ICE Arrests Skyrocket After New Quota to Keep Trump Happy

Donald Trump is apparently disappointed with how his mass deportation effort is going, and as a result, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is ramping up their daily arrest goal.

The Washington Post reports that ICE is boosting its daily arrests from a few hundred to between 1,200 and 1,500 each day. A high number of arrests by the agency means that more abuses are to be expected, and that legal immigrants and U.S. citizens are likely to get caught up in the dragnet.

The Trump administration reportedly held a phone call with senior ICE officials and told them that each of the agency’s field offices should make 75 arrests per day, with managers being held accountable for any shortfalls. This is an escalation from what “border czar” Tom Homan has told the media in recent weeks, claiming that ICE would prioritize detaining gang members and people with criminal records instead of mass detentions.

In a statement Sunday, ICE said that they had begun targeted operations in Chicago and cities across the country, claiming that 950 people were arrested across the country.

Last week, Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, which allows undocumented immigrants to be detained merely if they are suspected of committing a crime. As soon as Trump signs the bill, ICE will have expanded powers to detain undocumented immigrants and begin deportation proceedings. But the sweeps and mass arrests are already in full swing.

Meanwhile, military flights full of deportees have started going out to various countries, creating standoffs and tariff threats between Trump and foreign leaders in some cases. While Trump’s promised deportations haven’t gotten off to the start he would have liked, officials at all levels of government will be stepping up their efforts to make him and hardline conservatives happy.

Lindsey Graham is fully aware that Donald Trump’s inspectors general purge was illegal—he just doesn’t care.

The senator appeared on Meet the Press on Sunday and discussed the president’s firing of 17 crucial department watchdogs in the middle of the night, when the law states that they require a 30-day advance notice before being terminated.

“It’s a very common thing to do,” Trump told reporters in Florida. “I don’t know them … but some people thought that some were unfair or some were not doing their job. It’s a very standard thing to do.” Trump does know some of these people, as he fired multiple inspectors general who were appointed during his first term.

Graham’s media appearance just served to reaffirm the president’s lie.

“You know, I’m not overly worried about [the firings],” Graham said. “It’s not the first time people have come in and put their team in—when you win an election, you need people in your administration that reflect your views. So I’m not really worried about that.”

“But very quickly, the law says he’s supposed to give 30 days’ notice. He didn’t do that,” said host Kristen Welker. “Do you think he violated the law?”

“No, he didn’t. No, well, technically, yeah. But he has the authority to do it,” Graham said, waffling shamelessly. “So I’m not, you know, losing a whole lot of sleep that he wants to change the personnel out. I just want to make sure that he gets off to a good start. I think he has. I’m very supportive of what he wants to do with America.”

Republican leadership has made it very clear that they’ll be dutifully falling in line behind Trump, even if it means turning long-held rules into mere suggestions.

Trump reportedly doubled down on his threat to seize Greenland in a phone call with Denmark’s prime minister, sending the country’s government into a panic.

Trump spoke to Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen on the phone for about 45 minutes last week. While neither leader has commented specifically on the call, officials close to the situation said it went poorly, as reported by The Financial Times. They stated that Trump was “aggressive and confrontational” on the call.

“It was horrendous,” one official said. “He was very firm,” another added. “It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious, and potentially very dangerous.”

“The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode,” another official told the publication. “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”

“It was a very tough conversation. He threatened specific measures against Denmark, such as targeted tariffs,” said a former Danish official.

Trump has threatened to buy Greenland since his election victory, along with vows to take back the Panama Canal and make Canada the fifty-first state. And while many took his comments in jest, the recent phone call shows that he is seriously interested in seizing Greenland, perhaps due to its unique geopolitical position, its significant U.S. air base, or its potential real estate development.

Republicans in Mississippi are considering a law to help Donald Trump with his massive deportation plans—by enlisting bounty hunters.

A new bill introduced in the Magnolia State’s legislature Wednesday would pay bounty hunters a $1,000 reward for every undocumented immigrant they help deport. House Bill 1484, proposed by Republican state Representative Justin Keen, would create the “Illegal Alien Certified Bounty Hunter Program.”

“President Trump’s administration has made it clear that deporting illegal immigrants is a priority, and we are proud to do our part here in Mississippi to help support his agenda and protect our citizens,” Keen said in a statement.

The reward money would come from the state’s general assembly and be administered by the state treasurer, according to a statement, meaning ultimately Mississippi taxpayers would foot the bill. The bill has backing from the DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton, who says the whole thing was originally his idea.

