Poll everyone you can. Even the most MAGA never dreamed up this scenario. There’s no single-issue voter whose kink is “surely the people wanting green cards can get that done in their own countries.”
Nope, this is Trump’s kink. This is a blatant attempt to juice the deportation numbers to soothe the throbbing bald skull of Stephen Miller, who still has yet to see his 3,000 arrests per day bigoted fantasy become reality, no matter how many billions we’re (forced to) throw at ICE.
This is just blatant racism masquerading as slightly-less-blatant racism. The law was never unclear. The system wasn’t being exploited by immigrants. Pretty much everyone has always been fine with the US’s green card program. And yet, this is what America means now, just as it heads into its 250th year.
Foreigners in the U.S. who want a green card will need to leave and apply in their home country, the Trump administration announced Friday, in a surprise change to a longstanding policy that sowed confusion and concern among aid groups, immigration lawyers and immigrants.
The obvious question is “WHY?” The obvious answer is this: this administration hates people who aren’t white. If you think this policy might affect the small percentage of migrants from predominately white nations, you’re living in a self-induced psychosis. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the words falling out of the administration’s collective mouth:
In an emailed statement to the Associated Press the agency said people who provide an “economic benefit” or “national interest” could likely stay in the U.S. while others would have to go abroad to apply.
No need to read between the lines here. This administration is as unsophisticated as a used Croc. Both terms stated here can be read as “white” and “also white.” If you think this means otherwise, be sure to show your whole bigoted ass in the comment section below.
The “agency” mentioned here is the USCIS (US Citizenship and Immigration Services), which used to be more concerned with ensuring applicants kept on their path to citizenship. That’s no longer the case. It should rebrand as GTFO, since all it does now is give Trump whatever he wants when it comes to expelling non-white people from this nation.
I’m not even exaggerating. More than 90% of successful asylum seekers are white people from other nations. Any actions taken to limit lawful access to citizenship have targeted non-white people. Pretending that living in the US while seeking a green card is the exploitation of a legal loophole is nothing more than more blatant racism from an administration that has already been pretty fucking blatant about its racism.
The fully-suborned USCIS had this to say about a directive I can’t imagine it saw coming:
USCIS described the change as a return to “the original intent of the law” and closing a “loophole.”
Get thee to a white shoe law firm, he said in a Shakepearian voice. Bro, the “original intent of the law” never resulted in a demand to “close” a “loophole” for over FIVE DECADES. To claim it’s imperative NOW is to pretend you’d rather honor the law, rather than the nation’s foremost golf club groundskeeper.
To sum up: get fucked, Trump. This is nothing more than the administration deciding Lady Liberty is free to assault just because she showed a bit of ankle more than 100 years ago.
As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city.
Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a fellow asylum-seeker, in New Orleans while reporting to immigration agents for check-ins as she awaited her day in court. Finally, the date was approaching, in late November 2025. Days later, the Trump administration would flood the region with federal officers in “Operation Swamp Sweep.”
Urbina, 35, began searching for a Spanish speaker who could help her, and said she stumbled on a Facebook post advertising the services of Catholic Charities, a prominent aid organization whose services include assisting immigrants. After a few clicks, she connected via WhatsApp with “Susan Millan,” who claimed to have a law degree. The woman’s photo looked professional, showing a small library in the blurry background, according to a screenshot Urbina shared with ProPublica. The asylum-seeker said she discussed her predicament with the woman she thought was an attorney.
Millan told Urbina the ordeal could be settled over a virtual hearing with U.S. immigration authorities. Millan sprinkled in details about her own life — a sick husband, two kids, a supportive church — so Urbina felt comfortable. In an interview, Urbina said she completed paperwork to be sent to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, for a fee. Millan’s organization asked her for documentation, including five character references; for another fee, it would submit these up the line. Through the payment app Zelle, Urbina and her husband paid nearly $10,000, according to her financial records, money they had set aside to buy their first home.
On Nov. 21, Urbina made the case that a “credible fear” was keeping her from going home. In the virtual hearing, which lasted five minutes, she said she spoke to a man dressed in a green uniform, stitched with what looked like government insignia, seated in front of an American flag. A day later, via WhatsApp, Millan told her she “won residency.” Her documents would be in the mail.
In an instant, Urbina’s fears had been assuaged. She asked if she should still attend her court date, Nov. 24. “No, don’t worry,” she remembers the woman replying. “There’s no need.”
But when Urbina asked to speak with someone in a message to Millan’s phone number the next day, according to screenshots she shared with ProPublica, the WhatsApp chat fell silent. After two days, she suspected she’d been duped and wrote in anger: “God is with us and He fights for His children; today you messed with the wrong person and you will get your payment from the Most High, you cowards.”
There was no attorney named Susan Millan associated with Catholic Charities, and the deceit was just one example of hundreds that the group has become aware of when desperate immigrants eventually reach the real organization.
“There’s a reason why we have a good reputation,” said Chris Ross, vice president of migration and refugee resettlement services at Catholic Charities. “And so for someone to be trading on that goodwill with nefarious intent is very frustrating.”
Urbina had fallen prey to “notario fraud,” in which scammers provide legal advice, often by saying they’re public notaries or other legal professionals. In many Latin American countries, a public notary is the equivalent of a lawyer, and notario fraudsters rely on this mistranslation to fake credentials.
