Trump Win Emboldens ICE to Increase Surveillance Tools

Only hours after Donald Trump was elected president, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement put gears in motion to expand its surveillance capabilities, likely in anticipation of the president-elect’s promise for the largest deportation scheme in history. 

ICE published a Request for Information on November 6 seeking information about expanding its Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP, part of the government’s Alternatives to Detention program, according to Wired. 

Currently, ISAP monitors around 200,000 undocumented immigrants using a combination of ankle monitors, GPS tracking smart watches, and apps that use biometric facial recognition software. 

ICE’s current contractor for ISAP, B.I. Incorporated, is owned by private prison company Geo Group, which was the single biggest winner in the stock market the day after Trump was elected. Geo Group’s $2.4 billion contract with ICE is set to expire next year.  

But ICE’s Request for Information stated that it isn’t a request for proposals from vendors that can provide the tools for ISAP. Rather, it’s a way for the company to signal its anticipated needs in the coming months, “thereby delivering capabilities faster” and encouraging competition among potential vendors. 

The posting sought industry information about monitoring devices, as well as other services that would aid in Trump’s plan to rip 20 million immigrants out of their homes and communities. As of 2022, there were only 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country, but Trump has said that he intends to also remove immigrants who have obtained temporary protected status. There are roughly 860,000 people in the U.S. under temporary protected status.

One request was for information about “participant coordination services,” meaning physical space, staff, and administrative capabilities for monitoring large numbers of people. The posting also requested information about “community services,” including legal assistance, therapeutic and psychosocial support, medical services, food, and clothing. 

While the details of Trump’s “bloody” deportation scheme are unclear, they do involve camps for staging deportations. 

ICE was already planning to expand ISAP’s parent program before Trump won. In a 2023 notice, ICE said that Alternatives to Detention would be rebranded and expanded to monitor every single nondetained person awaiting a court hearing or deportation—around 5.7 million people, according to the agency. 

If ICE is actually able to expand its capabilities to monitor nearly six million people, it will have increased its capacity by 3,000 percent, according to Wired. The potential industry boom already has private prison owners sniffing the air. In an earnings call last week, Geo Group’s CEO George Zoley called a second Trump administration “an unprecedented opportunity.”

While the private prison industry stands to make billions off Trump’s deportation plans, it’s worth noting that ripping millions of workers out of the country will crater the economy. 

Last week, Trump said he would have “no choice” but to carry out the mass deportations he promised on the campaign trail. “It’s not a question of a price tag. It’s not—really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag,” he said.

Donald Trump’s lawyer Alina Habba said she would consider a possible appointment from the president-elect to be White House press secretary “very seriously.”

Mediaite reported Tuesday that Habba was a top candidate for the position, citing four sources. On Fox News Tuesday night, Sean Hannity asked if there was any truth to the report, and initially, she tried to deflect.

“I’d leave it to the president and three people that are on my board of directors: That’s Luke, Chloe, and Parker, my children,” Habba said. “Everybody’ll know in time.”

Hannity pressed further, asking if there were any “discussions about it,” and Habba again deflected, pivoting to Trump’s “amazing Cabinet” and the work of his transition team. Hannity then directly asked what Habba would do if Trump asked her to serve in his administration.

“I am very loyal to President Trump. I would think about it. Very seriously,” Habba replied.

As one of Trump’s attorneys, Habba is known for making excuses for Trump’s behavior during his trials in the past year, as well as making very noticeable mistakes in court. One day during Trump’s E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, she was reprimanded 12 times by the judge in the case.

If Trump chooses her as his press secretary, though, her obfuscation and willingness to explain away Trump’s rash actions would probably be an asset in the role. The job entails a lot of spin in presenting what the president wants to the American public and media, and painting Trump in a good light is where she excels. In addition, she would make history if Trump selects her as the first ever Arab American, and first Iraqi American press secretary.

Professional MAGA content creators somehow think that they have a realistic chance of landing a senior role in President-elect Donald Trump’s upcoming Cabinet. 

Politico is reporting that the content creators—some of whom have no professional political experience whatsoever—have been bolstered by the website “Nominees for the People,” Robert F. Kennedy’s genius idea to publicly crowdsource and vote on names for Cabinet nominations. Alt-right grifter Charlie Kirk leads votes for secretary of education, while former Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe leads Labor Department votes. The beggars, however, have much lower profiles.

