Two months after swimming across the breakwaters to Ceuta, Spain, Mohamed learned that his asylum claim was denied. In late July, at his home in Tangier, Mohamed didn’t hesitate when he received a social media alert that the border crossing between Morocco and the Spanish enclave had opened. He hopped in a friend’s car, drove four hours to the border, and jumped into the sea. “I swam for three or four hours, I was so cold,” he said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. You can’t even imagine.” He carried nothing but his phone and 14 euros.  I first connected with Mohamed through a friend in academia, and over the last few weeks, I’ve been speaking to him while he’s lived in a Ceuta shelter along the border. The facility has ten showers and four phone charging ports for over a thousand migrants. Mohamed was initially optimistic while waiting for his pending asylum application, but that’s changed now that his case has been denied. “I’m so sad, I have no mood,” he told me over WhatsApp. “All of our claims, they’re getting denied.” Mohamed (not his real name) is one of the estimated 80,000 people who crossed from Morocco into Ceuta over 48 hours last summer—the largest recorded migrant crossing which took place at one of only two land borders between Africa and the European Union. The other is the Spanish enclave Melilla and both locations have experienced migrant crossings. Over two days in May 2021, 8,000 people entered Ceuta, and in June 2022, 2,000 people attempted to cross the Melilla border fence. But the sheer number of people who made the crossing in July eclipses previous attempts by an order of magnitude. Like Mohamed, many migrants this summer waded into the sea and swam around the breakwaters of Tarajel Beach and Benzú into Ceuta. An estimated 141 people died, some by drowning and some were crushed as they attempted to climb around the border fence. “It was a disaster,” said Francesca Fusaro, a volunteer for No Name Kitchen, a humanitarian NGO that provides aid to migrants crossing borders. Within a matter of days, over 70,000 people voluntarily returned to Morocco, but thousands still remain in Ceuta hoping to be granted asylum. More are being rejected every day. Photo Mohamed shared with me on WhatsApp of migrants protesting for their asylum cases to be heard in Ceuta after crossing the border. Photo taken sometime in September 2026.Courtesy Photo When news of the mass crossing first broke, headlines describing the events went viral: “Taxi drivers called it an invasion; NGOs described it as a humanitarian crisis; local politicians faced with handling the situation labeled it a national emergency,” Carmen Morán Breña wrote in El País. Meanwhile, far-right Russian and Israeli networks fueled right-wing social media narratives online, calling the crossing an “assault” and pushing Islamophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories. Media attention may have focused on the geopolitics behind the crossing, but another reality was in the background: climate change.  That is not to say that the effects of climate change caused tens of thousands of people to risk their lives by attempting to swim to Ceuta. Economic forces were much more urgent motivators for Mohamed to leave his home. “I am suffering in Morocco,” he told me. “There are no job opportunities. I have a degree in British literature. I speak English, German, and French. I work as a painter.”  But after another summer of extreme temperatures and wildfires in the northern and southeastern provinces in Morocco, severe flash flooding and landslides in rural communities throughout the High Atlas Mountains, and the culmination of a seven-year drought after a winter of heavy rainfall across the country, climate change also may be an underlying factor in creating the economic crisis forcing so many to leave their homes. As Lauren Herzer Risi pointed out in her piece for New Security Beat, “60,000 [plus] people don’t just cross a border when a guard points to an open door.” I spoke to several experts focused on the intersection of climate change, migration, and border security. They explained the nuanced interaction between the warming world and migration. “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or not,” said Petra Molnar, a lawyer and researcher who has spent years documenting what she calls “border necrotechnics”—the lethal blend of law, racism, and technology at borders. “Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate element built into it.” > “Every story of human movement now is a climate story, whether we like it or > not. Pretty much every case of forced or ‘voluntary’ migration has a climate > element built into it.” Whether within or across borders, “no one calls themselves a climate migrant,” said Amali Tower, the co-founder of the organization Climate Refugees. Legally, there’s no such category because international law does not consider climate displacement to be grounds for refugee status. Add to this the fact that data on international climate displacement is lacking; it’s easier to measure displacement after a distinct disaster, such as a hurricane, rather than the slow onset of rising temperatures or sea levels. Today, North Africa and the Middle East are warming faster than the rest of the world, and Morocco’s agricultural sector—the cornerstone of the country’s economy—is particularly vulnerable to climate impacts like soil degradation and depleted groundwater. Many Moroccan farmers have had to adjust their lives in response to extreme weather events, planting different crops, or eating different food, or reducing livestock holdings. A January 2026 Afrobarometer survey showed that almost a fifth of all those surveyed considered moving to a new place due to climate impacts. A 2021 World Bank report found that by 2050 in Morocco, 1.9 million climate migrants would be moving internally in the country. “The relationship between environmental change, climate hazards, and aspirations to move is incredibly complex,” said Karolina Sobczak-Szelc, a migration researcher who studied climate displacement in Morocco. In Syria, for example, the decade-long civil war and subsequent refugee crisis was the result of systemic political and sectarian repression. But, just before the civil war broke out in 2011, the country experienced the worst multiyear drought in nearly a millennium, decimating Syria’s economy and livestock. Climate change is what Peter Schwartzstein, an environmental journalist and Stimson Center fellow, calls the “mood music” behind events like Ceuta, not mass migration’s main driver, but a constant presence. “It puts a proverbial thumb on the scales that amplifies the pressure exerted by a whole bundle of other things,” he said. “This is the bitter reality of climate-induced crises.” Coupled with stressors like rising housing costs, growing wealth inequality, and youth disenfranchisement laid bare during Morocco’s 2025 GenZ212 uprising, “the difference between the bright lights of Casablanca and some of these really, really quite deprived areas is stark in the extreme,” said Schwartzstein. Before even reaching another country’s border, climate migration typically starts with internal movement within a country. “They move from village to small town, from small town to bigger city,” said Sobczak-Szelc. “Only later, when the city doesn’t fulfill their changed expectations, do they think about moving further.” Mohamed followed a similar trajectory. He was originally from Fez, a city in central Morocco with high rates of income inequality and poor public infrastructure in comparison to its coastal neighbor. When he was unemployed and in his twenties he moved north to Tangier—only to find similar circumstances. “It’s reductive of international law and policy to expect people to fit into one neat lane,” Tower says. “People have always moved, and they’ve moved for no one singular reason.” After the mass crossing, Morocco’s Association for Human Rights issued a statement saying that it “[reflected] the profound despair among young people fueled by the lack of prospects, endemic corruption, the rise of authoritarianism, the absence of social justice, and the lack of employment opportunities and decent conditions.”   Todd Miller, a journalist for The Border Chronicle in Tucson, Arizona, has covered the intersection of border militarization, surveillance, and climate change. In his 2021 Global Climate Wall report, Miller wrote that wealthy countries would rather spend on average over 2.3 times more to arm their borders than on efforts to mitigate climate change, using the so-called threat of “mass migration” to justify increased surveillance. “Attention isn’t going towards helping people adapt to climate change or move them into better situations,” Amali Tower, from Climate Refugees, says. “Instead, we’re putting all our money and effort into how to keep people out.”  In some ways, the regional response to July’s mass crossing illustrates their points. Italy’s prime minister Giorgia Meloni called for Spain to be suspended from the EU’s visa-free region known as the Schengen Area, writing on X that the mass crossing demonstrated “that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders.” Finland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Denmark, and Austria supported Meloni’s call. And, in late September, the European Commission floated plans for the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, to lead a rapid-response team that could deploy within 24 hours in a crisis. The Chief of Frontex said its agency could deploy satellites, aircraft, and observers on the ground “to improve our situational awareness.” For the first three weeks after Mohamed arrived in Ceuta, he slept in a forest on the edge of the city with limited food and water. For several nights, Spanish military guards patrolled the forest for migrants. “Some friends near us, the military found them and started beating them, they smashed their phones,” Mohamed said. “Those first few nights, I was very scared.” As Ceuta has faded away from public attention, No Name Kitchen has continued to report similar stories of law enforcement violence against migrants waiting to have their asylum cases processed in Ceuta.  Photo shared with me via WhatsApp by Mohamed of migrants sleeping in the forest in Ceuta in August 2026.Courtesy photo And for the people most affected by climate change, leaving is not a choice, even when faced with violence from law enforcement and the security state. “There’s a desperation that leads to migrants wanting to leave, so, they’ll take any avenue available to them, even if it’s short-lived,” Tower said. “They do so when circumstances become untenable, when everything they’ve tried has been exhausted, and it’s now beyond their means of coping.”  Fatima Zahra Znioi, a researcher at Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research who moved to Poland from Morocco several years ago, compares the situation for many Moroccans to being trapped inside a burning house. “There are two ways of dying,” she said, “you can just burn to death, or jump out the window.” Znioi misses her home in Agadir, but understands why so many others have tried to leave. “I believe these people were completely desperate. You have to be to throw yourself into the sea.”  In my last video call with Mohamed, climate change never came up. Instead, Mohamed tells me he’s “fed up,” and even though he still has the right to appeal his asylum denial, he’s getting ready to return to Tangier. Then I ask about his plans for the future. “This isn’t the first time I’ve crossed into Ceuta,” he says. “I’ll just try again.” 

