Of all the horrible things this administration has wrought up on the world, their immigration/deportation policy is the one that produces the most white-hot rage in me. That is because it is personal for me. I am married to a naturalized US Citizen from Nicaragua and we also live in Mexico City, Mexico. Love and location have given me two unique perspectives that most Americans don’t have.
As a result, I have much more than just empathy for the plight of immigrants. I have a systemic view of what is happening in the US under Trump. There are patterns and connections between various forces. All of which should be dragged into the public eye. My only platform for doing so is here.
Let’s start here:
Trump repeatedly promised the largest deportation in American history. He failed.
The record, in his own administration’s figures:
Promised: one million removals a year
Delivered: about 605,000
Padded with: 1.9 million “self-deportations,” counting the people who fled as people he caught
Manufactured: 1.6 million immigrants stripped of legal status to replace the deportable people the raids never found
Spent: $170 billion and climbing
Immigration courts clear a few thousand cases a week. Detention holds about 70,000 people at a time. The system cannot remove a million people a year, and Trump knew this. In addition, if he was serious about deportations, he would have focused on procedural-related infrastructure. But he didn’t do that. He focused on turning ICE into a paramilitary force and building concentration camps.
Another failed venture is a familiar pattern for him. In this case, however, he knew they could never reach the stated deportation goal. Optics wasn’t a pivot from a failure. It was the point the entire time. It was and is far more diabolical than spinning a policy failure.
The point was to create what I call “Terror Optics”, the deliberate staging of state cruelty as spectacle, where suffering gets filmed and circulated because the footage, not the result, is the point. ISIS and other Islamic terrorist groups are an example of this strategy.
A Reality Show for Racists
Trump is only good at one thing: branding himself. His entire life has been a reality show. So that’s what he did here.
DHS told agents to stay camera-ready and wear the logo where a camera could catch them. It assigned staff to post raid clips. Border Patrol brought a film crew to Chicago. DHS released an apartment raid with helicopter sounds and music added. Dr. Phil rode along with a federal team. MAGA influencers were paid to amplify all of this.
The reality show/brand circus extended far beyond social posts. An example: Florida’s attorney general rolled out “Alligator Alcatraz” in a video bragging that anyone who ran would meet alligators and pythons. The White House posted AI-generated poster art of it. Crews swapped the airport sign for one bearing the brand. People took selfies next to the sign in their “Trump is My President, Jesus is My King” shirts.
DHS promised the “worst of the worst”and kept arresting cooks and mothers. In one case, when an arrest turned up no criminal record, the press team went looking for an egregious immigration history. When nothing turned up, they deleted the post but the arrest stood.
The “worst of the worst” was also a lie.
According to leaked ICE custody data analyzed by the Cato Institute, nearly three in four people booked into ICE detention in this fiscal year (73 percent) have no criminal conviction at all, and almost half have neither a conviction nor any pending criminal charge. Only 5 percent have a violent criminal conviction.
The same dataset shows that by November 2025, 69–70 percent of people ICE deported or held after ICE arrest had no criminal conviction, and about 40 percent had never even been charged with a crime.
One academic analysis of ICE data, highlighted by the Wall Street Journal, found that between late September 2025 and early January 2026, growth in detention was driven 92 percent by people with no criminal convictions, and 72 percent by people who did not even have a criminal charge—only an alleged immigration violation
It turns out that even Terror Optics had limits, so the next step was even darker: they rewrote the rules so that hundreds of thousands of people could be rebranded as criminals and queued up for removal.
Manufacturing Deportability
The administration knew that raids would not find enough deportable people to support the plot line, so they manufactured more, revoking the legal status of more than 1.6 million immigrants who were already living and working here legally, including: Temporary Protected Status holders, humanitarian parole beneficiaries who entered through structured programs, and roughly 500,000 CHNV beneficiaries from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. None of them hid. They were easy to find. ICE knew their names and addresses because it had issued their papers.
For many of these people, there is no “home” country to return to because they were political exiles. Many came from governments that strip citizenship from dissidents and exiles or refuse to recognize returnees, especially those who left through U.S. programs; others face regimes that treat deportees as traitors, criminals, or easy targets for imprisonment or extortion.
Trump’s need to feed the reality show did not simply move people from “legal” to “illegal.” It converts hundreds of thousands into practical statelessness, people whom two governments can disown while both still claim the power to cage, deport, or disappear them.
Neo-Confederacy
Trump, Miller, Vance, et al told crowds that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Trump has doubled down, saying migrants are “destroying the fabric of our country” and boasting that “if I weren’t elected, we would have a bloodbath like you’ve never seen.” In the same breath, they describe border crossers as criminals and mental patients “dumped” here from foreign prisons and asylums.
