these guys who helped us and gals. We have to do the right thing. We have to live up

01:06:42.580 to the promises we made, where the vetting has taken place, and we know. We know who the good guys are.

01:06:47.860 Right. And again, look, there's a big difference between, look, if you, most of the people that we're

01:06:51.020 bringing in to out of Afghanistan, two military bases have no documentation. And I know, but we

01:06:59.780 know them. I mean, our military dealt with them. They guys have been coming forward left and right,

01:07:05.040 guys in uniform for us saying, here's the guy. Let me, let me, I work with him for four years.

01:07:09.420 Let's get him across the line. Most of the ones have no document, most of them have no documentation

01:07:12.980 because they've never worked for the U.S. government. In other words, if you provide a

01:07:17.640 name that we have on file and we have a photo of you on file and we have biometrics on file

01:07:23.780 because you work for the U.S. government, you'll get a hit, you'll get a match. My point is that when

01:07:28.440 they're taking fingerprints of these people and taking facial recognition of these people and

01:07:31.940 taking names of people, they're not hitting anything in the database because they haven't worked

01:07:36.600 for the U.S. government. And from what I've been told, most of them aren't asserting they have worked

01:07:40.660 for the U.S. government. Okay. I see your point. Yeah, that they're not all who they say they are.

01:07:48.500 So, I mean, there's no question that this stuff needs to be vetted. This is not exactly, you know,

01:07:52.960 a country that's shown a lot of love toward us and as a, as a rule. And there's a reason that we wound

01:07:58.060 up conducting a war over there because of their harboring terrorists and so on. So yeah, we need to

01:08:04.020 be careful and we're not being careful. I just, I just don't want us to conflate to, I don't want

01:08:09.380 anyone to conflate two separate unrelated issues, which is the, the smaller number of people

01:08:16.340 who rendered long-term meaningful service to the U.S. government and the larger, much larger group

01:08:24.520 of people who are actually being evacuated, whose only common thread is that they want to leave

01:08:29.480 Afghanistan because they've been told if you get on one of these planes, you become an American.

01:08:33.600 And that's part of the reason why you see such a chaotic scene, such a massive humanity

01:08:40.180 at the airport, because don't you think that everyone is figured out by now? As long as when

01:08:44.900 they open the gate, you can rush past and get through that you get, that you're on a road

01:08:49.760 to U.S. citizenship. Don't you think that creates a very big and dangerous pull factor versus the

01:08:55.400 more selective vetting process we'd like to have? So that's, that's the number one issue.

01:08:59.780 But just, but just on the smaller issue of numerically speaking of translators,

01:09:06.520 there's a large continuum of people that were eligible or could be eligible for special

01:09:11.480 immigrant visas. In other words, the, there's people who were riding on convoys who were providing

01:09:16.780 interpretive services, who did this for a number of years and who had great affinity for the U.S.

01:09:22.520 government. And there's other people who, for example, took a six month job doing, doing

01:09:28.860 deliveries in 2007, never intended to apply for SIV, never tried to apply for SIV, never wanted

01:09:34.800 to apply for an SIV. And now, right, are trying to get to the airport to get a special immigrant visa.

01:09:40.640 There's a, there's a wide range of services that are provided to the U.S. government. But, but the,

01:09:45.780 but the tragedy of the moment is that the, the people that you'd want to get out, again, regardless

01:09:51.620 of where you put them, are not the ones that are getting out, not the people that are able to get

01:09:56.420 past the Taliban checkpoint. And so we have to have a reality check here. Biden's failed exit,

01:10:02.800 Biden's botched evacuation, Biden's surrendering control of the city to the Taliban means we're

01:10:08.200 not in control if we get to leave. And that's just the bottom line. Nothing anybody says can

01:10:12.940 ever change that. Don't leave me now. We got more coming up in 60 seconds.

01:10:17.500 I have to ask you a couple of questions about you. Um, you're married, you have a new baby. So

01:10:27.400 congrats on that. I've been thinking about you over the past few years, because I used to have you on

01:10:32.700 the Kelly file all the time and you are always just as smart as you are right now. I mean, just

01:10:36.580 wonder kid, you know, and, and you worked for sessions back then, you knew everything about

01:10:41.900 illegal immigration. And I've always been just a wealth of information on that front. And then I

01:10:45.820 watch you go work for Trump and I watched the media come after you both guns blazing. You know,

01:10:53.880 it was just double barreled assault every day. And then in particular, if you are a hardliner on

01:11:00.860 illegal immigration, as you know, they're going to call you things like a white nationalist and a

01:11:05.680 racist and all that. I mean, that's just what they do. So I was wondering, as I watched all this

01:11:10.500 happen during your time in the Trump white house, cause you're, I know you're tough. I know you're

01:11:16.200 not afraid of fights, but you're human. So did it bother you and does it bother your new wife? And

01:11:24.880 now that you have a child, do you worry about her reading that stuff? Like I just, as a man,

01:11:29.840 how has all of that affected you?

