MS NOW host Rachel Maddow said on “The Daily Show” Monday that President Trump’s planned immigration detention facilities—large enough to hold thousands of people without trial—could eventually be turned against American citizens, not just immigrants.
Maddow raised the warning while discussing the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to scrap a proposed 10,000-detainee immigration center planned for a commercial warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia. The project was dropped after local residents organized against it.
“Social circle stood up for itself,” Maddow said. “You know, people all over the country where Trump wanted to put these mega prisons, these were huge warehouses to hold people by the thousands. Places that would hold five, six, seven, ten, 14,000 people, all without trial, held indefinitely.”
Host Jon Stewart argued that many of those swept up in immigration enforcement are held over conduct “generally considered in our society” to be civil matters rather than serious crimes.
“These are people who overstayed a student visa or are here on a green card but got a parking ticket, like ticky-tack s— that normally would be treated civilly,” Stewart said.
Maddow went further, suggesting the stakes extend past immigration policy altogether.
“No, I’m sorry, with a president like this, if you give him seven to ten prisons around the country that hold 10,000 people each, where he can hold people without trial, without access to lawyers, indefinitely, you think he’s only going to leave immigrants in there?” she said. “I just don’t. I think that what they first do to immigrants, they want to do to the rest of us.”
The remarks drew a sharp response from the White House. Spokesman Davis Ingle told Fox News Digital that Stewart is “a talentless hack who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain and ruined his life to the point he has to compensate for his embarrassing inadequacies.”
Elizabeth Pipko, a former Republican National Committee spokesperson, pushed back on the framing of the discussion, arguing that Maddow and Stewart blurred the line between legal immigrants and those in the country illegally.
“There is a difference. Immigrants came to this country legally, built lives here and became proud American citizens,” Pipko said. “They are not targets for deportation or arrest by immigration officers. Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart both know that.”
Pipko added that she viewed the segment as a bid for attention rather than a good-faith critique. “This is an attempt to go viral and to push a political narrative against a president she doesn’t like, regardless of who suffers along the way. It’s selfish and evil, and, worst of all, she knows it but does it anyway,” she said.
The Social Circle project’s cancellation followed sustained local opposition to the scale of the proposed facility, which would have been among the largest immigration detention centers in the country.
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