It wasn’t designed to be a concentration camp with gas chambers for mass annihilation. It was intended to be a waystation, a stopover before prisoners were moved elsewhere.
Terezin, contained within the walls of the fortress Theresienstadt 30 miles north of Prague in the Czech Republic, was established by Germany’s Gestapo.
Terezin concentration camp
More than 150,000 Jews from Czechoslovakia, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Denmark were sent there, including 15,000 children. They were held for months or years. An estimated 33,000 died there from extreme crowding, malnutrition and disease. About 88,000 were sent to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland, as well as to smaller camps elsewhere. Less than 150 children survived.
Access to Terezin during WWII by outside impartial investigators was denied until the King of Denmark demanded it in late 1943 to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there earlier that year.
In late 1943, Christian X, the king of Denmark, demanded an inspection of Terezin to determine the condition of 466 Danish Jews sent there in October of that year. According to the organizationTerezin: Children of the Holocaust, to hide their cruelty, the Germans initiated a beautification program, “Operation Embellishment,” a ruse intended to mollify the king’s concerns.The area was cleaned up, many of the Jews were sent to Auschwitz to minimize the appearance of overcrowding and even fake shops and cafes were built to imply that the Jews lived in relative comfort.
A photo of Jewish children in Terezin during the inspection by the International Red Cross.
The International Red Cross carried out an inspection hosted by Adolf Eichmann on June 23, 1944. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Red Cross issued “a bland report about the visit, indicating that the representatives were taken in by the elaborate fiction”. Today’s visitors to ICE detention centers should we wary of ICE “cleaning things up” to deceive them.
Today, President Trump’s mass deportation push has resulted in the detention of a massive and growing number of alleged undocumented immigrants in the United States. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reports holding an average of approximately 65,000 to 73,000 people daily in its detention facilities. It’ is a vast network with detainees constantly being shifted around multiple times far from their homes. In theory, all these people are subject to deportation.
KING 5 Seattle television recently reported that ICE is repeatedly flying detainees back and forth across the country. The station cited a case where a Cuban man detained in Florida was subsequently flown from Miami to Denver, Colorado, then to Florence, Arizona, back to Denver, then to Florence again, then Denver, then back to Florence. “A lot of lawyers and judges around the country…believe that ICE is intentionally doing this to put people away from families, from legal representation and just honestly to try to encourage them self-deport,” the station reported.
For concerned people trying to keep track of the detainees the process is a nightmare.
The more frightening nightmare, however, bringing up memories of Terezin, is the use of American detention centers as waystations for deportations back to home countries where great danger lurks and to third countries where they are not citizens, frequently don’t speak the local language, have no personal ties and are subject to God knows what brutal conditions and even death.
More than 23,000 people have reportedly been sent to 26 countries other than their own in 2026, and according to Third Country Deportation Watch, at least 35 countries have signed agreements with the United States to take deported immigrants. The Trump administration pays other countries with documented histories of corruption and human rights abuses millions of dollars to take in deported people under “third country” agreements. As Jonathan Capeheart has said, “…the stories from immigrants swept up in third-country deportations should shock the conscience of a nation that says it believes in equal protection and the rule of law. “
The Guardian recently reported that in August about 20 people were put on a flight in the US, shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles, and sent to Liberia as part of a major third-country deportation arrangement. When six of them refused to get off the plane, they were dropped off in another African country, Equatorial Guinea, “one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt regimes, where armed men took them to a former luxury hotel turned detention centre in the capital, Malabo, where they have been held ever since,” the Guardian reported.
ICE has deported over 200 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador and deposited many of therm into CECOT (the Center for Terrorism Confinement)—a notorious maximum-security mega-prison. The migrants have testified that they were shot with rubber bullets and beaten on a regular basis. Many of them have alleged that they were routinely raped and tortured.
ICE has also deported migrants originating from countries such as Afghanistan and Iran to volatile regions like the Central African Republic and South Sudan. The U.S. State Department warns “Do not travel to Central African Republic due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, health, and terrorism” and “Do not travel to South Sudan due to risk of unrest, crime, kidnapping, landmines, and health risks”.
Detainees have also been sent to the African nation of Eswatini, where they were held in a maximum-security prison without charge and with no access to legal counsel. And last year U.S. immigration and federal authorities tried to deport nationals from Laos, Vietnam, and the Philippines to war-torn Libya until a federal judge blocked the planned flights.
Even in cases where ICE is deporting people to their home countries, the situations are often dire. There’s been an escalation of deportation flights to Haiti since the June 2026 Supreme Court decision that allowed the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), stripping legal protections from an estimated 330,000 Haitian immigrants. The humanitarian and security crisis in Haiti will expose all such deportees to harm. According to the New York Times, some 3,000 people were killed there in the first six months of this year, many of them in gang-related violence.
“Millions of people in Haiti continue to face a compounding crisis of food insecurity, forced displacement, deadly disease outbreaks, and surging violence,” says Alice Ribes, the International Rescue Committee’s director for Haiti. “Public services in many areas have collapsed under gang rule, leaving people with limited or no access to clean drinking water, food, medical care, and education.”
ICE attempts to minimize or conceal the conditions in America’s detention centers and the threats faced by deportees to their own and other countries are America’s “Operation Embellishment”.
The blood of those in harm’s way will be on our hands.
The fact is U.S. citizens do not have to carry proof of citizenship and you have the right to refuse to show documents. In my opinion, if Americans start wearing their passports to ward off seizure by ICE agents, they are ceding to ICE unprecedented and unjustified authority.
South Africa remembers that lesson.
Pass laws in South Africa were the cornerstone of apartheid, laws restricting the movement, employment, and residence of Black people. The laws created, in effect, an internal domestic passport system aimed at restricting movement. Black people over 16 were required to carry a passbook at all times, with non-compliance leading to arrest, fines, or imprisonment. Blacks were routinely humiliated by police who treated them as second-class citizens who did not belong.
A Black South African with a pass
A pocket-sized document known as a reference book, or pass., was an everyday threat for Blacks. The book contained a condensed history of the carrier’s life‐including birthplace, legal places of residence and employment, tax payments and marital status. The details, along with the fingerprints of every adult Black, were recorded and saved by the government.
“Now, many people here are asking a question that is a novel one in America: Is it safe to leave home without proof of citizenship,” the New York Times story said.“Has the United States turned into a show-me-your-papers nation? For many Minnesotans, the answer has been an unequivocal yes.”
The defiant answer should be an unequivocal NO!
The catch-22, of course, is if you refuse to provide proof of citizenship or are suspected of being undocumented, the result may be your detention by ICE until your status is verified. Joseph Heller’s book may be an absurdist comedy, but you may find yourself in a cold, filthy ICE detention center,
But, as happened in the 1950s and 60s, when civil rights activists were arrested for sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations, victory will eventually be yours.
“Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act helped roughly triple the ICE budget, allocating $45 billion for building new immigration centers and hiring 10,000 new ICE agents. One dispiriting lesson of the imperial boomerang is that, once. bought and paid for, structures of intimidation and oppression tend to endure.” David Wallace-Wells, 1/25/2026
Update, 1/30/2026 – The Washington Post reported that local officials are raising logistical and humanitarian concerns in 23 towns where U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to convert industrial buildings into detention centers that combined would hold up to 80,000 people. ICE has offered few details about its plan since The Washington Post first reported on it in December 2025. One detention center the Department of Homeland Security wants to open would be a more than 1 million sq. ft. industrial warehouse in Social Circle, Georgia that would be retrofitted to hold 8,500 detainees and hundreds of staff, more than the city’s total population. The City Manager, Eric Taylor, has said the city does not have the water or sewer infrastructure to support the facility. Unaddressed is the question of why the government needs such huge detention facilities when it says it’s objective is to deport people.
