Donald Trump is bragging that he plans to unleash ICE with a big raid in Chicago next week. This is typical Trump grandstanding, but it's worth keeping in mind that ICE arrests illegal immigrants all the time. Here's their weekly average over the past decade:
Under both Trump and Biden ICE has averaged about 2,500 arrests per week. Unless that goes up substantially, the Chicago raids are just theater for the rubes.
UPDATE: The chart originally had a small error. It's fixed now.
All the political media is excited about it. You took the bait.
Kevin's cool, rational (and accurate) analysis strikes you as "excited"?
Kevin missed the best part of the story:
In other words they're going to do two weeks' worth of arrests in one, and claim it's a BFD.
The Republican Party is such a fucking disgrace.
What the fuck is wrong with billionaires that they can only demand more?
Yecch.
But what does that say about the people who vote for them?
Wealth is an addictive drug.
Why Chicago, we wonders?
Because Trump wants to pick a fight with J.B. Pritzker, who is considered a potential 2028 presidential candidate.
But why should Trump care when he can't run again? Apparently he thinks he can.
Because Trump wants to pick a fight with J.B. Pritzker, who is considered a potential 2028 presidential candidate
Trump can't run again. And if he were concerned about Pritzker, it's better not to give him an opportunity to stand up to Trump and act strong.
They've said they're going to try this multiple cities. Chicago just happens to be first. I wouldn't read too much into the choice of venue other than that Chicago is a big, Democratic-leaning town that often serves as a proxy in MAGAville for "scary place dominated by failed liberal policies and DEI governance yada yada."
I guarantee you, Trump thinks he'll figure out a way to run again. I'll bet my last dollar on it.
I have zero doubt that, if he's cognitively capable*, Trump will try to figure out a way to hold onto power. But I reject the "third term" scenario as maximally unlikely because, if he wants to try this, there are other, less constitutionally suspect ways of going about it. Why try something that appears prima facie** unconstitutional? The reality is Trump doesn't have five guaranteed SC votes for any and all inanities. Most recently Trump lost Roberts and Barrett in the NY State sentencing matter. By all accounts he was furious.
Other methods for running the country after 2028 exist. He could stay on in the White House as a live-in "adviser" (wink-wink). He could issue orders from Mar-a-Lago as an old-style political boss. He could get himself elected Speaker of the House and rule as a sort of Speaker-Führer (he doesn't even need to win a House seat!). All of these situations are unambiguously permitted by our constitution.
*I also think his declining brain health could play a role. He hides his decline a lot better than Biden because of his apparent physical robustness. But there have been troubling signs for a while.
**I understand some constitutional analysts believe Trump is eligible to run for Vice President. Under that scenario, if elected as running mate, he would presumably succeed as POTUS if the President were to resign. But this is a decidedly minoritarian view, and it's far from clear he could pull it off. So, again, why not choose a path that is less constitutionally suspect?
IMO Trump would have 0 interest in being the power behind the throne. Being seen is his entire motivation.
And as for a third term, why, his first term doesn't count! it was marred by fake-new Russia gate and two unfair impeachments. This supreme court absolutely could come up with "reasoning" to uphold such nonsense.
President Emeritus! A unique place in the US government that nobody believed possible! JD Vance will head the election ticket with Lara Trump, and perform the administrative tasks of the presidency for four years under the wise guidance and leadership of President Emeritus Trump, who will continue to live with JD in the Summer and Winter White Houses. PEDJT will keep performing some public duties on behalf of the president, such as delivering his annual state of the union message to Congress, holding America First rallies and hosting state dinners.
(And if JD gets ideas about scrapping the deal after he's elected, the MAGA movement on which he is utterly dependent will make sure he doesn't win re-election.)
Is that plausible? I think so. A lot depends on whether Trump even makes it to 2028; and if he does, what his health is like.
He can run as vice-president candidate to some toady that will resign after the elections.
Even more clearly constitutional, runs two toadies, one of them resign, the other appoints Trump as vice-president and then resign. See here for a discussion on the Congress website:
https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/amdt22-1/ALDE_00001008/
The only difficulty is to ensure the toady wins, which he intends to do by harrassing all potential democrat canditates to scare them of running (and kill the ones that persist). This is how Putin did it.
