Something remarkable is unfolding in American politics, and most people are missing it. The Latino voters who handed Donald Trump a historic victory less than a year ago are now turning against him in numbers that should terrify the Republican Party. 

But this isn’t just about polling — it’s about something far more profound happening on the ground in communities from Chicago to southern California.

Our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano, has spent decades covering Latino communities, and he saw this moment coming long before anyone else. 

In this conversation, he takes us inside what he calls a “campaign of terror.” Arellano explains what Latino Trump voters thought they were getting, what they’re actually experiencing, and why even he has been surprised by what he’s witnessed.

Why are Chicago neighborhoods responding so differently than California suburbs? How does a journalist cover his own community under siege while maintaining his role as chronicler? What does it mean when US citizens — including Arellano’s own father — feel they need to carry their passports just to go about their daily lives? And what does a man who predicted Trump’s Latino support in 2016 see coming next? 

Arellano doesn’t offer easy answers or comfortable narratives. He’s reporting from protests where whistles have become a weapon, from detention centers where the numbers tell a very different story than administration talking points, and from communities wrestling with a choice they made that’s now playing out in ways they never imagined. 

He connects threads from California’s Prop 187 in 1994 (a ballot initiative that aimed to deny public services to undocumented immigrants) to today’s ICE raids, explaining why history might be repeating itself — just not in the direction Trump expected.

This is from the front lines of a political transformation still unfolding. And as Arellano makes clear: It’s only getting started.

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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:15] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. When history looks back at this moment in American politics, the story won’t be told through policy papers or legislative votes. It will be told through the faces of families torn apart at daycare centers, through the sound of whistles echoing across Chicago’s Little Village, and through the quiet rage of communities that once thought they’d found their political home, only to discover that the home was built on sand. Forty-eight percent, that’s the historic share of the Latino vote that Donald Trump won in 2024, the highest for any Republican presidential candidate in modern history. It seemed to signal a seismic realignment, a demographic earthquake that would reshape American politics for a generation. Pundits declared the Latino vote was finally, truly within the GOP reach. That was less than a year ago. Today, only 25 percent of Latinos view Trump favorably, a collapse so swift, so complete, that it makes the political earthquakes of past pale by comparison. Two-thirds of Latino men now think negatively of the president they helped elect. In New Jersey and Virginia, Latino voters just delivered crushing defeats to Republican candidates. The courtship is over, the betrayal is real, and the reckoning is here. My guest today has chronicled this transformation with the intimacy that comes from living it. Gustavo Arellano is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and one of the most important voices in American journalism, not because he speaks for all Latinos, but because he refuses to flatten their story into comfortable narratives. He’s reported from Chicago’s neighborhoods under siege, from California’s protest lines, and from the heart of communities watching their Trump-voting neighbors confront a brutal truth. The president they trusted has declared war on their families, their communities, and their dreams. The child of Mexican immigrants, including a father who crossed the border in the trunk of a Chevy, Arellano brings three decades of reporting to this story. His work has taken him from covering Prop 187 in 1994, California’s original anti-immigrant crusade, to witnessing Gregory Bovino’s Border Patrol operations that used Black Hawk helicopters to raid apartment buildings and tear-gas neighborhoods preparing for children’s Halloween parades. This is a story not just about what happens, but about how it feels. Not just the raids, but the ripple effects through communities. Not just the politics, but the people, including those who voted for Trump and now grapple with the consequences of that choice. Because in the end, this isn’t a story about demographics or voting blocs. It’s a story about betrayal, about cruelty, about what happens when people who thought they were buying into the American dream discover they were marked for deception all along. It is my pleasure to welcome Gustavo Arellano here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Gustavo, thanks so much for joining us.

[00:03:13] Gustavo Arellano: Gracias for having me.

[00:03:14] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is a delight to have you here. It is remarkable when one thinks back a year that 48 percent of Latino voters voted for Trump in 2024. What did they think they were getting? What did they think they were voting for at the time?