The Trump administration has desperately searched for evidence that Rep. Ilhan Omar committed fraud, alleging she or her late father are liars for changing her age from 18 to 17 years old on her citizenship application. According to what US officials and other people with knowledge of the federal government’s investigation told the Wall Street Journal, the goal is to construct a case to strip the Minnesota congresswoman of her American citizenship and deport her from the US. Omar became a US citizen in 2000, five years after arriving from a refugee camp in Kenya after she and her family fled the Somali Civil War. Early Monday morning, the Journal reported, Homeland Security agents took Omar’s phone, notebooks, personal computers, and her passport during the raid on her DC home. Authorities have also reportedly handed out more than a dozen subpoenas, which the New York Times wrote Wednesday include Sahra Noor, Omar’s sister, and “at least one other member of her family circle.  On Monday evening, the crowd at an Ohio Republican rally chanted “deport” as President Donald Trump yet again hurled racist rhetoric at Omar, people from Somalia living in Minnesota—whom he called “Somali bandits”—and Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed (Trump called him “a jihadist”).  On Tuesday, the president suggested on Truth Social that Omar had also committed financial fraud: “Could it be that her highly paid accountant actually reported the money that was stolen from her fraudulent account activities in Minnesota?” The same day, Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney in Washington, said she is looking into Omar’s financial disclosures.  “There are several investigations going on,” she said Tuesday on Fox News. “If there was a crime that was committed, it will be prosecuted.” The US attorney also asserted it “doesn’t matter” that a nonpartisan, independent body found Omar blameless of wrongdoing and recommended the House Ethics Committee withdraw misconduct allegations when she substantially overstated her wealth in documents she submitted to Congress. All of this is happening just three weeks before the November midterms, in which Omar is favored to win reelection.

This post originally appeared on author Garrett Graff’s site Doomsday Scenario, which you can subscribe to here. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Friday, I testified in front of Governor J.B. Pritzker’s “Illinois Accountability Commission,” the state government body he set up after the Trump administration’s “Operation Midway Blitz” attack on Chicago last summer and the precursor of the even larger federal occupation of Minneapolis that we’re experiencing now. The body’s goal is to both document what happened to Chicago, with an eye on future prosecutions, understand the role of various Trump officials in this federal occupation, and offer recommendations about how to fix immigration enforcement going forward. I was called as the commission’s expert witness on the history of problems, corruption, and training within CBP and ICE—a story I’ve covered for more than a dozen years, as regular readers of this newsletter know. To prepare, I spent the last week re-reading and re-familiarizing myself with DHS scandals and waves of corruption and mismanagement—and found myself horrified anew. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Good morning; my name is Garrett Graff and I’m honored to be here to speak about the historical challenges and problems with the Department of Homeland Security and two of its largest components, CBP—aka Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol—and the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, commonly known as ICE. First, let me introduce myself. I’m a journalist and historian; I’ve written multiple books focused on federal law enforcement, national security, and American government—one of which, about Watergate, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History—and published dozens of articles in places like POLITICO, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic about DHS, the Justice Department, and federal law enforcement, including the FBI, CBP, and ICE. My testimony today is based on, draws upon, and in places quotes from that extensive previous reporting and writing over the years and is informed by literally hundreds of conversations with agents and executives at all levels of federal law enforcement, including dozens or scores of interviews with agents and officers of ICE and CBP. I’ve interviewed CBP commissioners and ICE directors in their executive suites; I’ve been on patrol with Border Patrol, ridden on their boats and flown in their helicopters, shared meals with the union officials and been in the studio while they recorded their popular podcast, and observed as Border Patrol apprehended migrants crossing the Texas-Mexico border. My goal today is to outline for the Commission some of the history of ICE and CBP and, in particular, to outline what has changed—and what is changing—as the Trump administration floods both agencies with money from the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.” What I hope you will take away from my testimony today is that the problems, abuses, scandals, and controversies involving CBP and ICE that have been on display over the last year in far too many American cities and social media feeds—from deadly shootings and agent brutality to the routine abuse of Constitutional and civil rights and liberties—is entirely consistent with long-identified problems in CBP and ICE that have gone ignored and uncorrected both by a generation of Congress and multiple Democratic and Republican administrations alike. These are not aberrations—these incidents are the entirely foreseeable consequence of specific funding and management decisions and how the nation has approached immigration enforcement since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. An ICE agent wielding a pepper ball gun with his finger on the trigger, barrel pointed at press and protesters alike, during Operation Midway Blitz in Chicagoland, outside the Broadview ICE Facility. Chris Riha/ZUMA In particular, CBP has been likely the deadliest and certainly the most troubled federal law enforcement agency for the better part of two decades now. Since 9/11, the culture of ICE and CBP has meant that the agencies have been what you might call a fascist-secret-police-in-waiting, troubled agencies simply waiting for an ambitious would-be authoritarian. ICE is an agency whose recruiting and training standards are so low that other federal law enforcement agents say pejoratively that ICE is “hired by the pound, from the pound.” And the paramilitary CBP, especially, has been uniquely callous with human life and suffers from a deeply ingrained culture of racism and misogyny, all of which is enabled by an all-but unequaled longstanding sense of impunity. CBP—the nation’s largest law enforcement agency—has been plagued for two decades by a tidal wave of crime, corruption, and misconduct driven by a disastrous post-9/11 hiring surge that flooded the force with thousands of agents and officers who never should have been given a badge and a gun—including, as one CBP commissioner told me, even accidentally hiring members of actual drug cartels. Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005. CBP’s misconduct scandal is so long-running that today it would be old enough to drink. In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024—the last year numbers are available—at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times. (In 2018 alone, a single CBP employee was arrested five times.) To put that number in perspective: * The population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested would make it roughly the nation’s fourth largest police department—equal to the size of the entire Philadelphia police. * Indeed, for much of the 2010s and likely before and since, it appears the crime rate of CBP agents and offices was higher PER CAPITA than the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States. Before I dive in, I want to add an over-arching caveat. None of what I’m about to say is meant to imply that everything was hunky-dory in DHS at noon on January 20th last year when Donald Trump returned to the presidency. Quite the opposite. And yet something was fundamentally different before last year: ICE and CBP managed to go about their work in such a way that didn’t cause ordinary law-abiding US citizens to fear for their lives; ICE or CBP agents didn’t routinely operate wearing masks and deploy teargas daily against US citizens; the entire school systems of major US cities didn’t have to close in fear of CBP and ICE operations targeting neighborhoods, and professional sports leagues like the NBA didn’t have to cancel games because of ICE and CBP violence in major American cities. Something big has changed—and my hope is that this testimony will help explain what and how. Columbus, New Mexico, USA; The US Border Patrol steps up vigilance along the US/Mexico border as most illegal crossings occur after dark.Thomas Herbert/ZUMA PART I: THE HISTORY First, how history plagues CBP and ICE. On September 11, 2001, immigration was the purview of the Justice Department’s Immigration and Naturalization Service while border trade and travel was the responsibility of the Treasury Department’s US Customs Service. