AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, on our 29th anniversary of this daily global news broadcast.

We turn now to the impact of a flood of immigration policy changes and crackdowns over the last few weeks. President Trump has now moved to allow agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to carry out enforcement operations at courthouses, including in immigration courts. This comes as people are also widely reporting they’ve also faced detention or deportation after their regular ICE check-ins, as ICE has reportedly set new arrest quotas.

We go first to Arizona, where the Tucson-based independent outlet Arizona Luminaria has been following the case of a Venezuelan family torn apart after a mother of four was pulled by Arizona Public Safety troopers for driving under the speed limit. She and two of her children, aged 6 and 9, were quickly deported to Mexico, but her other two kids, aged 8 and 14, remain in Tucson. The deportations occurred just hours after the minor traffic stop. The mother described being handcuffed in front of her kids as the troopers called Border Patrol agents, who later turned them over to Mexican immigration officials in the border city of Nogales before they were put on a bus and driven about 2,000 miles away to the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. The mother was incommunicado for days, until she was finally able to call her family, letting them know of her whereabouts. We’re not saying the names of the mother or her kids in order to protect the family at the request of their attorney.

For more, we’re joined first in Tucson by John Washington, reporter for Arizona Luminaria. He covered this in a story headlined “Venezuelan migrant mother and two children deported to México just hours after Tucson traffic stop.” He’s the author of The Case for Open Borders and The Dispossessed: A Story of Asylum at the U.S.-Mexican Border and Beyond.

John, welcome back to Democracy Now! Fill out this story for us. Tell us what happened to this woman.

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, thanks for having me back on, and congrats on the 29 years.

So, what happened, this started last week. This mother of four was with two of her children, and she was selling empanadas outside of a gas station in Tucson, when she says that she was verbally attacked by someone who was leaving the gas station. And that person then called the police. The responding officers were state troopers. And this woman packed up her things and packed up her children and started driving away. And the officers made a stop down the road. The pretext was that she was driving too slowly, 25 miles a hour in a 40-mile-an-hour zone. She was taken out of the car. She was extensively questioned. And as that was happening, the Border Patrol were already on their way. The troopers had allegedly called the Border Patrol. She was handcuffed, as you mentioned, by Border Patrol officers in front of her children. And her children were then taken away to a short-term detention facility elsewhere in Tucson that was run by Border Patrol.

She says, from there, that she suffered a night of interrogation, that Border Patrol officers were accusing her of being in a Venezuelan gang. They were accusing her husband of being in a gang. They actually were questioning her 6-year-old daughter and saying that her dad was a gang member. All of these claims, the family vehemently denies.

And just hours later, after a really difficult night and with the 9-year-old son trying to protect his mom and his younger sister from what he saw as aggressive Border Patrol agents, they were deported to Mexico. And from there, they were taken about 2,000 miles south. And not until they arrived to their destination were they able to make the first call. So, the mother tells me that she pleaded with first the state troopers, then the Border Patrol agents who were arresting her, and then multiple times during the night, to please let her have a phone call to let her family know where she is, where she and her two children were, to check in with her other two kids and let them know. But she was repeatedly denied calls both in the U.S. and then also in Mexico.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, John, could you clarify, when you say she was deported to Mexico and then transported 2,000 miles? Was this — in other words, she’s a Venezuelan, so did the Mexican government willingly participate, and did the Mexican government transport her from the border further down into Mexico?

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, that’s right. So, Mexico has for some time been accepting Venezuelan and people from a couple other countries deported from the United States. This is a growing trend. The Trump administration has negotiated or strong-armed a number of other countries already to start accepting third-country deportees. And, yes, so, the Mexican government did willingly receive this woman and her two kids, and then they did transport her south.

This is something that we’ve been seeing increasingly, not just under Trump but in the past year, where after the Biden administration and now Trump has really been really trying to convince Mexico to do more to crack down. Mexico doesn’t have the funds or maybe the willingness to actually effect a lot of these deportations, these secondary deportations after people are removed from the United States. So what they’re doing is that they’re busing them south and just making their journey potentially back to the United States much more arduous, much more dangerous and potentially much more deadly.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to John Washington, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria. He’s in Tucson. We also want to bring into this conversation Greisa Martínez Rosas, executive director of United We Dream Action, the largest youth-led immigrant network in the United States. She’s a DACA recipient. That’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. And her new guest essay for The New York Times is headlined “Why Democrats Fail the Immigration Test Every Time.” She’s joining us from New Haven, Connecticut.

Greisa, thanks so much for being with us. You know, there is John in Arizona. He has two Democratic senators, Gallego and Kelly. Both voted for the Laken Riley Act. If you can talk about how that fits in to your op-ed piece about why you’re blaming the Democrats for what’s happening today?

GREISA MARTÍNEZ ROSAS: Well, thank you so much for having me this morning.

I’ll also note that newly elected Senator Gallego, who won with a lot of Latino support this last November, was the co-sponsor of the bill. So, not only did he vote for it, but co-sponsor it.

And I think that there’s enough blame to go around in this moment. There is a clear strategy that Republicans and the GOP have, like, advanced that — on the backs of immigrants. We know that this is not a strategy of enforcement or only a strategy of enforcement or deportation, but this is a strategy for low wages and legal limbo. We know that immigrants are a necessary part of, like, the workforce economy, and that when there are stories like the heartbreaking ones that we just heard today, it makes it more likely for low-wage workers to not go and ask for the wages that they deserve, not to ask for help when they’ve been hurt.

