What one senator saw inside Delaney Hall

Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. When I'm in there and I'm talking to a high school senior who just is trying to graduate high school, Why are we wasting money, detaining her? Inside the Delaney Hall Detention Center, where some immigrants are on a hunger strike. It's Thursday, June 4th, and this is here and now anytime, from NPR and WBUR.

I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, Republican Senator Thom Tillis said President Trump's new acting director of National Intelligence, is a joke. Whoever these people are in the White House need to get the hell out of the White House. I am tired of amateur hour. It's one of several examples of Republican senators going against Trump lately, after years of supporting him. We'll ask what it all amounts to, whether it's a passing fad, and what it means for legislation

that affects you, including war powers. Also, we'll listen back to a little of our past conversation with Marjan Satrapi, the Iranian French author known for her series of graphic novels, Persepolis. Satrapi has died at just 56 years old. The problem is that today, in today's world, we talk about everything, but about the human being. We're always, you know, going towards abstract notion. We forget that people just like us. Persepolis was a portrait of a girl growing up after the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

Some of the things she told us in 2008 are really prescient for the situation there to day. You can hear it in about 10 minutes. But first, we've been following the protests outside Delaney Hall, a privately run immigration detention center where some detainees say they've been on a hunger strike. The government is holding several hundred immigrants there, including some married to American citizens. We've heard from lawyers, for some of them, who say conditions inside are deplorable. But few people have been in to see for themselves. New Jersey Governor Mikey Cheryl says immigration officials will not let her visit. Senator Andy Kim was able to visit this week.

He's a Democrat, and he told Scott Tong what he saw. Well, I saw, first of all, about 800 detainees are there, and many of them were telling me just about the hardships that they've been having taught to with several women who were pregnant, that were not getting to care that they needed. You know, I met a person who has, you know, stage three lung cancer, and not getting the medical care that one would need. And just over and over again, people not getting their medication.

I saw how they were organizing the medication. They'd just do it all by handwritten lines in a notebook. There's no real coordination in any sophisticated way to be able to handle this. They have one doctor, one full-time doctor for about 800 detainees, at least that's what they told me. One person is in a wheelchair and the facility can't handle a wheelchair. So they put him in medical isolation. He's been in there for four months in one room, not able to go to other parts of, I will say that the detainees wanted me to make very clear that it's not just about the conditions inside Delaney Hall. It's the fact that many of the have been there for eight months, ten months, twelve months without any movement in their case.

And that's what I wanted, Senator, to ask you about is whether it's clear to these detainees when their immigration cases, will be heard. I've been reading about judges who have too much on their plate. Yeah, zero. They have zero idea when their cases will be heard. Many of them have cases. Many of them have filed habeas petitions as well and just uncertain about what's going to happen next. They've been there for a long time. They went and actually showed me this document. They had a document posted on the wall, which showed the court docket for the following few days. And it showed that on the Tuesday after Memorial Day, one judge had 74 cases before her in one day, which is about five minutes a case if everything goes perfectly. And they also need interpretation of any of them.

It's a huge mess. And I just want the people to know, like, we're paying for this. You know, we're paying upwards of $70,000 to $100,000 a person in their every year. They're not these worse than the worst that the Trump administration keeps talking about. You know, like I think we have large agreement that they're violent felons and criminals like we get it but when i'm in there and i'm talking to a high school senior who just is trying to graduate high school uh like why are we wasting money detaining her many of them were also spouses of american citizens mothers and fathers to american citizens so i just wanted to give people a greater context of who's inside you know these facilities. Early this week, Senator, you and other lawmakers appeared outside the center where

You know, they escalated it significantly from the ice side. And then things really spiraled out of control. Senator, before we let you go today, senators are voting on immigration funding for the administration's enforcement, deportation work that the administration plans to do. What do you expect from today's debate and vote? Well, what I hope the American people see is that about 70 billion dollars is on the line today with his vote in the Senate. There are billions, tens of billions of dollars for ICE, for Geo Group, these for-profit companies that are running Delaney Hall and making a fortune off of this. That's where your money's going. I don't think that that is the priority of this country. Is this bill going to go through? It could very well go through.

The Republicans are trying to be in lock. The president is pressuring them because this is the president's top priority. We've been talking to Senator Andy Kim, a Democrat from New Jersey. Senator, thanks much for the time. Thanks for having me.

We're going to dig deeper into that immigration bill the senator just mentioned, as well as a lot more happening in Congress. Robin Young has that story in just a minute. Support for this podcast comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Marotra Institute at Boston University. On the show, host Kurt Nickish asks the thorny questions necessary for this moment about the role business plays in society. Questions like, why are executives paid so much? Why is innovation in health care so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And of course, is business broken?

