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CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip

GOP Candidates Back Away from Trump as Polls Hit New Low; Standing by for Judge's Ruling on Trump's CNN Ban. ICE Mistakenly Detains Man Who Claims Eventually as a U.S. Citizen; Washington Post Report says Trump Dismissed White House Ballroom Safety Warnings. Aired 10-11p ET

Aired September 23, 2026 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[22:00:00]

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR (voice over): Tonight, as Donald Trump's numbers hit a new low, more Republican candidates are backing away.

MIKE ROGERS (R), MICHIGAN SENATE CANDIDATE: Groceries cost too much. The war with Iran needs to end.

PHILLIP: Plus, a judge considers whether the American president can ban media outlets for coverage he doesn't like.

Also, ICE under fire again after mistakenly detaining an American in the streets, as Renee Good's mother sounds the alarm.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I voted for President Trump. This is madness.

PHILLIP: And cheat code, why the president reportedly brushed off safety for his ballroom.

Live at the table, Noah Rothman, Ana Navarro, Peter Meijer, Alencia Johnson, and Josh Rogin.

Americans with different perspectives aren't talking to each other, but here, they do.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

PHILLIP (on camera): Good evening, I'm Abby Phillip in New York.

Tonight, 41 days before the midterms, the American president is more unpopular than ever. His allies are starting to jump ship. A new CNN poll finds that just 33 percent of Americans approve of Donald Trump's handling of his job as president. That is the worst across either of his terms.

And nationally, voters say that they prefer Democratic candidates over Republican ones by an eight-point margin. As prices soar, just 28 percent say economic conditions are good. Compare that to this time in 2018, just weeks before Trump lost the House, that's a drop of 41 points, a clear indictment of his economic agenda.

But if the red lights aren't flashing in the White House, they are on the campaign trail. Just this week, the Republican nominee for Florida governor scrubbed many references to Trump from his website, and that's after a Republican congresswoman in the same state called Trump out directly for betraying her voters.

And when it comes to the war, three more Republicans voted to end the war, and the Republican Senate nominee in Iowa also calls for it to end, along with her counterparts in Michigan and Ohio, and in the governor's race in Wisconsin.

Before we open it up to the table here, we'll invite you at home to join the debate. Go to cnn.com/abby and weigh in there. We'll get to some of your comments as we go throughout the show.

Noah, is it fair to say that the red lights are very much flashing for Republicans right now?

NOAH ROTHMAN, SENIOR WRITER, NATIONAL REVIEW: Yes, if you don't even look at the polls, just follow what the candidates are doing. You talked about Florida. That's interesting. Dark red state, and yet you have the Republican candidate for governor running away from the president, same thing in Iowa, same thing in Michigan, Kansas. Republicans are now free to have some problems with Donald Trump, at least on the margins, and particularly when it comes to policy if not, you know, personal behavior.

The polling is terrible, but there are some caveats that I don't think Democrats have fully internalized as they're celebrating perhaps prematurely an overwhelming victory in November. Donald Trump's very unpopular, but he's running behind the generic ballot. Republicans are running better than him in the generic ballot, and individual candidates are running better than the generic ballot.

Cook Political Report had a survey this week, last week, found out that at the 37 battleground districts that they surveyed, the average Democratic lead is two points, not ten points. Beyond that, you have some soft candidates in places like New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota. Kathy Hochul, for example, is polling poorly. So, if you're not a great candidate, you're not necessarily overperforming or even matching the performance of the Democratic Party at the generic ballot level. And every election since 2014, I think probably earlier, has had a lot of really crazy surprises in store. I wouldn't be surprised if this is one of those.

ANA NAVARRO, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: Well, that race in Florida, that congresswoman in Florida, that's actually my, the district I live in. It's Florida 27. It's Maria Elvira Salazar. And I will tell you, I was shocked when I saw that ad where she's talking straight to camera to Donald Trump and saying, you're making mistakes, and she's distancing herself from him on immigration. She actually put money behind that ad. I thought, Okay, maybe it's just an internet thing. I saw it on T.V. in Miami over the weekend.

And I had taken for granted that she was going to win that district, because she won by over 20 points just two years ago. So, when I saw that ad, I was like, whoa, it's been incredibly counterproductive for her. Because number one, the true Trumpers do not take criticism of dear leader lightly. Number two, it's put a spotlight on her and her inconsistencies and hypocrisy. In the same light that she's criticizing his immigration policy, she voted for the big, beautiful bill that authorized billions of dollars precisely for the ICE and ICE enforcement efforts that she's now criticizing.

[22:05:05]

And number three, it made people like me, who weren't paying attention to the race of the district I live in, pay attention and say, okay, what can we do to get Elliot Rodriguez, the guy she's running against, in a better place?

