Hayes: ICE killings expose illusion of Trump’s ‘quieter’ crackdown

Watch Disclosure Day at Home Now with exclusive bonus features. If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you? Would that frighten you? Well, now the truth belongs to 7 billion people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Kep starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Coleman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required, also in theaters. Burlington knows you cannot forget Mother's Day. And be real, texting your sibling to add your name to their card isn't enough. Instead, head to your newly refreshed Burlington, where it's easier to shop for deals that'll make Mom proud. Find fragrances from perfume to candles or opt for a brand name bag. Plus, your store had a glow-up, so it's more fun to shop for those special women in your life. Mom is Wow upside down after all. Burlington, deals, brands, wow. Tonight on All In. The justification originally for the person they said they were going after, I think was utter bullshit. The growing backlash has ICE kills a second person in less than a week. What I understand, talking to the director ICE, it's a short pause just to make sure we're doing the right thing. Tonight, Trump's deportation force gets a timeout with voters in Maine and beyond paying attention. Senator Susan Collins wrote the blank check to allow these officers to conduct themselves in the way that they have in Maine in the first place. Then Donald Trump's personal lawyer faces a reckoning over the Epstein cover-up and much more. Any senator who votes to confirm Todd Blanche, no, you're now part of the cover-up. And the president's attempt to spread election denial through all the networks. Oh, my goodness. All the networks. Wow! Why Democrats think they have an election winner in the backlash to AI. What All In starts right now.

Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Donald Trump and Stephen Miller's reign of terror on American streets has now taken two lives in less than a week. And it's forced the Trump administration to retreat a bit for now. We'll get into that. Americans are again waking up to the reality of what the Trump administration's mass deportation regime actually looks like on the streets in practice. It was almost two years ago to the day that folks, the Republican National Convention, held signs like the one you see there that read mass deportation now. And at the time, as I watched that, I didn't think people actually understood what that political project would entail. I think that was doubly true for regular voters, swing voters, not the folks who would attend the RNC, but those who told pollsters they were in favor of mass deportation that Trump was campaigning on. Because in practice, what that project entails is constructing a massive, expensive, intrusive police state that terrorizes everyone, everywhere. Legal immigrants, unauthorized immigrants, natural-born citizens, children, adults, and everyone in between. Everyone. And that police state wreaks total havoc and destruction physically, socially, and economically. People didn't understand that reality back during the campaign in 2024. A plurality voted for the guy who was promising mass deportations. He ran on it and he won. And as soon as he started actually implementing it, people figured out the ugly truth pretty quickly. Part of that had to do with how gross and shameless this administration was back in early 2025. The gleeful advertising of their inherently violent and exclusionary vision, the white nationalist propaganda seeping for every pore on social media. The approach from then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, remember her, and then border commissar, Greg Gregory Bovino, to shove this all in our faces, to revel in the cruelty? Infamously, Noam took a photo op at the El Salvadoran mega prison to gloat over all the folks this country was wrongfully deporting there. Her agency led a kind of shock and awe raid on a Southside residential Chicago apartment complex with Apache helicopters. Folks in Camel repelling down the sides, and at first they claimed they had to terrorize a residential neighborhood in the middle of the city because if Venezuela and gang had occupied the building. But in the end, no, we learned they really just harassed a bunch of folks the middle night because their landlord and complained about squatters. This was just a few examples, but it turned out that people didn't like to watch this. They didn't like this kind of behavior, the terror, and then the constant lying about it. A lot of ordinary folks. got radicalized as they watched this behavior from their government day after day and week after week and month after month. And they rose up and they protested all over the country, but specifically in the cities where ICE was coming in hard and advertising their big operations in places like Chicago and in Los Angeles. And then, of course, this winter, it all came to a head in Minneapolis back in January. Federal agents killed two American citizens in what looks to all the world like cold blood on the streets of our country.