Trump’s mass deportation plans, including the Laken Riley Act, which awaits his signature, will be very expensive to implement across the country. Trump wants to target every single undocumented immigrant in the U.S., estimated at 11 million people, and would need assistance from local and state law enforcement.

While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is proposing a new slate of state laws to assist the president, it seems that Mississippi is choosing to outsource the task and create a legal nightmare as bounty hunters in the state stand to profit from targeting the marginalized.

Donald Trump’s administration issued a 90-day pause on all foreign aid, with exceptions for Israel and Egypt, according to a new State Department memo Friday.

The memo signed by new Secretary of State Marco Rubio “shall ensure that, to the maximum extent permitted by law, no new obligations shall be made for foreign assistance” until Rubio carries out a review, which will take place over the next 85 days, at which time he will make his recommendation to Trump.

According to the memo, this will ensure that America’s foreign aid obligations “are not duplicated, are effective, and are consistent with President Trump’s foreign policy.”

The memo contains a special waiver for “foreign military financing” for Egypt and Israel, “including salaries, necessary to administer foreign military financing.” Those two countries happen to guard the exits to Gaza. While Gaza is currently experiencing a reprieve from the months of endless bombings, Trump recently admitted he is “not confident” that the ceasefire agreement he helped to negotiate will hold, leaving the door open for more brutality there.

Notably, Ukraine, which has received hundreds of billions in aid from the U.S., did not receive a waiver. Earlier this week, Trump said he was interested in discussing “denuclearization” between the U.S. and Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin signaled this week that he was prepared to talk with Trump about ending the war in Ukraine. Trump has threatened sanctions if his efforts at diplomacy fail.

On Monday, Trump signed an executive order blocking all “new obligations and disbursements” of foreign aid to countries, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and contractors for 90 days, while the country’s commitments went under review for 90 days.

The anti-abortion movement is “entering a new era,” according to Republican leadership.

Speaking before a crowd at the March for Life in Washington, House Speaker Mike Johnson pointed to a flurry of actions by Donald Trump in the last week that have aided the right’s anti-abortion efforts. They included the pardoning of 23 anti-abortion activists who blockaded the entrance of a Washington clinic in October 2020.

And an executive order signed by Trump earlier this week also elevated fetal personhood to the national stage while simultaneously cementing language at the executive level to delegitimize transgender identities.

Meanwhile, progress against abortion rights also churned in Congress. On Thursday, House Republicans passed a “born alive” abortion bill, insisting that the effort was more akin to an anti-infanticide effort than another attempt to restrict abortions. The bill would require health care professionals to administer the “same degree of professional skill, care, and diligence” for a premature child that lives through an abortion as for a child that is carried to term. Democrats in the Senate blocked a twin bill from advancing in the upper chamber.

The effort was, of course, redundant due to a 2002 statute, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which already prevents the “intentional killing of a child born alive”—otherwise known as murder.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley also made a personal appeal to Trump on Thursday, asking the newly minted forty-seventh president to restore reproductive policies he had implemented during his first term. That would include requiring women to pick up their abortion medication in person, a move that could significantly impact people’s ability to acquire the abortion pill via mail in states where the procedure is currently banned.

Hawley also suggested to Trump that, with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the rearview, states would prove to be “the most important theaters” for the fight to rid America of the procedure, according to The New York Times.

“House and Senate Republicans are committed to protecting innocent life,” Johnson told the crowd on Friday, championing his caucus’s efforts over the last five days.

Trump and JD Vance also gave remarks at the march. Speaking at the National Mall, Vance pledged to protect Christians and anti-abortion activists from federal prosecution.

“This administration stands by you, we stand with you, and most importantly we stand with the most vulnerable,” Vance said. “America is fundamentally a pro-baby, a pro-family and a pro-life country.”

Oklahoma’s state superintendent is inviting ICE to raid public schools. 

“In Oklahoma, we’re gonna work with law enforcement, we are gonna work with the Trump administration,” Ryan Walters told Oklahoma journalist Brenna Rose. “However President Trump decides to carry out the actions around his immigration policy, we’re gonna absolutely work with him on that. We’re gonna make sure that he has what he needs from us to carry those things out.”

“So you’re not completely ruling out a raid on an Oklahoma school?” Rose asked pointedly.

“No, if that’s what President Trump sees fit, as there’s [an] illegal immigrant population there that needs to have enforcement to remove them from the schools, absolutely. We will work with him to make sure that he’s able to carry that out.”  