Content creator Melissa Rein Lively has already put “Future Trump White House Press Secretary” in her Instagram bio. “I’m a hair away from the White House. I do think I’m going to get it,” said Lively, who gained fame after destroying a Covid-19 mask stand at Target in 2020 while going on an unhinged rant. “My sphere of influence goes far beyond people who are paper pushers on the Trump campaign. I work with billionaires. My clients are—I can’t even name who I work with. They own half of Palm Beach.”

Lively even moved to a luxury resort in Palm Beach to really concentrate on getting the nomination. “I’m telling you right now, I’m not leaving here without that press secretary gig,” she told Politico. She later explained that she’d take “any senior role in the press office, but I think press secretary is best fit.” Lively is now calling reports of attorney Alinna Habba as front-runner for press secretary “fake news” on her Instagram story.

Similarly to Lively, failed North Carolina superintendent candidate Michele Morrow is taking votes she received on RFK Jr.’s website for “Education Administration” as an actual, official nomination for the position. “Let’s help get Michele to Washington where she can fight to save our children in North Carolina and beyond!” she posted in third person from her own X account. Morrow gained prominence for calling for the public execution of former President Barack Obama and President Joe Biden. 

Influencer Breanna Morello, whose Instagram bio boasts she “quit Fox Corp over the Covid vaccine mandate,” said she had to “respectfully decline” the nominations for White House press secretary because she wants to stay in Florida with her dogs. She’d accept if she could do it from Mar-a-Lago.

The Trump team isn’t taking these nominations as seriously as their most extreme fans are. “People are begging at this point,” a Trump campaign source told Politico. “These maniacs are actually filming videos saying how honored they are. It is nuts. Holding a position in this administration will require more than fifty Instagram stories of you dining on tuna tartare at Mar-a-Lago.”

These “maniacs” are the most loyal part of Trump’s base, the heart and soul of the MAGA movement. The Trump campaign—with its proximity to QAnon and its general conspiracizing—has created a safe space for them to be completely delusional. Now, they have to deal with the results.

Donald Trump voters are having a shocking bout of buyer’s remorse now that their candidate is slated for a second term.

On Election Day and in the hours following, searches for “how to change my vote” spiked in states that the president-elect won, according to Google analytics. The searches first surged the morning of Election Day before declining the day afterward. Interest in the phrase was not short-lived, though, with numbers climbing again on Monday—just shy of a week out from the election—and continuing to grow throughout the week. The apparent change of heart comes after Trump allies had admitted Project 2025 was the plan all along, and after women and girls became the target of an overtly misogynistic, far-right campaign claiming ownership of their bodies.

The search became so popular that it hit 100, according to Google Trends, which registers searched phrases on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 indicating the peak popularity for a term.

Some of the states that Trump won by the biggest margins, such as Iowa, generated the highest number of state-by-state queries for the term. Those searches were concentrated around the Des Moines-Ames, Cedar Rapids-Waterlook-Iowa City, and Dubuque areas in the Hawkeye State, which already had a large portion of votes for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to Virginia news outlet WAVY. It is not clear, though, whether Trump or Harris supporters were hoping to change their vote.

It should be common knowledge that citizens cannot change their vote once they’ve dropped it into the ballot box, but the data points to an alarming number of Americans who apparently have no awareness of the legitimacy and finite nature of their vote.

Special counsel Jack Smith is throwing in the towel.

The prosecutor who oversaw President-elect Donald Trump’s January 6 case and his Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is planning to finish his work and quit the office before Inauguration Day, The New York Times reported Wednesday.

Trump had promised to fire Smith “within two seconds” of being sworn in as the country’s forty-seventh president.

“We got immunity at the Supreme Court. It’s so easy. I would fire him within two seconds. He’ll be one of the first things addressed,” Trump told the Hugh Hewitt Show in October, adding his intentions to sue Smith.

Smith worked for two years on outstandingly complex cases against the former president, but actually translating them into trials proved even more difficult. Trump’s legal team employed practically every tactic to slow-roll the cases until a general election that made the whole effort moot (Justice Department policy prevents a sitting president from being prosecuted for crimes).

Before leaving the post, regulation requires that Smith file a report summarizing the investigation and his team’s decisions, though it’s unclear how quickly he will be able to do so. If he manages to finish it within President Joe Biden’s term, the document will likely become public, leaving a historic black mark on Trump’s legacy before his second administration begins. But if Smith fails to do so, the fate of such a document would remain unknown.

Smith has become a favorite target of the MAGA party, which frames him as the figurehead behind Democratic efforts to destroy Trump.

