Direct Association Between FBI Stats of Historic Low Crimes and Trump's Mass Deportations

A controversial video depicting former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama as apes appeared briefly on President Trump's social media account. Joining me now to discuss are Denny Salas, the Executive Vice President at Gotham Government Relations. Good to see you again, Denny. We also have the co-founder of Gotham. He's also the co-founder of Gotham Polling and Analytics. We also have the Republican strategist, Katie Frost, on with us. Good to see you again too, Katie. Thank you for having me. So a video posted on President Trump's account, which was quickly taken down, this was a media depicting the Obamas as apes. The White House responded to this saying that it was from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the king of the jungle and Democrats as characters from The Lion King. Now the full video includes other Democrats as other animals, but only the clip of the Obamas was reposted on Trump's account. Denny, we'll start with you. What was your initial reaction to this? It was disgusting. Let's just not beat around the bush around it. We know it was racist. You even saw the most appropriate response come out of Senator Tim Scott. And the way the White House can clean up on this one is just issue an apology. Just own up to it. Don't try to hide it. Don't try to say it was going to be this, it was going to be that. Just own up to it. Apologize. You made a mistake. You shouldn't have put that video up there. It was racist. It was deeply offensive. It obviously doubles down on the offensiveness being Black History Month and that using that video, even though it's a small clip, we know it's like a two second clip at the end of that long video. But still, it should have never been posted, especially from President Trump's account or the White House account. It just shouldn't have happened. Katie, what do you think about this? Do you agree with Denny that this warrants an apology? I'd say it's just proof that boomers shouldn't be allowed on social media unsupervised. I mean, we all have seen mistakes happen on social media. The White House did take it down. They said it was not intended to be offensive and put up that way. I am willing to accept that explanation. And look, I myself have fallen prey to accidentally hitting the button on something. Thankfully for me, it was just on Instagram and it was a story from People Magazine about a celebrity breakup. But those things happen. You can post something without watching the entire video, without realizing the context or reading everything before you hit the reshare button. That's why you need to be very careful on social media. And as I said, boomers don't need to be on social media unsupervised. All right, guys, let's talk for a moment about ICE enforcement efforts. So ICE arrest detainers now surpass 33,000 criminal illegal immigrants, including murderers, sex offenders and drug traffickers, among others. ICE is urging California not to release criminals back into the streets if they have ICE detainers. I want to get both of your thoughts on this, but first, let's together listen to what the president had to say about this issue earlier this week. People don't want to be mugged. They don't want to have a murderer living next door that was, you know, killed three people in a certain country and is now living beautifully here. Because generally speaking, if they've killed in another country, they're not going to be the best of citizens and they're rough people. Katie, your thoughts? Well, these are exactly the kind of people that President Trump has talked about making sure arrested and deported and removed from our country, because these are violent criminals who come into our country illegally. We're talking about murder, sexual assault, predatories, gunned, gun offenses, armed robbery. These are the people that you do not want in your communities. We wouldn't have a citizen who had these charges out roaming on the streets, let alone a non-citizen who came in the country illegally. And when people look at the different ICE enforcement tactics that have been used, they want to complain. If local governments are not helping and they are releasing the people that ICE is actually targeting back into the streets, ICE has no choice other than to go out into the streets and try and get those people themselves. Why not cooperate and turn these people over to ICE? We know they're criminals. We know they're here illegally. We know they shouldn't be here. Let's just all work together and make our country safe. Denny, where do you stand on this? And specifically, do you see California cooperating with ICE's request now for local law enforcement officials to keep criminals with detainers in custody? I don't see California actually cooperating, but do I believe that they should? The answer is yes. I think this has been an issue that Democrats have repeatedly just failed on. We know that we should not have these illegal immigrants that are criminals on our streets. The guiding philosophy should be do no harm. We should not support any issue that leads to an innocent individual getting hurt. And we've seen this over and over again when we have an illegal immigrant that's committed a crime. And to be honest, when you started looking at these most recent FBI stats showing that right now America is experiencing historic lows on homicides, crime, and then all of a sudden you correlate that to this extensive operation from the Trump administration to actually deport illegal immigrants and focusing on the criminals, I think you can