How to Turn the U.S. Into an Immigration Police State in One Big Bill
Medicaid cuts? Trillions in new debt? All immaterial, MAGA insists, as long as we get to jail the foreigners.
The Senate version of the Big Beautiful Bill is back in the House, where it’s set to get a chamber-wide vote today. Will they wave it through, or are we going to get another flurry of revisions and additions? We’ll see. Happy Wednesday.
United States of Alcatraz
by William Kristol
Will July 1, 2025 be a date that will live in infamy?
Probably not. There are too many competitors, too many other dates in recent months and years that have been signposts on our descent toward authoritarianism and indecency, too many other markers of national decline, for this one day to stand out all that much.
Still, yesterday packed quite a one-two punch.
The Senate passed a massive budget reconciliation bill that stands out, probably more than any other recent piece of legislation, for comforting the very comfortable while afflicting the afflicted. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Alaska’s Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski hastened to say after the bill passed. It’s “not good enough” for our nation, and it’s the product of “an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline.”
Of course Murkowski told us this after having cast the deciding vote for the bill.
In addition to cutting health care for the poor and providing tax relief for the rich, the legislation provided massive funding increases for the federal agencies carrying out the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsession. The bill adds a total of $170.7 billion to immigration enforcement. It roughly triples the annual detention and enforcement budgets for the masked men of Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the next four years.
And according to our vice president, JD Vance, this was the point of it all: “Everything else—the CBO score, the proper baseline, the minutiae of the Medicaid policy—is immaterial compared to the ICE money and immigration enforcement provisions.”
All those people losing health insurance? “Minutiae.” “Immaterial.” Mass detention and deportation are what matters. They’re not only key to Making America Great Again, they’re what it means to Make America Great Again. That’s the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those foreigners seeking refuge and opportunity here, in our land.
And mass detention and deportation are also key to advancing the other point of it all: authoritarianism. That’s the other part of the MAGA dream: Finally getting rid of all those annoying features of due process and the rule of law, all those restraints of civility and decency, that have kept us from doing what we want.
And so, while his vice president was breaking the tied vote in the Senate, Donald Trump was celebrating a new detention facility in the Florida Everglades. It’s a physical manifestation and apt symbol of the MAGA dream. How proud they all were of its clever name—“Alligator Alcatraz”—and the collection of tents filled with cages to hold immigrants.
The name is of course unfair to the original Alcatraz, a maximum-security, minimum-privilege penitentiary prison that operated from 1933 to 1963. That Alcatraz housed about 275 criminals convicted of serious crimes who were considered—and in many cases, had proven themselves—the most incorrigible inmates in the federal prison system.
Trump’s version of Alcatraz isn’t for a few hundred convicted and hardened criminals. It’s meant to hold thousands of undocumented immigrants, most of whom will have committed no crimes.
And there won’t be only one such facility. Trump was asked yesterday whether he wanted to see many more like it. His answer was straightforward: “Well, I think we’d like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know [Florida Gov.] Ron [Desantis]’s doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.”
Massive detention facilities for immigrants convicted of no crime en route to their deportation to places they may have never been to: That’s the system Trump hopes we are going to keep for a long time.
Alcatraz—the real Alcatraz—was something we needed or thought we needed. Even the best nations need prisons. So far as I know, American presidents didn’t chortle about our prisons or hold them up as what America was all about. Alcatraz was an object of curiosity, a unique prison on an island in San Francisco Bay.
The island American presidents once touted as what America was all about is on the other coast. It’s called Liberty Island, and its most notable feature isn’t a prison. It’s been the home for almost a century and a half to a statue, the Statue of Liberty. Its official name is The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World.
“Liberty enlightening the world.” How quaint. Do we still believe in that?
After yesterday, let’s not kid ourselves.
Poisoning the Water Table
by Andrew Egger
Much of the damage Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is doing to America’s vaccine programs is direct and obvious: yanking FDA authorizations for shots, purging vaccine advisory committees and repopulating them with anti-vaxxers, and laying plans to monkey with the pediatric vaccine schedule. But the more insidious damage may be in the realm of public opinion, where Kennedy keeps pumping more and more anti-vax sewage into the wellwater.
