The Trump Presidency Timeline

The Trump administration decided that the real threat to national security wasn’t, say, violent extremists or foreign hackers, but a Tufts PhD student who wrote a campus op-ed criticizing her university’s response to Israel’s war on Gaza. So DHS yanked Rümeysa Öztürk’s student visa, grabbed her off a Massachusetts street, and tried to deport her for the crime of having an opinion. Very bold experiment in turning the student newspaper into a deportation trigger.

Unfortunately for the White House thought-police project, an immigration judge in Boston looked at this First-Amendment-speedrun-to-fascism and concluded DHS had failed to prove she was even removable, terminating the case. This follows a federal judge already finding that her 45-day detention in Louisiana likely amounted to unlawful retaliation for her speech. So yes, the government held a child development researcher in a Southern detention facility because she wrote words on a college campus, and the courts had to explain that "criticizing a war" is not a deportable offense. The administration can still appeal, because nothing says "respect for free speech" like the Department of Justice doubling down on punishing a student editorial.

Steve Bannon, the human cigar ash that gained sentience, just got a love letter from Donald Trump’s Department of Justice. Despite Bannon’s 2022 conviction on two counts of contempt of Congress for blowing off the January 6 committee, the Trump-run DOJ has now decided that tossing his criminal case is somehow "in the interests of justice". Apparently "justice" now means: if you help incite an insurrection and stonewall investigators, you get retroactive VIP treatment.

The motion to dismiss was signed by none other than US attorney Jeanine Pirro, because this timeline is written by drunk fan fiction authors. Pirro is asking a Trump-appointed judge, Carl Nichols, to dismiss the case with prejudice, which would permanently shield Bannon from being re-prosecuted for telling Congress to go pound sand after going on air and promising that "all hell is going to break loose" on January 6. In a functioning democracy, that gets you more scrutiny; in Trump’s America, it gets you a get-out-of-contempt-free card.

This is all part of the administration’s ongoing project to launder January 6 into a kind of patriotic cosplay. Trump has already pardoned over 1,000 rioters, and now his DOJ is busy erasing what little accountability was left for the people who helped plan, cheerlead, and then obstruct the investigation. The message is crystal clear: if you’re loyal to Trump, the law is optional; if you’re loyal to the Constitution, you’re the sucker.

In Minneapolis, the Trump administration’s immigration crusade has reached the "arrest people mourning the dead" phase of law and order. Protesters marking one month since ICE officer(s) shot and killed 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good outside her home gathered near the Bishop Henry Whipple federal building. Police responded to this dangerous mix of candles, grief, and constitutional rights by declaring the assembly unlawful and hauling people off the sidewalk, including a guy whose radical crime was delivering pizza.

Good was killed after ICE boxed in her SUV and an officer standing in front of her car opened fire at close range as it moved forward. The Trump administration immediately branded her a "domestic terrorist" who tried to run over an officer, a story state and local officials politely filed under "absolutely not." Weeks later, Alex Pretti was shot dead by immigration officers during a street scuffle after they noticed a gun he was legally licensed to carry. Two dead, both caught on bystander video, both now symbols of Trump’s "public safety" campaign that keeps killing the public.

Border czar Tom Homan, apparently confusing Minnesota for a hostile foreign province, announced he’d graciously pull 700 immigration officers out of the state—only a quarter of the federal occupation force—after local officials agreed to help turn over arrested immigrants. No timeline on when the crackdown ends, because why let a crisis go to waste when you can squeeze more compliance out of terrified communities. Meanwhile, hundreds gathered in a park for a ceremony led by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, honoring Good and Pretti while Becca Good reminded the country that there are many more victims whose names we don’t know yet, quietly ground up in Trump’s deportation machine.

So to recap: ICE kills two people, the White House smears one as a terrorist, local cops arrest the people protesting the killings, and the feds negotiate how much cooperation they can extract in exchange for dialing back the siege. Truly a shining example of how to run an immigration system if your policy goals are fear, silence, and a body count.