Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Dexter Filkins:

I think what President Biden is running up against is, I think, it’s a visceral thing as well, and I think it’s well beyond the Republican Party now. It’s in the Democratic Party among voters, which is the border is out of control. We’re a nation of laws, and it’s chaos.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Dexter Filkins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a staff writer at The New Yorker. Filkins has reported from conflict and war zones all over the world. He recently spent time reporting from the southern border where a record number of migrants are crossing over to seek asylum. The unfolding crisis has overwhelmed federal, state, and city officials posing a significant challenge for the Biden administration. Filkins joins me to discuss his experience reporting from the border, what’s driving the recent surge in migrations and what our government can do to handle the influx. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Q&A

Now, let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet or a post from X user @JimWente2, who asks, “Do judges read slash watch the news? I’m sure they do. So how do they manage trials when the trial and the defendant (read Trump) are in the news every day -before and during the trial? Lock themselves away? Cancel their New York Times subscription? Banish the TV?” I want to answer your question by beginning with a premise that seems obvious but is often forgotten that judges are human beings. They may be accomplished lawyers with excellent credentials and have a lifetime of achievement. In the legal profession, to become a judge is to reach the pinnacle of that profession, but they remain always even as judges, even while wearing the robe, even while sitting on the bench, human beings. And so that renders them curious. They’re curious about how their proceedings are being perceived.

They’re sensitive and curious with respect to how they may be being perceived too. Again, I’m speaking generally, all judges are different, just like all people are different, but some judges are very focused on the coverage of the things that they’re overseeing and presiding over. In fact, I once had a judge call me after the U.S. Attorney’s Office issued a press release about the sentencing of a defendant who we had tried and convicted, and the judge called and seemed to be unhappy that the judge’s name was not in the press release as the sentencing judge. That’s unusual, but that tells you how some judges do pay attention to the news, do pay attention to what’s being covered and are sensitive to it. By the way, I should emphasize there’s nothing at all wrong with judges following the coverage of matters and proceedings before them. We expect and trust that judges can put aside prejudicial facts or irrelevant facts when they render their judgements. They do that all the time in court proceedings as well.

There’s a distinction between judges and our expectation of judges and jurors who are admonished on a daily basis pretty much when they’re sitting in judgment not to watch the news, not to follow the papers, not to do any of their own research or Googling or internet queries about the matter that they’re supposed to decide. Now, part of the spirit of your question is what do judges do if they’re overwhelmed under so much news about their cases? I don’t expect they banish the TV or canceled their New York Times subscription, but they do what probably you and I do from time to time, which is lower the supply of that news. By the way, from time to time, particularly with respect to some of the Trump matters, a judge’s obligation and responsibility may extend to knowing what’s being said in the press, what the reporting is.

For example, with respect to the policing of a gag order against Donald Trump, it’s part of the judge’s responsibility to know about and perceive what’s being said to police that gag order. But just to repeat, our system relies on the principle that judges are expected to decide cases and matters on the law and the facts, not an extraneous material, not on irrelevant material, not on sensational or salacious material. If they ever feel overwhelmed and inundated by the news, they can always put down their phone.

This question comes into tweet or a post from Twitter slash X user @GrumpClumpFrump, great username. “#AskPreet, should anything be inferred from Judge Cannon’s glacial pace, or are we overreacting? Can you please give a quick overview of the consequences and recourse? Thank you.” Well, that’s a great question and as I’ve been saying over and over and over again that as we discuss the legal principles and the legal decisions and the strategizing and the arguments being made by the government and by Trump in these four criminal cases, one of the most important features to keep your finger on and your mind focused on is the clock. As I’ve said many times, the election is an inflection point. And if Trump wins re-election, these trials may all go away. So, accountability requires some speediness in getting to these trials. Now, you’re of course talking about Judge Cannon, who’s the federal district court judge in Florida who’s overseeing the government’s case against Donald Trump relating to classified documents and the mishandling of documents at Mar-a-Lago and elsewhere.

I’ll say that as a general matter, it doesn’t look like Judge Cannon is aiming to break the land speed record for going to trial. I think you’re asking the question at this moment because of a particular ruling she made in the last number of days. Jack Smith’s office recently asked the judge to compel the Trump team to give over some information. As you may remember, in the documents case, one potential defense that Trump is likely to assert is an advice of counsel defense. In other words, my lawyers told me that I had to behave in this particular way. They told me that I could retain these documents. They told me that I could declassify these documents and I relied on their advice. And if I relied on their advice, then I didn’t have the mental state or the proper intent to commit a crime, and that can be a dispositive defense.

When someone makes an advice of counsel defense as a general matter, the government is entitled to get notice of that fact so they can prepare their own prosecution case and they’re entitled to get some information about the nature of that defense, what the advice of counsel was, et cetera. In the ordinary course, and they have a legitimate basis for doing so, they’ve asked for that information, and Judge Canon did not deny them their request, but said it’s premature. Here’s what Judge Cannon said in the last few days, quote, “Assuming the facts and circumstances in this case warrant an order compelling disclosure of an advice of counsel trial defense, the court determines that such a request is not amenable to proper consideration at this juncture prior to at least partial resolution of pretrial motions, transmission to defendants of the special counsel’s exhibit and witness lists, and other disclosures as may become necessary.”

That decision on its own and in a vacuum is not necessarily a bad one, is not necessarily an improper one and is not necessarily a dilatory one, meaning intended to cause delay. The problem is that in matter, after matter after matter, it doesn’t seem like Judge Cannon is in any hurry. Right now, by the way, of the four criminal trials pending against Donald Trump, one case, the Georgia case, does not have a trial date set. But among the other three cases, the trial date set in the Judge Cannon case is the latest so far except for May 20th, which I think most experts believe is not going to be possible at the current pace. By the way, you’re not the first to observe that Judge Cannon doesn’t seem to be in any hurry.

