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00:00Tonight on All In.
00:02How far are you willing to go to acquire Greenland?
00:05You'll find out.
00:07Donald Trump fools around and finds out with Greenland,
00:10which he also calls Iceland.
00:13Our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland.
00:17So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money.
00:20And the president backs down on territorial conquest.
00:24People thought I would use force.
00:25I don't have to use force.
00:27I don't want to use force.
00:27I won't use force.
00:29Tonight, inside the global and financial rebuke of Donald Trump.
00:34It's a little bit complex, but we'll explain it down the line.
00:38Then, as the siege in Minnesota continues,
00:40exclusive reporting on Pentagon plans for troops to Minneapolis
00:44and the harrowing story of one family's fearful attempt
00:47to escape Trump's crackdown.
00:51What was going through your head?
00:53They're trying to kill us or something.
00:55They're trying to kidnap us or something.
00:58But all in starts right now.
01:05Good evening from New York.
01:06I'm Chris Hayes.
01:07Donald Trump loves nothing more than to start a crisis that he could then claim credit for solving.
01:13It's a go-to move of his.
01:15And today, we've got the latest example of this on the world stage.
01:17Trump spoke to fellow global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland,
01:22ranting about how much he wanted to own Greenland, insulting all the European countries who've objected,
01:28going into weird tangents of, like, gutter racism, generally embarrassing himself and all of us once again on the world
01:35stage.
01:35It's a familiar refrain now, an obsession of his.
01:38For months, he's basically been threatening to take Greenland by force the way that Hitler rolled into Czechoslovakia and Putin
01:46rolled into Ukraine.
01:47Same idea.
01:48It has brought the NATO alliance to the brink.
01:50It has spooked stock markets.
01:52It has even led Canada, yes, Canada, to formulate a military plan for dealing with the U.S. invasion.
01:59Then today, having stared the united European opposition in the face, having seen the S&P stock index lose all
02:06its gains on the year in one day,
02:07having seen poll numbers that show 86 of Americans do not want to go to war over Greenland,
02:13Donald Trump started a walk back that ended in a total retreat.
02:17It started with one line in his speech that seemed unlike all the others.
02:22We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable.
02:31But I won't do that.
02:34OK, now everyone's saying, oh, good.
02:37That's probably the biggest statement I made, because people thought I would use force.
02:42I don't have to use force.
02:43I don't want to use force.
02:44I won't use force.
02:46OK.
02:48Again, this is Donald Trump speaking.
02:49So, like, should you listen to him?
02:51It was, of course, a sentiment belied by everything else he said in his speech and almost everything else his
02:55administration has said about Greenland in recent weeks.
02:58On Monday, just to cite one example, the Department of Defense was posting AI photos of American soldiers and bombings
03:05and bombers invading a snowy mountainous land.
03:08On Tuesday, when a reporter asked what lengths he would go to to acquire Greenland, he said, you'll find out.
03:13And then shortly after that speech today, Trump took to social media to announce full retreat.
03:18Quote, based upon a very productive meeting that I've had with the Secretary-General of NATO, Mark Rutte, we have
03:24formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic region.
03:29Based upon this understanding, I will not be imposing the tariffs that were scheduled to go into effect on February
03:351st.
03:35Additional discussions are being held concerning the Golden Dome as it pertains to Greenland.
03:40I forgot about that part.
03:42Further information will be made available as discussions progress.
03:45What does that mean?
03:47I don't know.
03:49Honestly, I think it's pretty clear Trump doesn't either.
03:53Well, we have a concept of a deal.
03:55I think it's going to be a very good deal for the United States, also for them.
03:59And we're going to work together on something having to do with the Arctic as a whole, but also Greenland.
04:05And it has to do with the security, great security, strong security and other things.
04:11That's Trump earlier in an interview with CNBC at Davos.
04:15So it's a concept of a framework of a future deal.
04:18And it does not sound like Trump is getting Greenland.
04:21He's getting talks about Arctic security in return.
04:24He is not waging a trade war on Europe this time and apparently not going to invade Greenland.
04:29Now, what happened?
04:30And again, we've been through this cycle a few times.
04:32Markets rallied on that news.
04:33People breathe a sigh of relief.
04:35And who could blame them?
04:36That's not how the day started, right?
04:38Trump did himself no favor today.
04:39He gave an hour-long rant in which he blasted NATO while repeatedly confusing
04:44and this is really key, Greenland with Iceland.
04:49Until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me.
04:55They called me daddy, right, last time.
04:59Very smart man said, he's our daddy.
05:01He's running it.
05:02I was like running it.
05:03I went from running it to being a terrible human being.
05:07But now what I'm asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located,
05:14that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection.
05:19I don't know that they'd be there for us.
05:22They're not there for us on Iceland.
05:24That I can tell you.
05:26I mean, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland.
05:30So Iceland's already cost us a lot of money.
05:34What are you talking about?
05:38When a reporter noted how Trump misspoke,
05:40White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt responded to her on social media.
05:44No, he didn't.
05:44His written remarks referred to Greenland as a piece of ice because that's what it is.
