MAGA Report Cards — Immigration

An ICE Camp Is Going Up in Tom Kean Jr.'s District. His Own Republican Town Council Says He Never Showed Up for Them.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:53:30 +0000

On July 14, 2026, the Trump administration told a federal judge it was going ahead with plans to turn a vacant warehouse in Roxbury Township, New Jersey, into an immigration detention facility — two weeks after New Jersey's governor announced the plan had been killed.

Roxbury is in New Jersey's 7th Congressional District. That is Tom Kean Jr.'s district. Reporters asked him where he stood.

"I have remained actively engaged on this issue from the beginning, and I will continue to bring together multiple levels of government to find a responsible, workable solution."

Read that twice. It does not say he is for the detention center. It does not say he is against it. Six months into the biggest fight his district has had in years, that is still the whole answer.

What is actually being built

In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security closed on a 470,000-square-foot empty warehouse at 1879 Route 46 in Roxbury. It paid $129.3 million — roughly double the building's assessed value — as part of about a billion dollars in property DHS has been buying up around the country.

The plan was to fill it with people. New Jersey's own lawsuit, filed by Governor Mikie Sherrill and Attorney General Jennifer Davenport alongside Roxbury Township, says the site was designed to hold up to 1,500 detainees plus roughly 1,000 ICE staff. After the public found out, federal officials disputed that number and said it would be fewer than 550.

Either number is a problem, because of what the building actually is. It's a warehouse. Right now it has four toilets and is approved to use 12,000 gallons of water a day. Holding 1,500 people would take about 187,500 gallons a day and produce more than fifteen times the sewage the site is permitted to handle. The overflow risk runs downhill into Lake Musconetcong and Lake Hopatcong, and the surrounding aquifer feeds drinking water for a large share of the state. On top of that, taking a taxable building off the rolls costs Roxbury an estimated $1.8 million a year.

That is not a partisan complaint. Those are the engineering facts in a lawsuit brought by the township itself.

Roxbury fought it. Roxbury is Republican.

Roxbury Township is governed by a seven-member, all-Republican council. They voted unanimously for a resolution saying the town "unequivocally opposes" converting local warehouses for ICE use. When DHS moved ahead anyway, the mayor and council put out a statement saying they had to "reiterate in the strongest possible terms that this property is not an appropriate location for a facility of this nature in a suburban community."

Then the state sued. On March 20, 2026, New Jersey and Roxbury took DHS and ICE to federal court, arguing the government skipped the environmental reviews and local consultation that federal law requires. Their case is about water, sewage, traffic on an already dangerous stretch of Route 46 and I-80, and money — not about immigration policy.

In other words: the Republicans who run this town, the Republicans who elected Kean, went to war with a Republican administration over a project in their backyard.

And in the middle of that fight, they said this about their own congressman:

"Despite repeated outreach, our federal representative, Congressman Tom Kean Jr., did not engage to the level we had hoped to provide the advocacy our residents deserved."

That is Roxbury's own township officials, in a press release, naming him. Not a Democratic opponent. Not an activist group. The people running the town.

What he did instead: a bill nobody signed

Kean's answer to that criticism was to introduce a bill. On February 23, 2026, he filed H.R. 7648, the Local Taxpayer Protection Act of 2026. He said at the time:

"Local taxpayers cannot be expected to foot the bill for federal facilities, and towns like Roxbury should not have to absorb the costs."

Look at what the bill does. It doesn't stop the detention center. It doesn't slow it down. It asks the Secretary of Homeland Security — the same official building the thing — to set up a grant program to reimburse towns that end up hosting an ICE facility, for lost property taxes and utility costs.

Now read the whole bill, which is short enough to read in five minutes. Three things stand out:

It authorizes no money. There is no dollar amount anywhere in the text. A grant program with no appropriation is a suggestion.
It has zero cosponsors. Not one other member of Congress — Republican or Democrat, from New Jersey or anywhere else — has put their name on it in nearly six months.
It went nowhere. It was referred to three committees on the day it was introduced, and the congressional record shows no action on it since. February 23 is the first and last thing that ever happened to H.R. 7648.

And then there's the part of the bill that gives away the whole game. Under the "Use of Funds" section, the town receiving the grant "shall, to the extent practicable, make a facility described in subsection (a) in the municipality self-sufficient with regard to use of public utilities, or extend the capacity of the public utilities systems to accommodate the use of such systems by such facility."

The grantee is the town. So the deal Kean drafted for Roxbury is: take the check, and in exchange help expand your own water and sewer system so the detention camp works. The specific thing the township sued to stop is the thing his bill would have the township pay to make possible.

The letter that never asked for anything

On April 7, 2026, Kean wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the project. Here is what he asked for:

"I respectfully request that the Department take a deeper look at the proposal and give careful consideration to the concerns raised by local officials."

And:

"My priority is to ensure that any decision is the result of a thoughtful and balanced approach that considers law enforcement's operational necessities alongside the interests of the local community."

He did not ask DHS to cancel it. He did not ask them to pick a different site. He asked them to take a deeper look and be thoughtful. Roxbury's mayor, Shawn Potillo, invited the DHS secretary to come see the place himself and hadn't heard back.

Note the date on that letter: April 7. By then, Kean had not cast a vote in Congress for a month, and nobody in New Jersey could tell you where he was.

He was gone for the part that mattered

Kean's last vote was March 5, 2026. He did not return to the House floor until June 30, and in between he missed more than 100 votes while his office said almost nothing about why. We wrote about that stretch when a reporter finally found him standing in his own doorway in Westfield. When he came back, he said he had been treated for depression — and nobody should be attacked for getting help.

But line the two timelines up, because they are the same four months:


February 2026	DHS closes on the warehouse; Roxbury's council says Kean didn't engage
March 5	Kean casts his last vote
March 20	New Jersey and Roxbury sue DHS and ICE
April 7	A letter goes out over Kean's name asking DHS to "take a deeper look"
May 2026	ICE agrees to pause most work pending environmental review
June 9	The House passes $70 billion for ICE by two votes. Kean is recorded "Not Voting."
June 30	Kean returns to Congress

That June 9 line deserves its own sentence. S. 2 — the bill that hands ICE and the Border Patrol nearly $70 billion, money that pays for detention facilities exactly like the one planned for his district — passed the House 214 to 212. Two votes. The official roll call lists Kean as Not Voting.

He already voted for the money

Not voting in June isn't the same as opposing it, and Kean's record on this is not a blank page. On July 3, 2025, he voted Aye on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and his office put out a press release applauding it. That law set aside $45 billion for ICE to pay private contractors to detain immigrants.

He voted for the money. Then the money came to Roxbury.

This is a pattern, and it isn't only him

Republicans in swing districts have found the same three-step routine when a detention center lands nearby: express concern, avoid taking a position, hope it goes away. In Colorado, a 1,200-bed ICE jail is opening on the edge of Gabe Evans's district and his office declined to discuss it. In Missouri, Mark Alford went further — the morning after Kansas City voted 12–1 against a 7,500-bed facility, he wrote to ICE offering land in his own district and called the local opposition "obstruction."

Kean hasn't gone as far as Alford. He also hasn't done what the Republicans who run Roxbury asked him to do, which was simply to fight.

What representation is supposed to look like

The people of Roxbury did everything right. They organized. Their all-Republican council passed a resolution. Their township hired lawyers and went to federal court. They got their state's governor and attorney general to sue on their behalf. They did not need their congressman to agree with them about immigration — they needed him to pick up the phone and say not here, not in a building with four toilets, not next to the drinking water.

Instead they got a letter asking for a "deeper look," a bill with no money and no cosponsors that would have them widen their own sewer pipes for the camp, and four months of silence at exactly the moment the decisions were being made.

As of late July, Justice Department attorneys told the court DHS is still "continuing to assess whether to proceed", with no timeline for a decision. The warehouse sits there. The lawsuit grinds on. And Tom Kean Jr. still hasn't said whether he thinks a detention camp belongs in his district.

A representative who won't take a side when his own party's town council is begging him to isn't representing anyone. We deserve better.

Source

This post was prompted by Trump Threw Missing GOP Representative Under the Bus While He Was Out — The New Republic, July 14, 2026, on the Trump administration reviving the Roxbury detention plan in Kean's district. Photo of Rep. Tom Kean Jr. by Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Additional reporting from Bolts, New Jersey 101.5, the New Jersey Globe, and the Jersey Vindicator.

Jeff Van Drew Ran a Hearing Called 'False Narratives.' Then He Told Detainees They Could Always Self-Deport.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:47:44 +0000

Congressional oversight is supposed to work like this: something might be going wrong, so Congress calls in the people responsible and makes them answer questions under oath.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2026, Jeff Van Drew ran a hearing that did the opposite. He announced the answer in the title, then spent two hours making sure nobody who could contradict it was in the room.

The hearing was called "False Narratives Surrounding Conditions at the Delaney Hall ICE Detention Center."

Delaney Hall is a 1,000-bed immigration jail in Newark, run for ICE by a private prison company. Detainees there have described rotten food, weeks-long waits for a doctor, and broken air conditioning in 100-degree heat. Hundreds of them went on a hunger strike over it.

Van Drew's committee decided, in advance and in writing, that all of that was made up.

He didn't call anyone who runs the place

Van Drew chairs the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight. That gavel is real power. It means he decides who has to show up and answer.

Here is who he did not make show up:

Nobody from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which pays for the facility
Nobody from the Department of Homeland Security, which runs ICE
Nobody from GEO Group, the private prison company that owns and operates Delaney Hall

Instead, the official witness list shows he called three witnesses to defend the facility: a retired ICE deputy field office director, a border security adviser from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies.

Not one of them had current firsthand knowledge of Delaney Hall. Two had never set foot in it. The third had last been there before the building closed in 2017 — nearly a decade ago.

One of them said so out loud, in his opening statement.

"First, a confession. I've never been to Delaney Hall, and I've never toured the facility to assess any of the allegations that have been made about it." — Andrew Arthur, Center for Immigration Studies

That is the hearing. A chairman announces the reports are false, and then calls three witnesses to agree with him, at least one of whom has to open by admitting he has no idea.

The one witness Democrats were allowed was Amol Sinha, executive director of the ACLU of New Jersey — the only person at the table who had actually talked to people held inside.

What the witness who had done the work said

Sinha described a man who did not eat for three days after arriving at Delaney Hall because the food smelled rancid. When hunger finally forced him to eat it, he was in severe pain. He asked for a doctor and waited seven more days to see one. After he got out, he spent a week in the hospital and needed surgery for a serious stomach condition that developed while he was locked up.

Then Sinha made clear that man was not a one-off.

"I wish I could tell you that his case was unusual, but I could sit here and tell you about the man denied his wheelchair for 40 days, the 18-year-old denied the ability to finish high school on time, the husband who lost so much weight that even lying down became physically painful."

He described the pattern the same way every time: no access to medical care, pressure to sign "voluntary" departure papers, filthy conditions, inedible food, broken air conditioning in 100-degree temperatures.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the full Judiciary Committee, added what Sen. Andy Kim found on unannounced visits: milk so spoiled it had curdled, water people said was undrinkable, and detainees sleeping on floors because the place was too crowded.

Raskin also brought the numbers that undercut the whole "dangerous criminals" framing. Of the 891 people held at Delaney Hall in April, he said about 90% had no criminal record at all. For the ones who did, the most common offense was a traffic violation. Sinha put it at more than 70% with no criminal history, nearly 90% with no conviction, and 84% with no final removal order.

And people have died. Sinha noted that more than 50 people have died in ICE custody under this administration. ICE's own death-reporting data backs that up: 54 people have died in ICE custody since the start of fiscal 2025 — 125% more than died across all four previous fiscal years combined, which was 24. One of them was Jean Wilson Brutus, who died after being at Delaney Hall for a single day.

This is not a New Jersey problem alone. Senate Judiciary staff who got two hours inside a CoreCivic-run family detention center in Texas came back with a report describing worms in the food and coloring books passed off as school.

"Potato chips and Twinkies"

Van Drew's answer to all of it was that he had walked through the building himself.

"I walked the facility. I met with the staff. What I saw goes against all the narratives that you hear and that the Democrats have tried to say about this facility."

He said detainees get three meals a day reviewed by dietitians, plus medical, dental, and mental health care, a gym, and soccer fields. He cited a state inspection that found the kitchen satisfactory and no sign of vermin — an inspection that looked at the kitchen and did not examine any of the things Sinha had just described.

Then he took on the hunger strike. Hundreds of people refusing food to protest the conditions, and Van Drew's rebuttal was that commissary sales went up:

"They were going to the commissary, and they were getting their potato chips and Twinkies. They were getting plenty of food."

He also went after a man he identified as a leader of the strike, telling the room the man had been arrested on a domestic violence charge before ICE picked him up, and adding: "He ain't my hero."

And then Van Drew offered the people inside Delaney Hall his solution.

"If it's so bad at Delaney Hall, just so you know, everybody has the option to self-deport."

That is a chairman of a congressional oversight subcommittee telling detained people that if they don't like the conditions, they can leave the country. It is not oversight. It is a taunt.

Raskin answered it in the room with the case of Marlon Andres Torres Gomez — a man who did try to leave. An immigration judge approved his departure. He had a plane ticket and an agreement with ICE. Federal officers stopped him at the airport and hauled him back to Delaney Hall. A federal judge ruled the day before the hearing that holding him was unlawful.

So the option Van Drew was so sure everybody had was one the government had physically prevented at least one man from taking.

The company he didn't subpoena writes him checks

Delaney Hall is not a government building. It is owned and operated by GEO Group, a publicly traded private prison company.

GEO's own annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission spells out the deal. On February 27, 2025, the company announced it had been awarded a 15-year, fixed-price contract from ICE for the company-owned, 1,000-bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark. The same filing lists the contract as starting in May 2025, and credits Delaney Hall as one of the new activations that drove GEO's detention revenue up by $222.6 million last year.

Sinha put the local number on it at the hearing: "We're spending billions of taxpayer dollars detaining people who pose no threat to the public, while GEO Group pockets over $60 million a year from Delaney Hall alone."

That is the company Van Drew declined to put under oath. It is also a company having an extremely good year — GEO Group and CoreCivic together booked $1.4 billion in a single quarter as ICE detention hit record levels, paid for by money Congress appropriated.

Van Drew helped appropriate it. He was one of the Republicans who voted to send $70 billion to ICE on a 214–212 margin, where every single Republican yes vote was the deciding vote.

And Federal Election Commission records show GEO Group's political action committee gave $3,000 to Van Drew for Congress on June 30, 2025 — weeks after Delaney Hall opened under the new contract, and roughly a year before he gaveled in a hearing declaring that complaints about the place were false narratives.

Three thousand dollars is not a fortune. That's not the point. The point is that the chairman deciding whether GEO Group has to answer questions is on GEO Group's donor list, and he resolved that question by not calling them.

He is not the only one. The Republican who took over the House committee that oversees ICE last July collected $30,000 from all three big detention companies in the months right after he got the gavel — more than any other member of Congress.

He has done this before

There is a pattern in how Jeff Van Drew handles a story where the facts aren't in yet: he goes on television, states a conclusion with total confidence, and never revisits it.

In December 2024, during the New Jersey drone panic, he told a national Fox News audience that Iran had parked a "mothership" off the Jersey Shore and was launching drones from it, citing "high sources." The Pentagon knocked it down within hours. He accused the Pentagon of lying instead.

In January 2026, after federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, Van Drew went on Fox and said, "Peaceful protesters don't have 9mm weapons with two extra magazines" — while three Republican senators were asking for independent investigations.

Now his subcommittee has ruled on conditions inside a jail without hearing from the people who run it. Sinha closed by asking Van Drew's members for the one thing that would actually settle it:

"Allow the press in. Allow members of Congress in. Allow advocacy organizations in for full access."

Van Drew adjourned instead, noting that members had five days to submit written questions.

What this costs South Jersey

Van Drew has the gavel that decides what gets investigated. His constituents have been asking him to use it on something closer to home.

In March 2025, about 600 people lined the road outside his Northfield office asking him to protect their health care. They brought written concerns to hand in. The doors were locked and the building was closed. He does not hold in-person town halls, telling a reporter they just draw "the same 50 or 100 people who just don't like you."

They had a reason to show up. The Joint Economic Committee projects that 30,460 people in his district will lose health coverage because of the budget bill he voted for.

No hearing on that. But a two-hour hearing, in the Rayburn building, with a title written to pre-decide the outcome, to tell the country that a private prison company's customers are lying about the food.

Congress has one tool for finding out whether the government is mistreating people in its custody. Jeff Van Drew is holding it. He used it as a shield.

Source

This post is based on reporting by the Jersey Vindicator: At House hearing, Republicans dismiss reports of abuse at Delaney Hall by Krystal Knapp. Photo: screenshot via YouTube, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight.

Andy Harris Says Officials Who Block Deportations Should Be Prosecuted. He Also Talked the White House Into Bringing In 30,000 More Foreign Workers.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:44:10 +0000

On March 30, 2026, a congressman stood outside a crab processing plant on the Choptank River in Cambridge, Maryland, and took a victory lap.

He had just persuaded the Trump White House to let roughly 65,000 extra foreign workers into the country for the season — about 30,000 more than the administration had said it would allow. The owner of the plant thanked him for it.

"I've been in long enough to know how to get things done, and we got it done," the congressman said.

The congressman was Andy Harris — chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, the most hard-line bloc in Congress, and the same man who spent the previous year saying local officials who get in the way of deportations should be prosecuted.

Both of those things are true at once. That's the story.

What he did in Washington

Start with the public Andy Harris, the one who goes on television.

In December 2024, after several Maryland jurisdictions said they wouldn't help federal immigration agents, Harris told FOX45 Baltimore that local leaders who stood in ICE's way should face criminal charges: "If they are going to stop them from doing it, they should be prosecuted." He added: "Shame on these local officials."

He also floated cutting off their money. "If states are not willing to keep up their end of the bargain, which is that federal immigration law – that's the law of the land – well then maybe you don't need the education dollars, the road dollars, all the other dollars that flow from the federal government."

A month later, in January 2025, he said the same thing again while launching a state-level Freedom Caucus in Annapolis: the incoming administration was "not going to look favorably upon jurisdictions that, with one hand, ask for federal dollars and, with the other hand, pass it out to illegal immigrants." One of the first things Congress would do, he said, is "go to those jurisdictions that don't cooperate with the federal government and attempt to achieve savings there."

In September 2025, when Wicomico County signed a 287(g) agreement letting local officers enforce federal immigration law, Harris applauded it: "I applaud Wicomico County for taking steps to help get illegal alien criminals off our streets, making our neighborhoods safer."

And on June 9, 2026, he was one of the 214 votes that put $70 billion into ICE — a bill that passed by two votes, which means every Republican yes was a deciding vote, his included.

That's the record. Nobody has to guess where the public Andy Harris stands.

What he did back home

Now the other one.

The H-2B visa program lets American businesses bring in foreign workers for seasonal, non-farm jobs — landscaping, construction, hotels, and on Maryland's Eastern Shore, picking meat out of blue crabs by hand. Congress caps it at 66,000 a year, split between halves of the fiscal year, and hands out the slots by lottery. Since 2016, appropriators have also given the Homeland Security secretary the power to release tens of thousands more if he chooses.

Trump's administration usually didn't choose to. Under the "Buy American, Hire American" policy, it repeatedly resisted issuing the maximum.

This year Harris went to the White House and changed that. On February 3, 2026, DHS and the Labor Department published a rule authorizing 64,716 supplemental H-2B visas — the full amount the law allows, and roughly 30,000 more than the administration had previously announced.

He is not shy about wanting more. He told the crab plant's owner he plans to push "certified employer" language into the next Homeland Security funding bill, so that companies that have used the program for years are guaranteed their workers every season regardless of the lottery. He has pitched Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on expanding temporary foreign labor generally. An analyst who follows visa policy at the Economic Policy Institute — a group critical of how H-2B workers are treated — called Harris "the ringleader" of the push.

Harris chairs the House subcommittee that writes the Agriculture Department's budget. He is the only Republican in Maryland's ten-member delegation, and the only member of it with the ear of this White House. When he asks, he gets.

His answer, and the problem with it

Harris has a response ready, and it deserves to be stated fairly.

"This is not an immigration issue — this is a temporary foreign worker issue," he told POLITICO. "Once we control the uncontrolled border crossing, let's talk about how we can bring a foreign workforce in to boost the economy where it needs to be boosted."

That is a real distinction. H-2B workers come legally, on paperwork, and go home at the end of the season. Nobody is accusing Harris of breaking a rule.

But look at what the distinction actually does for the people in his district.

On July 21, 2025, ICE agents arrested Daniel Fuentes Espinal, 54, while he was driving to work in Easton — a town in Harris's district. Fuentes Espinal had come to the United States legally in 2001 on a six-month visa and stayed. He had been pastor of Iglesia del Nazareno Jesús Te Ama in Easton since 2015. He has three children. He was moved to a detention center in Salisbury, then Baltimore, then to Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana, most of a country away from his congregation.

His neighbors raised more than $50,000 for his family and asked their congressman for help.

Here is what their congressman said:

"I believe he's here illegally, under illegal status, not even Temporary Protected Status."

"Under clear reading of federal law, I mean, the gentleman is subject to deportation."

"I don't think he's ever attempted to become a U.S. citizen or attempted to gain legal status. I don't think he's ever worked in my office to do it."

Harris said his office would "pursue whether or not exceptions can be made." Fuentes Espinal was eventually granted bond and released after about three weeks, and his family is still working on a green card.

So set the two months next to each other. In February, Harris walked down Pennsylvania Avenue and personally arranged for tens of thousands of foreign workers to enter the country, because businesses in his district needed the labor. In August, a man who had lived in his district for a decade and preached to its Spanish-speaking families every Sunday got a lecture about the clear reading of federal law.

