WHEN AN ICE AGENT is involved in a deadly, high-profile shooting, you should now assume that the government’s initial story is packed with lies—and that the truth will only come out over time as the spotlight fades.

That’s been the case, yet again, in the two most recent episod…

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THERE IS A FAMILIAR PATTERN to how the Trump administration responds when its immigration enforcement agents commit a high-profile killing: They move swiftly to malign the victim.

Usually, this involves dredging up menacing pictures. Often it means pointing to past, unrelated crimes. In the case of Alex Pretti, it meant surfacing video of a separate confrontation he had with ICE officers before he was fatally shot.

Now, following the killing last week of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo by ICE, we find ourselves in this cycle once again.

Reports emerged on Wednesday that the FBI, which is leading an investigation of the confrontation in which Araujo was shot to death in Houston, claimed to have found potential “controlled substances” in Araujo’s van. According to a search-warrant application approved by a judge on Tuesday and obtained by the New York Times, an FBI special agent inspecting the van sometime after the fatal incident saw eight “plastic bags with what appeared to be a white crystal-like substance”—packaging supposedly “consistent with methamphetamine.” The news was quickly amplified by right-wing media, which posted photos from the warrant application showing the small bags of powder.

Alarm bells went off immediately. It’s unusual for an application like this to be unsealed so swiftly, as the Times notes. And knowing the Trump administration’s history of vilifying its victims, it was hard to escape the suspicion this was orchestrated to insinuate Araujo was not an innocent working-class immigrant father but rather a . . . drug addict? A drug pusher? A bad guy somehow deserving of the bullets?

It strained credulity. And, sure enough,

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THE MOST NOTABLE PART of the most recent statement from the Department of Homeland Security’s most recent deadly shooting of an immigrant by ICE was what that statement did not say.

Responding to the death of 26-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero on Monday on the streets of Biddeford, Maine, DHS did not deploy its now-standard narrative about ICE agents feeling threatened by an immigrant or protester weaponizing a car. Instead, the anodyne press release mentioned that “ICE law enforcement attempted to conduct a vehicle stop. The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” Not officer safety. Public safety.

So ICE officers believed they would better serve the interest of public safety by shooting Guerrero than by letting him drive away in the coastal Maine city of 22,000 people.

The other details of yet another inglorious chapter in the Trump administration’s ramped-up immigration enforcement had to be gleaned from elsewhere.

As with the deadly shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo last week in Houston, DHS has admitted to Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) that Guerrero was not the target of the operation that led to his death.

As with the shooting of Araujo, ICE agents were not wearing body cameras, despite Congress allocating DHS $20 million in funding for that express purpose. The Atlantic reports that the ICE officer who fired the fatal shots was a new recruit.

And as with the shooting of Araujo, Guerrero was a father. Witnesses report that his 3-year-old daughter was at the scene wearing Bluey pajamas and carrying a pink backpack. They report hearing a woman yelling repeatedly “You took her dad!” while a little girl looked on, being comforted by another child.

“I heard agony,” a witness told the New York Times. “I heard a howl that came from your soul, that your whole life had just changed and it was never going to be the same.”

What the daughter reportedly witnessed was gruesome. Doorbell cameras captured what appeared to be five gunshots. Bystander video shows a white car listlessly turning in circles as agents run alongside it—the driver, Guerrero, so incapacitated by bullets he was unable to bring the car to a stop. A separate video showed agents subsequently removing Guerrero’s dying body from the car and handcuffing him on the ground.

There was no reason to expect it would end like this. He had a Social Security number and was authorized to work in the United States, according to immigration advocacy organization Presente! in Maine. He had posted a picture of his daughter just three days ago, according to CBS News journalist Lilia Luciano. “I love you my beautiful princess,” he wrote in Spanish.1

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IN THE DAYS AND HOURS before Guerrero’s shooting, I spoke to several Hispanic members of Congress about the killing of Araujo and, more generally, about the ways in which the Trump administration has terrorized Latino fathers. It wasn’t just the fear of death that now permeates this community. It’s the sense that legal boundaries no longer apply.

It is possible to do immigration enforcement without resorting to shooting. Whether someone is in the country illegally or not does not give ICE license to murder. And when the end result is a tragic killing, the fallout goes far beyond a solitary individual.

“These are many times the providers for the family. They’re not just taking out the dad; they’re taking out the Latino family, and it’s really struck a nerve,” Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) told me. “The Latino community especially. We have fathers or grandfathers who worked in the field, worked construction, worked with their hands, weren’t making a lot of money, but fought to give us a better chance than they had.”

In the first Trump administration, opposition to the president’s immigration agenda was galvanized by the horrors of family separation. As Adam Serwer memorably noted back in 2018, “The cruelty is the point.”

Today, the opposition is different, and the stakes seem far higher. It’s not separation that drives the fear; it’s disruption and death. There is deep mourning, but there is also a growing fury at these ICE killings all over Latino social media. It’s become clear that mass deportation comes with this type of violence—and maybe that’s by design.

Under images of Araujo and Guerrero as departed angels, the page Latino and Muslim Unity wrote, “Our fathers deserve to come home to their families. We demand accountability.”

Carlos Espina, a social media influencer with 23 million followers across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, posted videos at turns angry and heartbroken.

“The Colombian immigrant that was assassinated in a hail of bullets by ICE in Maine was in the car with his three-year-old baby,” Espina said in one. “It shows this agency has no type of respect for human life, much less the lives of our people. They see us as dogs, animals or worse.”

JC Frias, a Mexican-American activist with nearly 250,000 Instagram followers, shared the final words of both men: “Me estan matando” and “I tried to stop.”

“They were fathers. They were providers. They were loved. And they were HUNTED because of the color of their skin,” he wrote. In another post, Frias echoed a sentiment I’ve seen repeated often, including in private messages to me from Latinos and Mexican-Americans who saw their own father in Lorenzo Araujo.

“Lorenzo’s memorial says more than words ever could,” Frias wrote, describing the candles, Mexican flags, soccer jerseys, and families stopping to pray. “One message echoed over and over,” he said. “Lorenzo could have been any of our dads.”

Cynthia Santiago-Borbon, a psychotherapist specializing in trauma recovery and systemic oppression, told me what this killing means for Hispanic Americans—what this inhumanity does to those who are coming to realize our government views them as disposable, inconvenient, and fundamentally un-American.

“What it does is teach a whole community that their grief has no shelf life—you don’t get to finish mourning one father before you’re handed another,” she told me. “That’s not incidental; that’s the message. Devalue, discard, then insist the killing was procedural, and you’re the one being unreasonable. It’s narcissistic abuse at the scale of a state, and the deepest wound isn’t the violence. It’s being told the violence didn’t mean what you know it meant.”

I Know Lorenzo Salgado Araujo Lived

THE VIOLENCE ON AMERICAN STREETS raises a question for Washington D.C.: What can the political system do to push back on all this? Democrats responded to the shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by demanding ICE reforms. But they only held up government funding for so long. Eventually, tens of billions of additional dollars were appropriated for DHS, with strictly Republican support.

But pushback can work. One day later after the Guerrero shooting, ICE decided to “largely suspend vehicle stops until further notice,” CNN reported. That’s a major decision, and it’s proof that public opinion can still shape policy. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, up for re-election this fall, released a statement saying she had directly asked DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin for the reprieve. However, the Trump administration has said the pause will only be temporary—just “a short-term review,” according to White House “border czar” Tom Homan.

So expect these incredibly risky operations, endangering both immigrants and U.S. citizens on American roads, to resume. Indeed, as this newsletter was being edited and prepared for publication, another man was killed after an encounter with ICE on a Florida highway in St. Augustine.

In light of the recent killings, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus is planning a field hearing in Houston this month to hear from the community there directly, according to CHC sources. Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), who spoke to me on a dizzying Monday morning just after the killing in Maine, has met separately with Victor Salgado, Araujo’s brother, and Daniel Pantoja, at an ICE detention center. Both men were in the car when Araujo was shot. Garcia says the devastated men tell a story very different from that told by ICE, which claims Araujo attempted to hit them with his van.

“Agents never identified themselves, never read them any rights, there was no administrative warrant,” she told me. “The ICE agent who was the shooter, approached, and pointed his gun inside the vehicle.” At no time was an agent in front of the van while it was mobile,” the men told her.

The vehicles were unmarked, there were no visible body cameras, no lights or sirens, and the shot was fired through the passenger side window. Victor saw the fatal weapon in front of him. “There was no medical aid,” the men relayed to Garcia. “They held Lorenzo on the ground with a knee to his body as he was bleeding. There was no first aid kit. When they saw he was bleeding at some point they put a rag or cloth on him where he was bleeding.”

I asked Garcia how she was doing and she became emotional. She cited the example of Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, saying, “We’re all children of God, born with dignity, and deserve respect. It hurts me when I see this kind of brutality against a human being.”

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Reporting on all this, I can’t help but be affected too. I sometimes recall a speech I heard eight years ago at the Congressional Hispanic Institute Gala in Washington in 2018, where former congressman Luis Gutiérrez choked back tears as he spoke of the victims of Hurricane Maria. Trump had downplayed the effects of the storm, trying to minimize the death toll and political backlash. “I know you lived,” Gutierrez said. “We recognize your humanity. We recognize your humanity even if the president of the United States refuses to do so. You all had children and we miss you. We miss you very much.”

Gutiérrez’s point was that we can’t lose sight of our collective humanity as we sift through our political debates. ICE and the Trump administration must be held accountable, but we must also speak about the people—about Lorenzo and Johan—as human beings, as men and as fathers. We must remember how they lived.

It’s a message Lorenzo’s sons, and their surrounding community, have echoed as well.

“I just wanted to say we’re all so proud of you,” said a former teacher of Ronaldo Salgado, one of Lorenzo’s sons, bringing Ronaldo to tears. “We’ve seen how you’ve risen to this occasion, this incredible tragedy, and you have risen up. You’ve made your father proud. It’s clear that he raised you to be a good man, because he was a good man. So don’t you ever doubt that we’re not proud of you. He would be proud of you.”

At a small vigil in Houston, a Mexican-American man gave a similar heartfelt message in Spanish.

I see you as my sons. We’re the generation of your dad, more than thirty-four years here. We came out of Mexico . . . and we’re cabrones,2 and we make this country great. We don’t ask anyone for anything. We hand our children over to this nation, and with all my heart, I see you as my son. And I know you make your father proud, and your father is watching you. And you make him proud, and I can tell you that, because of how you’re representing your family, I love you.

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IMAGINE THIS: AN UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANT gets into her car, just as she does every day. She drives past the local college campus, one county over, on her way to work. Then, after finishing a shift, she heads home—when she’s set upon by an unmarked SUV with no lights. Terrified, she guns it through a traffic chokepoint. Maybe she was imagining things. Arriving home, she starts unpacking her car when two unmarked vehicles hurtle onto her property. ICE agents surround her. She’d been clocked by cameras on the college campus, which fed the data to federal authorities tracking down targets for immigration enforcement.

This isn’t Minority Report. It’s a massive, smart surveillance–enabled system that is already becoming part of the Trump administration’s deportation machinery.

The use of this system has become so pronounced that a new national campaign is set to debut this summer with the aim of ridding college campuses of Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs)—specialized surveillance cameras that turn visual information into searchable data.

The Emergency Campaign to Support Higher Education (ECSHE)—a grassroots coalition of students, faculty, labor, and alumni, along with the progressive group Schools Drop ICE—aims to call attention to the use of ALPRs by Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company whose cameras and services are used by over 5,000 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. Ultimately, the activists are hoping to see Flock no longer deployed on campuses at all. The group is zeroing in on 75 universities and colleges publicly identified as having Flock contracts.

These activists argue that Flock’s ALPR system is being abused by local police and, through partner agencies, ICE. It is becoming a tool in the Trump administration’s deportation program—a program that has already shifted from one targeting criminals to one threatening all undocumented people and even people with legal status regardless of how long they’ve called the United States their home.

Flock Safety and companies like it, the campaign will argue, enrich themselves off government contracts while normalizing ubiquitous, silent surveillance.

A spokesperson for Flock told me that the company has no contracts with ICE or DHS.

But the organizers of the campaign explain that it isn’t necessarily a matter of formal contracts between the company and the feds. Local police departments, they say, coordinate with ICE and run searches on behalf of it and other federal agencies. Activists also claim to have heard of instances where police have shared Flock system passwords directly with ICE agents for the purpose of immigration searches.

Certainly, the type of identification made possible by networked Flock cameras and ALPRs aligns neatly with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin’s new supposed emphasis on avoiding the messy public confrontations that characterized the first year of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. (That aim may already have been dashed with ICE agents killing Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a small business owner and father of three U.S. citizen sons, in Houston this week.) If federal agents have access to ubiquitous surveillance tools to track immigrants before swooping in, they will presumably be able to move more swiftly and stealthily.

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WHEN A CAR DRIVES BY a Flock camera, the ALPR captures and records the license plates, the car’s location, its color, and a timestamp.

‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about,’ goes the old saw. But as ECSHE executive director Ethan Rome argues, the system can be, and often is, easily abused: Police chiefs and beat cops alike have already been caught running the license plates of their wives or exes or romantic rivals through the system.

“Very rarely, someone does something stupid. They use it to figure out where an ex-girlfriend is or something like that,” said Dan Haley, Flock’s chief legal officer, in a radio interview. “That’s actually the most common thing.”

“Common” might be exactly the right word for it. Take for instance an Illinois police officer named, uh, William Copp, who ran the license plates of three women he had dated, as well as the license plate of an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, through the Flock system 140 times during an eighteen-month period.

