How Companies Profit from a Supersized ICE
A conversation with Alvaro Bedoya and Sabeel Rahman
Trump 2.0’s deportation regime has dominated headlines over the last year and sparked mass protests in Minnesota and beyond. And while the administration has slashed much of the federal government’s capacity, ICE has ballooned in size and budget. In today’s conversation, we’re exploring the role corporate interests have played in getting us here.
Former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya and former OIRA head K. Sabeel Rahman1 join Roosevelt President and CEO Elizabeth Wilkins to break it down: what it means that ICE has $85 billion of public money at its disposal, and how the country’s biggest corporations benefit from this massive deportation and detention bureaucracy.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Elizabeth Wilkins: Hey everybody. I’m Elizabeth Wilkins, president and CEO of Roosevelt Forward, and we’re here today to talk about ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The country has watched over the past month as a surge of enforcement in Minnesota has resulted in forcing families apart, in community terror, and in death. And while that has captivated public attention, the truth is Minnesota is only the latest and most poignant of a nationwide surge. I myself live here in DC, and in my own community we had families line the streets to ensure that children would feel safe getting to school despite ICE presence. This is what many communities in our country are facing.
Today is the deadline for Congress to strike a deal on funding the Department of Homeland Security. And as we tape, we don’t yet see a deal in sight. This wrangling overfunding for the agency is about using that leverage to ensure some measure of accountability for what has become a national police force run amok. We wanted to take this moment to step back a little from this particular inflection point and to reflect a little bit about how ICE became what it is. We’re going to explore the role that concentrated corporate power has in immigration enforcement and how we should be thinking about government capacity when it comes to functions like police.
To have that conversation, it is my delight that I am joined by two of my former colleagues and good friends. Sabeel Rahman is a professor at Cornell Law and a former official at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, OIRA. He’s also a longtime friend of Roosevelt. And Alvaro Bedoya is a digital privacy expert and a former commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission, who you may remember from when the administration tried to fire him. I am personally just thrilled to have both of you.
So let’s get into it. We of course know, in terms of what’s been happening in Minnesota, about the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the protests and mutual aid that we have seen rising from ICE’s presence there, particularly in the Twin Cities. Alvaro, I just wanted to start with you maybe on a little bit of a hopeful note, but also to help us understand some of the cleavages in the business community. Could you just say a little bit about what we’re seeing, especially in terms of the role of the small businesses in the community, and how we’re seeing them show up and how that might be different with other businesses?
Alvaro Bedoya: Absolutely. Let’s actually start away from the small businesses, with the massive companies. I was Chief Counsel to Senator Al Franken for five years, I worked for the people of Minnesota for five years, and it was a great experience. And honestly, my politics were a little different then, but I had this experience of working with all these executives from Minnesota companies, companies like 3M—which is actually Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing—sometimes corporate executives from Target, Mayo Clinic, General Mills, all these name-brand companies that most Minnesotans are actually pretty proud of having as hometown companies. And this thing happened after the killing of Alex Pretti where people kept on calling on these companies to do something, say something. These are powerful entities in the American economy. And what they did is issue this letter that didn’t even name what had happened, to Mr. Pretti, didn’t name what had happened to Ms. Good, and just called for a de-escalation of tensions. It was so, just, weak and milquetoast that a whole lot of people in Minnesota, not just lefties, but just regular people, said, “what are you doing? Why did you do this?”
And then it started coming out—The American Prospect[‘s] David Dayen [and Whitney] Curry Wimbish wrote an essay pointing out that, hey, 3M actually backed the Big Beautiful Bill, which sent roughly $70 billion into the deportation machine. Companies like Target are affirmatively allowing ICE to use their facilities. You have all these other companies, through their trade associations, industry associations, backing the Big Beautiful Bill. And so what came out was not just a milquetoast statement out of, certainly, the most community-minded executives you could probably find in the country, in Minnesota. (And yes, I am biased, but I don’t think it’s a crazy thing to say.) Not just that, but an actual degree of complicity in what was happening because they wanted their tax breaks. They wanted the economy to keep chugging along so they could stay in the black, and they affirmatively supported (many of them, not all of them—it’s not like the Minnesota Vikings or the Twins were tied up in this). They ended up helping push forward this legislation that made ICE the third-largest—I think someone described them as being funded possibly as the third-largest military, certainly the largest law enforcement associate organization in this country.