The difference isn't that one is legal and one isn't. Harris helped write the rule that made the first group legal. He's actively trying to write a better one for next year. He has the power to move immigration law when the people asking are business owners. He has said it is not his job when the person asking is a pastor.

The economy he describes runs on this labor either way

Harris's own account of the Eastern Shore makes the point better than we could.

There were once more than 50 crab producers in the region. Local pickers moved into manufacturing jobs in the mid-1990s and never came back. The companies that couldn't bring in foreign workers closed. The ones that had bad luck in the visa lottery closed later. Fewer than a dozen are left.

That is a local economy that has depended on foreign labor for thirty years, and Harris knows it in detail — he has been fighting for these visas since he arrived in Congress in 2011, and pushed the same policy in the House while then-Sen. Barbara Mikulski pushed it in the Senate. In a 2022 statement, he warned that without the visas, American businesses would "be forced to scale back or shutter their operations entirely, further driving up prices for goods and services, killing good paying permanent American jobs, and harming local economies."

He's right. Cutting off the workers raises prices and kills jobs. He has understood that about the crab houses for fifteen years.

He has never once applied it to anybody else. He rails against any path to citizenship for people already here. He voted to fund the largest interior enforcement operation in American history. He wants sheriffs deputized and officials prosecuted. And when the raids reach a church in Easton, the answer is that the law is the law.

There's even a version of this in his own words on food. Harris told POLITICO he wants a "buy American" mandate on the roughly $100 billion a year in SNAP food assistance, so the money buys American-grown food. Then he added the quiet part: "But that means that you're going to have to have workers here."

Workers here. Just not the ones already here.

We've seen this shape before

Harris is not the only Republican running two immigration policies at once. Mario Diaz-Balart wrote letters defending Venezuelans in his district and then voted for the same $70 billion ICE bill. Cliff Bentz told a reporter he'd spent six months privately lobbying Stephen Miller to stop deporting people with no criminal record — three weeks after voting to pay for it.

What makes Harris different is that he isn't hedging or apologizing. He is using real power, effectively, and getting real results — for employers. The pastor got a citation to federal law.

Andy Harris has represented Maryland's 1st District for 15 years. He is the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and one of the most influential Republicans in Congress on immigration. He has proved, in writing, that he can move this administration when he wants to.

Voters on the Eastern Shore are entitled to ask why he only wants to for some people.

Source

The Trump ally cracking down on immigration in Washington — and bringing in foreign workers back home — Jennifer Scholtes, POLITICO, April 12, 2026.

Photo: Rep. Andy Harris tours the J.M. Clayton Company's crab processing plant in Cambridge, Maryland, March 30, 2026. Francis Chung/POLITICO.

Brandon Gill's Answer to Being Called Racist Isn't That He Isn't One. It's That the Word Doesn't Work Anymore.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:32:02 +0000

There's a specific move people make when they've said something indefensible and don't want to defend it. They don't argue that the thing was fine. They argue that you're not allowed to name it.

On July 3, 2026, Brandon Gill made that move in public, twice.

He posted on X: "The left has one debate tactic: call you a racist and pray you shut up. I never will." And: "Calling us racist doesn't work anymore."

Notice what's not in either sentence. Not "I'm not a racist." Not "here's what I actually meant." Just that the word has lost its power.

Someone took him up on it.

"We call you racist because you refer to Indian Americans as '7-Eleven workers'"

Rep. Shri Thanedar of Michigan is an Indian American Democrat. He immigrated to the United States from India and became a citizen. He replied to Gill's post by quoting something Gill himself had written during a debate over immigration policy:

"We don't need to import 7-Eleven workers from India or anywhere across the globe. Hire Americans."

Then Thanedar answered Gill's premise directly:

"No one is calling you racist as an attempt to scare you into shutting up. We call you racist because you refer to Indian Americans as '7-Eleven workers.'"

He went further, and this is the part that got picked up everywhere:

"But the fact that you married an Indian American shows that you're just a grifter pandering to a racist base. How pathetic it must be to be that cheap."

Gill is married to Danielle D'Souza Gill, an American-born conservative media personality and the daughter of right-wing commentator Dinesh D'Souza, whose family is Indian.

Gill did not publicly respond to Thanedar.

What he did instead

Three days later, on the evening of July 6, 2026, Gill posted a fundraising ad for his reelection campaign. The theme was family values. The photo showed him with his two children. The caption read:

"You can call me by any name you want. I just want my children to grow up in a country that they recognize."

His wife wasn't in the picture.

People noticed immediately, and the backlash was substantial — commenters accused him of leaving her out of a family-values ad to avoid complicating his appeal to a particular set of voters. She has appeared in plenty of his other campaign material and at his events.

We can't tell you what was in his head when he picked that photo, and we're not going to pretend to. One photo is one photo. What we can tell you is why so many people read it the way they did — because of the two years of material behind it, which is a matter of public record and not of interpretation.

The record behind the question

This is not a man who said one careless thing.

In June 2025, a video circulated of Zohran Mamdani, then running for mayor of New York, eating rice with his hands. Gill posted: "Civilized people in America don't eat like this. If you refuse to adopt Western customs, go back to the Third World." His wife replied publicly at the time that she was born in the United States, identifies as a Christian MAGA patriot, and has always eaten with a fork.
In October 2025, he told the British journalist Mehdi Hasan to "go back to the UK" and said Muslims come to America "en masse" to "fundamentally transform the landscape of American public life."
In November 2025, he told Newsmax that "Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States" — incompatible with "our constitutional system and with Western civilization more broadly."
In February 2026, he circulated a petition to deport Rep. Ilhan Omar — a U.S. citizen and a sitting member of Congress — to Somalia, and his campaign raised money off it.
He introduced the Somalia Immigration Moratorium Act, which would bar nearly all immigration from one country — Somalia — for 25 years.
In March 2026, he posted, "How many Americans have to get 'Allahu Akbar'ed before we realize Islam is a problem?" — a line that drew widespread condemnation.
In January 2026, he joined the "Sharia Free America Caucus", telling colleagues his constituents worry about "the rise of mass Islamic immigration in north Texas."

Put the list next to the defense. Gill's position is that calling this racist is a debate tactic. But the tactic in that list is his: pick a group, tell them the country isn't theirs, and raise money on the reaction.

He does it from a committee gavel, too

The reason this matters more than a bad X account is that Gill doesn't just post. He chairs a House Oversight panel — the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses — and he runs it on the same theme.

At its first hearing, in June 2026, he pointed at Somali and Bhutanese immigrants as the cause of Medicaid fraud in Ohio, told the room "it may not be politically correct to say, but it's true," and said in his prepared remarks that America "wouldn't have a problem with Somalis and Bhutanese populations defrauding us if we didn't import large numbers of Somalis and Bhutanese to begin with." He also blocked all three Ohio Democrats who asked to question the witnesses.

He has used the same gavel to run a standing hearing series against "DEI" and to subpoena businesses and float "criminal conspiracy" charges against doctors over birthright citizenship.

The phrase in the campaign ad — "a country that they recognize" — is the whole project stated as a family sentiment. Somebody has to be the thing that made the country unrecognizable. In Gill's telling it's always the same somebody.

What this costs Texas's 26th District

Denton County sent a first-term congressman to Washington and got a full-time culture warrior. Gill's constituents are dealing with grocery prices, rent, insurance premiums and child care costs. The hearings he calls are about law school accreditation, birth certificates, and which immigrant groups he thinks are draining the country.

And when a colleague quoted his own words back to him and asked him to account for them, his answer was that the accusation doesn't work anymore.

He's right that it doesn't scare him. That isn't the same as it not being true.

We deserve better.

Source

Keerthi Ramesh, "Texas Rep. Brandon Gill faces backlash over campaign ad excluding Indian American wife," The American Bazaar (July 7, 2026), and NRI Pulse's account of the Thanedar exchange (July 3, 2026). Photo: The American Bazaar.

A Texas Congressman Held a Hearing About Ohio's Medicaid — Then Blocked Every Ohio Democrat Who Asked to Speak

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:20:57 +0000

On June 3, 2026, a congressman from Texas gaveled in a hearing about Ohio.

Brandon Gill represents Texas's 26th District — Denton County, north of Dallas, about a thousand miles from Columbus. He has been in Congress since 2025. But he chairs a House Oversight panel with a very long name, the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, and he decided its very first hearing would be about Ohio's Medicaid program.

Three Ohio members of Congress asked to take part. Gill told them no.

What actually happened in that room

Reps. Shontel Brown, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman all asked to question the witnesses. All three represent Ohio. All three were denied.

Brown is the one whose exclusion is hardest to explain. She sits on the full House Oversight Committee — she's the only Ohio Democrat on it — and she says she represents over 300,000 constituents who rely on Medicaid. A hearing was being held about the health program her constituents depend on, by a committee she serves on, and the chairman would not let her ask a question.

She had written out remarks she never got to give:

"This is a political hearing built on allegations that remain unproven, amplified by partisan actors, and aimed at justifying a broader political goal: cutting Medicaid and shifting blame away from those who have actually been in charge."

Her point about who's been in charge is the one Gill's hearing never got around to. Republicans have run Ohio's state government — the agencies that enroll Medicaid providers, process claims, and catch fraud — for more than fifteen years.

Tempers flared right at the start. Brown interrupted the opening statement of the hearing's lead witness. That witness was Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter at the Daily Wire, a conservative news and opinion site — the man who wrote the story the hearing was built on.

The $1.2 billion number came from a blog post

The hearing's headline figure was $1.2 billion in Ohio Medicaid home healthcare fraud. Where does that number come from? The Daily Wire story. Spectrum News, reporting from the hearing room, put it plainly: the $1.2 billion amount in alleged home healthcare fraud is not verified.

For comparison, Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber — a Republican, who testified at the hearing — released a report in 2024 that found $209 million in Medicaid spending for patients enrolled in both Ohio and another state.

Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, did announce a six-month moratorium in May on new home healthcare providers receiving Medicaid funds. He talked about it the way you'd expect a person actually responsible for a state to talk about it:

"We do have a long history in Ohio of being very successful in prosecutions. But we always can do better, and we're going to continue to work and try to stop any kind of fraud that we're seeing."

Notice what's missing from DeWine's answer. He didn't name an ethnic group.

Gill did

Here is what Gill said in his opening statement, published by his own committee:

"So who are these fraudsters? Well, just like in Minnesota, many of them are Somali."

He went on to say Ohio is also home to the largest Bhutanese population in America, and that "the Somali and Bhutanese communities commit a large portion — if not the vast majority — of home health Medicaid fraud in Ohio."

Then he said the quiet part out loud:

"The reality is that America wouldn't have a problem with Somalis and Bhutanese populations defrauding us if we didn't import large numbers of Somalis and Bhutanese to begin with."

He described those communities as "foreigners from low trust societies." He pre-emptively dismissed anyone who objected: "we cannot back down to fraud simply because of spurious slanders of racism." And before any of it, he added the line people use when they know exactly how something sounds — "It may not be politically correct to say, but it's true."

Ohio State Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio was in that hearing. Gill asked her whether Somali immigration had been good for the state. She said she was almost brought to tears.

"Because the rate of the level of hateful rhetoric based on false information is shocking to me, the lack of humanity."

Who he was actually talking about

The Bhutanese community Gill described as having been "imported" is largely made up of Lhotshampa — Nepali-speaking people expelled from Bhutan, who then spent years, in many cases decades, in United Nations refugee camps in eastern Nepal. They came to the United States through the federal refugee resettlement program. Around 20,000 of them live in the Columbus area, making it home to the largest Bhutanese-Nepali population in the country. Many are now U.S. citizens.

These are people the United States government invited, vetted, and resettled. Gill described their presence here as the reason for a fraud problem.

He inflated his own committee's number

Gill's opening statement leaned on Minnesota as the template — "just a couple months ago, the House Oversight Committee examined a similar problem in Minnesota, where Somali fraudsters stole over $16 billion from American taxpayers."

That's his own committee's investigation he's describing. And his own committee doesn't use that number. The House Oversight Committee's official wrap-up of the Minnesota hearing says fraudsters stole "an estimated $9 billion," and quotes federal prosecutors putting the figure at "at least $9 billion."

Gill nearly doubled it. Not a rival party's number he was disputing — the number his own committee published.

This is what he does with the job

Gill got the gavel to this task force in 2026, and the pattern of what he uses it for is by now easy to trace. He has run it as a standing hearing series against "DEI", summoning the president of the American Bar Association to answer for what law schools teach. He has used it to subpoena maternity clinics and float "criminal conspiracy" charges against doctors over birthright citizenship — a right written into the 14th Amendment.

And when the subject was finally something that touches people's health care, he pointed at two immigrant communities and told the room it wasn't politically correct to say so.

He didn't invent this playbook. He's one of the members who joined the "Sharia Free America Caucus," and he's quoted in our reporting on the ten-million-dollar Republican effort to make "Sharia" a campaign word saying "No more Muslims immigrating to America." He told Newsmax in November 2025 that "Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States", and he has introduced a bill, the Somalia Immigration Moratorium Act, to ban nearly all immigration from Somalia — and only Somalia — for 25 years.

What Ohio actually needed from that hearing

Medicaid fraud is real, and prosecuting it is legitimate work. Nobody — not Shontel Brown, not Nickie Antonio, not Mike DeWine — argued otherwise. Brown's prepared remarks said flatly: "if providers committed fraud, they should be prosecuted. If taxpayer dollars were stolen, they should be recovered."

But a serious hearing about Ohio's Medicaid program would have started with the people who run Ohio's Medicaid program, and it would have let Ohio's own representatives ask questions. Gill's hearing did neither. It built its central number on a partisan website's estimate, seated that website's reporter as its star witness, named two ethnic groups as the cause, and locked out the three members of Congress who could have pushed back.

That's not oversight. That's a press release with a witness table.

Gill's constituents in Denton County are dealing with grocery bills, rent, health insurance premiums, and child care costs. He spent the first hearing of his own task force a thousand miles away from them, explaining who he thinks doesn't belong in this country.

We deserve better.

Source

Reporting from the hearing by Harri Leigh, "Ohio Medicaid fraud discussed in House hearing," Spectrum News 1 (June 3, 2026). Photo: House Oversight Committee, via Spectrum News.

Andrew Garbarino Got the Gavel Over ICE in July. By September, All Three Big Detention Companies Were Writing Him Checks.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:08:35 +0000

Andrew Garbarino has the job in Congress that decides how hard anyone looks at ICE.

On July 21, 2025, House Republicans picked him to chair the Committee on Homeland Security, replacing Mark Green of Tennessee, who had just resigned from Congress. The gavel came with real authority over Immigration and Customs Enforcement: what gets a hearing, who testifies under oath, what documents get subpoenaed, which contracts get questions asked about them.

Eight weeks later, three checks arrived.

The three checks

Here is what the Federal Election Commission's records show, straight from the filings of the companies' own political action committees:

September 17, 2025 — $5,000 from The GEO Group's PAC.
September 23, 2025 — $5,000 from CoreCivic's PAC.
September 30, 2025 — $5,000 from Management & Training Corporation's PAC.

Three companies. Thirteen days. All of them go to Garbarino for Congress, his campaign committee.

Those are the three largest private companies in the business of locking up immigrants for the federal government. And they had never done anything like this for him before.

What they used to give him

Garbarino was first elected in 2020. Across his first three campaigns, all three of these companies combined gave him $2,500:

2020 cycle: nothing.
2022 cycle: $1,000, from GEO Group's PAC — and not even to his campaign. It went to his joint fundraising committee.
2024 cycle: $1,500, from GEO Group's PAC.

CoreCivic had never given him a dollar. Neither had MTC.

Since he took over the ICE oversight committee, the three of them have given him $30,000 — twelve times what he got in six years of not running the committee. Ten thousand dollars from each, the maximum a PAC can give across a primary and a general.

And they kept going after that first round. GEO Group added $2,500 on January 30, 2026 and another $2,500 on April 21. MTC added $5,000 on April 15. CoreCivic added $5,000 on April 22.

Nobody else in Congress got close

We pulled every disbursement these three PACs made in the 2026 election cycle. After the party committees — the NRSC, the NRCC and the RNC, which together took $240,000 — Garbarino is the single largest recipient among members of Congress.

Not by a little. No other candidate's committee received more than $10,000 from these three PACs this cycle. Garbarino got triple that. He is also the only member of Congress all three companies decided to fund.

You can check this yourself: the FEC posts every disbursement GEO Group's PAC made, searchable by who got the money.

Why $30,000 is cheap

Because of what they're getting back.

Since January 20, 2025, ICE has obligated, according to the federal government's own spending database:

$1.20 billion to The GEO Group, Inc.
$548 million to CoreCivic, Inc.
$368 million to BI Incorporated — the GEO subsidiary that runs the ankle-monitor and check-in program ICE uses to track people who aren't in a cell. GEO tells its own investors that "our BI subsidiary" has held that contract since 2004.
$59 million to Management & Training Corporation.

That's over $2.1 billion in eighteen months, to three companies that spent $30,000 on the chairman who oversees the agency writing the checks.

For GEO Group, ICE is about half the business. Its founder's influence operation and its detention windfall were laid out in July by the Florida Bulldog, which reported that ICE contracts now account for 48% of GEO's total revenue, that the company's 2025 revenue hit $2.6 billion, and that first-quarter 2026 revenue jumped 17% to $705.2 million.

We've written before about what that boom looks like from the investor side: $1.4 billion in a single quarter for GEO and CoreCivic together, and a $1.6 billion sale of four CoreCivic facilities to the Department of Homeland Security that worked out to $307,000 per bed — after which the government paid CoreCivic to keep running the buildings it had just bought from them.

MTC's version is smaller and more direct. Last summer it bought a shuttered state prison outside Marana, Arizona for $15 million. On February 25, 2026, ICE published a notice that it intended to hand MTC a no-bid, two-year contract to fill it with up to 513 detained men. MTC's PAC wrote Garbarino its second $5,000 check seven weeks after that notice went up.

This is legal. That's the problem.

Federal law bars government contractors from giving money to federal candidates. The FEC says it plainly: campaigns "may not accept or solicit contributions from federal government contractors."

But there's a door in that wall. Under 11 CFR 115.3, a contractor may spend its own corporate money "to establish, administer, and solicit contributions to any separate segregated fund" — a company PAC. The company can't write the check. The PAC the company pays to run can.

So nobody here broke a law. Three companies holding $2.1 billion in ICE contracts routed money to the man who oversees ICE, through the one channel Congress left open for them. That is the arrangement working exactly as designed.

What Congress got for it

Garbarino has not been a bystander on this.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed the Secure America Act, funding ICE and CBP for three more fiscal years. It passed 214 to 212 — a two-vote margin in which every single Republican yes was a deciding vote, and not one Republican voted no. Garbarino voted aye. He and Rep. Michael Guest put out a statement the same day taking credit for it.

In the two months before that vote, all three private prison PACs had made their second round of contributions.

The bigger money came earlier. Trump's 2025 budget bill set aside $45 billion over four years for immigration detention, which the Brennan Center calculated as a 400% increase in ICE's annual detention budget — enough to detain potentially more than 100,000 people a year. Nearly 90% of them are held in for-profit facilities.

That is the money these three companies are dividing up. And Garbarino chairs the committee that is supposed to be watching them spend it.

Who is in those beds

As of July 11, 2026, TRAC at Syracuse University counted 65,765 people in ICE detention. Of those, 46,436 — 70.6% — had no criminal conviction of any kind.

Not a reduced charge. Not a plea. No conviction.

Seven out of every ten people filling the beds these companies are paid to maintain have been convicted of nothing.

At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025 — the most in any year since 2004, according to the Tucson Sentinel reporting on the Marana facility linked above.

The pattern on his own committee

Garbarino is not the only member of the Homeland Security Committee taking money from the industry his committee oversees. We wrote yesterday about the CoreCivic money flowing to Matt Van Epps, a Tennessee freshman on that same committee — $5,000 from CoreCivic's PAC plus checks from both its outgoing and incoming chief executives, arriving as he became one of Congress's loudest voices for funding ICE.

The difference is that Van Epps is a first-term member with one vote. Garbarino holds the gavel.

And we have already documented what he does with it. In January he requested testimony from ICE and CBP leadership after federal agents killed two American citizens in Minneapolis. In February, ICE told his committee that 6,000 more body cameras were being deployed. In June he voted to hand ICE three more years of money. Then on July 7, ICE agents in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — and the agents had no body or dashboard cameras. The chairman's response was to ask ICE for a briefing that, by its own terms, would not cover the shooting.

The same thing is happening one committee over, on a much bigger scale. Eleven days after Trump's budget bill passed, GEO Group sent $250,000 to a dark-money group whose president is Jim Jordan's former chief of staff — and Jordan chairs the Judiciary Committee, the other panel with oversight of ICE. GEO had given Jordan's campaign $12,500 total across 2022 through 2024. The donation only became public because an affiliated super PAC disclosed it by accident.

What we're saying and what we're not

We can't prove anyone told Garbarino what to do. There's no memo. There doesn't need to be one.

Here is what the public record shows, in order:

He got the gavel over ICE oversight on July 21, 2025.
By the end of September, all three of the biggest ICE detention contractors — two of which had never given him anything — had written him checks.
Over the cycle they gave him $30,000, more than any other member of Congress, while collecting $2.1 billion from the agency he oversees.
He voted to give that agency three more years of funding by a two-vote margin.

Garbarino's own funding tells you who he answers to before any of this. Only 5% of his money comes from small grassroots donors — ranking him #357 out of 440 House members — while 48% comes from PACs. And he still won't hold an in-person town hall, which is where a constituent might get to ask him about any of this out loud.

An estimated 2,000 people showed up outside his Patchogue office in April 2025 to try anyway. GEO Group, CoreCivic and MTC didn't have to stand outside. They just had to file a form.