Urbina shared documents that detail how she was lured into the scam, and ProPublica corroborated her story with her husband and Catholic Charities. After Urbina told local and federal authorities she had been tricked out of her day in court, Immigration and Customs Enforcement switched her scheduled December virtual check-in to an in-person meeting. When she showed up, agents arrested her. In January, she said, officers shackled her hands and feet and loaded her on a plane to Nicaragua.
She’d been scammed, then deported.
A spokesperson with the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to questions about Urbina’s case but said, “Anyone caught impersonating a federal immigration agent will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” New Orleans police did not answer ProPublica’s questions about a complaint she filed.
Scams like those that destroyed Urbina’s dreams are on the rise, federal data analyzed by ProPublica shows, as profiteers seize on the fear and confusion wrought by President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Complaints of immigration scams have doubled since Trump was elected, ProPublica found in analyzing more than 6,200 complaints filed with the Federal Trade Commission by victims and advocates over the last five years.
From the start of 2021 through the election in fall of 2024, the FTC — the nation’s top consumer protection agency — fielded about 960 immigration complaints per year, such as reports of fake attorneys offering services or people impersonating federal officers. In 2025, the commission received nearly 2,000 complaints.
In all, at least $94.4 million was reported stolen in complaints to the FTC over five years. That number is certainly an undercount, as not all immigrants report wrongdoing for fear of deportation, and not every report included dollar amounts.
The spike in complaints is so severe that many states and legal organizations have alerted the public about them. California’s and North Carolina’s attorneys general released statements in late 2025, as did the American Bar Association and AARP. In June 2025, the New York City Council passed legislation increasing notario fraud penalties, and a similar law passed in Florida.
“Immigration scammers contribute to a lawless environment, undermining our immigration system,” said Zach Kahler, a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency Urbina falsely thought had awarded her residency. Online, the agency provides guides on how to spot immigration fraud and warns consumers that it does not use WhatsApp. The agency tells people who think they’ve been scammed to complain to the FTC.
Old Problem, New Sophistication
Scams targeting those mired in the U.S. immigration system are not new, but advocates say predators have become more sophisticated, using technologies like artificial intelligence and targeted ads. At the same time, immigrants have become increasingly anxious about speedy mass deportations, creating a bonanza for those looking to cash in.
“I believe AI is being utilized in these scams pretty effectively. People think they’re talking to a real person, or the logos and stuff look pretty professional to the untrained eye,” said Ross, of Catholic Charities.
Many victims say they were duped by scammers who had professional-looking photos, wore immigration uniforms and staged realistic virtual hearings.
A review of the image of the person named Millan who was supposedly helping Urbina suggests that it was AI-generated.
Ross added: “The biggest thing is the desperation — that’s really what’s driving this.”
In San Diego, attorneys working for the city have been impersonated by scammers. City Attorney Heather Ferbert told ProPublica her office has forwarded these cases to the FBI and warned residents to be on the lookout for advertisements that promise a government official or lawyer can help with immigration proceedings. The FBI declined to comment.
“When you add the title and you add the government weight behind it — the city attorney’s office, the district attorney’s office, for example — the targets are sort of lulled,” Ferbert said. “We’ve heard stories where they promise that they can solve their immigration problems for them. No real lawyer is ever going to promise an outcome to you.”
Other scams extend beyond impersonating lawyers. The FTC complaints include a case in which people posing as Department of Homeland Security immigration officers received more than $600,000 from a family by claiming one of the relatives’ identities had been stolen and they needed to pay to protect it. In West Virginia, a “federal agent” threatened to deport a college student who was close to graduating unless they paid nearly $4,000 in gift cards.
“They claimed that if I did not comply immediately, I would be arrested, detained or deported,” wrote the student, who was legally residing in the U.S. on a student visa. The student, whose name was not disclosed in federal data, used prepaid Dollar General gift cards and then went broke and turned to family for help.
Immigrants from India and Bangladesh were told they had failed to update a necessary form and would be arrested and deported immediately unless they shared their Social Security numbers. Other scammers claimed the government had intercepted packages full of money and drugs addressed to immigrants, who were told to make a payment or face arrest.
“Well-Oiled Machine”
Most victims find the fake attorneys advertising on Facebook or TikTok. Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has pledged to delete scam accounts and announced new tools to track them.
Charity Anastasio, practice and ethics counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the ads are often pay-per-click and targeted at Spanish-speaking users.
“They’ve designed such a well-oiled machine,” Anastasio said.
The ads appealed to those in deportation proceedings, clinging to any means to stay in the U.S., but also those who may have wanted to get their paperwork in order ahead of Trump’s crackdown, said Adonia Simpson, an attorney with the American Bar Association.
“A lot of people are trying to preemptively get representation to see what their options are,” Simpson told ProPublica. “The enforcement has been a big driver. It’s caused a lot of people to be very fearful.”
The White House declined to comment.
In October 2024, 56-year-old José Aguilar, who had been granted temporary protected status under George W. Bush’s administration, was in just that position when he came upon a Facebook ad. The advertiser claimed to work for Jorge Rivera, a well-known Miami immigration attorney, and promised Aguilar they could get him permanent residency. It would take $15,000. ProPublica sought comment from the real Rivera, who is not accused of wrongdoing; he did not respond.
