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The Medicaid cuts are terrible; the ICE expansions are even worse.
f you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And if you have $75 billion over four years in new funding for ICE, you—Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan—will use it to fund a huge domestic army to round up four million people in the next three years, put them in “detention centers” and deport them.
If these cruel men planned to go after criminals, as they claimed, they would have needed only a fraction of the money that Republican lawmakers just gave them. And ending the genuine shortfall in the Department of Homeland Security budget doesn’t require this kind of dough.
So with virtually unlimited funds, they’ll make up for lost time. We’re already witnessing swarms of masked agents grabbing people off the street. Within weeks, it’ll get a lot worse. The grandma who has been here for 30 years paying taxes; the Dreamer college student who has been thoroughly American since he was a toddler; the small business owner who gets a traffic ticket—3,000 of them a day will be ripped from their families, sent to a prison and shipped to a country where they don’t know anyone.
Count on it. The iron law of government budgeting is use-it-or-lose-it. Only bureaucratic fools have money left over at the end of the fiscal year. ICE will spend billions on meeting Chief Homan’s arbitrary and inhumane quotas—the same kind of arrest quotas that drive police states all over the world, as Ronan Farrow has explained.
And the thousands of new Border Patrol agents? They already bring to mind those old ads about the Maytag Repairman—waiting in vain for something to happen. With border crossings plummeting, it’s only a matter of time before they’re shifted north for an even heavier presence in blue urban America.
Before long, many of us won’t even notice the roundups, just as white Californians in 1942 didn’t pay much heed when their Japanese-American neighbors were whisked away to detention camps in the desert.
That was an inexcusable act, but the conditions in those camps, while spare and dehumanizing, were not as bad as in the “Alligator Alcatraz” that Trump is gloating over. These will be jails—not camps—built to be as close to the abusive Salvadoran model as the president can make them. And the scale of his migrant gulag is much larger. All told, about 120,000 Japanese were interned. The capacity of the new detention centers is planned to be roughly 120,000 per day.
With most detainees only weeks or months from deportation, that means millions of new migrants cycling through. Many will have done nothing worse than Trump’s German immigrant grandparents (and my Jewish grandmother) did a century ago, namely, overstaying their visas. Of course, if they happen to be employed at a golf course or hotel (exempted by Trump for obvious personal reasons), they wouldn’t be in jail in the first place. Here’s where we’re headed: If migrants work on farms or in slaughterhouses (lots of both in red states), or a kitchen (hospitality), they’re OK or maybe even headed for amnesty, as Trump—to the dismay of MAGA—hinted last week. But if they cut grass, clean houses, or work in other occupations unprotected by the Dear Leader, off to jail you go.
Look, I’m appalled by almost everything in the Big Ugly Bill. (The exceptions are the slight expansion of the Child Tax Credit and “Trump Accounts”—baby bonds that are a good idea and can be made bigger over time.) The cuts to the social safety net are much worse than the ones I covered at the beginning of the Reagan Administration. Thousands of people will delay going to the doctor when they’re sick and will die earlier than they would otherwise. And the “Big Ugly” is an IED set to explode inside state budgets.
But we have more reasons for hope on Medicaid than we do on mass deportation. Several Republicans know that these provisions hurt their voters, and they claim they will try to restore at least some of the money. Even if they’re lying about that (a good bet), the nasty enrollment obstacles can be at least partially overcome. Non-profits will develop apps to cut through the burdensome paperwork that Trumpsters assume will dissuade many poorer Americans from applying for benefits, and volunteers can go door-to-door to make sure people know how to use them (a good way to feel useful in the Trump era). And if Democrats take the House in 2026, which is likely, they can use the appropriation process to make sure that at least some of the “Trumpcare” cuts scheduled for 2027 are not carried out.
By contrast, the money for ICE seems more locked in. Democrats will be afraid to cut it. And the numbers are huge: $45 billion for “immigration detention capacity” will make that budget more than 30 percent larger than that of the entire U.S. federal prison system, which already has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. And nearly $30 billion for ICE enforcement and deportation will make ICE larger than almost every army in the world.
On top of this, Congress might as well tear down the Statue of Liberty and flush Emma Lazarus’s poem down the toilet. For those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, Trump capped the number of immigration judges at 800. This means the record backlogs in asylum cases will get a lot worse.