Copp is not a lone bad apple. The Institute for Justice, drawing just on press reports and public records, found at least twenty-one examples of police officers using Flock systems to enable stalking, including by men who have since been arrested or forced to resign. Among the cases were a Georgia police chief who was arrested, an Iowa sheriff who ran his wife’s license plate 700 times prior to retiring, and a Kansas police chief who “ran his ex-girlfriend’s plate 164 times and her new boyfriend’s 64 times before resigning.”

When I pressed Flock Safety on these incidents, the firm’s public relations manager, Paris Lewbel, sent me a press release detailing how its audit system had led to the termination and arrest of five officers for the alleged abuse of the license plate readers.

“Technology doesn’t create misconduct. People do,” said company cofounder Paige Todd.

That’s true as far as it goes, but this powerful technology is primed for further abuse—especially when put toward an illiberal state agenda. And it’s not just a matter of staffing safeguards in place as police departments implement these systems: The tools themselves open up disturbing new possibilities.

For example, the Flock system has incorporated an AI functionality that allows for deeper searching. It can be used to identify markers beyond just license plates and car dimensions. So, say, a Los Angeles Lakers bumper sticker could be used to help find a driver. But that same tool could just as easily be used to instead track, say, a “No Kings” bumper sticker—opening up the possibility of digitally surveilling or profiling people with different political views.

“Their big thing is the license-plate capturing,” Rome told me. “But they capture other things,” and “thanks to AI, what would have taken a year to pore through five years ago can take a couple hours to write algorithms now.”

IN ITS EFFORT TO GET FLOCK SAFETY off college campuses, ECSHE is seeking personal testimony of people targeted by ICE through the company’s surveillance systems. But the data we already have on that subject is deeply concerning in its scale and scope.

Last summer, Flock Safety told Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that 75 percent of its law enforcement customers had opted in to the company’s National Lookup Tool—a system that allows thousands of agencies to search Flock data, which includes roughly tens of thousands of local networks and cameras. (Sen. Wyden has raised national security concerns about the threat of malicious cyber actors gaining access to the system and the vast amounts of information it contains.)

Anonymous researchers who shared their data with 404 Media found that in just under a year—from June 2024, before Trump’s re-election, to May 2025—police used the system to make millions of searches, including “more than 4,000 searches that contained immigration keywords” such as “ICE,” “immigration,” or “ERO” (Enforcement and Removal Operations).

Strikingly, the researchers found that explicit “immigration” searches happened only during the Trump administration, suggesting a change in policy or strategy at some level, and strongly implying that many of these searches were being conducted on behalf of or in partnership with ICE.

Because Flock’s National Lookup Tool permits users from any opted-in organization to search the data of any other opted-in organization, state and local jurisdictions that join may lose some control over who or what is being surveilled within their boundaries—but not only that: Without performing a network audit, they may not even have even basic awareness of whether, how often, and at what scale these searches of their cameras and data are happening.

As an illustration of just how much ALPR information is being made available through the lookup tool, 404 Media reports that the Dallas Police Department’s “ICE+ERO”–related searches on just March 6 of last year accessed data from more than 6,500 different individual Flock camera networks comprising more than 77,000 total devices.

Flock is facing a growing backlash in some cities where its technology has been deployed. This past May, an audit by the Dayton, Ohio police department found that its cameras were searched more than 7,000 times for immigration enforcement purposes in contravention of city policy. Unsure if the cameras are actually off or not, city workers have taken to covering them with trash bags.

A company spokesperson told me Flock “has built filters that block searches tied to immigration enforcement. Those filters can be activated at any time by the agency’s Flock administrator, and they are applied automatically in certain states where required by law.” That phrasing suggests individual agencies have a lot of discretion when it comes to blocking immigration-related searches, whether to limit methods of accessing its own data by users in Flock’s larger network, or to prevent its agents from conducting such searches across Flock’s network.

An Electronic Frontier Foundation piece from last month titled “Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?” also revealed that law enforcement agencies are cross-referencing Flock’s plate data against the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) “hotlists,” which associate specific plates with “topics” such as “stolen vehicle” and “missing person.” One hotlist contains plates that have been added to the system and tagged with a label by just one agency: ICE. The label? “Immigration Violator.”

It is possible for agencies to opt in to receive alerts for different NCIC hotlists, and “if Immigration Violator is selected, the local agency will receive an alert that a vehicle ICE is looking for has been sighted,” EFF investigator Dave Maass writes.

As part of its anti-ALPR campaign, ECSHE is offering a “campaign-in-a-box,” a robust toolkit intended for rapid adoption by students. The campaign is active in universities in California, as well as on the East Coast and in Chicago. ECSHE is looking to expand to major universities in the South and Southwest, including Texas and Arizona.

“These are key states where we know for a fact that enforcement is happening in college campuses on a daily basis,” a lead organizer for Schools Drop ICE told me. “It’s happening five minutes from where I live [in Texas] but is not being highlighted and documented nationally, like it was in Minnesota, because of the state we’re in.”

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Flock Safety and the “AI War Machine”

THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST FLOCK should be seen as one part of a larger pushback against the weaponization of modern technology for immigration and law enforcement.

Kat Finneran, a doctoral candidate at Ohio State University whose research deals with political geography, technology, and control, describes Flock as a component of the government’s “AI war machine.” That machine also includes companies like Palantir, the Peter Thiel-founded, AI-powered data-analytics firm, and Anduril, the maker of autonomous weapons and surveillance systems that reportedly counts Vice President JD Vance among its investors.

“In science fiction we had only really thought about a camera on your private porch or at Kroger. But this is one eye, one vision across it all,” Finneran said of the new generation of surveillance companies like Flock.1

Opposing Flock at OSU is complicated by a provision in state law that forbids the public from requesting Flock data or auditing Flock data requests; as a result, most of what is happening involving the data remains out of public view, Finneran said. This lack of visibility has, if anything, contributed to larger anxieties about the purposes and applications of the technology. Finneran describes paranoia across a campus where pro-Palestine and climate justice groups feel afraid to meet or discuss issues.

Finneran described a meeting that students held last month with Monica Moll, OSU’s associate vice president for public safety, as part of the effort to push back against Flock on campus. While the university would not be moving away from using Flock technology, Moll guardedly added that administrators were open to the students’ concerns that the system could be used in a more responsible manner, Finneran recalled. At the time OSU adopted and installed Flock technology, the message was, the university may not have anticipated some of the more troubling possibilities for ways the company’s cameras and data system can be used.

Similar frictions over Flock Safety recently erupted at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Tobias Halpern, a 19-year-old student, worked to get Flock’s seventeen cameras off the Cal Poly campus and eventually received word that the administration would not renew its contract with the company after its current contract ends in May 2027.

Halpern’s journey to activism may be instructive. He first learned of ALPRs from YouTuber Benn Jordan.

“I was like ‘Wow, this shit sucks,’ but then I kind of forgot about it,” he told me. “Then I went back to school and saw them all over Cal Poly.” Halpern started speaking out on campus, and soon after, he began DeFlockSLO, an organization meant to get the word out about Flock’s presence on campus and provide tools to students for pushing back on the issue. Facing resistance from an administration led by a stubborn president, Halpern said he and his fellow student activists finally broke through when they started reaching out to incoming students and parents groups—and, through them, they found a way to trouble the waters of Cal Poly’s revenue streams.

Since Cal Poly is designated a Hispanic-Serving Institution, Halpern says the school has been strict about refusing ICE access to the campus—but letting Flock cameras, which produce images that could be accessed by ICE, onto the campus seemed like a violation of that spirit.

“It’s something we had to come to terms with. The ICE and Flock connection is part of the reason Flock is the worst vendor out there,” Halpern said. But “at least on our libertarian campus, the ‘Police-[are]-following-you-everywhere-you-go’ argument worked way better.”

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LORENZO SALGADO ARAUJO CAME TO THE UNITED STATES thirty-five years ago—a few years too late to benefit from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, popularly known as the “Reagan amnesty.” He worked in construction. By the 2000s, he was a small business owner who provided jobs and work for other men. They would drive to the North Houston suburbs and build houses. His dream was to build his own home for his family one day—a dream he achieved.

On Tuesday morning, Lorenzo was picking up workers as usual shortly after 6 a.m. when he was confronted by ICE and killed. He was 52 years old.

The shooting in Houston’s historically Mexican-American East End community near Magnolia Park took place just five minutes from the site of Houston’s FIFA Fan Festival.

Lorenzo’s son Ronaldo Salgado, a teacher, wrote on Facebook Tuesday night that his father had been in the process of obtaining his work permit through the legal process.

Speaking at a press conference Wednesday morning, Ronaldo thanked his former students for being in attendance and Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) for spending time in the hospital with him overnight.

He said Lorenzo had been a hardworking man of routine, one who never cared for his name to be known outside his family, only for his children—three sons, all born in the United States—to be educated and to become good people.

“I love our dad, he worked hard,” Ronaldo told me in an interview after the press conference. “He always told us that we needed to do well in school so we don’t end up like him in the sun.”

On Tuesday, Lorenzo’s day began at 5 a.m., the same way it did every day: “with a hearty meal prepared by my mom,” Ronaldo said.

But after taking his coffee and loading his work boots in the car to pick up his crew for work on houses in North Houston, Lorenzo was beset by ICE agents in unmarked cars. Some sort of confrontation ensued. He was shot. He died of his injuries at a hospital.

As Ronaldo wrote this morning, “Today is the first day without him for all of us, and it is heartbreaking to know that my mom did not make lunch for my dad before going to work—the first time in their 30+ year marriage.”

In the emotional press conference, Ronaldo described his desperate scramble to find out information about what happened to his father. When he first heard about an interaction with ICE, the reports were conflicting. He hoped his father had simply been detained, so his first plan had been to find his father’s white work van and deliver it to his crew so that they might be able to finish work and get paid.

As time went on, Ronaldo remained in the dark. He did not learn about his father’s final moments from a hospital or law enforcement. Instead, confirmation of his death came in the cruel form of videos on social media.

“I recognized him immediately: not from his appearance, but from his voice crying in the street as he was bleeding out,” Ronaldo said through tears.

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STANDING THERE HONORING HIS FATHER at the press conference this morning, Ronaldo demonstrated why he and his brothers were their dad’s pride and joy. They had become educated: Ronaldo, 29, graduated from the University of Houston; Lorenzo Jr., 27, from Tufts University; and their youngest brother is in college now.

Ronaldo said he wants his father to be remembered as a fan of the Mexican national team and of C.D. Guadalajara (Chivas), and as a man who sat on his porch every evening after work petting his dog and looking out in satisfaction at the life he’d built in this country.

In our interview, Ronaldo and Lorenzo Jr. told me about what their dad cherished. They took turns ticking off what he loved to eat. “Chile relleno, pozole, chilaquiles,” they said. “Anything my mom made with love,” Ronaldo added. He supported their mom’s garden, buying her flowers to plant, and he loved a good deal at the flea market. Last week it was a “big pot” for tamales, which reminded the young men of their childhood where, while they didn’t have a lot, they never wanted for anything.

One thing Lorenzo especially loved was his John Deere riding lawnmower. It was more than just a machine to him. The yard in the Araujos’ old home was too small for a riding mower. But with the bigger yard in their new home he “was able to justify the purchase,” Ronaldo said. It was a symbol of pride and progress.

Three men were also in the van with Lorenzo at the time of the shooting, including Lorenzo’s brother. They have been detained, and their current whereabouts are unknown. Both the Araujo family and local activists fear the men will be quickly deported to prevent them from providing testimony about ICE’s actions.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment on the location of the three witnesses.

“I hope they can provide statements that my father feared for his life,” Ronaldo said.

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“Me estan matando”

ICE HAS PORTRAYED LORENZO in its statements to the media as an “illegal alien” who acted violently in the confrontation.

“From information we are receiving, he rammed an ICE law enforcement vehicle, refused to follow multiple verbal commands, and weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer, resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense,” an ICE spokesperson said.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve all heard it before. As Lorenzo’s family, activists, and Democratic officeholders have all pointed out, ICE’s response after this shooting has been the same as its response to each ICE-related killing during Trump 2.0: to claim its personnel acted responsibly, and not to wait for an investigation before casting blame on the dead. The New York Times found that Trump administration claims about shootings frequently unravel under legal scrutiny.

One witness told the Washington Post that he heard a man—Lorenzo—gurgling and shouting “Me estan matando”—they’re killing me, a haunting echo of “I can’t breathe,” the final words of Eric Garner and George Floyd, two others killed by law enforcement.

Roman Palomares, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), one of the oldest Hispanic civil rights organizations in the country, accused ICE of a coverup.

“In the absence of facts from ICE we are left to conclude a man was unlawfully killed on the streets of Houston,” he said. “It’s unacceptable and un-American to use lethal force against a human being and lock away the evidence and expect his family, the people of Houston, the American people to say ‘We believe you.’ We don’t believe you. ICE has not earned that trust from the American people.”

“This is a tragedy,” Rep. Garcia said at the press conference. “A family led by a man here thirty-five years with absolutely no criminal history. Remember Renée Good? Has ICE learned nothing from that experience?”

“Someone losing their life is a big goddamn deal,” Rep. Christian Menefee (D-Texas) said at the press conference. Menefee emphasized that Houstonians are deeply familiar with immigrants, regardless of status. “We are a city of undocumented immigrants, they are our neighbors.”

LULAC has taken a leading role in helping the family, with CEO Juan Proaño calling for a full and independent investigation and announcing a $5,000 reward for witnesses to come forward with video of the shooting or any information that leads to an indictment or exoneration in the case. They have also organized a GoFundMe for Lorenzo’s family.

