Supreme Court lets Virginia resume its purge of voter rolls | The Excerpt

On Thursday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast (first released on October 31, 2024): The high court allows Virginia to resume its voter roll purge. Studies have found a negligible number of suspected noncitizens vote, but Republicans have made removal of suspected noncitizens a focus of their voter integrity lawsuits this year. USA TODAY National Immigration Reporter Lauren Villagran talks about the election's impact on companies involved with deportations. What do foreign betting markets say about the election? We learn about the history of trick-or-treating from Halloween historian Lisa Morton. The Los Angeles Dodgers are World Series champions.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Thursday, October 31st, 2024. This is The Excerpt.

Today, the Supreme Court has allowed Virginia to reinstate its purge of suspected non-citizens from voter rolls. Plus, what the election means for companies that help run deportations. And on this Halloween, we look back at the history of trick-or-treating.

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The Supreme Court yesterday allowed Virginia to reinstate a purge of suspected non-citizens from voter rolls. Over the objections of the three liberal justices, the court accepted an emergency request from state officials to intervene after lower courts stopped a state program that had removed more than 1,600 names since August 7th. The majority did not give a reason for their decision, which is common in emergency orders. Republican Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin called the Order a victory for common sense and election fairness.

Danielle Lang, senior director for voting rights at the Campaign Legal Center, which represented advocacy groups in the lawsuit, said it was outrageous to allow a last minute purge that includes many known eligible citizens. Voting rights groups fought the state policy because it removed naturalized citizens from the rolls if they had previously declared themselves non-citizens on motor vehicle forms. Youngkin's program had notified suspected non-citizens that they would be removed if they did not affirm their citizenship within 14 days. But because years might've passed since the motor vehicle declarations advocacy groups and the Justice Department challenged the program in court arguing naturalized citizens were being removed from the rolls.

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The companies quietly running the federal government's immigration detention and deportation system are anticipating a potentially massive payday if Donald Trump returns to the White House. I spoke with USA Today national immigration reporter Lauren Villagran for more on that potential outcome as well as what a Kamala Harris presidency might mean for this aspect of immigration enforcement.

Lauren, thanks for making the time as always.

Lauren Villagran:

Hey, Taylor.

Taylor Wilson:

So Lauren, how does the federal government really rely on this network of for-profit companies as part of its immigration enforcement?

Lauren Villagran:

Many Americans may not realize that the entire immigration enforcement system is largely based on the use of private contractors, so through federal and private company and publicly traded company partnerships. That means everything from transportation to detention and ultimately deportation flights.

Taylor Wilson:

So why might it make sense really Lauren for the government to have contracts like these? Why might it be necessary in some cases? And what do some critics say about these types of partnerships?

Lauren Villagran:

To start, Taylor, the federal government just doesn't have the employee or staffing power to do everything it wants to do with respect to immigration enforcement, even under the current Biden-Harris administration. So I'll give you an example.

On the side of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which includes the deportation officer, there's only several hundred of those folks who are the people who would do the literal knocking on doors or the investigations into a person who may be removable. As a result, ICE contracts, for example, with transportation and security companies to bus people from the interior to border detention centers. It contracts with publicly-traded companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic to run the detention centers that will house people while ICE is seeking to remove them.

The removal process can't happen overnight, Taylor. People may have a claim that they want to make to stay. There is, to some extent, due process even for people who may be in the country illegally. And ultimately, in the last step of the deportation process, folks have to be largely flown out if they aren't Mexican. Those contracts are handled by charter flight companies.

Taylor Wilson:

Interesting, Lauren. So with the election next week, we know that immigration has been a big part of this election conversation and election season. Let's start by talking about Donald Trump. What has Trump promised really as part of his essentially mass deportation plan, Lauren, and what would his approach to immigration mean for these private partnerships we've been talking about?