A leather factory worker in Minnesota who had fled El Salvador, Aguilar cobbled together the money in installments through loans from friends and that year’s tax refund. Over several months, he had four video calls with the fake attorney and two calls with immigration agent impersonators. He was initially skeptical but became convinced when they sent him videos of residency cards with the Citizenship and Immigration Services logo.
“Don’t try to deceive me, because I’m borrowing money, I’m a man of faith, and I’m a person who has had a heart transplant, so I can’t get angry because it hurts me,” Aguilar remembered saying.
“No, don’t worry, sir,” Aguilar said the scammer responded. “This is real. It’s super real.”
During one of their last conversations, Aguilar says the scammer appealed to their shared Christian faith, thanking God for approving the paperwork and earning him residency.
By February 2025, the scammers had stopped responding. A month later, Aguilar realized he was probably never going to get the residency cards and contacted an attorney who confirmed he had been duped. Aguilar, who has two young daughters, says his family is subsisting on food banks and relies on donations for rent.
“It’s unforgivable,” Aguilar said. “Even bringing God into it.”
Mother and Daughter Torn Apart
For Mariela, an undocumented Honduran mother of three, financial stress began long ago. In 2021, the father of her children headed for the U.S. along with one of their daughters, seeking construction work. Two years later, when she traveled 2,000 miles in blistering heat to join them, she broke her arm in three places after falling into the Rio Grande while crossing the border. ProPublica is withholding her last name because she fears being deported.
And then, in October 2025, immigration agents detained her 20-year-old daughter. Desperate, the mother reached out to what she thought was a Catholic Charities Facebook page.
She was pulled into a scheme involving a man who posed as a priest, another posing as an immigration judge, and another posing as Oscar Carrillo, an attorney licensed in Texas who practices tax law.
The real Carrillo told ProPublica he began getting calls from frustrated immigrants last spring, all of them Spanish speakers who claimed they had been referred by Catholic Charities. When he realized his name and photo were being misused, he alerted the FBI and FTC. The State Bar of Texas has posted a public warning on its webpage about Carrillo impersonators.
“Most of these clients, because of their immigration status, are afraid to report this to the police,” Carrillo said. “I feel sorry for these clients. We’re not talking about wealthy individuals.”
In January, after her daughter was deported, Mariela realized the fraudsters had cheated her out of more than $18,000 over three months.
She said she had borrowed $3,000 from an uncle in Honduras, another $1,500 from a cousin, a few thousand from her boss, and another $2,000 from a friend from her Honduran hometown who had also emigrated to the U.S. In addition, she burned through her savings and her daughter’s.
Public Alerts, Little Recourse
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, local law enforcement, advocacy groups, state attorneys general and law firms have published notices warning immigrants about an uptick in scams.
“Our best advice is to make direct contact, outside of social media channels, with the organization you’re seeking help from,” said Kevin Brennan, vice president for media relations at Catholic Charities. “Call the organization on the phone or visit an office in person.”
Scammers show no signs of retreat.
In April, three months after her deportation to Nicaragua, Urbina received a call from someone claiming to be a lawyer. He said that he’d been referred to her by a bishop with Catholic Charities and that he’d help her obtain immigration papers.
The stress of being scammed and separated from her husband, who remains in the U.S., had taken a toll. “I’ve been through a lot of things, one right after the other,” Urbina said. She’s living with her mother in a remote village, afraid to step outside in a country where the government has ramped up surveillance of those who previously moved to the U.S.
Desperate, she gave the “lawyer” her personal information.
After earlier saying his help would be free, he then asked for money, she said.
“Where did you get my number?” she asked.
Intrigued but skeptical, Urbina followed up with WhatsApp messages, hoping he might really be an immigration attorney.
The government needs more funding than ever, which is kind of hilarious when you realize the Tea Party of the Obama era was the predecessor of this Big Government version of the GOP.
The DHS can’t even get itself a budget at the moment. Sure, it will get some money thrown to it sooner or later and the administration won’t let the lack of tax revenue offsets stop it from feeding billions more into its Bigotry Machine.
But that’s not all. Behold our all-but-officially-declared war in Iran, currently headed by the Department of DefenseWarLittle Excursion, which is adding billions of dollars weekly to the national deficit. After all, as right-leaning libertarians like to point out, the government doesn’t actually “make” anything. The private sector builds the bombs and missiles. And unlike TSA agents, they expect to be paid.
Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.
More succinctly, immigrants out-punch their weight class when it comes to erasing budget deficits:
Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
[…]
Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
But that help is apparently no longer welcome. The Trump administration has succeeded in eliminating the firewall between the IRS and ICE, allowing ICE agents to use this data to hunt down taxpayers who work harder and pay more taxes than the white, natural-born citizens that this administration pretends make America great.
That’s going to cause even more problems for an administration that is spending far more liberally than any “liberal” it blames its current budget problems on. Here’s how that looks on the ground as Tax Day has come and gone in the United States:
By the time Tax Day rolls around every April 15, accountant María José Solís usually has more to do. More clients. More paperwork. More phones ringing, more emails and WhatsApp messages pinging.