René Good and Alex Preddy were fatally shot while exercising their rights to protest their government. In both cases, the Trump administration lied about the victims and then slandered them, called them radicals and domestic terrorists, said they were trying to harm the officers. ICE also got caught lying about a Venezuelan man that an agent shot through a closed door. Now, that man lived, but the lie was so bad, so egregious, that Minnesota prosecutors charged the ICE agent for falsely reporting a crime. And the sum total of all this chaos and this lawlessness and brutality and all the deceit was massive public outcry. What happened in Minnesota in January was that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller lost the country. They lost the country. Everybody could see their deportation programs were a debacle, and they actually had to retreat a little bit, or at least appear to retreat. They fired Christine Ome as the cosplaying DHS chief. They put Bovino in his tiny tailored overcoats out to pasture. He has since retired to become a kind of full-time white nationalist palling around with literal neo-Nazis in Europe. And they brought in Markwayne Mullin to run DHS, but the policy didn't change. This is the important point here. Just the PR campaign. Mullen has been very clear about this. Basically pledging for ICE to be more discreet about what it does, essentially, look, we're going to do the same thing. We're just not going to advertise it. We're just going to do this under the radar. And this is just what they were doing to this point. They have, under Markwayne Mullin, ramped back up enforcement, massively increased it over the past few months. We're hearing reports of quotas for agents. They're hitting new records. And so what is the inevitable consequence? This is the inevitable consequence, the blood on the street. They have once again killed two innocent people for no reason. First, in Texas last week, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado-Arajo after they pulled over the wrong car, a man who had lived in the United States for three decades, who had American children, had a business, and a family, and a life who contributed to his neighborhood and his community, whose family found out he had been killed by our government on social media. I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot. I recognize him immediately. Not from his appearance, but from his voice, crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out. Like I have so many times before, this administration claims Salgado Arajo was trying to ram ICE agents with this car. video that has emerged from multiple angles does not show this. In fact, it appears to show DH agents trying to run him off the road. And as we all know, as we have all seen, DHS and ICE have lied about this in the past. They've been caught red-handed lying about it, so much so they've had to drop criminal cases. And so there is absolutely no reason to believe them at this time unless there's more evidence. Because it's the same playbook over and over and over again. And so yesterday... Less than a week after Salgado Raho was killed, Trump's agents killed someone again on the street. In Bitterford, Maine, about 20 miles south of Portland, Johann Sebastian Guerrero was shot and killed by ICE. And once again, he was not the intended target of their search. And once again, ICE claimed he was trying to ram them with his car. Listen to this. An eyewitness of the scene says she heard the agent trying to get his story straight in real time. Quote, he tried to run me over.

Another eyewitness said he heard the same justification. The ICE agent that had done the shooting was walking by me. I said, I hope you're satisfied with what you've done. And he looked at me, the person that did the shooting, and he said, well, he was trying to run me over or something to that effect. What it's worth, the statement from ICE only says the officer was fearing for public safety. Not fearing for his life. Doesn't indicate in the officialized statement that he was trying to run him over. You can determine for yourself who's most credible here. But here we are, once again, there's two more people dead, killed by our government on the street in broad daylight. They weren't doing anything wrong. In fact, both of these men were in the process of proactively attempting to regularize their status in this country. And once again, DHS is trying to shift the narrative. Today, ICE announced they are temporarily halting most traffic stop arrests. Time will tell if that's true or how long the pledge will last. For what it's worth, Trump's so-called borders are, does not think it will be long. That decision was made by the Secretary along with leadership at ICE. But look, it's not a policy change. It's a temporary pause. Look, the last couple of shootings, ICE leadership along with DHS believes they want to look at these last couple minutes and look, is there something that could have been done better? Is there any training to get me improved? Or it's simply ICE doing the job and bad things happen when people don't comply with law enforcement officers. So I think it's going to be a short. pause, and I'm confident that ICE is well-trained, the vehicle stops, and you're going to see us keep moving forward. But this is just a temporary pause where they look at the incidents. Don't worry, Oman saying it's temporary pause. We will get back to running people off the road and firing at them at will. We should also note just today a man in Florida was struck and killed by a vehicle as he fled an encounter with ICE at a Wawa gas station. Obviously, Trump and Stephen Miller are committed to this, and they're going to find a way to ensure that their aggressive deportation scheme continues. I think Miller thinks particularly they have a mandate to enact it. And it's not crazy, not as crazy as some of the other stuff they did. I mean, they ran on it. They won. Maybe they did have a mandate 18 months ago. But they sure as hell don't now. Trump's approval rating on immigration is way underwater and slipping. They have lost the country and they're losing more of it because the fundamental thing that they promised mass deportations now is horrific when you see it up close. To everyone. In your neighborhoods, in your communities, to your neighbors, the slogan was one thing, reality quite another. There is no humane and orderly under the radar way to do what they want to do. And so cruelty and chaos will inevitably follow. I think Americans see that now quite clearly. Congressman Primalogia Paul is a ranking member on the Subcommittee on Immigration. She joins me now. Let me just start with your understanding of the arc here. Does this square with how you've understood what they've done in terms of enforcement, the kind of very big push, both substantively and in PR, a kind of tactical retreat after Minnesota, and then a kind of, you know, getting the gears going again that have led us to this moment?

