The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

Trump’s second-term deportation cosplay has gotten so out of hand that Ilhan Omar is now proposing a Make ICE Pay Act to send the check back to the people whose lives ICE and CBP have been casually shredding. Her bill would block nearly $140bn from Trump’s "One Big Beautiful Bill" – you know, the one that turned immigration enforcement into a nationwide paramilitary LARP – and reroute it to the cities, small businesses, and nonprofits left picking up the pieces after the raids.

Minneapolis alone got treated to Operation Metro Surge, where thousands of federal agents flooded the city, made almost 4,000 arrests, and managed to fatally shoot two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti. Local cost: about $700m and a climate of fear that cratered commerce. Elsewhere, the regime helpfully rolled out family-friendly branded crackdowns like Operation Midway Blitz, Swamp Sweet, Catahoula Crunch, Catch of the Day, Charlotte’s Web, and Black Rose – because if you’re going to terrorize communities, you might as well workshop the names like you’re launching a new cereal line.

Omar’s bill doesn’t just throw money at the wreckage; it funds investigations, truth commissions, memorials, and psychosocial support for the people ICE treated like props in Trump’s reelection snuff film. All this as ICE arrests hit a new high – nearly 50,000 in July – after Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin promised a "more moderate" approach, presumably meaning they’d only kick down most of the doors. Public opinion is finally souring on ICE, but Trump’s still onstage yelling that we should "get her the hell out" while crowds chant "Send her back" at a sitting congresswoman and naturalized citizen whose family fled a civil war. The administration keeps screaming about law and order while running a federal agency that behaves like it’s allergic to both.

The Trump administration tried to fix America’s terrifying problem of too many scientists and reporters by shredding a 50-year system that lets foreign students and journalists stay for the “duration of status.” Judge F Dennis Saylor, a George W Bush appointee who apparently still reads laws before lighting them on fire, blocked the rule and called DHS’s rationale “exceptionally weak,” which is lawyer-speak for “did you write this on a cocktail napkin at Mar-a-Lago?”

DHS claimed it needed to cap student visas at four years and journalist visas at 240 days to stop “rampant abuse,” then somehow forgot it was legally required to respond to criticisms and consider less destructive alternatives. The judge noted that the existing system brought tens of millions of students and researchers to the US, fueling groundbreaking science, medicine, and economic growth. Trump’s DHS saw all that prosperity and thought: better crush it before someone invents another vaccine or publishes a story about ICE.

Under the blocked rule, universities like MIT and Harvard were staring down hundreds of millions in losses and plummeting enrollment, while ICE’s top lawyer James Percival wailed that now people might “come on a student visa, take one class per semester, and stay here for decades.” Yes, the real threat to America is obviously the grad student who spends 14 hours a day in a lab and the foreign correspondent who writes mean facts about the government. For now, thanks to the injunction, the US keeps its long-standing system that attracts global talent — which is exactly why Trump’s people were so eager to smash it.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that immigration courts were still too fair, so now we’re doing pop-up tribunals in mystery buildings. Immigrants with upcoming hearings in Maryland and Virginia are being quietly rerouted at the last minute to new, previously undisclosed locations in D.C. and Falls Church — including a FEMA-occupied building with no listed Justice Department affiliation, because nothing says “legitimate court” like “we swear it’s in there somewhere, just try a different door.”

Lawyers describe immigrants being ordered to show up in person at these off-the-books venues while the judge and prosecutor beam in remotely, like a dystopian Zoom call where only your deportation is guaranteed to arrive on time. Many people are given just days of notice — or no notice at all — despite DOJ regulations requiring at least ten days and “ample notice.” Conveniently, the targets appear to be unrepresented immigrants, the ones least likely to understand what’s happening before the government slaps them with an in absentia removal order for a hearing they never knew about.

EOIR’s official explanation is that it’s just “scheduling adjustments” to “ensure all cases are handled in a timely and lawful manner,” which is a poetic way of saying, “we’re speed-running deportations by booby-trapping the calendar.” This is not an immigration system; it’s a bureaucratic shell game where the prize is getting disappeared from the country because your notice got lost in the mail — or was never sent in the first place.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new frontier in cruelty: deporting people to random other countries they’ve never lived in. On Saturday, the U.S. shipped dozens of migrants off to the Central African Republic, including a young Afghan man whose brothers collaborated with the U.S. military against the Taliban. One brother now lives in the U.S. after serving in the Afghan National Army; another was a U.S.-trained pilot killed by the Taliban. A U.S. judge had already granted the man protection from deportation to Afghanistan because of credible persecution fears, so naturally the administration’s response was: fine, we’ll just dump him somewhere else.