01:11:31.560 Well, there's certainly in our society, a strong incentive structure to just adopt elite opinion

01:11:41.280 on immigration to make your life so much easier. You can get any corporate job, you can get invited

01:11:51.000 if you're into politics onto any entertainment news program, and you can get any job in Washington

01:11:57.640 and life will be very easy for you. But my conscience never allowed that. I understood

01:12:02.100 going into the Trump administration that being a voice for working people of all colors on the subject

01:12:10.400 of immigration and border control, among other issues, of course, was going to cost me a personal

01:12:18.420 price in the form of relentless vilification from the open borders lobby. I wasn't naive.

01:12:27.640 about it. Again, I didn't feel like my conscience allowed me any other choice. We'd made a promise

01:12:31.700 to the American people. We're going to implement a system designed for the benefit, first and foremost,

01:12:37.480 of the people already living here, consistent with U.S. law. What really, and you know this as well,

01:12:46.200 when you see a story that's inaccurate or an outright lie or simply defamatory, of course,

01:12:52.360 it irks you. In other words, you know, you're, you know, you're scrolling through your phone or

01:12:57.160 whatever. And then, you know, a story pops up with some, I mean, you don't like that. But I'll tell

01:13:02.740 you, and now, especially with a, with a young kid, I mean, you certainly do think about that. I can,

01:13:09.500 I can assure you that, you know, we're not going to want to send our daughter to a school

01:13:17.320 where the parents are of the view that, who, that open borders are fabulous, but live in

01:13:26.480 gated communities. We're going to want to send it to a school with normal Americans who have normal

01:13:31.280 thoughts on normal things. But what bothers me really is what it does to young people who want

01:13:40.960 to serve their country in politics. In other words, all the young people in high school and in college

01:13:48.300 who are talented, who believe in America, who believe in the country and its people, who want to

01:13:57.420 go to Washington, who want to go work in Congress, want to go work in the White House, want to go work

01:14:01.700 for it. And they see the way that I am attacked and, and defamed and slandered by the left, by corporate

01:14:13.400 media. When they see that, it dissuades them from going into this line of work, or if they do from

01:14:21.100 taking out this issue. And I think that's kind of the point, right? In other words, they left things

01:14:25.420 that they make an example out of me, that it will scare other people away from doing the right thing, doing

01:14:30.600 what their conscience requires of them. And so that's the thing that really upsets me, because

01:14:38.140 the incentive structure is Republican, go to Washington, go work on tax policy, talk about the

01:14:46.180 deficit a whole bunch, you know, talk about regulations, just don't talk about the culture,

01:14:53.620 don't talk about citizenship, certainly don't talk about immigration. Because if you do, then you're

01:14:58.640 going to pay a price, and you're going to get blacklisted, and you're going to get banned, and you're

01:15:02.120 going to get demonized, and everything else. That's what really bothers me, is the incentive

01:15:06.100 structure it creates. And I see that every day in Washington, where a lot of our most talented young

01:15:10.760 people don't even want to get involved with this issue. Whereas on the other side, the world's your

01:15:15.780 oyster. People just throw money at you. You know, Mark Zuckerberg just write you a check to help

01:15:20.380 destroy the country. And I think that's really unfortunate. And look, you see it right now in this

01:15:25.400 conversation we're having about Afghanistan. You know, there's an environment of fear. There's an

01:15:30.800 environment where people feel like they can't ask legitimate questions about what Biden's program

01:15:38.640 of unrestricted resettlement from Afghanistan into our cities. Can your school afford enough

01:15:43.740 translators to pay for all the new students? Who's going to fund that? Is there enough available public

01:15:50.520 housing in your community in the middle of a pandemic? What's it going to do to our public

01:15:54.400 safety? All these questions could be openly discussed and debated. I mean, there's a reason

01:15:58.780 why our NATO allies, you know, there's supposedly a NATO mission in Afghanistan, supposedly, right?