05:48Leavitt included a shot of an iceberg that she apparently found when Googling Greenland.
05:52Well done.
05:54That was the culmination of a humiliating week for the U.S. in Davos.
05:59On Tuesday night, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was heckled at a World Economic Forum dinner in Davos
06:03with European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde walking out during his speech.
06:08That dinner was reportedly called off before dessert.
06:11The Commerce Department's only response was, quote,
06:13only one person booed and it was Al Gore, which, if true, good for him.
06:17Yesterday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a really stirring speech in Davos
06:23about the middle powers, like Canada of the world, moving on from U.S. leadership,
06:27announcing that the rules-based order is basically dead.
06:32Multiple EU nations moved troops to Greenland in recent days,
06:35making it clear to Trump that an attack on the island would be an attack on all of Europe.
06:39And just before Trump's speech today, European lawmakers agreed
06:42to indefinitely freeze the trade agreement that Trump had struck with them last summer.
06:46In other words, Europe pushed back and called Trump's bluff.
06:50And he was isolated and humiliated.
06:52And on a dime, he backed down from only America can protect Greenland.
06:55And I need to have it psychologically because I want to feel big to let's have great talks on Greenland.
07:03But we've been here before.
07:05Like I said at the top, this is a pattern.
07:06We saw it last year.
07:07Trump announced his arbitrary tariffs on the entire world, including uninhabited islands.
07:12Remember, so-called Liberation Day.
07:14Markets tanked.
07:15People panicked.
07:15Trump met resistance, both at home and abroad.
07:18He kept delaying the date when the tariffs would kick in.
07:20He started lowering his arbitrary tax rates on individual countries,
07:23essentially negotiating with himself.
07:25And his tendency to back down under pressure on tariffs even earned him the nickname on Wall Street,
07:30taco, as in Trump always chickens out.
07:33That was called the taco trade.
07:35What we know from experience is Trump will push as far and as hard as he can until he meets
07:40resistance.
07:41He doesn't understand consent.
07:43He will just do what he can to people until he meets some force resisting him.
07:51And it's OK, I think, to breathe a sigh of relief today.
07:55But when you zoom out, it's a toxic and dangerous cycle.
07:59I mean, Trump backed off his worst tariff threats, but not before doing huge damage to international alliances,
08:05driving up inflation, squeezing American consumers and small businesses,
08:09taking a sledgehammer to the American auto industry, pushing China to make a deal with Canada.
08:15I mean, we are worse off than when he started the tariff day crisis and then solved it.
08:21Definitely in every way.
08:22So backing off the worst case scenario, is it hardly comforting?
08:26Now we find ourselves in the same situation.
08:28OK, we're not going to have a war of conquest in Greenland in which young American service members are shooting
08:35and killing Danes for some reason
08:37and Danes and shooting or killing American service members so that we can steal a piece of land that is
08:42not ours.
08:42Few. But this whole screechingly stupid affair has fundamentally altered and some would say, I think, rightly destroyed the American
08:53led rules based global order that's held since World War Two.
08:58The fundamental lesson here is that the crisis isn't over until Donald Trump's regime is no longer in power
09:04because he will keep pushing every day for whatever he can get away with.
09:09And really, honestly, whatever. Be imaginative when you think about what that could be.
09:16He will do that until he's really opposed, which means you have to have unified resistance on the other side.
09:22And I think if there's one silver lining from this whole despicable mess, global leaders now understand that in a
09:29similar way that it took a while for American institutions to grasp and some still haven't.
09:34You cannot just price in that he will back down on his own because sometimes he does go all the
09:38way.
09:38Like after he lost the 2020 election and called it rigged and many people who should have known better said,
09:43what's the harm in humoring him?
09:45The harm was that he tried to violently overthrow the United States government.
09:50Because his self-serving lies didn't meet enough resistance.
09:53If Donald Trump thinks he can get away with it, he will do it.
09:56Ask E. Jean Carroll.
09:57Now, when he is at his most reckless, the only check on his power at home and abroad is total,
10:04constant, eternal vigilance.
10:08Ben Rhodes serves as deputy national security advisor, President Obama.
10:11He's the co-host of Pod Save the World.
10:12He's written a book on the rise of authoritarianism and the so-called rules-based order after the fall.
10:17And he joins me now.
10:20Well, Ben, that was stupid and destructive and possibly not over.
10:25What do you make of today's developments?
10:28Well, I mean, I totally agree with you, Chris.
10:30The European leaders have gone through the same cycle that American law firms and universities and other institutions have.
10:37They tried flattering him.
10:38They tried charming him.
10:40They did try to call him daddy.
10:41That was something the NATO Secretary General actually said in words.
10:45And they found that, like a bully, if you give him your lunch money, he keeps coming back for more.
10:50And this time, they saw, I think rightly, that this Greenland fixation was real.
10:54They put up a united front.
10:56They threatened repercussions.
10:57They didn't split.
10:59And Trump, spooked by the markets, which is usually the one thing that gets his attention, back down.
11:04I will say, Chris, I don't think this is the last we've heard of Greenland.