[00:03:28] Gustavo Arellano: They were voting for someone who was saying that they were going to improve the economy. That’s what Donald Trump said. Someone that promised to deport the worst of the worst, and especially for the Latino community, many of whom actually have been in this country now a couple of generations, a lot of whom are Spanish dominant. Don’t believe the continual media stereotyping of Latinos as Spanish speaking and immigrants. And also, frankly, somebody who they saw was, for lack of a better term, a “strong” man, something straight out of Latin America, someone who’s going to give it to the liberals, give it to the people who want to persecute them, and was promising and basically said, I am not a weakling like the Democrats. I am not sleepy Joe Biden. I am not crazy Kamala. I am Donald Trump. I am someone who thinks that the traditional Latino family needs to be supported. And so a lot of them voted for that. And then you add on top of that exceptionalism, transphobia, and all that. It was the perfect cocktail that the Democratic Party refused to acknowledge until Trump won. And then later on, forget the exit polls, try the Pew Research Center. When it comes to gauging how Latinos, and really Americans, feel, they are seen as the gold standard. And so I think it was in the spring when they came out with their final validated voting surveys, and it showed 48 percent of Latinos went for Trump and 51 percent of Latino men voted for Trump. Historic in so many ways and not all of them good and most of them not good.

[00:05:10] Jeff Schechtman: And in fact, even to the 25 percent that it’s collapsed to now seems like a high number given what has gone on.

[00:05:17] Gustavo Arellano: Not surprising because I, and of course you’re going to hear me say this a lot, I wrote about this before because that’s my job is really to call things months, if not years, before they happen. And I have been writing about Latino support for Trump going back to 2018 for the Los Angeles Times and in the previous newspaper that I worked for, OC Weekly, in 2016. I saw the appeal that he would have to a certain segment of people. And as the years went along, and as the economy didn’t really improve that much, and as you had new migrants from Latin America who were not of Mexican heritage, look, a lot of the people that I know, people who should know better, they don’t care about the Latino immigrants from El Salvador, from Venezuela, the people who’ve come over during the past two years with the Biden administration. By the way, I am not supporting any deportation policy whatsoever. In fact, most deportations I’m probably going to be opposed to. But if Trump had been smart about it, he would not have had this historic collapse. And people are going to say, well, Latinos care about the economy. That as well. But when the majority of Latinos in the United States are of Mexican heritage in California, it’s a super majority, at least 75 percent of them. And when you’re seeing the people being rounded up and harassed are people of Mexican descent who have been here 20 or 30 years, the tamale lady, the frutero, the father with three Marines like here in Orange County, daycare workers like in Chicago. Yeah, people are going to get upset. These are not the worst of the worst. These are just regular folks trying to make something of themselves. And yeah, don’t be surprised if Latinos are not going to be throwing roses at Trump anymore and turning away from the Republican Party come this past Election Day.

[00:07:11] Jeff Schechtman: And what sense of betrayal is there that they did put their trust, they put their vote in someone that has betrayed them for all intents and purposes?

[00:07:20] Gustavo Arellano: I’ll tell you this much, a lot of the Latino Trumpers that I know, they’re not talking. It’s almost like they do not want to be subject to the embarrassment that comes with Latinos who hated Trump telling them, see, I told you so. I don’t know if shame does anything. And I also don’t think that this necessarily guarantees that these Latinos are going to go for the Democrats in the 2026 election. A lot of things can happen in a year. I mean, we’re less than a year away from Election Day 2026. So I wouldn’t call it a betrayal, more like disillusionment, because Trump was supposed to deliver Latinos to the promised land. He was supposed to get rid of all the worst of the worst. And instead, all he’s done is sown chaos. He’s messed with the pocketbooks of Latinos. This government shutdown didn’t help things whatsoever. And so it’s like, oh, you ended up becoming no better than Biden, except you’re persecuting all these people and you’re throwing your hammer specifically at Latinos, not anyone else. They’re going to say, oh, it’s just undocumented people. Well, the vast majority of people that have been rounded up have been people of Latino heritage. So what are Latinos supposed to think?

[00:08:37] Jeff Schechtman: There’s also an element of white supremacy to this that you’ve written about. Talk about that.

