Nearly eight in ten asylum seekers are now being turned away by immigration judges, a dramatic reversal from the Biden era that signals the most consequential shift in American immigration enforcement in years. In the last quarter, asylum grant rates plummeted to roughly 20% — down from 50% as recently as May 2022, when the southern border was hemorrhaging record numbers of illegal crossings.
The numbers aren't subtle. Deportations have topped 30,000 every month since Trump took office. In the most recent December on record, 38,215 illegal immigrants were removed — nearly double the 19,265 deported in December 2023 under Biden. Daily apprehensions at the border have cratered to 245, a 95% drop from the Biden-era average of 5,110 per day.
The floodgates didn't close themselves. This is what happens when an administration decides the immigration system should enforce the law rather than process an invasion.
The Trump administration has pursued a two-pronged strategy: remove judges who weren't doing their jobs, and replace them with people who will. Over the past year, the administration fired in excess of 100 immigration judges. This month alone, the Department of Justice hired 33 new ones. Another 36 were brought on in October. The Pentagon has been reassigning Judge Advocate General lawyers from the military to immigration courts on temporary assignments to attack the backlog.
The results are measurable. Immigration courts are now completing roughly 12,000 cases per month — nearly double the 6,000 to 7,000 monthly caseloads under Biden.
The DOJ framed the overhaul bluntly:
"After four years of Biden administration hiring practices that undermined the credibility and impartiality of the immigration courts, this Department of Justice continues to restore integrity to our immigration system."
The New York Bar Association expressed "deep concern" over the judicial firings, which is roughly as surprising as the sun rising in the east. But the math tells a different story than the legal establishment's hand-wringing. A 3.38 million-case backlog still looms — and even at the current accelerated pace, clearing it would take an estimated 14 years. Queens County alone carries 105,635 pending cases, the third-largest backlog in the country, as New York Post reports.
When the system is that broken, half-measures aren't reforms. They're window dressing.
Michael Cutler, who spent 30 years as an agent at the former Immigration and Naturalization Service, offered a corrective that shouldn't need offering but clearly does:
"If you look at what asylum is supposed to be, it's a very narrow definition . . . You have to be able to demonstrate a credible fear and be able to articulate that credible fear of persecution."
He drove the point further:
"It's not because there's a gang that's doing business down the block or you can't stand your mother in law or you can't find a job."
For years, the asylum system was treated as a general-purpose admissions program. Anyone who showed up at the border and uttered the right words was funneled into a process that could take years to resolve — years spent living and working in the United States, often with little incentive to appear for a hearing that might never come. The 50% grant rate under Biden wasn't evidence of legitimate persecution on a massive scale. It was evidence of a system that had abandoned its own standards.
Andrew Arthur, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Policy and a former immigration judge himself, connected the dots:
"It's having a real impact. The Trump Administration is doing all kinds of things to drive down the asylum grant rate."
"Drive down" is doing interesting work in that sentence. A more honest framing: the grant rate is returning to something resembling what asylum law was designed to produce.
The policy debate never stays abstract for long. Not when the consequences have names.
Laken Riley was killed while jogging at the University of Georgia in 2024, murdered by an illegal immigrant. Rachel Morin, a Maryland mother of five, was raped and killed in 2023. Her attacker, illegal immigrant Victor Martinez-Hernandez from El Salvador, received a life sentence. Matthew Denice was 23 when he was killed by a drunk-driving illegal immigrant from Ecuador in Milford, Massachusetts, in 2011.
These cases became flashpoints not because they were isolated, but because they were preventable. Every one of them involved someone who should not have been in the country.
Patricia Morin, Rachel's mother, told The Post what millions of Americans already understood:
"That's what American voted for, they voted for safety… this is the top issue that got him elected, and he's keeping his word."
She didn't stop there:
"Democrats keep talking about how bad all this is and it's not compassionate, but it's not virtue when you only give compassion to the criminal and don't give a second thought to the victim who has died."
That's the contradiction the left has never been able to answer. Compassion without accountability isn't compassion — it's negligence with better branding.
The scale of what the Trump administration inherited is worth sitting with. In 2022, Customs and Border Protection reported 2.76 million people crossed the southern border — a record. In 2023, more than 2.4 million migrants arrived at the Southwest border, with 3.2 million encounters nationwide. By August 2023, 70% of Americans disapproved of Biden's handling of the border in national polls.
Seventy percent. In a country that can't agree on pizza toppings, seven in ten Americans looked at the border and saw the same thing: failure.
Biden's own words from a 2019 Iowa campaign event aged like milk left in the sun:
"We could afford to take in a heartbeat, another 4 million people. The idea that a country of 330 million people cannot absorb people who are in desperate need and who are justifiably fleeing oppression is absolutely bizarre."
He got his wish. Americans have a 3.38 million-case asylum backlog, overwhelmed courts, and communities paying the price for policies designed to sound generous on a debate stage rather than function in reality.
Maureen Maloney, vice president of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime, has been fighting for tighter borders since her son Matthew was killed in 2011. She didn't mince words:
"What Biden did to this country with the open borders was treason and Americans will be paying the price for many years to come."
She also acknowledged the sheer scale of the problem now facing enforcement:
"It's impossible for President Trump to deport however many millions of illegal aliens that have come across the border during the Biden administration."
Even with courts running at double capacity, even with deportations exceeding 30,000 a month, the math remains brutal. A 14-year timeline to clear the existing backlog means the damage from the Biden years will outlast multiple administrations. The top destinations for deportees — Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, in that order — represent a pipeline that took years to build and won't be dismantled overnight.
But the trajectory has reversed. Courts are adjudicating cases faster. Judges with military backgrounds are applying the law as written rather than as activists wish it read. The asylum grant rate reflects what the statute demands — a narrow, specific standard of persecution — not a generalized sympathy for anyone who makes the journey north.
Patricia Morin put it simply:
"We have all these unvetted people that are here in America and we don't know if they really are who they say they are."