The shooting is the first big test for a Department of Homeland Security that has tried in recent months to avoid the kind of imagery we saw earlier this year of Renée Good and Alex Pretti being killed in the streets of Minneapolis and Border Patrol officer Greg Bovino ghoulishly swooping after publicity. The department has sought to refashion itself as a more professional organization that makes less noise while still executing the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. Just this Monday, in fact, Politico Playbook asked whether the mass deportation drive was softening or whether ICE had simply gotten better at avoiding negative attention. They reported that Markwayne Mullin, the new homeland security secretary, championed a “quieter and smarter” approach, and that the nation shouldn’t “expect another Minneapolis anytime soon.”

Reduced media attention, though, does not mean a less extreme approach to deportations. On Monday, White House Border Czar Tom Homan admitted what activists, lawmakers, and analysts have been observing for a while: that half of those targeted by ICE do not have criminal records.

Surreptitious extremism is still extremism, and ICE remains an undertrained, overly aggressive organization. Which is why, in this shooting just hours after Homan’s remarks, we see all too clearly what happens when armed agents swarm blue-collar working parents fearing for their lives.

“Secretary Markwayne Mullin is no different than former Secretary Kristi Noem,” Proaño said. “The same goes for the new ICE director. We do not believe them. They are using a playbook they’ve used in shootings across the country.”

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HAPPY JULY FOURTH! Who’s ready for some forced sterilizations?

Sorry. Let me explain. For months, legal experts have been expecting the Supreme Court to rule against Trump’s executive order that attempted to end birthright citizenship; those expectations were met earlier this week. I knew that when the ruling was announced, the administration and its allies would fire back at the justices, which they did. But while I’m fairly familiar with MAGA world, I’m no Will Sommer, which is to say: I was simply not ready for the cuckoo-bananas direction MAGA went in response to the Trump v. Barbara ruling.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller went, predictably, nuts. After bizarrely comparing America to a plane and citizens to trained pilots, he got down to his real concern: namely, that people from ‘shithole’ countries aren’t fit to be Americans.

“We have people from all over the world—from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel—and they can just come into the country, have a baby in a hospital, paid for by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen?” Miller fumed. “That baby can sit on a jury when he turns 18, and sit in judgment of . . . me?”

Alonso Gurmendi, a fellow in human rights at the London School of Economics, had Miller’s number when he responded, “This is straight out of Mein Kampf. . . . the idea that the Aryan race invented culture/technology and so a Pole or a Slav could never be truly German is the core foundational idea that gave birth to Nazism.”

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh suggested that because the Supreme Court had reaffirmed the law of the land, ICE should step up its enforcement activities. The reactionary influencer threw in an extra gibe for good measure that seemed to make light of the murder of Renée Good.

“Now that SCOTUS has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement,” he ranted on X. “Militarize the border. Mass deportations. Round every illegal up. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it. Use whatever force is necessary. There is no other option.”

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Demonstrating that his bigotry isn’t limited to immigrants, Walsh added that Republicans should learn the obvious lesson from Amy Coney Barrett’s role in the ruling and stop nominating female justices.

“The worst Supreme Court Justices of all time have all been women,” he complained. “That’s just a fact. Republican presidents should take the hint.” I’m curious what Walsh would say if someone were to ask him if he thinks Barrett is a worse justice than the authors of Dred Scott or Plessy v. Ferguson. Actually, on second thought, I’m not curious about that.

Derrick Evans, a pardoned January 6th rioter and Republican former West Virginia state legislator, kept the xenophobia short and to the point.

“If you see a pregnant foreigner, contact ICE immediately,” Evans wrote. “The future of our country depends on it.”

But the most truly deranged response to the Court’s ruling came from Sean Davis, the CEO and cofounder of Trump fansite the Federalist. Davis claimed that because Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts had chosen to “nullify” the Fourteenth Amendment, states should in turn effect the “nullification” of birthright citizenship by refusing to issue birth certificates to non-citizens. But that suggestion was just a warm-up, as was his recommendation for Republicans to pack the court. He really got rolling with recommendation #3: “Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners.” Too much of a hassle to ascertain who’s pregnant? Perhaps we should then “deny entry to all female foreigners” instead. Or simply require the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

Forced sterilization. America is back, baby! It’s remarkable to think that “dissolution of the union” was not the craziest suggestion on Davis’s list.

But what should we expect? It’s clear that the MAGA coalition, at least at the elite and influencer levels, has become fully radicalized on race and immigration. It’s dark out there, and the darkness makes it even more important to continue the work of throwing light on the stories of immigrants as well as the Trump administration’s attempts to push immigrants out of the country. With the right’s self-appointed leaders joining the Sean Davis chorus, it’s not hard to see why this issue—and the extremes in play—aren’t going away soon.

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Future—and Retroactive—Punishment of Babies

When I tried to interview some birthright citizens immediately after the Court’s decision, I repeatedly heard that they were afraid to speak out; they didn’t want to put a spotlight on themselves and their families. Some were open to talking at first but then backed out, worried for their parents who are either not citizens or are only green card holders. That was a clear theme in my conversations: a palpable fear not just for the citizenship status of future generations but also for residents and children with citizenship already.

Here’s what I mean:

Estrella Lopez, 19, is a U.S. citizen whose mother is active with We Are CASA, an immigrant-rights organization. When the birthright citizenship ruling came down, she was in Maryland with her aunt and her baby nephew. “We felt so happy, we cried. My mom got happy. She’s been part of CASA fighting for this,” Estrella said.

“I was there with my nephew and felt complete happiness. I feel like I felt his future in my eyes. I feel so emotional right now due to the fact that this was even a thought—something we even had to fight for . . . that there was something in the Constitution they wanted to destroy.”

While her nephew is a U.S. citizen and Trump’s executive order was written to apply to children of parents in the country illegally after February 19, 2025, Estrella was still afraid. If the ruling had upheld the executive order, “my nephew would be unsafe, his place in this world revoked, his citizenship could have been taken away. He was not in danger, but it felt like he was in danger and his citizenship could be taken.”

Estrella was not alone in worrying that retroactive revocations of citizenship could follow.

Rosa, 34, a food vendor in Las Vegas, has a pending asylum claim based on domestic violence she endured in El Salvador. Her 18-month-old baby is a U.S. citizen, but instead of feeling more confident after the ruling, Rosa too worried the administration might seek to revoke it had the ruling been different.

“I was afraid about that,” she told me. “It would cause a huge impact in our lives because children born here have benefits and opportunities when they become adults.”

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Beyond the fact that our country was looking to create this group of second-class citizens, the logic behind this fear is all too understandable. If the Trump administration could change the plain-language meaning of the Constitution by fiat and then have that assertion affirmed by conservatives on the Supreme Court, then immigrants may well have been right to ask: Are my children safe?

“I heard it was possible—that this could affect our future kids, that they would suffer these consequences,” Rosa told me.

Another Salvadoran I spoke to, this time a Temporary Protected Status holder, felt a double blow after the last week of Supreme Court rulings. Not only did she fear losing her TPS and mass de-legalization, she worried about her immediate family.

The woman had immigrated to California with her parents and her sister in December 2000 and received Temporary Protected Status as a result of the devastating 7.7 earthquake off the coast of El Salvador in January 2001. The status allowed her to live and work in the United States. Her fear, she told me, was that the Trump administration might have targeted people, like her parents, who had recently become residents with green cards based on familial relationships with birthright citizens.

Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, told me such fears are totally comprehensible. The Court’s ruling on TPS last week gave Trump “a loaded gun” aimed at 1.3 million people, he said.

A birthright citizen himself, Awawdeh was “on pins and needles” until that decision was announced this week. But even after the ruling, the future of birthright citizenship remains uncertain to Awawdeh. “Legally, for now” it’s safe, he said. But “we all have to continue to fight for all of our rights, because when the government tries to convince us some people have rights and others don’t, none of us do.”

He summed up the challenge by quoting Ronald Reagan: “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.” That sensible sentiment, Awawdeh suggested, would seem radical to MAGA types.

“My fear was what it says about this country that we even entertained the idea that some babies born on American soil count less than others,” Awawdeh told me. “That’s not a legal debate. That’s a confession that America still questions whether some of its children are truly its own.”

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THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DEALT a major blow to Donald Trump’s mass deportation program Tuesday morning in Trump v. Barbara with a 6–3 decision striking down his executive order that purported to end birthright citizenship.

But how much of a blow was it really?

I’ve been grappling with that question ever since the ruling came out on Tuesday morning. And in my various conversations with legal scholars and immigrant advocates, it is clear that the fear they felt coming into decision day has been only partially alleviated.

Yes, the Supreme Court’s decision upheld that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and “are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”

And yes, Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, said “citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ . . . We keep that promise today.”

But step back from the prose and take note of the purpose. Roberts wasn’t making the case just to the public. He was making it to his colleagues.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh affirmed the judgment but dissented in part and did not join Roberts’s majority opinion.) In other words, four Supreme Court justices were willing to state that they do not believe birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution—a fact that would have shocked most legal scholars not too long ago.

So yes, the Court’s rejection of Trump’s order reveals the limits of his expansive and often illegal view of executive power that extends to modifying the Constitution via such orders. And yes, more than 250,000 babies born in the United States each year who would have been affected had the executive order been upheld, were not.

But opponents of Trump’s executive order still have future developments to fear. The door remains open to a future Congress restricting birthright citizenship through legislation, with only one justice needed to flip for that goal to be achieved.

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THIS ISSUE BECAME the stuff of 72-point headlines when, among the many executive orders Trump approved in the hours after being sworn in for his second term, he signed one attempting to abolish birthright citizenship.

Ratified in 1868 to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved black Americans, the Fourteenth Amendment makes those born on U.S. soil full citizens entitled to all the associated rights and privileges thereof and ensuring “equality under the law, regardless of race, ancestry, or parentage,” as the American Immigration Council puts it. The amendment overrode the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that black people “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.”

Or as John Bingham, author of the amendment, once said, its purpose was to end the “horrid blasphemy . . . that this is a Government of white men.”

But that intention has been contested at times in history since. As Columbia University’s Mae Ngai, a historian specializing in immigration, told me, while the struggle over birthright citizenship is profoundly important, it is not new. She said today’s fight over the issue mirrors past episodes, such as the one in which Frederick Douglass challenged racialist and nativist positions in his famous 1867 lecture, “Our Composite Nation.” At the time, Douglass was speaking in opposition to attempts to restrict Chinese immigration and naturalization. He charged that post-Civil War American democracy must include all races.

This was the singular American identity the Trump administration sought to destroy.

“As the Trump administration lawyer said: We live in a different world today. And [Chief Justice] John Roberts said [during oral argument in April], ‘Yes it’s a different world, but it’s the same Constitution,’” Ngai noted.

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WHICH RAISES ANOTHER reason that Tuesday’s ruling from the Court has not been so widely celebrated by immigrant rights activists. There simply has been too much damage done in other areas to celebrate a thin reaffirmation of the Constitution.

This certainly is a rebuke of the Trump administration, Ngai noted, but it is one amid so many large-scale political and legal abdications. “If you look at birthright citizenship as a signature piece in the Trump agenda against people of color, they [Trump supporters] got everything else—mass removals, ‘build the wall,’ no asylum, even green card holders at risk—but they lost big on birthright.”

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, a pro-immigration group that rose out of Silicon Valley, described to me how the anti-birthright citizenship order had acted as a “heat shield” for the administration, helping it rebuff nationwide injunctions and draw media attention away from dozens of other policies that hurt thousands of people. Schulte warned that the fact the Court split over whether to rewrite the Constitution should “be of the deepest concern.”

“Winning is better than losing…” he added, trailing off.

The Trump team “knew everyone would scream the most because it’s so clearly unlawful,” Schulte told me, but “their efforts to rewrite the Constitution as they see fit—even if they end with a ‘loss’ today—have advanced their goals substantially. We should be clear-eyed on where they’re going to continue taking status from millions of people.”

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Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.) has seen the administration’s mass deportation machine up close at the Delaney Hall Detention Center in Newark, New Jersey. Though she has an unfiltered view of the brutality of the administration’s policies in this area, she still sees profound importance in the Court’s rebuke to Trump and Stephen Miller.

“The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are the fruit of the Second Founding of this nation,” she said.

A struggle built in from our inception culminates with a Civil War. You have both black and white abolitionists recognize that we not only have to abolish slavery, one of the most horrific things mankind has done, but we also have to hardwire facets of freedom in perpetuity, with birthright citizenship as a cornerstone. Because freed slaves understood no one is born with less rights than another, which is one of the most important facets of our Constitution—of this Second Founding—and I’m disgusted this administration was willing to challenge it.

Democrats and immigration activists had broadly agreed that while the administration’s assault on birthright citizenship was dangerous—and still is, as mentioned above—its anti-birthright push was always likely to fail at the nation’s highest court.

Despite this reprieve for the hundreds of thousands of new Americans each year whose citizenship was threatened by Trump’s executive order, some of the immigration leaders I spoke with said the most consequential recent decision with immediate consequences for immigrants is the likely fatal blow the Court dealt to Temporary Protected Status late last week. Hundreds of thousands of Haitian refugees are now facing removal despite the program that afforded them their status having been designed to prevent new administrations from destroying it on a whim.

Schulte told me he’d “heard people say TPS wasn’t the major decision”—but in many ways, it was.

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“The Largest Delegalization Campaign in History”

WHILE WAITING for Trump v. Barbara, I knew that if the Court overturned the executive order, many would see it as a win for democracy and a rebuke of Trump—both of which are true, as Mejia and others I spoke with affirmed.