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entire business. Visit Dataiku. That's d-a-a-a-I-U.com slash NPR. President Trump is facing a fresh setback to his agenda in his second term, and it's coming from his own party. Last night, four Republican representatives joined with House Democrats to pass an Iran-war powers resolution. It's an example of the growing opposition to the president's handling of the war. Largely a symbolic one, even if the Senate advances the House resolution, it will land on the president's desk. can likely end up being tossed from there.

Still, there are things being said that make one pause. Here's North Carolina's Republican Senator Thom Tillis. Whoever these people are in the White House need to get the hell out of the White House. I am tired of amateur hour. Okay. Kate Sanales is a congressional reporter for Axios. Hi, Kate. Hi, thank you for having me. And we're also thinking that the Treasury Secretary was asked in a hearing

if he wanted to punch Trump's acting head of national security in the nose. He said, no, I wanted to kick him in the butt, for lack of a better word. It's just exchanges like this, just to start, are you having a sense that there's something, you know, really roiling? Yeah, I mean, I think we are seeing pushback from congressional Republicans to this White House for the first time, this entire administration. You know, Republicans and this White House, they've been in lockstep since Trump came back into office. But over the last couple of weeks, we've really started to see some calculated takes from congressional Republicans about pushing back against this White House. And a big part of that is the fact that President Trump has gone after some of these lawmakers in a way to prevent them from having their reelection prospects. You know, John Cornyn just lost his primary.

Bill Cassidy also lost his primary. And now we have this group of senators who are part of this, quote, Yolo caucus who don't feel like they need to be in lockstep in the way that they have. have been in the past and are pushing back against him. And we're also seeing other Republicans that are upset with some of this administration's actions, like the war in Iran, like this $1.8 billion weaponization fund, like the ballroom. And it's all coming at a time where congressional Republicans need to deliver on Trump's agenda. And these things are all stalling it right now. Yolo, you only live once?

Yes. So why not? Yeah. Yeah. So why not? It's really because, you know, when these senators were running for re-election, they didn't want to do anything to be in the bad graces of President Trump, right? They needed his support. We know that Trump's endorsement means a lot when it comes to Republicans winning their primaries.

And if they don't get it, like we saw with Senators John Cornyn and Bill Cassidy and Congressman Thomas Massie, they end up losing. So that's why we did see a lot of pushback before that. But now that we have this group who are lame ducks, they're not running for re-election, we're starting to see some of them really push back against the president that we haven't seen it away. And again, it's some of the administration's actions, too, that are contributing to this, taking things too far for some Republicans. Well, let's talk about that. The war, for instance. The House vote last night and this resolution now headed to the Senate, you know, as we said, it's just symbolic. And we mentioned there was pushback from Republicans. It's just four. But at one time, it wouldn't have been one. And the president did lash out at them. Yes, he did. Yeah, we did see four Republicans yesterday. That was Thomas Massie. Warren Davidson and Brian Fitzpatrick join every House Democrat in voting to force President Trump to end this war.

And it is symbolic. But again, we do have small margins in the House, which is why it only took four of them. But either way, President Trump is really not happy about this result. He took to Truth Social this morning. He called the vote meaningless, noted that it was just four bad Republicans who did this in the middle of his negotiations to end the war. But still, this was really a stunning result from the House after we saw so many failed attempts to raise. in the president's campaign in Iran and other military operations overseas. And Republicans overall have largely backed this war since the beginning in February.

But this unease within the GOP has continued to grow, especially as gas prices continue to rise. That's not something that they want to be dealing with so close to the November midterms. Yeah. And as what appears to be a deal would put the U.S. pretty much where it was, you know, before all of this money and, of course, loss of life. look, it doesn't seem like a good time for the president to have this fracture. The Senate is launching into a voting blitz on that budget reconciliation package that would fund immigration enforcement agencies. Democrats have been holding out because of the ICE funding. But this bill now also doesn't have that $1.776 billion, so-called weaponization fund in it. That might have paid

out money to Jan 6 rioters. That was a bridge too far for Republicans. But might some Republicans balk on this for any reason? Yeah, I mean, we're already seeing that now. Of course, they're on their sixth voterama of this Congress, which allows entity senator to offer an unlimited number of amendments. And we've seen this weaponization fund really dominate this conversation around it. They're on their first vote of that will be several votes throughout this day. And it's already taken a little bit over two hours.

They're still stuck on this. And if this vote were to pass, it would send the entire bill back to the committee, ban the weaponization fund. So GOP senators would be forced to start this entire process over again and not be able to finish out this immigration funding that a lot of them want, and the president really wants to see. So we're going to have to see what happens here today. We're seeing a lot of Republican senators struggle with the fact

that there is no language right now in this bill banning this fund. That's something that they want to see. Right now, I know we have senators Bill Cassidy, John Houston, and Dan Sullivan all withholding their votes on this first vote, debating whether they should vote for this Democratic motion that would kill the fund. So we're going to have to see what happens here. Well, there's so many other issues that have floated up the president's appointment of Bill Pulte to be the acting director of national intelligence and the ballroom.