But this is a democracy. It requires all of us to take action, and most of all, our elected officials, people that are trusted by millions of us to take action and to change the government. And that is where some of the responsibility lies on Democrats. We know that in this moment we need a true opposition power and party. They have been elected to ensure that there is a pro-immigrant agenda in this country. They have, for the last 40 years, promised action on this. And when the most dark moment in American history for immigrants in recent history happens, what we’re hearing from Democrats is, “We don’t have enough power. They’re the ones that won. We’ve got to wait for him to make a mistake.”

What we know in this moment is that we have to flip the con. We have to flip the script on them. This is not about safety or, like, the remembrance of a past time. This is about the control and the ensuring that billionaires and corporations continue to squeeze out money from everyday working Americans, not only undocumented immigrants, not only immigrants to the U.S., but also native-born people. So, it is time for all of us to not turn away, and keep our attention on what’s happening at the White House, what Elon Musk is doing in ravaging our government, and we must have worthy stewards of that agenda and that vision. And Democrats have an opportunity to do that.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Greisa, I wanted to ask you — in your op-ed, you write, quote, “Many Latinos don’t primarily see themselves through the lens of systemic” racism, and they see themselves more as other European immigrants. But I’m wondering — there is some agency in the Latino community around these issues and the growing number of them voting for Trump. To what extent does the class character of the migration to the United States have an impact on how people see the Trump policies? Because increasingly, more and more middle-class people from Latin America have fled and come to the United States. And to what degree their class origins have an impact on how they vote or how they perceive the issue of immigration?

GREISA MARTÍNEZ ROSAS: What we know is that class and power define the conditions of the political landscape. And I guess I want to start off by saying that even if every Latino had voted on the Democratic side this last election, we would still see the outcome of the election having Donald Trump won. So I just want to make sure that, like, in the narrative, we’re not overstating the impact of Latinos voting for Trump in the outcome of the election.

And I think it’s important for us to note that there have been some significant shifts. And I think that that’s both connected to, like, the experiences that immigrants and Latinos carry from Latin America and what it felt like to have to survive under authoritarian regimes, and people are moving in a way that ensures the maximum survival. I also think that class and, like, the transition of class, as we’ve seen in the cases of Irish Americans, Italian Americans, that there is a pull that both the culture sort of like moves us to wanting to be more absorbed into this country, and therefore reject some of our origin spaces.

But the truth of the moment right now is that the conditions are being set by our ability to be workers and labor for this country. And so, there is a — there is a story being sold to not only Latinos but some Black Americans, white Americans in the U.S. that are working-class, that the reason why we don’t have enough for our table, why we don’t have enough to pay rent, it’s because of immigrants. And that’s the con that we have to flip. We know that that’s not the truth. It’s been historic disinvestment in those communities. It’s been systemic laws that have kept our people in detention centers and in prisons. It’s been the divestment in our education system, the housing crisis that we currently find ourselves in. Those are the reasons. And the greed, the corporate greed, is the reasons why Americans don’t have enough on the table and why it’s hard to pay rent.

And that’s why it’s important for Democrats, for people like myself, for people in larger civil society to not give in to the simple story that the GOP and MAGA are trying to drive, but to ask more questions and to be clear about what are the current conditions in place, not only because it helps us understand this moment, but because it impacts real lives. The mother of the story that we just heard right now, that’s the nightmare for millions of mothers in this country right now that are holding their kids tight at night. It’s the nightmare that my family had to go through when I was 17, when my father was deported in a little — over a couple of days. It’s the nightmare that, like, every single American should not look away from, because once they come for immigrants, we understand and we’re seeing that they will come for all of us.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, I wanted to ask, bring John Washington back into the conversation. We mentioned the Laken Riley Act, the first act passed by the new Congress. Part of the act also allows state attorneys general to sue the federal government for not enforcing immigration. Could you talk about the significance of that particular provision and what that could portend?

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah, that’s right. So, yeah, and, you know, I think, looking at Gallego, who bills himself as a moderate and has co-sponsored this bill, I think it’s really important to look at these contours and what the actual bill says. You know, and he says that he has the support of Latinos; when he goes back to Arizona, he has people who support these kinds of measures. But the family that I have been reporting on, the community that they come from, and a lot of the people I’ve been speaking with in southern Arizona have been aghast at Gallego for sponsoring this bill and for saying that he has the support of their community.

So, one of the things that this bill does is it creates mandatory detention. That’s no-bond detention for people who are merely accused of crimes. So, when someone claims that someone else robbed something from a grocery store or maybe took something from a gas station, that can result in what we saw with this family. And this is more or less what we did see, because this woman was originally called out by a person who was at the gas station, as well, and they called the police on them. That would result in a mandatory detention for them.

And as you mentioned, the other — one of the other provisions is giving —

AMY GOODMAN: John, we have less than a minute.

JOHN WASHINGTON: Yeah — is giving states much more power to force the federal government’s hand to enforce immigration policies. And also, they’re given permanent standing, so states can sue in a potential future Democratic administration that would maybe try to roll back some of the excesses that we’re seeing now. States would automatically be able to sue and block the federal government from enacting or rolling back any of these anti-immigrant provisions.

AMY GOODMAN: John Washington —

JOHN WASHINGTON: So it’s really — 

AMY GOODMAN: — we want to thank you so much for being with us and for joining us from Tucson, a reporter for Arizona Luminaria, and Greisa Martínez Rosas, a DACA recipient, executive director of United We Dream Action. We’ll link to your essay in The New York Times, “Why Democrats Fail the Immigration Test Every Time.”

Coming up, up to 20 million people could lose Medicaid. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: “Rata de Dos Patas,” “Two-Legged Rat,” by the iconic Mexican singer and songwriter Paquita la del Barrio. She passed away Monday in her home in Veracruz, Mexico. Her songs are praised as feminist anthems that defy machismo and misogyny and celebrate the resilience of women. Paquita was 77 years old.