The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

Donald Trump is already unhappy about the pace of deportations under his presidency. The Washington Post reports that Trump officials have instructed ICE to aggressively ramp up the number of daily arrests to make Trump happy, even setting quotas and threatening to discipline those who fall short of them. But something else in this report caught our eye: The pressure to meet those quotas will make it more likely that ICE officials sweep in noncriminal immigrants, which reveals the absurdity of all the Trump/White House propaganda on deportations we’ve been seeing. They’ll now have to target less dangerous offenders to keep up appearances that Trump is strong and powerful. Today, we have a great guest to demystify all this: Deborah Fleischaker, a former senior official at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security for many years, including during the first Trump administration. Deborah, thanks for coming on.

Deborah Fleischaker: Thanks for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Sargent: This Washington Post report says that officials with ICE have been informed by Trump officials to arrest at least 1,200 to 1,500 people per day because Trump is “disappointed” with his mass deportations so far. Trump people are denying this, but the bottom line is they really are asking for a very large ramped up deportation total, even if they’re not asking for exact quotas. Can you put this in perspective for us? How many average arrests were we seeing daily under Biden? And how big a scaling up would what Trump wants really amount to?

Fleischaker: Look, it would be a huge increase. I don’t have the exact numbers, but it would be that we were arresting probably around 300 a day under the Biden administration. So going up to 1,200 a day would be an exponential increase in arrests. I’m not even sure that they could do that many arrests. But what it would mean is that they have to focus on where they can get numbers, not where they can go after the biggest public safety threats. And from my perspective, you want to make sure that you’re handling those public safety threats first.

Now, you could arrest people who are checking in at ICE offices—that wouldn’t be how I would suggest people do it, they’re already complying. But they could do that. It just, again, means that we’re diverting resources from the people who I think the Trump administration promised to focus on and who I would argue we should be focusing on.

Sargent: What Deborah is saying here is that one way you could get those numbers up is to go after the people who are actually checking in with ICE. These are people who are cooperating. They may be awaiting certain types of legal proceedings, that type of stuff. These are not people who are trying to evade the law. They’re cooperating with ICE and you could arrest them to get those numbers up. It’s absurd. So you were at DHS during the first Trump administration at the time. They also tried to hit new deportation levels and failed, right? What was your role there? Why weren’t they able to hit new targets? And how is what we’re seeing now different from Trump 1.0?

Fleischaker: It is hard to get numbers up. The Obama administration did increase the number of deportations, of removals. So for the Trump administration under Trump 1.0 to continue to increase them was challenging, given the resources in terms of the dollars you had to put toward that and the number of law enforcement officers you had to put toward that.

In Trump 2.0, they’re trying to increase those variables, certainly with the number of people they’re putting toward it,........

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