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The Trump regime just put a target on my back

We have a lot of metaphors for it; the camel’s nose under the tent, the foot in the door, where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the handwriting on the wall, among others. Every police state in history started this way. As the White House declared last week in a press release:

“Under the leadership of President Donald J. Trump, far-left extremism will be treated with the same seriousness and ferocity the world has long reserved for jihadist terrorism.”

First, they built the infrastructure based on what the public widely perceived as a real public safety and economic problem.

People had been pouring into the United States for centuries, looking for economic opportunity and a new life. Some were criminals, and Trump and the GOP highlighted their presence as the reason why it was so imperative to “build the wall” to seal the border and then begin aggressive mass deportations.

The majority of Americans (81% of Republicans and 49% of Democrats) rated border security as “important” in 2016, so Trump began by building his wall and expanding the detention centers that pre-existed from Reagan’s 1981 opening of them to detain Black Haitian refugees. (The detention firm CoreCivic got its first immigration detention contract in 1981, and another, GEO Group, was founded in 1984.)

The story Trump campaigned on and used as an excuse to massively expand arrests and detentions was the widely popular notion that they were hunting down and imprisoning “the worst of the worst.” Even many Hispanics voted for him thinking he would clean up their neighborhoods of criminals.

Trump rarely referenced immigrants without including words like “rapists” and “murderers”: he kicked off his 2016 campaign with such a speech after coming down the escalator at Trump Tower.

Then came the first policy turn that showed the lie and exposed what may have been their plan all along. Instead of arresting immigrants who’d committed crimes (or were even accused of having committed crimes), they went after Jose the gardener and Maria the maid.

Quickly, with encouragement by Supreme Court Justice Brett “Beer Bong” Kavanaugh, the system turned into a mass arrest and deportation program for people with brown and black skin rather than genuine “bad guys.”

This was the first point where Democrats began to publicly back away from the policy as white supremacist Republicans and racist independents embraced it more vigorously.

Then came the second policy turn, taking Trump, Vance, and Miller the next step toward their ultimate goal of turning America into a modern police state. In March 2025, during Trump’s second term, ICE agents began to mask up to conceal their identities and started using explicit and deadly violence against not only people of color suspected of being undocumented immigrants but also against anyone demonstrating against Trump and his ICE.

In the 16 months since, ICE officers have shot at least 30 people, killing at least eight that we know about and, as of last month, at least another 50 people have died in ICE custody. There have been no meaningful investigations of any of them and no prosecutions of ICE officers whatsoever for these “routine” actions.

And routine is exactly what they’ve become.

Which brings us to the next step, their third turn in the road: arresting and imprisoning legal immigrants for their words rather than their actions.

The Guardian reported this week that Salah Sarsour, the president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque, a green-card-holding business-owning legal permanent resident of the United States for over 30 years with six U.S. citizen children and nine citizen grandchildren, was arrested by ICE and held in a brutal detention center for 80 days where he lost 30 pounds and was denied monitoring for his diabetes:

“On 30 March, he was on his way to see his elderly mother when he was surrounded, he said, by at least 10 unmarked vehicles and armed agents in civilian clothing and whisked away, first to a detention center near Chicago and later miles away at a facility in Indiana. …

“When Sarsour, who has no criminal record in the US, was first detained, he thought the agents had mistaken him for someone else. When they tried to get him to sign paperwork agreeing to being deported, he refused.

“‘I was very confused,’ he said. Only as his ordeal protracted into days did he realize he had been targeted for his activism. ‘That really shocked me, to be honest,’ he said.”

Sarsour was only released because U.S. district judge James Patrick Hanlon concluded he’d been held because of his outspoken support of Palestinian rights and not because of any crime he’d committed, immigration status or otherwise. He had another court proceeding Wednesday in Chicago — he's waiting to find out if he will be fully freed or re-imprisoned.

But now Trump’s concentration camps have officially been used to hold people whose views the administration dislikes.

Trump’s September 25th National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” identified as potential “domestic terrorist” threats those Americans who espouse:

“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity, … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”

It was used last month to indict 15 protesters in Minneapolis. And now Secretary of State Marco Rubio has essentially declared that it’s a loaded gun pointed at anybody who opposes Trump or is even a progressive member of the Democratic Party. The excuse/weapon they’re apparently planning to use is Cuba.

