MSNBC Stars Maddow And O’Donnell Stunned By New Trump Legal Bomb: ‘Roundup of Millions!’
MSNBC hosts Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell sounded the alarm over a Trump administration memo declaring that detained immigrants are ineligible for a bond hearing, which they said paves the way for a “roundup of millions!”
News broke Monday night of new legal guidance, first reported by The Washington Post and later confirmed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), stating that
That story broke as Maddow interviewed Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL) on Monday night’s edition of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, and O’Donnell remarked at length about it during the toss to his own show:
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: What he’s here to actually talk about was completely unimaginable before Donald Trump entered politics. And it was actually unimaginable during Donald Trump’s first term. It was not anything close to this level of cruelty in the first term.
RACHEL MADDOW: Yeah. And that is true about the visit to the Everglades immigration prison camp that I was talking to him about. It’s also true about that breaking news that I was asking him about. I mean, again, we’re just absorbing this. This is like a novel legal interpretation just revealed by the Trump administration.
But what they are talking about here is incarcerating millions of people, not 100,000 people. Right? Not 50,000, not 40,000 something people, which is what they’ve got now, not 100,000 people, which is the kind of numbers they talked about for the scaling up of, of immigrant imprisonment that they passed and funded in their — in their last bill.
What they’re talking about with this interpretation means is instant incarceration, rounding up incarceration of millions of people who are living peaceably in this country right now without process, purely on the executive branch’s say so, like not letting people go to prison — not letting people go to court to adjudicate this sort of thing and not getting a say before not getting their say before a judge.
If we’re talking about putting millions of people in prison who have not committed crimes, we instantly are a completely different country than we are today. And obviously, this is going to be litigated and we will see what this means. But this is — like this is a really big reveal in terms of what they are planning on.
And yeah, Maxwell Frost got it instantly understood the origins of something like this and the radicalism of what they’re doing all at once. And it’s no longer a curiosity that he’s the youngest person elected to Congress. He’s a very serious member of Congress, one worth taking seriously. And somebody who I felt real lucky to have on the air tonight.
O’DONNELL: Yeah. And, Rachel, when we’re talking about a roundup of millions or a roundup that aspires to millions. There’s no question that we’re now talking about American citizens, native born American citizens being rounded up that way because how many of us are walking the streets with proof of citizenship in our pockets? And if you don’t have that and they take you, you’re going to have to wait for your hearing to prove that you’re a citizen, the hearing that you’re not going to get under this idea.
Watch above via MSNBC’s The Last Word.