Update, 2/12/2026 – It’s not just more detention centers coming down the pike. Wired reported that ICE and DHS have quietly carried out a months-long expansion, securing more than 150 new leases and office expansions across nearly every state, often in or near major metro areas. Many new facilities sit near schools, medical offices, and places of worship, with DHS pressing the GSA to bypass standard procurement rules and hide lease details under claims of “national security.”
Update, 2/21/2026 – Funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired has expired and Democrats have made 10 demands to rein in Trump’s surge of deportation forces into U.S. cities. One of those demands is “Compliance with Basic Detention Standards and Oversight of Facilities.” Think about it. Incarceration facilities are already legally required to be humane and hygienic., but as Radley Balko has reported on SubStack in The Unpopulist, there is a growing pile of reports from attorneys, journalists, human rights groups, judges, and others about shocking, inhumane conditions at facilities around the country.
Update, 3/7/2026 – So far, DHS has completed the purchase of 10 of the 23 detention center properties it initially pursued, spending more than $890 million, according to deed records or statements by local officials. Efforts to acquire 10 other properties — in Indiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia — have failed, according to statements by local officials or building owners.
In the years preceding his death in 1875, George Templeton Strong, a prominent Wall Street attorney, kept a voluminous journal of his life and times. In April 1865, near the end of the American civil war, he wrote, “These four years have reduced me to something like pauperism, But I am profoundly grateful for them nevertheless. They have given me — & my wife & my boys, — a country worth living in & living for, & to be proud of.”
I can’t say President Trump’s inhumane crackdown on immigrants and harassment and murder of American citizens in the past year have given me a country worth living in, living for and to be proud of.
Not while the Trump administration promotes hatred of “the other”. David Masciotra. David Masciotrar ecently wrote in the Washington Monthly, “Through (Elie) Wiesel’s story and the stories he told and created, two truths become inescapable. The first is that it is naïve, if not catastrophic, to underestimate the power of hatred. “
I doubt 7-year-old Diana Crespo, a second grader at Gresham’s Alder Elementary School, and 5-year-old Liam Ramos, the bunny-hatted child detained by immigration agents in Minneapolis, see America as a country worth living in and living for and to be proud of either. They are both being held at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s South Texas Family Residential Center in Texas.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has spread its detention center tentacles across the United States:
Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) reported on January 29, 2026 that ICE is planning another detention center in Newport, Oregon as soon as May.
The Atlantic reported that the warehouses expected to be detention centers could become white elephants if there’s a change in ICE policies and the detainee population decreases. “If the goal is to not have endless illegal immigration, those centers will be obsolete in three to five years,” a longtime ICE official told me. “The amount of money going into them is abhorrent.”
The spread of these. detention centers reminds me of another brutal time.
Most of us know the names of a few Nazi concentration camps, like Dachau, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, where Anne Frank died. But they were part of a massive complex of more than 850 ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labor camps and extermination camps CNN has identified. They stretched from France and the Netherlands in the west to Estonia, Lithuania and Poland in the east that the Nazis established during the 12 years Adolf Hitler was in power. Their purpose — to segregate , oppress and persecute their opponents.
Like the ICE detention centers, the Nazi system started small and then metastasized like a cancer, according to the Wiener Holocaust Library.
Initially there were so-called SA camps. (Sturmabteilung (SA), or “Brownshirts,” was the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary wing). After the Night of Long Knives in 1934, the SS and Heinrich Himmler shut down the SA camps and consolidated control of all camps in Germany. Himmler and the SS used Dachau, an original SS camp, as a blueprint for all camps. From 1934 onwards, the SS developed and then operated the camp system, which lasted until Germany’s defeat in 1945.
The SS started building major camps, beginning with Sachsenhausen in 1936, then Buchenwald in 1937, Flossenbürg and Mauthausen in 1938 and Ravensbrück for women in 1939. Political prisoners were the first inmates. Then people with previous criminal convictions. Next were the so-called “asocials”, such as Roma, homosexuals, prostitutes, the homeless and the “work-shy”. The mass imprisonment of Jews began in 1938 after the Anschluss and Kristallnacht.
As the Second World War began in earnest, foreign citizens from newly occupied countries such as Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands began to be imprisoned , followed by Soviet prisoners of war (POW’s) after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941.
Those who believe U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement can and will be restrained under the Trump administration might want to stop and reconsider.
With an administration where cruelty is the point, it can happen here.
This is a frightening sign of where we are headed as a country. It reminds me of the extermination and concentration camps established in occupied Poland as part of the “Final Solution” during the Holocaust. Are ICE officers going to oversee these American warehouses like the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss in The Zone of Interest (2023), enjoying their idyllic life right beside the horror?
“Go back to where you came from”, he said to the Somali immigrants in Minnesota, employing an insulting slur unacceptable in polite society.
Last week Trump said on his social media channel, Truth Social, he’d send Somalis “back to where they came from.” Yesterday he said Somalis in the U.S. should “go back to where they came from and fix it.”
A person familiar with Trump’s plans told the Associated Press federal authorities are preparing a targeted immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota that would primarily focus on Somali immigrants living unlawfully in the U.S.
At a cabinet meeting yesterday, Trump said Somalis “contribute nothing.”
“I don’t want them in our country,” a snarling Trump told reporters. “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
I remember hearing that taunt directed at minorities by racist know-nothings in my youth in the 1950s, but I thought people had long ago been shamed from uttering it.
Trump, however, seems to enjoy denigrating “the other”.
Trump’s own Equal Employment Opportunity Commission cites “Go back to where you came from,” as an example of unlawful workplace conduct, along with the use of “insults, taunting, or ethnic epithets”.
I suppose in some respects nobody should really be surprised by Trump’s insults. That’s his modus operandi. Demean and slander his opponents, particularly those he deems not “real” Americans. And his supporters often embrace his scurrilous attacks.
He even goes after members of Congress with abandon. He has described Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, (D-Minn), who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”
“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
And Trump’s recent explicit use of hateful speech is not original or unprecedented. It was a feature, not a bug, of his campaigns for office.
An analysis published by Presidential Studies Quarterly[1] , cited by the National Library of Medicine, concluded that “no other comparable candidate of either major US party has ever approached the level of negativity and vitriol toward racial/ethnic minorities that Trump did.”
A Washington Post column today by George Will is headlined “A sickening moral slum of an administration”.
Indeed.
[1] Çinar I, Stokes S, Uribe A. Presidential rhetoric and populism. Presidential Studies Quarterly. 2020;50(2):240–263. doi: 10.1111/psq.12656. [DOI] [Google Scholar]
It was 1943. By all appearances, Rudolph Höss, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children – Klaus, Heidetraud, Brigitte, Hans-Jürgen and Annegret – had an idyllic life in the Polish countryside. They lived in an exquisite villa with a tranquil garden, a greenhouse and a small swimming pool.
The children played in the yard, Rudolph and Hedwig went about their daily lives and Hedwig adorned herself with lipstick and jewelry.
The Höss family’s backyard (Scene from The Zone of Interest)
But something was amiss.
Hedwig’s clothing and jewels were taken from a Jewish woman on her way to the gas chambers. Beyond the concrete wall at the property’s edge, topped with barbed wire, was a sprawling complex of gas chambers and crematoria known as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the largest extermination camp run by the Nazis in Poland during WWII. Rudolph Höss, a German SS officer, was the camp commandant. An estimated 960,000 Jews were killed there.
Women and children deemed “unfit for work” being unknowingly led to gas chamber #3 at Auschwitz, where two thousand people at a time could be murdered. Source: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
“Human beings did this to other human beings and it’s very convenient for us to try and distance ourselves from them because we think we can never behave this way, but I think we should be less certain than that,” said Jonathan Glazer, the director of a 2024 movie, “The Zone of Interest” that depicted the mundane daily activities of the family at their home during the war.
