Could Elon’s Disgusting Abomination Create Opportunities for Other Migrants?
It’s fashionable to focus reporting about Elon Musk’s attacks on Trump’s Big Awful on the spat within the Republican party.
Politico has separate stories on how “hard-liners” like Tom Massie and Rand Paul are “rejoic[ing]” over Elon’s tweets and parroting White House excuses for Musk’s comments, which both repeat four claims Marc Caputo first aired (half of which are dubious or dated) and demand that journalists view Elon’s comments as exclusively about the effect on his own business.
“When businessmen criticize legislation, journalists don’t take them at their word, they look at how the legislation would impact their business interests,” said a Republican close to the White House. “They should be doing that in this case.”
I wonder if this anonymous Republican close to the White House raised similar concerns about Elon’s business interests driving his decisions as he shredded regulators overseeing his own businesses? In a brilliant summary of 130 shitty things Elon did in his 130 days in government, Elizabeth Warren cited 29 Federal contracts and 34 instances where Elon fiddled with his regulators, of which this is just a selection:
55. Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the auto safety agency investigating Tesla for crashes stemming from its “full self-driving” and remote control features.
56. The Trump Administration first shut down NLRB altogether — which had cases against multiple Musk companies (including SpaceX, Tesla, and X).
57. Then President Trump removed independent NLRB members.
58. DOGE is gutting NOAA while Musk eyes privatization of NOAA weather satellites, which could present a business opportunity for Starlink.
59. President Trump signed an executive order halting operations of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which had Tesla on its list of contractors scheduled for audits.
60. OSHA has 27 cases against Tesla for workers rights violations and investigated SpaceX for workplace injuries — and now DOGE is limiting the agency’s work.
61. President Trump tried to fire over 90% of National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), which put two Musk companies — Boring and Tesla — on its “dirty dozen” list of worst workplace safety offenders.
All that drama is amusing. All the tweets from House members like Scott Perry and Marjorie Taylor Greene disavowing their votes could become more interesting once this bill returns to the House, but probably won’t
I’m more focused in the extent to which Elon’s comments will unsettle the dynamic that otherwise would permit (as Politico also reported was the plan) John Thune to ram through changes and Mike Johnson in turn to ram through the changed bill.
Elon’s comments unsettle things. Who knows what could happen as a result.
Consider the several instances where local communities have stood up against Stephen Miller’s authoritarian dragnet. There was the backlash to a heavy-handed raid in San Diego where ICE agents deployed flash bangs before bystanders chased them off, chanting, “Shame, shame.” Then there was the spontaneous protest yesterday in response to a restaurant raid in Minneapolis.
A more controversial case involves Carol Hui, whose plight mobilized a conservative Missouri town, with a number of Trump voters claiming they didn’t vote to deport their sweet neighbor.
“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Ms. Hui from church. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”
She paused. “This is Carol.”
Whatever you think of such disavowals — Never Trumper JV Last is unimpressed; Greg Sargent did a great interview that conveys why she’s the kind of person non-liberals might rally behind — G Elliot Morris made a compelling argument that these Trump voters are precisely the kind of people you’d need to combat these policies.
The other way to say that — and the way Carol’s friends put it — is that millions of Americans voted for Trump, but they didn’t vote for this.
[snip]
If you are a Democrat, I know it is tempting to do schadenfreude and voter-bashing toward regretful Trump voters, who you see as enabling authoritarianism. But it is very important right now to make the point that people who voted for Trump did not support all of his policy agenda (the vast majority of which is unpopular) for four reasons.
First, internalizing that voting for someone is not an endorsement of their future policy agenda gives people data to fight the worst excesses of Trump’s agenda, especially on trade and immigration. Data can be a very powerful rhetorical tool in catalyzing opposition to unpopular policies.
In Trump’s first administration, for example, polling on his separation of families crossing the border was almost 50 points underwater. That data and related protests convinced the administration to change course.
The alternative to this is assuming that moderate Trump supporters actually support deporting non-criminal parents, which we know (given the data above) to be false. If you assume that, then there is a much smaller landscape of opinion on which to do battle about politics. You have to believe these people are persuadable to move them.
You will not defeat fascism with just the people who voted for Kamala Harris, or even just the people who voted for Joe Biden in 2020. You need some of Carol Hui’s neighbors to stand up for what is decent.
All the better if the process of standing up leads them to rethink their support for MAGAt.
The point being, we’re beginning to see real activism against Trump’s immigration dragnet, the same kind of activism that (Morris notes) led Trump to temper his plans in the first term.
