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mass deportations
Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Your Undocumented Neighbors Won't Be Voting, But You Can
Our neighbors with the most to gain or lose from the election results, for whom Tuesday’s election is about a lot more than paying a few cents less per gallon at the gas pump, are also people who cannot vote. They desperately need you to cast a vote for them.
Nov 03, 2026
One of the joys, or perils, of a weekly Tuesday newsletter is coming out every year on Election Day, right when the world is on hold for those 13 or so hours the polls are open. If you live, as I do, in a corner of Pennsylvania without a hotly contested congressional race, and with Gov. Josh Shapiro up by double digits, the day might seem less consequential. That’s wrong. Not only is control of the state legislature on the line, but we’re fighting for a bigger principle: the right to vote again in a free and fair election in two years. Vote as if your life depends upon it, because in a sense, it does.
In Maryland, a man named Julian Curo Churata arrived more than a decade ago from Peru to work as a carpenter and build a new life with his wife, Veronica Ramirez, their two children from previous marriages, and eventually their own daughter, now age 6.
In June, as President Donald Trump’s campaign of mass deportation was surging across America, agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested Curo Churata in a targeted operation, and the undocumented immigrant was flown to detention in Louisiana. He managed to call his daughter every day—pretending he was out of town on a job—until September 29, when ICE said he suffered cardiac arrest, was rushed to a nearby hospital, and pronounced dead. He was just 47.
The most despicable campaign promise in American history proved to be the only one Trump kept.
Ramirez went public with her grief, her unanswered questions about her husband’s death, and the lack of information she was receiving from ICE, in a story on the front page of The Washington Post.
“He wasn’t a criminal,” Ramirez said at the time. “All he wanted to do in this country was work. He paid his taxes, he wanted a better future for his children and for me—for his family. He didn’t deserve this at all. I want justice.”
What Ramirez got instead from ICE was a notice to appear for an immigration court hearing that could lead to her deportation to El Salvador—dated just three days after the newspaper article. Now she fears for the future of her already traumatized daughter, who may lose a second parent. “She’s afraid—afraid of being alone,” Ramirez said.
This case of seeming retaliation by an uncaring and increasingly tyrannical US government where the ultimate victim is a defenseless 6-year-old girl is the kind of article that makes your blood boil. But it’s also just one of a series of stories of heartlessness and violent thuggery toward the undocumented on our soil that have polluted my social media feed in recent days.
I saw a video of an ICE agent pointing a gun in the face of an innocent bystander in North Hollywood, California during the arrest of an immigrant; read about the Afghani refugees that ICE plans to fly back to their native country even after their relatives risked everything to aid US troops; and noted the Cuban-American lawyer who voted for Trump in 2024, tried and failed to stop his cousin’s deportation during the ensuing ICE crackdown, and then cried that, “This isn’t what I voted for.”
No, this is exactly what you voted for. I was inside Milwaukee’s Fiserv Forum on the night of July 16, 2024—watching in horror as white Trump delegates in their red MAGA garb or Texas cowboy hats waved placards that read, “MASS DEPORTATION NOW.” The most despicable campaign promise in American history proved to be the only one Trump kept.
And you still don’t think that elections have consequences?
There are millions of people—who live on our blocks, and pray in our houses of worship, and work the backbreaking jobs in our communities that no one else seems willing to do—who face the greatest consequences from the results of Tuesday’s midterm election. People like Veronica Ramirez and her 6-year-old girl.
Our neighbors with the most to gain or lose from the election results, for whom Tuesday’s election is about a lot more than paying a few cents less per gallon at the gas pump, are also people who cannot vote.
They desperately need you to cast a vote for them.
Hubert Humphrey, the former Democratic vice president known for his outspoken defenses of civil rights in the postwar era, said most famously that “the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, and those who are in the shadows of life...”
In today’s United States, no one is forced to retreat into those shadows more deeply than the 14-million-or-so undocumented immigrants and the American dreams of their children, many of whom are US citizens who might have to watch masked government goons rip their parents away.
Unfortunately, it’s a nightmare that won’t end on Wednesday morning no matter who wins, since Trump and his xenophobic henchmen like Stephen Miller will still be in the White House and—barring the unexpected—will be there until January 20, 2029.
But your vote will still make a huge difference. One party will hold public hearings, subpoena top officials, expose evil, and refuse to provide any new dollars to co-opt our local police to arrest our neighbors, hire more masked thugs, or open the squalid equivalent of concentration camps. The other party will continue, and look to expand, a mass-deportation crusade that has become a dark moral stain on our nation.
It’s fine to vote your pocketbook, but Tuesday’s ballot is about so much more. This is a moral imperative.
I know when I vote Tuesday, I’ll be thinking about Wendy Martínez, a woman I met this summer in Pottsville. With her four kids, Martínez rarely left their cramped apartment with the windows covered in blankets after ICE took away her husband, Carlos Moreno. There are thousands like her—women whose family breadwinner was arrested by ICE in a deliberate strategy to drive their families out of the United States.
Martínez won’t be voting Tuesday, but you can.
I think about the family members like Maryland’s Ramirez or Ly Wang, the stepdaughter of a Philadelphia Amerasian immigrant from Vietnam named Tuan Van Bui. whose loved ones died this year in the ICE-detention gulag archipelago, with little or no explanation
Ramirez won’t be voting Tuesday, but you can.
Tuesday’s election caps a year that started with the brutal murders by immigration officers in Minneapolis of two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who objected to what the government is doing in our name.
Good and Pretti won’t be casting ballots on Tuesday, but you can. If you care about justice, you must.
Many are. Tuesday morning, I woke up to see a photo online of the ever-growing memorial to Pretti on the Minneapolis street corner where the protester was gunned down nine months ago. A number of Minnesotans have traveled straight from their early-voting site to the memorial, and attached their “I Voted” stickers.