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and as part of the creation of DHS and the massive reshuffling of government, both INS and Customs were broken apart. ICE brought together the “legacy INS” deportation and detention officers, which were renamed as what’s now known as Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), as well as the “legacy INS” and “legacy Customs” special agents to form the Homeland Security Investigations division, HSI. Other parts of INS and Customs were reshuffled into the new, supposedly “unified” border agency of Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The green-uniformed Border Patrol were in charge of patrolling the border in between legal ports of entry while a team made up of “legacy Customs inspectors” and USDA agriculture inspectors were combined and renamed into the blue-uniformed Office of Field Operations to handle legitimate trade and travel through “ports of entry” like land crossings, seaports, and airports. PROBLEM #1: A HIRING SURGE GONE WRONG One of the first things Congress did with the new agency was to super-charge its hiring. The agency’s own studies concluded the Border Patrol did not have “operational control” over 97 percent of the border. * Altogether, the border was so porous that in 2000, a three-ton American elephant named Benny appeared in a Mexico City circus, only for US authorities to discover there was no record he’d ever crossed the border. The plan to remedy this lack of control of the border was audacious—and remarkably ill-conceived: During the eight years of the Bush administration, the Border Patrol surged from 9,200 agents in 2001 to some 18,000 agents—and eventually peaked in the Obama administration at 21,000 agents. Add in the officers of the Office of Field Operations and the air and marine officers, and CBP had a gun-carrying workforce of about 45,000 agents and officers. There was plenty of evidence even before the hiring surge to believe it was a bad idea. Police departments in Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., had all been beset by systemic misconduct scandals after they had tried to grow their force rapidly in the 1980s and ’90s. The Border Patrol hiring surge would be no different. The surge meant the agency had to search far and wide for increasingly less qualified candidates. The agency raised its recruiting age limit from 37 to 40, and regularly sent new agents through the academy and even out into the field before completing full background checks. Agents in the field pejoratively referred to the new hires as “No Trainee Left Behind.” By the end of the Bush administration, more than half of the Border Patrol had been in the field for less than two years. This hiring surge collided with two other fundamental and foundational problems with CBP—its legal authorities and its culture. PROBLEM #2: LIMITED LEGAL AUTHORITIES Understanding both ICE and CBP requires starting with the difference between two US government “job codes,” known as “1811s” vs. “1801s.” So-called “GS-1801s” are the federal government’s street cops—the bottom ranks of law enforcement. The positions come with less training and lower education requirements—usually only a high school degree or equivalent—as well as more limited authority. All of CBP, including both the Border Patrol and Office of Field Operation, are “1801s,” as are all ICE ERO deportation officers. All of them have strictly limited arrest powers. Then there are the “GS-1811” positions, known as “Special Agent / Criminal Investigator.” These are the government’s detectives—think the FBI, Secret Service, US Marshals, and, notably, ICE HSI agents. These positions usually require more work experience and a college degree, and come with far more training (months, not weeks), and more broad investigative authority. The difference between 1801s and 1811s may seem minor, but it’s incredibly important in understanding why CBP and ICE are as rogue and poorly trained as they are.  For one thing, that subtle difference in job code meant that CBP was entirely set up as 1801s, which inadvertently meant that it had no authority or power to investigate wrongdoing by its own agents and workforce—to make that point more sharply, in the post-9/11 reorganization, we created the nation’s largest law enforcement agency and didn’t give it the power to have the internal affairs capacity that one would expect at even a mid-size local police department. It was a key ingredient in a recipe for disaster—one that would not be fixed until the final months of the Obama administration, more than a decade after the creation of DHS. Which brings me to the third fundamental challenge and problem with CBP and, especially, the Border Patrol—its fiercely independent and closed-rank culture and tradition, borne of policing and protecting a largely unpopulated, harsh, and isolated region along the US-Mexican border. Members of the US Border Patrol listen as Vice President JD Vance speaks to the press as he tours the US-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, on March 5, 2025. Brandon Bell/Pool/AFP/Getty PROBLEM #3: TRADITION AND CULTURE The Border Patrol’s culturally and traditionally something akin to what I’ve described as “part police force, part occupying army, [and] part frontier cavalry.” The traditional job of Border Patrol agents has been hard—they often work alone or in pairs in rural, rugged terrain, with backup and help often miles and sometimes even an hour or more away. Agents developed a strong tradition of frontier-style justice; its agency motto, “Honor first,” is as much a statement of machismo as it is about integrity. This fierce independence manifests itself in distinct areas worthy of note, which combine to make it particularly susceptible for a would-be authoritarian—its approach to its daily work and use-of-force; a deep-seated institutional culture of racism and misogyny; and a pugilistic approach to politics. Use of force: This is an agency that is uniquely callous about human lives—both of US citizens and migrants. * It is, as best as anyone can determine, perhaps the nation’s deadliest law enforcement agency. It is notoriously hard to understand federal law enforcement shootings, but since 2010, CBP agents have been involved in at least 72 deadly shootings or use of force incidents. * An internal report in 2013 that the agency tried to keep secret accused its agents of shooting their weapons not out of fear but instead out of “frustration.” * In 2013, a report by the Police Executive Research Forum examined 67 incidents and found that “too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force.” * Agents are emboldened in their use-of-force by a sense that there will never be consequences for doing so. Roughly 96 or 97 percent of complaints against Border Patrol historically have gone nowhere. In fact, across a four-year period from 2012–2015 that included 2,178 complaints that warranted investigation, just eleven resulted in an agent’s temporary suspension and eleven more resulted in a reprimand. Only one—one of 2,178 complaints!—led to an agent’s resignation. If you do that math, that works out to be that across the entire Border Patrol about three agents a year received a formal disciplinary reprimand. If agents act like they can get away with anything, the statistics back them up. Racism and misogyny: The racist and nativist roots of the Border Patrol are well known, as scholars like Kelly Lytle Hernandez traced in her book “Migra!” But what is remarkable is how the seeping cultural corruption since 9/11 has taken an agency founded a century ago to enforce explicitly racist policies and managed to make it even more racist. * In 2017 CBP officers at Newark Airport set up a “rape table” at the New Jersey airport where they would sexually assaulted and hazed other officers. One female CBP officer described the incident, saying, “I’m afraid for my life, my safety.” * In 2019, ProPublica uncovered a racist Facebook group made up of some 9,500 current and former Border Patrol agents and leadership—including the then-chief of the Border Patrol herself. As ProPublica wrote, “current and former Border Patrol agents mocked dead migrants, called congresswomen ‘scum buckets,’ and uploaded misogynistic images.” A United States Border Patrol agent on horseback tries to stop a Haitian migrant from entering an encampment on the banks of the Rio Grande near the Acuna Del Rio International Bridge in Del Rio, Texas on September 19, 2021. Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty This underlying racism, misogyny, and nativism has contributed to the third area of the Border Patrol’s culture I’d like to address—its unusually pugilistic participation in national politics. The Border Patrol union has particularly resisted transparency efforts and attempts to rein in use-of-force. When CBP announced it would recognize officers and agents who de-escalated confrontations and avoid using deadly force, the union called the new award “despicable.” The union has also especially carved out a unique relationship with Donald Trump since the earliest days of his presidential campaign. It was the first union to endorse Trump—later followed by ICE’s union—and Donald Trump actually first wore his now signature “Make America Great Again” hat during a summer 2015 tour of the border initiated by local Border Patrol union officials. The entirely predictable result: It wouldn’t surprise any seasoned law enforcement leader that doubling the size of CBP without adequate vetting, training, oversight, or management led to a host of problems—not the least of which was the stunning arrest statistics I cited earlier. * In 2016, in the final months of the Obama administration—a period that represented the peak of reform and professionalization efforts at CBP—an outside advisory group headed by NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton concluded, “The CBP discipline system is broken.” Bratton’s advisory group noted that CBP’s discipline system was less rigorous, in fact, for its armed officers and agents than the Transportation Security Administration’s system for its unarmed airport screeners. Hugely elevated misconduct, crime, and corruption problems continue to dog CBP to this day. Overall, CBP’s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES higher than other federal law enforcement agencies. CBP’s corruption problem was so bad that, according to what two CBP officials told me, DHS leadership under Janet Napolitano ordered CBP to change its definition of corruption to downplay to Congress the breadth of the problem. US law enforcement has never experienced a scandal as big, as far-reaching, destructive, and as far-lasting as the wave of corruption and criminality that has overtaken CBP and the Border Patrol since 2005. It’s a story that too much of the public still doesn’t know and too many policymakers still don’t understand. Let me add one more caveat here: It’s not my goal here to paint all of CBP with a brush of misconduct, racism, and corruption. Many agents and officers are excellent—serving our nation in hard jobs in the best possible tradition. But as one female agent told Mother Jones in 2024, “I was a loyal agent and employee for 27 years and I see the good in the agency. But I can’t deny that the worst that I’ve seen has come at the hands of agents, and not the criminals we’re supposed to arrest.” A BRIEF HISTORY OF ICE Now let me turn my attention for a moment to ICE. In the reshuffling of DHS, ICE got the job no one wanted—immigration enforcement domestically is arguably the country’s most fraught and unsettled policy area. For most of its roughly 20 years of existence, ICE has faced a clear problem—there are way way way more undocumented immigrants in the United States than Congress funded ICE to find, arrest, and deport. For many years, ICE was budgeted for around 400,000 deportations. ICE’s ERO side has long relied upon and focused heavily on what’s known as “prosecutorial discretion.” Under that strategy, ICE ERO mostly focused on deporting people with a so-called “final order of removal”—e.g., people who had exhausted all the legal process and ignored the binding decision of the immigration courts to leave the country—or people with criminal records above and beyond simply being undocumented—e.g., the much-talked murderers, drug smugglers, gang members, rapists, and the like who are always cited as the Trump administration’s main targets. That meant—generally speaking, and again with the all caveats I listed above—that if you were an undocumented immigrant but weren’t on the government’s radar, you didn’t have to worry much in your day-to-day life. The strategy of discretion worked. By 2011, nearly half of the 400,000 people deported by ICE had a criminal conviction, up from a third in 2008. That work was manpower intensive, but it also meant that they were making a real difference in terms of crime in the United States. They were actually finding, arresting, and deporting the “worst of the worst,” while, for the most part, leaving the day-laborers and abuelas alone to await whatever political solution to America’s immigration crisis Congress could someday find. Then Donald Trump was elected president and took office a second time last year.  