01:16:04.520 There's a reason why our NATO allies aren't raising their hands to take anybody, right? That tells you

01:16:09.060 something, doesn't it? What it means is that we don't have an honest dialogue in this country

01:16:13.060 because of that fear factor, because people think they're going to be attacked and demeaned,

01:16:18.180 then it's just not worth it. Just keep saying about taxes. Marginal tax rate.

01:16:23.440 It's true. No, I mean, they use, they use, they definitely use those words to silence,

01:16:30.440 to intimidate. Instead of engaging on the ideas and with the facts, it's much easier to call names

01:16:36.340 and hope the other person is shamed into silence. And this is a fraught issue, you know, for anybody

01:16:42.400 who takes it on. I hope you'll forgive me for asking you about this hateful book about you,

01:16:47.620 because I just want to give you the chance to weigh in on it. It's, it's literally called

01:16:50.700 hate monger. So this is not a, this is not an attempt to be objective by this woman,

01:16:56.780 Jean Guerrero. It's about you. It's not a nice book. I'll give you the audience, just a sample.

01:17:02.980 She says Trump and Stephen Miller packed the hate that fuels white terrorism and sold it like cotton

01:17:09.880 candy at an amusement park. And she goes through, and I just, I want to give you the chance to respond

01:17:15.820 to the one piece where she claims that you, you were pushing white nationalist website articles

01:17:23.840 from the, from a website called V dare. And that you push this book, the camp of the saints,

01:17:30.980 which is all about, you know, how Brown people are beasts and so on. And it's, and are going to take

01:17:36.720 over the world against white people. This is her, her quote, best evidence that you are this white

01:17:43.080 nationalist, that you are this person. She, she portrays in the, in the title as hate monger

01:17:48.900 with that sort of intro. What, what did you think of her book? And, and what do you say to those

01:17:55.780 claims in particular about the, like the, the websites and that book? Well, first of all, I have

01:18:01.280 not, I've not read the book. I'm certainly not familiar with the author and had enough time and

01:18:09.220 money. Obviously would love to be able to pursue a defamation lawsuit, but I'm too busy actually

01:18:16.500 trying to do positive things for my country. The reality is I have been in the public life and the

01:18:24.940 public eye for many years now. And all of my emails, all of my statements, public, private, recorded,

01:18:35.500 eavesdropped, everything have all been public and parsed over with a fine tooth comb for the last

01:18:45.180 six years. If you think about it for a moment, all of the pieces or some, I would say they've been

01:18:51.680 written about me. You've seen some of the hit pieces on MSNBC or on CNN or elsewhere. Ask yourself

01:18:59.360 this question, Megan, have you ever seen in all that time, one quote ever, one statement ever

01:19:08.980 produced from me in quotation marks from me that has been objectionable? Think about it. You did the

01:19:16.100 research for this interview. Did you actually ask me about, well, here's this quote from you, explain

01:19:21.280 this quote. Here's the statement from you. There's not a single solitary quote screen anywhere in any of

01:19:28.420 these segments ever saying, aha, here's the quote. Here's the quote from Stephen. Look at this quote.

01:19:34.400 Defend this quote because it doesn't exist. It doesn't exist. And the fact that you, that you

01:19:41.760 would forward an article from websites like these, right? Like this book, I haven't read the camp of

01:19:47.480 the saints, but you know, the fact that you would say, Hey, compare what's happening in the country to

01:19:51.740 what happened in that book that it's, you're right. Cause we actually went back. We did. I had my team go

01:19:56.780 back. I said, go. Yeah. I just, honestly, I don't pay that close attention when they're calling

01:20:00.880 everybody in the Trump white house, white, wet nationalists. Cause they say about everybody.

01:20:04.400 It's like, that's their, their way of shutting you up. So in preparation for today, I went back and I

01:20:08.800 said, all right, well, let's see what he actually sent. And I see the citation to the websites, but

01:20:13.760 you're talking about immigration policy. It's, it's about, um, the, the one article was never let a crisis

01:20:20.760 go to waste Mexico's hurricane, Patricia and temporary protected status. Um, it, we were

01:20:27.100 talking about articles that should appear in Breitbart with another person there. People can

01:20:32.060 look it up for themselves, but yeah, that the quotes themselves, I don't think are as much of the issues

01:20:36.320 as the citation of the sources, the statement, the accusation from a handful of insane people

01:20:43.380 that I am a white nationalist or other various smears are detestable and execrable lies that I've

01:20:54.260 repeatedly rebutted. I'm a Jewish American. I'm not even ethnically white, but I am Jewish. That's

