Hi, I’m George Gerbo and welcome to 100 Days of Trump, where we take a look back at the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term in the White House and what to expect moving forward.
To do that, I have two of our excellent White House reporters, White House correspondent Jeff Mordock and White House reporter Mallory Wilson.
[GERBO] There’s two dominant themes that emerge when we talk about what’s happened here in the first three months of the Trump administration, the second Trump administration, and it really boils down to immigration and the economy. I’ll start with immigration because that’s been maybe the most newsworthy topic and the one that’s gotten the most back and forth, whether it’s from the courts, the American people, Democrats, all have a position here. The president and the White House, I think Jeff, believe that they’ve got the winning message here, and polling would indicate that most Americans generally support the efforts to close the southern U.S. border. We’ve seen border crossings and arrests at the border drop dramatically since the final months and days of the Biden administration, where that kind of comes to a head is how Americans and the public at large feel about deportations and mass flights to Venezuela, El Salvador, and other efforts that have gone on the deportation side. But immigration, the White House believes is a winning issue for them, correct?
[MORDOCK] Oh, that’s correct, and that they argued that that’s the mandate that sent them to the White House in the first place. It’s really interesting to compare the numbers that are out there under this administration compared to the first couple months of the Biden administration, when the border crossings increased dramatically. And I think also the fact that we said that the polling is coming back with the numbers that they’re seeing, it’s emboldening them to not follow some of the court directives that have come out. The man from Maryland, for example, they’ve been defying the court order. Trump said last night, he could bring them back, but it doesn’t seem like he’s planning to. And I think that’s what they’re hanging their hat on when it comes to not following some of these rulings that are coming out of these judges that we have the American people on our side.
[GERBO] Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, Maryland man, his attorneys believe he’s been wrongly deported. The government believes he is a gang member, and so that’s kind of been the main flash point of, yes, Americans are supportive of immigration efforts, but in terms of you getting to questions of due process, and there’s still a lot of stuff to be shaken out there.
[WILSON] Yeah, they’re really harping on the fact that the ones that they have deported are illegal immigrants and the fact that they’ve committed crimes, whether it’s proven or not. People have questioned, well, where are the women and children that you’re deporting? Where’s the due process for any of these people, whether they’re illegal or not? For Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, they did admit that it was an administrative error that he was sent there, whether he’s actually an El Salvadoran citizen or not. He is, but at the same time, he was just taken and they admit it’s an error. Last night, Trump said he could bring him back. You know, one phone call to the El Salvador president, because he’s Trump, could get him back, but he said that Abrego-Garcia wasn’t this upstanding citizen that everyone seems to — or he says the left — thinks that this man was.
Democrat lawmakers have really been pushing to get him back, and it was Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, who actually went there and saw him, suppose holding with the X posts about him meeting with him and them having margaritas, which, you know, turned out not to be true. But it’s been this going back and forth between Democrats and Republicans over whether these people do deserve their due process. Or whether, because they’re illegal, they don’t deserve anything.
[GERBO] And there’s still a lot to be determined in terms of court actions, and we’ll see how that shakes out.
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