Charles Fain Lehman, Judge Glock, Rafael Mangual, and Daniel Di Martino discuss what’s next for Trump’s tariffs, the latest in the deportation saga of former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, and what people are getting up to with corpses on the New York City subway.
Audio Transcript
Charles Fain Lehman: Welcome to the panelists joining me today are Rafael Mangual, Crime Guy at the Manhattan Institute, Daniel DiMartino, Immigration Guy at the Manhattan Institute, and Judge Glock, Economics Guy at the Manhattan Institute. I want us to jump right in. The big news story of the past week, and I think coming into this week, has been the Trump administration's tariffs. They've sort of pivoted yet again in their ongoing push to do something with tariffs. A couple of weeks ago, for those who have had their heads under a rock, the administration imposed exorbitant tariffs on most trading partners. Last week, they ratcheted them back so that most countries now face a still very high 10 percent surcharge, while tariffs on the Chinese rapidly escalated to almost 150 percent on some goods.
It seems like we've moved into sort of a second stage of tariffs where it's now the primary focus is on a trade war with China. So on Sunday yesterday, the Chinese cut off the flow of many critical minerals that seems to be threatening American high-tech manufacturing. The administration has, I think, 90 days to renegotiate the terms of free trade agreements with 70 something countries.
We're still very much on the precipice. Markets are still pretty jumpy. It's a little unclear where they're trying to go. So I guess, you know, I wanna ask the big question and Judge, I wanna start with you. What exactly are we doing here? Like what's going on with tariffs? Because I think everyone's a little confused, including possibly some people in the White House, about what the bigger picture agenda is.
Judge Glock: Yeah, well, I definitely couldn't predict it because apparently the markets can't predict it going four hours out or two hours out. And I'm not that much smarter than the entirety of the New York Stock Exchange. So I'm not going to try too hard there to see where we're going. But I mean, one of the interesting things to me that I've discussed with people about these tariffs is that there just isn't a massive constituency for them. So for these tariffs to be really long lasting at the level that Trump wants them to be, you need a big political backing. And we're not in a place like in the 1980s or early 1990s where people are smashing Japanese cars back then, or I don't know, smashing Chinese-made iPhones. Now people just aren't doing that. There's not the same like visceral outrage about trade that we've had in the past in America, that we had going back in, you know, in the 19th century when we were practically an isolated economy in a lot of ways, this was a big political issue. And even into the 1990s again, this was top of mind for a lot of people. in the recent polling, this is not a big deal. This is like, if you look at the Pew polls going into the last election and other things, this is far, far down the list. If people mentioned it at all, trade or tariffs. And when they do mention it, they tend to be generally positive about it. Not unbelievably open to all sorts of trade if it cost American jobs, not saying, well, I'll sacrifice jobs for cheaper products if you ask them that directly. But the most recent Gallup poll showed 81 percent see trade as a net beneficial thing or an opportunity for America. So there's some desire to do something about trade in the abstract from a lot of people. Outside of the White House, I would say even in the Republican Congress, there's not the sort of strong desire for these massive tariffs that are being proposed. Which means I think over the long term, it's gonna be really tough to survive, to keep them alive outside of the China tariffs, which is a whole different can of worms. It's something that was both Trump and Biden had a kind of consensus around, but at least big 10 percent across the board tariffs, which look like they're gonna stay in place, that's gonna be a tough thing to ask everybody to swallow, especially when the, you know, the surveys look or the economic analysis looks like this would cost, you know, maybe a thousand plus bucks a family, this is gonna be a big deal.
Daniel Di Martino: And don't forget the 25 percent auto tariffs, steel and aluminum on all countries that's on top of everything else.
Judge Glock: Yeah, yeah, exactly. There's this huge number of tariffs and things. Like we do know, even though trade was way down the list of issues in the 2024 election, we do know the one that was the number one issue in the last election, the cost of living. That was like far in a way, the biggest issue that Americans said what we care about is high prices. And everyone agrees that tariffs raise prices. And so even if they have these other concerns about trade, clearly Americans aren't in a space where, hey, I'll accept an extra 800 bucks paying for a car to protect American manufacturing. We're not in that headspace right now.