But we are hearing that just in the few seconds we have, the money for the ballroom has been stripped out of that bill? Yes, that happened a couple weeks ago. We knew that that didn't have support. That was another thing that we saw a lot of Republican senators pushed back on. And Trump did relent on that one a little bit and was like, let's just let this immigration funding go through. So that's not going to be in this bill now. Axios, congressional reporter, Kate Sathlis.

Thank you so much. Busy time for you. Thank you. Thank you.

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One about pharmaceutical patents, giving more latitude to generic drug makers. A unanimous decision, by the way. another making it a little easier for the Securities and Exchange Commission to go after financial fraudsters, and a third keeping in place the government's mechanism for fining telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon for data privacy violations. Justice Clarence Thomas was the loan dissenter on that one. He said it was unfair to the companies. Noah Feldman at Harvard said, while there are still many major cases we are waiting for decisions on, the court has already left a legacy this term. It's a blockbuster term in which the court did hold back Donald Trump's power in the

tariff's case, and we'll probably do so in the birthright citizenship case, but has made huge, huge strides towards ending voting rights law as we know it in the United States, and that's going to be remembered. You can listen to that whole conversation about the Supreme Court, including a preview of the big cases that justices have yet to decide right now at hereandnow.org.

We are also remembering Marjan Satrapi today. She was an Iranian French author known for her series of graphic novels Persepolis. Satrapi died at 56. Persepolis is the story of a little girl who, like Satrapi, grew up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Satrapi moved to France in 1994. Back in 2008, Persepolis was made into a movie, and Satrapi spoke to the to Robin Young. I grew up with the idea that the show was, you know, the king and, you know, because we didn't

have really the freedom of speech. So even my parents said they were not very much for the show. They never talked anything against him because, you know, for me not to repeat it in the school. So suddenly, you know, you're at the age of nine and they tell you the guy that was supposed to be the king and the best man in the universe. Actually, he's not a good man. So that was a big shock.

I had to concentrate to understand what was really happening. which was not always obvious, of course. Can you describe that disconnect between being someone who loved Western culture but lived with this police, you know, culture police? But what I wanted to show also, you know, is that adolescents, wherever they are in the word, you know, they want the same thing. You always want to poster of this pop singer in your room and you always want to listen to this kind of music because, you know,

that is the thing that happened everywhere. Plus, for us, it was something even more than that. Because since, you know, the border of the country were closed in AT, and, you know, we didn't have any connection with outside. Listening to the pop music, you know, wanting to, you know, have the posters in our room was also meaning that we had a connection with outside. Because of the different contrasts that you see in Iran, you've said you wanted this film to show Western audiences that Iranians are human beings.

They're not just abstract notions like a fundamentalist or a terrorist. Yes. Do you think you've achieved that? I don't know if I have achieved that, but I hope that I will achieve it. You know, I mean, my pretent. I don't think that with a movie you can change the word or, you know. But the problem is that today, in today's word, we talk about everything but about the human being. They're always, you know, going towards abstract notion.

We forget that people, they are just, people just like us. If by this movie, you know, people they can say to themselves that, you know, the people that they're so scared of, they're just people like them. And these people are exactly the first victim of fanaticism. They're the people themselves. What would you want people to know about Iran today? If there is any change that has to come in any country, it has to come from within the country. You cannot, for any reason in the world, go and attack a country.

Like, for example, we are going to bring democracy. You know, democracy is not a gift that you give to people by bombing them. It doesn't happen this way. Well, I was going to ask you about this because you haven't been in the country for eight years. Yes. Your mother in the film says to you Iran is no place for you because of the problems. Some would say she must be a candidate for the U.S. going in and overthrowing the current regime. I think people, they would say everything to say they should be perverts because, you know, Iran belongs to the Iranian as America belongs to the American.

If there is any changes that should come from Iranian, you know, I mean, I mean, I don't cannot understand people that see what is the result of a war in Iraq. How can they support another idea of war? It's not because you criticize a place that you want in this place to be war, you know. And war does not kill the leaders. War kills the innocent people. that is what I'm showing in the movie. When a war happened, that is innocent people that dies.

The late Marjan Satrapi, author of Persepolis, speaking with Robin Young in 2008. Preciant words to hear almost 20 years later with the U.S. now at war with Iran. There is more to that conversation as well. You can find it at hereand now.org.

But that'll do it for the show today. Here and now anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Lynn Menningon, Thomas Denielion, and Jill Ryan. Today's editors were Todd Munt, Mikhaila Rodriguez, Michael Scato, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Matt Reed and Andre Peralta. Our theme music is by Mike Mosquito, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin, and here and now's executive producer is Alan Price.

Thanks for listening. Check out Persepolis if you've never read it. It's really great. We'll be back with you tomorrow.

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