PHILLIP: Yes, and you're starting to see that in a lot of places. People that should be pretty safe, Kansas and other parts of the country, Nebraska, are not so safe. But I also want to play, this is what the first lady, Melania Trump, said in an interview today about how her husband is doing in the job.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MELANIA TRUMP, U.S. FIRST LADY: He's very focused. He has a lot on his plate. It's very different what's going on around the world now. And -- but I think he's doing the best that he can.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

JOSH ROGIN, LEAD GLOBAL SECURITY ANALYST, WASHINGTON POST INTELLIGENCE: Soft bigotry of low expectations.

PHILLIP: Not exactly a ringing endorsement of what's been going on.

ROGIN: Yes. I mean, listen I cover foreign policy, and very rarely does foreign policy matter in elections, like, almost never in midterm elections. They're local. But what's obvious is that the Iran war is hurting people all over the country in every jurisdiction, raising gas prices for everybody, raising inflation for everybody.

And Republicans at some point have to acknowledge the reality that we all see, that it's not going well, and Trump won't acknowledge it, and at some point it becomes a credibility issue.

PHILLIP: And to that point about foreign policy just rising as an issue take a look at this. These are the issues that are extremely important to voters' Congressional vote, and, obviously, the economy is up there at the top. But then you've got voting and elections, inflation, healthcare, immigration, and there's the war in Iran.

And I would just, you know, in your mind, keep in mind that on every single one of those top issues, top six issues, going up, down to the war in Iran, the president and his party are underwater on those issues. Voters are dissatisfied with how they're handling it.

ROGIN: And one in three are also related to the war in Iran. PHILLIP: Yes.

ROGIN: So, the war in Iran is actually one, three, and six.

PHILLIP: Right.

ROGIN: Because it's causing the inflation and the bad economy.

ALENCIA JOHNSON, FORMER SENIOR ADVISER, HARRIS 2024 AND BIDEN 2020 CAMPAIGNS: Well, and to your point, voters are actually connecting the dots about what's happening overseas to what's happening with their -- the gas prices and the grocery prices.

I want to pick upon -- pick up something that Noah said about the Democrats. And, listen, I'm not a Democrat that's running around saying, we got this in the bag. Because one thing Democrats sometimes do is we fumble right at the ten-yard line, right? And the reason that we potentially could do that is if we continue to run against Trump.

I think voters are tired of the message of just being against Trump. Show us how you're going to fix this, which is why you see in so many different places surprise candidates, underdog Democratic candidates that are winning on affordability, on let's change the leadership in Washington, D.C.

And Democrats have to have an aspirational message, but also something that voters, and particularly Gen Z voters who are done with both parties, who don't believe that there's anybody that's protecting them, anybody that's paying attention to their needs, they want to make sure that if they get them in office in November, if we take back the House, and if we surprisingly take the Senate, I don't know, that they will actually do something and not just be up there talking about, this is how we've done it before and this is decorum.

PHILLIP: So, I mean, you know, what Noah pointed out, Karl Rove laid this out in a Wall Street Journal piece this week that was interesting and important to keep in mind, we take these national trends and we try to say, okay, well the size of the wave is going to be this much because this is what the margin in the generic ballot was in 2018, or what have you. But it is the individual races.

And in some of these states, part of the problem for Republicans is that it's not just the obvious battlegrounds that are in play right now. Here's a picture in Iowa. Steve Deace, who I think many people know, he's a conservative radio host. He posted this today, got millions of views. He said, Yesterday, Iowa House Republicans were informed by their own pollsters that if you are in a plus 15 district, you're within the margin of error. If you're within a plus 10 district, you're underwater. And this might be -- this might end up being an even worse midterm environment than 2006.

So, there might be some places where, yes, Kathy Hochul probably could be doing a little better. She's still beating her opponent in these polls, but she probably could be doing better. But if you're in Iowa, and you're looking at a plus 15 district and you don't know who's going to win that race, that's a real problem for Republicans. PETER MEIJER, CO-FOUNDER AND HEAD OF STRATEGY, THE NEW INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION: What isn't a problem is running like you're 15 points behind. That is something that I think every candidate should be doing. I mean, to your point on fumbling when you get to the one-yard line, like if you have that sense of complacency, that will kill your campaign.

But, yes, the polls are bad. The polls are terrible. And a lot of this also has to do with that general dissatisfaction. If you are an incumbent or if you're currently an office holder, you know, in a good time, that is your credibility.

[22:10:02]

That is you saying, I'm experienced, trust me. In a time where folks don't trust the current leadership, when they feel like we're heading in the wrong direction, they don't want somebody who's in office.