Source

Reporting on GEO Group's political spending and detention revenue: "GEO Group's immigration detention windfall follows millions in pro-Trump political spending" by Dan Christensen, Florida Bulldog, July 16, 2026. Photo: Florida Bulldog.

Contribution figures in this post were pulled directly from Federal Election Commission filings by the GEO Group PAC (C00382150), CoreCivic PAC (C00366468), and Management & Training Corporation PAC (C00208322) for the 2020, 2022, 2024 and 2026 election cycles. Contract totals are from USAspending.gov, covering ICE obligations from January 20, 2025 through August 11, 2026.

A 1,200-Bed ICE Jail Is About to Open on the Edge of Gabe Evans's District. His Office Declined to Discuss It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:41:51 +0000

Hudson, Colorado has 1,600 people, one stoplight, and no grocery store. It is about to get an immigration jail with room for 1,200 detainees.

The Big Horn detention center is going into an empty prison on the edge of town that has sat vacant for more than a decade. The GEO Group, one of the biggest private prison companies in the country, holds a $529 million contract to run it and is already hiring security officers at $35 an hour. It could open as early as September. When it does, it will nearly double Colorado's immigrant detention capacity.

It sits along the border of Colorado's 8th Congressional District, which is represented by Gabe Evans.

Asked about it by The New York Times this month, a spokesperson for Evans declined a request to discuss the issue.

He has been declining to discuss it for a while

This isn't new. On November 21, 2025, about 30 people gathered outside Evans's district office in Greeley with petitions and four written questions about the Hudson facility and about ICE's tactics. The Colorado Times Recorder was there. The door was locked on a Friday morning. Evans's office did not answer the four questions, and did not explain why the office was closed.

One of the people outside, Gina McAffee, put her question this way: "Do you agree with ICE targeting non-criminals?"

Around 1,500 people signed a petition against the facility. Evans supports it. In an August 2025 radio interview he said plainly: "We've got to have these facilities."

That's an answer. It's just not one he'll give to the people standing outside his office.

The 23 seconds

Here's the part that's hard to square.

In early February 2026, ahead of a House hearing on Homeland Security oversight, Evans told CBS Colorado he was going to press ICE hard on how its agents were running raids. He was specific about what bothered him:

"I do have a lot of heartburn over ICE saying that they don't need a judicial warrant to go into somebody's private home."

And he was specific about the law:

"I believe that you need a judicial warrant to go into people's private residences. And I think that's a pretty iron-clad standard that's been established through decades of Supreme Court law."

That was February 6, 2026. The hearing was February 10.

At the hearing, Evans spent his question time on sanctuary cities. Then, with 23 seconds left on the clock, he mentioned that he had "many questions about the memo saying you don't need a warrant to go into the house" — and asked the ICE director whether they could talk about it some other time.

The iron-clad standard established through decades of Supreme Court law got 23 seconds and a request for a follow-up meeting.

He funded all of it

Whatever heartburn Evans has, it has never once shown up in a vote.

He voted for Trump's budget bill, which paid for the mass deportation campaign. He voted for the $70 billion ICE funding package that passed the House by two votes — a bill that not one Republican opposed.

That money bought more than beds. ICE now runs a round-the-clock social media dragnet, subpoenaing the identities of Americans who post criticism of the agency, with nobody charged with a crime. Evans has not objected to that one either.

Every dollar behind the Big Horn detention center, and behind the agents who will fill it, came through votes Evans cast.

Who lives here

Evans's district is about 40% Hispanic — he has said so himself. It is a corner of Colorado where immigrants work the meatpacking plants and the fields. A 1,200-bed detention center 12 miles from the nearest hospital is not an abstraction to those families. It is the building they will drive past.

Some of the people most upset are the ones who put Trump in office. Diana and Ernesto Cruz, who live in Fort Lupton, voted Republican in 2024 because they were fed up with inflation and with the border. They told the Times the crackdown has gone too far and they don't want a detention center down the road. They're voting for Evans's opponent in November.

The town itself says it can't stop it. "We're very limited in our abilities to do anything," town manager Bryce Lange said. "It's already built." Opponents have sued Hudson, arguing the site isn't zoned for an immigration detention center and that 1,200 detainees would overwhelm the town's water, roads and emergency services.

The pattern

This is the same move Evans has made on every issue where his district's interests and his party's demands point in opposite directions.

He voted for the Medicaid cuts, then told Colorado the bill wouldn't hurt anyone's health care and called the warnings "fear mongering" — and a year later nurses named 12 Colorado hospitals at risk. He said he'd grill ICE and used 23 seconds. He supports a detention center his constituents are protesting, and won't say so to a reporter who asks.

There is a version of this job where a member of Congress with genuine concerns about warrantless home entries writes a bill, forces a vote, or at minimum uses his five minutes. Evans has the seat. He has the microphone. He has, by his own account, the heartburn.

What he does not have is a single action to show for it.

Source

"Shame!": An ICE Facility Roils a Tiny Town, With a House Seat in Play — Jack Healy, The New York Times, August 7, 2026. Photo: Colorado Times Recorder, from the November 2025 rally outside Evans's Greeley office.

Border Patrol Swept His Valley and One Orchard Lost 25 of Its 30 Workers. David Valadao Asked for Better Communication.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:14:07 +0000

In the first week of January 2025 — before Donald Trump had even been sworn in — Border Patrol agents from the El Centro sector drove several hundred miles north into California's San Joaquin Valley and spent three days making arrests.

They called it Operation Return to Sender. Agents in unmarked SUVs picked people up outside a Home Depot in Bakersfield and at a gas station where field workers eat breakfast. The agency said it made 78 arrests and touted the capture of two alleged child rapists and 30 pounds of marijuana. Community groups disputed the number.

Border Patrol usually works within 100 miles of a border. Bakersfield is not within 100 miles of a border. As Bruno Huizar of the California Immigrant Policy Center told Valley Public Radio, "The border patrol often ignores that 100-mile boundary and rejects any geographic limitation on the agency's authority."

The effect on the farms was immediate. One Kern County orchard reported that just five of its 30 contracted workers showed up, in the middle of the mandarin harvest.

A landscaper named Ernesto Campos was detained for four hours. Video shared by KGET shows an agent threatening to break his truck window — "I'm going to have to break the window. It's your fault." Campos is a U.S. citizen. He was held until agents confirmed it.

The United Farm Workers said two of its members were detained, neither with a criminal record.

What the congressman said

David Valadao represents parts of Kern, Tulare, and Kings counties. He put out a statement that week:

"I think we can all agree known criminals should be expelled from the United States, but it is crucial that future operations are communicated clearly to avoid causing any further alarm among our farmworkers."

Read the ask. It is not that the raids stop. It is not that agents identify themselves, or carry warrants, or stay out of the parking lots where people wait for work. It is that future operations are communicated clearly — that somebody give the district a heads-up.

He calls them "our farmworkers." He asked for a better-run version of the thing that scared them.

Who he is, and why this is his fight if it's anyone's

Valadao is not a generic Republican on immigration. He is the only dairy farmer in Congress, and his own family's story is an immigration story.

His father Eduardo grew up in the Portuguese Azores, the youngest of eight, working his family's dairy. A few years after immigrating to California, Eduardo and his wife Maria bought their first cows, and later their own land in Hanford. David grew up bucking hay and feeding the cows before school.

More than 65% of his district is Latino, according to the California Target Book. His district's economy is farm labor. His first television ad this year shows him walking through a tree-nut farm under the words "David Valadao is on our side."

The people who milk the cows and pick the mandarins are the people Border Patrol was loading into vans.

The bill he signed

To his credit, Valadao has never joined the deport-everyone caucus. He has put his name on the bills that would actually fix this. Two of them, in this Congress alone.

On May 7, 2025, he cosponsored H.R. 3227, the Farm Workforce Modernization Act of 2025 — the bill that would give farmworkers already doing the work a legal way to keep doing it.

On July 15, 2025, he cosponsored H.R. 4393, the DIGNIDAD Act — a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants who've been here for years, paired with tougher border enforcement and work requirements.

Now look at what has happened to them.

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act was referred to committee on the day it was introduced. Congress.gov shows no action since. Fifteen months. It has 11 cosponsors.

The Dignity Act went to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement on July 16, 2025. Nothing has happened to it since — no hearing, no markup, no vote, in thirteen months, in a chamber his own party controls. It has 39 cosponsors out of 435.

Cosponsoring a bill costs nothing. It is a signature on a list. Neither of these bills has ever been scheduled for so much as a hearing by the Republicans who run the committees.

The bill he passed

Eleven months later, a different immigration bill moved.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2, the Secure America Act, funding ICE and Customs and Border Protection for three fiscal years — roughly $70 billion for interior immigration enforcement.

It passed 214 to 212. Not one Republican voted no. At that margin every single Republican yes was a deciding vote — including Valadao's. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

That is the whole comparison. The bill that would legalize the people who work his valley's fields has sat in a drawer for over a year. The bill that pays for the agents who raid them took one afternoon and passed by two, with his vote.

"Communicated clearly"

Go back to what he asked for in January 2025 and measure it against what came after.

He wanted advance notice of enforcement operations. What Congress funded instead was a much larger version of the operation, with three years of money behind it — plus the social media monitoring contracts that let the agency scan what people post.

None of that comes with a phone call to the Kern County Farm Bureau.

Valadao's Democratic opponent this year, Randy Villegas, is the son of Mexican immigrant farm laborers. He put the argument this way: "Everybody and anybody knows somebody who works in agriculture in the valley. And anybody in the valley will tell you that workers and agriculture are struggling right now because of Valadao and this administration."

Valadao has consistently declined CalMatters' interview requests, and his spokesperson said he was not available to answer questions for its July 2026 story on his race.

He is not the loudest Republican on immigration. He may be the most consequential one, because in a district where more than two in three people are Latino and the economy runs on farm labor, he keeps casting the vote that decides.

Source

Joshua Yeager and Cresencio Rodriguez-Delgado, "In wake of border patrol raids in California's Central Valley, a clearer picture emerges," Valley Public Radio (KVPR), January 16, 2025 — the source of Valadao's statement and the arrest figures. Farm labor impacts from Sergio Olmos, "A surprising immigration raid in Kern County foreshadows what awaits farmworkers and businesses," CalMatters, January 10, 2025.

ICE Told Andrew Garbarino's Committee the Body Cameras Were Coming. Five Months Later Its Agents Shot a Man Without Them.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:06:06 +0000

Andrew Garbarino has one of the few jobs in Congress where you don't have to settle for a strongly worded letter.

Since July 2025 he has chaired the House Committee on Homeland Security. That gavel comes with real power over Immigration and Customs Enforcement: he decides what gets a hearing, who sits at the witness table under oath, and what documents get subpoenaed.

Here is what he has done with it over the last six months, in order.

January: he calls the hearing

On January 24, 2026, two Customs and Border Protection agents in Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old VA intensive care nurse, about ten times in roughly five seconds. Renee Nicole Good was also killed by federal agents in Minneapolis that month. Both were U.S. citizens.

Garbarino did the right thing. He formally requested testimony from ICE acting director Todd Lyons, CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott, and USCIS Director Joseph Edlow.

"I take my oversight duties for the department seriously," he said, "and Congress has an important responsibility to ensure the safety of law enforcement and the people they serve and protect."

That's the right instinct, and plenty of Republicans didn't have it.

February: the hearing happens, and the promise gets made

The hearing was held February 10, 2026. A staffer held up photographs of Good and Pretti in the room.

Garbarino's opening line was not about them. It was: "Let me be clear: shutting down DHS makes America less safe."

Neither Lyons nor Scott answered questions about the two killings, citing the ongoing investigations. Lyons told Rep. Eric Swalwell he would not resign. He told the room, "We will not be intimidated."

But on body cameras, ICE made a commitment with numbers attached. Lyons said about 3,000 of ICE's 13,000 field agents had body cameras, and that 6,000 more were being deployed. Scott said CBP had roughly 10,000 cameras for 67,000 agents.

That was the deal on the table: the cameras are coming.

Garbarino had already paid for them. The DHS funding bill the House passed in January included money for body cameras, de-escalation training, and the DHS Inspector General — a point his committee has advertised repeatedly.

June: he gives ICE three more years of money

On June 9, 2026, the House passed the Secure America Act, funding ICE and CBP for the next three fiscal years. It passed 214 to 212 — a two-vote margin in which every Republican yes was a deciding vote. Not one Republican voted no. Garbarino was one of them.

He put out a statement the same day:

"Today, Republicans fulfilled our responsibility to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security... I am proud that Republicans voted earlier this year to fund new transparency and accountability requirements for DHS."

So by June, the chairman had held the hearing, extracted the promise, funded the cameras, and handed over the money.

July 7: a man is killed in Houston, and the cameras aren't there

On the morning of July 7, 2026, ICE agents in Houston tried to stop a van. One of them shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican national who had lived in this country for decades.

An ICE spokesperson said agents opened fire because Salgado Araujo "weaponized his vehicle in an attempt to run over an ICE law enforcement officer resulting in our officer firing his weapon in self-defense."

Three men who were in the van with him told their lawyer that isn't what happened — that Salgado Araujo never rammed the ICE vehicles, and that there were no officers in front of or behind the van, only to the side. They are now in immigration custody.

We may never know which account is right, and here is exactly why. In the Texas Tribune's words: the agents "did not have body-worn or dashboard cameras."

Five months after ICE promised Garbarino's committee that 6,000 more cameras were being deployed, the agents in the most consequential encounter of the summer had none.

On July 13, six days later, ICE officers shot and killed a second person, in Maine.

July 15: the chairman responds

Garbarino told The Hill his committee would conduct oversight. Specifically, it had asked ICE for a briefing the following week.

Read the next part carefully, because it's the whole story:

The briefing will not include information on the shootings, because both incidents are being investigated by the FBI.

He wanted the briefing to cover the status of ICE's body camera rollout — after it turned out the Texas officers weren't wearing them "because they had yet to arrive."

That is the same answer, in slightly different words, that the agency gave his committee in February. In February the cameras were being deployed. In July they hadn't arrived. In between, Congress paid for them and a man died.

Garbarino also said ICE should keep making traffic stops. The agency had paused them after the Maine shooting. He disagreed:

"As long as… those officers are focused on what they told us they were focused on, and they are, I don't have a problem with them doing traffic stops."

"As long as those officers are focused on what they told us they were focused on, and they are." The chairman's basis for believing that is what the agency told his committee — the same source that told his committee about the cameras.

What a subpoena is for

None of this requires Garbarino to become a liberal. He can believe every word of his own statements about border security and still notice that an agency made his committee a commitment with a number in it and did not keep it.

A committee chairman in the majority has options a rank-and-file member does not. He can put Lyons back under oath and ask, on the record, how many of the 6,000 cameras have actually shipped. He can subpoena the deployment records. He can demand the use-of-force reports.

What he has done instead is request a briefing that is scoped, in advance, to exclude the shootings.

Meanwhile Senate Democrats wrote at the end of July that none of the February pledges could be verified as kept, and by the first week of August there were reports of two more men shot by agents without cameras.

The pattern on Long Island

Garbarino's brand is the reasonable one. He voted for the January 6 commission, for the infrastructure law, for the Respect for Marriage Act. He was one of eight Republicans who voted for universal background checks in 2021. Those votes were real.

But the same man cast a deciding vote for roughly $70 billion in ICE and CBP funding — a bill that passed by two, with not one Republican voting no.

His constituents on Long Island have been asking him to show up in person for a year and a half. He does telephone town halls instead. In April 2025, about 2,000 people protested outside his Patchogue office. A month later, nearly 2,000 packed the Patchogue Theater across the street to hear a congressman from Maryland, because their own wouldn't hold the event.

He has the gavel. He has the subpoena power. He has an agency that told his committee something that turned out not to be true.

So far, what he has is a briefing that won't discuss the shootings.

Source

Misty Severi, "House Homeland Security Chair Garbarino vows oversight of ICE after shootings," Just the News, July 15, 2026, reporting on Garbarino's comments to The Hill. Photo: Samuel Corum / Getty Images, via WJAR.

Kansas City Voted 12–1 to Keep a 7,500-Bed ICE Detention Center Out. The Next Morning, Mark Alford Wrote ICE Offering His Own District Instead.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:03:41 +0000

On January 15, 2026, Homeland Security and ICE officials toured a warehouse at 14901 Botts Road in south Kansas City. It's called I-49 Industrial Center 7. It is 920,400 square feet, and the plan under discussion was to put roughly 7,500 beds in it.

Hours later, the Kansas City Council voted 12 to 1 to block it. As KCUR reported, the ordinance freezes city approvals — permits, zoning, project plans — for any non-municipal detention facility until January 15, 2031.

Mayor Quinton Lucas put it plainly: "Warehousing 10,000 people in an industrial factory is not the move of enlightened or humane societies."

The next morning, Mark Alford sat down and wrote a letter to ICE.

What the letter says

Alford's January 16 letter to ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons is not subtle, and he published it himself.

He opens by thanking ICE for "restoring order and integrity to our nation's immigration system." Then he gets to Kansas City:

"Kansas City officials have responded by imposing a sweeping moratorium on approvals for non-municipal detention facilities, explicitly aimed at preventing the establishment of an ICE facility within the city. This action reflects a broader pattern of local resistance to lawful federal enforcement activities and creates unnecessary legal, logistical, and political obstacles to the execution of ICE's mission."

A 12–1 vote by an elected city council is, in Alford's telling, an "obstacle." Then comes the pitch:

"If Kansas City doesn't want an ICE facility, Cass County has several site options near I-49 which would be ideal fits for ICE's needs. As a member of the Appropriations Committee, we look forward to helping make this happen in the 4th District."

Read that clause again. Alford sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the committee that writes the checks for the Department of Homeland Security. He put that fact in a letter to the agency, next to a request, in writing.

He closes by arguing ICE shouldn't have to deal with places that say no at all:

"The federal government should not be forced to negotiate with jurisdictions that openly seek to block or delay the execution of federal law."

That is a sitting member of Congress telling a federal agency it should route around local democratic decisions — and volunteering his own constituents' county as the place to route to.

Where he wants to put it

This isn't abstract. Alford named actual ground.

KSHB reported that one option is a 70-acre county-owned parcel near the Cass County Justice Center in Harrisonville. He also floated land near the Harrisonville airport, and county-owned land in Belton. The Cass County Sheriff's Office declined to comment on the Belton idea.

Harrisonville has a population under 10,000. Belton is a Kansas City suburb. These are small places, and the thing being proposed for them is one of the largest immigration detention operations in the Midwest.

He didn't ask anybody first

Reaction in Cass County, per KSHB's reporting, was mixed at best — and most residents interviewed opposed it. One said Alford hadn't consulted residents in any meeting about how they'd feel.

Cass County Presiding Commissioner Bob Huston was noticeably cooler than the letter that invoked his county: "I think we're a long way from discussion or if they even have a discussion with us."

Jaenna Jackson, of Archie, said what a lot of people said: "I don't like the violent way they're treating these people."

Troy Fellers of Pleasant Hill summed up the split: "We need it, but a lot of people don't want it that close."

Alford's own framing was that he was doing everyone a favor — "This gives DHS an option, a supportive option of a community, a city, a county." He was describing a community he had not asked.

The rest of the region said no too

Kansas City wasn't an outlier. On March 3, 2026, the Jackson County Legislature passed its own five-year moratorium, 6 to 1, on zoning and permitting approvals for detention facilities in unincorporated parts of the county. Like Kansas City's, it runs through at least 2031, and it allows only municipal facilities such as a city jail.

Two of the largest local governments in the metro looked at the same proposal and said no. Alford's response was that saying no is illegitimate.

What he's inviting in

Alford voted for the money that pays for all of this. On June 9, 2026, he was one of the 214 House Republicans whose votes passed S. 2 by a two-vote margin — $70 billion for DHS, CBP, and ICE through 2029, covering detention facilities, transportation, and, in the law's own summary language, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

He also voted for the surveillance side of it. ICE has been paying contractors to monitor Americans' social media around the clock and issuing subpoenas to unmask critics — an operation Congress funded.

So Alford voted for the $70 billion, and then wrote to the agency spending it, offering his own district as the site, and citing his seat on the committee that controls its budget.

This is the second time he's done the Appropriations thing in writing

Three weeks after the ICE letter, Alford went on cable news and announced that House Republicans were investigating the Super Bowl halftime show — while admitting he doesn't speak the language it was performed in — and said he'd be "talking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this." He sits on the Appropriations subcommittee that funds the FCC, too.

It's the same move both times. Alford controls agency budgets, and he tells the agencies so.

What Cass County should ask him

Alford holds real town halls — he did 15 stops in four days last August, which is more than most of his colleagues can say. He won his primary on August 4 and faces Democrat Jordan Herrera in November.

So there will be rooms. And the questions write themselves:

Which residents of Cass County did you consult before offering their county to ICE?
What did you mean by "as a member of the Appropriations Committee, we look forward to helping make this happen"?
If Kansas City's 12–1 vote was "obstruction," what would a legitimate local no look like?

A congressman's job is to carry his district's wishes to Washington. Alford carried Washington's wishes back to his district, and called the people who objected obstructionists. We deserve better.

Sources

Celisa Calacal, "Hours after ICE toured a Kansas City warehouse, council blocks federal detention center permits" — KCUR, January 15, 2026.

Ryan Gamboa, "Cass County residents respond to talk about possible ICE detention center in Harrisonville" — KSHB 41 Kansas City. Photo: KSHB 41.

"Alford Urges ICE to Consider Cass County Sites for Proposed Detention and Processing Facility" — Office of Rep. Mark Alford, January 16, 2026.