For Rubio, it’s a two-fer. He wants to run for president and thinks taking Cuba will get him there…but he needs an excuse. And that excuse will also provide Trump, Vance, Miller, et al with a fine opportunity to start rounding up American progressives.

Labeling Cuba as “The Capital of 21st Century Communism,” Rubio issued a 140-page document which claims that that poverty-stricken island nation:

“…has infiltrated the highest reaches of the U.S. government, recruited and cultivated generations of American activists, backed an unprecedented wave of left-wing terrorism on American soil, and carried out one of the most durable and damaging foreign intelligence penetrations in American history.”

He claimed, to an audience including representatives from 66 countries and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Education Secretary Linda McMahon:

“The Cubans devoted themselves to recruiting, cultivating and mobilizing a global coalition of activists, intellectuals, and political groups around this cause, building a sprawling revolutionary network that shaped a disproportionate share of America’s most famous and influential extremist movements, from the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground through to Antifa.

“Today, that network continues to maintain ties to powerful leftist nonprofits, anti-ICE collectives, socialist groups, and Marxist militant organizations across the United States.”

The document names American citizens, just as the new White House website is now naming individual American reporters, who are essentially accused of being communist/“leftist” collaborators.

They include my colleagues David Pakman and Amy Goodman, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, influencer Hasan Piker, and nineteen others, including two other members of Congress.

The 20 organizations named include the Amazon Labor Union, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Socialists of America, the National Lawyer’s Guild, and “Antifa.”

So now the architecture is in place. ICE has billions to expand their concentration camps, they’ve spread their secret police across every corner of America, they’re tied into Flock cameras and Palantir’s databases on pretty much every American citizen, and they’ve demonstrated they’re invulnerable to local law enforcement and can abuse or even kill people who resist them at will.

And now the Trump regime, like Putin and Hitler before them (among dozens of others), have identified “the enemy within” who must be purged and separated from society.

Trump launches 'unprecedented' new attack on US citizens

On Monday, the Justice Department announced that it will take action to revoke citizenship from 17 people across the country, which CNN reports is an "unprecedented" escalation in President Donald Trump’s push to target naturalized citizens.

“Since President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration has doubled down on its denaturalization campaign, targeting foreign-born American citizens whom it accuses of fraudulently obtaining US citizenship,” CNN explains. “Denaturalization – the process of revoking citizenship from a naturalized US citizen – is rare and can only occur in federal court. Historically, the U.S. revoked citizenship for a range of reasons, from lying about a person’s date of arrival, age or marital status to political reasons.”

While under the Biden Administration, the Justice Department filed only 24 denaturalization cases over the entire term, the Trump Administration outpaced that in just one year, in May alone moving to denaturalize a dozen citizens.

“Gaining U.S. citizenship is a privilege and under the steadfast leadership of President Trump, this Department of Justice maintains a zero-tolerance policy for the abuse of this process,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement on the latest effort. The new denaturalization cases, according to the government, are based on allegations ranging from immigration fraud to money laundering to sexual abuse.

Per CBS News, “In federal court complaints filed across the country in recent days, Justice Department officials argued that the individuals concealed their criminal activity when they applied for U.S. citizenship or were otherwise ineligible to be naturalized, including because they lacked a 'good moral character,' one of the requirements in the naturalization process.”

The White House’s latest push represents the largest single denaturalization effort in U.S. history. According to CBS News, “The denaturalization process allows the targeted citizens to challenge the government's filings to try to retain their citizenship. If U.S. citizens are denaturalized, they return to their prior immigration status, typically as permanent U.S. residents, and lose all the legal benefits of American citizenship, including protection from deportation.”

According to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, the administration “will continue to use every lawful avenue to denaturalize and remove aliens.”

As NPR reports, however, this can be more difficult than the administration’s rhetoric may suggest.

"These are cases in which the law is pretty clear that people are entitled to due process,” said Daniel Kanstroom, professor of law at Boston College who specializes in immigration. “They're entitled to be heard by a federal judge, not just an immigration judge. So the protections in place for people facing denaturalization are pretty robust.”

Other legal experts have raised concerns about the lack of legal representation for some of the accused, or that the denaturalization process could be leveraged to stifle speech.

