- An enormous amount of money went into the detention of people.

$42 billion spent on immigrant incarceration.

- The funding bill that passed included enough resources to grow ICE to be larger than the United States Marine Corps.

They needed to build their own army under the control of DHS, and that didn't necessarily have to abide by the same constitutional guardrails and rules that the military has to.

- Being undocumented in the United States is not a crime.

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders and Friends," the place where the people who say it can't be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat music) When the Supreme Court declared that immigration agents could consider race during deportation sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn't worry.

When House Speaker Mike Johnson described No Kings protest participants as pro Hamas, GOP media saw no problem with that.

With President Donald Trump threatening repeatedly to invoke the Insurrection Act if federal courts continue to bar him from sending National Guard troops to Democrat run cities, White House officials continue to tell reporters that they don't think he'll do it, but others see those steps as a prelude to dictatorship.

Invoking the Insurrection Act would federalize the National Guard and permit the president to use the US military to put down what he deemed to be unrest or as the president put it recently, "There's no more court cases, there's no more anything."

Well, that's just not true.

But it hints at what the president might like.

Is Trump's next move invoking the Insurrection Act?

Our guests are taking Trump's threats absolutely seriously.

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal is the ranking member of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, and represents Washington State's seventh Congressional District.

She's been at the forefront of congressional oversight and opposition to the Trump administration's immigration policies.

Marine Captain Janessa Goldbeck is a veteran and CEO of VetVoice, a national nonprofit that mobilizes veterans and military families to help shape American democracy and defend the values they swore to uphold.

Here's representative Jayapal at Seattle's recent No Kings protest.

(crowd cheers) - We are the people's movement that will save our democracy!

(crowd cheers) Look, you all are here today because we are up against a serious choice in our country.

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of a government they were establishing.

A monarchy or a republic, to which he famously answered, "A republic if you can keep it."

(crowd cheers) Seattle, we are at that "if you can keep it" moment.

- Congressman Pramila Jayapal addressing the crowd at the No Kings Rally in Seattle recently.

I'm very happy to welcome the Congresswoman and Janessa Goldbeck to "Laura Flanders and Friends."

Thanks for joining me.

Let's start with you Congresswoman.

Why Ben Franklin?

What did he mean, and what was your point by raising that quote?

- My point by raising that was really to remind people that keeping a democracy is not easy.

Our founders didn't think it was easy.

They put in some things that they thought were checks and balances, but those checks and balances are failing us in this moment.

Not entirely, we still have a lot of hope for a few of the things that are happening, but the most important thing is that people really do not disengage, that they stand up and that they think of themselves as the protectors of our democracy.

And that is true, whether it's No Kings or whether it is every day in between with what's happening in Chicago, what's happening in LA, what's happening in DC, around the country, for people to really understand how far away what is happening now is from the principles that Ben Franklin, that the founders of our country were trying to go away from.

And so it was important for me to read the Declaration of Independence because if you actually go through that list that follows right after the quote that I gave, it goes through corruption, it goes through the use of the military, it goes through the use of the federal government for partisan political purposes.

It goes through many of the things that we are seeing happen right now.

- Very frightening.

While we're talking about our foundational documents coming to you, Janessa, as a Marine, you took an oath to do certain things and defend that Constitution was one of them.

As you understood it at that moment, what was your role, and what do you think as you watch the, what military members are being asked to do today?

- Yeah, well, every member of the military takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the values enshrined within it.

We don't take an oath to a man, to a political party, certainly not to a king.

And our Constitution is very clear.

As Americans, we have the freedom of speech, we have the freedom of assembly, we have the right to dissent, we have the right to debate, and we have the right to believe in things that are different from our political leaders.

And that is what makes America a free and fair country.

Those are the values we are always seeking to expand upon and to enshrine and to ensure others around the world have access to those very same rights and freedoms.

And what we're seeing now is the President attempting to reshape the US military into a tool of his own domestic political control, to present the military as something that belongs to him through shows of force like the parade in Washington D.C.

or in San Diego recently, the military demonstration here that was ostensibly for the Marine Corps birthday, but not on the Marine Corps birthday, which is actually in November.

And you know, at great expense to taxpayers and the time and training of our troops in uniform.

And then to deploy uniformed service members in the National Guard across the country against the wishes of local elected leaders, local police who've said, "This is inflammatory.

This is actually not making us safer.

It's doing the opposite."

So we're in a really tenuous time in terms of civil military relations in this country.