There was a political article written by Josh Gerstein in November, almost two months ago. The article was entitled How One Judge is Slowing Down One of Trump’s Biggest Criminal Cases. And the first sentence of the analysis is, quote, “Judge Eileen Cannon seems to be in no hurry.” End quote. And this is before the recent decision about divisive counsel notice and information. As the article recounts back in November, the pretrial process was set at a leisurely pace. Other delays were embraced by Judge Cannon. There’s also a complexity in this case that’s going to take some time to unravel and to resolve, and that is the use of classified information at trial. What can be used, what can’t be used, what has to be redacted, what doesn’t have to be redacted under a somewhat complicated law known as CIPA, the Classified Information Procedures Act. Now again, any one of these particular decisions to go a little bit more slowly or take a little bit more time is not a reason to think that she’s going along with the delay tactics of the Trump team. But in combination, you’re right to worry about it.

Going back to the second part of your question, can you give a quick overview of the consequences and the recourse? The consequences are pretty profound if this trial doesn’t take place and is not concluded before the election. With respect to recourse, there’s not that much the government can do other than push and push and nudge and nudge and maybe pressure the judge into moving with a little bit more speed. But decisions about when motion should be decided and when discovery should be provided are pretty much in the discretion of the district court judge and not a matter of appeal. They can push and they can pressure, but they don’t have any definitive recourse, if the judge wants to go slow. I’ll be right back with my conversation with Dexter Filkins.

THE INTERVIEW

In December, an estimated 300,000 people crossed the southern border into the U.S., a record high. In the meantime, Congress, which has not passed comprehensive immigration reform in almost four decades, continues to struggle to develop more effective policy. New Yorker journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Dexter Filkins, recently reported on the situation and crisis at the border. Dexter Filkins, welcome to the show.

Dexter Filkins:

Thank you so much.

Preet Bharara:

We have a lot to talk about on this main issue that I wanted to address with you, immigration in all of its forms. In particular, we’ll talk about the border. But I guess my first question based on some of the chitchat we had before we started actually recording, how hard a story is this to cover and to understand and to explain?

Dexter Filkins:

Remarkably hard, remarkably difficult.

Preet Bharara:

Why is that because it’s not intuitive that it would be that difficult? Explain what the challenges are in both understanding and explaining.

Dexter Filkins:

I’ve worked in war zones, but this was remarkably difficult. I imagined when I set out to essentially answer one question, which is what’s happening at the border and how many people are coming in? I thought, I’ll just go to the DHS website and look that number up, and I couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The statistics are, they’re held in kind of categories that were designed for a reality that existed long ago but doesn’t exist anymore. So, they don’t really reflect the reality.

Preet Bharara:

Is the problem that someone knows, and the information in accurate form is not being shared with journalists, or is nobody keeping proper track? Okay, it’s the first one.

Dexter Filkins:

No, it’s the former. That’s the other thing, which is this is not something that certainly the current administration has any enthusiasm to talk about. I think they ignored it for a long time and imagined it wasn’t a big problem, but now they realize that it is a big problem. So, when people like me come knocking on the door and say, I want to know what’s really happening, you’re not exactly welcomed with open arms.

Preet Bharara:

Is that a new problem or is that culture of obscuring information, does that date back?

Dexter Filkins:

I always run into that as a journalist, but I think with immigration, it’s changed. And I think because immigration and the border, that topic has changed as an issue. For instance, the Trump people were happy to talk about the border because they felt like we’re doing something about it. We’re taking drastic measures because a big problem and we’re happy to talk about it. I think what happened when President Biden came in was President Trump had taken a lot of really drastic measures on the border that had never been done before. Things like, your listeners will have heard some of these terms, remain in Mexico where you can’t come across, and you have to stay in Mexico until we decide to let you in. And the Muslim band and things like that. The Biden administration came into office in 2021 determined not to be Trump and determined to basically tear down a lot of the things that he had done. And I think-

Preet Bharara:

But are you saying all things, or are you speaking specifically about immigration, and was their motivation merely to be anti-Trump or, as they’ve said, to be humane for change?

Dexter Filkins:

I think both. I think when they took down a lot of Trump’s programs, people in the White House told me this, “We didn’t think through what would happen if we did that.” And when, for instance, President Biden during the campaign was saying…

Joe Biden:

That’s who we are. We’re a nation that says if you want to flee and you’re fleeing oppression, you should come.

Dexter Filkins:

That was heard throughout Latin America, and it was on Univision and people came and the numbers surged incredibly. And then when you basically took away Trump’s programs for however good the motivations were, I think they weren’t ready for the deluge that came.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have a view on whether or not you can attribute that deluge to Biden’s exhortation and welcome, or to other factors in central and South America or elsewhere?

Dexter Filkins:

I think it’s both. I think what we’re facing on the border is collapsing states in Central America and South America, Venezuela, Central America. Venezuela has produced, I think, seven million refugees. I think three or four million of them have gone to Columbia. A lot of them have come to the United States, but these are really, really troubled states. You have drug cartels and gangs, which are in some places as powerful as the state. The people who are coming to the border, your heart just bleeds for them. You can see it. They’re here. They, in some cases, walked thousands of miles. They spend all the money that they have, they bring their children with them. They’re here for a better life. They want the American dream. And America was founded on that. We’re all descendant from immigrants. And that’s what is so heartbreaking about it is there’s a gigantic, and when you talk to an immigration policy person, they talk about push and pull. So, there’s this enormous push coming from principally Latin America and Central America towards the border.

Preet Bharara:

So, the question I was going to start with, and this is a prelude to that, was going to be to ask you what the scope of the issue is in terms of numbers of people coming over what period of time, and how that compares to prior periods of time, including the Trump administration and the Obama administration. You see a lot of numbers being thrown around. Often, they’re different depending on the perspective of the person offering up the numbers. In your most unbiased formulation, what is the scope of incoming at the border in recent weeks and months?

Dexter Filkins:

The numbers are just staggering. They really are. They’re kind of abstract, but they’re staggering. They’re huge. For instance, month of December, last month, 225,000 people came across the border that we know of, so that’s-

Preet Bharara:

Put that in perspective. How does that compare to other months in prior administrations?

Dexter Filkins:

That’s a lot. Right now, it’s the levels of, say that’s 7,000 people a day coming across every day. There’s some days when it’s hit 20,000, but 7,000 a day as a daily average is basically higher than it’s ever been. Some of that is the push that I just mentioned, but also there’s a perception that they’re going to get in, so it’s those two things combined.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s make sure we’re defining what we’re talking about. When you talk about the 225,000, am I correct that you’re talking about 225,000 people who are presenting themselves at the border for ultimate asylum adjudication rather than 225,000 people sneaking across and being found illegally on the other side, or is it a combination?