"The denaturalization efforts are an attempt to suppress the political speech of naturalized citizens," said Cassandra Robertson, law professor at Case Western Reserve University. "Although the cases that have been brought first are maybe people who've committed some pretty bad crimes, the government's rhetoric is certainly not limited to that."

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'Outright hostility': Federal judge unloads on Trump in blow to administration

A federal judge in Ohio has just issued a major blow against the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies, citing statements from both President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance as proof of racist intent.

This is according to Politico senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who on Monday posted, “JUST IN: A federal judge in Ohio, describing hostility toward nonwhite immigrants expressed by President Trump/VP Vance, becomes the latest judge to order the administration to unfreeze immigrant benefit applications frozen by USCIS.”

As the court opinion explained, “This case concerns the legality of a series of policies developed and implemented by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). These policies indefinitely pause USCIS’s final adjudication of pending immigration benefit applications submitted by foreign nationals from certain countries, and treat nationality from those countries as a significant and negative factor in that adjudication process.”

In other words, the Trump administration sought to ban the processing of green card and work authorization applications for immigrants from certain countries, penalizing them for nothing more than their nationality. What’s more, the judge found that there was no shortage of proof of this racist intent, citing the anti-immigrant rhetoric of Trump and Vance at length, particularly their assertions that Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of Ohioans.

According to the judge, “Both the President and the Vice President have publicly and repeatedly expressed outright hostility toward immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential election. Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia. As the Supreme Court just observed, President Trump’s comments have ‘broadly denigrate[d] countries’ and ‘malign[ed]’ certain groups of immigrants… These include the extraordinary statements that certain foreign nationals, including Haitians, are ‘poisoning the blood’ of the United States.”

What’s more, the judge noted, “This general hostility to immigration contrasts with an apparent interest in and preference for the migration of white people.” The opinion raises examples of Trump calling for more immigration from Scandinavia and welcoming white refugees from South Africa.

In the end, argues the judge, the administration was “exceeding authority” when it “unreasonably delayed” immigrant applications based on “shifting or post hoc rationales,” causing “irreparable harm.” The opinion lists several examples of this harm, such as the separation of families, the destruction of educational and career opportunities, and the disruption of cancer research.

As Cheney noted, this is just the latest in a string of several major setbacks courts have issued to Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. In June, a judge ended a ban on visa processing for applicants from 39 targeted countries. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court slapped down Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship. Then on Thursday, a court sharply curtailed the administration’s desire to detain migrants while deportation cases are proceeding.

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Federal judge issues massive blow to Trump's xenophobic project

A federal judge has just ordered the extension of an administrative stay on the Trump administration's attempt to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopia, stymying the White House's push for the speedy deportation of Ethiopian refugees. This represents the latest blow to President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.

The news was shared by Politico Senior Legal Affairs reporter Josh Gerstein on Friday afternoon, when he posted the ruling by Judge Brian Murphy, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts and was appointed by President Joe Biden.

"Plaintiffs have moved for an administrative stay pending resolution of their motion to amend their complaint and renewed motion for postponement. As previously noted by another Court in this District, a court “may issue an administrative stay ‘in an exercise of its docket-management authority.’ Administrative stays are not a reflection of the merits, but instead allow the court time to consider the merits of a case that cannot be successfully or appropriately evaluated in haste.” After review, and in light of the novel arguments raised in Plaintiffs’ amended complaint, the Court GRANTS Plaintiffs’ motion for an administrative stay as follows. To preserve the status quo, the effective date of termination of the designation of Temporary Protected Status for Ethiopia (the “Termination”) will be STAYED, subject to further order of this Court or higher courts, pending resolution of Plaintiffs’ renewed motion for postponement. During the period of the stay of the Termination, the Termination shall be null, void, and of no legal effect."

Temporary Protected Status is a program that extends temporary immigration benefits to those from certain countries who cannot safely return due to war, natural disaster, or other concerns. The Trump administration has been attempting to end TPS for Ethiopian refugees since December, but a suit filed in January has suspended that termination while its legality is wrangled in the courts. Friday's decision is a major win for the plaintiffs, allowing them to remain and work in the United States while the case is determined.

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Top fraud cases in Minnesota take a back seat to Trump's 'crushing immigration workload'

A prosecutor was dismissed in Minnesota after complaining that they would be happy to be held in contempt by the judge because they desperately needed sleep. Now it appears the rest of the office is following that lead.

Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney wrote on Thursday that the top prosecutor appointed by President Donald Trump in the Minnesota district is dropping "pressing priorities" to manage the huge number of cases. Cheney said on X that it's "a crushing immigration workload."

In a "little-noticed filing" last week, Cheney said the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals said it is being crushed by the number of cases filed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said that they must make serious changes to triage the situation.

Trump sent a surge of 3,000 federal agents to Minneapolis to nab people it claimed were undocumented immigrants.

The office is already short-staffed after several high-profile resignations. Now the lawyers working in the office are "bouncing between contempt hearings."

There have been 427 habeas cases on top of the "100+ cases filed in the second half of 2025," the report said

The office thus shifted resources from other priorities to address immigration matters.

"The MN-USAO has cancelled all ACE work and any other affirmative priorities and is operating in reactive mode. AUSAs are appearing daily for hearings on contempt motions. The Court is setting deadlines within hours, including weekends and holidays. Paralegals are continuously working overtime. Lawyers are continuously working overtime. All this is happening while the MN-USAO Civil division is down 50 percent," Cheney said.

Trump spent the first part of his new administration firing staff in an effort to shrink the size of government. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller set a quote of 3,000 immigrants the country must nab and detain each day.

Rosen's office is also overseeing a critical case involving a daycare facility scandal that Trump and his Justice Department highlighted as part of their crime-fighting fcorce. While the investigation had been going on for most on President Joe Biden's time in office. It's unclear if that is an example of one of the cases that must take a back seat to Trump's immigration crusade.

See the full report here.

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Red states stand to gain more political power over immigration shift

A drop in immigration amid President Donald Trump’s enforcement crackdown led to historically slow population growth in the United States last year.

Activity at the southern border is at a historic low. The population change reflects the last months of the Biden administration, when immigration controls began to tighten, and the first months of the Trump administration’s massive anti-immigration and deportation agenda.

Five states lost population, according to the new Census Bureau estimates released Jan. 27 covering changes between mid-2024 and mid-2025. The changes suggest Texas and Florida could gain congressional seats at the expense of California, Illinois and New York.

States that did gain population were concentrated in the South, where numbers appear to give Republican states in the region a political edge halfway through the decade.

An analysis by Jonathan Cervas at Carnegie Mellon University predicted four more seats in Congress after the 2030 census for Texas and Florida, with losses of four seats in California and two each in New York and Illinois. Cervas is an assistant teaching professor who researches representation and redistricting.

“We are still a long way off from 2030, so there is a lot of uncertainty in these projections,” Cervas said, adding that California’s loss in the next decade could be only two or three seats.

Another expert, redistricting consultant Kimball Brace of Virginia, said he was suspicious of the sudden drop in California’s population. Earlier projections had the state losing only one seat after 2030, he said.

“This acceleration in California’s population loss is not something that was in the projections at all,” Brace said. “I’ve got to be a little bit skeptical in terms of the numbers. It shows a significant difference in what we’ve seen in the early part of the decade.”

Brace was still working on his own analysis. William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said net immigration was about 1.3 million nationally for the year, down by more than half from the year before.

“As a result most states showed slower growth or greater declines,” Frey said. California had about 200,000 fewer immigrants than the previous year, similar to Texas and New York, though those two states eked out populations gains anyway because of people moving in and births

Texas and North Carolina gained the most people between mid-2024 and mid-2025, while California and Hawaii lost the most.

Nationally, the population increased only about 1.7 million, or half a percentage point, to about 341.8 million. It was the lowest increase of the decade and the smallest gain since the pandemic sharply cut growth in 2020 and 2021. Growth was just 1.4 million between mid-2019 and mid-2020, and only about 500,000 between mid-2020 and mid-2021. Before that, national population growth was below 2 million only twice since 1975.

Among the states, Texas gained about 391,000 in population, up 1.2%, followed in the top 5 by Florida (197,000, or .8%, North Carolina (146,000, or 1.3%), Georgia (99,000, or .9%) and South Carolina (80,000, or 1.5%).

California went from one of the largest increases the previous year to the greatest population loss, about 9,500, less than .1%, followed by Hawaii (down 2,000, or .1%), Vermont (down 1,900 or 0.3%), New Mexico (down 1,300, or 0.1%) and West Virginia (down 1,300 or .1%).

