Berkeley Talks: Berkeley scholars unpack what’s at stake for U.S. democracy

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Shereen Marisol Meraji: K-A-L-X Berkeley.

(Montage of voices over music)

Travis Bristol: The more that we give a strong man more imagined power, the more power that strong man will lean into and take.

Sarah Song: In the area of refugee and asylum law, the president has considerable discretionary power.

David Hausman: If you’re concerned about crime, which is a real problem in the world. The idea that you would address that through the immigration system, magical thinking.

Eric Greenwald: It’s an attack on all of science. These are profoundly ideological decisions being made. It’s the opposite of science.

Shereen Marisol Meraji: North Gate Radio Presents The Stakes Explained (where) professors, frontline journalists and community members unpack President Trump’s executive orders and actions to see what’s at stake for our democracy. 

From the studios at North Gate Hall and UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, I’m Shereen Marisol Meraji, assistant professor and director of the audio program.

The idea for The Stakes Explained originated in my race and journalism seminar that I teach each spring semester. 

I believe it’s crucial for journalists to have at least a basic understanding of colonialism, settler colonialism, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and how the legacy of those systems continue to affect us as a society. It’s led to persistent racial disparities in wealth, in education, housing, healthcare, in policing and incarceration. 

And I firmly believe that you can’t meaningfully report on any of those issues, here in the United States, without an understanding of how race operates.

So when President Trump signed a barrage of executive orders starting in late January of 2025, many that intersect directly with race, I suggested that my students interview experts at UC Berkeley to help make sense of all of these new anti-DEI policies, immigration enforcement changes and regulatory rollbacks. 

And we decided to record those interviews in hopes we could share them with a wider audience.

I also know first hand how difficult it is to include historical context and policy analysis in a news story, because you’re only allowed so many words, and in my case, when I worked full-time at NPR … just a few minutes of airtime. 

So these interviews that my students conducted, they’re really meant to slow things down to provide some of that context and history. 

In this hourlong special, UC Berkeley scholars are going to break down the executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion in education, as well as executive orders and actions reshaping the immigration system and immigration enforcement.

And we’ll end this hour with insight from professor john powell, director of UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, on where we go from here.

john powell: Racism has a history and history’s not that old. So for most of human history, it didn’t exist. Someone had to create it. Convince people of it. Tell a story. But we’re not done. We can tell different stories.”

Shereen Marisol Meraji: Most of the interviews you’re about to hear were recorded at the end of the spring semester with the exception of the one I did with David Hausman from the Deportation Data Project, which was recorded in June.

Alright, let’s begin with President Trump’s executive order: Ending Radical Indoctronation in K-12 Schooling. 

The stated purpose of this order — and I’m paraphrasing  — is to ensure that K-12 schools provide children with a rigorous education and instill patriotic admiration for the United States and its values. And, not long after this executive order was signed … the Department of Education launched an “End DEI” portal encouraging parents, students, teachers and the broader community to report K-12 public schools and teachers engaged in diversity equity and inclusion work.

So, with that context in mind, reporter Erika Zaro interviewed Professor Travis Bristol. He researches the role of race and gender in educational settings, here at UC Berkeley.

Travis Bristol: Hello, I am Professor Travis Bristol. I’m a professor of teacher education and education policy. 

Erika Zaro: So Travis, I wanna start by talking about Executive Order 14190 that aims to end radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling. Can you break-down the executive order for our audience? 

Travis Bristol: I’ll probably zoom out first and ask us to consider what radical indoctrination is. If radical indoctrination is presenting an accurate telling of her-story and his-story to the children in our public schools, then I’m not sure how that’s radical. If radical indoctrination is de-centering the contributions of white people and whiteness, to include the contributions of Native Americans, of Black Americans, of Asian Americans, of Latinx Americans, I’m not sure what radical indoctrination is as the Department and the President are defining it. 

What is radical is to erase her-story and his-story. The goal is to not talk about race. And for me, that is radical. 

Erika Zaro: What do you think the Trump administration is trying to do with this order?

Travis Bristol: Some scholars have talked about this moment as being the second nadir of race relations. The first nadir of race relations sort of comes after reconstruction. When Black people begin to find their way into this American project, this thing called “America.” And after reconstruction we see the rise of the KKK, we see Plessy v. Ferguson. 

The second nadir begins many would say with the election of President Barack Obama, a Black man, like me, and that created a great sense of cognitive dissonance for white people. 

They’ve had a history where they were placed in the center. And I think we saw this with the birtherism from the current president, trying to discredit the fact that this Black man was the president of the United States. So some of this comes out of the fear that white people were grappling with. And the response, the backlash of this coloring of America is to make America great again, or white, again. 

Erika Zaro: What do you think the role of race in education is, you know, what’s the importance of it, for students? 

Travis Bristol: I’m wondering if the question is why talk about race in schools, in education. And for me, America comes into being, it grows into its economic prowess, its economic prowess is in many ways based on a racial project, which was the subjugation of Black bodies. It becomes hard to disentangle because the country,  in its founding, was a racialized project. We talk about race because, one, it’s important for all children in this country to understand their her-story, their his-story. 

