On her eponymous Saturday afternoon show, MSNBC host Katie Phang accused "convicted felon" President Donald Trump of "indiscriminately" arresting "black and brown" immigrants and "dehumanizing" them with detention without due process rights while MSNBC contributor Paola Ramos (and daughter of Jorge Ramos) said Trump views deporting (illegal) immigrants as a "new chapter in the war on terror."
Phang also took at shot at Latinos who voted for Trump, scoffing: "It's what I say is the 'find out' part for those folks that voted for him thinking, 'It won't happen to me or my family.'"
Rewinding to the beginning of the segment, she tagged Trump as a "convicted felon" and claimed he was waging a "terror campaign" against illegal aliens before asking where all the additional detainees would be kept: "Convicted felon President Trump's terror campaign through heightened mass deportation efforts has led to an increase in arrests while deportation flights remain at typical pre-Trump levels. So with more arrests, the federal government has to house those in custody somewhere. But where?"
After a clip of President Trump announcing that up to 30,000 of "the worst criminal illegal aliens" can be held at Guantanamo Bay if there are problems with returning some to their home countries, Phang brought aboard Ramos and accused the President of wanting to "dehumanize" detainees: "The continued dehumanization of migrants is the goal here, right?"
Ramos declared that "that's exactly right," and fretted:
[W]hat scares me, at least, is that history tells us that when, as Americans, we sort of enter this paranoid state that we're in, we do have a tendency to turn a blind eye on the violations that happen in Guantanamo Bay, you know. We have a tendency to turn a blind eye on the human rights violations, the abuses, and all of the darkness that has happened, there, and that is exactly where we are. So our job is to ensure that we don't turn a blind eye, you know, that we don't allow history to repeat itself.
Ramos then argued the images of ICE raids, troops going to the border, and Guantanamo Bay housing illegal immigrants are all meant to illicit feelings of "entering this new chapter in the war on terror" will illegal immigrants on bar with Islamic terrorists.
Phang then accused ICE of being "indiscriminate" in detaining "everybody who's black and brown" people, and of depriving detainees of due process:
[ICE raids] are indiscriminate in terms of who they're picking up and who they're detaining. They're actually -- it's the reverse of due process, right? It's "I'm going to take everybody who's brown and black, and then I'm going to make you prove that you're a U.S. citizen," versus ICE saying, "I know you're not a U.S. citizen, and I'm here to be able to take you."you."
She soon added:
When you put them all in Guantanamo, and you put it in an overtaxed system like this government that doesn't even know what they're doing with them, you're putting women, children, men indiscriminately together, in this facility -- you don't let lawyers that don't get to go there, Paola. You don't just get on a plane and you're a lawyer and you're just there. It's almost impossible to be able to provide them with any type of due process.
Transcript follows:
MSNBC's The Katie Phang Show
February 1, 2025
12:29 p.m. Eastern
KATIE PHANG: Convicted felon President Trump's terror campaign through heightened mass deportation efforts has led to an increase in arrests while deportation flights remain at typical pre-Trump levels. So with more arrests, the federal government has to house those in custody somewhere. But where?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [on 01/29/25]: Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay. Most people don't even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad, we don't even trust the countries to hold them because we don't want them coming back, so we're going to send them out to Guantanamo.
PHANG: Joining me now is Paola Ramos, MSNBC contributor and the author of Defectors: The Rise of the Latino Far Right and What It Means for America. Pao, my friend, necessary conversations. Let's get straight to it. Guantanamo Bay -- a place that you and I know well, having been in Miami and in Florida. Maybe a lot of people don't know. There's the military facility, but then they also have a separate detention facility for migrants, and, listen, the military facility -- they kept the detainees after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but we're hearing -- and we know -- the vice president of the National Immigration Law Center saying, "report upon report on conditions" in those detention facilities "that don't provide basic health care," they "shackle women when pregnant," and they haven't had "protections for communicable diseases such as Covid." I mean, Pao, the continued dehumanization of migrants is the goal here, right?
PAOLA RAMOS: That's exactly right. I think the first thing that comes to mind when you mention Guantanamo -- when you mention the report -- is "war on terror," and that is precisely the point. That is what Donald Trump wants us to think about. Look, I think if you take a step back, you know, and you look at all of these images that we have been bombarded with just this week, Katie, you know, you see the ICE raids -- you see troops deploying to the border. You see images of military planes carrying migrants and now the image of Guantanamo Bay. The point is precisely to get this country to believe that we are entering this new chapter in the war on terror.
(....)
12:32 p.m. Eastern
RAMOS: And so the point that we are in right now is for Donald Trump to continue to condition Americans to believe that story and to now believe that the next iteration of that story means to defeat them and to defeat them, meaning the terrorists. So I think what Guantanamo Bay brings up -- what scares me, at least, is that history tells us that when, as Americans, we sort of enter this paranoid state that we're in, we do have a tendency to turn a blind eye on the violations that happen in Guantanamo Bay, you know. We have a tendency to turn a blind eye on the human rights violations, the abuses, and all of the darkness that has happened, there, and that is exactly where we are. So our job is to ensure that we don't turn a blind eye, you know, that we don't allow history to repeat itself.
PHANG: You know, Paola, I think what's so important to underscore here is these ICE raids that are happening right now. They are indiscriminate in terms of who they're picking up and who they're detaining. They're actually -- it's the reverse of due process, right? It's "I'm going to take everybody who's brown and black, and then I'm going to make you prove that you're a U.S. citizen," versus ICE saying, "I know you're not a U.S. citizen, and I'm here to be able to take you." Furthermore, the "illegal" moniker that is being put on migrants has now been completely distorted because folks who had temporary protected status, for example, from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, people like that now have lost that status through the revocation of that that was afforded to them under the Biden administration. And that means that they are now here illegally. When you put them all in Guantanamo, and you put it in an overtaxed system like this government that doesn't even know what they're doing with them, you're putting women, children, men indiscriminately together, in this facility -- you don't let lawyers that don't get to go there, Paola. You don't just get on a plane and you're a lawyer and you're just there. It's almost impossible to be able to provide them with any type of due process.
(....)
12:36 p.m. Eastern
PHANG: It's what I say is the "find out" part for those folks that voted for him thinking, "It won't happen to me or my family."