In the movie, when her husband is transferred to a new post in Germany, Hedwig is enraged. She demands that the family stay at Auschwitz, claiming, “This is the life we’ve always dreamed of.”
It all brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s talk about “the banality of evil”, which she cited when writing about one of Höss’ compatriots, Adolf Eichmann, in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
“Never again,” proclaimed the weary idealists, the peace-seekers, the hopeful.
So much for that.
Moises Sotelo, 54, of Newberg, OR was on his way to work at about 5:30 a.m. on June 12 when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers swooped in and took him into custody. According to an ICE detention database, Sotelo was transferred to ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington.
Moises Sotelo
“ICE Seattle arrested Moises Sotelo-Casas, 54, who is a citizen of Mexico, as a part of routine federal law enforcement activity that identifies, detains and removes criminal aliens to their country of origin,” ICE Public Affairs Officer David Yost said in a statement. “Sotelo has a criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, OR, and he will remain in custody pending removal.”
Sotelo’s family sought community support through a GoFundMe account with a $175,000 goal to “Help the Sotelo Family with Expenses After ICE Detainment”. The account had raised $142,751 from 2,100 donations as of June 30.
There was a time when Moises Sotel0’s plight would have generated little public concern and certainly fewer helping hands. .
In 2022, the public perception of an invasion of migrants across the southern border of the United States bore some relation to reality.
U.S. immigration authorities carried out 2.38 million migrant encounters (a term encompassing apprehensions and expulsions) at the southwest border during Joseph Biden’s presidency in FY 2022, according to the Migration Policy Institute. For the first time, not only were there more Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans encountered than migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but there were significant attempted crossings by Brazilians, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Ukrainians, Indians and Turks. Monthly encounters peaked at over 370,000 people in December 2023, nearly 12,000 a day. This isn’t count migrants who crossed the border and escaped detection. (For a better understanding of the brutal migration process, see Footnote 2)
The crescendo of arrivals overwhelmed processing capacities, federal infrastructure, and border communities. As the chaos at the border increased, the public became more hostile to the migrants. Donald Trump exploited that hostility in winning re-election to the presidency in November 2024.
His administration has since initiated vigorous, combative mass deportation efforts that resemble military-style attacks at homes, businesses and public spaces. Masked and heavily armed ICE agents wearing tactical gear and carrying high-powered rifles have been descending on areas in unmarked black SUVs and armored vehicles. Immigrants showing up at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices for routine check-ins are being arrested. “What should be routine appointments are becoming detention traps,” Katrina Kilgren, an immigration attorney and pro tem instructor at the Knight Law Center in Eugene, OR told the Register-Guard newspaper.
Increasingly, ICE has been targeting work sites, such as farms, meat production plants and restaurants, and migrant worker gathering places, such as Home Depot, in immigration sweeps.
In April, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told attendees of the 2025 Border Security Expo in Arizona he wanted the agency to become as efficient at deporting immigrants as e-commerce giant Amazon is at delivering packages. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, describing his ideal deportation process as “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
In one deportation case reported by the Portland Mercury, Jorge (a pseudonym being used to protect his identity) received a text message on his cell phone in Spanish from ICE in early June.Jorge had immigrated to the US from Nicaragua in late 2021 as an asylum seeker. He has an active asylum case, a work permit, a job, and a young family. The message told him to report to the nearest ICE facility within 12 hours to check in and sign paperwork, or face deportation. After consulting a lawyer, he followed the instructions, only to be detained by ICE agents and sent to a federal detention center in Tacoma, Washington.
ICE was holding about 56,397 people in detention facilities across the country as of June 15, 2025 likely setting a record high, according to TRAC Immigration. Despite the government’s stated goal of pursuing criminals, 40,433 out of 56,397—or 71.7%—held in ICE detention had no criminal record, TRAC Immigration claims. Adams County Detention Center in Natchez, Mississippi held the largest number of ICE detainees so far in FY 2025, averaging 2,166 per day as of June 2025.
The vast majority of ICE detention centers are privately operated and for profit, with companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic dominant in the space. Tom Homan, Trump’s border adviser, has called for boosting ICE’s detention capacity to at least 100,000 people. In furtherance of that goal, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted a request in April asking contractors to submit bids for new detention facilities, transportation, security personnel, medical services and administrative support.
Florida is now turning a remote abandoned mosquito-infested 39-square-mile airport next to Everglades National Park in Florida into the newest migrant prison featuring mostly tents and trailers in sweltering heat and nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said the facility will be temporary and have “zero environmental impacts.”
“It’s like a theatricalization of cruelty,” Maria Asuncion Bilbao, Florida campaign coordinator at the immigration advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, told The Associated Press.
President Trump visited the Everglades detention center on July 1, 2025.
The Trump administration has also sent immigrants to detention facilities outside the United States, including to Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo ( CECOT) in El Salvador, where brutal conditions predominate.
The Trump administration is also trying to deport a group of migrants convicted of violent crimes from countries including Cuba, Mexico and Vietnam to South Sudan, a country embroiled in fighting between various political and ethnic groups. In a Travel Advisory, the U.S. Department of State advises: “Violent crime, such as carjackings, shootings, ambushes, assaults, robberies, and kidnappings are common throughout South Sudan, including Juba. Foreign nationals have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, armed robberies, and other violent crimes.”
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The Trump administration wanted the power to do so as part of its effort to discourage illegal migration by threatening to deport migrants a third country with no recourse.
Legal analyst Steve Vladeck told CNN, “…today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
To add insult to injury, Semafor reported on July 1 that the Trump administration is thinking about trying to void naturalized immigrants citizenship— potentially starting with New York City mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani. Asked about Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’ proposal to strip Mamdani, who was born in Uganda but became a citizen in 2018, of his legal status, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s “something to be investigated.” Semafor reported that GOP leaders are increasingly comfortable with revoking foreign nationals’ visas over their political beliefs or actions, and that may soon extend to citizens.
An American naturalization ceremony
NPR reported on June 30 that the Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship, a practice heavily used during there McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s. “Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online,” NPR said. Approximately 25 million immigrants are naturalized citizens.
Hans von Spakovsky, with the conservative Heritage Foundation, told NPR he supports the DOJ’s denaturalization efforts. “I do not understand how anyone could possibly be opposed to the Justice Department taking such action to protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals, and terrorists,” he said.
But Trump’s draconian efforts to halt border crossings and deport already settled migrants are now driving a new sympathy for migrants and resistance to ICE’s aggressive deportation efforts.
Even popular podcaster Joe Rogan is raising doubts about Trump’s deportation chaos. “Bro, these ICE raids are fucking nuts, man,” Rogan said in June. ” I don’t think if they, the Trump administration, if they’re running and they said, we’re gonna go to Home Depot and we’re gonna arrest all the people at Home Depot, we’re gonna go to construction sites, and we’re gonna just, like, tackle people at construction sites. I don’t think anybody would have signed up for that. They said, we’re gonna get rid of the criminals and the gang members first, right? And now we’re, we’re seeing, like, Home Depots get raided. Like, that’s crazy.”
Local government officials are raising concerns, too. A group of elected officials in one of Oregon’s most racially diverse counties pushed back Monday against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (See footnote 3)
“ICE has no place in our neighborhoods,” Cornelius City Councilor Angeles Godinez told OPB in June. “When fear enters our community, trust leaves,” she said. “Without trust, our schools, our cities and even our local economies suffer.”
“To the immigrant community across Oregon, I am one of you, I see you. I know what you’re going through and I stand with you in unwavering solidarity,” said Tigard City Councilor Yi-Kang Hu.