Dexter Filkins:

It’s a combination of both, and what’s-

Preet Bharara:

The total number?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, that’s as good a number as I have right now, it’s 225,000. And that’s defined. They use, there’s bureaucratic terms, but they call that encounters. An encounter is when a border patrol agent basically arrests someone coming across without permission, that’s anybody that walks across the wades across the Rio Grande and then comes up on shore.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have an understanding or a sense of what percentage of those are people in that particular category who are presenting themselves for asylum?

Dexter Filkins:

Historically, and I just mean in recent history, like say since Biden has taken office, most of them are people who are seeking asylum. What’s remarkable, and you can see this when you go down to the border, is I think most people, I certainly did, I imagine that most of the people, the overwhelming were sneaking across and they’re running into the streets and then border patrol guys run after them. Most of what you see is the opposite. You see people wading across the Rio Grande, they come on shore, and they sit down, and they wait to be arrested. They want to be arrested. They’ve basically been briefed, most of them, before they’ve come over saying, you will be arrested. This is the way it works. And then you’re essentially doing that in the hope that you’re going to be then released after a couple of hours, you’ll be released into the United States. That’s the hope of a typical person coming across.

Preet Bharara:

It seems important to distinguish between those two categories, and we’ll get into this. People can have disagreements or views about the generosity of our asylum program or the efficiency of it, or the timeliness of it, the speediness of it, and all of that. But people who come to the border and present themselves as you’ve described and present themselves as asylum seekers are not breaking the law, correct?

Dexter Filkins:

Well, they are breaking the law and they’re not, and this is like-

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s like angels dancing on the head of a pin.

Dexter Filkins:

It’s the heart of the matter. It’s not legal to walk into the United States, but the law of asylum, which has been on the books and is on the books of most Western countries since the end of World War II, is basically like, if you are inside the United States, i.e., if your feet are on American soil, you may ask for asylum, and then a whole kind of legal regime kicks in. That’s essentially what happens. They cross the border without permission, not legally, but when they’re in, they ask for asylum. It’s a bit of a paradox, but that’s the majority of cases.

Preet Bharara:

Let’s maybe take a moment to talk about how broken the system is, particularly with respect to timing. You come across, you are found, you say, I want asylum, which is your right to do, even though you have maybe technically broken the law by coming into the United States, the goal is what for most of those people, to have a speedy, perfectly efficient asylum hearing with a decision on that in an impossible hypothetical universe of a month? Or as some people argue and criticize, it’s to understand that you can’t be adjudicated quickly and years will go by while you basically have lawful legal status in the United States to disappear into the shadows or to ultimately perhaps if you’re lucky, get that proper status. Is that a fair way of thinking about it?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, that’s exactly what’s happening. This is the heart of the matter right here. You wade across Rio Grande-

Preet Bharara:

As a practical matter, once you get in and wait for an adjudication of asylum, you’re basically in-

Dexter Filkins:

You’re in.

Preet Bharara:

… because we don’t have the staff or the systems in place to do these things quickly.

Dexter Filkins:

That’s right. A typical wait time. You get arrested at the border, you ask for asylum, and then there’s this kind of a legal… The legal standard is credible fear. Do you have credible fear of being persecuted or killed if you go back home? It’s a pretty hazy standard. The interview doesn’t last that long. The border patrol guy says, “Okay, you’ve got a credible fear.” So, after a couple of hours, you’re released into the United States. At some later date, you’re supposed to report to an immigration office, but the wait times are years.

Preet Bharara:

You just give your WhatsApp address.

Dexter Filkins:

It’s remarkable but it really does come down to that. Most people that come cross over, if you’re in a town like Del Rio, Texas on the border, it’s a town of about 35,000 people. Thousands and thousands of people have come into Rio, but they don’t stay. Most of them don’t stay for more than a few hours. They come in, they make a phone call, usually to a family member in Miami, in Connecticut, Minnesota, California, and then they get on a bus, or they get on a plane, and they’re gone. I talked to this woman, Karen Gleason, who’s a reporter in Rio, Texas, and she said, “If it wasn’t my job to know that all these people had come through here, I wouldn’t know.” She said, “We’ve had thousands and thousands of people come through the town of Del Rio, but you don’t really see them because they’re always moving somewhere else.”

Preet Bharara:

Sometimes on the courtesy of a governor like Governor Abbott, right?

Dexter Filkins:

Yes, yes, that’s…

Preet Bharara:

We’re going to get to that in a moment. Do you have a sense at all, of at the end of the day, how many asylum seekers have reasonably legitimate asylum claims, or do experts know?

Dexter Filkins:

You have to wade through the statistics, but basically you have to wait several years before you finally get your hearing. Oftentimes, that’s 6, 7, 8 years before you get to stand in front of an immigration judge and make your case. A lot of people never show up for those hearings, but if they do, typically more than half are rejected basically. But that’s like eight years later when you’re in the courtroom and a lot of people haven’t showed up, and so a lot of things have changed. It’s a tricky number, but I think what the critics of the current policy would say is that, and I don’t think this is necessarily unfair, I think that they’d say the system’s being gamed because most of the people who come to the border are desperate, and they want a better life for themselves and for their families, and that’s what they want. They want the American dream. That’s the bulk of the people that, I think, it’s fair to say we’re dealing with. They know that their best chance is to plead asylum, and so I think that’s what’s happening.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned this policy that some people have a passing acquaintance with, which arguably the removal of which has caused this crisis to expand, and that was the Trump policy of remain in Mexico. Could you just explain that again and give us your best understanding of how a change in that policy has affected the problem at the border?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, the remain in Mexico policy was designed to deal with the problems that we’re talking about now, which is you cross the Rio Grande, you were on American soil, you ask for asylum, you’re released into the United States, maybe we see you again in six or seven years. What the Trump administration wanted to do, and what they tried to do was to say, you want to come into the United States and make your case for asylum, okay, but you’re not going to be allowed to wait in the United States for the time being. You’re not going to be allowed to wait six or seven years. You’re going to have to wait in Mexico. That, of course, created all sorts of other problems. But basically, people were being turned away who were asking for asylum. People who were saying to the board, patrol, “If I go home, I will be tortured or killed.” And we were turning them around and saying, “You got to wait in Mexico. Sorry, we will call you when your turn comes up.”