But this year, she said, more than 550 of her regular clients have disappeared. That’s about 15 percent of her customer base at Toro Taxes, the bilingual firm in Wheaton, Maryland, that Solís runs.
There’s your anecdote, albeit one that’s being repeated around the nation. Here’s the data:
The Yale Budget Lab estimates that the IRS stands to lose between $147 billion and $479 billion over the next decade as migration to the U.S. declines, deportations increase and immigrants of various statuses disengage from the formal economy for what some experts say may be an extended period.
That estimate will likely be low if the Trump administration continues to purge migrants at the rate it has since Trump returned to office. It will definitely be lower if another similarly bigoted GOP lawmaker succeeds him as president.
And it’s not just the losses up front. There’s money leaking out the back as well. It’s a double-dip, because migrants with ITINs (individual tax identification numbers) pay taxes for services they can’t actually access, like Social Security and Medicare. They’re actually subsidizing citizens who pay fewer taxes, work fewer hours, and commit more crimes than they do.
This nation continues to become poorer, not just in terms of financial viability, but in heart and spirit. Migrants made this nation great. Now, a bunch of ungrateful people who hate people who aren’t white are not only driving us deeper into debt, but they’re eliminating a source of income that never asked for anything more than a chance to survive.
We’ve got a throwback administration that wants to bring us back to halcyon days of early 1950s America, that preceded Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation. If it could, I’m sure it would go back even further, taking at least another 100 years off the clock.
The Trump administration has no problem with embracing bigotry. That much has been made clear by the guy at the top of the org chart.
While most presidents — no matter how racist — would at least try to present something “statesmanlike” when talking to the public, Trump has delivered his hatred of non-whites in press conferences and social media tweets. He has frequently referred to non-white countries as “shitholes” and their citizens as “low IQ.” He has claimed Latin America and South America are “sending” the US nothing but terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists.
He has also asked publicly why we can’t get more immigrants from predominantly white countries, like Switzerland, Norway, and other countries where blue eyes and blond hair are commonplace. (The answer, of course, is that citizens of those countries actually like the nations they reside in, what with their sensible governments, the prioritization of social safety nets over golden parachutes, and affordable health care. They also prefer their government not be run by criminals and rapists, nor overly forgiving of certain terrorists.)
In hopes of replacing the browner people he’s actively displacing in his War on Migrants, Trump reached out to the supposedly persecuted white people of South Africa, which has only recently made steps towards treating Black people like human beings, rather than possessions or low-level subordinates. Having seen some out-of-context viral video, Trump was convinced white South Africans were being oppressed by Black South Africans, much in the same way he became convinced Haitian refugees were eating people’s pets and/or local water fowl.
All of this racism is now traceable. It’s in the official numbers, as Alex Ip pointed out on Bluesky. The latest refugee numbers compiled [PDF] by the State Department (and released every month) show there’s a new replacement theory in operation here — one that hopes to fill the US with as many white people as possible.
Between October 1, 2025 and March 31, 2026, 4,499 refugees were admitted to the US. All five pages (10 states each) tell the same story: every single refugee admitted during this six-month period was from South Africa. The only exception? Three Afghan refugees who are now residing in Colorado and who arrived here last November.
Since last November, every refugee has been from South Africa. While it may be presumptive to assume that every South African admitted was white, it’s the kind of assumption that’s safe to make because this administration publicly stated it’s only interested in rescuing white South Africans from largely imagined “racial violence.”
The state-by-state breakdown makes it clear the South Africans who have taken advantage of this refugee status are there because Trump rolled out the white carpet for them. The two states with by far the largest numbers of South African refugees are Texas (551) and Florida (331) — both deeply red states that are fully MAGA cooked. California runs a close third with 316, but that’s because California has always attracted arrivals from foreign countries, much in the same way it has attracted US citizens from all over the nation, with its promises of beaches, warm weather, and plenty of places to work while you wait for your script to be optioned.
The only thing working against the administration is all the efforts it’s made to prevent non-citizens from having any rights, much less an opportunity to vote. I’m sure the White House’s finest legal minds (smash cut to a million monkeys with typewriters and Trump U law degrees) are busy finding a way to speed run the naturalization process, but only for refugees admitted to this country since last November. The other irony is some South Africans who’ve taken advantage of this are now claiming they’d rather go back to living in the country they “fled” from because it seems far less dangerous than remaining in a country run by people who prefer fascism to democracy.
This is about as openly racist as it gets. And yet, it’s just going to end up being more bigoted flotsam that will be pushed aside by the next burst of awfulness by this administration. There will be more where this came from. Sooner or later, some of it will manage to break the surface.
In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace.
The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.
In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.
The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.
But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.
In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.
Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.
The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.
In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”
The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”
The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.
The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.
Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.
“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.
The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.
Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.
“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.
A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”
The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.
The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.
Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.
The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.
“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”
Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.
“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”
Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.
Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.
Drugs
As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.
Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.
“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”
He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.
“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”
The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.
National Security
Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.
The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”
Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.
“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.
Labor
The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.
Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.
A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”
The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.
White-Collar Crime
The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.
The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.
The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.
Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.
The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.
Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.
Promises Kept
The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.
Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”
In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.