And we’re seeing it before it’s too late to, one way or another, defeat (or at least impose a cost for) the vast expansion of Stephen Miller’s dragnet in the Big Ugly.
Yesterday, Miller listed the immigration provisions first among the reasons he likes the bill — ahead of giving Elon a tax cut, ahead of taking food from poor children.
There’s a reason Miller is so excited about the bill. It would dramatically expand ICE, ICE detention centers, and ICE’s ability to deputize cops, making ICE — rather than the FBI — the biggest federal law “enforcement” agency.
The House GOP-crafted bill includes some $45 billion that would go toward detaining immigrants until 2029.
That’s roughly $9 billion per year — an amount that far surpasses a previous record-high of $3.4 billion Congress appropriated for ICE detention a little over a year ago, under the Biden administration.
ICE currently has capacity to detain roughly 41,000 people. Under the GOP bill, that number would increase to some 100,000.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, says there’s not currently enough space to detain that many people.
“ICE would be forced to use this funding to build new detention centers, new soft-sided detention camps, where tents would be thrown up by detention contractors, where immigrants would be held, potentially en masse,” he said.
The bill includes over $150 billion for various components of immigration enforcement, including detention, border wall construction and deportation transportation.
“Taken together, this funding would make ICE the best funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history, with more detention bed funding that the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons and potentially more agents on board than the entire Federal Bureau of Investigations,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
He says the new bill also includes additional funds for ICE to hire new agents and increase collaboration initiatives with local law enforcement agencies — like 287-g agreements. But, no funding for DHS oversight.
ICE is the leading edge of Miller’s assault on the Constitution. His goons are already struggling to find as many migrants as he demands be arrested, leading to screaming sessions and threats (first reported in the Washington Examiner!!).
“They’ve been threatened, told they’re watching their emails and texts and Signals,” the first official said. “That’s what is horrible about things right now. It’s a fearful environment. Everybody in leadership is afraid. … There’s no morale. Everybody is demoralized.”
ICE’s top 50 field officials were given roughly a week’s notice of an emergency meeting in Washington.
ICE’s 25 Enforcement Removal Operations, or ERO, field office directors and 25 Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, special agents in charge flew into Washington and descended on the agency’s Washington headquarters last Tuesday, May 20. There, they were met by Miller, ICE confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone. ‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down,” said the first official, who spoke with those in the room that day.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
One of the ERO officials in attendance stood up and stated that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House had publicly messaged about targeting criminal illegal immigrants, and therefore, ICE was targeting them, and not the general illegal immigration population.
“Miller said, ‘What do you mean you’re going after criminals?’ Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest. ‘That’s what Tom Homan says every time he’s on TV: ‘We’re going after criminals,’” the ICE official told Miller, according to the first official.
The (un)intended consequences of this vast expansion, with Stephen Miller screaming that ICE has to go search places for people who are definitely not the criminal aliens he lied about during the election, are pretty obvious.
Now is the time for the people shaming ICE’s invasions of their neighborhood to make a stink about this bill.
To be clear: it won’t kill the bill. The only way the bill will die is if the conflict between hardliners and those who want to preserve health care reaches an impasse which, so far, it has not.
But it would be useful if the localized mobilization raised the cost of this bill going forward, especially if the bill happens to die via other means.
I’m not convinced that this is anything other than kabuki. No way egos like theirs would willingly walk away from power, and FWIW there is no way Convict-1 / Krasnov / TACO leaves access to that much money behind. I see it as cover for Elno going behind the scenes, perhaps using $trump for payment and ‘privately’ messaging his DOGE commissars.
I agree— very strong kayfabe undertones.
President Musk and the anti-BBB Rs seem mostly to be against it because it isn’t cruel *enough*.
This seems so obvious to me that I feel like I’m going crazy for no one in my usually informed social circle seeing it. Musk isn’t complaining about about Ebenezer Scrooge. He’s complaining that Tiny Tim still has his crutch.
“Musk isn’t complaining about about Ebenezer Scrooge. He’s complaining that Tiny Tim still has his crutch.”
Exactly. And so perfectly phrased that I’d judge you to have won the Internet yesterday.
This white guy originally from Denmark is another one that’s likely in the “we didn’t vote for this” column:
https://www.mississippifreepress.org/ice-arrests-mississippi-father-at-his-citizenship-hearing-threatening-deportation/
Near the end of piece it mentions he was to have a preliminary hearing on May 27, but I don’t know if that hearing happened, or, if it did, what transpired.
