If there’s anything the GOP/MAGA party can’t stand, it’s people who won’t fall in line. It openly courts fascism while still pretending its ultimate concern is the protection of (certain) civil liberties. It cheers on politically motivated prosecutions while still making mouth noises about “activist judges.” It’s a land of contrasts, to be sure. But the US — under this leadership — certainly isn’t “a place of honor.”
Today, Governor Larry Rhoden announced Operation: Prairie Thunder – a comprehensive, targeted public safety initiative to protect South Dakotans, especially in the Sioux Falls metro area.
“We are keeping South Dakotans strong, safe, and free. When it comes to safety, one of our biggest opportunities to move the needle is right here in Sioux Falls, and that’s where Operation: Prairie Thunder comes in,” said Governor Larry Rhoden. “We are taking decisive action to hold criminals accountable and protect our communities.”
Whew. Sounds like a lot. This July announcement claimed all kinds of good things would be happening in terms of crime prevention and enforcement. But it was actually just more of the usual “war on drugs” stuff: saturation patrols, a few more helicopters in the air, and a concentrated effort to round up anyone who may have given law enforcement the slip while paroled or on probation.
But the part that meant the most is this:
The comprehensive effort to support ICE’s work includes:
Equipping the South Dakota Highway Patrol to assist with ICE’s actions to keep America safe – a partnership that the Governor previously obtained;
Activating six SDNG soldiers to assist ICE with administrative functions; and
Enabling DOC to work with ICE to deport offenders and transfer violent offenders for federal incarceration and assist ICE with processing and transportation of illegal alien criminals.
In other words, it was just a convenient excuse to roll hard with local law enforcement while riding shotgun with Trump’s bigots-in-masks kidnappers.
Since this announcement, “Prairie Thunder” has moved past Sioux Falls and into other towns, including Yankton, Belle Fourche, and Huron. Press releases and appearances from Governor Rhoden claimed this saturation+ICE had been a huge success.
Troopers jailed 75 people in total across the two operations, according to the release — 42 on drug charges and 33 on non-drug charges — and 19 people were charged with drug offenses but not detained.
The patrol interviewed 25 people on behalf of ICE, the release said, 21 of whom were held for the federal agency.
But a lot of locals in a red-coded state weren’t convinced this had anything to do with real crime. The towns targeted by “Prairie Thunder” weren’t exactly hotbeds of criminal activity. Huron, in particular, is the state’s most diverse city, which raised obvious questions about why it was next on list after the Thunder had rolled through the state’s most-populous city, Sioux Falls.
[T]he November patrols raised concerns for the city’s Hispanic community, according to Republican state Rep.Kevin Van Diepen, who’s also a former police chief.
He said many residents believed that ICE — not state law enforcement — was behind the saturation patrols in the city of 14,000.
The governor had never announced this unexpected expansion of the program to other South Dakota cities. But it’s clear that Prairie Thunder is still an ongoing program. The city of Brookings (pop. 23,377) decided it wasn’t going to play nice with ICE or the governor’s desire to keep all of this under the radar. An extremely short post on the city’s official website let every resident know what was headed their way, as well as making it clear the city had no desire to pitch in with ICE’s deportation efforts:
The City of Brookings has been made aware that Operation Prairie Thunder, an anti-crime task force with the State of South Dakota, will be in the Brookings area Dec. 17-19. The City of Brookings will not be participating in these operations.
The governor voiced his disapproval with the city of Brookings Friday afternoon, suggesting that the broadcasting of when and where stings, saturations or any other temporary, concentrated policing will take place undermines law enforcement operations — and the men and women carrying out that work.
“For security reasons, we are not going to comment on operational specifics. It’s unfortunate that the City of Brookings would jeopardize an anti-crime operation and put the safety of our officers at risk by publishing this information,” he said in a statement provided to The Dakota Scout. “In South Dakota, we enforce the rule of law.”
This is dumb for several reasons. First, even the mayor of Sioux Falls issued statements distancing himself and his city’s police officers from ICE activity related to “Prairie Thunder.” So, even at the initial flash-point of the operation, politicians knew it would be bad for political business to be thought of as complicit in ICE raids.
Second, saturation patrols are often announced ahead of time by the cities and law enforcement agencies engaging in them. We hear radio announcements for these patrols ahead of every major holiday. Local cops also let people know ahead of time if they’re going to be running sobriety checkpoints. None of these notifications have ever been portrayed as “jeopardizing anti-crime operations” by local politicians.
Finally, go fuck yourself, Governor Rhoden. What ICE does has almost nothing to do with the “rule of law.” And the administration overseeing ICE only cares about the “rule of law” when it needs to get the Supreme Court to sign off on its latest constitutional violations. You’re nothing but a Kristi Noem understudy, which means you’re incapable (or unwilling) of doing anything that doesn’t align exactly with the New MAGA Order.
If ICE wants to perform a bunch of crimes of opportunity in Brookings, it should still be able to do so even if its officers are being filmed, insulted, or otherwise treated like the pariahs they are. You serve the state, not Donald Trump and his fleeting whims. If it won’t hurt your brain too much, try to remember that now and then.
Trump was always going to target Minnesota and, specifically, the home of its most liberal residents, Minneapolis. Trump hates the state’s governor, Tim Walz. He also hates one of the state’s congressional reps, Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia.
This is only part of Trump’s recent hateful statements targeting Somalians, Tim Walz, and Rep. Ilhan Omar:
As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
That was delivered via Trump’s favorite outlet for his unhinged rants, Truth Social. He followed that up by making these statements where anyone could hear them during a press briefing:
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
[…]
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
That put another target on Minnesota’s back. The state is home to nearly a third of the nation’s 260,000 Somalians. It’s not as though they’re here illegally, though.
Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S., and 87 percent of those born elsewhere are naturalized citizens.
Not that any of that matters to Donald Trump or ICE’s collective of masked thugs. So, these are the sort of things that are happening now in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area as Trump’s hatred becomes personified.
Federal agents used chemical irritants to push through an angry crowd that blocked their vehicles as they checked identifications in a heavily Somali neighborhood of Minneapolis on Tuesday, amid the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown targeting the community.
City Council member Jamal Osman, a Somali American who represents the neighborhood, witnessed the confrontation, as did an Associated Press videographer.
[…]
He also said he spoke with one young Somali American who was dragged to a vehicle, detained and taken to an ICE detention center. There, officials finally looked at his U.S. passport, fingerprinted him, and released him but told him to find his own way home, about 6 miles (10 kilometers) away in snowy weather.
The DHS also made some noise about an arrest that supposedly justified the violent actions taken by ICE officers (who not only deployed chemicals but also arrested two people who were simply recording ICE officers and/or asserting their Fourth Amendment rights). But the statement seems extremely light on facts, as is often the case when DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin decides to open her mouth:
The Department of Homeland Security’s Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested Jesus Saucedo-Portillo, whom she described as an unauthorized immigrant, on Dec. 6 while he was getting into his vehicle in a campus parking lot.
In a divergence from what school officials have said about the incident, McLaughlin said officers had a warrant and were obstructed by a university administrator and campus security during the encounter.
McLaughlin said Saucedo-Portillo “is a registered sex offender and has a previous arrest for driving while intoxicated.” A search of Minnesota court records by the Minnesota Star Tribune found no record of a DWI case under that name, and Saucedo-Portillo does not appear in the national sex-offender registry.