Immigration, of course, isn’t the only important issue on the ballot. It’s not even the only moral one. You can play a role in ending the erosion of gains for Black and brown Americans in the classroom and the voting booth; turning the tide back toward the LGBTQ community, including our transgender neighbors; and electing more opponents of US militarism from Iran to the Caribbean.
But the fiercest battle for the soul of America is being waged in the streets of our immigrant communities. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) used to ask his rally goers, “Are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?”
This Tuesday, the existential question is, are you willing to vote for the immigrant who can’t—even more than you’re willing to vote for yourself?
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I Swore an Oath to Serve and Protect—the President and ICE Betrayed Theirs
The Trump administration's priorities are all wrong: We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.
Oct 31, 2026
Since President Donald Trump took the oath of office for a second time, he got to work helping billionaires get richer, while families across southern Minnesota are stretched thin. They’ve struggled to feed their families, fill their gas tank, and pay for their healthcare. Instead of taking action to lower costs, Trump and federal officials invaded our communities and used our tax dollars to fund mass deportations.
As a United States Army and Military Police Corps veteran, I know what it means to uphold an oath to serve and protect. What I can’t understand is betraying that oath, which is what our president and too many leaders have done. That’s why I was especially angered learning how much we stand to lose because of these federal deportation policies, according to a new cost calculator. Across southern Minnesota. $374 million of our taxes, or $1,520 per taxpayer, could continue funding the mass deportations. Knowing that our tax dollars are fueling this, while we are getting by with less, makes me sick.
I dedicated my career to our country, serving 32 years in the criminal justice system as a deputy sheriff, a jail administrator, consultant trainer, and policy writer for the National Institute of Corrections. As a former administrator, I know the cost of public safety, the value of every taxpayer dollar, and right from wrong.
When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota.
The actions from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection officers during “Operation Metro Surge” and the subsequent Department of Homeland Security proceedings should sicken every law enforcement and correctional officer who takes pride in upholding the law. Not since the insurrection on January 6, 2021 have I been so angry and disillusioned with our government. Our country watched as public servants who swore an oath condemned the attacks of January 6. But after a corrupt president pressured them, too many of our leaders changed their tune, blurred the lines between right and wrong, and seemingly forgot their oath entirely. Watching “Operation Metro Surge” resurfaced feelings of disappointment, disgust, and betrayal of trust I hadn’t felt since January 6.
Officers depriving anyone of their civil rights, including due process, is wrong.
Officers brandishing firearms without articulable cause is wrong.
Officers detaining people without the ability to communicate with legal counsel within a reasonable amount of time is wrong.
And forcing working Minnesotans to pay for this chaos is wrong.
When the Trump administration chooses to spend $374 million on ICE operations, that decision takes money away from programs that can improve the lives of folks in southern Minnesota. That’s 6,900 veterans who won't get their medical care paid for. That’s 1,260 teachers in our public schools and 2,053 firefighters in our communities.
These numbers, while disturbing, are consistent when it comes to how Donald Trump harms working families. The president’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” slashed the budget for lifesaving programs like Medicaid, the Affordable Care Act, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to provide massive tax cuts for billionaires and large corporations. While CEOs pick out their newest vacation home, more people have to forgo doctor’s visits to cover their electricity bill or car payment.
These priorities are all wrong. We want our veterans to have healthcare, our local hospitals to stay open, and our first responders to help in emergencies, not more reckless and poorly trained federal agents on our streets.
As taxpayers, we have a responsibility to speak up when lawmakers have betrayed our trust. I encourage everyone to speak to their friends and family about how Trump will always be in the business of helping the ultra wealthy while making us pay for it.
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Democracy Means More Life, But Not to Trump and Company
The administration’s agenda for the last two years is built around the concept of less access to life. It has committed billions of taxpayer dollars to this mission.
Oct 03, 2026
It’s such a simple idea—that our nation was founded to provide its citizens and new arrivals with more life. Our unique form of government, grounded in the notion of self-determination, explicitly seeks to expand life possibilities for more people so that they might realize gifts granted at birth. Why didn’t this occur to me sooner? After all, “life” so clearly precedes “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.
To our detriment, we are now living through a period where the person we elected president, whose predecessors largely upheld the nation’s founding principles, seeks to bury its most basic intent. The administration’s agenda for the last two years is built around the concept of less access to life. It has committed billions of taxpayer dollars to this mission. When superimposed on their repetitive attempts to disempower women, people of color, and ethnic minorities, the four efforts that follow cap a prolonged assault on life:
The allocation of vast resources to expel several hundred thousand people from the country, sidestepping their due process rights. All emigrated to fulfill more of life’s possibilities in safer and more nurturing surroundings. A strong majority have bolstered the nation’s economic might and cultural richness. Read this Guardian article for a full grasp of the horrifying actions done in our name and paid for with taxpayer dollars. For those expelled, life’s possibilities have been lessened. Ours too are diminished, as their contributions are subtracted from community life.
Preserving an entitlement to more life in all its various forms inspires a cause that warrants universal backing.
The denial of science-based findings regarding climate disruption and positive health measures. This translates into many more citizens having fewer life options. On the climate front, the administration has contended that more oil enhances our lives. The truth is that more oil equals less life. Profligate burning of it disrupts the proper functioning of the atmosphere, sickens more people, and causes extreme weather that results in severe dislocations and needless deaths. At the same time, disregarding years of learning regarding preventive health measures and positive treatment protocols shrinks the chances of more of us for a full life.
The constriction of public discourse by curtailing press freedom and criminalizing constitutionally protected citizen dissent. The upshot is that the breadth and depth of the field of ideas available to us as citizens is considerably constrained. Life’s richness is fed with bursts of fresh air, not with heavy doses of government suppression. When the range of the possible is narrowed, there is less of life’s potential.
