“responsible political movements are embarrassed by hypocrisy, but MAGA displays it as a loyalty test. Vice President J.D. Vance berated the Brits for detaining people over social media posts, then called on Americans to report people to their employers for negative posts about Charlie Kirk. And Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to crack down on “hate speech,” even though Republicans have long viewed such laws as speech controls.
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The clearest image is one of masked ICE agents emerging from unmarked cars, roughing up suspected illegal immigrants—and then “disappearing” them to an unknown location.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” That’s how George Orwell put it, but it doesn’t have to be forever if more Americans start caring about their constitutional birthright.
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author Sen. Scott Wiener (D–San Francisco) got it right: “The recent federal operations in California have created an environment of profound terror, with officers—or people who claim to be officers—wearing what are essentially ski masks, not identifying themselves, grabbing people, putting them in unmarked cars, and disappearing them. If we want the public to trust law enforcement, we cannot allow them to behave like secret police in an authoritarian state.”
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Practically speaking, there is no reason for law-enforcement agents to conceal their identities, wear face masks, and grab people off the street without identifying themselves. How is an ordinary person supposed to know whether their abductor is a legit government agent or kidnappers from a drug cartel? In the former, fighting back will land you in the morgue—in the latter, not fighting back will do so.
Trump supporters claim the masks protect agents from doxing, but that’s just an after-the-fact excuse. This shouldn’t be news to conservatives, but the Constitution is meant to protect ordinary people from their government rather than the other way around. The first concern is to protect our liberties, not to ensure that armed agents have an easier time of it. Doxing is illegal and should be punished, but that’s no excuse to green-light police-state tactics.
“The general public does not distinguish between federal agents and local law enforcement,” said my R Street Institute colleague Jillian Snider in a CNN interview. “So when federal agents go into local jurisdictions wearing masks and not making their identities known, that hinders the operations of local law enforcement because then that community fails to trust the local law enforcement that are trying to keep them safe.”
Then again, perhaps that’s MAGA’s point: to intimidate Americans into submission via a high-profile show of force. We should be shocked by this, but the right response is disgust rather than awe.”
“An Alabama construction worker is challenging the Trump administration’s warrantless construction site raids after he says he was arrested and detained by federal immigration agents—twice—despite being a U.S. citizen with a valid ID in his pocket.
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Venegas was detained twice in May and June during raids on private construction sites where he was working. In both instances, the lawsuit says, masked immigration officers entered the private sites without a warrant and began detaining workers based solely on their apparent ethnicity.
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According to the suit, “The officers ran right past the white and black workers without detaining them and went straight for the Latino workers.”
The officers tackled Venegas’ brother, who was also on the crew, and Venegas began filming the scene on his cell phone. One of the officers then approached Venegas and said, “You’re making this more complicated than you want to.”
Immediately after, the officer grabbed Venegas and began wrestling him to the ground. Another construction worker also took cell phone video of the two brothers’ arrests, which shows the agent struggling with Venegas who repeatedly yells, “I’m a citizen.”
Two other officers joined in to subdue Venegas, telling him to “Get on the fucking ground.”
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According to the suit, the officers retrieved Venegas’ REAL ID from his pocket, but they called it fake, kept him handcuffed, and detained for more than an hour in the Alabama summer sun, until an officer agreed to run his social security number.
Then on June 12, Venegas was working in a nearly finished house when ICE agents cornered him in a bedroom and ordered him to come with them. Venegas was marched outside to the edge of the subdivision where he was working to have his immigration status checked. According to the lawsuit, two other U.S. citizens had been rounded up with him. Again, officers said his REAL ID could be fake and detained for 20 to 30 minutes before releasing him.
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Venegas is one of many documented cases of U.S. citizens being violently detained and arrested during indiscriminate federal immigration sweeps.
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Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a concurring opinion in which he waved away concerns that allowing such profiling would lead to citizens and legal residents being unduly harassed.
“As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief,” Kavanaugh wrote, “and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U. S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.”
Whatever world Kavanaugh is describing, it’s not the one that Venegas lives in.”
It sounds like Trump is helping Iran’s theocracy round up its dissidents.
“In the lead up to and after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, a large number of Iranians fled to the U.S. In the decades since, the U.S. had been sensitive in allowing those fleeing from Iran over religious, sexual or political persecution to seek residency.
In the 2024 fiscal year, for instance, the U.S. deported only 20 Iranians, according to statistics from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Iran has criticized Washington for hosting dissidents and others in the past. U.S. federal prosecutors have accused Iran of hiring hitmen to target dissidents as well in America.
It’s unclear exactly what has changed now in American policy. However, since returning to the White House, Trump has cracked down on those living in the U.S. illegally.
Noushabadi said that American authorities unilaterally made the decision without consultations with Iran.
But The New York Times said Tuesday, citing anonymous Iranian officials, that the deportations were “the culmination of months of discussions between the two countries.””
China has been trying to attract top intellectual talent for years. Trump is discouraging such talent from working in the U.S. and China is encouraging them to live in China. This is hugely dumb policy that could make China the clear leader in world technology.
“a new annual fee of $100,000 will be levied on each H-1B visa applicant going forward, which will serve as a big deterrent. Some number of the roughly 500,000 people currently in the U.S. with H-1Bs—high-skill visas used by tech workers, medical workers, and other professionals working in the fields they received degrees in—would have been dissuaded from coming here had the new system been in place. For companies hiring new talent, this fee will be a huge barrier to sponsoring foreign workers—which appears to be the point.
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Companies in many industries will probably respond to this shift by offshoring more of their workforces or relying on contract workers. (For the medical industry, this won’t really work. Bigger shortages might just become a fact of life.)”
“George Retes was denied access to an attorney, wasn’t allowed to make a phone call, was not presented to a judge, and was put in an isolation cell before being released with no charges.
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[he] was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies for three days and nights despite telling officers he was an American citizen and his identification was in his nearby car.
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“United States Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh released a concurring opinion essentially blessing the use of racial profiling by the Trump administration’s immigration enforcers, even as critics warned American citizens’ rights would inevitably be violated.
The stops of people who are legally in the country are “typically brief,” Kavanaugh asserted, “and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.””
Trump’s H1b Visa 100k fee will increase the cost of doing business in America, which means a smaller economy and less jobs. It also incentivizes companies to offshore labor rather than use people in the U.S. who spend some of their salaries in-country.