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, I went to an Afro-centric school. In the first grade, I learned, and I asked my students this, you know, how many of you have heard of Crispus Attucks? I learned about Crispus Attucks in the first-grade. I learned that Crispus Attucks was a Black and Indigenous man who was one of the first persons killed at the start of what would become the American Revolution. And I learned that part of this country fighting against the colonial empire, England, was that a Black man and an Indigenous man had to lay down his life. 

Those kinds of lessons should not only be taught to Black children, but it should be taught white children. So much of the conversation that we’re having in this country around not talking about race or not talking about sensitive issues, it’s an attempt to protect white people, white children. 

And I fundamentally believe that white children, they have the intellectual capacity to hold that white people have done some harm in this country, that white people have made contributions to the United States, as well as Black people and Latinx people and Asian American people and Indigenous people. 

Lots of my research is around diversifying the educator workforce. How can white children compete in a global economy if they have singular notions about history if they aren’t exposed to diverse cultures, as children?

Erika Zaro: How do you think the Department of Education’s portal to report DEI in schools will affect educators? 

Travis Bristol: So I believe it will and it won’t. For our generation, it feels new, but historically we’ve been here before. To my undergrads, here at Berkeley, I talked about the work of Black educators during Jim and Jane Crow. 

They developed the capacity of their students in their classrooms to understand the hypocrisy of what was in the founding documents and what was being manifested through conversations at the federal government. And what that did was it birthed a generation of civil rights leaders. 

Who was in the classrooms of Black educators in the South in the 20s and the 30s? King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, individuals who then became the leaders of the civil rights movement. 

So one, I just wanna underscore that we’ve been here before and what I believe that the individuals in the Trump administration may not understand about the complexities of schools is that they close their doors and they continue to do. And so I think that you’ll have lots of educators who will continue to do what they need to do to prepare their children to be successful in this global economy. 

And that’s talk about diversity, to talk about equity, and to talk about inclusion, in this moment, you’ll have teachers talking about how we are stronger when we’re more diverse. And diversity isn’t only race, it’s ability, it’s gender. So we’ll have teachers continuing to do that. 

But I also recognize that there will be some pain. I’ve told my students here at Cal that it will get worse before it gets better. You will have individuals who, and I think we’ve seen this with some of the Moms for Liberty, reporting teachers, reporting principals. I mean, you’re seeing people lose their jobs. You’ll see universities acquiesce to the demands of the department. I believe it will be for a season because you cannot stop work that, by its very nature, is centered around justice. 

Erika Zaro: Is there anything you think our audience needs to pay attention to when it comes to public education under the Trump administration?

Travis Bristol: It’s important for people to know that the President cannot shut down a department of education. A president can work to undermine the work of the department, but that’s an act of Congress. 

And I’m saying it because I think the more that we give a strong man more imagined power, the more power that strong man will lean into and take. 

And as I’ve reminded students in my class, the only thing that we have is our voice. That in this moment, what I have, this medium that we’re engaged in right now, this is the one thing that I have. 

I don’t know fully what will happen tomorrow, but today what I know is that in the midst of what might be happening in Washington, that I have an obligation to my students to continue to present what I believe is an accurate telling of what’s happening, a reminder that we’ve been here before, a reminder that a country that’s built off of a racial project, of course, will want to run away from talking about race. 

And, I, like probably many teachers in K-12 schools, are going to focus on today, recognizing that we may not see the seeds that we’re planting today how they’ll blossom tomorrow, but I know that they will. 

History will remember what we do in this moment, how we acquiesce or choose not to acquiesce in this moment, because this is … this is a moment. This is a moment.

Shereen Marisol Meraji: You’ve been listening to Travis Bristol. He’s a UC Berkeley professor of teacher education and education policy, and he was speaking with reporter Erika Zaro. 

Erika recently graduated from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism in spring of 2025. 

You’re listening to The Stakes Explained, a show produced by students at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. I’m Shereen Marisol Meraji, head of the audio journalism program at Cal. 

And next, we’re going to hear from Eric Greenwald, a senior researcher at the Lawrence Hall of Science whose life’s work involves making science education accessible to all children. 

Reporter and recent J-School graduate Megumi Tanaka interviewed Eric Greenwald for The Stakes Explained. 

Meg Tanaka: Can you tell us a little bit about your work and what originally drew you to this field?

Eric Greenwald: Yeah, so I am a learning sciences researcher. I look at how cutting edge technologies can be brought into math and science classrooms at the K-12 level and in informal learning spaces with an emphasis on learning design that works for communities long minoritized in STEM. 

Meg Tanaka: So making science accessible has kind of always been your passion? 

Eric Greenwald: Always. A lot of my work is at the intersection of AI, computer science, and math and science subject areas. And so we’re looking at ways to integrate AI concepts, ethics, computational thinking into math and sciences core subjects so that all kids have an opportunity to learn these things.

Meg Tanaka: I mean, AI specifically, we’re seeing it expand at such a rapid rate. I can definitely see how the impacts of that would be really important. And along the lines of that, if you could speak directly to policymakers about the importance of inclusive science education, what would you say?