Some journalists who got an inside look at this operation could have tried to undercut McLaughlin’s narrative about targeted arrests and “worst of the worst.” Instead, NBC News embedded with ICE for a day and ended up generating an article headlined “ICE operation shows the difficulty of immigration arrests amid pushback in frigid Minnesota.”
The article isn’t nearly as bad as the headline, but it allows ICE and their spokespeople to flat out lie about what’s been happening all over this nation, but has most recently focused almost exclusively on cities or states run by members of the Democratic Party.
“It is not an operation targeting the Somali community,” [ICE Acting Executive Director Marcos] Charles said. “We’re looking for people that are here illegally.”
Right. And that’s why the raid that made all the headlines (and generated a handful of bullshit arrests) just happened to have occurred in a neighborhood that is primarily populated by Somalis.
Then there’s this, which is directly contradicted by NBC’s reporting, even if NBC tries to present its observations as supporting Marcos Charles’s assertion:
“The biggest misconception is that we’re out there just randomly arresting people, which we’re not,” Charles said.
[…]
During NBC News’ roughly eight hours with ICE, fewer than a dozen people were arrested despite not being the initial targets of the operation. They just happened to be at the scene when agents showed up.
Given the wording, I would assume eleven people who weren’t ICE targets were arrested. If it were less than that, I assume NBC would have used wording like “ten people” or “less than ten people.” Either way, it’s like more than one “collateral” arrest per hour, which is crazy considering this is an article involving officers griping about the cold keeping people indoors, being prevented from entering homes by property owners multiple times due to the ICE’s lack of actual judicial warrants, and double-tap home search that revealed the targeted person had already fled. The officers decided to arrest the other person there just because.
Minneapolis is pushing back, which is exactly the way it should be. Here’s an incredible recording of anti-ICE protesters shielding a Minneapolis store from being entered by ICE officers, who collectively can’t even explain why they need to enter the building. The officers are eventually shamed into leaving, and showered with nothing but expressions of love, sympathy, and offers of prayer:
Resistance works. ICE officers work best when there’s no friction. When confronted or slowed, they’re far more apt to give up and leave than continue their likely illegal actions. In some cases, being confronted results in unprovoked acts of violence by federal officers. Fortunately, nothing like that happened here.
And just because we’re talking about Minneapolis, “Minnesota Nice,” and ICE activity largely fueled by xenophobic hate, here’s a palate cleanser. I don’t agree with my dad on nearly anything political, but he’s one of the most helpful people you will ever meet. He recently made the news in Minneapolis for doing what he’s always done: pitching in wherever needed.
After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation’s toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
This is one of the unintended consequences of the Trump administration’s focus on mass deportations. For months, ICE has been on a recruiting blitz, offering $50,000 starting bonuses and tuition reimbursement at an agency that has long offered better pay than the federal prison system. For many corrections officers, it’s been an easy sell.
Workers at detention centers and maximum-security prisons from Florida to Minnesota to California counted off the number of co-workers who’d left for ICE or were in the process of doing so. Six at one lockup in Texas, eight at another. More than a dozen at one California facility, and over four dozen at a larger one. After retirements and other attrition, by the start of November the agency had lost at least 1,400 more staff this year than it had hired, according to internal prison data shared with ProPublica.
“We’re broken and we’re being poached by ICE,” one official with the prison workers union told ProPublica. “It’s unbelievable. People are leaving in droves.”
The exodus comes amid shortages of critical supplies, from food to personal hygiene items, and threatens to make the already grim conditions in federal prisons even worse. Fewer corrections officers means more lockdowns, less programming and fewer health care services for inmates, along with more risks to staff and more grueling hours of mandatory overtime. Prison teachers and medical staff are being forced to step in as corrections officers on a regular basis.
And at some facilities, staff said the agency had even stopped providing basic hygiene items for officers, such as paper towels, soap and toilet paper.
“I have never seen it like this in all my 25 years,” an officer in Texas told ProPublica. “You have to literally go around carrying your own roll of toilet paper. No paper towels, you have to bring your own stuff. No soap. I even ordered little sheets that you put in an envelope and it turns to soap because there wasn’t any soap.”
The prisons bureau did not answer a series of emailed questions. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon, Deputy Director Josh Smith said that the agency was “left in shambles by the previous administration” and would take years to repair. Staffing levels, he said, were “catastrophic,” which, along with crumbling infrastructure and corruption, had made the prisons less safe.
Smith said that he and Director William Marshall III had been empowered by the Trump administration to “confront these challenges head-on.” “Transparency and accountability are the cornerstones of our mission to make the BOP great again, and we’re going to expose the truth and hold those responsible accountable.”
ICE, meanwhile, responded to a request for comment by forwarding a press release that failed to answer specific questions but noted that the agency had made more than 18,000 total tentative job offers as of mid-September.
The bureau tried tackling the problem with a long-term hiring push that included signing bonuses, retention pay and a fast-tracked hiring process. By the start of the year, that effort seemed to be working.
Kathleen Toomey, then the bureau’s associate deputy director, told members of Congress in February that the agency had just enjoyed its most successful hiring spree in a decade, increasing its ranks by more than 1,200 in 2024.
“Higher staffing levels make institutions safer,” she told a House appropriations subcommittee.
But the costly efforts to reel in more staff strained a stagnant budget that was already stretched thin. Toomey told Congress the bureau had not seen a funding increase since 2023, even as it absorbed millions in pay raises and retention incentives. As inflation and personnel costs rose, the bureau was forced to cut its operating budgets by 20%, Toomey said.
And despite some improvement, the staffing problems persisted. In her February testimony, Toomey acknowledgedthere were still at least 4,000 vacant positions, leaving the agency with so few officers that prison teachers, nurses and electricians were regularly being ordered to abandon their normal duties and fill in as corrections officers.
Then ICE rolled out its recruiting drive.
“At first it seemed like it was going to be no big deal, and then over the last week or so we already lost five, and then we have another 10 to 15 in various stages of waiting for a start date,” an employee at one low-security facility told ProPublica in October. “For us that’s almost 20% of our custody staff.”
He, like most of the prison workers and union officials who spoke to ProPublica, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation — a concern that has grown since the agency canceled the union’s contract in September following an executive order. Now union leaders say they’ve been warned that without their union protections, they could be punished for speaking to the media.
After the contract’s cancellation, many of the current staff who had originally spoken on the record asked to have their names withheld. Those who still agreed to be identified asked ProPublica to note that their interviews took place before the agency revoked the union agreement.
Earlier this year, Brandy Moore White, national president of the prison workers union, said it’s not unprecedented to see a string of prison staffers leaving the agency, often in response to changes that significantly impact their working conditions. Prior government shutdowns, changes in leadership and the pandemic all drove away workers — but usually, she said, people leaving the agency en masse tended to be near the end of their careers. Now, that’s not the case.
“This is, from what I can remember, the biggest exodus of younger staff, staff who are not retirement-eligible,” she said. “And that’s super concerning to me.” ICE’s expansion has even thrown a wrench into BOP’s usual training program for rookies. Normally, new officers have to take a three-week Introduction to Correctional Techniques course at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Georgia within their first 60 days on the job, according to the prisons bureau’s website. In August, FLETC announced that it would focus only on “surge-related training,” pausing programs for other law enforcement agencies until at least early 2026, according to an internal email obtained by ProPublica. Afterward, FLETC said in a press release that it was “exploring temporary solutions” to “meet the needs of all partner agencies,” though it’s not clear whether any of those solutions have since been implemented. The centers did not respond to emailed requests for comment.
