The Trump administration is purposefully cruel. That much cannot be argued, not when it has deliberately sent deportees to foreign torture prisons, dumped them in war-torn countries with histories of human rights abuses, and stranded people its has been ordered to release far from home without their IDs, phones, or money.
This regime loves to inflict pain. Its desire to erase as many minorities from this country as possible has led it to do things no competent government would ever do, especially not one that serves a nation long known as a land of hope and opportunity. The people who first landed here were escaping religious persecution. (They then went on to eradicate the people who actually lived here, but stick with me for a moment.) People seeking the same refuge from persecution are now being ejected from this country as quickly as possible.
The good news is that a federal court has at least pumped the brakes on one such DHS effort. In Minnesota — where Trump has used benefits fraud allegations as justification for a “surge” that has resulted in two murders committed by federal officers (so far!) — a federal judge has just told the administration it can’t just suddenly declare an end to refugee status.
The longtime government policy has been that refugees — vetted and legally admitted individuals — who are yet to adjust to lawful permanent resident status cannot be detained on that basis alone.
With Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), the Trump administration wants to change that.
In a pair of memos issued in December 2025 and February 2026 — which Law Dork has covered extensively — the Department of Homeland Security has purported to change that policy by rescinding and re-rescinding the 2010 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that most recently enunciated that policy for applying the relevant provision — 8 U.S.C. 1159 — of the Refugee Act of 1980.
What used to be a normal part of the “give me your tired, huddled masses” ideal that once represented this Land of Opportunity is no longer. The Trump administration is now claiming it can simply pretend existing law no longer matters. And while it is true that Congress could decide to rewrite or overturn the 1980 law, it cannot simply be ignored just because the DHS sent out a couple of memos telling federal officers they’re free to ignore existing law.
Fortunately, this Minnesota court isn’t going to sit by while the administration pretends the only interpretation of the law is the one it recently wrote for itself. From the opinion [PDF]:
When the clock strikes 12:00 a.m. on the 366th day after a refugee was lawfully admitted to the United States, according to the Government, 8 U.S.C. § 1159(a) gives Department of Homeland Security officials the power to arrest and detain that refugee with no limits on the length of detention. Because § 1159(a) provides no such power, the Court will issue a preliminary injunction enjoining Defendants from arresting or detaining refugees in Minnesota on the basis that have not yet been adjusted to lawful permanent resident status—which, by law, cannot occur until one year has passed. The Court will not allow federal authorities to use a new and erroneous statutory interpretation to terrorize refugees who immigrated to this country under the promise that they would be welcomed and allowed to live in peace, far from the persecution they fled.
You see the obvious evil here, right? A refugee — at earliest — cannot secure lawful permanent status until after one year has passed. Trump’s DHS says refugees applying for permanent residence can be arrested and detained indefinitely 24 hours after they’ve been here for a year. The court is right: this not only flips the law on its head, it completely destroys an American ideal that made this nation of a beacon of hope for oppressed people around the world.
Decades ago, as a nation, we made a solemn promise to refugees fleeing persecution: that after rigorous vetting, they would be welcomed to the United States and given the opportunity to rebuild their lives. We assured them that they could care for their families, earn a living, contribute to their communities, and live in peace here in the United States. We promised them the hope that one day they could achieve the American Dream.
The Government’s new policy breaks that promise—without congressional authorization—and raises serious constitutional concerns. The new policy turns the refugees’ American Dream into a dystopian nightmare.
A government that retains any notion of serving the public good would never have attempted to enact this policy. Only a government filled with unjustified hatred of “others” would dare to destroy the American Dream. And only a regime so laden with craven bigots would dare to drape themselves in the flag while shitting on what actually makes this country great.
And, it must be noted, this is only a temporary block. The court is going to allow the government to defend its actions. I don’t think the government will win, but it will certainly kick this up the ladder to the appellate level. That’s fine, so long as the restraining order stays in place while the government cooks up a defense for its blatant racism. With any luck, this will stick all the way to the Supreme Court… and then hopefully after that review as well. No one who truly loves America would back this effort. And no one who only claims to love America while strip-mining it of its greatness should be allowed to turn this great nation into a “dystopian nightmare.”
On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump’s top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city’s diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner.
The visitors from Washington included Marcus Thornton, a former Border Patrol agent known for a series of public lawsuits against the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; Kenneth Jackson, a former oil executive who had done a stint in government under the first Trump administration; and Laken Rapier, who’d previously managed communications for the city of Fort Worth, Texas. This year, all had been appointed to leadership roles in the U.S. Agency for International Development, the premier government humanitarian agency in the world.
Five months earlier, some of the visiting aides had celebrated USAID’s destruction over cake and speeches in Washington. With that job done, they’d embarked on a world tour of half a dozen cities, including the Kenyan capital. They were granted special permission to fly business class “to help ensure maximum rest and comfort,” according to an internal memo. Thornton alone received authorization to expense more than $35,000 in taxpayer money for the trip. The plan was to conduct exit interviews with USAID’s top experts, who were being forced out of the agency amid the administration’s stated commitment to austerity.
When the U.S. embassy in Nairobi learned of the visit, officials there arranged the dinner with a goal in mind. It would be their last opportunity to explain, face-to-face, the catastrophic impact of Trump’s drastic cuts to foreign aid.
A top concern: the administration’s failure to fund the World Food Program’s operation in Kenya, where about 720,000 refugees, among the most vulnerable people on earth, relied on the organization to survive. After providing $112 million in 2024, the U.S. abruptly cut off money in January without warning, leaving the program with no time to find adequate support or import the food needed for the rest of the year.
For months afterward, U.S. government and humanitarian officials warned Washington that the cutoff had led to increasingly dire circumstances. They begged Trump’s political advisers, including Thornton, to renew WFP’s grant and give the money it needed to avert disaster. The embassy in Nairobi sent at least eight cables to the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, explaining the situation on the ground and projecting mass hunger, violence and regional instability.
Those warnings went unheeded. Rubio, facing pressure from lawmakers and humanitarian groups, nevertheless publicly asserted that the agency’s mass cuts had spared food programs — even as the administration failed to fund WFP in Kenya behind the scenes. “If it’s providing food or medicine or anything that is saving lives and is immediate and urgent, you’re not included in the freeze,” Rubio told reporters on Feb. 4. “I don’t know how much more clear we can be than that.”
By the spring, WFP still had not received funding, ran low on supplies and would be forced to stop feeding many of Kenya’s refugees. In Kakuma, the third-largest camp in the world, WFP cut rations to their lowest in history, trapping most of the 308,000 people in the camp with almost nothing to eat.
They began to starve, and many — mostly children — died because their malnourished bodies couldn’t fight off infections, ProPublica found while reporting in the camp. Mothers had to choose which of their kids to feed. Young men took to the streets in protests, some of which devolved into violent riots. Pregnant women with life-threatening anemia were so desperate for calories that they ate mud. Out of options and mortally afraid, refugees began fleeing the camp by foot and in overcramped cars, threatening a new migration crisis on the continent. They said they’d rather risk being shot or dying on the perilous route than slowly starving in Kakuma.
To press the urgency of the situation in East Africa at dinner, the embassy officials enlisted Dragica Pajevic, a WFP veteran of more than two decades. Pajevic arrived at the Tribe Hotel early. She brought props. The bag slung over her shoulder held a collection of Tupperware containers with different amounts of dry rice, lentils and oil.