Rafael Mangual: I was watching some of the Sunday shows yesterday and there was some interesting things being said by spokespeople from the White House, members of Congress, which I thought was a good point, which is that the tariffs are certainly going to raise costs. Every economist agrees on that. But the question is, how is that going to look when you zoom out and consider all the other economic initiatives that the administration is taking, potential tax cuts, for example, especially when you consider the revenue that the tariffs might bring in, the work being done on inflation. It could be that at least some of that cost for the tariffs is going to be offset by some of these other economic initiatives, which I'm not saying is a reason to pursue this particular approach. But it does seem like the administration is at least thinking about that.
Daniel Di Martino: But by the way, happy Passover and start of Easter week. But I've heard that argument, Rafa, about all the deregulation will pay for the tariffs. It's like, obviously, that's not an argument for the tariffs because you could just have the deregulation and be better off. But I also think it's meaningless compared to the size of the tariffs. Because if you just take the 10 percent plus the 145 percent on China, all the auto tariffs on top, the steel and aluminum,
Rafael Mangual: Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah.
Rafael Mangual: Right, sure.
Daniel Di Martino: It's essentially the largest tax increase since World War II. I mean, it's much larger than the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in size, if it were permanent, right?
Rafael Mangual: Well, that's a big question, right? mean, you know, this is where you're getting mixed messages from the administration. You almost wish they would just say exactly what it is that they're trying to do, but maybe, you know, that would be a tactical error and sort of lose them the advantage here. But I mean, they keep bragging about these 75 countries that are, you know, knocking at their door, willing to negotiate trade deals. I mean, maybe that's the whole end game. And if it is, you know, maybe these aren't permanent.
Charles Fain Lehman: Here, you know, I wanna, and I feel a little bit of the compulsion to play devil's advocate, because that's my job. But, you I think there's this sort of, you think about the madman theory of Trump foreign policy, which is like often a pretty good model, which is that Trump just sort of claims to be the craziest guy in the room, right? This was his case for John Bolton, his national security advisor. He's like, when I bring Bolton into room, people get really nervous, because they think he's nuts, and I like that.
But this has always been the Trump strategy. It's been the Trump strategy in domestic politics, and it's been the Trump strategy in foreign policy. And so as Ralf alludes to, maybe the lack of information is part of the strategy. Maybe the lack of information is just like they don't know what they're doing. But maybe it is part of the strategy. To me, the interesting question is, and this gets to what Judge was saying, there are two components here. There's the imposing tariffs on our close allies like Canada, which I don't love. And then there's imposing tariffs on the Chinese for which there is, in my view, a much stronger strategic case. And that's where a lot of the administration's emphasis has been in the past couple of weeks is unfair trade practices in China, China's geopolitical threat or dependency on China. So, you know, is there an end game? And I'm curious if you think, Daniel, is there an end game where this turns into mostly a China focused policy? And if so, is there a way to make that successful? Like, where do we go from here?
Daniel Di Martino: Well, I think that the, you mentioned the case on China and I think there's a nuance thing, but the reasoning for imposing tariffs on China goes by first recognizing that they cost us money. We are poorer if we put tariffs on China. The question is, is it worth it for us to be poorer for national security reasons because China will also be poor as a consequence and we will redirect imports to other countries, right? But I hear all the cheating arguments on trade, not just on China, hear that Canada now cheats on trade, that Mexico does, that the EU does. And so we just need tariffs on every country. And it's a slippery slope into just not trading. And so I think the reason for the chaos is not necessarily the Madman theory for negotiation. I wish it was. I think it is that there's different factions within the White House, just like there's different factions in Congress, and everybody has different ideas, everybody has different goals, there's not a unified agenda. know, Peter Navarro or the nickname that Elon Musk calls him, he wants no trade. Other people do want it as negotiation, right? So because there's that internal debate, that also will undermine the reasoning behind the tariffs because they won't be permanent, we know it. Because if they are, my theory is that if these tariffs last for the four years of the Trump administration, Republicans will lose the 2028 election because of the economic disaster that will follow. And what will be the number one campaign issue? How tariffs destroy our economy. We're going to repeal them as soon as 2029 comes. So why would you build a factory when you know you just need to last four years?