Eric Greenwald: We need to position youth for success in future STEM careers. And we need to broaden the pool of people who can participate in those careers, just from a numbers perspective, but also from a quality of work perspective. For example, in AI, if the developers are all coming from a particular background and it’s not representative there’s a blindness to the problems that it can create. AI is filled with examples of that. And so it’s really, really critical to me that those conversations about how to develop AI, whether or not to deploy AI … include all voices. 

Meg Tanaka: The Trump administration has introduced policies restricting the use of federal funds for DEI initiatives, and we’ve seen significant cuts to science research as well as education outreach. What do you think is the reasoning for these cuts? And I would also like to ask how have these changes directly impacted your work? 

Eric Greenwald: The reasons given are efficiency and alignment with priorities. It’s hard to understand how those could be the actual reasons. Let me give you an example of a program that got terminated. A few months into a multi-year grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences, I was working with a science museum to help them use data more effectively, to improve operational decisions, to make them more data-driven, and to be more responsive to visitors.

When I think about what efficiency means, that seems like we were working on efficiency with this museum. But that got terminated. There’s no rationale that makes sense to me. These attacks on science education,you know, focusing on DEI and stuff like that, like I think that it’s an attack on all of science. You know, these are profoundly ideological decisions being made. It’s the opposite of science. I think it’s a tremendous tragedy to the health of our society. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot and it’s so sad.

Meg Tanaka: A lot of the efficiency related cuts have actually, it seems like, caused more work that is mitigating efficiency in different institutions, whether that be rewriting grants or rewording websites or reallocating funding within an institution.

Eric Greenwald: Yeah. The energy that I and my colleagues have been expending over the past months to try to figure out what of our work might still get funded. What of it might get pulled, how to pivot. It’s exhausting. It’s stressful. It feels so depressing. We’re in science education, like we’re trying to position our public for success. You know, this is public service work.

Meg Tanaka: What would you like the public to know when it comes to publicly funded university-level research? 

Eric Greenwald: The first thing is how competitive these grants are to win. These are not slush funds. These are projects where tremendous planning goes into the proposal. Teams of people with diverse expertise come together to construct a plan for how they might do the research. Developing that plan takes a tremendous amount of energy and time. And then the proposal is reviewed by other experts. 

I’ve been a part of review panels, the idea that something gets funded that doesn’t have merit is ridiculous. Yeah, so I think that’s a really important piece of just how competitive these grants are being terminated. 

Meg Tanaka: We talked a lot about the doom and gloom and of it all, which I think is so important to address. And I know it’s really hard for you to, you know, articulate all of this. And I really want to appreciate you for that, first of all, but I also want to ask you if you have any hope for the future of the field of science education, STEM education, even in the face of such challenges?

Eric Greenwald: It’s interesting because I think part of what my sadness comes from is how far we’ve come, especially over the last 10 years or so, in understanding how to design learning experiences that serve all students and that position kids for involvement in STEM fields. 

The sadness I feel is the potential loss of that, but the hope I feel is that there’s something really valuable that we’ve been building, collectively, that if we can figure out a way to maintain some of it, we have really good ideas. 

Meg Tanaka: Yeah, well, the ideas aren’t going to go away. 

Eric Greenwald: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s going to need some really loud pushback. And I know a lot of people are ready for it. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: You’ve been listening to  reporter Meg Tanaka interviewing Eric Greenwald. He’s a senior researcher at the Lawrence Hall of Science. 

The federal government canceled another one of Eric’s grants not long after this interview and the Lawrence hall of science has lost at least $6 million in federal funding cuts over the last couple of months. 

We’re moving now from education to immigration …where the Trump Administration set an aggressive target: 3,000 immigration arrests daily. According to David Hausman, a civil rights attorney, law professor and head of the Deportation Data Project, the executive order, Protecting the American People Against Invasion, offers a window into the current chaos.

David Hausman: What I always want to know is what’s new and what’s the same. So until recently, the numbers we were seeing in immigration enforcement, while they had gone up a lot since the end of the Biden administration, weren’t higher than the numbers we saw during President Obama’s first term. I constantly want to know whether that’s changing, whether the administration is succeeding in realizing its logistical plans to increase arrests, to increase detentions, to increase deportation flights. What’s new here? How different are things? 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: What is new? 

David Hausman: What’s new!?! In a way, the thing that’s most new is that we can’t keep track of what’s new. That there have been so many policy changes and it’s really hard to keep track of which ones are really important and which ones actually don’t matter very much. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: All right, so we’re going to go back in time to late January. President Trump signed an executive order titled Protecting the American People Against Invasion. That executive order looked like it broadened the definition of criminal behavior to include anybody who’s here without documentation? Is that your interpretation of the executive order? 

David Hausman: It’s broadly absolutely right that what that order did was make it open season for federal immigration officials to arrest anybody they found who they thought could be removed from the United States. 

So the way immigration enforcement traditionally practically has worked is that when ICE arrests people, it doesn’t really go arrest people on the street. Instead, it goes into local jails, state prisons, sometimes federal prisons, and transfers people who are already being held there to ICE custody. 