Maria Elvira Salazar Has Toured the Country for a Year Promoting Her Immigration Bill. It Has Never Had a Hearing — and It Doesn't Lead to Citizenship.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:00:43 +0000

Maria Elvira Salazar represents Florida's 27th District — Little Havana, Coral Gables, Westchester, Palmetto Bay. It is one of the most immigrant-heavy districts in America. And she has an answer for the people in it: the Dignity Act.

She has an entire section of her congressional website devoted to it. She launched a national "Dignity Tour" in March. Her office put out a press release in July announcing that the bill had generated "250+ stories leading the national conversation on immigration reform." Another announced that its coalition had passed 100 endorsements.

Two things are true about that bill that don't appear in any of those press releases.

One: nothing has happened to it. At all.

Salazar introduced the DIGNIDAD Act on July 15, 2025. On July 16, 2025, it was referred to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement.

That is the last thing that has ever happened to it. Congress.gov lists no action since. No hearing. No markup. No committee vote. No floor vote. Thirteen months.

It has 39 cosponsors, out of 435 members.

Her own party runs the House. Her own party runs the Judiciary Committee. Her own party sets the floor schedule. In thirteen months of Republican control, the Republican leadership has not given her signature bill a single hour of committee time — and she has not made them pay any price for it.

What she has done instead is tour.

Two: read what's actually in it

The Dignity Act is not the amnesty its critics on the right call it. It is also not what a lot of people in Little Havana think they're being offered.

Here is what the bill actually does, per the National Immigration Forum's summary:

What an immigrant has to do to qualify for "Dignity Status":

Have been continuously present in the U.S. since December 31, 2020
Pay $7,000 in restitution over seven years
Pay all back taxes
Pass a criminal background check
Carry health coverage — while being barred from federal means-tested benefits
Work or study at least four of the seven years
Report to the Department of Homeland Security every two years

And at the end of all that, what do they get?

In the summary's own words: "The status does not provide a path to U.S. citizenship."

It's a seven-year deferred-action status, renewable every seven years, forever, as long as you stay in good standing. Pay $7,000, hand DHS your address every two years for the rest of your life, and you are still not a citizen. You are still not a permanent resident. You are a person with a renewable permission slip.

What the bill gives the enforcement side, meanwhile:

$46.5 billion authorized for physical barriers, tactical infrastructure, and border technology
Mandatory E-Verify for every employer in the country, phased in over 6 to 24 months
Expedited removal for anyone who fails a credible-fear screening, and detention during processing
Illegal reentry penalties raised to 10 years in prison — 20 years for a third offense

That is the trade Salazar is touring the country to sell: $46.5 billion in wall and enforcement money, a national employment-verification mandate, and longer prison sentences — in exchange for a status that runs out every seven years and never becomes citizenship.

Now put it next to how she actually votes

While the Dignity Act sat untouched in a subcommittee, a different immigration bill moved.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2, which puts $70 billion into DHS, Customs and Border Protection, and ICE through fiscal year 2029 — money for ICE hiring, transportation, detention facilities, 287(g) agreements that deputize local police as immigration agents, and, in the law's own summary language, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

It passed 214 to 212. Two votes.

Salazar voted yes. At that margin, every single Republican yes was a deciding vote — hers included. Two Republicans switching would have killed it. Not one did.

She also voted for the $70 billion machine's surveillance arm, which pays for monitoring people's social media accounts.

So the record for the last thirteen months reads: one immigration bill she talks about, which has never received a vote of any kind, and one immigration bill she voted for, which is now Public Law 119-98 and is spending $70 billion in her constituents' neighborhoods.

This is the same district, the same people

Her neighbor in Congress, Mario Diaz-Balart, has run the same play with letters — writing to the administration on behalf of Venezuelans in South Florida, then voting for the money that pays for their arrest. Salazar signed one of those statements with him.

She has urged the administration to ensure fair treatment for Cubans holding I-220A paperwork. That is a real thing and it belongs in the record.

But a letter is not a vote. A tour is not a hearing. And $70 billion for interior enforcement is not offset by a bill that a subcommittee chaired by her own party has ignored for thirteen months.

What we'd want to hear her asked

Salazar is a former television journalist. She knows the difference between a story and a result. So the questions are simple:

Why has the Republican Judiciary Committee never given the Dignity Act a hearing, and what have you done about it?
Does the Dignity Program lead to citizenship — yes or no?
You cast a deciding vote on a $70 billion bill for ICE. Was that consistent with the Dignity Act?

She is unlikely to be asked in a room in her own district. Florida Politics reported in September 2025 that her "general disinclination to discuss policy and politics in an open, potentially unfriendly forum" had been noticed — she skipped a town hall Democrats say they invited her to, and a petition asking her to hold in-person town halls was still circulating.

A bill nobody will vote on is a very safe thing to campaign on. We deserve better.

Sources

H.R. 4393 — DIGNIDAD (Dignity) Act of 2025, Congress.gov: sponsor, introduction date, referral, cosponsor count, and complete action history.

"The Dignity Act of 2025: Bill Summary" — National Immigration Forum, July 15, 2025.

Roll Call 214, June 9, 2026 — U.S. House Clerk. Image: Office of Rep. María Elvira Salazar.

Pete Stauber Named a Bill After a Nationality. Then He Put Al-Shabaab in It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:50:42 +0000

On March 12, 2026, Pete Stauber introduced a bill in the U.S. House and gave it a name: the Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act.

The acronym is a stretch, and everybody could see it. In the official text, SOMALIA stands for "Strengthening Oversight and More Accountability for Lying and Illegal Activity." Nobody was fooled. Stauber's own press statement said the quiet part plainly:

"Taxpayers in Minnesota and across the country deserve to know their hard-earned dollars are supporting legitimate services and not lining the pockets of Somali fraudsters."

That's the congressman for Minnesota's 8th District, quoted by KAXE, describing a whole nationality as the problem his bill exists to solve.

Minnesota's largest Muslim civil rights group called it what it is. "You cannot name a federal bill after a nationality or ethnic group and claim it is about accountability," said Suleiman Adan, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota. "Fraud is a crime committed by individuals, not by entire communities."

The group's executive director, Jaylani Hussein, put the test in one sentence: "No member of Congress would introduce legislation titled the 'Stop Fraud by Norwegians Act' or the 'Stop Fraud by Germans Act.'"

Read the actual bill

This is where it stops being about a name.

H.R. 7923 is nominally a child care bill. Section 2 amends the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act to permanently bar providers found to have committed fraud. Fine — nobody defends stealing from a program for poor working parents.

Then keep reading.

Section 4 amends the terrorism section of immigration law. It writes into federal statute that a debarred child care provider who is found to have sent money to "any terrorist organization, including Al-Shabaab" is inadmissible. The same section adds a blanket bar for anyone "in any way associated with" the Palestine Liberation Organization or al-Shabaab.
Section 5 makes a debarred provider deportable, ineligible for asylum, ineligible to adjust status, and legally incapable of showing "good moral character."
Section 6 is the one to sit with. If an immigration officer or judge merely "suspects" an arriving person may be inadmissible under the new fraud provision, the officer "shall order the alien removed" — and must "refrain from conducting any further inquiry or hearing" unless a senior official says otherwise.

Suspicion. Not a conviction, not a hearing — suspicion, and you're on a plane.

A day care billing dispute is now a terrorism screening and an expedited removal. That is not an oversight bill. That is a bill built to tell one community that its members are presumed criminals, presumed foreigners, and presumed one step from a terrorist group.

Stauber introduced it alone. Five months later it still has zero cosponsors and has never moved past a committee referral. It was never going to become law. It was written to be said.

The scandal it's built on never checked out

Here's the part Stauber has never gone back and corrected.

The whole thing started the day after Christmas 2025, when a conservative YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a 43-minute video in which he knocked on the doors of ten Somali-run day cares in Minneapolis, and declared — when nobody answered, or when staff wouldn't let a group of strangers in — that there were no children inside. He claimed $111 million in fraud.

Then people actually went and looked.

On January 2, 2026, Minnesota's Department of Children, Youth and Families said inspectors had visited nine of the ten sites and found them "operating as expected". Children were present at eight of the nine. The ninth simply hadn't opened for the day yet.
The Minnesota Star Tribune visited all ten and found children inside four of them — the four that invited reporters in. Its review of state enforcement records and court filings found that none of the people publicly identified as owners or operators of the ten businesses "have ever been charged with fraud or any other felonies."
Three months later, on March 16 — four days after Stauber introduced his bill — MPR News summed up the state of play in one line: "No evidence of fraud has yet been confirmed at any of those sites."

We've written before about how this video was assembled and who fed it — the Minnesota House Republican caucus claimed a hand in it, then backed away when the YouTuber publicly called that a lie.

Real fraud in Minnesota's social service programs is real. More than 50 people have been convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But Stauber didn't build a bill around the convictions. He built it around a video that fell apart.

He gave a State of the Union seat to the man who said "EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud"

Three weeks before he introduced the bill, Stauber announced his two guests for Trump's State of the Union: Nick Shirley, and the man who appears in the video as "David."

"David" is David Hoch, a Minnesota lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for state attorney general. The Intercept identified him on January 3 and pulled his now-deleted Instagram posts. Two of them:

"EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them."

"Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims."

That was public, in a national outlet, seven weeks before Stauber handed him a ticket to the House chamber. Stauber's statement announcing the guests:

"By revealing stunning levels of obvious fraud to the American people, Nick and David did more work and showed more transparency than the Minnesota Department of Human Services."

He called them "citizen-driven oversight."

What it cost people who live here

None of this stayed on the internet.

A lawyer for one of the day cares told the Star Tribune his Somali clients had received hundreds of death threats. "Everybody is very scared right now of being targeted," attorney Jason Steck said. "Nobody wants to stick their head up. Nobody wants to get shot."

One director played reporters the voicemails his center was getting at 5 a.m. and at midnight — "We're coming," "ICE, ICE baby." A part-owner, Umi Hassan, said she'd lived in Minnesota since right after 9/11 and had never felt this marginalized. Crying, she asked the reporters: "What else can I do to be an American?"

Meanwhile the Trump administration froze federal child care money to Minnesota — the money that helps poor parents pay for care while they work — and around 3,000 federal immigration officers surged into the Twin Cities in Operation Metro Surge. Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal officers in January.

Stauber's answer to all of it was a bill with a nationality in the title.

This is a pattern, not a slip

Stauber's response to the ICE killing in Minneapolis wasn't to ask questions about the shooting. It was to blame local politicians for it: "When Twin Cities politicians spew hateful rhetoric about our law enforcement for months, it gives their constituencies permission to violently attack my brothers and sisters in uniform. The events of today are the result."

In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE operations were doing to the region.

He has not held an open, in-person town hall where any of them could ask him about it. When the mayor of Cloquet invited him to hold one, his office offered a virtual meeting with no date attached.

The ten day cares in that video are in Minneapolis. Stauber doesn't represent Minneapolis — his district runs from Duluth to the Iron Range to the Canadian border. He went looking for this fight. He named a bill after the people on the other side of it. And when the underlying story collapsed, he didn't withdraw the bill, revise the title, or say a word.

We deserve better.

Sources

MPR News, Muslim civil rights group: Congressman's fraud bill 'discriminatory and deeply irresponsible' (March 16, 2026)
KAXE, Stauber introduces Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act (March 13, 2026)
The Minnesota Star Tribune, We went to the day cares Nick Shirley did. Here's what we found. (Dec. 31, 2025)

Photo: Rep. Pete Stauber speaks on the House floor, January 2026 / U.S. House Clerk, via KAXE.

Brian Fitzpatrick Wrote the ICE Reform Bill Himself. Then He Cast the Deciding Vote to Fund ICE for Three More Years Without It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:56:00 +0000

Most members of Congress who vote to hand a federal agency an unconditional check can at least claim they didn't know what conditions to ask for.

Brian Fitzpatrick can't. He wrote them down himself, two months earlier, in his own bill.

April 2: the bill

Fitzpatrick spent 15 years as an FBI special agent before Congress. He teamed up with Democrat Tom Suozzi of New York, who had run the country's 11th largest police department as Nassau County executive, and on April 2, 2026, the two of them introduced the Reforming ICE and Protecting America Act.

Its premise was simple: fully fund the Department of Homeland Security, and in exchange hold ICE to the same rules as every other law enforcement agency in the country.

Here is what the two former law-enforcement officials said ICE needed:

Body cameras, visible identification, standardized uniforms and training — and a limit on masks.
Independent investigations of officer-involved shootings.
Probable-cause and warrant requirements in key enforcement contexts, including protection against the knowing detention of U.S. citizens without probable cause.
Guardrails at sensitive locations — limits on civil immigration enforcement at schools, health care facilities, places of worship, polling places on election day, childcare facilities, and private homes, absent a warrant.
Enforcement focused on violent offenders and the most serious threats to public safety.

Fitzpatrick's own words announcing it:

"This debate began with a legitimate call for real ICE reform, yet after weeks of political deadlock, no serious solution emerged. The right course was clear from the start: keep the Department of Homeland Security fully funded and confront the problem before us with real reform. That is precisely what this bill does. It is time to do what should have been done from the beginning: govern, reform, and protect."

Nobody made him write that. It is his analysis, from his own experience as a federal agent, of what a law enforcement agency operating without cameras, without identification and without independent review looks like.

June 9: the vote

Sixty-eight days later, the House took up S. 2, the Secure America Act — the funding bill with none of that in it.

The clerk's record of Roll Call 214 shows what happened at 5:23 PM on June 9, 2026:

	Aye	No
Republicans	214	0
Democrats	0	211
Independent	0	1
Total	214	212

It passed by two votes. Not one Republican voted no.

Which means every single Republican yes vote was decisive — and Fitzpatrick, the author of the reform bill, was one of them. Had he voted no, the tally would have been 213–213. A tie fails.

For the second time in a year, his was the vote that decided it. The first was Trump's budget bill, which passed the House 215–214 with his yes in May 2025 before he voted no on the final version once the outcome was settled.

What he voted to fund

The bill gives ICE $38.5 billion on top of the $75 billion it already had, Border Patrol $22.6 billion, and $5 billion for the Homeland Security Secretary to spend at his own discretion — running through September 30, 2029. As TIME put it, the bill "passed without imposing any new restrictions on how immigration agents should operate."

September 30, 2029 is the part to sit with. That date runs past the end of Trump's term. The reforms Democrats had spent the whole DHS funding fight demanding — body cameras, a limit on masks, warrants before agents enter homes — are the same reforms in Fitzpatrick's own bill. By funding the agency for three more years without them, the House gave up the leverage to demand them at all.

He did not just decline to attach his reforms. He voted to remove the only mechanism Congress had for insisting on them.

What it looks like without the guardrails

Read Fitzpatrick's list backwards and it tells you what he thinks is wrong right now.

You do not write a provision requiring visible identification and limiting masks unless agents are operating unidentified. You do not write a provision for independent investigations of officer-involved shootings unless the agency is currently investigating its own. You do not write protections against the knowing detention of U.S. citizens without probable cause unless U.S. citizens are being detained. And you do not list schools, hospitals, churches, childcare centers and polling places by name unless enforcement is happening in them.

That is a former FBI agent's assessment of the agency, written by him, in April. In June he voted to fund it through 2029 without changing any of it.

The response from his own district was immediate. The Bucks County Beacon's account of the vote quotes his Democratic opponent saying Fitzpatrick had voted "to give a $70 billion blank check for Trump's ICE with no accountability or safeguards," and the ACLU's Kate Voigt calling it "unconscionable that the House would vote to write yet another blank check for ICE."

The Beacon noted something else: the article carries no statement from Fitzpatrick explaining the vote.

The pattern

Fitzpatrick's political identity is built on being the reasonable one, and some of it is real: he carries a 76% League of Conservation Voters score for 2025, with a 71% lifetime score — numbers no other House Republican comes close to. His district, Bucks County, is one of the most competitive in America, and the brand is the whole strategy.

But the record shows a specific shape to it. On the votes where his single vote decided the outcome, he has gone with his party. On the votes that were already decided, he has gone the other way and issued a statement.

The ICE vote is the clearest version yet, because this time he didn't just vote the wrong way on someone else's bill. He wrote the right bill, said out loud what needed fixing, and then supplied the vote that made fixing it unnecessary.

Source

Bucks County Beacon, "Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick's Vote Gives Trump $70 Billion to Spend on Mass Deportation Operations Without Any Guardrails", June 10, 2026. The bill's provisions are from Fitzpatrick and Suozzi's own announcement, April 2, 2026.

Ben Cline Called Defunding the Police 'Reckless.' His New Bill Would Defund Any Police Department That Won't Work for ICE.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:39:00 +0000

In June 2020, Ben Cline put his name on a resolution condemning the movement to defund the police, and said this about it:

"The United States is grounded in the Rule of Law and calls from the left to 'Defund the Police' are reckless and antithetical to any functioning society... The brutal killing of George Floyd was a tragedy but dismantling our police departments is simply not the answer."

That's from the press release announcing the resolution, dated June 15, 2020.

Six years later, on March 25, 2026, Cline introduced a bill to take federal police funding away from police departments.

Not all of them. Just the ones that won't sign a contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

What the bill actually says

It's called H.R. 8077, the 287(g) Cooperation Act of 2026. It is two paragraphs long, and the operative one reads:

"Any State or political subdivision of a State that maintains a law enforcement agency that, not later than 180 days after the date of enactment... has not entered into a written memorandum of agreement with the Secretary of Homeland Security under this subsection is ineligible to apply for or receive any grant under the 'Community Oriented Policing Services' program or any successor program administered by the Department of Justice."

Read that carefully, because the reach is bigger than it first looks.

It isn't limited to sanctuary cities. It isn't limited to Virginia. Every state, and every county, city and town in the country that runs a police department, gets 180 days to sign an agreement handing some of its officers' time over to federal immigration enforcement. Miss the deadline and the whole jurisdiction is cut off from any COPS grant, permanently — the bill applies to fiscal year 2027 "and each fiscal year thereafter."

What COPS money actually pays for

The Community Oriented Policing Services office is the part of the Justice Department that helps local departments hire cops. By its own account it has invested over $20 billion in policing since Congress created it in 1994, and its flagship program, the COPS Hiring Program, exists to pay for hiring or rehiring full-time sworn officers at state, local, tribal and territorial agencies.

That is the money Cline's bill would use as a lever. Sign with ICE, or lose your officer-hiring grants.

Almost every police department in America would be on the wrong side of it

Here's the scale.

There are roughly 17,541 state and local law enforcement agencies in the United States, according to the Justice Department's own census.

As of August 10, 2026, ICE reports it has signed 2,179 memorandums of agreement under 287(g), covering 39 states and 2 territories. Some agencies hold more than one, so the number of participating departments is smaller still — and eleven states have none at all.

So the overwhelming majority of police departments in this country have not signed a 287(g) agreement. Under Cline's bill, all of them lose access to federal hiring grants unless they sign one inside six months.

That is a plan to defund the police. It's just conditional.

The reason he wrote it

On February 5, 2026, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger issued Executive Directive One, ending the 287(g) agreements that state law enforcement agencies had entered under her predecessor.

Her reasoning, as she put it: "Taking Virginia law enforcement state agency personnel and basically giving them over to ICE is something that ends today."

The directive covered state agencies — the State Police, Corrections, Conservation Police, Marine Police. It did not touch local sheriffs. Nearly two dozen local Virginia agencies kept their agreements, untouched.

Cline's response was a bill aimed at every local police department in the United States.

He was explicit about the mechanism. Speaking to WHSV, he said:

"Using the power of the purse, Congress can dictate how funds that they give to localities are used and what, if any, contingencies are put in place."

And:

"We're going to make sure that they can't receive these federal funds unless they're entering into these kinds of 287(g) agreements."

Cline sits on the House Appropriations Committee. The power of the purse is not an abstraction for him; it is his committee assignment. He is describing, accurately, what he is in a position to do.

The police chief in his own district said no

The most striking thing in WHSV's story isn't Cline. It's the police chief in Harrisonburg — a city inside Cline's own district, and one where, by his own biography, Cline served as an assistant Commonwealth's Attorney from 2007 to 2013.

Chief Joe Tucker's answer:

"We'll continue to do what we have been doing for a number of years, and that's keeping all residents of Harrisonburg safe — regardless of immigration status, race, you know, any of that."

"My job is to make sure all of my officers are safe and all the citizens are safe, regardless of any of the other noise that is going on currently in America."

That is a local police chief telling his own congressman that the department is not interested. Under H.R. 8077, that answer would cost Harrisonburg its eligibility for federal officer-hiring money.

There's a reason chiefs resist. Under 287(g), as The Conversation summarized the research, "local police officers can interview people to determine their immigration status" and "issue immigration detainers to jail people" until ICE takes custody. Departments that have done it report the same thing: the partnerships erode the trust that makes immigrant crime victims and witnesses willing to talk to police at all. And a 2018 Cato Institute study cited in that piece found no evidence the partnerships bring crime rates down.

So a chief who has spent years building that trust is being asked to trade it for a grant application.

What this looks like on the ground in Virginia

This isn't theoretical here.

ICE agents staked out the Chesterfield County courthouse and detained 14 people over three days as they showed up for minor matters. One man was picked up while paying a $130 traffic fine.

Cline has voted to expand all of it. He was one of the Republicans who put $70 billion into ICE's budget on a two-vote margin, and one of those who funded the agency's contract to monitor Americans' social media accounts.

Now he wants the local police in the middle of it, and he's willing to withhold their hiring money to get them there.

The through-line

Cline's 2020 statement said dismantling police departments "is simply not the answer."

His 2026 bill says federal support for police departments is conditional on doing immigration work — and that departments which decline, including one in his own district, should be cut off.

Both things can't be principle. One of them is leverage.

