Today was a big day in New Jersey. It was the day that both Congresswoman LaMonica McIver and DOJ had to submit supplemental fillings in McIver’s case about whether the second of three charges against her fit entirely within her duties of oversight as a Congressperson.
It was also the day after Alina Habba finally gave up play-acting as US Attorney in the wake of the Third Circuit ruling that such play-acting was unlawful, something that sane-washing journalists inaccurately called a resignation.
Indeed, the most interesting thing about the government’s response was that it was signed by the guy, Phillip Lamparello, Pam Bondi installed to oversee criminal matters as part of her contemptuous refusal to permit a US Attorney be appointed in a legal manner (which may be why Todd Blanche remains on these filings, because this is still bullshit).
Otherwise, that motion complained that, “the Defendant had not included among her exhibits the video footage that most clearly depicted the events described in Count Two.” It argued that physical contact initiated by ICE was just a continuation of what happened outside the gate.
The Defendant’s actions as alleged in Count Two were simply the continuation of her actions in Count One, albeit with a different individual being subject to her ongoing efforts to interfere with the Mayor’s arrest.
And it argued that when ICE assaults members of Congress it still must be treated as an assault on ICE unprotected by Speech and Debate.
The Government respectfully asserts that any assault upon a federal officer should qualify as an act that is “clearly non-legislative” given that such an act is clearly an “illegitimate activity.” And it would be clearly non-legislative whether the arrest that triggered the assault took place outside the Security Gate or inside of Delaney Hall.
2. Exhibit X is a true and correct copy of a signal chat produced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a folder titled USA-000353, including participants from DHS and HSI. This exhibit will be filed under seal pursuant to a protective order signed by the parties and entered by the Court. See ECF No. 38.
3. Exhibit Y is a true and correct copy of a signal chat produced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a folder titled USA-000334, including participants from HSI. This exhibit will be filed under seal pursuant to a protective order signed by the parties and entered by the Court. See ECF No. 38.
Most of McIver’s filing conducts a second-by-second analysis of the video, showing that when she got back inside the gate she immediately headed towards the facility and not to where Mayor Baraka was being arrested without probable cause.
But a footnote describes one of the things in those Signal chats (another was notice that McIver and her colleagues said they were there to conduct oversight).
It wasn’t until November 26 — almost two weeks after Judge Jamel Semper ruled on McIver’s immunity bid — that DOJ turned over texts copying this video, observing that it looked bad.
5 The Spotlight News video came to light during the course of supplemental briefing only because it was referenced in a May 9, 2025, text message that the government finally turned over on November 26, 2025. HSI special agents exchanged the video in that May 9 conversation, where the agents also acknowledged that the evidence in the video was “bad.” Ex. Y at 2-3. The prosecution team therefore clearly knew about the text messages (and thus the video) when disclosures were due in July.
McIver’s lawyer, Paul Fishman, says he will address this delayed discovery in a follow-up letter.
Inexplicable delays in the government’s discovery productions mean that the record continues to be developed.1
1 Congresswoman McIver will detail these shortcomings in a forthcoming letter to the Court.
But the implication of this is clear.
DOJ was never going to turn over these discussions — conducted on Signal — until Judge Semper ordered this supplemental briefing. They were sitting on evidence that shows that before DHS first started calling McIver’s actions an assault on May 10 (McIver had to ask to have these Tweets taken down, but the timeline is in her motion to do so), they had shared video noting that their own actions looked bad.
Over and over this year, DHS has assaulted opponents of ICE and then charged them for it. And these Signal texts sure seem to support that they knowingly did the same thing with Congresswoman McIver.
And then buried it in a discovery violation.
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Back on October 8, I noted that of the eleven people DHS claimed had been arrested at a September 27 protest at the Broadview ICE facility in Chicago, a protest at which Greg Bovino had promised a “shitshow,” the cases of all but one had been dismissed.
Bovino, I noted, was batting just 9% on his claims that protestors had engaged in violence.
Well, yesterday, the case of Dana Briggs, a 70-year old Air Force veteran charged with assault when he fell as officers were pushing him back, was dismissed too. He had planned to call Bovino as a witness at his December trial. Bovino’s success rate at substantiating his claim there were any rioters from that day is now zero.
Briggs is not actually the most stunning dismissal from yesterday. The case against Marimar Martinez (and her co-defendant Anthony Ruiz) was also dismissed, just before a follow-up hearing on the things the CBP agent, Charles Exum, did and said before and after he shot her.
At a press hearing afterward, Martinez’ attorney Christopher Parente suggested they would still be seeking vindication for her, so hopefully we’ll still get to learn what DOJ dropped the case in hopes of suppressing.
The Magistrate Judge who dismissed Briggs case (who had also signed the arrest warrants for the five actual arrests on September 27), Gabriel Fuentes, wrote a long opinion about the collapse of the September 27 cases.
Examining more closely the five September 27 Broadview criminal arrest cases, all of which came before the undersigned magistrate judge, the Court notes the following facts:
1) The initial complaints charged four (Collins, Robledo, Ivery, and Briggs) of the foregoing five persons with felony violations of Section 111(a). Only the complaint against Mazur was filed as a misdemeanor.
2) With today’s dismissal of the Briggs criminal information, none of these cases remains pending today – all have been dismissed.
3) As the docket entries reflect in all five of the cases, the undersigned magistrate judge obtained a sworn statement from the affiants in each affidavit, at the time of complaint issuance, that not only were the affidavit allegations true, but that video evidence of the encounters existed, that the affiants had reviewed the video evidence, and that the video evidence corroborated the version of events set forth in the affidavits. Mazur (D.E. 11); Collins/Robledo (D.E. 26); Ivery (D.E. 13); and Briggs (D.E. 14).
[snip]
4) Each of the five persons arrested on September 27 from Broadview on Section 111 charges endured official detention (or other government restrictions on their liberty) after their arrests.
[snip]
Importantly, nothing in this order should be construed as scolding the government for dismissing in these cases. Dismissing appears to be the responsible thing for the government to have done, in light of the government’s judgment and discretion. But the Court cannot help but note just how unusual and possibly unprecedented it is for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in this district to charge so hastily that it either could not obtain the indictment in the grand jury or was forced to dismiss upon a conclusion that the case is not provable, in repeated cases of a similar nature. Federal arrest brings federal detention, even for a short time. It brings the need to obtain counsel, to appear at court hearings, to answer the charges (as Briggs did in this case, pleading not guilty), and to prepare for trial (as Briggs also has had to do in this case). Being charged with a federal felony, even if it is later reduced to a misdemeanor, is no walk in the park.
He also noted, repeatedly, that Briggs’ case was dismissed when he noticed his intent to call Bovino to testify.
Also yesterday, Judge Sara Ellis released her 233-page opinion in the Civil Rights case against the ICE/CBP invasion (my weekend reading, I guess), which catalogs the depredations done during that invasion, including her judgement that Bovino is a liar.
Turning to Bovino, the Court specifically finds his testimony not credible. Bovino appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing “cute” responses to Plaintiffs’ counsel’s questions or outright lying. When shown a video of agents hitting Rev. Black with pepper balls, Bovino denied seeing a projectile hit Rev. Black in the head. Doc. 191- 3 at 162:21–165:17; Doc. 22-44 (Ex. 44 at 0:10–12, available at https://spaces.hightail.com/space/ZzXNsei63k). In another video shown to Bovino, he obviously tackles Scott Blackburn, one of Plaintiffs’ declarants. Doc. 191-3 at 172:13–173:7; Doc. 22-45 (Ex. 45 at 0:19–30, available at https://spaces.hightail.com/space/ZzXNsei63k). But instead of admitting to using force against Blackburn, Bovino denied it and instead stated that force was used against him. Doc. 191-3 at 173:9–176:11, 179:11–181:5. Bovino also testified that, in Little Village on October 23, 2025, several individuals associated with the Latin Kings were found taking weapons out of the back of their car, and that they, as well as at least one individual on a rooftop and one person in the crowd of protesters, all wore maroon hoodies. Id. at 227:2– 228:21. He further testified that he believed the “maroon hoodies . . . would signify a potential assailant or street gang member that was making their way to the location that I was present” and that “there did begin to appear, in that crowd, maroon hoodies, both on top of buildings and in the crowd.” Doc. 237 at 18:22–19:10. But Bovino also admitted that he could not identify a street gang associated with the color maroon, id. at 19:11–13, although Hewson acknowledged that while Latin Kings members usually wear black, “they also can throw on maroon hoodies,” Doc. 255 at 264:17–20.10 Even were maroon hoodies to signify gang membership, the only evidence on footage from the relevant date of individuals dressed in maroon protesting in Little Village consists of a male wearing a maroonish jacket with an orange safety vest over it, Alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez wearing a maroon sweater with a suit jacket over it, a female in a maroon shirt, a female in a maroon sweatshirt, and a man with a maroon hoodie under a green shirt and vest. Axon_Body_4_Video_2025-10-23_1053_D01A38302 at 10:03–10:33; Axon_Body_4_Video_2025-10-23_1106_D01A32103 at 16:12–17:17. Bovino’s and Hewson’s explanations about individuals in maroon hoodies being associated with the Latin Kings and threats strains credulity.