[00:08:42] Gustavo Arellano: As I’ve written before, and as you’re seeing all of this, well, you’re seeing a Trump administration that really seems to favor this idea of a mythical white American. By white I mean we’re talking about Leave It to Beaver era. We’re talking about that infamous painting of a woman, a white angel, a female angel in the center of a canvas. To her left is darkness, Native Americans, buffalo. To her right are white people coming in with their farms, with their railroads, with their guns, and all of that. That’s what the Trump administration is tweeting out there. They’re tweeting out the Department of Labor saying we’ll start working again America, with images straight out of like Nazi Germany, white men literally with perfect jaws and their full head of hair, which is ironic because then you see someone like Stephen Miller, who’s completely blonde or, rather, bald. So maybe it’s like goals for this guy to be looking as white as these people. I don’t know. But when you put it out there, you think, what the hell is wrong with this administration that they’re so obsessed with whiteness? They’re so obsessed with bringing back an era where “white makes right.” Here’s the thing, especially coming from the left. A lot of people said in 2024 that these Latino Trump supporters were just assimilating into whiteness. Nah, none of these Latinos want to be white. Most of these Latino Trumpers actually think white people are weak and feckless and a bunch of drug addicts and lazy. They’re proud of being Latinos. And they thought with Trump, he was just opening up the tent, much like the Democratic Party said they would many, many times before. But now that we’re inside the tent, there’s one group that keeps getting all the acclaim, all the applaud, and all the promos on social media. Yeah, I would think more than a few of these Latinos are like, what’s going on here? Because it’s kind of weird.

[00:10:44] Jeff Schechtman: There’s also a cruelty to it that we’ve seen repeatedly and that you’ve written about extensively, a cruelty that really accentuates all this bad stuff.

[00:10:55] Gustavo Arellano: Well, what else do you call subpar, inhumane conditions in detention centers? People being arrested, being in a damned if they do and damned if they don’t scenario where if they show up to the courthouse for a court hearing to determine whether they can stay, they can’t even make it to the courthouse. They can’t even make it to the judge’s chambers or to the courtroom because they’re going to get picked up and detained and then sent off. But if they don’t show up to the courthouse, then they automatically get a sentence to be deported the moment they’re caught. People being pepper-sprayed, families being pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, American citizens being caught up in this. ProPublica found that at least, and this was in September, we’re now in almost mid-November, in September, they had found that at least 170 US citizens had been detained by the Trump administration for hours, some claimed for days. And then out here in Southern California, a judge ruled that essentially the Trump administration was racially profiling people when it came to determining who they were going to try to detain. The Trump administration admitted to it and said, well, it’s perfectly legal and it’s perfectly necessary. And the Supreme Court issued, I think it was a court order, something really like they didn’t hear the whole case, but basically issued a declaration saying, yeah, it’s fine. And Brett Kavanaugh in what he filed to support this cockamamie bullshit, for lack of a better term, used the word “brief” or “briefly” eight times to say, well, if a US citizen does get questioned by ICE, it’s only going to be something brief. It’s horrible. It’s cruelty. And he’s basically saying if this happens to Latinos, well, you know what, it’s going to be brief, so it’s okay. But tell that to the military veteran who was caught up by mistake in a raid on a field out there in Camarillo, California, in Ventura County. Again, 170 US citizens would love to tell Justice Kavanaugh there is nothing brief about what they had to deal with when it came to ICE.

[00:13:14] Jeff Schechtman: And added to this is this English fluency crackdown, which is only exacerbating what you’re saying.

[00:13:20] Gustavo Arellano: Oh, well, no, you’re talking about my dad. That’s why, again, further white supremacy. When you have a Trump administration, that one of the first things they say is we’re going to rename the Gulf of Mexico, which has been called that by all the countries that have their borders or coastlines around it. They’ve called it that for centuries. Now Trump wants to call it the Gulf of America. In the spring, US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said that they were going to really start cracking down on English fluency when it came to truck drivers. And I did a column about my father, who was a truck driver for 30 years, came to, as you mentioned, this country in the trunk of a Chevy from Mexico, spends most of his life speaking Spanish, his native tongue. But I interviewed him like, do you need English to be a good truck driver? He said, not perfect, but everyone knows a little bit because that’s the truck driving industry. So I quizzed him, okay, like, take me back. He’s been retired now for a decade. Take me back to when you were a truck driver. And he walked me through everything, what every dispatcher could possibly tell him, any inspector at the weight stations. All of these truck drivers know how to do it because that’s their job. And everyone knows a little bit of English. But to demand that truck drivers essentially speak the King’s English, it’s racism. It’s white supremacy, as you pointed out.