In Michigan, one of our nominees on the Democratic side is a current lieutenant governor. On not a single one of his mailers, brochures, door hangers does he mention that he is the lieutenant governor of that state, because being an incumbent is bad when folks don't like the direction.

JOHNSON: Meanwhile, J.D. Vance is telling people, hey, just give us two more years to actually figure this out, but --

MEIJER: They will have two more years.

PHILLIP: He's also telling candidates, by the way, to nationalize the race. I mean, he's actually actively asking them to make this about Trump, which nobody apparently is listening to.

NAVARRO: Well, Trump told us it was about Trump, what, two weeks ago, and then now he's saying, I'm not on the ballot. So, obviously, somebody's showing him polls.

And, you know, you just said, Josh, that foreign policy doesn't usually determine elections. In South Florida they do. And let me tell you something, that meeting last night between Donald Trump and Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro's vice president, people -- even the staunchest Trump supporters that I know in Miami are aghast and disgusted at the image of him treating the -- Maduro's number two, his accomplice. If Maduro's a criminal, and he is, so is she. If Maduro's a drug trafficker, and he is, so is she.

And to see that woman sitting next to the president of the United States, being legitimized and empowered by him, that is going to have an effect in South Florida.

ROTHMAN: I share that frustration with the president's failure to follow through essentially with his rhetoric and seeming to embrace a socialist government in Venezuela. That's contrary to American principles, and it's bad statecraft.

I am frustrated, however, with the Iran talk. This is a foreign policy election in some extent, and what we're hearing now from Republicans is gimmicks, you know, especially in the Midwest. We should just end the war. We should defund the war. Essentially, they're mimicking the Democratic Party's talking points, saying that we should defund the war.

I don't know how that gets you to lower gas prices. The American pressure that we're putting on the Strait of Hormuz now is helping to reduce gas prices. What's happening in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait with the Houthis is almost entirely unrelated and may require additional military action. It wouldn't end if we were to defund the Iran war. That would continue, and the inflationary pressure would increase. So, if we're talking about foreign policy, we should also educate.

ROGIN: Yes. I think the situation in the Red Sea is directly related to the Strait of Hormuz because the Houthis are funded by the Iranians and because they say it's related and we're --

MEIJER: But they're attacking the Saudis.

ROTHMAN: But they -- and they held off conspicuously for months.

ROGIN: (INAUDIBLE) our allies.

MEIJER: There's a ceasefire agreement.

ROGIN: But on your point is -- I agree with you that just cutting and running is not going to be a great strategy, and politicians haven't been forced to present a lot of great alternatives because there are no great alternatives because Trump dragged us into a quagmire, and all the options are bad.

So, you're going to ask the politician to give us the perfect solution that doesn't exist. We're going to have to lose slowly, lose quickly, or make a deal. And I think make a deal is the best of those options, but that's not happening because Trump refuses to do the things that are necessary to make a deal.

PHILLIP: So, a viewer has a question. It's related to what we're talking about. It says, why do these Republican candidates think they can bait and switch now without anyone noticing? It's pretty insulting for anyone who's been paying attention.

And that probably applies on the war. It applies on just allegiance to Trump. You can't, 40 days before the election, just decide suddenly you're going to walk away from the president that you've been embracing all the way up until this point.

MEIJER: I mean, there's a lot of Democrats who are cutting and running on things that they were saying, or there was a little bit of a bait and switch. I mean, now granted, a lot of that is from Woke 1 five years ago, and not statements they were making within the past year. But I think what they're trying to signify and I actually don't know that it's a smart strategy but it's interesting that a lot of the candidates who are putting some distance, they're doing that based off of polls from Fabrizio, which is the president's pollster. So, this is not something that is coming from a crazy side. But to the point on it coming down to that individual candidate, those candidates want to say, listen, I agree with the president. I may not agree with him on everything. Here are the places where I differ. And just the fact that we're talking about some of these candidates is giving more focus and attention on races that I think will come to their benefit ultimately.

PHILLIP: I mean, maybe, or it could backfire, like Ana suggested in Florida, emboldening Democrats who are looking at a kind of expanded map right now, especially in the House.

All right, next for us, more breaking news. We are standing by for a ruling on the president's media ban, which a judge seemed skeptical of tonight, and Barack Obama is now weighing in.

Plus, another ICE incident, this time agents detaining an American citizen, as Renee Good's mother, who voted for Trump, says, this is madness.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:15:00]

PHILLIP: Tonight, we're standing by for a ruling in Donald Trump's media ban, which includes CNN. A judge could weigh in any minute now on whether he can bar three outlets from the White House, a decision that will have major, a, a major impact on the future presidents and how they'll handle the press corps.