Yeah, I think you outlined it incredibly well, Chris. And, you know, taking us back to the mini history, I think, was important because I might go one step further and say it was actually outlined in Project 2025. Stephen Miller came in with this specific mandate. Now, they did cover it up a little bit in saying we're going to go after the worst of the worst. So at the same time that they were saying mass deportation, they were also saying we're going after the worst of the worst. And what I think the problem has been. is that people see that the people that they're going after are not the worst of the worst. Now, you add to everything that you said, the fact that they supercharged the budget, $210 billion between the 140 that was in the big, bad betrayal bill last summer, and then the additional $70 billion that they just gave to ICE, even though there was $100 billion left over that hadn't been used. You give all of that money, you hire all. of these people, you give them absolutely no training, or maybe you give them the training, that the number is the most important thing. 2,000 people a day, arrest, detain, deport, whatever means you need to. And by the way, go ahead and racially profile too. And suddenly you're catching up. All of these people, like Lorenzo Salgado O'Rajo, like Yoan Guerrero, all of these people that people actually know and love and trust. And now they're saying, well, now you've got Renee Good. You've got Alex Prattie. You've got all of these people. And what does that mean for me? So now also the self-awareness that if they can do this to these people, they can do it to me. I think that is also starting to come in. So it's this combination of horror at the cruelty of what is happening right in front. I mean, I look at these videos, Chris, and... I can't stop myself from crying sometimes, looking at what people are experiencing. A three-year-old daughter, seeing her father pulled out, as happened in Maine. You know, Lorenzo's son having to hear his father cry out for help in his last moments on social media. I think that is starting now to eat away at Americans' conscience. And you're right. It's absolutely... incredibly unpopular, and Trump has taken a total reversal in what people actually want now that they're seeing what he's doing. Yeah, I mean, there's also the unmarked car aspect of it. I mean, Tom Homan talking about people not complying to law enforcement. I've seen these videos of unmarked black SUVs trying to run you off the road. I mean, it's like a... It's like a movie, right? I mean, it's, it's a movie. In the movie, it's the bad guys that are doing that. Like, that is, and there's no other law enforcement operation that I've ever seen, and I reported on the Chicago Public Police Department while I was there, which it had its troubles, that just try to do that. Like, I've never seen law enforcement do this as protocol in the way that it seems to be happening here.