Vermont had the largest percentage decrease and South Carolina had the largest increase.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

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'Horrible racist': Trump official slammed for using Christmas special to bash immigrants

Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller on Friday elicited disgust after he said that a beloved Christmas television special reminded him of his own personal animus toward immigrants.

Miller, often seen as the architect of President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, revealed in a post on X that he and his children had just watched “Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras,” a one-off 1967 TV holiday special that featured singers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.

Miller then quickly pivoted from that to once again bash immigrants who come to the US.

“Imagine watching that,” Miller wrote, “and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world.”

As Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez pointed out in response, both Martin and Sinatra both had parents who were first-generation Italian immigrants.

“Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti and gave himself a stage name because of braindead xenophobes like Stephen,” McCann Ramírez observed. “Sinatra was also a child of Italian immigrants. Imagine watching them and thinking immigrants didn’t build the culture you fetishize today.”

A similar point was made by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in a post on Bluesky.

“Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly and Antonini born in Genoa and Sicily, respectively,” she wrote, “and Martin, son of Gaetano and Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy and Ohio respectively... and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the US.”

Journalist and author Jeff Yang added some historical context to Miller’s remarks by noting that Italian immigrants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century faced many of the same stereotypes that Miller and his political allies ascribe to immigrants from Latin America.

“A reminder,” Yang wrote, while also posting old cartoons that featured racist depictions of Italians, “that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America.”

Yang added that Frank Sinatra’s mother “ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage, and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party.”

Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse promoted Yang’s thread that demonstrated Miller’s apparent ignorance of Dean and Sinatra’s family histories, and said it showed the Trump adviser is “a horrible racist in the sense that he is actually not that good at being racist.”

Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, managed to find an upside to Miller’s holiday-themed anti-immigrant rant.

“The one silver lining in all this sickness is that one day your children will despise you as much as most of America already does,” he commented.

Film producer Franklin Leonard was even more succinct in his response to Miller.

“Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics,” he wrote.

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The Supreme Court's final 'reckoning' may be right around the corner: legal experts

Slate Senior Editor Dahlia Lithwick and legal writer Mark Stern say there may be a reckoning underway among the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from moving forward with plans to deport roughly 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians who were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by Presidents Obama, Biden, and Trump himself in his first administration, which is a contradiction to conservatives’ apparent eagerness to give President Donald Trump his way on the shadow docket while the case plays itself out in court.

Stern said it was the right thing to do because federal statute “does not allow the secretary of homeland security to prematurely end a TPS designation before it expires.”

But, more directly, the court’s decision not to quietly give Trump his way as the case plays out “reflects that maybe the court could be conceding” to liberal Ketanji Brown Jackson’s arguments in past dissents when the court allowed Trump to do things like fire protected federal employees before a court decision was made.

In past dissents, Jackson argued that cases must also be considered on the base of who faces irreparable harm, and that immigrants are the ones who face irreparable injury and grievous harm if TPS is stripped, while the Trump administration couldn’t point to one single hardship it would face by keeping TPS in place for a few months.

“The previous two times around, the rest of the court — or at least the conservative justices — pretty much ignored her. But maybe this time they listened because they did exactly what she had counseled, which was to keep TPS in place and set this case for arguments and decision the right way so everybody’s claims will be deliberated on property,” said Stern.

Lithwick also noted that at a Monday event, attended by lower court judges and lawyers, Jackson called out conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh to his face, arguing that the “uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved with cases on the emergency docket is a real unfortunate problem.”

Kavanaugh argued that the rise in emergency cases was partly because presidents are eager to push policies thwarted by a gridlocked Congress, and called Brown’s criticism of the court’s emergency docket unfair, given that the court must rule one way or the other on whether to grant or deny those cases.

CNN reports he also questioned the “short memories” of some of the court’s critics, noting that the Biden administration also regularly appealed cases when lower courts shut down its policies.

But that provoked Jackson to respond that “Brett will remember that when we clerked some 20 years ago, this was not the Supreme Court’s stance, that just because these motions were filed the court actually had to entertain and grant them on their merits.”

US District Judge Paul Friedman — who had broached the topic of the supreme court’s abuse of the emergency docket — then turned to Kavanaugh and asked him if he wanted to offer a rebuttal.