The direction of public resources in support of the fortunes of a few extremely wealthy people. This distortion shuts off opportunities for more citizens to spread their economic wings in pursuit of a better life. The so-called “American Dream” has become a mirage of unrealizable expectations for 90% of the population. Ironically, it was the throttling of these expectations that stoked the anger and resentment of a plurality of our fellow citizens and led to the election of a person committed to limiting life chances for millions.
These acts, designed to deprive constituents of more life, are evidence of a transgression more egregious than all the others this administration has perpetrated. It demands immediate attention and redress.
Strategically speaking, fighting for more life is easier to grasp than fighting for democracy, The latter asked people to stand together in defense of an abstract idea. For some it had partisan overtones. In contrast, preserving an entitlement to more life in all its various forms inspires a cause that warrants universal backing. It would be sufficient for undertaking a mass movement fueled by nonviolent direct action.
Who of us, regardless of political affiliation, would advocate for less life? This is the cause for which we must fight now—to regain the ground we have lost, and to realize even more fully the primary intent of the Declaration of Independence: more life.
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25 Years After 9/11, the Deportation Machine Has Exploded
Rights that apply to some people are not rights. They are privileges with an expiration date, and that date moves every single time this country gets scared.
Sep 15, 2026
For my family, the story of September 11 didn’t end when we went to bed after a day of fear and confusion.
We were attacked during what was my first week of 9th grade. I was looking out my classroom window at the Twin Towers with a classmate as we inadvertently witnessed the first plane hit the building. We were in shock. More kids gathered at the windows as a particular silence fell over the group. We eventually moved to a bigger room with more students, but with blinds pulled down. The sound of the second plane hitting the building made the blinds pop.
I don't remember much else about that day except that the room went quiet in a way I'd never heard a room go quiet before. But I vividly remember what would happen in the days after.
The city's grief curdled into something else for people who looked like me. Harassment on the streets. Windows broken. Women with their hijabs pulled off on the street. Fathers, brothers, grandfathers were pulled out of homes and businesses across the city and questioned like suspects, not for anything they'd done, but for what mosque they prayed at or what their passport said.
Twenty-five years later, the machine that was built to watch a few of us is watching most of us.
By the following year, tens of thousands of other men were required to register in person at the immigration office because of where they were born. Between September 2002 and 2003, 83,519 men registered at intake windows across the country. Of those, 13,799 were placed in deportation proceedings. Yet, only 11 were found to have any connection to terrorism, by the government's own count at the time. A program that processed 83,000 people and tried to deport almost 14,000 of them.
Six months into that registration program, on March 1, 2003, the federal government opened the Department of Homeland Security, which folded 22 agencies into a single new department built to do that kind of work at scale. But this mandate’s impact on communities wasn't an abstraction to me. It was the agency that had just decided my brother didn't belong in our city, with a budget line and a headquarters and a mission that would live long past our nation’s trauma.
I started organizing more deeply because of what happened to my neighbors and family that year. Twenty-five years of doing this work has taught me one specific thing: The machine doesn't stay pointed where it started. It isn't only Arab and Muslim families anymore who get treated as a threat first and people second.
This year, Congress gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement $45 billion just for new detention spaces, a 265% jump that gives ICE a bigger detention budget than the entire federal prison system, plus another $30 billion for enforcement operations on top of that. No one has properly enumerated what threat justifies a budget that size. I don't think there is one. Rather, it's a machine that's been fed for 25 years and has simply gotten larger with more zeroes attached.
What happened to Muslim and Arab families after 9/11 is not identical to what's happening to immigrant families now. But what I recognize is narrower than that. It’s how a government decides that fear of a few individuals justifies suspicion of entire communities, and how fast the list of suspects grows once the infrastructure to monitor and process them is in place.
After 9/11, I learned the difference between charity and power. Charity helps people survive a system. Power changes what the system is permitted to do to those in society. I've spent my adult life on the side of building power, not because immigrants are just useful, exceptional, or because of their economic contributions, but because rights that apply to some people are not rights. They are privileges with an expiration date, and that date moves every single time this country gets scared.
Twenty-five years later, however, it's landing on more doors than it did in 2002. Others have said it countless times, but if some of us don't have rights, none of us do. It's the exact lesson this country refused to learn in 2002, when 11 real cases were enough to justify tracking 83,000 people, and the tracking was made permanent instead of undone. Twenty-five years later, the machine that was built to watch a few of us is watching most of us.
We must fight for every single one of us because we have all witnessed what happens when we do not. I watched it through a classroom window when I was 14. I have spent every year since making certain that the next community in the crosshairs does not face it the way mine did, alone and expected to be grateful for whatever protection somebody decided to spare us.
This anniversary is absolutely a time when we need to reflect on what we lost that day as New Yorkers and as Americans. It's also about whether we're finally willing to notice what we built right after it, and this time agree not to let it keep growing.
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Bessent Shrugs Off Ugly Employment Numbers: 'We Don't Need to Produce as Many Jobs' as Before
"No one expects Trump's treasury secretary to know anything about the economy," said one economist.
Aug 20, 2026
The American economy lost 23,000 jobs last month, according to federal data, but US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doesn't see much cause for concern.
During a Thursday interview on CNBC, Bessent was asked about whether the most recent jobs report was a sign of the US labor market "cracking," and he replied that the data at the moment are "quite noisy."
Bessent then asserted that, thanks to Trump's mass deportation policy, "the jobs that we're seeing are going to Americans."
"After the deportations we've seen during President Trump's administration, and the closing of the border... we don't need to produce as many jobs," he said. "And what's really important here is that we are seeing a manufacturing renaissance."