01:21:00.640 my ethnicity. I try not to spend a lot of my time responding to psychos and delusional conspiracy

01:21:06.480 theorists. Don't think it's a good use of my time. I don't think it's a good use of your time or your

01:21:11.460 audience's time. The, the reality is that everything that I've ever done in my entire life is to make

01:21:20.280 this country a better place for all the people who are living here with every race, color, religion,

01:21:24.960 and creed and open borders is immoral monstrosity as we have discussed today. And it is one of the

01:21:36.980 gravest atrocities that is happening to our country today and has for many years, except when President

01:21:43.620 Trump was in office. And there are those who, for a wide variety of reasons, some financial,

01:21:50.620 some seeking fame, some seeking power, some just because they're extremists, who want open borders

01:21:57.320 at any cost, at any price, no matter how many people get killed, no matter how many people suffer,

01:22:01.800 no matter how much money is shuffled hand over fist into coyotes and cartels, and they'll smear and

01:22:09.900 defame anybody who gets in their way. And the fact is, if I wasn't doing the right thing, if I wasn't

01:22:18.360 being effective, if I wasn't making a stand on principle for American citizens, they wouldn't be

01:22:24.920 attacking me. And that's really what it comes down to. Now, look, I'm not going to, I've not read,

01:22:31.060 I have no intention of reading all of these insane conspiratorial things that have been said and

01:22:38.540 written about me. But let's just be very clear. The thousands upon thousands upon thousands of my

01:22:44.860 emails from when I was a staffer in the Senate have been made public. And out of those thousands

01:22:50.980 and thousands and thousands of emails, sharing links from every single publication under the sign,

01:22:56.020 somebody said, Oh, well, you shared a link in this article, without endorsing it or making any

01:23:01.700 comment about it. Answer for that. I couldn't possibly tell you as I sit here today, what the

01:23:08.800 backstory was for why a link was sent without any surrounding context or comment. It'd be impossible

01:23:15.980 to know. All I can tell you is that my entire life has been devoted to the cause of egalitarianism.

01:23:24.000 My entire life has been devoted to the cause of equality under the law. My entire life has been

01:23:29.000 devoted to protecting people in this country, no matter where they come from, no matter where their

01:23:33.900 ancestors come from, no matter what they look like. Any claim to the contrary is wildly defamatory,

01:23:38.860 completely outrageous. And the fact is that all of my private emails were made public and they

01:23:49.760 couldn't find one objectionable statement. Who could pass that test, Megan? Well, you're frankly in

01:23:57.000 good company because Larry Elder, the sage of South Central, a black man now trying to oust Gavin

01:24:04.380 Newsom as the governor of California. He he was written up as a, quote, white nationalist by the

01:24:10.500 L.A. Times, an outrageous smear because he doesn't toe the right line when it comes to BLM and race

01:24:18.320 issues that have now exploded in the country. So it's you know, we see it done to anybody who

01:24:23.480 doesn't sort of toe the right line on these things that have become doctrine amongst the established

01:24:28.660 left. And it to me, it's just it's it's painful because. I see how it's used as a tool and it's

01:24:36.320 like they use it so often that they really undermine the times that they want to use it and they really

01:24:41.700 want us to pay attention. You know what I mean? It used to be when you use that word, certainly at

01:24:45.340 the terms of white nationalist, people would say, oh, my God, who what do you do? Right. You'd be

01:24:50.060 horrified. Now it's like, OK, it's like the guy who used to host The Bachelor was called that because

01:24:55.820 he defended that one contestant on and on it goes. Anyway, I got to ask about Larry Elder because I

01:25:01.160 had him on the show. He had wonderful things to say about you. He was very proud to count you as a

01:25:06.480 mentee. And now he has a legitimate shot that his numbers in California are getting better by the day.

01:25:16.500 And it seems to me that Gavin Newsom is starting to get worried and certainly the media starting to get

01:25:21.180 worried about the possibility of a governor elder. So what do you think is likely to happen

01:25:27.620 in that race? And I should say the odds are overwhelming stacked against him, given the

01:25:32.580 demographic makeup of California Democrats, Democrats. But it could happen.

01:25:37.320 Well, it's going to be a very close run thing. The the governor in California is extremely.