Meanwhile—and you said hopeful—so let’s talk about that. You had donut shops, book shops, random diners on the streets of Minnesota who were becoming de facto food distribution centers, aid distribution centers. I have a lot of friends in Minnesota because I worked for the state for five years. And by the way, I have friends on all sides of the aisle in Minnesota. And to a one, they say, “however it looks in the news, it is so much worse. You have no idea.” And number two, all of my friends whose skin doesn’t look Scandinavian are afraid to walk outside. Even they are not going to the grocery store. So all these mutual aid systems are developing and it is these small businesses that are moving forward to support them. This is why people look at small business—it’s like the most respected institution in our country. I think—recently, it surpassed the American military, which has long been the most respected institution in this country. And so it is this gulf between how these billionaire corporations really can’t find it in them to be brave, and how these small businesses—who are scrappy, who rise and fall with their communities—don’t hesitate to stand up for the people they serve. That for me gives me hope, while that letter made me pretty sad, honestly.
Elizabeth: Well, I’m just going to make you feel sadder. The whole topic might. So we talked a little bit about the corporate response of large Minnesota businesses, specifically, and this tie between corporations that want tax breaks and their complicity with the rest of this administration’s policies. Can you talk a little bit, broader than Minnesota businesses, about the relationship between business and ICE enforcement more directly? When we think about that bill and the funding that went to ICE, how does that funding work? What is the relationship between that enforcement and corporate contracts?
Alvaro: I think it is really, really important for people to understand that this is a business. This is not a small business. This is a deca-centibillion–dollar business. And it is not just these companies like Palantir that lean into that bad-boy, “I’m the one who knocks” persona—to quote Walter White out of Breaking Bad. Palantir loves being the bad guy. They lean—they recruit on the basis of it. They say, “oh, all you wilting lilies are afraid of doing the tough stuff.” They lean into almost the Few Good Men persona, of like, “oh, we’ll do it. We’re not afraid of the tough work in that gray margin.” Right?
My friends, yes, Palantir is getting extraordinarily wealthy thanks to this influx of money flowing to its coffers. Palantir is just that last layer on this massive infrastructure. What they do is just connect dots—or they purport to connect dots because I have a lot of friends in the investment community who say this thing is actually not nearly as powerful or profitable as people think it is—all they’re doing is connecting the dots. Underneath, you have this whole ecosystem of really boring companies that are making this possible and are making money hand over fist. There’s Deloitte, who the Financial Times called out for receiving billions of dollars. Financial Times, okay? This is the industry rag for the world financial industry. Deloitte, this consulting company, is making money hand over fist.
