Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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your support. I want to welcome back to the program
Andrew Dunn. He is a contributing columnist at the Charlotte
Observer and also the publisher of long Leaf Politics. You
can read that work at long leafpo l dot com
and subscribe to the newsletter there. Andrew, how are you, sir?
Speaker 2: I'm well, good to be back with you. Thanksgiving.
Speaker 1: I did I did not quite the four generations that
you wrote about at long Leave Politics, but so that
was that was good? And so yeah, what was your
because you did write a piece this I thought it
was very good. I enjoyed it. So what was the
sort of the lesson that you took away from you know,
the ability to have what was it you said? Four generations?
So what your grandfather or great grandfather, who all was there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just a wonderful time. We had everybody
from my seven month old niece I'm now an uncle,
which is fantastic, and then we had my ninety one
year old grandma. So wait quite the range. But you know,
really it was just a great time to kind of
unplug for a few days and relax. And you know,
I'm sure that all of us had different political thoughts
and whatnot, but it just never came up. You know,
what we were focused on was being together with family
and given thanks. And you know, if everybody could do
that more often, I think we'd be in a better place.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Say, I went down to Atlanta, was with my
brother and his wife's extended family. We do that every year,
and same thing. I know there are people, you know,
in that family that have very different political views than
I do. When we never talk politics, it never comes up,
and nobody tries to needle each other. But I guess
if you've got family members that want to antagonize, I
guess it would be a different story. But I didn't have.
There's nobody in the family that does that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank goodness.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so all right, and now we did not. A
topic that did not come up, but was all over
Charlotte media for the week prior to Thanksgiving was Operation
Charlotte's Web. We talked a little about it before Thanksgiving,
before last week, and you've written quite a few pieces
about this at Long Leave Politics, but also with the
Charlotte Observer. You wrote your first newspaper column. You talked
about why you were not a fan of the masked
agents and the unmarked vans. You wrote about then the
case that immigration enforcement, including deportation, is necessary and it's
moral as well. And then you have a piece at
Long Leave Politics how border patrol raids changed the North
Carolina political landscape. So I will ask how so.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I won't talk politics at Thanksgiving dinner, but I
love talking politics with you.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, how it changed the political landscape? I mean,
basically I had three takeaways here. You know. Number one
is it really seems to me that the kind of
shock and awe smash and grab raids are a political loser.
You know, I get that I may be a little
skewed in my perception living here in Charlotte, but I
do my best to get outside the bubble as much
as possible. And it does seem to me that that
sort of operation just kind of makes people uncomfortable, especially
you know, in unaffiliated voters, the suburban voters that tend
to be are the swing voters in our elections. People
just don't love to see it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I'll confirm that for you. People that are
not political at all, And even if they want the
border closed and they want the criminal aliens deported, what
they saw made them feel uneasy, right, And.
Speaker 2: Some of it is I think the Trump administration likes
to play up the drama a little bit, and that
certainly doesn't help when you're really leaning into it. You know,
President Obama deported a lot more people, but he never
went out and did press conferences on it. He just
kind of did it, and nobody seemed to care. But
that brings me to point number two, which is this
is actually a bigger shift than I think a lot
of people give it credit for. Is that the conversation
has completely changed. You know, six months ago, there was
a debate on whether law enforcement should cooperate with ICE
at all. You know, we've talked about this all the time,
where you know, Sheriff McFadden here in Mecklenburg County kind
of campaigned on not cooperating with ICE and not turning
people over, and now after Charlotte's Web, it seems like
that position is just completely untenable. That even Democrats, even
the left side of the aisle, is now saying, all right, well,
we're okay with deporting criminals, We're okay with handing them over. So,
you know, I think that's an opportunity for the General
Assembly in North Carolina to really push on that expand
the list of crimes that make people eligible for deportation.
And it seems kind of obvious, but I think anytime
somebody is brought to the jail there should be a
determination of their legal status in this country. I don't
know why you would limit that, you know, to certain
classes of folks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, hang on, you know why.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, I do know why. But it doesn't make
any sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it does if you don't want to anger
an activist base, right sure, And that's what the I mean,
that's what guys like Gary mcfaden ran on in twenty eighteen.