Walters has served as Oklahoma public schools superintendent since 2020, and has been a staunch MAGA advocate in that tenure. Last year, he made the Bible required reading in public schools, saying that “without basic knowledge of it, Oklahoma students are unable to properly contextualize the foundation of our nation.” When the state opened bids for companies seeking to supply the Bible, the requirements were so narrow the Trump Bible was one of the only ones to fit the bill. (Walters is currently being sued over the entire mandate.) He has also referred to teachers as “radical leftists” who are “turning our schools into Epstein Island.” And just last month, he proposed a rule that would let the Oklahoma State Department of Education gather data on undocumented children in public schools. 

Ushering ICE agents into public schools is yet another mask-off moment for the Trump administration and all its allies.

The Trump administration this week began a plan to send email alerts to every single federal government employee from a single email address, confusing and worrying many workers about what’s coming next.

CBS News reports that the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, is testing a new capability that would allow the alerts to be sent to every single employee, about roughly 2.3 million people. Workers at multiple federal agencies initially didn’t recognize the sender, an hr-at-opm-.gov email address, and reported the email as spam.

OPM sent the messages overnight between Thursday and Friday, two officials told CBS.

“This is a new effort under this administration,” one official told CBS.

The effort is so new that even some I.T. offices in federal agencies flagged the email as spam. One anonymous federal employee sent a screenshot to CBS and said their co-workers weren’t sure if the email was legitimate.

“Everyone thought it was spam,” said the employee. “There was a flurry of messages, ‘Is this spam?’”

At a time when the new administration is closing various federal offices and proposing massive cuts to the government under Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative, the new system’s potential worries federal employees.

“They had to send this this week, of all weeks? Really?” said CBS’s source. Only agency and department heads had advance notice of the email plan on Thursday, according to OPM officials. Some rank-and-file employees didn’t hear about the new plan until they received the first email, leading to Friday’s confusion.

White House officials didn’t respond to CBS’s questions about what the system will be used for. But looking at past comments from Trump and others close to his administration, the potential is vast and disturbing, with the possibility of upending some of our most critical federal agencies.

While it seems likely that the lion’s share of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees are going to sail through their confirmation hearings, the fortunes of three of his picks—Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence prospect Tulsi Gabbard, and would-be Department of Health and Human Services head Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—remain somewhat cloudy. Hegseth, of late, has emerged as the likeliest of the three to get over the line.

But according to a fresh report from Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, another may be edging closer: Kennedy Jr. And the reason RFK’s chances have slightly improved have nothing to do with the nominee sanding down his fringe ideas about vaccines and modern medicine, and everything to do with the fact that Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, while not “confirmed as voting for Kennedy” nevertheless “appears to be actively considering it.”

Naturally, the reasons why, given the high stakes, are both indescribably stupid and yet very typical of the way Washington works. As Marshall reports:

I’m told that there appear to be two reasons: One is that Whitehouse and Kennedy are personal friends. They were law school roommates at UVA and that seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong friendship. There are also specific issues with Rhode Island’s health care system that apparently need regulatory flexibility from HHS. That seems to be a real issue. But it hasn’t been enough of an issue to shift the state’s senior senator, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who remains firmly opposed to Kennedy’s nomination.

Why would it matter if Whitehouse bucks common sense and votes to install RFK in Trump’s Cabinet? As Marshall points out, support for Kennedy among Republican senators is fluid for all the reasons you might expect (not everyone wants to see long-conquered childhood diseases make a comeback in this, the twenty-first century). But Whitehouse’s support may go a long way toward providing some of the fence-sitters some political cover to back Trump’s man.

During his visit to North Carolina Friday, Donald Trump floated the idea of making changes to how the federal government responds to natural disasters—including getting rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

“We’re looking at the whole concept of FEMA. I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning the state takes care of it,” Trump told reporters on the tarmac in Asheville, citing the effects of Hurricanes Helene and Milton on the southwestern U.S. last year.

Trump also said that disaster aid for North Carolina and California,  both of which happen to be states with Democratic governors, would go directly through his administration rather than FEMA. Later, meeting with local officials during his visit, Trump said he’d be signing an executive order to begin reforming or even getting rid of the agency.

“I think, frankly, FEMA is not good,” Trump said. “FEMA has turned out to be a disaster…. I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

Eliminating the agency altogether would require congressional approval, and would result in more than 20,000 federal employees losing their jobs. Trump also discussed getting rid of FEMA on Wednesday in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, saying that he’d “rather see the states take care of their own problems.” 

But between 2015 and 2024, Republican-led states such as Florida, Texas, and Louisiana received the majority of federal disaster aid. Any cuts to FEMA would end up affecting states that voted for him in the last three presidential elections. Perhaps Trump sees this as an acceptable price for the power to restrict aid to other places whenever he pleases.