If Trump were really serious about deportations, he'd be going after the employers, which would be far easier than going after eleventy million illegals or whatever it is.
That's how you know this is all fake, all performative.
It is deportation theatre, from beginning to end.
The goal is 3,000 deportations a day, which over four years is only 4.3 million.
It is unserious policy, for an unserious country, but it is going to cost serious money.
I bought six heads of romaine lettuce yesterday like I usually do at Sam's Club every couple of weeks, for $4.46.
Such a deal, right?
Well, this has never happened before in years of shopping at Sam's: the cores were rotten. I barely salvaged half of it.
I also bought a five pound bag of organic carrots, for $3.62. That's always a great deal at Sam's, except this time all the carrots in the bin were THIN, THIN, THIN, and LIMP.
Summer weather is hard on such produce in any case, but I've been buying this stuff year round at Sam's for years and have never experienced this.
I should have taken the stuff back, but I do live in the country and I have compost piles.
Worms gotta eat, same as buzzards.
Illegal immigration theatre for the folks!
Editorial: Trump must act quickly to avert a harvest crisis
With harvest season about to begin in earnest, farmers are desperate for laborers to pick their fruit and vegetables. Already in the Pacific Northwest, much of the cherry crop was left to rot because of the shortage of agricultural workers.
The crisis will soon roll into Michigan, where apples, cherries, blueberries, asparagus and other crops are rapidly ripening. Hand-picked specialty crops are a $6.3 billion industry in Michigan, supporting 41,000 jobs.
The shortage of farm workers has been building for years, due to an aging agricultural workforce, competition from more lucrative and less grueling jobs and restrictions on immigrant labor.
This year, it is exacerbated by the Trump administration's crackdown on unauthorized immigrants and the deportation of those who have entered the country illegally.
Estimates are that 42% of farm workers are undocumented migrants. Recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on farms employing migrants have frightened away many of those workers from the fields where they had been working.
But the work they do hasn't gone away. Fruit and vegetables still need to be harvested. If they're not, it will lead to food waste, shortages and higher prices on the grocery shelves.
When asked about the worker shortage, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said the solution lies in greater mechanization of farms and matching the 34 million able bodied Americans who must find jobs or lose their Medicaid benefits with farmers who need workers.
While Rollins is correct that those who can work should be expected to, it's doubtful even the risk of losing health care benefits will coax the jobless into hot, backbreaking farm work.
Her solutions will take time and large capital investments. They won't save this year's harvest.
The Trump administration must take emergency action to assure there are enough workers to bring in the crops this summer and fall.
Rather than deporting migrants willing to fill essential jobs such as harvesting, the administration should grant them seasonal visas and a no-deportation guarantee as long as they are working on farms.
Beyond that, reform is needed for the H-2A visa program that allows farmers to legally employ temporary workers from another country. The application process is too complex and time-consuming. It must be simplified; farmers need help now.
Also at issue is the federal mandatory minimum wage for H-2A visa holders, now set at $18.50 an hour. That's nearly $8 an hour higher than the state minimum wage in Michigan. When added to housing and other costs for these workers, many farmers have to limit their use of the visas.
Longer term, resources should be devoted to recruiting domestic workers for the agriculture industry. Farmers are also being encouraged to raise wages for native-born workers, add benefits and improve working conditions.
All of that is expensive and will inevitably show up in grocery prices. But so will the shortages caused by allowing crops to rot in fields.
The most sensible option for this season is to back off deportation of farm workers while solutions are pursued for either replacing them or giving them legal status.
37 peacocks reported missing from historic hotel...
... He added that the four remaining peacocks at the hotel are acting upset and demonstrating behavior he has “never seen from them before.” ...
The percentage saying immigration is a good thing has been slowly rising since the 2002 low at 52% to a record high 79% now.
The percentage saying it's a bad thing has been steadily falling since the 2002 high at 42%, now at just 17%, a record low.
The ten-point underwater spread in 2002 is now sixty-two points in 2025.
Donald Trump has completely botched the issue, putting the stink of his ugly behavior on it for the foreseeable future.
ICE raids are leaving some L.A. cats and dogs homeless
... Pets belonging to people who are deported or flee are being left in empty apartments, dumped into the laps of unprepared friends and dropped off at overcrowded shelters, The Times found.
"Unless people do take the initiative [and get the pets out], those animals will starve to death in those backyards or those homes," said Yvette Berke, outreach manager for Cats at the Studios, a rescue that serves L.A. ...
"Pets are like the collateral damage to the current political climate,” said Jennifer Naitaki, vice president of programs and strategic initiatives at the Michelson Found Animals Foundation. ...
... As the “No Kings” resistance among Democrats bristles, and as President Trump continues to defy limits on executive power, it is instructive to examine comparisons of President Trump to George III. ...
Atkinson said that the only similarity between the pious monarch and the impious monarch manqué is “the use of the military against their own people to enforce the king’s will. There are incidents, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party.”