But the mood among Democrats and immigrant rights advocates remains dark as they consider the plight of the million-plus people living in the country legally under Temporary Protected Status. TPS grants the Department of Homeland Security the authority to determine whether citizens of specific nations can remain and work in the United States if they’re unable to “return safely to their own country,” whether because of a natural disaster, violence, or some other extreme but temporary situation.

In last week’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe, the Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to cancel temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians. Like Tuesday’s birthright citizenship decision, this one was also 6–3.

Critics of the Mullin decision characterized it as a rug-pull for those affected: The Trump administration has been given a license to arbitrarily decide who gets to be an immigrant at any given time, reserving for itself the right to take away in an instant the legal status of a person who has followed the rules to get here.

The decision is insidious, and the potential scale of its consequences is enormous.

There are 1.3 million people living in the United States with TPS, Schulte told me.1 As of early 2025, around 100,000 people with TPS had spouses and children with U.S. citizenship, and some 390,000 U.S. citizen children have parents with TPS.

They are our neighbors—the people next to us in grocery store aisles or the pews. In places like Springfield, Ohio, they work in manufacturing and service industries; in places like South Florida, they work predominantly in health care and taking care of our seniors—our grandmothers, as my colleague Jonathan Cohn has powerfully written.

All of these people are now at risk of deportation. If we only account for TPS holders from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti, that’s still a “quarter million people who have been here since last century,” Schulte added.

The threat they face is dizzying. For example, TPS for people from El Salvador who had “continuous residence” in the United States since 2001 is set to expire on September 9. Will Trump continue to designate the country of his strongman partner and prison exporter Nayib Bukele as unsafe, which would problematize the return of these TPS holders? Not likely.

“There’s no precedent for the level of revocation of immigration status and people with such longstanding ties to the country,” Schulte said. In frustration, he slammed the Court for dismissing the argument that the administration’s words revealed racist reasons for canceling Haitians’ TPS status. “If there isn’t racial animus towards Haitian TPS holders, then those words have no meaning.”

Andrea Flores, who served as the director of border management on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, said the TPS decision marks a turning point for how seriously the world can take our immigration policies.

“The word of the U.S. no longer matters when it comes to immigration. No immigrant will be able to trust the policy of the U.S. government when they know the next president can delegalize them with the stroke of a pen,” she told me.

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THE EFFECTS OF THIS DECISION will reverberate across the globe, but they will be felt with special force in Latin America. In Venezuela, the decision on TPS comes, as CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez writes, “against the backdrop of twin quakes . . . the type of natural disaster that might prompt a review for TPS by DHS.” Horrifyingly, a hundred Venezuelans deported from the United States just hours before the earthquakes were housed in a hotel that collapsed after the shaking started. They are now missing.

The effects on the business community and on eldercare will take time to emerge, but they, too, will be profound.

“We strongly disagree with terminating Haitian TPS,” Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said on a conference call after the decision came down. “It’s economically destructive and morally wrong.”

Senior care providers who were also on the call said the decision was going to devastate the lives of a million American seniors who were going to “lose beloved caretakers who bathed them, fed them, and kept them company for years.” They noted that many vulnerable seniors have memory issues, making turnover in their caretakers particularly harmful.

Rob Liebreich, president and CEO of faith-based nonprofit Goodwin Living, described his feeling of “sadness that more of our older adults who need support in years to come won’t get the care they need.”

And a senior resident at Goodwin House Bailey’s Crossroads in Virginia named Rita Siebenaler told the call it was a “dreadful” day.

“This is not the way a civil society should treat its seniors or humanely treat immigrants to our country,” she said, urging Congress to press for extension of TPS.

Linda Couch, the senior vice president of housing policy at Leading Age, an association of senior care providers, said the United States is staring down a massive shortage of people in the aging care workforce. The advocacy group PHI puts the shortfall at close to 10 million workers.

Couch said there are no replacements lined up for the skilled caretakers being forced out as a result of the decision.

“People can lose their jobs overnight and there is no workforce waiting in the wings that can replace these professionals,” she said.

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DURING A LITTLE NOTICED FIRESIDE CHAT this week in Washington, D.C., Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) told a gathering of fellow lawmakers, beltway types, and activists a scary campfire story.

“If Marco Rubio is the nominee for president,” Gallego warned, “we are in trouble.”

Gallego wasn’t definitively declaring that Secretary of State Rubio would win the Latino vote if he mounts a presidential bid in 2028. He was arguing something more nuanced: that the bilingual Cuban-American would blunt the growing strength Democrats have been showing in states like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and Florida with voters who have recoiled at Trump’s policies and priorities.

Gallego was doing his best impression of Dr. Strange in Marvel’s Infinity War—looking ahead to see a dark hellscape of a future. But he also had a remedy to offer: If the Democratic party got its act together not just with Latino voters but with better messaging immigration ahead of the 2026 midterms, a presidential election letdown could be avoided in 2028. He had reason to believe that Democrats could do just that.

Polling in recent months has shown how deeply Trump has slipped with Hispanic voters. A March poll of 1,054 Latino adults by Florida International University’s Latino Public Opinion Forum showed 67 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Trump, with cost of living, immigration, and health care as respondents’ top issues. In April, the Pew Research Center showed that Trump had reached a second-term low approval rating among Latino voters who backed him in 2024, with a 27-point drop in approval since his inauguration.

These numbers formed the backdrop for the event at which Gallego spoke: the inaugural Latino Vote Summit convened on Tuesday at the National Press Club. Speaking alongside the senator were Chuck Rocha and Mike Madrid, a duo from opposite sides of the aisle who have worked on campaigns for a couple decades and also host the Latino Vote podcast.

They and others discussed how Trump’s problems with voters stemmed largely from their belief that he had misplaced priorities and that none included a laser-like focus on the state of the economy. Carlos Odio, co-founder of Equis Research, a Democratic-aligned group, said that Trump came into office with a grace period with Latinos, which ended thanks to a combination of flailing on the economy and over-aggressive immigration enforcement last summer.

“With Trump it’s never one thing. It’s the experience of it all—everything, everywhere, all at once,” Odio told me after his panel:

It’s not just immigration, or just the tariffs. It’s an overall sense of priorities in the wrong place. People getting mad about Iran is not that different than when they get mad about the ballroom. They did think there was a problem with the immigration surge and wanted him to take measures to restore enforcement, but they don’t like what they’ve seen from his administration and don’t think it should be the priority.

And here’s where Rubio enters the equation.

Trump may be a singular, disruptive presence in American politics. But someday some Republican will have to take his place. It’s not that Rubio is beloved—though Republicans like him a lot, and more than JD Vance. It’s that a bilingual, bicultural South Florida Cuban-American is by definition different from Trump. Gallego’s worry was that if Democrats stumbled on how they talk to persuadable Hispanics, Rubio could sell a story that recaptured them and their votes.

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FOR ALL THE TALK OF HOW the economy and cost of living are the top issues for Americans—and they are—there was one stat from Equis’s polling over the last year that I found particularly instructive. When the Trump administration swarmed Minneapolis in the new year, leading to the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, immigration spiked as a priority for Hispanics, jumping up to 30 percent. That was nearly as high as the 34 percent of those who named the economy as their top issue during that same period in February. It then plummeted down to 13 percent in March and 10 percent this May.

The volatility illustrated the dilemma the Trump administration finds itself in: Immigration becomes top-of-mind for voters when the news around it is alarming. That’s widely different from 2024, when Trump ran successfully on mass deportations and border security.

Odio said that only now, seventeen months into Trump’s second term, are Trump’s approval ratings among Latinos looking the way they did in 2018, when Hispanics helped Democrats engineer a blue wave rebuke of Trump.

Aileen Cardona, a pollster with the polling firm Hart Research, told me that while immigration is not the top issue for these voters, it can nonetheless be a dealbreaker. And while she doesn’t anticipate that one election will erase the gains Republicans made with Hispanics over the last decade, she did see the possibility of real backsliding.

“Trump said he was going to get in there, bring down prices, deport violent criminals, and make us safer,” she said. “Instead, he’s gone all-in on immigration, not just criminals, and the failed promises and priorities theme matches people’s experience. Prices have not gone down and they’ve seen people deported beyond what he said he was going to do.”

Those perceptions could change if inflation slows, or if Trump softens his policies on deportation. The former may happen, the latter seems less possible as long as Stephen Miller & Co. have the president’s ear and the Supreme Court makes it easier for the administration to get away with skirting the law to end programs like TPS. Democrats know voters can be convinced that candidates with extreme histories are palatable enough. What they fear is that someone like Rubio, with a prior history pushing for immigration reform, could tack to the center and still hold on to them.

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ANTICIPATING THAT POSSIBILITY, participants at the summit said that Democratic leaders and candidates would be wise to sketch out what they actually support on immigration, and draw contrasts with the zealotry and cruelty of the modern Republican party.

Newly-elected Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-N.J.), whose district is 17 percent Latino, used her time at the summit to speak about centering humanity in her work. The congresswoman, who has visited and spoken to people at the infamous Delaney Hall and Elizabeth detention centers, said she rejects the implication that the federal government can take people, strip them of their legal status, incarcerate them with a lack of thorough medical care, and cost them their lives.

“I can see what’s happening to all immigrants,” she said. “The data bears out that what we are witnessing is an erosion of constitutional protections, which should scare every single American. . . . Protections being dismissed for immigrants, [both] legal and undocumented.”

For Gallego’s part, he was keen on explaining how he won his Senate race by heavily engaging Latino men, while often eschewing advice from the national party on how to run his race. Playing comically off Rocha, Gallego described his 2024 opponent, Kari Lake, showing up to the border with a gun strapped to her hip as if she was ready for a shootout, Sicario-style. He didn’t take the bait to match her with his own theatrics.

“They trusted us more, not the crazy, gung ho, show-up-with-guns at the border and put a hand to the border wall like it was the Wailing Wall in Israel,” Gallego said.

“It doesn’t work,” he said, before Rocha interjected, “because it’s crazy.”

Rocha, meanwhile, regaled attendees with other ways the campaign reached out to Latino men. He described setting up a Canelo Álvarez fight watch party at Gallego’s behest that made consultants worry that Gallego himself was going to spar at the event. And he laughed while recalling when the campaign threw a rodeo that Gallego attended. When Rocha said they had “secured bulls” for the event, the consultants believed they had bulls tied up somewhere in the parking lot.

Gallego stressed that commitment to authenticity was critical for his election. Trump’s overreach is toxic and not supported by Hispanics, he explained, but those voters are not as liberal as commonly believed, and they still want border security.

“The Democratic party still does not understand that there is no national Democratic party without the Latino vote being part of that coalition. And you have to answer to where the Latino voter is, not where you want the Latino voter to be,” Gallego said. “The fact is, not all Latinos are liberal.”

Gallego commended Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, whom Gallego has advised on reaching Hispanic voters, as someone open to doing that work. Gallego said he told Shapiro that he should ask retired Puerto Rican baseball players to attend local baseball games in Reading, Pennsylvania, which is two-thirds Latino.

It’s the kind of localized and culturally attuned advice that the party may want to listen to in case Gallego’s nightmare comes to pass and Rubio runs in 2028.

Rubio is a Cuban-American conservative with some charm and youth—or what passes for youth in Washington these days (he’s 55 and will be approaching 58 on January 20, 2029). And while he has debased himself and abandoned his old positions countless times, he seems to have an appeal that other possible 2028 candidates do not.

Does Rubio’s possible rise, Gallego was asked, mean that Democrats need to nominate someone Latino, like him, for president, too? Gallego said not necessarily.

“I don’t think Democrats need a Latino candidate,” he said. “But they need to make sure there is a targeted campaign to Latinos if Marco Rubio runs. . . . We would be playing with a lot less territory, because of the voter out there excited about the first Latino candidate running for president on top of the ticket.”

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WORLD CUP VIEWERS WATCHING the U.S. national team dismantle Paraguay 4–1 last Friday were treated to Telemundo’s play-by-play announcer Andrés Cantor unleashing his trademark “¡GOOOOOOOOOOL!” call as Folarin Balogun scored his second goal. At halftime, viewers would have seen a related Spanish-language political ad. Normally a vibe killer, this spot leaned into the moment. It laid out Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico’s views on Social Security and Medicare, education, and taxing millionaires. More to the point, it’s layered with footage of Talarico spending time with Latinos, ending with a shout of “¡TALARICOOOOOOOOO!”

The ad is running during the first batch of Mexico and United States group stage games, and is part of the Talarico campaign’s $800,000 ad buy. Chuck Rocha, an adviser to the Talarico campaign who got his start working for Gov. Ann Richards in the 1990s, said it was the earliest he’d ever seen a general-election candidate spend on Spanish-language TV since those halcyon days.

It’s a canny move.

Talarico’s chances for victory in Texas this November are real, but they will be determined by

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THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT THAT AI will play a profound role in the coming elections. And it won’t be visible just in revolts over data centers, or questions about state ownership, or arguments over regulation. It will be seen in the way AI systems provide basic facts to voters, too.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of that today comes on immigration, a topic where emotions run hot over basic word choice. An AI chatbot’s response to simple questions can vary in significant ways, in the process changing how voters might perceive core issues at the heart of the debate.

The other day, I asked the four most popular AI chatbots a question that someone just engaging in politics might ponder: “In one sentence, tell me whether immigration is a threat to the United States.”

Here are the results:

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AT EVERY TURN SINCE DONALD TRUMP regained office, Delaney Hall, the detention center in Newark, New Jersey, has been central in the struggle against the administration’s cruel approach to immigration enforcement.

