Speaking of serving Mammon, the price of Trump's Golden Visa has just been cut by 80%, but the workaround scheme to let rich people cut in line may backfire

And you thought only National Popular Vote liberals were capable of end-runs.

 

The global wealthy are lining up for Trump’s $1 million Gold Card after price cut

 

... “The Gold Card is almost too cheap,” said Reaz Jafri of international law firm Withers. “You get access to the U.S. education system, health-care system, banking system and financial markets, all for $1 million. It’s a pittance for many of these families. I think they should have kept it at $5 million to make it special.” ... 

 

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the government plans to issue 80,000 Gold Cards. Together with potential Platinum Card and the new H-1B fees, which were raised to $100,000, he said the programs are expected to raise $100 billion in federal revenue. ...

 

The program is also likely to be challenged in the courts and potentially by Congress. Because immigration law is set by Congress, the president created the Gold Card through several legal workarounds, including using the existing EB-1 and EB-2 programs as the infrastructure or basis for the Gold Card. The $1 million fee is officially labeled an “unrestricted gift” to the government rather than an official fee change. ...

 

The EB-1 and EB-2 programs (which form the basis for the Gold Card) already have large backlogs of applicants from China and India, stretching for years. If Gold Card buyers are allowed to skip to the front of the line because of their $1 million donation, the applicants who have been waiting could file lawsuits. At the same time, Gold Card buyers won’t be willing to spend $1 million if they’re forced to wait years for approval. ...

So Trump's border czar took a bribe last fall in an FBI sting operation, a paper bag with $50k cash in it

 

 The Trump Department of Injustice dropped the case.

So where's the money then? In Bob Menendez' closet? 

 

 

It's laughable to say that Charlie Kirk was squarely at the median of American politics

 It would be an example of extremism if a voter advocated for the death penalty for Joe Biden for his immigration policy crimes, as Charlie Kirk did in July 2023.

What Joe Biden did with immigration policy, which is basically let them all in, which by the way he promised in his campaign for president in 2020 in nationally televised debates, is indeed criminal to many of us on the right. But we know that presidents get away with murder. We ought to change that, too, but presidents are in fact immune. 

 

 

Foreign born employment actually recovered by 50,000 in August 2025 while native born employment fell by 561,000, and the Trump administration, unlike last month, is pretty quiet about it lol

 

Let's cut to the chase: They need the National Guard to protect ICE from the people

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 wonder how many illegal immigrants from Poland Trump will be rounding up in Chicago lol

There were still 50,000 illegal Poles in the United States in 2016.

 Sources: Feds Secure Naval Station Great Lakes for Immigration Blitz

Immigrant worker shortage impacts produce quality at Sam's Club?

 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.

 

 

  

Why do Republican led states have such a problem with illegal immigration that only the National Guard can solve?

Illegal immigration theatre for the folks!

The Detroit News: Harvest of hand-picked crops in Michigan in immediate peril due to Trump deportation program, prices set to rocket higher

 Editorial: Trump must act quickly to avert a harvest crisis

The immigration crisis at the southern border has been replaced by one in America's orchards and farm fields.

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.

Oh No! They're eating the peacocks . . .

 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.” ...

Gallup poll shows backlash to ugly Trump immigration enforcement, record 79% now say immigration is a good thing

 

 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.

More. 

They're leaving the dogs, they're leaving the cats . . .

 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. ...

Trump is threatening to throttle Elon Musk's opposition to the bill in the US Senate, which still hasn't been voted on after 24 hours of debate, by deporting him

 

Maureen Dowd: This is the moment when we find out just how mad a king Donald Trump is

 

 Who's the Mad King Now?:

... 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.”

It ain't over, but 3 judge panel of Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals votes unanimously to let Trump keep control of California National Guard troops

 Appeals court lets Trump keep control of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles

 

 ... In its decision, a three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously concluded it was likely Trump lawfully exercised his authority in federalizing control of the guard.

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. ...

These guys want to talk about the 802k foreign born who left in April, not about the 1.6m who arrived in January lol

 

Center For Immigration Studies Estimates One Million Illegal Aliens Left U.S. In First Half Of 2025

 

There is nothing remarkable about the recent decline in foreign born population in comparison with the immediate past under Biden, when 945k left in April 2024 and 896k left in June 2023.

 

The numbers are noisy if nothing else, and go back only to January 2007. 

That said, the January surge is probably more about the revisions of the data for the previous year than about anything else. 

 

About 6.1 million foreign born entered the country in 2021 through 2024 in this data, after about 629k left in 2020. In 2025 through May, about 849k have left, but May is notably flat from April.

 

You could just as easily say the May numbers indicate Trump's policies have been a complete failure. 

 

I would be more sanguine about attributing an exodus of foreign born to the new Trump policies if the leavers were much larger in number than recently, but they are not. 

 

In my book, Trump needs to get the foreign born population back down to 43.5 million, his 2019 peak. Anything less is not a victory. 

 

 

 

Mad King Ludwig restarts agricultural deportations, says the real illegal alien problem is the criminal ones in the big cities

 

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.”

Daily Beast reporter demotes Stephen Miller to deputy press secretary, still can't spell feud after correcting story lol

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 The White what?

https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-miller-and-ice-barbie-kristi-noem-in-bitter-west-wing-civil-war-over-round-ups/

Like the soul of the tyrant himself, Trump's administration is beset with fear and is full of convulsions and distractions, including on immigration enforcement, reversing last week's pause on deportations

 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 

Story. 

TACO Trump chickens out on more than just tariffs, calls off the ICE raids on agriculture, restaurant, and hotel jobs to quell heartland rebellion

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.

Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants. ... 

 

Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. ... 

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.