At the same time, the effects of the budget crunch were starting to show. In recent months, more than 40 staff and prisoners at facilities across the country have reported cutbacks even more severe than the usual prison scarcities.
In September, Moore White told ProPublica some prisons had fallen behind on utility and trash bills. At one point, she said, the prison complex in Oakdale, Louisiana, was days away from running out of food for inmates before the union — worried that hungry prisoners would be more apt to riot — intervened, nudging agency higher-ups to address the problem, an account confirmed by two other prison workers. (Officials at the prison complex declined to comment.) Elsewhere, staff and prisoners reported shortages — no eggs in a California facility and no beef in a Texas lockup where staff said they were doling out smaller portions at mealtimes.
Earlier this year, a defense lawyer complained that the Los Angeles detention center ran out of pens for prisoners in solitary confinement, where people without phone or e-messaging privileges rely on snail mail to contact the outside world. One of his clients was “rationing his ink to write letters to his family,” the attorney said. The center didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Personal hygiene supplies have been running low, too. Several prisoners said their facilities had become stingier than usual with toilet paper, and women incarcerated in Carswell in Texas reported a shortage of tampons. “I was told to use my socks,” one said. The facility did not answer questions from ProPublica about conditions there.
Fewer staff has meant in some cases that inmates have lost access to care. At the prison complex in Victorville, California, staff lodged written complaints accusing the warden of skimping on the number of officers assigned to inmate hospital visits in order to cut back on overtime. (The complex did not respond to a request for comment.) In some instances, the complaints alleged, that left so few officers at the hospital that ailing inmates missed the procedures that had landed them there in the first place.
Chyann Bratcher, a prisoner at Carswell, a medical lockup in Texas, said she missed an appointment for rectal surgery — something she’d been waiting on for two years — because there weren’t enough staff to take her there. She was able to have the procedure almost two months later, after another cancellation.
Staffers say several facilities have started scheduling recurring “blackout” days, when officers are banned from working overtime in an effort to save money. Instead, prison officials turn to a practice known as “augmentation,” where they direct teachers, plumbers and medical staff to fill in as corrections officers.
“That’s why I left,” said Tom Kamm, who retired in September from the federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, after 29 years with the bureau. “My job was to try to settle EEO complaints, so if somebody alleged discrimination against the agency it was my job to look into it and try to resolve it.”
When he found out earlier this year that he would soon be required to work two shifts per week as a corrections officer, he decided to retire instead.
“I hadn’t been an officer in a housing unit since like 2001 — it had been like 24 years,” he said. “I had really no clue how to do that anymore.”
Augmentation isn’t new, but staff and prisoners at some facilities say it’s being used more often than it once was. It also means fewer medical staff available to address inmates’ needs. “Today we had a Physical Therapist as a unit officer so all of his PT appointments would have been cancelled,” Brian Casper, an inmate at the federal medical prison in Missouri, wrote in an email earlier this year. “Yesterday one of the other units had the head of Radiology for the unit officer so there would have been one less person doing x-rays and CT scans.” The prison didn’t respond to emailed questions.
When the government shutdown hit in October, it only made the situation worse, exacerbating the shortages and increasing the allure of leaving the bureau. While ICE agents and corrections officers continued bringing home paychecks, thousands of prison teachers, plumbers and nurses did not.
The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the domestic policy megabill that Trump signed into law on July 4, could offer some financial support for the agency’s staffing woes, as it will route another $5 billion to the prisons bureau over four years — $3 billion of which is specifically earmarked to improve retention, hiring and training. Yet exactly what the effects of that cash infusion will look like remains to be seen: Though the funding bill passed more than four months ago, in November the bureau declined to answer questions about when it will receive the money or how it will be spent.
There is no doubt that fentanyl is a dangerous drug. It has long since surpassed heroin on the list of drugs people only do once. That its prevalence has more to do with pharma companies irresponsibly pushing opioids than drug pushers pushing a new drug often goes ignored during this heated, ongoing debate that is often so far removed from reality as to be literally laughable.
I mean, we’ve seen several law enforcement officials claim merely being in the proximity of fentanyl is capable of generating overdoses in officers. We’ve also seen law enforcement officials claim the amount of seized fentanyl is capable of killing the entire population of US states, if not the entire nation. And yet, states remain populated and the US public generally capable of surviving the drug’s existence if they choose not to ingest it.
What’s happening here is not only idiotic but intentional. The executive order issued by Trump yesterday is meant to do several things, none of them good. First, it seeks to retcon the boat strike narrative by reinforcing Trump’s hallucinatory claim that drug mules are, in fact, terrorists engaged in terrorist acts targeting America.
Second, it gives him the excuse to add military troops to the law enforcement mix by pretending an illicit substance that is generally voluntarily ingested in order to take effect is somehow a “weapon of mass destruction.” No one (well, outside of the CIA, anyway) has treated drugs like a weapon. Keeping your customer base alive is crucial to maintaining a steady revenue stream. Overdoses are an expected negative outcome in the drug trade, but they are never the point of drug trafficking operations.
This is all stuff you already know. I’m not going to sit here and insult your intelligence. I’ll turn things over to Donald Trump and allow him to insult your intelligence:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose and Policy. Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic. Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from fentanyl overdoses.
[Some stuff about how drug cartels are now “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”]
As President of the United States, my highest duty is the defense of the country and its citizens. Accordingly, I hereby designate illicit fentanyl and its core precursor chemicals as Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).
Well, I hope I don’t need to worry about drone strikes when visiting my primary care provider or local pharmacy. Or do I?
Trump eases into his martial law plan by directing the Attorney General to “pursue” fentanyl investigations and, if possible, add sentencing enhancements (not specified here) for those charged with fentanyl trafficking.
But here’s where Trump gets his war at home on:
[T]he Secretary of War and the Attorney General shall determine whether the threats posed by illicit fentanyl and its impact on the United States warrant the provision of resources from the Department of War to the Department of Justice to aid in the enforcement of title 18 of the United States Code, as consistent with 10 U.S.C. 282
10 U.S.C. 282 simply says the military can assist law enforcement if there’s a credible WMD threat that law enforcement isn’t capable of handling on its own, including locating, securing, and safely disposing of said WMD.
But here Trump links it to Title 18, which encompasses the entirety of law enforcement operations, including handling court cases, overseeing convicted criminals, and — obviously — engaging in normal law enforcement activities. That part of the law has already posed a problem for Trump, who definitely wanted military troops to be the new cops, especially in cities run by people he didn’t like. While there are existing provisions in 10 U.S.C. 282 linking it to parts of Title 18, it’s hard to believe Trump will be content with limiting military participation to the preexisting legal carve-outs.
The administration’s concurrent fact sheet glosses over the stapling of Title 18 to 10 U.S.C. 282, pretending instead that this new designation doesn’t actually change anything other than forcing the military to pretend fentanyl is a weapon of mass destruction.
The Order directs the Secretary of War and Attorney General to determine whether the Department of War should provide enhanced national security resources to the Department of Justice as necessary during an emergency situation involving a weapon of mass destruction.