11:08He seems fixated on it.
11:09He's come back to it multiple times.
11:12I kind of have a feeling that we'll be back on this precipice at some other point here.
11:16We're only a year after the Trump administration.
11:18But for the time being, the Europeans and the markets have backed him off.
11:23The president of Canada, prime minister of Canada, right?
11:27Prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney yesterday, gave this speech that I thought was remarkable.
11:33And people should really check out the whole thing.
11:35And today, in some ways, the speech was even more important.
11:38Because what he says yesterday is, whatever happens, we cannot continue living with the lie that is basically American stewardship
11:48of this post-war global order.
11:49Lots of people have already known this was a lie or have observed its tremendous fiction hypocrisy for decades.
11:57But those of us who have benefited from it, on the whole, like Canada, need to understand it's gone.
12:03Whatever happens now, you can't unring the bell.
12:06And after the deal was announced today, I immediately thought of that speech.
12:09What do you think?
12:10Yeah, I totally agree.
12:12I mean, look, the rules-based order, such as it was, and was always, you know, full of holes and
12:17hypocrisies.
12:17But it was over the day Trump was reelected.
12:20That was it, you know, full stop.
12:22It's taken kind of a year for a bunch of world leaders and a bunch of people in this country
12:26to realize that.
12:28Some still haven't.
12:29Mark Carney's been at the forefront, I think, of seeing it and calling it like it is.
12:33Let me tell you who understands this, though, Chris.
12:34The Russians understand it as they grind away in Ukraine.
12:37The Chinese understand that as they seek to kind of pick off other countries from U.S. influence.
12:43And the Gulf Arabs understand it.
12:45That's why they're paying tribute, essentially, to the Trump family for things that they want.
12:50And now you're seeing the small-D democratic world begin to understand this.
12:55And, you know, just to give one other illustration of how it's over, even when there's, you know, so-called
13:00good news like today, or at least not bad news,
13:01there is no system that's adjudicating this, right?
13:05The framework of a deal is this ad hoc process.
13:10No one knows what it is.
13:11The Board of Peace that he set up, what is that?
13:13This is not the U.N. system we're creating here.
13:16This is kind of corrupt.
13:18All roads lead to Donald Trump and his consolidation of power ad hoc approach to global politics.
13:23So we're not at war with Denmark today, but we are in a world in which, you know, might makes
13:31right,
13:31and everything is going to be a bit of a test of strength or a transaction.
13:35There's a dynamic here.
13:37There's an economist I really like named Aaron Dubé who posted about this today, about that taco Trump always chickens
13:42out trade.
13:43And he said this.
13:45Here's a really bad time.
13:46Over time, the dynamic breeds bigger and bigger crises because markets keep updating their beliefs about taco,
13:52so it takes ever more extreme actions to convince them he might not taco.
13:57Buckle up.
13:57Meaning, it is clear that markets tanking act as a kind of restraint on Trump.
14:02But the more that markets price in, he's just bluffing, the less likely they are to tank,
14:07the less likely they are to tank, the less likely they are to do the thing that's important to send
14:12the restraining signal
14:13until you get closer and closer to some tripwire.
14:18I have the exact same concern, Chris.
14:21I mean, let's just take the foreign conquest part of this, right,
14:25because you'll be getting to the invasion of an American city next.
14:28You know, we've already, under Trump, bombed Iran and Nigeria,
14:33not to mention Iraq and Syria and Yemen, and deposed, abducted, really, the leader of Venezuela.
14:39We still don't know what's going to happen in that country.
14:41We've threatened Greenland, Panama Canal, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia.
14:47There are a lot of pots that are kind of simmering.
14:50Some are boiling and spilling over.
14:52And Trump has a very small amount of bandwidth and people actually working on these things.
14:57Most of them don't really know what they're working on.
14:59Does anybody really know what the goal here is in Greenland?
15:01Does anybody really know what the approach is to Iran?
15:04He threatens to bomb one day and suddenly we have to deal the next.
15:07The problem with this is we're just, there are too many of these pots boiling.
15:11And just because the markets get some reassurance every now and then
15:15that Trump isn't the worst version of what they think he might be
15:19and that, you know, there's some gravity still in the universe,
15:23that doesn't mean that, as you said, net-net, things are getting worse.
15:27Things are getting more unstable, right?
15:28The strong men are still ascendant.
15:31You know, the indicators are not good.
15:33And so, you know, I hate to be pessimistic on a day where there was some glimmers of optimism.
15:38I think it'd just be a mistake to just bet on things going to the precipice
15:44and the car not slipping off one of these times.
15:47Yeah, and there's a lot of risk being pushed into the system over and over iteratively
15:52that I think is going to, I fear, will blow up.
15:56Ben Rhodes, as always, great to hear your thoughts on a day like today.
16:00Thanks, Chris.
16:01Coming up, the political fallout from Trump's Greenland temper tantrum.
16:05I made some truly horrendous polls for the president.
16:09That's next.
16:12What's happening in Minnesota is horrifying, and it's morally debased.