On Monday, Kennedy sat for a lengthy interview on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Among the usual thicket of batshit assertions—he said there was no way of knowing, for instance, whether the COVID vaccine “killed more than it saved”—one stood out. As a credulous Carlson listened, brow furrowed attentively, Kennedy claimed that a 1999 Centers for Disease Control study had found a strong connection between the pediatric Hepatitis B vaccine and autism. Worse, he added, the CDC had covered it up.
“They found an 1,135 percent elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children,” the secretary said. “And it shocked them, they kept the study secret, and they manipulated it through five different iterations to try to bury the link. . . . All of those [studies] were the subject of that kind of trickery.”
This outlandish claim was far from new. Just the opposite: It is one of Kennedy’s hoariest conspiracies, a central subject of his infamous 2005 piece for Salon, “Deadly Immunity,” which launched him into the wooly world of anti-vax activism.1
Perhaps this is why Kennedy’s remark made barely a blip beyond right-wing media. Most mainstream outlets passed over the interview altogether.
They shouldn’t have. Because while the substance of the remark wasn’t new for Kennedy, his making the claim while overseeing the CDC was entirely novel—and, for that reason, very significant. Anti-vax influencers on social media went absolutely bananas with the clip. Multiple posts sharing the moment racked up millions of views apiece on X alone. In their breathless telling, Kennedy wasn’t just rehashing decades-old arguments—he was revealing explosive truths he’d found in the bowels of the Deep State.
“This could be RFK’s most explosive interview since he took office as President Trump’s HHS Secretary,” offered MAHA writer Holden Culotta. “Conspiracy theorists were right AGAIN!” proclaimed X personality Nick Sortor. Self-described citizen journalist The Vigilant Fox fumed: “Imagine discovering evidence of catastrophic harm and making sure no one ever found out. Evil.”
All along, this has been one of the major dangers of putting Kennedy atop HHS: that he would cannibalize the institutional authority of the federal health authorities he now controls to spread his own anti-science delusions to a far wider audience. The bigger a megaphone such claims get, the more public support for pediatric vaccines is likely to polarize and crumble. And the more public support crumbles, the more Kennedy will claim a popular mandate for ever-more intrusive anti-vaccine policy.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump’s Bill Passes, But at What Cost for the GOP? A live reaction at the passage of yesterday’s “Big Beautiful Bill” from TIM MILLER, SARAH LONGWELL, JONATHAN COHN, and JVL.
Trump’s Team Is Lying About Iran’s WMD… He savaged Bush for distorting intelligence and overselling the military’s initial success in Iraq. Now Trump and his team are doing the same in Iran, writes WILL SALETAN.
From awe to boredom… SONNY BUNCH reviews Jurassic World Rebirth.
Latin Music Business Suffers as Trump’s Assault on Immigrants Expands… At Huddled Masses, ADRIAN CARRASQUILLO reports: tour dates have been canceled, ticket sales are down, artists’ visas have been revoked, and a climate of fear is growing around shows that fans have attended for years.
Too Much Kludge… On Just Between Us, MONA CHAREN and ANDREW EGGER discuss the BBB’s ICE funding, debt impact, and tax changes, plus how reconciliation weakens Congress. They also touch on RFK Jr.’s anti-science policies and Zohran Mamdani’s push for state-run grocery stores.
Quick Hits
PARA-MOUNTED: How much does it cost to get Donald Trump off your back? If you’re a telecom giant that owns a broadcast station, the answer appears to be $16 million. That’s the sum ABC News agreed to pay in January to settle a libel suit Trump filed, and it’s the amount Paramount—the owner of CBS News—agreed to pay to settle a similar suit this week.
Trump’s witless complaint was that the network had engaged in “deceitful, dangerous manipulation of news” by editing an interview last year with Kamala Harris. By engaging in this bog-standard journalistic practice, his lawyers argued, CBS News had run afoul of a Texas consumer-protection law. For good measure, they accused the network of inflicting “mental anguish” on poor Donald.