Police pepper spray a photographer after warning him to back up near the gates of the Metropolitan Detention Center during an ICE Out for Good demonstration in Los Angeles. Lela Edgar/SOPA Images/ZUMA PART II: WHAT’S CHANGED Today, that “prosecutorial discretion” is out the window. Last spring, Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller set an arbitrary target of one million deportations a year—which translates into immigration officers making 3,000 arrests a day. That new quota meant ICE and CBP had to abandon any pretext of targeted enforcement operations; it took too long and required too many officers. Those raids where Greg Bovino’s heavily-armed CBP agents storm into Home Depot parking lots are a necessity of this new quota because it’s the low-hanging fruit of immigration enforcement. Similarly, ICE and CBP officers around the country—and particularly in targeted operations in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, or Minneapolis—are stopping, detaining, and deporting people with no criminal records who are following all legal procedures for their asylum, immigration, or citizenship proceedings. These actions aren’t because any of these immigrants pose a threat to the United States—it’s because they’re easy pickings and ICE and CBP have embraced “quantity” over “quality.” The terror and trauma of theses arrests is the point—not the safety of the United States. That shift is reflected in how most people now detained by ICE have no criminal record. A CATO Institute roundup in November found that “nearly three in four (73 percent) had no criminal conviction” and just “5 percent had a violent criminal conviction.” This is not how ICE has traditionally been used, and CBP wasn’t supposed to be routinely policing the streets and cities of America’s interior. The Border Patrol and ICE are just not trained, prepared, or accustomed to patrolling “regular” America and rolling through neighborhoods, school grounds, parking lots. They’re not regular police, and they don’t know how to behave or navigate urban civilian environments. They don’t have the muscle memory or de-escalation skills of dealing with angry citizens or innocent people. It’s clear that many lack real-world policing skills. A shirtless protester stands and shows the effects of stings balls, pepper spray and tear gas on his back outside the Broadview facility during a protest against ICE and ‘Operation Midway Blitz’ in Chicago. Dave Decker/ZUMA The fact that they’re instead approaching their work not as law enforcement but as an occupation military force is clear in the language officials are using; yesterday alone, Greg Bovino gave an attaboy video calling for agents to “Turn and Burn” and Tom Homan referred to agents deploying to Minneapolis as being “in theater.” This is not the mentality we want guiding or inspiring a federal law enforcement agency. Their poor training and sense of political impunity is contributing to and driving their “Arrest First and Question Later” approach, which is the exact opposite of what would you expect in a free and democratic society, and it has had entirely predictable outcomes. ProPublica found in October that more than 170 US citizens had been arrested by immigration authorities, some disappearing into ICE’s apparatus for days. Sometimes I believe that American exceptionalism—the sense that “it can’t happen here”—blinds us to the realities of our current political life. The behavior of ICE and CBP over the last year is one such case. In any other foreign country, if a US reporter was writing about these raids and the occupation of Chicago last fall or Minneapolis right now, we wouldn’t hesitate to call ICE or CBP as a “paramilitary force loyal to the regime” or “masked right-wing militia” (and that, by the way, is exactly what other countries’ media are calling it here). And, as an even larger cohort of even less qualified and less trained ICE and CBP officers begin to hit the streets, this is all almost certainly going to get worse.  PART III: WHAT’S TO COME I want to focus my final section of remarks about what we can expect in the months to come as ICE and CBP together see a flood of funding that is unprecedented—even measured against the wild amounts of money thrown at immigration and border security after 9/11. In 2014, my Border Patrol reporting was titled “The Green Monster.” Today, we’re creating something even more dangerous to the country: A masked monster of a law enforcement agency—one uniquely unsuited for its new power, authority, reach, and funding levels. This time, unlike the money for the Border Patrol after 9/11, ICE’s giant new supercharged ranks will be focused not on America’s borders, but America’s streets, neighborhoods, and businesses. We are set to repeat as a nation every single mistake we made after 9/11 with CBP and the Border Patrol—but worse. The goal for growing ICE with 10,000 new officers is both a larger total number than the Border Patrol tried to hire during its surge and also represents a larger total percentage of the existing ICE force. ICE is set to receive $30 billion in new funding for this hiring surge. Moreover, we should have specific fresh concerns about WHO is applying for these new jobs at ICE and CBP, which also has plans to hire thousands of new agents. After 9/11, the Border Patrol played on patriotism in its recruiting. Today, DHS and ICE are relying are explicitly white nationalist rhetoric and imagery in their promotion materials. U.S. Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump poses for a picture with the National Border Patrol Council during a campaign rally at Findlay Toyota Center on October 13, 2024 in Prescott Valley, Arizona. Rebecca Noble/Getty As one of the first moves to revamp its training, ICE proved that it’s building a Trump cult of personality as much as hiring for a law enforcement agency—it cut its previous five-month training academy to just 47 days, a period chosen, according to what three officials told The Atlantic, “because Trump is the 47th president.” ICE is no longer interviewing candidates before hiring them and swearing them in virtually, promising that it’ll catch up on their background checks later, CNN reported. The training has already been cut a second time to just 42 days to speed getting officers into the field. The fact that as DHS deploys CBP and ICE in new ways in American life that it is actually CUTTING, and not increasing, training, shows that DHS has no intention to have them up to the basic national law enforcement standards—they are being designed to be a blunt instrument only, a roving paramilitary force that serves at the pleasure of the president himself. Lastly, news headlines are also beginning to feel eerily familiar about what the early warning signs of CBP’s tidal wave of misconduct and criminality looked like in the late 2000s. There are major warning signs that ICE’s workforce has a similar misconduct problem today. In December, a detention officer at an ICE facility in Louisiana pleaded guilty to raping a Nicaraguan detainee for months, and an off-duty ICE officer who shot and killed a man in L.A. on New Year’s Eve had been accused of “allegedly whipp[ing] his sons with a belt and ma[king] racist and homophobic remarks in the past.”) And again—the hiring surge is just getting started. Furthermore, there are two specific new concerns I see looming on the horizon that I have not addressed previously in today’s testimony. First is ICE and CBP’s giant investment and deployment of surveillance technologies—some of which have been leading to mistaken arrests in the field and much of which, as currently envisioned, is not consistent with policing in a free society. ICE is extensively using data-mining and facial recognition technologies with little public understanding of the safeguards behind their use. In particular, there’s a facial recognition app called “Mobile Fortify,” which ICE is using and claiming is the “be-all-and-end-all” of whether someone is in the United States legally. There are multiple documented instances where this app has returned false or contradictory information and yet ICE has relied on it to make detentions and arrests. A Border Patrol Agent scans the face of a driver as they stop and question him in the street during an Immigration Enforcement Operation in Minneapolis.Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu/Getty Second, I have not spoken much about ICE’s detention centers; the Trump administration and ICE are in the midst of enormously ambitious plans to double the capacity of detention facilities, from about 55,000 beds to more than 107,000 beds, as part of the plan to pour about $45 billion into detention facilities. I would expect and predict that over the course of 2026, we will see this plan become the center of new scandals. Let me leave you today with a final point: This doesn’t change unless we demand change and make it change—the way that the funding for ICE has been allocated, it can spend this money straight through 2029. Congress is going to have to act to turn that funding and hiring spigot off—otherwise, this continues on autopilot for the next four years. But the damage we are doing to our own country is long-lasting. Remember we are two decades removed from the start of the CBP hiring surge and I can still find you a news story or headline every single day that traces its origins back to the mistakes made in that surge. We as a nation must act to change the trajectory of immigration enforcement in our country. America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year—let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.

