Transcript: Can Trump’s Thugs Be Reined In? These Dems Have an Idea.

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

MAGA’s response to the awful killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis has truly gone off the rails. Top MAGA figures and Republicans are unrepentant about it in every way. Yet at the same time, powerful new video analyses from news organizations show clearly that the shooting was, at an absolute minimum, unjustified. We think Democrats will now have to fundamentally alter their stance toward ICE and Trump as a result. And we’re talking about this with two Democrats, Representatives Eric Swalwell of California and Dan Goldman of New York, who are introducing a new measure to rein in ICE. We’re going to get into all this. Congressmen, thanks for coming on.

Congressman Eric Swalwell: Of course.

Congressman Dan Goldman: Yeah, thank you for having us, Greg.

Sargent: Well, I want to start with some responses from MAGA figures. There’s JD Vance.

JD Vance (voiceover): Look, there’s a part of me that feels very, very sad for this woman, not just because she lost her life, but because I think she is a victim. of left-wing ideology. What young mother shows up and decides they’re going to throw their car in front of ICE officers who are enforcing legitimate law? You’ve got to be a little brainwashed.

Sargent: Vance also said:

JD Vance (voiceover): You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that. I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making.

Sargent: There’s Randy Fine, who said:

Randy Fine: It’s time for Americans to say enough. And if you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did yesterday.

Sargent: Congressman Swalwell, you want to respond to all that?

Swalwell: Renee Good was a mom of three kids. And if you looked at her glove compartment, which has been photographed and shared, you don’t see a weapon, you don’t see a knife, you don’t see a gun. You see what we as parents call “stuffies,” stuffed animals. You see a little cup of Cheerios. She’s not a domestic terrorist. She was there to hold to account and bear witness to the atrocities that ICE is committing in our communities. And she should be alive today.

Instead, Donald Trump has sent these mother-murdering thugs into our community. And of course this is what was gonna happen because it started with putting ICE in the streets and then deporting a six-year-old, stage 4 cancer victim, U.S. citizen, dragging women by their hair. Those apparently were the lucky ones when you look at what happened to Ms. Good.

Sargent: Representatives Swalwell and Goldman will introduce a new bill called the ICE OUT Act, which will end qualified immunity for ICE agents. Congressman Goldman, can you describe what this bill would do and why it’s needed right now?

Goldman: Yeah, well, basically what the officer is going to say would be that, I personally, subjectively, myself believed that she was driving her car right at me and using her car to try to run me over, and therefore I had to shoot her in self-defense. And because the standard is subjective and it allows for the officer’s own view to carry a lot of weight, it will be very difficult for him to be prosecuted with the current status of qualified immunity.

So what this bill does is only for civil enforcement officers—not criminal enforcement officers who are dealing with real bad guys, not moms driving cars it—would say that it’s an objective test. And if you are acting completely outside of your duties and responsibilities, you don’t have immunity from a civil lawsuit and you don’t have a defense from a criminal charge.

Sargent: Okay, I want to break that down a little bit more. So one piece of this is that it removes the protection against lawsuits from victims who allege that their constitutional rights were violated. That’s one piece, yes?

Swalwell: Yes, it’s very hard today with qualified immunity to bring a civil action against somebody who has that immunity.

Sargent: Okay, the second piece of this is more complicated. If they thought they were doing what they needed to do to execute federal law, they’re generally protected from prosecution. You guys are trying to remove that and put something in place that’s a lot more clear and doesn’t necessarily turn on what the officer says he or she thought, right?

Swalwell: Yes, we see these guys as acting as if they’re invincible, they’re untouchable—that they can drag women by their hair, throw them in vans that are unidentified, and now shoot them three times in the face and nothing will happen to them. So yes, civilly, this puts them into a place where they can be liable. And criminally, it knocks out a defense that they would otherwise enjoy, which would make a prosecutor think twice as they try and put forward a case that they’d have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Again, it’s just saying, Look, we see what you’re doing. We’re not helpless to stop you. And we’re going to bring account to the acts that you’re committing in our communities.

Sargent: Back to Congressman Goldman, what is the exact standard that this sets up? How does it set up a basic guardrail? What does it say?

Goldman: Well, it would be an objective standard. So it would be what a reasonable person standing in the shoes of that officer would and should have thought. And that’s important because it still does give an officer a real and legitimate argument that, I’m acting in self-defense or that I reasonably believed that I was doing this. But the other thing that I do think is also very important about this is it narrows and identifies what the duties and responsibilities defense is.

So ICE agents are not allowed to arrest citizens, and they are not allowed to arrest anyone for criminal violations such as obstruction of justice. Their only authority is to investigate and civilly arrest immigrants for immigration violations.

And so they should never have been in the situation they were in where they were trying to take a woman out of a car. That was not part of what they should be doing. They could ask her to move if they needed to. It doesn’t look like from the video that she was doing anything that was obstructing them. But for them to then be able to just say, I have this blanket defense that I thought she was coming after me and therefore I shot—I mean, basically they should be treated as a civilian would be treated.