And we've had law enforcement testify at the hearings that I've been doing. I've been doing a series of hearings. I think I've done nine now, including one in Minnesota, a week after Renee Good was... murdered, and we have law enforcement come forward and testify and say, we would never do that. You don't shoot at a moving car. You don't shoot from the front. All of the things that are happening right now, including, like you said, the unmarked cars. How is Lorenzo Salgado or Raho supposed to know that that is ice when it's an unmarked car, when people are wearing masks and have no identification on them? And so there is a lot of terror in the community, and I do think... that the tactics that are being used are that of a militia. I mean, this is really what people are seeing unleashed on their streets in their towns, is this governmental militia that is called ICE and CBP, by the way, both of them are being utilized in these operations. And again, it's all... with absolutely no focus on, quote, the worst of the worst, which was the story, I think, that they sold to some people. That is clearly not the case. Yeah, this is a quote from the Washington Post reporting in Houston. A resident named Rhonda Smith said, it ain't right. I support Trump. I don't support this. Why aren't they going after murders and rapists, to your point about the sort of bill of goods that was sold here? The president's 13% underwater in the latest Quinnipiac poll. To come back around to what can be done here, I mean, you've got Susan Collins trying to sort of present herself as, you know, she's sticking up for Mainers and she's called Markwayne Mullin. But of course. I mean, the numbers you gave there, just to remember, there's 140 billion in that first bill. They had 100 billion sitting in the account. And then after Democrats refused to spend more money on this agency after Minnesota, they took their one shot, their one party line reconciliation bill. They got to do one thing on domestic policy this year. And what they spent it on was giving another 70 billion to the same agency with no strings attached while it had $100 billion in the bank. And now here we are. And Susan Collins voted for it. And at the same time, right. And at the same time that they cut health care for the American people. And they said there wasn't enough money for other things when gas and groceries were going up. And so I think all of that is right. And I do, you know, I take this back to some of the first bills they put on the floor last year. I remember whipping like crazy, including, frankly, on our side around Lake and Riley. And I said the plan here is to take away all due process for immigrants. bill did. That's what a series of bills that they put on the floor after that did is they said, we're just going to get rid of due process for crime after crime after crime or alleged crime after crime after crime. And that is actually what has also been playing out on the streets, right? So when federal courts, over 130 federal courts are saying you're not giving due process to people when they come in front of us, when they do mass deportation hearings, when they move people from one to

center to another without letting them see attorneys. This is all about taking away any existing rights. And it's just important, Chris, that we always talk about the fact that immigration is a civil system. It is not a criminal offense to be here with undocumented presence. If you cross the border and you're caught within a certain mileage of the border, that's one thing. But once you're in the country, immigration is a civil offense. That's why it was always done out of DHS. before Homeland Security was created. Now we've got this criminal agency that is pursuing people as if they're criminals, regardless of what immigration status they have. Congressman Pramila Jayapal, thanks to your time tonight. Thank you. Coming up, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse on Trump's push to install his personal lawyer as the Attorney General. Next. Watch Disclosure Day at Home Now with exclusive bonus features. If you found out we weren't alone, if someone showed you, proved it to you? Would that frighten you? Well, now the truth belongs to seven billion people in an original event film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by David Kep starring Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Coleman Domingo. Find Disclosure Day on major digital platforms now with no subscription required, also in theaters. This is a Monday.com ad. The same Monday.com designed for every team. The same Monday.com with built-in AI, scaling your work from day one. The same Monday.com with an easy and intuitive setup. Go to Monday.com and try it for free. Burlington knows you cannot forget Mother's Day. And be real, texting your sibling to add your name to their card isn't enough. Instead, head to your newly refreshed Burlington, where it's easier to shop for deals that'll make Mom proud. Find fragrances from perfume to candles or opt for a brand name bag. Plus, your store had a glow up, so it's more fun to shop for those special women in your life. Mom is Wow upside down after all. Burlington, deals, brands, wow. Tomorrow morning, Trump's former defense attorney turned acting attorney general will come before the Senate Judiciary Committee to make his job permanent. Now, by some accounts, Todd Blanche is on a glide path to confirmation, but there are a lot of things senators should ask this guy who in just four short months has become one of the worst attorneys general in my lifetime, if not the worst. They could also ask about his role in the creation of a slush fund for insurrectionists and an IRS audit shield for the Trump family. And that might be one of the most interesting lines of question tomorrow because on the eve of his hearings, a federal judge has accused Todd Blanche a professional, unethical, and sanctionable behavior for his role in that Trump IRS lawsuit that purported to create the slushful. In a 56-page judicial order yesterday, Judge Kathleen Williams, rebuked that lawsuit, referred the lawyer who brought the suit to the Florida bar, and announced she was forwarding a decision to the New York bar for its ongoing investigation of Todd Blanche. She wrote of the entire thing, quote, this was an attempt to use the court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the president. The judge added, quote, this lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights. It was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee and he joins me now. I want to start with Judge Williams' order because it is such a, so rare.