The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”
Because South Dakota governor Larry Rhoden is forever obligated to serve Kristi Noem and Kristi Noem is forever obligated to serve Donald Trump, he and his GOP buddies are making America MAGA again, starting with his home turf.
Non-citizens have never really disrupted voting. But they’re the convenient scapegoat for a party that’s justifiably worried it’s going to lose its majority during the mid-terms. Multiple efforts are being made all over the nation to disenfranchise anyone that’s not part of Trump’s most rabid voting base. Pretending people not allowed to legally vote are somehow flipping elections for the Democratic Party is more than merely obnoxious. It’s actually harming the democratic process.
Here in South Dakota, two laws have been passed in recent weeks with the express purpose of keeping non-white people from showing up to vote. The first, passed at the beginning of this month, allows any rando to claim a person they saw voting shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Voters in South Dakota will soon be able to challenge other voters’ citizenship.
Republican Gov. Larry Rhoden signed legislation into law last week that authorizes challenges by individuals and election officials.
[…]
State law already allows challenges to a voter’s registration up to the 90th day before an election, if a person is suspected of lacking South Dakota residency, voting in another state or being registered to vote in another state. The new law adds citizenship as a justification for a challenge.
Challenges may be filed by the South Dakota Secretary of State’s Office, the auditor in the county where the voter is registered, or a voter in the same county. The challenge must be in the form of a signed, sworn statement and must include what the law describes as “documented evidence.”
Now, we can all see what the law is. But we all know how it will be applied. State employees with access to voter rolls will raise challenges against anyone with a foreign-sounding last name. While it’s unlikely few citizens will actually file challenges, they’ll certainly feel comfortable accosting anyone standing in line to vote whose skin is darker than their own. Given the inevitability of these responses, it’s easy to see the law accomplishing exactly what it’s supposed to: limit the number of non-white voters at the polls during the mid-terms and beyond.
But that’s not the only suppression effort signed into law this month. There’s also this one, which raises the bar for participating in the democratic process with the obvious intention of limiting participation to the sort of voters the GOP thinks with vote for it:
New voters in South Dakota will have to prove that they are United States citizens in order to cast a ballot in state and local races under a bill signed on Thursday by Gov. Larry Rhoden.
The new law, which does not apply to South Dakotans already on the voter rolls, comes amid a national push by Republicans to tighten voting rules and root out voting by noncitizens, which is already illegal and believed to be rare.
“This bill ensures only citizens vote in state elections, keeping our elections safe and secure,” said Mr. Rhoden, who is seeking election to a full term this year and is facing a crowded Republican primary field.
It’s already illegal in South Dakota to vote if you’re not a citizen. This bill addresses a completely imaginary “problem.” And it forces voters to provide a passport, birth certificate, and other documents proving citizenship before they’re allowed to vote. While it may be easy for many people to present these documents, the simple fact is that they’ve never been asked to do this before, and anyone who’s not aware this law has been passed will be denied the opportunity to vote because the GOP decided to move the goalposts during an election year.
Non-citizens voting in South Dakota has never been an issue. The fact that 273 non-citizens were recently removed from the state’s voting rolls may seem a bit sketchy but there’s a good reason there might be a few hundred non-citizens with voter registrations:
Noncitizens can obtain a driver’s license or state ID if they are lawful permanent residents or have temporary legal status. There’s a part of the driver’s license form that allows an applicant to register to vote. That part says voters must be citizens.
The problem is that this is all on the same form. The voter registration part of the form has a signature line, which many applicants will fill out and sign even if their intention is only to get a drivers license or ID card, especially since it appears before the final signature block for the entire application.
If applicants are not asked to affirmatively state their intention to register to vote (as the Department of Public Safety employees ask now, along with asking applicants to write “vote” on the form to signal their affirmation), their applications might be processed, along with the voter registration applicants didn’t realize they enabling.
The Secretary of State’s office (the office that’s supposed to be reviewing voter registrations for eligibility) threw the Department of Public Safety under the bus:
Rachel Soulek, director of the Division of Elections in the Secretary of State’s Office, placed blame on the department in her response to South Dakota Searchlight questions about the situation.
“These non U.S. citizens had marked ‘no’ to the citizenship question on their driver’s license application but were incorrectly processed as U.S. citizens due to human error by the Department of Public Safety,” Soulek wrote.
That’s not what happened. Their ID applications were processed and the Soulek’s department failed to catch the inadvertent errors. And it doesn’t really even matter who’s at fault because despite the errors, this is still a non-issue.
Soulek said only one of the 273 noncitizens had ever cast a ballot. That was during the 2016 general election.
A handful of clerical errors that resulted in a single illegal vote in the past decade cannot be a rational basis for a new law. And there’s a good chance the sole vote was made in error, rather than maliciously. After all, if the state told this person they could vote, who were they to question that determination?
This is nothing more than state governments stepping up to do what Trump can’t. His SAVE Act is stalled and lots of last-minute gerrymandering at the behest of the president is tied up in court. His loyalists are doing what they can to make his perverted dreams a reality in states that are most likely to lean Republican in the first place, which makes all of this as pointless as it is stupid. But the underlying threat to democracy remains, ever propelled forward by the people who claim to love America the most.
Shortly after Trump took office for a second time, his administration made it clear that it felt constitutional rightswere merely privileges it would extend only to those who fully supported whatever the hell the administration happened to be doing.