Most tellingly, Bovino admitted in his deposition that he lied multiple times about the events that occurred in Little Village that prompted him to throw tear gas at protesters. As discussed further below, Bovino and DHS have represented that a rock hit Bovino in the helmet before he threw tear gas. See Doc. 190-1 at 1; Homeland Security (@DHSgov), X (Oct. 28, 2025 9:56 a.m.), https://x.com/dhsgov/status/1983186057798545573?s=46&t=4rUXTBt_W24muWR74DQ5A. Bovino was asked about this during his deposition, which took place over three days. On the first day, Bovino admitted that he was not hit with a rock until after he had deployed tear gas. Doc. 191-3 at 222:24–223:18. Bovino then offered a new justification for his use of chemical munitions, testifying that he only threw tear gas after he “had received a projectile, a rock,” which “almost hit” him. Doc. 191-3 at 222:24–223:18. Despite being presented with video evidence that did not show a rock thrown at him before he launched the first tear gas canister, Bovino nonetheless maintained his testimony throughout the first and second days of his deposition, id. at 225–27; Doc. 237 at 11–17. But on November 4, 2025, the final session of his deposition, Bovino admitted that he was again “mistaken” and that no rock was thrown at him before he deployed the first tear gas canister. Doc. 238 at 9:12–21 (“That white rock was . . . thrown at me, but that was after . . . I deployed less lethal means in chemical munitions.”); id. at 10:20–23 (Q. [Y]ou deployed the canisters, plural, before that black rock came along and you say hit you in the head, correct? A. Yes. Before the rock hit me in the head, yes.”).
This is what the complete collapse of credibility looks like.
It should have happened after Bovino got caught prevaricating on the stand in Brayan Ramos-Brito’s Los Angeles trial in September, another protestor charged with assault but ultimately exonerated.
But unless and until an Appeals Court disrupts Ellis’ finding (the Seventh Circuit has stayed her order with respect to remedy, not fact-finding), the word of Greg Bovino will be utterly useless in any court in the United States.
Greg Bovino and his violent goons have moved on, at least to Charlotte (where — as Chris Geidner laid out — Bovino doesn’t understand he’s the guy trying to kill Wilbur, not the clever spider who thwarts that effort), possibly already onto New Orleans.
But his reputation as a liar will now follow him wherever he goes.
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HuffPo had a story describing how Trump has hired 50,000 new people while firing a bunch more in the parts of government that make your lives better,
The U.S. government has hired 50,000 employees since President Donald Trump took office, his top personnel official said, with the new staff largely in national security positions reflecting the administration’s policy focus.
The bulk of the new hires, reported first by Reuters, work at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Scott Kupor, the federal government’s human resources director, in an interview on Thursday night.
The staff changes are part of Trump’s campaign to recast the government while sharply cutting other federal jobs.
“It’s about reshaping the workforce to focus on the priorities that we think are most important,” Kupor said.
The administration brought on the new employees while freezing hiring and laying off workers in other parts of the government, such as the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration expects to shed about 300,000 workers this year, Kupor said in August.
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast has yet another story about the continued shitshow of the effort to expand Kristi Noem’s goon squad, this time with the price tag associated with getting people to do such morally repugnant work.
DHS insiders said the money on offer has lured back former executive-level leaders from HSI and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)—with some of them taking home north of $250,000 for office-based shiftwork, per multiple sources who spoke to the Beast.
According to those familiar with the packages, the most senior HSI rehires return as GS-13s on the federal pay scale. With locality pay in high-cost areas—such as parts of Texas, California, and New York—adding 35 percent or more to a basic salary, agents can earn up to $137,000 in the majority of the country. This rises to $171,268 in more expensive parts of the country, such as San Jose and San Francisco.
Law Enforcement Availability Pay (LEAP) adds a further 25 percent for being available for substantial unscheduled duty beyond 40 hours. Add in ongoing federal pensions worth around $8,000–$9,000 a month, and some rehires can land well in excess of a quarter of a million annually, sources said.
But it still retains support of a big chunk of the population, probably because Trump officials routinely blame their own failures to address American problems on migrants, when as often as not, Trump’s response to immigration is the source of the problem.
America can’t have nice things, like cures for cancer and welcoming public schools, because Republicans in Congress took the money used to pay for those things and gave it to Stephen Miller to use to invade America’s neighborhoods.
We need to start making that more obvious.
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https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Ingraham-Shift.jpg13012000emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-11-18 13:13:132025-11-18 13:13:13The United States Can’t Afford the Opportunity Cost of Stephen Miller’s Bigotry
There have been a slew of articles in recent days about how DHS and DOJ are neglecting important concerns to instead chase Stephen Miller’s racist fever dreams.
NYT has a long piece summarizing the stories we’ve heard piecemeal of 60 DOJ lawyers who’ve left. MS-NOW reveals that an FBI SWAT team is babysitting Kash’s girlfriend.
And NYT has a story that incorporates FOIAed data with interviews about what DHS investigators aren’t doing because they are instead chasing migrants.
Homeland security agents investigating sexual crimes against children, for instance, have been redeployed to the immigrant crackdown for weeks at a time, hampering their pursuit of child predators.
A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear.
And federal efforts to combat human smuggling and sex trafficking have languished with investigators reassigned to help staff deportation efforts.
[snip]
Homeland security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years, according to a Times analysis of data obtained through the F.O.I.A. lawsuit.
“It’s heartbreaking,” said Hany Farid, a computer scientist who helped create software used by law enforcement and technology companies to detect child sexual abuse material. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children.”
It includes a story of a child who got lost as agents were pulled off to chase immigrants.
Earlier this year, special agents at Homeland Security Investigations found online videos showing violent sexual abuse of an unidentified young child.
Trained to hunt down pedophiles who use the internet to distribute illegal imagery, the H.S.I. agents spent weeks analyzing the footage to try to identify the child and infiltrate the online networks that had shared and may have directed the abuse, according to a person with knowledge of the investigation.
But the agents working the case have since been asked to go out in the field and help arrest undocumented immigrants. The reassignment has hindered progress toward identifying and rescuing the child, said this person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive investigation. The person said that the agents, no longer able to spend as much time undercover online, had lost contact with a key source they had cultivated over years in the online world of abusers.
But the story that really brings the misplaced priority home for me is this criminal complaint, noted in the latest CourtWatch, charging an American citizen with assault “involving physical contact” for spitting at — and filming — a Supervisory Border Patrol Agent in the parking lot of an Anaheim Home Depot on November 6.
When I first saw the picture accusing Robert Cortez of being the one guy out of 15 protesting Border Patrol in that parking lot of being the guy who spat at “JA” (as the alleged spitee is called), somehow managing to first “hit his right arm and [then] splash onto his face,” on what appears to be his left side, I couldn’t see the spit in the picture in the affidavit at all.
I see it there, now, on the strap of his helmet.
It’s the affiant’s day job — hunting child exploitation — that gets me.