that a judge issues something like this. The case itself stunk to high heaven from the beginning. It seemed obviously pretextual, the settlement. They've had to sort of walk back from it. But here's a guy who's going to come before the community of murder to be the most important lawyer in the country. And a federal judge has just said that the bar should investigate him for and possibly disbarrow. Yeah, and it's a little bit like what the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee did with Emil Bovi, who also had a judicial inquiry into contempt. That's right. pending, and rather than wait until that was resolved, they jammed him through before it could be resolved, so they didn't have to know the result of it. And I'm worried that that will be the case here. But this is quite a big deal. This opened with what I think is the first allegation in American history of something called fraud upon the court by the Department of Justice. And it wasn't a ridiculous or trivial accusation. It was an accusation that a federal judge reopened the case to do an inquiry into. And that's the background to the decision that you describe, which did three key things. First, it said that the Trump side of this fake collusive case was, in fact, collusive and brought in bad faith as cover for a sweetheart deal. So that's why the Trump lawyer got sent to the Florida bar for sanctions. The weird thing here in this case is that the Department of Justice never filed a pleading as if they were trying to avoid any hook that would give the judge authority over the Department of Justice, a little bit of sort of consciousness of guilt, that this was a bad, crooked deal. And the judge went there anyway. First of all, she talked about collusion, and collusion takes two. So that obviously brings in the Department of Justice. She also described violation of Department of Justice policies and conduct incompatible with the duties of Department of Justice attorneys. And then, as you mentioned, She ordered that her decision be transmitted to the New York bar to look at as a disciplinary matter over Todd Blanche. So really remarkable day, really shameful day in the Department of Justice's history. I think there's no shortage of reasons of disqualifying actions by Todd Blanche, in my humble opinion, if you were asking me where I come from and how I would vote. I mean, I think going to interview Glenn Maxwell and then essentially, apparently being a party to what seems like an insanely corrupt bargain to move her to a prison she wasn't even qualified for under Bureau of Prisons itself is disqualifying. That said...

Still ahead, new reporting on the internal White House fight over Donald Trump's plan to spread the big lie. Still, about 2020, in the year of our Lord, 2026. That's next. Tonight, anonymous officials inside Donald Trump's White House are raising alarms about the president's big speech on Thursday. MS now reports that in his speech, Trump will focus on false claims about voting machines and foreign influence in American elections. He'll also, at least the plan is now, release related to classified intelligence documents with the help of that guy, Bill Pulte and other cronies, willing to spread conspiracy theories about 2020. At least that's the plan. We'll see what happens by Thursday. It's just the latest in his project to subvert a free and fair election and instead stack the deck for Republicans. He already launched a gerrymandering war totally unprecedented that is expected to net Republicans up to a dozen new congressional seats, not based on anything other than their manipulation of maps. It's the most straightforward way he's put his thumb on the scale. But it's also important, remember, there are examples of people successfully fighting back. In 2020, intense pushback from lawyers and people of conscience across the country, stop Trump from under-turning the election results. And at the state level, the story of the state of Wisconsin is really instructive. I mean, Republicans there had used aggressive gerrymandering in a similar way to draw themselves into a near legislative supermajority in a razor-thin, evenly divided swing state. And that was finally unwound in 2023 when Fair Map advocacy groups won a stunning victory in the Wisconsin Supreme Court that led to the overturning of the Republican gerrymander and giving Wisconsinites a real say in the representation. Ben Wickler was at the head of that effort. He served as the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025. He's the author of the upcoming book, This is the Plan. how to end America's meltdown and save democracy, and he joins me now. And Ben, I got to say, of all the people that talk about what's going on, I think you are in the top five of people with credibility to talk about concretely what we do because of what happened in Wisconsin under your leadership and stewardship, a plan that I remember you telling me before it happened, this is our game plan for how we're going to sort of, this is how we're going to reestablish democracy in Wisconsin. What are the lessons there? Because they're basically doing the Wisconsin model nationally right now. They really are. And it's great to be with you, Chris. And I'm really excited to be able to share this book, essentially taking people inside the game plan for what we need to do as a country now drawing on the pattern in Wisconsin. What we realized in Wisconsin is that there was no... One election, there was no single fight that would allow us to unrig our state's democracy. It took a year-long effort mapping out, step by step, domino by domino, what it would take to unrig our state and make it a democracy after it was a democracy desert. That's where we are now as a country. Project 2025 is basically reheated Project 2011, what Scott Walker and the Republicans did in Wisconsin, and many Republican state governments did after the Republican sweep in