That used to be an unremarkable observation. Somewhere along the way, it became a controversial one. The fact that it no longer drives policy paralysis is the most important shift of all.
Barack Obama sat down with progressive YouTuber Brian Tyler Cohen on Saturday to deliver his most direct public endorsement yet of the demonstrators who have mobilized against ICE operations in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The former president framed the protests as a patriotic act — American citizens standing up for their values — and characterized federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota as lawless and unaccountable.
It was a carefully staged moment. Not a press conference, not a statement through a spokesperson, but a lengthy interview with a friendly progressive media figure, designed to reach the activist base that once powered Obama's own political machine.
And the message was unmistakable: Obama wants the resistance to continue.
Obama's rhetoric escalated well beyond vague disapproval. He described ICE operations in the Twin Cities as "unprecedented" and rattled off a series of inflammatory claims about federal agents' conduct. In the interview, he said:
"It is important for us to recognize the unprecedented nature of what ICE was doing in Minneapolis, St Paul, the way that federal agents, ICE agents were being deployed, without any clear guidelines, training, pulling people out of their homes, using five-year-olds to try to bait their parents, all the stuff that we saw, teargassing crowds simply who were standing there, not breaking any laws."
No sourcing for those specific claims. No investigation cited. No official finding referenced. Just Barack Obama's characterizations, delivered with the calm authority of a man who knows his words will be repeated without scrutiny by every legacy newsroom in the country, as The Guardian reports.
He then cast the protests in the broadest possible terms — not as opposition to immigration enforcement, but as a test of national character:
"Right now, we're being tested, and the good news is, what we saw in Minneapolis and St Paul, and what we're seeing in places across the country, including here in Los Angeles, has been the American people saying no. At least a good number of the American people saying, we're going to live up to those values that we say we believe in."
And his bottom line:
"As long as we have folks doing that, I feel like we're going to get through this."
"Get through this." As though enforcing federal immigration law is something the country must survive rather than something it chose through an election.
This isn't the first time Obama has weighed in. Last month, he and Michelle Obama released a joint statement calling the death of Alex Pretti — one of two people who died in connection with federal operations in the Twin Cities — "a heartbreaking tragedy" and "a wake-up call to every American, regardless of party, that many of our core values as a nation are increasingly under assault." The statement also accused federal law enforcement and immigration agents of not operating "in a lawful or accountable way in Minnesota" and claimed the tactics employed by ICE and other federal agents seemed "designed to intimidate, harass, provoke and endanger the residents of a major American city."
That language does real work. It doesn't just criticize specific incidents — it delegitimizes the entire enforcement apparatus. When a former president tells the country that federal agents are operating unlawfully, he is providing moral permission for obstruction. He's telling local officials, activists, and ordinary citizens that resisting federal law enforcement is not just acceptable but noble.
The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in connection with federal operations deserve scrutiny — every use of lethal force by government agents does. But note what Obama did not do: he did not call for an investigation. He did not call for due process. He did not wait for facts. He rendered his verdict and wrapped it in the flag.
There's a particular irony in Obama positioning himself as the champion of lawful, accountable government. His own administration deported millions of illegal immigrants. His own DHS conducted workplace raids and interior enforcement operations. The infrastructure he now decries didn't materialize from nowhere.
But the deeper problem isn't hypocrisy — it's strategy. Obama knows exactly what he's doing. By elevating Minneapolis as a model of resistance, he's signaling to Democratic mayors, progressive DAs, and activist organizations across the country that confrontation with federal immigration enforcement is the path forward. He referenced Los Angeles in the same breath as Minneapolis, drawing a line from the Twin Cities to every blue city in America.
He also offered what amounts to a theory of political change:
"The reason I point out that I don't think the majority of the American people approve of this is because ultimately, the answer is going to come from the American people. We just saw this in Minnesota, in Minneapolis."
The framing is deliberate. Obama wants the public to believe that street protests represent the majority opinion — that the crowds in Minneapolis speak for America. This is from the man who watched his party lose the White House in an election in which immigration enforcement was a central promise to voters.
Border czar Tom Homan said this week that the Trump administration would draw down its immigration operations in Minnesota following the two deaths. Many have credited the protests as the reason for the pullback, and Obama clearly wants that narrative cemented.
But the administration's decision to scale back in a specific locality after two deaths connected to federal operations is not the same as capitulation to protest movements. Operational adjustments happen. The conflation of a tactical drawdown with a political retreat serves Obama's narrative, not reality.
What the protests in Minneapolis have actually demonstrated is something different: that a sufficiently mobilized local population, backed by sympathetic city and state officials, can create enough friction to complicate federal enforcement. That's not a values victory. That's obstruction with better branding.
Obama closed his interview with hope for the next generation of American leaders — the kind of gauzy optimism that made him famous. But strip away the rhetoric, and the picture is stark. A former president of the United States is actively encouraging citizens to resist federal law enforcement operations targeting illegal immigrants. He's doing it from a platform designed to maximize reach among the activist left. And he's doing it while casting the agents carrying out those operations as rogue actors operating outside the law.
That's not a call for accountability. That's a call to arms — wrapped in the language of values so it goes down easier.
The American people spoke on immigration. They spoke in November. Obama just didn't like what they said.
January's Consumer Price Index came in below expectations, dropping annual inflation to 2.4% — the lowest reading since May and a sharp decline from December's 2.7%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a modest 0.2% seasonally adjusted monthly increase for all urban consumers, beating economists' forecasts of 2.5%. Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, fell to its lowest point in nearly five years.
Florida's Voice reported that the Trump administration wasted no time framing the numbers as vindication. White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai delivered a statement that doubled as a victory lap:
"Today's expectation-beating CPI report proves that President Trump has defeated Joe Biden's inflation crisis: overall inflation fell, and real wages grew by $1,400 in President Trump's first year in office."