3. I have been employed as a Special Agent (“SA”) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations (“HSI”) since 2023, and I am currently assigned to the Child Exploitation Investigations Group in Orange County. Prior to my employment as a Special Agent, I was employed as a Border Patrol Agent with USBP from 2018-2021. My responsibilities as a Special Agent include investigating crimes involving the sexual exploitation of minors, including, but not limited to, offenses involving travel in foreign commerce to engage in sexually explicit conduct with minors, and offenses involving the production, possession, distribution, and transportation of child pornography.
This guy’s day job is hunting down assholes who rape children.
Instead of doing that, he is avenging poor JS, who might feel shame for being filmed — and spat on — while snatching workers from a Home Depot parking lot.
And now DOJ is going to spend time and money to try to cage this guy for trying to shame those snatching his neighbors.
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The high profile politicized prosecutions — of Jim Comey, Tish James, and John Bolton (and of LaMonica McIver if the press weren’t broken) — are really important tests of Trump’s attempt to turn DOJ into a weapon.
But the relatively anonymous cases — as often as not, defended by Federal Public Defenders — are just important a vindication of rule of law.
Today’s important victory goes to Ashleigh Brown. She was charged in conjunction with a confrontation with Federal Protective Services (not, NOT ICE or CBP) outside Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on August 2.
c. Approximately three [Federal Protective Services] Officers, including FPS Officer Z.C., walked out to remove REDONDO-ROSALES from the path of the government car. As the group of FPS officers approached REDONDO-ROSALES, he moved backwards away from the FPS officers in an apparent attempt to avoid being apprehended. Then, FPS Officer Z.C. approached REDONDO-ROSALES in an effort to detain him, and REDONDO-ROSALES intentionally struck Officer Z.C. in the face with his left hand (at the time, REDONDO-ROSALES had a tan, wide-brimmed hat in his left hand).
d. After FPS officers were able to detain REDONDORO-SALES, Officer Z.C. and approximately four other FPS officers began to escort REDONDO-ROSALES towards the Alameda Street Entrance.
e. As Officer Z.C. walked a few feet in front of the two FPS officers who were escorting REDONDO-ROSALES toward the Alameda Street Entrance, BROWN approached Officer Z.C. and stepped into Officer Z.C.’s path. Officer Z.C. continued past BROWN toward the Alameda Street Entrance, but as he did so, BROWN intentionally hit Officer Z.C. in his left side with her right arm.
The felony charge against Brown was reportedly no-billed by a jury. For whatever reason, Bill Essayli charged her with misdemeanor interference instead, only to succeed in getting her detained after she allegedly violated bail by following an ICE officer home, for which she and two others were charged with conspiracy to dox him.
Though in Brown’s response to a 404(b) notice attempting to present the doxing case to the “assault” jury, her lawyers claimed that, “R.H. got into his personal vehicle and drove to where Ms. Brown was parked. He stopped his vehicle in the driveway, blocking Ms. Brown’s vehicle from leaving.” That is, even on the case that did get indicted, the cop in question arguably instigated the confrontation.
There were a number of things that would have been interesting if this had gone to trial, including Brown’s sealed filings about why she had a claim of self defense, as well as her success, after submitting them, in getting an order to share DHS’ Use of Force guidelines.
But things got interesting today when Brown submitted a motion to disqualify the victim in this case, ZC, from testifying based on DOJ’s failure to tell the defense that he had a (misdemeanor) criminal record, most notably a conviction in a harassment involving physical contact charge just four years ago.
C. Defense Discovers Z.C.’s Criminal History
On October 23, 2025, while preparing for trial in this matter, defense counsel learned that Z.C. has criminal history that includes at least:
Harassment – subjecting a person to physical contact, in violation of Pennsylvania Statute § 18.2709(a)(1), convicted on June 17, 2021;
Disorderly conduct, in violation of Florida Statute § 509.143, arrested on August 31, 2014; and
Driving under the influence, in violation of Florida Statute § 316193(1), convicted on November 4, 2013.
Exhibits H, I, filed under seal.
These records were obtained through independent defense investigation. Of note, the defense does not have access to law enforcement databases and thus cannot confirm whether this is Z.C.’s complete criminal history or whether there is additional relevant information about these or any other arrests or convictions.
D. Defense Contacts the USAO With Its Findings. The USAO States It Was Not Aware of Z.C.’s Assault History.
On October 26, 2025, after further research and internal discussion, defense counsel contacted government counsel regarding its findings. Government counsel requested a few hours to investigate and respond. Later that evening, the parties conferred by telephone. Government counsel indicated that it was not previously aware of Z.C.’s 2021 conviction for assault. The government had asked Z.C. about his prior convictions in interviews. The government was only aware of Z.C.’s 2014 arrest for disorderly conduct and his 2013 conviction for driving under the influence. In addition, government counsel stated that it had not conducted an independent Henthorn review of Z.C., but had relied on the word and responsiveness of another agency (FPS) to conduct a Henthorn review of Z.C.’s personnel file.
The judge in the case, Obama appointee Fernando Olguin, was not only interested in learning more about DOJ’s failure to disclose this detail, but also who, if anyone, knew about ZC’s criminal history, and if so, why they didn’t disclose it.
Having reviewed and considered all the briefing filed with respect to defendant’s Motion to Compel Production of Complete Personnel Files and Motion in Limine to Exclude Testimony of Z.C., (Dkt. 83, “Motion”), the court concludes that it would benefit from full briefing on the issues presented in the Motion. Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED THAT:
1. The government shall file its papers in opposition to the Motion by no later than Tuesday, October 28, 2025 at 5:00 p.m.
2. Together with its opposition, the government must submit a declaration signed by counsel for the government that sets forth the names and titles of the individuals who conducted the Henthorn and/or Brady reviews of the relevant personnel file materials, and the dates on which such reviews were conducted. Counsel for the government is cautioned that failure to provide such a declaration may lead to the imposition of sanctions, including but not limited to the exclusion of evidence and/or witnesses.
Normally, when DOJ has decided they have to abandon false assault charges, they attempt to dismiss without prejudice.
Not so here. They’re filing to dismiss with prejudice.
The United States moves to dismiss its information with prejudice against defendant in the interests of justice under Federal Criminal Rule 48(a), and therefore respectfully requests that the Court grant its motion. Defendant does not oppose dismissal and the parties agree all pending motions should be denied as moot.
Brown’s legal troubles are not done. The doxing case is a felony, and as a conspiracy case, DOJ has broader leeway for introducing evidence against Brown. She remains detained (based on her prior violation of bail) in that case.
But DOJ has been attempting to link these two cases, presumably as a way to salvage the initial assault case.
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I start what is sure to be a kaleidoscopic (or some might call disorganized) reflection on the undercurrents of power as Trump attempts to build a new America based on illusion by reminding that the first assault was on USAID. USAID was targeted, among other reasons, because it supported the kind of pro-democracy NGOs that have haunted Viktor Orbán for years, and also because the realities of aid in the field look funny to those pickled in the provincialism of culture war.
But it’s a useful reminder, because the destruction of USAID was both the first great strike against Congress’ power of the purse (because Marco Rubio was refusing to spend on programs Congress had appropriated, including programs with bipartisan support, like PEPFAR), and also the consensual destruction of a great deal of soft power the United States built up going back to the Cold War. Then, during the Cold War, USAID was recognized as a low-cost way to contest another great power and, along the way, to do something good and maybe even create a few new reliable markets for farmers in the heartland. Now, it had become a symbol of a past hegemony that conspiracy theorists, starting with the richest man in the world, had made suspect.
This reflection will focus on how Stephen Miller’s two-faced war on America’s immigrant diversity and Latin America exists in tension with Trump’s attempt to subjugate both the Democrats and China. I’m attempting to capture these intertwined threads to get to a point I’ve raised before. We know what the decline from democracy to authoritarianism looks like. Trump is overtly following Orbán’s path to competitive authoritarianism. But far too few have considered what it means that Trump is pursuing that model while committing hegemonic suicide.
The willful destruction of USAID laid an important foundation for two “negotiations” that are bedeviling Trump’s effort to consolidate power: the trade war Trump picked with China, and a funding fight with Democrats over whether Congress will be Congress anymore.
