Immigration

President Trump’s call for a new US census that excludes illegal immigrants has stirred up exactly the kind of debate this country needs – but not necessarily in the way he’s proposed it. Let’s be clear: the spirit of Trump’s order is right. It’s outrageous that congressional seats and federal funding are based, in part, on populations that include people who entered this country illegally. Sanctuary states like California, New York and Illinois benefit politically and financially from shielding those who bypassed our laws, while law-abiding states are left underrepresented. The American people have every right to demand that representation reflect citizenship, not lawbreaking.But even as I share the outrage, I can’t support the tactic.

There is never a dull moment in the second, more cheerful reign of Donald Trump. I am writing from London, but was in France last week, picking my way through various battlefields and cemeteries in and around Verdun, Bastogne (think “Easy Company” and “Battle of the Bulge”), and Reims. Well-informed readers will know, as I did not, that “Reims” is not pronounced as its letters might suggest but rather as a nasalized “Reince.” I have always associated the place with champagne, and I am pleased to say that the city capitalizes on the association. But one point of interest had nothing to do with that magical elixir. Reims was also the location of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters at the end of World War II.

New York Mayor Ed Koch used to ask almost everyone he met, “How’m I doing?” Trump hasn’t asked me “How’m I doing?” on immigration, but if he did, I’d answer, “Outstanding, Mr. President, but with one hiccup and much left to do.” The first challenge the President faced was to stop the disaster at the border. And he’s succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. As journalist Byron York asked on X, “How many presidents solve a problem... that was a huge issue in the campaign, and solve it in the first few months of their presidency?” Arrests at the southern border in May were down 93 percent from the same time last year.

In 1976, the Ramirez Pharmacy opened in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Appropriately located on the corner of East Cesar Chavez Ave, the pharmacy is the crowning achievement of my grandfather, Eddie Ramirez, and is in many ways physical evidence of the American dream.  But in today’s Los Angeles, we’ve seen citizens and non-citizens waving Mexican flags while torching cars, attacking police and burning US flags in protest of the Trump administration's immigration raids in the state. Protesters have looted businesses downtown and lit fires, leading to full blocks of the LA commercial district nailing plywood to their storefronts.  “Lately, since all this ruckus started with a protest, we have seen a drop in the business.

“You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” So goes the bartenders’ refrain to customers at closing time. The Trump administration is issuing that same call to millions of illegal immigrants, beginning with the most violent (and those caught staying with them). You can’t stay here. It’s a wildly popular stance, but it is running into predictable problems. The first is that rounding up the millions here illegally is costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. That problem was vastly increased by Joe Biden’s deliberate decision to open the southern border, allow millions of people to cross it illegally and then lie to the public and Congress about what his administration was doing.

In the matter of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his all-expenses-paid sojourn in El Salvador, there has been a goodly quota of posturing all around. Or, rather, there has been understandable outrage and intransigence on the part of the Trump administration. There has also been wild, almost comic posturing on the part of Democrats and their megaphones held up by the media. There are 195 countries in the world today. It is unfortunate, or at least complicating, that the Trump administration settled on El Salvador as the country to which to deport Garcia, whose wife was granted a temporary protective order against him in 2021, according to Maryland court records. Garcia has admitted to clambering into the US illegally in 2012, though he has never been convicted of any crime.

Michelle Obama says Donald Trump’s immigration policies “keep her up at night.” But if immigration enforcement is a moral crisis, why wasn’t she losing sleep when her own husband deported more immigrants than any president in American history? Instead of helping the Democrats, this kind of out-of-touch moral posturing only highlights the party’s elite detachment from reality – and it’s costing them working-class voters who live with the consequences of the failed policies they are still defending.Michelle Obama may lie awake thinking about immigration enforcement. Many of us stay up worrying about what happens when our neighborhoods, wages and public schools are strained by policies designed to win applause, not provide order.

When it comes to Donald Trump and his achievements during his first 100 days, who are you going to believe, the New York Times or your lyin’ eyes?  By “the New York Times,” incidentally, I do not mean just that one woke media outlet masquerading as a source of news.  No, I take the Times as a metonym for the entire propaganda industrial complex, the giant dispenser of politically correct nostrums and seismically sensitive Keeper of the Narrative.  Thus it is that the Times is a reliable dispenser not of that sort of information we denominate “news” – that is, what is actually happening and who is involved in making it happen.

On Monday morning, the nation awoke to learn that 100 "Wanted"-style posters now line the driveway to the White House, featuring faces of people the Trump administration has deported and the crimes they’d committed. A perpetual shriek, warning about the rise of fascism, arose from the online cosmos, as people began posting, again, “This is how it starts.” I saw more than one person compare the display to a medieval king posting heads on spikes around a moat, or Nazi propaganda magazine spreads about dangerous “Juden.” Perhaps. Or maybe it was just oppositional troll-bait. This is how the Trump White House operates. It’s government by meme, and it can be very effective.

Forget the towering slabs of steel and concrete sprawling across the southern border. Quietly, beneath the tangible symbols of Donald Trump’s immigration clampdown, another revolution has taken hold. A revolution of invisible digital watchtowers, wires and algorithms – that is as impressive as it is unsettling.The curtain shielding this vast expansion of America’s digital surveillance technology has, thanks to recent disclosures, been drawn back to reveal at its core a controversial and critically influential digital engine churning through data.Enter Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DoGE has recently launched a master database targeting undocumented migrants, WIRED reports.

The barrage of media coverage and political activity surrounding the deportation of an illegal migrant to El Salvador might suggest the story plays to the advantage of Democrats targeting President Trump’s immigration crackdown. But that’s actually not the case according to new poll data provided to The Spectator. Polling this week conducted by OnMessage, one of the top Republican-aligned firms, found that despite the drumbeat in support of the Democratic storyline on Kilmar Abrego Garcia over the past several weeks, American voters are evenly split on the issue overall – reflecting how quickly this case has become a simple partisan divide. Overall, support for the Garcia deportation is dead even at 49-49.

Luigi Mangione has yet another day in court. A fresh collection of glamorous perp walk photos will emerge. Sexy orange-jumpsuit clad come-hither glances are forthcoming. This will surely appeal to his many fans – his stans – who’ve been dying to get a fresh look at their alleged murderous dreamboat. Luigi’s re-emergence comes at the end of an extraordinary week where the American left embraced a rogue’s gallery of villains so ridiculous that they almost seem fictional. You have Mangione, accused of shooting a healthcare CEO in cold blood; Mahmoud Khalil, who faces deportation for his role in Columbia's radical protests; and the latest entry into the sinister sweepstakes, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

A federal immigration judge ruled on Friday that the government could deport Mahmoud Khalil, not a student, but a “Columbia University graduate.” Judge Jamee Comans, a former Mississippi police officer and a Biden appointee in 2023, said that Khalil’s political activities posed “potentially serious foreign policy consequences” for the United States, which is claiming that Khalil is undermining “US policy to fight anti-Semitism.”  Khalil supporters talk about him like he’s Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, Dr. King writing letters from Birmingham jail or Oscar Wilde staring wistfully at the moon from his cell in Reading Gaol. But anyone looking to ding the Trump administration on its deportation policy could find a better example of injustice.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling lifting the order blocking the deportation of accused members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua is a significant legal victory for the Trump administration. More importantly, it's also a policy vindication for those within this White House whose approach to government upon their return to Washington was to do everything, everywhere, all at once. The legal victory itself was hailed by every prominent member of the President's deportation team, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing she’d redouble her efforts, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declaring that all those here illegally must “LEAVE NOW” and Stephen Miller practically ebullient in his interview last night with Sean Hannity.