2010. They suppressed votes. They smashed unions. They rigged maps. They took over state Supreme Courts. They flooded money into state legislative races and local races so they could change the rules and hold on to control. And if you want to fight against that, it takes more than a single candidate or the perfect message for the perfect moment. It takes a movement of thousands of people rolling up their sleeves and talking to people who may not agree with them yet year after year to be able to build power and win the races at every level that allow you to unravel a system of undemocratic control. That's where we are now as a country. And if we do that, that work? If we focus not just on congressional and Senate races, incredibly important as those are, but the state-level fights and local fights, including this fall, like Wisconsin's trifecta, the North Carolina state Supreme Court race, we can get out of this mess and actually have a democracy worth the title of democracy in this country. Yeah, and one of the key elements here that you can't like strategize or tactics your way out of is you got to win elections on tough terrain in a swing state. Like, there's no way out other than winning these statewide races, particularly those state Supreme Court races. You know, Elon Musk threw a ton of money behind the sort of MAGA-backed, Republican-backed state Supreme Court candidate last year. In fact, there was, you probably broke Wisconsin law by promising $1 million in payouts. A Wisconsin board says today. But. I guess that's sort of both good and bad news, right? But like fundamentally, even when the deck is stacked, you've got a lot of money on the other side. You've got to find a way to win in terrain that may be tough terrain. That's it. Now, when you're facing this kind of disaster, when you're facing the world's richest man coming into your state trying to buy a state Supreme Court race to reverse the majority, win his own lawsuit there, at a moment when he's killing hundreds of thousands of people around the world by unconstitutionally shredding foreign aid, threatening primary challenges against any politician who gets in his way, you have a choice. You can curl up in the fetal position under your covers and doom scroll. Or you can get out and try to play an Uno reverse card on him and turn it into a referendum on whether far-right billionaires should be able to break the law, rewrite the rules, and dominate our country, or whether we should have a government buy-of and for the people. We had an amazing candidate, Susan Crawford. We had this movement that had been building for years across our state with thousands of people involved.

We won by 10 percentage points. Elon Musk, who at that time, seemed like a guy who no one could stand up against, he went down in flames, and Trump pushed him out of the White House starting the next day. And I think there's a lesson there about standing up and fighting in the face of this. There's also a lesson about Paying attention to races where nobody's watching. There are so many of these right now, and there are chances with state legislative races to win control of state governments across the country and secretary of state races, attorneys general, governors' races that nobody's talking about, where if all this huge movement of millions of people right now, if we all do our job. then the people who run the elections in 2028 will be people who believe in democracy because we've won the midterm elections at the state and local level in 2026. That is the first key thing in the plan of this is the plan. It's to be the hipster wearing the Misfits shirt in the 80s before people knew about those races, not just the people wearing the t-shirt now. You've got to get involved in elections that no one's paying attention to. That's where your power is the greatest, where the impact of volunteers and yard signs can actually tip the balance. But if we do that, If we have victories in 26, at every level. In 28, we can protect the election, and that could allow us to actually make the kinds of reforms after the 2028's election to end partisan gerrymandering, expand or put term limits on the U.S. Supreme Court to add states that need representation. There's so much we can do to unrig the American system of government. We basically have one shot in 2029, and it's going to take years of work between now and then. So my call to everyone, and this is the plan, which you can find that this is the plan.com for pre-hearted now is to throw yourself into the work to retake our democracy. And if all that sounds grandiose or unlikely, I will say that I sat in a coffee shop at Ben Wickler, sometimes in 2021, where he mapped out what they had to do in Wisconsin. And every single thing he said, which when you concatenated them together seemed unlikely, like a six-leg parlay. happened. So if there's one person, this is not just behind the guy. Ben Wickler, I would check out the book of our view. Thank you very much. Appreciate it, man. Thanks so much, Chris. Still to come, how AI became the perfect foil for Democratic candidates ahead of the midterms. Next.

