What The Hell America!

INSIDE NED’S CLUB WASHINGTON, DC—the swanky new private members’ club featuring vintage gold and green furnishings, a renowned chef and mixologist, and a rooftop with views of the White House—cable news figures can often be seen holding court alongside an array of Democrats and Trump administration officials taking meetings, all of them free to relax in the same space outside the view of the public.

A recent chance encounter there between bitter 2024 campaign rivals, however, reveals how the overheated political climate is becoming less and less hospitable to cross-partisan bonhomie, particularly when immigration is a chief concern.

As Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) headed toward the elevator to leave on a recent late-winter day, he ran into his former opponent, the infamous Trump acolyte Kari Lake. As Gallego went for a handshake, Lake accepted it with both hands—a gesture that usually accompanies a warm greeting.

What she said was anything but that.

“How does it feel,” she asked, “to be bought and paid for by the cartels?”

Gallego was taken aback, according to a person familiar with the exchange. So, too, was Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.), who was within earshot of two and blasted Lake—whom Trump tapped to lead Voice of America before dismantling it this week—for speaking that way to a U.S. senator.

Lake’s comments echoed dark accusations she first made during her last failed campaign, when she publicly claimed Gallego was “controlled by the cartels” and that his “own father was a Colombian drug trafficker.” Those comments, delivered in an interview with Newsmax, were rated by PolitiFact as “Pants on Fire!” false.

“I mean, look, it is pretty gross,” Gallego told The Bulwark when asked about the exchange with Lake. While Gallego said he tried to avoid escalating the situation in the moment, he did drop a sarcastic barb before the elevator doors closed.

“My wife is very disappointed in me because she said ‘You didn’t take the bait for two years,’” he told The Bulwark.

“I should not have overreacted,” he added. “I did try to rub it in—when [Lake] essentially said, ‘How could you live with yourself everyday?’ I’m like, ‘Easily: I won,’ and I walked away.”

Lake’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

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I WAS THINKING ABOUT LAKE’S UGLY COMMENTS as I arrived at the NOAH Cholla Health Center in Scottsdale, Arizona for a town hall with Gallego and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), who were there to rouse voters to support their defense against expected Republican Medicaid cuts. Deep purple Arizona was ground zero for immigration as an electoral issue in 2024. It’s where Trump wrestled back control of the state’s Electoral College votes even as Gallego outperformed Kamala Harris, particularly with Latinos, to beat Lake.

Now, as Trump pursues a mass-deportation program with new legally dubious actions seemingly every day, I am wondering how voters are looking back on their choice.

On the whole, it appears that they remain largely supportive of Trump.

While a recent NBC News poll found that the president was underwater with voters on the economy, inflation and cost of living, foreign policy, and the Russia-Ukraine war, 55 percent of respondents still approved of his moves on immigration and the border.

But in interviews, the takeaway is often more nuanced. Retired Navy veteran Tom Dyson, 69, said he had been looking forward to the bipartisan immigration bill being passed during Biden’s term—until, “unfortunately, Trump decided he wanted to torpedo that.” Dyson, who lives ninety minutes from the border, said Trump’s deportations only accomplish half of the job on immigration.

“I know someone down where I live who’s been waiting eight years to get his son into the country who happened to be born outside of the U.S.,” he said. “I’m not an advocate of completely open borders, but by the same token, you have to have easy mechanisms for people to use.”

The town hall came immediately after the administration made good on its promise to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—crafted to be used during wartime—to classify Venezuelan migrants (alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang) as enemies it can summarily deport without due process.

While legal scholars, attorneys, and some Democrats fear the nation is barreling headlong towards a constitutional crisis—or is already in the middle of one—Gallego told The Bulwark that Trump has set a “trap” for his party on the issue.

“I think the most important thing we have to understand—this is all one big set trap. He wants us to fight him on Venezuelans, probably most of them are gang members and Venezuela is not taking them back, so El Salvador is,” he said. “The real problem is when he’s gonna use this on the mother who has U.S.-born citizen kids and skipping their due process. The real problem is going to be for the Dreamer that hasn’t done anything wrong.”