“Ketanji states it well,” Kavanaugh said, adding that “you have to have the same position, no matter who’s president.”

Stern noted there was applause in the room that day.

“It’s a fight over just how much disrespect the Supreme Court is going to show to the lower courts as they try to do their jobs under immense pressure and constant fierce criticism and slander from the leader of the country and many of the politicians in his party,” said Stern, arguing that every time the Supreme Court’s conservative majority quietly erases lower court’s decisions in the shadow docket they are disrespecting the lower courts that are the ones who are “actually on the front lines of these cases.”

“Shaming her colleagues into doing the right thing seems to be her MO, and, based on the court allowing TPS to remain in place so far, may suggest that it might be working and she should be keeping the pressure on,” Stern said.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

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Republicans' real agenda was never about legality —and it's a scam

I will spare you the details of the rightwing reaction to the Supreme Court's decision last week to uphold birthright citizenship. I will spare you because they are disgusting, especially on America's 250th anniversary. What you need to know is that the mainstream of the Republican Party is no longer flirting with the so-called "Great Replacement Theory." In GOP circles, the idea that immigration is "civilizational suicide" is now conventional wisdom.

I know the Democrats have a lot on their plates right now, but the rest of us need to push them into accepting this reality. Rightwingers no longer care, if they ever genuinely did, about the "illegal" part of "illegal immigration." As their reaction to the court should make clear, federal law and the Constitution are obstacles to overcome. To them, it doesn't matter what immigrants do or don't. What matters is who they are – namely their race, culture and religion – and from the viewpoint of these reactionaries, it's their humanity that's "illegal."

I think it's up to the rest of us to push the Democrats, because they tend toward inertia, not action. The party's mainstream – think Chuck Schumer – will interpret the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship as the end of the story. Fact is, it's probably the beginning. First, because the court itself is corrupt and in need of punishment. It's only a matter of time before it strikes down 158 years of Constitutional law. Second, because we have been here before. Democrats used to think abortion was settled. Look where that perspective got us.

These reactionaries will always be with us, alas, and they will never be satisfied with a court siding with the law, because, as they see it, the law is part of the conspiracy against them. They have convinced themselves that they are locked in a war for their very survival. "Border security," therefore, has nothing to do with the "border" or "security" in any objective sense of those words. It means closing the door and purging anyone "who does not belong."

The Times reported last week that immigrant arrests have surged to 10,000 in five days. The number of immigrants in detention has reached 63,000. The Post reported last month that due to immigrants dying in custody during the first five months of this year, the administration is no longer going to report deaths. The Marshall Project reported in April that 6,200 minors have been detained since the beginning of last year. It published a follow-up story, in June, reporting that 500 of those minors were literal babies. The Supreme Court supercharged the effort by dramatically eroding the means by which to seek asylum and ending the protective status of nearly one and a half million refugees from Haiti and Syria.

The Republicans have taken a maximal position that requires a maximal counter-position. Theirs is anti-immigration, and every action taken by the Trump administration, with the blessing of the court (mostly), has advanced that position. So the maximal counter-position should be anti-anti-immigration – or simply pro-immigration, a view that gives a whole-chested defense of immigration in terms of freedom and America as the land of opportunity,

But that's not what I see in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. I don't want to sand the corners of nuance here, but I do think it's fair to say that the center of the party still accepts the bad faith of the Republicans as if it were well-intended. They talk about loyalty when they mean conformity and obedience. They talk about patriotism when they mean bigotry and prejudice. They talk about capitalism and tradition when they mean creating an economic system in which mediocre men do not have to compete on the basis of merit and risk the humiliation of losing to women. They are this close to saying that immigrants have no rights which the white man is bound to respect. Yet many Democrats seem to believe that reasonable people can work together to find a halfway point between liberty and tyranny.

Again, I don't want to encourage the idea that all Democrats are the same, but I do not believe the Democrats as a party truly understand the maximal position being taken by their rightwing counterparts, and what that requires. Therefore, it is up to the rest of us to make it clear to them that compromise, though it may mitigate immediate harms done by the forces of anti-immigration, will not defeat those forces in the end. "Pro-immigration, pro-security" might seem like common sense, but ultimately, the boot still comes down on the necks of immigrants. Indeed, from the immigrant's point of view, "pro-immigration, pro-security" means there's a dime's worth of difference between the parties, as the Republicans get to stomp and the Democrats get to tell the Republicans there's a better way to stomp.

