The Shock-and-Awe Deportations Will Get Worse
Trump’s immigration policy has quickly become a stain on the country. But it’s just getting started.
Last night, Donald Trump sounded relieved as he announced an Israel and Iran ceasefire. “CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!” he wrote. “This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will!”
A short time later, he sounded triumphant: “The ceasefire is unlimited,” he told NBC. “It’s going to go forever . . . I don’t believe they will ever be shooting at each other again.”
A few hours later, he seemed worried: the “CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT” he announced, before warning, “PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!”
This morning, after Israel said Iran had already violated the ceasefire with another missile barrage—and that it would respond in kind—he seemed angry. “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” he posted shortly before 7 a.m.1 “IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!”
And as he boarded a flight to the NATO summit, he was undeniably steamed, telling reporters he is “not happy” with Israel or Iran. Neither country, he said, “knows what the fuck they’re doing.”
The pressure seems to have worked, at least momentarily: Axios reports that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu responded by scaling back his planned response to Iran’s violation of the ceasefire. Whether that holds or for how long, we’ll see. Happy Tuesday.
Brutality Upon Brutality
by Andrew Egger
Within hours of Narciso Barranco’s arrest on Saturday, the video had gone viral. Masked ICE agents had surrounded and tackled the Orange County, California landscaper, allegedly an illegal immigrant. In the video, his weed whacker lies discarded while they pin him to the ground and beat him around the head and neck.
The more details came out, the worse the story got. Barranco’s son Alejandro told local news his father had been pepper sprayed and suffered a dislocated shoulder; in more than 24 hours since entering ICE custody, Alejandro said, his father had not received food, water, or medical care.
Alejandro and his two brothers, Emanuel and José Luis, are U.S. citizens. They also happen to be U.S. Marines.
Barranco’s arrest may have prompted the largest recent outpouring of indignation, but his is an increasingly common story—one that represents a stain on our collective consciousness and a black mark in our nation’s history.
As they chase ever more stringent immigrant detention quotas—whipped along by mass-deportation ideologues like Stephen Miller—federal agents are increasingly abandoning the slightest concern for optics or basic human decency. Instead, they are bringing the hammer down on any migrant they can find. These are just some of the stories that we’ve seen in the last few weeks:
In New Haven, Connecticut, masked ICE agents wearing no identification boxed in an immigrant woman’s car as she left home to drive her kids to school, arresting her and leaving them sobbing on the sidewalk with their grandmother, who had rushed out of the house as the arrest proceeded.
In Houston, Texas, plainclothes officers detained and then deported the undocumented wife of an active-duty Army sergeant after misrepresenting themselves as “public safety officers” and telling her that her car had been in an accident in the parking lot outside her work. The woman, Shirly Guardado, had been brought to America as a child more than a decade ago.
In New Orleans, Louisiana, ICE agents detained the wife of a Marine veteran who was in green-card proceedings because her mother had missed an immigration hearing years before, triggering removal orders against the entire family.
Also in New Orleans, federal agents arrested at least 15 workers in a raid on a construction site for a major and long-delayed flood control project. New Orleans, as a reminder, is prone to disastrous flooding.
In Nashville, Tennessee, an undocumented woman who was detained by ICE while pregnant suffered a stillbirth after allegedly being denied adequate medical care in ICE custody.
In Atlanta, Georgia, an undocumented migrant who entered the country in 2004 and has gained a large following as a reporter covering ICE raids was arrested while reporting on a “No Kings” protest earlier this month. ICE promptly detained him and began deportation proceedings.
In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a two-year-old girl, who happens to be a U.S. citizen, was deported along with her undocumented parents to Brazil, where she is now the undocumented one. “She has no right to routine pediatric checkups in Brazil’s public healthcare system,” the Washington Post reported. “She cannot easily enroll in a Brazilian school or day care. And she’s living on a temporary tourism visa that’s set to expire in weeks.”
If anything, we should expect stories like these to multiply in the days ahead. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a remarkable assist in its efforts not merely to detain illegal immigrants, but to short-circuit their due process in order to quickly deport them. In an unsigned and unexplained ruling, the court’s conservative majority paused a ruling from a lower judge who had blocked the administration from deporting migrants to countries with which they had no connection without giving them a hearing to make the case they could face torture there.
The immediate effect of the ruling was to give the White House clearance to move forward with deporting a clutch of convicted criminal aliens to South Sudan. Their deportations had been paused last month.
But the ruling also seemed to cut in a different direction from other SCOTUS decisions this year, which have forced the White House to stop ignoring migrants’ rights to due process as they seek to deport as many as possible as quickly as possible.
That’s all good news for the White House. The president and his aides have responded to every story of injustice in immigration enforcement with insistence that the media is either misrepresenting the story or ignoring other cases in which actual, hardened criminals are being taken off the streets. Now, they don’t need to pause all that long to differentiate between the immigrants they’re going after—if they were ever pausing in the first place. In fact, they seem poised to accelerate a deportation strategy of moving the maximum number of bodies allowed by law, no matter the individual circumstances of the migrants in question or the public reaction.
“DHS can now execute its lawful authority and remove illegal aliens to a country willing to accept them,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement yesterday. “Fire up the deportation planes.”
A Quick Note on the Brave
Our fearless leader, Sarah Longwell, doesn’t spend all her time in focus groups or on Bulwark podcasts. Today, she and a group of likeminded Never Trump Republicans (or ex-Republicans?)—Bill’s among them as well—helped launch a new messaging campaign called Home of the Brave, intended to share the stories of everyday Americans who have been hurt by Trump’s policies. They’ve launched a $15 million ad campaign and set up a new Substack as well (all the cool kids are doing it).
