LISTEN HERE
Three hours. More insight. More laughs. More music.
Saturday mornings are where we have time to go beyond the headlines. It’s three hours of news, lively conversation, thought-provoking guests, your phone calls, and, of course, some great music mixed in along the way. We connect the dots, challenge the conventional wisdom, and explore the stories shaping our country with a little more depth—and a lot more fun—than the weekday clock allows.
SATURDAY MORNING EXTRAVAGANZA: When an arrest becomes ‘terrorism’ because ICE did it
Saturday morning radio is supposed to wander a little. You talk politics, you play music, somebody reminds you that three guys once tried to steal Elvis Presley’s body, and you discover that Kevin has apparently assembled the most annoying-song playlist in human history.
And somewhere between Rick Astley and Sergeant Pepper, Chris Murphy tells you ICE is terrorizing Connecticut.
That got my attention.
Murphy was talking about immigration arrests in Danbury, where ICE agents reportedly waited until children had boarded school buses before taking parents into custody. His description was dramatic: children go to school, their parents are “disappeared,” six- and seven-year-olds return to an empty bus stop, walk home, find a locked door and discover Mom and Dad are gone.
Then came the conclusion. Murphy said this was intentionally designed to “traumatize” children and put an entire city “into a state of terror.”
That is an enormous accusation, and I kept coming back to a very basic question: What exactly would ICE have been allowed to do?
Arrest the parents while the children were standing there?
Imagine that headline: ICE agents seize parents in front of terrified children.
If an arrest became noisy, emotional or physical, we would hear that agents recklessly endangered kids. Instead, if the account is accurate, agents waited until the children were gone — and now that is evidence of cruelty too.
That is quite a system. Arrest them in front of the kids, you’re a monster. Wait until the kids leave, you’re also a monster.
At some point, enforcing the law has to be possible without every available option being described as an atrocity.
None of that means separation from a parent is pleasant. Of course it isn’t. A child whose mother or father is arrested can be frightened, confused and heartbroken.
But that happens every day in America.
Police arrest parents for all sorts of offenses, and those parents are taken away from their children — sometimes for hours, sometimes for years. We do not normally describe the police department as a terrorist organization because an arrest disrupted a family.
Yet when immigration law is involved, suddenly ordinary consequences of law enforcement are presented as something uniquely monstrous.
That is the part I object to, because words matter. “Terrorism” means something. “Disappeared” means something. If every lawful arrest becomes terror because we dislike the law being enforced, pretty soon those words mean nothing at all.
There is another problem here too. States and local governments that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement make these confrontations more likely.
If ICE cannot take custody of someone at a jail because local authorities will not cooperate, agents have to locate that person somewhere else: at home, at work, in public, maybe near a school bus.
Then everybody acts shocked that immigration agents are operating in public.
You cannot make ordinary enforcement harder and then complain that enforcement becomes visible.
That was the political argument that stuck with me Saturday. Thankfully, though, a three-hour Saturday show is not three straight hours of politicians yelling.
We also celebrated one of the stranger anniversaries in American history. In 1977, three men were arrested in Memphis for allegedly trying to steal Elvis Presley’s body.
Apparently Elvis had not merely left the building. Somebody was trying to take the building’s former occupant with them.
The incident helped lead to his remains being moved to Graceland, which seems like a fairly extreme way to improve home security.
Then there was the music.
Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” made an appearance, a perfectly good song that humanity collectively turned into a prank. You clicked a link expecting a chimpanzee fighting a dog and suddenly there was Rick Astley.
It happened often enough that an entire generation got Rickrolled into submission.
We also had the Beatles and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” which Kevin thankfully did not place on the annoying-song list. There are some lines you simply do not cross.
And that was hardly everything that found its way onto the air this week. There was the Lindsay Clancy trial, Rikers Island, Hasan Piker, political campaigns paying influencers, immigration fights, Trump, oil and enough bizarre cultural material to keep us busy for considerably longer than one column.
But I keep returning to Danbury because it illustrates something larger than immigration.
We are increasingly losing the ability to distinguish between something painful and something illegal, something unpleasant and something abusive, something politically objectionable and something evil.
A child being separated from a parent after an arrest can be heartbreaking without making the arrest terrorism. A government can enforce a law without enjoying its consequences. Citizens can debate whether a law is wise without pretending the people enforcing it are deliberately trying to traumatize children.
We used to be able to hold all those thoughts at the same time.
Maybe we still can.
Although if Kevin plays Rick Astley again next Saturday, I reserve the right to reconsider.
— Bo Snerdley
That is what makes the Saturday Morning Extravaganza different. We have time to play the full clips, take your calls, explore the history, enjoy the music and let a conversation breathe. You can listen to the complete Saturday Extravaganza here—preferably with a strong cup of coffee and enough time to enjoy the ride.
And if you like your politics at a faster clip, join me Monday through Friday for Rush Hour. It is a quicker, hotter sprint through the day’s biggest stories—the political fights, media foolishness and breaking developments everyone will be arguing about by dinner.
Finally, don’t rely on social-media algorithms to decide what news you are allowed to see. Sign up for The Daily BS and get my news stack delivered directly to you. It is free, it arrives daily, and unlike the legacy media, we do not need three unnamed sources to tell us which way the wind is blowing.
LOOK FOR RUSH HOUR IN THE DAILY BS BLASTS TUESDAY – SAT!
Look out for the Rush Hour link Tuesday – Saturday in your Daily BS email blast.
