Bill Burr says ICE will eventually target crackdown backers

Comedian Bill Burr said in a new interview that federal immigration agents will eventually turn their attention to supporters of the current immigration crackdown — people he suggested believe they’re safely in the “in-group” — part of a wide-ranging conversation that also touched on data centers, the housing market, and a corporate-ownership claim that turned out to be false.

Mr. Burr, who appears in Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming Facebook drama “The Social Reckoning,” sat down with Rolling Stone senior editor David Fear for a lengthy interview published Tuesday. Discussing material from his current stand-up tour about Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, Mr. Burr described telling an audience that white Americans who back the raids would eventually find themselves targeted, too. “We’re not nearly as upset as we need to be,” he told the magazine, adding that people who see themselves as part of the “in-group” would eventually “work their way back” into ICE’s crosshairs because, in his telling, they don’t yet see themselves as the ones going into agents’ vans.

“They’re going to work their way back to you,” Mr. Burr said. “Eventually, you guys will be. These people, they think they’re in the group. They think they’re going to get under the mountain or get on the spaceship. It’s like, you’re not. They’re using you.” 

Mr. Burr made several additional claims during that same Rolling Stone interview — reported by Breitbart — that were omitted from the edited written Q&A Rolling Stone published online. He suggested that data centers exist primarily to surveil the public, linking the idea to the “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention facility. He also argued that illegal immigration does not drive up housing costs, saying “that is basic math.”

That claim runs counter to recent economic research. A Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas working paper published in March found that an increase in unauthorized immigrant worker flows equal to 1% of a local market’s initial employment level corresponded with a roughly one-for-one rise in local employment, alongside a roughly 2.2% rise in home prices and a 1.4% increase in rents. The paper’s authors, who describe the findings as preliminary, estimated that unauthorized immigration accounted for about 30% of home-price growth and 20% of rent growth in the average metro area from 2021 to 2024.

The picture is more nuanced than either side has presented it, though. PolitiFact found that while the Dallas Fed paper does attribute a real effect to unauthorized immigration — about 4.3 percentage points of a 22.6% overall rise in rents from 2021 to 2024 — claims that immigration drove housing costs up by 40% or 50%, as President Trump has stated, substantially overstate the research. Some economists cited in that fact-check argue that a shortage of new home construction, not immigration, remains the primary driver of higher housing costs.

Mr. Burr also claimed that Walmart owns the Schwinn bicycle brand. It does not. Schwinn belongs to the Dutch company Pon Holdings, which acquired the brand through its 2022 purchase of Dorel Sports’ bicycle division; Walmart only sells Schwinn bikes at retail, according to Wisconsin Public Radio.