My thought is that Musk is putting on a show to boost Tesla sells.. I don’t think it’s out of his character to think of liberals as being stupid enough to fall for it.
About the Trump supporter who is upset the face eating leopards are eating their beloved neighbor’s face, she needs to make her way over to the Dems on her own.. No amount of courting from the Dems will bring her over. It will only be her personal experiences that she will then walk on her own two feet to the Dems. Only when she gets sad, desperate, scared, poor, depressed, outraged etc enough, will she open her mind to the idea that the Dems are not demons set on making her gay, trans etc. Dems cannot do this for her, this step cannot be skipped. The road to the Dems is right in front of her.. There are no walls or locked gates, she can do it from her living room, she can just walk right in without a word. She has to let a crack form in her beliefs about Dems otherwise anything Dems say or do she only will see through her Dems are demons glasses.
Joe Orton, I may be misreading EW’s commentary (both this one and the most recent on the Stephen Miller rampage, posted 5 June), but my takeaway from her is that she’s not suggesting we need to convert, say, Missouri Republicans over to Democrats…we just need to find common cause with them on this issue.
Stephen Miller and his goons critically overstepped when they went after Carol Hui. But Carol Hui is emblematic of the people whom Miller has sought to claim by a sort of demonization-creep. Go after real criminals first, then folks who look like them or have similar sounding names, then just label anyone you feel like a “criminal” and make it stick by commandeering the entire law enforcement arm of the federal government.
Rallying people against this overreach does not need to involve party affiliation. It’s a violation of every tenet of my faith, which happens to overlap with beliefs most GOPers claim to share. I start there. I don’t try to sign them up with my political party.
Elon has lost the libs and they’re not coming back to Tesla. I’m reading where the dealerships have resorted to putting the glut of triangle trucks in mall parking lots because they’re not selling.
Those dealers would be making several big assumptions that won’t necessarily work out their way. That would include whether those Swasticars remain insured, when dumped in private parking spaces a dealer doesn’t own or have rights to; and about being able to account for and/or write off those trucks at full cost.
I saw a pic of one wrapped in rainbow colors and towing a float in a Pride parade.
I can’t help but think the number of maggot voters that now think “We didn’t want our neighbors to be detained” is insignificant.
The other thing that occurs to me reading this is maybe off topic, but every time I read about the creation of detention camps I see this as becoming the solution to homelessness, which will likely increase exponentially as a result of economic policy.
There was a guy on xitter during the runup to the election, who was looking for a following, who espoused the belief that the housing crisis from 2008 with all the robosigning was basically a way to destroy the record of ownership so that it would be possible for an entity to take over anyone’s house & evict the rightful owners. He said that many state recorders of deeds had realized this was possible & had been trying to warn the public about this but no one would listen to them or give them a platform. I cannot remember his name but his argument seemed very esoteric having to do with the difficulty of title searches. Does anyone here have some understanding that could shed light on whether this is actually a possibility? Given that trump is a known realestate grifter it seems as if this would be within the realm of possibilty. Rayne I know this sounds like I’m fomenting a conspiracy but this is an honest question given Miller’s overweening need for detention camps & how much easier it becomes to lose your house. Also the robosigning was a problem that was never addressed by the government in its “forgiveness” to perpetrators & putting taxpayers on the hook for the bailout.
I read something similar. Apparently when they financialized mortages they put “ownership” into something called the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, which apparently has never tracked ownership of the house’s deed. So who owns the house’s mortgage according to MERS and who owns the house according to the deed can apparently be wildly different. My big takeaway from this was that when I bought a house I should make sure that I had the deed in hand and that nobody else had the paper. I don’t think it was a ‘conspiracy’ so much as an unexpected side-effect of the bankster’s method for tracking ownership of the financial paper.
I would not draw any conclusions from what I just wrote – this was a long piece I read 8-10 years ago and I may be remembering it incorrectly. However, researching the Mortgage Electronic Registration System will probably get you enough information to draw a valid conclusion.
Thank you so much Troutwaxer.
Yes, the severance of the title from the mortgage debt with the introduction of MERS has been a thing. There were fraudulent foreclosures in the middle of the foreclosure crisis based on this problem.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur had been extremely vocal about the problem; there had been at least one congressional hearing about it.
https://www.congress.gov/event/111th-congress/house-event/LC5316/text
https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=njlsp
https://web.archive.org/web/20150329020554/http://loanworkout.org/2008/06/the-mers-fifty-million-mortgage-meltdown/
I have no idea how this sorted out after 2010. I just know a lot of mortgagees, a substantive number of which were minorities, were fucked over.