As they ate, she placed each container on the table. The largest represented 2,100 daily calories, what humanitarians like her consider the minimum daily intake for an adult. The next container showed 840 calories. That is what a fifth of refugees in Kakuma were set to receive come August. Another third would get just over 400 calories. Then she showed an empty container. The rest — almost half of the people in Kakuma — would get nothing at all.
Pajevic ended her presentation by relaying a truism that she said a government official in Liberia had once told her: The only difference between life and death during a famine is WFP and the U.S. government, its largest donor.
“The one who’s not hungry cannot understand the beastly pain of hunger,” Pajevic said, “and what a person is willing to do just to tame that beastly pain.”
The response was muted, according to other people familiar with the dinner. Jackson, then USAID’s deputy administrator for management and resources, said the decision to renew WFP’s grant was now with the State Department, and gave no indication he would appeal on the organization’s behalf. Thornton, a foreign service officer who ascended to a leadership post under Trump, did not speak. Instead, he spent much of the meal looking at his cellphone.
The dinner plates were cleared and the visitors headed to the airport. “They just took zero responsibility for this,” one of the attendees said, “and zero responsibility for what’s going to happen.”
The details of this episode are drawn from accounts by six people familiar with the trip, as well as internal government records. Most people in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. This year, ProPublica, The New Yorker and other outlets have documented violence and hunger due to the aid cuts in Kenya’s camps. But the scale of suffering throughout Kakuma — and the string of decisions by American officials that contributed to it — have not been previously reported.
The camp had seen similar spikes in pediatric malnutrition in recent years, but they were tied to natural causes, such as malaria outbreaks, extreme drought or COVID-19, according to staff of the International Rescue Committee, a U.S.-based nonprofit that operates Kakuma’s only hospital.
This was something different: an American-made hunger crisis. So far this year, community health workers have referred almost 12,000 malnourished children for immediate medical attention.
“What has come with Trump, I’ve never experienced anything like it,” said one aid worker who has been in Kakuma for decades. “It’s huge and brutal and traumatizing.”
In response to a detailed list of questions, a senior State Department official insisted that no one had died as a result of foreign aid cuts. The official also said that the U.S. still gives WFP hundreds of millions a year and the administration is shifting to investments that will better serve both the U.S. and key allies like Kenya over time. “We just signed a landmark health agreement with Kenya,” the official said, pointing to recent endorsements by government officials there. “That’s going to transform their ability to build their domestic capacity, to take care of their populations, to improve the quality of health care in Kenya.”
The day of the dinner, 370 miles from the Tribe Hotel, Mary Sunday sat on a vinyl bed in the pediatric malnutrition ward of Kakuma’s hospital, cradling her 7-month-old baby, Santina. The name means “little saint” in Italian, and Mary could only pray that God would save her baby’s life.
Slender, with close-cropped hair and arresting eyes, Sunday had rushed Santina to the hospital four days earlier after the infant developed severe diarrhea. Her husband, Juma Lotunya, had stayed behind to care for their 2-year-old, Grace.
Devout Christians in their early 20s, the couple fled to Kakuma together from South Sudan. They considered parenthood a sacred responsibility — especially Sunday, whose own mother died when she was young. As their family grew, Lotunya had hoped to start a small shop so he could afford to send their daughters to school. “I had that simple dream,” he said.
But in June, when Santina was 6 months old, WFP cut the camp’s food rations. Families like theirs were allotted just a small amount of rice and lentils — 630 daily calories per person — which they were expected to make last until August. Sunday and Lotunya stretched it as long as they could, eating one small meal per day. But the food ran out before the end of June. Sunday stopped producing enough breastmilk to feed Santina, and their chubby baby began to waste away. By the time they arrived at the hospital, Santina weighed only 11 pounds. Staff noted in her charts that she was severely malnourished, her eyes sunken.
Sunday watched helplessly under the clinic’s fluorescent lights as hospital staff pumped her baby with medicine and tried to reintroduce more calories.
On the clinic’s walls, next to decals of butterflies, monkeys and seahorses, loomed dry-erase boards with columns of data tracking how many children and babies had died in the room this year. Sunday spoke no English, but she knew what the numbers meant: One row listed admissions to the pediatric malnutrition ward — about 400 per month on average, including the highest number of edema cases, a key marker of severity, in years.
Another row on the whiteboards tallied those who never left the clinic: At least 54 children have died in the hospital with complications brought on by malnutrition in 2025 alone, including a surge in the spring when families first began rationing their food because of the USAID cuts. Worldwide, this year is the first in decades that early childhood deaths will increase, the Gates Foundation recently reported. Researchers said a key factor is the cuts to foreign aid.
In the hospital’s courtyard, another mother, 20-year-old Nyangoap Riek, leaned against a tree with her two children at her feet and said she was considering an extreme solution. “The thing I think about is committing suicide,” she told ProPublica, “because I heard the U.N. takes care of the kids when the parents are gone.”
Kakuma has been a sanctuary in East Africa since the United Nations and Kenyan government began accepting refugees there in 1992. People have come fleeing deadly violence in some two dozen countries — mainly from South Sudan like Sunday and Lotunya — but also as far away as Afghanistan. Covering an area about half the size of Manhattan, Kakuma is a loose constellation of head-high mud and thatch neighborhoods and corrugated metal slums, like a macabre oasis in a desert, stitched together by rutted motorcycle trails.
Its sheer scale has drawn political figures, Olympic gold medalists and Hollywood celebrities on humanitarian visits. Movies have been made, including a documentary about the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of unaccompanied minors escaping war and conflict. Angelina Jolie opened a school there.
A high-ranking Republican-appointed diplomat from the U.S. once called Kakuma the hottest, driest land on earth, “a place that is very close to the edge of Hades.”
“We are sustaining life,” she said, “by helping fund the World Food Program.”
In the past, USAID gave WFP’s global operations billions every year, including the funds to feed refugees at camps in Kenya. The aid is one end of a bargain to bring stability to the region. Countries like Kenya take in refugees from a host of other countries fleeing violence, famine or natural disasters. In exchange, the U.S., along with other wealthy nations vested in saving lives, help foot the bill for essential services. Without food, experts say, refugees would likely spill out of Kenya into other countries. Conflicts may last longer, claim more lives and create new refugees.
USAID has been ubiquitous in Kakuma for so long that it’s a literal building block in the camp; millions of old cans of cooking oil bearing the agency’s letters have been flattened and repurposed as lattice fencing.
When the Trump administration froze thousands of USAID programs during a putative review of the agency’s operations in January, Rubio insisted food programs would be spared.
But then Rubio’s lieutenants failed to extend WFP’s Kenya funding, blowing up the typical timetable the organization needed in order to ship food to Kakuma by summer.
WFP was blindsided. The organization’s leaders had received no notice ahead of the cuts and no communication about whether the Trump administration would ever renew their grant. “There was zero plan, except causing pain,” said one U.N. official. “And that is not forgivable.”
Even before the second Trump administration, funding shortfalls in recent years had forced the organization to drop rations by around 20% to 40% throughout the camp. To adjust for the long term, WFP was planning to reform its model in Kenya to make sure the small minority of people with some income, like small-business owners, didn’t receive food.
Thousands of Refugee Families in Northwest Kenya Starved After USAID Funding Cuts
In August, food rations were cut to historic lows. Almost half the Kakuma camp got nothing at all.
Note: Rations and population sizes represent an Aug. 11 food distribution in Kakuma. ProPublica extrapolated the 100% ration amounts from the 20% ration. Amounts vary between distributions. Source: Documents obtained by ProPublica. Chris Alcantara/ProPublica
But this year, WFP’s leaders were forced to stretch their remaining supplies from last year. They made the drastic decision to cut rations to their lowest in Kakuma’s history. They also reduced distributions to once every other month instead of monthly.
