‘They’re Coming For The Rest Of Us’: Jon Stewart Nods Along As Maddow Comes Unglued Over Trump ‘Mega-Prisons’

MS NOW host Rachel Maddow told Jon Stewart on Monday’s The Daily Show that if President Trump gets the giant warehouse prisons his administration has sought for immigrants, they won’t stay immigrant-only for long.

“With a president like this, if you give him seven to ten prisons around the country that hold 10,000 people each, where he can hold people without trial, without access to lawyers indefinitely, you think he’s only going to leave immigrants in there?” Maddow asked. “I just don’t. I think that what they first do to immigrants, they want to do to the rest of us.”

On “Comedy Central,” Rachel Maddow very seriously says Trump wants to put his opponents in mega-prisons next to the illegal aliens slated for deportation. pic.twitter.com/CPVuD8C8Jb

— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) November 13, 2026

The exchange started with the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to turn a warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia, into a detention center for up to 10,000 people, which DHS dropped in June after the city fought it. Stewart said many of the people being held were in for what are usually treated as civil matters. “These are not the worst of the worst. These are people who overstayed a student visa or are here on a green card but got a parking ticket.”

Maddow added people who came in under temporary protected status, saying the administration “basically illegalized people who had never done anything illegal in their life.” Then she told Stewart that treating detention as an immigration issue misses the point: “We think about it as a special class of behavior by the government that’s just for immigrants. And we think, therefore, oh, you either care about immigrants or you don’t. No, I’m sorry.”

White House spokesman Davis Ingle told Fox News that “Jon Stewart is a talentless hack who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating disease known as Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain and ruined his life.” Former RNC spokesperson Elizabeth Pipko said the pair were conflating immigrants with illegal immigrants, adding that legal immigrants “are not targets for deportation or arrest by immigration officers. Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart both know that.”

Maddow was on the show to promote her new book on the Justice Department, Department of Fate, six days after Democrats’ midterm sweep. Asked what Democratic leaders in the House and Senate should do with their new power, Maddow said they should act “not only to investigate what’s been going on with ICE, but to defund what ICE has been doing,” and impeach “not only Pete Hegseth, but Todd Blanche.”

“I think that’s important not just to shame those guys, but in some cases it’s essentially to stop a crime wave in progress,” she said.

Rachel @maddow explains what she’d like to see from Democrats: investigate ICE, impeach Pete Hegseth and Todd Blanche, make healthcare more affordable for all, and more pic.twitter.com/otqflN1vGR

— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) November 10, 2026

Republicans in the outgoing House blocked Rep. Thomas Massie’s impeachment articles against Hegseth this week, with 11 Democrats missing the vote, which leaves the effort for the new Congress in January. Attorney General Blanche has refused to rule out prosecuting Democratic lawmakers who plan to investigate Trump officials, after the President ordered the Justice Department to look into what he called a “criminal act.”

Maddow also called for health insurance for every child in America through a bill from Sen. Andy Kim, and a ban on political donations from federal contractors. When Stewart asked, “No stock trading?” she said a ban on members of Congress trading stocks would go “on the floor first day.”

“I think they can use the power of the purse to stop the Iran war,” Maddow said.