Bessent on the latest bad jobs report: "After the deportations that we've seen and the closing of the border, we don't need to produce as many jobs" pic.twitter.com/kStWCiXAz5
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2026
In fact, there is no manufacturing jobs boom under Trump, as federal data shows the economy has lost an estimated 75,000 manufacturing jobs since the start of his second term.
Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, noted in a social media post that Bessent's claim about the Trump economy providing bountiful jobs to native-born US workers is also false.
"The employment rate for native-born people is down a percentage point from when Biden was in the White House," Baker wrote, "but no one expects Trump's treasury secretary to know anything about the economy."
Economist Tony Yates observed that Bessent's spin on the jobs report undermined one of the Trump administration's rationales for carrying out mass deportations.
"I love how this contradicts with the argument for the deportations—that migrants were stealing jobs from everyone else," Yates wrote. "Now the claim is that the jobs were created by migrants just as they are now gone with them."
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Trump’s Newest Unconstitutional, Dangerous Birthright Ban Must Be Stopped
People’s constitutional rights are once again being threatened by a xenophobic administration with no regard for the Constitution or the rule of law.
Aug 11, 2026
On August 6, five weeks after the Supreme Court rejected his first birthright ban, President Donald Trump signed two executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship and ending “birth tourism.”
Birthright Ban 2.0
The first denies automatic citizenship to babies born in the US to two noncitizen parents if at least one of them is: an “alien enemy,” a member of a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO), a government employee, or has “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.” While the scope of this is technically narrower than his first birthright ban, it is ultimately vague enough that the Trump administration could effectively weaponize it against anyone.
Consider this: On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order designating Tren de Aragua (TdA) and La Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) as FTOs. In March, Trump issued a proclamation declaring that all Venezuelan noncitizens 14 years or older who are members of TdA “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.” The very same day, the administration announced the deportation of nearly 300 Venezuelan nationals it accused of being members of TdA.
Among these deportees were those whose only crime was having a tattoo that immigration officials had designated as a sign of gang affiliation. Such tattoos included: “stars on shoulder,” “crowns,” “firearms and grenades,” “trains and dice,” “roses and predatory felines,” gas masks, clocks, and even the iconic silhouette of Michael Jordan dunking—the Jumpman. Notably, unlike other gangs, TdA does not require its members to obtain any tattoos. The Trump administration simply used this as a pretext to deport innocent people to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
No child is responsible for the circumstances of their birth—even if their parents are guilty of a crime, they are innocent.
Under this latest executive order, the US-born children of those accused of being a member of a FTO—no matter how baseless the allegation—would have their citizenship status jeopardized and more than likely denied. In doing so, it would pave the way for more family deportations. Notably, the Trump administration has already deported several US-born children along with their parents.
Moreover, while TdA and MS-13 are real organizations, the Trump administration has already designated at least one fictional group as a FTO: the Cartel de los Soles. In 2025, the State Department alleged that this organization was “headed by [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime.” This was a strategic lie. Like antifa, Cartel de los Soles is not a formal organization with a clearly defined leadership structure. Rather, experts describe it as a loose network of individuals broadly involved in the drug trade.
Nevertheless, that designation gave the Trump administration the pretext to invade Venezuela, kidnap Maduro, and put him on trial for his alleged narco-crimes. After his capture, the Department of Justice (DOJ) revised its indictment of Maduro and abandoned its claim that Cartel de los Soles is an actual organization. Whereas the old indictment made 32 mentions of the fictional cartel, the new one refers to it twice. It claims that Maduro, like former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, participated in, perpetuated, and protected this “patronage system.”
While the DOJ altered its indictment of Maduro, Cartel de los Soles is still formally classified as a FTO by the State Department.
Herein lies the real danger: The Trump administration lies and lies often. For an administration this corrupt and xenophobic, this new birthright ban offers it the ability to accuse any noncitizen, under whatever false pretenses, of being a member of a real or fictional organization to target their children. And, make no mistake, if the Supreme Court allows them, the Trump administration certainly will.
Ending Birth Tourism
The other executive order aims at ending birth tourism, or the practice of traveling to another country to give birth, thereby allowing the child to automatically acquire citizenship. While Trump insists that there are “hundreds of thousands” of such births each year, the Migration Policy Institute notes that the most expansive estimate puts the figure at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually in the US due to birth tourism—or less than 1% of all births in the country.
That number, however, is disputed. In 2024, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 9,576 babies were born in the US to mothers who list their official address as outside the US. A 2026 study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that birth tourism accounted for less than 0.3% of all US births in any given year between 2014 and 2024.
This executive order authorizes the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security “to issue or adopt rules, policies, operational guidance, or other guidance” designed to stop foreign nationals from entering the country via a temporary visa if they have the goal of giving birth on American soil.
Notably, while the executive order decries the purported dangers of birth tourism, it is vague with respect to how the State Department or DHS would actually go about identifying these people.
Since the first executive order explicitly targets the children of noncitizens who “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States, or a territory of the United States, to give birth,” these departments would be empowered to deport law-abiding visa holders and deny their children citizenship based solely on their own discretion—no matter how disingenuous.
In short, together, these two executive orders would allow the Trump administration to further accelerate its mass deportation agenda while denying citizenship to whoever they want.
Protect Birthright Citizenship
Given the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara, these orders should be ruled unconstitutional. Regardless of whether the parents engaged in fraud or were members of a real (or fictional) terrorist organization, their US-born child would still be a citizen under the 14th Amendment. No child is responsible for the circumstances of their birth—even if their parents are guilty of a crime, they are innocent.
So, what then is the point? Perhaps the Trump administration believes that by framing their birthright ban in terms of terrorism and fraud that the Supreme Court might see things differently.
Perhaps it believes that returning to the birthright issue will help Republicans in the midterms. While Trump is broadly unpopular, 8 in 10 Republicans continue to support his immigration policies. An April 2026 poll by Reuters found that 62% of Republicans support ending birthright citizenship.