Rafael Mangual: Although it was funny, there's this video that's been making the rounds somebody made a mashup of all the likely Democratic leaders that'll still be around in 2028, spouting the very same lines on tariffs. Elon Musk retweeted it with that laughing face. Yeah, so I don't know. mean, they're going to have a hard time, I think, selling that to the American people in 2028, if that's their entire... Sure. Sure.
Daniel Di Martino: Flip-flopping? thought that's normal.
Judge Glock: But they like
Charles Fain Lehman: Well...
Judge Glock: But this gets to the constituencies, That historically the Democrats, at least in modern history, have been the more anti-trade party. And that's a big part of the constituency. And look what happened in the 2020 election. Biden didn't go hard against Trump on trade, obviously. He generally supported. And when he got elected, he kept basically everything in and then increased tariffs over Trump's level, at least on China. But I mean, I think to get on the China point, the important part there is if you look at the first term for Trump and then Biden, all of the trade discussions were very general and we had a lot on steel and aluminum and the weird exception of washing machines, which was just a pure kind of lobbying campaign by Maytag. And then we had basically China tariffs. And if you look at the total funds we collected through the Trump and Biden tariffs, something like 94, 95 percent were on China.
Like, which is Daniel said, like there is a national security issue there and there seems to be a cross party consensus about it. And that's what happened in Trump won and Biden, despite all of the very general discussions of other tariffs. And as I've pointed out, there's a kind of a consensus going back to the Cold War that we don't maximize trade with our opponent. You know, during the Cold War, we did not try to maximize trade with the Soviet union, even though we needed stuff from them or wanted stuff from them. So there's that aspect of it that I think is going to be somewhat stable. this, yeah, this other 10 percent stuff on Canada and the other things, again, who is that negotiating with? This is on the ally that Trump already negotiated a free trade agreement with.
Charles Fain Lehman: It was a big, beautiful free trade agreement. No, I mean, think that's right. I think Daniel's point about factions is an accurate one. Reihan Salam, the Manhattan's president and I had a piece in the Atlantic last week, which was sort of about the politics of all of this, the thrust of which was the sort of broad electorate, the coalition of voters that installed Trump in the White House. One model of them is that the things that frustrated them about the Biden presidency were the lack of prioritization of their economic interests, that as we put it so invulnerably, they wanted to be rich. They're the big aspirant middle. And that's like, that's half the country. That is a winning constituency. As I think Judge s point alluded to, historically, that's been the Republicans coalition. And I think the best strategy for the Republicans to sort of carve off upwardsly mobile minority voters from the Democrats is to basically say, look, we're the pocketbook issue party.
It seems like there are representatives of that tendency in the White House. Scott Bessent is the secretary of the treasury, is the most obvious person in that role. And I think that there is an opportunity here to say, OK, we're going to of refactor this approach. We're going to promote freer trade. We're going to prioritize dealing with the Chinese. And we're going to combine this with the deregulatory agenda. And that will actually, long run, serve the interests of those sort of aspirant middle voters.
I think that that tendency is in conflict with the other faction in the White House that Dan alluded to, the Peter Navarro's, who are just like, tariffs are good, we need to re-industrialize, we shouldn't be trading with anybody, sort of for purely ideological reasons, or even an aesthetic sense that it's just better when we're autarkic because it feels more manly, I guess.
Rafael Mangual: Although Navarro was on Meet the Press yesterday and was really touting this whole, you know, opening up negotiations line. So maybe he's been brought in. Yeah, well, he was, I think the last question that was posed to him was, have you been sidelined? And he said, well, I'm here, aren't I?
Daniel Di Martino: Well, he needs to give his job too.
Charles Fain Lehman: This is the trade advisor, by the way.
Daniel Di Martino: Hey, this is not a bad answer. said that think that Bessent represents the faction that is not as much like Navarro. obviously, Navarro really, I think this is my personal opinion, of course, but supports tariffs for really ignorant reasons, like total ignorance. He's just flat out wrong on everything. But Bessent does support the tariffs too, just for a different reason and not as broad as Navarro does. And he's explained it himself too.
