As part of our work at Tangle, we solicit reader questions about politics and our work every day in our newsletter. And every few months, so many interesting questions we want to answer pile up that we decide to tackle a bunch of them at once in a members-only reader mailbag. Today is one of those days.
We think these mailbags are a healthy exercise that not only helps us cycle through our stack of questions, but also allows us to critically examine some of our own writing and provide readers with more perspectives that help us fulfill our core mission.
As always, a hearty thank you to the many readers and listeners who write in with thoughtful questions or raise challenging criticisms that help us improve. We hope you enjoy today’s mailbag!
Q: What did you think about Trump’s foreign policy speech in the Middle East? It struck me as a pretty big deal.
— Terry from Springfield, Ohio
Isaac Saul, Executive Editor: I loved it, genuinely. If you were someone who didn’t watch it, I highly recommend giving it a view or reading the transcript. It was the kind of speech — and worldview — that Trump espoused in 2016 that I found really appealing.
Among other things, he insisted on building a path toward peace in the Middle East on trade rather than war. I particularly loved this flourish: “Before our eyes, a new generation of leaders is transcending the ancient conflicts and tired divisions of the past, and forging a future where the Middle East is defined by commerce, not chaos; where it exports technology, not terrorism; and where people of different nations, religions, and creeds are building cities together — not bombing each other out of existence.”
He also openly criticized the failed nation building of past U.S. administrations, emphasizing that strides toward regional peace have been made not by Western interventionists (“nation builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits”), but by “the people of the region themselves… developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies.”
During Trump’s first term, he made quite a bit of progress in this mission with the Abraham Accords. He is clearly interested, now, in bringing Saudi Arabia and Qatar more fully into the fold — and I expect any grand “deal” or vision for the Middle East will include advancing the Arabian peninsula's relationships with Israel and charting a definite path forward for Palestinians and Gaza.
Of course, Trump opened himself up to easy criticism: His typical exaggerations about past successes, some inconsistencies between his speech and his current actions (see: saber-rattling with Iran, his greenlighting of the bombings in Gaza), and the undercurrent of corruption that permeates so many of his dealings with Middle East countries. These are not small caveats, to be clear, but I can separate them from his overall vision for a prosperous Middle East.
Q: Has the crime rate gone down in the communities where ICE has removed the greatest number of immigrants? Stated another way, are we getting a benefit from the costs of deportation and the loss of tax money generated by immigrants?
— Peggy from Lotus, California
Lindsey Knuth, Associate Editor: The most recent national removal numbers are current as of March 28, but the most relevant data for your question is actually deportations delineated by area of removal, which stopped updating in January of this year (President Trump is probably being less forthcoming about deportation numbers than he is with, say, border encounters because deportations have lagged behind his goals). But as of January, the top five cities by number of removals have been Harlingen (TX), El Paso (TX), Phoenix (AZ), San Antonio (TX), and Houston (TX).
These communities, all in states along the U.S.–Mexico border, account for approximately 60% of all deportations conducted in the last five years. A majority of them also have rates of violent crime that trend above the national average. In 2023, cases of violent crime averaged 374 incidents per 100,000 people nationally, compared to Harlingen (312), El Paso (336), Phoenix (790), San Antonio (694), and Houston (1092). However, looking side-by-side at the two numbers doesn’t tell us much — especially not about whether deportation can affect the crime rate. To draw any firm conclusion, we’d have to employ a methodology that controls for variables like existing crime rate trends, other drivers of crime, reverse causes (perhaps more crime causes more deportation), demographics, lag time to see effects on the crime rate — just to name a few.
Fortunately, some researchers have done that. Several studies have tackled the deportation/crime-rate question by following the rollout of a federal program called Secure Communities, which aimed to prevent recidivism — repeat crimes — by unauthorized migrants by requiring local law enforcement to share arrestee records with federal immigration officials and deport individuals already in custody. From 2008–2013 (and a brief stint in 2017), the program removed more than 363,400 unauthorized migrants with criminal convictions across over 3,100 jurisdictions. For reference, that’s nearly eight times as many migrants currently in detention in the U.S. Each of the studies took a slightly different approach to measure Secure Communities’ effects, but together their findings support a similar, surprising conclusion: The policy had no meaningful impact on trends in the crime rate.