In October, Smith released an eye-opening report related to Trump’s January 6 case that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6. The report outlined what Smith described as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

But Smith’s efforts to make Trump face legal consequences were cut off at the legs in July, when the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

Donald Trump has appointed Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense—and he’s one of the worst choices yet.

“Pete is tough, smart and a true believer in America First,” Trump said in a statement Tuesday night. “With Pete at the helm, America’s enemies are on notice—Our military will be Great Again, and America will Never Back Down.”

While Hegseth is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, he is significantly less experienced than a traditional pick to head the Department of Defense. Hegseth once called the very same Iraq War that Trump and JD Vance just spent weeks pretending to critique “an example of what we got right, when we got it right.”

He will now run the Pentagon and command 1.3 million active-duty troops. Or maybe fewer: Just last week, Hegseth said, “I’m straight up just saying, we should not have women in combat roles.

“It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated,” he explained. “Our institutions don’t have to incentivize that in places where traditionally—not traditionally, over history—men in those positions are more capable.”

Hegseth doesn’t seem to want anyone but white men to be in the military. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth painted the military as anti-white and suffering from a “long-term infection of radical left wing social justice policies.”

He wrote that “affirmative action posts have skyrocketed, with ‘firsts’ being the most important factor in filling new commanders. We will not stop until trans-lesbian Black females run everything!”

Trump seemed to echo many of Hegseth’s complaints on the campaign trail, with his own ramblings about “woke” military leadership.

Hegseth has repeatedly fearmongered about the spread of Islam in the United States, both as a contributor to Fox News and in his 2020 book, American Crusade.

“Just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today,” Hegseth wrote in his book.

“Islamists—and even mainstream Muslims—use aggressive tactics to exploit American ‘tolerance’ as utter weakness in order to achieve accommodations that would never otherwise be tolerated,” he wrote. “I’m not talking about on the battlefield, I’m talking about in our classrooms, city councils, and social media.”

Hegseth has also complained about Muslim birth rates in states such as Michigan, which has the largest Arab population in the country. He pushed fears about the “integration” of Muslims into American society and has lamented France’s changing “demography” in the wake of the Syrian refugee crisis, which he compared to an invasion.

“Next to the communist Chinese and their global ambitions, Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, coexisted with, or understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and crushed,” he wrote in American Crusade.

Unsurprisingly, Hegseth is a big supporter of “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer.

Although he graduated from Princeton University, Hegseth has criticized elite universities. “I have a new rule, the more elite the university and advanced a graduate is, the dumber they are,” Hegseth said on an episode of Fox News’s The Five. “If you went to an Ivy League, prove that you have any common sense at all.”

Hegseth has claimed that he sent his degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government back.

Maybe he’s right. In 2019 Hegseth, laughed on air about not washing his hands for 10 years, saying, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them, therefore, they are not real.”

This story has been updated.

Despite Republicans winning control of the presidency, the Senate, and likely the House, one losing GOP candidate is still alleging fraud in his race and refusing to concede.

Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde, who lost to incumbent Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin, posted a video on X Tuesday afternoon claiming inconsistencies in the vote tally, citing everything from a surge in “same-day registration on a rainy day” to a sudden spike in absentee ballots, as well as “voting irregularities” in Milwaukee.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Hovde had refused to concede but not requested funds needed for a recount, according to the Wisconsin Republican Party. He addressed that question in the video, saying “asking for recount is a serious decision that requires careful consideration.”

“Further, there are meaningful limits on a recount, because they don’t look at the integrity of a ballot,” Hovde added, before complaining about two third-party candidates on the ballot.

Hovde claimed that Democrats “organized and funded a phony America First candidate,” Thomas Leager, in addition to Libertarian candidate Phil Anderson, both of whom Hovde claimed took votes away from him.

“Is this right and fair to deceive voters? Is this the democratic process we want?” Hovde asked.

Hovde probably isn’t pushing for a recount because his complaints don’t actually address the vote count. Instead, he’s upset that his margin was low enough to have third-party candidates matter in Baldwin’s margin of victory. Wisconsin, like the other battleground states in this election, was won by Donald Trump and in fact clinched his victory. If Hovde is mad about his loss, he has only his own campaign to blame.

House Speaker Mike Johnson’s job may be in jeopardy once again.

Some conservative lawmakers are plotting to nominate an alternative candidate to Johnson during internal GOP elections this week, The Hill reported Tuesday.

One source told The Hill that “there will be a nomination” on Wednesday.

Johnson, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, has expressed confidence that he will be reelected. “I think you’ll have total unity in the party,” he said.