And for him, it was about the value of the dollar and it being overvalued. And, you know, in a way, even though initial economic theory will tell you that tariffs will actually help overvalue the dollar more and that will help pay for them. What we saw since the tariffs were imposed was the opposite, was a steep depreciation of the dollar, which further made the tariffs more expensive for consumers and importers. Because I feel like we're losing confidence, right? Like this manufacturing of uncertainty that has been happening, which initially was with this weird logic of we're going to lower interest rates by manufacturing uncertainty, totally backfired because they manufactured way too much uncertainty.
Judge Glock: Yeah, the manufactured uncertainty, we lower the interest rates. Yeah. It never made much sense because even if that had worked out, the logic was, uh, we're going to manufacture uncertainty, which is going to lower the size of the American economy and that will lower interest rates. But that's like I said, that's like cutting the numerator and the denominator at the same time. Uh, that's not helping us pay down anything. Interest rates went down in 2008 too, and in the great depression That's not a great, you know, reason to reduce interest rates. We have less money to pay for the bonds and everything else in that case. That didn't work. But yeah, ultimately, everyone agrees our trade deficit is going to be the size of the difference between how much we invest or borrow and how much we save. And we don't save enough to do all our investments and federal deficit spending. And so the money's got to come from outside. And unless we're drastically cutting the federal deficit, we got to run a trade deficit. There's literally no other way.
Daniel Di Martino: By the way, we could still close the federal budget deficit and maintain the current trade deficit if investment just goes up. And that would be even better because that means that there's no crowd out. Like we're just bringing in the new money from reducing the deficit into private investment. So it's either we reduce the trade deficit or we increase investment. Like we don't know what's going to happen.
Judge Glock: I can see Charles getting nervous here. We're onto like deficit, surpluses, earn account interest rates, and we're like, whoa, whoa,
Charles Fain Lehman: I'm gonna yeah, I'm gonna take us to the final question. Let me get very concrete in a month a month from today. So middle of May, will we still have the same level of tariffs and if so on whom? Daniel, what do you think?
Daniel Di Martino: At first, I think we are still going to have this tariff by the middle of May. Yes.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay, and at the current configuration, are they gonna go up, are they gonna go down?
Daniel Di Martino: No, no, I mean, no, things will change, I mean, and they may change by the day or by the week.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay, Judge, where do think we're going to be in a month?
Judge Glock: Yeah, yeah, since I can't predict the next four hours, I'm definitely not going to predict a month, but in general, yeah, the 10 percent ones are probably going to be in place a little while. I can't imagine that disappears. Trump in the campaign said 10 to 20 percent tariffs on everybody, and he said he would do it on day one. So if anything, we've been delayed having those introduced. Now, I think at some point they're going to be pushed back, but at least in the next month, two months, he's got some runway to keep those high tariffs on everybody.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, Ralph?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that's right, although I think you'll see some changes, especially as any trade agreements are negotiated. We'll see what happens, but I think we'll likely see some deals negotiated over that next month, and that's going to change.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, I think they're gonna want to walk back from the brink. I'm skeptical that we're gonna be in as heightened of a state of conflict with the possible exception of the Chinese, where we're just gonna be like, I think there's some strategic consensus that that's worth the cost. And so there's gonna be much more pressure to keep those on. But I think, look, the President wants to make deals. He's a deals guy. He likes to make deals. He wrote a whole book on deals.
I'm fairly optimistic that they're going to want to take wins when they can get them. And so if they can kill, you know, 10 percent on Cambodia or whatever in exchange for the Cambodians buying more American made, I don't know what we make that Cambodia wants, but we can make it. I think that they will take the deals where they can get them. That's the political model. And by the way, the costs associated with tariffs are already apparent to me. They're going to become more apparent that the cost of a chicken sandwich went up 10 percent for me last week. So I'm unhappy about that. It did it did. They hiked the costs in anticipation of the tariffs. So you know, I think more voters are gonna see that people get more unhappy. So I think we'll start to see more pressure over the next month. I want to I want to take us into the other story. We at CJ have been following the great interest the story of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia sometime-student who was very involved with the protests slash occasional vandalism slash occasional riots at Columbia last fall. Khalil has been issued. The Trump administration is in the process of attempting to deport Khalil, who is a green card holder with an Algerian passport, who's allegedly a Palestinian from Syria. I have lot of questions about that, but we aren't going to get into them here.