In August, the handouts would become even more austere, as WFP rushed to prioritize families based on need. They determined only half the population would receive food. Most people learned which half they were in from a number stamped on the back of their ration card.
Across the world in Washington, the fate of places like Kakuma was in the hands of a select few political appointees, including Thornton, who was named the agency’s deputy chief of staff on March 18. Thornton first worked beneath Peter Marocco, Rubio’s head of foreign assistance, and later under Jeremy Lewin, initially an Elon Musk hire. Besides Rubio, none of them were subject to Senate confirmation.
As pleas poured in from government officials in Washington and abroad to restart aid operations in Africa, including WFP in Kenya, the appointees often failed to act, records and interviews show.
On March 18, USAID’s political leadership invited career government aid officials from the agency’s major bureaus to pitch the handful of programs they thought were most critical. It was the only time the agency’s Africa bureau had an opportunity to make a full-throated case for its development programs across the continent. They had just 45 minutes to do it.
In the room was Thornton, a member of the Ben Franklin Fellowship, an organization that champions “the primacy of American sovereignty.” Thornton said in podcast appearances that his campaign against President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for federal workers introduced him to a government bureaucracy “that is not reflective of the values of the people that it serves” and requires “fear and accountability” to come to heel, Mother Jones reported.
As part of the meeting, Brian Frantz, acting head of USAID’s Africa bureau and a diplomat with nearly 25 years of experience, pitched Kenya as an important trade and national security partner. At one point when discussing another country, Frantz mentioned the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, using the acronym TDA. Thornton perked up, according to two attendees. Then he asked: Was TDA a reference to the Venezuelan criminal organization Tren de Aragua?
The USAID officials were stunned. “That was the one thing he said in that meeting,” one of the attendees recalled. “There was just zero interest in the subject matter.”
In a blistering memo circulated around the agency before he was laid off in late summer, Frantz upbraided political leaders. He detailed how they had prevented lifesaving programs from coming back online by refusing to pay for services already rendered and restricting access to USAID’s payment systems. He said they had frequently changed the process for how to appeal program terminations, burying their subordinates in paperwork for months.
“We were given make-work to keep us spinning our wheels,” another former official recalled.
Months before the last-ditch appeal at the Tribe dinner, embassy staff in Nairobi had also tried unsuccessfully to get funding restored to WFP. In March, Marc Dillard, the acting U.S. ambassador, went to Kakuma for a tour of the hospital where Sunday and Santina would later check in.
After seeing the stakes firsthand, Dillard signed a series of cables to Washington documenting the chaos and death in Kakuma and other camps caused by the sudden funding cuts to WFP. On May 6, the embassy wrote that declining food assistance had “already contributed to several deaths and could result in escalating instability in Kenya.”
At one point, a group of teenagers and young men in Kakuma splintered off from a protest and set fire to WFP’s tents. Kenyan police responded by shooting at them, wounding at least two, including a teenager who was hospitalized with a gunshot wound to the head. Ordinarily considered among the most peaceful refugee camps in Africa, Kakuma went into lockdown. Aid workers hid inside their compounds.
Sexual assault, violent protests and other crimes would only increase without aid, Kenyan government officials warned the embassy, according to another cable. They predicted the cuts could destabilize one of America’s closest allies in Africa, “undermining Kenyan willingness to host thousands of refugees, many of whom would likely otherwise join the illegal migration flows bound for Europe and the United States.”
At a roadside staging area, some of those fleeing Kakuma hired smugglers to take them the 70 miles to the South Sudan border — the same country where they had escaped violence. As many as two dozen women, children and babies contorted inside cars with their belongings piled on the roof. “It’s hunger that chased us,” one woman said through the cracked window of a car about to depart. “It’s hunger that’s making us leave.”
In mid-May, USAID’s humanitarian assistance bureau in Washington delivered a memo again requesting the political appointees approve funding for WFP Kenya. “Without this additional assistance,” the appeal stated, “the WFP-provided food rations will reduce from normal levels of 60% to 20%, putting nearly 1 million people at risk of starvation and death and likely triggering additional insecurity within the refugee camps.”
Records show seven advisers in the chain of command signed off on more funding for WFP in Kenya. When the request got to Thornton, who by then had been promoted to USAID’s chief of staff, he did not. No money went through at that time. “Thornton became a real road block,” a former USAID official said.
Thornton did not respond to a request for comment. In response to questions about episodes like this, the senior State Department official said the Office of Management and Budget, not USAID or the State Department, has ultimate authority to approve new foreign aid money. They said they worked closely with OMB to review all of the funding requests. “In order to make an obligation like that,” the official said, “you need to have apportioned funds from OMB.”
When ProPublica asked about the funding delays and the State Department’s explanation, OMB’s communications director Rachel Cauley said in an email, “That’s absolutely false. And that’s not even how this process works.” She did not clarify what was false.
Santina declined rapidly in the days after arriving at the clinic. Hospital staff tried everything. They gave her IV fluids, put her on oxygen support and updated the diagnosis to marasmus, a severe form of malnutrition where the body starts to eat itself. Pneumonia gripped her lungs. Santina’s color faded and she struggled to breathe. She became unresponsive to pain.
Cradling her baby, Sunday thought about her oldest daughter back at home. Two-year-old Grace wore a little bell around her ankle because she was prone to wandering off. Sunday thought: What will Grace eat today? Tomorrow? Will she end up here too?
Just after 5 a.m. on July 21, hospital staff pronounced Santina dead.
A doctor and nutrition specialist with the International Rescue Committee said Santina almost certainly would have survived if she weren’t malnourished. To Lotunya, the cause was clear: After starving for weeks, his wife could no longer breastfeed, which is why Santina had become so tiny and weak. “That is why she died,” he said.
Santina was transferred to the hospital’s morgue, a squat concrete building at the edge of the compound. Lotunya borrowed $10 to bury his daughter in Kakuma’s cemetery, just on the other side of the hospital fence.
Once proud to be the mother she’d grown up missing, shame washed over Sunday. “I felt I wasn’t mother enough,” she said later, nearly in a whisper.
In early August, Sunday came home after helping to harvest the sallow greens a neighbor was growing out of dry, cracked earth. In exchange, they had given her a few handfuls of the vegetable wrapped in fabric. It was the family’s only food.
The August food distribution was supposed to come any day; the camp was tense. WFP’s new rankings determined that only half of Kakuma would receive food, a decision most refugees deeply opposed. Lotunya, Sunday and Grace were among those who would get nothing.
Someone had stolen the roof off the family’s single-room mud house, so Lotunya had used tarp and cardboard for a makeshift cover, which was disintegrating in the hot sun. Grace played on the dirt patio, the bell on her ankle chiming as she moved between her parents, clinging to their legs and crawling into their laps.
Doting on her, they said, was the only way to cope with losing Santina. They have just one picture of their youngest child: a fuzzy, black-and-white image on the family’s refugee registration. “But,” Sunday said, looking at her oldest daughter asleep on Lotunya’s shoulder, “I have Grace.”
In late September, the State Department signed an extension to WFP’s Kenya operation. This year, the U.S. gave $66 million, which is 40% less than it received last year and, critically, the funds arrived nine months into the year.
WFP has told refugees it plans to provide food through at least March. Even then, most families are set to receive between one-fifth and three-fifths of the recommended minimum daily calories.
Sunday, Lotunya and Grace would each get the equivalent of 420 calories a day.