Preet Bharara:

And how did the Mexican government feel about that?

Dexter Filkins:

Exactly. I mean, these problems are so complicated. Often when-

Preet Bharara:

They already had to pay for the wall, so that seems like a double burden for them.

Dexter Filkins:

Yes. Mexico often when border patrol turns people around, the Mexican government doesn’t want to take them. For instance, they don’t want to take somebody from Venezuela, or they don’t want to take the people, and so it’s very, very difficult. For instance, if you take a person, hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela who’ve come to the border, if you try to turn someone around or send them back, how do you do that? We don’t have any kind of working diplomatic relations with the Venezuelan government, so we can’t put them on a plane and send them back. If we try to give them to the Mexican government, often they’ll say no, and so we’re stuck. That’s a lot of the cases as well, which is, okay, we’ve got a group of Venezuelans. I watched a thousand Venezuelans come over in the space of an hour in El Paso. What do you do with them? It’s really, really hard. You can’t just put them on a plane and send them back because when we call the Venezuelan government, nobody answers the phone. What do you do? That’s just one example of how difficult this stuff is.

Preet Bharara:

A cynical person might frame the issue as, what do you do with them? Is it better and more humane for them to remain in Mexico or to remain in Martha’s Vineyard where some of them have been transported? It’s a weird way of putting the question, but isn’t that a little bit how it shakes out?

Dexter Filkins:

Well, I think that was Ron DeSantis trying to make a political point. But I think what a lot of the concerns or a lot of criticism of the remain in Mexico policy was that the people we were sending back into Mexico were being brutalized, robbed, murdered, raped, killed, and that was on us. The stories that these people have when they arrive at the border are often just astonishing. People walk thousands of miles, they spend all of their money, they’re robbed repeatedly, often they’re raped, and this is all before they get to the United States. These are epic human struggles that people… The people who you see at the border are often just, they’re extraordinary. They’ve walked hundreds of miles on almost no money confronting the worst hardships along the way, and they’re coming not because they want a free ride here, it’s because they want to work. That’s so heartbreaking about it, is that most of the people who are coming are good people and they just want to make better lives for themselves.

Preet Bharara:

I’ll be right back with Dexter Filkins after this.

Based on your sourcing, I think earlier you mentioned that there were either, I can’t remember if you said current or former Biden administration officials who basically suggested the administration was naive in undoing certain policies and not foreseeing how much of an increase there would be at the border. Do you think the policy makers up to and including the president, if they had to do it over again, would do it differently?

Dexter Filkins:

I think they would. I think President Biden would. I think-

Preet Bharara:

How so? How do you think that would play out if he could have a do-over?

Dexter Filkins:

I think that during the campaign in 2020 when all these things were being discussed, President Biden said, “What President Trump has done at the border is inhumane, and it’s un-American. He’s turning people back, and terrible things are happening to them, and that’s not-”

Preet Bharara:

He was separating children from their families.

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, we’re separating children, we’re putting children in cages, and that’s not who we are. We’re banning people because they’re Muslim. That’s not-

Preet Bharara:

Those are all correct statements, right?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, those are some of the things that Trump in fact was doing. So, Biden said, essentially, we’re not doing any of that, and if I get elected, we’re going to throw all that stuff in the trash and we’re going to go back to being the United States of America and the shining city on the hill. I think when everybody heard that, they took it, people told me this on the border, when they heard that, they thought, wow, that means the border is open, let’s go. You can look at the numbers when however inhumane President Trump was being, whether you disagree with that or not, the numbers were much lower than when Biden came in. When the Biden administration comes in, you just see the numbers begin to surge. They had been climbing in the last months of the Trump administration, but they really, really started to surge when President Biden took over and basically, they haven’t come back down. They’ve been high ever since.

I think a lot of the things that President Biden has been trying to do recently have been pretty close to some of the things that Trump is doing. For instance, the Trump administration had something called a transit ban, which means basically, look, if you cross through 10 countries on your way to the United States, you have to show us that you tried to get asylum in one of those countries and they turned you away. If you can’t do that, we’re not letting you in. Trump did that and got a lot of criticism for it. The administration got sued. The Biden administration is trying to do the same thing. I think what’s happened in the Biden administration is this, you’re basically just grappling with… It’s really about the numbers. It’s like, we want to be humane, but the numbers are staggering. The numbers are just massive. So, we have to try to find a way to get this under control. And I think that’s what they’re dealing with right now.

Preet Bharara:

And in part because they’re hearing criticism not just from Republicans but from Democrats. And you quote someone in your article framed as follows, you have a source who’s a former senior administration official who told you that the changes were also prompted by public criticism from Democratic governors and mayors. And this person said, quote, “When it was just Republicans complaining, they could ignore them. They could say they were just being partisan or racist. When the Democrats started complaining they had to listen.” End quote. Can you elaborate on that dynamic and how it’s playing out politically?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, I think that’s exactly what’s happened basically. I think it’s fair to say two years ago right after Biden came in, the border was seen as like, okay, well that’s something that Fox News cares about. And they’re banging the drum over there, and they show videos of people walking across the Rio Grande, but it’s not something we have to worry about. It’s always been that way, it’s okay. I’m in New York City, you see it all over the place. What’s happened is that the numbers have been so enormous that places like New York City, places with Democratic governors, New York City, Chicago, Denver, have been overwhelmed by the number of migrants who have come into this city. In New York City, for instance, I think it’s 160,000 have come in into the city since, since 2021. And New York is unique in the United States in that it has a right to housing law.

That means essentially the city is obliged to provide housing for 160,000 people. There are hotels all over the city where these people are staying. I interviewed a family that had come across, they were from Venezuela, and there were three of them, and they were staying in a hotel in midtown that beforehand had gone for $289 a night. There were thousands of those people. New York City has spent well over a billion dollars. It’s probably close to $2 billion now. And as they say, “We’re very proud of what we’ve done and the way that we’ve been able to welcome people. We’re a city of immigrants, but we’re out of money.” What’s happened is that you’ve had this revolt of Democrats all across the country in cities where migrants have poured into. So, you have the mayor of Chicago, Washington D.C., Denver, they’re all saying, look, we can’t do this anymore. And they’re blaming a Democratic president.