Khalil has become sort of a martyr of the free speech left who maintains that he's done nothing wrong. On Friday, before we recording this, an immigration judge finally started the full process of removing him by ruling that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had met the relatively low evidentiary bar to remove him from the country, making him deportable. This is just the first step, probably in a long line of litigation that will involve this case.
But I want to sort of take the temperature. Is this good? Is this bad? Daniel, where are you at on this?
Daniel Di Martino: On his case, I think it's good. And what I find interesting is that the legal strategy of his lawyers seem to be headed at challenging the constitutionality of the provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act for First Amendment reasons. And so that case will probably head to the Supreme Court if it does. And so I think it's a cool thing from legal purposes, but I think that it's going to be upheld, especially because the know, Rubio did get some evidence and did describe like the reasons why he determined that. And if you want to talk about other cases later, I'm happy to, which I think it's more difficult. But in his case, I do think it's really obvious. He did things that are detrimental to US foreign policy.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, Ralf, you're the lawyer here. What do you make of the situation?
Rafael Mangual: I think that's exactly right. you know, I'm pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist. I'm a big fan of free speech, but I don't think that gets much play here. mean, the people making the free speech argument are saying that the government is engaging in viewpoint discrimination, but no one, I don't think, with any real understanding of the law in the United States, would say that the US would be obligated to admit everyone despite
what they said, right? So you can take speech into account when it comes to the decision as to whether or not to let someone into the country, which is, I think, a point worth making. But here, he's being removed for the national security risk that he poses. And that's a determination that was made by Marco Rubio. And the rule cannot be that all speech has to be ignored by the people making that determination. So I think this is just different from just the sort pure viewpoint discrimination kind of case that would be relatively easy to win here. This is a national security argument where, yes, his speech and his actions that are protected by the First Amendment played into that analysis, but I don't think that the government has to blind itself to the public statements and public actions of an individual making a determination about the national security risk that they pose. So, you to me, this is a pretty easy case. It's also a very good one.
I'd like to see the U.S. be a little more protective of the greatest privilege in the free world, which is to come here legally and be able to live and work and prosper in this country. And there are plenty of people who want to do that and also don't want to undermine our national interests. And I think those are the people that should be prioritized for entry.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, and I want to just, for a little context for those who haven't followed this in exhaustive detail, the sort of core question is, he's being removed under a little used component of immigration law that says the Secretary of State can rule that somebody is a threat to our foreign policy interests and have them removed on that basis. The question is, can he be a threat to our foreign policy interests based exclusively on his involvement in otherwise protected speech? The statute says yes.
Maybe the courts are gonna say no. Our colleague Tal Fortgang, who I think is gonna be on the show on Thursday, knock on wood, and others, our colleague Ilya Shapiro have all argued that this guy's probably deportable for reasons unrelated to his speech. But I think it's interesting that the administration has gone in and said, we wanna pick this fight, we wanna go full on. This is a little bit like what they did with the removal of alleged gang members under the Alien Enemies Act, where they basically were trying as hard as possible to minimize process and to test the legal boundaries. think the same thing is happening here.
Daniel Di Martino: Yeah.