Democratic lawmakers have been arrested and physically harassed at the site. Detainees there have launched a hunger strike to draw attention to what they describe as its deplorable conditions. And as the protests have grown more regular, so too have the violent efforts by federal agents to quash them. The facility, situated in an industrial strip a stone’s throw from Newark Bay, is a composite of all that emerges from Trump’s punishing mass-deportation system.

But why Delaney Hall? What is it about that place that has made it the center of these clashes in Trump 2.0?

Part of it is that New Jersey lawmakers have proven keen to directly confront the administration.

Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) is one of them. He showed up at Delaney in late May to monitor a hunger and labor strike launched in response to “disease, overflowing toilets, poor ventilation, and worm-riddled food.” While on site on Memorial Day, he attempted to de-escalate a confrontation between protesters and ICE agents and got pepper-sprayed for his troubles.

Kim, who has since said that that week was one of the most difficult of his life, says violence felt almost inevitable that day. He said he hasn’t seen New Jersey so close to the edge at any point in his time in office. The problems, he added in an interview with me, start with the facility itself.

Delaney Hall is run by the GEO Group. The private prison giant was last year awarded a $1 billion contract lasting fifteen years that quadrupled detention center space in New Jersey. The Delaney Hall compound is so shoddily constructed that four detainees broke out last June.

“First, the facility needs to be shut down. It’s not up to any type of standard,” Kim told me. “When there was this breakout of four detainees last year, I actually went to figure out what happened. GEO Group refused to let me in at first. Someone that worked there told me the exterior wall of that cell was just made of mesh and drywall.”

“It’s an exceedingly old building, not up to standards, which is causing so many of the problems and poor conditions—like the extreme heat detainees are complaining about now,” Kim said of the facility. Built a quarter-century ago, Delaney was used for much of the last decade as a halfway house; it reopened last year as a GEO-run immigrant-detention facility.

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The facility’s location is another reason it has become so central to the story of Trump’s immigration horrors. New Jersey is a “warehouse” state, as Nedia Morsy, director of Make the Road New Jersey, which is part of the ICE Out of New Jersey coalition, noted. Which means there are ample targets for an administration looking to ramp up workplace enforcement. On top of that, Delaney Hall is close to both a major airport and the second-largest port in the country—each critical pinchpoints for ICE operations. Morsy, whose group has protested Delaney Hall and advocated for immigrant rights, described it as the ideal place for the administration “to pilot and launch the deportation matrix.”

“What we’re seeing is a symptom of the infrastructure the fascist regime has laid out in New Jersey,” she added.

In fact, the first workplace raid of Trump’s second administration occurred in Newark. The Ocean Seafood Depot was raided in January 2025, within seventy-two hours of Trump returning to office. At the time, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka described the “indignity” experienced by a Puerto Rican veteran whose military credentials were questioned after he was swept up in the raid. Four months later, Baraka, who has long sought to close Delaney Hall, was himself arrested outside it.

In Trump world, though, we cannot overlook the political component when explaining why Delaney has become Ground Zero for Trump’s deportation efforts.

Flush with confidence from Trump’s victory in 2024 and his overperformance in the traditionally blue state, MAGA allies began viewing New Jersey as a swing state. Trump installed his personal lawyer, Alina Habba, as an acting U.S. attorney in New Jersey. And she quickly looked to make a splash. Confrontations with Democratic lawmakers were a simple way to impress MAGA zealots and further press Republicans’ “advantage” on immigration. Delaney Hall was the staging ground.

It didn’t hurt matters that the site sits not too far away from New York City. The Trump administration got the major media market publicity it craved without the risk of a swell of protesters fighting back.

“There was in late 2024 and early 2025 a push by Republicans saying New Jersey is a swing state and gains have been made, and Habba had been stoking that, talking in political terms about turning New Jersey into a red state,” Kim told me. “Early on this just became a real proving ground for Alina Habba’s ambitions and her efforts to perform for President Trump.”1

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‘The who is the most important part of the story’

It’s worth recalling that in those early days, when Habba was ascendant and dreams of a red New Jersey didn’t seem so far-fetched, many Democrats thought they were powerless to stop the cruelty the president was imposing on undocumented immigrants. But not all Democrats. Some, like Rep. Joaquin Castro down in the Dilley facility in Texas, chose a path of greater resistance.

In New Jersey, one of those Democrats has been Rep. Rob Menendez, whose district includes the seafood depot raided in January 2025. When federal agents pushed around Rep. LaMonica McIver at Delaney and then blamed her for inciting violence, Menendez was there, shielding her.

Menendez has placed a high priority on uncovering the true story of Delaney. He has conducted oversight visits at the facility fifteen times, and, along with other New Jersey Democrats, is demanding accountability for systemic and life-threatening medical neglect there. I asked how many people Menendez has helped, both at Delaney Hall and including family members and people detained elsewhere and his office responded with pretty shocking numbers.2

Menendez told me that, while Newark hasn’t seen the paramilitary response from the administration that cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis have endured, Delaney Hall illustrates the vision “Stephen Miller and others had” around mass deportation. It also, he added, shows what happens when people push back against that vision—“how it’s been falling apart and how you’ve seen a huge erosion of support for the president’s immigration policies.”

Trump sold the American people on going after criminals—not ordinary immigrants. So, as bad as the conditions in the detention center are, Menendez says, “the who is the most important part of the story.”

Menendez described to me the cast of humanity he has seen behind the doors of Delaney Hall:

• Pregnant women—whose presence in the detention facility was, until recently, denied.

• Immigrants with Alien Registration Numbers who believe they have been wrongly detained.

• Medically vulnerable people—like Emanuel Rodrigues, 38, who requires crutches or a wheelchair and was deprived of both for forty days, then moved to medical isolation for four months.

• People who have protected status—like Adriana Quiroz Zapata, who, because of the horrors inflicted upon her by her ex-boyfriend and his police buddies in Colombia, should have been protected by the Convention Against Torture yet was shipped to the Democratic Republic of Congo instead.

“I talk to parents: mothers who got their kids ready for school and left their house to go do a routine ICE check-in and never came home to their children,” Menendez told me. “And only by the grace of God and my grandparents being from Cuba instead of Guatemala or Honduras, I get to go back to my kids after visiting Delaney Hall.”

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DELANEY HALL IS THE MOST VISIBLE manifestation of the administration’s cruelty in New Jersey, but it’s not the only one. There are other people detained nearby in the state.

Margarita and Filemon Ruiz are grandparents. They own 3 Hermanos Mexican Restaurant in Rockaway, New Jersey. It’s a 45-minute drive from Delaney Hall. Margarita has diabetes, while Filemon recently had back surgery.

I spoke to their son Osmar. He was told his parents are being held at the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. He hasn’t heard anything about how they’re coping. But Osmar couldn’t talk long. With his parents gone, he was taking the restaurant’s orders. There was, as before, work to be done.

Rep. Menendez, in our talk, emphasized that these stories matter just as much as those from Delaney.

But he also acknowledged that the people inside Delaney were special to him—not because they had experienced dispiriting cruelty but because of how they had risen above it.

“The place is meant to break people,” Menendez said. “The place is meant to take humanity away from our communities, strip it all away. But to see them create something there to hold on to, to keep faith and keep hope, you have to do everything you can, and it’s powerful to see.”

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THE DIVIDING LINES in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary are coming into focus. And they’re running right through the issue of immigration.

Ro Khanna, the ubiquitous California congressman with one eye ever on the White House, put his fellow Democrats on blast this week, saying anyone who supported the Laken Riley Act—one of the first major laws passed during the second Trump administration—should be disqualified from becoming the party’s next standard-bearer.

“Nine swing-state Democrats gave permission for mass deportation,” Khanna told me. “No one who voted for the Laken Riley Act should have any role in the future leadership of the Democratic party in this country. . . . It’s disqualifying, just like the Iraq War vote.”

His remarks offer an early preview of the fraught and complex immigration debates yet to come among Democrats who aspire to the presidency. While the party is fairly united in opposition to Trump’s use of ICE and his pursuit of mass deportations, there remain sharp disagreements over how much they should lean into aggressive interior enforcement policies and tough talk on border security. The Laken Riley Act, in particular, has potential to become a major point of friction.

The bill, which was signed into law in January 2025, grants law enforcement a wide berth to detain immigrants arrested for low-level crimes like shoplifting, whether or not they are ultimately convicted of the offense. When it was considered by lawmakers, Democrats were still reeling from the 2024 elections, during which the party had been tagged as insufficiently responsive to voters’ worries about illegal immigration. Twelve Democratic senators voted for it. Nine are from swing states: Sens. John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto, Jacky Rosen, Jon Ossoff, Raphael Warnock, Gary Peters, and Elissa Slotkin.

Of those, Gallego, Kelly, Ossoff, and Warnock are often discussed as—or are seemingly positioning themselves to be—potential candidates for president in 2028. Khanna, who is heading to South Carolina (a critical early primary state) this weekend, criticized those senators for “political opportunism” in voting for the bill.

“If you didn’t have the guts to stand up to Donald Trump then, why will you have guts as leader of this party?” he said.

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Khanna, whose mix of progressive views and technocratic capitalism idiosyncratically bridge the left and centrist wings of his party, and who vaulted to national attention over the last year because of his work exposing the Epstein documents, made these comments during a wide-ranging interview on immigration. The topic is already testing the party in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. As I’ve written before, simply saying “Trump is bad” and “mass deportation is terrible” can only take Democrats so far. Voters disgusted with Trump still need to be persuaded by Democrats that they will not just do a better job on immigration, but bring forward a strategy that includes everything from revamping our asylum system to modernizing our borders to, yes, establishing pathways to legalization and citizenship.

The officials who are going to have the most influence in filling in those blanks are the ones most likely to run for president. And Khanna himself has made no secret of his interest in that office. The congressman has said he believes he has the right economic vision for the country. In our interview, he cast Trump as a vestige of the past, someone whose ideas about how to build wealth are locked in a 1980s frame (including the focus on acquiring land). Khanna argued that what the country really needed was someone who knows how to position the economy for the twenty-first century. And as a congressman representing Silicon Valley, he might just fit the bill.

“I want the economic future in my district for every American,” he told me. “That success—I get it, as the son of immigrants. We have that roadmap, and I want the Democratic party to be that party, and I have a clear sense of where I want to lead.”

Khanna said immigration reform and economic growth go hand-in-hand, noting that immigrants helped found a significant proportion—he puts the figure at 40 percent—of venture capital–backed tech companies that went public, including Yahoo, Intel, eBay, and Google. Khanna, to be clear, has not announced a candidacy for the White House. But apparently envisioning what he would do as president, he told me he would prioritize legalization for immigrants who have weathered a brutal assault from the Trump administration. He even offered that he would do so during the first six months of his hypothetical administration.

“You have to have a real path to legalization and citizenship,” Khanna said, “but we won’t stand for another Democratic president promising the moon and not getting legalization done.” He argued the first thing immigrants are interested in securing is not the right to vote, but the ability to live and work here without fear of getting dragged out of their car by masked police and thrown in detention.

“In the first six months, we would get the immigrant community out of the shadows,” Khanna said.

While some Democrats have recoiled at the immigration rhetoric the party adopted during the Joe Biden era, Khanna seemed comfortable embracing some of it. He called to “abolish ICE—first of all—tear it down,” saying the agency had vastly outgrown the purpose of its post-9/11 creation, which was meant to coordinate immigration issues with national intelligence around terrorism threats. Instead, Khanna called for the dynamic that existed under the previous Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), where it served as the lead enforcement agency, operating under the Department of Justice, as it had for six decades before its abolition.

I asked Khanna if he believed Trump has done anything right on immigration. He said the president was right to say we need a secure border. But he didn’t frame it as a matter of national security so much as economic exploitation. Without border protections, Khanna said, big corporations are able to exploit undocumented immigrants for lower wages, which in turn undermines unionization efforts.

Some of the country’s biggest corporations have roots in Khanna’s district. I asked him if he had any exhortations to offer tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, who quickly abandoned their past pro-immigrant positions once Trump returned to power, or others like Peter Thiel, whose company Palantir helped build tools to make immigration enforcement easier and more precise.

“Have some courage,” Khanna said. It was a statement directed at several CEOs he knows, like Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who themselves had to navigate the immigration system before their stratospheric success. “You had no trouble telling Biden what he was doing wrong, but you’re seated with Trump and can’t say ‘Hey, Mr. President I was on an H-1B visa.’ Tim Cook is giving [Trump] gifts but has no guts to say [that he doesn’t] agree on his assault on immigrants in the country, which has quietly impacted [his] company. None of you were quiet with Biden on crypto and regulations, but [you] have sat, muted, with a total lack of courage with Donald Trump.”

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Palantir and the True Cost of Mass Deportation

Standing in front of a lectern that said “ICE KILLS, PALANTIR PROFITS” at a press event in February, Khanna became the first Bay Area Democrat to agree to return contributions from the Thiel-founded company. He also pledged that he would accept no future contributions from its employees, either. Palantir secured a $30 million ICE contract to build an “Immigration Lifecycle Operating System,” or “ImmigrationOS,” to enable the agency to track self-deportations almost as they happen. The company also enjoys a $1 billion purchasing agreement to provide future services with the Department of Homeland Security.

But Khanna’s not entirely clean here, either. He filed a stock transaction disclosure in January that showed his wife bought up to $125,000 in Palantir stock last year. According to NOTUS, her transactions include a $50,000 stock purchase on April 22, days after the news broke about ICE’s contract with Palantir for “ImmigrationOS.”

Khanna told me his wife has a trust that his in-laws set up prior to marriage that he has no say over. “Neither of us trade, .001% of it has some transactions with Palantir. It’s like looking at a mutual fund and picking one stock, but I have zero say in it.”