That $1,400 figure — the real earnings gain for private-sector workers over the past year — sits at the center of the administration's case. Real average hourly earnings climbed 1.2% across all private-sector workers and 1.5% for middle- and lower-wage employees. Under the Biden administration, workers lost nearly $3,000 in real earnings, according to White House figures. The reversal is not subtle.
The numbers aren't abstract. They map onto the parts of the economy that working Americans actually feel.
Energy prices dropped 1.5%. Gasoline fell 3.2%. Used vehicles — a category that became a symbol of Biden-era sticker shock — declined 1.8%. Beef, eggs, and coffee all saw reductions in January. Prescription drug prices remained steady last month and declined over the course of 2025.
The sector-level wage data tells its own story:
These are not Silicon Valley knowledge workers or government-sector employees padding their resumes with DEI certifications. These are the people who build things, extract things, and make things — the backbone of the physical economy. When their real wages rise, it means the policy environment is rewarding production, not just consumption.
For months, critics warned that Trump's trade posture would ignite a new inflation spiral. The January data offers a clean rebuttal: no broad spikes have materialized. Energy is cheaper. Goods are cheaper. The categories most exposed to supply-chain disruption moved in the right direction.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. The entire economic case against the administration's trade agenda rested on the assumption that tariffs would function as a consumer tax, driving prices higher across the board. January's CPI doesn't just fail to confirm that theory — it contradicts it. The economy absorbed the policy shift and kept cooling.
That doesn't mean tariffs carry zero cost in any category. But the doomsday framing — the breathless cable-news segments, the op-eds treating every tariff announcement as a prelude to Smoot-Hawley — looks increasingly disconnected from the data.
Desai pointed to two areas where the administration sees continued momentum. Housing inflation, which has been the stickiest component of CPI for years, continues to cool. And prescription drug prices actually fell over the year — a trend the White House credits to its Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan.
"Housing inflation notably continues to cool, while prescription drug prices actually fell in 2025, with even more price relief ahead for American patients thanks to President Trump's Most Favored Nation drug pricing deals and the Great Healthcare Plan."
Housing and healthcare are the two categories that erode middle-class purchasing power faster than anything else. If both trend lines hold, the downstream effects on household budgets could be substantial — and politically potent heading into the midterms.
The White House didn't stop at celebrating the present. Desai turned the data into a direct message aimed at the Federal Reserve:
"With inflation now low and stable, America's economy is set to turbocharge even further through long-overdue interest rate cuts from the Fed."
The phrase "long-overdue" is doing deliberate work. The administration's position is clear: the Fed held rates higher than the data justified, and every month of delay costs borrowers — homebuyers, small businesses, anyone carrying variable-rate debt — real money. With inflation now sitting comfortably below economists' expectations, the case for continued restraint thins considerably.
Whether the Fed acts on that signal is another matter. But the political ground has shifted. A central bank that holds rates steady while inflation undershoots forecasts isn't being prudent. It's being stubborn.
Strip the rhetoric away, and the administration's argument reduces to a simple contrast: $3,000 lost under Biden, $1,400 gained under Trump. One presidency bled purchasing power from working families. The other restored it in twelve months.
Critics will note these are White House figures, not independently audited calculations. Fair enough. But the BLS data is the BLS data. Inflation fell. Real wages rose. Energy got cheaper. Food got cheaper. The trend lines all point in the same direction, and they all point away from the previous administration's record.
Americans don't need a press secretary to tell them whether their paycheck stretches further at the grocery store. They already know. The CPI report just confirmed what the checkout line has been saying for months.
California Governor Gavin Newsom landed in Munich, Germany this weekend to attend the Munich Security Conference — appearing on a climate panel and meeting with Denmark's foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen — while back home, his state staggers under the weight of devastating wildfires, roughly 116,000 homeless residents, rampant drug overdoses, and a proposed billionaires' tax that is already driving wealth out of the state.
This is the second international trip in as many months. The Daily Mail reported that last month, Newsom attended the World Economic Forum in Davos. Before that, a visit to Brazil to announce a climate partnership. His office says the governor has "stepped up as the leading US presence on the global stage."
The governor of a state. The global stage.
Newsom isn't hiding the ball anymore — if he ever was. At the Munich climate panel, he told attendees that President Trump was "temporary," adding:
"He'll be gone in three years."
That's not diplomacy. That's a campaign stump speech delivered on foreign soil. Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, told the San Francisco Chronicle what everyone already knows:
"This is a standard strategy that you use when you're running for president, especially if you're running as a governor."
Newsom isn't the only Democrat treating Munich like an early primary stop. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer — both described as potential 2028 nominees — were also scheduled to attend. The Munich Security Conference has apparently doubled as a Democratic beauty pageant.
Meanwhile, Newsom's rhetoric abroad grows sharper with each trip. His official statement before departing framed the whole excursion as a counter to Washington:
"While Donald Trump continues to demonstrate that he is unstable and unreliable, California is leaning in on the partnerships that make California stronger, Americans safer, and our planet healthier."
His office added that the trip comes as the Trump administration "undermines alliances and retreats from climate leadership." The framing is unmistakable: Newsom isn't governing California. He's auditioning to govern America — and using foreign capitals as his backdrop.
The Munich trip follows a revealing episode at Davos last month. Newsom claimed he was denied access to the US headquarters at the World Economic Forum following pressure from the Trump administration. His response, posted on X:
"How weak and pathetic do you have to be to be this scared of a fireside chat?"
The White House Rapid Response account offered a different read on the situation:
"The failing Governor of California (rampant with fraud) watches from the corner cuck chair as @POTUS delivers a true masterclass in Davos. Embarrassing!"
Newsom defended the Davos trip by leaning into California's economic heft:
"Give me a category and California outperforms. Fourth largest economy in the world, so we can punch above our weight. We can come here with formal authority and a little moral authority."
He continued:
"And I tell you, we need a little moral authority in our body politic in the United States of America today."
Moral authority. The governor presiding over 116,000 homeless people and a wildfire recovery effort that has drawn bipartisan frustration.