He added: “This proclivity for using armed forces for domestic suppression of dissent. That’s a slippery slope in this country. It led to an eight-year war when George did it, and Lord knows where it’s going to lead this time.” ...
“The fact that we’re looking for a monarch to draw parallels to him is telling in and of itself, because that’s not what we do. That’s what the whole shooting match was about in the 1770s.”
Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles
It said that while presidents don’t have unfettered power to seize control of a state’s guard, the Trump administration had presented enough evidence to show it had a defensible rationale for doing so, citing violent acts by protesters. ...
Trump yanks brief reprieve for immigrants he said are ‘good, long time workers’
The Trump administration has reopened arrests of immigrant workers at hotels, restaurants and agricultural businesses, backtracking on the brief reprieve they got after President Donald Trump stated they were necessary, good, longtime workers whose jobs were almost “impossible” to replace. ...
The announcement backpedals on Trump’s statement last week on social media that “changes are coming” after farmers and hotel and leisure business employers had complained that “our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.”
Just six days ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement paused arrests at worksites in agriculture industries, including fisheries and meatpacking plants, restaurants and hotels, according to an internal policy memo obtained by NBC News last Thursday. ...
Asked about the change during a gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One on his return from the G7 summit, Trump said: “We’re going to look everywhere. But I think the biggest problem is the inner cities.” ...
Trump said cities are where “the really bad ones are, the murderers.”
“We’re going to get them out,” Trump said. “There are far more in the inner cities, Democrat-run cities, sadly, and I’m just giving you, there’s far more in there than you have on a farm or someplace.”
The White what?
https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-and-ice-barbie-kristi-noem-in-bitter-west-wing-civil-war-over-round-ups/
All his life long he is beset with fear and is full of convulsions, and distractions, even as the State which he resembles.
-- Plato, Republic
Stephen Miller most hurt.
On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.
But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” ...
More.
Observe again how quickly Trump is to turn on a dime. The policy changed in less than 48 hours. The last person he talked to can be the most influential, which is not what you want from the leader of the free world. Sometimes he stumbles into the right decision, to be sure, but he can always stumble the wrong way. The tyrant's soul resembles the state which he rules, full of chaos and conflicting desires which he is utterly unable to satisfy.
Imagine if the Democrats interfered like this in Wyoming or West Virginia. Republicans would throw a fit like they're doing in LA.
... At one point, the judge said, “We live in response to a monarchy,” noting that there is a difference between the president and King George III, the British monarch on the throne at the time of the American Revolution.
“At this early stage of the proceedings, the Court must determine whether the President followed the congressionally mandated procedure for his actions. He did not,” Breyer wrote in his order.
“His actions were illegal — both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the judge wrote. “He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith.”
Breyer said that none of the three conditions required for Trump’s federalization of the Guard under a certain federal statute existed, namely the U.S. having been invaded or in danger of being invaded; a “rebellion” against the federal government; or the president being unable to execute U.S. laws.
“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’ ” Breyer wrote.
And he said that “regardless” of the outcome of California’s lawsuit against the administration, Trump’s federalizing of the Guard without the consent of Newsom “alone threatens serious injury to the constitutional balance of power between the federal and state governments.”
“And it sets a dangerous precedent for future domestic military activity,” Breyer added. ...
More.
... the White House deputy chief of staff — and chief architect of Trump’s immigration agenda — is taking a sledgehammer to what remains of the libertarian-conservative fusionism that was prominent in the party pre-Trump.
“The libertarians in the House and Senate trying to take down this bill — they’re not stupid. They just don’t care,” Miller said in an interview with conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk last week.
“Immigration has never mattered to them; it will never matter to them. Deportations have never mattered to them; it will never matter to them. You will never live a day in your life where a libertarian cares as much about immigration and sovereignty as they do about the Congressional Budget Office.” ...
Miller’s aversion to libertarians, though, seems to go deeper than opportunistic messaging for the bill. He posted in 2022 that the uprising of the ideology in the House GOP is “how we ended up with open borders globalist [Paul] Ryan.” He blamed libertarian candidates for siphoning votes away from failed Trump-endorsed candidates in 2022 — Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Don Bolduc in New Hampshire.
“Another example of how libertarians ruin everything,” Miller said in one post responding to a 2022 Georgia Senate poll. ...
More.
The CBS Poll referenced in the story indicates 55% like Trump's deportation goals but 56% dislike his approach.
Polling on the reconciliation bill indicates most think it will help the wealthy and hurt poor and middle class people, with a third admitting they have no idea what's in the bill. Well, neither did many in the US House who voted for the damn thing.
This points up the political danger of these Christmas Tree bills adorned with something for everyone. They're too complicated to understand and therefore capture little enthusiasm. But Stephen Miller fancifully thinks otherwise:
“By including the immigration language with the tax cuts with the welfare reform, it creates a coalition. Politics is all about coalitions,” Miller said in the interview with Kirk — also praising Trump in the interview as “able to create a winning formula for populist, nationalist, conservative government.”
But not libertarian government.