Once again, we are put in a position where we must trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing. And once again we are forced to reckon with the fact that we cannot take for granted that it will.
Perhaps the point is to stoke more fear within immigrant communities in hopes that more people will self-deport.
Perhaps the cruelty is the point.
Whatever the reason, the reality is that birthright citizenship is once again under fire. People’s constitutional rights are once again being threatened by a xenophobic administration with no regard for the Constitution or the rule of law. Once again, we are put in a position where we must trust the Supreme Court to do the right thing. And once again we are forced to reckon with the fact that we cannot take for granted that it will.
For the sake of ourselves, future generations, and the country, we cannot allow this to become the new normal. We must continue to protest the Trump administration’s abuses, support the journalists documenting its atrocities, and demand that Congress take actions to rein in its corruption.
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Trump's Immigration Policies Have Been Rejected; Why Won't Dems Act Like It?
Rather than continue internecine fights, Democratic elites should join the grassroots in fighting the real adversary—the brutal, violent, white-nationalist deportation campaign now tearing this country apart.
Aug 05, 2026
With midterms approaching and the future of US.democracy balanced on a knife's edge, a media-driven moral panic about the Democratic Socialists of America is dividing the Democratic Party. That's unhelpful. Everyone knows Democrats need to unify under a big tent to retake Congress and check President Donald Trump's authoritarianism. This isn't the first unproductive debate of its kind. Before it came another fight—over the proper role of resistance to Trump's immigration crackdown—driven by the same hand-wringing, among the same people, that has slowed progress for years. As with immigration, the lesson is the same: it is grassroots resistance, not elite caution, that is winning this fight, and Democrats' cowardice in scapegoating their own base is what's holding the party back.
CNN reports that Trump is polling lower than Herbert Hoover did in the Great Depression, and a recent Fox News poll shows that voters now favor Democrats over Republicans on immigration. That is a huge turnaround—the GOP led by eight points on immigration as recently as April. That's also a huge collapse for Trump on what was once his signature issue. But it shouldn't be shocking or surprising. Trump's (and by extension all Republicans’) popularity on immigration was bound to go down from the moment he was sworn in. The only question is why it took so long.
Trump's failure on immigration was baked in, predestined, and unavoidable. The tragedy is that too many Democratic leaders and policy influencers have never understood this. Their tepid and craven response to Trump’s barbaric treatment of immigrants has hindered emerging bottom-up national consensus that can overtake Trumpism.
For years, Democratic party elites urged immigrants and advocates to abandon their ferocious defense of immigrants' rights. They said endlessly that the only way to win good immigration policies was to compromise on the bad ones. Their path to comprehensive immigration reform required grassroots activists to fall in line. Pundits, think tank thought leaders, and the philanthropic donor class insisted it was smart politics not to challenge the Republicans' dishonest framing of immigration. That is, as a crime and jobs problem to be solved only with more policing, as a security threat to be solved with militarized borders, and a public-health emergency to be solved by ending asylum. And that's not to mention the cultural panic.
While Democrats continue to read polls and ruminate over slide decks, the vilified street protests are doing their work for them.
Talk tough, they told us. Give Republicans what they want on the border, the prisons, the boots, and guns. Avoid using the word “amnesty” to talk about legalization. Say no to "sanctuary cities,” say yes to the Chamber of Commerce, and shut up about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Then they might let you have some extra green cards. And if we don’t win immigration reform in Congress, we were told, at least we will have an issue that will keep Latinos voting for Democrats in the next election. And we can even tell undecided voters and moderate Republicans that we’re just as tough as the other guys. In short, the Democratic elite felt confident it could play all sides.
But the visas never came. Reform never happened. Trump won the White House, and won again (this time with a higher share of Latino support), and the Republicans took Congress and the Supreme Court along with it. How did prospects for immigration reform and the Democrats political advantage disappear into thin air?
Democrats, consultants, and talking heads needed to pin the blame. Immigrants themselves were the first scapegoats. Newcomers made lunch-pail voters nervous. Asylum-seekers were next. Too many, too fast. America was full. "No vacancy," said the cover of The Atlantic magazine.
But then, curiously, a new culprit emerged: grassroots immigrant-rights organizations like mine—known derisively by collective shorthand as "the groups” among the Acela corridor class. They said "the groups" had pushed President Joe Biden to be too radical on immigration. Too "open borders." Too tolerant of people fleeing poverty and death and seeking refuge here. Too heedless of public opinion. Too sanctimonious.
That view was always wrong. Let's unpack why.
Trump's first presidential campaign began with an explicitly racist anti-immigrant lie about Mexicans. He ran on his promise to build a border wall to keep out criminal rapists and terrorists and to win back jobs for native-born Americans. He made his racist, xenophobic agenda more explicit when he ran for and won a second term, replacing the promise of the big, beautiful wall with a pledge to do mass deportations.
But that fascist tactic—promising quick, brutally simple answers to complex problems—was bound to fail. Lofty promises on immigration are easy for candidates because immigration is a meta issue that encompasses the fiction that a country tells about itself. For the MAGA movement (always a minority of the country, it’s worth remembering), America is a secure homeland for white English speakers. For Trump, it’s more like a vast country club, exclusive and gated like his fabled Mar-a-Lago.
In his first term, Trump’s deranged fantasies about immigration and other things started vaporizing immediately. Support for his false promises precipitously and steadily declined soon after his inauguration and throughout his term. The wall never got built. America didn't become Great Again.
Now, just as in Trump's first time in the White House, a huge chasm has opened up between lies and reality. The gaps are many. Get criminals? They're already covered by the criminal-justice system. Seal the border? It already was. Make America Great Again, again? With masked death squads terrorizing American cities? Yeah, right.