Khanna wasn’t combative when I pressed him on the stock transactions, but he did slow down the interview to more clearly explain his position. He then requested that it be properly explained to readers, cognizant that the situation could be used to come up with “attack lines,” as he said. The moment opened a small window into the other ways immigration policy—and how the Trump administration has conducted it—will shape Democratic politics in the years ahead.

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The more immediate matter, though, is the mass deportation machine that keeps humming along, even as Republicans, wary of its unpopularity, insist it no longer exists.

It’s still visible in the actions of the White House, as when earlier this month Trump issued an executive order leaning on banks to look into the immigration status of customers, or as Markwayne Mullin, the newly minted DHS chief, floats the idea of canceling international flights into sanctuary cities. And it’s evident in local communities, too, as in the case of Wendy Hernandez Reyes—an Alabama woman who was deported from Louisiana, where she was detained, to Honduras without her toddler, who was then killed by a violent uncle. ICE actually blamed her for her tiny child’s murder.

Khanna recently spoke up at a hearing about the Reyes case. And he mentioned it to me, as well, arguing that Trump’s cruel mass deportation policies undermined a central American project, Frederick Douglass’s Reconstruction-era vision of a “composite nation” built on absolute equality.

“It undermines the principle of America as an immigrant nation, as a nation where anyone can come from any background, education level, and help contribute to our culture, help build a life for themselves,” Khanna said. “People are being deported without any respect for their dignity, for their rights, deported even though they’re paying taxes, and are peaceful neighbors.”

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THE NEW HEAD of Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be David Venturella, a former executive of the GEO Group, which I think of as the Coca-Cola of immigrant detention—the ubiquitous, hugely profitable, default option wherever you go. (That would make CoreCivic, America’s second-largest provider, the Pepsi of private prisons.)

Trump’s appointment of a veteran of the prison-industrial complex is a shocking display of how intertwined private industry and government bureaucracy have become over the last sixteen months. It also shines a light on the state of the Department of Homeland Security and hints at the authority (or lack thereof) of its new leader, Markwayne Mullin.

But first, let’s chat about Venturella.

This isn’t one of those things where, as part of a long career, Venturella held an executive post a dozen years ago.

No. From 2012 to 2023, Venturella was a senior vice president of a company that holds $1 billion in ICE contracts. According to the SEC, even after retiring from the GEO Group, Venturella continued to advise on new and existing contracts, serving as a paid consultant until January 2025. What ever could have happened in January 2025 that led Venturella to give up this gig?

And, how unusual is this?

Well, ethics rules bar federal employees from working on contracts awarded to their former employers. But the Washington Post reports the Trump administration conveniently granted Venturella a waiver. Within two weeks of leaving his consulting role at GEO Group, Venturella joined ICE as a senior adviser. At the time, ICE reassured the press that Venturella would have “no role in reviewing, approving, or recommending contracts.” If that state of affairs was ever true, it’s over now.

Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.), a staunch critic of ICE and of Mullin’s predecessor, Kristi Noem, said that only a few years ago it would have been “unimaginable” for a former private prison executive to oversee the awarding of contracts to his former employer.

“Private detention centers that contract with ICE will now run ICE. That’s probably the easiest way to explain it,” Ramirez told me. “This administration is trying to push and push and push and see how far they can go. And what they’ve proven is they can go pretty damn far. You’re talking about a private prison company profiting off of the pain of immigrants now having their employee be the new head of ICE.”

Ramirez added that Venturella’s appointment tells Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration donors—like GEO Group and CoreCivic—they have the green light to maximize their profits, minimize expenses, and worsen conditions at detention centers because, at the end of the day, their people are now calling the shots on contracts.

Readers who have seen the vast corruption of the Trump administration may resign themselves to thinking this is all unsurprising. After all, elections have consequences. The New York Times reported Venturella favors quieter immigration enforcement than the carnival of horrors Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and little angry Greg Bovino brought to town. But here’s one story about him worth telling.

Last summer, Paolo Zampolli, a former modeling agent and longtime Trump friend (who actually introduced him to Melania), needed a favor. In order to win custody of his son, Zampolli wanted his Brazilian ex-girlfriend, in jail for fraud charges, to be deported. No biggie. Zampolli reached out to the Trump administration, and an ICE official scrambled to get it done. The official called the Miami ICE field office telling them it was important to someone close to Trump.

That ICE official serving as Trump’s hatchet man that day was David Venturella.

Homan Up, Mullin Down

A private-prison insider taking over ICE is further evidence that in the second, more brutal, Trump administration, the mass detention and deportation machine will continue to hum.

Still, it’s worth taking a step back to see where the agency finds itself now. With Noem, Lewandowski, and Bovino out, Border Patrol agents are no longer making headlines for spraying constitutional observers and protesters with chemical agents. The steady stream of corruption allegations that dogged the agency under Noem has slowed—for now.

“Dozens of civilians I still talk to—they’re thankful that the Kristi Noem, Chief Bovino, Corey Lewandowski vein of activity is going to be investigated and reviewed because of how harmful it was to carrying out the mission,” said Jason Houser, who served in the Biden administration as chief of staff at ICE.

Following the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, DHS had already drawn back from its indiscipline and violence amid invasions of (blue) American cities—before Markwayne Mullin’s installation as DHS chief. During his confirmation hearing, Mullin laid out the new goal: Get ICE out of the headlines.

“My goal in six months is that we’re not in the lead story every single day,” he said. “My goal is for people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.”

He sang a similar tune on Fox Business last week. “We’re not going into New York like another Minneapolis,” he said. “We’re going to go after the felons.”

That approach, while jibing with Republican leaders’ strategy of quietening down about “mass deportations” because of the policy’s abysmal poll numbers, runs afoul of Trump’s feverish base that wants millions of deportations, skulls cracked—U.S. citizen, visa holder, or not—and legal immigration severely cut (with certain exceptions, of course).

But while Mullin is in the hot seat, it is in fact Tom Homan, the border czar known for Cava lunches and cartoon bags of cash, who has been empowered in the post-Noem era. To those alleging that President Trump is getting weak on mass deportation, Homan bellowed: “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

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In conversations I had with former DHS officials who served in both the Biden and Trump administrations and remain in contact with their old colleagues, it became clear that employees who believe in secure borders and interior enforcement are worried about how that mission squares with election-year politics.

“There is nervousness about the fact Congress is giving them hundreds of millions to carry out a mission that is now being pulled back a bit, of mass arrests and mass detentions,” Houser told me, echoing others I spoke to.

One thing Mullin had taken a keen interest in, though, was the appointment of the new head of ICE.

Instead of Venturella, Mullin had “weighed in pretty heavily” in favor of a different candidate, a former DHS official told me. Mullin particularly liked Vic Regalado, the controversial sheriff of Tulsa County, Oklahoma. Regalado had no experience in federal immigration enforcement, but he has posed for pictures with Eric Trump and cast doubt on the 2020 election results. He also spoke at a “Health and Freedom Conference” at Rhema Bible College in Oklahoma, which, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, ended with a ritual mask-burning ceremony. Because of course it did.

The Daily Beast’s PunchUp Substack also called Regalado “Mullin’s favorite.” But while the Daily Mail wrote last week that others had “big dogs” in the fight, Mullin had only a “chihuahua.”

Homan liked Venturella.

Peter Mina, a civil rights lawyer who spent a career working at DHS and ICE including a stint in the second Trump administration, said Regalado would have been a “ridiculous” pick and a “lightning rod.”

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Let’s unpack this. Mullin wanted someone from outside DHS and outside ICE. It seems likely he also wanted someone from his home state—which he represented in the Senate before becoming secretary of homeland security—to be his guy at the department’s most prominent agency. Regalado fit those criteria, and he had some additional political advantages: As a Latino, he could have helped the administration defend against charges that ICE engages in racially discriminatory practices. As a wackjob, he would have driven the president’s critics nuts—which in this administration counts as a policy win. But his lack of experience would have ultimately made his appointment inadvisable. The last thing the administration needs right now is inexperience at DHS causing more bad news stories. (Well, maybe second only to revelations of more connections between Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.)

Maybe Homan and the powers that back him—especially Stephen Miller—still had fresh memories of a different DHS head with too much power causing them problems with her lack of experience and poor decision-making. So the first time Mullin wanted to put his stamp on the agency, they overruled him.

But as it is with the Trump administration, one near terrible pick gives way to an insidious one. As Rep. Ramirez told me, people should be outraged.

“The intentionality is to normalize the corruption and therefore normalize the pain,” she continued. “The idea you would have the very same people that are getting maximum contracts now controlling the contracting process—if that is not just the ultimate level of corruption, I don’t know what is.”

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AMERICANS MAY BE REJECTING the execution of Trump’s mass deportation program, but if Democratic candidates want to have a shot at sustained electoral and governing success, they will need to offer a new path forward on immigration. A top advocacy organization has released a report exclusively to The Bulwark it hopes will mark the first steps towards restoring badly damaged public trust in the rule of law and returning credibility and humanity to a broken immigration system.

The American Immigration Council (AIC) report recognizes the country is at a crossroads regarding immigration enforcement. It lays out how Americans’ views of mass deportation have soured. In fact, the polling has become so negative that in March the Trump administration urged Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations.” But this strategy of reticence hasn’t worked. (Just this week, Tom Homan, the White House border czar, promised that “mass deportations are coming”; the Cava enthusiast put quite a point on it, saying, “You ain’t seen shit yet.”) An April Politico poll found that “half of Americans—including one quarter of [Trump’s] 2024 voters—said Trump’s mass deportations campaign, including his widespread deployment of ICE agents, is too aggressive.”

AIC hopes Democrats will back their framework on interior enforcement as a constructive new approach to immigration. Built around four pillars—compliance, safety, proportionality, and accountability—it recommends fourteen areas of reform. The plan emphasizes making rules that people living in the country can follow; law enforcement that protects communities from threats rather than treating the community as one; consequences for civil immigration violations that are “tailored, reasonable, and humane”; and holding agencies—and individual agents—accountable, up to and including by firing those who abuse their power.

“We’ve seen Democrats over the last six months have become more aligned with what they are against on mass deportation,” said Nayna Gupta, AIC’s policy director, “but now we are at the moment where we have to absolutely pivot to what they stand for.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Even if GOP majorities get washed away in a blue wave this November, polls and focus groups show that voters turned off by Trump aren’t in love with the Democratic party. For decades, Democrats have failed to present a proactive and motivating vision for the immigration system, and their perceived softness on immigration played a role in Trump’s rise. It is essential going forward that Democrats convince voters they have a plan to recalibrate a system that has been twisted and abused by this administration and made to punish everyone—from undocumented immigrants to people with visas and legal status (such as torture victims), to even U.S. citizens who have been targeted, beaten, and detained, often because of their language or presumed racial identity.

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has forcefully advocated for the children and families stuck in the detention center in Dilley, Texas, told me he’s encouraged these conversations have begun. Castro envisions that in January 2029, the presidency, House, and Senate will all be under Democratic control, but he cautions that power can be fleeting and Democrats must make substantive changes to a system Trump exploited.

“This period has been an ugly reminder for the country about the value of immigrants and is another period in American history where we let nativism and anti-immigrant sentiment take us in a very cruel and inhumane direction,” Castro said. “For Democrats, it’s one thing to criticize Donald Trump when he’s committing abuses against immigrants, and another thing once we have power to actually put all your energy to help pass substantive immigration reform. A big part of the reason the country was frustrated with us is we would go on the campaign trail and say we’re going to do this or that, then we get into power and try half of it. People need to see you making an earnest effort to do what you said you’re going to do.”

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A key section of the AIC report proposes reforming civil immigration enforcement by creating a new agency—or, Gupta told me, reappropriating funds for an existing agency like Citizenship and Immigration Services—that would act in a far less punitive fashion than ICE under Trump 2.0. Since the vast majority of immigration violations are civil, not criminal, there is a need for an agency that provides law enforcement without roughing up, handcuffing, and imprisoning detainees indiscriminately, including immigrants who have lived here for decades without a criminal record.

Jason Houser, chief of staff of ICE in the Biden administration and a Homeland Security counterterrorism official, advised AIC on the report and connected them with law enforcement sources around the country for feedback. He agreed that ICE, the Border Patrol, and DHS are not hallowed institutions breathed into existence by the Founding Fathers, but post-9/11 creations that can be altered. While Houser, like the AIC, believes enforcement is necessary, he also supports officers using far less aggressive measures.

“We believe these institutions, to carry out our laws, have to be here, but we’re in a moment, reflexively, where we have to question that,” he said. “I like the idea of challenging the need. There’s always going to be some enforcement that needs to be handled, but the massive gap is in the management.”

Houser said he hopes Democrats take advantage of the opening created by a framework like AIC’s, which runs counter to simplistic narratives and glib slogans about immigration that leave no space for nuance. He sees a deeper vision as being particularly necessary at a time when Republicans are ramming through $70 billion more for ICE and the Border Patrol in the face of rising gas prices and inflation.

“If we’re going to fund systems at those levels, how do we also create pathways for migrants?” Houser said. “Our laws protect more than just Americans, they protect noncitizens as well.”

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I spoke to Gupta, AIC’s policy director, about the bevy of horrendous policies that have emerged from the mass-deportation era: masked agents refusing to identify themselves; flying migrants to Guantanamo Bay or El Salvador with nothing like due process; canceling visas for political reasons; ending programs for hundreds of thousands of people here under temporary protected status; immigration enforcement outside schools and churches; busting into homes without judicial warrants; and accosting and assaulting U.S. citizens. Gupta told me that the only thing that prevented many of these abuses in the past was agency policy, not laws. She said these thin protections for people’s rights demonstrate the critical need for new legislation to reform the immigration system, where laws on the books like the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act gave Trump a legal opening to terrorize people by, for example, putting people with civil immigration violations in detention.