It was an explicit promise to get rid of the
two eighty seven g program. So they would not know
who's coming into the jail, so they would and not
be able to cooperate with ICE. That was explicit, and
all of his actions since then have been in line
with that campaign promise. So credit where it's due. He is,
you know, he is fulfilling his campaign promise.
Speaker 2: Well, I guess you got to give him credit for that.
But yeah, I mean, now is the time to really
put pressure on that because I don't think anybody can
be front and center saying they're not going to cooperate
with ICE for people arrested and brought to the jail.
That's a non starter now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, And then also the third component here
the businesses e verified specifically, I was surprised that you
found only five e verify enforcement actions since twenty seventeen,
and that's in North Carolina.
Speaker 2: Alone, exactly. Yeah, So the North Carolina Department of Labor
is responsible for enforcing the e verify law, and North
Carolina has a really weak everify law. You know, some
states have started to go in to requiring all employers
to use it, but North Carolina still only requires, you know,
employers of twenty five or more to use everify, and
that makes it incredibly easy to work around it. You know,
if you're a contractor, you use subcontractors and everybody falls
under the twenty five employee threshold, so nobody is checking it.
But I have to believe that there are some businesses
that are violating this law, you know, just driving around
the state. You know, it seems to be quite clear,
but I don't know what the exact issue is. My
guess is that the Department of Labor just doesn't have
the resources to actually enforce this, and I think that's
probably by design. I mean, I think there's a lot
of folks who give money to the General Assembly who
do not want tight enforcement of this law.
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah. I mean that's always been going back, you know,
twenty five years when immigration sort of exploded as a
national issue the first time, with the path the citizenship
and all of that. Right, there was this alliance between
people who wanted you know, open borders for I guess
what they thought were, you know, the potential for new
voters for Democrats, but also the cheap labor for the
chamber and the business crowd. And that's been that alliance,
and like to your point, I don't know if that's
a tenable position any longer, especially in economic heart hard times, right,
people are now looking at anybody coming across the border
illegally as now somebody that's taking a job that they
want to hold themselves, and so it's a harder sell.
I think at this point. Now I did think your
piece at the Charlotte Observer, I think this is actually
the winning argument on open borders versus enforcement. And you
start off the piece by saying there is nothing compassionate
about open borders, and I think when you go through
as you did in your piece, and you talk about
the horrors that people go through to come across the border,
and then once they are here, they are basically indentured servants,
and they are and they're employed by the cartels as
sort of the logistical support for whatever cartel operations are
functioning in various cities. Like these people have no option
but to stay and work illegally and have their money
siphoned away from them and not be able to report
abuses or crimes and that sort of stuff, because if
they do so, the cartels will kill them, They'll kill
their families back home. And so like, this is this
open border idea, and let everybody in that that's not
the morally superior position. It's not the compassionate position.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. And we've known this for decades.
I mean it's almost twenty years ago now. The Charlotte Observer,
I believe, was a Pulitzer finalists for their piece called
the Cruelest Cuts looking at the conditions, labor conditions and
some of the Piedmont North Carolina poultry plants. And you know,
that's exactly what you get if you have kind of
a wink in a nod and greation enforcement and you know,
leave the borders open and encourage people to come put
their life at risk. And there's just no, there's no
good argument for the arrangement that we have today. And
I think you know at the conservative position is the
truly humanitarian one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like you mentioned, I've talked about this with
people from like particularly the construction industry when we were
talking about Charlotte's Web and they say, look, our job
sites are empty. You know, Americans won't do these jobs.
And I said, well, then create like a like the
farm worker program, what do you call it, the Brasero's program, right,
where like you can create something to fill these jobs.
But the key is that you've got to have a
legal way to do it, and you can't be undercutting
American workers. So then employers are incentivized to go with
the illegal labor and keep this sort of underground economy going.