The president, who drapes himself in the flag so inappropriately you’d think it would be filing HR complaints on a daily basis, is now preventing some the best potential US citizens from becoming US citizens.
Ever since Trump’s unexpected second appearance in the Oval Office began, it was immediately clear the bigoted efforts he fired up during his first term were only a prelude to the incessant cruelty he’s engaged in now. Trump leveraged a tragedy into an opportunity to shut down migration efforts from 10 countries. A few days later, the DHS (via dog-killing frontmouth Kristi Noem) said the racist plague had expanded to cover another nine countries.
While this took place, Trump converted his personal animus towards political opponents into truly racist invective targeting an entire country:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.
[…]
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
Trump continues to insist there’s no better place in the world than the United States. Then he makes it clear the only people welcome to avail themselves of his version of American exceptionalism are whites who probably already live here. Everyone else from anywhere else can go fuck themselves… if they can find time to do so between being persecuted/tortured to death in their countries of origin.
Immigrants approved to be naturalized went to Faneuil Hall Thursday — known as the country’s cradle of liberty — for that long-awaited moment to pledge allegiance to the United States. But instead, as they lined up, some were told by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials that they couldn’t proceed due to their countries of origin.
The same situation is playing out at naturalization events across the country as USCIS directed its employees to halt adjudicating all immigration pathways for people from 19 countries deemed to be “high risk”.
That’s right. People who have spent years jumping through all the citizenship hoops (which includes a test 99% of natural-born American citizens couldn’t pass) are being fucked out of their effort by a bunch of racists who have been given the keys to the American Dream kingdom.
This is heartbreaking. And it’s just as heartbreaking even if you don’t often engage with recent American citizens or migrants doing everything they can to remain in this land of opportunity. And it’s obviously targeted. The whole process didn’t get shut down. It only targeted the people this administration feels are more worthless than others.
“People are devastated and they’re frightened,” Breslow told GBH News. “People were plucked out of line. They didn’t cancel the whole ceremony.”
This is where I get personal, mainly because there are still too many commenters willing to wade in and spew stereotypes and bad faith arguments all over the the comment thread.
Outside of Techdirt, I am otherwise employed. Most of my recent work experience involves manufacturing. My current job spreads that to things like meat processing and food prep. I have had the privilege to work beside some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever encountered. And few of those people were white, natural-born US citizens.
I have witnessed the sheer joy of coworkers returning from citizenship ceremonies like these. I have seen them struggle with not only the weirdness of the American language, but the subsets created by heavy industry without ever seeing any one of these amazing people express any desire to give it all up.
I have watched an absolute fireball of a young man — an El Salvadoran refugee — work 100+ hours week after week to turn his dreams into a reality. I also had the pleasure of watching this person obtain his US citizenship after being jerked around by the bureaucracy that always makes this sort of thing more difficult than it should be, even when not overseen by a cadre of white Christian nationalists. I also saw this man turn his hours of servitude to multiple employers into the most impractical of second vehicles: a 2019 Maserati GT, which is not the sort of car one would expect anyone to buy in a state that spends 4 months a year covered in snow. (To be fair, his primary vehicle is a 2014 Ford F-150.)
These immigrants are amazing. And their work ethic embodies the American ideal of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Meanwhile, the more privileged in our midst have been buying “rolling coal” flip switches and turning the American flag into something that can be brandished with ill intent, completely erasing its long history as a symbol of hope. On top of it all, there’s the new Trump administration, which sees bootstraps as Achilles tendons and immediately starts slashing away at them.
Many of the best people I know weren’t born here. The people I do know who make the most noise about patriotism are mainly hypocrites whose claims about using their Second Amendment rights to protect the rest of the Constitution are as empty as their claims that it’s always everyone but them to blame for the shithole Trump is desperate to turn this country into.
We are ruled by people who have never truly engaged with anyone who doesn’t completely align with their views and preconceptions. The real world is filled with people who are wonderful and open and giving and never ask for anything more than to be treated as fellow human beings. This administration wants those people gone and, if possible, scrubbed from history. But these are the people I would go full “ride or die” for: the people who have seen the worst the world has to offer and still remain optimistic and helpful and considerate despite having lived through things most Americans can’t possibly imagine.
The people running the government have never experienced joy. The only way they can interact with optimism is by pushing the narrative that the glass is half-empty and insisting it’s the “others” among us who have taken the best part of the glass’s content and left us to deal with what’s left over. It’s all lies. And yet it will always work because, while it’s impossible to get a majority of Americans to agree on a hero, it’s insanely easy to get most Americans to agree on a scapegoat.
This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren’t white leave the country because they’re not white. And this is according to this administration’s own press release, which celebrates the fact that we’re now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty’s base, which read:
Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free The wretched refuse of your teeming shore Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
That was when America was great… or at least periodically tried to be. This is who we are now:
The Trump administration is on pace to shatter historic records and deport nearly 600,000 illegal aliens by the end of President Donald Trump’s first year since returning to office. Two million illegal aliens have left the United States in less than 250 days, including an estimated 1.6 million who have voluntarily self-deported and more than 400,000 deportations.
Are these records we want to be “shattering?” This doesn’t sound like America, the melting pot that once used to be a welcoming refuge for those subjected to violence, poverty, political/religious persecution in their home countries. Now, we’re just the nation of Get The Fuck Out, ejecting hard-working non-criminals who commit fewer crimes and pay more taxes than those blessed to be white enough to avoid this ethnic purge that’s been marketed as making this nation “safer.” Leave before ICE comes for you. The alternatives — foreign gulags, war-torn countries, perennial human rights violators — are worse than leaving for your home country before the government goons make this decision for you.
I mean, listen to this fucking bullshit:
“The numbers don’t lie: 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days— proving that President Trump’s policies and Secretary Noem’s leadership are working and making American communities safe,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”
This is a lie. And it’s not even a particularly crafty one. Anyone with half-assed Googling skills could prove this assertion wrong. Most immigrants don’t commit criminal acts, and those who do commit criminal acts do it at a rate that’s far lower than that of natural-born citizens of this country.
ICE pretends that it’s doing God’s work (literally pretends, lest you think otherwise) but all it’s really doing is targeting people because of their skin color and depriving them of their due process rights.
Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.
[…]
According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.
Everyone knows the government doesn’t really care whether you have a criminal record or not. The constant pressure from the administration to increase daily arrests means that being a migrant and/or having brown skin makes you a target. The message has been sent: only whites are welcome here. That’s why people are self-deporting. And that’s why the data shows ICE has long since run out of the “worst of the worst” to target:
If you combine the two non-criminal numbers (those without a criminal charge and those who have not been convicted), it’s a 2:1 ratio to immigrants who are actually convicted criminals. These are the actions of a regime that is no longer content to wrap itself in the flag while shitting on long-held American ideals. Now, it’s trying to pretend that doing the worst it can to the “least of my brethren” is doing the Lord’s work — that somehow the God that defined himself with single word in the Bible (“love”) would condone the relentless cruelty that is Trump’s mass deportation program.
We’re being robbed of a better future — not just because this administration has demonstrated the system of checks and balances is irrevocably flawed, but also because we’re actively hunting and ejecting some the most wonderful, hardest-working people in this nation: people who came to this country because it was still the Land of Opportunity. And the only thing this administration is demonstrating to people all over the world is that the United States can be just as awful as nations we can only now condemn hypocritically.
Abrego Garcia, however, actually still had some legal representation left in the States. A court sided with Garcia and demanded the government return him to the US. First, the Trump DOJ said it wouldn’t. Then it said it couldn’t. The court asked which it was and the government said, “Either? Both?”
