Pete Buttigieg on Immigration, Policing, and His Pitch to Libertarians

"If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we're in it," former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg posted on X. He was responding to the Trump administration's aggressive immigration enforcement tactics that had led to the deaths of two Americans in Minneapolis.

A former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Buttigieg won the Iowa caucuses during his 2020 presidential run. In February, the possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie to make his case to libertarians.

Q: What should we be doing in terms of removing illegal aliens in the country?

A: I think there is a kind of commonsense consensus among most Americans, left, right, and center, that if somebody is a danger to society, if somebody has a criminal record, then they need to be dealt with. They need to be deported and/or dealt with in our criminal justice system. I don't think there's a ton of disagreement with that. I think a lot of people who voted for this administration did so believing that they would prioritize the most dangerous, the people with the worst criminal records. After all, they said that they would.

The challenge is we've seen something that's gone so far beyond that, where you have people who have been in this country, everything legal other than they don't have permission to be here—paying taxes, often having work permits, doing what they're supposed to do. As well as people who are 100 percent legal, people with some kind of asylum or refugee status, even United States citizens, all being caught up in being on the abusive and the business end of this administration's immigration policy.

Q: How do you go about changing ICE so that people are more comfortable helping it do its functions?

A: This breakdown of trust has obviously been going on for a long time. I think it's a huge problem. I wrote a whole book about it about five or six years ago now, and it's only become more serious since then. I thought a lot about how trust, in particular between law enforcement and citizens, is earned, because of my time as mayor, where I oversaw a police force. We had a lot of challenges with that police force and its relationship to the community. Part of where trust was earned was that people knew each other, the members of the community and the members of the police department. The policing worked best when people trusted those in uniform.

Q: What do you have to offer libertarian voters, who could be decisive in elections over the next few years?

A: The core of what I have to say is that I am driven by a commitment to freedom, and I think anyone libertarian views themselves as having that same core commitment. To me, there are three things, three categories of things, that the government has to do in order for us to be free.

One, it has to provide basic services, because you're actually not free if you can't get clean, safe drinking water out of the tap or if you don't have national defense. Two, it has to constrain anybody who could make you unfree. This is traditionally the thing progressives are more interested in. I would say that means if your boss can make you unfree, if your neighbor can make you unfree, if your cable company can make you unfree, there can be a role for government. The third thing a government has to do is constrain itself. This is the area that I think it was conservatives and libertarians who paid more attention to, or talked about it more, for most of my lifetime.

What I have to offer is a politics where of course we're going to have a push-pull tug-of-war on exactly what it means to make good on those three things.

The result should be that if we get government right—make it maybe more powerful in certain ways where I think it should have more power to deal with monopolies, for example, or with inequality, but also make government less powerful when it comes to surveillance and intimidation and some of the other things we're seeing on the streets of American cities right now—we would in fact enjoy more freedom as Americans.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

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