They just want the legal case because they could have, you know, charged him with crimes of like property damage, occupation, like they have done so many things. And they chose to just go with this in the INA, the Immigration and Nationality Act use because they want the constitutional challenge, I believe.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yes, I think that's true across the board with a lot of the administration's legal strategy is to say like, how much latitude do we really have here? We want an answer from the Supreme Court so we could like, you know, and this gets to something that Daniel's talking about, don't want bring Judge in in a second, but this gets something that Daniel has talked about, which is so much of the problem with the immigration system writ large predating Trump is just how hard it is to move people through the process that like, you know, part of what they're trying to do is figure out ways to remove people from the country without being bogged down in interminable procedural hurdles. And I think that's what the powers that they're looking for.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think that's right. one thing to be clear about here, this is the Secretary of State, Mark Rubio, making an individualized determination as to a specific person. There's an inherent capacity limit on how much of that can be done. So I'm not sure that that rationale of just kind of making the process easier by allowing you to sort of skirt the more onerous legal proceedings, it really makes a ton of sense here because there's just an inherent limit as to how many individualized determinations that the one Secretary of State can make.
Charles Fain Lehman: a lot of help.
Daniel Di Martino: I have a challenge on that and it's something that is not being reported as much and it's the terminations of student visas for minor trafficking infractions that are happening. It's estimated that it's been thousands in the last month and it's because I believe they're using AI to cross-check fingerprint readers across the country and people who have been fingerprinted even as victims. There's one case of a woman who actually accused her domestic partner of domestic violence and he was charged, she was determined to be the victim, but she was fingerprinted, her visa was canceled, even though she was the victim in the crime. And I think it's not because it's purposeful, but it's because they're trying to make it efficiently. And as a consequence, they are actually ipending lives of people unfairly. And so that kind of use of technology that is not as advanced as it should be to do that does concern me.
Judge Glock: So can I, I was going to say, can I play the ignoramus here, but I'm not playing. I legitimately don't know. This is outside my area of expertise. The Khalil thing in terms of his actions seems like, yes, this is one of the more deportable dudes out there and that he's not just talking. He's also occupying spaces. Deportable dudes should also be the title of our podcast. yeah, yeah. That's a whole, that's a whole nother conversation.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, yeah, please.
Daniel Di Martino: Hahaha
Charles Fain Lehman: This actually the title of this podcast actually.
Judge Glock: But like, so for he's, he's occupying buildings. He's working with the people in Columbia. This is not just the speech. He's also doing, some stuff that's actively sabotaging the things he's supposed to be here to encourage with education, et cetera, as far as I can understand it. But doesn't matter that he's a green heart, heart holder. my, like you, Ralph says, no, you were saying like, we can't let people in because, what they say. And I'm totally with you there. Some guys spouting Nazi propaganda all day and all night. He shows up, otherwise admitting all the, he checks all the boxes on the immigration form so we can say, no, we don't want you, this Nazi in our, in our country. This guy's already in there and he's got the green card. Does that matter?
Daniel Di Martino: It is different legally because you're not in an airport. When you're in an airport it's different because you don't have rights because you're technically outside US jurisdiction. But once you are inside the US, you do have rights. It is different.
Charles Fain Lehman: You do have you do have rights but I and I think this gets to a deeper point. He was issued the green card in November. He's got a three year period or five year period. Yeah.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I think the distinction between.
Daniel Di Martino: Two, two year period of conditionality. And then in three years you can naturalize because it was a green card through marriage.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, so he's married to a US citizen, she's pregnant, so they're gonna have a kid soon. I think this is, in some senses, you know, it feels morally salient, but part of the argument is because of his actions, he was here on a student visa, he adjusted to a green card, he should have been found unadjustable. All of his adjustment came after all of the stuff that he is now being accused of doing. So the green card is, some senses, should not have been issued to him. And this gets to the deeper point.
Daniel Di Martino: I agree.
Charles Fain Lehman: Which is like the premise, you know, there are certain legal rights which accrue to people who are here on a visa and those rights become more expansive, the sort of more permanent the visa is. And on the other hand, the sort of key premise here is like the executive branch has wide latitude over immigration policy for a reason, which is that people who are deprived of their immigration status are not being deprived of life, liberty, property. They aren't being charged with a criminal offense.
And so the standard for removal is lower because the premise is like they are here at the pleasure of the US government. There are procedural rights that obtain in the context of removing them. You want to, to Daniel's point, you don't want to like accidentally label a victim as an offender and kick her out on that basis. But like it does make sense for Marco Rubio to have relatively wide latitude to say like this guy is a problem for our foreign policy. It's time for him to go because that right, that imperative is not really being checked by a right in the same way that, you know, Marco Rubio could not say, this guy's speech is a threat to our foreign policy, he should go to prison as a citizen.