H.R. 8077 has 16 cosponsors and sits in the Judiciary Committee. It has not moved. But bills like this one tell you what a member would do with the power if he had it, and Cline, on Appropriations, is closer to that power than almost anyone.

Source

"Rep. Ben Cline proposes bill to reverse Gov. Spanberger's policies on ICE", WHSV, March 26, 2026. Photo: WHSV.

Morgan Griffith Wrote a Bill to End Citizenship for Babies Born in Guam. Not One of His 440 Colleagues Has Cosponsored It.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:50:44 +0000

On July 16, 2026, Morgan Griffith introduced H.R. 9724, the End Birthright Citizenship for Territories Act.

The bill would strip automatic U.S. citizenship from children born after January 1, 2027 in Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Three weeks later, The Guam Daily Post reported a detail worth sitting with. Of the 434 other voting members of the House and the six nonvoting delegates, not one has signed on as a cosponsor.

Not one. In a Republican conference that has spent two years competing to introduce the toughest immigration bill anyone can think of, Griffith wrote something that 440 colleagues looked at and walked away from.

We covered the bill's introduction alongside a similar effort from another Virginia Republican. What has happened since is that the Americans it would affect have been answering him — and he hasn't answered back.

Guam's leaders, across the aisle

Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero's administration told the Post it opposes H.R. 9724 and, in its own words, "We are actively working to have the bill withdrawn."

Asked what expectant parents on the island should know, the administration tried to calm people down: "Right now the security of their citizenship is the same. It remains legal. There is no change." It said it would "remain vigilant, proactive, and work collaboratively with fellow stakeholders to tamp this down" until Congress drops or defeats the bill.

That is a government having to reassure pregnant women that their babies will still be Americans.

Speaker Frank Blas Jr. is not a soft touch on immigration. He said plainly that he supports securing the border and prosecuting anyone who abuses birthright citizenship through illegal conduct. He still rejected Griffith's bill — because of the legal foundation it rests on.

"I wholeheartedly support the complete repeal of the Insular Cases."

The Insular Cases are the century-old Supreme Court rulings that let Congress treat the rights of people in the territories as optional. Griffith's argument for his bill depends on them: he contends that because citizenship in the territories comes from federal statute rather than the 14th Amendment, Congress can take it back.

Blas said he respects Griffith's aim of curbing immigration fraud but "cannot support reliance upon the Insular Cases as justification for legislation affecting Guam."

He also named the structural problem underneath the whole thing:

"That democratic deficit is unacceptable, and it is something to which I strenuously object."

Guam has no vote in Congress. Neither does Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands or the Northern Marianas. A congressman from Salem, Virginia can propose ending the citizenship of their newborns, and there is no one in the room who can vote against him on their behalf.

Sen. William Parkinson introduced a resolution condemning the measure. Del. James Moylan, Guam's own nonvoting delegate in the U.S. House, announced his opposition after public pressure to take a stronger stand.

The invitation

The most striking response came from Vice Speaker Tony Ada, an Army veteran, who didn't issue a condemnation. He sent Griffith a formal invitation to come to Guam.

"This invitation is about ensuring Guam's people are seen, heard, and respected."

Ada offered to arrange meetings with health care providers, veterans, business leaders and residents — covering not only citizenship but Medicaid funding, energy resilience, disaster recovery and federal maritime policy. He tied the request to the island's 82nd Liberation Day, honoring the CHamoru people who lived through the Japanese occupation and the servicemembers who ended it, and to Guam's enlistment rate.

"Guam has consistently answered our nation's call to serve."

"The strongest federal policies affecting Guam are developed with Guam, not simply for Guam. Guam is not just a point on a map; we are an American community with a unique history, deep service to our country, and a rightful place in the national conversation."

Ada asked Griffith to consider a visit during Congress's August district work period. That period is happening right now.

He never asked them, and he isn't answering

Two sentences from the Post's reporting do more work than anything else in this story.

The first: "Neither Griffith's office nor his July 16 release has addressed whether he consulted territorial delegates before introducing the bill."

The second: "The Post sent Griffith a list of questions about the bill's origins and his response to territorial opposition. His office had not replied as of press time."

He wrote legislation to end the citizenship of American babies in four American places. He apparently did not talk to any of them first. When their newspaper asked him about it, he didn't respond.

That is exactly the "democratic deficit" Blas was describing, demonstrated rather than argued.

Even the advocates say the drafting is bad

Right to Democracy, which works on territorial rights, launched a survey and an FAQ this month to help residents figure out what the bill would actually do to them.

Co-director Neil Weare called the measure poorly crafted and said the uncertainty about its real effect makes public understanding all the more important. His co-director, Adi Martínez-Román, was blunter about why people are confused:

"This bill has caused much concern and confusion, as it is even written in a sloppy way."

The bill sits before the House Judiciary Committee with no hearing scheduled.

What this does for Virginia's 9th District

Nothing.

Griffith frames H.R. 9724 as a crackdown on "birth tourism." Set aside whether that's the right description of what the bill does. The people who will live with it are in Hagåtña and San Juan and Charlotte Amalie. The people who elected him are in Wise County and Bristol and Salem, where eight school-based health clinics closed last month and three rural hospitals are on a watchlist for closure.

He chairs the House Subcommittee on Health. He is Co-Chair of the Coal Caucus. He has plenty of levers that touch his own district's actual problems.

Instead, his most talked-about bill of 2026 is a proposal that no other member of Congress will put their name on, aimed at Americans who have no vote, who have asked him to come talk to them, and who cannot get his office to answer the phone.

Source

Reported by Walter Ulloa for The Guam Daily Post: Guam leaders unite to oppose birthright citizenship measure (July 22, 2026). Photo: David Castro / The Guam Daily Post — U.S. and Guam flags at the 82nd Liberation Day observance, Asan Beach, War in the Pacific National Historical Park.

Monica De La Cruz Got the Famous Mariachi Teen Out of ICE Detention. A Man Outside the Same Gate Asked About His Fiancée.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:36:21 +0000

On Monday, March 9, 2026, Juan Rodriguez stood outside the El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, and watched a congresswoman walk a teenager out the gate.

The teenager was Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar, a McAllen high schooler who had been locked up for 12 days. The congresswoman was Monica De La Cruz.

Rodriguez was one of the demonstrators outside. He had a personal reason to be there: his fiancée is held in the same facility, with the same kind of immigration case, and he wanted to know whether anyone was coming for her.

"It's really unfair that only the chosen few get selected. She's in the exact same situation."

Why this case, and not the others

The Gámez-Cuéllar family's detention became a national story, and the details are why.

They were detained while doing what the government told them to do — showing up for a required check-in with immigration officials. And the brothers were members of an award-winning high school mariachi group that De La Cruz herself had invited to perform at the U.S. Capitol the previous summer.

So the congresswoman's own guests, from her own district, were taken by the agency her votes fund, for complying with a government instruction. After what the Texas Tribune described as "an intense public backlash," De La Cruz worked to get Antonio released from El Valle. A delegation of Democrats led by Rep. Joaquin Castro got the rest of his family out of the detention center in Dilley.

Then came the part that matters for everyone else in Texas's 15th District.

De La Cruz stopped short of pledging to make individual appeals for other detainees' release. She said her colleagues in Congress should work on "common sense" enforcement policies instead.

She declined the Texas Tribune's request for an interview.

Johanny Lacruz

Rodriguez's fiancée is Johanny Lacruz, 28, from Venezuela. Here is her record.

She entered the United States legally in November 2023 at the Brownsville port of entry, with an asylum appointment secured through the government's CBP One app.
In a sworn declaration reviewed by the Tribune, she wrote that she fled Venezuela after receiving threats over her political activism with Voluntad Popular, an opposition party.
She holds a work permit valid until 2030.
She has no criminal record. She had a job, a driver's license and filed her taxes.
Her asylum hearing was scheduled for March.

On February 4, driving to San Antonio with Rodriguez, she stopped at the Border Patrol checkpoint in Falfurrias — a checkpoint more than 70 miles inside the border that anyone leaving the Rio Grande Valley by road has to pass through. She showed her work permit. An officer sent them to secondary inspection and took her into custody.

She was detained a month before the hearing she was waiting for. Rodriguez had planned to propose on Valentine's Day at the top of the Tower of the Americas.

"She never committed any crime. She had her driver's license. She had everything in line, all her ducks were in line — she had a job, she did her taxes and everything, everything, everything, and they detained her."

Since March, Rodriguez has been asking De La Cruz's office for help. He has also asked her Democratic opponent. Lacruz has been considering voluntary departure to Mexico — leaving the country rather than risk a removal order — so that they might eventually restart their lives somewhere else.

This is not an unlucky exception

Two numbers put the "chosen few" problem in perspective.

About 74% of people held in ICE detention have no criminal history, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, which tracks immigration cases through public-records requests.

And detentions of people with no criminal record have risen 2,450% since Trump took office, according to the American Immigration Council.

Carlos M. Garcia, the immigration attorney who represented Gámez-Cuéllar, described the mechanism to the Tribune. ICE has been sending "call-in" letters telling people to appear earlier than their scheduled appointments — and arresting them when they show up.

"When they show up to their check-in, in compliance with this call-in letter, they are being detained. They're suffering the consequences of complying."

"I have not seen the number of call-in letters that have been sent out by ICE like this ever."

"Nobody is safe right now."

There is no version of this where a congresswoman can fix it one person at a time. There are thousands of Johanny Lacruzes and one Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar with a national news cycle behind him.

She paid for the machine

De La Cruz did not merely fail to stop this. She funded it, twice.

She voted for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 3, 2025, which poured money into the deportation campaign.

And on June 9, 2026 — three months after she walked Antonio Gámez-Cuéllar out of El Valle — she was one of the Republicans who passed S. 2, putting $70 billion into DHS, CBP and ICE by a margin of two votes. Not a single Republican voted no. At a two-vote margin, every yes was a deciding vote. The law's own summary says ICE's share pays for personnel, transportation, facilities, 287(g) agreements deputizing local police, and "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

She had seen exactly what those arrests look like in her own district, up close, standing at the gate. Then she voted to buy four more years of them.

The election-year softening

De La Cruz's public position has moved as the enforcement has gotten less popular in South Texas.

By 2026 she was, according to the Texas Tribune, the only Republican from Texas to support a bipartisan immigration reform bill creating a seven-year pathway to legal status — not citizenship — for people in the country since 2020 who pass a criminal background check. She had also pitched a special visa for construction workers, after meeting with builders in her district who told her enforcement had wrecked their labor supply.

Her statement to the Tribune listed the bills she's filed:

"Fixing our broken immigration system is a top priority. Since I arrived in Congress, I have put forward policy solutions, including my Bracero Program 2.0 Act, my Fair Wages for Farm Workers, and my Texas Dreamer Work Authorization Act, to bridge the gap and bring stability to the immigration process."

Those proposals, the Tribune noted, "have gained little traction." One of them — her H-2A streamlining bill — would also cut wages for many of the farmworkers it covers.

That's the shape of it. The bills that would help people go nowhere. The bills that fund the arrests become law, with her vote, by two.

Her Democratic opponent and her Democratic colleagues called the El Valle appearance a political stunt. Whether it was or not, the test isn't what happened that Monday. It's what happens to the people with no news cameras.

Juan Rodriguez put the test plainly:

"If [she] is in the exact same boat that [Gámez-Cuéllar] was in but he can get out because he's famous but she can't get out because she's not famous, that's just unfortunate."

Source

Reported by Berenice Garcia for The Texas Tribune: With no ties to Congress, Texan wonders who will help fiancée in ICE custody (March 14, 2026). Photo: Chris Stokes for The Texas Tribune.

Riley Moore Wrote to the Fed Demanding One Named Executive Be Removed From an Advisory Panel. Her Company Says the Layoffs Had Nothing to Do With Visas.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 08:02:00 +0000

In July 2026, Riley Moore did something members of Congress do not normally do. He wrote to the chair of the Federal Reserve and demanded that a specific private citizen be removed from an advisory panel.

The citizen was Asha Sharma, who became CEO of Microsoft Gaming earlier in 2026 and runs Xbox. She had been named a co-leader of the Federal Reserve's Productivity and Jobs Task Force, which studies how new technology — mostly artificial intelligence — affects employment. She serves on it alongside the economist Charles I. Jones and the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Moore's letter to Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called for Sharma's removal, arguing that her recent corporate decisions raise questions about whether she belongs on a panel about productivity and jobs. On social media he framed it more directly: the "first question should be why Xbox CEO Asha Sharma" was picked while the company was cutting American jobs and hiring through the H-1B visa program.

The claim he built it on

Here is the difficulty. The thing Moore is accusing her of is not established.

Microsoft announced roughly 4,800 job cuts in the round that set this off, with about 1,600 falling in the Xbox division. Microsoft is separately one of the country's largest H-1B sponsors. Those two facts are true and they happened at the same time.

That is not the same as the second thing being the cause of the first, and Microsoft has said flatly that it isn't. Microsoft told Newsweek:

"These decisions are based on business need, not visa status. H-1B employees were also impacted by job eliminations in the U.S."

Independent experts quoted in the same piece describe the overlap as real but ambiguous. Immigration attorney Richard T. Herman: "A company can legally lay off workers and still file H-1B LCAs, but it doesn't make the optics easy to defend."

"Optics that are hard to defend" is a fair criticism of Microsoft. It is not evidence that a named executive personally fired Americans to import cheaper replacements — which is the viral version of the story, and the version Moore's demand rests on.

He did not hold a hearing. He did not subpoena Microsoft's filings. He did not ask the Labor Department to audit the company's Labor Condition Applications. He wrote a letter asking that one woman lose her seat.

The pattern

This is not the first time Moore has gone after people by category rather than conduct.

In March 2025 he introduced the "Stop CCP VISAs Act", which, despite what the name suggests, would bar every citizen of China from getting a U.S. student visa — not party members, not anyone screened for anything. Every one. Chinese American organizations including the Committee of 100 and Asian Americans Advancing Justice called it discriminatory for treating every Chinese student as a suspect based on nationality.

On the visa program itself, Moore is unambiguous. He told Fox News in July 2026:

"I think the H-1B visa program is a scam, and it's one that has been perpetrated on the American worker for far too long."

"Essentially, we shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas and people were told to 'learn how to code.' Well, now they're being replaced with the H-1B visa workers on the coding jobs as well. So when is the American worker actually going to get a win here?"

And on his standing in the fight: "I'm certainly not the lone voice in this. I might be the loudest."

The part West Virginians should notice

Set aside what you think of the H-1B program. There's a real argument that it's used to hold down wages, and serious labor economists make it.

Look instead at what Moore does with the argument.

The workers he says he's defending are American software engineers at a company headquartered on the other side of the country. The remedy he pursued was not a bill, not an investigation, not an enforcement referral — it was getting one executive removed from an advisory panel at the Federal Reserve.

Meanwhile, the thing actually happening to workers in West Virginia's 2nd District runs through his own committee. Moore sits on House Appropriations. He led the Republican Study Committee's task force charged with turning DOGE's cuts into permanent law, calling the $9.4 billion package "only the first step — more cuts are coming." Those cuts fall on federal jobs and federal grants in a state that has fewer of both to spare than almost anywhere else.

When he asked that same committee for $50 million to get clean drinking water to McDowell County — holding up a jar of brown tap water from a constituent's home — it voted him down.

A letter about one executive's seat on a Fed panel gets written and gets covered. A jar of brown water gets voted down. Both of those are things Riley Moore did this year.

Source

Jayujyoti Mullick, "Riley Moore demands removal of Xbox CEO Asha Sharma", The American Bazaar, July 22, 2026. Photo via The American Bazaar.

Mario Diaz-Balart Wrote Letters Defending Venezuelans in His District. Then He Voted to Give ICE $70 Billion.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:13:30 +0000

There is a way of doing politics where you say one thing to the people who elect you and do another thing on the House floor, and you count on the two never being read side by side.

So let's read them side by side.

What Mario Diaz-Balart said

February 6, 2025. Days after the Trump administration moved to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans, Diaz-Balart wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem:

"I respectfully request, within all applicable rules and regulations, that you assess all options available to ensure that Venezuelan nationals without criminal records are not forcibly returned to one of the most repressive dictatorships in the world."

May 2025. After the Supreme Court cleared the way for the terminations, Diaz-Balart put out a joint statement in Spanish with Reps. Carlos Gimenez and Maria Elvira Salazar. Translated:

"As we have expressed on numerous occasions, we have always supported — and will continue to support — Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans."

The same statement blamed Joe Biden for opening the southern border, praised Donald Trump for restoring the rule of law "from day one," and promised they were "working with the Trump administration on a permanent solution."

That was the pitch to Miami-Dade: we're on your side, we're working on it, trust us.

What happened

Nothing was fixed.

On October 3, 2025, the Supreme Court sided with the administration and let the terminations proceed. On November 7, 2025, they took effect. More than 250,000 Venezuelans nationwide — including tens of thousands in South Florida — lost their protection from deportation. They also lost their work permits and, in many cases, their driver's licenses.

These are not strangers to Florida's 26th District. They are the people who fled Nicolás Maduro — the same dictatorship Diaz-Balart has built a 23-year career denouncing. They bought houses in Doral, opened businesses, sent kids to school here. And on a Friday in November, a large number of them woke up unable to legally go to work.

Diaz-Balart's letters did not stop it. His "permanent solution" never arrived.

What he did next

Here is where the story stops being about a letter that didn't work and starts being about a choice.

On June 9, 2026, the House voted on S. 2, the "Secure America Act" — the bill putting roughly $70 billion more into immigration enforcement. It passed by 214 votes to 212.

Two votes. At that margin, there is no such thing as a symbolic yes. Every Republican who pressed the green button cast a deciding vote; had any two of them voted no, the bill would have died on the floor.

Diaz-Balart voted Aye. So did Gimenez. So did Salazar. Not a single Republican voted no.

That money is what pays for the agents, the vehicles, the detention beds and the flights that turn a revoked TPS designation into a person taken out of a parking lot in Hialeah. Diaz-Balart could not stop the Supreme Court. He could not make Kristi Noem answer his letter. But the vote on funding the machine was entirely his, and it was close enough that his single vote was the difference.

He voted to fund it.

Somebody noticed a year before the vote

He was warned, publicly, by people in his own community.

In June 2025, a nonprofit called Keep Them Honest launched a digital and cable ad campaign in South Florida aimed squarely at Diaz-Balart and Gimenez over deportations affecting families from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba. The ads accused Diaz-Balart of taking no action to stop the administration.

"We will hold those Republicans accountable for each and every family that is ripped apart by Trump and Rubio's cruel policies targeting immigrants," the group's spokesman, Chris Wills, told WLRN.

That was a year before the S. 2 vote. He had all the notice anyone could ask for.

The thing about representing an exile community

Diaz-Balart's whole political identity is built on standing with people fleeing dictatorships. He co-chairs the Congressional Cuba Democracy Caucus. He chairs the Congressional Hispanic Conference. He chairs the House appropriations subcommittee that writes the State Department and foreign aid budget — which means when he says the Maduro regime is repressive, he isn't just talking, he's holding the pen on U.S. policy toward Venezuela.

That is exactly what makes this indefensible. He is not a Republican from Idaho who has never met a Venezuelan asylum seeker. He is the member of Congress best positioned in the entire House to know precisely what happens to a person sent back to Caracas — and he told his constituents so, in Spanish, in writing.

Then he voted to fund the removals by a two-vote margin.

What we deserve

A letter is not a vote. A press release in Spanish is not a vote. "We are working with the administration on a permanent solution" is not a vote.

The vote is the vote, and Diaz-Balart's is on the record: Aye, on the bill that gives ICE $70 billion, cast four days short of a year after his own constituents put his face in an ad asking him to do something.

If he genuinely believes Venezuelans without criminal records shouldn't be sent back to Maduro, there was a moment when believing it would have cost him something. That moment was June 9, 2026, and it came down to two votes.

Sources

Díaz-Balart writes letter to DHS urging protection for Venezuelans facing deportation — Miami Herald, February 6, 2025
Díaz-Balart, Giménez and Salazar statement on SCOTUS ruling on TPS for Venezuelans — Office of Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart, May 2025
New digital, TV ad campaign targets Giménez and Díaz-Balart over Trump's deportation policies — WLRN, June 13, 2025. Image: campaign ad still, via WLRN.

An ICE Agent Killed a Mother of Three. A Week Later Michael Baumgartner Called It "a Justified Shooting" — Then Said He'd Wait for the Investigation.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 19:12:07 +0000

On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good in a Minneapolis street. Good was 37, a mother of three, and — according to city officials — was acting as a legal observer at a confrontation between agents and protesters. Ross fired three times: once through her windshield and twice through her side window.

Within hours, President Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Good had run the agent over, citing a grainy video shot from a distance. Noem called it domestic terrorism.

Then the New York Times and other outlets published clearer video from several angles. Those videos show Good's vehicle turning away from Ross as he fired.

A week after that, Michael Baumgartner told reporters the shooting looked justified.

What he said

Baumgartner, who has represented Washington's 5th District since January 2025, made the comments to reporters in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, January 14, 2026:

"Obviously, it's a tragedy whenever anybody gets killed, but from what I've seen, it looks like a justified shooting."

His basis for that conclusion was two unnamed U.S. officials who had told CBS News that day that Ross suffered internal bleeding.

Two anonymous officials, speaking for the agency under investigation, versus published video from multiple angles. He went with the anonymous officials.

Compare that to what he said a moment later, when a reporter asked whether he agreed with Noem calling Good a domestic terrorist:

"I would like to refrain from making those kinds of comments until there's an investigation and I know more."

He'd wait for the investigation before saying anything about the dead woman's character. He would not wait for the investigation before clearing the man who killed her.

The person who actually investigates shootings for a living disagreed

Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara has criticized ICE agents' conduct in his city, and said the agent who killed Good violated "traffic stop 101" by putting himself in front of her vehicle as he circled it, filming her with his phone.