I think the real difficulty would be ensuring that the toady didn't decide he liked being president, and declined to step aside.
There are enough toadies that he can trust, starting with his sons, and it is safer for him than the "President Emeritus", which gives the actual president further oppurtunities to break.
If he is still healthy in 2028 he will certainly try something like this.
You wouldn't read much into it except that every time they headline a city which Republicans are feuding with.
Theater of the absurd.
Yawn.
When Trump throws an illegal employer (like himself) in prison, that will be news.
Number of corporations prosecuted by the former Trump Administration for illegally hiring illegal immigrants: zero.
The entire purpose of this horseshit kabuki is to ensure a free flow of slave labor to right wing farmers, construction contractors, meatpackers, and golf course owners while throwing racist red meat to the white working class idiots Trump is fucking over.
There’s a reason he (and all Republicans) love the poorly educated.
Of course it's all kayfabe for right now, a bit of symbolism to he's in charge once again. But the problem is there are people around him who really do want to deport everyone and everything. How long are they going to be satisfied with symbolism if it's not getting the results they want?
+1
"the Chicago raids are just theater for the rubes."
And also pointless cruelty harming people for cruelties sake
For Republicans, the cruelty is the point.
I fear that this will be an appropriate comment hundreds of times over the next four years.
They won’t be pointless if they remove illegals from our country.
What makes you think this is not happening now (i.e., 2500 arrests per as noted above)? That sounds like a pretty silly statement.
Yes, they are doing it now. I just meant more of it.
Of course the bigot who supports policies which kill infants and women think 'something good' comes of pretending to harass workers for their papers.
And also pointless cruelty harming people for cruelties sake
Why is it pointless to deport people who are in the country in violation of the law? I'm one of the most pro-immigration people on this board, but even I don't think it's illegitimate to deport people who are in the country, erm, illegally (which doesn't include asylum seekers, obviously).
Kevin's right that this is theater* for the rubes, performed to show the electorate that Trump (unlike feckless Biden and Harris) is a strong guardian of America's borders.
But as Kevin points out, the Biden administration, too, has been arresting thousands of undocumented immigrants each week. That's what "enforcing the law" looks like. Don't like it? Change the law. (We should change the law, as it happens; I'd like to see much higher immigration quotas and various other policy changes in tandem with a big amnesty. Far more sensible to work with the labor market than guarantee the existence of a black market. But again, until the law changes, people who are in the country illegally are by definition breaking the law).
Frankly, the Biden administration should have engaged in some robust border immigration enforcement "theater for the rubes" of its own, starting in early 2021. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference. Maybe! But it turned out to be a pretty close election.
*It's theater, that is, unless Trump is stupid or obstinate enough to pump gigantic resources into such an effort so as to radically increase the number of deportations (or self-deportations). But the signs suggest that the business wing of the GOP is winning the early fights against America First, and the former will have warned Trump that truly large scale deportations will stoke inflation and increase economic instability. So I expect Kevin is absolutely correct that it's theater.
Ah yes, the intentional abuse of prosecutorial discretion to capriciously target a specific disfavored jurisdiction and community for the selective enforcement of immigration law on purely political grounds. That's definitely what "enforcing the law" looks like. President Trump has certainly demonstrated his utter commitment to the Rule of Law and its impartial application to all in its majestic equality.
Let me know when they decide to go after the CEO's and employers who are also breaking immigration and labor law, rather than housekeepers or janitors or other BOH folks who are otherwise indistinguishable from most citizen's great grandparents.
Deportation of persons who are in the country illegally isn’t abusing anything. It’s simply enforcing our immigration laws. “Theater for the rubes” simply refers to getting some useful publicity out of it.
If the employees of a meatpacking plant are deported, but the owners face no sanction, I agree that’s wrong. But as far as I know, enterprises in the United States can be and regularly are fined for violating immigration law.
Why are you supporting bigotry writ large, tho?
People are forgetting that Customs and Border, especially ICE are not that disciplined. Some of them are going to try feel their sand and probably make mistakes. I mean they do it now, but remember the leash is off. There will be...at least pain for some Innocents. Let's hope that's all there is.
What makes you think they are “not that disciplined”? That sounds like a pretty silly statement.
