The Trump Presidency Is Going Great

The second Trump administration is so committed to efficiency that it’s now deporting people judges explicitly said not to deport, then acting shocked when courts notice. Kilmar Abrego Garcia went from working in Maryland to being dumped in a notorious El Salvador mega-prison in about a week — a pace that would be impressive if it weren’t also flatly illegal, as a government lawyer helpfully admitted in court.

Lawyers thought Kilmar’s case might be a horrifying one-off. Adorable. Instead, it turns out he was just the promotional poster for a whole line of wrongful deportations, as judges in Maryland and New York have ordered ICE to drag multiple people back from the same hellhole prison after removals that violated standing court orders. When your deportation program keeps getting reversed because you literally ignored judges, that’s not “strong borders”; that’s “we don’t read the rulings.”

Driving all this is Trump’s magic number: one million deportations a year, with daily quotas pushing agents to ship people out within days — sometimes to their home countries, sometimes to random “third countries” willing to take America’s human paperwork errors. As policy experts note, the system is moving so fast that different parts of the government aren’t even talking to each other. The good news for the White House is that if you treat due process like a speed bump, your stats look fantastic. The bad news is that the Constitution is not supposed to be optional, and neither are those pesky court orders.

Trump kicked off his second term on Jan. 20, 2025 by promising to send “millions and millions of criminal aliens” back where they came from. A year later, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have done what the government refused to do: actually count who’s being rounded up, where they’re being disappeared to, and how many of them are, awkwardly, U.S. citizens. Because nothing says “law and order” like detaining Americans your own agencies can’t be bothered to distinguish from your scapegoats.

In the name of this multibillion-dollar “win,” the administration has turned the country into a sprawling immigration dragnet: historic-high daily detention numbers, federal agents sweeping through cities, and “crowd control” tactics in places like Los Angeles and Chicago that look less like policing and more like a beta test for domestic paramilitary cosplay. Some immigrants are being shipped to Guantanamo, because of course the post-9/11 legal black hole is back on the menu, while more than 230 men were flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador as supposed “worst of the worst” — which ProPublica’s reporting shows mostly didn’t even have U.S. criminal convictions. But sure, tell us again how this is about safety.

The White House has proudly listed this mass deportation push at the top of its “365 wins in 365 days” propaganda sheet, bragging that border crossings are down while detention numbers hit records. In other words, the metric of success is not justice, due process, or public safety — it’s how many human beings you can lock up, disappear offshore, or dump into foreign prisons while slapping a “national security” label on the receipts. Has Trump fulfilled his promises? Apparently yes, if the promise was: turn U.S. immigration enforcement into a rights-free zone and dare anyone to stop you.

A federal judge had to step in and issue a temporary restraining order to stop the Trump administration from removing a 5-year-old boy and his father after ICE scooped them up in Minnesota and quietly shipped them to Texas. Because nothing says "law and order" like grabbing a kid after preschool and flying him a thousand miles away to a detention center in Dilley.

The Department of Homeland Security insists they weren’t targeting little Liam Conejo Ramos, they were just coincidentally arresting his dad right after preschool drop-off, then moving both of them across the country. Critics say ICE is using kids as "bait"; DHS says, actually, this is fine and "consistent with past administrations," which is a hell of a defense: we’ve always been awful, your honor.

The family’s lawyer points out they did everything by the book: entered in 2023 using the CBP One app, showed up for court, followed every protocol, posed no flight risk—and still got detained. Then Trump killed the app last year, because why have an orderly, legal process when you can have chaos and child detention instead? Meanwhile, a school board chair on the scene says there were multiple safe adults ready to take the child, but ICE somehow chose the "drag him to Texas" option on the menu.

For now, the judge has barred ICE from removing or transferring the father and son outside the Western District of Texas. In other words, the only thing standing between a 5-year-old and Trump’s deportation machine is a federal court order. But sure, tell us more about how this is all about "border security" and not a deliberate policy of terrorizing immigrant families.

Trump’s second-term immigration brain trust has apparently decided that if you can’t legally deport people back to countries that might kill them, you just outsource the problem. Enter Costa Rica, one of several Central American countries strong-armed into taking plane-loads of asylum seekers the US refused to even let ask for asylum. These people — including 81 children — were flown in chains on deportation flights despite not being criminals, because nothing says "land of the free" like shackling desperate families and dumping them in countries they’ve never set foot in.

Among them: a Russian family who fled after the husband documented election irregularities in Putin’s happy fun democracy and tried to get the evidence to Navalny’s network. They did the “legal” thing under Biden’s system, got a CBPOne appointment, and then watched Trump stroll back into the White House and, within hours of inauguration, nuke the entire asylum process and cancel their slot. When they turned themselves in at the border anyway and requested asylum — that thing protected by both US and international law — they were handcuffed in front of their child, locked in Otay Mesa for a month, then loaded onto a military plane and secretly shipped to Costa Rica.

Once there, this supposed “safe haven” locked them in a migrant detention center for two months, prompting Human Rights Watch to call it “reprehensible.” The family didn’t even know where Costa Rica was on a map, but Trump knew it was far enough away that Americans wouldn’t see what was being done in their name. In other words: the US government grabbed a political dissident fleeing an authoritarian regime, denied him the right to request asylum, chained his family up, and disappeared them into a third country where they’re still in legal limbo — and we’re all supposed to pretend this is just "border security" and not a dress rehearsal for how you treat dissidents once you’re done with the immigrants.

The Trump White House has apparently decided that if you can't make cruel immigration policy popular, you can at least slap a filter on it and add a promo code. So Minnesota is getting a double feature: a surge of federal agents and a caravan of Trump-friendly influencers, all dispatched as part of a coordinated communications strategy to justify whatever the administration wants to do to immigrants this week. Because nothing says 'serious policymaking' like pairing ICE raids with sponsored content.

Instead of, say, consulting legal experts, affected communities, or anyone who’s read the Constitution, the administration is investing in online content to manufacture consent for its immigration agenda. In other words, actual people’s lives and rights are being run through the same machinery normally used to sell energy drinks and sketchy crypto coins. Federal power on the ground, propaganda in your feed, and a President who thinks public policy is just another brand campaign—but sure, tell us again how this is all about 'law and order.'