Trump, he added, “really has failed at his goals of increasing deportations,” so he’s making a “dangerous” turn toward the “innocent” elements of the immigrant community. “We have to be aware and ready to then fight him. But let’s not fight him in this area because it’s not our high ground. These aren’t people I want in this country, either, a bunch of gang members from Venezuela.”

I followed up with Gallego. After all, while the administration says these men are gang members, it has provided no evidence to support its claim except specious arguments about tattoos. Some of the people being sent to Guantánamo Bay on those grounds ended up not having criminal records.

Isn’t this controversy really about the fact that we don’t know who these people are, I asked?

“Yeah, of course. Again this is why we have to choose our battles smartly,” Gallego said. “Most Americans don’t understand, and they’re going to believe that most of them were gang members, and so on the individual level, when we have those types of situations, we should make sure that we help them when we can, but on the grander scheme of things, lets fight on smart, higher ground.”

Gail Hildebrant, a 70-year-old retired telecommunications professional and former Reagan voter, was at the town hall event. She said she disagrees with the senator.

“The 1798 Alien Act and deporting tons of people—I’m against that,” she said. “They don’t even have a chance to find out if the people they’re deporting are in a gang, there’s not enough time. I don’t like unfair practices made against people who are vulnerable like immigrants are. I don’t like not using due process.”

Sen. Kelly came in along similar lines.

“While we need to focus on removing violent criminals, this is just another example of the Trump administration focused more on intimidation and headlines than real, long-lasting solutions for our immigration system,” the former U.S. Navy combat pilot told The Bulwark. “There are more than enough laws on the books to enforce without needing to invoke wartime powers in peacetime.”

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Ricardo Reyes, 43, an organizer for Common Defense, a veterans-led grassroots organization, said while he supported Gallego, he did take issue with the senator’s vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which many Democrats and activists fear will be used to erode due process and increase racial profiling for immigrants accused of petty crimes like shoplifting.

I asked Gallego about Reyes’s criticism of what the latter called a “terrible” bill and mentioned his desire to hear an explanation from the senator for why he voted for it.

“At the end of the day, Laken Riley was a tough vote, no matter what. It is a tool that can be used by law enforcement to get some really bad people,” Gallego stressed. But he added that he does not believe the law will be used to broadly erode rights because, by design, it is costly to detain somebody until their court date. “There’s a lot of other bills we’re going to have to fight off. This is not one of those we should be expending our political capital on,” he said.

While the town hall was centered on Medicaid cuts, a discussion about a lack of doctors did illustrate how immigration can often become central to conversations about seemingly unrelated issues.

Kelly invoked the case of Rasha Alawieh, a kidney-transplant doctor and professor at Brown University who was deported to Lebanon.

“Now we’ve started tossing people out,” Kelly said of Alawieh not receiving due process. “So we’re up against an administration that does not follow the rules and in some cases are breaking laws.”

(Later, DHS said Alawieh had told agents that she was in Beirut for the funeral of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, whom she said she supported in his role as a Shia Muslim religious figure but not as a political leader.)

It was clear that at least in the first town hall for Arizona’s senators, there were many in the room who felt immigrants are being constantly smeared because figures like Trump and Lake are so committed to using them to divide people.

Gallego, for example, has been open about his father’s criminal history (the elder Gallego was found guilty of felony possession with intent to sell marijuana and cocaine when Ruben was a child). Still, Lake’s words at Ned’s Club stung, he said.

“I think the reason it finally got to me—I always thought it was an act, I thought she was always just acting and pretending that she thought I was somehow involved with cartels,” Gallego said, “because no sane person would ever look at me or my family, who clearly have rejected the criminality of my father. I served my country to repay my debt to this country and to try to wash away the sins of my father. I’ve been a fairly successful person in life, and so has the rest of my family. So I guess, for me, it hurts.”

He said Latinos in this country could relate.

“There’s a lot of other Latinos that are in my same situation, that you could do everything right, and all it takes is some wacky lady to accuse you as being part of a cartel just because your last name happens to be Hispanic,” he said.

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