[00:14:43] Jeff Schechtman: One of the other aspects of this is the difference in reaction in different parts of the country. You’ve spent a lot of time talking about the different reactions in California versus Chicago. Talk about that.

[00:14:55] Gustavo Arellano: Well, it’s, I mean, the country and I haven’t traveled the whole country, but the Trump administration recently put out that they had detained 1,500 people in the Houston area over the past couple of months. But where was the resistance? Where were the protests? That’s around the same number that you had in Los Angeles over the summer, I believe. And you saw what happened in Los Angeles. People stood up to that. People really said, hell no. And then when I went to Chicago recently, it was on a completely different level. I ended up in Little Village. Little Village is, they call it, the heart of the Mexican Midwest, one of the more famous Latino majority suburbs, not suburbs, it’s a neighborhood in Chicago. And that’s a place that the Border Patrol had been hitting repeatedly again and again and again. And so when I went there, I saw immediately what happens when you activate an entire neighborhood. It is hard in Los Angeles and suburbia because in suburbia we get high on the apathy. We think everything is nice and wonderful. Things are also very spread out. Little Village is super dense, super compact. And when I got there, the Border Patrol was patrolling that day, and I ended up with a group of activists and we were chasing around warning people. We never did catch up to the Border Patrol, although they were like a phantom, always one step ahead of us. But everyone seemed to have a whistle. Everyone seemed to be participating. It was something that I just have not seen in Los Angeles. And don’t get me wrong, Los Angeles has a lot of down activists, and they have been doing the good work. But Chicago was a completely different level.

[00:16:39] Jeff Schechtman: And why do you think that was?

[00:16:41] Gustavo Arellano: Well, there’s that tradition of activism and radical activism in Chicago. I mean, this is the home of the Haymarket Riot, for crying out loud. And that was what, 1886? Yes, Los Angeles has had activism over the decades too. But when the whole city is active, Chicago is bluer than Los Angeles. What was I think 70? I think 26 percent of the city of Los Angeles voted for Trump. In Chicago, it was 22 percent. So a difference of like five percentage points. But still, Chicago is a more blue place. It has more of a tradition. It’s more of a union town. That solidarity is there. And so, I mean, that’s just part of the equation. I’m not going to pretend and say I know everything about Chicago now to be able to say here’s what I could, here are the main differences. One interesting thing that Chicago residents, our activists, did tell me is that they don’t have the infrastructure of the nonprofit industry or nonprofits to be able to fund a lot of activists and teach them how to do these things. So in that sense, there’s way more grassroots activism that I saw in Chicago on these different levels. And the most important thing, the whistles that I got when my Uber dropped me off in the famous archway right in the heart of Little Village on 26th Street, their main street. I get off and everywhere I’m hearing car honks, which, okay, you’ll expect. But more importantly, whistles and whistles have been the soundtrack to this deportation wreck in Chicago all fall. The moment I came back from Chicago, I got a whistle myself. I’m going to put it in my car, and I’m going to urge anyone from Southern California, that is a soundtrack because that immediately gets people’s attention. And look, if the walls of Jericho fell down with horns, surely whistles can do the same, no?

[00:18:45] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about who Gregory Bovino is.