Art of the Deal guy is conducting a bunch of “negotiations” right now. Many of them involve levying threats, whether threatening to withdraw government funding, launching frivolous lawsuits, imposing draconian tariffs, or even charging people with fabricated crimes, and in response, extorting bribes, like the free work some white shoe law firms decided to give away or payment for the ballroom that will scar the edifice where the East Wing used to be. For most negotiating partners, such threats leave two choices: suing in an attempt to deem the entire extortion attempt unlawful, or attempting to minimize the extracted tribute through flattery.
But for China and the Democrats it is different. The government of China doesn’t do flattery — not of foreigners, anyway. Plus, China has been preparing for this moment since the last time Trump tried it, in his first term, in part by increasing its own capacity, in part by replacing American suppliers with countries China has been wooing with soft power for years.
And while Democrats have been suing and suing and suing, Trump’s ultimate goal for the minority — whose party currently leads most of the net donor states in the US — is nothing less than subjugation. Trump was happier to negotiate with Hamas than negotiate with Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. Trump intends to make them, all Democrats, give him the adulation they refuse him.
And so Trump’s negotiating “tactics” for both are similar: a serial ratcheting up of demands, based on the belief that the desired end — subjugation — is the means to win the negotiation. In both cases, this obstinance has instead created vulnerabilities. By pushing China to impose an export control regime not dissimilar to those the US uses, Trump gave China leverage over the Rest of World countries with which China will continue to trade even as Trump shrivels inside his manufactured walls, the countries Trump once wished to peel off from China.
But when Trump decided that he had to pay military servicemembers, he directly violated congressional statute. It is “by far the most illegal budgetary action he’s taken as POTUS, potentially setting the stage to break everything,” writes Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress. “The mechanism through which Trump is paying the troops is the most blatant large Antideficiency Act (ADA) violation in US history.”
Trump is taking money from an account specifically earmarked for research, development, testing, and evaluation, and spending it on military pay, which is forbidden by both the Constitution and law (the Antideficiency Act carries a jail sentence of up to two years), and something administration officials publicly promised Congress they would not do. Dave Jamieson reports at HuffPost that Trump is planning a similar process to keep paying ICE and CBP law enforcement.
Even in three votes on paying essential workers, Democrats refused to budge for a bill that ceded any more power to Vought (the end vote was the same as cloture for the continuing resolution has been, but two different Democrats — Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock — voting with Republicans instead of Catherine Cortez Masto and Angus King).
Vought becomes a greater liability as he gleefully cuts things cherished by Republicans, too, like the promise of an easier commute into NYC.
Having failed thus far, Trump is going to withhold emergency funding for SNAP starting this week. Either he believes that Democrats have empathy (or courage) that Republicans don’t, or he forgets that poor people across the country rely on government aid. But he believes that starving families will force Democrats to bow.
Donald Trump is destroying not just the village but broad swaths of the country in his bid to humiliate his two adversaries. He is seeking capitulation to his person rather than any benefits for the United States.
Trump has reverted to Cold War means, launching a larger covert war based on dubious legal claims, what his buddies call the “Donroe Doctrine,” a name as stupid as the concept.
Mr. Trump’s new directive appears to envision a different approach, focused on U.S. forces directly capturing or killing people involved in the drug trade.
Labeling the cartels as terrorist groups allows the United States “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups if we have an opportunity to do it,” Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser, said on Thursday in an interview with the Catholic news outlet EWTN. “We have to start treating them as armed terrorist organizations, not simply drug dealing organizations.”
The use of Special Forces against alleged drug cartels in other countries rests on the same kind of legal chicanery and nested fabrications that went into Stephen Miller’s unlawful deportation of mostly innocent Venezuelans to Bukele’s concentration camp. And even though the B-1 bombers flying off the coast of Venezuela were readily tracked on commercial apps, Trump explicitly denied them. They’re not hiding, though, that they’re sending the ships that have for decades projected power in the Middle East to take out a two-bit dictator in Venezuela.
But that’s not the only bullshit Trump is selling. For example, Trump’s latest cartel designation — of Cartel de los Soles — is of a cartel that (unlike TdA) may not even exist.
While some of US President Donald Trump’s right-wing led allies in South America — Argentina, Ecuador and Paraguay — have echoed his designation of “Soles” as a terrorist organization, many have doubts such a group even exists.
Venezuela itself, and neighbor Colombia, insist there is no such thing as “Cartel de los Soles.”
Some experts agree, saying there is no evidence of the existence of an organized group with a defined hierarchy that goes by that name.
[snip]
“There is no such thing, so Maduro can hardly be its boss,” Phil Gunson, an analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, told AFP of the so-called “Cartel de los Soles.”
[snip]
According to the InSight Crime think tank, the name was ironically coined by Venezuelan media in 1993 after two generals were nabbed for drug trafficking. The sun is a symbol on the military uniform epaulettes of generals in the South American country.
“Rather than a hierarchical organization with Maduro directing drug trafficking strategies, the Cartel of the Suns is more accurately described as a system of corruption wherein military and political officials profit by working with drug traffickers,” InSight Crime said on its website.
Yet that is the sketchy basis on which Stephen Miller has authorized the murder of one after another boat full of unidentified, first in the Caribbean and now in the Pacific.
The Administration’s thinking — starting from Stephen Miller’s goal of using dead Latinos as a propaganda stunt– is insanely childish.
Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where Defense Department planners hope to reassert American primacy. Finally, there’s Trump himself, who wants to score a foreign-policy victory amid frustrations over his inability to end the war in Ukraine. One close ally of the president’s told us that he was also drawn to the chance to take decisive action, as he did with June’s Iran bombings. “He can give the order and watch it explode. It’s clear-cut and simple, and no American gets hurt,” that ally told us.
This is not the Dulles brothers playing chess. It’s a bunch of insecure boys overturning the checkers board because the rules assign the same number of pieces to both sides. But they’re toppling the board while wielding very big weapons and sketchy — or no — targeting data.
Such buffoonery extends to Miller’s war on Blue cities. For all the untold human damage it has and is causing, it nevertheless continues to shine in its Butt Cracks and Beer Belly squalor, including in its training dropouts who can’t pass an open book test on the Fourth Amendment.
Like the invasion of Latin America, it feigns root in intelligence, as viewed by the invasion of an entire apartment building on Chicago’s South Shore Drive predicated on the alleged presence of one or at most two Tren de Aragua members, looking just like an apartment invasion John Yoo dreamt up 24 years ago.
[I]n execution, a number of aspects of the raid looks just like what the raid Yoo envisioned two decades ago.
The raid took place in the middle of the night; a warranted search would mandate permissible hours — usually after dawn — when the search could be conducted.
The entire raid was predicated on the presence of (initially) two and in retrospect just a single Tren de Aragua member. But virtually every one was detained while law enforcement searched for active warrants, and 37 people were arrested. With the exception of a few apartments, the entire building was searched, and left in a mess.
[snip]
In other words, this raid looks just like what we would expect if Stephen Miller were applying already-dodgy John Yoo opinions targeting terrorists who really did launch a military style attack on the US, and applied it, instead, against a gang that Miller has lied persistently to turn into something greater than it is.
But mostly, like the make-believe cartel just added to the terrorist list, the predicate for invading Blue cities remains make-believe.
Stephen Miller’s justifications for invading Blue cities is no more based in reality than the latest cartel he invaded on which to hang murderboats and Special Operations invasions.
Miller has fed Trump manufactured propaganda about Oregon. And those on the ground have manufactured false claims. Or, in Oregon, the state informed the Ninth Circuit that a key claim a panel used to overturn Trump appointee Karin Immergut’s injunction on Guard deployment — that much of the Federal Protective Services had had to deploy to Portland, was false: “defendants admitted that 115 FPS officers have never been redeployed to Portland.”
Or in Chicago, the explanation that Greg Bovino contemptuously violated a retraining more with claims of “commercial artillery shell fireworks.” “The statement is a lie,” lawyers for Illinois stated plainly about the claimed use of commercial artillery shell fireworks.
It’s still very much in question whether appellate courts and SCOTUS will permit Trump to invade Blue cities based entirely on propaganda, as Susan Graber asked in her dissent to her colleagues’ decision to allow Trump to invade Oregon (a dissent that noted the vagueness of the now-debunked FPS claim).