01:25:44.320 Well, the governor in California is under extreme heat right now for all of his decisions related to

01:25:51.780 the economy, relating to the pandemic, relating to homelessness, related to crime, relating to the

01:25:56.100 issue you can imagine that affects the quality of life of people living in California. But as you

01:26:01.500 mentioned, also, the Democrats have a massive registration advantage. So we'll see what happens. But I'm hoping and

01:26:07.800 praying that the recall is successful and that Larry Elder is the next governor of California. And

01:26:15.320 ultimately, if that happens, it'll be a safer and more prosperous and more secure state for all the

01:26:20.140 people living there. But again, to your point, whether it's Larry Elder, whether it's me, whether

01:26:27.040 it's I'm sure many people that we both would consider mutual friends, the left engages in ruthless

01:26:34.240 demonization of people, character assassination of the worst kind, to try to advance their ideological

01:26:41.580 and political objectives. And all I have done as a staffer, as an aide in Washington, D.C., is fight to

01:26:52.140 save American lives from open borders, fight to save children from being killed by opioids, fight to

01:26:59.140 save families from having a loved one stolen by MS-13, fight to ensure good working conditions, good

01:27:05.720 wages, good living conditions, good health care for families of all colors and backgrounds. And for

01:27:12.880 that, for that, I've been attacked by people who've never once in their life that anything, they get

01:27:21.440 innocent people hurt. Just like happening today, congratulations. Because the policies that you

01:27:27.780 have pushed for to the open borders radicals, the policies that you have pushed for, that your

01:27:33.760 friends are now adopting in the Department of Homeland Security, are getting innocent people raped and

01:27:39.300 murdered. That's your doing. You're separating families by the tens of thousands. You're pushing

01:27:47.360 children into labor trafficking and sex trafficking. You're filling the coffers of organizations that

01:27:53.360 have no regard for human life. You are committing a moral atrocity every single day. You have no podium

01:28:00.680 to stand on. You have no soapbox to stand on to lecture me about anything. People don't know it because

01:28:07.280 the press doesn't write it up that way. You know, it's this really, in part, is largely blamable on the

01:28:13.360 media. The media doesn't write about illegal immigration in this way at all. So people,

01:28:18.760 good-meaning people, well-meaning people who really just want to be informed are regularly

01:28:23.720 misinformed on issues like this because they don't understand that they're, the stats that you just

01:28:29.420 gave us, you know, how dangerous it is, the crime that's caused. We have, yeah, I mean, we have,

01:28:35.440 in a given year before Biden, ICE removes 2,000 people from the interior who have been charged or

01:28:44.620 convicted of homicide. Think about that. In a typical year, ICE removes, so that means they have to,

01:28:52.580 this is the people, it's just the people they find, right? Just the people they find. ICE removes 2,000

01:28:57.840 people for taking another human life who are here illegally year after year after year after year,

01:29:09.380 and those are just the ones we catch. I had to look those families in the eye during the campaign.

01:29:17.880 I had the privilege of getting to look them in the eye and promise, as our president did,

01:29:23.580 that we would fight for them, and we did. The families that lost their loved ones,

01:29:27.760 they'll never see them again. And the parents who have a kid, 16 years old, goes to school,

01:29:34.980 gets a cheap, lethal narcotic that was smuggled across the border. Maybe he gets a narcotic that's

01:29:41.080 laced with fentanyl, ODs and dies simply because we wouldn't enforce our laws. We wouldn't protect

01:29:48.940 our people. We wouldn't protect our citizens. I can give you a thousand examples, a million examples.

01:29:55.260 Not to mention, you hear stories like this all the time. A guy is running a small construction

01:29:59.740 firm in Texas. He says, I do everything right. I only hire legal workers. I use E-Verify. I check

01:30:05.460 everyone's paperwork. I check everyone's documentation. I hire U.S. citizens and legal immigrants to do the

01:30:11.340 job here in Texas, and I provide a good living wage. But I'm going out of business because my

01:30:16.980 competition hires legal workers. So I have to lay off American citizens. I have to lay off legal

01:30:22.400 Hispanic immigrant workers who've lived here for 20 years because I follow the rules. I do it the

01:30:28.940 right way, and I lose my business. I lose my home. I lay off my employees. How is that just? How is that

01:30:36.380 fair? What kind of upside-down society takes away someone's living for doing the right thing?

01:30:42.620 All right. Now, this is one of the reasons why you were voted most outspoken

01:30:45.160 in your high school. I think the audience gets it, that you are not a shrinking violet,

01:30:51.720 and that's a good thing. I got to end on politics because, you know, the $64,000 question is about

01:30:58.220 your old boss and whether he's likely to run again for the 2024 nomination for the presidency.

01:31:05.120 What's your gut? You know him better than most of us. What's your gut tell you?