Sometimes those people don’t have criminal convictions. They might’ve just been arrested on suspicion of a crime. They might have even been arrested for just a traffic offense. That’s common. But ICE vastly prefers to arrest people who are already being locked up because it’s so much easier for ICE to do that. 

And so this order really broadens the scope of immigration enforcement. And it also suggests that immigration enforcement is really going to change in terms of the kinds of arrests that ICE is going to make and where those are going to happen. And I think we’ve actually seen that start, especially over the last couple of weeks, where there have been many more arrests out in the community and what we’re seeing is a public reaction against that because that’s not what people are used to. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: So when people are a little bit confused and they’re seeing what’s happening right now and they are saying, “Wow, we thought President Trump was just going to deport people with criminal records,” what would you say to them? 

David Hausman: I would say it was always a false promise that President Trump could conduct mass deportations of people convicted of crimes. There just aren’t very many non-citizens convicted of crimes in the United States. So this idea that you could have mass deportation of criminals is nonsense. 

In addition, very few crimes in relative terms are committed by non-citizens. So the idea that crime … if you’re concerned about crime, which is a real problem in the world, the idea that you would address that through the immigration system is also magical thinking. Because if you entered the U.S. on a visa and you overstayed it, that’s not a crime. It’s a civil infraction. There’s no crime there whatsoever.

Entering the U.S. between ports of entry is a minor misdemeanor. For many of the people who are here, the statute of limitations has run, so they couldn’t be charged with that crime. Very, very few people are charged or have been charged with that crime because it wasn’t understood in any kind of popular way as a crime. Deportation is generally a civil process. When somebody is deported from the United States, that’s not a criminal process. And what that means is you don’t get criminal protections either. You don’t get a trial before a real judge. You instead get a proceeding in immigration court, which is just a part of the Department of Justice. And the judge there is an official who works for the executive branch. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: Something that I’ve been thinking about while watching this most recent news is how these arrests are happening in sanctuary cities. Los Angeles is a sanctuary city. San Francisco is a Sanctuary city. Does this moniker, sanctuary city, does it hold any weight? 

David Hausman: Yeah, I think the term sanctuary city is really confusing actually because a sanctuary city has never meant that the government can’t come in and arrest a non-citizen on the street. It’s always been the case that the federal government is able to do that when it has lawful suspicion. 

So what a sanctuary City instead does is it limits voluntary cooperation between a local government, and it’s actually usually the county rather than the city. It’s usually about the sheriff who runs the county jail. And specifically, I mentioned before, that ICE’s favorite kind of arrest is an arrest of somebody who’s already locked up. It’s those kinds of arrests that sanctuary policies make a little more difficult. Because the way ICE likes to do this best is to send what’s called a detainer request to the local jail, which says you hold this person for 48 hours beyond when they otherwise would be released. And that way, we ICE will have plenty of time to come and transfer this person to our custody. 

And sanctuary cities say, “No, we don’t want to spend our own resources holding people for extra time for your immigration purposes. If you want to come arrest this person, you can do so, but we’re not going to help you out.” And that’s really what a sanctuary policy is mostly about. And so that’s why it doesn’t do anything to stop ICE agents from conducting arrests in public places in sanctuary cities. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: Birthright citizenship. There was the executive order that said, “Hey, we’re gonna get rid of birthright citizenship,” legal experts were like, “There’s no way that can possibly happen!” That’s coming back up in these conversations as people are watching ICE agents arrest people in ways that they hadn’t before. Is this something that we should pay attention to? 

David Hausman: I think birthright citizenship is something that the Supreme Court will agree is in the 14th amendment. I don’t think that there’s any reasonable chance that the Supreme Court will agree with the administration’s frankly pretty outlandish interpretation that would upend the century and a half of law here.

Shereen Marisol Meraji: So if people are going to prioritize what they’re worried about, are you saying that goes lower on the priority list? 

David Hausman: I would worry less about that and more about new arrests, more about attempts to deport people without any process. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: It is confusing to know what due process is …

David Hausman: The Supreme Court has said that due process rights stretch farther and less far in different contexts. Everybody who’s in the U.S., on U.S. Soil, very clearly has due process rights. That comes from the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, which just says you can’t be deprived of your liberty without due process. And it says persons, doesn’t say citizens, it says, persons. 

Anybody in the U.S. has due-process rights. And there’s a whole body of case law about exactly what due process means in terms of the right to a lawyer. Courts haven’t required the government to pay for people’s lawyers in deportation proceedings. So unlike in the criminal system where you get a public defender, in the immigration system there’s no right to lawyer at government expense. But there is a right, and this is a right that’s guaranteed by due process, to bring your own lawyer. 

Now, one thing people are often referring to is the way the Alien Enemies Act was used to deport people with no procedure at all. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: The Venezuelan nationals, for example, who were taken and put in CECOT in El Salvador, one of the most infamous prisons in the world.

David Hausman: That is certainly unprecedented. It’s also unprecedented, at least in any recent decade, to use immigration enforcement squarely to try to suppress speech. So the use of deportation proceedings in order to punish peaceful protest, that is new. And I think it’s also a mistake to see that as related to immigration. That’s instead about trying to suppress peaceful protest. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: This feels very chaotic and I actually don’t understand how the government is tracking all of this. 