This magic trick is powered by a web of “often secret agreements” with about two dozen countries, allowing Trump’s people to fly asylum seekers to states they have no connection to, using third-country deportations as a loophole to gut asylum law while pretending everything is perfectly legal. The latest flight to Bangui carried 12 Afghans, eight Iranians, plus migrants from Nepal and Nicaragua—because when you’re running an immigration crackdown built on spite, geography and human rights are just optional settings. Welcome to Trump’s immigration policy: if we can’t legally send you back to the place you fled in fear, we’ll just send you somewhere even less prepared to protect you.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to "support the troops": deport their spouses while they're still on active duty and juggling childcare. Cristy Maryori Villafranca-Trejo, wife of Army Sgt Hedar Leonel Turcios Juarez, was picked up outside a Walmart near Fort Bliss and shipped to Honduras, because nothing says "thank you for your service" like turning a six-year-old’s school run into a one-parent operation.

Villafranca-Trejo has no criminal record, entered the US at 18, married a soldier who then became a US citizen, applied for legal status, and tried to use a special program literally designed to protect military families. So naturally, under Trump’s rollback of those protections, DHS decided she had "received due process" and treated a missed-hearing removal order from 2017 like a sacred text. Her motion to reopen? Denied. Her parole-in-place request? Just sitting there while ICE dusts off old files and new handcuffs.

Former ICE counsel Dan Gividen helpfully notes that, pre–Trump 2.0, the agency would not usually detain and deport the spouse of an active-duty soldier who was clearly on a path to a green card. That quaint era of basic humanity has been replaced with a policy of "if we can ruin a military family, we probably should." Even Democratic congresswoman Veronica Escobar opening an inquiry and visiting Villafranca-Trejo in detention couldn’t stop the deportation conveyor belt from doing what it does best.

Meanwhile, Turcios Juarez is left trying to figure out how to serve his country while raising his daughter alone and explaining why the nation he put on his uniform for just exiled her mother. The administration gets to brag about being "tough" on immigration, and the price is paid by a US citizen soldier and a first grader. Truly, Trump’s America: where the flag is sacred, the troops are props, and their families are expendable paperwork.

The Trump administration has graciously decided to temporarily stop bulldozing Big Bend national park while the guy in charge of the wall, CBP chief Rodney Scott, flies in for an “on-the-ground evaluation” – also known as: looking at the damage and asking, “So how mad is everyone?” After ramming ahead with a border project that both parties somehow agree is terrible for a pristine, rugged stretch of Texas that already deters crossings on its own, Team Law and Order is pretending to discover the concept of “assessment” after the backhoes are already parked on the riverbank.

Congress handed the administration a $46bn wall allowance last summer to build from the Pacific to the Gulf, and the White House has been speedrunning the “ignore all the rules” category ever since, waiving environmental and other regulations like they’re spam pop-ups. Scott says he still expects to get the first layer of the wall done by the end of next year, but Texas landowners, conservationists, and basically anyone who’s seen a map of Big Bend are not thrilled about turning one of America’s most remote national parks into a monument to Trump’s anti-immigration cosplay. This “pause” looks less like a rethink and more like a PR coffee break before the next round of destruction resumes on schedule.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that the real threat to America is families in Tevas, so bulldozers are now chewing through Big Bend national park’s iconic Santa Elena Canyon to make room for the multibillion-dollar "smart wall" expansion. Activists filmed heavy machinery carving a fresh road into one of the most beloved stretches of the park — footage that Customs and Border Protection first pretended didn’t exist, because who among us hasn’t accidentally forgotten about a giant bulldozer tearing up a national treasure.

Local businesses, river guides, and politicians from both parties are asking the obvious question: why are we wrecking an 800,000-acre desert wilderness and its tourism economy for a part of the border that barely sees any unlawful crossings? Former park superintendent Bob Krumenaker notes that Big Bend saw roughly 100–125 arrests a year, and those numbers have dropped further since Trump’s 2025 crackdown. So naturally, the White House solution is to pour billions into militarizing one of the quietest stretches of the border while pretending it’s an emergency — because nothing says "America First" like grinding your own national parks into gravel for a campaign prop.