16:16It's an offense to our most basic American liberties.
16:18But it's also not exactly unexpected.
16:21I mean, Donald Trump ran on mass deportation.
16:23The Republican Party and the MAGA movement have spent the last decade using incredibly vile
16:28and racist propaganda trying to get people to hate immigrants enough to round them up
16:32and ship them out and to support them when they do.
16:35It's a project that people in this country are now rebelling against on the streets every day.
16:38We're going to have more on that with Jacob Soberoff in just a bit.
16:41But the thing about the grab for Greenland is that it's none of those things, OK?
16:45It is not something that Donald Trump campaigned on.
16:48It is not a central part of conservative thought or MAGA ideology.
16:51The idea the U.S. should take over Greenland is a position born in the head of a crazy person.
16:57It has been invented by Donald Trump the last few months and entered into American discourse.
17:03So it's not too surprising to see polling that shows everyone in the country thinks it's nuts.
17:0986% of Americans, again, we don't get a lot of 86 numbers that we get to put up on
17:13that screen.
17:1486% of Americans oppose the idea of the United States trying to take Greenland by military force.
17:19Nikki McCann Ramirez is a political reporter for Rolling Stone, where her latest piece is
17:23Multi-layered BS, Trump's push for Greenland.
17:25Makes no sense.
17:26Fact check, true.
17:27Philip Bump is a data journalist and MSNOW contributor.
17:29His latest piece is Why Does Trump Want Greenland?
17:32The same reason he wanted the Nobel Peace Prize, and they joined me now.
17:35And this is the thing that I think has flummoxed world leaders, flummoxed a lot of people, was
17:41you've already got this agreement signed in 1951 that you can put whatever bases you want there.
17:46So your ostensible reasons for security in the umbrella don't make any sense.
17:49Also, again, this is not immigration.
17:52It's not trade.
17:53It's not like your brand or your identity.
17:54Like, what gives?
17:56Yeah, I mean, well, first of all, I think we can set aside the idea that Donald Trump
17:59was familiar with this 1951 agreement, right?
18:01Like, he got in his head that Greenland's this big thing he wants.
18:03It's not like he knew that.
18:05I think that the thing we can isolate is not just the peace prize, but let's talk about
18:09the fact that today he started railing against wind turbines again.
18:11The reason he doesn't like wind turbines is not because of anything about wind turbines.
18:15It is because in, like, 2011, they were going to build some offshore wind turbines near
18:19his golf course in Scotland.
18:20He got mad about it, and he's been mad about it since.
18:22He has gone out of his way to backfill a rationale for why he doesn't like wind turbines.
18:25Right?
18:26This is why he talks about it all the time.
18:27And this is his approach to everything.
18:29He gets it in his head that something should happen, and then he fights tooth and nail
18:34to make that thing happen, regardless of how much sense it makes.
18:37We saw it with the peace prize.
18:38He tried very, very hard to get the peace prize until finally he got something that was enough
18:42of a simulacrum that he could, like, live with it.
18:44Right?
18:44He got a hand-me-down.
18:45Yeah, he got a hand-me-down and a fake one from the soccer guy.
18:48Right, right.
18:48Good for him.
18:49And then we see this with Greenland.
18:50Part of this fight is simply that people are saying no to him, so he's trying to dominate
18:54them, even though it doesn't make any sense.
18:55Well, I was joking today when we got, you know, when first we got some agreement, right?
18:59And it was like, are we getting the first ever NATO peace prize given to Donald Trump
19:03today?
19:03Or are we getting the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Island of Greenland?
19:11Like, what was given to him here to assuage the ego?
19:15I mean, I would not be surprised if in two to three days they come out with a supposed
19:20plan that is the agreement that's already in place, but just announced as if it's a
19:25new thing.
19:25I don't think he's...
19:26He literally did that with trade deals the first time around.
19:29Exactly.
19:29And what I'm hearing from sources who understand this a lot better than I do is, like you said,
19:34there was no threat to Greenland.
19:36There is, of course, the implication that Russia and China might have trade access through
19:42the Arctic.
19:43But we had every system in place to deal with that.
19:47And if you look back a decade ago, there was already a bit of a separatist movement in
19:51Greenland arguing that they should have been independent from Denmark.
19:54And if the Trump administration had simply approached this as a matter of, hey, we support your claim
20:01for sovereignty, we would be in a completely different position right now.
20:05This, of course, is the devious and insidious thing that Putin has done, right?
20:09Which is to cultivate through subterfuge and through all sorts of means, like genuine,
20:16organic movements of dissent against the power, right?
20:19The Russian speakers in the Donbass, those in Crimea, right?
20:22But, of course, he's just too kind of pig-headed to actually do that.
20:27So it's like, we want Greenland, we take.
20:29Right.
20:30Yeah.
20:30I mean, he's essentially Twitter-brained, right?
20:32Right.
20:32I mean, like, he sees something that can make decent social media content, and he thinks
20:36in that context.
20:37So, yeah, I mean, we saw it, too, with Canada, right?
20:40He started talking about how the United States was going to somehow access Canada.