Finally, after a lot of outside pressure and internal litigation, the DOJ finally decided to bring Garcia back to the US to finally access his due process rights to challenge his removal. But the DOJ didn’t want to play fair, not after being (somewhat) forced to respect the rights of someone it hoped to never have to hear from ever again.
Upon his return, the DOJ re-opened a long-dead investigation and generated a bunch of criminal charges against him. (The official and unofficial term is “trumped-up charges.”) Then it told Garcia that he could either agree to plead guilty to the charges, spend some time in a US prison, and then be unceremoniously dumped back into El Salvador or he could fight the charges and be deported immediately to Uganda, a war-torn country Garcia has never been to.
The DOJ continues to press its case against Garcia, claiming he is such a dangerous criminal no one should care what happens to him. That viewpoint hasn’t managed to sway the district court and made so little of an impression on the Supreme Court that it upheld the lower court’s ruling.
But that’s not how the US justice system works, which is being made clear repeatedly to the Trump administration, currently being under-served by the only prosecutors still willing to take orders from a despot.
Fortunately, the judge in this case doesn’t need the approval of a despot to keep serving up roadblocks to the administration’s authoritarian aims. In the court’s latest decision [PDF], Judge Barbara Holmes says it’s more likely than not that the DOJ’s prosecution of Garcia is purely vindictive, rather than the regular ebb and flow of criminal justice the Trump DOJ pretends it is. (h/t Joshua Friedman)
Not helping the government’s “this is just regular stuff” case is all the irregular, vindictive stuff said by government, spewing from some of the worst front-mouths Trump has ever decided to appoint to federal office. Here’s how the administration responded to court orders demanding Garcia’s return to the United States:
Mere days after the Supreme Court affirmed the District Court’s injunction, HSI reopened its investigation into Abrego’s November 30, 2022 traffic stop.
[…]
Less than a month later, on May 21, 2025, the Middle District of Tennessee grand jury returned a two-count indictment against Abrego arising primarily from the November 30, 2022 traffic stop. An arrest warrant issued, prompting the United States to return Abrego from El Salvador. Abrego was arrested on June 6, 2025, and brought to this District.
Not content to resurrect a three-year-old traffic stop that resulted in no arrests or citations, government officials then took to the airwaves (social media and otherwise) to presumptively declare Abrego Garcia guilty of human trafficking.
Notably, on the day of and shortly after Abrego’s arrest, several Executive Official Defendants and their subordinates made public statements about Abrego and celebrated the criminal charges against him. For instance, Secretary Noem posted on her X account on the day of Abrego’s arrest that he is “a known MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, and serial domestic abuser.
That same day, Attorney General Bondi announced during a press conference that Abrego would be found guilty, sentenced, and “returned to his home country of El Salvador.” Most tellingly, Attorney General Bondi’s direct report, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, linked Abrego’s criminal charges to Abrego’s civil lawsuit in Maryland. Strikingly, during a television interview Deputy Attorney General Blanche revealed that the government started “investigating” Abrego after “a judge in Maryland . . . questioned” the government’s decision, found that it “had no right to deport him,” and “accus[ed] [the government] of doing something wrong.”
Well, that sure looks retaliatory: a government prosecutor stating in public that the government only decided to “investigate” Abrego Garcia after his release had been ordered by a federal court.
The court says this more than just looks like actual vindictiveness.
Actual vindictiveness may be apparent based on the Executive Official Defendants’ and their subordinates’ statements about Abrego from the time he filed his Maryland lawsuit through his arrest in this District. While many of the statements made by the Executive Official Defendants about Abrego raise cause for concern, one stands out amongst the rest.
The statement that “stands out” is the one in bold print above. And the court says DAG Blanche only managed to make things worse for the government by continuing to press this point.
To remove any doubt, Deputy Attorney General Blanche said that the criminal case was brought to return Abrego to the United States, “not [because of] a Judge,” but instead, because of “an arrest warrant issued by a grand jury in the Middle District of Tennessee.” This could be direct evidence of vindictiveness.
Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.
Perhaps most damning is the speed with which the government acted, once Abrego Garcia had prevailed in this court, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court, and finally, the Supreme Court.
Only 58 days passed from the time Abrego filed suit in Maryland to when he was indicted in this District. Or consider the close timing between developments in Abrego’s civil suit and HSI reopening its investigation into him, which may be even more alarming: HSI reopened that investigation, after closing it the month prior, only 24 days after Abrego filed his civil suit, 13 days after he obtained relief in the District Court, and a mere seven days after he prevailed against the Executive Official Defendants on appeal at the Supreme Court.
All of this stands in stark contrast to the 832 days the HSI investigation into Abrego remained pending, without referral to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Middle District of Tennessee for prosecution, prior to Abrego’s lawsuit against the Executive Official Defendants commenced.
What it looks like is what it is. The government was embarrassed not only by Abrego Garcia’s refusal to remain silent, but by the three consecutive court losses it sustained while weathering weeks of critical coverage from press outlets and online commentators. Once it brought Abrego Garcia back, it made every effort it could to put him back behind bars and onto the fast track for deportation — especially if his final destination would be somewhere he would never voluntarily choose to go.
Now, the government will have to demonstrate that this isn’t exactly what it looks like. Chances are, it won’t be able to do this. But it will still hold the power to do the same thing to other people who likely won’t have the tireless legal advocates willing to ensure the it doesn’t get away with again. A battle will be lost, but the war on migrants is still raging. The government will get the wins it wants. And it will always live to fight another day to ensure the rights it’s supposed to be protecting are ignored whenever they get in the way of what it wants to do.
The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes.
The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had failed to fix violations despite years of warnings.
Louisiana’s prison system has kept thousands of incarcerated people behind bars for weeks, months or sometimes more than a year after they were supposed to be released, records show. And the DOJ accused South Carolina of institutionalizing thousands of people diagnosed with serious mental illnesses — sometimes for decades — rather than provide services that would allow them to live in less restricted settings, as is their right under federal law.
Federal judges temporarily suspended the lawsuits in February at the request of the states and with the support of the DOJ.
Civil rights lawyers who have monitored the cases said the move is another sign of the Trump administration’s retreat from the department’s mission of protecting the rights of vulnerable groups. Since January, President Donald Trump’s DOJ has dropped racial discrimination lawsuits, abandoned investigations of police misconduct and canceled oversight of troubled law enforcement agencies.
“This administration has been very aggressive in rolling back any kind of civil rights reforms or advancements,” said Anya Bidwell, senior attorney at the public-interest law firm Institute for Justice. “It’s unquestionably disappointing.”
The cases against Louisiana and South Carolina were brought by a unit of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division tasked with enforcing laws that guarantee religious freedom, access to reproductive health services, constitutional policing, and the rights of people in state and local institutions, including jails, prisons and health care facilities for people with disabilities.
The unit, the Special Litigation Section, has seen a dramatic reduction in lawyers since Trump took office in January. Court records show at least seven attorneys working on the lawsuits against Louisiana and South Carolina are no longer with the DOJ.
The section had more than 90 employees at the start of the year, including about 60 front-line attorneys. By June, it had about 25, including around 15 front-line lawyers, according to a source familiar with its operation. Sources said some were reassigned to other areas of the department while others quit in protest against the direction of the office under Trump, found new jobs or took early retirement.
The exodus will hamper its ability to carry out essential functions, such as battling sexual harassment in housing, discrimination against disabled people, and the improper use of restraints and seclusions against students in schools, said Omar Noureldin, a former senior attorney in the Civil Rights Division and President Joe Biden appointee who left in January.
