- At what point will people begin to understand like, "Huh, if they're denying due process to them, then at what point do you get to be denied due process?"

- Sometimes, simply saying academic freedom doesn't really resonate with the people.

We have to engage in our own educational campaign to show people why academic freedom, it matters to everybody.

- There are great American academics who are dealing with the next generation, who want to know and wanna be engaged in democracy.

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders & Friends," the place where the people who say, "It can't be done," take a back seat to the people who are doing it.

Welcome.

(upbeat intro music) (upbeat intro music continues) The second Trump administration has enacted sweeping changes to immigration policy, emphasizing militarization, detention, rendition, and the elimination of relief and rights, even for legal residents.

At the same time, the Republican regime is implementing policies in higher education that eliminate diversity initiatives, restrict academic freedom, deny grants, and change institutional governance.

Free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of the press, freedom to teach, freedom to learn, they all seem to be hanging in the balance Well our guests live and work at the intersection of all of these issues.

Maria Hinojosa is co-anchor and executive producer of "Latino USA" and producer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning podcast "Suave," which is launching its second season this week.

She is also a regular contributor to MSNBC and she teaches at Barnard College.

Chenjerai Kumanyika is a Peabody Award winner, creator and co-host of "Uncivil," and creator and host of the series, "Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD," from Crooked Media and Wondery.

"Empire City" won the 2025 Best History Podcast Ambie from The Podcast Academy, the pre-eminent professional podcast organization.

He's also an assistant professor of journalism at New York University and serves on the National Council of the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP.

I am happy to welcome them both to this monthly feature that we call "Meet the BIPOC Press."

Welcome.

Maria, congratulations on a new season of "Suave" launching, more or less as we speak.

What can we expect?

And congratulations.

- Thank you, sweetie, and it's great to be with you and Chenjerai.

So, Season One is a lot about the story of Suave, how he ended up in prison, and this relationship between he and I over decades.

Season Two is a roller coaster emotionally.

If we were dealing with the real jail cells, the prison bars, Season Two is really dealing with the mental prison bars that come with trauma after serving 31 years.

It's a roller coaster, and yeah, thank you for mentioning it.

- Absolutely.

Chenjerai, congratulations on the Ambie.

- I gotta start out by saying I'm so excited about "Suave" coming back.

You know, "Suave," that is an incredible podcast.

I teach it, I literally teach it in all, you know, my podcasting courses.

There's so much about that show that demonstrates the best of this form of journalism and, you know, quite frankly, you know, education about what can be a better way to relate to people who have been incarcerated and come to grips with this.

So I just am so excited and can't wait to listen.

And yes, "Empire City" won an Ambie award.

We were nominated in three categories, and I'm glad to see that, you know, first of all, that The Podcast Academy exists to honor so that, you know, works like "Suave" and "Empire City" and all the other nominees have a place to kind of stretch out and we can consider all the facets of it.

And yeah, it's nice to that our podcast is made and we're now getting ready to launch an incredible impact campaign.

So, you're gonna be seeing "Empire City" hopefully as a tour, as curriculum, and lots of other exciting things.

- Well, we're starting with the awards and the celebrations, and I'm glad we did.

And we're also starting in the area of incarceration, which I'm glad we're starting there too.

Maria, as I understand it, we are talking as the president of El Salvador, President Bukele, who calls himself a dictator, is visiting the White House after the U.S has been sending people en masse to a max security prison in his country and is telling us that even when they make a mistake and send somebody that perhaps shouldn't be there, there's nothing they could do.

Maria, you were recently in El Salvador where you, I think, tried to visit the maximum security CECOT Prison.

What happened?

- Yeah, so, Laura, you and I have been, you know, doing this for quite a while, and El Salvador was in the news in the 1980s when we were in college.

I was reporting about that then.

I never could have imagined that the United States, that a Trump administration would be looking at the Nayib Bukele administration and saying, "Huh, we wanna do things a little bit more like you.

Maybe we should declare martial law.

Maybe we should create a prison like CECOT," where the only way that you get in that prison is because the president gives you, a journalist permission.

So, we didn't get in.

We attempted to get in there and to other men's prisons and to women's prisons.

You know, I just wanna stress, when you're put in CECOT, you are not given any access to any visitors at all, period.

So, when we think about kind of the dream scenario for a carceral state in the United States, it's like, well, I guess that's what they wanna do.

I mean, Donald Trump has already said that he would consider putting American citizens behind bars in El Salvador.

It is very dystopic.

But there were protests in El Salvador the week after the first group of men were not deported but removed.

They were not deported, they did not have any legal process.

That means that there are some cracks in the Bukele dictatorship.