Earlier, Trump called the three outlets sick, treasonous, and demented, while also attacking the judge, who he appointed, as totally disloyal. In a court document, the feds argue that the president has found that plaintiffs have engaged in a number of reporting incidents that have threatened national security, and such reporting directly raises national security concerns.

National security, as you can imagine, has become a common refrain for this administration when it's looking to defend one of its policies.

[22:20:02]

Trump has used it to justify tariffs, deportations, extrajudicial attacks on these alleged drug trafficking boats, his Greenland plans, and even now his ballroom. In fact, one of the stories mentioned is from CNN back in January, which talks about the planned bunker underneath his ballroom, which, of course, Trump has talked about publicly after that reporting.

But the president made no mention of national security concerns when he first announced the ban on Friday, and no mention of it when he talked to reporters that night. Instead, he made it clear that the reason was because of coverage he didn't like, and that wasn't positive enough about him.

Josh, you work at The Washington Post, but we've also seen this movie before with the president. Do you think this national security thing is going to fly?

ROGIN: No. I mean, to be fair, invoking national security to try to kill embarrassing news stories is a time-honored Washington tradition. Every administration has done it. I've been dealt with Democrats and Republicans. It's always, like 99 times out of 100, it's just embarrassing. It's it, in the cases where it's like, you know, ongoing troop movements or like the name of a covert CIA officer, that's a real national security. That's a high bar. Everything else is they're just trying not to get embarrassed.

And what's really, you know, shocking about this one is that the examples they're using are so laughable. The bunker that you could see from -- you know, like, if you're standing on the hotel across the street, you could see it. The munitions shortages that they released the -- it's true. Everybody knows it.

PHILLIP: It's in a Pentagon inspector general report.

ROGIN: And they say it's fake.

PHILLIP: Yes.

ROGIN: If it's fake, how can it be classified? Fake information? So, which is it? It's fake or it's classified.

PHILLIP: Yes, I mean, just --

ROGIN: It doesn't make any sense. They're not making any sense.

PHILLIP: To that exact example, I mean, on the munitions shortage, Pete Hegseth claimed that it's not true, a CNN report, that there was a shortage on interceptors. And the Pentagon inspector general report says the Office of the Undersecretary for Acquisition and Sustainment said that, munitions expenditure in Operations Epic Fury has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply.

So, they're denying stories. It's contradicted by their own documents. They're claiming that even writing the story is a national security concern, but then the story's not true. I mean, come on.

MEIJER: It just facially doesn't make sense and is illogical. But just from a communication standpoint, like, if you feel like you're losing the narrative, why are you closing yourself off from the outlets that even if their coverage is hostile, even if they don't report anything the president does pretty good when he is sparring with reporters, when he's able to defend himself, when he's able to get in some digs here and there. That is when he gets his message out because even if it's framed in a negative way, he is being shown.

The Pentagon restricted access to media now I think nine months ago. I don't think the coverage has improved. I don't think it has led to the outcome they want, and it just -- it seems like you're cutting off a guy who prides himself on communication from the mechanism to get that message out. PHILLIP: Yes. It's telling. It's telling that Pete Hegseth was one of the most vocal cabinet secretaries about endorsing this ban because he took the strategy at the Pentagon. And I think to Pete's point, has it helped?

NAVARRO: Nobody drills more holes into Trump's argument than Donald Trump of the reason why he is banning these outlets, right, and it being national security. When he banned them, he said, you know, I want to set them straight. He talked about the money that he's gotten from other outlets. When he banned the A.P., one of the first acts he took as president of the United States when he swore in again, he said that he was banning the A.P. because they were refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of Mexico.

So, I mean, just read Trump's words back in court and you'll have the argument, and, you know, you will destroy the Trump administration's arguments.

PHILLIP: Yes, I mean, let me play --

NAVARRO: I mean, the guy won't shut up.

PHILLIP: Let me play what he said in his own words on Friday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: It's sick. I mean, there's something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories.

Now, if they want to write them, that's fine, but I don't have to let them into my -- into the people's house.

REPORTER: What do you envision the ban to look like on media outlets?

TRUMP: Oh, the ban on the free press, right? A very simple ban. I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: So, in the filing on Tuesday, the administration says, at the very least, the government may control reporters' access to restricted presidential areas, like the Oval Office, even for viewpoint discriminatory reasons.

[22:25:03]

So, I mean, they're saying they ought to be able to do this just simply because the president doesn't like what the media has to say.

And if you just put aside for a moment any legal aspect of this, I just think it just seems kind of un-American.

ROTHMAN: Well, that statement was kind of un-American. The notion that there's something wrong with this country if the press can print - mean stories, negative stories about me. No, there's something quite right with this country when the free press can criticize the leader without fear of reprisal. Unfortunately, there is now fear of reprisal.

