This week, we’re proud to share the pilot season of a new podcast made by students at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. It’s called The Stakes Explained. Each episode tries to make sense of the executive orders that continue to flood out of the Oval Office.
On today's show about immigration:
- Shereen Marisol Meraji interviews David Hausman, professor at Berkeley Law School and head of the Deportation Data Project
- José Velazquez interviews alum Madeline Bair, award-winning journalist and founder of El Tímpano, a nonprofit local news organization that serves Spanish speakers and Mam speakers
- Daniela Sandoval interviews Cristina Mora, the author of Making Hispanics: How activists, bureaucrats, and media constructed a new American.
BAY MADE: THE STAKES EXPLAINED, EPISODE 2 (TRANSCRIPT)
DAVID BOYER: You're listening to Bay Made, a mix of local stories and storytellers from the Bay Area, only on KALW. I'm DAVID BOYER. Each week on the show, we spotlight a different Bay Area producer or podcast. You may hear things you totally agree with and some stuff that you don't. That is the point of the show to share a range of perspectives, ideas and stories that reflect the diversity of the Bay Area. This week, we are proud to share the pilot season of a podcast made by the students at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. It's called The Stakes Explained. Each episode tries to make sense of the executive orders and actions that continue to flood out of the Oval Office.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: Thank you, Mr. Boyer, I appreciate you. I'll take it from here. I'm SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI, a KALW board member and journalism professor at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. And The Stakes Explained is a podcast series that came out of my race and journalism seminar this past spring. When President Trump issued a wave of executive orders, many of them touching on race and civil rights, I encouraged my students to talk to experts here at UC Berkeley to better understand what those orders could mean for our democracy.
If you want to hear the full Stakes Explained origin story, check out yesterday's episode.
But on today's show, we're focusing on immigration. And because so much has happened on the immigration front over the past couple of weeks, this episode needed an update.
So I grabbed a brilliant legal mind from UC Berkeley Law and brought him into The Stakes Explained studio at UC Berkeley journalism.
DAVID HAUSMAN: Hi, I'm DAVID HAUSMAN. I teach law at Berkeley Law School, and I run the Deportation Data Project, which collects and makes public, information about immigration enforcement in the United States.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: As an immigration enforcement expert, somebody who researches immigration enforcement, what's keeping you up at night?
DAVID HAUSMAN: What I always want to know is what's new and what's the same. So until recently, the numbers we were seeing in immigration enforcement, while they had gone up a lot since the end of the Biden administration, weren't higher than the numbers we saw during President Obama's first term. I constantly want to know whether that's changing, whether the administration is succeeding in realizing its logistical plans to increase arrests, to increase detentions, to increase deportation flights. What's new here? How different are things?
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: What IS new?
DAVID HAUSMAN: In a way, the thing that's most new is that we can't keep track of what's new. That there have been so many policy changes and it's really hard to keep track. Of which ones are really important and which ones actually don't matter very much.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: All right, so we're going go back in time to late January. President Trump signed an executive order titled “protecting the American people against invasion.” That executive order looked like it broadened the definition of criminal behavior to include anybody who's here without documentation? Is that your interpretation of the executive order?
DAVID HAUSMAN: It's broadly right that what that order did was make it open season for federal immigration officials to arrest anybody they found who they thought could be removed from the United States.
So the way immigration enforcement traditionally practically has worked is that when ICE arrests people, it doesn't really go arrest people on the street. Instead, it goes into local jails, state prisons, sometimes federal prisons, and transfers those who are already being held there, to ICE custody.
Sometimes those people don't have criminal convictions. They might've just been arrested on suspicion of a crime. They might have even been arrested for just a traffic offense. That's common. ICE vastly prefers to arrest people who are already being locked up because it's so much easier for ICE to do that.
And so this order really broadens the scope of immigration enforcement. And it also suggests that immigration enforcement is really going to change in terms of the kinds of arrests that ICE is going to make and where those are going to happen. And I think we've actually seen that start, especially over the last couple of weeks, where there have been many more arrests out in the community and what we're seeing is a public reaction against that because that's not what people are used to.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: So when people are a little bit confused and they're seeing what's happening right now and they are saying, wow, we thought President Trump was just going to deport people with criminal records, what would you say to them?