Monday.com AI agents took over my work. And I absolutely love it. Chasing deadlines, writing status reports, updating stakeholders. Agents handle the daily grind now. I stay in the loop only when it matters. Create your own AI agent in minutes on Monday.com. Saturday, September 26th, join MS Now Live in Texas for our biggest event yet with Rachel Maddo, Jen Saki, Michael Steele, and more for a day of powerful conversations and timely insights in a crucial state for the midterms. Democracies heal and advance themselves by engaging everybody where they are. Plus exclusive community experiences. MS now live together in Texas. September 26th, get tickets today at MS. dot now slash. Together. One of the U.S. Senate seats, Democrats hope to flip November is in Ohio, where Democrat Sherrod Brown faces an uphill battle against Republican Senator John Husted in a state Donald Trump won three times. Recent polling, though, shows them neck and neck. Now, Brown lost his Senate race two years ago. Before that, he served his center in Ohio for three terms, and for nearly 20 years, he managed to defy political gravity by finding issues that appeal to populist Republicans and swing voters. And now he has a new ad out against Husted on data centers in Ohio, an issue that presents a huge opportunity for Democrats. An issue where people across the political spectrum agree. Recent polling shows seven out of ten Americans oppose local construction of data center. In fact, just today, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation's first statewide moratorium on data centers. It will be for one year during a period of study. Robeson Meyer is the executive editor of HeatMap. We just wrote a piece on who actually likes data centers. Heather McGee is author of The Sum of Us. What Racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. She serves as chairwoman of the board for color of change. Somerson, Rob, let me start with you because you and I've talked about this on our podcast, but HeatMap's been doing some of the best. public opinion work on data centers. And I want to just show this one graph. This is, would you oppose getting a data center near you? August 2025, 42% yes. February, 26, 51%. May 2026, 71%. Like, this is moving in one direction and pretty definitively, wouldn't you say? I would say so. Well, first of all, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. And thanks for the kind words. I mean, it has been shocking because when we started, we started polling, first of all, those poll results, we pulled the exact same question in August of last year, in February of this year, and then last month or late May. And when we started pulling this question, you know, the American public was really split. It was like exactly 42% on each side, said, I would support, I would oppose. And then 15% were in the middle and said, I don't know. And since then it has been this massive shift in. public opinion on a scale that like I didn't know was still possible in like the U.S. political sphere. And what's crazy is that data center, would you support a local, you know, a data center being built locally in our polling is not only like underwater with the American public writ large, but it's underwater with all political parties. It's underwater in most age groups. Obviously younger Americans are are more opposed to data centers than older Americans, but it is.