We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth. By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda. I urge my colleagues on this court to act swiftly to vacate the majority’s order before the illegal deployment of troops under false pretenses can occur. Above all, I ask those who are watching this case unfold to retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.
Steve Vladeck lays out the play of all three Blue states — California, Oregon, and Illinois — challenging Trump’s invasion. Joyce Vance has a great update on the Ninth. And Chris Geidner catalogs all the innocent Americans whose rights are being trampled along the way, with three attempts to get Justice Kavanaugh to answer for the Kavanaugh stops he blessed.
Trump is engaging in a kind of magical realism in both Latin America and the United States, inventing the most transparent, outlandish bullshit to justify military invasions by incompetent dolts of both other countries and Blue states.
And for all his dickwagging about power, both of those campaigns make the United States far weaker.
But all that’s happening against the background of Trump’s intransigence — his demand that, while he conducts these invasions, both China and the Democrats (and more recently, Canada) simply bow before him.
This is one reason I’m especially fascinated by Trump’s treatment of Argentina, an attempt to support their peso long enough to stave off a debacle for Javier Milei in this weekend’s legislative elections. That part succeeded: Milei’s party won more than enough seats to sustain his veto power.
President Javier Milei scored a decisive political win Sunday, strengthening his position in Argentina’s Congress and securing a lifeline for his audacious free-market revolution backed by President Trump.
With nearly 92% of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41% of the national vote, putting it on track to more than double its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies should secure at least one-third of the seats in both chambers—the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.
The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction.
But at what expense?
The only conceivable way to spin this bailout as a benefit for the US — other than for Scott Bessent’s hedge fund buddies and a right wing populist, like Trump, tainted by corruption problems — is to imagine that this bailout, the cost of which soon may rise to $40 billion, helps shore up US allies on a continent increasingly cultivated by China.
That is, in the same year Trump willfully destroyed USAID (yearly budget, $30 billion for the entire world), the best explanation for spending up to $40 billion bailing out a failed economic ideology is that same purpose: soft power.
For just one country.
In a nice touch, the folks in Treasury who’ve implemented Bessent’s bailout of his hedgie buddies have been instructed not to take and disseminate pictures of the wreck Trump has made of the East Wing.
“As construction proceeds on the White House grounds, employees should refrain from taking and sharing photographs of the grounds, to include the East Wing, without prior approval from the Office of Public Affairs,” a Treasury official wrote on Monday evening in an email to department employees viewed by The Wall Street Journal.
A Treasury Department spokesman said the email was sent to employees because photos could “potentially reveal sensitive items, including security features or confidential structural details.”
But the tone deaf bailout wasn’t enough. Nor was Argentina’s poaching of US soybean markets in China, the final death blow for the US soybean market this year. But in the last week, Trump has signaled he will turn to Argentine beef imports in an attempt to bring sky-high beef prices down.
In an interview with Fox Business on Thursday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said: “Currently, Americans consume 12 million metric tons of beef. 10 million, we produce in this country. 2 million, we import. Out of 12 million, [the Argentine quota] would be 20,000 every quarter. This is not a massive influx in the millions of tons I think that some have thought of beef from Argentina.”
But Christian Lovell, an Illinois cattle farmer and the senior director of programs at Farm Action, a nonpartisan farm organization, said: “If Trump goes through with what he outlined, I do believe it’s a betrayal of the American rancher. It’s a feeling that you’re selling us out to a foreign competitor.”
On Wednesday, Trump reacted to the backlash from cattle ranchers.
“The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,” Trump wrote on social media.
“It would be nice if they would understand that, but they also have to get their prices down, because the consumer is a very big factor in my thinking, also!” he added.
In a statement, Colin Woodall, CEO of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a trade association for beef producers, said the organization and its members “cannot stand behind the President while he undercuts the future of family farmers and ranchers by importing Argentinian beef in an attempt to influence prices.”
Trump got what he wanted in Argentina, propping up his chainsaw puppet for the next little while.
But in doing so, he made the US far weaker, making China’s leverage over the US even greater.
Trump’s attempts to extend his power by force — to replace American hegemony with personalized coercion — are and will continue to backfire, diluting the power of that coercion.
No one knows what happens after that.
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National Guard in DC fighting crime, drugs, and terrorism
Watching the members of the National Guard being deployed in DC has been . . . painful. I’m not talking about the assault on democracy, as bad as that is, but the toll this deployment must be taking on the members of the Guard themselves. As a pastor, I’ve had countless members of the National Guard in my congregations. They’re the modern version of the Minutemen, practicing on the weekends every so often, ready to go at a moment’s notice when the need arises. And when the need passes, they go home.
Now imagine that you are one of these members of the Guard who has been deployed in DC, and you’re about to head back home. Then imagine the conversation you’re going to have with your kid . . .
Kid: Dad, what happened on your deployment?
Dad (looking down at hisfeet): Oh, you know. We went and did our thing, then came home.
Kid: How many terrorists did you shoot?
Dad: It wasn’t that kind of mission.
Kid: Did you blow up somebody’s headquarters?
Dad: Uh, no.
Kid: Then what *did* you do? Is it so secret you can’t tell me? long pause
Dad (leaning in really close, and whispering): If I tell you, you can’t tell anyone. Promise?
Kid (excited): Promise!
Dad (dramatically looking left and right, to see who might belistening): We picked up . . . trash. long pause as the Kid looks at Dad
Kid (grinning): Ok, you got me. Seriously, what did you do?
Dad: I’m serious. We. Picked. Up. Trash.
Kid (grin fades to afrown): Trash? Like you put on a day-glo orange vest over your camo uniforms and scooped up water bottles and french fry cups?
Dad: Yeah. And remember, you promised not to tell anyone about this.
Kid: Don’t worry – no one would believe me. And if they did, they’d all laugh at me all day long if they found out. Your secret is safe with me.
Seriously. This makes Alice’s Restaurant and its Group W bench look like nothing. “Son, are you manly enough and lethal enough to pick up trash?”
Trump did this for the symbolism. He did it to make it look as if he is Strong On . . . something. Whatever it is, he’s Strong, and calling out the National Guard is how he shows it. “Look at me, and how Important and Powerful I am. I, only I, the Greatest President in history, can do this!”
In response, there are all kinds of very serious, very appropriate ways to fight back against this. Mayors and governors are filing lawsuits, and working hard to keep this from happening again. Good. Do it, again and again and again. Pundits are punditing, and historians are describing how unprecedented this all it. Fine. These are necessary parts of a response, but they are not a sufficient response. No, the fullness of a response needs to take Trump on on the battlefield of symbolism, turning his desire to project power into a punch line.
As I’ve pondered this, it suddenly hit me. My friends, it is time to call out the National Gourd. I’m talking pumpkins.
Imagine the fence around the White House suddenly surrounded by the National Gourd, as the tourists deposit their pumpkins on the sidewalks around Trump’s doorstep.
Imagine the National Gourd appearing along the mansions of Embassy Row.
Imagine the National Gourd filling Lafayette Square, just north of the White House.
Imagine the National Gourd appearing at Blair House, at the US Naval Observatory (home to JD Vance), and on the steps of SCOTUS.
Imagine the National Gourd appearing at the DC Armory, home to the DC National Guard.
Imagine the National Gourd appearing all over DC. Imagine DC businesses putting a member of the National Gourd at their doors and in their windows. Imagine Metro Stations with their own National Gourd presence. Imagine the National Gourd lining The Wall at the Vietnam Memorial. Imagine the National Gourd sitting at the feet of every soldier in the Korean War Memorial. Imagine the National Gourd alongside every figure in the FDR Memorial. Imagine the National Gourd appearing at Dulles Airport and at DC (aka Reagan) National Airport. Imagine the National Gourd appearing at Langley, the Pentagon, and the FBI headquarters.
Imagine the National Gourd showing up at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, Trump Tower in New York, and Trump’s Bedminster golf course in New Jersey.
And then imagine the National Gourd showing up at the Great Lakes Naval Station outside of Chicago, to greet the folks Trump is apparently going to send there.
