Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has his first day of hearings for his nomination to the top Justice Department job today. He’ll spend most of the day answering questions—or, more precisely, not answering questions, because the rules the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee imposed on this hearing (ten minutes of questioning per senator only) basically guarantee that Blanche can blather, platitudinize, and filibuster his way through the whole thing. Happy Wednesday.
New ICE, Same as the Old ICE
by William Kristol
After the killings in January in Minneapolis of Renée Good and Alex Pretti sparked widespread public outrage, and with Democrats in Congress blocking additional multi-year funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Trump administration made some adjustments. Two of the most visible faces of the mass deportation effort, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol “commander-at-large” Greg Bovino, were fired. Incoming DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said during his confirmation hearing that he hoped to have DHS generate less controversy. And as Republicans in Congress muscled through multi-year funding for ICE, there was talk that ICE would itself initiate various reforms, like having its agents wear body cameras.
All of this helped Trump’s mass deportation regime weather the political storm, get its multi-year appropriation, and avoid all requirements of accountability or transparency. By summer, ICE was unabashedly back. Under renewed pressure from the White House to meet higher immigration arrest quotas, the agency ramped up arrests to roughly 2,000 a day—about twice its daily total compared with the spring.
Then in the last ten days, in the course of its deportation frenzy, ICE has once again killed two innocent individuals. When 52-year-old husband and father Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot a week ago in Houston, DHS lied that he had “weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer.” A week later, when 26-year- old husband and father Joan Sebastian Guerrero was killed in Biddeford, Maine, DHS retreated to the meaningless claim that the agent who shot Guerrero was “fearing for public safety.” ICE has shared no evidence from videos or witnesses about what actually happened in either case. It has not told us who those agents, acting and killing in our name, are. We do know that they were supposed to be looking for men other than the ones they shot. And we’ve been told they were not wearing body cameras.
Houston’s top prosecutor, Harris District Attorney Sean Teare, has been more forthcoming. He has said that the actions of federal immigration agents “in no way resemble” the tactics of “every law enforcement agency” he’s worked in, and that “either these agents are completely untrained, or intentionally putting themselves in situations where they can justify firing into cars.” Or both.
And these recent shootings didn’t come out of the blue. In recent weeks, we’ve seen videos and heard reports from all around the nation of illegal and indecent behavior by ICE agents. So while billions more dollars have been spent and thousands more agents have been added, we have no more transparency and accountability than before.
Now, after the killings, and after widespread criticism of the practice of vehicle stops, there were once again some suggestions that things might change. On Monday night, ICE ordered a suspension of vehicle stops during enforcement operations. But by Tuesday afternoon, border czar Tom Homan was reassuring Fox News that the pause on ICE agents conducting vehicle stops is not a policy change but rather a short-term review, and that ICE agents will “get back to doing what they do best.” And our president posted this morning to tell us that “the men and women of ICE are doing a GREAT job,” adding, “we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”
There’s no reason to think there’ll be any kind of fundamental change to this thuggish and lawless agency, or to the mass deportation agenda that incentivizes and excuses its thuggish and lawless behavior. In fact, all evidence now points to things staying the same.
My colleague Adrian Carrasquillo reported yesterday that at a small vigil in Houston a Mexican-American man told Ronaldo Salgado,
I see you as my sons. We’re the generation of your dad . . . 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.
The fact that immigrants like Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero want to come here and live here and work here and raise their families here should make us all proud. It is the acts of our own government that should make us ashamed.
Triumphal Arch . . . of What?
by Mona Charen
If completed as planned, Donald Trump’s triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery will tower over the graceful Memorial Bridge, obstruct the view of the Lincoln Memorial from Arlington cemetery (and vice versa), and offend anyone whose taste is north of Liberace.
But there’s another aspect of this grotesquerie that deserves some attention: Namely, what is the triumph Trump is celebrating?
The Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates the Roman victory over the Jews and the sacking of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Arch of Constantine honors Emperor Constantine’s A.D. 315 victory in the Battle at the Milvian Bridge (before which Constantine supposedly saw a cross in the sky and therefore converted to Christianity). The Arc de Triomphe in Paris was commissioned by Napoleon to commemorate his victory over the combined armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz in 1805. Whatever your view of imperial campaigns, military historians regard Napoleon’s victory there as one of history’s greatest. Nelson’s Column in London honors Horatio Nelson’s defeat of the French and Spanish fleets at the Battle of Trafalgar. Nelson was mortally wounded, but his statue towers above the city he saved.
The United States has not traditionally gone in for victory monuments. We have a Washington monument, but that’s for the whole man, not the military victory. Same with the Lincoln memorial, which stresses the terrible sacrifices the Civil War demanded. There is a moving memorial at Pearl Harbor that remembers our dead and tells the story of our recovery. The tone is solemn. You can find a World War II memorial in Washington, but it’s a tribute to the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and others who fought the war, not a gloating expression of chauvinism.
The Dewey monument in San Francisco honors the commodore who defeated the Spanish in Manila Bay, but it’s the exception that proves the rule. There is no victory arch for the Mexican–American War—though it was a crushing victory that doubled our territory. Americans felt queasy about celebrating it even in the nineteenth century. Ulysses Grant, who served in that war, recalled in his memoir: “I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was a youngster, only I had not moral courage enough to resign.”
And the Vietnam Memorial is a mournful thing. A black granite trove of carved names, it memorializes the thousands of 15- to 62-year-olds who gave the last full measure of devotion to a nation that should never have gotten involved in that war with ground troops.
What victory is Trump memorializing? The great battle of Caracas that extracted a single man from his palace and left a repressive regime in place? Or is it the Iran War, clocking in at an estimated $113 billion so far, draining our munitions (that could have helped Ukraine), and leaving the regime in the hands of even more radical forces than before, a regime that now knows it has little to fear from the United States and has a powerful weapon in the Strait of Hormuz? A regime before which the Trump administration is dangling $300 billion of carrots for peace? When one side is offering reparations, who won?
The proposed Arc de Trump would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe in scale, and destroy the geometry of the capital. The Memorial Bridge connects Arlington Cemetery and Robert E Lee’s former homestead to the Lincoln Memorial. It knits the former enemies back into one nation, but emphasizes that this is Lincoln’s country now. His temple catches the sunlight.
After World War I, New York constructed a temporary Victory Arch of wood and plaster to welcome home the troops. There were plans to finish it in stone but the funds never materialized and it was allowed to crumble. That would be a just fate for Trump’s monstrosity—but then again, wrecking cranes would be more efficient.
AROUND THE BULWARK
As America Is Losing Friends, China Is Courting Them… Just look at the contrast between NATO and BRICS, writes MARK HERTLING.
Are We Reading the Odyssey Wrong?… Two new books try to tame Homer’s hero. Neither succeeds, writes ALYSSA ROSENBERG.
Time for Radical Change… On the flagship pod, PETE BUTTIGIEG joins TIM MILLER to discuss his speech in Iowa, and the radical institutional changes he’d like to see.
The Faustian Tragedy of Lindsey Graham… His loyalty to Trump would have guaranteed him another six years in the Senate. Instead, it became the closing irony of his life, WILL SALETAN observes.
Quick Hits
JUSTICE FOR E. JEAN?: It’s really by a series of misnomers that we refer to “the justice system,” the “Justice Department,” Supreme Court “justices,” and so on. We have a system that attempts, at its best, to ensure some fairness in the process of social control—a process that’s a necessary and even salubrious part of any government. Government is generally better than anarchy, and if there can be a modicum of deliberation, reflection, and impartiality in the exercise of power, that’s better still—but it ain’t justice.
Take the case of E. Jean Carroll. She finally received the $5 million Donald Trump owed her for sexually abusing her and then defaming her ($5.6 million to be precise, when accounting for interest). That’s good. We should live in a society in which, if one person is legally found to have sexually abused another and then defames them, they should pay a penalty to the victim. (Maybe they should also pay a penalty to society, but that would involve the criminal “justice” system, which isn’t in play here.) A jury determined in 2023 that the amount Trump owed Carroll was $5 million—and now, after exhausting all appeals, the money has been transferred, along with the interest.