And then there’s the massive cost of Trump’s immigration program, a veritable cornucopia of cash.[1] “If the bill passes, it could make ICE the nation’s largest jailer, Wirth more funding for detention than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons,” according to immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
With the federal deficit already high, and projected to increase to destructive levels under the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill”, America is going to pay a heavy price for Trump’s deportation fiasco. With the immigration blowout, the Senate-passed a reconciliation bill that would add over $4 trillion to the national debt through Fiscal Year (FY) 2034, $1 trillion more than the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
Protests against immigration arrests are multiplying as people rail against government overreach and a majority of Americans now say actions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have “gone too far,” according to a new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll..
But it’s not enough.
As The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said earlier this year, the Trump administration’s widespread and persistent cruelty, indiscriminate immigration enforcement tactics, wrongful questioning and detention of American citizens, unjust profiling, and abuse of common decency “signals a troubling shift toward a more punitive and dehumanizing approach to immigration enforcement.”
” History has shown us time and time again,” the Leadership Conference said, ” that when communities come together, our collective resistance has the power to rewrite the narrative and create change. While it may feel like we are in the midst of a dark chapter, together, we can write the next one — a chapter where compassion and justice prevail over cruelty and inhumanity. In the end, that’s what defines us — not just as a nation, but as human beings.”
We cannot be the Höss family. We cannot be innocent bystanders. Evil must not triumph. We must resist.
Immigration detention capacity: Expand capacity to detain immigrants taken into custody
$45 bil.
Border wall: Fund border barrier system construction and related activities
$45 bil.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Funding for hiring, training, transportation, facilities and legal resources to carry out immigration enforcement and removals
$31 bil.
State and local grants: Funding for border security, immigration enforcement and major event security. The Senate parliamentarian determined that this provision does not comply with the chamber’s rules, and it may be removed or modified.
$13 bil.
Homeland Security Department funding: For border security and immigration enforcement
$12 bil.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Funding to expand workforce and purchase new vehicles and technology
$12 bil.
Border surveillance technology
$6.2 bil.
Department of Justice grants: For state and local immigration and law enforcement
$3.5 bil.
Department of Justice funding: For immigration and other law enforcement
$3.3 bil.
Fund vetting for sponsors of unaccompanied alien children: Through the Office of Refugee Resettlement
$0.3 bil.
2. For a better understanding of what is driving migrants to the United States and who is guiding them through Mexico to the US border, read Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León. In 2015, he began a long-term ethnographic project focused on understanding the daily lives of Honduran smugglers who profit from transporting migrants across the length of Mexico. This 2024 National Book Award-winning story examines the complicated relationship among transnational gangs, the human smuggling industry, and migrant desires for safety and well-being.
3 .An immigration scholar, Austin Kocher, has written a Journalist Resource guide analyzing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest data, based on datasets published by the Data Deportation Project. His observations are revealing as to the Trump administration’s motives:
“The Trump administration is now demanding that ICE make 3,000 arrests per day. That is to say, ICE did not come close to meeting the quota set in January until June—and even then; only for a few days at a time. To be clear: this is a lot of arrests. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s also clear that the Trump administration’s daily arrest quotas are detached from the reality of what ICE can do—and even more so now that the new quota is 3,000 per day.
This prompts a further question: if these quotas are demonstrably unattainable, why have them? In my view, the answer is simple: the unattainability of the quotas is the point.
An essential component of Donald Trump’s longstanding approach to politics is to invent crises, or exploit existing crises, in ways that ensure they are unsolvable. No amount of funding for immigration enforcement will ever be enough to achieve his mass deportation goals. No amount of power concentrated in the office of the President will ever be sufficient to exercise totalizing control over immigration. The goal is not to solve a real problem, but to manufacture an ever-expanding crisis that justifies ever-expanding unregulated power.”
Donald Trump is no Winston Churchill. He does not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes urged, ” carve every word before you let it fall”. More often than not, when Trump speaks, as Rod Serling said, “You’re traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That’s the signpost up ahead – your next stop, the Twilight Zone!”
A collection of Trump’s curious remarks:
o March 11, 2026 – Trump urging ships to go through the perilous Strait of Hormuz : “These ships should go through…and show some guts. There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Trump said to Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade on the phone, not long before three international cargo ships were hit by fiery Iranian projectiles.
o March 6, 2026 – Reporter: “It sounds like the Russians are helping Iran.” Trump: “I have a lot of respect for you. You’ve always been nice to me. What a stupid question to be asking.”
o March 2, 2026 – At a Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony, Trump turned and pointed at gold curtains to his right. . “See that nice drape? When that comes down right now you see a very, very deep hole, but in about a year and half from now, you’re gonna see a very, very beautiful building. And there’s your entrance to it right there. In fact, I think I’ll even, I’ll save money on the doors because you can’t get more beautiful than that. I picked those drapes in my first term. I always liked gold, but I think we can save a lot of money. I just saved, I just saved curtains.”
o February 9, 2026 – Trump railed against Canada and China for attempting to improve trade cooperation. ″…Prime Minister Carney wants to make a deal with China — which will eat Canada alive. We’ll just get the leftovers! I don’t think so. The first thing China will do is terminate ALL Ice Hockey being played in Canada, and permanently eliminate The Stanley Cup.”
o January 21, 2026 (Speech at Davos): “When they go out into those boats, they want to take over a billion and a half dollar tanker, load it up with oil, and they say, “We’re going to blow up your boat, they have powerful weapons.” You hit the side of the boat, you blow the whole thing up. The insurance companies are petrified, so they say, “Just give them the boat, we’ll give them money instead.” And I don’t do that. We blow them right to hell out of the water. We see them going out, we blow them out of the water. We don’t have any pirates so much anymore. We do. They won’t be there long. We’ve cut down with the hitting of the boats that are loaded up with drugs, including submarines. Can you believe they actually buy some, they call mini subs. very fast. They’re meant for drugs. We’ve knocked out to them the Democrats. They were fishing. You have ruined somebody’s fishing. We can’t, I would say, a submarine is not a fishing boat. You don’t fish. But we’ve knocked down drugs by water. The oceans, the sea, by 97.2%.”
o Dec. 15, 2025: A Truth Social post by Trump on the Dec. 14 murder of actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife – “Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. “
o Dec. 1, 2025: A female reporter to Trump – Can you tell us what they were looking at with the MRI test? What part of the body? Trump: I have no idea. It was just an MRI. It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing.”
o Nov. 28, 2025: “Q: Do you plan to attend Sarah’s funeral? (National Guard soldier killed in DC) TRUMP: I haven’t thought about it yet, but it’s certainly something I can conceive of. I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.”
o Nov. 26, 2025: Trump on Truth Social: NOV. 26: The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again. This cheap “RAG” is truly an “ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out. Despite all of this, I have my highest Poll Numbers, ever.” In late November 2025, Trump’s overall job approval was hovering around 36-38%, hitting new lows for his second term.
o Nov. 17, 2025: Trump speaking at McDonald’s Impact Summit: “As an example, if you take me at 20 for one year, sleepy Joe Biden, you know what he was? Less than one for four years. And if they got elected, they would’ve been at minus 10 because people were moving out of the country in record numbers and welfare and other charges were increasing at levels that nobody has ever seen before. So, you would’ve had double and maybe 50%, maybe literally more than they’ve ever seen.”
