The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Along the Texas border, Trump’s big, beautiful deportation machine is working so well that even some of the Latinos who voted for him are now watching ICE agents in masks drag people out of cars and thinking, “Huh, this seems bad.” Construction boss Benny Melendez is so thrilled with the law-and-order renaissance that he’s literally building fences to keep federal agents off his private property unless they show up with an actual judicial warrant. The project timeline for a house has stretched from four months to a year because the workforce keeps getting disappeared by Trump’s immigration cosplay.

Republican McAllen mayor Javier Villalobos politely notes that when your constituents see masked ICE teams yanking people off the street, it starts to feel less like “border security” and more like a crackdown on the entire Hispanic community — including U.S. citizens. Meanwhile, White House border czar Tom Homan, channeling every aspiring tinpot ever, says he doesn’t “particularly care about midterms” and is just here to “enforce immigration law,” which currently translates to scaring the hell out of voters his boss supposedly “won over” in 2024.

Latino Trump voters now confess they expected deportations, just not of “innocent, hardworking people,” a touching faith in a system that has never once distinguished neatly between “good immigrant” and “bad immigrant” when there are quotas to hit and TV segments to feed. Democrats, ever the optimists, are hoping that watching neighbors get hauled away by federal stormtroopers in tactical gear might nudge people back to their side. Bold plan: betting on basic human self-preservation as a campaign strategy against an administration that treats fear as a policy tool.

The Trump administration’s top border guy, Rodney Scott, has emerged from whatever bunker CBP keeps its worst ideas in to proudly defend a $46bn plan to lace the Big Bend region of Texas with 30-foot steel fencing, roads, and surveillance gear. This, in an area with historically low migrant crossings, but apparently a dangerously high concentration of intact ecosystems and happy local businesses that must be stopped at all costs.

A bipartisan coalition of landowners, environmentalists, and local businesses has the audacity to call this a waste of taxpayer money that will shred one of the most spectacular landscapes on the border. A judge even agreed enough to slap a court-ordered pause on construction, warning of “serious, irreparable harm” – at which point the administration ran to the supreme court to ask if they pretty please could keep bulldozing the desert while the lawsuits catch up.

Scott, whose job description under Trump is essentially "finish the wall, laws optional", insists that fortifying Big Bend is “non-negotiable” and predicts the region will be “completely overrun and destroyed” if it doesn’t get its share of steel. The fact that crossings there are low is, in this magical thinking, proof that a wall is urgently needed. CBP is bragging about building roughly 12 miles of barrier a week and being “ahead of schedule” on turning a 2,000-mile border into a monument to panic, contractor profits, and environmental devastation.

After bulldozers were caught tearing up ground inside Big Bend national park, Scott graciously ordered a “pause” and went on a listening tour, promising to figure out how to build the project so it doesn’t look like it’s mauling the park. He now says the giant steel fences won’t go in the national park itself because of ongoing lawsuits – a refreshing reminder that the only thing standing between protected lands and this administration’s wrecking crew is a judge with a spine and a temporary injunction.

In Little Havana’s Domino Park, a guy gets arrested mid-game and suddenly the conversation turns from double-sixes to deportations and who wrecked the cost of living more, Biden or Trump. Welcome to Florida’s 27th, where more than 70% of the district is Latino and a growing number of people have noticed that Trump’s big beautiful deportation machine doesn’t really care if you voted for him in 2024, as long as you’re easy to throw in a van.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar, who has apparently discovered that terrorizing your own base has downsides, filmed an ad in front of the White House telling Trump he’s “gone too far” on immigration and that the Hispanics who helped elect him now feel betrayed. Trump responded on Truth Social by boosting a post calling her a “back stabber,” because nothing says “serious governing” like subtweeting your own party’s Cuban-American congresswoman while ICE is raiding her district.

Salazar insists this is just Democracy, where you tell “the boss” what your people are feeling — a charming way to describe the relationship between a coequal branch of government and the guy screaming on social media. Meanwhile, new polling shows Latinos swinging back hard toward Democrats (57–31 in a recent survey), suggesting that maybe, just maybe, running on family separation plus mass deportations in a community where everyone knows someone with papers issues is not the electoral masterstroke Republicans sold themselves. The GOP wanted a strongman crusade against immigrants; now they’re shocked the strongman is coming for their own voters too.

The Trump administration has finally found a way to make its anti-immigrant obsession hurt everybody: by blowing a hole in Social Security so big you could drive an ICE raid bus through it. A new analysis projects that if Trump’s mass-deportation campaign keeps going, American seniors can look forward to losing an average of $2,152 a year in Social Security benefits starting in 2034 — an 8.6% cut, every year, forever. The same immigrants Republicans call “takers” were in fact quietly paying about $26bn a year into the system they’re barred from using, and now that Trump is kicking them out, the trust fund math has gone from bad to "hope you like cat food."

Meanwhile, the economy is doing exactly what happens when you rip 1.2 million workers out of key industries because Stephen Miller’s group chat demanded a purge. Food prices are spiking, crops are rotting in the fields, and anything that requires construction now costs more and happens less, because shockingly, you can’t build houses or harvest apples with Fox News monologues. Native-born workers are losing jobs too — electricians, plumbers, and others who apparently failed to realize that deporting the entire workforce that makes their projects possible might be bad for business. Even Trump’s own Social Security trustees — including RFK Jr and assorted handpicked loyalists — are now warning that lower immigration is trashing the program’s finances.