O'Hara runs a police department. He is describing basic officer-safety procedure — the thing recruits are taught so that an agent never ends up standing where a moving car can justify shooting.

It's also worth noting who was allowed to look into it. State and local law enforcement in Minnesota were excluded from the federal investigation into Good's death and denied access to evidence, which raised concerns that an inquiry run solely by the Trump administration wouldn't be seen as legitimate. So Baumgartner's "let's wait for the investigation" meant waiting for an investigation run entirely by the administration whose agent pulled the trigger.

This isn't an isolated case. We've documented two other ICE killings in a single week last July where the government's initial account collapsed once the facts came out, and a federal lawsuit alleging DHS surveilled and punished Americans who filmed immigration agents — the exact activity Good was engaged in when she was killed.

The governor who reacted was the problem, apparently

Washington Governor Bob Ferguson posted on X on January 8:

"Now ICE is killing moms in the street? The escalating violence from the Trump Administration against immigrants and protestors is absolutely outrageous."

Baumgartner's verdict on that:

"That is highly irresponsible and it fosters the kind of division and paranoia amongst the public that's very dangerous. I was really disappointed that so many public elected officials, like Gov. Bob Ferguson, rushed to make irresponsible statements."

Set the two side by side. Ferguson described what had happened — an ICE agent killed a mother in the street — the day after it happened. Baumgartner declared the killing justified six days after that, on anonymous sourcing, and called Ferguson the reckless one.

Meanwhile the administration had labeled Good a domestic terrorist before any investigation at all. Baumgartner had no criticism for that.

The letter he sent the day after she died

There's one more piece to the timeline that's easy to miss.

The day after Good was killed, Baumgartner sent a letter to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asking them to review potential fraud in Washington state's administration of federal food assistance and other benefit programs.

His stated reason was Minnesota. In 2022, federal prosecutors there charged dozens of people — most of Somali descent — in a large fraud scheme. Trump cited that case in December 2025 when he ordered the Minneapolis immigration operation that Good was observing when she was killed.

Baumgartner wrote that he was "not alleging misconduct by Washington state," only seeking assurance "that Washington's administration of major federal funds is protected against the same vulnerabilities that have been publicly documented in Minnesota."

Asked whether it's appropriate for the administration to target an entire ethnic group in Minnesota because most of those convicted were Somali American, he said authorities should "follow the crimes and the evidence wherever it leads," and added:

"If there are significant problems amongst significant ethnic groups, we shouldn't not investigate those groups for the sake of wokeness or DEI."

Read the sequence plainly. An immigration crackdown justified by a fraud case involving Somali Americans killed a U.S.-citizen bystander. Baumgartner's response, one day later, was to ask the federal government to look for the same kind of fraud in his own state — and a week after that, to tell reporters the killing looked fine to him.

What this tells 5th District voters

Baumgartner has built a big part of his first term on immigration enforcement. He joined House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and Rep. Tom McClintock in a letter pressuring Washington's attorney general over the state's sanctuary law, charging that "The state of Washington not only actively thwarts federal immigration enforcement, but it also targets local law enforcement officials for complying with federal law."

The month before that, ICE agents in Spokane Valley broke a car window and dragged out two green-card holders on their way to a court hearing; a seven-months-pregnant U.S. citizen riding with them was also removed from the car against her will. At his March 2025 town hall, constituent Michaela Kelso asked him what he would do about it. He first asked the booing crowd how many of them had voted for Trump — fewer than a dozen hands went up out of hundreds — and then answered:

"So you're not going to like my answer but it would be far better for the security of the state of Washington and for immigrants in the state of Washington if Washington was not a sanctuary state."

He added that he intended to "make that happen," and declined to say what he meant by it when reporters asked afterward.

You can hold every one of those positions and still wait for the facts before declaring a killing justified. Baumgartner didn't.

Renee Good was an American citizen standing in an American street. Asked about her death, a member of Congress spent his answer defending the agent, criticizing a governor for objecting, and pivoting to food-stamp fraud.

Source

Orion Donovan Smith, "Rep. Baumgartner weighs in on ICE shooting of Renee Good in Minnesota; calls for review of potential fraud in Washington", The Spokesman-Review, January 15, 2026. Photo by Orion Donovan Smith / The Spokesman-Review.

Nick LaLota Is Cutting East Hampton Off From Federal Money. The Mayor — a Former Police Chief — Says He "Obviously Hasn't Read" the Law.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:15:40 +0000

In June 2026, Nick LaLota sent a letter to every town supervisor, mayor, and local official in New York's 1st District. It said this:

"I will not support community project funding requests from municipalities that have adopted policies, enacted local laws, or taken official actions that deliberately obstruct, impede, or refuse lawful cooperation with federal authorities carrying out their responsibilities under federal law."

Community project funding is the money members of Congress steer to their own districts for local projects — road repairs, water mains, sewer hookups. Individual members have wide latitude over who gets it. It is one of the few things a House member can hand a hometown directly.

Only two places in the district fit LaLota's description: East Hampton Town and East Hampton Village. He named them himself.

So he cut them off.

What the laws he's punishing actually say

Here is the East Hampton Village law, passed unanimously by the village board in April 2026.

It creates a new section of the village code barring the village from entering a 287(g) agreement — the arrangement that lets ICE deputize local police officers to do federal immigration work. It states plainly that the federal government has the authority to enforce immigration law, and that federal law overrides conflicting local law.

Then it adds the operative part: village personnel

"shall not use village resources, equipment, property, databases, or funds to investigate, detain, question, arrest, or transport any individual solely for purposes of federal civil immigration enforcement, except pursuant to a judicial warrant or as otherwise required by law."

It also says the village's Flock license plate reader cameras can't be queried for federal civil immigration enforcement.

The town passed a similar law in May 2026.

Read those two sentences again, because everything in this fight turns on them. Civil immigration enforcement. Except pursuant to a judicial warrant. Or as otherwise required by law. The law does not stop ICE from operating in East Hampton. It says the village won't spend its own money and staff doing ICE's civil paperwork, and that a judge's warrant still opens every door.

New York State has since banned 287(g) agreements statewide anyway, in its most recent budget. Which means the single loudest provision of East Hampton's law is now simply state law everywhere in New York.

What LaLota says the laws do

On July 13, he wrote on social media that the town and village had

"just adopted Suffolk County's first Mamdani-Hochul-style sanctuary policies, blocking cooperation with federal immigration authorities, even to remove illegal immigrants in custody on rape, assault, or DUI charges. But I won't let Long Island become NYC's sixth borough. No CPF funding until they reverse these dangerous policies."

In a July 16 letter to constituents, he went further: under these laws, he wrote, if either municipality had someone in custody after an arrest for possessing child sexual abuse material, third-degree assault, or second-degree robbery, "local officials could not use local personnel or vehicles to transport that individual into federal custody," and combined with New York's bail laws, "these sanctuary policies require that those violent criminal illegal aliens be expeditiously released from custody."

That is a description of a law that requires releasing violent criminals. It is not a description of the law East Hampton passed.

Jerry Larsen, the village mayor, spent his career in the village Police Department — he was its chief. His response:

"The congressman obviously hasn't read our legislation, because if he had taken the time to read the legislation, he would hopefully understand that this has nothing to do with criminal offenses and is in no way impacting our communities in a dangerous manner."

And: "What is dangerous is sending untrained immigration officers into communities, causing chaos."

Town Supervisor Kathee Burke-Gonzalez walked through the actual sequence. The town's law "does not require the release of anyone charged with a crime" and "does not prevent cooperation with federal authorities when required by law." Town police could not drive someone straight to federal immigration authorities on the charges LaLota listed because that is not how an arrest works — the person is processed and arraigned, and a judge decides whether they're released, held on bail, or sent to the Suffolk County jail. If federal authorities show up with a judicial warrant while the person is still in custody, police can hold them.

Her summary of what the town law actually changed: additional police reporting to the town board, a new citizens task force, and the 287(g) ban. "The town's law largely mirrors the rules already followed by local police departments across the East End."

Withholding federal money over a reporting requirement and an advisory committee, she said, "is not a serious public safety policy" but "a bizarre form of political retaliation over two basic measures, and the only practical result is our residents' tax dollars are sent elsewhere."

Minerva Perez, who runs Organización Latino Americana of Eastern Long Island, has been asking LaLota one question in public for two months: which specific provision of the local law do you oppose? Where, she asked, "does our law stop local law enforcement from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement when required by law?"

He hasn't answered it. He didn't respond to The East Hampton Star's request for comment either.

"Choose the money instead of going broke"

The part that should bother every voter in NY-01, whatever they think about immigration, is what LaLota did with the threat next.

Last month he stood at a ceremony announcing a $3.5 million appropriation for Huntington Town's Highway Department — a nice, ordinary piece of congressional work — and used it as a stage. As quoted in Newsday, he advised municipalities to "choose the money instead of going broke, when [East Hampton] went woke."

On WABC radio on July 3, he called the town and village "run by some pretty far-left individuals" who "are trying to out-Mamdani each other," and said their laws are the basis "of some of this mayhem we're seeing across the nation in places like Minnesota, Los Angeles, and other places."

And he told the hosts his funding cutoff was "also a warning sign to some of these other drifting municipalities: Don't go there."

That is the whole thing said out loud. The federal money isn't LaLota's — it's tax revenue his constituents already sent to Washington. He is holding it as leverage over local governments to make them repeal ordinances their own voters' elected boards passed unanimously. And he's telling every other town and village on Long Island — of which, by his own count, there are 13 and 96 — to watch what happens to the ones who don't fall in line.

By August it was working. On August 4, hours before Southold's work session on immigration policy, LaLota's re-election campaign emailed supporters to claim credit: the town attorney had cited his position when recommending against the policy, warning it put "real dollars at stake." "I stood up, and Southold is poised to say no," he wrote.

He is not describing a policy victory. He is describing a town lawyer telling elected officials they can't afford to cross their congressman.

The "mayhem" he's pointing at

LaLota told the radio audience these local laws are the source of the mayhem in Minnesota and Los Angeles.

Here's what has actually happened in the places he named and elsewhere. In January, ICE agents shot and killed two American citizens in Minneapolis during protests against masked agents operating in their neighborhood. In July, ICE agents shot and killed a man during a traffic stop in Houston and a Colombian immigrant with a work permit in Biddeford, Maine — both on their way to work, neither the target of the operation, and in both cases the government's initial account fell apart. Since January 2025, at least 12 people have been killed in shootings and violent incidents involving ICE agents, and more than 60 others have died in ICE custody or immigration detention.

That's the enforcement East Hampton's law declines to fund with village vehicles and village databases. LaLota's position is that declining to fund it is what makes people unsafe.

The pattern

This isn't a local quirk. It's the national playbook arriving in Suffolk County.

The Justice Department has filed 27 lawsuits against more than 20 cities, counties and states over sanctuary policies — including a suit to stop Philadelphia from barring ICE agents from wearing masks and hiding their badges. In California, Tom McClintock has used his immigration subcommittee chairmanship to demand six years of records from Philadelphia's sheriff, including her correspondence with named immigrant-rights groups. In San Diego County, Jim Desmond cast the lone vote to keep handing people to ICE without a judge's warrant, then brought a motion to repeal the new policy three months later.

LaLota's version uses the one lever a House member has that a lawsuit doesn't: the checkbook.

What it actually costs

Here's the sour joke at the center of it. East Hampton Town has received $758,900 in earmarks this century — against an annual town budget of roughly $110 million. LaLota's threat is worth a rounding error to East Hampton's finances.

Which tells you what it's for. It was never really about the money. It's a message to Southold, to Riverhead, to Shelter Island, to every village board on the East End: pass the wrong local ordinance and your congressman will campaign against your town.

He's running for a third term this fall against Chris Gallant, who won the Democratic primary in June.

Meanwhile, the congressman who has time to write to every local official in the district about East Hampton's police reporting requirements has still never held a public, in-person town hall since taking office in January 2023. The two elected officials he's punishing sat for interviews about this. He didn't return a call.

We deserve better.

Source

LaLota Doubles Down on Withholding Federal Money — Christopher Walsh, The East Hampton Star, July 23, 2026, and LaLota: Play Nice With ICE or You're Cut Off, The East Hampton Star, June 18, 2026. LaLota's Southold claim is from his August 4, 2026 campaign email, reported by The East End Beacon. Photo: The East Hampton Star.

$70 Billion for ICE Passed the House by Two Votes. Not One Republican Voted No.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 17:57:39 +0000

Most big bills pass with room to spare. This one didn't.

On June 9, 2026, the House passed S. 2 — the "Secure America Act" — by 214 votes to 212. The next day it became Public Law 119-98.

Two votes. That's the whole margin. And when a bill passes by two, there is no such thing as a symbolic yes. Every single Republican who pressed the green button that day cast a deciding vote. If any two of them had voted no instead, the bill would have failed on the floor.

Not one of them did. Zero Republicans voted against it. All 211 Democrats present voted no, along with the House's one independent. Three Republicans didn't vote at all.

We've already written about the Senate half of this bill, which passed 52 to 47 at 4:42 in the morning on June 5. This is the other half — the one that actually made it law, by the narrowest margin either chamber managed.

What the money is for

S. 2 puts $70 billion into the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it keeps that money available through fiscal year 2029.

The official summary of the law spells out what ICE's share pays for: hiring, paying and training personnel; transportation; facilities and fleet; 287(g) agreements, which deputize state and local police to do federal immigration enforcement; the agency's legal office; and, in the summary's own words, "operations by ICE to arrest certain unlawful aliens."

CBP's share buys agents and hardware — surveillance towers along the southern and northern borders, air and marine platforms, biometric entry-and-exit systems, and inspection equipment described in the text as using "artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or other algorithms."

This is not a border-security budget in the ordinary sense. It is the interior enforcement machine: the arrests, the local police partnerships, the surveillance, all funded four years out in a single lump.

The only limits Congress wrote were about equipment

Here is the detail that tells you what this Congress cared about.

S. 2 does contain restrictions. Read the summary and you'll find them. Funds can't be used to hire or train processing coordinators after October 31, 2028. And no money may go to surveillance towers "that have not been tested and accepted by CBP to deliver autonomous capabilities."

That's it. The guardrails Congress bothered to write into a $70 billion law are about procurement — what gear CBP is allowed to buy, and when it may stop hiring a particular job title.

Nothing about what agents may do. No body-camera requirement. No rule against agents concealing their identities. No limit on funding family separation. No mandated reporting on who is being detained, or where, or for how long. Congress found the time to specify that a surveillance tower must pass acceptance testing, and did not find the time to specify that the people operating it must be identifiable.

That omission is a choice, and it was made by the 214 members below the line.

Why the margin matters more than the bill

We write up a lot of party-line votes. Usually the honest framing is that any one member's vote didn't change the outcome — 220 Republicans vote yes, and the bill passes whether or not your representative shows up.

This vote was not that. At 214–212, the outcome turned on every last one of them.

That means the usual answer — I was one vote out of hundreds, leadership had the votes anyway — is factually unavailable here. Any two of these members could have walked to the well and changed the result. It would have taken two people out of 214 deciding that a $70 billion enforcement fund with no conduct rules attached was worth a second look.

Two. Out of 214. And the number who did it was zero.

That's worth remembering the next time one of them tells a town hall they have concerns about how ICE is operating. They had a moment where their individual vote was the whole ballgame, and they used it to hand the agency four years of money with no strings on its conduct.

The 187 with report cards

Two hundred fourteen Republicans voted yes. These are the ones who have a report card on this site, by state:

Alabama: Robert Aderholt, Barry Moore, Gary Palmer, Mike Rogers, Dale Strong Alaska: Nick Begich Arizona: Andy Biggs, Juan Ciscomani, Eli Crane, Paul Gosar, Abraham Hamadeh Arkansas: Rick Crawford, French Hill, Bruce Westerman, Steve Womack California: Ken Calvert, Vince Fong, Young Kim, Tom McClintock, Jay Obernolte, David Valadao Colorado: Lauren Boebert, Jeff Crank, Gabe Evans, Jeff Hurd Florida: Aaron Bean, Gus Bilirakis, Kat Cammack, Mario Diaz-Balart, Byron Donalds, Randy Fine, Scott Franklin, Carlos Gimenez, Mike Haridopolos, Laurel Lee, Anna Paulina Luna, Brian Mast, Cory Mills, Jimmy Patronis, John Rutherford, Maria Elvira Salazar, Greg Steube Georgia: Rick Allen, Andrew Clyde, Mike Collins, Clay Fuller, Brian Jack, Rich McCormick, Austin Scott Idaho: Russ Fulcher, Mike Simpson Illinois: Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, Mary Miller Indiana: Jim Baird, Erin Houchin, Mark Messmer, Jefferson Shreve, Victoria Spartz, Marlin Stutzman, Rudy Yakym Iowa: Ashley Hinson, Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Zach Nunn Kansas: Ron Estes, Tracey Mann, Derek Schmidt Kentucky: Andy Barr, James Comer, Brett Guthrie, Hal Rogers Louisiana: Clay Higgins, Mike Johnson, Julia Letlow, Steve Scalise Maryland: Andy Harris Michigan: Tom Barrett, Jack Bergman, Bill Huizenga, John James, Lisa McClain, John Moolenaar, Tim Walberg Minnesota: Tom Emmer, Brad Finstad, Michelle Fischbach, Pete Stauber Mississippi: Mike Ezell, Michael Guest, Trent Kelly Missouri: Mark Alford, Eric Burlison, Bob Onder, Jason Smith, Ann Wagner Montana: Troy Downing Nebraska: Mike Flood, Adrian Smith New Jersey: Chris Smith, Jeff Van Drew New York: Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota, Nick Langworthy, Mike Lawler, Nicole Malliotakis, Claudia Tenney North Carolina: Virginia Foxx, Pat Harrigan, Mark Harris, Richard Hudson, Brad Knott, Addison McDowell, Tim Moore, Greg Murphy, David Rouzer North Dakota: Julie Fedorchak Ohio: Troy Balderson, Mike Carey, Warren Davidson, Jim Jordan, David Joyce, Bob Latta, Max Miller, Michael Rulli, David Taylor, Mike Turner Oklahoma: Stephanie Bice, Josh Brecheen, Tom Cole, Kevin Hern, Frank Lucas Oregon: Cliff Bentz Pennsylvania: Rob Bresnahan, Brian Fitzpatrick, John Joyce, Mike Kelly, Ryan Mackenzie, Dan Meuser, Scott Perry, Guy Reschenthaler, Lloyd Smucker, Glenn Thompson South Carolina: Sheri Biggs, Russell Fry, William Timmons, Joe Wilson Tennessee: Tim Burchett, Scott DesJarlais, Chuck Fleischmann, Diana Harshbarger, David Kustoff, Matt Van Epps Texas: Brian Babin, John Carter, Michael Cloud, Monica De La Cruz, Jake Ellzey, Pat Fallon, Brandon Gill, Craig Goldman, Lance Gooden, Ronny Jackson, Nathaniel Moran, August Pfluger, Keith Self, Pete Sessions, Beth Van Duyne, Randy Weber, Roger Williams Utah: Mike Kennedy, Celeste Maloy, Blake Moore Virginia: Ben Cline, Morgan Griffith, Jen Kiggans, John McGuire, Rob Wittman Washington: Michael Baumgartner West Virginia: Carol Miller, Riley Moore Wisconsin: Scott Fitzgerald, Glenn Grothman, Bryan Steil, Tom Tiffany, Derrick Van Orden, Tony Wied Wyoming: Harriet Hageman

How they voted

None of this is our characterization. It's the official record, and it will be there permanently: the House Clerk's roll call for vote 214 on S. 2, June 9, 2026 — every name, every vote — and the bill itself on congress.gov, including the summary of what the $70 billion buys.

If your representative is on that list, they were one of the two votes this needed.

A Military Base in Jefferson Shreve's District Was Handed to ICE. He Said Yes Before Asking a Single Question.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:46:49 +0000

On July 15, 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth sent a letter to members of Congress. It named two military installations that the Pentagon was making available "for temporary use by the Department of Homeland Security to house illegal aliens." One was Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The other was Camp Atterbury, near Edinburgh, Indiana — 34,000 acres about forty miles south of Indianapolis, inside Indiana's 6th Congressional District.

The letter became public three days later. Jefferson Shreve, the district's congressman, put out a statement backing it:

"I support the use of Camp Atterbury as part of our national effort to detain and remove criminal aliens who entered our country illegally."

"Hoosiers voted for secure borders and safer neighborhoods last November. The influx of illegal aliens under the Biden Administration's lax border policy left many of our communities less safe."

That was the whole response. No questions about how many people, for how long, under whose supervision, at whose cost, with what medical care, or what happens if someone dies there.

Other Indiana Republicans asked. He didn't.

Here's what makes it stand out. Shreve wasn't the only Indiana Republican who got that letter.

Staff for Republican Senator Todd Young told the Indiana Capital Chronicle they had received the letter and "have asked the Trump Administration for more information about its plans for possible detention operations at Camp Atterbury."

Even the Indiana National Guard, which runs the base, was in the dark. Its spokesperson, Lauren Houck, said the Guard was "aware of the letter" and working with Pentagon and DHS officials, but had "no details other than what is in the memo" — not when detainees were expected, not how many, not where on the installation they would be housed.

So: the senator asked for information. The Guard had none. And the one member of Congress whose district actually contains the base announced his support without waiting for any.

That's the sequence. Shreve took a position on a detention operation that nobody involved could yet describe.

Then his constituents came looking for him

Through that summer, people in Johnson County kept showing up.

On August 25, 2025, more than 200 demonstrators gathered at Johnson County Park near the base, carrying signs reading "No Hoosier concentration camps" and "ICE out of Indiana."