“Why is the Gulf of Mexico called the Gulf of Mexico?” I said, “We’re changing the name.” And now it’s the Gulf of America. It has nothing to do with McDonald’s, but maybe it does because it’s very nice… We have 92% of the shoreline, they have 8%. I wouldn’t say I made a lot of friends in Mexico, but they still like me. Wasn’t that a good change? No, seriously, wasn’t that beautiful? “(Fact: The United States controls approximately 45% of the Gulf of Mexico; Mexico claims about 48%; Cuba claims 5%)
“And we got rid of the drip-drip water. We call it the drip-drip where drip-drips out of the sink. States with tremendous water, so much water, they have nothing but problems getting rid. They had restrictions on water. It comes down from heaven, right? They had restrictions on water. So you want to wash your hands or like me, I want to wash my hair. I lather up. Then I turn that and there’s no water. The water’s drip, they call it. “
o Nov. 13, 2025: “Christians and more, think of this, more than twice as likely foster care they’ll adopt the general population. They adopt to it so easily. When they get out, they adopt to it like it’s become second nature. It’s amazing.”
o Nov. 12, 2025: An interview with Fox host Laura Ingraham discussing Trump’s proposal to initiate 50 year mortgages: Q – Is a 50 year mortgage really a good idea? Trump: It’s not even a big deal. You go from 40 years to 50. Ingraham: It’s 30 years. Trump: It’s not even a big deal! You go from 40 to 50 years. And what it means is you pay something less. From 30, some people had a 40, and now they have a 50. You pay it over a long period of time. It’s not like a big factor!”
o Oct. 28, 2025: (1) Trump in a speech to US service members on the USS George Washington, an aircraft carrier stationed in Japan: “I’d like to be an Admiral. I always wanted to be an admiral, to be honest.” (2) “You know, we won the second election (2020) by a lot, so we had to just prove it by winning the third — by too big to rig, I called it. It was too big to rig.” (3) “I ended eight wars in eight months,” including “Kosovo and Serbia, Egypt and Ethiopia.” The facts: The war between Kosovo and Serbia didn’t occur during his presidency, and there was no war between Egypt and Ethiopia for Trump to end. (4) “we have 92% of the shoreline” of the Gulf of Mexico. Fact: There is a roughly even divide in Gulf coastline between Mexico and the US .
o October 27, 2025: Asked by a reporter about an CE raid on a Hyundai battery factory: Q – “Did I hear you right that you said you were opposed to the way that raid in Georgia was handled? Trump: I was opposed to getting them out and before they got out they were pretty well set but before they got out, I said they could stay. They’re going to be coming back.”
o October 19, 2025: “Trees fall down after a short period of time, about 18 months. They become really dry. They become really like a matchstick and they get up. You know, there’s no water pouring through and they become very, very, uh . They just explode. ” So much for the redwoods, I guess.
o Sept. 30, 2025: Sorry, this is a long one. Remarks by President Trump to 800 of the nation’s top military generals and admirals, along with their top enlisted advisors, flown from around the world to Marine Corps Base Quantico – “We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling downstairs every day. Every day, the guy is falling downstairs. He said, It’s not our President. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall, because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that. You walk nice and easy. You’re not having—you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down, but don’t—don’t pop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a President, but he would bop down those stairs. I’ve never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop. He’d go down the stairs. Wouldn’t hold on. I said, It’s great. I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it. But eventually, bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president. A year ago, we were a dead country. We were dead. This country was going to hell.”
o Sept. 22, 2025: “Bobby wants to be very careful with what he says. I’m not so careful with what I say. Certain groups, the Amish, as an example – they have essentially no autism.” According to a study cited by the International Society of Autism Research, Preliminary data have identified the presence of ASD in the Amish community at a rate of approximately 1 in 271 children using standard ASD screening and diagnostic tools.
o Sept. 22, 2025: “They’re pumping, it looks like they’re pumping into a horse. You have a little child, a little fragile child, and you get a vat of 80 different vaccines, I guess. 80 different blends. And they pump it in.” In fact, a typical American child receives approximately 25-30 vaccine doses, with the exact number of shots depending on the specific combination vaccines used and whether annual Covid-19 or flu shots are included. The recommended immunization schedule protects against around 16 serious and potentially deadly diseases from birth to adulthood.
o “Tariffs are making us rich again. Richer than anybody ever thought was possible.” Economists overwhelmingly conclude that tariffs are not making the United States richer. While tariffs do generate revenue for the government, this is not a net gain for the country because the costs are primarily borne by domestic consumers and businesses through higher prices and reduced economic growth.
o Sept. 5, 2025: Asked if he would trust new jobs numbers issued that day – “Well, we’re going to have to see what the numbers, I don’t know, they come out tomorrow. But the real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is. But, uh, will be in a year from now when these monstrous huge beautiful places they’re palaces of genius and when they start opening up. You’re seeing, I think you’ll see job numbers that are absolutely incredible. Right now it’s a lot of construction numbers, but you’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen before.”
o August 26, 2025: “Foreign nations are paying hundreds of billions of dollars (in tariffs) straight into our treasury. Numbers nobody has seen before. Many of those countries, just to sit at the table, are paying us hundreds of billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars is coming into our country. Trillions.” Foreign nations don’t pay tariffs directly to the U.S. government. American companies that import goods from foreign countries pay the tariffs to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. and then try to recoup the money by absorbing the cost or raising prices.
Trump on deploying the National Guard to Chicago: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.” Umm. Not exactly.
“There’s no inflation.” The inflation rate as of August. 25, 2025 was 2.7%, above the Fed’s 2% target.
o August 25, 2025: “”We are going to be doing numbers on the cost of drugs…I’m not talking 20% decrease. I’m talking 1,000%.”
o Aug. 25, 2025: “I gave Wes Moore (Governor of Maryland) a lot of money to fix his demolished bridge. I will now have to rethink that decision??” Trump had nothing to do with the appropriation of funds to rebuild the Baltimore bridge after a ship struck it. The appropriation was passed in 2024 as part of a continuing resolution President Biden signed into law.
o Aug. 20, 2025: “Crimea is massive — I would say, like, the size of Texas or something — in the middle of the ocean. And it’s gorgeous.” Crimea is roughly 1/25th the size of Texas and is a peninsula in the Black Sea that borders the Sea of Azov.
o Aug. 19, 2025: Although some want Netanyahu prosecuted on war crime charges, “he’s a war hero” Trump said. “He’s a war hero because we worked together. He’s a war hero. I guess I am too.” Trump has never been deployed or fought in a war.
o Aug. 19, 2025: “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been — Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” Posted on Truth Social. Uh, well, maybe slavery wasn’t so bad.
o Aug. 18, 2025: “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED.” Data compiled by a Sweden-based organization that advocates for democracy globally, The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, found in an October 2024 report found that 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting.
o August 10, 2025: Truth Social post – “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.” It’s spelled Capitol, Mr. President.
o August 1, 2025. “I think we’re gonna be very successful fairly soon (in lowering drug prices). We’ll have drug prices coming down by 500%, 600%, 800%, even 1,200%.”
o July 27, 2025: “You have a certain place in the Massachusetts area that over the last 20 years had 1 or 2 whales wash ashore. And over the last short period of time they had 18. Ok? Because it’s driving them loco. No, windmills will not happen in the United States.” According g to NOAA, , there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths. There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities. There are, according to the U.S. Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB), 76,051 wind turbines operating across 45 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico.
o July 23, 2025: “This is somebody nobody else can do. I can get the drug prices down… 1000% 600% 500% 1500%. Numbers that are not even thought to be achievable.” Huh?
o On July 16, 2025, during a rant against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Trump said, “I’m surprised he was appointed. I was surprised that Biden put him in.” Trump nominated Powell for the position in 2017.
o At a July 14, 2025 Oval Office press conference:
Q – If Putin escalates further, how far are you willing to go in response if Putin were to escalate and send more bombs in coming days? TRUMP: “Don’t ask me a question like that. They’re not Americans that are dying in it. I have a problem – andJD has a problem with it. It’s a stance that he’s had for a long time – they’re not Americans dying. We want to defend our country.”