Preet Bharara:

Right, but are they saying, and I’m not sure I know, which is the answer to this, are they saying shut down the border, or are they saying, give us money to meet our obligations?

Dexter Filkins:

I think both. They’re saying both. Mayor Adams is [inaudible 00:33:47].

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to ask you one question where the answer’s not going to be both.

Dexter Filkins:

I know.

Preet Bharara:

At some point in this interview, Dexter.

Dexter Filkins:

I can answer that. I can give you a very-

Preet Bharara:

You were the guy in high school in the multiple-choice exam, I think it’s all of the above.

Dexter Filkins:

All the above.

Preet Bharara:

All the above guy.

Dexter Filkins:

To answer your question more directly, I think Mayor Adams has basically said, we’re out of room. We don’t have any more room. Don’t come to New York City, which is remarkable. [inaudible 00:34:16].

Preet Bharara:

I think it’s an important distinction because I want to ask you, even though neither you nor I are moral philosophers, but there’s a moral aspect to this that I’m having a hard time coming to grips with as an immigrant myself. I’m not the children of immigrants. I immigrated myself when I was a child. It seems to me important to understand what the basis of the complaining is on the part of someone like Eric Adams. Is he still devoted to the right to shelter law and the humanity that expresses and reflects, or is he having a change of heart? He wouldn’t have talked this way before if the numbers weren’t what the numbers were. If you believe in people having the right to shelter, that should be true. If there’s five new people or there’s 10,000 new people, I would think.

Is he having a change of heart, or is he just saying… Eric Adams as opposed to other people because New York City has a particular fairly almost unique law, is he just saying, I want to meet my obligations and I want to be humane, but I need some help from my federal government?

Dexter Filkins:

I think that Mayor Adams, as well as the other big mayors of the big Democratic cities, I think they’re confronting practical realities. They want to be humane, but then suddenly there’s no money left and there are no beds.

Preet Bharara:

Well, the Republicans would say… I’m just playing devil’s advocate. I have no views. They would say, well, what’s happening with them is they’re getting finally an education in reality and pragmatism, and it serves them right. That’s what the Republican governors who I don’t have much love for will say. Do they have a point?

Dexter Filkins:

They do have a point. They have a point because look, at the end of the day, if you want to be charitable, you can only be as charitable as your means allow you to be. That’s what Mayor Adams and the other mayors are confronting, which is how much do we spend? New York has already spent well over a billion dollars. The projections are up to four billion that they’re going to have to spend taking care of immigrants. There has to be a limit. We don’t have unlimited amounts of resources. And I think that’s what they’re up against right now. The Republicans may be right in saying, well, we told you all along, you’re a bunch of bleeding hearts and you’ve never thought about this stuff. All true. But nonetheless, this is what we’re dealing with, which is we are at the limits of charity. I think that’s what these Democratic governors are expressing, and they’re expressing it to a Democratic president. Among other things, they’re essentially communicating, I’m not going to get reelected in my city if policies in Washington are making a disaster here. So, this is also about politics.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, I want to talk more about the politics in a second, or I guess we’ll get right into it. Does this problem and the ratcheting up of the problem and the fact that Republicans are making it number one on their list, and the fact that you have written quoting somebody about how Democratic politicians and leaders are not happy either, does this make it more difficult to get some kind of even moderate immigration legislative package passed? Does it make it easier to do that or less easy to do that?

Dexter Filkins:

I think it’s really hard right now because in an election year, but there’s always reasons for this. When you look at on paper, a deal ought to be pretty easy. What do Republicans want? They want more border security. What do the Democrats want? They want more legal pathways for immigration.

Preet Bharara:

For people who are already here.

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yet an important statistic, and you point this out and others have pointed this out, the last time we had any comprehensive immigration legislation was 1986.

Dexter Filkins:

1986. Yeah, a thousand years ago.

Preet Bharara:

A thousand years ago, or 37. It’s a thousand years metric. It’s 37.

Dexter Filkins:

I talked to the Republican senator who helped shepherd that through, Alan Simpson from Wyoming.

Preet Bharara:

You did. I didn’t realize, and I hate to admit this, I did not realize he was still with us 91 years old.

Dexter Filkins:

And razor sharp. And he said, “Look, it was Ted Kennedy.” He said, “Ted and I didn’t agree on anything,” but he said back then, he said, “If Ted told me he was going to do something, then I knew he was going to do it,” and he said, “That’s the problem today.” He said, “Trust is the coin of the Rome in Congress and there’s no more trust anymore.”

Preet Bharara:

But there was an inflection point. People who’ve listened to the show religiously, and at least two or three of you members of my family mostly. I’ve made this point before. I worked in the Senate between 2005 and 2009, and there was a movement for comprehensive immigration reform, a follow on to 1986 and I think ’06, ’07, and you had the legislative giant you just mentioned. Ted Kennedy was still in the Senate. Another legislative giant both now gone from us based on illness was John McCain. And you had an open-minded, on this issue at least, and welcoming of legislative immigration reform in the form of a Republican President George W. Bush. So, you had what you would think were all the makings of success, especially when you consider the admonition from Alan Simpson who you just quoted from. In your research and in excavating all this, do you have a theory as to why that failed back then? Do you agree with a somewhat cynical view that if it couldn’t happen, then how on earth could it happen now?

Dexter Filkins:

I definitely agree with the latter there. I think that what a number of people told me, and I think this is true, is that this is really one realm. It’s easy to blame President Trump for everything, which I try not to do. But this is one realm in which he changed the conversation about immigration. You can talk to say somebody like Senator Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming who would say, “Yeah, we weren’t anti-immigration. We wanted legal immigration and controlled immigration, but we didn’t demonize foreigners and we didn’t hate them. That’s what Trump has changed. If you remember in the 2016 campaign, they’re rapists, they’re murder murderers, they’re coming from shithole countries and those kinds of things, it’s poisoned the debate. I think I quote Senator Michael Bennett from Colorado in my piece, who’s a super smart moderate Democrat, and he says, “When you sit across the table now from the Republicans, there is no appetite for a discussion about legal avenues or any kind of increase in legal immigration [inaudible 00:40:55].

