Trump’s Border Czar Vows to Resurrect One of His Worst Policies

Donald Trump’s “border czar” is pledging to bring back the practice of family detention for undocumented immigrants.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Tom Homan, who oversaw the family separation policy as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first term, said that the next Trump administration will be holding families in detention centers and won’t hesitate to deport undocumented parents with U.S.-born children.

“Here’s the issue,” Homan told the Post. “You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position.”

“We’re going to need to construct family facilities,” Homan added. “How many beds we’re going to need will depend on what the data says.”

In the first Trump term, ICE used facilities known as “residential centers,” which contained 3,000 beds similar to dormitories. Immigration activists and doctors criticized them as creating a harmful environment for children. This time around, with Trump’s plan to increase deportations on a massive scale, ICE plans to house immigrant families with “soft-sided” tent structures, Homan said.

President Biden ended the family detention policy in 2021, and the federal judge who oversees immigration detention has put a 20-day limit on how long children can be held at an immigration facility. Trump has repeatedly promised an overhaul of Biden’s immigration policies, pledging mass deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States.

Trump is already getting pushback on his deportation plans, which is probably a contributing factor as to why Homan said he hasn’t committed to a target number of deportations.

“I’ll be setting myself up for disappointment,” Homan said, telling the Post that he doesn’t know how much resources he’ll have.

Billionaire immigrant Elon Musk and his supporters are beefing over how to grow Silicon Valley.

“There is a permanent shortage of excellent engineering talent. It is the fundamental limiting factor in Silicon Valley,” Musk wrote on X on Wednesday morning, in response to Replit CEO Amjad Masad, suggesting that the industry needs to look outside of the United States for its engineers.

“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk continued in another post. “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

This ruffled the feathers of many MAGA fans on the right who are anti-immigration.

“There are over 330 million people in America. Surely, there must be enough among them to build your ultimate team?” said one X user in a viral reply to Musk. “Why would you deny real Americans that opportunity by bringing foreigners here?”

That “real Americans” quip underscores some of the tension between Musk, himself an immigrant from South Africa, and the MAGA base. Musk thinks it necessary to draw an influx of international engineering talent while many of those who voted for Trump (and arguably Musk by proxy) are against that on principle. The end result of this tension is yet to be seen.

“It comes down to this: do you want America to WIN or do you want America to LOSE. If you force the world’s best talent to play for the other side, America will LOSE,” Musk reiterated in another post. “End of story.”

In the least surprising revelation ever, Donald Trump’s adviser Corey Lewandowski said the president-elect’s dream of annexing Greenland was all to boost his own ego—and acted like that was a good enough reason.

During an interview on Newsmax Monday, Lewandowski suggested that Trump’s recent calls to have the U.S. claim the Panama Canal and Greenland were purposefully outrageous declarations, and just part of the tactical brilliance one could expect from his bold America First agenda.

“So what is Donald Trump talking about? He’s talking about maybe Greenland from a historic perspective coming as part of the United States, taking back the Panama Canal so that China doesn’t have its influence there,” Lewandowski said.

“This is a president who is making out-of-the-box announcements to put the world on notice that once again the United States is the dominant world superpower, and we have a president who understands what that means, and is not going to kowtow to our foreign friends, or our foreign adversaries,” Lewandowski added.

Technically, Lewandowski is right. A world superpower can easily keep both allies and enemies on their toes if they continually make a series of absurd statements on the world stage.

When Newsmax’s Emma Rechenberg gently reminded Lewandowski that Greenland was a semiautonomous state, owned by Denmark, he didn’t seem the least bit dissuaded.

“Why would [Trump] want this?” Rechenberg asked.

“Well, look, Donald Trump is a real estate master, and he understands the historic and the strategic, more importantly, significance of Greenland,” Lewandowski replied, but didn’t appear to know what exactly made it so significant.

“So it’s not because of its beautiful temperatures. We know that’s not the case,” Lewandowski continued. “There is a very important strategic value to the United States having control of this.”

But Lewandowski wasn’t done. “And by the way, we have not expanded our country in 70 years. So, look, Donald Trump is, again, thinking outside the box. How do we have a lasting impact on the world stage? What does his legacy look like?”