I don't think you can separate the legal issues out from this. If you were to, say, ban all the media from the White House, my understanding from the jurisprudence is that'd be fine. But if you allow one outlet onto the property, you have to provide some 1A protections, First Amendment protections for them, and therefore for all. At least that's my understanding of the jurisprudence. I'd be surprised if the Supreme Court wants to revisit it.

That is not to say that some prudence could not be imposed on media outlets. Let's take the interceptor issue, for example. I don't think anybody thinks that's false, that there is no shortage of exquisite munitions. He would like to say as much. Nevertheless, I don't think any outlet in America should be printing the exact number of our munitions.

PHILLIP: We didn't. Nobody did that.

ROTHMAN: Some do. Some do.

PHILLIP: No. But, I mean --

ROTHMAN: And when they do --

PHILLIP: But in this case, that's not what happened.

ROTHMAN: Okay. But some do. And when they do, they jeopardize American national security in the process. And that should be something that --

NAVARRO: But not the three that were banned.

PHILLIP: Yes. Nobody --

ROTHMAN: Yes.

PHILLIP: I mean, nobody that we're talking about here printed the exact number of our munitions.

ROTHMAN: Because it's immaterial. Nevertheless -- no, and it's immaterial to the argument. The shortage that the interceptor was bringing up, that's the type of fear-mongering that this administration is promulgating in order to justify what is essentially the president's tantrum.

That being said, it is valuable to have a media apparatus that observes the contours of prudence, particularly when it comes to national security.

PHILLIP: Which, by the way, we do all the time.

ROGIN: And, you know, and the media --

ROTHMAN: No, it should be determined by private actors.

ROGIN: The argument that the Trump's -- the administration's lawyers made about the munitions story was that it was aiding the enemy. That's what they said, that disclosing the fact that we don't have enough munitions to beat the enemy is aiding the enemy. Guess what? The enemy already knows that. It's a country with an intelligence service. They know better than us. They know better than CNN.

So, the claim is that the reporters are being treasonous, right? If I'm giving classified information to the Iranians, that's espionage, okay? If I'm reporting true information to my viewers, that's journalism.

ROTHMAN: We had this debate around the Iraq War.

ROGIN: And they're trying to conflate the two, and it's a very scary thing.

ROTHMAN: No, we had this debate around the Iraq War, whether it is aiding and abetting the enemy to articulate essentially where American troop movements are, drawing lines in the sand, for example.

ROGIN: That we talked about that already.

ROTHMAN: Yes, I know.

ROGIN: And I ceded that that was an issue, but that's not what we're talking about now. So, yes, the things that we're not talking about, you may be right on. But on the things we are talking about, the facts are the same, is that these are not -- but if you're --

NAVARRO: I mean, you guys are getting into the weeds about this. But when we all agree that what he's doing is having a tantrum, and that he's acting as an authoritarian. I thought that what you said that it was actually very American to allow it, you have no idea how much that resonates with me.

I fled Nicaragua. I lived under right-wing dictators and left-wing dictators in Nicaragua. You know what they both had in common? They hate the free press. They censored the free press. They killed journalists. They attacked journalists. They silenced outlets.

PHILLIP: Let me -- hold on.

ROGIN: (INAUDIBLE) Xi Jinping at the White House tomorrow, and the Trump's lawyers argued today, according to CNN, that they asked the judge to delay this ruling until after Xi Jinping left. Why would they do that? Because he doesn't want to be embarrassed in front of his friend, Xi Jinping. He wants to pretend like he's got these authoritarian powers just like his friend, Xi Jinping. That's where we are.

PHILLIP: Let me play what former President Obama said about this media ban. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT: I am not surprised that the current president wants to ban newscasts that are critical of him because he's that guy.

The issue is the brazenness with which any president could act like this, and the people in his or her own party would not say, no, you cannot do that. That's not acceptable. That lack of guardrails is what I'm most concerned about.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: And, in fact, many of them are endorsing it just because Trump wants to do it.

JOHNSON: Right. I mean, you know, Ana, you brought up a good point about how he wants to be like these other authoritarians. You brought this up, too, and that's the piece that we have to be talking about. He is attacking the free press and free speech in this country.

But the other thing here that I don't think we're all talking about, he understands the media really, really well. He also understands that we're going to be having this conversation about who he's banning out of the White House instead of his low-performing numbers.

Now, the hard part about this --

MEIJER: We've done both.

JOHNSON: I know. Well, I know that we've done both, but we are spending a significant amount of time.

[22:30:01]

I'm not saying that this isn't a serious issue, but he is drumming up some more story so that the whole piece isn't just about the media.