Mismanaging expectations is nothing new for modern presidents. George W. Bush had the right instincts on immigration, but he couldn’t close the bipartisan deal handed to him by Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). President Barack Obama had lofty goals and rhetoric. But he became the deporter-in-chief, a terrible stain on his historic legacy, and one that prefigured Trump’s outright war on immigrants. President Biden’s brightest moment in an otherwise dismal campaign was his promise to defend asylum. Until he ended it.
That cycle of promise and betrayal on immigration had become the rule, not the exception. Everyone knows the immigration system needs modernizing—amnesty paired with sensible enforcement measures—but with Congress dysfunctional beyond all recognition, no president has been able to deliver legislation. So they have all reached for executive power instead, using it not just to govern but to wedge and divide the opposition party. For a while, it worked. Republicans were in full-scale disarray after Obama's 2012 reelection, with voices from Sean Hannity to Charles Krauthammer calling for surrender on immigration reform.
This all changed with Trump. As a candidate, he defied the conventional wisdom of Republican elites with overt racism. In office, he became truly unique: the first president to triple down on an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda rather than tack to the middle. Trump has a lap-dog Republican Congress and more leverage than any other recent president to cut a comprehensive immigration deal. But he likely won't—certainly not when his top ghoul, Stephen Miller, is pursuing a vast ethnic-cleansing campaign instead. By now, the only constant in Trump’s addled mind is probably a belief in his own lies about immigration and in the notion that punching down at immigrants is the only way to save himself.
With Trump's popularity on immigration destined to fail, and with daily images of ICE cruelty that shock the conscience, all Democrats had to do was stay united in opposition. First, to help the people they had been promising citizenship for more than 20 years. Second, to help themselves. Instead, their divisions in the face of Trump's campaign of white supremacy have been uniquely ugly and counterproductive. Democratic elites made the same mistake Republican elites made in their 2012 autopsy, only in reverse. They mistook the repudiation of Biden’s failure as a ratification of Trump’s racist vision of America. The difference is that this time, far more people are suffering for it. And democracy itself is now at risk if Democrats don’t change course.
Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry—the two leading Obama-era voices guiding Democrats on immigration from inside and outside the White House—should have blamed themselves for decades of failure. Instead, they conveniently blamed "the groups." Senate Democrats surrendered on the racist Laken Riley Act. Two supposedly progressive Democrats, Sens. Jon Ossoff (Ga.) and Ruben Gallego (Ariz.), are already calculating how much this capitulation will cost their 2028 presidential ambitions.
House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) assailed Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) for standing up for Kilmar Abrego Garcia—the former day laborer whom the Trump administration defamed, abducted, and disappeared into a torture prison in El Salvador.
And it's not just Obama alums and elected officials. Pundits from Matt Yglesias to the Pod Save America bros have warned of doom if Democrats don't keep the groups in check and moderate on immigration. How many New York Times op-eds have blamed the 1965 immigration act for the rise of right-wing xenophobia? How many have blamed immigrants for upsetting white voters? Not even hashtags were spared—somehow #AbolishICE got blamed for everything.
Meanwhile, the maligned groups in the field have labored on—with far more to do, with far fewer resources, and with none of the luxury enjoyed by the elites who spent their time pointing fingers. There's no time for that when the work itself is the emergency.
They are helpers to those in need. Across the country, in response to what is now a full-scale domestic human rights crisis, leadership has come from the streets, not from those in elected office. People assisting neighbors. Defending their communities. Protecting kids. Showing up at courthouses and ICE check-ins so no one faces fascism alone. And immigrants and citizens standing and marching together, courageously, in the streets to demand: ICE out of our cities.
While Democrats continue to read polls and ruminate over slide decks, the vilified street protests are doing their work for them. The resistance that Beltway Democrats shun has become their lifeline—turning the tide on the one issue Trump was supposed to own.
And those sanctuary policies, once treated as the source of Democrats' problems back in 2016? They have literally stopped hundreds of thousands of deportations—in police stations, in jails, in courthouses across the country.
The Beltway Democrats' skittishness—their craven blaming of immigrants to conceal their own failure—has been a brake on progress. Those people need to join the resistance. Do something. Help someone. And stop bashing the people you claim to defend.
Absent the mother of all pivots from the White House, the downward trajectory for Trump on immigration will continue inexorably. The only questions are about the rate of decline and what comes next.
Rather than continue internecine fights, Democratic elites should join the grassroots in fighting the real adversary—the brutal, violent, white-nationalist deportation campaign now tearing this country apart. They should get out of their conference rooms and Zoom calls and hit the streets with us. A number of members of Congress have already followed Sen. Van Hollen's lead, forcing their way into the warehouses where immigrants are jailed in defense of their constituents. Every Democrat should do the same. Not as a photo op, but because it's right. And because in every election to come, Democrats will be judged not by their campaign promises, but by what they did in years Trump was in office.
The stakes go beyond the midterms. Fighting back now, unequivocally, is what will get Democratic leaders ready for what comes after Trump's inevitable downfall. They need to think about the vast possibilities ahead—restoring truth to immigration discourse, and pursuing policies that make a real difference in the lives of real people. They should be as ambitious in proposing new ways to help immigrants and rebuild this country as Trump has been in trying to destroy it.
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Trump's Deadly, Cruel Immigration Policy May Be a Political Failure As Well
As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, previously supportive voters may turn against Trump's mass deportation agenda.
Jul 24, 2026
The Trump administration is doing everything it can to get rid of what it considers to be “undesirable” people.
The administration has removed temporary protected status (TPS) for more than a million people from over a dozen countries. It is sending people back to active war zones in Sudan and Somalia. It is deporting people to Myanmar, a country under a military dictatorship. In the case of Venezuela, it is returning people to a country struggling to deal with the aftereffects of an earthquake.