Sargent: Let’s talk about this particular case. Congressman Swalwell, would you expect the state of Minnesota to prosecute this ICE agent? And what—what would your bill say and do that would—how would it impact that prosecution exactly?

Swalwell: Well, certainly I would expect any other administration—and by the way, if this individual is not pardoned, a future administration federally could prosecute this individual. But yes, certainly Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, or the Hennepin County district attorney would have the ability to do that.

And what I believe we have to do with these guys is, as long as they’re going to continue to run rogue in our communities, we have to max out the law enforcement authorities that our attorneys general and district attorneys across the country have. They only understand one language.

And so if they’re going to commit false imprisonment, kidnapping, battery, assault against the most vulnerable in our communities, you have to charge them with the crime. And the second you start doing that, I promise you these guys are going to think twice.

Sargent: Right, under your bill, it would no longer turn on whether he thought he was acting in good faith compliance with what’s necessary and proper to execute federal law. It would turn on a more independent judgment.

Goldman: That’s right. The one thing to know, though, is it’s still unclear that it could be charged by a state or local prosecutor. Because it’s a federal officer, and generally, even if it were charged in the state, it can be removed to federal court because of the Supremacy Clause.

But what this is also tackling—and I think the messaging here is almost as important, Greg, as anything else—because, as you heard from Randy Fine or JD Vance—we’re not expecting to get Republicans to support this—but immediately after this incident, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump had already concluded that he did nothing wrong. And so if the FBI is the only investigative agency and you have Kash Patel, who is basically an extension of Donald Trump’s right arm, doing this investigation, we all know it’s going nowhere. It’s not a legitimate investigation.

Kristi Noem had a press conference today where she said, On the one hand, we’re going to go through the policies and procedures to conduct this investigation. Then right after that she said, And we know that those policies and procedures are going to reveal that he acted within his authority. She literally has already made up her mind even though presumably there’s a lot more to the investigation—in talking to witnesses, in talking to the other officers—that you would want to do.

Swalwell: What that does is that tells the next officer in the next environment, in the next case, that you, too, can shoot a mom three times in the face. If they see that they’re going to be so quickly acquitted by the president and Noem, what is there out there to protect the next mom who’s trying to bear witness to what ICE is doing?

Sargent: Okay, well, I want to ask about funding for ICE. Obviously, Trump and Stephen Miller have gotten huge infusions of federal money. They’re about to dramatically expand recruitment for ICE. This will get much worse. I’ve got to think this shooting in Minneapolis should make it very hard or even impossible for most Democrats to support the level of funding that ICE is getting. Congressman Swalwell, what do you guys want Dems to do in the upcoming budget debate to rein in ICE funding or dramatically limit it?

Swalwell: I wouldn’t vote to give them a penny under what they’re doing right now. We were promised that the most violent in our community would be targeted. And I can’t speak for Dan, but again, as a former prosecutor, I imagine that we all agree with that: Get violent criminals out of our community.

That’s not what they’re doing. They’re chasing people through the fields and factories where they work. They’re going to churches, they’re going to schools, they’re terrorizing people who are here with all of their documents. And again, they shot a U.S. citizen in the face. They deported a six-year-old with Stage 4 cancer.

So I would not vote to give them a penny with what they’re doing right now. And I’ll let Dan speak for himself as to how he sees it.

Sargent: Congressman Goldman, let me just ask it this way to you. If Democrats take back the House, what should their position on ICE be? I think it’s obvious ICE can’t continue in anything like its current form. What should Dems be for? Is it abolishing it? Is it crushing it? Is it defunding it dramatically and putting major strictures on it so it’s barely recognizable? What should House Democrats in the majority, if they get it, be for?

Goldman: ICE is going to have to be dramatically and overwhelmingly revamped. Whether that means that ICE is eliminated and a new agency is stood up to start from scratch, or it means that the funding is dramatically withdrawn and there are new rules, new procedures, new laws that guide it—I think that’s a debate that’s worth having. But the outcome is more or less the same.

ICE is essentially a military now, and it’s only supposed to be for civil infractions. My district office in downtown Manhattan is across the street from 26 Federal Plaza, which is where the immigration courthouses are and where the immigration detention center—actually, it’s not a detention center, it’s a processing facility that’s been used as a detention center.

And ICE agents, masked ICE agents, are literally pulling people out of court and arresting them. When they are there for their asylum cases, asylum is a lawful pathway. And even Kristi Noem acknowledged in testimony before our committee, the Homeland Security Committee, that it is illegal to deport someone who is here lawfully; and if you have an active asylum case, you’re here lawfully.

So they are violating the law not just with the excessive force that we see all over the place, but also by deporting so many people who are not criminals. Seventy percent of those arrested in New York by ICE have no criminal record whatsoever. Seventy. And yet we’re told it’s the worst of the worst and it’s criminals and all this. It’s not.

They’re just trying to jack up the quotas to terrorize immigrant communities so that immigrants will self-deport and so that they can keep out as many people who don’t look like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

Sargent: Well, I want to give Congressman Swalwell a chance to answer the same question. Abolish ICE, crush ICE—what’s the way to understand it?

