Ep. 1788 - Join Now! $50k To Round Up Mexicans For ICE

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Another switchback. Wait, this isn't the top.

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Where's the summit?

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Why am I doing this?

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At REI Co-op, we believe there are places within ourselves. Almost there.

**Michael Knowles** (0:12)
You got this.

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That we find only outside.

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Wow, this is worth it.

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We have the gear, inspiration and advice to help you get there. REI Co-op. Visit rei.com.

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These are questions that take cultures thousands of years to answer. During Answer the Call, I take questions from people just like you about their problems, opportunities, challenges or when they simply need advice.

**Michael Knowles** (1:12)
How do I balance all of this grief, responsibility?

**Jim Acosta** (1:15)
How do you repair this kind of damage?

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My daughter, Michaela, guides the conversations as we hopefully help people navigate their lives. Everyone has their own destiny. Everyone.

**Michael Knowles** (1:32)
When I was young, when I was young and playing in my career, I got some great advice. Find something you love to do and then figure out how to get paid for it. Would you love to deport 11 to 16 million illegal aliens from this country? I certainly would. If the popular vote last November is any indication, most Americans would love to do that too. What if I told you that you could today get a $50,000 signing bonus, a decent salary, possible performance-based bonuses, we'll get to that in a moment, and even student loan repayment, if you have student loans at all because you don't even need a college degree, all to deport a bunch of illegals, which is something that most of us would probably do for free. If you don't see me behind this desk tomorrow, you will know why, because that is the current offer on the table from the Trump administration. I'm Michael Knowles, this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show. Do you remember Jim Acosta? Jim Acosta was the real life Ron Burgundy from CNN during the first Trump administration. So Acosta is no longer with CNN, and still not helping CNN's ratings all that much, but he's out, he's doing his own show now, and he decided to interview a dead teenager. How did he do that? Why did he do that? We will get to that momentarily. One of the weirdest, most disturbing showings from mainstream media journalists, which is saying a lot. First though, I'm not joking. I know it sounds like kind of a joke. Hey, do you want a new job? We'll go round up illegals. I'm not joking. It's funny, it's delightful. I'm entertained by it, but this is a great job offer. The Trump administration is currently offering people who maybe they have a college degree, maybe you don't have a college degree, a job with a pretty good salary. I think the average salary for an ICE officer is like 90 grand a year. It starts off much lower, but you can keep moving up and I think it goes all the way up to like 110, 120 is pretty good salary plus very good benefits, plus apparently a $50,000 signing bonus plus, here's the controversial part, performance-based bonuses, meaning, I'm just making up a number here, but 500 bucks for every illegal you throw out of the country. So you say, all right, let's go, I'm working on commissions. Come here, Jose, get over here. He started twirling the lasso. This was reported in the New York Times. So take it with a grain of salt, but I think it actually did happen. Tuesday morning, ICE announced in an internal email that it would offer cash bonuses to agents for deporting people quickly. So, you know, the job is to deport people. The deportations are not going fast enough for most of our liking. So they're saying, look, we'll give you cash bonuses for every illegal head that you toss out of the country. Not just that you arrest, but that you actually get deported on the other side of the border. So that was the internal email, according to the New York Times. Four hours later, an official in the ICE Field Operations Division, Liana J. Costano, wrote an email, said, please disregard. So forget about the cash bonuses, forget about that for now. Now, the $50,000 signing bonus, that's still good. The agency has made apparently over 1,000 tentative job offers already on these grounds. The big, beautiful bill that Trump just passed, his signature legislation for this year, has just increased ICE's annual budget by many multiples. It's going from $8 billion a year to $28 billion a year. I think that makes it the second best funded law enforcement agency in the country. But here's the key paragraph. Here's the key for this report. The bonus program that ended on Tuesday, almost as quickly as it began, had been described as a 30-day pilot. According to documents reviewed by The Times, under its terms, ICE would hand out $200 cash, okay, not $500, $200. This is a fiscally responsible administration. $200 bonuses for each immigrant deported within seven days of being arrested and $100 for those deported within two weeks, according to an initial memo signed by Ms. Costano that was sent to the directors and deputy directors of ICE's field offices across the country. What's the takeaway here?