So the grand populist promise to defend Medicare and Social Security has been translated into policy as: deport the people who subsidize your retirement, shrink the labor force, slow job growth to a crawl, jack up prices on food and housing, then act shocked when the affordability crisis explodes. It’s an "America First" agenda where America gets higher grocery bills, fewer jobs, and smaller Social Security checks, while the White House gets more campaign rally chants about “invasions.” The leopard is not just eating faces anymore — it’s chewing through the Social Security trust fund, too.

JD Vance has bravely uncovered a shocking scandal: the US immigration system treats skilled foreign workers like “indentured servants” — so naturally, the White House response is to punish the workers and the companies that sponsor them, while making the workers even easier to deport. The administration has ordered the Labor Department to stop processing any new or pending PERM applications from Microsoft and seven other tech firms, effectively blocking a key pathway to permanent residency for thousands of highly skilled immigrants.

Vice President Vance thundered that “no company in the US has abused this system more than Microsoft,” accusing it of replacing Americans with cheap foreign labor, while Labor Secretary Kieth Sonderling helpfully labeled universities and big tech firms “visa mills.” At the same time, the administration is moving to eliminate the 60-day grace period that lets laid-off H‑1B workers stay in the country and find another job — turning Vance’s “indentured servants” into something closer to instant deportation hostages. Naturally, none of this touches Amazon, Google, Meta, Apple, or Nvidia, who magically escape this sudden moral crusade.

Meanwhile, Satya Nadella is literally at the White House getting a shiny new tech medal from Donald Trump while his company is being publicly denounced as the nation’s leading visa fraud cartel. So on one side, a photo op about innovation and American greatness; on the other, a nativist stunt that shreds any pretense that US immigration policy is about talent or fairness rather than raw political targeting. Welcome to Trump–Vance labor policy: corporate access for the CEOs, fear and precarity for the workers, and a government that calls people “indentured” and then slams the door behind them.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new innovation in cruelty: outsourcing its legal obligations. Since 2025, the US has been cutting checks to 35 countries – many already drowning in conflict and poverty – to take in migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers who have exactly zero connection to those places. Roughly 20,000 people have been dumped by bus into Mexico and over 5,000 more flown off to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and central Asia, because nothing says "beacon of freedom" like airlifting desperate people to places they’ve never been and hoping no one asks questions.

Two dozen UN human rights experts, plus a special rapporteur from the African Commission, have now helpfully clarified that yes, this is a “cascade of human rights violations” with potentially “deadly” consequences. People are being shipped to countries where they face torture, enforced disappearance, trafficking, slavery, and violence based on gender or sexual orientation. One man who fled Ghana after being outed was sent somewhere else entirely; an Iranian woman who protested her regime wound up in the same human rights shell game. It’s like rendition, but with more paperwork and fewer euphemisms.

The legal genius here is that US law says you can’t deport people back to where they’ll be persecuted, so DHS just sends them to a third country that will quietly send them back later. Problem solved – at least for the people in Washington who never have to see the bags over detainees’ heads, the beatings, or the stairwell “accidents” reported in places like Equatorial Guinea. Meanwhile, African governments cash the checks, EU governments eye the model for their own offshore camps, and human rights lawyers describe their advocacy as “screaming into a void.” The void, in this case, is filled with money and plausible deniability.

What’s at stake, the UN experts politely note, is “not merely migration policy” but actual lives, safety, and dignity. The Trump team, however, has pioneered a new doctrine: if you pay enough countries to participate in your cruelty, maybe the law won’t catch up before the next election cycle. The world’s richest country is now treating asylum seekers like toxic waste – just ship them far enough away, and pretend the spill never happened.

The Trump administration is back at the Supreme Court, begging for permission to keep playing its favorite game show: Deportation Roulette. After a federal judge — and then an appeals court — pointed out that you actually have to give people notice and a chance to challenge being exiled to a country they’ve never set foot in, the Justice Department rushed in with an emergency request to revive the policy. Due process, meet the emergency of "we had to cancel a deportation flight" for 70 people, some with criminal records, many without, all apparently expendable.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer helpfully explained that the policy has already been used to remove "thousands" of people to so‑called third countries, and that "thousands more" are ready to be shipped out — including "the worst of the worst" whose home countries won’t take them back. The solution? Dump them on other nations that signed blanket assurances that they definitely, totally, pinky-swear won’t persecute or torture them. Some of these countries: Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, South Sudan — places famous for repression, conflict, and human rights reports you wouldn’t read after dark.

Meanwhile, CBS talked to migrants from Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Venezuela who woke up in Liberia — not their home, not their region, not even their continent — after being deported there without warning or any chance to object. Many had no criminal records beyond immigration violations. The administration insists that court rulings requiring basic notice and a hearing are causing "irreparable harm" to U.S. foreign policy, because judges are rudely interfering with the delicate diplomatic art of paying other countries to take people we don’t want.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has given lawyers for the deportees until Monday to respond to the government’s emergency plea for the right to continue outsourcing human beings like defective merchandise. The White House calls it an efficient immigration crackdown; everyone else recognizes a due-process-free deportation pipeline that treats people as cargo and the Constitution as optional fine print.