Preet Bharara:

Is that because it’s an effective political cudgel?

Dexter Filkins:

Yes, but I do think also there’re listening to their base, and I think the base feels like we’ve got enough, there’s too much and we have to get control of the borders. I think what President Biden is running up against is, I think it’s a visceral thing as well. I think it’s well beyond the Republican Party now. It’s in the Democratic Party among voters, which is the border is out of control. We’re a nation of laws and it’s chaos, and people don’t like chaos. I think that that’s what people find disturbing. And I think that’s not just Republicans who feel that way. I think we’re dealing with that too.

Preet Bharara:

I have heard erstwhile liberals who would’ve said the most open-minded and welcoming things about immigrants and immigration for the most part lawful, who now say there are public school kids whose teachers have to buy with their own money, underpaid public school teachers have to buy with their own money supplies for the class. And yet here we are, as Eric Adams keeps bemoaning as well, fairly liberal Democratic mayor, we have to use money that could be spent on other things on this. My question is, going back to the morality of this, if you’re a good faith citizen in this country, how are you supposed to think about this dilemma? Who are you supposed to blame? Are you supposed to simultaneously want anyone who has the wherewithal to come here, to come here, have a decent process? Are you a bad person if on this issue you want the borders closed?

Help us out with your moral philosophy hat, because I do sense a feeling of angst on the part of people who have had a view about this, and I think a liberal and open-minded and tolerant view, find themselves getting very angry and don’t fully understand if that’s right and how to think about that change of feelings. Does that make sense?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah. I had a couple conversations with Democratic pollsters, and they said to me the following, and it made a lot of sense to me, which is people support legal immigration, but they don’t support illegal immigration. We want to have open arms, and we want the world to come here. We especially like it when you have a master’s degree in computer science, which a lot easier to get in the United States if you do, but we want the world to come. People support that, and you’ll find support for that across both parties. But what makes people really uneasy is when you have cheating because that’s what it is, basically. It’s cheating. I remember President Obama spoke directly to this when he was president. President Obama, who bragged about how many people he deported. He said, “Look, we support legal immigration. Americans support legal immigration, but what we’re against is illegal immigration, and we’re against people who break the rules.”

Preet Bharara:

Maybe I’m naive, it’s more morally difficult, the category of asylum seekers. And let’s assume that some large number of the people coming to the border have legitimate asylum claims, and people may disagree with that and think the percentage is not as high as some people think it is. Doesn’t that fall into a twilight zone in between legal and illegal?

Dexter Filkins:

Yes, if you could sort all those things out. The problem is the system is completely overwhelmed and it’s broken, so all we have are-

Preet Bharara:

It goes back to your earlier point, which really struck me, and that is your charity can extend only so far as you can afford.

Dexter Filkins:

That’s right. And I think we’re all confronting that now. We can always let more people in. There are constituencies for doing that. I think one of the things which I didn’t mention because I was really struck by the following, and I mentioned this in the long piece that I wrote, but I remember when I sat down with some of the people in the Biden administration, former and current, and I said something like, what are you trying to do at the border? And I thought what I’d hear was, well, we’re trying to get the border under control and hold the people back. That’s not the answer they gave me. The answer they gave me was, we’re trying to manage the flow of people. We’re trying to get the flow under control. I was really struck by that.

And the reason why, I think they’re motivated by some humanitarian concern, but also I think they look at the southern border and they say, there are millions of people who are coming and we will not be able to hold them back, and we can’t fairly ask other countries to hold them back and to take their refugees. How do we ask Columbia to take 4 million Venezuelan refugees if we won’t take any ourselves? And that the region to the south of us is basically disintegrating because of the burdens of illegal immigration, and so that we have to do our part. It’s the right thing to do, but also the practical thing to do. Our goal in the Biden administration, and this was I think early in the Biden administration, was we have to try to manage the flow of people who are coming in. I was just struck by that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, no, that is striking. I’m going to allow you, Dexter, to take off your morality hat.

Dexter Filkins:

Thank you.

Preet Bharara:

And now put on, I don’t know if this is easier or tougher, put on your political hat. We’ve already alluded to it, but as we’ve all read and seen, the Republicans both on the local and state level, and certainly on the national level, are making this issue immigration generally and the border specifically their number one issue, and they’re getting traction, as you have said, among independents and moderates and even some Democrats. How’s this going to play out between, let’s assume it’s Biden and Trump, or you want to do the alternative universe, and we’ll know shortly if Nikki Haley’s rise has any real depth to it between Biden and Nikki Haley, who herself is the child of Indian immigrants. How’s this going to play out in the brutal ground war of the election?

Dexter Filkins:

I think it plays out terribly for the current administration. I remember when I went… I think I was an Eagle Pass, which is a town in Texas on the Rio Grande, gets lots and lots and lots of people coming across because the water’s very shallow there. I remember watching several hundred people wade across the river and some of them are climbing over the fence that was there, but it was a pretty striking scene. I thought to myself, if I were a Republican political consultant, I would just film this and I could make after add, after add, add about how the border is out of control. The scenes are so vivid, and there’s no way to spin them. This is what’s happening. And they’re emotionally very powerful that if I were a Republican political consultant, I’d go right there, and I can’t imagine that they’re not. I think we’re going to start seeing those. We’re going to start seeing those ads, they’re going to look something like that, and we’re going to see a lot of them over the summer.

Preet Bharara:

And how do you think the Biden campaign responds if they can?

Dexter Filkins:

I’m surprised frankly that the Biden administration hasn’t woken up more to the change in public opinion on this. I’m just surprised.

Preet Bharara:

Are they just relying on the Pro-Choice Movement that’s very angry about Roe v. Wade being overturned? Are they resting on that, or are they just, as you just suggested, they’ve just been very late to the ball game on the shifting sentiment about this issue? Alternatively, which is a noble reason, they’re being principled and being steadfast because they think America is the city on a shining hill.