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIP: Well, you know it's -- we do have to go, but I'll just say this about that because I've heard that argument a lot. And I do think one of the things the White House misunderstands is that when Trump drums up an unrelated story, sorry, that's unrelated to what voters care about, he's the one who gets punished for that.

Because then voters say, almost a 70-30 margin, that he doesn't care about the things that they care about. So, maybe they might be mad at the media, but they seem to be a lot more mad at him for not having the right priorities in moments like this. But that's just my two cents.

Next for us, a case of mistaken identity and ICE is yet again under scrutiny. A U.S. citizen was left injured on the side of the road in Chicago after an ICE stop. We're going to discuss that case next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:35:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) PHILLIP: Tonight, outrage in Illinois over another ICE encounter. Sunday, ICE agents detained a man in Evanston who turned out to be a U.S. citizen. You can see here on the arrest, on a surveillance video -- that you can see that arrest in the surveillance video, and in another video, you can also hear him telling them that they were making a mistake. Listen to this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNKNOWN: I'm a (expletive) U.S. citizen. I've got better (expletive) (inaudible).

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: So after that scuffle, the agents realized that they had the wrong man. They let him go. And they're seen here driving off from the scene while the man remained on the ground. Bystanders came to his aid, ultimately calling for an ambulance. And local police say that he suffered injuries to his head, his neck, and teeth.

The Department of Homeland Security told CNN that the agents were conducting a targeted operation and had immediately identified themselves as law enforcement. They said the individual was not cooperative and refused to identify himself, and then ICE officers relied on their training and later left the scene without further incident once the individual finally identified himself.

Now, this comes as we learn about two other incidents involving ICE this week. In Austin, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela was shot while making a DoorDash delivery. And in Michigan, the governor is ordering an investigation into the death of a Guatemalan man who died in a car crash while being pursued by ICE agents. CNN has been unable to determine his immigration status and has reached out to DHS about that story.

One of the most important factors, I think, in this midterm, as we were just talking about, Ana, is going to be immigration. It's become a deeply unpopular issue for the President, and this "New York Times" analysis found that according to an average of high-quality polls, Democrats now lead Republicans among likely Hispanic voters by 35 percentage points, 64 to 29, on the congressional ballot. That would be a major turnaround since Kamala Harris led Trump by an average of only seven points.

ANA NAVARRO, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL COMMENTATOR, AND IHEART RADIO HOST, "BLEEP WITH ANA NAVARRO": Yes, listen, Donald Trump made historic headway with Hispanic voters all over the country, and it certainly helped in some of the swing states, but I think Hispanic voters feel betrayed.

And it's, of course, Hispanics, like every other American, we care about the economy. That is issue number one. But on top of the bad economy, add to that a war that everybody hates, where Latinos serve disproportionately over more than anybody else. Add to that the fact that they are seeing the racial profiling of anybody that looks like us, that sounds like us. They are seeing Hispanics dragged through the streets. There have been

58 deaths under ICE custody since Trump took office. There have been 21 people shot that we know of. There have been U.S. citizens captured and beaten to a pulp.

There was another woman last year, Marimar Martinez, a teacher's aide, a U.S. citizen who was left with permanent damage because of the beating she got from ICE. And so I think, you know, you talk about what's American and what's not American, it's un-American to ban the press, it's un-American to do to American citizens or any human what we are seeing ICE do in this country. And I think Americans and particularly Latinos, have had enough.

PETER MEIJER (R), FORMER U.S. REPRESENTATIVE, MICHIGAN, U.S. ARMY IRAQ WAR VETERAN, AND INTELLIGENCE ADVISOR: I think it's hard to look at any of those videos and say, this is going well, this is going great. I mean, why was Trump incredibly popular on immigration to start with? Why was it one of his strongest issues? Because you had a border that was in chaos. You had a feeling like things were out of control.

When you look at videos like that, that doesn't say we have order now. That says this looks chaotic, this looks like cruelty, this looks like it's wanton. It is not ordered, it is not something that seems disheartening.

JOSH ROGIN, LEAD GLOBAL SECURITY ANALYST, WASHINGTON POST INTELLIGENCE, AND AUTHOR, "CHAOS UNDER HEAVEN": It is something. It's intentionally cruel. The cruelty is the point.

They designed a system where they armed tens of thousands of poorly trained, trigger-happy thugs and sent them into these communities with arrest quotas that were insane and then told them there would be no accountability if they broke the rules. And all of the results were predictable and predicted.

And yes, it's politically disastrous, but obviously the designers of that system don't care about that.

[22:40:02]

And they're terrorizing these communities, and they're doing so many of them. We all see it. We see it in our communities.