Imagine the National Gourd appearing at federal buildings and offices around the country. Agricultural extension offices, military recruiting centers, federal courthouses, and post offices. Navy bases and Air Force bases and Army bases and Marine bases. National park entrances and IRS buildings and ICE offices. Imagine a member of the National Gourd showing up at every federal facility in the country.
Call out the National Gourd, and make Trump weep.
This past week, a certain coffee chain released their annual chemical pumpkin-based weapon: the pumpkin spice latte. All around the country, pumpkin-based artillery units are holding their annual “Punkin Chunkin” events (see here or here or here or here for examples), where trebuchets, catapults, and other devices launch pumpkins enormous distances (unless the pumpkin explodes in mid-air, known as “pumpkin pie”). [If you want to see more, google “punkin chunkin”] The world championships used to be broadcast on various television stations, but perhaps the powers that be realized that they were disclosing military secrets and the broadcasts have ceased in recent years. Even so, these are the regular training events for the National Gourd.
And then there’s the Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival.
In six weeks, the little town of Half Moon Bay, California, population 11,795, will be transformed from a sleepy little coastal village to become the epicenter of Pumpkinism as around 200,000 folks come to town for their annual Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival.
200,000 people line the streets for a grand parade, and it is the pumpkin equivalent of the USSR’s May Day parades in Red Square, where missiles and tanks were paraded before the Soviet Politburo. In Half Moon Bay, the highlight of the parade is the Mother of All Pumpkins, as growers from all over bring their best to Half Moon Bay, hoping to be crowned the biggest and the best. We’re talking pumpkins in excess of 1000 pounds. When I lived in the Bay Area, the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival was an annual pilgrimage.
This is the parade that Trump wanted for his birthday, and never got.
We are approaching peak pumpkin season, and along with all the serious lawsuits and punditry, maybe the National Gourd can help take Trump’s ego down a notch or two. In a publicity contest between the National Guard and the National Gourd, I’ll bet on the Gourd every day and twice on Sundays. Especially in September and October.
Oh, and while we’re chatting . . .
Like many such events, the Half Moon Bay Art and Pumpkin Festival did not happen during COVID. Even so, the festival made their usual contributions to a bunch of local organizations, as if the festival had continued as usual. While this kept those groups afloat, it hurt the finances of the festival hard. Last April, local media reported that their own sustainability was in jeopardy. This is an amazing local festival, and if you are so inclined, you can help them out here.
Seriously. This is an incredible event, and they can use all the help they can get.
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I have a fond memory of dropping my barely school-aged child off with a friend for babysitting. My friend, Simone, took my daughter’s hand and said “You’re going to learn the right way to misuse a roman candle!” I held up my hands, and shouted “ten!” to indicate how many fingers I wanted my child to have when I picked her up. Simone waved me away while she whisked my child off to learn about using small explosives in creative ways.
My child grew up in a community of lovable dorks, weirdos, hackers, and burners. I grew up in the kind of family were we shot beer cans off fences. We did unwise things with cars that got rebuilt in a driveway, which no shock absorber in the universe could hope to cushion. We were very much a ‘hold my beer’ family, and we had the scars to prove it. But more important, we had the stories.
These stories are part of being American; they can even sometimes rise above the violent cut lines of our fractured society. Black, white, native, Afghan, Chinese, whatever, we all bring our stories, we tell them loudly and lovingly to each other, across generations, neighborhoods, and communities. Sometimes we tell them laughing, crying, or both.
Americans love a good story so much we will go out and make them, even if it costs a fingertip, or a bit of foot. It absolutely gets out of hand. We regret it sometimes. You can’t always stop before you’ve gone a bit too far. This is also why so many great American stories are about apologizing.
“Hold my beer” is what you say to your cousin on the raft right before you try shooting the fish that haven’t been taking the bait. It’s what you say right before you try to grab an alligator by the snout, because you saw someone do it on YouTube. It’s what comes right before you cliff jump into a pond, get on an improvised zip line, or try cocaine for the first time.
You can call us stupid, because we definitely are. But nobody denied that Americans were fun. When an American says hold my beer, someone inevitably reaches over to take it, and steps back to observe the mayhem from a safe(r) distance. We may end up with scars, but we’ll get a story to go with them.
But that fun, that’s getting complicated in these, the waning days of the American spirit.
In the last few decades the very American desire to have some fun ran smack-dab into the carceral state, the cost of healthcare, and now, the rise of fascism. It has been all part of a long slow slide into not at all fun things. It’s continuously squeezing the whimsy out of being American. It is starting to hurt, really hurt, and not in a way that’s fun to tell people about later.
Americans were always known to be a little stupid about the rest of the world, but mostly that’s because the world is so far away. It’s a very big country with two very distant borders for most of the people. I now live on a continent where I have gone on a hike and accidentally crossed an international border. The frame of reference is different enough that it’s hard for Americans to understand the lives of others, but equally it’s hard for others to understand the lives of Americans.
There’s not much to tell us when we’re moving the wrong way, we struggle with out a larger frame of reference. Americans can’t imagine a healthcare system that just works, and almost no one else can imagine one that works as terribly as ours does.
I’ve traveled all over this lovely little blue marble, and when I tell people I’m American, they so often say the same thing: We hate the American government. But the Americans themselves? Americans are OK. Some Americans are great, one is even Snoop Dogg! (Everyone loves Snoop.)
When I assure them that I also hate the American government, and I’ve had to deal with it a lot more than they have, we all high five and go get drinks together.
50s style Florida man shows us how it’s done, whatever it is.
Whatever people have thought about the USA, Americans were always considered fun, even when we were still kind of English. We’ve been the good time people since before we were a country. Our reputation for partying was global before globalization.
In the 17th to 19th centuries, whaling ships that sailed out of Boston and other east coast ports would head out for years at a time, running around the world doing what we didn’t know at the time was a very bad deed – killing and harvesting whales. When American ships would pull up to cities anywhere around the world for some shore leave, it was Party Time. We bought the drinks, danced, sang, got in fights, and demanded mainly that everyone have a a good time, often on our shilling, or dollar, or whatever.
In writer and museum educator SJ Costello’s description, “The business of whaleships was welcome in such ports because the economies became so linked to their presence, but the whalers themselves could cause havoc in the few days they occupied the land. This was largely due to the dynamics of the crew and the lifestyle aboard: a bunch of young 18, 19, 20-something year-old men are let loose for a few days liberty after months on an often heavily-disciplined ship. Many of them have the twin goals of get drunk, have sex.”
We were memorable visitors.
The Americans would buy a few rounds, and come up with terrible ideas. The sailors of the whaling ships were the good time guys of the 17th to 19th century, and that set a lot of the tone for how people saw America and Americans in the early days of the nation. Partying sailors never impressed the good and great of any nation, but rarely did anyone turn down an American good time. And we never stopped being hold-my-beer crazy.
We eventually stopped whaling, but we didn’t stop the fun. We moved our fun into many things, but maybe most importantly, media and technology.
From the 20th to the 21st century, we made radio big, then TV, and finally Marvel movies. We even accidentally the memes when we made a whole internet. We’re not always the world’s favorite people, but that’s true for us, too. We’ve even made plenty of self-critical media. Take the Fallout franchise — it’s a classic example of the fact that even when we go hard on ourselves, were truly self-critical, we were still fun.
We’ve never really lost our reputation of bringing a good time. We’re adventurous and unguarded. We’re stupid and oblivious. Even when we’re trying to be guarded and sneaky, we just don’t manage it the way a Russian or a Chilean can. Eventually we just say something loud, weird, or funny, and blow our cover. We are the world’s goofy motherfuckers.
But this is changing now. And if we’re honest, it’s been changing for a while.
It’s harder to have some fun. The police seem to be everywhere, news reports about ICE are daily. Be careful, we tell each other. We say this because we care for each other. We say this, even though we know it is giving ground to the enemies of fun; and maybe our freedom, maybe even our human dignity.
The police are increasingly secret. They have gone from faces and badge numbers you could write down to body armor, camo, and masking. Sometimes they bare no markings beyond their air of malice, gaiter covered faces, sunglasses, and of course, their guns. This isn’t to protect them, they’re not really in much danger. It’s to install police in our minds as well as on our streets.
You never know who might be looking these days. You never know who might take your picture and put it online.