David Hausman: The government does really have to track each time it arrests somebody, each time it books that person into a detention center, each time it moves that person from one detention center to another, and every deportation flight. The government has that information because it has to, otherwise it couldn’t conduct these operations at all. And that’s also the source of the data that we seek at Deportation Data Project, which is these government datasets. Which are subject to the Freedom of Information Act once personal information has been stripped away from them. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: Has the government been playing ball? 

David Hausman: The Freedom of Information Act FOIA process is really backlogged. As a result, if you want to get a swift response from the government, you often have to sue the government and we’ve done that. We got one update back in March that goes through mid February. We are hoping for another update soon. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: Well, David, thank you. 

David Hausman: Thanks so much for having me.

Shereen Marisol Meraji: You’ve been listening to UC Berkeley Assistant Professor of Law David Hausman. David runs the Deportation Data Project. The project collects and posts U.S. Immigration enforcement data sets and that’s at deportationdata.org.

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You’re listening to The Stakes Explained, a multimedia series from UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Reporters interview campus experts, journalists, and community members to unpack all those executive orders and actions … to find out what’s at stake for our democracy. We’ve posted videos from all of these conversations on Instagram. You can find us there @Berkeley Journalism. 

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Reporter Andrés Larios wanted to dig into the executive orders affecting refugee admissions into the United States. 

One order, Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program, suspended refugee resettlement indefinitely — unless you’re an Afrikaner from South Africa, there’s a different executive order President Trump signed titled Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa. And that executive order prioritizes resettlement for Afrikaners.

Andrés invited UC Berkeley Law Professor Sarah Song into The Stakes studio to better understand what all of this means. Her research areas include democratic theory and issues of immigration and citizenship. 

Andrés Larios: Welcome to The Stakes Explained. Professor Song, thank you for being with me. 

Sarah Song: Pleasure to be here. Please call me Sarah. 

Andrés Larios: Of course. Sarah, to get started, I would really love to understand a little bit why you decided to go into immigration law and study this very complex field. 

Sarah Song: So I am an immigrant. I immigrated to the U.S. When I was 6 from South Korea. And my dad had come to study theology in Chicago. And a year later, he got a green card. And he sponsored my mom, my brother, and me. And we moved to Kansas City, Missouri. And I always wondered, Why were we able to move? And how did my dad even get the idea to migrate? 

So I think those were always in the back of my mind. But also, intellectually, pedagogically, I think immigration touches on such important questions about the legitimacy of state power, the boundaries of justice, who belongs, citizenship, all of that. So I think it was something that was really calling to me. 

Andrés Larios: There are so many terms that refer to people trying to enter the United States. In our conversation today, you have the terms refugee, asylee, under U.S. law. What do these terms mean? 

Sarah Song: Refugee is often a term that’s used in everyday language colloquially to mean migrants who are fleeing danger, persecution. In the law, refugee, has a very specific definition. It’s a definition that goes back in international law to the UN convention on refugees in the 1950s. And that was incorporated into American law in 1980 with the Refugee Act. And so the definition is a person who is outside of their country of origin. So they’re no longer in their country of origin and who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin because of a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, political affiliation, or membership in a social group. 

Asylum seeker: Similar, someone who is fleeing persecution, but the critical difference between an overseas refugee and an asylum seeker is an asylum seeker has set foot in the territory of the United States or has presented themselves at a port of entry. And they are seeking to undergo the asylum process to show that they have a well-founded fear of persecution. And so I think that’s the key difference. 

Andrés Larios: What’s the process for becoming a refugee? 

Sarah Song: The process involves applying for asylum, undergoing interviews, and depending on the complexity of the case, especially for asylum seekers who arrive at a port of entry wanting to undergo the process, they may have to participate in legal proceedings. If the asylum officer who interviews them says, nope, you don’t qualify, they can appeal, and they’re supposed to have a hearing in front of an immigration judge. And the immigration judge makes the final determination. That process can take years. There are enormous backlogs, especially in the asylum seeker process. 

Andrés Larios: Can you give us a little bit about the history of refugee admission into the United States, the reception, and where many of these refugees to the United States are coming from? 

Sarah Song: So the history of refugee admissions in the U.S. have been marked by periods of large resettlement and admissions and also by periods of strict limits. So just to give you some examples, after World War II and during the Cold War, the U.S. admitted large numbers of refugees from Europe. So for example, the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 allowed for the admission of over 350,000 refugees from Europe. 

During the Cold War, the U.S. admitted refugees fleeing communist regimes, this is the Cold war, not only from Europe, but also from Cuba and from Southeast Asia. And so some of the factors influencing where refugees are coming from are where are their international conflicts? Because refugee crises are often the result of war and conflict. In 2023, the top countries of origin for refugees who were admitted to the United States were the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria and Afghanistan. 

Andrés Larios: Currently, we have President Donald Trump who is challenging these refugee admission norms and practices. Can you tell me why it is that the president is able to challenge these refugee admissions practices? 

Sarah Song: Good question. In the area of refugee and asylum law, the president has considerable discretionary power. 