But before the Democrats can liberate immigrants, they must liberate themselves. The Republicans have been living in their heads rent-free for a quarter of a century. During that time, they have accepted as true the implication that immigrants are a threat to national security, cultural identity, social cohesion and "our way of life." It's to the point where the Democrats are co-dependent, asking the Republicans to be allowed to disagree. In fact, immigrants are not and never have been any of these things. For God's sake, even Ronald Reagan said immigrants are "one of the most important sources of America's greatness."

The Democrats do not need Reagan's permission, of course, but I think it's important to remember what he once said: "If we ever close the doors to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost." Democrats should make their own case for immigration as a universal good for their own sake but also for the country's. The forces of anti-immigration are not only destructive but a perversion, a profanity, a con. The Democrats should go on the offensive, demanding that the immigration system be burned down and rebuilt so the burden of proof is no longer on the huddled masses yearning to breathe free but on the government to assume the humanity of "new Americans" so their pathway to citizenship is just details.

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Republicans break with Trump in deep‑red Idaho

Under the second Trump administration, the United States has seen mass deportations and a sharp escalation in immigration enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security says the crackdown pushed nearly 3 million people out of the country in Trump’s first year back in office.

For the first time since the 1960s, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. is declining; because most farmworkers are foreign born, those losses are already beginning to strain American farms.

We are social scientists who study immigrant communities in Idaho and the challenges farmworkers face. We also run an annual survey exploring public opinion on a range of policy issues, including immigration and economic conditions. Amid the government’s heated rhetoric, our data shows public opinion on immigration in one of the country’s reddest agricultural states is diverging from national politics and may even be at odds with federal policy.

Immigrant labor in agriculture

According to the Center for Migration Studies, 86% of farmworkers in the U.S. are foreign born, and 45% are undocumented. In 2025 the Trump administration suggested it would not target farms. Still, farmworkers across the country are scared to go to work.

Between March and July 2025, the agricultural workforce declined by 7%, with farms reporting labor shortages in states that voted for Trump, including Pennsylvania, and states that didn’t, including California. Meanwhile, immigration crackdowns are threatening this country’s food security.

National polling on the administration’s immigration policies tends to follow party lines, drawing Democrats’ disapproval and Republicans’ support, but recent polling suggests some softening among the latter. Pew Research Center reported that half of all respondents disapprove of the administration’s approach to immigration, and more than half say Trump is “doing too much” when it comes to deportation. Among Republicans the share is smaller – 20% – but rising.

Research suggests people think about immigration differently at the local level. To explore how public opinion on immigration varies in farm-dependent states, we looked at one of the most agriculture-reliant and Republican states in the country just as its farms face policy-driven labor shortfalls.

A closer look

Agribusiness is important for Idaho’s economy, accounting for 20% of its annual GDP, according to the Idaho State Department of Agriculture. Dairy is a cornerstone: The state is the fourth-largest milk producer in the U.S., according to the Idaho Dairymen’s Association. Ninety percent of Idaho dairy workers are foreign born.

Idaho is also a deeply red state: About 60% of voters are registered Republicans, and 67% voted for Trump in 2024. These numbers make Idaho a clear test of how national rhetoric and intensifying immigration enforcement track with public sentiment in places that have the most to lose.

Our 11th annual Idaho Public Policy Survey polled 1,000 adults in the fall of 2025. Because immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans, we designed a question around long-term residents without a criminal record – specifically, dairy workers and their families who have lived in Idaho more than 10 years.

The results showed broad support for a pathway to legal working status for them: 85% of respondents were in favor, with 56% strongly supportive and 29% somewhat. Just 9% opposed. We expected immigration positions to tie directly to political affiliation, but results cut across party lines, with 79% of Republicans, 88% of independents and 95% of Democrats in favor.

We also asked participants whether increased presence from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, would help or harm Idaho’s agricultural economy. More than half – 53% – said it would harm the economy, 19% said it would help, 18% said there would be no impact, and 10% were unsure.