Speaker 2: Exactly. I mean, I think I don't think it's true
that Americans don't want to do those jobs. Maybe it's
true they don't want to do the jobs for the
wages you're trying to pay. And that's why I think
one of the best ideas that the Trump administration has
had this year is increasing the fee for employers to
use the H one B visa program. I can't remember
what the number was they landed on, but increasing the
cost of doing that so it's not a it's truly
getting workers that you can't hire in the United States,
rather than a cost saving measure. And I think we
should bring that approach all up and down to all
all levels of visas.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I saw there's a some Twitter account that was
posting all of these different ads for the H one
B jobs, and I mean, it's obviously rife with fraud
that companies are bringing people in and they're doing it
in order to undercut and pay undercut American workers and
pay lower salaries and they're abusing the system. But that
being said, there there, you know, there can be a
way to bring in labor if we're not filling the
jobs with Americans. So yeah, I think that's the I
think that's the sane and rational position. And I even
saw people in the comment section that we're giving you kudos,
saying and they never agree with conservatives on anything, but
on this one, they tend to agree with you. So
I think this is the winning argument.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'll tell you if the Observer comments section agrees
with me, maybe maybe I'm on something or maybe I'm
just way off base.
Speaker 1: That's right, Hey, Andrew, I always appreciate it. Thank you, sir.
We'll talk with you next week.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: All right. That's Andrew Dunn. You can read his work
at the Charlotte Observer. He's a contributing columnist. You can
also get his substack newsletter at longleafpol dot com Longleaf Politics.
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so excuse me. Andrew Dunn's piece over at the Charlotte
Observer Border patrol leaves Charlotte, but hardly sorry, but hard
reality remains. We need deportations. That was the headline and
wrote in this piece. When we refuse to enforce our laws,
we haven't chosen mercy We've chosen a system that leaves
people to die in the desert, drown in rivers, be
assaulted by cartels, and then live in a permanent shadow
class here in the United States. There is no honest
path forward on immigration that does not include enforcing the law,
and that includes deportations. That's what I said during the operation.
You know, if you don't like the law, then you
change the law. You don't get to nullify a law
that you don't like. That's not how this system is
supposed to work. It's not. And if you know, if
you're allowed to nullify laws that you don't like, well
you know, I've got some laws that I'd like to
nullify as well. So who's to say just because you
don't like the way it looks, you don't like Custom
and Border Patrol agents coming to town and rounding up
three hundred and seventy plus people, you don't like the
way it looks, it makes you feel sad or something,
then change the law. You don't get to say don't
enforce it. But I understand like, and this is what
Andrew was saying. Also about the optics. I get that
I've heard it. It makes people feel uncomfortable. It makes
them feel sad because you see the crying mom. You
see the kid no mommy or daddy, you know, crying
that their parent is being taken away. Which, by the
way that scene plays out, whenever police arrest somebody for
breaking the law and a child is present like that,
is that that sort of thing happens all the time.
Families are broken up whenever there is an arrest of
one of the family members. That's what happens there. It's
just now you're seeing it because people are videotaping it.
They're employing the the you know, Hamas playbook. Democrats once
again employing the Hamas playbook, which is to force the
focus of attention onto the ramifications of the decision to
break the law, to do something bad on the front end,
pay no attention to that, and flip the the oppressor
oppressed narrative. And now, or if I want to go
all Darvo on you, it's the reverse victim and offender.
The offender is the people who the offenders of the
people who came into the country illegally. That's the initial offense.
When they are caught and sent home, that doesn't make
them the victim. They are still the offender. They are
suffering the repercussions, the penalties of their offense. That's how
that works, he said. The progressive left often treats loose
borders as an act of compassion, but in reality they
produce something close to law ballless cruelty. And I went
over this about a week ago, week and a half ago,
going through the way that the cartels use these illegal
immigrants that they have smuggled into the country. They keep
them indentured, they threaten them, they threaten their families, and
then they use those people to aid the cartel operations.
And those people have no choice but to continue working here,
staying here, sending money back to the cartels, providing logistical
support or whatever lookout you know, support, doing whatever the
cartel demands of them. They can't go home, they can't quit,
they can't run away. So what do you do? Well,
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text line here, Alan says, we are at the end
of the covert parts of the left's revolutions. Stopping it
and repairing the damage are not going to look pleasant.
People better come to understand that this is the result
of someone else's actions that weren't broadcast to the masses.
Many of the masses still don't know that they opened
the borders wide open, nor do they know why. Also,
Obama counted turnarounds at the border. Yeah, I've talked about
that that data point as well. Obama deported quote unquote
deported three million people. They called him the deporter in chief.