DAVID HAUSMAN: I would say it was always a false promise that President Trump could conduct mass deportations of people convicted of crimes. There just aren't very many non-citizens convicted of crime in the United States. So this idea that you could have mass deportation of criminals is nonsense. In addition, very few crimes in relative terms are committed by non-citizens. So, the idea that crime... If you're concerned about crime, which is a real problem in the world, the idea that you would address that through the immigration system is also magical thinking. Because if you entered the US on a visa and you overstayed it, that's not a crime. It's a civil infraction. There's no crime there whatsoever. Entering the US between ports of entry is a minor misdemeanor. For many of the people who are here, the statute of limitations has run, so they couldn't be charged with that crime. Very, very few people are charged or have been charged with that crime because it wasn't understood in any kind of popular way as a crime. Deportation is generally a civil process. So when somebody is deported from the United States, that's not a criminal process. And what that means is you don't get criminal protections either. You don't get a trial before a real judge. You instead get a proceeding in immigration court, which is just a part of the Department of Justice. And the judge there is an official who works for the executive branch.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI:Something that I've been thinking about while watching this most recent news is how these arrests are happening in sanctuary cities. Los Angeles is a sanctuary city. San Francisco is a Sanctuary city. Does this moniker sanctuary city, does it hold any weight?
DAVID HAUSMAN: Yeah, I think the term sanctuary city is really confusing actually because a sanctuary city has never meant that the government can't come in and arrest a non-citizen on the street. It's always been the case that the federal government is able to do that when it has lawful suspicion.
So what a sanctuary City instead does is it limits voluntary cooperation between a local government. And it's actually usually the county rather than the city. It's usually about the sheriff who runs the county jail. And specifically, I mentioned before, that ICE's favorite kind of arrest is an arrest of somebody who's already locked up. It's those kinds of arrests that sanctuary policies make a little more difficult. Because the way ICE likes to do this best is to send what's called a detainer request to the local jail, which says you hold this person for 48 hours beyond when they otherwise would be released. And that way, we ICE will have plenty of time to come and transfer this person to our custody.
And sanctuary cities say, no, we don't want to spend our own resources holding people for extra time for your immigration purposes. If you want to come arrest this person, you can do so, but we're not going to help you out. And that's really what a sanctuary policy is mostly about. And so that's why it doesn't do anything to stop. ICE agents from conducting arrests in public places in sanctuary cities.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: Birthright citizenship. There was the executive order that said, hey, we're gonna get rid of birthright citizenship, legal experts were like, there's no way that can possibly happen! That's coming back up in these conversations as people are watching ICE agents arrest people in ways that they hadn't before. Is this something that we should pay attention to?
DAVID HAUSMAN:Birthright citizenship is something that the Supreme Court will agree is in the 14th amendment. I don't think that there's any reasonable chance that the Supreme Court would agree with the administration's frankly pretty outlandish interpretation that would upend the century and a half of law here.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: So if people are going to prioritize what they're worried about, are you saying that goes lower on the priority list?
DAVID HAUSMAN: I would worry less about that and more about new arrests, more about attempts to deport people without any process.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: It is confusing to know what due process is.
DAVID HAUSMAN: The Supreme Court has said that due process rights stretch farther and less far in different contexts. Everybody who's in the U.S., on U. S. Soil, very clearly has due process right. That comes from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which just says you can't be deprived of your liberty without due process. And it says persons, doesn't say citizens, it says, persons.
Anybody in the US has due-process rights. And there's a whole body of case law about exactly what due process means in terms of the right to a lawyer. Courts haven't required the government to pay for people's lawyers in deportation proceedings. So unlike in the criminal system where you get a public defender, in the immigration system there's no right to lawyer at government expense. But there is a right, and this is a right that's guaranteed by due process, to bring your own lawyer.
Now, one thing people are often referring to is the way the Alien Enemies Act was used to deport people with no procedure at all.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: …The Venezuelan nationals, for example, who were taken and put in CECOT in El Salvador, one of the most infamous prisons in the world.
DAVID HAUSMAN: That is certainly unprecedented. It's also unprecedented, at least in any recent decade, to use immigration enforcement squarely to try to suppress speech. So the use of deportation proceedings in order to punish peaceful protest, that is new. And I think it's also a mistake to see that as related to immigration. That's instead about trying to suppress peaceful protest.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: This feels very chaotic and I actually don't understand how the government is tracking all of this.