This story was co-published with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. On December 31, in the waning hours of 2025, the Washington Post reported on an internal ICE document that concerned the agency’s “wartime recruitment” strategy, or rather its attempt to expeditiously swell its ranks of deportation officers. The memo, according to the Post, had in mind a pool of ideal candidates who lead a “patriotic” lifestyle and have an interest in “military and veterans affairs,” “physical training,” “gun rights organizations,” and “tactical gear brands.” The memo’s logic was easy enough to understand, since what it described, if you read between the lines, was an informal paramilitary that was waiting to be tapped. Over the last month—as a violent federal occupation has unfolded in Minneapolis, where veteran immigration agents brutally killed two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti—both the memo and the new recruits it would draw into the fold began to take up outsized space in my mind. For a long time now, the gun rights movement has been animated by the promise of a violent reckoning, a sentiment nurtured by the groups that represent it and Republican politicians, who seek to channel a wild, truculent energy into votes and profits. It seemed the promise was being fulfilled in Minneapolis, like the fatal denouement of a production that had one harbinger after another. > “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range.” During the 2016 election cycle, when as a reporter I attended my first National Rifle Association annual meeting, I began to see that the promised reckoning could not be delayed forever. At the convention, in Louisville, Kentucky, there was the tradeshow floor, akin to a medieval arms bazaar and containing some 520,000 square feet of guns and tactical accessories. There were seminars covering “Defensive Shooting Skills Development,” “Methods of Concealed Carry,” “Current and Emerging Threats,” and “The Bulletproof Mind For The Armed Civilian.” And there was a line of some 7,000 people, leading into an arena called “Freedom Hall,” where there would be speeches by the emerging Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and Mark “Oz” Geist, a member of the Benghazi diplomatic compound’s security team that had come under siege in 2012. Three middle-aged white men stood in line in front of me making confident assertions about Barack Obama and “government cover-ups.” One informed the others that Obama, still president, had purchased a “$10 million mansion in Saudi Arabia,” where he and his family would flee after leaving the White House to “evade charges.” Trump would of course chase him down, the man assured everyone, while the United States reembraced frontier justice and flourished under his rule. The line then moved inside, 7,000 people took their seats, and the Republican presidential candidate promised them: “I will never let you down.” Based on the ecstatic response from the crowd, it seemed to me that the message Trump had transmitted was about power—raw power—and who would wield it during his administration.   Going back to at least the early nineties, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, was in office, gun rights organizations, led by the NRA, and various prominent Republicans pushed an argument for the Second Amendment that was disguised as a historical one. The right to bear arms, they said, was intended to be unfettered because its purpose was to provide citizens with the means to fight a tyrannical government that had turned against its own people. Federal agents, under Clinton, were “jack-booted government thugs,” according to a notorious fundraising letter signed by former NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre. These thugs, he said, had the power to “take away our Constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.” It was often implied that such arguments, which grew in prominence during Barack Obama’s tenure, applied only to the Democratic Party, which posed a vague yet persistent threat to “freedom,” while the Republican party would preserve it. Republican values were antithetical to tyranny, whereas Democrats were inherently tyrannical, and therefore any actions taken by the former were in service of saving the country from the latter. In 2016, while sitting in “Freedom Hall,” I began to feel a sense of alarm that I’d never before felt. Under Trump, this contingent would feel it had permission to act against the enemy. The carrot that was dangled during each election cycle—in fundraising pitches by gun rights groups and the sale of military-style firearms to civilians—was finally being fed to the horse. There would be no more “couch commandos,” as gun industry executives referred to their most enthusiastic customers in the years after 9/11. This was the period in which soldiers were in American streets, and the industry, en masse, had seized on a marketing opportunity to blur the line between soldier and civilian.  What the industry was selling was theatrical participation, the thrill of COSPLAY, except the props were real. “As close as you can get without enlisting,” one gun company, in 2010, boasted as it advertised its “semi-auto only version of the U.S. Special Operations Command’s newest rifle.” “Any mission, any condition, any foes, at any range,” said another manufacturer about its latest assault weapon. In the ad it was equipped with a scope and propped on a tripod, as if intended for a sniper, which of course was the point. Companies were selling military-style weapons with a “combat-proven design,” that provided “versatility on the range or during patrol,” and were a symbol of “bravery on duty.” To enhance the feeling of a simulated combat experience, manufacturers of AR-style firearms cut product placement deals with video game designers. An executive at the gun company Sig Sauer told authors Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, who co-wrote the book American Gun, that featuring the weapons in games was tantamount to “seed planting.”  Buying a gun had become a way to serve at home, and serving at home came to mean preparing for Democratic tyranny. In 2015, for instance, while Obama was still president, the Pentagon prepared for a training exercise across the American Southwest called Jade Helm 15. It was here that the performative, paranoid politics of the right during the Obama years reached something of a fever pitch. Conservative bloggers and commentators created widespread hysteria by alleging that the exercise was a veil for imposing martial law, confiscating firearms, arresting dissidents, and taking over Texas. The state’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, called on the Texas State Guard to monitor developments. It was “important,” he said, that Texans know their “rights” and “liberties” would not be “infringed.” The last word did not seem like an accidental allusion to the Second Amendment. For conservative elites, the preservation of power requires giving those beneath them a taste of it, without actually surrendering anything substantial, such as higher tax payments. In the meantime, they have created a shadow army, empowering them not with wealth but with the alluring prospect of crushing their opponents. A few months after the 2016 NRA convention, Trump said at a rally that Hillary Clinton “wants to abolish” the Second Amendment. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he went on. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is.” Trump for much of his career had been the paragon of vapid wealth, but unlike other leaders of the right who came before him, he was signaling that he would take the army off standby, out of the realm of theater, and move the violent plot forward. The 2020 anti-lockdown Covid protests were a stark indicator of the new paradigm under Trump, who directed blame for restrictions toward Democrats such as Michigan’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer. After state lawmakers voted to extend her state of emergency, a large group of men carrying assault rifles packed the Michigan Capitol rotunda and attempted to barge into the legislature, where a line of police guarded the doors. They screamed in the faces of the officers, who looked on impassively. > The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but > the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. As the year wore on, Trump told the Proud Boys during a televised presidential debate to “stand back and stand by.” His loss to Joe Biden then set into motion the January 6 insurrection. Oath Keepers stashed an arsenal of weapons at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia. One member imagined a scenario in which “millions die resisting the death of the 1st and 2nd amendment.” A week later, a middle-aged white man named Ian Rogers, a California resident and proud NRA member, was arrested with his best friend for planning to attack the state’s Democratic headquarters. He owned roughly 50 firearms, including four illegal automatic weapons, and had stockpiled 15,000 rounds of ammunition. Writing to me from prison last year, he said that the Democratic Party was “the greatest threat facing the United States today.” He went on, “Just as Rome was brought down by enemies within, we have such traitors amongst us now,” adding, “These people fundamentally hate the country and they will do anything to impose their vision on the nation.” Now, in Minneapolis, masked federal agents, dressed as soldiers, have fatally shot two American citizens. Both were victims of an occupation, in which the Trump administration has unleashed a savage campaign of terror against civilians. The lurid fantasy at the heart of the gun rights movement is playing out, but the leading roles, as they were previously imagined, have been reversed. The party in power is not a Democratic regime, but a Republican one, prompting accusations of hypocrisy against gun rights organizations, who have had little to say and have not called on their followers to face down tyranny in Minneapolis. Following the merciless second killing, of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse, federal officials, led by Stephen Miller and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, concocted a false narrative alleging that Pretti had murderous intentions. Pretti had a sidearm on his waist, and they shamelessly pointed to it as evidence, even though the gun was holstered, he was legally carrying it, and agents shot him after they had removed the weapon.  Officials also tried to argue that, owing to the firearm’s presence, Pretti’s death was justified. This assertion presented an existential quandary for gun rights organizations, which have spent decades working to dismantle carry restrictions. One by one, the groups issued statements about how a holstered handgun did not give law enforcement the right to kill a person. That was the wrong message, the groups said, but the tyranny of the occupation itself was treated as legitimate. Gun Owners of America stated that “the Left must stop antagonizing @ICEgov and @CBP agents who are taking criminals off the streets and play a crucial role in protecting communities and upholding the rule of law.” The NRA similarly declared, “For months, radical progressive politicians like Tim Walz have incited violence against law enforcement officers who are simply trying to do their jobs.” What is happening now, in other words, is a reminder that the argument about government tyranny was always a canard. Beneath it lurked what was really at stake, which was the right to assert control through force. Over and over, conservatives and Second Amendment stalwarts have claimed that right as their own, with Minneapolis being the latest example. The story they have told for decades is a binary one—good versus evil. In that framing, they are righteous and have but one job: Vanquish the enemy. Hold power. Save America. The same day Pretti was shot, video surfaced of federal agents pointing their weapons at civilians. “It’s like ‘Call of Duty,’” someone could be heard saying, referencing the blockbuster military-style video game series. Since then, Trump has suggested he will deescalate in Minneapolis. But whatever happens, the players have had a taste of the real thing, and there’s no going back.