20:43And what happened is that the party in Canada, Justin Trudeau's party in Canada, was doing
20:47terribly.
20:48And then all of a sudden, everyone rallied around the leadership of Canada.
20:50And that's why Carney's now the prime minister of Canada, right?
20:52He's seen this happen elsewhere.
20:53Here's the thing that I think is most dangerous.
20:55I think Trump is at his most dangerous when he's at his least transactional.
20:59So he doesn't, he is not an ideologue, and there's very few things he actually believes
21:03in.
21:03But when he gets an idea that he's fixed on is when things get scary and dangerous,
21:08right?
21:08Because he can't be bribed off it, and he can't be.
21:11And my fear, Nikki, and I'm curious how this squares with what you hear from your reporting,
21:15is this is a man who's staring down his own mortality.
21:18He's very clear.
21:18He talks about it all the time.
21:19He talks about whether he's going to get in heaven.
21:21He very clearly wants to make the U.S. bigger on the map because Donald Trump made it bigger.
21:27I think that's clear as day, and I think he's casting around for where he can do it.
21:31Greenland was option one.
21:33But I don't think he's letting that go, and I think that's genuinely ominous.
21:37No, I don't think he's letting it go.
21:38And I think he's being egged on by our adversaries.
21:42Watching Russian state media, you see Kremlin propagandists saying, if he pulls this off, he'll be bigger than Abraham Lincoln.
21:51And he loves that kind of feedback.
21:53But I think, like you said, the thing that is most insidious here, and I think the thing that scares
21:57me,
21:58because it is kind of funny, ha, ha, ha, he wants Greenland.
22:00It was a joke four years ago.
22:02It's that our allies and our adversaries are seeing that the mythical American institutions,
22:08the city on the hill, cannot rein in a rogue executive.
22:13That is the thing that is motivating the speeches we're seeing in Davos.
22:16It's this idea that these institutions that are supposed to hold the international order can't put a stop to this
22:22man.
22:23Well, and I think there's a whole, you know, we hear the Niemöller poem so much,
22:26first they came for, right?
22:27First they came for the Roma, and then they came for the Jews, and then they came for me,
22:30and there was no one else.
22:31They came for the communists.
22:32And we hear that all the time.
22:34It's invoked as a cliche.
22:34But I just think we're having, in the last few weeks, a real, like, Niemöller moment,
22:37where it was like, they go after the trans teenagers who want to play softball in West Virginia,
22:43and they go after the immigrants, and they go after the universities,
22:45and they go after the law firms.
22:47And now here we are, and at the end of the poem, it's NATO and the Federal Reserve, right?
22:52Like, today in the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether Trump can use a preposterous pretext
22:56to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board that he doesn't like.
23:02The justices seemed a little skeptical of that.
23:05But now we're, like, we're in the core center of the power structure of the post-war global order,
23:12which is, like, NATO and the Federal Reserve.
23:14And now he's coming for them.
23:16And the question for the people of NATO, European, the Supreme Court, the folks in the Fed is,
23:20can you defend yourself?
23:21Yeah, and I think the fundamental thing that occurred this week is something that can't be undone.
23:27And I think we're used to taco, you know, and Trump backing off,
23:31and things just sort of go back to the way they were.
23:32We're not going back the way they were.
23:34The prime minister of Canada said, this is done.
23:36We're not—we don't have the same relationship with the United States.
23:39Canada, as you mentioned earlier, is building a military plan for an invasion from the United States.
23:43That is different.
23:44The bell has been rung.
23:46It cannot be unrung.
23:47And that is the change that we're seeing here.
23:49And so, yes, we are now at this core.
23:51I mean, Donald Trump's always said to NATO, he's gotten to that core.
23:53But it is not just that he's gotten to that core and we can go back outward.
23:56It is different.
23:58The big question, I think, here domestically is how much do courts, institutions in year two rally to defend these
24:08core principles and these core centers of power?
24:11I don't have a lot of confidence just off what we saw in year one, what we saw in the
24:15interregnum.
24:16I think while the Supreme Court justices seemed widely skeptical of Trump's ability to fire Lisa Cook historically,
24:22and especially in immigration cases, in the instances where the court has ruled against Trump,
24:27they, in their opinions, kind of give him a roadmap to how to get to yes.
24:32And that is my concern coming out of this hearing, is that they might say, oh, well, you can't fire
24:37Lisa Cook because you didn't follow these steps.
24:39But what if you did this?
24:41And what if the other pressure tactics he's using against the Fed succeed?
24:45And we've already got right.
24:47And I think the Fed thing is a little like the NATO thing, too, where a line has already been
24:51crossed in some ways with the threats themselves,
24:55the investigation of Jerome Powell and the subpoena.
24:57And even if you kind of get out of it, something about the institutional arrangement has been broken and corrupted.
25:02Mickey McCann, Ramirez, Philip Bump.
25:04Thank you both.
25:05Still have come as the Pentagon prepares to send the Army to Minnesota, possibly.
25:08Jacob Soberoff joins us live from the streets of Minneapolis.
