It seems pretty clear now that there is nowhere to hide from the murder of Alex Pretti. Trump is now flapping around trying to find an offramp in Minnesota, given he has totally lost the narrative. If Kristy ‘cosplay’ Noem survives the day, I’ll be very surprised. Regardless, this will not bring Renee Good or Alex Pretti back to their families following this shameful real-life made-for-TV whodunit mystery that never was, given the world saw two murders with their own eyes.
In Trump’s world, cruelty and humiliation are king. It pains me to listen to Democratic leadership unable to talk the talk, let alone walk the walk, until tragedy struck and another American citizen lost his life. Last week, seven House Democrats voted to add $770 million to the DHS budget to increase funding for fiscal year 2026. As noted by the National Immigration Law Centre, this will include:
$400 million more for ICE’s detention budget, an increase from $3.4 billion to $3.8 billion.
This money enables ICE to continue to massively expand its detention infrastructure across local, state, and federal jails, military bases, warehouses, and more. ICE is already jailing more than 70,000 people, including 6,000 people in harmful family detention facilities.$370 million more for ICE’s enforcement budget, an increase from $5.08 billion to $5.45 billion.
ICE and CBP agents are shooting people in broad daylight, violently targeting peaceful protestors, and invading people’s homes without warrants. If our elected representatives hand over even more funding, without securing any new accountability measures, it’s essentially an invitation for ICE and CBP to continue to violate our rights.
This is IN ADDITION to the $170 billion in DHS funding the reconciliation budget bill provided. Chuck Schumer now claims Democrats will block the bill in the Senate, stating:
“Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”
It is worth noting that holding up the bill in the Senate would still leave open the option for DHS to tap into the $75 billion appropriated in the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ in 2025, so there is no quick win for those wanting to rein in ICE. Nevertheless, the spending bill remains significant leverage for Senate Democrats, assuming they don’t fold.
Trump claims that making America great is all about building a strong economy and restoring the once-mighty manufacturing sector to its former glory. Dream on, is what I would say to that delusional statement. What he fails to mention is that his so-called ‘good ol’ days’ were driven by immigrant labour and the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. It was immigrants who made America great, and it’s also immigrant talent that has delivered the US tech sector. Without H-1B visas, there would be no ‘dominant’ tech industry to speak of. These visas have long been a cost-saving vehicle for attracting highly qualified foreign technology specialists, removing the need to educate homegrown talent at scale as China does.
Whether it’s the fresh food delivered to the tables of Americans or the technology they can’t put down at the dinner table, all of it would not be possible without immigrants. The eye-watering amount of money being spent to deport wealth-creating undocumented workers has absolutely no economic upside. In a report by the Institute on Taxationand Economic Policy dated July 2024 by Carl Davis, Marco Guzman and Emma Sifre, it notes:
Undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Most of that amount, $59.4 billion, was paid to the federal government while the remaining $37.3 billion was paid to state and local governments.
Undocumented immigrants paid federal, state, and local taxes of $8,889 per person in 2022. In other words, for every 1 million undocumented immigrants who reside in the country, public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue.
More than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs that these workers are barred from accessing. Undocumented immigrants paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes in 2022.
So who exactly are these low IQ rapist, criminal murderers, that Trump and Miller like to refer to them as?
In a large majority of states (40), undocumented immigrants pay higher state and local tax rates than the top 1% of households living within their borders. When the likes of JD Vance falsely claim that undocumented workers are receiving healthcare (which they are not). He never mentions that American citizens are using the $6.4 billion of contributions each year made by the same so-called ‘illegal aliens’ who receive no benefit for their contribution, while being hunted down by masked thugs Vance has illegally given immunity to.
Undocumented immigrants in communities across America represent between 4.6% and 5.2% of the US workforce (7.5 to 8.3 million) in key sectors such as construction, agriculture, and hospitality. As a percentage of the US population, they represent just 3%. I want you to pause for a moment and clear your mind so we can focus on a blank piece of paper and do some numbers. Then I want you to ask yourself whether this justifies executing US citizens in broad daylight for having the audacity to question the actions of thugs employed by the government to terrorise their communities.
We can scream and shout about the cruel and unjust treatment of immigrants, many of whom have long been law-abiding net contributors to communities. However, to understand this fascist mass deportation operation, we need to understand the thinking behind the approach. I’ve said many times that the campaign in Minnesota is not an on-the-fly policy directive; these operations are carefully crafted with specific objectives to stress-test state governance, law enforcement, and public response to their actions.