ATHENS — Greece’s parliament is expected to pass double-edged legislation on Wednesday that will help recruit tens of thousands more South Asian workers, while simultaneously penalizing migrants that the government says have entered the country illegally. Greece’s right-wing administration seeks to style itself as tough on migration but needs to pass Wednesday’s bill thanks to a crippling labor shortfall in vital sectors such as tourism, construction and agriculture. The central idea of the new legislation is to simplify bringing in workers through recruitment schemes agreed with countries such as India, Bangladesh and Egypt. There will be a special “fast track” for big public-works projects. The New Democracy government knows, however, that these measures to recruit more foreign workers will play badly with some core supporters. For that reason the bill includes strong measures against immigrants who have already entered Greece illegally, and also pledges to clamp down on the non-government organizations helping migrants. “We need workers, but we are tough on illegal immigration,” Greece’s Migration Minister Thanos Plevris told ERT television. The migration tensions in Greece reflect the extent to which it remains a hot button issue across Europe, even though numbers have dropped significantly since the massive flows of 2015, when the Greek Aegean islands were one of the main points of arrival. More than 80,000 positions for immigrants have been approved by the Greek state annually over the past two years. There are no official figures on labor shortages, but studies from industry associations indicate the country’s needs are more than double the state-approved number of spots, and that only half of those positions are filled. The migration bill is expected to pass because the government holds a majority in parliament. Opposition parties have condemned it, saying it ignores the need to integrate the migrants already in Greece and adopts the rhetoric of the far right. Under the new legislation, migrants who entered the country illegally will have no opportunity to acquire legal status. The bill also abolishes a provision granting residence permits to unaccompanied minors once they turn 18, provided they attend school in Greece. “Whoever is illegal right now will remain illegal, and when they are located they will be arrested, imprisoned for two to five years and repatriated,” Plevris told lawmakers. Human-rights groups also oppose the legislation, which they say criminalizes humanitarian NGOs by explicitly linking their migration-related activities to serious crimes.  The bill envisages severe penalties such as mandatory prison terms of at least 10 years and heavy fines for assisting irregular entry, providing transport for illegal migration, or helping those migrants stay. “Whoever is illegal right now will remain illegal,” Thanos Plevris told lawmakers. | Orestis Panagiotou/EPA Wednesday’s legislation also grants the migration minister broad powers to deregister NGOs based solely on criminal charges against one member, and will allow residence permits to be revoked on the basis of suspicion alone — undermining the presumption of innocence. Greece’s national ombudsman has expressed serious concerns about the bill, arguing that punishing people for entering the country illegally contravenes international conventions on the treatment of refugees. Lefteris Papagiannakis, director of the Greek Council for Refugees, was equally damning. “This binary political approach follows the global hostile and racist policy around migration,” he said.

A federal judge issued a last-minute temporary stay on Monday to block the Trump administration’s attempt to remove temporary legal protections for up to 350,000 Haitian immigrants across the United States. In a brutal 83-page takedown, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the US District Court for DC specifically laid into a December X post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that claimed foreign “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” are ruining the vision of the founding fathers. “The plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders,” Reyes wrote. “They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’ They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank, Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major, id., and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.” > I just met with the President. > > I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that's been flooding > our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies. > > Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of > freedom—not for foreign… > > — Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) December 1, 2025 “One of those (her word) ‘damn’ countries is Haiti,” Reyes continued. “Three days before making the above post, Secretary Noem announced she would terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026.” Reyes said that it was therefore “substantially likely” that Noem had moved to end TPS status for Haitians due to “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Temporary Protected Status is a designation that allows people who have moved to the US from countries enduring ongoing armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or epidemics to legally work and reside in the US. It was set to expire on Tuesday, meaning many Haitian immigrants who came to the US legally would be subject to deportation.  As of March 2025, the US provides TPS protections to roughly 330,000 Haitians, according to the National Immigration Forum. Former President Barack Obama designated Haiti for TPS after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country in January 2010, in which an estimated 220,000 people died and over 300,000 were injured.  As Isabela Dias wrote last year: “The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans and canceled a humanitarian parole initiative, known as CHNV, that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from four countries, including Venezuela, to come to the United States and work for up to two years.” In fact, as Reyes notes, “Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk—twelve countries up, twelve countries down.” Bigotry toward immigrants has long been a cornerstone for Donald Trump and his followers. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeated unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets. The rhetoric resulted in dozens of bomb threats [link please]. Springfield, a city with fewer than 60,000, is home to about 15,000 Haitians. In 2018, Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries. Since Reyes’ ruling, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS, posted on X that the department would take the case to the Supreme Court.  “Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin wrote. “Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”

Over a few weeks this January, two Minneapolis sisters repeatedly left their homes and headed out to mock, insult, and record Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino, who until recently was leading the disastrous and violent anti-immigrant operation of the city. The first time they heard him speak, the women, who uploaded their street surveillance of Bovino to TikTok, howled with laughter: Bovino’s voice is somewhat high and surprisingly nasal. “Wait, your voice is not what I expected,” one of the women hollered through a megaphone, sounding near tears with hilarity. “Speak again! Talk again!”  > “When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power.” The first time they had seen Bovino, things went differently. The two women, who are both in their 20s and asked that they not be named or have their videos linked, were standing on a public sidewalk after spotting ICE vehicles nearby, when Bovino walked out of a local TV-affiliate’s building flanked by masked men. “I had my megaphone,” one sister told me. “And I just screamed at him with all the rage in my body from across the street.” While righteously venting was, she says, “cathartic,” she noticed that Bovino also seemed to enjoy it. “He was energized by it. It was so gross.” With their anger seeming to backfire, the sisters “realized we need to strategize,” she says. After some research, “we chose mockery as a deliberate tactic,” she says, a way to try to respond to and puncture the image that Bovino has carefully crafted. “His social media presence, his news appearances—everything he does—leans into these theatrics,” she says. “He posts what I call thirst traps to his Instagram, these edited videos of him walking around and detaining people. It was so clear that it was the attention that he wanted.” Luck was on their side; the next time they saw Bovino again, he looked at the sisters and chirped, “All right! Title 8 immigration enforcement!” Her laughing response of borderline hysteria worked, she says: “You can see in his body language that it just shuts him down.” The video went viral, and prompted the sisters to create a series of riotously funny and often uncomfortable videos based on their continued birddogging of Bovino and the agents accompanying him. “I wanted to put a video out there so other people could see him and make sure they could recognize him in public and make sure he didn’t have peace,” the Minnesota woman explains. “I wanted to alter public perception of him. He works so visibly hard to portray a powerful image. When I realized that I had eyeballs on these videos, I had some power myself to alter that perception.” Before his apparent demotion and unceremonious return to the arid confines of El Centro, California, Bovino had come to stand in for the proudly amoral, violent, lie-riddled way that ICE has conducted operations in Minnesota and elsewhere. He’s also an excellent representation of how monumentally cheesy these guys are. The Border Patrol commander, who is, as many protesters have pointed out, quite diminutive in stature, likes to stride around in a long military-style green coat and a questionably useful leather cross-body strap, both of which clearly resemble outfits donned by Nazi SS commanders. “Get your Hitler coat off, you little bitch,” one of the Minneapolis women recommended during one of their on-camera interactions. (In a sympathetic interview with the outlet News Nation, Bovino claimed that the coat is “Border Patrol issued,” adding, “I’ve had it for over 25 years.”)  