And El Salvador is a country that knows a lot about grassroots community organizing and pushing back.

So, we will see, but it is a very strange time to see that the United States is looking to the Bukele administration to kinda get some lessons.

- Maria's pointing to the delicacies of language, and I've been very struck that we're using a language of deportation for one group of people and detention for another group of people.

Chenjerai, looking from your vantage point and the lens that you apply to this story, do you think specifically thinking about the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia that we are taking it seriously enough, what happened to this father of three who had every legal right to be here and now the administration says, "Oops, our mistake, nothing we can do."

- Well, no, I don't think we're taking it seriously enough.

But in terms of, like, the larger American public and even the media, I think this needs to be focused on more.

You know, when you focus on the history of policing, policing has always tried to present itself as part of democracy, right?

As something that is subject to democratic processes to a kind of due process.

But it always has had, inside of it, this more core DNA, which is just about raw power and the ability to detain people, to abduct people, because that's, in fact, what we're seeing are abductions here.

And so, what you're actually seeing now is that kernel of abduction and detention without process, which has, by the way, been already being applied to a lot of people.

All kinds of folks are suddenly being roped into this story that they somehow don't deserve due process, that they're so evil, you know, just because someone wrote an essay.

The student visas that are being revoked, it's not even clear that these people did anything that we can even identify.

And the administration has not even offered a rationale for why they're being deported.

- And it's pretty clear that the Tufts student, Rümeysa Öztürk, had actually done nothing that brought any of this upon her.

The reason I'm so happy to bring the two of you together is you're helping break down these silos.

The other thing, Maria, you've been drawing attention to is the time that, you know, the chaptering of our history as if this just began.

I think about rendition, started many, many years ago under the W. Bush administration.

So, talk a bit about, you know, advice to reporters as they try to cover this.

Is this a Trump crisis right now or something much bigger?

- What's being taken advantage of in this moment, as Chenjerai just said, is the painting of a picture of people who are so, to use that 1990s term, super predators, therefore they deserve nothing, no due process.

This is, in fact, it's not true.

But if you only consume media that is coming from the Trump administration, you are convinced that all of these people who are being taken outta the country are terrifying and terrorists - And just to stop you for one second, it's not true because A, this isn't who they are, but B, also, even if they were, they would be entitled to due process.

- Exactly, and (chuckles) that goes to the point of the story, Laura, is that at what point will people begin to understand, like, "Huh, if they're denying due process to them, then at what point do you get to be denied due process?"

I wasn't born in this country, right?

So, that means that I, in a minute, if I were to engage with immigration officials for any reason, because I wasn't born in this country, I can be denied due process.

If you are charged criminally in this country, you have more rights than if you are engaging with the immigration system.

And this needs to sit in.

It begins to need to sit with people because the border patrol is the largest law enforcement agency in the United States of America with the least amount of oversight.

Now, everyone has to be thinking like, "Wow, I have to find my own documentation or else I could be taken."

And that is part of the politics of fear that this administration is expert at.

And again, modeling on Bukele's administration, the politics of fear and "mano dura".

In Spanish, "mano dura", which means hard hand.

We come down with a hard hand, forget due process.

It's a hard hand.

- We have to talk about racism, too.

I wasn't born in this country either.

I was able to become a dual citizen.

Where was I born?

England.

Different.

And we should remember that at this moment, the administration is offering gold visas to some people.

So, Chenjerai, coming to you, I have been struck that the discussions around what's happening on campus have become kind of obscure.

We're talking about attacks on DEI, when a minute ago, we were talking about affirmative action, desegregation.

We just did this episode about Selma.

It's so important that we understand what got weaponized to start this hatred of higher education.

- As you're saying, I think history always rewards our research, as Malcolm X said.

And we have to understand that we're talking about decades of attacking people's understanding of what higher education is.

Telling people that people who are studying things like women's studies, right?

You know, Black studies or, you know, people who are studying critical studies of American Empire are somehow, you know, like, those things are unrelatable, you know, when in fact, those are the precise kinds of studies that have been about trying to make America into a democracy.

We should recognize that the reason why those particular areas are being attacked is because they are very threatening, right?

I mean, you know.

And in that regard, it's important, I think, for scholars in those areas as people are doing to figure out ways to continue to keep doing that.

But I think also we're trying to reach out... You know, there are ways in which, you know, higher education had our own limitations.

And many people in higher education, you know, the AAUP and others, and, you know, and many campus unions have been involved in trying to make sure that these institutions are serving the public good.

But I do think that in academia, we have to think about how we can reach out to the rest of the public and make this case.

Sometimes, simply saying academic freedom doesn't really resonate with the people.

We have to engage in our own educational campaign to show people why academic freedom, it matters to everybody.