25:11He's been there doing reporting all day.
25:12He'll fill us in.
25:13That's next.
25:19MSNOW is out tonight with exclusive reporting that more active duty United States military has been placed on standby to
25:25be deployed here on American soil.
25:27Our own Laura Barron-Lopez and David Rode report the Pentagon issued a, quote,
25:31prepare to deploy order to members of an Army military police brigade the station at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.
25:38At least a few hundred soldiers are being prepared for the possible mobilization of Minneapolis, according to two people familiar
25:43with the potential deployment.
25:45Now, this comes after orders last Friday that two battalions with the Army's 11th Airborne Division in Alaska prepare for
25:51deployment as well.
25:52When asked for comment, a Pentagon official told MSNOW, quote,
25:55we have nothing to announce at this time, and any tip about this is pre-decisional.
26:00Adjective I've never heard.
26:02This news, the U.S. Armed Forces might be headed to Minneapolis,
26:05comes as officials in Minnesota and Illinois are challenging the presence of ICE agents in their states in court,
26:09calling it unconstitutional.
26:11This afternoon, in a separate case brought by Twin City protesters,
26:15an appeals court froze a lower judge's order that restricted the use of aggressive tactics against peaceful protesters.
26:21That order came in last week, reported on it.
26:25Despite that, protesters have been out in the streets of Minneapolis all day standing up against ICE in their city.
26:30And this now senior political and national reporter, Jacob Soborov,
26:33has been out in Minnesota all day covering those ongoing protests, and he joins me now.
26:38Jacob, tell me what you've seen today.
26:40Chris, South Minneapolis was lit today, as it were.
26:45Greg Bovino and his caravan of heavily armed, masked federal agents were driving all over the neighborhood in Minneapolis.
26:53And in fact, you might have seen that video of Greg Bovino actually deploying some kind of chemical agent himself
26:59earlier today.
27:01The Department of Homeland Security says they were out conducting routine operations.
27:04And the reason that he took out a tear gas canister himself was because they had to go to the
27:11bathroom.
27:12And it might sound ridiculous, but that was the statement from the Department of Homeland Security today.
27:17And that because people were interfering with their bathroom break, ultimately, the Department of Homeland Security, Greg Bovino, and those
27:26elite Border Patrol agents had to use that type of force.
27:31Yeah, that what we're seeing there in the video of them deploying chemical agents is something that we've seen them
27:36do in a bunch of cities.
27:37There was a federal judge who issued an injunction to stop them from doing it in Chicago, and it's exactly
27:43the kind of behavior directed at protesters that I think was what the judge was attempting to restrain, that order
27:50now being stayed and suspended.
27:52We've also got some news today, Jacob, from local reporting about ICE agents going after children, including four children in
28:02the Columbia Heights School District there in the Minneapolis metro area, including a five-year-old boy who they appear
28:11to have taken, then possibly taken to the door of his house to use as a decoy to see if
28:15anyone was home.
28:16Local reports indicate this child is now in Texas, apparently and hopefully with his father.
28:22But I imagine, given the fact that you covered child separation, watching this happen now where they're going after children
28:31and trying to get people at school seems like a new line being crossed.
28:36Well, I have to tell you, Chris, we were in the Columbia Heights neighborhood yesterday in the aftermath of one
28:42of these operations happening.
28:43And while we didn't witness it ourselves, the ICE watchers that were out in the streets made very clear to
28:49me that not only were there families in the neighborhood and that there were some form of family separations happening
28:54in the interior,
28:56but that there were many schools in the neighborhood where those federal agents were deployed to yesterday.
29:01One thing I do want to circle back about, though, Chris, and let's just be clear, this is family separation,
29:07what's happening right now in the interior.
29:08It's not family separation at the border. It's not taking kids away from their parents inside of detention centers along
29:14the Rio Grande Valley.
29:15But it is taking children away from their parents in many cases in the interior of the country.
29:20And that's what they've been intending to do all along.
29:22In terms of circling back to what you were talking about earlier about protesters, I do want to say I
29:26was right there where Greg Bovino deployed those chemical agents right after he did so earlier today in South Minneapolis.
29:31We are also were on the scene of another interaction between protesters and ICE watchers and those federal agents.
29:36We rolled up on it minutes after it happened.
29:39I just want to show you a little bit of what it looks like in the aftermath of the chaos
29:42of all of this.
29:42Take a look at this.
29:45You can see right here the window of this car has been smashed in.
29:49What happened? Who was in this car?
29:51Oh, it was another lady that would just try to get to the light.
29:55And then they just, because she was stopped right there, she couldn't get through.
29:58And they just pulled her out of the car, snatched her, they put her on the ground, they put her
30:01on the heck of it, they took her.
30:02Where is she now?
30:03Oh, they took her, they put her behind the car.
30:05They took her?
30:06Yeah.
30:09So, Chris, whether it's families and children and parents or protesters who are attempting to stand up to this largest
30:15mass deportation effort in American history.
30:17And by the way, Greg Bovino did say yesterday that this opposition that he has faced in Minneapolis from the
30:21protesters on the streets is the most well-organized, most forceful, most vocal opposition that he has seen.