Under the 1980 Refugee Act, the president has the power to set the annual number of refugees that can be admitted. They can also establish ceilings for refugee admissions from different parts of the world. The president can also suspend refugee admissions altogether. And that’s what the executive order that President Trump signed in February does. 

And it can go either way. A president can reduce or entirely suspend refugee emissions in a particular year, or they can increase. And so for example, I’ll give you some numbers. In 2008, President Obama raised the annual cap to 80,000 per year. And his administration admitted between 55,000 and 75,000 refugees per year during his administrations. Under President Trump’s first term, annual admissions, he lowered them. They dropped to 22,000 per year, and then in his final year to 11,000, per year. President Biden came in, he raised the ceiling to higher than what it was under Obama. He raised it to 125,000 per year but it took time to ramp back up. So in President Biden’s first year, only about 11,000 refugees were admitted. But by the end of President Biden’s term, the number of refugees admitted was about 100,000. 

Andrés Larios: Well, speaking of presidential power, the Trump administration under the first 100 days signed the reevaluating and redefining the refugee admissions program. But alongside that, they also signed an executive order designating Afrikaners as an oppressed group of people that have refugee status. Can you comment a little bit about this, how this came about and why? 

Sarah Song: So the executive order says it is U.S. policy to promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation. So think about this, the South African government is trying to rectify the legacy of apartheid. And President Trump is saying, well, that’s a kind of reverse discrimination against white Afrikaners. 

Andrés Larios: Why? Why is he sympathetic to Afrikaners and their plight?

Sarah Song: This is such an important question. And I think we have to go back to the first Trump administration. You may remember early in his first administration, he met with a bipartisan group of U.S. senators to talk about immigration policy. When he learned, right, that there are Haitians coming into the country, he referred to Haiti and African countries asshole countries. And he said, “Why do we have to take people in from those countries?” And he says, “Could we just take Haiti off the list?” And someone in the room said, “Well, if you did, it would be obvious why, that Haitians are not white.” In referencing Haiti and African countries asshole countries, right, he’s saying, “We don’t want migrants or refugees from those countries. Why can’t we take people from Norway?” 

Andrés Larios: And finally, for those who might not be following the issue of refugee admissions closely, why should they care? Why should someone care about the redefining and reevaluation of a refugee resettlement program in the United States? 

Sarah Song: I think we all have a stake in standing up for an inclusive vision of what it means to be an American. And so, even if, you know, you don’t think every day about the refugee admissions program and how it’s been suspended, if you think about the motivations for why it’s been suspended and a privileging of a particular group of people as the ideal American, I think it implies that all of the current citizens who are not white are not fully included. So that’s why. We should all care, even those of us who are privileged to already have the legal status of U.S. citizenship. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: That was UC Berkeley professor of law Sarah Song speaking with reporter Andrés Larios. 

There has been a barrage of news about immigration enforcement and immigration policy changes and journalists are having a hard time keeping up.

Reporter José Velazquez wanted to know the best practices for reporting on a rapidly shifting immigration landscape when your readers are Latino immigrants.

He spoke with Madeleine Bair to learn more. She’s a Berkeley J-school alum and the creator of a nonprofit news organization here in the Bay Area, called El Tímpano, which means eardrum in Spanish. 

Jose Velazquez: All right, so we’re here with Madeline Bair, award-winning journalist and founder of El Tímpano, a nonprofit local news organization that serves Spanish speakers and Mam speakers, which is a Mayan dialect. You’re also an alumni of the school, so welcome back. 

Madeleine Bair: Thank you. 

Jose Velazquez: How does it feel to be back, first of all? 

Madeleine Bair: Oh, it always feels great to be here.

José Velazquez: And then, just going straight into it, what was your inspiration for founding El Tímpano? Did you see that something was lacking for Spanish speakers and MAM speakers, or was it your experience in Oakland? 

Madeleine Bair: It goes back to my own personal and professional history. I actually got my start in journalism in Youth Media when I was a kid growing up in Oakland. And Youth Media really trains you to analyze media and think about whose perspectives are portrayed in the media: Whose are left out? Who does media serve? How does media sometimes perpetuate harm? And so those are questions that I continue to carry with me as I wound up then pursuing a career in journalism. 

I was always really interested in equity in media and growing up in Oakland, my community was always very diverse and I never saw that diversity really reflected in journalism, I’m not Latina. I’m not an immigrant myself, but I wound up falling in love in New York City and marrying into a Latino immigrant family.

As an English speaker, as a college graduate, as someone with a smartphone, I had so much more access to quality news and information and so many options as compared to my in-laws who had been living in New York for decades and had very few sources of quality news and information that they could turn to. 

Jose Velazquez: Hmm and so you saw that that was lacking for people here in the Bay Area? Just because this is very interesting to me … how were you ever to identify the Mayan diaspora here? Cause I think you actually really need to be in these communities to really recognize that that’s part of it, too. 

Madeleine Bair: You know, I had this inkling from the experience of my in-laws, from what I saw, that there was a gap here in the Bay Area. And I moved back to the Bay Area at the start of 2017. But I wanted to check my assumptions. I’m not from Oakland’s Latino immigrant community. 