“Regardless of your political leanings, I think most people would agree these are the kind of bad situations that should be addressed by the nation’s top civil rights enforcer,” Noureldin said.
A department spokesperson declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica about the Louisiana and South Carolina cases. Sources familiar with the lawsuits said Trump appointees have told DOJ lawyers handling the cases that they want to resolve matters out of court.
The federal government has used settlement talks in the past to hammer out consent decrees, agreements that set a list of requirements to fix civil rights violations and are overseen by an outside monitor and federal judge to ensure compliance. But Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, Trump’s appointee to run the DOJ’s civil rights division, has made no secret of her distaste for such measures.
In May, Dhillon announced she was moving to dismiss efforts to impose consent decrees on the Louisville, Kentucky, and Minneapolis police departments. She complained that consent decrees turn local control of policing over to “unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats.”
A DOJ investigation in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer accused the department of excessive force, unjustified shootings, and discrimination against Black and Native American people. The agency issued similar findings against the Louisville Metro Police Department after the high-profile killing of Breonna Taylor, who was shot in 2020 when officers forced their way into her home to execute a search warrant.
Noureldin, now a senior vice president at the government watchdog group Common Cause, said consent decrees provide an important level of oversight by an independent judge. By contrast, out-of-court settlements can be subject to the political whims of a new administration, which can decide to drop a case or end an agreement despite evidence of continuing constitutional violations.
“When you have a consent decree or a court-enforced settlement, the Justice Department can’t unilaterally just withdraw from the agreement,” Noureldin said. “A federal judge would have to agree that the public interest is served by terminating that settlement.”
“I Lost Everything”
In the case of Louisiana, the Justice Department issued a scathing report in January 2023 about the state confining prisoners beyond their sentences. The problems dated back more than a decade and remained widespread, the report said. Between January and April 2022 alone, more than a quarter of everyone released from prison custody was held past their release dates. Of those, 24% spent an additional 90 days or more behind bars, the DOJ found.
Among those held longer than they should have been was Robert Parker, a disc jockey known as “DJ Rob” in New Orleans, where he played R&B and hip-hop music at weddings and private parties. Parker, 55, was arrested in late 2016 after violating a restraining order brought by a former girlfriend.
He was supposed to be released in October 2017, but a prison staffer mistakenly classified him as a sex offender. That meant he was required to provide prison authorities with two addresses where he could stay that complied with sex offender registry rules.
Prison documents show Parker repeatedly told authorities that he wasn’t a sex offender and pleaded to speak to the warden to clear up the mistake. But nobody acted until a deputy public defender contacted state officials months later to complain. By the time he walked out, Parker had spent 337 extra days behind bars. During that period, he said, his car was repossessed, his mother died and his reputation was ruined.
“I lost everything,” he told ProPublica in an interview from a nursing home, where he was recovering from a stroke. “I’m ready to get away from Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s detention system is complex. Unlike other jurisdictions, where the convicted are housed in state facilities, inmates in Louisiana can be held in local jails overseen by sheriffs. A major contributor to the so-called over-detentions was poor communication among Louisiana’s court clerks, sheriff’s offices and the state department of corrections, according to interviews with attorneys, depositions of state officials, and reports from state and federal reviews of the prison system.
Until recently, the agencies shared prisoner sentencing information by shuttling stacks of paperwork by van or truck from the court to the sheriff’s office for the parish holding the prisoner, then to corrections officials. The document transfers, which often crisscrossed the state, typically happened only once a week. When the records finally arrived, it could take staff a month or longer to enter the data into computers, creating more delays. In addition, staff made data errors when calculating release dates.
Two years ago, The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Parker could pursue a lawsuit against the former head of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, James LeBlanc. That lawsuit is ongoing, said Parker’s attorney, Jonathan Rhodes. LeBlanc, who resigned last year, could not be reached for comment, and his attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
In a statement, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill acknowledged that the state’s process to determine release dates was unreliable but said the issue had been overblown by the Justice Department’s investigation, which she called “factually incorrect.”
“There were simply parts of it that are outside state control, such as clerks & courts,” Murrill stated.
Murrill said correction officials have been working with local officials to ensure prisoner releases are computed in a “timely and correct fashion.” Louisiana officials point to a new website that allows electronic sharing of information among the various agencies.
“The system has been overhauled. That has dramatically diminished, if not completely eliminated this problem,” Murrill stated. She did not address questions from ProPublica asking if prisoners were being held longer than their release dates this year.
Local attorneys who are handling lawsuits against the state expressed skepticism about Murrill’s claims.
William Most, an attorney who filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of incarcerated people who had been detained past their release dates, noted that as late as May 2024, 141 people who were released that month had been kept longer than they should have been, 120 of them for more than 30 days.
“I have seen no evidence suggesting the problem in Louisiana is fixed,” Most said. “And it seems unwise to dismiss any cases while that’s the situation.”
Trapped in Group Homes
South Carolina’s mentally ill population is grappling with similar challenges.
After years of lawsuits and complaints, a DOJ investigation determined that officials illegally denied community-based services — required by the Americans with Disabilities Act and a 1999 Supreme Court decision — to over 1,000 people diagnosed as seriously mentally ill. Instead, the state placed them in group homes that failed to provide adequate care and were overly restrictive, the department alleged.
The DOJ report didn’t address why the state relied so heavily on group homes. It noted that South Carolina’s own goals and plans called for increasing community-based services to help more people live independently. But the investigation concluded that the availability of community-based services varied widely across the state, leaving people in some areas with no access. And the DOJ said the state’s rules for deciding when someone could leave were too stringent.
South Carolina funds and oversees more than 400 facilities that serve people with serious mental illness, according to a state affidavit.
Kimberly Tissot, president of the disability rights group Able South Carolina, said it was common for disabled adults who were living successfully on their own to be involuntarily committed to an adult group home simply because they visited a hospital to pick up medicine.
Tissot, who has inspected hundreds of the adult facilities, said they often are roach-infested, soaked in urine, lacking in adequate medicine and staffed by untrained employees. Her description mirrors the findings of several state and independent investigations. In some group homes, patients weren’t allowed to leave or freely move around. Subsequently, their mental health would deteriorate, Tissot said.
“We have had people die in these facilities because of the conditions,” said Tissot, who worked closely with the DOJ investigators. Scores of sexual abuse incidents, assaults and deaths in such group homes have been reported to the state, according to a 2022 federal report that faulted South Carolina’s oversight.
South Carolina has been on notice about the difficulties since 2016 but didn’t make sufficient progress, the DOJ alleged in its lawsuit filed in December.
After two years of failed attempts, state lawmakers passed a law in April that consolidated services for disabled people into a new agency responsible for expanding access to home and community-based treatments and for ensuring compliance with federal laws.
South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has argued in the DOJ’s lawsuit that the state has been providing necessary services and has not been violating people’s constitutional rights. In January, his office asked the court for a delay in the case to give the Trump administration enough time to determine how to proceed.
His office and a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Disabilities declined to comment, citing the ongoing DOJ lawsuit.
Tissot credits the federal attention with creating a sense of urgency among state lawmakers to make improvements. While she said she is pleased with the latest progress, she warned that if the DOJ dropped the case, it would undermine the enforcement of disabled people’s civil rights and allow state abuses to continue.
“It would signal that systemic discrimination will go unchecked and embolden institutional providers to resist change,” Tissot said. “Most importantly, it abandons the people directly impacted.”