Much under-discussed is the Israeli connection. For years, law enforcement agencies have taken advantage of exchange programmes with the Israeli police and military. In a piece by Mersiha Gadzo from Al Jazeera News from June 2020, Merisha notes:
According to the organisations Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and Researching the American-Israeli Alliance (RAIA), one common theme shared between United States and Israel is the exchange of tactics and expertise in state violence, which has been ongoing for 18 years.
She goes on to say:
Since [9/11], thousands – including agents from the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – have been schooled at these meetings in both Israel and the US, sponsored by far-right Israeli lobby organisations. But instead of promoting effective security for communities, the programme facilitates an exchange of tactics used in police violence and control, including mass surveillance, racial profiling and the suppression of protests and dissent, according to the JVP and RAIA’s 2018 report (PDF) titled Deadly Exchange, which details the extent of the cooperation.
If you want an insight as to how law enforcement modelling is based around Israeli tactics in controlling the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories, you should definitely read Deadly Exchange - The Dangerous Consequences of American Law Enforcement Training in Israel. Of course, I am not suggesting that the current crop of ICE thugs is benefiting from this type of training. However, if you look at the tactics they use, they are very similar to those used in the West Bank by the IDF.
I would also certainly not dismiss the possibility that AI is being used to analyse action-reaction, etc., to fine-tune the model for the next target state. Nobody should underestimate the role of Palantir and other surveillance technologies, often developed by Israeli companies. Facial recognition is now a key component in these operations. ICE officers often take pictures of not just suspected targets, but also bystanders and protesters. It’s difficult to explain to people unfamiliar with the technology how invasive it can be.
The objective of the regime is to tie any act of dissent to a social security ID. This is your unique identifier. In Trump’s March executive order, the aim was to consolidate data across government departments and create an aggregated dataset. This is just one simple step from a state surveillance system. The technology has been around in some form or other in law enforcement for decades, but Trump’s executive order took it to a new level. ICE can now link car number plates to facial recognition. As for data on your phone, tech now exists to read your texts, check your browser history and data from most apps in real time, remotely. ICE doesn’t need a tracker on your car; your mobile phone handles that, and you pay the network for the privilege.
The point I’m making here is that in other Democratic countries, this is illegal, but in Trump's world, there appears to be no adherence to laws if he decides he needs to target you. AI has removed the labour-intensive nature of collating intelligence data. ICE is now a huge data-gathering machine, harvesting data as they go, to build a picture of any source of dissent. This is something you need to be critically aware of in your daily interactions with the state. If you are out and acting as a civil rights monitor, the best way to do this is to switch your phone to aeroplane mode.
For comms use, have a cheap burner phone to hand. You should be mindful that these measures offer only partial protection because if they use facial ID, they will likely know where you live and who your cell phone carrier is, and so be able to access your regular mobile phone. None of your data is safe from the state if they want to access it. They can access social media accounts, DMs and, from a technical perspective, use AI to politically score your activity.
Given the amount of aggregated data the federal government now hold on the population, I suspect that it would be a small step to introduce a social credit system that could be based on your level of compliance with regime ideology, govern your ability to, for example, buy airline tickets, use public transport or even limit what you can buy on your credit or debit card. I am NOT suggesting, for one moment, that this is what they plan to do. I am merely telling you what is possible using the technology they have access to. Now, how do you feel about using voter ID to vote?
What I’m trying to say, is that, sadly, we appear to be just passengers on the fascist express train to theocratic autocracy. This is all about being aware of what we are up against in Trump’s reimagined America. The only bonus here is that state surveillance is antithetical to MAGA ideology, so there is some comfort in that. However, what if they said to their supporters that the technology would only be used on registered Democrats? I merely want to create an awareness of the risks in this new world.
Moving back to the justification for mass deportation, I think we have established there is no economic case for it. It impacts key sectors of the economy, reduces tax revenue by $96.7 billion every year, and that’s before we consider the money undocumented workers spend in the economy. They contribute to economic growth through around $389 billion in consumption spending (in 2023).
In summary, they contribute almost half a trillion dollars to the US economy in taxes and consumer spending every year. The ITEP report also notes that:
Providing access to work authorisation for undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions both because their wages would rise and because their rates of tax compliance would increase. Under a scenario where work authorisation is provided to all current undocumented immigrants, their tax contributions would rise by $40.2 billion per year to $136.9 billion. Most of the new revenue raised in this scenario ($33.1 billion) would flow to the federal government, while the remainder ($7.1 billion) would flow to states and localities.