(CROSSTALK)

NAVARRO: You know, I don't understand. They know that it's counterproductive because after Minnesota, we saw a very concerted effort by the administration to get immigration off the headlines. And for a while, it worked. But now, it seems to be completely out of control.

JOHNSON: They wanted it off the headlines, but to this point of designing it to be extremely cruel and barbaric, they don't actually care. They want to make sure that black and brown people feel a certain type of threat and way in this nation. And they're doing a really good job at it, unfortunately, where people are losing their lives.

People are scared to continue with their daily lives. And it's interesting because this point you were raising about the border and this issue around chaos at the border. Immigration has been an issue for every President, Democrat and Republican. And Trump ran on fixing immigration. And there were voters who said, I'm going to give you the opportunity to do it. But these voters are also saying, and we'll see this in the midterms, we didn't want you to do it like this, right? We wanted there to be a humane way of approaching immigration and unfortunately they just doubled down.

MEIJER: -- politics. Always is all enough.

PHILLIP: So let me play, Renee Good, who was killed in Minnesota, her mother Donna Granger, or Ganger, was a Trump voter and here's what she said about all of this immigration stuff.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONNA GANGER, MOTHER OF RENEE GOOD, ICE SHOOTING VICTIM: I'm a registered Republican, I voted for President Trump under the impression that these agents were here to protect the citizens of the United States, innocents like our family and the others here, against terrorists. Certainly not to accuse those of us here of being terrorists and take precious lives. This is madness.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

PHILLIP: So, I mean, she's one person, but she lost her daughter. I just also want to give you one more anecdote because this is literally happening right now, tonight.

Both of Kansas' senators are speaking out about ICE operations in their state. Roger Marshall says that "When ICE operates in Kansas, it needs to coordinate with our local law enforcement."

And if you take a scan of the local headlines in Kansas right now, it is businesses closing, it is neighborhoods organizing protests. Kansas, okay? And Roger Marshall, according to a lot of the reporting, is in a tough race right now.

NOAH ROTHMAN, SENIOR WRITER, "NATIONAL REVIEW", AND AUTHOR, "BLOOD AND PROGRESS: A CENTURY OF LEFT-WING VIOLENCE IN AMERICA": Yes, he is. And, you know, I don't begrudge anybody who looks at these images and says, that's not what I wanted.

You know, at the outset of this administration, you were here, I wasn't here, but I was saying on our podcast in "National Review" that you can't have the kind of deportation regime that they wanted without having messy images like this.

There is a little bit of selection bias here because we're talking about a very expansive campaign and three videos, which are not illustrative of the entire campaign, but they are illustrative of how it was looking at the beginning of the year. Again, when we break, and I've talked about this before, when you

break out the polling, immigration versus border security, the President is still above water when it comes to border security. One of the things that he was elected to do is to address Biden's immigration crisis, 7 million people, which was very visible, which had New York City alone, entire hotels taken over by migrants -- migrant families.

That was what you had to address, and you had to address that by a stringent deportation campaign to the tune of millions. That is an army-sized operation. It was never going to be easy, and it was going to be messy and I warned at the time that there was going to be political problems associated with it.

However, we're assuming that the American people are not getting what they voted for. They did vote for a deportation campaign. The President was very clear about that on the campaign trail. He said, "This is what I'm going to do," and then executed to the satisfaction of Stephen Miller, perhaps not to everybody else, they were not sold to them as this.

(CROSSTALK)

NAVARRO: I'll tell you what I hear all the time in South Florida, where Cuban Americans overwhelmingly voted for Trump. And it bothers me terribly when I hear folks say this.

We don't think he meant us. So they were okay. People were okay who voted for Trump with this level of pain and terror being inflicted on other communities, not just, you know, and now that it's happening to them, now that you see communities that overwhelmingly supported Trump, like Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Cubans, being deported to families far off places in Africa where the State Department has issued advisories to American citizens not to travel to.

Places in Africa where there are civil wars and that's where Cubans are being deported to. Now, yes, there's a lot of buyer's remorse going on.

ROGIN: Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't President Obama deport millions of people without anybody getting killed in the street?

ROTHMAN: He did.

ROGIN: Okay, thank you.

ROTHMAN: -- people getting deported. However, if you ask progressives, they will give you a very different answer.

[22:45:00]

Progressives regarded him as the deporter-in-chief. Progressives accused him of violating civil rights.

ROGIN: You conceded the point and that you admitted that it can be done. ROTHMAN: Josh, because I'm intellectually consistent. But I'm not

conceding.

It's the notion that Barack Obama, who, by the way, we should have given him more grief in that last segment. He has no right complaining about the when he, what he did to Fox News, surveilling 20 A.P. reporters and taking their home and cell phones.