I feel a lot of sadness and frustration on behalf of those who are serving in uniform today who are being put into this very partisan political position by the United States president.

- Congresswoman Jayapal, you recently held a shadow hearing called "Kidnapped and Disappeared," one of a series I think, on Trump's assault on families and communities.

Janessa participated.

When I actually read the transcripts and saw what was said there, it was shocking to me, and I thought I'd been following what's been going on.

What was the most shocking thing to come out of that as far as you're concerned, Congresswoman?

- It's very difficult to pick one thing, Laura, because I think across the board, we are seeing Trump use the levers of the US government to crack down on people who live in this country, whether it's US citizens, whether it's undocumented immigrants, whether it is people with legal visas.

And I think part of what we were trying to do in that hearing, and Janessa was magnificent in bringing that very important voice of our troops who we all value, and who we all believe should exist to protect the security and the safety of a nation, not to be at the whim of a political leader.

But from the individual stories of, you know, directly impacted individuals, one of whom had to move to Mexico because she's a US citizen.

Her husband was picked up and you know, was coerced essentially into moving to Mexico.

If this can happen to any one group of people, it can happen to anyone.

If it can be used in the context of the National Guard being deployed in the context of immigration, they can be deployed to crack down on peaceful protestors.

And they are, in fact, in different ways, still at the edges, but they can be deployed for any reason.

There are very clear reasons why these protections that Janessa mentioned are in place.

And I think the horror of the violence may be the thing that is most shocking to people.

When you see in Chicago a raid on an apartment building that in the south side of Chicago where you have helicopters, US military helicopters, people rapelling down onto the roof, everybody being pulled out, people being pulled out naked, zip tied, children, children being pulled out in that way and separated and finding out that amongst all of those people are people of all legal statuses.

So now apparently in the United States of America, you have to continue to prove, over and over again, that you are somebody that belongs here in this country.

And I think all of that is perhaps, you know, the thing that is shocking the conscience the most, but the pieces of how we get this information out is really important, which is why I've been doing these shadow hearings, and why we'll be in Chicago with members of Congress.

- I do think it's important for our audience and me to understand where ICE functions in our kind of structure of enforcement agencies.

It's not ostensibly, it's not a member of the military, it's not the National Guard, it's not police, it's something else.

Can you explain it?

- Yeah, ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

It is a division of the Department of Homeland Security or DHS.

It has, traditionally immigration until after, you know, until just after 9/11, immigration sort of was more about services, and the DHS structure kind of took a bunch of different components and put 'em all in together.

What ICE is now doing, what DHS Secretary Kristi Noem is now doing, is she is actually taking law enforcement from just about every agency within the US government and assigning those people to conduct immigration enforcement, most of who have no training whatsoever.

And in doing that, she's doing two things.

One, she's taking very important resources away from real public safety, crime, national security, intelligence, all of those things.

We know, for example, at the FBI, that 20% of the FBI's officers have now been deployed to do immigration work, which means they're not doing the important work that the FBI needs to do.

Second, being undocumented in the United States is not a crime.

And I think it's very important that all of our listeners understand that.

It is a civil system.

And so what she is now doing is turning a civil system into a massive criminal justice system in the bad, big bad betrayal bills, what I call it, that the Republicans passed earlier this summer.

One of the little known facts is that an enormous amount of money went into immigration enforcement.

Both the detention of people, $42 billion spent on immigrant incarceration, now overtaking the amount of money that's spent on the Bureau of Prisons.

But then in addition, lots of other money that is to private contractors for deportation, for crackdowns on immigrants.

So she's really militarizing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is an enforcement arm of a civil system.

- And this is on top of the, what, $900 billion military appropriations in this administration's sites in the next year?

Coming to you, Janessa, how do you in the military who go through famously strenuous training, most of you, think about all of this?

- Well, I think it's important to really delineate between the National Guard, the active duty military, and federal law enforcement, in particular, ICE.

Congresswoman Jayapal just named how Secretary Noem is taking officers who are not trained in immigration enforcement and putting them into these roles.

They're also recruiting off the streets and out of local police departments.

So you're getting beat cops sometimes who are now no longer working their jobs in their communities, but are now going out in masks and kidnapping folks off the streets.

But they don't have the same training that the National Guard or the military has.

We don't know what their rules of engagement are.

We've seen all kinds of things that should never be happening.

