The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The DACA generation is turning 30 and settling into adult milestones like careers, parenting, and the ever-popular American rite of passage: waking up one day to discover the federal government has quietly flipped the switch on your legal existence. Diana, a decade-long DACA recipient, finds her work permit suddenly lapsed, meaning she can’t drive, can’t go to a friend’s wedding, and gets to play the fun daily game of "is today the day I’m detained?" This is what passes for "law and order" in Trump’s America: build people’s lives around a program and then booby-trap the paperwork.

DACA was sold in 2012 as a temporary bridge while Congress found a permanent solution. Fourteen years, several performative floor speeches, and countless crocodile tears later, there’s still no bridge—just a rickety plank suspended over deportation. Recipients are now professionals, parents, Ph.D. candidates, community leaders… and perpetual hostages to whichever white guy in office wants to goose his base by threatening to yank their status. Republicans scream about "border chaos" while quietly manufacturing chaos for people who’ve spent most of their lives here, paying taxes and doing the jobs native-born citizens apparently can’t be bothered to do.

The Biden years have mostly meant more paperwork purgatory instead of open attacks, but Trump and his allies already did the real structural damage: turning DACA into a loaded gun on the Oval Office desk. Now USCIS delays and shifting rules make renewals a game of bureaucratic Russian roulette. You can have a degree, a mortgage, and kids in school, but if your renewal gets "lost" for a month, your life gets turned off like a streaming subscription. It’s not policy; it’s extortion with extra steps.

So as the DACA generation hits their 30s, they’ve achieved the American dream—just with a cage wrapped around it. They plan careers and families in two-year increments, because Congress would rather fund more border theatrics than pass a law acknowledging reality. The message from Trump’s GOP and its enablers is crystal clear: we’re happy to exploit your labor, your taxes, and your talents, but your humanity? That’s still "under review" at DHS.

Turns out when you unleash ICE and CBP on immigrant communities like it's a live-action Fox News fantasy, kids don't just shrug it off and go back to Minecraft. A Los Angeles clinic serving mostly Latino Medicaid patients handed NPR hard data showing spikes in anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts every time Trump ramps up his immigration crackdown. The administration calls it "enforcement." Mental health professionals, who have actually met a child before, call it a real-time public health stressor.

Therapist Sophia Pages from Zócalo Health lays it out: whenever Trump's goons intensify raids and courthouse arrests, their screening numbers light up with distress. Families are terrified to leave home, parents are yanked away in front of their kids, and an entire community is living in a rolling panic attack so Stephen Miller’s ghost of a policy agenda can feel validated. The White House keeps insisting this is about "law and order"; the clinic data suggests it's about systematically terrorizing a vulnerable population and then acting shocked when the children start having nightmares and suicidal ideation.

So yes, the "tough on immigration" agenda is working—if the goal was to turn routine pediatric visits into triage for trauma, and primary care clinics into de facto disaster response centers for a man-made crisis. Congratulations to the Trump administration on finally achieving universal health care for immigrants: everyone now qualifies for chronic fear, untreated PTSD, and the lifelong joy of remembering the day federal agents dragged your dad away from a courthouse hallway.

The Trump administration has apparently looked at the Internal Revenue Service — the agency that’s supposed to care only about numbers and receipts — and decided what it really needs is a little more secret-police energy. Officials are pressuring the IRS to retool Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) so that undocumented immigrants get their very own scarlet code, effectively forcing them to tell the government their status or drop out of the tax system entirely.

For decades, the IRS has followed a quaint little idea called "encouraging people to pay taxes" regardless of immigration status. Now Team Trump wants to carve out special, easily identifiable ITINs for undocumented filers, after previously floating the even more subtle plan of just adding a "are you here illegally?" checkbox to tax returns. The supposed purpose is murky, which is what you say when the obvious answer — building a handy deportation cheat sheet — sounds too honest for the press release.

There’s one small snag: tax information is legally protected, and a prior scheme to share IRS data on undocumented immigrants with ICE was blocked in court. So the administration is back with Version 2.0: if they can’t legally hand ICE the list, they’ll just terrify people out of filing taxes at all. It’s a perfect Trump-era policy: punish immigrants, undermine a functioning tax system, and drag yet another supposedly independent institution into the culture war — all while pretending this is about "integrity" and not about building an administrative wall made of fear and nine-digit codes.

The Vatican has apparently decided to troll Donald Trump personally by appointing Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala — who first entered the US hidden in the trunk of a car — as the new bishop of West Virginia. So yes, the new spiritual leader for part of Trump Country is a former undocumented immigrant who crossed the desert, survived a civil war, learned English, got his GED, worked janitorial and construction jobs, and then became a bishop. Meanwhile, Trump survived a military school, some bankrupt casinos, and a well-documented allergy to reading.

Menjivar-Ayala has openly criticized Trump’s immigrant-bashing policies and now gets promoted by Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, who has already called out the Trump administration for treating migrants in an "extremely disrespectful" way. Trump, ever the theologian, responded on Truth Social by declaring the pope "WEAK on Crime" and "terrible for Foreign Policy," as if the Bishop of Rome is supposed to be running drone strikes and ICE raids.