Dexter Filkins:

I think there’s a genuine contingent of people in the White House who believed the latter, we’re doing the right thing here. But let me point out one thing I learned in the course of reporting, the story I worked on, which was somebody inside the White House told me this, or somebody who had worked inside the White House in immigration told me this, they said, “Look, the classic way that a person gets elected President of the United States, it goes like this. You make a bunch of promises to your supporters in your party. So, if you’re a Democrat, you make promises to the lefties, or if you’re a Republican, you make promises to the hard right. And then when you get the nomination, you come back to the center.” And that didn’t happen in this case. What happened in this case was Biden, who’s essentially a centrist at heart, needed the left to win and went to the left. After he got the nomination, he went to the left and said, “I need to motivate people to get to the polls, and I need to get the base out.”

And that basically he was, and I hate to use this word, but he was captured by his base on that. I think there was some evidence of that in the administration, certainly people that I talked to. He brought people into the administration from the immigration advocacy community. They began to enact the programs that they wanted. And I think that’s where… Biden has been trying to tack back from that and back to the center, I think, for about the last year. But I’ve been surprised at how slow they are to react. And maybe it’s because I was standing on Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande that day, and I had that epiphany, which is my God, somebody’s going to get a lot of mileage out of these shots, and they really will.

Preet Bharara:

Sometimes it’s the case when I and my colleagues cover legal matters on the podcast and otherwise. We sometimes sit there, and we criticize a lawyer for making arguments that are not particularly good, but sometimes those are the best arguments they got. With respect to the Biden predicament, aside from the options that we’ve just discussed, what is the thing that he’s going to say given the policies that he’s been supporting, and given that it’s not a great issue for him? Sometimes it’s the case that you don’t engage, and you play up your strengths, some political consultants would say, now put on your political advisor hat, which is a subspecies of the political hat, Dexter. What could he say or do that is also not anathema to his conscience, but that mitigates the problem he’s having about the border?

Dexter Filkins:

Here’s the real squeeze right here, which is there’s an outline of a deal in Congress now, which if it were struck, could help get a lot of the border under control. The Republicans want the following, and I think this is the rub, which is we need to change the standard for asylum. We have to do away with credible fear. There’s a credible fear I’ll be killed or tortured if I go home, therefore I get to stay. They want to do away with it. They want to raise the bar essentially. I think people in the immigration advocacy community, people around Biden, they’re resisting that.

They think this would be a betrayal of what America stands for. We are the shining city on the hill, come to America, we’re the last best hope. I think they find this kind of personally repellent to be having these kind of conversations. But that’s the kind of thing that if you were to do it could actually make a real difference at the border. I think that that’s what Biden is up against right now. Do you make that deal even if personally you don’t like it, so that you can improve your situation going into November? Do you do that deal?

Preet Bharara:

But do you think republicans, the important ones, in good faith want a deal, or do they just want the cudgel as I mentioned before?

Dexter Filkins:

I think so. I think-

Preet Bharara:

Even in an election year?

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah. I spent a few days driving around with a Republican congressman from Texas named Tony Gonzalez. Great guy.

Preet Bharara:

What kind of car does he have?

Dexter Filkins:

It was an SUV, but his district is gigantic. It’s just like hundreds of miles across southern Texas. So, he’s like, “I’m in my car all the time. I’m always driving around.” He wants to make a deal. He has been criticized within the Republican Party because he’s not extreme enough. Some of the Republican proposals coming out of the house want to essentially do away with, maybe not do away with asylum, but really, really sharply limit it. And he’s opposed to that. He’s been very clear. He is like, “I can’t go that far.” So, I think there is a desire among a lot of Republicans to take care of this issue as well, because I think it’s a problem for the country. It’s a problem for them. But obviously, there’s an element the closer we get to November and the Republican media people are making those ads that we talked about that show the oceans of people coming across the Rio Grande, it’s just going to be impossible to make a deal because it’s going to be too powerful a weapon for them to get elected.

Preet Bharara:

What about on the Democratic side in Congress? Who are the people who are seriously contemplating an actual deal?

Dexter Filkins:

Kyrsten Sinema, who I guess is no longer a Democrat, but there’s a couple of people around her, they’re trying to find a deal in the middle. And it’s basically something like a reworking of the asylum rules that the Democrats can live with, and then maybe some expanded legal pathways, more legal immigration. That’s the very amorphous shape of a deal would be that. And it seems obvious, it’s more border security on one hand that the Republicans want and more legal pathways for immigrants that the Democrats want.

But again, I should point out that also what’s happening right now is you have some of the really conservative members in Congress in the house are saying, if we don’t shut down the border, if there isn’t a massive infusion of money for border security, then we’re going to shut down the government. You just had a group of Republican congressmen go to the border and they said, “Shut down the border or shut down the government.” That’s where we’re headed right now, and that’s American politics in 2024. The compromise is just outside of your grasp, and then it all falls apart. That’s what’s in play right now.

Preet Bharara:

Can we talk about one other tool that people want to deploy in a clear-eyed way? The wall. What is the status of the wall? What is the real deal with the efficacy or morality or humanity of a wall? Do you have a view on that?

Dexter Filkins:

When I was there, I’ll paint the picture for you. I thought if you’re in downtown El Paso, and I saw this, there’s a wall in El Paso that goes right along Rio Grande. I sat in a helicopter one day, hovering over El Paso, and I watched 1,000 people wade across the Rio Grande. But you can’t put the wall in the middle of the river. You have to put it on land. And what does that mean?

Preet Bharara:

That’s called a dam.

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, exactly.

Preet Bharara:

That’s a different public structure.

Dexter Filkins:

But that means that a piece of America is always going to be in front of that wall. In this case, it was like, gosh, 20 feet maybe, 20 feet of land between the wall and the river. That’s all they need. So, the 1,000 people that came across, they waded across the river, and they sat down, and they waited to be arrested and they were taken away. How many of those people are now in the United States? I don’t know. I tried to find out, I couldn’t, but probably a good number of them, probably at least half are probably in the United States now. And that’s the problem with a wall. I think a wall would work in parts of the border where you’re in the middle of nowhere where it’s just desert and mountains, then the wall works. But the wall doesn’t work if it’s-

Preet Bharara:

You can’t just go around that wall, if there’s… People argue, if you don’t have a full wall, you can get around it. People on the other side say, you have a 20-foot wall, all you need is a 21-foot ladder, and so on and so forth. Those are nice bumper sticker slogans on the issue, but do they have any value, those arguments?