Now, the Secure Communities program is distinct from President Trump’s mass deportation agenda in a few respects: It solely targeted migrants in custody and focused on the efforts of local police, but the results complicate his administration’s core assumption — that mass deportation will inevitably lead to a decrease in crime. Highly publicized cases of violent crime committed by unauthorized immigrants tend to obscure the lack of evidence they commit more crime than U.S. citizens or immigrants here legally. Here we have a program directly targeting criminals that didn’t (statistically) make communities safer, and instead led to decreased reports of crime, by worsening trust between immigrants and the police.
As for whether the public-safety benefit of deportation outweighs its financial costs, the answer is probably not. As you noted, deportations aren’t free — in 2016, Immigration and Customers Enforcement (ICE) estimated the government cost per removal to be $10,854. This figure accounted for direct costs, like funding for detention centers and ICE and Customs and Border Protection operations, but removal costs also come more indirectly, through losses in deported migrants’ tax revenue and in any future contributions they might make to GDP. Recently, more partisan policy groups attempted to calculate the bill we’d foot should Trump succeed in his promise to deport “millions and millions” of unauthorized migrants, and those estimates are running into the trillions.
All evidence aside, it’s worth noting that some people view deportation as an effective means of deterring crime whether or not it lowers the crime rate. In their view, even if migrants here illegally don’t have higher rates of crime than U.S. citizens, unauthorized immigrants are a group we have the legal means to remove from the country, therefore stopping any crimes they would have committed as noncitizens. For that camp, this question might be a nonstarter to rule on the benefits of deportation.
Q: Have you ever run across stories you wanted to make an article about but the coverage was dominated by one side of the political spectrum and hardly mentioned by the other side? If you found yourself in this situation what would you do? How would you address it?
— Anonymous
Will Kaback, Senior Editor: Absolutely. In fact, it’s happened a few times in recent weeks. On Wednesday, we narrowed our potential topics for the next day’s newsletter down to the Afrikaner refugees coming to the U.S. and the internal disarray at the Democratic National Committee. As a team, we leaned toward the DNC story, since it felt like an under-the-radar topic with interesting implications for the future of the party. However, after an extensive search, we found virtually no opinion articles from writers on the left.
Conversely, on Tuesday, we considered covering Trump’s comments about raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for Republicans’ tax and spending cuts package. However, that story had generated sufficient commentary on the left, but very little on the right.
Other times, stories like the Google antitrust trial don’t generate enough commentary from either side to allow us to cover as a main story.
Overall, it’s rare that we run into this issue, but it’s frustrating when we do — especially when a story seems like a good fit for our approach. We do have a few workarounds, though. For one, we might answer a reader question about the story. Another option is to cover the story as a Friday edition, if we feel there is enough meat on the bone (and Isaac is pretty good at finding interesting things to say about most topics). Other times, Isaac and Ari will discuss the topic as a segment on the Sunday Podcast.
We’d love to be able to give every story the full Tangle treatment — with a neutral introduction, left and right views, and a “My take” — but the reality is that partisans tend to ignore stories that are inconvenient to their beliefs, and that can be a limiting factor in our coverage options. Still, I would reiterate that this situation doesn’t arise often, and we’ll only drop a topic from consideration after a comprehensive search for commentary.
Q: I think Isaac is a great host for Tangle. I like his balanced commentary. However, it's natural for people's political preferences to change over the years. Depending on their circumstances and life experiences, they might become more liberal or more conservative. How have Isaac's politics changed over his career? Now that he has built a brand for himself as Tangle's voice of reason, does he feel locked into that political identity? In the future, if he feels his political opinions are steadily drifting away from the middle, how would that affect the My Take section of Tangle?
— Trevor from Pasadena, California
Isaac Saul: Thank you for the kind words, Trevor! Interestingly, my answer is yes, my politics have changed in deep and profound ways over the last six years.
