Partway through answering questions on January 26 during an immigration enforcement blitz in Chicago, a man who appeared to be in federal custody briefly stopped talking when he recognized the man with the Texas accent asking the questions.
“You’re Dr. Phil,” the man said to television personality Phil McGraw, who, while standing alongside federal agents, peppered the man with questions about his citizenship and alleged crimes.
The scene played out not only in Chicago but across the internet as McGraw and cameras from his Merit TV media platform were embedded with President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan and others from various federal agencies as they began their long-promised immigration action in and around the city this past weekend.
Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not respond to questions on January 27 about McGraw’s presence during the enforcement actions or the specifics of interactions with suspects that were disseminated on his platform and social media accounts. But in an interview with Tribune, McGraw, who spoke at a Trump rally just before last year’s election, said he was in Chicago to provide “transparency” for “a very targeted, surgical operation” aimed at people with criminal records who are in the country without legal authorization.
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“Transparency is going to be important for people to understand what’s going on and what’s not going on,” McGraw said. “I’ve read a lot of things about sweeping neighborhoods and raiding businesses and even schools and things like that. That is just absolutely untrue. That’s not going on.”
For many others, however, granting largely unrestricted access to a well-known television personality during high-stakes law enforcement encounters raises questions about the propriety of the operation. It also underscores the extent to which Trump — who parlayed his turn as a reality TV star into a political career powered by harsh rhetoric on illegal immigration — relies on spectacle and showmanship to convey his message.
Further blurring of the lines between politics and popular media is likely to be a hallmark of the second Trump administration, as evidenced by his cabinet appointments of former Fox News personalities such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Sean Duffy, a former Wisconsin congressman and star of MTV’s The Real World tapped to lead the Department of Transportation.
Longtime Chicago immigration attorney Kevin Raica said he was surprised to see McGraw tagging along with federal officials during the enforcement actions.
“These are usually law enforcement-only operations,” said Raica, who’s practiced immigration law for 20 years. “Generally, they want to restrict that access because they say it’s law enforcement sensitive and that it could reveal their methods of operation or how they conduct themselves. That it would be unsafe for the people they’re trying to detain.”
Indeed, a former federal law enforcement official who was based in Chicago said he wouldn’t have permitted a TV personality to have cameras rolling during an operation.
“We generally tried to stay out of the media’s attention … for a host of reasons,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized by his current employer to speak to the press.
Those reasons include both safety concerns and ‘the humiliation issue.’
“We always took great pains to make sure nobody, regardless whether they were a public official, a law enforcement officer, a drug dealer or anybody else, [was] humiliated in a process of an arrest because that creates a whole host of other grievances that could emerge at the scene or down the line,” the former official said.
McGraw, who’s previously interviewed Homan at length, said officials took great care to ensure safety.
“Their No. 1 priority was safety of everybody involved, including the targets that they were arresting, and they were going to great lengths to make sure that they went about this operation in a way that provided the greatest degree and likelihood of safety for the people that were being arrested as well as the agents that were doing the detaining,” he said.
Still, videos from the incidents, especially those that involved McGraw, were surreal — and questionable.
During the exchange with the man who recognized McGraw as “Dr. Phil,” the TV personality continued asking questions of the man even after he mentions wanting to speak to a lawyer. The clip posted to McGraw’s account on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter, showed the man being questioned stood with his hands behind his back next to a law enforcement official.
Standing at McGraw’s side, Homan said: “This is an example of sanctuary cities, right?” mentioning the policy Chicago and many other large cities have in which city agencies and local law enforcement do not cooperate with federal deportation authorities.
“We’ve got an illegal alien convicted of sex crimes involving children, and he’s walking the streets of Chicago,” Homan continued.
“You’ve been charged with sex crimes with children?” McGraw said.
“Not really,” the man said, shortly before Homan is seen on the video telling agents to “take him in, process him and lock him up.”
The questioning should have stopped as soon as the man mentioned wanting to speak to an attorney, the former federal official said.
“You have to cease and desist and let them get their lawyer,” the former official said.
