Something terrifying lived under my bed when I was a little boy.
There wasn't a single night I can remember when I didn’t navigate the final moments of the dreaded bedtime hour with a running start, and a leap into the warm safety of the covers atop my bed.
I never knew for sure if there really was anything at all lurking under my my bed — the boogeyman’s boney hand never did grab me by my ankle and yank me into the darkness — but it would have been stupid to take any chances.
I bet you had a Boogeyman who lived somewhere in your house, but most likely under your bed …
I’ll also bet the Boogeyman never surfaced, but the remote possibility he might, kept you on edge.
Say, have you heard about all the evil, undocumented immigrants out there, who are up to no good?
Of course you have, unless you live under a rock, or even a bed …
“They are eating the dogs and the cats!! They’re eating the pets of the people that live there!!”
That projectile vomit raced from the mouth of the orange, slobbery, woman-assaulting creature with the robin’s nest taped to his head during the 2024 campaign. It’s a wonder HE isn’t lurking under some bed …
According to this America-attacking ghoul “there are millions and millions” of undocumented people in America who are causing all manner of distress, and doing “terrible, horrible” things to us every chance they get.
As I type this, hundreds of thousands of them are no doubt being rounded up and will be sent packing back to where they came.
Some — the mythical dog and cat-eaters, I reckon — will be sent to gruesome places, like Guantanamo Bay where our highly trained troops will make use of their state-of-the-art combat skills to stand outside a jail cell to protect the island’s dogs and cats.
Thing is, almost none of this happening — not yet, anyway — and according to this NBC News report the fearless, orange Boogeyman hunter is “unhappy” about that, and has “made his unhappiness known” about the relatively low numbers of arrests and deportations during his three-week reign of terror.
The man ran on nothing but doom and gloom, and he simply must deliver it. Kicking around innocent public servants can only quench the thirst of a dry-heaving, 78-year-old monster for so long.
The truth is (because that occasionally still matters these days), thing are going so poorly on the “round ‘em up and ship ‘em out” front Google has taken to gaming search results on the subject to make it appear that there are mass exportations happening across our country every minute.
In this great story by The Guardian “Thousands of press releases about decade-old enforcement actions topped search results, all updated with a timestamp from after Trump’s inauguration.”
Read this:
News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens” and, in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.
But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.
That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.
So ICE wants people to believe they are busy carrying out Herr Trump’s cleansing operation when the truth is they are so far coming up mostly empty, and are re-dating press releases from previous administrations to make it look like they are busy little bees.
Why do this? According to an immigration lawyer quoted in the story, here’s why:
“If the objective is to scare people who look up raids … that would be a good way to accomplish it. That would be a good way to mislead people.”
Boogeymen are hiding everywhere, and fear and cruelty are always the point with Republicans.
As to why Google would go along with this, besides the fact they are a fat-cat tech company staffed by pock-faced, pathetic, needy little tech bros, well, as always, it’s all about the clicks. Clicks equals dollars. Dollars equal power.
I encourage you to spend some time with this important story in The Guardian, and support independent journalism and journalists whenever you can. They might yet save us ...
But if Robinhead needs help rounding up all these illegal immigrants I can be of some help here. He needs only send his people-eaters to damn near any big farm here in Wisconsin where there are no doubt thousands of these good people working in jobs that help feed us, simply so they can feed themselves and their families.
Everybody knows they are here and on our farms throughout the country, but mostly the farmers themselves, who on one hand hate what diversity (DEI) is doing to our country, but on the other hand use this diversity as a vital tool to keep their farms thriving.
It’s estimated that 40 percent of the people who are working on these farms are undocumented immigrants.
The stone-old fact is, you are not going to see any heinous roundups in these places, because our economy would collapse.
So why do such a high percentage of farmers support Trump if he’d like to take a blowtorch to the workforce that helps provide for THEM? You’d have to ask them, but I am boldly predicting it is a severe case of hateful ignorance.
By their reckoning, it’s the boogeymen in all those scary cities, not their farms, that are causing all the problems in America, you see. And so what if these cities provide the tax base that helps pay THEIR bills. And so what if all these endless subsidies they receive come from OUR tax money.
These are the racist louts who have the audacity to hate our federal government.
Look, I don’t want to be too hard on farmers here, because their ability to tie themselves up in hypocritical knots to justify a vote for a lifetime racist is impressive in its sheer audacity.
Really, I just wish they’d pull their heads out of their asses.
Bare minimum, I wish they would grow up, evolve, and understand the Boogeyman isn’t living under their beds, he is actually the person sleeping in them.
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D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here, and follow him on Bluesky here.