[00:18:47] Gustavo Arellano: Well, Gregory Bovino is a guy from Western Carolina who made a career out of being in the Border Patrol. When the year started, he was in charge of the El Centro sector of the Border Patrol, which we’re talking about the desert in California, east of San Diego County. So mostly Imperial County. Right before Trump gets inaugurated, he stages this really bold raid up in Kern County that he was not supposed to do because that’s not really his terrain. And he basically did it to give a warning to everyone. There’s a new sheriff in town, and I’m ready to get this. Well, he had been reprimanded before during his time in the Border Patrol, which, for the Trump administration that means, hey, you’re our guy. So he gets put in charge of putting out the Border Patrol in Los Angeles to do actions, which his team did throughout the summer. Then he gets told, okay, you’re now going to go to Chicago to do the same. Chicago got hit way harder than Los Angeles on many levels. Meanwhile, a judge put an injunction against Bovino saying that you cannot be using tear gas the way you have. And they’ve just been thumbing their nose at the injunction. The judge that issued it said what Bovino and the Border Patrol had been doing in tossing tear gas, and everything that they had done at crowds, “shocks the conscience.” And this man who’s in charge of this force that “shocks the conscience,” he is now the commander-at-large for the Border Patrol, reports directly to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The Trump administration has put him in charge of replacing ICE officials with his Border Patrol guys. So expect whatever happened to Chicago to come near you wherever you may be.

[00:20:52] Jeff Schechtman: And in addition to everything that’s happening on the ground, there’s the larger picture, the tariffs on Latin America, the bombing of the drug boats, the trade wars, the ending of federal grants for college recruitment of Latino students. I mean, this goes even further than what we see happening on the ground every day.

[00:21:11] Gustavo Arellano: Look, again, I think this year has shown that Latinos, Latin America, we are public enemy number one to the Trump administration and all the various manifestations. There is no one Trump administration or, rather, there is no one Latino group. There’s multiples. We contain multitudes in ways just like the United States, which we are very much a part of. But you see Trump’s record for 2025 against so many things that Latinos cherish. Yeah, we’re public enemy number one. So yeah, don’t be surprised if you turn off a whole bunch of people and you disillusion even more people.

[00:21:51] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things you’ve written about is how Prop 187 in California back in 1994, in many ways, is ground zero for all of this.

[00:22:01] Gustavo Arellano: Well, in two ways. So Prop 187 was a 1994 ballot initiative that essentially sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants in many ways. Too long for me to really get into detail here. But what you need to know is that it was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it radicalized a generation of young Latinos like myself who became Democrat and eventually vowed to never vote for the Republican Party again. The reason California is as deep blue as it is was in large part because of Prop 187. It spawned an entire generation of Latino leaders like Antonio Villaraigosa, the former mayor of Los Angeles; Xavier Becerra, the former housing and health services secretary; and Alex Padilla, the US senator. But it also taught the Republican Party that anti-immigrant politics could win. So you can make a direct connection between Prop 187, which, by the way, passed with almost two-thirds of the vote but eventually was ruled unconstitutional by a judge and never went into effect. And it taught the Republican Party that xenophobic politics can work. Prop 187 worked for decades, but by the time Trump rolls around in 2024 for his reelection campaign, look, at a certain point if all you as a Democratic Party can say, oh, don’t vote for Republicans because of Prop 187. And if you’re going above and beyond to try to protect undocumented people, even though now the mass of your Latino electorate is no longer undocumented and really has no connections or ties to the new generation, well, yeah, don’t be surprised if Prop 187 eventually became anemic as political platform to the point where it basically was gone for Trump. It no longer existed. When I did my podcast in 2019, it was a warning to the Trump administration to not be so anti-immigrant. Well, look what happened five years after that. No one in 2019 would have seen this coming. But I saw rumbles of it. And here we are.

[00:24:14] Jeff Schechtman: One of the things that we’re seeing is almost a conflict between local law enforcement and the federal agents, the ICE agents, the Homeland Security agents. Talk about what you’re seeing there.

[00:24:24] Gustavo Arellano: It’s not so much a matter of conflict because law enforcement’s not really going to go beat up law enforcement. But local law enforcement is not happy with the Fed, and they never are. I mean, this happens when ATF rolls into town, FBI. There’s always going to be that clash. But when you have ICE coming in, before they would come in, they’d give the local law enforcement a courtesy call, hey, we’re going to be in town. We’re researching or we’re investigating this. Now they’re not coming in at all. Now ICE is trying to recruit local law enforcement away from their jobs using the excuse that a lot of you work in sanctuary cities. Well, if you really want to go after the bad guys, you should sign up with us. We’ll give you unfettered cruelty, basically, or unfettered tools to do the job that you do. So law enforcement will rarely speak ill of other law enforcement. And you’re not really seeing this, but just sources that have rambled.