PHILLIP: What he did to, okay --

(CROSSTALK)

ROTHMAN: But at the same time, no, Barack Obama does deserve censorship.

PHILLIP: Yes, he deserves criticism for sure for their pursuit of journalists and prosecution of them for their sources. But what he allegedly, what you're claiming he did to Fox News is not even close to what Trump is doing right now.

ROTHMAN: Thankfully it is a President for me.

ROGIN: And we can have a humane and immigration immigration.

PHILLIP: Next for us, I am the code. That is what the President reportedly said to his first architect who was designing the ballroom when that architect raised concerns about safety compliance. We'll debate that next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[22:50:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIP: Tonight, a new report from the "Washington Post" reveals Donald Trump clashed with his first architect for the White House ballroom before he resigned. According to the Post, the architect repeatedly warned Trump that his preferred design didn't have adequate emergency exit routes or fire containment measures, and Trump reportedly countered the concerns by arguing that no building codes apply to the White House construction. And he also said, I am the code.

In a statement to the Post, the White House said, "It would be 'factually false and totally inaccurate' to say that the architect's departure from the project was in any way associated with code issues, and that life safety issues have been addressed as the design process continues."

This would be amusing if it weren't about something so serious, but also just, I mean, as with all times that we discuss this ballroom, a lot of this has to do with kind of what you were talking about earlier, which is what is Trump worried about? What is he on right now? Apparently it's the ballroom. JOHNSON: If you're living in Washington, D.C., he is worried about

making D.C. very much in homage to him, throwing up all of these things. But, you know, to this point, I think the American people are seeing, like, he is not paying attention. She's been talking about this ballroom since even before he got elected.

And so he's still talking about it. He can't get it done. Even if there were people who actually supported this ballroom, they would say, oh, you can't finish the job, so why would we trust you?

But, you know, the challenging part, I think, for me, and I hope that Democrats do a better job on the campaign trail connecting the dots, is how much money is being spent on these vanity projects that are being taken away from the American people, or figuring out how we can lower the cost for other people.

He's got millions of dollars, or he's finding millions of dollars to tear up the White House, but he can't figure out a way to lower prices for everyday voters.

MEIJER: Here's a way to lower prices for everyday voters. If we go with what he said, I am the code, and we have a Trump code that addresses why elevators in this country are four times the cost in Europe, that goes after single stair reform to get some missing middle regulations in there, that could be fantastic and transformative.

Because you know what? The International Building Code, it's bullshit.

(CROSSTALK)

NAVARRO: If you read the article and you realize the level of minutiae that he was getting into when it came to this ballroom design, the amount of hours that he has devoted to this ballroom when we are in the midst of a war.

ROGIN: I'm for that. Every minute that Trump spends on the arch and the pool and the minutiae of the ballroom is a minute that he's not spending on foreign policy.

(CROSSTALK)

PHILLIP: Or if you listen to him, the arch is foreign policy, He's decided he's going to reveal to the entire world that it's now a sniper (inaudible).

But also, speaking of ignoring rules and regulations, they're acknowledging that they're adverse effects to the Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, and other national monuments that are in that area as a result of this 250-foot arch.

ROTHMAN: Yes, I struggle to get worked up about traffic patterns in Washington, D.C. I just don't spend a lot of time there. I understand if you do, you would.

The national security invocations are an attempt to get around Congress. He needs congressional money to do this sort of thing, and so he's trying to tap other funds in order to get around it. And then invoking national security is sort of a bank shot way of doing that.

It's not going to work but it is attempt at least the ballroom serves a purpose I got my face in eyes just lost over whenever we start to talk about being the monument talk it has become very circular. But at least the ballroom serves a functional purpose which would be state events on White House property which you now currently have to use tense to a lot of Democrats are talking about tearing it down I will eat my hat.

ROGIN: -- in the East wing. I love the state (inaudible) you knocked it down.

PHILLIP: All right, we got to go. Next for us will react to your feedback from cnn.com/abby. We'll be right back.

[22:55:10]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PHILLIP: And now some viewer feedback from cnn.com/abby.

The first one says, "Where was all the White House and DOJ concern about national security during Signal Gate when Hegseth and the boys discussed extremely sensitive information on an unsecured chat?"

Seems like a fair question.

[23:00:08]

And then we've got one more.

This one is from Moses, who says, "I think Peter is an undercover Republican spy. On the weekends, he infiltrates hippie drum circles."

True or false?

ROGIN: Answer the question, Peter.

PHILLIP: All right. Before we go, you can stream the show live or watch it on demand anytime with an all-access subscription. Scan that Q.R. code at the bottom of your screen. Go to cnn.com/watch to learn more.

Thank you very much for watching. "Laura Coates Live" starts right now.