The crises Newsom keeps flying away from aren't abstractions. They are Californians without homes, without answers, and increasingly without patience.
The Los Angeles wildfires devastated communities, and Newsom's rebuilding plan has faced significant pushback. Spencer Pratt — the reality star who announced a run for Los Angeles mayor — captured a frustration shared well beyond celebrity circles when he posted on X:
"Nobody actually believes that giving the STATE money will help fire victims rebuild their homes."
He followed up:
"We have all seen billions of federal dollars fall into Newsom's bottomless money pit, without a single dollar seen by the intended recipients."
When a reality television personality is making a more compelling case for government accountability than the state's elected opposition, something has gone sideways.
Then there's the proposed billionaires' tax — a one-time levy of 5% on net worth, covering stocks, bonds, artwork, and intellectual property, with billionaires given five years to pay. It hasn't been voted on or signed into law yet, but the signal alone has been enough.
Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and tech investor David Sacks have all made moves to leave the state. California currently has roughly 200 billionaires. The question is how many it will have once Sacramento finishes telling them they're ATMs.
The tax targets net worth, not income — a distinction that matters enormously. This isn't a higher marginal rate on earnings. It's the state claiming a percentage of what people own. The flight of capital isn't a mystery. It's a rational response.
There's a particular kind of politician who believes that looking important is the same thing as being effective. Newsom's international itinerary — Brazil, Davos, Munich — reads like the calendar of a man who has decided that his state's problems are less interesting than his own ambitions.
Consider the math. California's governor is flying to Europe to talk about climate leadership while his state's wealthiest residents pack their bags. He's meeting with foreign ministers while wildfire victims wait for rebuilding funds. He's telling foreign audiences that the sitting president is "temporary" while 116,000 Californians sleep without permanent shelter.
Newsom wants the world to see him as America's shadow president — a serious man doing serious work on the global stage. But you don't earn moral authority by claiming it at a podium in Munich. You earn it by solving the problems in your own backyard.
California's crises will still be there when the governor lands. They always are.
Senate Democrats voted Thursday to block a House-passed bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, tanking the motion 52-47 and all but guaranteeing a partial government shutdown by Saturday. Funding for TSA, FEMA, and the Coast Guard will lapse without further congressional action — and Democrats made clear they have no intention of acting without concessions on immigration enforcement.
Only one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, crossed the aisle to vote for advancing the measure. Senate Majority Leader John Thune voted no for procedural reasons, preserving his ability to bring the bill back to the floor later. The motion needed 60 votes. It wasn't close.
When Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama tried a fallback — unanimous consent on a simple two-week stopgap — Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut killed that too.
More than 260,000 federal employees now face a partial shutdown because Senate Democrats decided that leverage over ICE operations matters more than keeping the lights on at the agencies Americans depend on for airport security, disaster relief, and maritime safety.
Democrats aren't hiding the ball here. This is about ICE — specifically, about using the threat of a shutdown to force restrictions on immigration enforcement.
According to The Hill, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer framed the blockade in dramatic terms:
"Democrats have been very clear. We will not support an extension of the status quo, a status quo that permits masked secret police to barge into people's homes without warrants, no guardrails, zero oversight from independent authorities."
"Masked secret police." That's the language of a party that has abandoned any pretense of good-faith negotiation and is instead auditioning for cable news segments. Schumer isn't describing a verified agency protocol — he's painting a picture designed to justify an extraordinary tactic: shutting down homeland security funding during an era when the agencies in question have finally been resourced to do their jobs.
Last week, Democrats unveiled a 10-point plan for what they called reforming immigration enforcement operations. Among the demands:
Some of these sound reasonable in isolation. Body cameras and identification standards are ideas with bipartisan support in other law enforcement contexts. But packaged together and wielded as a precondition for funding the entire Department of Homeland Security, they become something else entirely: a legislative straitjacket designed to hamstring enforcement operations that Democrats spent years pretending to support.
Here's the part that deserves attention. Senate Republican Whip John Barrasso made a point on the floor that Democrats have not credibly answered:
"What we see are Democrats flip-flopping on funding the government. This was a bipartisan bill. Democrats helped negotiate it."
He's right. Just last month, Democrats signed off on the Homeland Security appropriations bill. Sen. Patty Murray — ranking member of the Appropriations panel — defended it publicly at the time, arguing that blocking the measure wouldn't even affect ICE and CBP operations in Minnesota, the flashpoint that has since consumed the Democratic caucus.
Now Murray stood on the Senate floor Thursday and declared:
"It is clear to just about everyone in every part of the country that ICE and CBP are out of control and must be reined in."
A month ago, she defended the bill. Now she's blocking it. The bill didn't change. The politics did.
What changed the politics was the fatal shootings of two individuals in Minneapolis last month and, specifically, the Jan. 24 emergence of video footage showing two federal officers shooting and killing Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse. According to reporting, Pretti was holding his phone and his glasses while kneeling on the ground when the first shots were fired. Another officer had already confiscated a concealed pistol that Pretti was licensed to carry.
The shooting demands an investigation. If the facts are as described, serious questions about the use of force deserve serious answers. No conservative argument for strong enforcement requires defending officers who shoot a kneeling, disarmed man. Accountability and enforcement are not in tension — they're prerequisites for each other.
But Democrats aren't pursuing accountability. They're pursuing leverage. There is a vast distance between demanding a transparent investigation into a specific shooting and holding hostage the funding for every TSA agent, every FEMA responder, and every Coast Guard crew member in the country.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire — described as a key moderate — made the strategy explicit:
"I'm not going to vote for a CR until we see some progress on reforms. It's not acceptable that we have a federal agency killing American citizens in the streets and we're not taking any action."
Shaheen previously voted in November to end what was described as a record-breaking 43-day government shutdown. Apparently, shutdowns are unconscionable when Democrats want them to end and perfectly acceptable when Democrats want something in return.