DAVID HAUSMAN: The government does really have to track each time it arrests somebody, each time it books that person into a detention center, each time it moves that person from one detention center to another, and every deportation flight. The government has that information because it has to, otherwise it couldn't conduct these operations at all. And that's also the source of the data that we seek at the Deportation Data Project, which is these government datasets. Which are subject to the Freedom of Information Act once personal information has been stripped away from them.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: Has the government been playing ball?
DAVID HAUSMAN: The Freedom of Information Act FOIA process is really backlogged. As a result, if you want to get a swift response from the government, you often have to sue the government and we've done that. We got one update back in March that goes through mid February. We are hoping for another update soon.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: Well, David, thank you.
DAVID HAUSMAN: Thanks so much for having me.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: You've been listening to UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Law, DAVID HAUSMAN on The Stakes Explained. David runs the Deportation Data Project.
The project collects and posts U.S. Immigration enforcement data sets that's at deportationdata.org. The Stake Explained is a multimedia series from UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism where reporters interview campus experts, journalists, and community members to unpack what's at stake for our democracy.
Next up, reporter José Velasquez wanted to know how to report on immigration issues for immigrant communities. So we brought MADELEINE BLAIR into the Stakes studio.
Madeleines is the creator of El Tímpano, which means eardrum in Spanish.
JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ: All right, so we're here with Madeline Bair, award-winning journalist and founder of El Tímpano, a nonprofit local news organization that serves Spanish speakers and Mam speakers, which is a Mayan dialect. You’re also an alumni of the school, so welcome back.
MADELEINE BLAIR: Thank you.
JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ: How does it feel to be back, first of all?
MADELEINE BLAIR: Oh, it always feels great to be here. [00:13:03][1.1]
JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ: And then, just going straight into it, what was your inspiration for founding El Tímpano? Did you see that something was lacking for Spanish speakers and MAM speakers, or was it your experience in Oakland?
MADELEINE BLAIR:You know, I think it goes back to my own personal and professional history. I actually got my start in journalism in youth media when I was a kid growing up in Oakland. And youth media really trains you to, you know, not only learn kind of the tools and skills of journalism, but also really to analyze media and think about whose perspectives are portrayed in the media, whose are left out, who does media serve, how does media sometimes perpetuate harm. And so those are questions that I continue to carry with me as I wound up pursuing a career in journalism.
I was always really interested in equity in media and growing up in Oakland, my community was always very diverse and I never saw that diversity really reflected in journalism, I've always really tried to carry forth those questions. How can journalism better portray and better serve the diversity of our communities? I'm not Latina. I'm not an immigrant myself, but I wound up falling in love in New York City and marrying into a Latino immigrant family.
As an English speaker, as a college graduate, as someone with a smartphone, I had so much more access to quality news and information and so many options as compared to my in-laws who had been living in New York for decades and had very few sources of quality news and information that they could turn to.
JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ: And so you saw that that was lacking for people here in the Bay Area? Just because this is very interesting to me… how were you ever to identify the Mayan diaspora here? Cause I think you actually really need to be in these communities to really recognize that that's part of it too.
MADELEINE BLAIR: The idea that I had of starting El Tímpano really expanded and was shaped by community input. So, I had this inkling from the experience of my in-laws, from what I saw, that there was a gap here in the Bay Area. And I moved back to the Bay area at the start of 2017. But I wanted to check my assumptions.
I'm not from Oakland's Latino immigrant community. I spent nearly a year just meeting with community leaders, asking them, do you see that there's a gap? What is that gap? How would you like to see local media better serve or better reflect the communities that you're from or that you serve? And every single person I talked to said, yes, there's huge need. And I'm so grateful so many of them extended a hand to help me then kind of continue to pursue these questions. And then from there, we created a survey and spoke to hundreds of immigrants to hear directly from them what issues are most important to you.
So in that process, there were a lot of introductions that were made and the then branch manager of the Cesar Chavez Library said, you know, Madeleine, you need to speak with this guy, Henry Salas. He's pursuing a lot of these same questions, but for the Mayan Mam community. And so... I met this amazing young community leader, Henry, who's from the Oakland's Indigenous Mayan community and had really been trying to fill gaps, as well, in terms of providing more news, connecting people to resources that they need. And he's the first person who really opened up my eyes and made me see that if there's a need, particularly with Spanish-speaking immigrants, the need is so much greater for Mam Mayan-speaking immigrants.
JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ: Big, polarizing topic: immigration. As we all know, President Trump was able to use this topic in his campaign to successfully win the presidency, again. I know El Tímpano started around his first administration. What differences do you see now in news coverage compared to back then?
MADELEINE BLAIR: When I was first starting El Tímpano, and I shared with you, you know what, I was listening to a lot of immigrants themselves to hear what they want to see in local media.
And one of the most common responses that we heard from people was, I just avoid news because it just covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can actually use to take action. And I'm sure we can all relate to that. The news is depressing, it's frightening. Especially in times like this, I want to avoid the news too. Yet that sort of news avoidance can also leave people vulnerable. Vulnerable to disinformation, vulnerable to just making decisions based on fear rather than based on quality information or certainty about how to navigate political changes.
And so, El Tímpano has really, we've really designed our work so that it can provide people with information that actually connects them to resources or to pathways to take action.
There has been more discussion since then in our industry as a whole of news avoidance, of what leads to that, of how we as journalists can actually equip people with information that is empowering or that helps them find solutions, or helps them navigate uncertainty, but it's certainly not part of the mainstream. It's certainly not ingrained in how our industry works.
JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ: Do you have advice for reporters attempting to cover immigration? Me, myself, I'm trying to do that.
MADELEINE BLAIR: Yeah I would say I think there are two particularly challenging things to navigate. One is what we were just talking about, is the the fear and how can we report on these issues without perpetuating fear because that is actually an objective of this administration, to really broadcast this idea of massive deportations and of really attacking immigrant communities and just using the fear tactic as a weapon in and of itself.
But then another issue is the safety of the community members that we serve and who are in many times sources for our reporting. So El Tímpano’s newsroom created new policies, source protection policies.
So right now our reporters carry postcards when they go out to report.
That they use to talk with potential sources so that those sources understand, you know, basic things like what does it mean to speak to a reporter, that they have rights. They can decide at any moment to not speak with us or to tell us that, you now, this is off record. It also explains what does it mean to be off record, what does that mean to be on record. Sometimes those are terms that, as journalists, we throw around and just assume that everyone knows, but most people on a day-to-day basis... have never actually spoken to a journalist and don't really know what those terms mean. So we don't want to take that for granted.
And then we also take the identification of our sources very sensitively, particularly under this administration, just knowing that identifying people as undocumented immigrants can be a risk factor. We go to lengths to not identify sources that are suggested to be undocumented. We only use first name, we often change that name. This is very different, you know, it's very different from editors who want to know anything and everything about a source.
But then I think another thing that we've found that wasn't really on my mind when I started El Tímpano, but I've seen this impact from hearing from our audience, it provides a sense of belonging for people to see their own stories reflected in the news. There's a real impact in that, it's kind of hard to measure, but people have really thanked El Tímpano for providing a listening ear. And I think particularly at a time when there is so much dehumanization of immigrants, it is so important for people to know that they belong and that their story matters.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: You've been listening to MADELEINE BLAIR, a journalist and founder of El Tímpano, a nonprofit newsroom designed to engage and amplify the voices of the Latino and Mayan immigrants of Oakland. She was speaking with reporter JOSÉ VELAZQUEZ.
And our final interview today is with CRISTINA MORA, the author of Making Hispanics: How activists, bureaucrats, and media constructed a new American.
She's being interviewed by Berkeley journalism grad student and reporter, DANIELA SANDOVAL.
CRISTINA MORA: My name is CRISTINA MORA and I'm a professor of sociology and the co-director of the Institute of Governmental Studies here at UC Berkeley.
DANIELA SANDOVAL:Well, CRISTINA MORA, thank you so much for joining me at The Stakes Explained. With so many executive orders and policies targeting immigration, I'm just wondering, do you think Donald Trump is targeting Latinos, keeping in mind that the vast majority of the immigrant demographic is from Mexico?
