Donald Trump and maga Republicans use Americn tax money to fund evil ICE operations to punish American citizens

Why the Department of Homeland Security Disaster in Minneapolis Was Predictable.

Donald Trump has created his own personal Gestapo*❗

For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies.

By Jonathan Blitzer published in The New Yorker.

When Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, in 2002, one lawmaker bragged that the United States was finally “meeting the enemy’s agility with our agility.” 

At the time, the issue of who the enemy was didn’t cause much political disagreement in Washington; it was generally understood to be Al Qaeda, or groups like it. Early skeptics questioned the wisdom of giving a single federal department a monumental budget as well as broad policing and surveillance powers, but caution was largely cast aside. Agencies within the department, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P.), which includes Border Patrol, received lavish bipartisan support. Twenty-four years later, their mission and their conduct have exceeded the worst imaginings of even their sharpest critics. With Donald Trump in the White House, and a servile Republican majority in Congress, ICE and Border Patrol are turning into the President’s personal army, targeting immigrants, Democrats, and, as the recent events in Minnesota have shown, just about anyone who crosses their path.

The situation is no less shocking for having been at least partly predictable. For decades, ICE and Border Patrol have operated with fewer constitutional constraints than typical law-enforcement agencies when they conduct searches and make arrests; in instances of abuse, oversight has tended to be far more lax, leading to a culture of freewheeling unaccountability. The consequences were on display from the start of D.H.S.’s incursion into Minneapolis, which began in December, under the name Operation Metro Surge. On January 7th, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer and an Army veteran, shot and killed Ms. Renee Good, a mother of three. Less than three weeks later, Alex Pretti, an I.C.U. nurse, was killed when two C.B.P. agents fired at least ten shots at him, including six while he was lying motionless on the ground. Witness accounts and phone videos make clear that neither Good nor Pretti, both of whom were U.S. citizens, posed any immediate danger to the agents. Nevertheless, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of D.H.S., said that they had engaged in “domestic terrorism.” She was following the White House line. Stephen Miller, a top adviser to the President, told agents after Good’s killing, “You have immunity.” Pretti, he later wrote on X, was 🤥“an assassin” who “tried to murder federal agents.”

These lies 🤥were the basis of the government’s legal response, prompting half a dozen federal prosecutors and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the Minneapolis field office to resign. State and local authorities, blocked from conducting their own inquiries, were accused by the Justice Department of conspiring to oppose Trump. Shortly after Mr. Pretti’s killing (murder❗😢), Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, sent a letter to Governor Tim Walz, offering three “common sense solutions” to end the federal siege. One of them was to turn over the state’s voter rolls. “Is the executive trying to achieve a goal through force that it cannot achieve through the courts?” a district-court judge asked Department of Justice (DOJ) lawyers.

In the face of mounting national outrage, the Administration came as close as it could to admitting fault without actually doing so. The President demoted Greg Bovino, the commanding agent in charge of the roving patrols that have besieged Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis. The night before, according to the Times, Noem had to defend herself in a two-hour meeting at the White House. Miller wasn’t there—“he knows just how and when to disappear,” a former colleague once said. But he has since acknowledged that the two agents involved in the Mr. Pretti shooting “may not have been following” protocol.

The idea that this response would be enough to temper the political fallout from 🤢Operation Metro Surge💢 is a sign of the unbridled impunity that reigns in the White House. 

Three thousand federal agents remain in Minnesota. A parallel operation, run by Citizenship and Immigration Services—the D.H.S. agency responsible for administering the legal-immigration system—has targeted fifty-six hundred refugees in the state for potential “fraud.” The federal government had previously granted these people legal status. But, more than a hundred of them, according to a lawsuit by the International Refugee Assistance Project, were arrested by ICE and sent to jails in Texas, where they were re-interviewed, as though the legal process they’d already gone through meant nothing.

No other aspect of Trump’s crackdown has shown any sign of changing, either. D.H.S. agents in masks and unmarked vehicles have been abducting immigrants with legal status and detaining and harassing citizens who look or sound as though they might not be U.S.-born. A recent ICE memo, obtained by the Associated Press, stated that agents can now enter people’s homes to make arrests without a warrant from a judge. The agency has always relied on administrative warrants, signed by its own officials, to carry out deportation orders. But, this authorization marks a radical departure from legal precedent, and a clear affront to the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal searches.

On Wednesday, a federal judge issued an injunction to block the refugee arrests in Minnesota, but whether D.H.S. will comply is anyone’s guess. According to a recent ruling from the chief federal district-court judge in the state, ICE violated nearly a hundred court orders in January alone—and that was just orders relating to Operation Metro Surge. The Administration has ignored other federal injunctions, going back to March of last year, and it has serially lied about aspects of its operations in court, bringing rebukes from judges across the country. “After nearly thirty-five years of experience with federal law enforcement,” one of them, a Trump appointee on Long Island, wrote, “I have never encountered anything like this.”