At the time, the administration was not only engaged in a full-blown, bigoted war against migrants, but throwing all of its support behind Israel’s ongoing anti-Palestinian efforts, which look a whole lot like actual genocide.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced it will begin screening immigrants’ social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. The screenings will affect people applying for permanent residence status as well as foreigners affiliated with educational institutions. The policy will go into effect immediately.
In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it will “protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or [the Houthis].”
But, in true MAGA fashion. Trump’s anti-antisemitic efforts only affected people who were more brown than white. A month later, Trump was opening the immigration door to South African “refugees,” but only the white ones. This decision was presumably based on lizard brain analysis of out-of-context clips shown on social media and/or Fox News that pretended whites in South Africa were being persecuted by the Black residents they’d persecuted for decades under apartheid.
And that included white South Africans who engaged in antisemitic speech, who were given a free pass to play their version of the race card to gain unvetted admittance to the Land of Opportunity.
Nine months later, the doors have been thrown wide open for white South Africans, with the administration yet again claiming — without facts in evidence — that these particular South Africans were more deserving of expedited asylum proceedings than anyone from any country where actual violence and persecution targets residents who are not white enough for the administration to consider worthy of naturalization.
The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.
While both versions of the Trump administration may have rendered satire mostly obsolete, it can’t eradicate irony. And here’s where it gets absolutely hilarious. White South Africans are now thinking their homeland is a better option than living here under this administration, as Reuters reports.
Andrew Veitch left South Africa after being held up at gunpoint in his car. But now he feels there are greater threats in the United States, he said, citing mass shootings in public places as well as violence by U.S. immigration officers.
“People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” said the 53-year-old, who moved to California in 2003. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.”
It’s a valid point — one that people who have lived here for their entire lives are making, albeit without the easily available option of just pressing CTRL-Z on their temporary protected status. Veitch isn’t the only one wanting to return to the allegedly-hyper-violent country of South Africa, rather than continue to live in the Land of Opportunity that is daily being rebranded as the Land of Impending Martial Law.
Other South African (white) “refugees” are heading back home because the financial climate is preferable, even if they choose to ignore the threat Trump poses to every freedom Americans hold dear. After 20 years of US residence, it’s the Trump administration that’s encouraging South African (white) migrant Naomi Saphire to return to her homeland.
[Saphire] had been settled in the United States for two decades when she came back for a holiday and realized how much she missed home.
Last year, she left North Carolina for a seaside town in South Africa’s Western Cape, where she said her three children spend more time outdoors, health insurance is affordable and she prefers the schools.
“My heart is just full of gratefulness to be here,” the 46-year-old said from her home in Plettenberg Bay. “The U.S. has been really good to me (but) I just felt like I was depriving my kids of this life.”
As for the supposed violence targeting white South Africans Trump is now pretending to “save” from their misery with his “let’s get a bunch more whites in here” immigration policies, it’s as mythical as divorced from reality as Trump’s self-perception as the smartest, savviest businessman/politician to ever grace the Earth with his presence:
Crime and joblessness are major issues in South Africa, but the unemployment rate is 35% for Black people compared with 8% for whites, according to the latest figures from the national statistics agency Stats SA.
Police statistics released last year showed that even farm murders, which Trump has focused on, killed more Black people than whites. Reuters has found that photos and videos Trump has presented on the matter were taken out of context or misrepresented.
While this might seem like the most useless of anecdotal evidence, there’s reason to believe white South Africans will either ignore the Trump’s invitation to further whiten the US, or head back home where things are still pretty fucking good for whites, but without having to deal with a megalomaniac chaos agent who seems to believe World War III will finally allow Truth Social to turn a profit.
White South Africans have been rejecting the United States since 2022, when a law allowed them to regain their citizenship after it was stripped by a post-apartheid law passed in 1995. 15,000 white South Africans took advantage of that to return to their homeland. Now that Trump’s back in office, even more whites are exiting than entering the United States, despite the administration’s warm welcome of white migrants into its white Christian nationalism plans.
Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said 1,000 people had reclaimed their citizenship, a number he expected to grow significantly as the programme takes off.
One of the main reasons for exiting the US was “lower cost of living,” something Trump has actively worked against achieving, starting with his indiscriminate (and apparently unlawful) tariffs and continuing through his destabilization of the world economy by (1) being buddies with Russia, (2) starting yet another forever war in the Middle East, (3) refusing to engage honestly with inflation and joblessness, and (4) decreasing American productivity by forcibly ejecting hundreds of thousands of people who work harder, pay more in taxes, and commit fewer crimes than US citizens.
And now it’s clear this administration is so inept and inherently dangerous it can’t even convince white people to live here. Let that sink in for a bit.
Roughly a year ago — as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism — his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that equated opposing Trump and his open bigotry with hating America.
One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.
Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.
Trump apparently believes white South Africans are so extremely persecuted (after decades of subjugating Black South Africans), they deserve to avail themselves of everything offered by the Land of the Free. Trump wants incoming whites so badly he’s willing to rewrite the rules to flood the zone with new bigots.
The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.
The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.