But in the meantime, Trump became president again and used his power to enrich himself by at least $2.6 billion so far. That ain’t justice.
THE KILLINGS WILL CONTINUE: ICE’s rapid changes in its policy regarding vehicle stops over the last twenty-four hours are enough to give every agent whiplash. As Bill wrote above, the agency is under pressure to meet its quotas. Some in the administration clearly see the practice’s deadly consequences as a bad thing (or, at least, the resulting PR from those deaths are viewed as a bad thing). Others—possibly including the president—don’t agree. But the reaction many in the MAGA crowd had to the announcement of a brief pause in the policy reveals that the movement writ large doesn’t have any compunction about the policy at all. Just take a look at this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or . . . You get the point.
So why is ICE so focused on traffic stops in the first place? A sympathetic answer could be that it’s easier for officers to control the situation compared to, say, going into people’s houses. But if any credence at all is to be given to ICE’s reflexive insistence that any officer who shot someone feared for his life because his victim had weaponized a vehicle, maybe homes are safer after all.
Homes are also more private. Depending on how the administration is feeling, that could be a good thing or a bad thing: Quiet deportations don’t create annoying news cycles like the ones we’ve seen after the extrajudicial killings of Renée Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Joan Sebastian Guerrero. But also, the government simply doesn’t have the capacity to deport all the people it wants—it needs some of them to self-deport, which means it needs them to be terrified to stay, which means it needs to inflict some kind of violence—whether that’s sending people to a Salvadoran torture chamber or occasionally shooting someone in the head. It’s not formally part of the mass deportation policy, but the administration, and its diehards online, certainly aren’t acting like these killings get in the way of their policy goals.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN: Is there about to be a major conversion in the postliberal world? First Things is perhaps the most prominent outlet publishing on religion and politics today. One of its big-ticket items is the Erasmus Lecture, given annually by a public intellectual. This year it’s Yoram Hazony, the Israeli-American political theorist whose The Virtue of Nationalism put an intellectual veneer on a global nationalist turn in the late 2010s.
One problem: First Things’s print edition announced Hazony, a Modern Orthodox Jew, will be lecturing on “How Only the New Testament Can Restore America.” Big if true, as they say. Could it be that Hazony had seen the light of Christ? It’s hard to think of someone whose political thinking would be more fundamentally changed by conversion than Hazony. In any case, it wasn’t so. Hazony corrected the magazine’s “erroneous announcement” on X. He would be speaking on his original topic, “Only the Old Testament Can Restore America.” (Even that’s a concession—Jews prefer not to think of the Hebrew Bible as something old which had to be completed by something new). One wag joked it was “wishful thinking” from the First Things crew, whose religious profession tends toward the Catholicism of its editors-in-chief (both converts).
This copyediting pratfall raises darker specters. Under the editorship of R. R. Reno, First Things has become a primary venue of postliberal writing, and while postliberals form a united front against liberals, their visions are often incompatible. We saw this in an early kerfuffle, when Reno published a piece by a Catholic “integralist” defending “the Mortara case,” a nineteenth-century incident in which a sickly Italian Jewish boy was secretly baptized by his Catholic nanny. When he recovered, the Church found it necessary to “adopt” the boy, now six years old. “Should putative civil liberties trump the requirements of faith?” the author asked pregnantly. Well, Jewish readers freaked out, and so did small-L liberal Catholics and Protestants. And when Reno walked it back, integralists complained he was a squish.
The Erasmus Lecture typo wasn’t a Mortara case by stealth, but it reminds us that the postliberal alliance can only last until the Great Satan of liberalism is defeated. After that, it’s every postlib for himself.
—Joshua Tait
Cheap Shots
They (Miller, Homan, Trump, the whole gang of them) definitely don't care if ICE kills people. They only care that the killing be done off-camera, so that they can lie about the circumstances.
The killings will continue until public approval improves