The White House didn't stonewall. Earlier this week, it sent a one-page letter offering concessions, followed by legislative text to Democratic negotiators. On Thursday, White House border czar Tom Homan announced the administration was ending its surge deployment of ICE officers in Minnesota — a direct response to the political pressure point Democrats had been hammering.
Schumer's response to Homan's concession was revealing:
"We need legislation to rein in ICE and end the violence." "Without legislation, what Tom Homan says today could be reversed tomorrow on a whim from a Donald Trump."
Murray was equally dismissive, telling The Hill that the White House proposal didn't address major concerns:
"They did not address our major concerns. We're going through it right now and intend to offer a counteroffer."
The administration offered concessions. Democrats moved the goalposts. The administration pulled back a surge deployment. Democrats said it wasn't enough. At some point, a reasonable observer asks whether the goal is reform or whether the goal is the shutdown itself — a way to manufacture a crisis they can blame on Republican governance.
It's worth remembering the backdrop here. ICE and CBP received tens of billions of dollars through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law by President Trump. These agencies are better resourced than they've been in years — because the law demanded it. Democrats who voted against that law are now demanding oversight of the spending it enabled, which is a convenient inversion: oppose the funding, then claim the funded agencies are "out of control."
Meanwhile, TSA agents, FEMA personnel, and Coast Guard members will continue working in some limited capacity during a shutdown — but the full scope of that limitation is still being assessed by Senate appropriators. These are the people who screen your bags, respond to hurricanes, and patrol American waterways. They're collateral damage in a fight over whether ICE agents in Minnesota need to wear standardized uniforms.
Thune's procedural vote preserves the ability to bring the bill back quickly. Democrats say they'll offer a counteroffer. The White House has shown willingness to negotiate. But the clock runs out Saturday, and Democrats have now blocked both the full funding bill and a two-week bridge.
Asked what the White House is willing to do to rein in ICE officers, Shaheen offered a telling answer:
"Nothing that I've heard."
That's not an indictment of the White House. It's an admission that Democrats aren't listening. A one-page letter of concessions, legislative text, and the withdrawal of a surge deployment apparently don't register as "something."
Senate Democrats helped write this funding bill. They defended it a month ago. Now they've blown it up, blocked the backup plan, and told 260,000 federal workers that the real priority is rewriting immigration enforcement on their terms — during a shutdown, under duress, with Saturday's deadline as the hammer.
That's not governing. That's hostage-taking with better press coverage.
Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday that approximately 1.6 million illegal immigrants with final deportation orders are currently living in the United States — and roughly half of them have criminal convictions.
That's 800,000 people whom an immigration judge already ordered removed from the country, who broke the law again after arriving here illegally, and who remained anyway. The orders weren't issued by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security. They came from immigration judges within the Department of Justice — the judicial process that amnesty advocates constantly insist must be respected.
The process spoke. Nobody enforced it.
According to Fox News, Lyons broke the numbers down further during questioning from Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., offering a state-level snapshot that sharpens the national picture. In Minnesota alone — a state that has become a flashpoint for clashes over immigration enforcement — Lyons testified that there are 16,840 individuals with final deportation orders at large.
"There's 16,840 final orders at large in the state of Minnesota."
Minnesota. One state. Nearly 17,000 people, a judge told to leave, who simply didn't. Multiply that pattern across fifty states, and you begin to understand how 1.6 million becomes not a statistic but a systemic failure — one that previous administrations chose to tolerate.
Lyons made clear that these deportation orders were issued through the legal system's own channels:
"Through an immigration judge with the Department of Justice separate from Immigration Customs Enforcement."
This distinction matters. Every time critics accuse the administration of acting unilaterally or bypassing due process, the answer is sitting in 1.6 million case files. These people received hearings. They received orders. The system rendered its judgment. What was missing — for years — was anyone willing to carry it out.
Lankford used his time to connect the current enforcement challenge to the open-border conditions that created it. The senator's testimony painted a picture of a border that functionally ceased to exist:
"Two years ago, we had 10,000 people a day illegally crossing into the country, two years ago, 10,000 people a day not vetted, had no idea who they were."
Ten thousand a day. That's not immigration — it's capitulation dressed up as compassion.
Lankford went further, citing the Biden administration's own estimates on one of the most alarming categories of border crossers:
"70,000 people were estimated by the Biden administration to come in in 2024 that were special interest aliens that had a locational connection to terrorism."
The Biden administration knew. Its own estimates flagged 70,000 individuals entering the country with ties to regions connected to terrorism — and the border remained open. Lankford drove the point home:
"But we had no idea who they were. They were allowed to be able to come into the country two years ago."
This is the inheritance. Not a policy disagreement. Not a difference in emphasis. A security catastrophe that the previous administration documented in its own data and then chose to ignore.
While ICE agents work to execute the deportation orders that judges issued — in some cases years ago — they face an increasingly hostile environment on the ground. Two activists, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, died in altercations with federal officers in Minnesota, incidents that have fueled protests against enforcement operations.
Lankford addressed the nature of those protests directly, describing a pattern that goes well beyond peaceful dissent:
"There are thousands of arrests that are happening in a day that are happening by the book. And what's happening is a group of protesters that are protesting and agitating, and some of them running into churches and disturbing church services and saying, 'It's my First Amendment right to shut down your church during a service.' And saying they're a peaceful protester while they throw rocks at agents, it just gets old."
There's a particular kind of audacity in invoking the First Amendment to disrupt someone else's worship — then throwing rocks at federal agents and calling it a peaceful protest. The contradiction doesn't need commentary. It speaks for itself.
Meanwhile, Democrats have threatened to defund DHS unless the agency changes its enforcement approach. The logic is remarkable: the judicial system issued 1.6 million deportation orders, agents are finally executing them, and the response from the left is to strip funding from the agency doing the work the courts demanded.
Lankford closed his remarks by acknowledging the men and women doing the actual work of enforcement — the agents operating under threat, executing lawful orders in communities where local politicians and activist groups treat them as the enemy.
"The work that the men and women that work around you have done have stopped that chaos."