Tom Homan, the Administration’s “border czar,” has been dispatched to Minneapolis to oversee the situation. His current title is itself revealing. The White House is bringing the border to the rest of the country. Politically, in light of the institutional history of D.H.S., this gives the Administration broader license to claim that it’s facing down foreign threats; practically, agents on the ground are engaging in exceptionally aggressive forms of policing.

Last year, at the Administration’s behest, Congress tripled ICE’s budget, making it the most heavily funded law-enforcement body in the country. After the killings in Minnesota, Democrats have threatened to block further funding unless the Administration agrees to impose modest restraints on agents’ conduct, such as forcing them to remove their masks and raising the legal bar for the use of warrants. These are rearguard actions that are long overdue. 

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats reached a deal with Donald Trump to forestall a government shutdown while they negotiate the details. The inevitable retrenchment came hours later: Bondi issued orders to arrest four people for disrupting a church service in Minneapolis. Two of them were anti-ice activists; the others were journalists reporting the story. ♦

Published in the print edition with the headline “Out of Control.”

*Gestapo:  

The secret police of Nazi Germany, formed in 1933, and operating until 1945, that enforced government rule through terror and repression, with the authority to arrest individuals and organizations suspected of opposing the Nazi regime without judicial oversight. The organization's primary function was to identify and suppress threats to the state, a mission that included significant involvement in the Holocaust.

Due process for illegally deported migrants! Cruelty is the Trump brand

Donald Trump’s Deportation Obsession
Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. Now all Americans are at risk for deportation at Donald Trump's whim. 

Published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jonathan Blitzer

El Salvador Navib Bukele, president

In 2022, (three years ago), in El Salvador, after the MS-13 gang killed eighty-seven people in a span of seventy-two hours, the country's President Nayib Bukele called on his loyalists in the legislature to declare a “state of exception.” The government could arrest anyone it deemed suspicious, and those taken into custody lost their right to a legal defense. Since then, in a country of six million people, eighty-five thousand have been jailed, many without credible charges; according to the human-rights group Cristosal, three hundred and sixty-eight of them have died. The gangs have been decimated, but the “state of exception” remains in effect, something that has earned Bukele plaudits from the MAGA movement and, last week, an invitation to the White House.

The Trump Administration is now paying El Salvador six million dollars to hold deported immigrants—among them more than a hundred Venezuelans removed under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act of 1798—in a supermax prison that Bukele built for his crackdown. He has proudly advertised his services as “outsourcing.” He has also offered to house American citizens convicted of crimes, and Donald Trump appears to be considering it. “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele told the President and members of his Cabinet in the Oval Office. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” “Who gave him that line?” Trump said. “Do you think I can use that?”

Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the idea is that, if the government is sufficiently hostile to immigrants, they will feel that they have no choice but to leave the country. The Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. In a campaign reminiscent of Bukele’s “state of exception,” it has moved to suspend the rule of law; this is as much an attack on immigrants as it is a fever dream of untrammelled power.

At the White House, Bukele and Trump flaunted their defiance of a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Justices  instructed the Administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who has lived in Maryland for nearly fifteen years and was deported last month to Bukele’s prison, owing to what government lawyers admit was an “administrative error.” Trump’s initial response was to say that he was powerless to bring Abrego Garcia back. Before long, top officials started calling him an MS-13 gangster and a terrorist, even though he’s never been convicted of a crime. Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, simply asserted that the Court had ruled in Trump’s favor and that “nobody was mistakenly deported anywhere.” 

On April 18, 2025, after Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia, who had been transferred to another facility, El Salvadore's Bukele said, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” 

But, the White House tagged Van Hollen on X, saying that Abrego Garcia is “NOT coming back.”

✸So what changed❓ Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been returned to the United States to face criminal charges CNN reports.

Migrants are human being who deserve due process rights provided by the Constitution❗

Donald Trump and the Republican administration created a racist based immigrataion policy

Trump Makes America’s Refugee Program a Tool of White Racial Grievance
Donald Trump's interest in the plight of (South African) Afrikaners seems to have begun with—what else?—segments on Fox News.
By Jonathan Blitzer.

Trump is surrounded entirely by enablers

The chaos of Donald Trump’s failed leadership often obscures its rank and evil consistency. Only a few hours into his second term, Trump signed an executive order suspending the admission of refugees to the United States, something that he’d tried to do his first time in office. Twelve thousand people who had been cleared to come were stranded, their flights cancelled. A hundred and eighteen thousand others had been approved but didn’t yet have plane tickets. Some, including Iraqis and Afghans who had been targeted in their home countries for helping the U.S. military, filed a lawsuit, alongside a group of resettlement organizations. Eventually, a federal appeals court instructed the Administration to admit anyone whose flight had been scheduled on or before January 20th; it has shown no sign that it will comply. In 2017, when Trump banned refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries, the legal challenges they filed took almost all his first term to sort out. Many of them were still waiting abroad to learn their fate when he returned to the White House this year.

