Mother Jones illustration; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty
In the tumultuous swirl of President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown—which has both succeeded in terrorizing communities across the country and largely failed to detain all those violent criminals supposedly rampant in the United States—an unexpected bit player has emerged: Phil McGraw.
Better known as the TV personality Dr. Phil, who rose to fame on the Oprah Winfrey Show during the ’90s, McGraw appears to have positioned himself as a willing narrator of our dystopian immigration policies. It follows a relatively recent embrace of Trumpism that in less than a year has taken McGraw from 2024 rally speaker to filming ICE raids.
There he was in Chicago last month, tagging along for an Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid with the intimate access to border czar Tom Homan usually reserved for New York Mayor Eric Adams. Amid his documentation, McGraw seemed to employ a cinema vérité style. “Where you from? Where were you born?” McGraw asks in a video posted to Instagram, as officers detain a man they believe is a convicted sex offender. “You ever been deported from the United States?”
At one point during the arrest, the man seems to recognize the absurdity of McGraw’s presence. “You’re Dr. Phil,” he says. McGraw asks the man how he knows him. “You’re on TV,” he replies. It was a collision of valorizing cop propaganda and D-list celebrity. The main reward for McGraw, it seems, is content for his social media.
McGraw partaking in the raid struck many as inappropriate, even confounding. But his ICE embed was one of several highly publicized anti-immigration spectacles to have taken place since Trump’s return to power.
ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight 🔊 pic.twitter.com/O6L1iYt9b4
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) February 18, 2025
The most absurd saw newly appointed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, one week after the inauguration, in heavily caked-on makeup and earrings, joining ICE officials for a predawn raid in the Bronx. “We’re getting the dirtbags off these streets,” Noem said in a three-second video clip, clad in a bulletproof vest. Then, of course, there’s the perennially camera-ready Adams, who, in between hanging out with Tucker Carlson, has been actively selling out New York’s sanctuary city policies since securing the president’s protection from federal corruption charges.
His aid in doing so? Dr. Phil. As my colleague Isabela Dias reported:
Back in December, McGraw reportedly brokered a friendly meeting between Homan and New York City Mayor Eric Adams, after which, according to Gothamist, the Democrat said he would alter sanctuary city laws to give local authorities more latitude to cooperate with the federal government on immigration enforcement.
Still, a discredited psychologist with barely remaining celebrity clout among a burgeoning landscape of fresh-faced right-wing influencers strikes as an oddity. Is he a patsy? Or, like Adams, does McGraw see something to gain by hitching a wagon to Trump?
As NBC News reports, it’s been less than a year since McGraw launched Merit Street Media, a period of reported struggle for the nascent venture that has seen McGraw taking an increasingly supportive stance of Trump’s immigration policies as the company attempts relevance. So between episodes with titles like “The World’s Biggest Bride Update,” will front-row access to cruelty boost Merit viewership? In this era of tabloid trash as politics, it just might work.