The Trump administration’s maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it.
To make things even worse, undocumented migrants aren’t even being sent back to the countries they came from. Instead, planes full of deportees are being sent to places like war-torn South Sudan or, more often, a maximum security concentration camp run by the El Salvadoran government.
Those being deported have reason to fear for their safety when the only options are some of the worst places on earth. Normally, that would allow them to petition courts for removal to their home country or, at least, somewhere less hideous than a country currently hosting a war or a maximum security prison run by a sadistic government.
Even if the Trump administration was willing to entertain these petitions (and it definitely isn’t), it no longer has to concern itself with the well-being of the people it deports. The Supreme Court decided late last month that there’s nothing wrong — constitutionally or otherwise — with engaging in human trafficking of deportees… at least not not that it’s the Trump administration doing it.
The government has always had the power to send deportees to countries they’re not actually from. But the government is supposed to — right up until SCOTUS said otherwise — allow deportees to assess their survival chances in yet another foreign country and give them an opportunity to be deported somewhere less dangerous or, preferably, to the country they came from.
Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.
People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.
Why is this expedited removal process so extremely necessary migrants will only have less than a day to assess their survival chances in whatever country the US chooses to dump them in? Well, if you believe DHS head Kristi Noem (and you definitely shouldn’t), it’s the only way to keep this country safe.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, whose agency oversees ICE, confirmed on “Fox News Sunday” that the agency had the policy in place. The memo is “incredibly important to make sure we get these worst of the worst out of our country,” she said.
But that’s not what’s happening. It wasn’t even happening nearly a decade ago, when Trump took his first run at eliminating non-white people from the United States. Back in 2017, ICE couldn’t find enough dangerous criminals to deport, so it basically began falsifying arrest numbers to keep the administration’s top bigots satiated.
This time around, there’s been a whole lot more deportation. And with White House advisor Stephen Miller expecting ICE to perform 3,000 arrests a day (the closest it’s come to this point is still several hundred arrests short of that mark), moving a few numbers around isn’t going to work. To accomplish this, ICE has to basically expel every migrant officers come across, which is why nearly two-thirds of people arrested by ICE have no criminal record at all, and nearly every person arrested (93%) by ICE has never been convicted of any violent offenses.
This isn’t the “worst of the worst” being given what they supposedly deserve. This is thousands of people who work hard, pay taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the white people who seem believe they’re operating at a higher human level than people whose skin is darker than theirs.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
ICE did go to Home Depot, it must be noted. And because it did, Los Angeles is now filled with soldiers — more than 4,000 National Guard troops and another few hundred Marines.
The Trump administration couldn’t find enough criminals to arrest the first time it held power. With the quotas increasing exponentially during Trump’s second term, it’s no longer acceptable to just let ICE be ICE and raid whatever the hell it wants whenever the hell it wants to. It’s not enough to send federal officers into US courts to arrest migrants for daring to show up for their mandated check-ins. It’s not enough to pile as many people with brown skin into a bunch of buses for daring to exist in a nation that used to be considered a melting pot, not to mention a beacon of hope to oppressed people all over the world.
This irrational hatred can’t be satiated using the normal stuff, or even the “new normal” stuff, like daily raids of businesses by ICE. It probably can’t even be satiated by turning ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency by adding another $60 billion to its budget, as Trump’s budget bill does.
Anything that might slow the removal of migrants from the US must be removed. The administration isn’t willing to tolerate any speed bumps that hinder its maximum cruelty efforts. Within the last two weeks, the administration has taken steps that will grease the already extremely slippery wheels of its mass deportation program.
Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.
Yes, Trump is again playing all the old hits. He brought back the Alien Enemies Act — something made infamous for its abuse of Japanese migrants during World War II — to justify extrajudicial expulsions of migrants, routing them to foreign torture prisons and war-torn nations the US has no interest in making any less war-torn.
This moves the cruelty plan forward a half-decade or so, aligning the Trump administration with Cold War McCarthyism and the expeditious stripping of citizenship of anyone Joe McCarthy and his supporters felt weren’t American enough to remain Americans. This move goes further than earlier denaturalization efforts pursued by President Obama and Trump during his first term in office, rigging the game for the government by allowing it to use criminal charge removal justifications while bringing these cases in civil court.
The DOJ memo says that the federal government will pursue denaturalization cases via civil litigation — an especially concerning move, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.
In civil proceedings, any individual subject to denaturalization is not entitled to an attorney, Robertson said; there is also a lower burden of proof for the government to reach, and it is far easier and faster to reach a conclusion in these cases.
Robertson saysthat stripping Americans of citizenship through civil litigation violates due process and infringes on the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Like any bully, the government isn’t interested in a fair fight. It will use criminal allegations during these hearings, while simultaneously denying those accused of full access to their rights.
Migrants not suspected of criminal acts aren’t in the clear, though. ICE may be working its way towards 3,000 arrests a day but that doesn’t mean the administration can’t punish people ICE hasn’t managed to arrest yet. Migrants in the country illegally will no longer be given a warning period before being fined for this civil infraction, allowing the government to run up the tab on several million people.
The Trump administration is looking to speed up its ability to fine those in the United States illegally — up to $1,000 per day — according to a rule set to be published Friday in the Federal Register that was obtained by ABC News.
Currently, the government can alert those in the U.S. illegally 30 days before it starts issuing fines.
The rule proposed by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security allows the government to immediately start fining those in the U.S. illegally.
People who’ve never been told their actions might subject them to daily fines will now be several thousand dollars in debt before they’re even aware this is an option the federal government has at its disposal. Trump started fining migrants during his first term, something that was halted when Biden took office. Trump’s return to the Oval Office brought the fines back. But it’s only now that the heads up issued to migrants is being replaced with federal silence and the steady tick of increasing fines.
The DHS says this is just good government business, pinning the blame on those who will not be notified their continued presence in the United States might be costing them up to $1,000 a day.
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced that it would terminate temporary protected status for Haiti, setting the groundwork for hundreds of thousands of Haitians to potentially be deported from the United States once the designation expires later this summer.
The termination of temporary protected status — a designation that shields from deportation people who have traveled to the U.S. from countries that are deemed unsafe because of natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary conditions — would put up to 500,000 Haitians at risk of deportation, as gang violence continues to roil the country.
DHS Bratz doll Kristi Noem says everything is going great in Haiti, claiming there’s no need to extend the temporary protected status. What’s left unsaid is why this is even happening, because there’s no way in hell the Trump administration will ever be honest about its own fear-mongering about Haitian immigrants or its willingness amplify racist conspiracy theories on national TV.
Noem and Trump say Haiti is safe. The State Department still disagrees, even with Marco Rubio currently serving as the top level of mismanagement.
Since March 2024, Haiti has been under a State of Emergency. Crimes involving firearms are common in Haiti. They include robbery, carjackings, sexual assault, and kidnappings for ransom. Kidnapping is widespread, and U.S. citizens have been victims and have been hurt or killed. Kidnappers may plan carefully or target victims at random, unplanned times. Kidnappers will even target and attack convoys. Kidnapping cases often involve ransom requests. Victims’ families have paid thousands of dollars to rescue their family members.
Protests, demonstrations, and roadblocks are common and unpredictable. They often damage or destroy infrastructure and can become violent. Mob killings and assaults by the public have increased, including targeting those suspected of committing crimes.
The airport in Port-au-Prince can be a focal point for armed activity. Armed robberies are common. Carjackers attack private vehicles stuck in traffic. They often target lone drivers, especially women. As a result, the U.S. embassy requires its staff to use official transportation to and from the airport.
