In Colorado’s June 2026 primaries, 29-year-old Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros unseated 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in the dark-blue 1st Congressional District, which consists largely of Denver residents.
As the overwhelming favorite against her Republican opponent in November’s general election, Kiros, 29, is expected to be the first self-identified socialist to be elected to Congress in Colorado history.
“We just proved that if you organize the people, you can beat the organized money,” Kiros told Colorado Newsline after her win. “And we’re going to replicate it in races all across the state.”
Will they?
Before pundits and the public accept this assertion, let’s step back and examine what just happened in Colorado’s 1stCongressional District.
The numbers suggest that the real victor was voter apathy, as in so many political contests across the country. Non-voters default to being led by the preferences of voters. That, combined with the creation of safe party districts, is increasingly turning primaries into the real elections.
Bear with me now.
In looking at the 1st Congressional District race, it’s important to recognize that it was limited to registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters. There are 477,098 active registered voters in the district. Of those, 187,317 are registered as Democrats and 236,454 are registered as Unaffiliated voters. So, the number of eligible voters in the Democratic primary totaled 423,771.
But only 157,645 people, or 37.2 % of those eligible, voted in the primary.
That translated into 83,855 for Kiros, 62,715 for DeGette and 11,075 for the Democratic party candidate, Wanda James. In other words, the Democratic Socialist Melat Kiros won the primary with just 19.79 % of eligible voters, only a few more than would fit in the Denver Bronco’s stadium.
Overwhelming? A massive sign of a cultural shift? A rejection of a more moderate political climate? I don’t think so.
A similar situation in New York City is why caution is warranted in interpreting recent races.
“Turnout in New York’s closed primary races is typically small—even Mamdani won last year’s Democratic mayoral primary with less than 7 percent of the city’s overall population backing him,” City Journal reported. “Tuesday’s results do not prove, then, that the majority of residents in New York are hard-left socialists. They instead suggest that, since most potential voters remain politically apathetic, a small but well-organized machine like the DSA’s can deliver big results.”
There’s a parallel here with Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George’s victory in Washington, D.C’s mayoral Democratic primary, which has led some to declare her win a mandate. There are approximately 357,000 registered Democrats in Washington, D.C., making up roughly 75% of all registered voters in the District. Only about 38% of registered Democrats voted and George won with just 75,000 votes. A mandate? Hardly.
So, calm down folks.
This isn’t to say that the new socialist legislators in the House won’t be able to muck things up.
As commentator Gerard Baker has observed, “The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia. Sure, we can overstate its importance. New York isn’t America. What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country.”
In addition, if Democrats retake the House in November, their margin is likely to be slim and an enlarged cadre of disruptors will be able to challenge leadership. Republicans are also likely to try to tar the entire Democratic Party for its association with the Democratic Socialists. President Trump has already called the socialist nominees “godless” communists who are threatening the country. At a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, he urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms,saying his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power.
Hyperventilating political prognosticators don’t always get it right.
“(New York City) Mayor Zohran Mamdani and his Democratic Socialists of America are now the most capable political force in the Democratic Party heading into 2028,” John Ketcham and Christian Browne at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative policy think tank, just wrote in City Journal. “In yesterday’s primaries in New York, his three endorsed candidates beat better-established adversaries, demonstrating how Mamdani and the DSA have become the face of the party’s progressive wing.”
“…the Democratic Party has been taken over by socialists,” says Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who represents a suburban New York House seat.
Zeteo, a left-leaning digital media company, says “a new politics is brewing. And the epicenter is New York City.”
Wait a minute. Before other pundits and the public accept this assertion, let’s step back and examine what just happened in New York City, focusing on one of the winning socialist candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier.
32-year-old Chevalier is no shrinking violet. In 2020, she branded Joe Biden a “rapist” and a “war criminal” and called the US a “fucking disgrace”. The day after the horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre of Jews in Israel, she joined a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square organized by leftist groups that appeared to celebrate the event. In posts onTwitter from 2018 through 2022, she maligned interracial relationships. She’s written that Russia invaded Ukraine because the United States had “been bullying Russia”. In a tweet disparaging America, she wrote, “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”.
Voter apathy in primary races is the culprit here, as in so many political contests across the country. That, combined with the creation of safe districts across the country, is increasingly causing primaries to be the real elections.
In looking at the New York primary race, it’s important to recognize not only that the race was limited to registered Democrats, of which there are 373,000 in the District NY-13, but that only 67,473 voters participated in the primary, or 18.09 percent. That allowed the Democratic Socialists to wield disproportionate influence. Of those, who bothered to vote, just 32,790 voted for Chevalier, who came out ahead of her main challenger, Adriano Espaillat, by only 2,326 votes.
City Journal acknowledged this in a post on June 27: “Turnout in New York’s closed primary races is typically small—even Mamdani won last year’s Democratic mayoral primary with less than 7 percent of the city’s overall population backing him. Tuesday’s results do not prove, then, that the majority of residents in New York are hard-left socialists. They instead suggest that, since most potential voters remain politically apathetic, a small but well-organized machine like the DSA’s can deliver big results.”
There’s a parallel here with Democratic Socialist Janeese Lewis George’s victory in Washington, D.C’s mayoral Democratic primary, which has led some to declare her win a mandate. There are approximately 357,000 registered Democrats in Washington, D.C., making up roughly 75% of all registered voters in the District. Only about 38% of registered Democrats voted and Janeese Lewis George won with just 75,000 votes. A mandate? Hardly.
So, calm down folks.
This isn’t to say, however, that the new socialist legislators in the House, largely a result of voter lethargy, won’t muck things up.
As commentator Gerard Baker has observed, “The victory by “democratic socialists” and their allies in New York Democratic primaries last week is a signal moment in the nation’s descent into political dystopia. In it we see a Democratic base, relatively small in number but energized by anti-Trump rage, that has decided that the Black Lives Matter, No Such Thing as a Woman, Mostly Peaceful Rioting that the party nourished under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is too timid for their tastes.
Sure, we can overstate its importance. New York isn’t America. What passes for cool radicalism in Brooklyn’s Park Slope would get you a psychiatric evaluation in most of the country.”
Also, even if the Democrats retake the House in November, their margin is likely to be slim and an enlarged cadre of disruptors will be able to challenge leadership. Republicans are also likely to try to tar the entire Democratic Party for its association with the Democratic Socialists. President Trump has already called the socialist nominees “godless” communists who are threatening the country. At a Faith and Freedom Coalition gathering, he urged religious conservatives to prevent a “communist” victory in the midterms,saying his pro-Christian policies would be reversed if Democrats returned to power.
And right on cue, Mike Marinella, a spokesperson for National Republican Congressional Committee, said, “Tonight wasn’t just a bad night for so-called ‘Leader’ Hakeem Jeffries. It was the night the Democrat establishment officially surrendered to Zohran Mamdani and the socialist wing of their party. Every House Democrat, in safe and competitive districts alike, will now answer to the radicals calling the shots. And Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”
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.”