There is no chance CBS News would have lost the case on the merits. But Trump had Paramount in a bind: The company is currently in the middle of a corporate merger with Skydance Media, which the Federal Communications Commission still needs to approve. That’s coming to a head. And the worry was that Trump would refuse to permit the merger unless Paramount bent the knee. Paramount may insist that the terms of the settlement agreed to are light—that the money will not go directly to Trump, and that CBS News will admit no wrongdoing—but bending the knee is exactly what it did.
AND WHILE WE’RE AT IT: Meanwhile, the administration’s thirst for punitive actions against media companies only seems to grow. Yesterday, several White House officials suggested they were considering criminal charges against CNN for the act of basic reporting. The story in the administration’s crosshairs was a report on an app, ICEBlock, where users can alert one another to sightings of ICE agents in their area.
The app constitutes speech protected by the First Amendment—enormously popular apps like Google Maps and Waze offer features based on the same concept, letting drivers alert those behind them to speed traps on the highway. But the White House has already opened an investigation into developer Joshua Aaron, as Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News this week: “He is giving a message to criminals where our federal officers are, and he cannot do that, and we are looking at it, we are looking at him, and he better watch out.”
And they’re apparently drooling to go after CNN, too—again, because the network had the audacity to report on the app’s existence. “I think the [Department of Justice] needs to look at this and see if they crossed a line,” deportations czar Tom Homan said Tuesday. “This sure looks like obstruction of justice,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said of the CNN story. “If you obstruct or assault our law enforcement, we will hunt you down and you will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
‘IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HERE, LEAVE’: If there’s been a tiny consolation for Democrats in holding no power in Congress, it’s that their role this week was pretty straightforward: Pressure Republican moderates to oppose the One Big Beautiful Bill, decry its most obscene provisions to the public, and then vote no. Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman seemingly missed the memo. “Oh my God, I just want to go home,” he told reporters Monday. “I’ve already missed our entire trip to the beach.”
The moment has led to some friendly fire from inside the Pennsylvania Democratic delegation. Over at our YouTube channel yesterday, Sam interviewed Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), who ripped Fetterman’s indifference. “If you are here, you are damned lucky and privileged to be here. You should want to be here, and if you don’t want to be here, leave,” Boyle said. “Threre is no place I would rather be than right here, right now, and if I can make a difference and stop this bill from happening, I will do whatever it takes. That should be the attitude, frankly, of every Democratic member of the House and Senate.”
Cheap Shots
The piece’s many factual errors led to a host of corrections and, years later, its complete retraction. If you want to read more about the study Kennedy is wildly misrepresenting—as well as an excellent and detailed history of vaccine safety science and anti-vax activism in the oughts—I recommend Seth Mnookin’s 2011 book The Panic Virus.
We need to quit using the terms "detention center" and "Alligator Alcatraz". These creeps are masters at misusing language. Let's use "concentration camp" or "Alligator Auschwitz" at every opportunity.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Alaska’s Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski hastened to say after the bill passed. It’s “not good enough” for our nation, and it’s the product of “an awful process—a frantic rush to meet an artificial deadline.”
Is it me, or are the rest of you sick of one senator from a state with under a million in population with the ability to control the destiny of millions of others? Alaska has a population of approximately 770,000, yet Murkowski’s decision will affect the lives of 18 times more people (14 million children and adults). And we wonder why Washington is a place where good ideas go to die!
That said. Republicans constantly use the term communist and socialist as trigger words, but in reality, we are the only developed democratic nation that refuses to offer a National Healthcare System to its citizens.
And more importantly, we are the only advanced nation in which hundreds of thousands of people file for bankruptcy because they can’t afford healthcare (60% of all annual bankruptcy filings). Let that sink in!
I’m no socialist or communist, but there needs to be a better way, and under Trump the only way is cruelty and pain, at least for most of America. IMHO…:)