The various OIG reports and investigations that document it
The shakedowns, rapes, murders by Border Patrol agents.
"ICE Guards “Systematically” Sexually Assault Detainees in an El Paso Detention Center"
“They Treat You Like You Are Worthless” Internal DHS Reports of Abuses by US Border Officials
the statement does not seem silly at all. it seems pretty factual
Of course the guy who supports policies which kill infants and women also supports policies which kill random non-whites.
Seems to me like Chicago may have been chosen specifically because the immigrants there are not involved in agriculture, especially in January. In other words, Trump looks tough but doesn't affect food prices (much). Or am I wrong?
Bet you a Three Dollar bill that the raids will be at Hyatt Hotels.
Why?
The Prtizker's founded and run Hyatt. And are big Democratic donors. And the Governor of Illinois in JB Pritzker.
Chicago is a shibboleth and a meme. That it is also an actual physical place has little to do with what is meant when Republicans conjure Chicago. Our air is 80% bullets, roving gangs of woke DEI union thugs drive establishments out of business, and also we have black people.
Similar for Detroit and Baltimore. New York means all that and also Jews. Meanwhile places like Omaha or Tulsa suspiciously don't count as inner city urban hellholes
This
> Chicago is a shibboleth and a meme. ...
As is San Francisco, just with a different set of bogeymen.
In other words, Trump looks tough but doesn't affect food prices (much). Or am I wrong?
Given the likely numbers involved, even if the raids where in the Central Valley there'd be no impact on food prices. Agains, it's theater.
Trump may be stupid/obstinate enough to massively increase deportations. A huge-in scale ratcheting up of deportations would affect many sectors of the economy, including agriculture, and stoke inflation. But that's what it'll take for this to have a palpable impact on the economy: a massive increase in immigration law enforcement. As Kevin points out, the Biden administration, too, has been engaged in robust enforcement efforts, to the tune of thousands of weekly deportations.
Trump may indeed be stupid enough to score a big economic own goal on his watch. I kinda doubt it. But we'll see.
“President-elect Donald Trump’s handpicked “border czar” Tom Homan said in an interview Saturday that the incoming administration is reconsidering whether to launch immigration raids in Chicago next week after preliminary details leaked out in news reports.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/01/18/chicago-immigration-raids/
But, as far as I can tell, Homan is the “leaker”. Watching this stupidity over the next 4 years is going to be tiring.
Bragging at a party. And this guy will have top security clearance??
The Trump admin will always be the leaker. They want the media obsessively covering their narratives. Giving them these stories and pretending it was a leak and not a planted storyline is key to driving interest.
How many times have we seen "what they don't want us to tell you!"
Operational security has never been strength of Trump operations
You're talking about the guy who actually separated children from their parents then deported the parents while the children were lost in the system, tried a Muslim ban before the Court said no, tried to shake down Zelensky, asked to have police fire on protestors, etc.
You sure you want to stick to the "this is all kabuki" narrative? Seems to me that the lynchpin to all the chaos -- the guardrails -- were removed this time.
Except in this case it would be enforcing the law. Of course we would would prefer to have all
Illegals arrested and deported. It’s just a matter of resources that we can’t do that. Ideally, we’d have everyone that runs a stop sign get a ticket. But we there can’t be a police car at every intersection 24/7.
If there were cameras automatically issuing thousand dollar tickets at every stop sign, stop sign running would drop ~99% without a single police officer needed at any of them. (It wouldn’t be 100% because rich people could afford to still run them and pay the ticket, drunk people wouldn’t have the capacity to realize they’re getting tickets for their stop sign running, and people already doing criminal things like covering up their license plates would be undetected by the cameras.)
The cameras aren’t expensive to set up and would pay for themselves after the first 10-100 tickets, depending on how hardened you want them to be (so that our nation’s drivers can’t second amendment their way out of getting a ticket).
We just choose not to do this because most of us like running stop signs. So we come up with reasons like “oh what if the owner of the car isn’t the one driving it?” and “the city/county/state is using the cameras as a cash cow.” But - if we had the willpower to do it - it’s nowhere near as hard to catch most stop sign runners as it is to ferret out all the undocumented people in the country.
That's nonsense.
The letter of the law and what you can set a camera system to is very different from what is physically possible.
so you are advocating selective, arbitrary enforcement of laws based on what YOU deem important?