“We call America the Home of the Brave. But in the face of President Trump’s threats of retribution, many of our elite institutions are caving rather than pushing back when Trump attacks them,” Sarah said in a statement about the campaign. “But regular Americans aren’t afraid to speak out about what’s happening to our country. That’s why we’re launching Home of the Brave—to give regular Americans a place to tell their story about how the Trump administration is harming them, their communities, and their country.”
AROUND THE BULWARK
Teaching the Holocaust Just Got Harder in Mississippi… A new state law forbids education increasing ‘awareness’ of issues relating to race. How are educators supposed to teach history? MARGARET MCMULLAN explains.
Trump Is Botching the Bombing of Iran… His lies and gaffes are making a mess of the mission and its aftermath, argues WILL SALETAN.
MAGA Doves Learn to Love The Bomb… War, what is it good for? Exposing some hypocrisy, for starters. At False Flag, WILL SOMMER dives into the contortions the anti-war MAGA punditry had to make.
A Novel About the Spanish Inquisition… On The Mona Charen Show, LINDA CHAVEZ joins MONA CHAREN to discuss her debut novel, The Silver Candlesticks.
Quick Hits
THE NATO SCOLD COMETH: Donald Trump is inbound to the Hague this morning for the first NATO summit of his second term, and ABC News has the latest:
Trump is going into the conference with a key priority: he wants the alliance to codify an increase in defense spending across all member nations, from 2% of their gross domestic product to 5%. This has been a signature issue for Trump well before the new Middle East conflict. The president has long complained that the U.S. has been subsidizing the defense of its allies—and has even gone so far as threatening that he would not come to the defense of nations not fully paying their way, a radical departure from NATO’s Article 5, which says an attack on one is an attack on all. . . .
In the time since Trump last attended a NATO summit, Russia invaded Ukraine. The war in Ukraine has raged on for more than three years and Trump has repeatedly claimed it would not have happened if he were in office. He has also blamed the war on Ukraine’s desire to join NATO. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has been a featured guest at NATO summits since the war, including the one former President Joe Biden hosted in Washington last year, but it’s reported that Zelenskyy’s involvement will be limited this year—including not having a seat at the table.
HERE COMES ZOHRAN: On the eve of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary today, a shock poll has leftist candidate Zohran Mamdani inching ahead of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a ranked-choice voting simulation for the very first time.
The survey from PIX11 News, Emerson College, and the Hill found Cuomo still leading Mamdani in first-choice voting, 36.4 percent to 33.7 percent, and through most of the balloting rounds that follow. But when the ranked-choice dust settles and only the top two candidates are left, the poll finds Mamdani edging Cuomo 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent.
Mamdani has clearly picked up momentum. But this has been happening over many weeks. One internal poll from another candidate found him narrowly ahead of Cuomo in first-choice ballots earlier this month when Cuomo was thought to still enjoy a comfortable lead. The race has also been shaken by a late development earlier this month: Mamdani and city comptroller Brad Lander, who is polling third, cross-endorsed one another’s candidacies, asking their own voters to rank the other second.
THEY’RE BRINGING DRUGS. THEY’RE BRINGING CRIME. THEY’RE BRINGING PRAYER MATS: Right-wing conspiracy theories never really die—they just go into cold storage until they’re needed again. Yesterday, deportation czar Tom Homan, looking to make a connection between the threat of Iranian retaliation and border security, pried one conspiracy out of the back of the freezer.
“Joe Biden let MILLIONS of unknown gotaways cross the border,” he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We don’t know who they are . . . but Iranian passports were found ditched south of the border with prayer mats.”
The “Iranian passports” bit is some novel spice—that’s why they pay Homan the big bucks—but the “prayer mats” claim goes back more than a decade. Back in 2014, a Breitbart story credulously reported on internet rumors of “what American security contractors on the ground believe is a Muslim prayer rug found near the border in Arizona last week.” The story, sourced to a group called American Patriot, Three Percent and featuring pictures of a piece of fabric of unknown provenance, earned a Pants on Fire rating from PolitiFact at the time. (Even if the rumor were true, we feel compelled to note, there is nothing wrong with a Muslim prayer rug. There are 1.9 billion practicing Muslims in the world.)
A few years later, in 2019, a rancher repeated the same rumor to a reporter for the Washington Examiner; her credulous write-up was quickly shared by President Trump. Now Homan is reaching for the same canard.
Cheap Shots
If you’re wondering how DHS is messaging on the filmed beating and arrest of Narciso Barranco:
You might think he’d have a more direct way to get ahold of world leaders.
We just cannot stop talking about these stories. We must show every single video. We must continue to scream about the fact that these ICE agents are dressed like the worst versions of cosplay villains.
I’m old enough to remember when these same fellas couldn’t possibly put on a mask to prevent a deadly virus from spreading because “I can’t breathe in this thing”. EYEROLL.
Everything that they are doing is truly so anti-American that I feel sick daily. Everyone should be made to see this and hear about it and every voter who voted for him should try to defend this absolutely indefensible behavior.
Side note, but any chance we can give Trump an extended tour of The Hague? Just to prepare him for his future stay there?
Asking for 78 million friends.
Masked thugs arrest people who have not committed any crime. Kept away from communicating with their families. Some may be sent to prisons in foreign lands where they will have no access to justice in US courts.
How is this not fascism. Fascism is now the rule in the US. Not everywhere but... maybe at the next protest we will see the marines followed by more masked thugs.
This is not America ... or maybe it is.