He also offered a broader observation that deserves to echo beyond the committee room:
"We're losing perspective of what's really happened."
He's right. The national conversation has drifted so far from the underlying reality that enforcing a judge's order now gets treated as authoritarian overreach. A country that cannot remove people its own courts have ordered deported is not exercising compassion — it's advertising that its laws mean nothing.
There are 1.6 million tests of that proposition sitting in the United States right now. Eight hundred thousand of them have criminal records. The question was never whether enforcement would be difficult. The question is whether a nation that refuses to enforce its own judicial orders can still call itself a nation of laws.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told podcast host Theo Von on Thursday that he used to snort cocaine off toilet seats — and that the addiction he developed as a young man still requires daily vigilance decades later.
Kennedy appeared on "This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von," where the two discussed their shared history in recovery. Kennedy and Von met in substance abuse recovery years ago, and the conversation turned to how Kennedy maintained his sobriety through the COVID-19 pandemic while much of the country shut down.
His answer was characteristically blunt.
"We still did live meetings every day during COVID. We moved from the bank. There was about 15 of us who moved from the bank and we got into the Palisades Playhouse, which now is burned down during the fire, but it was kind of a pirate group … I don't care what happens, I'm going to a meeting every day. And I said, I'm not scared of a germ. You know, I used to snort cocaine off of toilet seats. And I know this disease will kill me, right?"
No hedging. No PR-scrubbed language. The nation's top health official talked about his addiction the way people in recovery actually talk about it — directly, with the kind of gallows humor that comes from staring down something that nearly destroyed you.
There is a particular species of Beltway discomfort that surfaces whenever a public figure refuses to behave like a public figure. Kennedy's remarks will inevitably generate pearl-clutching from the same people who spent years demanding politicians be "authentic" and "vulnerable." Now they have one, and the authenticity makes them squirm.
Kennedy didn't stop at cocaine, according to the Daily Caller. He described recovery as a matter of survival — not a lifestyle choice, not a personal brand, but something that keeps the wheels from coming off entirely.
"If I don't treat it, which means, for me, going to meetings every day, it's just bad for my life. So for me it was survival. And then the opportunity to help another alcoholic, that's the secret sauce of the meetings. And that's what keeps us all sober and keeps us from self-will."
That's a man who understands his own weakness well enough to build a life around managing it. There's more moral clarity in that single paragraph than in a year's worth of congressional testimony.
This isn't Kennedy's first public disclosure about substance abuse. At HMP Global's Rx and Illicit Drug Summit 2025 in Nashville, he recounted the story of taking LSD for the first time at age 15:
"I said to the guy, 'If I take that, will I see dinosaurs?' He said, 'You might.'"
Kennedy has been open about his history of drug use and his decades-long experience in recovery programs. He has a family history of addiction. None of this is hidden. None of it is leaked. He volunteers it — at summits, on podcasts, in rooms where the cameras are rolling.
Consider the contrast. Washington is full of people who build elaborate facades, sanitize their histories, and crumble the moment a skeleton surfaces. Kennedy walks into a room, opens the closet door himself, and starts naming the bones.
The easy take is the sensational one: "HHS Secretary did cocaine off toilet seats." It'll trend. It'll generate clips. And it'll miss the point entirely.
The harder truth — the one that matters for the roughly 15 people who moved their meetings to the Palisades Playhouse rather than go virtual, the one that matters for every person white-knuckling sobriety through isolation — is that Kennedy chose physical presence over safety theater. During COVID, when the federal government was telling Americans to stay home, Kennedy and his small group decided that the disease of addiction was more immediately lethal than a respiratory virus.
For people in recovery, that wasn't reckless. It was triage.
The public health establishment spent years insisting that every in-person gathering was a potential super-spreader event. Recovery meetings, church services, funerals — all subordinated to a single-variable risk calculus that ignored every other way a human being can fall apart. Kennedy lived the cost of that calculus and rejected it in real time.
Something is fitting about a person with Kennedy's history leading HHS. Not despite the addiction — because of the recovery. The pharmaceutical industry, the institutional inertia of federal health agencies, the sheer scale of the addiction crisis in this country — none of it is abstract to him. He has skin in the game in a way that career bureaucrats simply don't.
His critics will use this interview as ammunition. They always do. But the attack requires you to believe that a man who has been sober for decades, who attends meetings daily, who speaks openly about his worst moments, is somehow less qualified than the parade of credentialed functionaries who presided over an opioid epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.
Kennedy didn't snort cocaine off a toilet seat last week. He did it in another life — and then he clawed his way out. The people running health policy before him can't say the same about their failures. Those are ongoing.
A federal judge struck down California's ban on face coverings for federal law enforcement officers this week, handing the Trump administration a clean legal victory and exposing a rift between Governor Gavin Newsom and the state senator who authored the law.
Judge Christina Snyder blocked enforcement of the mask ban on Monday while upholding a separate California law requiring federal agents to visibly display identification. The ruling turned on a straightforward problem: the law banned federal agents from covering their faces during operations but exempted state and local police. The court deemed that the carve-out was unfair.
The result is a law that was designed to obstruct federal immigration enforcement — struck down because its authors couldn't even write it consistently.
Newsom signed the mask ban last fall in response to ICE officers wearing face coverings during immigration operations in Los Angeles. At the time, the governor framed the issue in the most dramatic terms possible:
"Masked men jumping out of unmarked cars, people disappearing, no due process, no oversight, zero accountability, happening in the United States of America today."
"These are authoritarian actions by an authoritarian government."
State Senator Scott Wiener authored the bill and reportedly intended it to apply to all law enforcement — federal, state, and local. But the version Newsom signed exempted state police, a carve-out that reportedly came from negotiations with the governor's own office, according to the Daily Mail.
That exemption became the law's fatal flaw. You cannot argue that masked law enforcement is a threat to civil liberties and then protect the right of your own state troopers to do the same thing. The court noticed.
What followed the ruling was not a unified Democratic response. It was a public finger-pointing exercise.