The Donut has been secured.
I wanted to believe that authoritarianism is antithetical to the American character, but not because we’re freedom loving. All people love being free, just as all people love their communities and children. All people want to live in a system of justice, peace, and hope.
No, the way in which I hoped we were incompatible with fascism is that I believed that Americans were just too goofy to be ruled that way. We do crazy shit to see what happens. We just aren’t self preserving enough to obey in advance.
We point roman candles at each other, giggling, even though our health insurance sucks. We do things just to see if they hurt. We do things to see how much they hurt. We do things that hurt just so we can tell the story of when we did that thing, and how much it hurt.
But maybe it turned out some things just hurt too much. Or they hurt too deep.
It’s changing now. Sometimes people just disappear. So many of us are obeying in advance, pointing out the vulnerable, telling the police about our neighbors.
And the others, those neighbors, the ones who may be unwanted, they’re hiding. They don’t go out much. Some of them don’t go to work anymore. Some assure their friends they can work at home, so they’ll be OK. Don’t worry, they won’t answer the door. Some of our friends don’t leave the house anymore at all. They’re scared, maybe because they’re vulnerable to ICE raids or because they don’t “look American” enough.
Or sometimes they’re not scared, just realistic. Just adapting to the slow and steady unpersoning of everyone Trump doesn’t like, who isn’t white enough, servile enough.
We might still be up for fighting the po-po in Downtown LA, but can we really keep it up? Will they take us away, one by one, put us in some camp, and no one will ever hear from us again?
Will anyone go looking?
Even the Trump supporters are trapped in their support. They can’t question or criticize anything without risking losing their standing, maybe their livelihood. For the rest of us, it’s worse. What happens if we try to cross the border, in or out? Will we be harassed? Will our devices be taken, our online lives rifled through like an underwear drawer?
Will some social media rant against the Trump administration be put down on a table in front of us by men with guns?
We look at each other differently. Any of these white roughneck men could be police, or their sympathizers.. The police could come from anywhere, and steal my friends, my neighbors, my family, away. We hear about Kilmar Abrego Garcia sometimes, but almost nothing of the hundreds who flew with him to El Salvador, in defiance of a legal court order.
We only hear of the vanished when a court case says they shouldn’t have been sent to South Sudan. How many Americans can find South Sudan on a map? We only carry the weight of these souls in their absence, but they are getting heavier every day. The law is for you, not for the rulers. Not for Trump.
Fascism always burdens the guilt of living for the not yet dead. It carries the fear of joy for anyone outside of the circle of the followers. And what they have is not joy – it’s gleeful cruelty, and it must be maintained at all costs. Don’t doubt. Keep your head down. Your favorite color will always be gray, whatever name they’re giving gray this week.
In a way, the most universal right we’re losing under the Trump regime is the right to be different, to be weird, to be ourselves, to be from somewhere, to not fit in, to be stupid, to make stories about the times we did those crazy things. To hand someone our beer and be a glorious American idiot. Maybe we need to be scared because we’re foreign, or gay, or need help in some way. Nobody can be sure they’re safely inside the circle of the authoritarian’s allowance all the time.
Hold my beer no more, America. We have murdered fun, and we will no longer be foolish and brave. Wondering why your neighbors disappeared isn’t fun. I keep wondering if I write the wrong thing, will someone (possibly even me), get hurt? The fun that binds up all our cares, our stories, our bold hope, we have traded it for a small and guilty existence, full of worry and what will our neighbors think of us? Will they report us?
It becomes a torrent, hard to hold in one’s head. Will we allow it all to happen, and worse, again? And again? The kids in cages, families destroyed by the Trumpian violence. The Salvadorian mega prison, but also all the overloaded prison camps full of who knows who, or even where. Some in southern Florida, Texas, filled and more than filled, waiting on a hurricane season NOAA can’t track like it used to.
Will they ever come home? Will their mothers look for their bones one day? Will the ones that didn’t speak up deny it happened? Just refuse to talk about it?
Will we become timid people?
I wonder who is allowed to have fun in America now. But also, who is required to look like they’re having fun.
Detainees in Texas spelling out “SOS” with their bodies.
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Thus far, Trump’s biggest success on immigration in his second term has been to claim credit — twice! — for things that Sleepy Joe Biden did, in one case years ago.
He threatened sanctions on Colombia, only to agree to let Colombian President Gustavo Petro send planes to fetch deportees, sometimes in Colombian military planes, rather than receive them in US military planes.
He threatened sanctions on Mexico, only to boast after Claudia Sheinbaum committed to put 5,000 fewer Mexican troops on the border than are already there, the same 10,000 that Biden obtained years ago.
He threatened sanctions on Canada, only to boast that Justin Trudeau agreed to the same $1.3 billion in investments to counter fentanyl trafficking he put in place in December.
As for his efforts to round up and deport migrants in the US? Almost two weeks ago, I noted that the quotas ICE introduced to try to boost the deportation numbers fell wildly short of delivering the deportations Trump had promised his rubes, to say nothing of the way those quotas will lead to deportation of non-criminal migrants instead of the violent criminals Trump claims to be targeting. Almost two weeks ago, Trump’s flunkies confessed they would never be able to meet his promises for mass deportation.
The fate of a highly publicized raid in Aurora last week is a spectacular case in point.
On Thursday, shortly after the raid, the Fox News propagandist whose job it is to stoke fear about migration, Bill Melugin, first celebrated the “massive” raid, only later to reveal the raid had resulted in far fewer arrests than promised and just one arrest of a Tren de Aragua member. ICE immediately blamed its failure to detain more people on leaks.
That same day, Tom Homan announced he may have to halt the kind of embed ICE has been all too happy to give Melugin, because of leaks or operational security; he did not say that truthful reports to Fox viewers about his failures gets him in trouble with the boss. Tom Homan can’t afford to have Trump know that this massive raid found only a single Tren de Aragua member.
Both reporting sympathetic to migrants and that of mainstream outlets describes what actually happened, why the raid failed to lead to the number of arrests Trump promised: Heavily armed officers swarmed the building and knocked on every door, but after residents didn’t open up, they finally left. (Update: Elevating this really good account of the raid GinnyRED57 put in comments.)
Heavily armed federal agents raided apartment buildings across metro Denver early Wednesday in a search for Venezuelan gang members and other migrants under the Trump administration’s mass deportation effort targeting major cities.
At least two dozen officers carrying high-powered weapons stormed several complexes before sunrise. In some cases, they were backed by large, military-style vehicles.
The Department of Homeland Security said on social media that it was targeting 100 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua for arrest and detention. It did not say how many people were taken into custody.
The operation included officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; and the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives.
[snip]
At an apartment complex in Denver, a 31-year-old Venezuelan man said that shortly after 5 a.m., ICE agents and other federal officers began yelling and loudly banging on every door.
The man, who asked that his name be withheld because he was afraid of being deported, said residents discreetly peered out their windows as large trucks and unmarked vehicles entered the parking lot.
Several residents said eight people were arrested at the complex.
People “hid with fear,” “didn’t open their doors” and remained “quiet without saying anything,” he said after all the agents had left.
In other words, while ICE had a few specific targets, they had no warrants for the vast majority of residences. They just kept knocking and knocking and knocking. And because the residents knew their rights, they didn’t open up.
It’s probably no surprise that this story from NBC is coming out days after the flopped Aurora raid. Trump is angry that his deportation numbers are falling so far short of what he promised his supporters.
Agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are under increasing pressure to boost the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants, as President Donald Trump has expressed anger that the amount of people deported in the first weeks of his administration is not higher, according to three sources familiar with the discussions at ICE and the White House.
A source familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president is getting “angry” that more people are not being deported and that the message is being passed along to “border czar” Tom Homan, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and acting ICE Director Caleb Vitello.
“It’s driving him nuts they’re not deporting more people,” said the person familiar with Trump’s thinking.
[snip]
Meanwhile at ICE, Vitello told agents in January to aim to meet a daily quota of 1,200-1,400 arrests. According to numbers ICE has posted on X, the highest single day total since Trump was inaugurated was just 1,100, and the number has fallen since that day. On Tuesday of this week, arrests of immigrants were over 800, according to a source familiar with the numbers. But last weekend, there were only about 300 arrests, another source told NBC News.