staggeringly kind of across the board, do we see this opposition taking hold? And one of the places where the sort of fallout from this has been most acute is in Tennessee, Heather, where Elon Musk's XAI has built some data centers that they're using these huge generators. They seem to be just flagrantly violating federal environmental law, possibly local environmental law. The Trump administration has basically stepped in the Department of Justice to basically say it's okay for them to keep polluting. Don't worry about it, like this unprecedented protection while black folks in that area have been suing. You've been there up close and seen how the organizing around this is happening. What would you learn? This is such an important issue, and it is a cross-cutting issue. I first got to know the local leader there, Justin Pearson, when he was in his early 20s, as an environmental activist who was able to unite segregated Memphis along black and white lines to stop an oil pipeline. And then the David and Goliath story happened again when Elon Musk, the richest and I like to remind folks, the greediest man in the world, came to overnight. throw up these dozens of huge gas turbines in this community that already is in the sort of cancer alley of a highly polluted community. And what he didn't count on was a person like Justin Jay Pearson, who's this incredible advocate. He's now running for Congress. And he has been able to, again, unite this black-white coalition. There's been like a million chapters in this story. But basically, they were able to get... And Color of Change has been involved in this fight as well on the ground. They've been able to get many of the turbines which were illegally put up there for this huge data center using so much of this precious resources in Memphis. They love their water, some of the cleanest water in the world. And then they just moved it across the state lines to Mississippi to a working class, low-income white community, South Haven, Mississippi. This is one of those issues. There are not that many where we're talking about rising costs for electricity. We're talking about land use. We're talking about, obviously, climate change. We're talking mostly, though, about democracy. You know, when I first think about John Houston, I think about someone who purged voters gleefully when he was Secretary of State of... of Ohio. I think about Justin Pearson as someone whom the Supreme Court just robbed Black. Tennessee from potentially having him as their chosen candidate by, you know, gutting the Voting Rights Act. There are so many ways in which the powers that want to dominate our electricity use, our land use, our entire economy through AI data centers, see democracy and cross-racial solidarity and movement building as the enemy. This is the issue to unite all of those causes.

Well, and I guess my question for you, Rob, is like, that point you made about how you didn't think swings like this were possible. I mean, one of the things I would say about this, and to point you're making, Heather, about these coalitions is it has not become... partisan identified or partisan polarized yet. And there's always this question of, if it does, do you then get the equal and opposite reaction, right? So if Democrats are like, oh, this A conforms with our values and is good politics, we're going to seize on it, do you then end up in a world where people are like, oh, now, oh, it's a Democrat thing? Well, now I want a data center, Rob. Do you think, like, do you, do you, do you, is that a possibility here? You know, this is the biggest question going forward and one that I'm still really not sure how it's going to wind up. I think there's a world here where we see data centers become something almost like fracking where they get banned or paused or there's far more regulated in blue states, but they continue to get built in Texas and other parts of the sunbelt. And it winds up being, you know, another... you know, sector of the economy that's almost divided between red and blue states. And red states reap a lot of the economic growth and tax revenue from them. I think there's another world, though, where these things keep being unpopular. I mean, I think in Utah, recently, the Utah, the longtime Utah state Senate president lost his seat because he supported, as we're talking about in your podcast, this massive data center campus sponsored or invested in by the, uh, Shark Tank host, Mr. Wonderful. And local residents rebelled against it. And ultimately, even though this state Senate president had just approved a permit, kicked him out of the seat. And so when we look at the polling, we see that Republicans, you know, are slightly more pro-Data center than Democrats. But that is like... Both parties, majority of both parties, want to see AI regulated. They tend to oppose data centers. It is not, you know, it's not, it's still has quite some, it's still pretty across the board. Yeah, Robinson, Meyer, and Heather McGee, thank you both for your time. It's going to be, we're going to be a lot more talk about this as the midterms continue. Stay tuned, Jen Saki, is both Georgia Center Jon Ossoff and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Coming up, we'll be right back.

Before you go, I'm sure everyone watched Spain defeat France earlier today in the semifinals. Next up, England and Argentina. So this week on my podcast, Why Is This Happening? I spoke with my friend and colleague, Amen Mohan, about all things World Cup. It was so much fun. Please check it out. That does it for All In. You can catch us every weeknight at 8 o'clock on MS now. Don't forget to like us on Facebook. That's facebook.com slash on with Chris. Now, you can watch Ali Valshi five nights a week in prime time on MS now as he takes command of the 11th hour. The breaking news in the last hour. The 11th hour with Ali Valshie, weeknights at 11 p.m. Eastern on MS now.