[00:25:25] Jeff Schechtman: We saw those police officers in Chicago that were tear-gassed by the federal agency.

[00:25:29] Gustavo Arellano: Well, they’re just caught up. And a lot of times what happens is that ICE or the people who they’re detaining, they’ll call them. And so they’re stuck in the middle. Basically ICE is using local law enforcement to protect them from crowds. I mean, that’s why Trump wants to call in the National Guard, because a lot of local law enforcement doesn’t want to be a part of this. And so ICE is not apologizing to the, in Chicago, I believe it was 13 officers who were in the middle of the deployment of tear gas. Yeah, the mayor is mad, but the police chief or commissioner or whatever they call them, they’re only going to criticize so much.

[00:26:09] Jeff Schechtman: How sustainable is the kind of community resistance that you were talking about in Chicago?

[00:26:15] Gustavo Arellano: No, don’t mess with Chicago. Chicago throws down. Any of these communities, you don’t want to mess with them, especially when it comes to Latinos. Look, if you really want to get into it, we’ve fought revolutions before. We’ve seen the worst that a government can do. And still we resist and still we persist. And this is the United States. The United States is different from Latin America. But the Border Patrol, ICE, they’re going to get billions of dollars more in funds to ramp up their deportation proceedings and efforts. On the other hand, look, maybe this stops. Maybe Trump gets a Nixon goes to China moment and declares victory and says this is how we’re going to legalize all of these people. You just never know. I doubt it’ll happen, but you just never know. But Latinos are ready for it one way or another. Sure, they’re always throwing more and more horrible things at undocumented people. But again, we’ve been through this before. And here we are.

[00:27:11] Jeff Schechtman: Is there anything other than the fantasy about what Trump might do? Is there anything hopeful about this picture at the moment?

[00:27:19] Gustavo Arellano: Yeah, resistance. That’s where you get the hope that people are unbowed, that people are not going to be broken. I’m not trying to be Pollyannish about this because there is a lot of trauma. There are businesses especially hurting mightily. People are terrorized. People are traumatized. There’s all of that crap. And it’s only going to get worse. This is the thing. It’s only going to get worse before it gets better. But you know what? People are going to rise up to the moment. People have risen up and people are tired. But the more these outrages happen, you’re going to get more people starting to come in and more people resisting. And yeah, for me, that’s hopeful.

[00:27:52] Jeff Schechtman: And what is it like? Give a sense of what it’s like for these communities that are living under this kind of fear right now.

[00:28:00] Gustavo Arellano: I mean, you see people not going to restaurants, children not going to school, people self-deporting, people not refusing to leave, people refusing to leave their home, people getting evicted because they’re not going to work anymore. It is terror. It is terror. This is not everyone, but it’s spreading. And look, when you as a US citizen of Latino heritage feel that you have to walk around with your passport because you don’t know what’s going to happen, like myself, like my father, like a lot of people that I know. I mean, ask yourself, what does that say about that person’s countenance? Not countenance, but what does that say about that person’s trust in the federal government right now and how horrible it is that mostly white people, almost exclusively white people, are not going to have those worries the way a lot of us Latinos do? That is not a community that is in its best days right now. Let me take that back. That is not a community that is particularly happy or optimistic about the moment. And yet, still, we’re rising up to it. And then some.

[00:29:06] Jeff Schechtman: Is there anything that turns this around in terms of the relationship between Trump and the Latino community?

[00:29:13] Gustavo Arellano: The economy becomes better. This terrorizing stops. Some sort of amnesty. Look, if Trump offered an amnesty, yeah, a lot of Latinos will be like, okay, we’re hearing you out. But if Trump improves the economy, sure, more of them will. But if Trump stops these indiscriminate raids and really, like I said earlier, focuses on the so-called worst of the worst and then the more recent arrivals to where a lot of Latinos don’t have connections, then maybe he has a chance of winning them back. But that ship sailed for a lot of people a long time ago. And the November elections that we just saw are just the beginning. These raids don’t seem to be slowing down any soon and far from it. You’ve seen that the Trump administration wants to escalate them. Right now, I think they’re only detaining about 1,700 people a day. Stephen Miller, Trump’s right-hand man, was demanding 3,000 people a day. So there’s still a long way to go from 1,700 to 3,000. If the Trump administration were smart, they would just ratchet it down as much as possible. But I don’t think they’re smart. I think they’re devious, but devious is not smart.

