The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The second Trump administration has finally cracked the code on America’s truck driver shortage: just yank the licenses of thousands of immigrant drivers and then act surprised when the supply chain faceplants again. Transportation secretary Sean P Duffy — a sentence that still reads like a typo — pushed through new rules that bar anyone without citizenship or a green card from getting or keeping a commercial driver’s license, even if they’re refugees, asylum seekers, or Daca recipients who were previously driving legally and safely.

Schools like Start CDL in New Jersey, run by Ukrainian immigrant Vasyl Kushnir and his partner Gene Moik, went from nearly 100 students a month to barely 25 after the rules hit. Companies are begging for drivers, but the government’s answer is: Have you tried xenophobia? The administration also rolled out an aggressive English requirement, framed as a safety measure but operating more like a linguistic poll tax — conveniently disqualifying the very immigrants who kept goods moving during the last round of Trump-made chaos.

Refugees who fled Russian bombs under the Uniting for Ukraine program, Dreamers who grew up in the US, asylum seekers with work authorization — all shoved out of the driver’s seat so Trump can keep feeding his base the fantasy that immigrants are the problem, not his policies. The result: shuttered schools, lost jobs, and a kneecapped logistics sector. But hey, at least the culture war is delivered on time, even if everything else now arrives three weeks late.

The Trump administration looked at the World Cup and apparently decided it wasn’t enough of a global unifying event unless you added a little light extortion. Fans and even players from five African countries that actually qualified for the tournament — Algeria, Cape Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Tunisia — are now staring down visa bonds of up to $15,000 just to enter the US. That’s a refundable “security deposit” in the same way your landlord is definitely going to give you back the full amount after inventing twelve new cleaning fees.

The State Department quietly expanded its visa bond scheme — first piloted in 2025 against the usual travel-ban suspects in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and parts of Asia — to cover visitors from 50 countries. Conveniently, the only World Cup teams caught in this net are all African, from nations where the average annual income is about $5,000 or less. So to see your team play in person, you just need to front several years’ salary to a government that built its brand on calling your home a “shithole country.” Totally normal, deeply not racist at all.

Adding to the fun: sky-high ticket prices, gouged hotel rates, visa delays, and the reassuring presence of ICE and assorted federal immigration officers roaming host cities like it’s a live-action deportation scavenger hunt. And unlike Trump’s earlier travel bans, this program doesn’t even bother carving out clear exemptions for athletes and officials. So the United States is co-hosting a World Cup while simultaneously telling African fans, and maybe their own teams, that they can come celebrate the beautiful game — as long as they can first wire a massive cash offering to the Department of Homeland Security.

America keeps insisting it’s open for business, and the Trump administration has finally clarified what that means: you’re welcome to visit, cheer, and spend money, as long as you can pay the racism surcharge up front.

Trump’s deportation machine is running so hot it’s now scooping up Canadian moms married to US citizens and locking them up with their autistic kids for the crime of … having their paperwork in process. Tania Warner and her seven-year-old daughter Ayla were driving home from a baby shower in Texas when Border Patrol decided the most American thing to do was disappear them into ICE custody and start the paperwork for “have you considered deporting yourself?”

Warner says agents handcuffed everyone – including children – parked them on thin mats under 24/7 lights, blocked her from calling a lawyer, and relentlessly pushed her to sign “self-deportation” forms. She keeps explaining that she has the correct documents to live and work in the US; the government keeps explaining that under Trump, the only correct document is a one-way ticket out.

After a stint in the notorious McAllen facility, they were moved to the Dilley family prison – a site so bad it was shut down under Biden and then lovingly resurrected in 2025 to warehouse families again. Ayla now has a full-body rash and Benadryl, her mother has a $15,000 bond hanging over her head, and Canada is scrambling to figure out how to get its citizens out of America’s "lawful" kidnapping program. The official Canadian line is that there are “multiple cases” of Canadians in US immigration detention; the unofficial line is: if Trump’s president, stay the hell away from the border and hope the empire doesn’t notice you.

Gregory Bovino, Trump’s former Border Patrol commander-at-large and part-time cosplay SS enthusiast, is riding off into the retirement sunset after overseeing raids so reckless they left two US citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, dead in Minneapolis. His main regret? Not that federal agents killed Americans. No, Chief Border Domination here just wishes he’d nabbed “even more illegal aliens” and gotten to fully execute his plan to deport 100 million people — which is impressive, given that’s several times more than the estimated undocumented population. Math, like basic humanity, is for the weak.