01:31:08.580 Well, I am not going to make any news here today. All I can say is that the 45th president,

01:31:18.480 President Trump, is very engaged in the news of the day. Anyone who's following his statements can

01:31:24.360 tell you. He's very, very active in speaking out about all the issues that are happening right now,

01:31:30.680 especially Afghanistan. And he is very, very focused on the upcoming midterm elections and endorsing

01:31:40.280 candidates that he believes are going to be critical in pushing back against the Biden agenda.

01:31:47.460 And so we'll see what happens after that. But I will say this, and I really want to

01:31:52.900 close on this note, which is that getting to work for President Trump to effectuate these policies

01:32:03.540 was the greatest honor of my life. And I'm so proud every day of what we did to make life better and

01:32:11.200 safer for our people, not just on the border, though certainly there, but supporting our police and law

01:32:17.880 enforcement, supporting our union workers whose jobs are being exported to China, supporting our energy

01:32:25.660 workers whose jobs are being exported to OPEC, supporting our citizens who are suffering from

01:32:34.340 severe illnesses that we can now treat through legislation like Right to Try, supporting low-income

01:32:41.280 workers with rising wages and rising incomes and a record jobs market, all the things, and so much

01:32:49.960 more that we had a chance to do, including bringing stability and security to the Middle East. It truly was

01:32:56.160 the greatest honor of my life. And I understand and I've always understood that if you step into the arena,

01:33:02.140 people will comb over every little piece of your life from the moment you were born to find some

01:33:09.060 little threat to hurt you, to try to embarrass you, to try to lie about you. But the reality is that I've already

01:33:17.220 had the chance to do things that most people could only ever dream of. So it really isn't about me. But if

01:33:25.860 there's somebody out there today, who's in high school or in college or just graduated from college, my message to

01:33:32.580 them is don't worry about yourself. If you do the right thing, if you're clear in your own conscience,

01:33:39.060 if you believe that what you're doing is right for your country and your countrymen, that's all that

01:33:45.680 matters. Your eyes will rest very easy and you will be a very happy person. And if you're lucky like

01:33:51.960 me, you'll fall in love and you'll get married and you'll have a kid of your own and hopefully more on

01:33:57.340 the way. That's all that matters in life. Don't do the easy thing. Don't do the convenient thing.

01:34:02.140 Do the right thing and you'll be happy and you'll be fulfilled.

01:34:05.520 Look, I'm thrilled that you are working on this new project and that you have a good wife and a sweet

01:34:12.120 baby. And that gives you such a different perspective on everything and just dwarfs the concerns you had

01:34:19.480 about yourself and all that once you become a parent. And you're a young man. You're only 35 years

01:34:24.660 old. Is that true? 35, right? Good gracious. I just, so this is my, um, this is my, uh, my birthday

01:34:31.500 week, if you will. Um, I just turned, I just turned 36. And so I am, uh, very, very excited to

01:34:40.640 see what, uh, my wife got me for my birthday. Listen, I, I think it's amazing what you've

01:34:45.180 accomplished in your young, in your young time. I feel like the sky's the limit for you and I can't

01:34:49.620 wait to see what you're going to do next. It's been absolutely fascinating and enlightening.

01:34:55.300 Stephen Miller, great to catch up again. Thank you so much. Look forward to talking again soon.

01:35:03.660 Don't miss the show on Thursday. We've got Michael Shermer, a professional skeptic and the founder of

01:35:09.540 Skeptic Magazine on conspiracy theories everywhere. Why they're so ubiquitous right now. And if you knew

01:35:17.280 somebody, if you know somebody who's fallen under the spell of some weird conspiracy story in the

01:35:23.080 news or on the internet, how do you get him out of it? Is it even possible? Loved our discussion. He's

01:35:28.680 next. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. No BS, no agenda and no fear. The Megan Kelly show

01:35:38.360 is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

01:35:47.280 No BS. Thanks.

01:35:52.780 There we go.

01:35:55.100 There we go.

01:36:01.560 There we go.

01:36:03.960 There we go.

01:36:05.120 A field of pain that numbers are just STEM一 through this.

01:36:09.860 No problem.

01:36:10.900 There we go.

01:36:11.900 It's QUESTION THREE

01:36:13.280 fi parlors.

01:36:14.160 There we go.

01:36:15.040 There we go.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 30, 2021

Stephen Miller on Biden’s Terror Response, the Border Crisis, and Trump 2024 ｜ Ep. 152

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