30:28This is what it looks like out here.
30:30And it is why Minnesotans, people from Minneapolis, my mom's from St. Louis Park.
30:35I've never, I come here, you know, every summer almost as a kid to go to the state fair.
30:38I have never seen it, especially in the winter like this.
30:41People are engaged.
30:42It's just a very civic community, but most people are very, very upset that I have talked to you about
30:48what's playing out on the streets of Minneapolis.
30:50And they are all coming out.
30:51By the way, tomorrow it's going to be negative 45 wind chill, and there is still a protest playing here,
30:55Chris.
30:56Yeah, that image, if we can show that again of the car, I mean, one of the haunting things I've
31:00been hearing from people is just, and we've heard this from police chiefs,
31:04they're just leaving, it's like the rapture, like the TV show The Leftovers.
31:09Like, they're just taking people and just leaving their cars with broken windows in the middle of the roads.
31:14Local law enforcement or local EMS or other folks have to come and, like, tow it and deal with the
31:20car.
31:21But that's just what happens.
31:23They come, they break people's windows, they snatch them away, and then it's someone else's mess to clean up the
31:28car that's now sitting empty in the middle of the road.
31:31But I'll never forget during family separations when you use the term rendered, that they were rendering these children unaccompanied
31:37because they were taking them away from their parents.
31:39People are being rendered out of their cars in the middle of the street in American cities.
31:43And that green car that you're looking at on your screen that I was standing right next to, look, you
31:47see the woman right there.
31:48That's an ice watcher who got into the car, drove the car away, and pulled it over to the side
31:53of the road because federal agents literally ripped people out of the car, left the car there.
31:58There was a person in the car, a cell phone in the car.
32:00People had to go in and literally try to do detective work to figure out who it was in the
32:04car that was taken out of the middle of that South Minneapolis intersection today.
32:08We still don't know where they are, frankly.
32:12Jacob Soberoff, who has covered not just immigration, but the Los Angeles wildfires that ripped through communities along the coast
32:17last year.
32:18His new book, Firestorm, is out now.
32:21We had a great conversation on my podcast, Why Is This Happening?
32:23I highly recommend you check it out.
32:25Jacob, great to talk to you.
32:27Thanks, Chris.
32:29Still to come, the horrific story of Trump's agents abusing their power against one family in Texas.
32:35Antonia Hilton joins me with that excellent MSNOW exclusive reporting next.
32:43We are watching truly awful images of abuses and extreme use of force by ICE coming out of Minnesota nearly
32:48every day.
32:49We just showed some with Jacob.
32:51And it's in large part because more than 3,000 federal immigration agents have been deployed there.
32:56And we're able to see what those agents are doing because it is being documented by this incredibly active and
33:01courageous core of citizens and also lots of local and national media.
33:05We're not only seeing this in Minnesota.
33:07Those abuses are happening all over the country.
33:09MSNOW correspondent Antonia Hilton has new exclusive digital reporting about how a high school sophomore in Houston,
33:16a U.S. citizen named Arnoldo Bazan, became a victim of those abuses
33:20when masked, unidentified immigration agents in an unmarked vehicle rammed his undocumented father's van on the way to school.
33:28MSNOW obtained video of the car chase from Bazan, who recorded the chase on his phone.
33:34Within seconds, a fear the 16-year-old U.S. citizen had long suppressed comes to the surface.
33:41His undocumented father might be taken by federal agents.
33:44We'll be able to get some more information on our own.
33:48Let's go, flake.
33:54Let's go.
34:06Let's go.
34:10Let's go.
34:12Let's go.
34:34We didn't know what was happening, but they were still chasing us, and that's when they
34:37started hitting her car trying to flip us.
34:44Agents appear to ram into the Bazan's car at least four times.
34:57Department of Homeland Security denies the Bazan family's allegations, and Tony Hilton
35:01is an MSNOW correspondent and co-host of Weekend Prime.
35:04She joins me now.
35:05Oh God, that footage is insane.
35:06Tell me about the context of this boy, his father, and how this played out.
35:11Before I give you the full context, I want to tell you too that DHS doesn't just deny their
35:15allegations.
35:16They actually say that Arnolfo, the father, struck their agents with his vehicle.
35:22Okay.
35:23That is their, that's DHS's official story.
35:25When we told them that we had video showing that not only was it actually the reverse,
35:31that their agents struck him four times.
35:34That was sort of the point in which our conversations with DHS broke down and we could no longer
35:38get answers from them about what really was this sort of multi-stage, just, Chris, it's
35:47like the strangest story, and yet it's also becoming so emblematic of what we're starting
35:51to see across the country.
35:52This father and son, their morning started out on the way to school getting breakfast when
35:56they're pulled over by what they think are maybe local police in unmarked cars.
36:00But what they then say they see is masked men jump out of cars with guns already drawn.
36:07No commands, no you're under arrest, no here's our warrant.
36:11They don't even say their names, so they're under the impression these guys actually don't
36:14know who they are.