Who is providing this data? Your utility company. When I was at Georgetown, the team I built discovered this because it wasn’t out in the open. Your water company, electricity company, shares your address with a data broker named NCTUE. That data broker shares it initially to a company, and—I forget the order—at one point, it was LexisNexis (every single lawyer listening to this will understand fully well what company that is) and to the Minnesota company Thomson Reuters (and every lawyer listening will understand that to be Westlaw). And it was ICE using their Palantir skin that would plug into those systems. So what I want everyone to understand is—there are some folks saying abolish ICE, other folks saying we need to dramatically restructure ICE. Whatever it is you do, in the same way that companies like TurboTax and H&R Block make damn sure that it’s super hard to file your taxes so that you go to their quote-unquote “free services” that you end up paying $100, $200 for—any shift in ICE that will occur will be stymied by these companies. They’re gonna quietly go in and meet with young Hill staffers, like I was, and say, “oh yeah, ICE is bad. ICE is bad. But all we do is provide data. And so, just don’t mess too much with the underlying system.” And so that is what I want to clarify is that this isn’t just Palantir. It is all these companies that are profiting from the system. [1]
And the very last thing I’ll say—sorry for going on for a little bit—is some people might say: Well, Alvaro, I don’t have a problem with, whatever you wanna call it, ICE, someone else, going out and finding violent criminals. You know what? Neither do I. I have no problem—not with ICE. I’ve got a big problem with ICE. I don’t want people who are violent and are illegally present in this country to be in this country. I don’t want that. But my congressman, Jamie Raskin, just went to a facility. Members of Congress have a power to knock on the door of an ICE facility. One time out of two, ICE honors that request and lets them in. He’s finding people packed 60 to a cell with one open toilet, packed like sardines with aluminum foil for blankets around themselves. And he described in a post yesterday, [he] went and visited the cell reserved for violent criminals. Guess how many people were in that cell? Guess.
Elizabeth: Oh, I don’t know. Don’t tell me it was zero.
Alvaro: It was zero. Zero people. This is not an infrastructure that’s being used to find violent people who are hurting your neighbors. This is an infrastructure that’s being used to find your neighbors. And many of whom have been decades in this—many who are lawful, are lawfully present in this country. So that is what people need to understand.
Elizabeth: Sabeel, I would like to bring you in here for a second because what I am hearing is a couple of things. I actually am hearing—particularly with the data infrastructure, but presumably with other parts of ICE’s infrastructure as well, detention centers, all of these things—that there is a set of companies that have vested interest in the growth and continuation of a set of government functions, because of the way that we have contracted out and depended on those corporate functions for its self-perpetuation. Can you give us a quick sense of, how did we get here? Stepping back from ICE a little bit, how did we get here to a place where our government capacity to operate was dependent on these layers of companies and what that means for how we should think about state capacity more broadly?
Sabeel: This is such a rich conversation already. Thanks, Elizabeth and Alvaro. The disentangling, or peeling back, the layers of private power lurking behind this mass deportation coercive regime is hugely important, and there’s a longer story there as well, to your point, Elizabeth. Part of how we got here is, for many decades, two things have been happening to our government. One is it’s been slowly, steadily privatized and emaciated such that, on all kinds of things, even for the delivery of safety net programs, we actually depend on these private intermediaries who then make big money and, by the way, don’t actually serve the people. And so the story Alvaro just described, on the back end of the surveillance infrastructure—you could tell a similar story about other aspects of government that over time has been disinvested in. At the same time, we’ve had—across many multiple administrations, multiple parties—an increasing concentration of unaccountable coercive power.
ICE itself was created after 9/11. It started off as essentially a service delivery organization to process visas, moved over to the newly created Department of Homeland Security, and given this particular mandate around enforcement. And then that also creates a certain culture to the organization. All the surveillance infrastructure that Alvaro described, I would argue a lot of those roots are in that post-9/11 moment of building a mass national security state. And so this combination of thinning out the state so that we’re more dependent on private capacity in the first place—and that creates opportunities for self-dealing and self-interest and exploitation against the public interest—and at the same time, supercharging other aspects of the state to be unaccountably coercive. Part of why ICE is able to go after peoples’ neighbors is that the Supreme Court itself blessed, basically, open racial profiling in a case earlier in the summer in which Brett Kavanaugh authors this opinion saying how, well, racial profiling doesn’t really happen. And Kavanaugh stops are now all over the country and people are being plucked out of their homes.
And so the point I want to make here is that there’s a private infrastructure that Alvaro described, and legally, structurally, our government has both become dependent on that private infrastructure and at the same time has been essentially shielded from all kinds of legal and democratic accountability for this type of coercive power.