A lot of the mortgage atrocities from MERS went through a FL court nicknamed the ‘rocket docket’ that rubber stamped foreclosures by lenders no one ever heard of. At least in Santa Clara County we still require recording at the assessor.
There were entities created by congress to aid homeowners in trouble & Merscorp, which is, oddly enough, now called ICE Mortgage Technology, has many links to these places. But with this administration who knows how long that info or those services will be in existence. We had dealings years ago with United Mortgage Wholesale, the largest mortgage generator in the country & they were very supportive of our need for a small payment amount. They sold our mortgage to another bank then that bank sold us to a different entity. Now, given our worsened financial situation, the new entity is informing us our home’s value has increased to a bit less than half a million dollars. All I can say to that is the value of the dollar must really be subpar. Another interesting aspect to this is that almost all major stockholders of ICE Mortgage are selling their shares. Writing on the wall?
OT, but there’s no open thread:
The Felon Guy’s latest piece of lunacy: he wants Biden’s use of autopen investigated, apparently with the intent of invalidating all his signatures. Neither its use since 1960 nor the ruling by SCCOTUS on its legality seem to have registered on anyone at the WH. (And if Biden’s usage is invalid, so is The Felon Guy’s.)
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-investigation-autopen-james-comer-ae7013baea1f3da5417d02a6e83811ec
It’s like a kid losing a baseball game. “You used a fielder’s mitt while you were playing first base, so you cheated!”
Hey Ken! Is it RICO yet?
More of the usual projection by Team Trump—their man is deep in the throes of cognitive decline.
They certainly must be well aware of it—hence the overblown distraction.
From the post above: “Never Trumper JV Last is unimpressed”. For those interested in more on this, JV Last and Sarah Longwell have a podcast at The Bulwark. “Deporting Someone They Know”.
(Adding.) As usual, “JVL” and Sarah try to clarify/justify their somewhat differing opinions. The listener’s comments can be helpful, too.
The Texas Tribune does stellar investigative reporting, sometimes in a partnership with ProPublica. They’ve a report posted on a group of people who rented a six bedroom house for a family gathering, adults and kids. They were woken at 5:00 AM by ICE setting off flashbangs.
For me, this raises a question of surveillance; how was the decision reached to raid this house on this day? Much of the pertinent paperwork is sealed.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/06/04/texas-immigration-raid-hays-county-austin-venezuelan-gang/
Yesterday ICE grabbed 15 people who appeared in court for a scheduled check-in. One was 3 YEARS OLD.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/bayarea/article/15-arrested-at-immigration-court-wednesday-20362244.php
Yes, immigration court has become a trap. Don’t show up, you’re out of compliance; do show up and you are detained.
From NYC Wednesday:
Guess it isn’t a conflict of interest for GeoGroup to run check-ins while profiting from immigrant detention?
https://www.thecity.nyc/2025/06/04/ice-immigration-enforcement-manhattan-roundup-geo-group/
Not with this maladministration.
A 3 year old.
I hope the officer kept his face covered to keep safe from the MS thirtren de Aragua human trafficking, drug dealing, gang leading three year olds invading our country.
“I dumped Trump on xitter” said Musk.
“Nuh uh, I dumped Musk on Truth Social” said Trump.
Well it is time to break out the Emptywheel popcorn bowl. It is getting very heated between Elon and Trump. Trump is dangling pulling all of Elon’s subsidies and contracts and Elon is threatening the Epstein files.
Pass the salt and pour me an Old Fashion.
Two reasonable intelligent men with no ego so I’m sure they’ll work things out.
Ok, you can laugh now.
As entertaining as this is (I can’t wait to see how Lincoln Project improves on Meidas Touch) let’s not forget the DOGE commissars are still burrowed inside the government. Elon’s not really going anywhere. Convict-1 / Krasnov / TACO may not be fully aware of what that means.
I wonder what Bannon or Hannity says.
Well I am not sure what has gotten into Bannon. Yesterday he was calling on raising taxes on the rich.
Maybe Trump told him he’ll have to make do with just two pens.
BTW, Lincoln Project just posted a picture of a commercial popcorn popping machine with the caption “Popcorn Shortage Concern”. hahahahaha
If Trump and Musk both survive the lirpa…