The most immediate effect of this order is on sentencing. Possessing fentanyl with intent to distribute will not only get the usual drug enhancements, but the lengthy mandatory sentences attached to acts of terrorism. Buying drugs could plausibly get someone charged with “providing material support to terrorists,” which means some low-level felonies will instead come with prison sentences of 10-25 years pre-attached.
But it appears the real purpose of this executive order is to create an excuse to send soldiers into cities to do police work, while also allowing the administration to continue to engage in extrajudicial killings in international waters. Whatever it actually ends up being will definitely make America worse. It’s another abuse of executive power that comes with a universal adapter. If Trump can call fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction,” anyone can call anything that could possibly be deadly a WMD. Fentanyl is just the beginning.
ICE continues to be increasingly awful as it chases arrest and deportation quotas it will never meet. The administration’s desire to rid this nation of as many migrants as possible is generating new nastiness on a daily basis.
This bit of hideousness will likely have been subsumed several times over by the time you read this, but that doesn’t mean it should pass by unnoticed. The “worst of the worst” applies more to ICE officers and officials than it does to most of the people it sweeps up. This case is no exception. (h/t Kyle Cheney)
Guatemalan native Faustino Pablo Pablo has been in the United States since 2012, following all the rules of the lengthy asylum process. He received a ruling from a US immigration judge that said it “more likely than not” he would be “tortured” by (or with the permission of) the Guatemalan government if he was forced to return. The ruling made it clear Pablo Pablo could be removed to another country but was absolutely not to be sent back to Guatemala.
From 2013 to 2025, Pablo Pablo complied with every aspect of his order or release, including making regular check-ins to ICE’s ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations) office. Then this happened:
On November 5, 2025, ICE detained Pablo Pablo at a “regular check-in appointment” without notice or explanation. Pablo Pablo’s attorney promptly contacted ICE to share, inter alia, receipt of his withholding of removal to Guatemala. On November 17, 2025, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (“ERO”) component of ICE transported Pablo Pablo to El Paso, Texas, “for staging of removal to Guatemala.”
That from the recent order [PDF] issued by federal judge David Guaderrama. The judge definitely isn’t happy with ICE, which is hardly surprising since the government basically admits it did the wrong thing willfully.
Once it became clear Pablo Pablo was challenging his (illegal) deportation, ICE accelerated the removal process:
On November 20, 2025, [Pablo Pablo] filed an additional motion, asking that Respondents be enjoined from transferring him outside of the Western District of Texas during the pendency of his habeas petition. The same day, at 5:00 AM MST, ICE transported Pablo Pablo to the airport. At 6:00 AM, ICE placed him on a flight direct to Guatemala By the time the Court ordered Respondents not to remove Pablo Pablo, he had arrived in Guatemala City.
That led to the court demanding some answers from the government. And while the government was responsive (in the legal sense), it doesn’t appear to be all that concerned about Pablo Pablo’s whereabouts or well-being.
Respondents conceded that Pablo Pablo “was subject to withholding of removal to Guatemala at the time he was removed, and therefore the physical removal was unlawful.” To rectify the error, Respondents stated that Pablo Pablo’s return flight had been “tentatively scheduled” for December 4, 2025.23 On December 4, 2025, Respondents provided an update that “Petitioner was not returned to the United States.” As far as the Court is aware, Pablo Pablo currently remains in Guatemala.
But then the government argued that the judge no longer had jurisdiction over Pablo Pablo’s habeas petition because… the government no longer had custody of Pablo Pablo. This is ridiculous, says the judge.
For reasons squarely outside of Pablo Pablo’s control, his attention has shifted from challenging his detention to challenging the blatant lawlessness of his removal. In other words, “[t]he removal itself lies at the heart of the wrongs.”
You’ll notice the words “blatant lawlessness of his removal” are not in quotes. This is a judge talking directly to ICE and the government’s legal reps, telling them exactly what he thinks about their actions. This isn’t an indirect slam cribbed from precedent.
And the judge is right to be angry. As Kyle Cheney’s report for Politico notes, this is something ICE has been doing repeatedly since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
The administration has acknowledged several other improper deportations, including a man sent to El Salvador despite a court-approved settlement agreement barring his deportation while his asylum claim was pending, a man who was sent to Mexico despite immigration officials’ acknowledgment that they had no record of a “credible fear” interview to determine whether he might face persecution, a man deported to El Salvador — where he remains incarcerated — despite a federal appeals court order barring his deportation, and a transgender woman deported to Mexico despite an immigration court order finding she was likely to be tortured there.
And even though the government admitted it had engaged in a “blatantly unlawful” removal when questioned by the court, the DHS remains defiant. Assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement that basically says that Pablo Pablo is more wrong than ICE is:
“This illegal alien from Guatemala has a final order of removal from an immigration judge issued in 2015. He received full due process. One thing is certain: he is not going to be able to remain in the U.S. We will deport him to another country.”
McLaughlin also said this in her statement, which yet again undercuts the “worst of worst” narrative that gets trotted out every time ICE starts ramping up raids.
If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a criminal with a lengthy rap sheet or someone who spent more than a decade here doing everything the government asked of him and, apparently, being a law-abiding non-citizen. Either way, this administration wants you gone.
A recent shooting involving a former Afghani US counter-terrorism asset who worked with the CIA (!!!) has become the tragedy the Trump administration apparently needed to go from “consistently racist” to “openly racist.” The wounding of two National Guard troops led directly to the president spending the holiday doing what he always does on holidays: ranting about a bunch of shit rather than just wish the people he supposed to serving a happy Thanksgiving.
Trump went on a multi-day Truth Social bender, beginning with multiple invective-filled posts on Thanksgiving that led to a marathon 158-post (!!!) barrage over a three-hour period starting late Monday (December 1) night.
Trump dropped back-to-back “bangers” on Truth Social, both loaded with bigoted language that made it clear the US — under Trump — is only interested in importing white people.
This post first blamed Biden for some stuff before moving on (within the space of a sentence) to declaring the termination of asylum/visa applications from nations Trump considers to be unworthy of entering the former Land of Opportunity.
I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization.
It appears the administration will decide which countries fit the “Third World” descriptor on a case-by-bigoted-case basis. This means the ten countries considered too inherently dangerous to be allowed to be part of the migration ecosystem are (lol) in the minority. If you’ve been paying attention, the original list of countries whose residents are forbidden from entering the US contains a lot of countries this administration wants to send deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia to, despite much-friendlier countries (Costa Rica, for example) offering to take Garcia off the US government’s hands.
Mr. Trump’s June proclamation imposed a near-total restriction on the entry of people from Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
The Trump administration has halted all immigration applications filed by people from 19 countries, its latest move to restrict legal immigration pathways following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C., last week, according to internal government guidance and a source familiar with the move.
[…]
It also partially suspended the entry of travelers and immigrants from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
The latest proclamation means all 19 of these countries are on Trump’s shit list. The limitations are now effectively a complete ban on migration. And former residents of the listed nations can expect to be deported ASAFP. (“Feasibly.”)
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is recommending that the Trump administration’s travel ban list include between 30 to 32 countries, marking an increase from the current list of 19 countries, according to a source familiar with the matter.
[…]
Noem said Monday that, following a meeting with President Donald Trump, she recommended a “full travel ban” on “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
Huh. Will the US of A be added to that list, considering it generates plenty of “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” on its own? The simple fact is that immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more than their share of taxes, and generally do everything they can to stand on their own two feet, even when the government insists on depriving them of their bootstraps every time a bunch of bigots seize an inordinate amount of power.