In the meantime, according to the executive order, the U.S. will “admit only those refugees who can fully and appropriately assimilate into the United States.” Less than a month later, the Administration made clear who that might be. A February executive order, called “Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa,” blamed that nation’s government for perpetrating racism against white people. 

In May, fifty-nine Afrikaners were flown to the U.S. Stephen Miller, (IMO) the Donald Trump equivilent to Joesph Goebbels (Nazi politician 1897-1945), the Trumpzi 's top immigration adviser in both of his cruel administrations, hailed their case as “the textbook definition of why the refugee program was created.” They were, he said, the victims of “race-based persecution.” (Question❓:  Does Stephen Miller believe in "eugenics"❓  Inquiring minds want to know if Miller is evidence of reincarnation.  Is he the reincarnated Joseph Goebbels❓ Just askin'❗)

The U.S. Congress hasn’t passed legislation to reform the immigration system in thirty-five years, and one consequence has been a steady perversion of how lawmakers address the issue of who belongs here. Which people deserve our protection, in the form of asylum or refugee status, has become a kind of proxy fight, waged by successive Presidents operating on the margins of congressional inaction. The Refugee Act of 1980, which codified legal protections for those fleeing persecution, was supposed to be insulated from domestic identity politics. It had largely bipartisan support until Trump’s first term, when Miller and his allies went to work. In a series of technical moves, they rewrote government guidelines for identifying and processing refugees. Resettlement agencies were starved of resources, leading many to shut down. In the final year of that term, the government resettled some eleven thousand refugees, the lowest amount, by a wide margin, in the program’s history. Between 2023, and 2024, the Biden Administration resettled more than a hundred thousand. No one doubted that Trump would attempt to reverse such progress, yet he went further: his Administration has now turned the system into a tool of white racial grievance.

Trump’s interest in the plight of Afrikaners seems to have begun in 2018, with—what else❓🙄—segments on (Fake❗) Fox News. 

While interviewing an Afrikaner activist, Tucker Carlson focussed on a policy that permitted the South African government to redistribute land owned by white farmers. “Racism is what our élites say they dislike most,” Carlson later said. “ ‘Donald Trump is a racist,’ they say. But they pay no attention to this.” The policy, while inevitably controversial, was meant to correct for the nearly fifty years of brutal privations that Black South Africans endured under apartheid. Trump went on to claim, falsely, that the South African government was engaged in the “large scale killing” of white farmers, and he ordered the State Department to investigate. Top officials, as they did with many of Donald Trump's most fervid obsessions, appeared to slow-walk the inquiry.

This time, Trump took issue with a new law by which the government could expropriate white farmers’ unused property. 

In fact, South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel before the International Court of Justice, in 2023, is a separate point of contention. There are others. In February, Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, refused to attend a G-20 summit in South Africa because the country supported what he summarized, on X, as “DEI and climate change.”

On May 21st, Trump staged a diplomatic mugging of the sort that’s become common in the Oval Office, assailing the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, with more false claims of a “genocide.” (The nation’s murder rate is high, but the available evidence suggests that white farmers make up a tiny fraction of the victims.) Aides played a propaganda video, and Trump held up a photograph of body bags which, according to Reuters, actually showed aid workers burying corpses in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 😳😦😡😢

This term, Trump is surrounded entirely by enablers. One of them was the South African-born billionaire Elon Musk, who has subscribed to conspiracy theories about antiwhite violence and spread them on social media. 

Musk also sought to operate Starlink, his satellite-internet company, in South Africa, but has balked at a law requiring foreign tech firms to sell a portion of their local subsidiaries to shareholders who are Black or historically disadvantaged.

Trump’s refugee gambit comes just as his Administration is eviscerating a range of other protections for immigrants. 

A decade after the passage of the Refugee Act, Congress created a designation called Temporary Protected Status, to allow foreigners in the U.S. to remain here, on a provisional basis, if they face security concerns—from political strife to environmental disaster—at home. Some nine hundred thousand people from seventeen nations currently have T.P.S. But Trump has begun revoking it, country by country, including for some eight thousand Afghans and as many as half a million Haitians. In May, the Supreme Court allowed the Administration to proceed with its plan to cancel T.P.S. for three hundred and fifty thousand Venezuelans. Days later, the Justices temporarily lifted a lower-court order that had blocked the President from ending humanitarian parole for another half a million migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

Last week, the State Department sent a formal notification to Congress with a long list of bureaucratic changes, including substantial job cuts and a new emphasis on promoting “western values.” (What the hell are "western values"❓) The bureau in charge of refugee resettlement will have a new section: the Office of Remigration. The thrust of its mission will be to “return illegal aliens to their country of origin.” “Remigration” is the preferred term of right-wing European populists, and it carries a host of white-nationalist associations. Trump had used the word only once before, in a social-media post during the 2024, campaign. It was a fringe concept then—but, not anymore. ♦

Published in the print edition of the June 9, 2025, issue, with the headline “Get Out.”