Immigration

“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.

In recent days parliament has been recalled on a Saturday to debate the renationalisation of the British steel industry. Then, after a month-long strike by binmen in Birmingham, army planners have been called in to help address the issue of large amounts of refuse piling up in the city. Absent a major ideological split on the right, it is hard to see how much more reminiscent of the 1970s Britain could become. I don’t however want to join the legions of people who are carping. Rather, I should like to suggest an answer to some of these things.

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.

Before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Elon Musk caused a huge controversy within the MAGA movement by advocating increased high-skill immigration. As head of the Department of Government Efficiency he wanted, for example, to expand the H-1B visa program, which many Trump supporters are against. The angry debate over the visa issue still rages on social media and both sides tend to talk past each other. The MAGA movement is against any increase in immigration, whether high- or low-skill. Musk has acknowledged that the existing H-1B program was subject to abuse by employers and especially by IT firms that rely on outsourcing: the workers they import are often no better than the Americans they replace.