Pretty much stating the obvious, Lewandowski explained that the megalomaniacal Trump was hoping to acquire Greenland so he would look cool. A big acquisition like that might distract from any calamities stateside, including his planned massive violent deportations and tariffs set to tank the economy.

Donald Trump has an outstanding tax evasion case in Panama, the same country he’s just publicly accused of financial wrongdoing, according to Newsweek.

Trump railed against Panama’s commerce policies while speaking at the Turning Point USA conference in Arizona on Sunday, threatening to take over the Panama Canal.

“The fees being charged by Panama are ridiculous, highly unfair. Especially knowing the extraordinary generosity that has been bestowed to Panama, I say very foolishly, by the United States,” the president-elect told the conference crowd. “If the principles, both moral and legal, of this magnanimous gesture of giving are not followed, then we will demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America, in full, quickly and without question.”

Panamanian President José Raúl Mulino, himself a conservative, rebuked Trump.

“As president, I want to express clearly that every square meter of the Panama Canal and its adjacent zone belongs to Panama, and will continue to do so,” he said in a video statement. “The sovereignty and independence of our country are not negotiable.”

Every analysis of this new Trump threat should come with a reminder: In 2019, the owners of a Panama City hotel tower that was previously managed and operated under the Trump brand, accused Trump Panama Hotel Management LLC and Trump International Hotels Management LLC, of not paying the required 12.5 percent taxes to the Panamanian government. Instead, the lawsuit alleges, the companies simply kept the money, “intentionally evading taxes” and leaving the new owner liable for millions.

A tax audit of the hotels submitted as evidence found massive inconsistencies. The case is still pending in New York District Court.

President Joe Biden on Monday commuted the sentences of 37 men on federal death row, before Donald Trump could return to office and carry out his planned “execution spree.”

“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said in a statement. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

The prisoners on death row will now serve life in prison instead. Biden also noted that he wouldn’t commute the sentences of those charged with hate crimes or terrorism. Dylan Roof, who killed nine Black people at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston in 2015, Robert Bowers, who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, will each remain on death row. 

Biden’s announcement has already infuriated the right, who see it as some great injustice that men who were set to be executed will instead be spending the rest of their lives in a cage.

“It’s horrifying that Pres. Biden has granted clemency to some of our nation’s most monstrous killers,” Senator John Kennedy wrote on X. “Their victims deserve better, and justice demands more.”

“I think it’s yet another abuse of the pardon power,” said Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy. “He wiped the slate clean … and he did it in a way that is a categorical change of the law.” 

“It wasn’t BAD ENOUGH Joe Biden let in violent criminals and terrorists across our border ON PURPOSE. Now, he’s commuting the sentences of 37 of America’s OWN most dangerous criminals,” chimed Speaker Mike Johnson on X. “This is a slap in the face to the families who have suffered immeasurably at the hands of these animals.”

Luigi Mangione’s lawyer slammed Mayor Eric Adams during a hearing Monday, after the embattled New York politician made public statements about her client. 

“I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Mangione’s lawyer. “He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials.”

Friedman Agnifilo said that her client was being used as “political fodder” when New York officials on Thursday made a theatrical show of transporting him from Pennsylvania to New York, where he will face state and federal charges.

“He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career,” Friedman Agnilio said. “It was absolutely unnecessary.”

She argued that it was also illegal, given that a perp walk is unconstitutional if not used for a “legitimate law enforcement objective,” citing a Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruling, Lauro v. Charles.

Mangione was escorted away from a helicopter surrounded by a massive entourage of more than 15 people, including some heavily armed New York Police Department officers, and one special guest. 

“And what was the NYC mayor doing at this press conference? That just made it utterly political,” Friedman Agnifilo said. 

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges in October, inexplicably loomed behind Mangione.  

“There was absolutely no need for that whatsoever, and frankly, your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone of the presumption of innocence that he too is afforded when he [is] dealing with his own issues,” Friedman Agnifilo said. “And frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione.”