All of it is a lie.
This language a deliberate use of blood rhetoric to cast immigrants as contaminants and to tell the base that the state will defend a racialized idea of who counts as fully American
This is what I call Neo-Confederacy, which is a far more accurate description than calling them Nazis. Neo-Confederacy is a blend of Christian Nationalism with white supremacy, with a little tecno-facism thrown in. The creed is clear.
The nation’s worth lives in the bloodline of its dominant race
Some religions and cultures count as more American than others
Demographic change means “White Replacement Theory”, not arithmetic
Trump’s apologists say Trump’s language about blood and poison are actually about crime and security, and insist he would say the same about migrants from anywhere. His supporters swear their concerns are about culture and values, not skin color, and that critics are inventing bigotry because of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”.
Grand Theft Authoritarianism
The MAGA spin is that Trump and his family are talented businesspeople who happen to hold power. In fact, they have mastered the art of using state power to enrich themselves. Trump and his family have taken in at least 2 billion dollars in business income this term, more once you count the opaque vehicles and licensing deals
Trump couldn’t sell tickets to his reality show, but he could sell access to federal funding. Trump’s immigration policy has created a cash ecosystem for a specific slice of his supporters: private detention corporations, contractors, charter airlines, tech and surveillance vendors, and some big donors who got exactly the business they were betting on.
Two businesses stand out:
GEO Group and CoreCivic executives and PACs gave millions to Trump and then saw ICE detention funding soar, with GEO’s profits reportedly jumping from around 30 million dollars in 2024 to more than 250 million in 2025 as ICE contracts expanded.
A single logistics firm, Acquisition Logistics, received about 598 million dollars from ICE in 2025 under a contract worth up to 1.2 billion dollars to provide tent facilities and surge detention space for Trump’s deportation drive.
In a diabolical twist, Terror Optics become both a distraction from the greater grift, but also a monetization stream.
The Cost
Terror Optics has resulted in thousands of broken families and shuttered businesses. It has also resulted in spilled blood.
At least fourteen people shot by DHS immigration officers in eleven incidents during the crackdown
Three dead in those incidents, including U.S. citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis
At least six people shot dead by immigration agents since the campaign began, with more wounded or held at gunpoint
An administration that valued civil liberties and human life would call this a crisis. Instead, they call the shootings and deaths tragic but unavoidable answers to a dangerous situation. They point to split-second decisions. They swear their agents acted with courage under fire. They reframe any objection to these costs as an attack on law and order, while recasting grief for the victims as weakness.
This does not include the number of people who have died in ICE custody.
Oversight visits have found people in Trump-era ICE facilities shackled on buses for hours, held up to ten days in tiny rooms without beds or showers, and then moved into severely overcrowded units where many sleep on floors or endure de facto solitary confinement for twenty-one hours a day with no outdoor access. Across multiple centers, detainees report sewage backing up from drains, insects on walls, freezing temperatures, inadequate clothing and blankets, spoiled or insufficient food, and systematic denial of medical care, disability accommodations, and legal visits, with those who complain punished through threats, transfers, or solitary.
Health reviews conclude that these conditions are not only degrading but deadly, with most deaths in ICE custody under Trump’s second term deemed preventable or possibly preventable if basic standards of care had been met, even as the administration rapidly expanded warehouse-style camps while claiming detainees received “better care than most U.S. prisoners.”
Karma is a Bitch
Yes, my rage about this is personal. But it only affirms what I’ve known for four decades: throughout the history of this troubled young country of ours, we produce the very best and the very worst of people. So the ultimate karma for me is that every one of the people that are involved in this and/or supported will at some point, in some way, feel what is like to be the people they targeted.
Karma, in the broader context, is being prosecuted in the legal system they denied to take from other people.
For Trump, Miller, Vance, and the rest, that looks like steady, unglamorous accountability: prosecutors and grand juries working through documents, money trails, and testimony; inspectors general documenting abuses that cannot be spun away; courts narrowing the shield of immunity they assumed would always hold.
Karma also looks like them sitting at defense tables under fluorescent lights while raid footage plays on courtroom screens, survivors testify, and hearing judges read out sentences that end not in motorcades and green rooms but in jumpsuits, locked doors, and long, empty hours in the same cages they once treated as props. At least they get due process. What they deserve is far worse.
For the GOP, karma looks like losing elections in a long, grinding rejection. It looks like once‑safe districts slipping away by a few hundred votes at a time because suburban parents and small‑town business owners are tired of living under a government that treats their neighbors like threats. It looks like candidates who built their careers on “law and order” suddenly insisting they were always “concerned” about the excesses, swearing they never meant cages or shootings, and discovering that voters remember everything.