Curious
Not sure how you got that from my comment. Like most people. I’m advocating enforcing the law as much as possible.
They want to publicize the hell out of what will be comparatively routine operations by current standards. It'll be so early in their tenure they can't do much else yet. They'll need time to move agency people around, set up camp contracts, make deals with compliant sheriffs, etc. So this part is mainly for media coverage and for terror value among the target population. They'll do more over time, but it'll take at least until summer to get halfway ramped up.
Meantime the real early action, I predict, will be a semi-hidden assault on the civil service along the lines of Schedule F. That's something they think they can do simply by executive order and can get going to full scale quickly using the commissars that will be embedded in all agencies by the DOGGIE office. Once it really gets going and attracts some publicity it'll be tied up in court for years, but it'll demoralize and depopulate the civil service and further prove that "government doesn't work" [narrator: when Republicans run it].
"Meantime the real early action, I predict, will be a semi-hidden .."
Appointing Patel for director of the FBI is not hidden at all. He clearly wants to convert the FBI to his own gang, so he can use it to intimidate any opposition.
Yes, but a Schedule F-type purge by job reclassification (threatened or real) and/or intimidation doesn't need Patel and I think would preferentially be started without publicity. Patel will be the public face of vengeance and arbitrary federal police power brought to bear on civilian opponents. The civil servants and others who work for the feds but aren't political appointees are already subject to federal government authority. Changing the nature of that authority, pressuring and forcing them into putting political obedience ahead of everything else, is something I think they'd want to get started on without attracting a lot of attention. Publicity would only slow things down and be a drag on the shock and awe that would be their essential way of dealing with the federal bureaucracy.
Everything with Donald Trump is just theater (not to say it couldn't end up killing all of us).
I hope I'm wrong, but theater or not, this is the start. A televised pogram.
Why does the average line for Trump go well into 2021, and the line for Biden start late in 2021?
Not immediately obvious, I agree, but the way I read the graph, the years start at the tick lines above the last digits. So Biden's part in this starts at the tick above the 1 in 2021.
I wonder why he advertised them in advance. It lets a lot of them hide. What is the chance that a lot of them are not illegal, but are picked up anyway?
Probably not a very big chance considering ICE makes about 2,500 of these arrests every week ans you don’t hear of that situation
Yeah you never hear of it happening. But it’s costly when it does happen. $125k for Mr Rios in 2021 for example. “ICE detained him” in 2019 for 7 days “at the Northwest Detention Center despite the fact that he had his U.S. passport in his possession at the time of his arrest and even though he repeatedly told the arresting officers that he is a U.S. citizen.” Sucks that Mr Rios says “even now I still feel sad about what happened ‘cause it caused me so much harm, to my family, my job,” but it won’t happen to (I’m guessing purebred white male perhaps even with blond hair) Atticus so he doesn’t care.
https://www.nwirp.org/news-events/press-releases/posts/Government-Agrees-to-Settlement-for-Citizen%E2%80%99s-7-Day-Detention/index.html
+1
Yeah, I have no doubt it just happen sometimes. I just meant it’s not that comment otherwise it would be widely reported and serve as a rallying cry for the open border liberals.
It appears we “only” deported 70 US citizens the last time Trump was in power. Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right, Chef Atticus? Especially when you know it won’t be your life and family and savings destroyed… whoops, I meant your “eggs” broken (wink).
Next up: Atticus tells us how it’s better to execute 1 innocent person than let 999 guilty people get their executions commuted to life in prison.
https://www.aclunc.org/news/civil-rights-groups-sue-ice-unlawful-arrest-and-detention-us-citizen
Exactly. Got to break a few eggs.
It's been theater since his fat ass rode down the escalator in 2015. It's going to be hundreds of times worse now. There are no safeguards, no guard rails. 24/7 non stop grift and unethical if not illegal behavior from him and his basket of truly deplorable sychophants.
The choice of Chicago is interesting because it shows that Trump understands that what he is proposing is punishment for the local economy, not a boon. If he believed that these raids were a favor to the places where they occur then the raids would be happening in Texas or Florida. It is happening in Chicago because Trump hates the mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois and wants to teach them a lesson.
Sounds right.