… Q – Why are you giving Putin 50 more days? TRUMP: “I’ve just really been involved in this for not very long. It wasn’t an initial focus. This is aBiden war. This is a Democrat war.”
o July 10, 2025:
Asked about the Epstein files, Trump posted: Could you all just FOCUS on the very many other more important things to discuss than whether or not I may or MAY NOT be all over the Epstein Files? There was a BIG FLOOD in Texas. Huge flood as it relates to water. Many people DIED. Many beautiful young girls. Perhaps some not so beautiful illegal Mexican peoples as well. Perhaps drug dealers disguised as day laborers. You can never tell. They don’t speak American. That is very suspicious. Again, forget about me and the Epstein Files. Focus on MEXICANS and FLOODING.
Talking about the deadly Texas floods: You know, it’s called rain. It rains a lot in certain places. But, now their idea, you know, did you see the other day? They just, I opened it up and they closed it again. I opened it, they close it, washing machines to wash your dishes.
o REPORTER: How do you want Republican voters in NYC to vote in the upcoming mayoral election? TRUMP: We have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to. We could run DC … we’re thinking about doing it, to be honest with you.
o On July 1, 2025, a reporter from the Fox News Channel asked Trump about Alligator Alcatraz, the new detention facility in the Everglades: “Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here? Days, weeks, months?”
Trump’s reply: “In Florida? I’m going to spend a lot. Look, this is my home state. I love it, I love your government, I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine. They know very well. I mean, I’m not surprised that they do so well. They’re great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I’ll spend a lot of time here. I want to, you know, for four years, I’ve got to be in Washington, and I’m okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it—it’s like a diamond, it’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. It wasn’t maintained properly, I will tell you that. But even when it wasn’t, it was still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot. But I’ll spend as much time as I can here. You know, my vacation is generally here, because it’s convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It’s my home. And I have a very nice little place, nice little cottage to stay at, right? But we have a lot of fun, and I’m a big contributor to Florida, you know, pay a lot of tax, and a lot of people moved from New York, and I don’t know what New York is going to do. A lot of people moved to Florida from New York, and it was for a lot of reasons, but one of them was taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they’re leaving. I don’t know what New York’s going to do about that, because some of the biggest, wealthiest people, and some of the people that pay the most taxes of any people anywhere in the world, for that matter, they’re moving to Florida and other places. So we’re going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much. I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”
o “Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was, The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable – I mean, it was so much and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. It, it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch.”
o On why Trump wouldn’t call Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after the targeted shootings of state lawmakers: “I don’t really call him. He’s slick — he appointed this guy to a position. I think the governor of Minnesota is so whacked out. I’m not calling him. why would I call him? I could call him and say, ‘Hi, how you doing? The guy doesn’t have a clue. He’s a, he’s a mess. So, you know, I could be nice and call him but why waste time?”
o “[Harris’s] vice presidential pick says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth – it’s execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born – is okay.”
o Reporter – “Is there ‘a threshold’ of pain in the stock market you are unwilling to tolerate?” “I think your question is so stupid.”
o On why he decided to reopen Alcatraz: “Well, I guess I was supposed to be a moviemaker. We’re talking about, we started with the movie making it will end. I mean, it represents something very strong, very powerful in terms of law and order. Our country needs law and order. Alcatraz is, I would say, the ultimate, right? Alcatraz, Sing Sing and Alcatraz, the movies, but, uh, it’s now a museum, believe it or not. A lot of people go there. It housed the most violent criminals in the world. …It sort of represents something that’s both horrible and beautiful and strong and miserable. It’s got a lot of qualities that are interesting.”
Alcatraz
o On sea level rise with climate change: “It’s going to create more oceanfront property.”
o “Silence of the Lamb! Has anyone ever seen The Silence of the Lambs? The late, great Hannibal Lecter is a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner as this poor doctor walked by. I’m about to have a friend for dinner. But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter. We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country.”
Hannibal Lecter
o On airplanes during the revolutionary war: “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.”
Image AI-generated on ChatGTP
o “But the transgender thing is incredible, think of it! Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation, the school decides what’s going to happen with your child. And you know many of these childs (sic) 15 years later say, what the hell happened, who did this to me? They say, who did this to me? It’s incredible.”
o “Whoever heard you get indicted for interfering with a presidential election where you have every right to do it, you get indicted, and your poll numbers go up?” When people get indicted, your poll numbers go down. But it was such, such nonsense.”
o On Senator John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
o “The great pandemic certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick.”
o “I think Viagra is wonderful if you need it, if you have medical issues, if you’ve had surgery. I’ve just never needed it. Frankly, I wouldn’t mind if there were an anti-Viagra, something with the opposite effect. I’m not bragging. I’m just lucky. I don’t need it. I’ve always said, “If you need Viagra, you’re probably with the wrong girl.”
o “My fingers are long and beautiful, as it has been well documented, are various other parts of my body.”
o On consulting with others on foreign policy: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”
o On him stealing a gossip columnist’s girlfriend: “Any girl you have, I can take from you.”
o On why Napolean failed to invade Russia in the 18th century: “His one problem is he didn’t go to Russia that night because he had extracurricular activities, and they froze to death,”
o Criticizing a nuclear deal the Obama administration negotiated with Iran: “…but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is so powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us, this is horrible.”
o Responding to a complaint about illegal immigrants taking away opportunities from Americans. “It’s going to start with the Black population. African Americans are losing their jobs. And I don’t know if you heard the latest statistic, that of the jobs that these people created, which is very little, every single job was taken – about 107 percent – was taken by illegal immigrants.”
o Speaking about hurricane Florence: “This is one of the wettest we’ve seen, from the standpoint of water.”
o “Right now, in a number of states, the laws allow a baby to be born from his or her mother’s womb in. the ninth month. It is wrong. It has to change.”
o On the affect of wind turbines: “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”
o Reporter: “George W. Bush said the reason the Oval Office is round as there are no corners you can hide in.” Trump: “Well, there’s truth to that. There is truth to that. There are certainly no corners. And you look, there’s a certain openness. But there’s nobody out there. You know, there is an openness, but I’ve never seen anybody out there actually, as you could imagine.”
o On the impact of his tariffs. “You know, somebody said, ‘Oh, the shelves are going to be open. Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”
o On the Dodgers winning the 2024 World Series: “When you ran out the healthy arms, you ran out of really healthy— they had great arms but they ran out. It’s called sports. It’s called baseball in particular and pitchers I guess you could say.”
o On Project 25, which has been guiding his 2nd term: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”
o On wind power and bacon: “You take a look at bacon and some of these products. Some people don’t eat bacon anymore. And we are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down — you know, this was caused by their horrible energy — wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow, we have a little problem.”
o On his supporters storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021: “The primary scene in Washington was hundreds of thousands, the largest group of people I’ve ever spoken before, and I’ve spoken – and it was love and peace. And some people went to the Capitol. And a lot of strange things happened there. A lot of strange things with people being waved into the Capitol by police, with people screaming, go in with – that never got into trouble, you know? I don’t want to mention names, but you know who they are. A lot of strange things happened.”
Credit: BBC
o On whether Chinese ownership of TikTok is a security threat: “I think it is a threat. I – I – frankly, I think everything’s a threat. There’s nothing that’s not a threat.They do treat me very badly. Oh, and he told me no way. You’re the No. 1 person on all of Google for stories. I mean – which probably makes sense, to be honest with you. I hate (inaudible). Most of them are bad stories but these are minor details, right? Be – and it’s only bad because of the fake news, cause the news is really fake. We – that’s the one we really have to – straighten it – and we have to straighten out our press because we have a corrupt press.”
o Aug. 10, 2020: “In 1917 … the great pandemic certainly was a terrible thing where they lost anywhere from 50 to 100 million people. Probably ended the Second World War, all the soldiers were sick. That was a terrible situation.” The pandemic, due to the Spanish Flu, occurred in 1918-1919 toward the end of WWI.
o On how he would react if Playboy magazine were to feature a picture of his daughter Ivanka on its cover: “I don’t think Ivanka would do that inside the magazine. Although she does have a very nice figure. I’ve said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.”