And that leads us back to what’s always been propelling this mass deportation surge: the GOP’s racism, currently embodied by an aged, obese man with bad hair who has never wanted for anything in his life: Donald Trump.
His immediate follow-up (one [1] minute later [!!]) to his pseudo-Thanksgiving well-wishing was this post, which immediately attacked political opponents not just because they opposed him, but because they were not as white as Trump is (current level of spray tan notwithstanding).
I’m going to quote quite a bit of it (for which I kind of apologize) because you have to see all of this for yourself and ABSOLUTELY KNOW this has all been written by a man who currently holds the office of the President of the United States. (All emphasis mine.)
YOUR WALL OF TEXT AWAITS.
The official United States Foreign population stands at 53 million people (Census), most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels. They and their children are supported through massive payments from Patriotic American Citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape, or form. They put up with what has happened to our Country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (Failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc.). As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc…
Yeah. This is “racist grandpa” shit except that it’s being said by perhaps the most powerful man in the world. There are lies about the costs immigrants create, followed by a bunch of stereotypes, the casual use of the word “retarded” to describe another politician, and the well-past-the-point-of-insinuation claims that Ilhan Omar not only married her brother but comes from a country that shouldn’t even be considered a country.
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.
[…]
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
[…]
Trump also renewed his criticism of Omar, whose family fled the civil war in Somalia and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the U.S.
“We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
Man, I can only hope that when the face-eating leopard party really starts stripping faces off the MAGA faithful, their asylum requests will be rejected with the same callous shrugging about how these people are “garbage” that shouldn’t be allowed to enter other countries because the United States “stinks” and their pasty white nationalists “contribute nothing” to the world at large. And I also hope these little Mussolini wannabes the GOP caters will take a look at history and wonder whether it’s truly worth it to be the worst Americans imaginable just because it plays well with the Nazis.
Online influencer Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has millions of young male followers, was facing allegations of sex trafficking women in three countries when he and his brother left their home in Romania to visit the United States.
“The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” Tate posted on X before the trip in February — one of many times he has sung the president’s praises to his fans.
But when the Tate brothers arrived by private plane in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, they immediately found themselves in the crosshairs of law enforcement once more, as Customs and Border Protection officials seized their electronic devices.
This time, they had a powerful ally come to their aid. Behind the scenes, the White House intervened on their behalf.
Interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show a White House official told senior Department of Homeland Security officials to return the devices to the brothers several days after they were seized. The official who delivered the message, Paul Ingrassia, is a lawyer who previously represented the Tate brothers before joining the White House, where he was working as its DHS liaison.
In his written request, a copy of which was reviewed by ProPublica, Ingrassia chided authorities for taking the action, saying the seizure of the Tates’ devices was not a good use of time or resources. The request to return the electronics to the Tates, he emphasized, was coming from the White House.
The incident is the latest in a string of law enforcement matters where the Trump White House has inserted itself to help friends and target foes. Since entering office for a second term, Trump has urged the Justice Department to go after elected officials who investigated him and his businesses, and he pardoned a string of political allies. Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent members of the so-called manosphere, a collection of influencers, podcasters and content creators who helped deliver young male voters to Trump. And news of the White House intervention on behalf of the accused sex traffickers comes as Trump is under fire over his ties to notorious child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his administration’s recent efforts to stop the public release of the so-called Epstein files.
Ingrassia’s intervention on behalf of Tate and his brother, Tristan, caused alarm among DHS officials that they could be interfering with a federal investigation if they followed through with the instruction, according to interviews and screenshots of contemporaneous communications between officials.
One official who was involved and spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid facing retribution said they were disgusted by the request’s “brazenness and the high-handed expectation of complicity.”
“It was so offensive to what we’re all here to do, to uphold the law and protect the American people,” the person said. “We don’t want to be seen as handing out favors.”
It’s unclear why law enforcement wanted to examine the devices, what their analysis found or whether Ingrassia’s intervention hindered any investigation. The White House and DHS declined to answer questions about the incident.
But law enforcement experts said it is highly unusual for the White House to get involved in particular border seizures or to demand authorities give up custody of potential evidence in an investigation.
“I’ve never heard of anything like that in my 30 years working,” said John F. Tobon, a retired assistant director for Homeland Security Investigations, which typically analyzes the contents of electronic devices after they’re seized by Customs and Border Protection. “For anyone to say this request is from the White House, it feels like an intimidation tactic.”
Tobon said that even if authorities resisted the request from Ingrassia, knowledge that the White House opposed their actions could cause them to be less aggressive than they would normally be: “Anytime somebody feels intimidated or as if they’re not free to follow procedure, that’s going to stay in the back of their mind because of the consequences. In this administration the consequences are different, people are getting fired.”
Samuel Buell, a Duke University law school professor and former federal prosecutor, called the pressure on behalf of the Tates “another data point” in the White House politicizing law enforcement.
“This is not something that would have been viewed as appropriate or acceptable prior to 2025,” Buell said. “There’s a pattern here of severe departure from preexisting norms … that are being tossed aside left and right.”
The Tate brothers’ lawyer, Joseph McBride, said he didn’t know what happened to the devices but that his clients have still not had them returned. He said it’s unclear whether any investigation into their contents is continuing.
His clients, he said, are innocent and there were no illicit materials on their electronics. “There have been multiple investigations against them and nothing has come of it,” McBride said.
Ingrassia worked at McBride’s firm before joining the White House, and McBride acknowledged speaking “to Paul from time to time” but couldn’t recall discussing the seized devices with him. Ingrassia, he said, has never given the Tates special treatment since joining the Trump administration.
The White House declined to answer questions about whether Ingrassia was acting on his own or representing the White House’s wishes.
In a brief interview with ProPublica, Ingrassia denied trying to help the Tates, before hanging up. “There was no intervention. Nothing happened,” he said. “There was nothing.”
Ingrassia’s lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said in a text message: “Mr. Ingrassia never ordered that the Tate Brothers’ devices be returned to them, nor did he say — and nor would he have ever said — that such a directive came from the White House. This story is fiction, simply not true.”
When questioned about whether Ingrassia had asked authorities to return the devices, even if he did not order them to, Paltzik declined to comment, explaining that “the word ‘ask’ is inappropriate because it is meaningless in this context. He either ordered something or he didn’t. And as I said, he did NOT order anything.”
A DHS spokesperson did not respond to specific questions about the intervention or any impact it might have had on an investigation, only saying in a statement that Customs and Border Protection “performed a 100% baggage examination and detained all electronic media devices when the Tate Brothers entered the country. Electronic media devices were detained and turned over to Homeland Security Investigators for inspectional purposes.”
Ingrassia’s work at McBride’s small New York law firm included helping to represent the Tate brothers. He has praised Andrew Tate’s “physical prowess” on social media along with his “willpower and spirit,” calling him “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence.”
Ethics experts said when government officials take actions to benefit former clients, it undermines public trust.
“The rule of law cannot be carried out if it depends on cronyism,” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer who served in the administrations of both parties. “To have a member of the White House interfere when they’ve had a prior client relationship and some sort of personal relationship, that gives rise to questions of impartiality.”
Trump had nominated Ingrassia to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but the 30-year-old lawyer’s chances for Senate confirmation imploded after Politico reported that he had sent a string of racist text messages to fellow Republicans and described himself as having “a Nazi streak.” Paltzik, his lawyer, raised doubts about the authenticity of the texts but said “even if the texts are authentic, they clearly read as self-deprecating and satirical humor.”