Newsom's press office wasted no time putting the loss on Wiener:
"Mr. Wiener rejected our proposed fixes to his bill — language that was later included in the identification bill the court upheld today. He chose a different approach, and today the court found his approach unlawful."
Wiener, for his part, immediately pledged to try again:
"Now that the Court has made clear that state officers must be included, I am immediately introducing new legislation to include state officers. We will unmask these thugs and hold them accountable. Full stop."
So the governor's team says the senator refused their fixes. The senator says he'll write a new version that does what the governor apparently wanted all along. The only people who came out of this with a clear message were the ones who sued to stop it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi framed the ruling as part of a broader pattern of courtroom success:
"Following our arguments, a district court in California BLOCKED the enforcement of a law that would have banned federal agents from wearing masks to protect their identities."
"These federal agents are harassed, doxxed, obstructed, and attacked on a regular basis just for doing their jobs. We have no tolerance for it."
"We will continue fighting and winning in court for President Trump's law-and-order agenda."
The Trump administration sued to block the mask ban back in November, arguing California lacked the authority to regulate federal agents. The Department of Homeland Security urged authorities to ignore the law entirely. The court's ruling vindicated that position.
There's a reason ICE agents wear face coverings during operations. They work in hostile environments where activists film them, post their faces online, and target them for harassment. Bondi's statement pointed to a reality that California's leadership would prefer to ignore: the people enforcing immigration law face real threats from the people who oppose it.
This was never really about masks. It was about obstruction — finding any procedural lever to make federal immigration enforcement harder, slower, and more dangerous for the agents carrying it out. If you can force agents to show their faces, you give the doxxing machine fresh ammunition. If you can tie up enforcement operations in state-level compliance requirements, you create friction where the federal government is supposed to operate freely.
Newsom tipped his hand on Tuesday when he suggested the ruling should inspire a federal mask ban:
"Based on the court's decision, I think we should move in the opposite direction. We should have a federal mask ban."
"I don't believe federal agents should be running roughshod over the Constitution, putting communities that are already on edge in more terror and more distress by having masks on. No other law enforcement agency operates like this."
The governor's office added:
"No badge and no name mean no accountability."
But the court upheld the identification requirement. Federal agents will be required to visibly display identification. That's the accountability mechanism — and it survived. The mask ban was something else entirely, and the court saw through it.
Wiener says he'll reintroduce the legislation with state officers included. Whether Newsom signs a version that applies to his own state police remains an open question — and a revealing one. It's easy to demand transparency from federal agents enforcing laws you don't like. It's harder when the same standard applies to officers under your command.
California's Democratic leadership wanted to build a legal wall around illegal immigrants. Instead, they built a law so poorly constructed that it collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy. The court didn't need to reach the federal supremacy question. The equal protection problem was enough.
When your law fails because you carved out an exception for your own side, the court isn't handing your opponents a win. You handed it to them yourself.
Eight people are dead in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, after an 18-year-old former student opened fire at a local residence and then at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School on Tuesday afternoon. The shooter, identified by RCMP Deputy Commissioner Dwayne McDonald on Wednesday as Jesse Van Rootselaar, killed his mother, his 11-year-old stepbrother, and six people inside the school before turning the gun on himself.
Van Rootselaar was born male and began transitioning to female approximately six years ago. An initial emergency alert described the active shooter as a "female in a dress." A police superintendent later referred to Van Rootselaar as a "gunperson" during a press briefing.
Approximately 25 others were wounded. Most of the school victims were found in the library. One was found in a stairwell. Among the dead: a 39-year-old female teacher, three 12-year-old female students, one 12-year-old male student, and one 13-year-old male student. Their identities have not been released.
This was not a case where nobody saw anything coming. The New York Post reported that according to McDonald, police had visited the Van Rootselaar family home on multiple occasions over the last several years due to concerns about the shooter's mental health. Van Rootselaar was taken into custody for assessment under British Columbia's Mental Health Act on more than one occasion.
Two years ago, firearms were seized from the home. The lawful owner — whom McDonald did not name — petitioned to have them returned. And got them back.
Two firearms were recovered at the school: one long gun and one modified handgun. Whether these were the same weapons previously seized and returned is, according to authorities, "not immediately clear." How Van Rootselaar gained access to the school building during school hours is also unknown. He had dropped out approximately four years ago. Tumbler Ridge Secondary serves grades 7 through 12 and has a student body of roughly 160. Around 100 students were evacuated to safety after being barricaded in classrooms for more than two hours.
Reports of the shooting reached the RCMP at approximately 1:20 p.m. local time. The emergency public alert wasn't canceled until 5:45 p.m.
When asked whether he believed there was any correlation between Van Rootselaar identifying as transgender and the shooting, McDonald said it was:
"Too early to say."
It's always too early to say. And then the conversation moves on, and the question is never revisited — not because the evidence doesn't warrant it, but because the cultural gatekeepers have decided the question itself is impermissible.
The Tumbler Ridge massacre is the latest in a series of mass shootings carried out by individuals who identify as transgender:
Pointing this out is not an accusation that transgender identity causes violence. The overwhelming majority of transgender-identifying people will never harm anyone. But the refusal to even examine the intersection of gender dysphoria, severe mental illness, and mass violence is not compassion — it's cowardice dressed up as sensitivity. When a pattern recurs, adults investigate it. They don't close their eyes and call it kindness.
Van Rootselaar's mother, 39-year-old Jennifer Strang, was among his first victims. She was killed at the family residence alongside her 11-year-old son, Van Rootselaar's stepbrother.
Strang had been a vocal advocate for her child's transition. In July 2024, she posted a trans-inclusive Pride flag on Instagram with the message:
"I really hope the hate I see online is just bored old people and not true hatred. Do better and educate yourself before spewing bulls–t online."
She added:
"Do you have any idea how many kids are killing themselves over this kind of hate?"