Notably, this isn’t a free pass for any South African. The document apparently extends this to whites only, which is a hell of a thing to do in this day and age. I have to imagine even the most racist of Afrikaners might balk a bit at boarding a plane where non-whites are being ejected over whatever country the plane flies over on its way to Land of Opportunity.
No one ever said this administration is clever. But it’s not accurate to call it stupid. It’s something else entirely: a collection of shitbirds who are so contemptuous of everyone else in the nation that it will stroke itself off publicly and shrug off complaints with non-sequiturs liberally peppered with phrases like “leftist media” or “activist judges.”
This administration will not only piss down your leg and tell you it’s raining, but swing by later to bitch about people “illegally” benefiting from the uninvited precipitation. It’s shit stacked on shit stacked on shit topped off by wedding cake figurines standing on the necks of fallen lawn jockeys.
If you want this to be your nation, please get the fuck out. Get your Fourth Reich on elsewhere, you absolute mooks. And I dare you explain how THIS isn’t pure racism, especially when you’ve gone all in on the “get the foreigners out” purge this government has been engaged in since Trump returned to the Oval Office.
There’s not a single conservative left in the GOP. The ideals that were formerly considered “conservative” — small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. — have been replaced by white Christian nationalism, water-carrying for would-be autocrats, and immense amounts of deficit spending for the sole purpose of making America whiter.
That’s not the same as making it “greater,” no matter how Trump and his cohorts choose to spin it. Instead of asking themselves whether or not they’re actually making America worse, they just get on the bullhorn and blare racist invective on main.
Here’s Kristi Noem, engaging in the sort of thing most GOP politicians have managed to limit to PAC fundraisers behind closed doors:
Here’s her December 2025 X post in full:
I just met with the President.
I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.
Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.
WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.
Lovely, eh? But she’s only doing what the Supreme Leader wants her to do. After all, the guy running the nation is no better. Actually, he’s worse, since he’s supposed to hold himself to a higher standard than his own political appointees.
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.”
Counterpoint: this administration stinks and we don’t want them in our country. Every smear leveled against migrants by the Trump administration is a lie, starting with the “worst of the worst” posturing, continuing all the way down to the suggestion migrants add nothing to this country while dangling from the government teat the entire time.
It’s insanely ignorant to claim immigrants are more likely to be criminals than US citizens. That has never been true. Neither have the claims made by Trump and Noem. If there’s anyone capable of reducing the deficit, it’s migrants rather than the most powerful political party in the nation.
Cato Institute continues to expose the government’s lies about migrants by doing nothing more than simply looking at the data. While Trump continues to pretend immigrants are robbing the country blind and that levying tariffs will make average Americans richer, Cato is delivering the facts. And the facts say that the best thing this country could do for both the economy and national deficit is bring in as many migrants as possible.
Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
Immigrants have always paid more than their “fair share” in taxes. Tax cheats like Donald Trump are the kind of people who always insist otherwise while preaching to the ignorant faithful. Of the $14.5 trillion in debt reduction created by our nation’s migrant population, more than a third of it ($6.3 trillion) was generated by non-citizens — people who are here illegally or have yet to become naturalized citizens and/or permanent residents.
The upshot of the data is this: without immigrants, this nation would be so far underwater that it would threaten the future of the nation itself:
Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
Both Kristi Noem and Donald Trump should be made to eat every word of this next paragraph, as painfully and protractedly as possible:
Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.
Calling immigrants “leeches” and “entitlement junkies” is nothing but naked bigotry. It has fuck all to do with the actual facts — facts this government has access to but chooses to ignore in favor of blowing its handful of racist dog whistles repeatedly.
And yet again, let’s take the latest look at the fact that is perhaps the most uncomfortable for a regime that repeatedly infers that being a migrant means being a criminal worthy of speedy ejection:
It’s BOGO time at the migrant facts warehouse: by committing fewer crimes migrants are less of drain on public resources than US citizens, who are spending more time behind bars than their “illegal” counterparts. And lest we forget, racists think the reason migrants commit less crime than American citizens is because we have Black American citizens. Cato has already dismantled this counterargument, even after factoring in the blatant racism this collection of “but for the Black people” asshats think will allow them to double-down on their bigotry:
A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….
Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.
This government can continue to stoke the flames of hatred. But it will never have the facts to back its hateful rhetoric. Of course, that hardly matters to this government and its top officials. But it should matter to everyone else who’s not part of the Executive Branch circle jerk. Migrants are better equipped to make this country great than the people who think merely existing here as the offspring of white people makes them the superior breed.
The ICE surge in Minneapolis, Minnesota was instigated by a far-right click bait artist and encouraged by the president’s portrayal of Somali immigrants as “garbage” people from a “garbage” country. And those were some of the nicer words Trump used to describe the people his agencies would be hunting down first.
Several weeks later, a draw-down has begun, prompted by two murders committed by federal officers, an inability to obtain indictments against protesters, and every narrative about violence perpetrated by federal officers disintegrating the moment the government was asked to provide some evidence of its claims to the court.
Hundreds of judges in hundreds of immigration cases have found that the government has routinely violated the due process rights of the immigrants it has arrested. This dates all the way back to the beginning of Trump’s second term, but months of roving patrols by masked men with guns has created a massive influx of cases courts are still trying to sort out. But one thing is clear: the government will do anything it can to keep the people it arrests from availing themselves of their constitutional rights.