Two weeks later, on Sunday, September 7, about 200 people rallied outside the Greenwood City Center — the building where Shreve's district office is. The Daily Journal's Noah Crenshaw was there. Their chant: "Support housing, not ICE." Their argument was that federal money should go to Indiana's affordable housing shortage rather than to detention beds.

Shreve was not in the office. The city center was closed. So protesters set up a human-sized milk carton at the corner of Main Street and Madison Avenue with the word "Missing" and a photograph of their congressman on it.

Ron Newlin of Indivisible Central Indiana explained why they picked that corner: "We wanted to stand outside of Jefferson Shreve's office, even though we know he's not here, and let the public know that many of us do not want our community used as a detention camp."

Asked for comment — including on the accusation that he only appears at "closed-door events" — Shreve's office sent this:

"I'm working in Congress to prioritize Hoosier workers ahead of undocumented immigrants. After meeting with roughly two thousand Hoosiers at public events during my constituent tour across the district this past month, I'm delivering on what the majority of my constituents told me they want: A secure border, tax relief and a lower cost of living."

Read it again and notice what isn't in it. The words "Camp Atterbury" do not appear. Neither does any answer to anything the people outside his office were asking.

This is the same posture his constituents got in May 2025, when 6th District Democrats held a "People's Town Hall" after he declined to attend — one of a run of empty-chair town halls across Indiana that spring.

"Criminal aliens" is doing a lot of work

Shreve's statement described the effort as detaining and removing "criminal aliens who entered our country illegally." That's the category he says the base is for.

It is not the category ICE has actually been filling. We have documented what this agency's year has looked like — agents shooting people, killing U.S. citizens, sweeping up people with no criminal record at all, and a round-the-clock social media dragnet that Congress paid for. None of that is a hypothetical objection to a facility. It's the operating record of the agency being handed a piece of his district.

A congressman who genuinely believed the base would only hold convicted criminals had an easy way to guarantee it: ask, in writing, before endorsing. Todd Young's office did the first part. Shreve skipped straight to the endorsement.

What we still don't know

More than a year on, the basic facts remain unpublished. As of late August 2025, no ICE detainees were being held at Camp Atterbury while state and federal officials worked out the arrangements. How many people the base would hold, for how long, and who would answer for their treatment were never spelled out publicly.

Those are exactly the questions a district's representative exists to force into the open. Shreve had the standing to demand them — the base is in his district, and he was one of the members of Congress the Pentagon's letter was addressed to. He used that standing to issue a press statement agreeing in advance.

His constituents noticed. That's what the milk carton was about.

Source

Defense letter confirms Indiana's Camp Atterbury to be used for immigrant detention — Indiana Capital Chronicle, July 18, 2025, and 'Support housing, not ICE' — Noah Crenshaw, Daily Journal, September 8, 2025. Photo: Noah Crenshaw / Daily Journal.

Cliff Bentz Says He's Been Privately Asking Stephen Miller to Change Course on Deportations. In Public, He Voted to Hand ICE $75 Billion.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:42:00 +0000

On January 27, 2026, Cliff Bentz sat down with the Baker City Herald and said something his voters had never heard him say in public.

He disagrees with how Trump is doing the deportations.

Not all of it. He supports removing people who came here illegally and committed crimes in their home countries — a group he put at about 1 million people. But the crackdown has also swept up people with no criminal record, and on that, he told the reporter plainly: "I disagree with that approach."

Then he explained where he'd been saying so. Not on the House floor. Not in a press release. In private meetings with Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who designed the policy.

Bentz said he belongs to the Main Street Caucus, a group of about 85 House Republicans, and that the group had spent "about six months" urging the administration to focus on immigrants with criminal records and to make sure enforcement is done lawfully. He was part of a delegation that met with Miller directly. "We've expressed to him our concerns," Bentz said.

Six months before late January 2026 puts the start of that private lobbying campaign in late July 2025.

Three weeks earlier, he voted to pay for all of it

On July 3, 2025, Bentz voted for Trump's budget bill. His "Aye" is on the roll call. Trump signed it the next day.

That bill is the single largest immigration enforcement appropriation in American history. According to the American Immigration Council's line-by-line breakdown, it provides $170.7 billion for immigration and border enforcement, including:

What it funds	Amount
Detention capacity expansion, including family detention	$45 billion
Enforcement and removal — hiring ICE agents, transportation, detaining families	$29.9 billion
Cost-reimbursement funds for state and local immigration enforcement	$13.5 billion

That's roughly $75 billion handed directly to ICE for detention and deportation operations. The Council calculates it raises ICE's detention budget to at least $14 billion a year — a 308 percent increase over 2024, and more than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons budget.

The Council notes that the agencies receiving this money have "significant discretion as to how to allocate them" over the next 51 months. In other words, the bill bought agents, buses and beds, and left the decisions about whom to arrest to the administration Bentz says he's been privately asking to be more careful.

So the sequence, by his own account, is: vote to build the machine on July 3, then spend the next six months asking the man operating it to please point it somewhere else.

He hadn't heard about the raid in his own district

The same interview contains one more line worth sitting with. Bentz said he has not heard of any ICE operations in his district.

Here is what happened in his district.

On July 30, 2025 — four weeks after his vote — federal agents executed search warrants at 11 sites across Medford, Central Point, Eagle Point and Grants Pass. All four are in Oregon's 2nd District. Seventeen cannabis workers were detained and handed to ICE, then bused overnight to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington.

Volunteers tracked the bus by license plate from the Medford ICE facility to the Washington detention center and confirmed who was inside using names and birthdates supplied by families whose relatives never came home from work. The Drug Enforcement Administration eventually confirmed the arrests. Ashland.news reported the whole thing on December 20, 2025, calling it one of the largest such enforcement actions in Oregon since the crackdown began.

That story ran in his district five weeks before he said he hadn't heard of any operations there.

It kept going after the interview, too. By late May 2026, six people were taken into custody in public places in the Rogue Valley in eleven days — including outside the Jackson County Circuit Court in Medford, the first confirmed courthouse detention in the valley. Local volunteers had by then trained more than 200 people to spot and report ICE activity in southern Oregon.

Bentz's district covers most of Oregon east of the Cascades plus Jackson and Josephine counties in the southwest. It is farm country — orchards, cattle, cannabis, watermelon, onions. The people ICE is picking up are, in many cases, the people harvesting his district's crops.

Private disagreement isn't a record

There's a pattern here that shows up again and again in this Congress: what a Republican says behind a closed door and what they do on the board are two different things. In Iowa, Ashley Hinson told a private room the Iran war was a "political liability" while voting six times in public to keep it going. Bentz's version is quieter but works the same way — a real objection, expressed only where it costs him nothing.

Asked about the January killings of two Minneapolis residents by federal agents — the deaths he cited as showing the need for a new strategy — Bentz wouldn't say whether the shootings were justified. He cautioned against "prejudging" based on videos, since images "don't tell a complete story."

He has never voted to restrict what he says he disagrees with. He voted to fund it, and then he went to talk to Stephen Miller about it.

He's also stopped taking questions in person

The same interview covered why his constituents can't ask him about any of this face to face.

Bentz switched from in-person town halls to phone events in 2025. In January he gave two reasons: concern for his physical safety, and that protests make dialogue impossible. He said he'd hold in-person events again but had none scheduled. "I really enjoy my town hall meetings, very very much," he said. "I'd be more than happy to (resume) if we can make them productive."

He has not held an in-person town hall since February 2025, when four of them across eastern Oregon drew crowds up to five times his usual turnout and one room in deep-red Union County shouted him down until he snapped, "If you just came here to yell, I can leave — do you want me to do that?" His phone town halls, he said, drew 31,000 to 32,000 callers — a number that sounds enormous until you remember he answered fewer than a dozen questions in an hour at one of them.

It's a tidy arrangement. The disagreement goes to Stephen Miller in a private meeting. The vote goes on the board in public. And the constituents whose neighbors got put on a bus to Tacoma don't get to ask about either one.

Bentz has represented Oregon's 2nd District since 2021 — five years, and the only Republican in Oregon's congressional delegation. Congress paid for the surveillance and enforcement apparatus he now says he has concerns about; we wrote about one piece of it, the social media dragnet, here.

Source

Bentz advocates for 'different approach' on deportations — Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald, January 27, 2026. Photo: La Grande Observer.

Two CoreCivic CEOs Wrote Checks to Matt Van Epps. Then He Became Congress's Loudest Voice for Funding ICE.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:56:40 +0000

On August 6, 2026, the private prison company CoreCivic told investors it had just had one of the best quarters in its history. Revenue up more than 27% from a year earlier, to $684.9 million. On top of that, $1.6 billion in net proceeds from selling four of its facilities to the Department of Homeland Security — which then paid the company to keep running them.

The reason is not complicated. The United States is now holding almost 66,000 people in immigration detention. Somebody has to be paid to hold them.

CoreCivic is a Tennessee company, based in Brentwood. And over the eight months before that earnings call, three checks moved from the top of that company to a Tennessee freshman in Congress.

The checks

Matt Van Epps won a special election on December 2, 2025 and was sworn in two days later. Here is what the Federal Election Commission's records show about who was funding him on the way in and immediately after:

Damon Hininger — $13,500. CoreCivic's chief executive from 2009 until he stepped down in 2025 gave to Van Epps four separate times: July 23, September 17 and November 6 of 2025, and again on January 26, 2026.
Patrick Swindle — $3,500. Swindle took over as CoreCivic's president and CEO on January 1, 2026. He wrote his check on January 19 — his third week in the job.
CoreCivic's PAC — $5,000, on March 9, 2026.

That's $22,000 from the company's political action committee and both of its chief executives. Whoboughtmyrep's FEC-derived donor database lists another $13,500 from Carrie Hininger, plus more from other CoreCivic employees.

For a first-term member of the House, that's a lot of attention from one company.

What the company needed

CoreCivic's business is detention beds, and the customer is the federal government.

Hininger had already told investors on earnings calls that Trump's immigration crackdown was good for the company's bottom line. Patrick Swindle did the math for them on this month's call: the four facilities sold to DHS worked out to an average of $307,000 per bed. We laid out the whole industry picture earlier today: two companies, $1.4 billion in a single quarter, a former GEO Group executive now running ICE, and a president whose brokers have traded private prison stock 29 times since he took office.

None of that money arrives on its own. It requires Congress to keep writing appropriations for detention.

Which brings us to what Van Epps has been doing with his first eight months.

The freshman on the Homeland Security Committee

Van Epps sits on the House Committee on Homeland Security — the committee with jurisdiction over ICE.

When funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed in February 2026 and the shutdown dragged past 70 days, Van Epps didn't just vote to restore the money. He ran a campaign about it. His own office's April 29 press release announcing his vote lists more than twenty separate appearances, videos and statements he made on the subject — Newsmax, OANN, a whiteboard video, floor remarks, committee remarks, local radio.

His words in that release:

"Democrats have demonized the brave men and women of ICE and CBP who are on the front line of this fight to protect the American people. This disrespect has been nothing short of despicable."

And:

"It is high time we empower these agencies to accomplish their crucial mission, and I urge my colleagues to join me in passing this budget resolution."

"Empower these agencies" is a phrase that means one thing on television and a different thing on an earnings call. Every dollar Congress appropriates for detention is a dollar that flows to whoever owns the beds — and in Tennessee, that is overwhelmingly CoreCivic.

We should be clear about what we can and cannot prove. There's no evidence anyone told Van Epps what to say. There doesn't have to be. The company that profits from detention funded the campaign of a member who was placed on the committee that oversees detention, and that member became one of the most vocal people in Congress on the subject within four months of arriving. That is how the arrangement works, and it works without anyone ever having to say the quiet part.

The prison that's about to become his problem

Here's the part that makes this local.

CoreCivic runs four prisons under contract with the state of Tennessee, plus a fifth in West Tennessee now contracted to ICE. One of those state-contracted prisons, in Trousdale County, has been under federal civil rights investigation since 2024. The Justice Department opened it after audits flagged dangerous understaffing and safety problems, to examine whether people held there were being protected from physical violence and sexual abuse. The investigation is still open.

Under Tennessee's new congressional map, Trousdale County is in the 7th District — the district Van Epps is running in this November.

So the freshman funded by CoreCivic's outgoing CEO, its incoming CEO, and its PAC is about to represent the county where CoreCivic's most troubled Tennessee prison sits, while serving on the committee that decides how much federal money flows to the company's detention business.

Tim Leeper, whose son died of an overdose in a CoreCivic-run prison in Tennessee, has spent years asking state lawmakers for accountability legislation and watching company lobbyists kill it. He told the Tennessee Lookout what he thinks the pattern is:

"If he becomes our next senator by appointment, it will just be a continuation of the favor network. He and CoreCivic donate a lot to politicians."

Leeper was talking about Hininger, who is now openly interested in a U.S. Senate seat. But the description fits the whole arrangement.

Why we should care

Detention is not free, and it is not neutral. Every bed is a public bill, and right now that bill is being paid to a company whose executives fund the people who vote on it.

We already documented that Van Epps arrived in Congress on more than $2.4 million in outside spending — more than his own campaign raised. This is the same story at a smaller scale and closer to home: a Tennessee company with a direct financial stake in federal policy, a Tennessee congressman with a vote on that policy, and money moving from one to the other before he had cast a single vote.

The question we should be asking our representative isn't whether ICE officers deserve to be paid. It's why the company that gets rich from the detention buildup found him quite so early.

We deserve better.

Sources

Vanessa Romo, "Private prisons announce $1.4 billion in revenue as immigration detentions climb," NPR, August 8, 2026.
Adam Friedman, "Former CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger floats replacing Blackburn in U.S. Senate," Tennessee Lookout, June 23, 2026.
Contribution dates and amounts are from Federal Election Commission itemized receipts for the 2026 cycle. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Ron Estes Flew to El Salvador During the Abrego Garcia Fight. He Has Never Said a Word About It.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:55:56 +0000

In April 2025, the biggest fight in American law was over one man.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father, had been deported to CECOT — El Salvador's mega-prison — without a hearing. The government admitted the deportation was an error. On April 10, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the administration had to facilitate his return. The administration didn't.

That was the week Ron Estes went to El Salvador.

The photo

Estes never announced the trip. What put him there was a picture posted by the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador on Wednesday, April 16, 2025, showing a congressional delegation led by Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri.

Standing in that lineup: Estes, along with Reps. Riley Moore of West Virginia, Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Carol Miller of West Virginia and Claudia Tenney of New York.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas broke the story on April 17. Smith and Moore had already posted their own photographs from inside CECOT — pictures of themselves in front of caged prisoners. Kabas contacted every office on the list. Only Hern's answered, and only to say it "cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman's location for security purposes."

Estes's office said nothing at all.

Asked directly. Answered nothing.

Kansas Reflector opinion editor Clay Wirestone emailed Estes spokesman Roman Rodriguez with two straightforward questions: did the congressman go inside the prison, and was he concerned about Abrego Garcia's welfare?

"He did not respond."

That's the whole answer, printed in the column on April 21, 2025. Axios, compiling its own list of lawmakers who had visited CECOT, got no answer from Estes's office either.

The Reflector later added an update: Estes did tour the prison, based on a photo shared on Jason Smith's Facebook account.

So a sitting member of Congress went inside a foreign prison holding people his own government had shipped there without hearings, and then declined to tell his constituents whether he'd been in the building.

More than a year later, his own press release archive still contains no statement about the trip. No readout, no photo, no paragraph explaining what he saw or why he went.

What CECOT is

This matters because of where he was standing.

Amnesty International's Americas director, Ana Piquer, described El Salvador's mass detention system as "a systematic state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty," with more than 85,000 people held "without sufficient admissible evidence."

Human Rights Watch described conditions in CECOT and other Salvadoran prisons as including "cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food." People held there are denied contact with relatives and lawyers, appear before courts only in mass online hearings, and — in Human Rights Watch's account — the government has said they "will never leave."

Both of those assessments are quoted in the Kansas Reflector's column. Neither is disputed by the Salvadoran government, which built CECOT precisely as a place people don't come out of.

The part that isn't about El Salvador

Estes is a member of the legislative branch. When the executive branch defies a unanimous Supreme Court order, checking it is not optional — it is the job.

He had a rare kind of leverage that week. He was on the ground, in the country, with the embassy arranging his schedule. Sen. Chris Van Hollen showed what was possible: he flew down and met with Abrego Garcia on April 17, the day after the embassy photo.

Estes could have asked to see him. He could have asked the Salvadoran government a single question about a man the United States government conceded it sent there by mistake. He could have come home and told Kansans what he found.

Instead, as Wirestone put it, "he posed for the picture and made no public comment."

It fits the record

None of this is a departure for Estes. He has been backing the enforcement apparatus for years. In 2018, sitting on the Homeland Security Committee, he voted for a resolution supporting ICE and said: "Amidst dangerous and extreme calls to abolish ICE, I voted to show our support for ICE and our men and women in law enforcement."

The trip was consistent with all of that. What's harder to defend is the silence. If Estes believed the trip was right, the ordinary move was to say so — the way Smith and Moore did, loudly, with photographs. Kevin Hern went a step further and told Newsmax the men held there "will never see the light of day" — a statement he at least had to own.

Estes did the trip and skipped the explanation.

The people of Kansas's 4th District are entitled to know what their congressman did on an official trip taken in their name. Estes has spent more than a year not telling them.

Source

Clay Wirestone's April 21, 2025 column for Kansas Reflector: Did Kansas Rep. Ron Estes visit notorious torture prison? We know he was in El Salvador last week.

The Supreme Court Said Kids Born Here Are Citizens, 6–3. Jeff Crank Is "Very Disappointed."

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:45:54 +0000

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Trump v. Barbara and struck down the executive order that would have ended birthright citizenship.

The vote was 6–3. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion. Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined it. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed the order was invalid, though on statutory rather than constitutional grounds.

Roberts's holding, about children born in this country to parents here unlawfully or temporarily, was one sentence long:

"Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth."

He noted the precedent had been settled since 1898, when United States v. Wong Kim Ark established that "the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States."

Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented.

Jeff Crank went on Newsmax and said he was disappointed.

What He Said

Crank's comment, as reported by the Colorado Times Recorder:

"[I'm] very disappointed in the Supreme Court's decision on birthright citizenship. I do think we live in an era where people are coming to the United States to take advantage of our kindness and our goodness. We do need to address this."

He added that he would be meeting with House leadership in the following week to figure out what the House could do about it.

The paper asked his office whether that meeting had actually been scheduled. His office didn't respond.

What "Address This" Would Actually Require

Here is the part that doesn't fit in a cable hit.

The Court did not say the executive order was poorly drafted, or that the President used the wrong procedure, or that a statute was missing. It said the order cannot be squared with the Fourteenth Amendment — the text that says anyone "born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" is a citizen.

That means Congress can't fix it by passing a bill. Six justices just held that the Constitution itself decides this question. Changing it takes a constitutional amendment: two-thirds of the House, two-thirds of the Senate, and ratification by 38 states.

There is no version of "meeting with House leadership" that gets around a 6–3 constitutional holding by the Roberts Court.

There is a bill that pretends otherwise. The Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025 (H.R. 569) was introduced in January 2025 and has 93 cosponsors. Crank isn't one of them. He has been in Congress since January 2025 and hasn't signed it in nineteen months — including in the weeks since he said "we do need to address this."

So the record is: a statement of disappointment on television, a promised meeting his office wouldn't confirm, and no name on the one bill in the House that claims to do the thing.

Who This Is Actually About

Birthright citizenship is not primarily a rule about immigrants. It's a rule about how the United States proves anyone is a citizen.

Right now, if you were born here, your birth certificate is the whole answer. That's it. That's the system. It works for everybody — the fifth-generation rancher in El Paso County and the baby born down the hall from him last year — because the question the government asks is simply where were you born.

Take that away, and the question becomes what was your mother's immigration status on the day you were born — a fact most Americans have never had to document and many couldn't produce on demand. Every parent in the country would need paperwork proving their own status to establish their child's. Hospitals would be sorting newborns into categories.

The Fourteenth Amendment was written after the Civil War precisely to take that discretion away from politicians — so citizenship couldn't be handed out or withheld based on who your parents were. That's the design. It's not a loophole somebody found.

He Keeps Landing on the Same Side of Due Process

This is the second time in Crank's short congressional career that he's ended up arguing against a court that told the executive branch it had gone too far.

In April 2025, three weeks after the administration flew 238 people to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without hearings, Crank was the lead sponsor of a House resolution endorsing the removals and affirming the President's authority to carry them out. Two federal courts later ruled otherwise — one finding the men had been removed unlawfully, without notice or a chance to be heard.

Both times, a court applied a constitutional limit to what a president could do to people. Both times, Crank's public position was that the President should have won.

That's a pattern, and it's worth naming for what it is: a member of the branch that is supposed to check executive power, using his platform to argue that the checks keep getting in the way.

Sources

Colorado Times Recorder, "Colorado Congressman 'Very Disappointed' Supreme Court Upheld Birthright Citizenship" (July 7, 2026), and the Supreme Court's opinion in Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (June 30, 2026).

The Day After 60 Minutes Reported 75% of the Men Sent to El Salvador Had No Criminal Record, Jeff Crank Wrote a Resolution Congratulating Trump for Sending Them

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:40:34 +0000

Most members of Congress, when a policy blows up, go quiet. Jeff Crank went the other way. He wrote a resolution.

On April 7, 2025, Crank introduced H. Res. 295, "Expressing Support for the President's Actions to Safeguard National Security and Eliminate Threats from Foreign Terrorist Organizations." He was the lead sponsor. Tom Tiffany, Lauren Boebert, Michael Guest, and Sheri Biggs signed on with him.

To understand what that resolution was, you have to know what had happened in the three weeks before he wrote it — and what had been reported the day before.

What Happened on March 15, 2025

On March 15, 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — a wartime law — and put people on planes.