The Louisiana Republican previously faced a failed challenge to vacate the speakership from Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie. He has also been openly criticized by Representative Chip Roy, who said that there were “a lot of Republicans” who were concerned about Johnson.

Roy said Tuesday that it “seems likely” that Johnson will have a challenger in the vote but did not clarify whether he or someone else would be the one to challenge the current speaker.

Johnson said Tuesday that Republicans will be “ready to deliver” Trump’s 2025 agenda.

“We will be ready day one. We are prepared this time,” he said.

Ready for what, exactly? Johnson has previously promised to push for government spending reform that could threaten Medicare, the Affordable Care Act, and Social Security. Johnson has also said he would repeal the CHIPS Act, which is set to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and bring in billions of dollars, even though it’s not currently on the GOP agenda. He later walked back that statement by saying it wasn’t on the agenda.

Republicans have begun warning Trump’s transition team that it cannot select any more Republican representatives to the president-elect’s Cabinet, because it threatens the GOP’s narrow House majority.

Trump’s transition team has a “warrior board” executive order ready for the president-elect’s desk. 

An executive order draft is floating around MAGA world that would establish a Trump-appointed “warrior board” with the power to purge any three- or four-star generals as it sees fit. The board would send its dismissal recommendations to Trump and they would be acted upon within 30 days.

The draft executive order, which was first reported on by The Wall Street Journal, makes it easy to quickly remove military officials “lacking in requisite leadership qualities” but leaves open the question of what those requisite qualities are. The executive order draws on General George C. Marshall’s 1940 creation of a “plucking board” led by retired general officers to “remove from line promotion any officer for reasons deemed good and sufficient.” But that plucking board was to uplift young officers with high potential, not to cull anyone not perfectly aligned with MAGA. 

It’s not yet clear if Trump will sign the executive order, but Trump has held vitriol toward certain military leaders for some time now. He has vowed to weaponize them against the “enemy within,” to fire anyone involved in the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and to create a task force to weed out “woke generals.”  

“This looks like an administration getting ready to purge anyone who will not be a yes man,” former Army lawyer Eric Carpenter told The Wall Street Journal. “If you are looking to fire officers who might say no because of the law or their ethics, you set up a system with completely arbitrary standards, so you can fire anyone you want.”

This draft may be ready to see President-elect Trump’s desk on day one.

Last month, the Biden administration gave Israel a 30-day deadline to increase aid flow to Gaza, or the U.S. would potentially cut military assistance. On Tuesday, that deadline came and went without Israel facing any consequences.

Aid groups including Oxfam, Mercy Corps, and Save the Children issued a statement Tuesday saying Israel failed to meet any of the conditions that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken laid out in an October 13 letter to Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer. These include increased civilian access to food and other necessities.

“Israel’s actions failed to meet any of the specific criteria set out in the U.S. letter,” the statement read. “Israel not only failed to meet the U.S. criteria that would indicate support to the humanitarian response, but concurrently took actions that dramatically worsened the situation on the ground, particularly in Northern Gaza.”

In a press briefing on Tuesday, State Department deputy spokesman Vedant Patel said, “I certainly don’t have a change in U.S. policy to announce today.”

“We have seen some steps being taken. There need to be some additional steps that are also taken,” Patel added. “There is nobody in this administration saying that the humanitarian situation in Gaza is pristine.… It continues to be a crisis.”

On Tuesday, Israel announced that it was opening a new crossing into Gaza, meeting one demand in the October 13 letter, but there were no indications that any aid had traveled through it. At least 44,383 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s brutal war on the territory since October 7, 2023, including more than 16,765 children.

A July study from the medical journal The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll could exceed 186,000, taking into account thousands of bodies trapped under rubble and indirect deaths due to the destruction of infrastructure, including hospitals and food distribution systems. Last month, 99 health workers who worked in Gaza sent President Biden a letter saying that they had “witnessed crimes beyond comprehension,” urging a U.S. arms embargo to Israel.

Those pleas appear to have fallen on deaf ears in the Biden administration and the State Department, following a pattern where expert advice on Gaza has been ignored by top U.S. officials. During the 2024 election campaign, any potential changes in policy toward Israel and Palestine were dismissed by Kamala Harris’s campaign, a factor that likely contributed to her loss.

Donald Trump’s incoming administration is bringing in hawks who support Israel’s further killing and destruction, including Representative Elise Stefanik as the new ambassador to the United Nations and former Governor Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel. In his last few months as president, Joe Biden has a chance to not only negotiate an end to the war but save lives, and he seems to be passing it up.