A lot of the lefty activists were mad at him
for that, But those were not deportations from the interior.
They were people coming across and then being sent right back,
and those counted as deportations. So that's why he got
the numbers up, you know. And also Donald Trump, you know,
when you lock down the border, you're not going to
have as many deportations because you're not catching people at
the border anymore because they're not coming across the border, right,
So that allows them to focus on the interior enforcement,
and what we saw in Charlotte is what that looks like,
and that makes people feel uneasy and uncomfortable. And that's
why I've been saying this for the last three weeks, right,
which is I said it yesterday with the sheriff Gary
not my fault McFadden's press release, where it's like, you know,
we didn't create this confusion and chaos and fear, and
oh no, you did. You absolutely did. The Democrat Party
under the Biden administration opened the borders. We got ten
to fifteen million people that came across the border in
four years. And this is what it looks like to
try to find them and get them out. And when
you've got a guy like McFadden as sheriff that doesn't
even want to identify somebody as a legal or illegal
alien in the jail and refuses to cooperate with ICE
and just releases the person back out onto the street,
then yes, this is what it looks like. And yes,
you're responsible for creating the fear and confusion and chaos
that the operation looks like because you did it. You
forced this operation to occur, right, You let inten to
fifteen million people within four years, and it creates a
backlog of any quote unquote due process proceedings. And so
the left is using this narrative, this argument that, oh,
we have to have due process, this due process that meanwhile,
like most of the people that they've caught already had
deportation orders against them. They were not here, they were
not supposed to be here. They were told to go
home and they didn't, or they came back after they did.
And so what the argument is about due process is
to slow the process down. Get you a bunch of
court court hearings, make a bunch of asylum claims, like,
do all of these procedural things that you can do
in order to slow everything down, so you can run
out the clock on Donald Trump's term and hope that
a Democrat gets in and gives you amnesty or gives
you a path to citizenship which is amnesty right, or
goes back to the status quo where you know, don't ask,
don't tell. Basically, we're not going to enforce immigration law.
Let me see. And there's another message here from Cohen
who says, before I retired from OSHA, every time we
went to a construction site, when we parked our vehicles
and got out and put on our NCOSH safety vests
and hard hats. Hispanic workers would actually take off running away.
We would yell at them that the were nots come back,
but they never did until we would leave when we
did a little bit of the inspection with very few workers,
and then we would leave the site. They would eventually
come back and get back to work. And this was
twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, you heard the story
during Operation Charlotte's Web about Miguel Martinez. This was the
US citizen who was arrested after documenting border patrol in Charlotte. Well,
why would you be arrested for simply documenting border patrol? Well,
there may have been a little bit of a van
that he was driving, jumping the median, running red lights,
driving the wrong way in traffic as he tried to
evade a traffic stop. Remember in the video went viral,
he was in like a large van tearing through an intersection. Yeah,
that was also him. Well, a federal judge last week
partially dismissed charges, so some of the charges remain, some
of them do not. I saw people reporting this on
social media that they dropped all the charges against him,
but that did not happen. The judge in the case
did not drop all the charges, but he did drop some.
The federal government brought charges against this guy, Martinez, twenty
four years old, who was taking photos of agents at
several locations. This was on November sixteenth. That was the
second day that CPB quote roamed the city. This is
from the Charlotte observer. Roamed the city in paramilitary gear.
How dare they be kitted up? How dare they? And
they were questioning and stopping people in public places. Border
patroll tried to get Martinez to engage in a voluntary stop,
that's in quotes, a voluntary stop, but he fled after
circling agents in a parking lot. This is all according
to court documents that the observer is apparently quoting but
did not link up. So I cannot independently verify if
this is in fact true, but we'll have to take
their word for it. They've earned our trust. Is kidding now,
That's why I when looking for the link. So when
he refuses to stop, they follow him and that prompts
the chase. Oh, by the way, Martinez has a previous
conviction of resisting an officer, which might be relevant. All right.