I spent nearly a year just meeting with community leaders, asking them, “Do you see that there’s a gap? What is that gap? How would you like to see local media better serve or better reflect the communities that you’re from or that you serve?” And every single person I talked to said, “Yes, there’s huge need.” And I’m so grateful so many of them extended a hand to help me then kind of continue to pursue these questions. And then from there, we created a survey and spoke to hundreds of immigrants to hear directly from them what issues are most important to you. 

In that process, there were a lot of introductions that were made and the then branch manager of the Cesar Chavez Library said, you know, Madeleine, you need to speak with this guy, Henry Salas. He’s pursuing a lot of these same questions, but for the Mayan Mam community. I met this amazing young community leader, Henry, who’s from the Oakland’s Indigenous Mayan community and had really been trying to fill gaps, as well, in terms of providing more news, connecting people to resources that they need. And he’s the first person who really opened up my eyes and made me see that if there’s a need, particularly with Spanish-speaking immigrants, the need is so much greater for Mam Mayan-speaking immigrants. 

Jose Velazquez: Big, polarizing topic: immigration. As we all know, President Trump was able to use this topic in his campaign to successfully win the presidency, again. I know El Tímpano started around his first administration. What differences do you see now in news coverage compared to back then? 

Madeleine Bair: When I was first starting El Tímpano, and I shared with you, you know what, I was listening to a lot of immigrants themselves to hear what they want to see in local media. 

And one of the most common responses that we heard from people was, “I just avoid news because it just covers attacks on my community without giving me information I can actually use to take action.” And I’m sure we can all relate to that. The news is depressing, it’s frightening. Especially in times like this, I want to avoid the news, too. Yet that sort of news avoidance can also leave people vulnerable. Vulnerable to disinformation, vulnerable to just making decisions based on fear rather than based on quality information. El Tímpano has really, we’ve really designed our work so that it can provide people with information that actually connects them to resources or to pathways to take action. 

There has been more discussion since then in our industry as a whole of news avoidance, of what leads to that, of how we as journalists can actually equip people with information that is empowering or that helps them find solutions, or helps them navigate uncertainty, but it’s certainly not part of the mainstream. It’s certainly not ingrained in how our industry works. 

Jose Velazquez: Do you have advice for reporters attempting to cover immigration? Me, myself, I’m trying to do that. 

Madeleine Bair: Yeah, I would say I think there are two particularly challenging things to navigate. One is what we were just talking about is the the fear, and how can we report on these issues without perpetuating fear because that is actually an objective of this administration, is to really broadcast this idea of massive deportations and of really attacking immigrant communities and just using the fear tactic as a weapon in and of itself. 

But then another issue is the safety of the community members that we serve and who are in many times sources for our reporting. So El Tímpano’s newsroom created new policies, source protection policies. 

Right now, our reporters carry postcards when they go out to report that they use to talk with potential sources so that those sources understand, you know, basic things like what does it mean to speak to a reporter, that they have rights. They can decide at any moment to not speak with us or to tell us that, “This is off record.” It also explains what does it mean to be off record, what does that mean to be on record. Sometimes those are terms that, us journalists, we throw around and just assume that everyone knows, but most people on a day-to-day basis … have never actually spoken to a journalist and don’t really know what those terms mean. So we don’t want to take that for granted. 

And then we also take the identification of our sources very sensitively, particularly under this administration, just knowing that identifying people as undocumented immigrants can be a risk factor. We only use first names, we often change that name. This is very different, you know, it’s very different from editors who want to know anything and everything about a source. 

But then I think another thing that we’ve found that wasn’t really on my mind when I started El Tímpano, but I’ve seen this impact from hearing from our audience, it provides a sense of belonging for people to see their own stories reflected in the news, particularly at a time when there is so much dehumanization of immigrants, it is so important for people to know that they belong and that their story matters. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: You’ve been listening to Madeleine Bair, a journalist and founder of El Tímpano, a nonprofit newsroom designed to engage and amplify the voices of the Latino immigrants of Oakland. She was speaking with reporter José Velazquez. 

Our last two interviewees stressed the importance of inclusion.

Sarah Song: I think we all have a stake in standing up for an inclusive vision of what it means to be an American. And belonging.

Madeleine Bair: It is so important for people to know that they belong and that their story matters. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: john a. powell studies the significance of belonging and bridging differences.

He’s the director of the Othering and Belonging Institute here at UC Berkeley. He’s also a law professor, he has a new book out, The Power of Bridging, and john powell is in conversation with reporter NeEddra James. 

NeEddra James: Can you explain for people who are new to your work what bridging means? 

john powell: Sure, the idea is that we have these social cleavages. We live in separate neighborhoods, we go to separate places to worship, we go to separate schools, and we have ideas about each other, but not from lived experience, from ideas, from movies, from books, from propaganda. And this is really what the nature of prejudice is about. Prejudice, prejudging. 

The one way you deal with that is that you bridge. You actually deliberately develop a relationship with people who are socially considered the other. And I say socially considered because there really is no other.  So we live in stories and bridging is: listen to another person’s story. We all know our own story. We all our own suffering. We don’t know the suffering and burden of other people. When that happens, the other person becomes humanized.

