The Trump Presidency Is Going 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.