Elizabeth: I just want to pull on a thread that you just said because I want to make clear—I think we are busting up a little bit of a very old trope and myth about the fight over the role of the state in public life. There is this notion that you are either big government or small government. You either believe in deregulation and letting the markets govern themselves, and getting out of their way, and getting out of people’s lives. Or you believe in a stronger, more muscular government, which is more interventionist and, depending on your viewpoints, maybe messes with people’s individual liberties too much. And you are telling a very different story, which is: Actually, behind what might seem like it was a small government, was a massive apparatus all the time. That the whole project of a, quote-unquote, “small deregulatory state” actually had this other looming story behind it. And you were telling a story about this ostensibly conservative state actually being much more interventionist in people’s rights, actually, more interventionist in people’s lives. I just want to call in, Sabeel, you have put forward a framework to say this old-school left versus right, small versus big, deregulatory versus interventionist, is the wrong way to think about the role of the state in society. You’ve put forward an anti-domination framework. Can you just spool that out a little bit more for us?
Sabeel: I appreciate that, Elizabeth. I think it’s very much in tune with what you and Alvaro were saying as well. Look, I’m—at the core of it, I’m a believer in small-d democracy. I believe in people. I believe in communities. I believe that we should govern ourselves, and we are safest and most secure when we are actually able to govern ourselves in politics and in economics. And so if the goal ultimately is that—democracy—the things we should be worried about [are] not about big government, small government as you said. The things we should be worried about are when power is concentrated in ways that we can’t control and we are now subject to someone else’s arbitrary will. That could be the arbitrary will of the ICE agent who rolls in and snatches you off the street. It could be the arbitrary will of the boss who [decides] that a worker can’t have a bathroom break on the shop floor. It could be the arbitrary will of the monopolist who keeps goods from going to market. And in this case, the combination of state power and private power creating this extreme fear and extreme violence against our own neighbors, that is—it’s a combination of both of these types of power.
At the end of the day, the thing we should be most worried about is this idea of domination when power is concentrated and unaccountable. Sometimes that takes a private economic form. Sometimes it takes a governmental form. Either way, it’s a problem. That’s why we want to create different kinds of democratic institutions. We want government to protect us against civil rights violations, protect our privacy, to protect economic equality against mistreatment, and we also need that government to be accountable to us, to we the people. So this thing that we’re seeing, what Alvaro described, is living in the netherworld where it’s not—government’s not accountable to us, and government is making common cause with all these private actors who are also not accountable to us. And between the two of them, it’s pretty big business.
Elizabeth: I think the next thing that I wanted to ask about—and, Alvaro, maybe I can bring you back in for this. Okay, so we’ve talked about the relationship between tax policy and corporate willingness to stand up. We’ve talked about the specific interactions between ICE and the corporate infrastructure behind it. I also think, to Sabeel’s point, right now we are in an extreme moment of consolidation of government and corporate power in a way that we have not seen in a very long time. We both have an authoritarian consolidation at the top of our federal government, in the way that power is being wielded, and it’s coming at a time when economic concentration is just extreme. And in particular, and this goes to your understanding and knowledge of the data infrastructure, the enormity of the power concentrated in the tech sector is reminiscent of Gilded Age railroad-baron type stuff. How do we think about, is this just an evolution of what we have seen in the past, in terms of the relationship between this type of state power and this type of corporate power, or are we seeing something else in the relationship between this administration and these tech titans? Whether it has to do with ICE enforcement or the broader relationship between these two types of power, how should we think about that?
Alvaro: I think we need to honestly, and this is not hyperbole, think about it in terms not just of the Gilded Age, but also not even the Roman Empire. One thing that Roman emperors had was a Praetorian guard. And this sounds hyperbolic, it’s not. The Roman emperors had these private guards around them that kept them safe. And I think, for example, of the fires in Los Angeles when all these billionaires have these private firefighters they could just call on, and others are flying to private islands. They literally own islands. In the same way a Roman emperor would have their own little enclave set off to the side. Absolutely, we’re looking at something like the Gilded Age. We are looking at levels of inequality that haven’t been seen since that age.