Rafael Mangual: Well, this is why I think that Khalil's lawyers are trying to make this a First Amendment issue because the First Amendment applies to all persons, right? We've adopted this substantive due process framework, which if you really want to get into the weeds on that, I would say read Justice Clarence Thomas's concurring opinion in McDonald versus City of Chicago, in my opinion, one of my favorite judicial opinions ever written. But he gets into why the distinction between substantive due process and privileges and immunities is meaningful and you know, of course, privileges and immunities, you know, is restricted to citizens. This is the 14th Amendment, right? Which makes, know, that's right.
Charles Fain Lehman: This is the text of the 14th Amendment for those who don't know. Yeah, this is constitutional law nerd nitty-gritty.
Daniel Di Martino: Now this is totally outside of my environment.
Charles Fain Lehman: It's a great opinion.
Rafael Mangual: That's right. So that is why I think they're trying to make this a First Amendment issue because it gets around that distinction. you know, I was talking about this with one of our other colleagues, Jim Copeland, earlier. You know, yeah, I do think that there's potentially something to the claim that the government doesn't have to meet the same burden here because there isn't the same kind of harm, right? They're not being subjected to a fine. They're not being subjected to imprisonment. They're not being, you know, charged with a crime and that, you know, the sort of thing that triggers all these other kinds of problems. And there's still process being served here, right? I mean, you know, this person's still being, you know, going through all the hearing process and, there's judicial oversight, et cetera. But I do think, you know, that what this really comes down to is a question about what the rule should be with respect to speech insofar as it influences the determination of national security risk. I don't think that they're going to be successful on a legal challenge to say that the Secretary of State doesn't have the authority to rule somebody a risk to national security enough to justify revoking a green card. And then I don't think the rule is going to turn out to be that speech cannot possibly be considered at any point during that process when making that determination. I think that would really bog us down.
Daniel Di Martino: Well, remember the Constitution already upheld the Trump travel ban. Sorry, the Supreme Court already upheld the Trump travel ban, meaning they can discriminate even by religion, people entering here. The question in this case is that this is not a person that is entering the United States from abroad, but somebody who was already inside. And I think that's why it gets trickier. But I do think that, I mean, I just think that in this case is the correct decision from the executive branch, mainly because they could have used many other provisions in the INA to deport him. And I would have preferred that instead of the constitutional case, but you know, that's their choice.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah. All right. want to wrap this up. So let me ask. I'll start with Ralph. Is Mahmoud Khalil ultimately going to be deported? Or who's going to prevail here? You think he's gone? Okay. Judge?
Rafael Mangual: See ya Adios amigo, he's gone
Daniel Di Martino: Uh-huh.
Judge Glock: Yeah, probably.
Charles Fain Lehman: Okay, okay Daniel.
Daniel Di Martino: I think he will because he will be a priority. If this had been somebody else not in the news, he would have waited it out and he would have survived, but this one will go.
Charles Fain Lehman: Interesting. Okay, so I think he's not going to go and I think he's not going to go for the following because I think that they are going to there are number of immigration court appeals that he still has to exhaust and then there are a bunch of federal court appeals and I think they're going to push the litigation for the next three years. I think they're going to succeed at doing that, at which point the neck an elected Democratic president will almost certainly decide this guy gets to stay in the country for some reason because it will become a you know, a hot button political issue. So I think it actually comes down to, can he
Daniel Di Martino: And what's
Rafael Mangual: You think they win if they run on that though? I don't know. That strikes me as a bit of a losing campaign promise.
Daniel Di Martino: funny is that if he waits it out...
Charles Fain Lehman: I think there's a real possibility that they run the clock on this one and that they are successful at running the clock on this one.
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, I don't see it.
Daniel Di Martino: And if he does,
Rafael Mangual: think he's mine.
Daniel Di Martino: By the way, he will be eligible for naturalization immediately because the time as a green card holder will have passed.