In a post on X announcing he was withdrawing from his Senate confirmation hearing because not enough Republican lawmakers were supporting him, Ingrassia said he would “continue to serve President Trump and this administration to Make America Great Again.”
Last month, Ingrassia announced he was moving to a new role within the administration, after Trump called him into his office and asked him to serve as deputy general counsel at the General Services Administration.
It’s unclear what prompted authorities to seize the Tates’ property, but the bar for searching electronic devices is significantly lower for those entering the U.S. compared with those already in the country, even if they are citizens.
After the seizure, the contents were examined by federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations, according to the official involved. A Homeland Security official, who asked for anonymity because they didn’t have permission to speak publicly, confirmed that HSI agents scrutinized the contents.
The Tates left the United States in late March.
No criminal charges have been filed against the brothers in the United States, though a lawyer representing four anonymous defendants sued by them in Florida filed court papers this year suggesting that federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were investigating the pair. No other details have become public, and a spokesperson for the prosecutors’ office declined to comment.
In an interview with conservative podcaster Candace Owens soon after landing in Florida, Andrew Tate revealed his devices had been seized, saying they were taken after he refused to give customs officers his passwords.
Tate, who was born in the U.S. but spent much of his childhood in Britain before moving as an adult to Romania, complained that his rights were violated, calling himself “one of the most innocent people on the planet.”
And he said law enforcement officials wouldn’t find anything on his devices: “You think I sleep with a phone full of evidence? You think I don’t wipe my phone every night? You think I’m dumb? Come get me.”
In that interview, Tate made no mention of a White House official intervening on his behalf and seemingly misidentified state authorities in Florida as responsible for taking his devices.
Shortly after the Tates landed on Feb. 27, Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that Florida authorities had launched an investigation into the brothers. Uthmeier said his office had “secured and executed subpoenas and warrants” and called the brothers’ behavior “atrocious.”
“These guys have themselves publicly admitted to participating in what very much appears to be soliciting, trafficking, preying upon women around the world,” he said at the time. “We’re not going to accept it.”
The status of the Florida investigation is unclear. A spokesperson for the Florida attorney general declined to comment for this article.
Allegations of sexual abuse and violence have swirled around Andrew Tate for almost as long as he’s been in the public eye. In 2016, Tate was booted off the cast of the British version of the “Big Brother” reality series around the time a video emerged of him whipping a woman with a belt. Tate said he and the woman were joking.
Tate’s profile only rose afterward, and he began amassing a following as a self-help guru for young men. He quickly aligned himself with Trump’s then-young MAGA movement.
“The tate family support trump FULLY. MAGA!” he posted on social media after meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower in 2017.
Tate moved to Romania a year after his brief foray in reality TV, in part, he said, because he believed authorities there investigate sex crimes less aggressively.
“I’m not a … rapist but I like the idea of being able to do what I want,” he said.
But in 2023, prosecutors in Romania accused the Tates of operating a criminal group that trafficked women, including some who alleged the brothers led them to believe they were interested in relationships but instead forced them into filming online pornographic videos. Prosecutors also said they were investigating allegations that the Tates trafficked minors. Andrew Tate was charged with rape. The Tates have denied the allegations, and the initial charges against them were sent back to prosecutors by a court because of procedural issues.
The Tates face similar allegations in Britain. Authorities there authorized a raft of charges against the brothers, including rape and human trafficking, based on allegations from three women. In 2024, arrest warrants were issued for the brothers, who have denied wrongdoing, but authorities said they would not be extradited to the United Kingdom until criminal proceedings in Romania were completed.
A woman has also sued the Tates in Florida, accusing them of luring her to Romania to coerce her into sex work. The Tates have denied the allegations, and last month a judge dismissed most of her claims but allowed for her to refile.
This year, Tate derided the allegations against him and compared himself to Trump on X. “Romania? No case UK? No case USA? No case,” he posted on X. “Lawfare? – Im one of the most mistreated men in history beside president Trump himself.”
The intervention on behalf of the Tates was not the first time those around Trump took an interest in legal issues involving the brothers.
In February, Romania’s foreign minister said that presidential envoy Richard Grenell told him at an international security conference in Germany that he remained interested in the fate of the Tates. “I did not perceive this statement as pressure,” the foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, said, “just a repeat of a known stance.” Grenell told the Financial Times that he had “no substantive conversation” with Hurezeanu but supported “the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”
Current Third Circuit Appeals Court judge and former Trump lawyer Emil Bove made it clear — on more than one occasion — that DOJ lawyers should tell the courts “fuck you” if they tried to shut down any anti-migrant operations.
That message apparently reached several receptive ears. Earlier this year, a federal judge ordered the administration to halt flights to El Salvador and to return immigrants who hadn’t been given access to their due process rights. The government went on to pretend this had never happened. It did at least not continue to send planes to El Salvador, but it refused to order those already in the air to turn around and return to the United States.
Thanks to a filing by the DOJ, we now know who made the final call to say “fuck you” to Judge James Boasberg, who issued both a verbal and written order demanding the flights to El Salvador be halted.
This is the angle the administration is taking to pretend it didn’t need to recall flights it had hastily sent aloft in anticipation of Boasberg’s ruling:
At approximately 6:45 PM on March 15, 2025, the Court orally directed counsel for the Government to inform his clients of the Court’s oral directives at the hearing, including statements directing that any removed class members “need to be returned to the United States.” By that point, two flights carrying individuals designated under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) had already departed from the United States and were outside United States territory and airspace.
At approximately 7:25 PM, the Court memorialized its temporary restraining order in a written order, as the Court had indicated at the hearing it would do. The written order enjoined Defendants “from removing” class members pursuant to the AEA. The written order, unlike the oral directives, said nothing about returning class members who had already been removed.
A government acting in good faith might have taken steps to return the planes already in the air as a precautionary step to avoid generating contempt of court allegations. This government never acts in good faith. It allowed the planes to continue heading towards El Salvador even though it had received a verbal order “directing that any removed [migrants] need[ed] to be returned to the United States.”
It instead let the planes continued to fly until it had received a written order, which it then decided to interpret as permission to allow these flights to continue.
But someone had to make the final call to blow off Judge Boasberg’s first order and pretend the second order wasn’t meant to be read in the spirit of his first order. And that person would be Kristi Noem, who is now defending her actions with the usual Trump admin horseshit about keeping America safe from dangerous brown people:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Sunday confirmed that she instructed the federal government to carry out the deportation and transferring Venezuelan detainees to El Salvador despite a court order halting the flights.
“The decisions that are made on deportations, where flights go, and when they go are my decision at the Department of Homeland Security,” Noem told NBC’s Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press.” “And we will continue to do the right thing and ensure that dangerous criminals are removed.”
Bullshit. That was never the case. The Trump administration doesn’t care whether or not the migrants it’s ejecting as as fast as it can are actually “dangerous criminals.” The latest data shows only 5% of those detained by ICE have criminal records that contain violent crimes. 73% of those detained have no criminal record at all.
Rather than err on the side of caution when confronted with a discrepancy between what was said and what was written by the judge, Kristi Noem signed off on the interpretation that allowed the administration to do what it was always going to do anyway. And in doing so, she’s made it clear this government will engage in actionable contempt that springs from its literal contempt for the system of checks and balances.