- If the interview with backlash activist, Christopher Rufo, on the New York Times' "Daily" podcast last week was anything to go by, these attacks on the curriculum, the funding, the grants, you name it, at colleges like the ones you teach in, Maria and Chenjerai, are part of a strategy to destroy higher education per se.

But I was very struck by the interviewer's willingness to kinda go along with what Rufo's assertions were about, the ideology, ideological leanings of professors.

And I guess, Maria, I would ask you, would you have done that interview?

Would you have handled it differently?

And how are you handling this discourse around DEI being a problem and antisemitism being a problem on the campuses where you work?

- So, Laura, you and I both are Barnard graduates.

We were both college activists, then we became journalists.

At the time when I was an activist on Barnard College, I don't know about you, but I had a green card at that time.

So, in essence, I am Mahmoud Khalil.

I am that student with a green card.

And just the thought that I would've called Dad, "Papi me sacaron del pais."

"They took me outta the country because of what I was doing on the college campus," is horrifying.

I'm on Barnard campus every week.

I'm with students of every background, including Jewish students, Muslim students, and everything in between.

And I'm always asking and checking in, and I need to say this unequivocally, Barnard and Columbia campuses are not antisemitic.

They are not antisemitic.

That is not the problem that we are facing.

And the problem right now, for me, I have to be very honest with you, is, my students are in a state of trauma.

The police, the NYPD, were called onto the Barnard campus by the president who is a woman.

NYPD men arresting Barnard women students.

It is something we could have never imagined, Laura.

We protested on the campus feeling completely safe in the conversation that we were having at the time.

So, my students are in a state of trauma.

My Muslim students are having a very difficult time.

My immigrant students, all of them are worried.

So, for me, to see my alma mater, Columbia University, accept this is terrifying.

I'm hoping that we can make it back.

There are incredible, as at NYU and across the country and our universities and colleges, there are great American academics who are dealing with the next generation who want to know and wanna be engaged in democracy, and the fact that people are afraid of that.

And I always harken back just to end up, you know, in 1968 when Columbia revolted and took over the campus, students were not expelled and suspended.

In 1984, '85, when apartheid and anti-apartheid took over Hamilton Hall for three weeks, the NYPD was not called onto the campus of Columbia University.

And who was taking part in those protests?

A young man by the name of Barack Obama.

So, the fact that both Columbia and Barnard have made this turn to feel somehow secure that the NYPD is going to treat our students safely when we're supposed to be a university, a college of brilliant creativity, that is the least creative decision that you could make.

- Maria, absolutely.

I mean, when I saw the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil, you were the first contact I made.

I said, "We would've been abducted."

I mean, what we engaged in at time, and it had to do with the funding of death squads and the honoring of a death squad supporter on campus in the name of a class, I think your class.

We would never have been able to go through what we went through with that sense of security that you mentioned.

And I will just add that that experience was an experience of dealing with multiple opinions and dealing with people, and it was incredibly educational and enriching and exactly the kind of experience one would hope one could have at an early time in your life.

Chenjerai, back to you.

I mean, your students are facing some of the same challenges.

And also, I do wanna go back to Rufo.

Would you have done that interview?

And if so, how?

- I don't think Chris Rufo is a good faith interocular, although at sometimes, his way of talking about this is more sophisticated than some people who are progressive might give it credit for, but sophisticated in an insidious way.

But I wanna come back to just underscore what you're talking about.

We're seeing students right now and professors who are not even leaving their apartments, because they're being advised that if they do, they might be abducted, right?

And, you know, in a way I see this, you know, from looking from a labor perspective, right?

We see this in a way as like a problem that because we no longer have worker power, student power over our universities, our universities have now been weaponized against us, right?

They've collected all this data on students, the demands here at NYU, very reasonable demands, which is, don't give data to a federal government who is doing things which courts are ruling illegal.

Like, get rid of this data.

You shouldn't have had some of this data anyway.

The disciplinary processes should have been more transparent, more democratic anyway.

So, our universities are now weaponized against us.

And again, you know, listen.

If you look at the kinds of people who are protesting, they themselves take the concerns about antisemitism the most seriously.

The idea that the Trump administration, an administration which started with an inauguration with a sieg heil, they're the ones who are gonna enforce concerns about antisemitism?

No!

- I can't help, Maria, but ask you about the memo that the Trump administration apparently has issued saying that federal lands can be used for operations at the U.S-Mexico border, meaning for detentions, who knows what else?

You've been down there, you've spent a lot of time at the border.

What are you seeing?

And how is our country changing?

- First of all, the narrative that there is an invasion is not true.

You know, it is not true.