Charles Fain Lehman: Right.
All right. On that note, I want to I want to wrap us up with an entertaining story. This is the City Journal podcast. You should expect to hear much more from us about big cities and in particular New York City as we're touching on the news to get you a little bit sense of who we are. But we'll be getting some of the city nitty gritty. But I want to give you guys our listeners a taste of that. I saw a great headline over the weekend. And I've shared this with our with our panelists, but I want to solicit their feedback.
There's a headline in the New York Times. I'm going to read you the sub headline, the thing that came underneath the headline. And then I'm going to ask our panelists what the headline was. Give me, don't, you know what the answer is, but give me your best guess. The sub headline was, New York subways have been the subject of debate with politicians using them to paint the city as out of control and dangerous to residents and visitors. What could go above that sub headline that calls into question the legitimacy of this idea that the subways are unsafe?
Ralph, what's your what's your best guess here?
Rafael Mangual: Yeah, assuming ignorance of what the real headline is, the best guess would be, you know, this is something that's coming alongside a story about the first quarter crime statistics, was significant decline in crime in the subway system, Right.
Charles Fain Lehman: So really it's unreasonable for them to be concerned about this.
Rafael Mangual: So, you know, the left has long been trying to sort of play this game that it's not as bad as it, you know, as people think it is, you know, in 2020 and when crime was going through a roof, was it was it's not as bad as it was in the 90s, right? The subways aren't as bad as they ever were. That's what I think if you read that sub headline, that's what you imagine that it's attached to.
Charles Fain Lehman: Yeah, yeah. Daniel, if you saw that subheadline, what would you expect was above it?
Daniel Di Martino: I would have said something like imaginary crime. And the reason is it reminds me of when I lived in Venezuela and the Maduro and Chavez regimes said that inflation was all in our minds and it was all imaginary. What we feel is not real. Crime was also fake. Crime is a perception, they told us. And I feel like this is exactly what's going on here.
Charles Fain Lehman: Thank you. Judge, what would you expect to be above that sub-headline?
Judge Glock: legitimately don't know and I'm I'm guessing there's an actual bad event because New York Times wouldn't feel the need to like do this throat clearing. No, it's a real event, but it's just used by bad people to do bad things. Like subway pushing, a subway pushing?
Charles Fain Lehman: Good. Yeah. Right. That's... The real answer is to read the headline for you, Police Seek Man Who They Say Violated a Corpse on an R Train. So, you know, is that really an issue? It's really just, I mean, it's just, that's part of life in the big city, you know?
Daniel Di Martino: I saw that, you're right!
Rafael Mangual: It's, I mean, imagine, imagine writing a story about someone sexually penetrating a dead body.
Daniel Di Martino: In the subway.
Rafael Mangual: in the subway, unclear as of yet as to whether the death was caused by this individual, and then feeling like the right way to follow that up is, but guys, it's not that bad, really.
Charles Fain Lehman: It's unreasonable to be concerned about that. Yeah. It's not really in this yet.
Judge Glock: Let's not, well, admittedly the, the corpse sexual violations in the subway have been, remained fairly low over the last couple of years. So yeah, it's, yeah, you really got to look at the overall stats. Cause those things, it's not an everyday thing. Like some politicians may want you to believe it's just the case. It's every few weeks, you know, or some.
Charles Fain Lehman: Since the 1990s, they're way down, so...
Rafael Mangual: This, you know, this still doesn't count toward the, you know, the assaults on live riders per million rides. So, you know, it's, it's like.
Charles Fain Lehman: That's true. And you have to consider the root causes as well.
Daniel Di Martino: This is not a live in person, you're right.
Charles Fain Lehman: All right. All right. On that note, thank you so much to our panelists. Thank you to our producer, Isabella Redjai. Listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, we hope you ll check us out on YouTube. We're on platforms. Otherwise, where you get your podcasts, please comment, like, rate, send us some feedback. If you send us some questions, we'll probably answer your questions on the show. That's about all the time that we have. So until next time, you've been listening to the City Journal podcast. We hope you'll join us again soon.
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