Report: Trump’s Businesses Rely on the Workers He’s Deporting

Immigrant workers are keeping Trump’s multiple estates running even as the president indiscriminately targets them for raids and deportation.

Forbes reports that Trump has used at least 1,880 seasonal immigrant workers at Mar-a-Lago and other golf clubs since 2008. His winery has hired 31 since the year started, even as his administration is working to deport thousands every single day.

These workers are on short-term temporary H-2A agricultural and H-2B hospitality visas—status that would very well put them at high risk of deportation if they weren’t cleaning Trump’s clubs. These workers make between $14.17 and $23.01 an hour working as servers, cooks, groundskeepers, and more.

Wouldn’t someone who claims to love American workers as much as Trump does, who waxes poetic about reinvigorating domestic markets, make it a point to staff his lavish estates with the U.S. laborers he’s fighting for? It’s clear that the president, like most avaricious businessmen, is cool with immigrant work—as long as it’s cheap, noncommittal, and for him.

The Department of Homeland Security admitted to scrounging around for dirt on Kilmar Abrego Garcia only after he was wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

Freshly returned from a Salvadoran prison, Abrego Garcia attended an arraignment hearing in Nashville Friday, where he pleaded not guilty to two charges related to illegally transporting undocumented immigrants for cash. The charges stemmed from an investigation into a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, where Abrego Garcia was discovered in a car with several Hispanic men who did not possess identification.  

During the hearing Friday, one DHS agent revealed that he was only asked to look into Abrego Garcia’s case on April 28 of this year, according to Tennessee Lookout’s Anita Wadhwani. 

That’s more than a month after Abrego Garcia was sent to a notorious Salvadoran prison, and a week after Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to recover his kidnapped constituent, boosting the story’s profile to the national level. That was also a full week after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed, seemingly out of nowhere and without providing any evidence, that Abrego Garcia had “engaged in human trafficking.”

Last week, after months of claiming that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States despite being deported over an “administrative error,” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced his return and made several other allegations against Abrego Garcia that were not included in the indictment. 

Since accidentally sending Abrego Garcia abroad, the Trump administration has been intent on smearing him any way it can, repeatedly alleging an affiliation to the transnational MS-13 gang based on thin evidence and even falsely claiming he was a convicted criminal. 

Bondi said that if Abrego Garcia is convicted, the government plans to return him to El Salvador after he completes his sentence, once again violating a judge’s order preventing his removal.

Donald Trump has praised Israel’s sweeping military operation targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders, and Republicans have already started taking up positions as faithful cheerleaders.

Shortly after the strikes in Iran were first reported Thursday evening, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham had his own sickening message of support for Israel. “Game on. Pray for Israel,” he wrote in a post on X Thursday, summoning a wave of critics condemning his rhetoric about the deadly strikes.

Republican Senator Jim Risch, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also shared his support for Israel’s strike in a post on X.

“We stand with Israel tonight and pray for the safety of its people and the success of this unilateral, defensive action. I am also praying for the brave U.S. service members in the Middle East who keep America safe—Iran would be foolish to attack the United States,” the post read.

Risch did not extend wishes of safety to Iranian civilians, after several were killed in Israel’s attacks on residential buildings. Risch was one of several lawmakers behind the recent Stand with Israel Act, which would bar the U.S. from funding any U.N. agency that suspends, downgrades, or expels Israel over its catastrophic military campaign in Gaza.

On Friday morning, House Speaker Mike Johnson jumped to Israel’s defense over its unprecedented strike, and blamed Iran for bringing the action on itself by refusing nuclear disarmament. “Israel decided it needed to take action to defend itself. They were clearly within their right to do so,” he wrote in a post on X. “Iran will face grave consequences if it responds by unjustifiably targeting U.S. interests.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz was also on defense, and compared people who criticized Israel’s strike to terrorists. In a post on X, former Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes wrote, “This is all so unnecessary. All of it. Everywhere.” Cruz reposted, adding, “You forgot to add ‘death to Israel’ and ‘death to America.’”