This starts with the arrests themselves, which most often occur without a judicial warrant. The same goes for the invasion of people’s houses and places of business. With the Supreme Court giving its tacit blessing to casual racism (the so-called “Kavanaugh stops”), anyone who looks less than white or whose English has a bit of an accent is considered reasonably suspicious enough to detain.
The government has been on the losing end of hundreds of cases involving due process rights. This decision [PDF], coming to us via Politico’s Kyle Cheney, details the massive amount of constant movement this government engages in to keep people separated from their rights and physical freedom.
It opens with this:
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) recognizes that noncitizen detainees have a constitutional right to access counsel. But in recent weeks, ICE has isolated thousands of people—most of them detained at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building—from their attorneys. Plaintiffs, who are noncitizen detainees and a nonprofit that represents noncitizens, have presented substantial, specific evidence detailing these alleged violations of the United States Constitution. In response, Defendants offer threadbare declarations generally asserting, without examples or evidence, that ICE provides telephone access to counsel for noncitizens in its custody. The Plaintiffs’ declarations provide specifics of the opposite. The gulf between the parties’ evidence is simply too wide and too deep for Defendants to overcome.
It’s not like ICE can’t provide detainees with access to attorneys or respect their due process rights. It’s that they choose not to, now that Trump is in charge. The access is theoretically possible. It’s just being purposefully denied. And it’s not even just being denied in the sense that phone call requests are being refused. People detained by ICE are placed into a constant state of flux for the sole purpose of making it as difficult as possible for them to avail themselves of their rights.
The devil is in the details. And the court brings plenty of those, all relating to the administration’s “Operation Metro Surge” that targeted Minneapolis, Minnesota:
Detainees are moved frequently, quickly, without notice,and often with no way for attorneys to know where or how long they will be at a given facility. (ECF No. 20 (“Boche Decl.”) ¶¶ 9, 13, 18; ECF No. 24 (“Edin Decl.”) ¶ 6; Heinz Decl. ¶ 5 (explaining that of eleven clients initially detained at Whipple, ten were transferred out of the state within twenty-four hours); Kelley Decl. ¶ 19.) Once a person has been transferred out of Minnesota, “representation becomes substantially more difficult”—attorneys must secure local counsel to sponsor a pro hac vice application and navigate additional barriers.
This is a key part of the administration’s deliberate destruction of constitutional rights. Moving people quickly helps prevent habeas corpus motions from being filed, since they need to be filed in the jurisdiction where they’re being held. If detainees are shifted from place to place quickly enough, their counsel needs to figure out where they’re being held and hope that their challenge lands in court before their clients are moved again. And with the Fifth Circuit basically codifying the denial of due process to migrants, more and more people arrested elsewhere in the nation are being sent to detainment centers in Texas as quickly as possible.
All of this is intentional:
Defendants transfer people so quickly that even Defendants struggle to locate detainees. Often, Defendants do not accurately or timely input information into the Online Detainee Locator System. This prevents Minnesota-based attorneys from locating and speaking with their clients.The locator either produces no search results or instructs attorneys to call for details, referencing a phone number that ICE does not answer. Often, Defendants do not update the locator until after detainees areout of state. Attorneys frequently learn of their client’s location for the first time when the government responds to a habeas petition.
These are not the good faith efforts of a government just trying to get a grasp on the immigration situation. These are the bad faith efforts of government hoping to violate rights quickly enough that the people it doesn’t like will be remanded to the nearest war-torn nation/foreign torture prison before the judicial branch has a chance to catch up.
There’s more. There’s the phone that detainees supposedly have access to for their one phone call. It’s the same line used to receive calls for inmates, so that means lawyers calling clients back either run into a busy signal or a ringing phone that detainees aren’t allowed to answer and ICE officers certainly aren’t interested in answering.
Lawyers seeking access to their clients have been refused access. In some cases, they’ve been threatened with arrest by officers simply for showing up. Even if they happen to make it inside the Whipple Detention Center, ICE officers and detention center employees usually refuse them access to their clients.
And when people try to work within the unconstitutional limitations of this deliberately broken system, they’re mocked for even bothering to avail themselves of their rights.
When an attorney told an agent that she sent a copy of a releaseorder to the specified email address, the agent laughed and said “something to the effect of ‘yeah we really need to get someone to check that email.’”
To sum up, the government is exactly what the court thinks it is: a set of deliberate rights violations pretending it’s a legitimate government operation that’s just trying to do the best it can in these troubling times:
It appears that in planning for Operation Metro Surge, the government failed to plan for the constitutional rights of its civil detainees. The government suggests—with minimal explanation and even less evidence—that doing so would result in “chaos.” The Constitution does not permit the government to arrest thousands of individuals and then disregard their constitutional rights because it would be too challenging to honor those rights.
The administration has long lost the “presumption of regularity” that courts have utilized for years while handling lawsuits and legal challenges against the government. It no longer is considered to be acting in good faith in much of the country (Fifth Circuit excluded, for the most part). This is the “rule of law” party making it clear that it will only follow the rules and laws it likes. And it will continue to do so because courts can’t actually physically free people or force the government to respect their rights. The Trump administration is fine with losing in court and losing the hearts and minds of most of America as long as those in power keep getting to do what they want.