Some holders of this status have been in the country for a long time. Nearly 90% of the 170,000 Salvadorans who have TPS, first granted 25 years ago, participate in the US labor force, contributing over US$5 billion to the US economy.
The administration makes no exceptions in its campaign to deport anyone and everyone. Even as it has promised to fight a war on behalf of the people of Iran, it has reportedly provided information about Iranian asylum-seekers to the Iranian government. These details about their lives, such as their sexual orientation and religious beliefs, make it even more likely that they will be persecuted on return. Dozens of Russians, who don’t enjoy TPS, were flown back to Russia, where several were immediately slapped with draft notices.
The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive.
There is no length to which the administration won’t go to deport people, even American citizens like the children born in the United States who were kicked out of the country along with their parents. So far, the Supreme Court has blocked the administration’s attempt to overturn the “birthright citizenship” clause in the US Constitution. But President Donald Trump is still pushing his allies to take up the fight in Congress to change the law.
The administration even tried to add 2.7 million living people to the “Death Master File,” which is a database of dead people maintained by the Social Security Administration. Trump’s plan was to make life so difficult for people declared “dead” that they would self-deport or, if they showed up to dispute their “death,” to detain them in preparation for deportation. It was only because of a whistleblower that this plan didn’t go into effect.
But the most visible effort by the US government has been to target the approximately 14 million “unauthorized immigrants” who, as of 2023, constituted over 4% of the US population. Such immigrants keep the American economy afloat by picking fruit, slaughtering cows, building houses, and taking care of the elderly.
Trump’s mass deportation campaign, in other words, would wreck the US economy. The undocumented don’t take away jobs from native-born Americans because the latter generally don’t want the jobs that immigrants fill. But the administration is willing to risk economic disaster in its effort to keep America a predominantly white country.
Trump’s anti-immigrant plan has not just evicted people. It has not just locked them away in detention centers. It has killed them.
In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were involved in two killings. Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old Colombian national living with his wife and young daughter in a small town in Maine, was not the subject of an ICE raid, but ICE agents killed him anyway. Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant, was a businessman and father of three on his way to work in Houston when agents stopped his car and shot him.
More than a dozen people have died in these kinds of interactions with ICE, including two US citizens—Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good—protesting ICE actions in Minnesota.
The number of detainees who have died in custody is even higher. Tens of thousands of people are being held in detention facilities that the Trump administration has established around the country. Despite administration claims that it is only deporting dangerous criminals, more than 70% of those detained have no prior criminal convictions.
More than 50 people have died in the detention facilities, a rate that is more than twice as high as Trump’s first term. They have died because of conditions inside the facilities or because they didn’t receive sufficient medical care. Several have died by suicide.
The Trump administration has pledged to deport a million people a year. It hasn’t quite reached that benchmark, with the administration itself claiming around 900,000 deportations as of mid-May. It has also claimed that more than 2 million people have self-deported. However, without transparent data from the Department of Homeland Security, it is difficult to verify the administration’s claims.
These numbers are critical to the administration’s approval rating. On virtually all other policies, Trump is losing popularity. Inflation numbers remain high, and the economy is failing millions of Americans. The war in Iran continues to push up gas prices. The administration is still dogged by controversies around budget cuts, corruption, anti-vaccine policies, and connections to Jeffrey Epstein. The overall approval rating for the administration is around 37%, with a large percentage of independent voters now adopting negative views of the president.
The one issue where a sizable number of Americans still approve of administration policies, however, is immigration. Compared to the economy at 33% and the war in Iran at 29%, 40% of Americans approve of his immigration policies. But even here the numbers are declining, since half of Americans supported his approach to immigration when he took office in 2025.
The administration has tried to tout the successes of its deportation program. But the deaths of citizens and noncitizens alike have put supporters of the president on the defensive. The detention and deportation of key members of communities—hard workers, religious leaders, even those espousing the same conservative family values of the administration—have led to a significant decline in anti-immigrant sentiment among Republicans.
Still, with the economy on the rocks and the war in Iran nowhere near an end, the Republicans will likely try to emphasize the “success” of the administration on immigration policy in the upcoming midterm elections in November. It will be a desperate strategy. As more information comes out about lives lost, communities harmed, and an economy hobbled by the loss of critical workers, the administration’s deportation strategy may turn out to be a failure politically as well for the president and his party.
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Venezuelans Just Deported by Trump Among Tens of Thousands Missing After Earthquakes
As the death toll continued to rise, the US Department of Homeland Security said that "when an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them."
Jun 29, 2026
Tens of thousands of people still haven't been found after a pair of devastating earthquakes in Venezuela last week—including some Venezuelans who had just been deported from the United States as part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation push and were being held in a hotel when the temblors hit, The Associated Press revealed Monday.
There were 146 Venezuelans, including 19 women and seven children, on a deportation flight that arrived just hours before the 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes, the AP reported, citing a Human Rights First initiative that has tracked thousands of such flights under Trump. They were brought to Hotel Santuario La Llanada in La Guaira, which collapsed because of the quakes.
"Lisbeth Portillo, 58, said she escaped the rubble from the hotel with about 20 other deportees who walked the streets looking for help. They saw people running, some naked and others barefoot as they emerged from the rubble of the building," according to the outlet.
Another deportee who survived, 24-year-old Jenny Rodriguez, told Telemundo: "I was trapped under the rubble. A colleague who had been on the same flight came by; I managed to free my hand from the debris, grabbed him by the trousers, and begged for help... Thanks to God—and to him—I was able to get out of there."
Oswadeliz Núñez Ramírez is still "frantically searching for her son," 28-year-old Daniel Alejandro Núñez Ramírez, who was also on the deportation flight and at the hotel, the Miami Herald reported Monday. A member of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service who called himself "Jonathan" told her that he had pulled her son from the rubble, but, "skeptical of the official account, his mother has searched every hospital, clinic, and sector of La Guaira and Caracas without success."