Gupta said DHS has famously operated by issuing internal memos that “are subject to the whim and political interests of political leaders” and can therefore shift year to year. She warned Democrats who might be hoping to govern with a light touch via agency memos of their own that “there’s no way to guarantee [Border Patrol] and ICE agents hired under a second Trump administration are going to listen to memos by a new administration, whereas laws written by Congress create a consistent, stable rule of law.”

Houser agreed about the need to get away from relying on memos and internal policy to direct immigration enforcement.

“We know now that fails,” he said, “and it fails over and over again.”

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How Trump Has Destroyed Our Faith in the Rule of Law

Kelly McCarthy is one of the people in law enforcement who has seen the scope of the mass-deportation regime’s failure up close. She is chief of police for Mendota Heights, a small town in Minnesota bordering St. Paul and across the river from Minneapolis. Kelly testified to Congress on federal agents’ stark lack of professionalism after the invasion of the Twin Cities earlier this year. She describes acting as a legal observer outside a Spanish-language Alcoholics Anonymous meeting near her home on a day off in January. A border patrol agent she encountered called her a “paid agitator” and told her to “get a job.” Kelly said she would have been embarrassed if the man had been one of her officers.

“All government is is the embodiment of the rules and processes we’re supposed to follow. We all came together and said, ‘These are the rules to this game,’” she told me, describing the deep damage Trump has done to both the rule of law and the perception of law enforcement in America. “When you have the referees and the arbiters not following the rules, it leads to a helplessness and a fear, and that fear spreads and impacts everyone’s daily life. If you’re not trustworthy, they don’t trust you in every avenue, and it’s everyone for themselves.”

Because Democrats are, after all, still Democrats, I asked Gupta: What’s the danger if, charitably, Democrats take the easier path, saying mass deportation was a very dark stain, but deciding to rely on those memos and internal policy to change enforcement instead of wading deeper into the fight over fundamental differences—or, less charitably, if they don’t do anything on immigration out of cowardice?

“The danger is, this is an extreme moment we’re in,” Gupta said. “The failure to act and make significant changes to the system is actually a threat to our rule of law and the credibility of the United States government.” She added a further warning: “They’re using the immigration system as the tip of the spear to go after political opponents, state and local leaders, and rights enshrined under the Constitution, and using the immigration system to encroach on principles of federalism and authority we give states to govern their communities.”

McCarthy was more succinct about the wisdom of a new way forward.

“If you had a cliff, and everyone fell off the cliff, you wouldn’t get more ambulances. We would install a fence on the top,” she said.

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ICE AT THE WORLD CUP. Will it actually happen?

There are reasons to believe it will. After all, in February, ICE Director Todd Lyons, who has since announced he is resigning at the end of May, said at a congressional hearing that ICE would be a “key part” of World Cup security.

And there are reasons to be skeptical. One is that the high-profile ICE raids of the first year of the Trump administration sparked so much political backlash—especially after Homeland Security agents killed two American citizens—that they cost former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem her job, forced Border Patrol frontman Greg Bovino into retirement, and compelled the administration as a whole to switch to a lower-profile strategy. ICE, notably, did not show up at the Super Bowl—even despite the Bad Bunny of it all.

But what if the answer to the question falls somewhere in between? That’s what sources in national immigration politics and in Texas are bracing for. They told me they think the more likely danger isn’t that ICE sets up checkpoints on the way to or from World Cup matches, but that agents

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ICE FINALLY STUCK IT to one of their detainees. Except this person is no criminal, no murderer, no monster. She is a torture victim from Colombia, one who—as we wrote last year—was repeatedly beaten and raped by the police buddies of her ex-boyfriend.

Adriana Quiroz Zapata finally escaped Colombia with her life, only to find more mistreatment at the hands of U.S. federal agents.

Because the Convention Against Torture prevented her from being deported to Colombia, ICE instead packed her onto a bus and tried to abandon her in Mexico, a country where she has no ties. But Mexican immigration authorities declined to take her after hearing details of her harrowing journey.

I wrote that story last April. On April 16 of this year, Zapata was finally removed from the United States. Along with fourteen others, she was shipped off to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—once again, a country where she has no ties.

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Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) who counts Zapata’s family members as constituents, told me the Trump administration clearly wanted to dump her in Africa with no actual plan or respect for her ability to survive.

“There’s no limits to their cruelty and I think that’s what’s really important for the American people to know, there’s a complete misalignment with what they sold the American people,” he said. “Americans are being shot in the street, people with protected status are being removed to third countries in Africa. Think about the hypocrisy on so many levels: They said they had to cut $1 trillion in fraud, waste, and abuse yet they’re using taxpayer money to remove people with protected status and flying them to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

On the House floor, Menendez slammed Republicans for being “silent” and “complicit” with respect to Trump’s mass deportation campaign brutalizing our neighbors—and said of Zapata, “If we do not get her back she will die.”

Menendez’s office and Zapata’s lawyer, Lauren O’Neal, both told me that the medical issues we wrote about last year have only worsened. Zapata’s prediabetes became diabetes due to her diet in detention, and she has been prescribed medication that officials in the DRC told O’Neal cannot be provided. Zapata did not respond to my request for comment about how she is doing mentally and physically; O’Neal told me her client is “fragile” and “very sensitive” right now.

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In an April 23 letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting Zapata’s expedited humanitarian parole back to the United States, O’Neal said that Zapata is being provided only bread and water, with escorted access to a convenience store. And O’Neal alleges that even the DRC may just be a way station: She says that DRC representatives, in conjunction with diplomatic officials from Colombia, have engaged in pressuring tactics. Their goal is apparently for Zapata, and other detainees like her, to sign documents agreeing to relinquish their rights—which, in Zapata’s case, would send her back to Colombia where she could be in grave danger once again.

“It seems the lawlessness is commonplace, it’s almost like I’m living in some twilight zone,” O’Neal told me. I pointed out to her that there seems to be some personal animosity in the actions of U.S. immigration authorities against Zapata, not just for filing a complaint in the past, which got an agent reassigned, but perhaps for how much she and her allies have fought for her release.

O’Neal agreed with the suggestion that Zapata was being targeted in that way, as did Menendez. O’Neal received a call from an ICE agent in the days preceding Zapata’s removal to the DRC where she learned Zapata was being given medical treatment. O’Neal asked if it was for an old broken arm injury or for her diabetes but was told Zapata was given a yellow fever vaccine—a prerequisite before being sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. O’Neal told me she could hear the “glee” in the ICE agent’s voice as they delivered the news.

Menendez said Americans should be horrified by the inhumanity of this situation, and by the affront to the rule of law that Zapata’s case represents. And he took a parting shot at Republicans who have stood by as Trump’s deportation forces have rampaged through communities only now wanting to moderate on the issue ahead of midterm elections.

“This is the same party that wraps themselves in religion, but they don’t say a word when a person is tortured in their country of origin, tortured here, then removed to the DRC,” he said.

O’Neal told me her Jewish background informs the slippery slope she sees for an administration that has come for immigrants now, here legally or not, and that could come for others later on.

“I want Americans to know what they should have known the whole time: that this administration’s utter and complete lack of due process of law should strike so much fear in us,” she said. “Today it serves their interest to do it to immigrants, but it shows how little you have to protect yourself . . . unchecked federal power is what our forefathers didn’t want.”

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THE SMOKE FROM ERIC SWALWELL’S POLITICAL IMPLOSION has not yet cleared from the California gubernatorial race, but one figure is deploying a giant political box fan to give himself some visibility. Billionaire liberal donor and environmental activist Tom Steyer’s recent ad buys total around $115 million, almost thirty times the total of his nearest Democratic competitor.

Swalwell’s exit from the scene appears to have benefited Steyer: He is leading at 20 percent in a new Emerson poll, with former congressman and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra1 close behind at 19 percent, also enjoying a bump in support following Swalwell’s exit.2 Steyer also picked up a major endorsement from the influential California Teachers Association, which had supported Swalwell before he withdrew from the race.

But while some of Swalwell’s collapsed political presence has been recouped by other Democrats still in the race, much of it is now that swirl of political smoke: There is not yet a clear frontrunner, which gives rise to the distant possibility that Democratic disarray will allow two Republicans to sneak in to the gubernatorial runoff thanks to California’s jungle primary system.

Steyer is no dummy: While a Washington Post poll last fall found that 75 percent of Democratic voters and 60 percent of independents thought spending by billionaires on political campaigns is either bad or very bad, those voters also overwhelmingly oppose ICE, and Steyer has worked hard to position himself as the anti-ICE candidate. He has called for abolishing the agency and jailing its agents who have broken the law; in a blog post he published last week detailing these plans, he described ICE as a “violent extremist group.” Don’t just take my word for it (or his). New York Times opinion contributor Jean Guerrero, who last week moderated a California gubernatorial debate, wrote that while the Democratic candidates should be stronger on immigration, Steyer “came across as the boldest defender of immigrants” on the debate stage.

“We need immigration services, we need it absolutely, but we don’t need a criminal organization with masks and assault rifles terrorizing our citizens and racially profiling them, and it’s not right,” Steyer told me in an interview a week ago.

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For his efforts, Steyer has received the backhanded gift of Trump lashing out over Fox News’s coverage of his candidacy, which Trump worries could have the effect of “putting him [Steyer] ‘into play’” to win the race.

It wasn’t just Trump who bristled at Steyer’s rise. Elon Musk retweeted a screenshot of the opening to Steyer’s blog post about his five-point plan for ICE with a single word of commentary: “Wow.” The plan calls for not just abolishing ICE and forbidding all law enforcement agencies from racial profiling, but also creating an investigative unit to monitor ICE in California, as well as conditions in the agency’s detention centers. Steyer told me he also wants to create a legal-defense “superfund” for people who have been “kidnapped” by ICE—a plan modeled on an initiative he took on with his wife in 2018 wherein the couple provided around $3.3 million to cover legal representation for people under threat of deportation during Trump 1.0.

Steyer is proud of the criticism and alarm he’s elicited from Trump and Musk, and by all accounts, he’s serious about opposing ICE in California. But there is one thing that could trip him up in the lane he’s chosen for himself in this race—what some call his “original sin” on immigration.

“Is He Ready to Atone for Those Sins?”

In 2004, Steyer’s former hedge fund bought tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock in the company now known as CoreCivic, a publicly traded detention company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Trump, tallying up allegations of poor medical care for sick detainees along the way.

Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and an attorney for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongfully sent to a prison camp in El Salvador last year, rejects the idea that a billionaire should be elected in California. He told me Steyer is “obviously” trying to “buy his way into the immigrant rights champion lane.”

“The guy profited from investing in commercial prison companies—is he ready to atone for those sins?” he asked.

Steyer has called this investment a “mistake.” When we spoke I asked him about it again, noting that his opponents see it as fundamentally undercutting his anti-ICE position.

“We did invest in it—it was twenty-two years ago—I realized over twenty years ago it was a mistake and got rid of it,” he told me, noting that he has since been endorsed by the leading rehabilitative-justice organization in the state, Smart Justice. “But I didn’t just do that,” he continued:

We worked for the next twenty years to push not just for fair treatment of immigrants but also against the era of mass incarceration. We worked to make California a sanctuary state in 2019, which means that California law officers cannot cooperate with ICE legally except with regards for violent felons. We pushed also in 2019 to make sure the state could not have contracts with private prisons.

Steyer framed the decision to invest in private prisons back in 2004 not just as a mistake or failure of judgment, but as an important personal turning point—“a wakeup call” that “changed my life,” he said. “And there’s a reason I walked away from my business and billions of dollars: because I want to have a different life than that, and being in that situation puts pressure on me to do things I’m not willing to do.”

Hiring the Most-Sought-After Influencer in the Nation

Loyal readers of Huddled Masses may remember Carlos Eduardo Espina, the influencer whom every 2028 Democratic hopeful is courting thanks to his charisma, positive content, and platform of more than 22 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Steyer, too, is hoping to benefit from Espina’s influence with Latinos and immigrants: The billionaire recently brought him aboard as a campaign adviser in the sprint to the June primary.

I asked the typically forthcoming Espina how much he’s being paid for his work on the campaign, and he said he would be happy to tell me—but contracts go two ways, so I would need to ask the campaign. Steyer’s team declined to share that juicy bit of info.

Espina’s choice has given rise to some criticism among his followers over his decision not to instead endorse a Hispanic candidate like Becerra. (Espina told me he didn’t want to criticize Becerra during our call, but did acknowledge that the congressman’s time as HHS secretary under Biden—a role in which he oversaw shelters for migrant children—left a bad taste in his mouth.)

Espina, a Texas native, said he wasn’t sure about getting involved in California, but a large portion of his followers are from the state, and he counts Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) as a friend and was swayed by Khanna’s endorsement of Steyer, whose team soon pitched him on advising the campaign on Latino issues and engagement.

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Espina has already advised Steyer’s campaign to do more events in the Central Valley, Modesto, and Madera. And he’s been tapping his Californian followers to help hone Steyer’s policy focus: A Google form he posted with questions on the top issues they’re concerned about got close to a thousand responses, he told me. He learned that immigration and ICE raids are by far the number-one issue for these Latino Californians, followed by the economy.

Steyer described Espina as a “trusted ambassador” to a broad swath of Californians he hopes to reach through his campaign. And one of the things he wants to communicate is a position that will doubtless anger his MAGA critics.

“One of the questions has always been . . . should we be providing health care for people without documentation? The answer is: Yes, absolutely,” Steyer told me. “Health care is a right; the people of California need to have health care.”