Let’s talk about Minnesota for a heartbeat. One of the reasons I was so hopeful about the Minnesotan industrial sector was—and it was naive, it was naive—but I remember when I was a staffer for Sen. Franken. You travel all around the state that you work for. I was in Northfield, Minnesota, home to St. Olaf [College], home to Carleton [College]. My colleague pointed to a house and she said, “you know who lives there?” And I was like, well, clearly, no. I have no idea who lives there. And she said, “the CEO of blank.” And it was this massive company, like GM or 3M, one of these companies. And it was like a real normal, kinda nice house, real normal house. And she said, look, in Minnesota, there’s this culture of egalitarianism. There’s this culture that it’s kinda vulgar to throw around your wealth, and all that has been erased. And instead, what you have now is a culture where it is not just accepted, it’s encouraged. It’s celebrated to put on these, just, vulgar displays of wealth. So look, I’ve talked about it ad nauseam elsewhere, so I won’t here. But what I want to point out is, to what you and Sabeel have been talking about, is [regarding] this merger of authoritarianism and oligarchy, is that our government, our laws, are not prepared for that merger.
I’ll give you two examples. You know, the three of us are lawyers. God help us. We come from a very specific professional tradition that has developed a muscle that people should be proud of, which is a public interest legal muscle. And yes, if you go to a fancy law school, you fall asleep, you’re gonna find yourself at a corporate white-shoe law firm defending the Fortune 500. That is true. It happened to me, happens to a lot of people. But if you’re scrappy and you want to work for the good guys, you can find your way, and there’s an infrastructure that gets you in public-interest institutions. If you’re on the left, there are often civil rights institutions, like Lambda Legal, like MALDEF (the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund), like NAACP Legal Defense Fund, like the National Women’s Law Center. If you care more about voting rights, you might end up at Protect Democracy, Democracy Forward, right? There’s this whole infrastructure, public-interest legal infrastructure, designed to keep the government in check.
There is no such public-interest legal infrastructure to check corporate power. There’s a couple of scrappy nonprofits that are out there. But in general, if it’s not ICE or not CBP that’s hurting you, but one of these other companies we’ve been talking about that helps them or works you on their warehouse floors so that your wrists and your back break. Either your case is worth $100 million and a private plaintiffs’ firm will take it up, or the government at the FTC or CFPB will help you—not anymore—or you’re SOL. At the very basic level, the Freedom of Information Act does not apply to Palantir. I can’t just FOIA Palantir to understand what’s going on there. Now there’s some arguments we should be able to, and I think there’s been some progress made on this. But when I FOIAed—when we FOIAed ICE, when we FOIAed police departments, we not only saw them working very closely with these tech vendors, we also saw them forming nonprofits that are even further insulated from public reporting. Because if you’re a publicly traded company on the stock exchange, you actually have to let people know a little insight, as to what’s going on underneath the hood. Nonprofits file a 990, and it is not equivalent to a 10-K. It is even less transparency. And so, this merger of these tech oligarchs and the government—our public interest legal system, our system of government transparency, just was not designed to meet these ends.
Elizabeth: Sabeel, did you want to jump in?
Sabeel: Just quickly, I think that’s so powerful, Alvaro, and I think this is one of the reasons why—there are many reform proposals being talked about right now, and anything that helps people in the country, in Minnesota and elsewhere, is an advance, a progress. But because of what Alvaro just described, this is why structural solutions have to be part of the conversation. It’s not enough to be like, oh, we need the ICE officers to just have better conduct. Don’t wear a mask, have a little badge. Like, no.
Alvaro: Arbitrary and capricious! Except in arbitrary and capricious circumstances, Sabeel.
Sabeel: Totally. Right, exactly. We need structural solutions both for this unaccountable state authoritarianism and for unaccountable private authoritarianism. There’s just too much wealth, too much money, too much resources flowing into all of this, and we are outgunned in all the reasons that—for all the reasons Alvaro just described.