All of the data shows that right now what is out of control at the border, and I've been crossing that border, by land, since I was about six or seven years old.

What is absolutely out of control is the militarization of the border.

We have to go back to the data.

If there were so many criminal immigrants in the United States, as this administration points and wants to make this picture, we don't have an immigration problem then.

We have a criminal problem, right?

And if we have a criminal problem where you have tens, let's say 12 million criminals running around the streets of the United States of America, then what you have is a police problem You have police that do not know how to do their job.

So it is not true.

That is not true.

Immigrants are not more likely to be criminals.

We know this.

There is less crime in our communities.

In fact, that is part of the data, more crime is committed by people born in the United States than people not.

But it is a terribly sad place right now, because people have this dream still of the United States as a place where their dreams can come true.

And that is being taken away.

And you know who's winning actually, or who ultimately, is gonna be Mexico.

And the president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, who is interestingly changing the narrative, right?

To say, "Well, stay in Mexico.

Let's grow Mexico."

So, the United States' loss will be Mexico's gain.

- I'm haunted by the reference that Kimberlé Crenshaw in our Selma episode says about how we don't understand our history well enough to protest the erasure of our history.

Something else is going on and why.

And you're both speaking to, we don't understand the reality of our lives right now and the company that we're in well enough to understand what is really going on.

Because when I hear Donald Trump talking about invasions, at the very same time, he's trying to invoke an Alien and Sedition Act from, you know, 1790s at a time of war.

I think, "Is he about to declare martial law?

Is that really what's going on here?"

- As he tries to come up with a legal rationale, the Trump administration is reaching into all these old laws and legal language from times that I think a lot of people would say were times that we've progressed from.

So, you have to ask, why are you going back to those eras of American history when the vast majority of Americans you know, didn't really have rights?

And that's the legal framework you're trying to bring to today.

And I think for journalists, part of the lesson is that, you know, I understand why journalists wanna kinda dig into the weeds ask, is this particular move legal?

We should be keeping track of the ways that any administration is kinda, like, breaking the law.

But I think that we can also get lost in those weeds.

And what we have to understand is that empires historically have broken laws, but they've also found ways to kinda hack the law to enforce an oppressive agenda.

A lot of this is being justified by the idea that crime is on the rise.

And as Maria pointed out, the kinds of crime they're saying is on the rise, are not on the rise, but there is a kind of crime that is on the rise.

For example, if you look at wage theft.

I would call everyone's attention to the incredible reporting by Documented, a great news agency here in New York, organization, that has created a wage theft database.

And you can see you know, that kind of crime is on the rise.

Unfortunately, that kind of crime is precisely the kind of crime that someone like Elon Musk is trying to get of the regulatory framework that would protect workers, protect consumers.

So, those kinda corporate crimes are on the rise, but actually, we're loosening things so more of that can happen.

Meanwhile, we're telling a fictitious lie about other crimes and then deporting people.

- Thank you both, really.

It's a pleasure to be able to share your work with others and to draw people's attention to the great work that you both do as well as to be able to come and relish this time together.

- There is such an audience for this important and critical work that the both of you are doing, that Futuro is doing, and we cannot give up on that.

And whenever I feel really low, which can happen, right?

I think of my godfather of American journalism of conscience, and that is Frederick Douglass.

And if Frederick, if Frederick could do this, we can do this, we can do this.

- We can, we can.

Thank you for that.

And hey, I'm gonna go to binge-listen "Suave" Season 2.

- Yes, yes!

- Thank you, thank you.

(cymbal ringing) - Maria Hinojosa is right.

Thinking about El Salvador takes me back 40 years to a time in the 1980s when many people in this country were horrified by the behavior of the government there.

The military-backed regime acted in dictatorial ways, identifying its enemies as insurgents, criminals, terrorists, and worse.

People could be killed by death squad, locked up in what was then the infamous Ilopango Prison, or dropped from helicopters onto the land beneath.

I remember starkly standing outside San Salvador in a gorgeous park looking at a verdant forest and being told, "Yes, that's where the bodies were dropped, right there."

So, we don't actually know what will be the fate of those our government has now sent to the new dictatorship in El Salvador to be locked up in the new maximum security prison, CECOT facility.

We don't know what will happen to those people sent by our government, but what we do know is that our government is changing.

U.S Attorney General Pam Bondi said that, "Only those will be sent to El Salvador, who the president has decided, are the worst of the worst."

That means we're no longer living under a system of law, but one of individual dictate, and there's a word for that, and we used to be against it.

Are we still?

You can find my full uncut conversation with today's guests through subscribing to our free podcast and find all of our archives right there at our website.

Till the next time, stay kind, stay curious.

For "Laura Flanders & Friends," I'm Laura.

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