CRISTINA MORA: I mean, in 2016, he said Mexicans are criminals and rapists, and he has never really backed down from that. So it's hard for us to imagine that many of these executive orders don't have the idea of the Mexican immigrant criminal, rapist sort of stereotype at their center. In very many ways, the executive orders are affecting Latinos disproportionately. At the core of this is also a sense of belonging. My parents are immigrants, and I've written about this in other places, growing up as Mexican-American in L.A. Often felt like growing up erased and invisibilized, even though everybody else looked like me. And part of that is because even though Hollywood is in LA., even though LA, even back in the 90s, had a significant, if not close to a majority of Latinos in the city. You would never see us in media, in positions of power, in politics, even in journalism, even in the stories that were written about us.
So a friend of mine said it's almost like growing up in a house where all of the family pictures don't have you in them.
DANIELA SANDOVAL: Belonging, I feel, plays an extremely important and pivotal role in how we as Latinos perceive ourselves. And I'm curious to get your insights about the Latino electorate in this past election. There was an uptick of support for Donald Trump from certain segments in the Latino electorate. What does that say in relation to belonging and even beyond?
CRISTINA MORA: I don't know how to make complete sense of this myself too, in part because we don't have all the voter files in, we don't have the best analyzes in, and hot takes are really easy to come about. I mean, watching the election results come in and seeing just in general news channel after general news channel, panelists, five, six, seven of them all talking about the Latino vote and not a single one of them were Latino, all having a very strong opinion that somehow Latinos had delivered the election or somehow Latinos have come to make themselves known against the Democratic party.
What I tend to think right now is true is that certainly there was an increase in support. I don't think it was more than what George W. Bush got in 2004. And I also think that there was an important gender dynamic here at play. Latinas consistently are less likely to translate their economic anxieties of the moment that they might be feeling into anti-immigrant sentiment. These two things don't coalesce for them. As much as they do for Latino males. And we might ask ourselves a bunch of things. We might ask ourselves about whether this is a question of belonging. We might be asking ourselves is the question of racialized labor markets that create one segment of a Latino male population in competition with the immigrant Latino male population. Labor market opportunities for Latinos in general, you know, have long been limited. Because of the lack of access to resources that would place Latinos in general in higher education categories that would then open up broader labor market opportunities, which makes me all the more curious about Latinas, right? How is it that they have escaped or evaded this?
DANIELA SANDOVAL: With the current administration, there's a lot of rhetoric about assimilation. What do you think it means to this administration?
CRISTINA MORA:I would say that these arguments about assimilation and who's assimilating successfully and who is not are often a big smokescreen to hide underlying sense of who is not worthy to be here.
And a broader discourse of assimilation is probably going to be more dog So politics that we see here, and this is why. Survey after survey for decade after decade has long shown, for example, that Latinos come to speak English, want to speak English. Latinos have the same want and desire to be homeowners, want and desire to have a higher education, and want and desire to have social mobility. I'm not sure I would place much stock in these hard definitions of assimilation, in fact, because they're probably often smoke screens or dog whistles.
And they're based not on three decades of data that we have now on attitudes, values, and mobility processes, but probably much more on political agendas.
DANIELA SANDOVAL: What is it like to be an academic studying issues that are right in the crosshairs of the Trump administration?
CRISTINA MORA: It is very odd to be the child of immigrants, to walk the halls that many of our communities have never been able to walk through, to sit in spaces that my grandmother, my mother, my great-grandmother would never have dreamed of, to contribute to the academic canon, to do everything one can to collect the data systematically, rigorously. In a way that can contribute to our overall universal knowledge. To have dedicated upwards of 20 years to this and suddenly arrive at a place in which perhaps data doesn't matter anymore. Perhaps the basis of these conversations are being questioned, and the values of our institutions are subject to outside forces. The university and academia has never been a perfect space. It has always been a space of othering, especially for communities that have not historically seen themselves here. And at the same time, it has also, especially public education, been a beautiful space of transformation and niches of belonging for many. It has been a place that has protected the conversations that have been allowed in so many other places. And so If I get emotional, I think it's just an odd configuration of what it's like to finally get into the places, finally teach the classes at a moment when it feels that even the institutions that we have love-hate relationships with are under attack and some days seem on the verge of unraveling.
SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI: CRISTINA MORA is a professor of sociology at UC Berkeley. She was speaking with reporter and Berkeley journalism graduate student, DANIELA SANDOVAL, for the Stakes Explained.
DAVID BOYER: Thanks for listening to today's Bay Made, and thanks to SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI and her students for sharing your new series. If you wanna learn more about the project, head to hub.journalism.berkeley.edu slash The Stakes.