Swalwell: Yeah. I’m not voting to fund this ICE. And so I will support getting rid of their immunity. I will support requiring them to take off the masks and take the identification out. And I want them subjected to every jurisdiction’s law enforcement authorities when they break the law, period. So this ICE is not what anybody asked for, and I’m not going to vote to continue it.

Sargent: Okay, let’s just go back to the measure you guys are introducing. I just was hoping to drill down a little more into how it actually works. So just walk us through what the removing of immunity actually does in terms of exposing an ICE agent to some form of prosecution, whether it’s state, federal—what’s the way to get them under the new regime that you would put in place?

Swalwell: Yeah. So Ms. Good’s family would be able to bring a federal...even if the federal government is not willing to prosecute or if the president were to pardon the person who killed her, her family would be able to go to federal court.

It would not be immediately thrown out under qualified immunity that exists today. And she would be able to make her case. And as Dan said, a more objective standard based on, like, the reasonableness or unreasonableness of the officer’s conduct.

But federally, as you said—I don’t want to mislead people—we can’t do anything to stop the president from pardoning what this officer did. He is still subjected—and I, and that’s why I think Dan and I agree that Minnesota authorities should bring a case against this officer. And so you’d still be subjected to state law.

This would take away defenses that they would have. And again, when you’re a prosecutor, to really drill down: To charge any individual with a crime, you have to be convinced that you can prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt. Not that you can get an indictment, that even post-indictment that you can prove that case to a jury of that person’s peers beyond a reasonable doubt.

With qualified immunity right now and the defenses offered to people right now, it makes it very hard for prosecutors to cross that Rubicon. This would get rid of that and make it much easier, taking those defenses out on the criminal side.

Sargent: Well, Congressman Goldman, just to boil this down as simply as possible: Your bill, if it were to pass, simply would make this officer and any other rogue officer who did something like this potentially more vulnerable to a state prosecution than he currently is or would be.

Goldman: I don’t think it actually will have a tremendous impact on a state prosecution because of the Supremacy Clause. Even if it were charged in the state, they’d remove it to federal court. But what it would do is if the attorney general of Minnesota, for example, were to charge the ICE officer based on the evidence that they collect, it would still be a live case that gets removed to the federal government, the federal court. So there is still a role for the state to play.

The biggest difference—and while this has much more direct impact on civil lawsuits, as we have been talking about, Greg—the civil standard of qualified immunity also has an application in criminal law. Which means that because you would have a defense to the murder by saying, I reasonably... I subjectively... I personally believed that I was under attack and therefore I had to use force, equal and opposite force. Now that personal, subjective belief would no longer be the standard. The standard would be what a reasonable officer in that situation would think.

And so that is less about what the individual is thinking and more about what someone—a jury, for example—would deem to be objective and reasonable.

Sargent: So under this bill, Keith Ellison could more easily charge this officer with a crime than before? And do you think that should happen?

Goldman: So, yes, it would be easier because there would be a weaker affirmative defense by the ICE agent. And I do think that because we know that the Trump administration has already concluded before any investigation occurred that the victim, Renee Good, was at fault here. And they’re blaming the victim. They’re claiming, even though as you watch the video, after she’s shot in the head, the car still turns because she’s trying to get away, that they’re saying that she was going after him. They’ve already made up their mind.

And sadly and unfortunately, Greg, in this administration—and we cannot normalize this—there’s no independence of the FBI and the DOJ from Donald Trump, the White House, the Homeland Security. It is all an apparatus of Donald Trump. So whatever Donald Trump decides is what is going to happen with the FBI. So there’s no hope that the FBI or the Department of Justice will charge this case. They’ve already concluded otherwise.

And so therefore I think that Attorney General Ellison needs to be much more aggressive in considering this because it was not properly investigated and will not be properly investigated by the federal authorities.

Sargent: I think that’s very clear. Just to close this out, Congressman Swalwell, what do you expect to happen in the upcoming budget battles? What stand do you expect Democrats to make here? I cannot see how Democrats vote for ICE funding in anything like its current form now. I guess every House Democrat opposes it? And what happens in the Senate? Is there a consensus position Democrats will reach that would represent an acceptable level in funding or what? What happens?

Swalwell: I am not going to pay masked thugs to shoot moms in the face. Period. So they’re going to have to go somewhere else. They want to find funding for that. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but people are horrified by what they saw.

Goldman: And remember, because of all the Big, Beautiful, Big, Ugly Bill funding, ICE got $45 billion last year. And they’re giving $50,000 hiring bonuses. And they’re not training these agents who are masked and anonymous and are wreaking havoc on our communities with violence and now with murder. We are not going to—I am not going to vote for anything that allows that to continue.

Sargent: Yeah, and simply put, I mean, the Senate is going to have a tough situation. There’s going to be pressure on Senate Democrats to not support anything like this level of funding. Congressman Swalwell, Congressman Goldman, thanks so much for coming on with us today.