see that there's a direct association and correlation between both. So Democrats have not been great on the illegal immigration issue at all. And this is an opportunity for them to just say, listen, we need to prioritize getting these folks that have a criminal history out of America. They shouldn't be here in the first place. And that's it. Democrats just need to do the right thing on this one. Denny, I want to follow up with you on this. You said that you don't anticipate California officials will cooperate with ICE. Why not? Do you have concerns that California politicians are using this as a political issue? Yes. I mean, we absolutely know that it's going to be a political issue. It has been a political issue leading up to the midterms and maybe going into the presidential election. It's the same thing about abolish ICE. We've seen this replay before. We've seen this exact same talking point happen during the first Trump administration. They're doing it again. They're just focusing on the emotions of voters rather than the actual policy itself, trying to galvanize people to make sure they're angry enough to get to the polls. We know that they're utilizing that. And emotion is powerful. We know that. Both sides use it to their advantage. This is one of those issues that has been galvanizing a lot of Democrats to get to the polls. We've seen kind of the numbers, and it turned out already for some of these special elections. It's going to continue. It may continue. It's going to go continue all the way to the midterms. It may continue to the presidential election. Who knows? But I will tell you that, yes, it's absolutely being utilized for political purposes. Katie, do you have any thoughts before we move on? What absolutely is being utilized for political purposes, I completely agree here. And it's really unfortunate that we have people in California holding elective office, particularly Governor Newsom, who would allow higher aspirations for presidency to get in the way of keeping the people of his state safe. All right, I want to talk to both of you about some changes that the administration wants to make to the census. The president wants to make changes to how the census is taken. Specifically, he wants to now ask people about their citizenship status. Denny, do you think that this will reshape in a significant way how the U.S. counts population? It's a great question. And based on the Constitution itself, we just need to count who is actually here. That's part of it itself. That's always been part of it, just on who is a current resident of the United States, not who is a citizen. That said, do I think having a question saying, are you an American citizen, yes or no, is that bad? I don't necessarily think so. I think it actually provides us with good data to actually see on a sample size on how many of our population are actually American citizens or not. It doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be registering that information in order to transfer over to ICE. And again, we're talking about 2030. Who's going to be president then? We don't know that. It could be a Democrat. All right. So at that point, it's all right to actually have that data to use. It's not necessarily an offensive question. I think it's really good to know because right now we just guess at how many illegal immigrants are here. We don't know the actual number. Now, critics, Denny, say that this could kind of deter illegal immigrants from answering the census at all, which could be an issue. Do you have any thoughts on concerns with regards to that? I mean, I'm sure it could, but I think for, again, we would have enough of a margin of error when it comes to the sample size if you're going to use that data for any other type of information that you can use. So I don't look at it. This is me touching upon that Gotham polling analytics side of me. So I'm looking at it just as pure as a data question. You can actually just see who is actually here and who's not. But it doesn't affect the overall census numbers itself because that's where the apportionment of federal dollars actually works with. It goes with the actual total population, not necessarily on who is an American citizen or not. Katie, what are your thoughts on this? Do you have any argument to those who say that this could lower response rates within immigrant communities? Well, there's always been a long series of questions on this census. So it's perfectly logical to me that we add a question about your citizenship because you aren't required to answer every single question. So you can tell. I remember in 2000, census taker came to my parents' house. I was a little girl and my father went to the door. He told him how many people live in the house. The lady started asking a bunch of questions. He goes, no, that's all I have. How many people are here? But if you go back looking historically, I'm one of those nerds that's gone on ancestry.com to find census records from my ancestors. They would ask questions about how many people live there, the names, the ages, the head of household, the value of the home. Were you a homeowner or were you a renter? All this kind of data, because this is a once in a decade undertaking, we should fully utilize it to gather all the relevant data that we can, especially when immigration is such an important issue. And as you point out, we don't actually know how many people are in this country who are non-citizens. Why would we not want to utilize this effort to find that number out? All right. Good points from both Katie and Denny. Thank you so much for joining us again and sharing your insights.