Espina’s crowdsourcing also found that working-class Latinos tend to see the Golden State as increasingly unaffordable—another area where Steyer feels he has a valuable political message to offer them.

Latinos are the biggest group in California, Steyer said, and they disproportionately work in physically difficult and underpaid jobs. Helping them, he said, dovetails with his campaign’s commitment to affordability.

“When I’m talking about dropping the cost of rent, dropping the cost of health care, dropping the cost of electricity, putting a windfall profits tax on gasoline and sending it back to California directly, I’m talking about Latinos,” he said. “I’m talking about people who do the hardest jobs for the lowest money. . . . Anytime I’m talking about costs coming down, I’m talking about Latinos being able to afford the life they want. Anytime I’m talking about bringing in money so that we can have better education so our kids can do better, I’m talking overwhelmingly about Latino kids.”

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WHEN DONALD TRUMP, Kristi Noem, Ron DeSantis, and local Florida officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer, its harsh location and cavalier nickname—“Alligator Alcatraz”—gave rise to a lot of brutal joking about what awaited detainees at the facility, especially any who might try to escape.

But the jokes and the nickname weren’t funny to the native Miccosukee tribe, whose lands are adjacent to the detention facility grounds. They have joined lawsuits against state and federal authorities alleging that construction was greenlit without a tribal consultation or an environmental impact study, overlooking important lawful requirements, they argue, for such a project at the site.

“The Everglades is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life,” one member of the tribe said.

But detaining life is what it does—thousands of lives so far. The Everglades detention center is a key site for Trump’s mass deportation regime. So it makes good fractal sense, then, that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), in an interview with me after an unannounced visit to the facility last week, described it as a “monument to cruelty.” The part reflects the whole.

One Cage, 32 Men, 3 Toilets, Zero Privacy

One of the first things Wasserman Schultz told me was that she wasn’t being provocative or inflammatory in calling the living quarters “cages”: It’s simply what they are. The congresswoman introduced the No Cages in the Everglades Act in the House last summer, but it never became law; she told me she saw 1,500 detainees housed in cages at the site, a cage area that smelled like urine, and one cage configuration where detainees appear to have no option but to go to the bathroom in front of everyone.

“It’s a vile, disgusting place that you would never want anyone you care about to spend five minutes in, let alone be warehoused in cages there,” she told me.

The facility, which was ordered closed by a district judge last summer due to the lawsuit from the tribe and others, before being reopened two weeks later by two Trump-appointed appeals court judges, already has a bad reputation for its poor treatment of immigrants. But often, things at the facility allegedly get even worse, sometimes declining for months at a time. This alarming pattern might owe to new guards coming in, or to more aggressive attempts to stamp out protests inside. That’s what I was told by Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Florida immigration activist who stays connected to the family members of detainees and has made it his business to bring what is happening at the facility to national attention.

New trouble began after a federal judge ruled in late March that the detention center must give free access to, as the Associated Press summarized the order, “timely, confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.” Days later, guards cut off the phones entirely without warning or explanation. This happened on April 2, according to a Miami Herald report published this week. Things escalated from there. As the Herald put it, after the phones were cut off, “the beatings began.”

Raiko Lopez Morffi was dragged out of his cell and severely beaten, leaving him with a black eye, as seen in photos taken by his attorney and presented to the court as part of the lawsuit. (Morffi’s black eye can be seen in a screenshot from a Zoom call included in the Herald story.) He also sustained injuries to his shoulder and arm and was kicked in the head; at one point, an officer pressed a knee against his neck to restrain him. One of Morffi’s fellow detainees had his wrist broken. All men in the cage were pepper-sprayed, and one of the older men lost consciousness apparently as a result.

This was far from the first example of grievous mistreatment of detainees at the facility. Days before the judge’s phone order and the guards’ phone suspension, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) published a three-page letter to new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting information about the use of “the box”—a punishment that resembles those meted out by totalitarian governments and police states.

“Detainees placed in ‘the box’—located outside and in direct sunlight—are reportedly forced to endure high temperatures, high humidity, and ‘horsefly-size mosquitos,’” the letter states. “One Nicaraguan man reported that his ‘hands and feet were painfully shackled’ when he was placed in ‘the box’ in the recreation yard, prohibiting any movement. He reportedly remained in ‘the box’ directly exposed to the sun and heat for hours, with no water.”

This is unconscionable. But Kennedy, the immigration activist, told me that in the past month, he’s heard that things at the facility have gotten even worse.

“We don’t know why,” he said. “It goes in waves, maybe because there’s a lot of turnover with the guards. It was more calm at the beginning of the year. But over the last month, I’ve heard awful shit.”

An Amnesty International report from December tells some of the story. It’s entitled: “Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Krome in Florida.”

Krome is another Florida detention center; it is located in Miami. Wasserman Schultz visited it as well and described the conditions as also being “awful.”

But Kennedy, who is in touch with families of Everglades detainees, shared a startling observation about the two sites.

“Krome has seen multiple civil rights and human rights complaints,” he told me. “But people in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ still say, ‘I want to get sent to Krome.’”

Cubans Voted for Trump—Now in “Alligator Alcatraz”

Kennedy is in a group chat with eighty or so women—the mothers and wives of immigrants held at the detention center. Through that chat and his advocacy, he has learned that a large number of Cubans are being held at the Everglades facility.

“Predominantly, the population are Cubans whose families voted for or supported Trump, and they’re pissed,” Kennedy said.

Wasserman Schultz agreed.

“The most significant evidence that points to that is Eileen Higgins’s election,” she said, referring to the new Democratic mayor of Miami who swept into office on the strength of high Latino support. “In elections across the country, the Hispanic vote is shifting dramatically to Democrats. Even if people voted for Trump, the cruelty threaded through this administration’s policies and priorities is not what they signed up for.”

Kennedy has seen it up close.

In the group chat, the family members share videos and memes about Trump with one general message, he said: “This guy is a fucking lunatic.”

He shared screenshots of some of them with me.

One depicts Trump and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, while another shows Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs. They also share videos of speakers declaring the “insanity” of Trump, pointing to him losing his mind, and they have recently been very upset by Trump attacking Pope Leo XIV.

But the general vibe is perhaps best captured by a YouTube video that recently made the rounds in the group. It’s a short clip of a song performed by the rapper YG at Coachella in 2016. As the crowd cheers, he sings “Fuck Donald Trump.”

The sentiment is only too easy to understand. Wasserman Schultz told me that when she says the Everglades detention center is a “monument to cruelty” and that the “cruelty is the point,” she wants to underscore that she sees the facility as a means to an end.

The reason DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier chose to place the facility “in the middle of the broiling hot swampy environment,” and the reason they have since made so many jokes about the perils that await escapees outside its fences, she told me, is that they want people to be afraid of getting sent there.

“They want to make it so awful people self-deport,” she said.

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WANT TO KNOW WHAT A WIN for liberalism looks like in the Trump administration? Sometimes you can spot it in the things that are not said.

Last month, Republicans floated a strategy for this year’s midterm elections that could be summarized as instructing their candidates to stop saying “mass deportations.” It was an admission that Trump’s anti-immigrant zealotry had become a liability with voters and that acts of pushing back can actually work.

Those acts are visible now both on the national stage and in communities across the country. One of the latest instances appeared last weekend: a fight against new border-wall construction that threatens to rip up the beloved Big Bend National Park.

The crowd of more than 2,000 people of all political affiliations—including many who wouldn’t normally participate in a political protest—gathered on the steps of the Texas State Capitol to deliver one message: Not in our backyard.

Texas Democratic state Sen. Cesar Blanco told me he was heartened to see the strong response to the planned construction, including the flood of letters his office had received from constituents sharing stories to underscore what Big Bend means to them.

“We’re living in interesting times,” Blanco said. “We had Republicans and Democrats coming together, people who aren’t involved in politics from different walks of life who showed up with a message of let’s not destroy this beautiful treasure we have for a wall that is ineffective. We heard from land owners who have concerns on eminent domain, people who are campers and hikers, and river rafters who are concerned, and folks who care about wildlife, which a wall would impact.”

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A crowd of a few thousand people—some motivated by a love of flora—is never going to get the headlines of a multi-million person national rally against Trump’s authoritarianism. But don’t discount its significance. Trump’s numbers on immigration have taken a dive not just because of a massive national shift in sentiment as people have seen what his mass-deportation regime looks like in practice but also because of steady pockets of resistance like this. People in local communities have been quietly opposing Trump throughout his second term. And as support for his handling of immigration continues to wane, that open opposition has grown louder and become more emboldened.

A CNN poll released last week found that in addition to Trump’s approval rating on the economy hitting a new low, 55 percent of Americans said he had gone too far in pursuing mass deportations. When it came to the DHS funding impasse and the resulting government shutdown that created interminably long lines at airports and left TSA workers without pay, 39 percent blamed Republicans while a quarter blamed Democrats; 28 percent said both groups shared equal blame. When asked whether Trump sending ICE agents to airports helped things, 40 percent said it made things worse, while 21 percent said it improved the situation.

This polling came after a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents, also conducted in late March and released April 1, found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of both Trump’s handling of nationwide protests against his immigration policies and the investigation of the killing of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal agents.

Trend lines also show support dropping for specific controversial policies. Those in favor of deporting people to countries they are not from fell from 20 percent last July to 13 percent today, while support for separating kids from their immigrant parents has fallen a comparable amount, from 18 percent last April to 11 percent now.

But again, the national numbers don’t tell the full story. To understand the full extent of the deteriorating environment for Trump on immigration, you need to drill down to what is happening in local towns and cities. I recently reported on DHS’s preparations to spend $38 billion overpaying for warehouses intended to house up to 10,000 immigrants; companies have been backing out of those deals after facing intense scrutiny from local municipalities and local residents who didn’t want detention centers in their backyards. Some local city governments even passed zoning ordinances to stop ICE’s plans for mass detention center, and in a small town in Georgia, the city manager put a lock on the water meter pending the agency’s demonstration that its planned facility won’t put undue strain on local infrastructure.

During the long days, weeks, and months of the second Trump administration, these are what wins often look like—not massive, decisive victories, but rather delaying, slowing, and jamming the gears of the mass-deportation machine instead of letting it roll unimpeded into your town.

DILLEY, TEXAS IS THE SITE of other recent attempts to stall the deportation machine. The town’s detention center came to national attention after Liam Ramos—the boy who you’ll remember was wearing his blue bunny hat in a heartbreaking photo—was taken with his father from their home in Minnesota and shuttled 1,200 miles away to be incarcerated there. The pressure has been constant to release the families and children at Dilley. They have told loved ones and reporters about their harrowing struggles with securing access to prescribed medicine, clean water, and food. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter published a story about a recent petition for the detention center to be closed; over the past month, it reached 215,000 signatures, including those of a bevy of celebrities including Jodie Foster, Ben Stiller, Pedro Pascal, Madonna, and Javier Bardem.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, who has already helped to secure the release of some families and children from the facility including Ramos and his dad, has continued to put pressure on the detention center in Dilley, not just by getting detainees released but by doing regular Instagram updates on the latest news out of the center and by continuing his periodic visits. The thorn-in-the-administration’s-side congressman appears to have caused enough frustration to elicit a response from federal agents: This week, he said that ICE has started locking down the facility when members of Congress come, apparently permitting no detainees into the common areas where they might speak with lawmakers.

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Even if Republicans are trying to avoid using the words “mass deportations,” Americans still understand that Trump’s extreme immigration policies go far beyond providing traditional border security, which polls consistently show people support. And those policies have caused—and will continue to cause—disruptions to families, disorder in local communities, and damage to local economies.

A successful border policy, Blanco, the state senator, told me, “depends on the type of border security.”

“You can’t use a first-century method to deal with the situation in 2026—you have to figure out what’s effective and what’s not,” he said. With an eye on the protests that started last week, he added: “Big Bend has a big economic impact for our region, and a cross section of folks—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—said this is overreach.”

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POP QUIZ: WHICH CITY is leading the nation in ICE arrests so far this year? It’s not the Twin Cities, which clocked in at over 5,000 arrests from mid-December to mid-March. And it’s not Chicago or Los Angeles, which were targeted by Donald Trump aggressively last year; they have had, respectively, about 4,900 and 3,300 arrests so far this year.

It’s Miami. The ICE field office in that city led the nation in arrests from December to March, with about 9,900. That comes to roughly 120 a day, more than Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio, which follow on the list. Since Trump took office last year, the total number of arrests made by the Miami field office is over 41,000, more than 35 percent higher than the next highest city (Dallas), according to New York Times data.

It’s a remarkable distinction considering Miami’s status as a metropolis that became MAGAfied thanks to Trump’s gains with Latinos. Yet the destabilization that ICE has caused in this bilingual, bicultural South Florida city has received scant media coverage and little attention from the rest of the country—at least compared to what accompanied ICE raids in Minneapolis and Chicago and L.A.

But that could be changing soon, in part because a political backlash is growing. In addition to the ICE raids—and perhaps to some degree because of them—Miami is also experiencing a hard political swing away from Trumpism. It even appears to be returning to its status as a Democratic bastion.

No Democrat better exemplifies the major changes underway in Miami than the city’s mayor, Eileen Higgins.

When she took office 106 days ago, Higgins became the first Democrat to serve as Miami mayor in almost thirty years. She was also the first woman ever elected to the office, and the first non-Hispanic since the 1990s. Facing off against a Republican Latino opponent, she received 59 percent of the vote in the city of almost half a million people, where seven in ten voters are Hispanic.

When I spoke with her this week, I wanted to know:

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