The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The Trump administration’s ICE has apparently discovered a bold new medical doctrine: if a detained immigrant is on the verge of dying, you can fix your statistics by releasing them. José Chajón-Raxón, a Guatemalan man held at Delaney Hall in Newark, suffered a medical emergency, was taken to a hospital, and then conveniently ceased to be ICE’s problem the moment they changed his status on paper. He’s now the third person linked to deaths at this one facility since it was triumphantly reopened in 2025 as part of Trump’s immigration crackdown.

DHS won’t say when Chajón-Raxón died, what happened at the hospital, or basically anything that might suggest they see him as a human being. Instead, they proudly cite an ICE policy that says once someone is no longer in custody, ICE has no responsibility to monitor or review their death, calling that “common sense.” That “common sense” just happens to follow a 2026 policy shift where ICE stopped reporting deaths occurring within 30 days of release, reversing a Biden-era rule. Representative Rob Menendez calls it a “loophole”; ICE calls it Tuesday.

All this is happening at Delaney Hall, a detention center already under fire for two other deaths, alleged guard abuse, spoiled food, and multiple hunger and labor strikes — including a women’s strike demanding basic medical care and the release of young women, sick women, and mothers. Rights groups say more than 50 people have died in ICE custody nationwide since Trump took office, but thanks to the new policy, that number is really more of a vibes-based estimate. ICE insists detainees receive appropriate medical care, which is technically true if you define “appropriate” as “whatever doesn’t mess up the talking points.”

The Trump administration has decided that the best use of presidential power is to strip more than 300,000 Haitians of Temporary Protected Status and then threaten them with arrest and deportation to a country the US government itself says is so dangerous that Americans should draft a will and leave DNA samples before visiting. DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin helpfully clarified the policy on camera: Haitians can either "self-deport" or be arrested and shipped back. Very normal, totally non-fascist language from the guy running the domestic security apparatus.

To make the purge more efficient, immigration officials are slapping ankle monitors on Haitians like they’re Amazon packages, while a Trump-packed supreme court has upended judicial review of TPS so the administration can go full dragnet without pesky judges getting in the way. Haitians who have lived here for decades, worked essential jobs, and pumped an estimated $262bn into the US economy are now told there is "no line" for them to get in, but there is a plane with a one-way ticket to gang-controlled territory and collapsed basic services.

Syrians are next in line for the humanitarian wood chipper, and even TPS holders from El Salvador, Ukraine, and Sudan are seeing their work permits yanked while they technically remain "protected" from deportation — a fun little experiment in how to destroy people’s livelihoods without the paperwork of actually removing them. Business owners in already short-staffed industries are being forced to fire workers they desperately need, because nothing says "America First" like sabotaging your own labor force to prove how tough you are on brown immigrants fleeing disasters we often helped create.

Meanwhile, Haitians and advocates are begging the Senate to pass a House-approved bill to restore TPS, while Trump’s team celebrates another "win" for border cruelty. The State Department warns Americans not to set foot in Haiti; the White House is busy shoving Haitians back there anyway. Bold strategy: treat human beings as disposable foreign policy collateral and hope no one notices the ankle monitors.

Temporary Protected Status was supposed to be the humane workaround for when a country is too wrecked to safely send people back. Haiti got TPS after the 2010 earthquake, then collapsed into a decade-plus of political chaos, gang rule, kidnappings, and state failure. So naturally, the Trump administration — with a helpful thumbs-up from the Supreme Court — has decided that actually, things are now just peachy in Haiti and 300,000 Haitians can go ahead and pack their bags.

In South Florida, people like Farah Larrieux, who has lived here for roughly twenty years and works overnight shifts while racking up community service awards, are now stocking their fridges like hurricanes are coming — not for a storm, but for ICE. She keeps her lawyer’s number memorized, covers the glass on her front door so she won’t see agents coming, and tries not to step outside because being a law-abiding worker with two decades of roots is now grounds for deportation. DHS loftily explains that TPS was never meant to become a “de facto asylum program,” which is an elegant way of saying: we were fine with you cleaning our hotel rooms and caring for our patients, but permanence? Rights? Stability? Don’t get greedy.

The Haitian community that props up South Florida’s health care, hospitality, construction, and service industries is now expected to pretend this is all some neutral, administrative housekeeping. The Court nods along, DHS issues a bloodless statement about “improved conditions,” and families who’ve done everything right are told to prepare for either exile to a collapsing state or life in the shadows. The message from Trump’s America is clear: your labor was always welcome; you never were.

The Trump administration has discovered a bold new way to protect America from dangerous threats: PhD candidates. New rules will cap foreign students’ stays at four years unless they beg the federal government for extra time, strip universities of their ability to extend visas, and cut the post-graduation grace period to 30 days. Because nothing says "world-leading research hub" like telling your physics grad students to finish their dissertation on a shot clock.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claims students have been "admitted into the US indefinitely," menacing the nation by checks notes taking too long to complete their degrees and switching programs. Meanwhile, NAFSA and actual educators point out that graduate and doctoral programs, especially in science and tech, often take longer, involve unpredictable funding, and require time to do things like, you know, research. The administration’s response is to inject more "uncertainty, bureaucracy, and fear" into a system that was working fine, because of course it is.

This isn’t just about paperwork; it’s part of a broader effort to shrink the number of foreign students, cap their presence at elite colleges, and even yank visas from students who criticize US foreign policy. So the message is clear: come to America, pay full freight, power our labs, keep quiet about Gaza or anything else, and then kindly vanish on a strict timetable. The country that once tried to attract the world’s best minds is now running its immigration system like a petty landlord with a stopwatch.

The Supreme Court, in a 5–4 decision in Trump v. Barbara, grudgingly remembered the 14th Amendment exists and upheld birthright citizenship, which unfortunately ruined Stephen Miller’s dream of turning the U.S. into a whites-only HOA with nukes. Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160 tried to strip citizenship from kids born here if their parents were undocumented or on temporary visas; the majority opinions shredded that idea without once naming Miller, which is like doing Dracula and forgetting the guy with the cape and the blood fetish.

Chief Justice Roberts called the old Dred Scott logic “odious,” while Justice Jackson calmly pointed out that the Trump administration, plus Thomas and Alito, are basically auditioning to bring back Taney’s bloodline-based citizenship. She notes that the Fourteenth Amendment was sort of designed to stop exactly this “citizenship by racial purity” nonsense, which you’d think would be obvious to people who allegedly read the Constitution for fun.

Miller, furious that the Court declined to resurrect 19th-century white supremacy as national policy, ran to X to declare the ruling “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions” in Court history and ranted that American citizenship “belongs only and solely to Americans,” which is a neat little tautology for people who think law is just vibes. On Fox News, he upgraded to full ethnonationalist word salad, sneering at “third world nations” that supposedly “would have never invented the wheel,” helpfully advertising that if he had to take a naturalization civics test he’d wash out before the first multiple choice question.

Behind the scenes, Miller has spent years trying to swap out a constitutional, law-based idea of American identity for a genetic one—pushing mass deportations, weaponized ICE, bogus claims of mass illegal voting, and the “Save Act,” a proof-of-citizenship scheme that functions like a poll tax with extra paperwork. All this while the Trump administration drives out tens of thousands of scientists and slashes research grants, even as immigrants found the majority of billion-dollar startups, lead AI innovation, staff hospitals, and do most of the actual “modern technology” work Miller insists they’re incapable of. So yes, the people building America’s future are immigrants; the guy trying to revoke their kids’ citizenship is just building a very loud, very stupid shrine to blood and soil.