Lauren Villagran:

So we haven't seen anything specific in writing, Taylor, but we do know that the federal government does rely heavily on private contractors. And that former President Donald Trump has promised to massively deport immigrants in the country unlawfully. The numbers that have been thrown around anywhere upwards of a million people per year, President Trump himself has said he wants to deport. He's used a numbers like 11 million, 12 million all the way up to 20 million people. I will say that Pew Research estimates that there are 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country. But regardless of the size of his deportation plans, it's very likely that the federal government would have to rely on private contractors. Some of the key agencies have, for example, had appropriations to hire more people and just haven't been able to. There are some barriers there to really scaling up the size of the federal workforce.

And you asked earlier why use private contractors, I think that there is some flexibility there for the federal government to increase detention space, decrease detention space depending on the whims or the goals of a particular administration. But Taylor, there are issues with oversight. You have sitting senators, government watchdog groups, immigrant advocates who have all looked into a variety of these contracts and found deficiencies.

Taylor Wilson:

Lauren, I'm also curious what a Harris presidency would mean for this deportation business and these partnerships. Do we have any indication of what could come based on what we've seen from the Biden-Harris administration or what we've heard from Harris out on the campaign truck?

Lauren Villagran:

Yeah, again, inferring from what we know about the Biden-Harris administration, obviously the administration has struggled on immigration enforcement until this year when through a combination of initiatives and partnerships with Mexico and other countries were able to bring the number of migrants arriving at the border down. That being said, Vice President Kamala Harris has not laid out a detailed plan. Neither has Trump. They've just sort of talked about what their goals would be. And I would expect a slight increase in immigration enforcement. We have seen the Biden-Harris administration recently increase the number of beds available in ICE detention from around 34,000 to over 41,000. So I think that even under a Harris administration, we may see a small uptick in ICE detention and deportations.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Lauren Villagran covers the border and immigration for USA Today. I appreciate your insight as always, Lauren. Thanks so much.

Lauren Villagran:

Thanks for having me, Taylor.

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Taylor Wilson:

We're just five days from the election, and polls, experts, and pundits continue to say the presidential race appears exceedingly close between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. But that's not the message offshore betting markets have been sending in recent weeks. The gap between Harris and Trump continues to widen on Polymarket, a crypto trading platform, and two major UK betting platforms, Sporting Index and Betfair Exchange.

As of yesterday evening, Betfair's temperature gauge pointed to a likely win for Trump. RealClearPolitics aggregates polls and shows trends in their results. It still considers eight battleground states with 103 electoral votes toss-ups because polling results remain within the margin of error. Offshore bettors have pushed up the probability of Trump winning all but two of those s tates. You can dig further into these numbers with a link in today's show notes.

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Kids:

Trick-or-treat!

Taylor Wilson:

It's Halloween, which means you're probably stocked up on candies. Maybe your house is decorated with pumpkins and cobwebs, and you're ready to see which costumes are the most popular this year. But where did trick-or-treating come from? If you're thinking Celtic Druids or All Souls' Day traditions, you'd be wrong. Our senior producer, Kaely Monahan, spoke with author and Halloween historian Lisa Morton, to unearth the very American roots of the spooky season custom.

Kaely Monahan:

Lisa, welcome to The Excerpt.

Lisa Morton:

Oh, thank you for having me, Kaely.

Kaely Monahan:

So when it comes to the history of Halloween and trick-or-treating specifically, there's a lot of writings on the internet that draw connections to old Celtic traditions. Is there any truth to that assumption?

Lisa Morton:

Well, first of all, that notion that it comes from old Celtic traditions is one of the many misconceptions around Halloween and trick-or-treat. It does not. I know I see things all the time like, oh, ancient druid priests would dress in bearskins and go to houses. No, I'm afraid none of that happened. And there really is virtually no real European tradition behind trick-or-treat. It's very American, and it's much more recent than most people think.