NeEddra James: If we have folks being educated kind of in silos in some instances and developing ideas about others who may not live in their neighborhood or that don’t go to their schools, for example, how do they even come to have these kinds of conversations if we see each other as so radically different? 

john powell: Yeah, I think empathy is not necessarily hard to achieve. I think in some ways it’s the opposite, is that we have to teach people to hate, we have teach people to be racist. Every single religion, and certainly Christianity, one of the radical teachings of Christianity was that we all are God’s children. And 2,000 years ago, and maybe even today, that’s a radical concept. Well, if you’re rich, you’re God’s child. Or if you are white, you are God’s Child. Or if you’re this, it’s like everybody. And so, it is not a new idea. And I think it’s more than an idea. 

I mean, human comes from the word humus, so this means “of the Earth.” We’re part of the earth. We’re connected to the earth, we are part of each other. It’s not just an idea and so we have to work really hard to keep the lie alive that we’re separate. And certainly they were separated by race and by ethnicity. 

NeEddra James: How would you respond to someone who says, “Well, it’s nice to have people sit together and talk about their stories and get to know each other, but that’s not gonna change structures. It’s not going to change institutions.” How do you respond to that critique? 

john powell: Well, you work on multiple levels. Structures are powerful, but in the last few years what people have found out is that stories may even be more powerful than structures. That what we believe call those structures into being. And so it’s not either or, it’s both/and. What we think is affected by structures and culture, and what the structures and cultures are is a reflection of our collective thinking. 

NeEddra James: What kind of stories or narratives does this moment need? 

john powell: Well, one of the things, because stories and narratives are really subtle and operate on many different levels, one of things is that we shouldn’t have someone telling somebody else’s story in the absence of that group. In other words, we should co-create. So we don’t want men being the sole storytellers of women, even before you know what they say. It’s not saying men can’t participate. But if you silence one group, and a lot of these executive orders are nothing but pure and simple, censoring thought and speech, it’s like I have an ideology, I’m powerful, I’m rich, I have the organ of government behind me. 

If you say certain words … I mean, how obscene is it in this country when we have a list of words that are suspect, a list of words? How is it that we’re banning books? That’s the bedrock of a liberal democracy, for people to be able to have an exchange of ideas. Nope, not that idea. So we’re not in search of the truth right now. We’re in the midst of a deep ideological war with people who are very powerful and offering something to America that’s as un-American as it could possibly be. 

NeEddra James: How do you explain to our listeners, for example, how someone as anti-democratic as Trump is turning out to be is able to ascend to power through democratic means? 

john powell: Sure, you know, our democracy has never been a full democracy. We’re still in process. But the thing that actually motivates people a lot is fear. And one of the things that actually creates that anxiety, that fear, is change that’s happening very rapidly, change that we feel like we can’t control. And that’s happened all around the world. Changes based on the economy, globalization, technology, and of course demographics. And so the world is changing and no one really feels in control. And what you have is what Amanda Ripley calls conflict entrepreneurs. What they do is trade in conflict. You’re afraid, I’ll tell you, you should be afraid. And this is why you should be afraid. 

First of all, they excite the fear and then they say, “I’m the only one that can protect you.” They point to the other as being the problem. The reason you’re afraid, the reason you are losing your religion, your house, your job, is because of the other. 

One of the things that’s interesting though, this may be a silver lining, othering is being weaponized, but the thing that’s driving a lot of it is people’s desire to belong. People feel alone, people feel lost, and the need to belong is actually quite powerful. But, we say, you have to have belonging without othering.

We, as sapiens, can imagine things, can tell stories, and those stories can become quite powerful. For example, money. Money is a story. Google, that’s a story, we can tell stories about things that we haven’t seen, that we can imagine. 

NeEddra James: So by that logic, democracy is a story. 

john powell: Democracy is a “And how far can we go in that story?” Imagination’s not limited. That’s the beauty of it, our ability to cooperate is because we can imagine. How far can we imagine? So we can’t imagine a world where, in some ways, racism doesn’t exist? Yet, racism has a history and history’s not that old. So for most of human history, it didn’t exist.

Someone had to create it. Convince people of it. Tell a story, then build structures and edifice to make it just have real consequences. But we’re not done. We can tell different stories. 

Shereen Marisol Meraji: That was NeEddra James, reporter and grad student at Berkeley Journalism, speaking with Cal Law Professor john powell, whose most recent book is called The Power of Bridging. 

Thank you for listening to North Gate Radio’s The Stakes Explained, where students at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism interview experts to help make sense of the new orders, actions and policies flooding out of the White House. 

I’m Shereen Marisol Meraji, the executive producer. I also run the audio program at UC Berkeley’s journalism school. 

And a big, big shout out to The Stakes Explained video crew: Hallie Applebaum, Alicia Chiang, Paul Ghusar and Winnie Yao. Paul Ghusar produced our theme music, you’re listening to it now.  If you want to see video of these conversations, find us on Instagram. We’re @berkeleyjournalism. 

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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