36:15But they say the agents start trying to smash their windows.
36:18So the father thinks he's actually being carjacked, maybe kidnapped.
36:23I mean, yeah.
36:23So he backs up his car and he flees.
36:25A few seconds into fleeing, they start to realize there's more unmarked cars around them,
36:30this must be federal immigration agents, and you hear the 16-year-old boy come to that
36:34realization there in the car.
36:36But shortly after what we just showed you there, they end up being able to tackle the
36:40father and son inside a nearby restaurant depot, and it's an incredibly violent scene.
36:46The father is being beaten on the ground, the son ends up in an incredibly violent chokehold.
36:54To the point, Chris, where he ends up having to go to the hospital, and we have an additional
36:59part of that clip I think that you might want to see, just showing you some of what he experienced
37:04there and described of the agent's actions.
37:07In this in kind of, let's take a listen.
37:10When was the first time that you tried to tell them, I'm a citizen?
37:14When I was on the ground, and I was in the headlock, and then he told me, you're done,
37:19you're done.
37:19And I was like, I'm underage, I'm a U.S. citizen.
37:26And he choked me more, so I guess I couldn't speak.
37:29What kinds of things did you hear them say to you and your father?
37:33A bunch of racist stuff.
37:34Like, they were calling us criminals, that we didn't deserve to live in the U.S.
37:39Beaner, border hopper, illegal, like, son of an alien and all that stuff.
37:48What happens to him and his father after that?
37:51So, he and his father are held in a car.
37:53They're detained, handcuffed in a car for several hours.
37:55And eventually, they confirm the boy is a U.S. citizen.
37:58They drop him home.
38:00When he reaches home, his clothes are completely torn apart.
38:03He has scarring and bruises all over his upper body, and his sisters are in shock.
38:10You can see there, they bring him to a hospital, the Texas Children's Hospital.
38:14He's immediately rushed into a trauma unit.
38:16A nurse there calls the police and actually initiates a report to say that this minor, this 10th grader, has
38:22been choked, has been beaten.
38:25But shortly after he leaves the hospital and has experienced that physical trauma, he realizes something, that after this encounter,
38:32he actually never received back his cell phone or his AirPod headphones.
38:37So, he and his family, they start scrambling, looking for them.
38:39And at the same time, his father is being transported to an immigration detention facility in a place called Conroe,
38:45Texas, about an hour away.
38:46Eventually, they find the phone's location, and it is in a pawn shop kiosk right near that detention center.
38:54I want to play this clip from the story because it's just a remarkable detail. Take a listen.
39:00That weekend, the Bazans tracked the phone on Apple's location service and found it traveled from Houston to a place
39:07two and a half miles down the street from where agents left their father, Arnofo, in the Montgomery Processing Center.
39:13Somehow, the iPhone went from the possession of federal immigration authorities to this tech-for-cash pawn shop kiosk.
39:21Conroe police retrieved the phone for Arnaldo and took down this report obtained by MS Now, noting that whoever sold
39:28Arnaldo's phone for cash committed a second-degree felony.
39:31The theft remains under investigation.
39:34Obviously, we don't know how it got into that pawn shop kiosk there.
39:39But, I mean, this is a U.S. citizen who has his car hit four times that he's driving with
39:44his father, who's wrestled to the ground, put in a chokehold, is injured severely enough that he has to go
39:50to a hospital where a nurse records everything, has his cell phone taken from him, ends up being sold.
39:55His father, how long has his dad been in the country?
39:58His dad came to the U.S. in the 90s, fleeing violence and instability in Mexico.
40:02He came undocumented.
40:04All four of his children, three daughters, and his only son, Arnaldo, there, are U.S. citizens.
40:09And the only crime that he has committed is a 2015 misdemeanor, a driving, well-intoxicated, decade-old misdemeanor.
40:17And, you know, the family has never denied this.
40:20But when I've spoken to experts, what they say is that is not the sort of crime that you send
40:24multi-agency federal immigration authorities after, and certainly not the kind of crime that warrants this sort of treatment.
40:33What we've been told by former DHS leaders, highly trained border patrol and ICE agents, is that the tactics that
40:40you see here are the kinds of tactics people are trained to only use within about 100 miles of a
40:45border when you encounter, say, a drug smuggler or a cartel.
40:50And you may be at a point of engaging in a shootout.
40:53I mean, that is the—those are the stakes that these tactics are used for.
40:56But not only are you seeing them deployed there against a 16-year-old, there's a pattern here.
41:01I mean, you even heard about it from Jacob.
41:03We're seeing it spread all across the interior.
41:05And that means that Americans, including U.S. citizens, they are going to see more and more of these tactics
41:11used as this entire immigration apparatus continues to expand.
41:15And Trump actually has been promoting some of the most aggressively trained agents, border patrol agents in particular, through all
41:22of the offices in DHS, in part because what experts tell us is he wants to reward that very aggression.
41:28Antonia Hilton, this is really incredible work.
41:31Thank you for sharing with us.
41:32You can find her exclusive new reporting about federal immigration enforcement practices on the MSNOW YouTube channel.
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