While US Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to the AP's request for comment, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, told the Herald: "This flight safely reached Venezuela, and all illegal aliens on board were returned home. When an individual is no longer in ICE custody, ICE is no longer responsible for them."
Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez said Monday that the earthquake has left at least 1,719 dead, 5,034 injured, and 15,866 displaced from their homes.
UN News noted Monday that the ongoing search and rescue effort involves more than 2,000 workers from over two dozen countries, plus over 160 dogs, and Gianluca Rampolla, the United Nations resident coordinator in Venezuela, "reported that the UN and Venezuelan authorities had agreed to procure 10,000 body bags in anticipation of the death toll rising further."
Rampolla said that "together with the search and rescue operations, we are focusing, together with the government, on providing emergency healthcare, shelter, food assistance, water and sanitation, and logistical support to ensure not only the storage but also the distribution of all the supplies arriving in the country, as well as protection."
As of Monday evening, more than 44,000 people remained missing, according to a reunion website for families. As NBC News detailed Monday:
Even as the chances of finding survivors diminished with every passing hour, Venezuelans continued using shovels, ropes, and their bare hands as they dug through mountains of collapsed concrete.
They were joined by a growing number of international rescue teams, who pulled multiple survivors from the wreckage, offering desperate families a rare glimmer of hope.
Among the rescues, teams from the United States, France, and Venezuela pulled a man and his son from the ruins Sunday morning after they had spent four days trapped beneath the rubble.
Organizations including US-based peace group CodePink and the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington, DC-based think tank, have called on the US and allied countries to lift all sanctions against Venezuela in the wake of the earthquakes.
Trump earlier this year directed an illegal invasion of Venezuela, during which US forces killed scores of people and abducted President Nicolás Maduro, then seized control of the South American country's nationalized oil industry.
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On World Refugee Day, Support Refugees, Don't Deport Them
The US dropped the bombs that forced Southeast Asian families to flee and is now deporting them back to the very land that is still littered with American bombs.
Jun 20, 2026
I was only an infant when my family slipped into a weathered wooden boat under the cover of darkness in 1978. Our journey across the mighty Mekong River was wrapped in an eerie, suffocating stillness as my parents, older brother, and I fled Laos. Whenever my mother recounts that night, she always ends with the same whispered awe: “It is a miracle you and Alex didn’t make a sound. I was terrified we wouldn’t make it.”
It would be decades before I fully grasped the terror of that treacherous crossing, the complex geopolitical forces at play, and the shared history between the US and my birth country that forced us out into the night.
I think of that river escape every year on World Refugee Day. It is a day to honor the immense courage of those forced to flee everything they know. For me, it is also a day that demands a deeply honest look at how we treat people once they arrive on our shores.
Following the violence that consumed Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in 1975, millions fled, culminating in the largest refugee resettlement in American history. We arrived first through sponsorship programs, and later through the Refugee Act of 1980, laying new roots across the US. Today, our Southeast Asian American community has grown to over 3 million, with vibrant enclaves from California to Minnesota, and my home here in Ohio.
Instead of tearing families apart here at home, the United States must commit to fully funding the removal of unexploded ordnance in Laos until the job is done.
My family is one of the lucky ones. After years of hardship, Columbus welcomed us and helped us plant our roots. Today, I am full of gratitude for my parents' sacrifice, and we are proud to give back through family businesses we built and by serving on nonprofit boards like the annual Columbus Asian Festival and Legacies of War.
Not every story mirrors ours.
Many Southeast Asian refugees were resettled in severely under-resourced, over-policed neighborhoods without the support necessary to heal from the invisible, lingering wounds of war. Forced to navigate poverty and systemic barriers, some young refugees became entangled in the criminal justice system. Decades later—long after they have served their time, rehabilitated, and built families—they are being subjected to a cruel double punishment.
Since 1998, over 17,000 Southeast Asians have received deportation orders. Many have lived here for decades; the United States is their chosen home, and often the only home they have ever known. Once someone is deported, there is almost no way back, severing families permanently. These policies do not make America safer. They merely manufacture new trauma, uprooting lives all over again.
The tragic irony of these deportations is impossible to ignore. We are sending refugees back to a country still littered with the very weapons that drove their families into the dark to begin with.
Laos remains the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. From 1964 to 1973, in a covert effort to destroy traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the US dropped at least 2.5 million tons of ordnance across 580,000 bombing missions. That is the equivalent of a planeload of bombs falling every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. Even today, unexploded ordnance continues to claim civilian lives, with children making up over 60% of those harmed.
True accountability requires a different path. It requires cleaning up the remnants of war that America left behind in Laos and honoring the humanity of those who survived it. For decades, US programs have addressed these lasting legacies. These efforts not only save lives and support vulnerable communities, but they also bolster years of diplomatic progress in a region of immense strategic importance. Foreign aid is not charity—it is a strategic investment for our country. US assistance in Southeast Asia consistently garners bipartisan support precisely because it yields clear, tangible benefits: enhanced safety, economic stability, and strengthened bilateral cooperation.
Instead of tearing families apart here at home, the United States must commit to fully funding the removal of unexploded ordnance in Laos until the job is done. I urge members of Congress to join the UXO and Demining Caucus and support legislation like the Southeast Asian Deportation Relief Act. We must end this cycle of displacement and keep our communities whole.
The United States was forged by those seeking a better life. This enduring legacy is embodied by the Statue of Liberty, our "Mother of Exiles," who stands as a beacon of hope for people escaping persecution and war.
World Refugee Day was first celebrated 25 years ago. This year’s theme, "solidarity with refugees," calls on us to recognize that true compassion does not end at the border. It means standing by refugees as they build their lives, acknowledging the full weight of our shared past, and ensuring that no one who seeks refuge from danger is ever forced back into harm’s way.
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