While he’s “not a lawyer,” McGraw told the Tribune, “I wouldn’t think that would extend to me, but I suppose somebody could certainly ask the lawyers involved if that’s true.”
A representative of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois also raised questions about the exchange.
“It is disturbing that high-level government officials stood idly by as a hand-picked media outlet sensationalized an arrest and attempted to gain admissions from a suspect even after he asked to speak to his lawyer,” ACLU of Illinois spokesman Ed Yohnka wrote in an email. “If the administration thinks this sort of stunt will lend credibility to its operations, it is mistaken.”
Immigration enforcement, particularly the deportation of people who’ve committed major crimes, is serious business and should be treated as such, said David Axelrod, an adviser to former President Barack Obama.
Obama deported more people during his first term than Trump did during his, Axelrod noted, but “didn’t bring camera and film crews with him to mark the occasion.”
“Donald Trump is the greatest marketer, brander and self-promoter in history. … I wouldn’t take that away from him,” Axelrod said. “But the spectacle of Dr. Phil on ICE raids is really … kind of a cheap reality show thing and detracts from the gravity and the seriousness of what this should be.”
‘Spectacle’ was also the word that came to mind for University of Illinois communications professor Stewart Coles.
“It’s no secret that Trump is personally obsessed with ratings, with popularity, with mass media,” said Coles, whose research includes the political effects of entertainment media.
With McGraw and cameras on hand, the administration’s highly publicized enforcement effort “turns into entertainment for, presumably, his supporters, that they see that he’s doing something about immigration.”
And while McGraw told the Tribune his goal was to document the “factual” and “actual,” there’s an array of unanswered questions in today’s fragmented media landscape about “what types of journalistic ethics are being followed here,” Coles said.
McGraw’s involvement, while “disturbing” and “abnormal,” “it’s also pointing to normalization,” said Heather Hendershot, a Northwestern University communications professor.
“It’s very strange to have a talk show host out with immigration officials, gathering people for potential deportation,” Hendershot said. “That is completely inappropriate. It doesn’t make any sense, but it points to the ways that I fear that the Trump administration and its extremism and authoritarian inclinations are being kind of normalized this time around.”
Nubia Willman, former deputy chief of staff and current chief programs officer at Latinos Progresando, said she imagines “this second round, the federal administration will continue to look for ways to antagonize and scare Chicagoans in an attempt to deepen divides. Adding a TV personality to the mix is likely the first of many questionable decisions we will see as they attempt to vilify immigrants.”
Alderman Raymond Lopez of Chicago’s 15th District, an outspoken critic of the city’s sanctuary status, appeared in an interview segment January 26 on McGraw’s Merit TV platform. He hasn’t met McGraw but said “it’s very important to show who these targets are and to show why they are being pursued by the federal government.”
Lopez added he thinks local media also should have been invited to witness the deportation efforts. “It’s crucial for all of us to share as much information, otherwise you have the rumor mill running rampant, spreading fear and hysteria,” said Lopez, who doesn’t support the deportation of immigrants without legal status who haven’t committed other crimes.
For some, though, the spotlight on the actions instilled more fear.
A Venezuelan woman who said her name was Iseamary said she forced herself to go to work on January 27 even though the messaging from Homan and McGraw scared her. She’s a single mom who lives on Chicago’s South Side.
“But what if something happens to me?” she asked. “Then my son will have no one.”
Iseamary asked not to have her last name included because of the threat of deportation. She said she normally takes the bus downtown, where she works cleaning hotels, she said.
“I’ve applied for asylum. And even though I have no legal papers yet, I keep my court documents on me at all times in case they stop me,” she said.
She said she watches the news and has heard that she needs to get a good lawyer. But because she doesn’t always have steady work, she said she doesn’t have the money to hire an attorney.
“I really don’t know what to do,” she said. “I don’t like hearing about what they’re doing to people.”
(Chicago Tribune’s Laura Rodríguez Presa contributed.)
—Dan Petrella, Nell Salzman and Jake Sheridan, Chicago Tribune (TNS)
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