If you're listening to this show, you know I try
to keep up with all sorts of current events, and
I know you do too, And you've probably heard me
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it's a website, and it combines news from around the
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as they make the media landscape more transparent from the
Charlotte Observer story by Julia Coyn talking about the arrest
of Miguel Martinez. It occurred back on the number sixteenth,
Some of it captured on video by passers by while
they were actually stopped in traffic and Martinez was zooming
past them with Border patrol in tow. The chase was
previously sorry. The chase followed after he refused to stop.
He was previously convicted of resisting an officer. He was
charged with felony assaulting, resisting, opposing, impeding, intimidating, or interfering
with federal officers. That federal charge was enhanced when the
government claimed that he used a deadly or dangerous weapon
in the alleged crime, that weapon being his vehicle. But
video played during his three hour preliminary hearing more on
that moment in the US District Court for the Western
District of North Carolina showed footage from inside a car
carrying four ICE agents who said they planned to smash
into Martinez. At one point, an agent said he's going
to get shot now. Again. I did not get to
see the video. I've not seen the transcripts of the proceeding,
so I cannot verify any of this. But it sounds
to me not like the officers are saying like, Ooh,
we hope he gets shot. It's not like they're saying
it that way, but it sounded like in the transcript
that was excerpted in the article later on, seems like
they're saying that the guy's behaving in a way that's
going to get him shot because he's acting erratically. He's
gone crazy, he's zooming around traffic, he's hoppin' medians. After
nearly a week of deliberating alone, US Magistrate Judge David
Keisler issued an order dismissing the enhancement charge. So it's
just the enhancement charge using a deadly or dangerous weapon
his vehicle. That's the charge that was dismissed. He found
there was probable cause to believe that Martinez forcibly interfered
with the agents, so that remains. Those charges remain. Martinez.
His federal public defender argued that Martinez had every right
to flee, which is an interesting argument. When agents tried
to stop Martinez, he says they were infringing on his
First Amendment rights to engage in citizen journalism and document
agents in public spaces. Okay, as a former reporter aka journalist,
went to school for it, was trained in it. There
is no such thing as a citizen journalist. All journalists,
unless you are working for like Stars and Stripes and
you are employed by the government, by the military, every
journalist is a citizen journalist. Oh, I guess, unless you're
an illegal alien journalist, then you're not a citizen. But
even then you'd be a citizen of whatever country you're
a citizen of. So, like a journal n lists does
not enjoy extra protections. This is one of the things
why I always oppose these shield laws that the journalism
in crowd always wants to put in place, Like I
should be able to have these special privileges. No, you shouldn't.
You're just a regular person, just like I was. And
what I was told many times over the years. When
you go to a police scene, when you go someplace
in law enforcement has for example, set up the crime
tape and they're telling people stay out of an area.
If they're telling every citizen to stay out of the area,
that includes you, Okay, you don't get Now. They may
be nice and set up a media staging area, say hey, media,
come over, here. We'll do press conferences right here, but
regular citizens can come in there too. Non journalists can
also stand in there. Right you're out on the street,
some crime has occurred, media shows up, and the cops
are like, stay back behind this line. If you cross
over into that line saying First Amendment, First Amendment, you're
gonna get arrested, and then you're not gonna get the
story and your boss is not gonna be happy. So
you can claim First Amendment protections, but the time to
fight that out is going to be in court, okay.
And if cops, if law enforcement of any kind, if
they're like, you need to get out of this area
because we're conducting an operation, and you choose not to
do so, that is your choice. But if you end
up arrested, right then you're gonna have to make that
argument at some other point. But it's not gonna stop
you from getting arrested. That's what we were taught. Maybe
the rules of journalisming have changed, but that was always
what we were told. The assistant US Attorney Karen Finley
in court said it's lucky that nobody got hurt. She's
exactly right, and she pointed out that the guy could
have just stopped. He could have just talked to the cops.
He's a US citizen. He could have just said, yeah,
I'm out here shooting video. I'm taking your pictures. I'm
posting them up onto Instagram. So I'm trying to get
everybody to know where you are. So they can avoid
being deported. They can they can avoid being held responsible
for the consequences of their actions. Right, he could have
said that. They could have They could have said, well,
you're we're gonna we're going to arrest you now for
interfering with the operation. Or maybe they could have said
stop it, go away. But he could have voluntarily engaged
in the conversation with CBP. He was at no risk
of being deported. He chose this course of action. All right,
that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much
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