Kaely Monahan:

That's so interesting. Well, I did come across this old European custom that sounds like it could have impacted our ideas of trick-or-treating, something called souling. What is that, and why do you argue that it doesn't have any influence on what we know as trick-or-treating today?

Lisa Morton:

Souling was a real thing. It was part of celebrating All Souls' Day, which actually happens on November 2nd, and it looks on the surface a little bit like trick-or-treat because beggars and also sometimes children would go from house to house in a village and they would offer to say prayers for the souls of your deceased loved ones. And in exchange for this service, they were given some kind of little treat. Quite often it was a custom little cake that was called a soul cake. Children would imitate the beggars. They would actually smear soot on their faces and dress in rags. So like I said, on the surface, this looks like the same thing. They're going from house to house. They're in costumes, they're collecting treats, but souling dies out long, long before trick-or-treat.

Kaely Monahan:

So where did the idea for trick-or-treating as we understand it come from?

Lisa Morton:

It comes about at a time when prank playing is huge with Halloween. It is how most children from around the end of the 19th century to about 1930 were celebrating Halloween. And the pranks were something that came over with the Scottish and the Irish when they emigrated to America, mainly in the 1840s to escape famine. They loved playing pranks. But by the time America gets more urbanized and we get big cities coming in, these pranks start to become vandalism. By 1933, they called that year Black Halloween because the amount of vandalism was so extreme, it was costing cities millions of dollars. A lot of cities thought about banning the holiday altogether.

But a few were smarter than that and said, "Maybe we can buy these kids off." And so it is the height of the Great Depression. So you can't just say to homeowners, "Hey, just stock up a bunch of treats and give them out to these kids instead." They created these things called house to house parties. And the house to house parties were where a bunch of houses would get together and each one would offer the kids a different little something. So the first house might give the kids a very simple costume, and we're talking like a sheet, so you're a ghost. Some old rags that you tie around your head, you're a pirate, that kind of thing. And then the next house would maybe give them a game. And then the next house, a little tiny version of a haunted attraction. And the last house would give them treats. That was very successful. And by the end of the '30s, it had spread throughout America and the prank playing stopped.

Kaely Monahan:

You mentioned that these kids were doing some pretty costly vandalism. Can you give me some examples?

Lisa Morton:

At first, the pranks were kind of amusing and fun. They were rural and they would do things like disassemble a buggy and reassemble it like on top of the roof of a barn. It was very industrious and very extravagant. But as I mentioned before, America starts to become more about cities, more urbanized. These kids start moving away from the farmlands. And when they go into the cities, it's not just fun, "Oh, let's soap a window." It's let's set fires. They're breaking glass fixtures. They're actually even tripping people on sidewalks. But the biggest thing was the amount of lighting fixtures and windows that were being smashed. And again, millions of dollars of damage to the cities. And so they really had to do something to control this.

Kaely Monahan:

All right. Lisa Morton is an author and Halloween historian. Lisa, thank you again so much for coming on The Excerpt. And happy Halloween.

Lisa Morton:

Happy Halloween to everyone.

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Taylor Wilson:

And the Los Angeles Dodgers are World Series champions. It took down the New York Yankees in five games after a thrilling win last night, including a five run comeback. Freddie Freeman won World Series MVP, hitting a home run in each of the first four games and driving in a World Series franchise record, 12 runs.

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40 of the richest colleges in the US, including heavyweights like Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Stanford are facing a major lawsuit. The universities are being accused of working together to overcharge students with divorced or separated parents by making them report the financial assets of their non-custodial parents, which in turn reduced their financial aid. This lawsuit comes on the heels of a $284 million settlement in a similar case. How did these schools manage to pull this off for so long? USA Today education reporter Zach Schermele joins my co-host Dana Taylor to explain just how schools got away with this alleged scheme until now. You can find it on The Excerpt today, beginning at 4:00 pm Eastern Time right here on this feed.

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And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods. And if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court lets Vir. resume its purge of voter rolls | The Excerpt