I wanted to elaborate on some points Theda Skocpol addressed in her reader email this weekend about ICE and the supercharged ICE the new Trump budget law envisions. Some of this may be obvious just seeing what we’ve all seen in recent months. But I wanted to describe some of the exact modalities we’re talking about.
First, a general point about ICE. Long before the current moment and even the controversies of the first Trump term, ICE was generally known as a place made up of people who couldn’t get jobs at the more established and reputable federal policing agencies — so, FBI, U.S. Marshals, DEA, ATF, etc. Because of this, it has a high proportion of people who are there because they want to wear a uniform, knock people around and act tough. That’s an aspect of every policing organization. But more professional organizations do their best to weed those people out on the front end and instill discipline that keeps those impulses in check. There’s much less of that at ICE. So it’s never had a good reputation within federal law enforcement.
TPM Reader TS (Harvard sociologist/political scientist Theda Skocpol) and I often compared notes on the news of the day and I am always particularly attentive to her thoughts on state structure and power. So I asked her to write out her comments in response to Josh Kovensky’s piece on the vast expansion of ICE funded in the new budget bill. I really strongly recommend you read this, especially in you’re a government worker or elected official in state or local government.
The Trump monster bill’s huge upward rewarding tax cuts and punitive shrinking of health and food benefits are crucial, but you are right Josh that massive militarization of ICE is the real heart of this law – didn’t J. D. Vance say just that a little while ago?
Late this afternoon, the Social Security Administration sent out an email, seemingly to all recipients, cheering the passage of the President’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
AdImpact is the canonical source that many journalists use to track political ad spending, where ads are running, the ability to see the actual ads and so forth. A few times I’ve considering subscribing for TPM during the peak of the big election cycles. (These are very high-dollar price points.) So I’m on their mailing list for the data overviews that are basically teasers for subscribing. I got one of those today and something immediately jumped out at me. The top political advertiser by spend this cycle is the Department of Homeland Security.
I continue to get requests for updates about the DOJ-in-Exile project. The update is that while I got a lot of inquiries from people who were interested in being involved and a number of people who were interested in making large (5- or 6-figure contributions), I was not able to find someone or some entity to run it. Or I haven’t yet. And here I mean someone to organize and run it as opposed to do the actual work, which needs to be done at least mostly by people with experience as prosecutors. To be fair, it’s not like I’ve spent all my time on this. I have TPM; I have what I write each day; I have a book project. But a lot of people are scared. Possibly more so than I realized. And leerier as you go forward. But as things have developed over the last couple months I think the whole thing is more important now than I did at the outset. So I will continue to look and consider other possibilities including possibly launching and running it myself, at least at the outset. That’s the update. Remain very open to suggestions. This really needs to happen.
I’ve had several TPM Readers reply to the post below about denaturalization and say it’s actually even worse than I say. Specifically, that we can’t really have any confidence that people who were born citizens won’t face denaturalization too. One reader simply makes the point: why not? What’s the bar that is stopping that? And of course, sure: Anything can in theory happen. And some things that we would have thought were only possible in theory a decade ago are happening routinely now or appear on the horizon. Another reader, more concretely, notes that, while his ancestors have been here for a century, the Chinese Exclusion Act raises the possibility that some of his “natural-born” ancestors may not have been citizens after all and that could be applied against him.
In another hearing Monday that stretched for more than two hours, Xinis waded through the latest round of Kafkaesque circularity from the Trump administration as it urged her to dismiss the original Abrego Garcia case now that he is back in the United States, albeit to face trumped-up federal charges in Tennessee.
For decades, Bill Moyers warned about our current crisis of democracy as it gradually drew nearer. And he saw the path through to the other side — should we choose to take it.
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