Boasberg previously found probable cause to start contempt proceedings over the administration’s deportations, an action that was paused for months until an appeals court last week cleared the way for him to charge forward.
This is something, at least. Its usefulness in forcing the administration to play by the rules has yet to be seen. So far, nothing really has had any deterrent effect on an administration that continues to expand the boundaries of executive power on a daily basis.
On Oct. 2, the second day of the government shutdown, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived at Mount Rushmore to shoot a television ad. Sitting on horseback in chaps and a cowboy hat, Noem addressed the camera with a stern message for immigrants: “Break our laws, we’ll punish you.”
Noem has hailed the more than $200 million, taxpayer-funded ad campaign as a crucial tool to stem illegal immigration. Her agency invoked the “national emergency” at the border as it awarded contracts for the campaign, bypassing the normal competitive bidding process designed to prevent waste and corruption.
The Department of Homeland Security has kept at least one beneficiary of the nine-figure ad deal a secret, records and interviews show: a Republican consulting firm with long-standing personal and business ties to Noem and her senior aides at DHS. The company running the Mount Rushmore shoot, called the Strategy Group, does not appear on public documents about the contract. The main recipient listed on the contracts is a mysterious Delaware company, which was created days before the deal was finalized.
No firm has closer ties to Noem’s political operation than the Strategy Group. It played a central role in her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. Corey Lewandowski, her top adviser at DHS, has worked extensively with the firm. And the company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson at DHS, Tricia McLaughlin.
The Strategy Group’s ad work is the first known example of money flowing from Noem’s agency to businesses controlled by her allies and friends.
Government contracting experts said the depth of the ties between DHS leadership and the Strategy Group suggested major potential violations of ethics rules.
“It’s corrupt, is the word,” said Charles Tiefer, a leading authority on federal contract law and former member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said that the Strategy Group’s role should prompt investigations by both the DHS inspector general and the House Oversight Committee.
“Hiding your friends as subcontractors is like playing hide the salami with the taxpayer,” Tiefer added.
Federal regulations forbid conflicts of interest in contracting and require that the process be conducted “with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none.”
“It’s worthy of an investigation to ferret out how these decisions were made, and whether they were made legally and without bias,” said Scott Amey, a contracting expert and general counsel at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.
The revelations come as the amount of money at Noem’s disposal has skyrocketed. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill granted DHS more than $150 billion, and Noem has given herself an unusual degree of control over how that money is spent. This summer, she began requiring that she personally approve any payment over $100,000.
Asked about the Strategy Group’s work for DHS, McLaughlin, the agency spokesperson, said in an interview, “We don’t have visibility into why they were chosen.”
“I don’t know who they’re a subcontractor with, but I don’t work with them because I have a conflict of interest and I fully recused myself,” she said. “My marriage is one thing and work is another. I don’t combine them.” Her husband, Strategy Group CEO Ben Yoho, didn’t respond to questions.
In a written statement, DHS said, “DHS has no involvement with the selection of subcontractors.” They added that the Strategy Group does not have a direct contract with the agency, saying “DHS cannot and does not determine, control, or weigh in on who contractors hire.”
Contracting experts said that agencies can and do sometimes require that subcontractors be approved by officials. It’s not clear how much the Strategy Group has been paid.
This is not the first time that the Strategy Group has gotten public money through a Noem contract. As governor of South Dakota in 2023, her administration set off a scandal by hiring the Ohio-based company to do a different ad campaign, paying it $8.5 million in state funds. While the state said the contract was done by the book, a former Noem administration official told ProPublica that Noem quietly intervened to ensure the Strategy Group got the deal. ProPublica granted some people anonymity to discuss the deals because of their sensitivity.
The firm also paid up to $25,000 to one of Noem’s closest advisers in South Dakota, previously unreported records show. (The adviser, 28-year-old Madison Sheahan, now serves at DHS as the second-in-command of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Sheahan didn’t respond to questions about why she was paid.)
The DHS ad that the company filmed at Mount Rushmore has aired during “Fox & Friends” in recent days. Executives from the Strategy Group traveled to the shoot and hired subcontractors to fill out the film crew, according to records and a person involved in the campaign. The ad’s aesthetic sits somewhere between a political campaign ad and a Jeep commercial as Noem tells would-be immigrants to “come here the right way.”
“From the cowboys who tamed the West to the titans who built our cities,” Noem says, as images of Trump Tower in Chicago and Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt last year flash on the screen, “America has always rewarded vision and grit.” Noem continues: “You cross the border illegally, we’ll find you.”
Watch the DHS Ad Filmed at Mount Rushmore
The ad is the latest in a campaign that Noem debuted in February, just a few weeks after she took charge of DHS. “Any delay in providing these critical communications to the public will increase the spread of misinformation, especially misinformation by smugglers,” the agency wrote, explaining why it was skipping the competitive bidding process normally required for government contracts. The initial ads featured Noem thanking Trump for securing the border.
The contracts total $220 million so far, leading the DHS ad budget to triple in the most recent fiscal year, according to Bloomberg. The lion’s share of ad contracts is typically used to buy TV airtime or spots on social media. Advertising firms make money by taking an often-hefty commission. Federal records show the contracts have gone to two firms. One is a Republican ad company in Louisiana called People Who Think, which has been awarded $77 million.
But the majority of the money — $143 million — has gone to a mysterious LLC in Delaware. The company was created just days before it was awarded the deal.
Little is known about the Delaware company, which is called Safe America Media and lists its address as the Virginia home of a veteran Republican operative, Michael McElwain. McElwain has long had his own advertising company (separate from the Delaware one), but there’s little evidence that firm could handle a nine-figure federal contract on its own: It reported just five employees when it received COVID-19 relief money a few years ago.
How, where and to whom Safe America Media doled out the $143 million is unknown. Any subcontractors hired to do work on the DHS ads are not disclosed in federal contracting databases.
The office funding the ad contracts is listed as the DHS Office of Public Affairs, which is run by McLaughlin, contract records show. McLaughlin married Yoho, the Strategy Group CEO, earlier this year.
In its statement, DHS said the agency does its contracting “by the book” and the process is run by career officials. “It is very sad that Pro Publica would seek to defame these public servants,” DHS added.
Asked about why the agency chose Safe America Media, DHS said, “The results speak for themselves: the most secure border in American history and over 2 million illegal aliens exiting the United States.” McElwain and People Who Think didn’t respond to questions.
Yoho was still in college when he first served as campaign manager for a U.S. congressman. Now, at 38 years old, he’s a national player in the cutthroat industry of political advertising. Federal election records show tens of millions in payments to his firm during the 2024 election cycle, coming from dozens of Republican congressional candidates. And Noem has proved a particularly lucrative client.
Lewandowski brought Yoho into Noem’s inner circle back in South Dakota, according to two people familiar with the matter, putting the young consultant in charge of the ad side of her 2022 gubernatorial reelection campaign. Noem had a more than $5 million advertising budget for the race, records show. After she won in a landslide, Yoho, who has called Noem a friend, came to South Dakota to attend her inauguration ceremony. He sat off to the side of the stage, next to Lewandowski. (Lewandowski didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
By then, Yoho’s next big project with Noem was already in the works. In late 2022, Noem was quietly preparing to launch another sprawling ad campaign — only this time, the money would come from state coffers. The stated goal was to encourage workers to move to South Dakota. The upcoming contract opportunity wasn’t public yet, but Yoho was already involved in planning the campaign, according to records first reported by Sioux Falls Live.