238 migrants were flown to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.

They did not get hearings first.

What CBS Found on April 6

Three weeks later, CBS News obtained the internal government list of who was on those planes and cross-checked it against domestic and international court filings, news reports, and arrest records.

The 60 Minutes report aired April 6, 2025. Its central finding:

"But we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans — 179 men — now sitting in prison."

Of the roughly 22% who did have records, CBS reported, "the vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing." About a dozen faced accusations of murder, rape, assault, or kidnapping.

About a dozen, out of 238.

By then, the administration had also already admitted, in a court filing on March 31, that it had deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador through what it called an "administrative error." An immigration judge had granted him protection from removal to El Salvador in October 2019; he kept that status through yearly ICE check-ins and had never been charged with a crime. ICE sent him anyway, and he ended up in CECOT.

That is where things stood on the evening of Sunday, April 6, 2025.

What Crank Wrote on April 7

The next day, Crank introduced his resolution. Its text recites the flights approvingly — "on March 16, 2025, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele received these two flights and immediately transferred the SDGTs into El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) for detention" — and then resolves that the House:

"(1) supports the President's Action to remove foreign terrorists under the Alien Enemies Act… (2) affirms that, as Commander in Chief, the President has executive authority to detain, deport, or restrict non-citizens from a Foreign Terrorist Organization; and (3) endorses the complete elimination of these organizations from the United States…"

There is no hedge anywhere in it. No line about making sure the right people were on the planes. No mention of Abrego Garcia. No acknowledgment that the government's own list, as reviewed by CBS the previous night, showed three out of four of these men with nothing on their record.

The resolution simply describes every person on those flights as a foreign terrorist and asks the House to say so too.

Then a Federal Court Ruled

On June 4, 2025, Chief Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled on the removals Crank's resolution had endorsed two months earlier.

He found that the more than 130 men were "unlawfully removed to CECOT before they had received constitutionally adequate notice" of the reason for their removal, and without "any meaningful opportunity to actually seek habeas relief." He ordered the administration to give them access to habeas corpus and to propose a process for it within a week.

On September 2, 2025, a Fifth Circuit panel went further. In a 2–1 ruling, it blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act for these deportations, concluding that "the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred." A country encouraging people to migrate, the majority wrote, "is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organised force."

Crank's resolution asserted the President had the authority. Two federal courts looked at it and said the opposite.

The Part Congress Was Supposed to Play

Here's what makes this more than a bad take on immigration.

The Alien Enemies Act is a wartime statute. It was written in 1798 for use against nationals of a country the United States is at war with, or that has launched an invasion or predatory incursion. Congress declares war. Congress wrote that law and set its limits.

When a president stretches a wartime power to cover peacetime immigration enforcement, the constitutional check is supposed to come from Congress — the branch that owns the war power in the first place.

Crank's response, as a member of that branch, was to write a resolution affirming that the President had the authority anyway.

That's not oversight. It's a permission slip. And he wrote it as a freshman, in his first four months in office, about a program whose own paperwork had been publicly discredited the day before.

Due Process Isn't a Technicality

The thing Boasberg found missing — notice, and a chance to be heard — is the entire machinery that separates "we deported a gang member" from "we deported a man with a tattoo."

That machinery is what caught Abrego Garcia's protected status in 2019. Skipping it is what sent him to CECOT in 2025.

Nobody has to sympathize with Tren de Aragua to see the problem. A hearing is how you find out who somebody actually is. When 179 of 238 men have no findable criminal record, the hearing wasn't a formality that got skipped — it was the only step that would have caught the error, and it got skipped on purpose.

Crank represents Colorado Springs, a military town. Every service member in his district took an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Due process is in that document. Twice.

He Doesn't Take These Questions in Person

If you live in Colorado's 5th District and want to ask Crank about H. Res. 295, good luck.

In March 2025 — the same month as the flights — Crank moved his first town hall online rather than face constituents in a room, and said of the people asking for an in-person event: "Why do they want to have an in-person town hall meeting? So they can stand there and wave a cane in my face like Al Green did last night and steal the show?"

Later that month, Colorado Springs residents held a town hall without him and put a cardboard cutout of Crank on the stage in his place.

The cutout can't answer for the resolution either. But at least it never signed one.

Sources

CBS News / 60 Minutes, "U.S. sent 238 migrants to Salvadoran mega-prison; documents indicate most have no apparent criminal records" (April 6, 2025), and the text of H. Res. 295 (April 7, 2025). Photo: Getty Images via CBS News.

David Kustoff Wants Memphis Occupied Forever

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:15:48 +0000

On October 16, 2025, David Kustoff spent a day riding along with President Trump's Memphis Safe Task Force. Then he called Fox News and said he wanted it to never end.

"Because of the local law enforcement numbers being down, it makes sense to have a stronger federal law enforcement presence," Kustoff told Fox News Digital. He said he would work with state officials and the Trump administration "to make sure that, on a permanent basis, we have extra federal law enforcement once this task force sees its completion."

He went further. He said Memphis should be the model for everybody else.

"This is a blueprint, what is being done in Memphis, for other big cities across the country. And I would think that any mayor and any governor who has a problem with crime in their communities would welcome such an effort."

Ten months later, NPR went and looked at what the blueprint actually built. It is not what Kustoff sold.

The task force was announced as an anti-crime operation. It became an immigration dragnet.

Trump authorized the Memphis Safe Task Force on September 15, 2025. He called it a "replica" of the operation in Washington, D.C., and said it would focus on "dangerous career criminals." Immigration enforcement was never mentioned as a goal — not by federal officials, not by local ones.

That is not how it went. NPR reviewed arrest data and talked to lawyers, immigrants and community members across ten months of the operation, and found something different: the flood of federal agents into Memphis produced widespread immigration arrests, a majority of them of people with no criminal convictions, according to a data analysis by the Institute for Public Service Reporting.

The first months of the task force brought hundreds of immigration arrests — a sixfold jump over the months before it. And most of the arrests the task force made overall, immigration or otherwise, were for nonviolent offenses, according to the city's own data.

The way they were made matters. Most of the operation ran on traffic stops.

"That's been the main way that families have been separated," Maria Oceja, co-founder of the local rapid-response network Vecindarios 901, told NPR. In the first months, she said, law enforcement was "pulling people over left and right." Her group's hotline got so many calls that four people had to answer it at once, all night, for months.

Hunter Demster, a Memphis resident who films task force activity, told NPR the stops were concentrated in the city's two main Hispanic neighborhoods. "It was very evident that this was an immigration operation at its core," he said. "This isn't necessarily about finding the worst of the worst or fixing crime. It's about targeting Black and brown folk."

What it did to Kustoff's own city

Kustoff told Fox News that people in Memphis "do appreciate the presence of the law enforcement and the National Guard," and that agents told him strangers were walking up to thank them and hug them. "That's the Memphis way, that's the Southern way, that's the Tennessee way," he said.

Here is the other Memphis way, as described by people who live there:

"There was a spike of fear and panic," said Mauricio Calvo, who runs Latino Memphis. "Kids were not going to school, people were not showing up to work. We were getting calls from medical providers saying people were not coming in."
Volunteers set up food pantries in their garages to deliver groceries to families too afraid to go out.
One woman's group started a Facebook channel just to tell people which routes were safest to drive.

And there is Yasser Lopez. He was 18, a junior at Memphis Business Academy, brought to the United States from Nicaragua as a child, with no criminal convictions. In February he was riding as a passenger in a car on the way to a soccer game. Memphis police stopped the car. Immigration agents followed. He was held without bond for 63 days.

His classmates walked out of school over it. A federal judge eventually ordered him released, finding his arrest and detention had violated his due process rights.

"I do not want children pulled from cars and out of schools," Ronnie Davis, a barber in the Frayser neighborhood, told NPR. Davis says he feels safer with the extra law enforcement around. He also said this: "But had I been Hispanic, I'd be terrified. If I was Haitian, I'd be terrified."

The crime emergency was already ending on its own

Kustoff's whole case for a permanent federal presence rests on an emergency. He told Fox News the crime rate in Memphis "really exacerbated" under Biden.

Crime in Memphis has been falling since 2023, when it hit a near-record high. By the time Trump launched the task force in the fall of 2025, crime in the city was at a 25-year low. Even the Fox News story carrying Kustoff's quotes noted that the Memphis Police Department had reported a significant drop over the first eight months of 2025 — before any of this started.

Crime has kept going down since. Trump flew to Memphis in March 2026 and declared it "fixed." What nobody has shown is that the troops are the reason for a decline that started two years before they arrived. When NPR asked the White House about the immigration side of the task forces, a spokesperson replied that they had "yielded tremendous results" — and, NPR noted, listed those results without providing evidence.

The task force does not have an end date.

Nobody in Memphis got a vote on this

The one thing that made Memphis different from Chicago or Minneapolis is that the state government was on board. Gov. Bill Lee sent in hundreds of Tennessee National Guard troops in October 2025 at Trump's request — not at the request of anyone in Memphis.

Seven state and local Democratic officials, led by Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris, sued to stop it. In November a Davidson County judge temporarily blocked the deployment, ruling the plaintiffs were likely to prove Lee had violated the Tennessee Military Code.

Chancellor Patricia Head Moskal wrote that "the power committed to the Governor as commander-in-chief of the Army and the Militia is not unfettered." She noted that Lee never issued an official order — he put out a press release after Trump signed a memo — and that the Tennessee legislature never voted to send the Guard to Memphis, which state law requires. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had already sent Lee a letter saying the Guard would be funded to stay through September 2026.

The troops stayed anyway. In April 2026 the Tennessee Court of Appeals ruled for the governor — but not because the deployment was lawful. The panel never reached that question. It held that the elected officials who sued couldn't prove they'd been harmed, so they had no standing to ask.

Memphis Mayor Paul Young, a Democrat, said he was not "supportive" of the immigration arrests but couldn't do anything about them. "There's no mayor in America that can control the immigration aspects of this," he said.

That is the actual blueprint Kustoff is recommending to every other city in America: the president decides, the governor signs off, the city it happens to gets no say, and the courts find nobody has standing to object.

He wants it permanent. He won't hold a town hall.

Kustoff was born in Memphis and told Fox News he has lived in the area his entire life. He is asking for a permanent armed federal presence there. He is not asking the people who live there what they think.

In late March 2025, Tennessee Lookout columnist Mark Harmon noted that Kustoff's scheduled event at Our Lady of Perpetual Help was cancelled over what were described as security concerns — after the Germantown Democratic Club planned a sign-waving protest outside. Steve Cohen, the Democrat next door in the 9th District, held a town hall that drew 750 people.

This is a pattern with this crowd, not a one-off. When federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Arizona's Eli Crane's response was to demand the military be sent in. And the surveillance machinery pointed at people who criticize ICE online is something Congress paid for — Kustoff included.

Kustoff got his day riding along. He got the photo op, the Fox News hit, and the numbers the task force handed him — 45 missing children recovered, more than 900 arrests. What he did not get, and did not go looking for, was the part NPR found: the neighborhoods that emptied out, the kids who stopped going to school, the 18-year-old held for 63 days over a ride to a soccer game.

He wants that permanent.

Source

In Memphis, an 'anti-crime' task force quietly turned into an ICE crackdown — Kat Lonsdorf, NPR, July 27, 2026. Photo: National Guard members on Beale Street, July 17, 2026 (George Walker IV/AP).

Brian Babin Wrote the Bill to End Birthright Citizenship. In 2021 He Said Democrats Wanted a "Third World Electorate."

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:16:01 +0000

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that babies born in the United States to parents here illegally or temporarily are not citizens.

The next day, Brian Babin filed a bill to put it in federal law.

Babin is the Republican congressman for Texas's 36th District, which covers part of southeast Houston and stretches east toward Louisiana. He has held the seat since 2015. He is the lead sponsor of the Birthright Citizenship Act of 2025, H.R. 569, filed January 21, 2025 with 35 original cosponsors. It now has 93.

Seventeen months later the Supreme Court threw Trump's order out. Babin's bill is still alive, and it is still the Republican Study Committee's official position.

What his bill actually does

The 14th Amendment says citizenship belongs to anyone "born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Babin's bill doesn't repeal that clause — it redefines the six words in the middle.

Under the text of H.R. 569, a baby born on American soil is only "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States if at least one parent is:

a U.S. citizen or national;
a lawful permanent resident living in the United States; or
someone with lawful immigration status on active duty in the armed forces.

Read that list again for what isn't on it.

A baby born in Houston to two parents on H-1B work visas — engineers at a refinery, doctors at the Texas Medical Center — is not a citizen under this bill. Neither is a baby born to parents on student visas. Neither is a baby born to a family that entered legally and is waiting years for an asylum hearing. Neither is a baby born to a green-card applicant whose paperwork hasn't cleared.

Lawful presence isn't enough. You need permanent residence, citizenship, or a uniform.

Babin's own press office describes it as closing "a dangerous loophole that encourages illegal immigration." But the bill doesn't stop at illegal immigration. It writes a new, narrower class of Americans, and it does it by statute rather than by amendment.

The Supreme Court already answered the question

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court struck Trump's executive order down in Trump v. Barbara. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, SCOTUSblog reported, and he was direct about it. Children "born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States," Roberts wrote, "satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause." His conclusion:

"Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth."

Roberts walked through the history. The rule came over from English common law, was adopted after the Revolution, and in 1868 the framers of the 14th Amendment wrote it into the Constitution specifically to repudiate Dred Scott — the 1857 decision holding that a Black man descended from enslaved people was not and could not be a citizen. The amendment's purpose, Roberts wrote, was to "permanently enshrine" birthright citizenship.

The Court also rejected the argument that a parent's permanent residence — "domicile" — is required, finding "scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view."

Domicile is the exact thing Babin's bill requires.

If the Citizenship Clause means what the Court's majority said it means, a statute cannot change it. That takes a constitutional amendment: two-thirds of both chambers and three-quarters of the states. Speaker Mike Johnson conceded as much the day of the ruling: "I'm sure the conclusion from this opinion is going to be that you've got to amend the Constitution to fix that."

Babin's bill is not a constitutional amendment. It's a statute. It was written to do by majority vote a thing the Supreme Court has now said requires changing the Constitution.

Where this comes from

To understand why Babin wrote this bill, it helps to hear how he talks about immigration when he isn't drafting legislation.

On September 23, 2021, Babin went on Newsmax to discuss migrants — many of them Haitian — gathered at the border in Del Rio, Texas. Mediaite transcribed what he said:

"We know what the Democrats are up to here. They want open borders. This is exactly their strategy. They want to replace the American electorate with Third World electorate that will be on welfare and public assistance."

He went on to say Democrats want to put migrants "on a path to citizenship and amnesty, and franchise them with the vote, and they will have a permanent majority."

That is the Great Replacement. It's a conspiracy theory, originally French and explicitly ethno-nationalist, holding that elites are deliberately importing non-white people to dilute the political power of white citizens. The Anti-Defamation League's explainer traces its path from the European far right into American politics. Its language has turned up in the manifestos of mass shooters.

The timing is not incidental. Babin made his remarks the day after Tucker Carlson aired a Fox News segment about the same Biden clip Babin referenced — a segment in which Carlson used the phrase "the great replacement" himself.

The two things fit together

A congressman who believes immigrants are being brought in to replace the electorate will naturally write a bill that stops their children from becoming voters.

That's what H.R. 569 does. Not deportation, not border security, not visa limits — it reaches the baby, and it reaches forward across that child's entire life. Someone born in Houston who grows up there, goes to school there, works there and pays taxes there would never be able to vote there.

The bill exempts children born before enactment, so it doesn't take citizenship from anyone who already has it. It just closes the door behind them.

It's not going away

Babin's bill isn't a message bill sitting in a drawer. In January 2026, he announced that the Birthright Citizenship Act had been included in the Republican Study Committee's Fiscal Year 2026 budget — the budget blueprint of the largest conservative caucus in the House. His statement called it "a major step forward."

And after the Supreme Court ruling, House Republicans didn't drop it. They started shopping for other routes: a constitutional amendment from the Speaker, a surrogacy bill from Sen. Rick Scott, and Babin's statute still on the table.

We've written about the reaction across the party. In Iowa, Ashley Hinson said the Supreme Court "got it wrong" and backs doing it by executive order anyway. In Tennessee, Andy Ogles introduced his own bill to gut birthright citizenship and called the babies "anchors". In Louisiana, Speaker Mike Johnson said he was "disappointed" and that Congress will "deal with it".

Babin is the one who wrote the bill they're all pointing at.

What it means in the 36th District

Texas's 36th runs from southeast Houston out through the refinery towns along the Gulf and into the piney woods toward Louisiana. Houston is a port city with a large immigrant workforce, and some of Babin's constituents are families where the parents arrived on a visa and the children were born in a Houston hospital.

Under the bill their congressman wrote, those children would be foreign nationals in the only country they have ever lived in — able to be here, work here, and pay taxes here, but never able to vote here.

Babin has been in Congress for 11 years. He chairs the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. He is a dentist by training and a deacon in his church. And the bill with his name on it, the one that made it into the Republican Study Committee's budget, is one the Supreme Court has effectively already told him he cannot pass.

Source

"Republicans float new ideas to restrict birthright citizenship after ruling" by Susan Carpenter, Spectrum News, June 30, 2026. Bill text and cosponsor counts from congress.gov. Babin's 2021 remarks as transcribed by Mediaite. Photo: official congressional portrait.

Tom McClintock Won't Meet His Own Constituents. He's Demanding Six Years of Records From Philadelphia's Sheriff.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:16:00 +0000

Tom McClintock chairs the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement. It is one of the most powerful immigration posts in Congress, and he has spent 2026 using it the same way over and over: sending letters to city and county officials across the country demanding their records.

Philadelphia. Boston. New York City. Arlington County, Virginia. California.

None of them are in his district. His district is in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Central Valley.

What the Philadelphia letters asked for

On May 6, 2026, McClintock and Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan sent letters to three Philadelphia officials: District Attorney Larry Krasner, Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel and Sheriff Rochelle Bilal.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported what they wanted: up to six years of immigration communications between those agencies and federal immigration officials, due back by May 18 — twelve days later.

That part is at least about government. This part isn't.

From the sheriff specifically, the committee also demanded her correspondence with a list of named private organizations:

No ICE Philly
Juntos
CAIR Philadelphia
Asian Americans United
the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition
New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia

Read that list again. These are immigrant-rights groups, a civil-rights organization, an Asian American community group and a faith-based coalition. A congressional committee asked an elected sheriff to hand over everything she has ever written to them.

The committee's stated justification, in its own words: "The shielding of criminal aliens from immigration enforcement in Philadelphia undermines public safety and thwarts the efficient enforcement of federal law."

Bilal's office declined to comment. Krasner, Bethel and the mayor's office could not immediately be reached.

The same letter, city after city

Two days earlier, on May 4, McClintock and Jordan sent the same kind of demand to Arlington County, Virginia — to Commonwealth's Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Police Chief Charles Penn and Sheriff Jose Quiroz.

On May 27, they gave Boston officials two weeks. The Washington Times reported that Jordan and McClintock demanded Police Commissioner Michael Cox turn over, by June 10, all Boston Police Department communications touching on immigration from January 2022 forward — plus detainer counts, criminal histories, and his communications with the district attorney, the sheriff and the mayor's office. They called the city's approach "pro-crime sanctuary policies."

To be fair to the letters, they aren't argument-free. The Boston letter cites three cases from the previous two years in which people released by the Suffolk County sheriff were later arrested by ICE and charged with serious crimes against children. That is a real thing to raise. It does not require four years of every email a police department wrote about immigration.

They have also gone after New York City officials and, with Rep. Darrell Issa, California officials.

The pattern is the point. This is not oversight of a federal agency, which is what a congressional committee is built for. It is a standing federal investigation into the internal communications of local prosecutors, police chiefs and sheriffs — the same local law enforcement officials the party running the committee spends most of its time promising to back.

It's a fight he's been building toward

McClintock isn't just sending letters. He wrote the Shut Down Sanctuary Policies Act (H.R. 7640), which cleared his committee in March 2026. By his own description, it pre-empts sanctuary jurisdictions from interfering with immigration enforcement and redirects federal law enforcement funding away from them and toward jurisdictions that cooperate with ICE.

So: a bill to defund them, and a document campaign to investigate them.

There is a broader version of this move going on right now. Claudia Tenney's bill to let one federal official strip any nonprofit's tax-exempt status — without showing it the evidence — was quietly reintroduced in December 2025. Greg Abbott declared Texas's largest Muslim civil-rights group a terrorist organization on reasoning that Texas Monthly traced to an anti-Muslim think tank's report. The common thread is government power pointed at the organizations that represent immigrants and Muslims, and at the local officials who work with them.

McClintock's letters put a congressional subpoena power's worth of pressure behind the same idea, without a subpoena.

Meanwhile, in his district

Here is the contrast that ought to bother the people who elected him.

McClintock has time to write to a sheriff in Philadelphia about her emails. He did not have time for his own constituents.

When people in his district organized their own town hall in Modesto in March 2025, nearly 200 of them showed up and he declined the invitations. They put their questions to a cardboard cutout of him instead. His office dismissed the whole event as "a nationally coordinated campaign by a group called Indivisible."

He has been in Congress since 2009. In that time the things his constituents have actually asked him about — 56% of adult Medi-Cal enrollees in his district at risk of losing coverage under the work requirements in the budget bill he voted for, the Caldor Fire that burned 221,835 acres across three counties — have not produced this kind of energy.

Six years of records from a sheriff 2,700 miles away did.

Source

House Judiciary committee criticizes Philly law enforcement over sanctuary policies, demands immigration records and correspondence — Jeff Gammage and Sam Janesch, The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 6, 2026. Committee letters and dates from judiciary.house.gov and the Washington Times.