In an interview with Pix11 News Thursday, a transcript of which Friedman Agnifilo read out for the record,  Adams had explained why he wanted to be present for the stunt. 

“I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we are leading from the front,” Adams said. “I’m not going to just allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state that, ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city that the people of New York love.’ And I wanted to be there to show the symbolism of that.”

Agnifilo pointed out that Adams was missing a crucial “allegedly” in there. “Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He is somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial, he’s innocent until proven guilty.”

Mangione pleaded not guilty to the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Last week, Mangione was indicted on several charges, including “murder in the second degree as a crime of terrorism.”

The House Ethics Committee report on former Representative Matt Gaetz released Monday details the downright shady ways the Florida Republican would allegedly pay—or not pay—several women and an underage girl with whom he had sexual encounters.

The long-awaited report that chased Gaetz out of his House seat determined that the Trump-backed Republican had “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” between at least 2017 and 2020. And the bill is nothing to scoff at.

To one woman, whom the committee determined had a long-term relationship with Gaetz from 2017 to 2020, the Florida Republican allegedly shelled out a whopping $63,836.58.

The report determined that due to the nature of their relationship “some of the payments may have been of a legitimate nature,” but the woman pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked if the payments were for sexual activity, drugs, or distributing payments to other women.

“Based on that assertion combined with evidence received from other sources, the Committee found substantial reason to believe that most of these payments were for such activity,” the report stated.

In addition to his payments to that woman, Gaetz allegedly paid nearly a total of $27,500 to eleven different women between 2017 and 2020. This total includes the $400 that Gaetz paid to a 17-year-old girl with whom he allegedly had a sexual encounter, according to the report.

An additional $3,950 was paid to Joel Greenberg between 2018 and 2019. Greenberg is Gaetz’s associate who would find girls for them to party with through sugar dating websites and be reimbursed for payments made by the former lawmaker, according to the report. In 2021, Greenberg pleaded guilty to underage sex trafficking, wire fraud, identity theft, stalking, producing a fake ID card, and conspiring to defraud the U.S. government. The Committee did not conclude that Gaetz had committed sex trafficking.

The report alleged that Gaetz would not set an amount to be paid before his sexual encounters, but that “the women had a general expectation that they would typically receive some amount of money after each sexual encounter.”

Gaetz allegedly used this power imbalance to his advantage, according to the report.

In one instance, a 21-year-old woman who had expressed to Gaetz that she needed help with her tuition said that he had told her to meet him at a hotel room where he would provide her with a check, which she noted to the Committee was “interesting because he had normally sent Venmo payments.”

When the woman arrived at the room, she said she was surprised to find Gaetz, Greenberg, and another 20-year-old woman, and she said there was an “expectation” of a “sexual encounter.” The four engaged in sexual activity, and the 21-year-old woman received a $750 check with “tuition reimbursement” as the memo line. She told the Committee she believed that the encounter “could potentially be a form of coercion because I really needed the money.”

Sometimes, it seems, Gaetz would get a little stingy, or fail to make payments to the women.

In another instance, Gaetz balked at a woman’s request for money in a text exchange reviewed by the committee. Gaetz bashed the woman for “ditching” him when she was feeling tired, claiming she only gave him a “drive by.” The woman told Gaetz that she was being “treated differently” than the other women he paid fo sex.

In a third instance, Gaetz’s then-girlfriend informed some of the women that he paid for sex that Gaetz and Greenberg were a “little limited in their cash flow this weekend,” and said that Gaetz was hoping it could be “more of a customer appreciation week.” In a message a few months later, she wrote that Gaetz now intended to be “a bit generous cause of the ‘customer appreciation’ thing last time.”

One woman recalled to the committee a conversation with Gaetz about Greenberg’s issues with “following through” on expected payments after Greenberg’s sexual encounters.

According to the report, Gaetz was given opportunities before the committee to discuss his payments to women, but he did not take them.

“While he has been unwilling to address the allegations under oath, Representative Gaetz has made several public statements regarding the allegations under the Committee’s review, including that his ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends’ is being misconstrued and that he has ‘never, ever paid for sex,’” the report stated. “The Committee found this to be untrue.”