You know, firing of rubber bullets and pepper bullets onto peaceful protestors, people being taken away, zip tied with no identification, no badge number.

And on top of that, they're wearing military fatigues.

They look, to a civilian who might not have a lot of experience with the military or various branches of law enforcement, they look like they're members of the military, and what this risks doing, what the president risks doing, and Kristi Noem risks doing is Americans think they're watching the military conduct these raids.

A lot of people think that, and they're indistinguishable because of the uniforms they're wearing.

And that risks really stretching and creating tension between the military and our society.

It risks, you know, how we take care of veterans going forward, whether or not people will want to join the military because they think that they're going to have to be doing immigration.

Enforcement.

I'm really concerned about this, Laura.

I mean, look at the budget.

The congresswoman mentioned, the big ugly bill or whatever we're calling it, that the funding bill that passed included enough resources to grow ICE to be larger than the United States Marine Corps.

They basically, I think, understood that the political cost of deploying the military domestically was going to be too damaging, at least to start.

And so they needed to build their own army, for lack of a better word, that was under the control of DHS.

And that didn't necessarily have to abide by the same constitutional guardrails and rules that the military has to in our society.

- Well, it's a really important that you point, that you're mentioning when you say it stands to increase tensions.

Because I do think increasing tensions is part of the point.

And I'm sure you, like I, was super impressed with the No Kings Day protests, that you could have 7 million people or maybe more on the streets in the United States, one of the most heavily armed countries in the world, if not the most heavily armed.

And as far as I could see, virtually no violence, a lot of good humor, levity even, people in frog suits.

But that threat of provoking tension seems to be part of the dictator playbook.

And I just want to come back to you, Congresswoman Jayapal, when you talked about what's happening at the margins of the protests, what do we need to be paying attention to?

- One of the clearest tools in an authoritarian's playbook is to actually try and escalate rather than deescalate.

And so what we see is with a lot of the National Guard being brought in, you know, and these are all being contested, as Janessa said, there's no authority as yet to actually deploy National Guard troops.

But I think what we are seeing is when you have a military presence, I'm going to use that term broadly, because ICE is acting as a military presence right now in our streets, this militarization in our streets, what law enforcement should be doing of any kind, whether it's ICE, whether it's National Guard, whoever, is trying to de-escalate.

But what we clearly see this set of military actors doing is escalate, right?

So when you crack down brutally, when you shoot a rubber bullet at a faith leader in Chicago, or when you, you know, violently push someone down to the ground, who by the way, happens to be the father of three US Marines, when you are, you know, sort of hunting people in front of schools, in front of neighborhood centers, all of these things, the violent videos that we've seen, I think that is really an attempt to suppress any kind of dissent, and to make it clear that anyone who protests peacefully is going to be in trouble.

- Would Donald Trump invoking the Insurrection Act take things to a whole new level, or is the threat really enough?

- I think the threat's enough.

I mean, listen, he hasn't needed the Insurrection Act to militarize Los Angeles, to militarize Chicago.

I think the Insurrection Act politically, it's perhaps more incendiary, more people kind of understand, well, that's a pretty dramatic step, but understanding that the Insurrection Act is whether it's invoked or not, when you see a fatigue, a service member in fatigues with a long gun walking towards you on a civilian street on a Tuesday in Washington D.C., I think that that feels just as, just as big of a deal and just as threatening as the invocation of the Insurrection Act.

- Well, I think we have to be on guard for anything, because it's clear that this is not a president that values norms.

Many of the things in the past have been norms.

I am concerned that the Supreme Court seems to be doing more and more of overturning of lower court decisions, sometimes as part of a shadow docket, with just one line, not even a real, you know, not even a real opinion.

And that some of the things that we never would've imagined possible are seem to, apparently seem to be possible now.

So yes, I think we have to be on guard.

I don't think we should give up hope.

And I think these lower court decisions, the federal judges are really, for the most part, doing what they need to do.

Trump appointees, you know, Obama, George W. Bush appointees, Reagan, you know, we have appointees across the political spectrum who are actually standing up for the Constitution.

I think about the ruling out of Judge Immergut in Portland.

This is a Trump appointee.

She prevented the National Guard from coming in from anywhere.

But I think we are a country of constitutional law, not martial law, I think is exactly what she said.

That, of course, has now been overturned or is in the process of being overturned by the appeals court in the Ninth Circuit.

But we'll see where that goes.

And I think we've got to be ready, vigilant, prepared.