Credit:New York Magazine
o On attractive girlfriends serving as an antidote to bad press: “You know, it doesn’t really matter what they write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.”
o On his sexual prowess: “Oftentimes when I was sleeping with one of the top women in the world I would say to myself, thinking about me as a boy from Queens, ‘Can you believe what I am getting?”
o On politics in the year 2000: . “One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government. I’d want to change that.”
o A Trump tweet at 12:06 a.m. on May 31, 2017: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”
o “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy.”
o On his superiority to “the haters”: “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure, it’s not your fault.”
o Said during a Rose Garden speech on tariffs: “It’s such an old-fashioned term, but a beautiful term: groceries. It says ‘a bag with different things in it.”
o On violent sadists being employed by the federal government: “The other thing we did is, we had civil service, 9,000 people that were crooks and thugs and sadists, a lot of sadists. They enjoyed beating up our wounded warriors in less than primetime. You know, in primetime, they would’ve gotten the hell beat out of them, but our people were in bad shape and they would beat them up. We had sadists. Can you believe this is a country? But it’s the way it is.”
o “They should give me the Nobel prize for Rwanda and have you looked at the Congo? You could say Serbia. You could say a lot of them. The big one is India and Pakistan. I should have gotten it 4-5 times. They won’t give it because they only give it to liberals.”
o On media reporting that the US aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear sites may not have” obliterated ” them as Trump asserted: “They’re really hurting great pilots that put their lives on the line. CNN is scum. And so is MSDNC, their all. I think CNN ought to apologize to the pilots of the B2s. I think MSDNC ought to apologize. I think these guys really; these networks and these cable networks are real losers. You really are. You’re real losers. You’re gutless losers. I say that to CNN, ’cause I watch it. I got no choice. I got to watch that garbage. It’s all garbage. It’s all fake news. But, I think CNN is a gutless group of people.”
o In a 1997 interview with radio personality Howard Stern , Trump claimed he was a “brave soldier” for avoiding STDs during his single years in the late ’90s. “It’s amazing, I can’t even believe it. I’ve been so lucky in terms of that whole world, it is a dangerous world out there. It’s like Vietnam, sort of. It is my personal Vietnam. I feel like a great and very brave solider,” Trump said when Stern asked how he handled making sure he wasn’t contracting STDs from the women he was sleeping with. Trump went on, calling women’s vaginas “potential landmines” and saying “there’s some real danger there.”
OK, one more.
Trump speaking at a Nevada rally on the danger of electric boats: “So I said, “Let me ask you a question.” And he said, “Nobody ever asks this question,” and it must because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart. I say, “What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now under water, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there”—by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? Lotta shark—I watched some guys justifying it today, “Well, they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were, they were . . . not hungry but they misunderstood what—who she was.” These people are crazy. He said, “There’s no problem with sharks, they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming,” no, really got decimated and other people, too, a lot of shark attacks. So I said, “There’s a shark ten yards away from the boat, ten yards, or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer. He said, “You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.” I said, “I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.” But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time.”
And none of this, of course, includes the the vitriol Trump spews on Truth Social, such as this post after CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reported that the U.S. strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities did not destroy the country’s nuclear program, but, in an initial finding that could change with additional intelligence, only set it back by months:
“Natasha Bertrand should be FIRED from CNN! I watched her for three days doing Fake News. She should be IMMEDIATELY reprimanded, and then thrown out “like a dog.” She lied on the Laptop from Hell Story, and now she lied on the Nuclear Sites Story, attempting to destroy our Patriot Pilots by making them look bad when, in fact, they did a GREAT job and hit “pay dirt” — TOTAL OBLITERATION! She should not be allowed to work at Fake News CNN. It’s people like her who destroyed the reputation of a once great Network. Her slant was so obviously negative, besides, she doesn’t have what it takes to be an on camera correspondent, not even close. FIRE NATASHA!”
Kseniia Petrova (Polina Pugacheva, via Associated Press)
UPDATE
On May 28, the New York Times reported that a federal judge said she would grant bail to Ksenia Petrova in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing. She added that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.
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To what levels of uncaring depravity have we sunk?
U.S. Government lawyers told a federal judge today that the Trump administration intends to deport a Harvard scientist back to Russia, a country she fled in 2022, despite her fear that she will be arrested there over her protest of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The New York Times reported the action today.
Christina Reiss, chief judge of the United States District Court in Vermont, asked the government to clarify whether or not it planned to deport Ms. Kseniia Petrova to Russia.
“You are asking for her removal to Russia?” she asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Jeffrey M. Hartman, an attorney representing the Department of Justice, replied, according to the Times.
That this is taking place in Donald Trump’s America is a travesty.
Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Returning to Boston’s Logan International Airport from a trip to France, she brought back frog embryo samples for her lab. The PBS News Hour reported on April 24 that ICE said she knowingly broke the law in failing to properly declare the embryos. According to the News Hour, A typical customs violation results in a fine, but Petrova had her visa revoked, was detained and flagged for deportation.
In moves more common in a police state, where people are swiftly moved from place to place to avoid detection, ICE first sent Petrova to a cell at the airport. The next day they transferred her to a jail in Vermont. She spent the next week there. Then ICE flew Petrova to detention in Louisiana. She has now been imprisoned at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana for two months in a one-room facility with 89 other women, wall-to-wall beds and almost no personal privacy. Yes, for two months now.
The News Hour reported that Petrova has been a vocal critic of the Russian government and its actions in Ukraine and fears persecution if deported there. “I am afraid that, if I come to Russia, I will be arrested, because we have in Russia special law,” she said. “If you say something against current war, you will be imprisoned, and you can be imprisoned for 15 years.”
“ICE is required to detain individuals … only if they are a flight risk or a danger to the community. Ms. Petrova is neither,” said her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky. “Her continued detention serves no purpose and wastes limited government resources.”
The Trump administration, banking on the support of its most dedicated backers, is running roughshod over human rights right here in America.
Remember when the eight-time WNBA All-Star, Britney Griner, was arrested in 2022 at a Moscow airport on drug-related charges? She was detained for nearly 10 months, spending much of that time in prison. American public and political outrage was severe and her supporters pressed the White House hard to bring her home.
“I’m terrified I might be here forever,” Griner said in a handwritten letter to President Biden appealing for her freedom.
Apparently, America learned a lesson from Griner’s imprisonment. But it was the wrong one.
Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Returning to Boston’s Logan International Airport from a trip to France, she brought back frog embryo samples for her lab. The PBS News Hour reported on April 24 that ICE said she knowingly broke the law in failing to properly declare the embryos. According to the News Hour, A typical customs violation results in a fine, but Petrova had her visa revoked, was detained and flagged for deportation.
In moves more common in a police state, where people are swiftly moved from place to place to avoid detection, ICE first sent Petrova to a cell at the airport. The next day they transferred her to a jail in Vermont. She spent the next week there. Then ICE flew Petrova to detention in Louisiana. She has now been imprisoned at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana for two months in a one-room facility with 89 other women, wall-to-wall beds and almost no personal privacy. Yes, for two months now.
She has an immigration court hearing scheduled for May 7 in Jena, Louisiana, related to her asylum case.