Elizabeth: That was a perfect segue. I was going to try and end us on a hopeful note, and ask us to talk a little bit about what solutions would look like. But I’m first, I’m gonna—professional prerogative—I’m gonna tell us a short story, which is: In thinking about this topic, I was doing a little research and found that under the FDR administration, under Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, one of the first things she did when she entered the Labor Department was she looked at this group called Section 24. And Section 24, at that time in the Labor Department, was an immigration enforcement group. It found and deported people, and it was, at the time, understood to be basically a mob-like terror organization that was going into immigrant communities, terrorizing people, taking people from their homes, and deporting them. And so one of the first things she did was defund it. She took all the money out, disbanded the group, and then, along with someone that she brought in to help her think more holistically about immigration, created a more humane system for understanding who wanted to come into the country and how to process people humanely.
So it turns out that was an incredible story of thinking about what government should be for, how it is supposed to relate to people, citizens and noncitizens alike, and the idea that the New Deal is still thought of as this time of great creativity for creating new government entities. They didn’t just create new government entities. They thought hard about where we should have more state capacity and also where we should have less, and how to reshape it. So in that spirit, this goes to both of you. You started to talk about the path forward, Sabeel. When you talk about structural solutions, for each of you, what are a couple of things that for our future, for our North Star, should we be thinking about? With respect to ICE, but also more broadly as we think about this anti-domination frame that Sabeel has laid out for us?
Sabeel: I’m happy to start, and then give Alvaro the last word here. So I think it’s exactly right. I’ll say a couple things about it. One is just, I love this Frances Perkins story. In a next governing moment, whenever that comes, we have to be thinking very seriously about administrative reorganization. Some—ICE shouldn’t exist, there are other agencies that need to be reduced in capacity, and we’re going to have to build up the power of agencies that protect us against other kinds of private domination. Of course, FTC, CFPB, and others. We have to reallocate resources. You can’t put 70-plus billion dollars into ICE and expect that to be okay. That money has to go away. And I think we’re gonna need a lot of—a very different legal framework on data and data privacy and surveillance. Alvaro is an expert there, so I’ll defer to him on that. And then one last thing I’ll say is not about the state reorganization, but also just about people. I think both, Elizabeth and Alvaro, you talked a lot about the way communities have shown up. And one thing just to note, Minnesota has a very rich civic infrastructure. People have been organizing in Minnesota on the ground for years in faith communities, in multiracial coalitions, in labor, and that infrastructure is a big part of, I think, why you’ve seen the community be able to stand up and defend one another. And so I think as we build our way out of this, we need to reconfigure the state in dramatic ways. The Perkins example is a great one. And I think we need to look for other ways to resource and build up the civic infrastructure, so that—I believe in democracy. It’s the people themselves who are going to actually get us out of this.
Elizabeth: Alvaro?
Alvaro: I want to take a step back and zoom out and talk about the underlying wound that we are trying to staunch and heal. Because I think a mistake we can make is [to] stop what Trump is trying to do, what this administration is trying to do to fix that wound, and not treat the underlying wound. And let me be clear, the wound is not immigrants and immigration. The wound is working people in this country who are here legally or looking at the work options they used to have and [saying], “what the heck happened to that job? That job used to pay well, used to have benefits. Not only now do I not have that job, it is dominated by men from Central and South America.” And what Trump did is look at that. What this president did is look at that and say, “there exactly: That’s the problem. The problem is those immigrants. We’re gonna deport those immigrants. We’re gonna call them criminals. We’re gonna get them out of the country.” And so that was what he said he was going to do. Now the big lie here is that this is not going to bring those jobs back. It’s not going—simultaneously, there was an essay in UnHerd where they are dramatically expanding the number of H-2B manual guest workers, and moving them into this country. They are—and so here’s the thing. You can’t deport your way out of a rigged economy. You deport that rideshare driver, construction worker, off the street brutally. You brutalize their family, you brutalize their neighbors, you brutalize a neighbor standing up to them. Those jobs aren’t going to suddenly start paying benefits and overtime and unemployment insurance. What’s just going to happen is they’re gonna be still terrible jobs that maybe for a little bit pay a little bit more, but still keep people—and again, that is assuming all of these assumptions are true—keep people in a place where they’re constantly struggling to keep their heads above water. What we need to do is look at why that wound is there, and the wound is not there because of undocumented immigration. Although, yes, it doesn’t help. The wound is there because decades ago, American corporate executives decided they could wave a little wand and decide all their employees were actually independent business owners. And I don’t need to pay minimum wage, and I don’t need to pay overtime, and I don’t need to pay unemployment insurance and workers’ compensation to these workers because they’re independent business owners. And guess what also happens when you magically wave that wand and turn all of your workers into independent business owners? You also—the requirements for hiring your tax accountant. Do you check the passport of the tax company that’s doing your taxes? You don’t. You don’t necessarily need to check all the documents for those people who are independent business owners who are working for you. And that is how those companies are getting rich. And that is also facilitating the hiring of this undocumented workforce.