In order to fulfill Trump’s Inauguration Day promise of “millions and millions” of deportations, the Trump administration would have to be deporting over 2,700 immigrants every day to reach 1 million in a year.
And, as NBC News has reported, arrests do not always equal immediate detentions, much less deportations. Of the more than 8,000 immigrants arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, 461 were released, according to the White House.
Of course Trump is pissed that his biggest immigration success so far was stolen from Sleepy Joe Biden.
Of course Tom Homan is pissed that he can’t deliver what he promised.
Of course ICE is squirmy because even if they could meet their quotas — even if those migrants in Aurora, CO against whom ICE had no probable cause of a crime willingly opened their doors so ICE could arrest and deport them — the number of deportees would still fall far short of Trump’s goal.
But this all arises from the false expectations set during the election — from the lies Stephen Miller told, over and over and over and over and over, about the number of criminal migrants.
Trump is furious that his thugs can’t fulfill his promises. But those failures arise not through want of trying. Rather, those failures stem from the fact that reality in no way matches the hellhole Miller pitched for Trump, the imaginary hellhole Miller used to get voters afraid enough to vote for Trump.
Trump has redirected virtually all instruments of US national security to chase Stephen Miller’s lies. Not only is it going to lead to ongoing fury from the Boss, because reality will never match the propaganda Miller spun. But by neglecting the things that really do pose much more urgent threats — by destaffing investigations into real terrorists or operations to counter real ransomware attacks — Trump leaves America vulnerable in myriad ways.
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After getting caught boasting last week because ICE was detaining the same number of people as Joe Biden’s Administration, the Administration has now imposed quotas — demanding that ICE arrest up to 1,500 migrants a day, which WaPo may have been the first to report.
Johnny Maga, a far right propagandist who never tires of looking like a stupid idiot, reported that with great excitement. Quotas!!!
Not so Stephen Miller. He got pissy that WaPo described, in both the subhed and in paragraph after paragraph of the report, that this will lead ICE to arrest non-criminals. Here’s how WaPo described the problem.
The orders significantly increase the chance that officers will engage in more indiscriminate enforcement tactics or face accusations of civil rights violations as they strain to meet quotas, according to current and former ICE officials.
[snip]
Neither ICE nor Homan responded to requests for comment. After an earlier version of this article was published, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in an email that, “your story is false,” but did not reply when asked for specifics.
[snip]
But Paul Hunker, a former ICE chief counsel in Dallas, said arresting serious offenders takes time, staff and planning — more time than quotas might allow.
“Quotas will incentivize ICE officers to arrest the easiest people to arrest, rather than the people that are dangerous noncitizens,” said Hunker, who, as the agency’s chief counsel in Dallas, oversaw offices in North Texas and Oklahoma from 2003 through January 2024.
Fox, in its story lifting the WaPo story (with attribution but not a link), instead provided paragraph after paragraph providing excuses.
As CATO reported recently, this is what happened last time: Trump focused so much on asylum seekers, he left criminal aliens to roam free.
Candidate Trump’s “mass deportation” agenda will make the country less safe in two significant ways. First, it would remove a population that is less likely to commit crimes, ultimately making America’s neighborhoods less safe. For instance, Cato’s research has shown that both legal and illegal immigrants are nearly half as likely to commit crimes for which they are incarcerated in the United States. With unique data from Texas, we have found that immigrants—both legal and illegal—are less likely to commit homicides. Numerous studies have also found that immigration is linked to lower crime rates, homicide rates, and drug-related deaths.
The second problem with mass deportation is just as significant: it would shift focus away from the removal of immigrants who do commit crimes. Noncitizens who commit serious crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and deported. Whatever amount the government spends on immigration enforcement, it should spend on detaining and removing this small minority of individuals. Donald Trump claims that he did that, but the facts tell a different story regarding his record on migrant criminals:
On his fourth day in office, Trump signed an executive order rescinding Obama-era policies that prioritized the detention and removal of serious public safety threats;
Within a few months, his administration was secretly separating families, using prosecutorial resources to jail migrant parents and focusing resources on visa overstays, not serious criminals;
During the height of family separation, Trump deprioritized prosecuting migrants with criminal histories to instead spend resources on separating families;
While Trump poured resources into detaining asylum seekers, he also released nearly 58,184 noncitizens with criminal records, including 8,620 violent criminals and 306 murderers;
ICE ended up (re)arresting nearly 11,000 noncitizens who entered under Trump and were convicted of non-immigration crimes, including rape and murder; and
Trump’s policies incentivized migrant criminals to enter, triggering a threefold increase in the number of convicted criminals attempting to cross the border illegally.
Miller predictably is already trying to spin the civil violation of illegal entry into a crime, to say nothing of paying Social Security that you’ll never get in return as a tax crime.
Which is what two experts told Axios would happen: Miller would have to falsely claim a larger pool of migrants are criminals because he falsely told stupid Trump voters there were more criminal aliens during the election.
What they’re saying: “There are not millions of people with criminal records to deport,” Nicole Hallett, director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago, tells Axios.
Trump “keeps trying to bullsh-t with the public that there are all these particularly serious so-called criminals. There aren’t enough of those people to exist to be 1 million,” Karen Tumlin, director of the immigrant legal advocacy group Justice Action Center, tells Axios.
Both Hallett and Tumlin expect Trump to begin calling all undocumented immigrants “criminals” in order to say millions of criminals could be deported.
Remember, during the election Trump and Miller falsely claimed there were over 400,000 criminal aliens wandering around, when that stat primarily counts the number of people who are already safely housed in US prisons.
Former President Donald Trump is wildly distorting new statistics on immigration and crime to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump falsely claimed Friday and Saturday that the statistics are specifically about criminal offenders who entered the US during the Biden-Harris administration; in reality, the figures are about offenders who entered the US over multiple decades, including during the Trump administration. And Trump falsely claimed that the statistics are specifically about people who are now living freely in the US; the figures actually include people who are currently in jails and prisons serving criminal sentences.
“Kamala should immediately cancel her News Conference because it was just revealed that 13,000 convicted murderers entered our Country during her three and a half year period as Border Czar,” Trump wrote in one post on Friday, the day Harris visited the southern border in Arizona. Harris “allowed almost 14,000 MURDERERS to freely and openly roam our Country,” Trump wrote in another Friday post. They “roam free to KILL AGAIN,” he wrote, escalating his rhetoric, on Saturday.
Facts First: Trump’s claims are false in two big ways. First, the statistics he was referring to are not specifically about people who entered the country during the Biden-Harris administration. Rather, those statistics are about noncitizens who entered the country under any administration, including Trump’s; were convicted of a crime at some point, usually in the US after their arrival; and are now living in the US while being listed on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained docket” — where some have been listed for years, including while Trump was president, because their country of citizenship won’t let the US deport them back there. Second, that ICE “non-detained” list includes people who are still serving jail and prison sentences for their crimes; they are on the list because they are not being held in immigration detention in particular.
The new statistics, released by ICE in a letter to a Republican congressman this week, said there were 425,431 total convicted criminals on the non-detained docket as of July 21, 2024, including 13,099 people with homicide convictions.
Trump lied to his rubes, with the able assistance of his chief racism advisor. And now he’s struggling to assure his supporters he’ll deliver the eye-popping numbers he promised.
Which is why I’m laughing so hard at Johnny Maga.
Because even if Trump meets these quotas — quotas which will end up focusing on the law-abiding migrants rather than the dangerous people Miller has been wailing about — he’ll only deport 547,500 people this year, nowhere close to the mass deportations he sold his rubes.
You all lied. You lied and lied and lied to make voters afraid.
And already on day 8, you’re spinning wildly rather than simply admitting you cynically lied to gin up fear to get Trump elected.
https://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Screenshot-2025-01-27-at-6.52.37 PM-1.png13601196emptywheelhttps://www.emptywheel.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Logo-Web.pngemptywheel2025-01-27 16:25:252025-01-28 08:40:23Stephen Miller Confesses that Trump Lied about Immigrants
Imagine a bunch of tourists marching east from 