More broadly, the clothes that ICE and CBP agents wear are a fine example of the powerful blend of menace, deadly incompetence, and total lack of drip they constantly display. Having made anonymity a hallmark, they virtually always appear masked, sometimes sporting neck gaiters with skulls on them, when they’re not wearing what GQ has called “Dropshipped Normcore,” “a kind of algorithmically-influenced, masculine mish-mash of the kind of high-crowned baseball hats, tight graphic T-shirts, open plaid button-ups, slim stretch denim jeans or cargo pants, and anonymous walking sneakers or trail shoes.” The author and illustrator Molly Crabapple has called them a “Temu death squad.” It’s no surprise that masked ICE agents slipping on (real) ice have provoked such intense hilarity that Homeland Security officials apparently instructed FEMA workers to avoid using the term “ice” in recent winter storm warnings, to avoid having their posts “being turned into internet fodder.”  It is, of course, not just ICE and CBP who look and sound like tremendous dorks while doing real and frightening damage. The Trump administration has adopted a cruel, gross, and weird way of communicating, blending moldy internet memes with overt white supremacy. The way they perform impunity when they are caught doing that is also a blend of chilling and deeply uncool. After Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Twin Cities activist was arrested after allegedly disrupting a church service, the White House was caught circulating a manipulated image showing her in tears. (Actual photos of the arrest show her looking calm and serious as she’s led away.) After The Guardian broke that story, the White House responded with what they clearly considered to be an epic clapback. As deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr posted, “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”  > The response from the American public has been to continue making fun of this > administration. “The memes will continue” is incredibly weak: it sounds like something Elon Musk would tweet in his frenzied and thus far unsuccessful efforts to be funny online. The White House’s memes about taking over Greenland last month also had an unpleasantly Musk-like aroma: an AI-generated image of Donald Trump walking hand-in-hand with a penguin that is holding an American flag, for instance, along with the words “Embrace the penguin.” (There are no penguins in Greenland, or really anywhere in the northern hemisphere.) These attempts at meme-based relevance go hand-in-hand with all the unsuccessful pivots and impersonations that people in the Trump orbit have tried to look cool, culturally relevant or even, God help us, badass: Katie Miller’s excruciatingly dull fascist wine mom podcast, say, or Pete Hegseth’s American flag-lined suit, camo ties, and ongoing impression of Slim Pickens‘ atomic bomb-riding cowboy character in Dr. Strangelove. There’s also JD Vance pretending he enjoys the Internet jokes about him having sex with a couch. All of these gambits try—and fail—to serve the same purpose: to make these people look cool, funny, or with it while they advance a profoundly unpopular agenda. Not surprisingly, the response from a large sector of the American public has been to continue making fun of this administration, from our increasingly exasperated and radicalized late night hosts—minus the always gutless Jimmy Fallon—to Minnesota protesters braving subzero temperatures to throw snowballs at ICE vehicles, pour a little freezing water on the ground, and let Greg Bovino know his coat looks stupid. Even world leaders openly mock Trump, as in a viral video from earlier this year of the leaders of France, Azerbaijan, and Armenia joking about Trump’s inability to keep the later two countries straight, or who might be at war with whom.   Trump’s opponents have tried this before: the former-reality TV star was treated like a joke almost right until the moment he won the 2016 election. It was hard not to, what with his surreal Baked Alaska hair, his ridiculous braggadocio, his weird grudge against windmills, and other endless things about him to mock—physically, financially, and spiritually. Recall, if you will, that the Huffington Post classified Donald Trump under “entertainment” news until, at the end of 2015, they had to stop doing that. Personally, in the time I worked at the feminist website Jezebel, we came up with dozens of creative nicknames to describe the then-candidate, including ones like “future leader of the free world” that I imagine were somewhat funny at the time. Srdja Popovic, a self-described “revolution consultant” whose activism helped overthrow Slobodan Milosevic, calls mocking the powerful “laughtivism”—using humor and creativity to effect profound social change. The Minnesota woman says that in their video-recorded beclowning of Greg Bovino, she and her sister happened on a central principle of mocking a powerful public figure, one that Popovic also understood: forcing the target into a situation where he would wind up looking silly no matter what. Popovic calls it a “dilemma action.” “We put him in a lose-lose situation,” the Minnesota woman says. “He could’ve kept talking and we would make fun of his voice, or he shuts up and we looked like we shut him down.” Dictators and despots understand the dangers of humor: early in his rule, Vladimir Putin was reportedly enraged by a depiction of him as an ugly, weird-looking puppet on “Kukly,” a show put out by the then-independent TV channel NTV. He demanded his puppet avatar never appear again and the show, as the New Yorker has written, cheekily obliged: a subsequent episode showed Putin as various weird manifestations of God, like “as a burning bush and a storm cloud.” In Nazi Germany, people also mocked Reich officials for being unpopular, incompetent, sweaty losers; so-called “whisper jokes” proliferated as a way to express discontent. Germans did this even when the stakes were deadly: in 1943, a woman named Marianne K cracked a joke about Hitler standing atop a radio tower with with Goering, trying to come up with something that would cheer up Berliners. “Why don’t you jump?” Goering suggests. After someone ratted her out, Marianne was soon executed. > By clumsily attempting to get in on the jokes, the people in charge try to > defuse their power. In an echo that might sound familiar today, Hitler and other Reich officials also took their own stabs at humor to make themselves more popular: a New York Times article from 1940, with the unfortunate headline “Hitler’s Fun,” says that a recent speech by the dictator was full of “merry quips,” adding, “He was very jovial about the thousands and thousands of bombs he promised to drop on England nightly for every hundred the British raiders scatter over Germany.”   By 1944, mockery was firmly entrenched in Germany as a form of dissent, the Times reported, including widespread parodies of popular Nazi songs. “None of the joking is very brilliant humor,” the paper sniffed, “some descending to gutter level, but showing, nevertheless, the general discontent with the Nazi regime on the part of vast numbers who have been deprived of other means of registering their disapproval.”  The danger with merely making jokes, then as now, is that they serve as a way to let off steam without effecting actual change. The Nazis, for instance, tried to at first stem the tide of parody songs, as the Times reported, before eventually thinking the better of it: “Goebbels evidently has decided on second thought that this sort of activity was a safety valve that would be dangerous to remove.” Similarly, JD Vance has not only pretended to love being called a couch-fucker, but, on Halloween, dressed as one of the memes of himself that has circulated online. By clumsily attempting to get in on the joke, the people in charge try to defuse the power those jokes have against them. These days, it feels borderline delusional to think it will do any good to mock Trump or the various maladaptive, malevolent dorks around him. Every joke that could be made has been, and all of them have bounced off him like a million arrows against the carapace of an armadillo streaked with cheap self-tanner. (See, I couldn’t resist one more, and look where it’s gotten us: nowhere.) Most credit for how Minnesota is prevailing against ICE should go to serious, effective, broad-scale activism, resistance, and community solidarity—and not just jokes about Greg Bovino. Yet the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. And in a way, jokes about Trump, ICE, and all the rest of them are a way of reasserting and insisting upon observable reality: what’s taking place is shocking, reprehensible—and also powerfully wack. When then-vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called Trump and his gang “weird,” it went over remarkably well, a rare example of a politician simply saying what so much of the public was thinking. Humor alone will not save us. But perhaps it allows us to continue the painful task of looking at what’s really happening here, and, in the words of the artist Barbara Kruger, “the ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers” who are doing it to us.   The day that we spoke, the Minneapolis woman was digesting Bovino’s departure, and Tom Homan’s installation. “I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing and learn about the new guy,” she told me. If ICE ever actually leaves her city, she adds, “I think sharing what we as a community have learned with the other cities that they’re going to go to will be huge. I think we’re going to be a model for the resistance of the occupation. I hope my videos showed one way of doing that, but there are so many more.”