So on one side: a guy who fled soldiers, crossed borders three times, worked cleaning floors, and now tells young people and immigrants they are the present of the church. On the other: a twice-impeached, multiply-indicted ex-president raging online that the pope isn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about caging kids and dumping families in the desert. One of these men talks about welcoming the stranger; the other built a political career on making sure the stranger never makes it out of the trunk.

The House has finally ended a 76-day partial government shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, because apparently even Republicans eventually notice when their little hostage-taking experiment starts breaking actual things instead of just people. They used a voice vote – the congressional equivalent of "everyone mumble yes so there’s no video for attack ads" – to pass the Senate’s bill.

The bill, blessed by President Donald Trump, reopens most of DHS without new money for ICE or Border Patrol, meaning the White House just spent two and a half months holding national security funding hostage and walked away with exactly zero extra deportation dollars. Democrats forced changes to immigration operations, while Republicans now promise to try to fund the deportation machinery separately, because if there’s one thing this era guarantees, it’s that the cruelty budget always gets a sequel vote.

So DHS turns the lights back on, the "law and order" crowd quietly retreats from its own shutdown stunt, and the next manufactured crisis over immigration enforcement is already loading in the chamber. Governance by temper tantrum remains the official policy.

The Trump administration is back in court asking the conservative supermajority to help them finish the job of turning "temporary protected status" into "don’t unpack, you’re deported." After already greenlighting the removal of TPS for more than 300,000 Venezuelans on the shadow docket, the supreme court will now hear whether the White House can also yank protections from Syrians and Haitians — people the U.S. government itself previously declared couldn’t safely go home because of war, state collapse, and disasters.

Nearly 1.3 million people started Trump’s second term with TPS. The administration has spent the year trying to rip that away from 13 countries, including Afghanistan, Honduras, Yemen, and others, while deadpanning that Syria is moving toward “stable institutional governance” and Haiti has “no extraordinary and temporary conditions” — a bold claim, given the raging gang violence and state failure currently happening there in real time. Kristi Noem, moonlighting as a geopolitical visionary, apparently believes that if you just say "it’s fine" enough times, civil war and organized crime politely disappear.

Haitian and Syrian TPS holders have sued, and their cases are now consolidated before the same court that’s been treating immigrant lives like administrative clutter. If the justices side with Trump again, analysts expect the administration to go for the full set and dismantle TPS everywhere — turning a 1990 humanitarian safeguard into yet another tool for legalized cruelty dressed up as policy. The message to people who followed the rules, built lives, and paid taxes is simple: your safety is temporary, but this government’s appetite for deportation is permanent.

A woman and her five children spent more than 10 months in Trump’s shiny second-term family prison system because her ex-husband allegedly firebombed a rally in Colorado. She condemned the attack, divorced the guy, and still wound up in a cage in Dilley, Texas — because under Trump immigration policy, marriage is apparently a strict-liability offense. Their crime was not having advance knowledge of what the government still can’t prove they knew, but sure, lock the kids up anyway.

US district judge Fred Biery finally ordered the family released, at which point the Department of Homeland Security had a full meltdown, denouncing him as an “activist judge” who was “releasing this terrorist’s family onto American streets”. The woman and her 18-year-old now get to wear ankle monitors as a consolation prize for surviving months in a notorious detention camp where, the legal team says, their health cratered, depression spread through all five kids, and the mother ended up in the ER with fluid around her heart. DHS, of course, insists they received excellent medical care and due process, which is an interesting way to describe indefinite detention of people you haven’t charged with a crime.

So the longest family detention of Trump’s second term ends not with an apology, accountability, or reform, but with a grudging release, ankle shackles, and the government loudly smearing a traumatized family as terrorist-adjacent for the crime of existing. The message from Trump’s immigration machine remains clear: if someone you once loved does something horrific, the state reserves the right to disappear you and your children into a desert detention center and dare a federal judge to stop them.

The President of the United States woke up, opened Truth Social, and decided the best way to manage a rocky relationship with India was to amplify a four-page rant calling India and China "hellholes" that are gaming American birthright citizenship. The screed, courtesy of podcaster and professional grievance machine Michael Savage, claims that people from these countries are abusing the 14th Amendment to sneak in entire families, because nothing says "serious policymaking" like reposting talk-radio paranoia as foreign policy.

India's foreign ministry, apparently still clinging to the idea that diplomacy should involve adults, called the remarks "uninformed, inappropriate and in poor taste"—which is diplomatic code for "what is wrong with this guy." Opposition leaders in India labeled the comments "extremely insulting and anti-Indian" and demanded that Narendra Modi actually say something to his orange pen pal about it.

This Truth Social tantrum lands on top of Trump's tariff war on India, his pressure campaign over Russian oil, and his administration’s hard pivot into anti-immigrant maximalism—complete with an executive order trying to kill birthright citizenship and a sustained attack on H-1B visas that overwhelmingly affect Indian workers. While the State Department sends Marco Rubio to "reset" relations, Trump is busy boosting a guy who insists high-tech jobs in California are secretly run by an Indian-Chinese shadow cabal, backed by exactly zero evidence and 100% white grievance.

So the US-India relationship, once billed as a strategic partnership of "mutual respect," is now being managed by: tariffs, sanctions whiplash, and the president reposting a podcast transcript that calls your country a hellhole. Truly a golden age of diplomacy.