The pattern was sharpest where it would matter most: Residents of agriculture-dependent regions were more likely to say ICE presence would hurt the economy. Republicans were more likely than others to say it would help; even so, only 35% of Republicans responded that way, compared with 11% of independents and less than 3% of Democrats.

In agriculture-dependent Idaho, many residents say they recognize the role immigrants play in sustaining local rural economies, and research shows that recognition can shift attitudes about immigration, potentially increasing support for more inclusive policies.

According to our research, public opinion in Idaho is more nuanced than the right-left divide suggests. We believe findings here are likely to hold in other places similarly dependent on agriculture, as farmers from Wisconsin to Delaware speak up about their reliance on immigrant labor.The Conversation

Lisa Meierotto, Associate Professor of Global Studies and Environmental Studies, Boise State University; Matthew May, Research Scholar, Boise State University, and Rebecca Som Castellano, Director of Human-Environment Systems and Professor of Sociology, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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MAGA declares they were 'intentionally misled' by Trump

During the run-up to President Donald Trump’s election in 2024, he told his followers that “mass deportations” were on the way. Now, while the immigration crackdown has undoubtedly been one of his most visible policies, many in the MAGA movement are beginning to say they were “intentionally misled,” arguing that Trump isn’t doing enough to deliver on his xenophobic campaign promises. This is according to the conservative publication the Dispatch, which asserts that “a vocal part of his base is beginning to publicly break with the administration over immigration enforcement.”

While the Trump administration has pursued “maximalist enforcement for more than a year — with deadly consequences — while also claiming the deportation campaign is prioritizing the ‘worst of the worst’ criminals” and that “its enforcement policies have resulted in a record-high number of deportations,” “the agency has stopped releasing the underlying data that would substantiate — or possibly undermine — its claims.” Now, says the Dispatch, “a vocal contingent of mass-deportation activists don’t believe the topline numbers coming from DHS and argue the administration is failing to honor Trump’s promise to deport millions of people.”

“I’m confused, I’m frustrated, and quite frankly, I’m angry because I believe we’re being intentionally misled,” said Mark Morgan, a former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) acting commissioner and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director during Trump’s first term. Morgan is involved in the Oversight Project, “an activist group lobbying for mass deportations that recently sued the administration to get access to enforcement data DHS used to publish regularly.”

Since Trump entered office, the White House has stopped releasing detailed immigrant arrest data via platforms like the ICE website, which used to be updated quarterly. Instead, DHS now puts out simple topline totals asserting hundreds of thousands of deportations along with millions of self-deportations. Currently the agency claims that more than 2 million undocumented immigrants have left the country. “Significantly,” notes the Dispatch, “this number was not based on actual records DHS has of millions of people leaving. DHS cited a Center for Immigration Studies researcher’s analysis as the source of the initial number, but has not explained how it has calculated the subsequent increases; the researcher, Steven Camarota, told The Dispatch last fall that how DHS has used the estimate doesn’t add up.”

Deportation lobbyists accuse the White House of fudging the numbers by including removals that were not previously considered deportations, like those turned away at airports due to visa paperwork issues or those apprehended while attempting to cross the border. As a result, “Immigration hard-liners in the House sent a letter to DHS last month requesting detailed data releases, citing conflicting reports on the numbers of deportations and the lack of transparency in how the agency is calculating self-deportations.”

While earlier in the month, DHS released data indicating that immigration arrest levels have reached the highest of the term, peaking at 1,400 per day in July, according to the Dispatch, “after more than a year of DHS circulating unsubstantiated and conflicting data, deportation hawks seem unimpressed and disinclined to believe the numbers.” As Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project and head of the Mass Deportation Coalition, pointed out last week, the 356,000 removals claimed by the administration in 2026 “includes exits and removals other than from interior deportations. ‘The numbers are also strikingly out of step with press releases claiming deportations cresting one million and self-deportations exceeding 2 million,’ he added.”

Other MAGA figures have expressed similar disappointment. According to the Dispatch, “Tomi Lahren, a Fox commentator, dedicated her podcast show last week to criticizing DHS for fudging the numbers and producing underwhelming results. Deportation advocates like Lahren and Howell argued that even taking the latest 356,000 figure at face value ... it’s still a far cry from the expectations set by Trump during the 2024 campaign when he promised the largest deportation campaign in history that would remove millions and millions of people from the country.”

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