[00:30:31] Jeff Schechtman: Are the worst of the worst getting picked up in all of this or some of them left behind?

[00:30:36] Gustavo Arellano: A lot of them are left behind. I believe it was, I can’t remember the name, but they are based out of Syracuse University. A nonprofit, not polling but research firm, as it were, that pulls government documents. As of September, the people detained in immigration custody in the United States, 71 percent of them had never been charged with a crime, let alone convicted of a crime. They are picking up everyone and anyone. And you’ll say, okay, well, that means 31 percent of them were charged or convicted with a crime. But very few of them are the violent ones that the so-called worst of the worst gangs are not being disappeared. The cartels are not losing none of this. This is just let’s terrorize Latinos as much as possible. That’s where we’re at right now. And that’s where it’s going to continue because that was always the point.

[00:31:30] Jeff Schechtman: What is the hope in terrorizing, that they will self-deport, that they will leave, that they will be more afraid? What’s the endgame of that?

[00:31:40] Gustavo Arellano: The endgame for the Trump administration, they said they wanted to get rid of all estimated 12 million undocumented people in this country. You try to figure out what that means. That means a decimation of the restaurant industry, the agricultural industry, the wiping out of neighborhoods. That’s scorched earth. That is out of the campaigns of conquest of the American West. The Trump administration has never said that explicitly. On the other hand, when they’re saying we’re going to get rid of 12 million undocumented people, you tell me what that signifies.

[00:32:15] Jeff Schechtman: All of that amidst an economy that’s got problems to begin with.

[00:32:19] Gustavo Arellano: Yeah, I mean, again, but that’s what they promised. Let’s hope it doesn’t get to that. But if that’s what they promised and it goes all the way through, then we’ll see exactly what that is. And then you’ve also heard people saying, okay, after all this is done, let’s do a brand-new census because the Republican Party historically has been mad that undocumented people were counted in the US census. So the people who are pushing this, they want a radically different United States where Latinos are basically back in the 1950s. And the stupidity of them is that they could have gotten to that with a big chunk of Latinos, but they chose not to. Again, that speaks to the white supremacy that’s baked into a lot of this.

[00:33:01] Jeff Schechtman: As you mentioned earlier, you predicted some of this. You’ve been writing about it for so long, even before where we are now. Talk about what this has been like for you covering this.

[00:33:13] Gustavo Arellano: My job is I’m a reporter. I’m a columnist to be specific. So my job as a columnist is to be prophetic, to see what’s going on down the line. Look, the best reporters, either you do a story that everyone’s doing the best or you do things that no one else is doing. And I pride myself throughout my career. I’ve been at this for 25 years, one way or another, in many ways, in doing things that everyone else picks up. Latinos and Trump. Again, I’ve been doing this since 2018. The Pulitzer Prize committee was kind enough to name me a finalist in commentary specifically for that. But I take no joy in predicting. I take no joy in covering what I had been railing about for years and Democrats dismissed as just Chicken Little. And well, at the end, who was a true Chicken Little. And then me on a personal level, this is all I do now, cover a topic that used to be part of my wheelhouse. Now it seems to be the overwhelming part of my wheelhouse. But that’s what a columnist does. They report on what’s important. They report on what’s going on in a community. And so I do it.

[00:34:17] Jeff Schechtman: And finally, what’s the biggest thing you think the public is missing about what’s going on in this right now?

[00:34:24] Gustavo Arellano: If you’re not paying attention, pay attention. This is a campaign of terror. This is a campaign to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants. Go out there, get angry, get a whistle, donate, do something. If you’re not doing something, then history is going to remember you the way they remembered people who stood silent when all the other racist terrors of the United States against immigrants happened in the past straight up. And again, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. But I keep hope because without hope, then what are we?

[00:35:00] Jeff Schechtman: Gustavo Arellano, I thank you so very much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:35:07] Gustavo Arellano: Gracias as always.

[00:35:08] Jeff Schechtman: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.