BRUSSELS — The European Union is pressing ahead with talks to grant United States border authorities unprecedented access to Europeans’ data, despite growing concerns about American surveillance. The European Commission is brokering a deal to exchange information about travelers, including fingerprints and law enforcement records, so the U.S. can determine if they “pose a risk to public security or public order,” according to official documents. Commission officials flew to Washington last week for the first round of negotiations, according to two people familiar with the matter. The Trump administration’s request for deeper access comes after the U.S. border agency in December proposed reviewing five years of social media history. Talks are happening as the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) service is under heavy scrutiny for its use of surveillance technology against protesters in cities such as Minneapolis. The negotiations should be “put on hold” until the security and privacy of citizens in the EU and U.S. can be guaranteed, liberal European Parliament member Raquel García Hermida-van der Walle said in an interview. Romain Lanneau, a legal researcher with surveillance watchdog Statewatch, said police databases in Europe could contain information on anyone from protesters to journalists who might be considered a “threat,” and that — under the deal being discussed — this information would be at the fingertips of U.S. border authorities who could refuse those people entry to the United States or even detain them. European regulators are “very cautiously looking at what’s happening in the United States,” Wojciech Wiewiórowski, the EU’s in-house data protection supervisor, told POLITICO. Europe “has to be careful” about how it allows the data of Europeans to flow to the U.S., he said.  Hermida-van der Walle in January co-signed a letter by six prominent lawmakers calling on the Commission to stand down given the “current geopolitical context,” despite Washington’s admonition that failure to reach a deal will mean Europeans lose access to its visa waiver program. UNPRECEDENTED ACCESS The U.S. is seeking access to information including biometric data such as fingerprints that is stored on national databases in European countries, according to an explanatory note sent to national experts. The data would be used to “address irregular migration and to prevent, detect, and combat serious crime and terrorist offences,” the note said. In an earlier opinion on the deal, the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) — a watchdog that advises the Commission on privacy policies — noted the deal would be the first of its kind to enable “large-scale sharing of personal data … for the purpose of border and immigration control” with a non-EU country. The Commission would negotiate a framework deal that would serve as a template for bilateral agreements called Enhanced Border Security Partnerships (EBSPs), which national governments agree with Washington. EU countries in December signed off on the Commission’s request to start talks with the U.S. Washington is pressuring its EU counterparts by imposing a deadline for the bilateral deals to be agreed by the end of 2026. If countries fail to reach a deal with the U.S. they risk being cut from the latter’s visa waiver program. The U.S has made it mandatory for all countries that are part of the visa waiver program to have an EBSP in place. “The pressure which the United States is extorting on our member states, the threats that if you don’t agree with this we will cancel your access to the visa waiver program, that is an element of blackmail that we cannot let go,” Hermida-van der Walle said. The EDPS watchdog has cautioned that the scope of data sharing should be as narrow as possible, with clear justifications for every query; transparency around how the data is used; and judicial redress available in the U.S. for any person. Commission spokesperson Markus Lammert emphasised at a recent press briefing that the framework being negotiated will involve “clear and robust safeguards on data protection,” and will ensure “a non-systematic nature of the information exchange and that the exchange is limited to what is strictly necessary to achieve the objectives of this cooperation.”  US PRIVACY UNDER PRESSURE Access to the data is the latest issue putting pressure on a troubled relationship between the U.S. and the EU on data privacy. Since whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed U.S. mass surveillance practices affecting Europeans, the EU has tightened controls on how Washington handles Europeans’ data. Since the return of Donald Trump as president last year, officials and rights groups have deplored a move by the U.S. administration to gut a key privacy watchdog tasked with overseeing privacy safeguards in place to protect Europeans. The Trump administration has also been ramping up mass surveillance of citizens by federal agencies like ICE, including through contracts with Israeli spyware company Paragon, surveillance giant Palantir and other firms. Capgemini, a prominent French IT firm, on Sunday said it was selling off its American activities after it faced political backlash from the French government that its software was being used by ICE authorities. Civil rights groups, lawmakers and other watchdogs fear the new EU-U.S. data sharing deals would add to backsliding on privacy rights.    “The current initiatives are being presented as toward counter-terrorism, but a lot of them are actually adopted for the chilling effect [on political activism],” Statewatch’s Lanneau said. Hermida-van der Walle, the liberal lawmaker, warned: “If people have to go to the United States, if it’s not a choice but something that they have do, there is a risk of self-censoring.”  “This comes from an administration who claims to be the biggest defender of free speech. What they’re doing with their actions is curtailing the possibility of people to express themselves freely, because otherwise they might not get access into the country,” she said.

A peaceful protest in Portland, Oregon on Saturday broke into chaos as federal agents deployed tear gas on demonstrators—including families with young children.  Thousands of protesters marched through the city and gathered in the blocks surrounding the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building. According to the Oregonian, just minutes after the crowd arrived at the facility, federal agents launched tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets, and flash-bang grenades after some demonstrators approached the security gate.  Labor leaders from over 20 unions led the march to the ICE building, with many protesters participating as part of the “Labor Against ICE” rally.  > Video shared with me by attendee at the ICE protest in Portland, OR earlier > this evening where federal agents tear gassed peaceful protestors—including > children, disabled and elderly: > > — Marisa Kabas (@marisakabas.bsky.social) 2026-02-01T04:09:52.219Z Portland City Councilor Mitch Green wrote in a social media post that he was tear gassed in the crowd: “Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas.” > I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had > their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed > children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions. I expect to > see enforcement of our city code prohibiting the use of tear gas. > > — Mitch Green (@councilorgreen.bsky.social) 2026-02-01T01:23:34.948Z Portland’s city code bans selling, furnishing, transporting, carrying, possessing, or using tear gas weapons within the city limits. The code does not apply to “members of the armed forces of the State of Oregon and the United States in the performance of their official duties,” but federal agents are not exempted under the statute. The Portland Police Bureau posted on X on Saturday night that they closed a major street to prevent drivers from being affected by the tear gas.  Portland Mayor Keith Wilson released a statement late Saturday night, saying that it was a “peaceful daytime protest” that “posed no danger to federal forces.”  “To those who continue to work for ICE: Resign. To those who control this facility: Leave,” he continued. “To those who continue to make these sickening decisions, go home, look in a mirror, and ask yourselves why you have gassed children. Ask yourselves why you continue to work for an agency responsible for murders on American streets.” Wilson said later in the lengthy statement that the city would carry out an ordinance that went into effect in January that imposes financial penalties on facilities where chemical agents are deployed. The crackdown against protesters in Portland comes one day after a nationwide uprising where hundreds of demonstrations took place across the country to demand federal agents leave American towns and cities.

A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos from an immigration detention facility outside San Antonio. Ramos, in the blue bunny hat and Spider-Man backpack, who became another symbol of the cruelty of ICE agents, was detained by federal agents earlier this month in a suburban Minneapolis neighborhood—an incident that has since drawn immense outrage. Judge Fred Biery of the Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas has ruled that the detention of Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was unconstitutional. They are both asylum seekers.  In a scathing opinion, the judge wrote that the father and son “seek nothing more than some modicum of due process and the rule of law,” adding that immigration agents were “traumatizing children.” The father and son’s case “has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” the judge noted. Biery wrote of the detainment: “Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency.” According to school officials in Minnesota, on January 20, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained the father as he and Liam were on their way home from school pickup. Agents then reportedly used the child as “bait” to knock on his front door to see if anyone else was home, Zena Stenvik, the superintendent for the Columbia Heights Public Schools district said. A photo of a federal agent holding onto the backpack of Liam went viral, sparking intense criticism. Writing in the Washington Post, Phillip Kennicott noted, “This is an image of universal moral urgency, akin to a small number of photographs that once upon a time had the power to change our behavior, away from cruelty or indifference and in the direction of basic decency.” Related THEY WANT TO TELL YOU A KID WITH A SPIDER-MAN BACKPACK IS EVIL The father and son were quickly sent to the Texas detention center, where Liam reportedly has been sick, according to his mother.  Judge Biery accused the federal government of “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and “that pesky inconvenience called the Fourth Amendment.” At the end of the ruling, he includes that now indelible photo of Liam with two Bible verses. Matthew 19:14, which quotes Jesus: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”