- Well, I'm hearing from a lot of military families, National Guard families, that they're really concerned about their guardsmen or women being sent into a really fraught and dangerous situation, where they're unnecessarily, you know, placed between protesters potentially and an ICE facility.

You know, there's so many opportunities with so many federal law enforcement officers on the ground who clearly are there to escalate.

There are many opportunities where things could go wrong, that could devolve into violence, that, so they're worried about their, the physical safety of their family member.

They're also worried about how they might be used next.

And I think this is something that every American needs to be thinking really hard about.

Why is the president of the United States trying to acclimate us to the National Guard in our cities?

What greater purpose is there to test the legality of his authority to do so?

And for me, the answer is quite clear.

It's the 2026 and 2028 elections.

And there is a very high possibility, and I say that with a lot of confidence because the president tried to do it the first time he was in office, and it's been spoken about on the Right for many years through Project 2025 and other documents.

But this notion of a rigged election, of election fraud, and some sort of national emergency that the president then uses to deploy National Guard around the election, to depress turnout, to intimidate people, particularly in swing districts or states or places where there are, you know, heavily immigrant communities, where people might fear going out and voting would lead to deportation or detainment.

That I think is the ball game.

And we all need to be thinking about how we can resist, both legally, both by pushing on our members of Congress, and in the streets peacefully.

- What difference does the civil society protest make, and what other guardrails exist there, in case Trump gets the wrong idea about martial law in this country?

- Well, there's really three, right?

There's Congress, but in order to have Congress be able to really step up, members of Congress, including of the majority party, of the President's party, have to be willing to stand up for their constituents in the Constitution, and not for their own personal gain.

I still have hope that if we mobilize the people, that more and more Republicans will stand up and will do the right thing.

We can't give up on that.

And we certainly, as Democrats, have to use every piece of leverage that we have to not treat this like some other moment in history, and stand up and stiffen our spines.

The second is the courts.

And I think that those discussions are still ongoing.

And I think that the fact that federal judges are getting upset, even if it's not openly, you know, but privately, are getting upset at what the Supreme Court is doing, is very important.

And we need to continue to push things through the courts, and force these judges to stand up for what they swore an oath to.

But the third and most important thing, Laura, is why I do my Resistance Lab trainings.

We've trained over 18,000 people across the country.

We just did one on immigration resistance, immigration justice, and we had over a thousand people from 44 different states.

People need to understand how they can plug in.

We have a lot of Americans across the country, 7 million at minimum, who showed up in the streets for No Kings, but many, many more who are our allies for democracy, who are our allies for immigration, who are our allies for a military that is actually used for the benefit of the people, not for the benefit of a king.

And so those are all of the people that we need to bring in and build a very powerful people's movement because at the end of the day, my belief is that that's the only thing that's ever saved democracies from falling, is the people.

- The greatest lie that the president wants us to believe is that we are powerless and that cynicism is the only way forward.

I fundamentally disagree with that.

I have hope if people can find the courage within themselves and share it with others.

That will inspire more courage and more collective action for change.

- You are both great examples of exactly that kind of courage.

So thank you both for being with us on "Laura Flanders and Friends."

Thank you.

- Thank you, Laura.

- Thank you, Laura.

- When a state turns its military inwards, it raises all sorts of questions about the function of that state and who is considered a threat.

It's worth remembering that less than a decade after the American Revolutionary War threw off occupying British forces and the exploitation of the crown, the very richest parts of Massachusetts society activated their own militia and raised funds for their own private forces to suppress the poorest parts of that society.

Poor farmers and war veterans who were being heavily taxed to pay off the war debts of the rich.

Fast forward to West Virginia in the 1920s and you've got federal troops being used to back up coal company owners against organizing workers, Black and white, fighting for their rights.

In the seventies, you have students killed at Kent State and Jackson State for protesting a war that was killing their brothers and sisters.

So what is the state for, and what is the nature of the threat?

We're always told the federal forces are being used to keep us safe, but more often than not, they're being used to dodge answering that question, to avoid having that debate.

Answering questions is not what troops are trained to do.

They're much better at suppressing dissent, but none of it is good for our democracy.

And those questions will have to be answered at some point.

You can get my full uncut conversation with today's guests through subscribing to our free podcast.

All the information's at the website.

In the meantime, stay kind, stay curious.

From "Laura Flanders and Friends," I'm Laura.

Thanks for joining us.

For more on this episode and other forward thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full uncut conversations.

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