Then on Jan. 12, 2023, Yoho’s company registered to do business in South Dakota under the name Go West Media. The next day, the contract opportunity went live.
Seven companies submitted proposals for the project. Then the pressure from above set in, according to a former Noem administration official involved in the process.
The former official said a top Noem aide told them the governor would be angry if Yoho’s company didn’t win the contract. “He was very direct: ‘She wants to do it,’” they said. Contemporaneous text messages reviewed by ProPublica corroborate that senior Noem administration officials pushed for Yoho to get the contract. Eventually, he did. (In its statement, DHS denied that Noem influenced the process.)
Noem starred in Yoho’s ads herself, dressing up as a dentist, a plumber and a state trooper as she touted her state’s growing economy. Exactly how much Yoho and the Strategy Group made off the $8.5 million deal is unclear. Some of the money was used to purchase spots on Fox News, including one during a Republican presidential debate. Some of the money appears to have gone back to South Dakota — into the bank account of another of Noem’s top advisers.
Sheahan, now the second-in-command at ICE, was paid up to $25,000 by Go West in 2023 for “consulting,” according to a financial disclosure document Sheahan later filed. At the time, Sheahan was serving as both the operations director for Noem as governor and the political director for Noem’s campaign work, according to a copy of her 2023 resume obtained by ProPublica. Her responsibilities included coordinating “daily logistics and operations” for Noem and her team, the resume said. She also managed the “relationship with high level donors” to American Resolve, Noem’s network of outside political groups.
As his firm received millions from the South Dakota state government, Yoho separately continued to work for Noem in other capacities. He worked under Lewandowski on the publicity campaign for Noem’s 2024 memoir, according to a person familiar with the matter. (The book became famous for including an anecdote about Noem shooting her dog.)
The Strategy Group also received a stream of payments for social media consulting and media production work over the last few years from Noem’s American Resolve PAC. Federal election records show the PAC made its last payment to Yoho’s company this February, a couple weeks after Noem took her post as the head of DHS.
I’ve expended far too many words stating the obvious: the Trump administration’s deportation program isn’t interested in removing criminals. It’s only interested in removing people who aren’t white. That’s why it vets visa applicants for “anti-American” social media posts while throwing the immigration door wide open for any white people seeking to escape the “persecution” they face in post-apartheid South Africa.
And that’s why so many people being arrested and deported don’t fit the profile of the “worst of the worst.” There simply aren’t enough criminal immigrants in America. Too much of our crime is home-grown and even if you’re a racist who thinks Black people are skewing the data, the data still shows white people commit crime more frequently than immigrants.
Back in September, federal officers rolled up on a fire crew in Washington state. Washington is already on the list of states Trump doesn’t like. The fact that these firefighters were on loan from Oregon — a state Trump vehemently (to the point of martial law) doesn’t like — surely factored into this equation.
After hassling a bunch of people just trying to keep a wildfire from spreading, the collective of federal officers only managed to secure two arrests. One of those was Jose Cruz-Estrada, who had been working as a firefighter since 2019. Officers arrested him and deported him to Mexico. In defense of its raid on firefighters, DHS said this:
The two illegal aliens apprehended were NOT firefighters. The two contracted work crews questioned on the day of their arrests were not even assigned to actively fight the fire; they were there in a support role, cutting logs into firewood. The firefighting response remained uninterrupted the entire time. No active firefighters were even questioned, and U.S. Border Patrol’s actions did not prevent or interfere with any personnel actively engaged in firefighting efforts.
They were firefighters. Just because they weren’t on the fire line didn’t mean they weren’t doing work to support firefighting efforts. This statement also lied about Cruz-Estrada’s role in firefighting, which involved more than this alleged response to a Bureau of Land Management investigation into the contractor’s hiring practices.
Once it became clear Cruz-Estrada was not just some migrant hastily hired to handle a wildfire, the DHS decided to amp up its deliberately misleading narrative. It issued a press release that had this to say about the firefighter (emphasis in the original):
Jose Bertin Cruz-Estrada, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico, past charges include the delivery and selling of methamphetamine. Border Patrol previously encountered this criminal illegal alien 15 times. Cruz-Estrada has a final order of removal from April 2015 and was last removed from the United States on February 27, 2016. He chose to disregard our laws and illegally re-enter the country again.
That’s the DHS skewing the facts to pretend a person, who not only runs his own lawn care business but has also handled supervisory roles in fire response teams, is a hardened criminal. According to the Guardian’s reporting, Cruz-Estrada has been a “squad boss and incident commander” since beginning his firefighting career. Here’s what actually happened, in far more detail than the DHS would ever be willing to share.
[I]n 2013, he got caught up in the criminal legal system after a local drug bust. Officers, records show, were not focused on Cruz-Estrada, but rather a resident of a home where Cruz-Estrada was hanging out. An informant bought drugs from the resident and secretly filmed the encounter; police accused Cruz-Estrada of being a “lookout”, because he was seen leaving the home and “walking around the surrounding area”, a prosecutor wrote.
Cruz-Estrada was charged with a litany of serious offenses, including racketeering and unlawful delivery of methamphetamine, but the charges were dismissed in exchange for him pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver meth, acharge stemming from the “lookout” allegations.
The conviction carried no prison time.
This is the evidence the DHS thinks is so damning: someone was once accused of serious drug crimes more than a decade ago and served no time in prison for the single charge the government secured via a plea deal. Since then, he has worked for firefighting crews when not running his own business, which he incorporated in 2022.
But fuck him, I guess, for not trying to obtain citizenship during Trump’s first term. Cruz-Estrada re-entered the US illegally in 2019, which wasn’t exactly the best time to be asking for asylum or trying to fast-track a citizenship application. But he went back to firefighting, contributing to several major wildfire-fighting efforts over the next six years.
And yet, this government continues to insist this is exactly the kind of person the United States should have fewer of. When asked for a comment on this recent article, the foul front-mouth of the DHS decided to spew the usual bullshit, letting everyone who doesn’t respond to racist dog whistling know that this administration is doing this to Cruz-Estrada because it simply doesn’t like people from Mexico:
[DHS Asst. Secretary Tricia McLaughlin] said the border patrol had “encountered” Cruz-Estrada 15 times over the years and again cited his past criminal charges without noting they were dismissed. “Once again, the Guardian is debasing itself by peddling sob stories from a criminal illegal alien … Stop publishing criminal illegal aliens’ testimonies as the truth.”
That’s the sort of thing you say when you have no real argument to make. You re-read the jacket, gloss over the lack of a serious conviction, refuse to acknowledge the fact that the offense occurred well over a decade ago, and insult the people asking you to explain your actions. This person should not be allowed to issue a Teams meeting invitation, much less serve as the underboss for Kristi “I Kill Pets” Noem.
Cruz-Estrada is the sort of person who actually makes America great: a human being as capable of failure as the rest of us, but willing to turn his life around and be a positive force in this nation — something far too few US natives are interested in doing. Migrants never get to rest on their laurels. Meanwhile, the MAGA crowd remains kicked back on the laurel lounger it scored at an asset forfeiture auction, applauding an administration that is deliberately destroying the American ideals these shitheels claim to love so much it might occasionally mean having to drink something other than Bud Light for a few weeks.
