Fear, Power, and the Rule of Law: Lee Gelernt on America's Immigration Crisis

Release date September 28. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify  and YouTube.

Since January 2025, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested more than 460,000 people — roughly three times the pace of the year before. On any given day, more than 73,000 people are held in ICE detention, a record high. Behind those numbers are families who no longer feel safe leaving their homes, children who don't know if their parents will be there when they get back from school, and communities across the country, from Los Angeles to rural Idaho, grappling with a level of fear that many residents say they've never experienced before.

In the latest episode of PopTalks, Dr. Thoại Ngô sits down with Lee Gelernt, Senior Attorney with the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, to make sense of what's changed — and why it matters well beyond the immigrant communities most directly affected. 

Key Takeaways:

• Since January 2025, ICE has arrested more than 460,000 people — nearly three times the previous year's pace — with over 73,000 people in detention on any given day, a record high.

• The administration has invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime authority used only three times before in U.S. history, against individuals alleged to be gang members — not a foreign nation at war with the U.S.

• Immigration courts are being reshaped from within, judges seen as too sympathetic to immigrants are being removed and replaced, eroding a degree of independence past administrations of both parties had preserved.

• Public health evidence changes what courts and the public understand.

• Gelernt argues that abstraction of immigration law is what allows harmful policy to persist — and that individual stories, like a reunited mother and daughter, are what cut through it.

• Public pushback, not just litigation, is what moves policy. Shifting polls and judges across the political spectrum standing up to the administration is evidence that visible public opposition is already having an effect.

• Gelernt remains hopeful. He frames progress as "a slow grind" rather than a single turning point, but believes the country will come through this period — provided people keep pushing.

A Different Scale, and a Different Kind of Power

Gelernt, who has spent more than three decades litigating immigrants' rights cases at the ACLU, tells Dr. Ngô that this moment is unlike anything he's seen. Part of it, he explains, is simply a matter of scale: the administration is enforcing existing immigration law "to the absolute hilt," abandoning the discretion that both Democratic and Republican administrations had historically applied to avoid separating families or targeting children.

But Gelernt argues something else is happening too — the use of authority that was never intended for immigration enforcement at all. He walks listeners through the administration's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law that has been used only three times in U.S. history: the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II. This time, it was invoked against individuals the administration alleged were members of a Venezuelan gang — men who were subsequently sent to a prison in El Salvador without due process, a fact the government has since admitted in court.

The conversation also turns to a less visible story: the restructuring of immigration courts, which operate within the executive branch rather than as independent federal courts. Gelernt describes new performance standards, accelerated proceedings, and the removal of judges seen as too sympathetic to immigrants — changes he says represent a broader effort to undermine due process and the rule of law itself.

Where Public Health Fits In

As Chair of Columbia's Department of Population and Family Health, Dr. Ngô presses Gelernt on a question that sits at the intersection of his own field and Gelernt's: what role can public health research play in moments like this?

Gelernt's answer is direct — an essential one. He points to the family separation litigation from Trump's first term, where affidavits from medical professionals and testimony on the developmental impact of separating young children from their parents were, in his words, "absolutely critical" to explaining the harm in court. He also describes how public health experts helped make the case for safe, targeted alternatives to a blanket asylum shutdown during COVID-19. For Gelernt, these aren't abstract contributions — they're often what turns a legal argument into something judges, lawmakers, and the public can viscerally understand.

The Human Stories Behind the Numbers

Some of the episode's most affecting moments come when Gelernt moves away from legal strategy and into memory. He describes the reunification of a mother and daughter after a four-month separation — a scene captured in the documentary The Fight — and a quieter moment in Mexico, when a ten-year-old boy summoned the courage to thank him, in halting English, for helping bring his family back together.

For Gelernt, these stories are the point. He tells Dr. Ngô that the administration's strategy depends on making immigration an abstraction — numbers, categories, threats — because abstractions are easier to dismiss than people. Countering that, he argues, means insisting on the human dimension of every case.

Reason for Hope

The episode doesn't end in despair. Gelernt points to a January 2026 poll showing nearly 60% of Americans disapprove of how ICE is enforcing immigration law, and to federal judges across the political spectrum pushing back against the administration's overreach. He's careful to describe civil rights progress as "a slow grind" rather than a single turning point — but he's clear that the public's willingness to push back is what has moved things so far, and what will determine how quickly the country moves through this period.

Asked what he'd want listeners to take away above all, Gelernt keeps it simple: this isn't the first time immigrants have been scapegoated in American history, and the country has come out of those periods before. Getting out of this one more quickly, he says, depends on the public refusing to stay quiet.

Listen to the full conversation between Dr. Thoại Ngô and Lee Gelernt on PopTalks — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. New episodes every two weeks.

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