Name: "Project 2025 Is Florida 2020" - Rep. Maxwell Frost On DeSantis, ICE Detentions And Due Process
Uploaded: 2025-06-21T16:48:32.000Z
Duration: 6 min 46 s
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Hey everybody, welcome back. Ladies and gentlemen, my next guest this evening is a congressman who represents Florida's 10th district. Please welcome back to The Late Show, Representative

Good to see you again. Yeah, good to be here.

It's been a bit. Last time you were here, you'd been in office for nine months or something along those lines. It's been two and a half years now. Compare and contrast your experience from the first year to now in the middle of your third year, and please support your answer with specific examples.

Look, obviously, we're in just so much chaos right now in this country. And when I think back to when I first got into Congress, I felt like we were doing so much good work with the administration. It was a different administration, by the way.

Different Congress. But I felt like, you know, this fight against far-right neo-fascism, for me at least, was mainly taking stage in my home in Florida, fighting against Ron DeSantis and the extremism there. And something I always told people is that Project 2025 is actually

Florida 2022, Florida 2020. And the stuff that's going on around the country right now, we've actually been dealing with in the South for a long time, especially my state of Florida.

So the difference is, it's like the struggle in my state has kind of been just spread throughout the nation. And honestly, that day after Election Day, I had a hard time getting up, probably like a lot of other people, and I wasn't automatically feeling hope. You know, we think of hope as like a feeling. But I think about something I learned, which is like, you know, long marriages, something people always say is that love isn't always a feeling. A lot of times it's a choice that you make actively. And I just thought, well, hope is the same way. I'm not always going to feel it when I wake up in the morning. And to be honest, like, I don't always feel it every morning, but I'm actively going to choose it. So we're definitely in a different time.

Well, a lot of people, a lot, a lot of people chose to be hopeful last week. Five million people plus turned out for the No Kings rally, which was really, it was an act of hope, it was hopeful to see. Thousands of people, thousands of people turned out in your district in central

Florida on the heels of the president sending in both National Guard, nationalized Army,

National Guard, so Army members into Los Angeles and Marines, and they're using and violating posse comitatus, arresting people. And you have, that was all in response to ICE doing raids around Los Angeles, somewhat indiscriminately, and even going into courts where people are trying to do the right thing and pulling them out and trying to get them out of the country without due process. You, you have described that as taxpayer funded, uh, kidnapping operation.

Well, because Donald Trump ran on this mass deportation thing, but the thing everyone needs to realize is deportation is a process. It's a legal process. Oftentimes it can take weeks if not months up to a year, depending on the case. And what's going on right now is actually not mass deportation even because people aren't being given due process. There is no legal process for people. We have ICE, ICE federal agents pulling up, terrorizing our communities, hopping out of unmarked vans, stealing and yes, kidnapping people, not giving them their day in court. And yes, human trafficking them to other nations, other countries around the entire world. And I want to be very, I like to be very clear about what's going on right now. So people understand that, that what is going on, I believe is outside of the bounds of the law. Due process is something that applies to every person in this country, regardless of your status. And this is from the party that likes to talk a lot about American exceptionalism, but they want to rip away the few things that make our country actually exceptional. And part of that is the fact that our rights are for everybody.

And one of the things, one of the things that I see it that alarms me most and, and it does feel like kidnapping because as you said, unmarked windowless vans will show up. Men will get out wearing masks, balaclavas or masks, no identifying patches, do not identify themselves. They don't have badges. They don't show ID. They just grab people and put them in the van. I mean, in a state like Florida that has a stand your ground law and people can open carry, it's dangerous for those officers. Yeah. It's not just for the people because you know, why wouldn't you think that you were being attacked? No, it's, it's dangerous for everyone. It's completely chaotic. And my other thing is if you are proud of what you're doing, why do you have to wear a mask to do it? If you are, if you're operating within the bounds of the law, you shouldn't have to cover your face. And that's the problem with ice and with the administration right now is this whole thing is happening in the shadows. I actually just introduced the bill called the sue them act. Um, it sounds like sue them because we want people to sue them. Um, and what it does is it mandates where if someone is taken by ice and they're put in a detainment facility or they're put in a jail under what's called an ice detainer, that they are required to post publicly why that person is there, where they're at and all the information associated with the case.

Cause here's the problem is that I'm meeting so many families in my district and across the country that one day their husband goes missing and they just have no idea where their loved ones are at. And we have people going to hospitals. We have people calling morgues asking, is my loved one there? That's what this country has devolved to right now because of this president and because of this whole operation that is completely BS and lied to people. And he went around the country telling people that you can't afford your rent because of immigrants, that you can't send your child to school, you can't afford food because of trans people. No, it's because of mega billionaires like Donald Trump and corporations that have been rigging the system for so long. And this blame game is so normal in this. It's from the textbook of authoritarians and right-wing neo-fascists. And we have to call it out because he's trying to divide our country when really we have a lot more in common.

We're going to take a quick break, but we're right back with more representative Maxwell-Crossley.