The likes of Stephen Miller, who attempt to claim undocumented workers are a drain on US public services and take jobs from American citizens, are demonstrably wrong. Aside from throwing half a trillion dollars in consumption and tax revenue down the toilet, the regime is spending additional hundreds of billions of dollars to economically shoot itself in the face. It represents the biggest act of economic self-harm in American history, all in the service of nothing but racist political ideology. I would add that the contribution to the US economy is close to double the revenue derived from tariffs in 2025. If you want to frame it another way, half the cost of the interest paid on the national debt in 2025.
Americans need to understand that this has nothing to do with the wealth and prosperity of the country and everything to do with racist political ideology. The Democratic strategy to ‘wait it out’ is not only untenable, but it’s also deeply disrespectful to the American people.
Sacrifice is not easy
The following excerpt is from a Washington Post Op-ed from 2020 regarding the Pandemic, but the lessons apply perfectly to opposing the current fascist takeover.
“Sacrifice is not easy and natural, but it can happen. And yet, the language of sacrifice faded in the aftermath of a more popular, more total and more demanding conflict for Americans. Following World War II, the “good war,” politicians, business leaders, unions and many Americans embraced the idea that mass consumption would drive economic prosperity. Even in the midst of the burgeoning Cold War, such a notion supplanted more collectivist notions of community and sacrifice, in part because those were increasingly stigmatized as “socialist” or “communist.” This offered an individualist reaffirmation of the nation’s democratic values and became central to American identity. Mass consumption and participation in the economy, not sacrifice, increasingly came to signal one’s patriotism.
The last military draft in the United States ended in 1973, and since then, service and sacrifice have been voluntary and borne unevenly. The fractures of national unity that came at the end of the Vietnam War and the distrust of government in the wake of Watergate helped to propel these changes. In their wake, collective sacrifice has been extolled by politicians but never urged, much less required. Instead, market logics and consumer-citizenship has been the default setting for how to practice engaged models of citizenship.
Shopping, traveling and showing confidence in the economy have come to define American citizenship and even responses to collective existential threats such as terrorism and emergencies, including deadly viral outbreaks.
The challenges the nation now faces are dire and require sacrifice, not consumption. The problem is that Americans have been actively discouraged by their leaders from making sacrifices in support of larger efforts — including wars, fossil fuel consumption, global warming, the Great Recession and the current pandemic. Confronting the looming public health, economic and climate challenges today requires a wholesale change in how citizens and the state conceive and construct a rhetoric as well as a practice of collective sacrifice.”
Christopher McKnight Nichols is professor of history and Woody Hayes Chair in national security studies at The Ohio State University. He is author of "Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age" and editor and author of "Rethinking American Grand Strategy" and "Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories” (Columbia UP, 2022).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/07/americans-used-sacrifice-public-good-what-happened/
Sacrifice is Necessary
Defeating the fascists in WWII did not happen without sacrifice from the citizens of the Allied countries. We will have to sacrifice to stop and reverse the fascist takeover of our country. We can sacrifice a little now or a much greater amount later. What kind of world will our children and grandchildren live in if we allow this to continue?
How much do you want to stop His Royal Heinous and the fascist takeover of the country?
Enough that you’re willing to make a small sacrifice? Like altering your spending habits for a month or two or three? That could be all it would take to get the attention of the oligarchs (formerly known as The Robber Barons in the first Gilded Age, also The Fat Cats, The Greedy Bastards).
A brief demonstration of We, the People’s, power of the purse could persuade them to quit supporting HRH and the politicians who enable him.
We quit spending, except on essentials, businesses lose money, stock market goes down, Greedy Bastards pay attention to our demands.
Greedy Bastards own most of the politicians of both major parties. GBs start losing money, then they tell the politicians to change course and do what We, the People want.
Spending Strike, Spending Freeze, Spending Suspension, Spending Pause, Economic Disengagement, Economic Warfare, Stop Spending!, even Boycott. Choose your favorite but Do It, and Spread the Word!
If a single dollar doubles every day for 30 days, it reaches a total of over $536 million ($536,870,912) at the end of the 30th day.
So, would it follow, that a single voice that doubled everyday would become 536 million voices after 30 days? That seems doable.
From Mark Mansour:
Sacrifice has always been the price of renewal. Democracy, if it is to survive, cannot be the cheap luxury item of a populace too comfortable to fight for it. The Trump regime can be resisted through civic courage, legal challenge, and organization. But it can also be starved—one deliberate, withheld dollar at a time.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mmansour/p/its-time-to-recognize-that-this-ordeal?r=5f62tm&utm_medium=ios
An outstanding post