During his exit interview, Bovino proudly defended “turn and burn” high-speed operations designed to hit cities before protesters could show up, boasted about wanting “total border domination,” and dismissed concerns that his tactics might cause fatalities with a casual “It’s possible, yes.” He referred to immigrants as “scum,” “trash,” and “filth,” called migrants “walking zombies,” and reveled in the kind of playground edginess where he insists on saying Barack Hussein Obama. Naturally, the Trump White House picked him to run Operation Metro Surge because he was a “badass” — which here means personally lobbing pepper gas into crowds and getting demoted only after the body count and lawsuits started piling up.

Bovino also stands by his claim that Alex Pretti wanted to “massacre law enforcement,” despite video showing Pretti unarmed when agents shot him dead. He’s now facing multiple civil-rights lawsuits and an internal investigation for allegedly disparaging a Jewish prosecutor for taking Shabbat off — which he dismisses as lies from “troglodytes,” a bold accusation from a man whose retirement dream is to personally wage vigilante war on coyotes in the Appalachians. After decades of abusing power, violating rights, and helping turn immigration enforcement into a paramilitary culture war, he’s leaving the federal government exactly as he served in it: absolutely sure he’s the hero, and absolutely proving why he should never have had a badge in the first place.

Abel Ortiz has lived in Los Angeles since he was two months old, built a life, a business, and a community, and yet remains an undocumented ghost in the only country he actually knows. After decades of existing in Trump’s America as a permanent suspect, his big crime is giving haircuts and paying rent, which of course makes him a top priority for the ICE cosplay police.

So under the constant threat of raids, detention, and bureaucratic roulette, Abel does the one thing the nativist brain trust has always fantasized about: he leaves. Not because he’s been deported, not because he’s committed some heinous offense, but because living in endless legal purgatory inside a militarized immigration regime is worse than starting over somewhere that doesn’t treat his existence as a felony. Trump’s America calls this a win for “law and order”; the rest of us recognize it as a man being pressured into self-deportation by a government that’s turned fear into domestic policy.

The Trump administration has finally cracked the code on mass deportations: if there aren’t enough undocumented immigrants to hit your targets, just create more. Legal residents, refugees, TPS holders – everyone’s fair game in what advocates are calling a “great de-legalization campaign”. The government is actively hunting for technicalities, paperwork gaps, and retroactive excuses to strip people of status and shove them into the deportation pipeline. It’s less an immigration system than a booby trap with flags.

Refugees who already survived wars, persecution, and several background checks that Jared Kushner would fail instantly are now being rewarded with an executive order “suspending” the refugee program, stranded flights, gutted resettlement support, and a sweeping review of anyone admitted under Biden. Green card processing for refugees? Paused. Detention for those who haven’t applied after a year? Potentially indefinite, with advocates estimating 100,000 at risk. And for 2026, the US refugee cap has been slashed from Biden’s 100,000 to 7,500 – with Trump openly trying to stack the tiny remaining slots with white South Africans, because the Statue of Liberty apparently now comes with a Pantone chart.

All of this is wrapped in the same law-and-order cosplay we’ve come to expect: ICE and DHS chasing deportation quotas while courts are flooded with challenges to blatantly discriminatory bans and retroactive status reviews. The administration isn’t enforcing immigration law; it’s rewriting the definition of “legal” on the fly so more people can be treated as criminals. Call it what it is: a federal program to convert documented immigrants into deportable bodies, backed by executive orders, travel bans covering 39 countries, and a bureaucracy repurposed as a deportation machine.

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you don’t ask whether detained immigrants have kids, you can’t technically be accused of separating families – you’re just randomly orphaning children by policy accident. A new report from the Women’s Refugee Commission and Physicians for Human Rights finds ICE is deporting parents to Honduras without even bothering to ask if they have children, let alone giving them a chance to decide whether those kids go with them or have safe care. One mother was deported without her two-month-old baby; another was grabbed in handcuffs while dropping off her autistic son at school. You know, the usual "law and order" stuff.

Researchers, blocked from US detention centers by the administration’s transparency allergy, had to catch parents after they’d already been dumped back in Honduras. They found people detained and then deported in a matter of days, often with no lawyer, no coordination with co-parents, and no plan for the kids left behind – some of them toddlers, some disabled, all of them collateral damage in Stephen Miller’s lifelong fanfic about Fortress America. Physicians describe parents and pregnant women showing up with extreme anxiety and panic symptoms, while toddlers are left with an abandonment trauma that will be imprinted for life. Freedom, but make it generational PTSD.

DHS, naturally, did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment, but has repeatedly insisted it doesn’t separate families and always lets parents choose to take their kids. The report – and previous Guardian investigations – strongly suggest that’s a lie with a badge on it. To make things even more dystopian, the administration quietly gutted the 2022 "Detained Parents Directive" in 2025 so ICE no longer has to factor in whether someone is a parent when deciding to detain or deport them. And even then, agents aren’t following their own watered-down rules. Once parents are shoved across a border, reuniting with their children becomes a bureaucratic obstacle course with no clear process. The cruelty isn’t a bug – it’s the operating system.