Dexter Filkins:

No, they’re good. The people who are coming here, they’re motivated. They’re really tenacious. These are driven people.

Preet Bharara:

They’ve left their home.

Dexter Filkins:

Yeah, they’ve left their home. They’ve walked hundreds of miles. I talked to a woman in New York City who had come from Venezuela. She walked, it took her weeks. She was robbed several times along the way, ran out of money several times. She made it to a ranch, paid a smuggler, made it to a ranch outside of Mexicali. In the middle of the night, they took a group of them, pitch black, but they took him to the border, and there was the border wall. It was whatever it was, 20 feet high. They just put a ladder up against it. It was 22 feet high, and they all climbed across, and they went down, and then they were in the United States. They saw the border patrol office, and they went over and turned themselves in. She’s living in New York City right now.

How are you going to hermetically seal hundreds and hundreds of miles of territory? But I think most of the people who are coming in the United States are coming in not because they jumped over a wall or because they evaded the border patrol guys, it’s because of the asylum rules and essentially because they’re seeking asylum that they came in. Most of the people who were here, and I think when my story ran, which was like in June, I had calculated that about four million people had been allowed into the country, and most of those were people who were allowed in on asylum requests essentially. These are people who were captured by the border patrol, and then they’re allowed in. The wall has no relevance to that. What hat is relevant is the asylum laws.

Preet Bharara:

There’s some other things that are going on that in my view, look performative, although they’re being claimed to be done in the name of this issue of immigration and the border in particular. The move to impeach DHS Secretary Mayorkas, what do you make of that?

Dexter Filkins:

It’s an empty gesture. It’s theater. It’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen with a Democratic president and a Democratic controlled Senate, it can’t. What will we have? We’ll have hearings in the house, and everybody will shout it. Mayorkas, and they’ll condemn him and criticize him. That’ll make for good TV, but that’s all we’re going to get from it is a lot of good TV, and maybe he’ll be, quote, unquote impeached, but that’s not going to go anywhere. It’s basically about theater. It’s hard not to be cynical about that because the problems at the border and it’s an epic disaster on the border, but they’re human. These millions of human beings that we’re dealing with here, so these problems are as big as an important as they get, and it’s not really time for theater.

Preet Bharara:

You’ve been very generous with your time, Dexter Filkins. Great piece. I hope you keep covering this issue and keep making us smarter about them.

Dexter Filkins:

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Dexter Filkins continues for members of the CAFE Insider community. In the bonus for insiders, we discuss a complicated moral question related to immigration policy.

Dexter Filkins:

Most Americans have a story about how they got here, and maybe that goes back six generations or maybe zero. That’s what America’s about.

Preet Bharara:

To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

BUTTON

I want to end the show this week by paying tribute to an iconic performer and one of my favorites who just achieved a very rare feat. On Monday night, Sir Elton John won an Emmy Award for his Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium. The Disney Plus concert film chronicled the Los Angeles date on John’s 330 date final tour, which ended last year. The win means that Elton John has now won an Emmy, a Grammy, actually five Grammys, an Oscar, actually two Oscars, and a Tony for the original score to Broadway’s Aida. That’s called an EGOT, E-G-O-T, a vaunted combination of awards that only 18 other artists have ever secured. Elton joins a legendary group of EGOT winners who include Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks, Whoopi Goldberg, Andrew Lloyd Weber, and most recently Viola Davis. Elton’s accomplishment gives me an opportunity to talk a little bit more about an artist who I greatly admire.

I’m sure you all know Elton John’s iconic voice, piano playing and melodies, and I’m sure many of you know about his legendary collaboration with lyricist Bernie Taupin, who usually first wrote the lyrics before John set them to music, often very, very quickly. One of the duo’s first collaborations was Your Song. As a legend goes, the tune took shape over one morning in 1969 at John’s mother’s apartment in North London. Taupin, then only 18, wrote the lyrics over breakfast. John took them to the piano and the song almost instantly took shape. As John said in 2013, “I just sat down at the piano and looked at it going, ‘Oh my God, this is such a great lyric. I can’t fuck this one up.’ It came out in about 20 minutes, and when I was done, I called him in, and we both knew.” There’s also a remarkable video floating around YouTube showing John explaining his process of writing the music to Tiny Dancer only days after the song was completed. Here he is explaining how he did it.

Elton John:

That’s all changes you see to this verse.

(singing)

Preet Bharara:

My own all-time favorite Elton John song is Empty Garden, the lead single from his 1982 album, Jump Up. The song is a tribute to John Lennon, who as you know, was assassinated in New York a year before John recorded the track. Elton John and John Lennon were close friends and collaborators. John sang on Lennon’s, Whatever Gets You Through the Night in 1974. Lennon, who had been on a long break from performing, agreed to a wager with John that he’d take the stage if the track reached number one on the billboard charts. To John Lennon’s shock, it did, and the duo performed in Madison Square Garden in December 1974. That show turned out to be Lennon’s final live performance. The Garden as rendered by Taupin and John in the track is both a metaphor for the artistic fertility of Lennon’s career and the actual Madison Square Garden. And John’s haunting devastating tune, one of the many eulogies he set to music over his career, was a perfect tribute to the fallen legend. Here’s a snippet.

(singing)

I do have other favorite Elton John tracks. They tend to be his ballots. I’m a huge fan of Levon, a 1971-character study about a man who sells cartoon balloons in town with an absolutely towering course.

(singing)

I also love his 1972, Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters, a song about trying to make it in New York. John performed the song at The Concert for New York City just after September 11th, 2001.

(singing)

I’m also partial to the 1976, Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word, a wrenching breakup song. Unlike most Taupin, John collaborations. The melody came first with this one, and when you hear it, you’ll understand how John’s music inspired Taupin’s devastating words.

(singing)

Of course, who doesn’t love Candle in the Wind? I’d love to hear what some of your favorites are. And if you’re not too familiar with Elton John, check out these tracks and the hundreds of other songs from his staggering 55-year output. You won’t regret it. And congrats, Sir Elton John on the EGOT.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Dexter Filkins. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me @PreetBharara with the hashtag #AskPreet. You can also now reach me on threads, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24-Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The editorial producers are David Kurlander and Noa Azulai. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The audio producer is Nat Weiner, and the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, Jake Kaplan, and Claudia Hernández. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.