Between 2019 and 2024, Cruz received a whopping $562,593 from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its members, and has received more than $1.8 million from pro-Israel PACs between 1990 and 2024, according to OpenSecrets.

Representative Don Bacon, who received $697,837 from AIPAC in 2024, did his paid gig as Israel’s spokesperson by simply reposting from Israel’s official X account. “When someone threatens to annihilate you - you better believe them. When they build weapons of mass death - stop them,” the post read.

Supporting Israel’s assault on Iran has caused the president to lose some of his longest-term acolytes.

One such loss apparently includes Tucker Carlson, who issued a newsletter to his audience Friday grimly titled: “This Could Be the Final Newsletter Before All-Out War.” In it, the ex–Fox News anchor accused Donald Trump of being “complicit in the act of war” and chastised executive decisions that he said had effectively launched U.S. soldiers into another war in the Middle East.

“Earlier this week, unnamed Washington sources expressed concern over Israel’s ability to fend off Iran’s retaliation, which would inevitably lead to Benjamin Netanyahu ordering the American military to step in and fight on his country’s behalf,” Carlson wrote. “On Thursday, Iran’s president threatened to ‘destroy’ any country that eliminates his government’s nuclear facilities. Now, the world will learn what that looks like.”

Carlson also rejected Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence that the White House had not been involved in the bubbling tensions that preceded the attack, and that the administration was putting the safety of American forces in the region above all else.

“While the American military may not have physically perpetrated the assault, years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night’s events,” Carlson continued. “Washington knew these attacks would happen. They aided Israel in carrying them out. Politicians purporting to be America First can’t now credibly turn around and say they had nothing to do with it. Our country is in deep.”

Prior to the election, Trump had won enormous support across America for pledging to swiftly end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Six months into his second term, he has not only failed to do either but has seemingly escalated the situation in the Middle East.

Israel bombed Iran early Friday morning, just days before Iran was scheduled for negotiations with U.S. officials regarding its nuclear program. The attack appeared to shut down potential talks, as Iran announced that it would withdraw from the discussions in the wake of the attack.

Iran has argued that it is seeking uranium for peaceful purposes. Iranian officials announced Thursday afternoon their intentions to expand their nuclear program, despite facing a censure from a U.N. nuclear watchdog for failing to uphold nonproliferation obligations.

Israeli strikes have so far killed four senior Iranian commanders, including Hossein Salami, the commander in chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iranian state media confirmed late Thursday, though regional sources told Reuters that up to 20 senior commanders had been killed.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, said there would be “severe punishment” for the strikes.

“It’s worth taking a step back and wondering how any of this helps the United States. We can’t think of a single way,” Carlson wrote.

The Trump administration is giving the personal data of Medicaid-enrolled immigrants to the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Associated Press. The Department of Homeland Security forced the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—which is part of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services—to hand over personal information, an unprecedented move.

This is yet another clear invasion of privacy aimed to help ICE find immigrants’ names, homes, and jobs and identify immigrants receiving aid so that they can revoke green card applications and target permanent residency seekers. 

Most of the data covers residents of California, Illinois, Washington state, and Washington, D.C.—all states that let noncitizens enroll in Medicaid, and all states that are seeing ramped-up ICE raids and protests in response.  

CMS tried to fight DHS’s request, arguing that they’d be violating the Social Security Act and the Privacy Act of 1974, and in general going against “longstanding policy” of not giving people’s personal Medicaid data to a department that has nothing to do with Medicaid just because they are immigrants.  

“We deeply value the privacy of all Californians,” Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “This potential data transfer brought to our attention by the AP is extremely concerning, and if true, potentially unlawful, particularly given numerous headlines highlighting potential improper federal use of personal information and federal actions to target the personal information of Americans.”