Ever since the emergence of the anti-immigrant “Know Nothing” Party in the 1850s, American attitudes toward immigration have always moved along a sine curve. In the late 19th Century, fears of a “Yellow Peril” led to racist restrictions on Asian immigration. The mean-spirited Immigration Act of 1924 essentially barred anyone who wasn’t from northern Europe and set the stage for the SS St. Louis tragedy (German Jews rebuffed at a Cuban port in 1939, with many returning to die in the Holocaust). In the 1930s and 1940s, around two million migrants— mostly Mexican—were deported, often on vessels that resembled slave ships, and in 1955, President Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” led to the rapid deportation of 250,000 Mexicans.
Each of these outbreaks of nativism was followed by periods of tolerance and greater appreciation of our true heritage as a nation of immigrants.
Polls show that Americans want secure borders, but they don’t favor mass deportation. The pushback has already begun, with cell phone cameras helping bear witness to roundups, aggressive litigation, and pledges by state and local Democratic officeholders not to help ICE, which Trump will try and fail to do anything about. (No, he cannot arrest Zohran Mamdani.)
For the last century, police states have foundered more often than they have endured. Demagogues and persecutors don’t look good in the eyes of their descendants. Stephen Miller will learn someday that history is a hammer, too, and he will be one of its nails.
Source: https://washingtonmonthly.com
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What a load of BS. MASS DEPORTATIONS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE MAJORITY OF AMERICANS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTED FOR! This writer is seriously delusional if they think there is any other agenda possibly, maybe, could, etc etc happen. Just the deep State getting pissed off at the GOP reversing their not so hidden agenda. It can't happen quick enough and Sleepy Joe and OBummer are criminals and should hang.
Immigrants that come into the United States illegally cost a great burden on law-abiding US citizens. If they are willing to come into the country illegally, then they are criminals and they need to be detained in order to be deported. Their cheap labor unfortunately hurts job-chances for the average American, since greedy companies are willing to pay illegal immigrants pennies compared to an average salary. It may not appear palatable on its surface, but deporting illegal immigrants helps the average American more than it hurts.
Obviously we are in a war between good and evil or God and the Devil for those who have understanding of what is happening, and this newsletter purports to be on the side of God, Love and We the People, so how can you include articles like this that obviously support the side of Evil that has been ruling over us for a long time. These articles by Edward Morgan or Johnathan Alter, whichever one you believe is true, are insane. Here you are pretending to be a proponent of Change, calling this newsletter 'Prepare for Change' yet, when it comes, in the best way possible for humanity, you take the side of the Devil, who doesn't want change because he's set up the present system to perpetuate all the evil happening. Are you aware that the Cabal drain the blood out of little children and drink it to give them a high and a longer, more youthful life? they call it adrenochrome. Why do you think there are so many missing children? Don't you understand that it is necessary to be a little tough when fighting Evil (the Cabal, Illuminati, the Deep State, whatever you want to call them, who have infiltrated our government and almost all our Institutions)? Now that we have a President willing to fight them and create the change we all want, you choose to support those who are defending the Devil. HOW WOULD YOU DO IT DIFFERENTLY??? Would you allow those who are creating huge problems, aside from the murderers and rapists, and are taking up a huge proportion of the jobs, and also the money meant for disabled/seniors etc. to remain here and perpetuate the poverty? I am over 80 and BEFORE the DOGE cuts, was told by the Biden government that they can no longer help with my rent or utilities because the money is all going to the Illegals. Don't you ever think about the character of people who instead of staying in their own (often beautiful Countries) and working hard to create a way of life that works for them, as American's have done here, they mostly sneak into the US and try to claim asylum and either use up most of our resources, take our jobs or work for the Cartels. The companies that ICE is emptying out are immediately getting filled with Americans. So President Trump is doing what's best for Americans, and IN THE LONG RUN, what's best for the rest of the world too.
How did this subversive BS get approved for inclusion into the daily Prepare For Change newsletter?
Too bad for you Ed that you support the aiding and abetting of illegal aliens. They are not immigrants, they are not dreamers. They are people who were ushered in via NGOs, human traffickers, and treasonous politicians who wanted, still want, a fabricated voter base, and to debase our society in fact replace the population. With peak numbers coming in daily the last four years, many are criminals and cartel affiliated people. What has happened to literally thousands of children they brought over the border, the real victims? Still can't find them, identify them? Do you not follow reports that have been available for years? We have a border, we are a country with laws that the last clown show creep administration notably completely ignored. No, no more of this nonsense! Hell no! We are done with this BS. Now these creeps are attacking law enforcement? If you support that, maybe you should take your tail to Canada or Mexico!
Why is this Marxist bs being distributed by your publication?