“Representative Gaetz took advantage of the economic vulnerability of young women to lure them into sexual activity for which they received an average of a few hundred dollars after each encounter,” the report concluded. “Such behavior is not ‘generosity to ex-girlfriends,’ and it does not reflect creditably upon the House.”

The long-awaited House Ethics Committee report on Matt Gaetz is out, and it finds that the former Florida representative did have sex with an underage girl, among many other offenses. 

The committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him,” and that he “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl.” The report also mentioned that Gaetz possessed and used cocaine and ecstasy while in office, and even lied to the State Department about the identity of one of his sexual partners so that she could get a passport. 

“Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress,” the report stated. Even still, it found no evidence that Gaetz was involved in sex trafficking, as the women were over 18 when they traveled.

The report also noted that “nearly every woman that the Committee spoke with could not remember the details of at least one or more of the events they attended with Representative Gaetz and attributed that to drug or alcohol consumption.”

At least one woman told the committee that drugs at the events with Gaetz may have “impair[ed their] ability to really know what was going on or fully consent.”

Among other charges, Gaetz was also found to have accepted an illegal gift via a 2018 trip to the Bahamas, lodgings included, which exceeded the amount allowed for members of Congress.

Gaetz has denied all allegations, even going so far as to request a restraining order against the House Ethics Committee.  

“Giving funds to someone you are dating - that they didn’t ask for - and that isn’t ‘charged’ for sex is now prostitution?!?” Gaetz wrote on X ahead of the report’s release. “There is a reason they did this to me in a Christmas Eve-Eve report and not in a courtroom of any kind where I could present evidence and challenge witnesses.”

Not content with trying to incorporate Canada, President-elect Donald Trump has set his sights further north to Greenland. Too bad it’s not for sale.

Greenland’s Prime Minister Mute Egede told Trump Monday to back off his outlandish bid to control the world’s biggest island. “Greenland is ours. We are not for sale and will never be for sale. We must not lose our long struggle for freedom,” Egede said in a written comment.

In a post on Sunday, the president-elect announced that Ken Howery, co-founder of PayPal and former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term, would serve as the ambassador to the Kingdom of Denmark, which holds control of the semiautonomous Greenland. He also re-upped a bid to take Greenland off its hands.

“For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Trump previously floated the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland in 2019, which the Danish prime minister at the time called “absurd.” His megalomaniacal musings never came to anything, and likely won’t this time around either.

Greenland is home to the U.S.’s Pituffik Space Base that, among other things, “detects and reports attack assessments of sea-launched and intercontinental ballistic missile threats in support of strategic missile warning and missile defense,” according to its website.

Greenland is strategically significant to the U.S because it sits between Russia and the eastern coast of the United States, and is the fastest way from Europe to New York. It’s also located beside the Norwegian Sea, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic Ocean and the Barents Sea, where the Russian navy’s northern fleet operates.

U.S. expansion seemed to be on Trump’s mind Sunday, and the geopolitical mastermind also threatened to take control of the Panama Canal, which has been the property of Panama since 1999. “Welcome to the United States Canal!” Trump captioned a photograph of the canal in a post on Truth Social Sunday.

Earlier this month, when facing criticism about his plan for harsh tariffs on Canadian imports, Trump made a crack about Canada becoming the 51st state. The last time the U.S. tried to make a play for Canada, the British burned down the U.S. Capitol.

It’s difficult to consider Trump’s latest imperialist dreams as anything other than a distraction from his sinister plans stateside—which include violently rounding up undocumented immigrants into camps and deporting them en masse.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz is filing a restraining order against the entire House Ethics Committee to stop them from showing the world their findings, which reportedly includes evidence that he paid an underage girl for sex.

Gaetz accuses the committee of an “unconstitutional” attempt “to exercise jurisdiction over a private citizen through the threatened release of an investigative report containing potentially defamatory allegations, in violation of the Committee’s own rules.”

This is the result of a yearslong investigation into allegations that Gaetz had paid a teenage girl and multiple women thousands of dollars for sex and drugs since 2017.

This is a developing story.