If we want to staunch that bleeding, we need to go at these centimillionaire, billionaire developers and their corporate conglomerate owners that have hollowed out what used to be decent—hard, but decent—manual and blue-collar jobs into a shadow of what they used to be. And I think once we do that, some of these inequalities are going to start fading away. And also, some of the hiring of undocumented labor is necessarily going to go away as well. So that is what I think needs to happen. We need to understand who’s getting rich, talk about that, talk about the structural problems of the American economy, to what you said, Sabeel. Right now, what Trump is doing is saying, “oh, there’s a wound. I got a stapler. This stapler is called ICE. I’m just gonna staple the wound, just like this.” Put the stapler down. Stop making this worse. But you also gotta get at why that wound exists in the first place, I would say.
Sabeel: I think that’s great, Alvaro. And maybe just one thing I would add there. I love this notion of “you can’t deport your way out of a rigged economy.” And to that, I would just also add that, once we’re actually solving the actual source of who is hoarding all the wealth and opportunity, there’s more than enough wealth and opportunity for us to actually have an inclusive society in which people can come, and make lives, and build [and] contribute to communities. That is totally possible. This notion of a zero-sum fight is a construction by people who want to profit by hoarding more and more of that wealth and opportunity. And so it is not about immigration at all, actually. This is a way for that wealth to continue to be hoarded.
Elizabeth: Just to close, I will say, to me what I take away from this is the idea both that there is a problem with the way that state power has been consolidated in an authoritarian moment. There has been, for a long time, an enormous problem with the way in which corporate power has been consolidated at the expense of workers of all backgrounds and consumers and small businesses. We see that at work in a couple of ways. The story about the difference between small and big businesses in this moment, the idea that small businesses are being good community members while big businesses are interested in maintaining their relationship to a coercive state, and that the future lies in figuring out how to deconstruct both some of that state power and that corporate power, and how to, to your point Sabeel, construct more community power at the same time. Some of that is, to me, getting into these questions of what actually are the natures of the powers over us and how do we make sure to have the right countervailing powers to enable the rest of us to live the lives we wanna live, are the real lessons here. And we are seeing the worst version of how that can play out badly, in Minnesota in this moment.
I just have to thank both of you for helping us remember that there’s a best version of this, if we are imaginative enough to seek those structural solutions, think big about them, and really reimagine how we could orchestrate those powers to our benefit rather than [other ends]. So that was a long way of saying thank you for helping us think through the big picture here. And in a real moment of pain and potential despair to remind us, yes, we’ve gotta fight this fight for today about funding an agency, but we also have to keep our eye on the future for a fundamentally different relationship between people and their government. So thank you both.
Sabeel: Thank you so much.
Elizabeth: Thank you, Elizabeth, for having us. Good to see you, Sabeel.
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Rahman is also a member of Roosevelt’s board of directors.