The Supreme Court has graciously agreed to hear arguments on whether the Trump administration can yank Temporary Protected Status from Haitians and Syrians, because nothing says "land of opportunity" like debating how fast to deport people back to war zones and disaster rubble. For now, the justices are allowing hundreds of thousands to keep living and working legally in the US, like a landlord who hasn’t quite gotten around to changing the locks.

The conservative majority has already greenlit ending protections for 600,000 Venezuelans, but this time the White House wants a deluxe package: a broad ruling that would basically tell lower courts to sit down and shut up whenever DHS decides a country is magically “safe” again. This, despite one court explicitly finding that “hostility to nonwhite immigrants” likely played a role in the decision to target Haitians. The administration, naturally, denies any racial animus, presumably because when you say the quiet part out loud in cabinet meetings, it doesn’t count as evidence.

At stake: protections for at least 356,000 people from Haiti and Syria and the precedent for 1.3 million TPS holders globally. The Justice Department is arguing that DHS has sole, unreviewable power to end these protections — a fun little theory of government where the executive branch gets to play immigration god and the judiciary’s job is to nod politely. Meanwhile, Homeland Security has been methodically terminating TPS for multiple countries since Trump’s encore performance in the Oval Office, turning a humanitarian safeguard into yet another loyalty test for nonwhite immigrants: how badly are you willing to risk death to prove America is still great?

The Trump administration has apparently decided that if you can’t legally disappear people at home, you can just wire money to a monarchy in southern Africa and let them do the honors. Eswatini cheerfully announced it has received four more "third country" deportees from the US — Somalis, a Sudanese man, and a Tanzanian — none of whom are actually from Eswatini, but who come bundled with a $5.1m payment and zero transparency. Think less "immigration policy" and more "human lives, now with frequent flyer miles".

These four bring the total to 19 people the US has shipped to Eswatini under Trump’s global offshoring scheme, where Washington pays foreign governments to imprison non-citizens who have already served their sentences in the US. A Senate Democratic investigation found at least $32m has been sprayed at five governments with lovely résumés full of corruption, human rights abuses, and human trafficking allegations. Perfect partners for a White House that treats international law like a spam email.

Some of the earlier deportees — from Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Yemen and elsewhere — are still locked up in Eswatini despite finishing their time in US prisons, and have had to take their case to the African Union’s human rights body because, naturally, the Eswatini high court tossed a local legal challenge. DHS, parent agency of ICE, did not respond to questions, presumably because it’s hard to craft a press release explaining why you’re running a global black-site-lite program with a Southwest Airlines route map.

So the "tough on crime" administration has landed on a bold new innovation: outsource due process to small, cash-strapped countries, pay them to hold people indefinitely, and then pretend deportation equals justice. It’s not immigration enforcement, it’s a privatized exile service — with the US government picking up the tab and dropping the rights.

The Trump administration has discovered an innovative new way to improve highway safety: kick up to 200,000 legally authorized immigrant drivers out of the trucking industry and hope the economy just hitchhikes. The Department of Transportation, taking a brief break from regulating actual vehicles, is pushing rules to block commercial licenses for immigrants with temporary legal status — including DACA recipients, asylum-seekers, and people with Temporary Protected Status — because of several high-profile crashes involving foreign-born drivers. Statistically rigorous policy analysis has been replaced with: "they weren’t born here, so that’s the problem."

Drivers like Jorge Rivera — brought here at age two, DACA recipient, decade-plus of clean commercial driving, owns his own trucking company, can identify mile markers from memory like some kind of human Google Maps — are now being told they’re too risky to operate a truck in Utah, but apparently totally fine to keep paying taxes and holding up the logistics system that keeps Walmart shelves from going feral. The administration’s own numbers admit the rule would purge around 200,000 workers from an industry already short of drivers, but hey, if your immigration policy doesn’t cause a supply chain crisis and jack up prices, is it even really cruelty?

Safety experts and critics point out that the crackdown is unlikely to make roads safer, because the problem isn’t “people with work permits,” it’s things like training, enforcement, and hours-of-service. But those require competence and investment, whereas shoving immigrants out of the labor market is free and comes with applause at rallies. So the White House gets to posture as tough on “dangerous foreign drivers” while kneecapping thousands of experienced workers, destabilizing their families, and nudging the economy closer to a ditch — all so Trump can keep pretending that a DACA trucker with a spotless record is the real threat to America, not the guy in the Oval Office flooring it toward the guardrail.