She described herself as a "conservative-leaning libertarian" and used the hashtag #ProtectTransKids. In August 2021, Van Rootselaar's grandmother posted a birthday message on Facebook — roughly two years into the transition — celebrating his 14th birthday:
"Happy 14th birthday to our grandson Jesse !! Love you always !! XOXO"
There is something unbearable about a mother who did everything the modern therapeutic consensus told her to do — affirm, support, protect — and was killed by the child she championed. This isn't a point to score. It's a tragedy to sit with. But it is also, inescapably, a data point that challenges the claim that affirmation alone is sufficient treatment for deeply troubled young people.
Van Rootselaar was repeatedly flagged for mental health crises. He was assessed under the Mental Health Act multiple times. He dropped out of school at roughly 14 years old. Firearms were in the home. Every institutional tripwire that was supposed to prevent exactly this outcome failed — not because the signs weren't there, but because the systems meant to act on them didn't.
Only two mass shootings in Canadian history have claimed more victims — the 1989 Montreal massacre at École Polytechnique, which killed 14 women, and the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks, which killed 22 people across 16 locations. Tumbler Ridge now joins that list. A school of 160 students in a rural community just absorbed a body count that would dominate American headlines for weeks.
The Canadian flag flew at half-staff at Parliament on Wednesday. Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke to the media in Ottawa. No specific policy responses or statements were quoted.
Canada's gun control regime is already among the most restrictive in the Western world. Firearms were seized from this home. The system worked exactly as designed — and then reversed itself when the legal owner asked. The weapons came back. Eight people are dead.
The uncomfortable truth is that no regulatory framework can substitute for institutional courage. The Mental Health Act assessments didn't hold Van Rootselaar. The firearms seizure didn't stick. The school, which he hadn't attended in four years, apparently had no mechanism to stop a former student from entering during school hours. Every checkpoint existed on paper. None of them held in practice.
The debate that follows this massacre will be predictable. Calls for stricter gun laws in a country that already has strict gun laws. Demands to avoid "politicizing" the shooter's transgender identity — demands that would never be made if the shooter's ideology pointed rightward. And a quiet burial of the mental health failures that let a known, repeatedly flagged individual walk into a school with two firearms.
A 39-year-old teacher is dead. Four children aged 12 and 13 are dead. A mother and her 11-year-old son are dead. The system knew Jesse Van Rootselaar was in crisis. It was known for years.
Knowing wasn't enough. It never is, when no one is willing to act on what they know.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — not exactly known as friendly territory for conservative policy — handed the Trump administration a significant legal victory this week, granting a stay of a lower court order that had blocked the end of Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal.
The ruling clears the path for the administration to proceed with terminating TPS for approximately 60,000 migrants who hold no other immigration status in the United States. The case, National TPS Alliance v. Noem, had been one of several legal battles waged to keep the decades-old designations alive indefinitely.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem didn't mince words:
"A win for the rule of law and vindication for the US Constitution. Under the previous administration, Temporary Protected Status was abused to allow violent terrorists, criminals, and national security threats into our nation."
The word "temporary" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Temporary Protected Status. Honduras and Nicaragua were first designated for TPS in 1999, following a hurricane. Nepal received its designation in 2015 after an earthquake. That means Honduran and Nicaraguan TPS holders have been living under "temporary" protection for over a quarter century.
A hurricane hit. Clinton granted temporary relief. Then Bush extended it. Then Obama extended it. Then Trump tried to end it. Then Biden not only extended it but expanded the entire program to the highest levels in its history, ensuring over a million migrants became eligible. Nearly every president since Clinton has routinely extended TPS and designated new countries — turning an emergency measure into a conveyor belt for indefinite residency.
As Breitbart News reported, Noem framed it plainly:
"TPS was never designed to be permanent, yet previous administrations have used it as a de facto amnesty program for decades. Given the improved situation in each of these countries, we are wisely concluding what was intended to be a temporary designation."
She's right on the structural point, whatever one thinks of the individual cases. Congress designed TPS as a short-term shield — a way to pause deportations when a country was in acute crisis. It was never meant to create a parallel immigration system where "temporary" meant "until someone has the political will to say no."
The scale of what the Biden administration did with TPS deserves its own reckoning. Over a million migrants became eligible under Biden's watch — a staggering expansion of a program that was already being stretched well past its statutory intent. That wasn't emergency management. That was immigration policy conducted through the back door, bypassing the legislative process entirely.
This is the pattern that conservatives have identified for years: a program is created with narrow, sympathetic parameters. It gets extended once, twice, a dozen times. Each extension creates a larger constituency that makes termination politically harder. Eventually, the "temporary" designation calcifies into something indistinguishable from permanent residency — and anyone who suggests winding it down gets accused of cruelty.
It's a ratchet that only turns one direction. Until now.
The fact that this stay came from the Ninth Circuit matters. This is the appellate court that immigration activists have long treated as a reliable backstop against enforcement. For years, the circuit served as the preferred venue for challenges to border security measures, deportation orders, and asylum restrictions.
The Ninth Circuit concluded the administration's position was strong enough to warrant staying the lower court's injunction, which signals something important about the legal merits. Courts grant stays when they believe the party seeking one is likely to succeed and that irreparable harm would result from leaving the lower court's order in place. The Trump administration cleared that bar in the Ninth Circuit.
That alone tells you where the legal winds are blowing on TPS termination.
The approximately 60,000 migrants affected by this ruling now face the reality that "temporary" may finally mean temporary. The legal battle in National TPS Alliance v. Noem isn't over — stays are procedural steps, not final rulings — but the trajectory is clear. The administration has momentum, the appellate court's action suggests the legal foundation is sound, and DHS is moving forward.
The broader question is whether this becomes a template. TPS designations remain in effect for numerous other countries, many with their own long histories of routine extension. If the administration succeeds in unwinding the Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal designations, the precedent will be difficult to contain.
For twenty-six years, Washington treated "temporary" as a word with no expiration date. The Ninth Circuit just put one back on the calendar.