The News Hour reported that Petrova has been a vocal critic of the Russian government and its actions in Ukraine and fears persecution if deported there. “I am afraid that, if I come to Russia, I will be arrested, because we have in Russia special law,” she said. “If you say something against current war, you will be imprisoned, and you can be imprisoned for 15 years.”
“ICE is required to detain individuals … only if they are a flight risk or a danger to the community. Ms. Petrova is neither,” said her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky. “Her continued detention serves no purpose and wastes limited government resources.”
He has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Vermont, arguing that a declaration issue doesn’t justify detention and the government failed to follow standard protocol.
NPR reported that earlier this week, during a preliminary hearing, a Louisiana immigration judge found the government’s case to be legally insufficient and ruled that the Notice to Appear, the document that initiates deportation proceedings, did not meet legal standards. The judge gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement one week to submit stronger evidence.
The Trump administration, banking on the support of its most dedicated backers, is running roughshod over human rights right here in America.
“The American people have given Donald Trump ultimate power,” says Paul Glastris, editor in chief of the Washington Monthly, “They’re going to get the Trump agenda, good and hard.”
America’s “immigration crisis” is a “massive invasion” spreading “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land” and the nation’s cities are being “flooded” by the “greatest invasion in history” of undesirables from “every corner of the earth, not just from South America, but from Africa, Asia, Middle East,” Donald Trump bellowed at the Republican National Convention in July 2024. “They’re coming from prisons. They’re coming from jails. They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. We have to stop the invasion into our country that’s killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”
Did you miss Trump describing migrants as “vermin” who would “poison the blood of the country”? How about when he said in 2023 that some South American countries were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” to send the patients to the United States as migrants.
You likely didn’t miss Trump’s solution? “Carry out the largest deportation operation in American history” the Republican platform said in “one of a series of bold promises that we will swiftly implement” Trump promised. Huddled masses, yearning to breathe free? Not in Trump country. Deport ’em all.
Easier said than done.
First, let’s talk about numbers.
In 2021, when Joe Biden took office, the figures thrown around for the number of undocumented/illegal/unauthorized/ (whatever word you choose) immigrants in the United States varied by a million or so. The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) put the number at 11.2 million. The Center for Migration Studies said there were approximately 10.3 million.
Curiously, much of the media coverage of the immigration situation today continues to use the 11 million figure, despite the upsurge in border crossings. That may be a sign of lazy reporting, purposefully misleading numbers for ideological reasons, different collections methods or confusion over how to count migrants.
Trump’s numbers have been all over the map. In March 2024, he said 15 million migrants had crossed into the United States border over just the past two years. In August, he said 10 million had come across the border since Biden took office. In later election rallies, he cited a 20 million crossings figure during Biden’s tenure as president. .And in his one televised debate with Kamala Harris he claimed 21 million migrants were crossing the border every single month.
One number often used to track migrants is “encounters” with migrants, including people who tried to cross into the US illegally and people who tried to enter legally but were deemed inadmissible. According to the Border Patrol, since Biden became president in January 2021, there have been more than 10 million encounters, about 8 million of those at the southwest land border with Mexico, up from 2.4 million encounters during the Trump administration. The number is not, however, a reliable count of people who stay in the US. Some are sent back and some are counted multiple times from multiple attempts to cross the border. The encounters number also, obviously, do not count those who manage to slip across the border and escape undetected.
Compounding the numbers problem, the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump wants to “revoke deportation protections from millions of immigrants, including tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians allowed in after the Russian invasion.”
Whatever the accurate number, it’s one hell of a lot of people, about equal to the entire population of Georgia.
How exactly does Trump plan to deport them all?
Is he going to demand that the military, the FBI, the Border Patrol, local police, the whole shebang of law enforcement, round them up and put them in detention centers?
On Nov. 18, The New York Times reported Trump had confirmed that he intended to declare a national emergency and use the U.S. military in some form to assist in his plans for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
The Times said Trump used his social media platform, Truth Social, to respond to a post made earlier in November by Tom Fitton, who runs the conservative group Judicial Watch, and who wrote that Mr. Trump’s administration would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to address illegal immigration “through a mass deportation program.” At around 4 a.m. on the 18th, Mr. Trump reposted Mr. Fitton’s post with the comment, “TRUE!!!”
Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, told the Times earlier in 2024 said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries. The Homeland Security Department would run the facilities, Miller said.
Is he going to commandeer railroad lines, planes and riverboats to ferry them to the Mexican border?
How’s Trump going to pay for this massive deportation program? The American Immigration Council, an admittedly pro- immigrant group, says the cost of deporting 13 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally could cost $968 billion over a little more than a decade.
Then there are the courts. Do Trump’ and his henchmen expect the American Civil Liberties Union and immigrant advocacy groups to forego court battles if Trump again tests the bounds of his legal authority. The ACLU’s website already promises, “Starting on day one, we’re ready to fight for our civil liberties and civil rights in the courts, in Congress, and in our communities. We did it during his first term – filing 434 legal actions against Trump while he was in office – and we’ll do it again.”
Of course, no matter what Trump wants to do, not all countries will be willing to accept the return of their citizens. Trump faced that problem in his first term.
In a 2016 speech in Phoenix, Trump said, “There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they’ve been ordered to leave the United States, including large numbers of violent criminals. They won’t take them back. So we say, ‘Okay, we’ll keep them.’ “Not going to happen with me, not going to happen with me.”
Not so fast, Mr. Trump. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) defines any country that fails to cooperate with the U.S. immigration removal process as “recalcitrant”. According to ICE, “Uncooperative countries significantly exacerbate the challenges presented to ICE by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Zadvydas v. Davis, 533 U.S. 678 (2001). In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that: With narrow exceptions, noncitizens with final orders of removal — including noncitizens determined to pose threats to the community or considered flight risks — may not be detained by ICE beyond a presumptively reasonable period of six months if there is no “significant likelihood of removal in the reasonably foreseeable future”.
The Trump administration may also encounter enforcement resistance from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions across the country, which include: Alameda, Berkeley, Fremont, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco (county and city), San Mateo County, Santa Ana, Santa Clara County, and Watsonville in California; Boulder and Denver in Colorado; King County, Seattle, and Walla Walla County in Washington; Portland in Oregon; and even Washington, D.C. The Los Angeles City Council has already voted to prohibit city resources from being used for federal immigration enforcement.
“Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken,” Trump said at the Republican Convention. “By the way, you know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.” But not all employers will likely be cooperative in immigrant sweeps. The Pew Research Center estimated that unauthorized immigrants represented about 4.8% of the U.S. workforce in 2022. About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, for example, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country, About two-thirds of U.S. crop-farm workers are foreign-born, and 42% aren’t legally authorized to work in the country, according to a Labor Department report.
“Implementing Trump’s (deportation) plan would be a logistical nightmare and social tragedy, with consequences reverberating beyond the deportees and into the lives of over 20 million people living in mixed-status households, including 5.5 million U.S.-born children suddenly missing one or both parents,” the Center asserts.
Then, no matter how individuals voted, there’s the question of how Americans across the board are going to respond to Trump’s draconian deportation program once it hits their neighborhood. I expect there will be a backlash. I couldn’t put it better than Yascha Benjamin Mounk, Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. In a post-election podcast conversation with American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Mounk said:
“When you have very lax policies and high levels of illegal immigration, people say, “clamp down, we want to close the border,” and the moment you start doing the things you actually need to do to clamp down, they start to say, “well, hang on a second, I didn’t want this kid to die. I didn’t want those kids to be separated from their parents. I didn’t want this particular member of the community, who’s been here for 25 years and who seems like a very good and reasonable person, to suddenly be taken and sent back to where they came from.” And so I think even on that issue, which was a winning issue of Trump’s and which he clearly has a popular mandate…he may quite quickly lose public support, nevertheless.”
ThinkingOregon 