This move says two things. First, Trump wants to expel Haitians because he probably believes they’re eating pets or otherwise are too dark-skinned to remain in the United States. Second, it says Haiti probably isn’t safe, but it’s safe enough for people this government no longer wants in this country. Separately, these implicit statements are horrible. Together, they’re just more Trump administration ugliness and bigotry from an administration that truly doesn’t care how awful it is, so long as it still has the support of the most awful people in the nation.
The border surge is upon us. Apparently. Since the 2016 election, actually, if we’re honest about it. Trump wasn’t a single-issue candidate but has sort of morphed into one since taking office. The swamp remains undrained. Hillary Clinton remains unjailed. But BUILD THE WALL has become the calling card of Donald Trump as he seeks to rid the nation of pesky brown people. Good times. To be fair, ICE and CBP have always sucked. But their moment in the spotlight has only increased the intensity of their sucking.
The problem with declaring the border a national security threat/war zone/flashpoint for a trade war/whatever is that you have to be ready to deal with the problem you’re causing. If you think America’s greatness is measured by the number of people we capture and detain, you have to have a plan in place to deal with this influx of eventual deportees.
We do not have a plan in place. ICE may be enjoying the extremely rare experience of being a presidential administration’s favorite agency, but it definitely had no idea what it was in for. For months, ICE scrambled around knocking heads and fudging numbers to back Trump’s claim that the United States was swimming with dangerous undocumented immigrants.
ICE performed raid after raid in major cities, hoping to score a batch of hardened criminals. CBP also stepped up enforcement, detaining more people than usual in hopes of sending a message to outsiders about America’s not-all-that-open borders.
The problem is you have to put all of these people somewhere. ICE is in charge of that and it doesn’t particularly relish any part of the job but locking people up. It farmed out some of this work to contractors. Whatever it doesn’t handle poorly itself is handled terribly by third parties. ICE rarely inspects its facilities and even more rarely makes sure the few problems it notices are addressed.
This has led directly to the problems found by ICE’s Inspector General. IG investigations of ICE detention centers have found a shitload of inhuman conditions that we, the people, are funding with our tax dollars. First, an inspection [PDF] of a facility in El Paso, Texas, discovered ICE and CBP are just shoving as many detainees into a room as inhumanly possible, resulting in standing-room-only detentions that can last for several days.
Here are a couple of photos taken by investigators. Each white block is covering a face… or faces, since there’s not a lot of room between detainees.
Part of the problem is a spike in apprehensions, apparently triggered by presidential rhetoric.
These agencies (ICE, CBP) view detainees as subhuman, much in the way prisons view prisoners.
Here are the numbers, according to the IG investigation:
According to PDT Border Patrol processing facility staff, the facility’s maximum capacity is 125 detainees. However, on May 7 and 8, 2019, Border Patrol’s custody logs indicated that there were approximately 750 and 900 detainees on site, respectively. TEDS standards provide that “under no circumstances should the maximum [cell] occupancy rate, as set by the fire marshal, be exceeded” (TEDS 4.7).
However, we observed dangerous overcrowding at the facility with single adults held in cells designed for one-fifth as many detainees (see Figures 1 through 3). Specifically, we observed:
– a cell with a maximum capacity of 12 held 76 detainees (Figure 1);
– a cell with a maximum capacity of 8 held 41 detainees (Figure 2); and
– a cell with a maximum capacity of 35 held 155 detainees (Figure 3).
66% of detainees had been there longer than the 72 hours and 4% (33 detainees) had been there — in these conditions — for more than two weeks. The IG also observed hundreds of detainees standing in line to surrender their valuables to DHS/CBP personnel prior to detention. The IG also observed how government personnel processed these possessions, which apparently involved a.) taking the valuables, and b.) hurling them into a nearby dumpster.
The CPB excuse? Some possession were “wet,” which made them “biohazards.” Management on site had their own complaints: employees were getting sick frequently and morale was pretty much nonexistent. Unsurprisingly, sending personnel into overcrowded holding areas to check on detainees also increases the dangers they face, especially when detainees are understandably distressed and angry about their supposedly-temporary living conditions.
There is no help coming from upper management. Nor is ICE willing to assist in alleviating the problems it’s caused.
Although CBP headquarters management has been aware of the situation at PDT for months and detailed staff to assist with custody management, DHS has not identified a process to alleviate issues with overcrowding at PDT. Within DHS, providing long-term detention is the responsibility of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), not CBP. El Paso sector Border Patrol management said they are able to complete immigration processing for most detainees within a few days, but have not been able to transfer single adults into ICE custody quickly. Border Patrol managers at the stations we visited said they call ICE daily to request detention space for single adults. They said in some instances ICE officers tell them they cannot take the detainees. In other instances, ICE initially agrees to take some adult detainees, but then reverses the decision.
El Paso isn’t the only area of concern. Another Inspector General’s report [PDF] obtained by CNN contains even more depictions of subhuman conditions being foisted on detainees by the federal government. Overcrowding isn’t the problem here. Everything else is.
This report summarizes findings on our latest round of unannounced inspections at four detention facilities housing ICE detainees. Although the conditions varied among the facilities and not every problem was present at each, our observations, detainee and staff interviews, and document reviews revealed several common issues. Because we observed immediate risks or egregious violations of detention standards at facilities in Adelanto, CA, and Essex County, NJ, including nooses in detainee cells, overly restrictive segregation, inadequate medical care, unreported security incidents, and significant food safety issues, we issued individual reports to ICE after our visits to these two facilities. All four facilities had issues with expired food, which puts detainees at risk for food-borne illnesses.
If you can take it, there’s more:
At three facilities, we found that segregation practices violated standards and infringed on detainee rights. Two facilities failed to provide recreation outside detainee housing units. Bathrooms in two facilities’ detainee housing units were dilapidated and moldy. At one facility, detainees do not receive appropriate clothing and hygiene items to ensure they could properly care for themselves. Lastly, one facility allowed only non-contact visits, despite being able to accommodate in-person visitation. Our observations confirmed concerns identified in detainee grievances, which indicated unsafe and unhealthy conditions to varying degrees at all of the facilities we visited.
In two facilities, food handling processes were so substandard, the kitchen manager was fired during the IG’s visit. At one facility, personnel performed suspicionless strip searches with alarming regularity and without proper documentation. In multiple facilities, detainees were not given adequate recreation time or access to outdoor activities. Some assholes (including government employees!) probably consider this to be coddling people engaged in illegal behavior, but the IG points out an important nuance that often gets ignored during heated discussions of immigration enforcement.
Detainees are held in civil, not criminal, custody; yet, according to the National Institute for Jail Operations, the loss or reduction of recreation-related amenities (indoor recreation; no fresh air and direct sunlight) may result in increased idle time and a significantly lower quality of life.
Given the conditions indoors, no wonder so many detainees wanted to spend more time outside detention facilities.
[A]t the Adelanto and Essex facilities, we observed detainee bathrooms that were in poor condition, including mold and peeling paint on walls, floors, and showers, and unusable toilets… At the Essex facility, mold permeated all walls in the bathroom area, including ceilings, vents, mirrors, and shower stalls.
That’s a factor that cannot be overlooked. Most of the thousands of people detained at ICE facilities are civil detainees. And in many cases, they’re being treated worse than the criminals housed in our nation’s many prisons. The administration is very engaged in an anti-immigration flex, but it has zero interest in handling its border enforcement activities responsibly. This does not reflect well on this country, especially if these problems continue long after Trump leaves office.
