Stephen Miller Demanded ICE Target Home Depots
INSIDE: Kristi Noem ... Pete Hegseth ... RFK Jr.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Indiscriminate Numbers Games
President Trump’s dream of mass deportations has always suffered from logistical and practical obstacles that make the entire exercise part cruelty, part performance, and part salve of his fragile ego.
It falls to White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to keep all the plates spinning, a role he happily embraces, but which comes with the inherent challenge of putting the “mass” in mass deportations.
And so it was that ICE officials found themselves being berated by Miller in late May that their arrest numbers weren’t high enough and the rhetorical focus on the worst of the worst needed to shift on the ground to focus on all undocumented immigrants, the WSJ reports:
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
That kind of indiscriminate enforcement action has had the effect of sweeping up documented and undocumented, citizen and noncitizen, workers and criminals in a Kafkaesque crackdown that was sure to enflame tensions in immigrant and minority communities that were hardest hit.
The WSJ report on the indiscriminate and aggressive nature of the ICE sweeps is worth your time. No one anecdote captures the entire picture, but repeated over and over across the country, a pattern emerges – and the grievances associated with it.
It’s not hard to draw a straight line from reckless roundups to civil unrest to military action from Trump.
In other developments:
In federal court in San Francisco, California sued Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth over the deployment of the National Guard over state objections.
Some 2,000 guardsman and 500-700 marines have been deployed to Los Angeles, and the Pentagon said Monday night that another 2,000 National Guard troops were being mobilized.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said violent Los Angeles protesters will face federal charges. At least nine have been charged so far.
What’s The End Game Here?
With unclear rules of engagement for the military and a vague, open-ended mission, it’s not clear what the path to deescalation might be – or if that’s even the plan.
As Politico reports about Trump’s troop deployment:
Trump’s stated rationale, legal scholars say, appears to be a flimsy and even contrived basis for such a rare and dramatic step. The real purpose, they worry, may be to amass more power over blue states that have resisted Trump’s deportation agenda. And the effect, whether intentional or not, may be to inflame the tension in L.A., potentially leading to a vicious cycle in which Trump calls up even more troops or broadens their mission.
The Brennan Center’s Liza Goitein cut through some of the legalese with a good thread that makes this important point: “But it would be a mistake to focus too much on which statutory power is being used here. What matters it that Trump is federalizing the Guard for the purpose of policing Americans’ protest activity. That’s dangerous for both public safety and democracy.”
For The Record
Pete Hegseth Watch
While overseeing a historic deployment of U.S. troops on American streets, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is, well, still Pete Hegseth:
The White House is struggling to find qualified people to fill roles as senior advisers to Pete Hegseth because they either don’t want to work for him or don’t fit the bill politically, NBC News reports.
The Pentagon inspector general looking into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal group chats is focused on whether the details of a military operation he shared were classified and if anyone ordered texts to be deleted, the WSJ reports.
The Pentagon was allegedly “duped” by a DOGE staffer who falsely claimed to know of warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA) that had identified DoD leakers, The Guardian reports. The DOGE staffer denies the allegation.
Anti-Immigration Cases: Rule Of Law Update
Alien Enemies Act: U.S. District Judge David Briones of El Paso ruled on the substance that President Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to target the Tren de Aragua gang was unlawful.
CECOT detainees: The Trump administration is appealing U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s ruling last week that it violated the due process rights of Venezuelan nationals when it deported them to a prison in El Salvador without notice or hearing.
South Sudan: The detainees originally slated to be deported to South Sudan remain at a military base in Djibouti, the Trump administration told a court yesterday, and have been given attorney contact info and will be given access to telephones.
The Corruption: DOJ Edition
The White House dismantling of the crime-fighting capabilities of the Justice Department in the white collar realm is going to end up being defining issue of this decade, with a cascading series of consequences ranging from simply more unbridled public corruption to the dire risk of a culture of corruption developing and implanting itself in American life. (I’ll concede that there’s a good argument such a culture already exists and produced two Trump presidencies.) Here’s the latest:
Reuters goes deep on the Trump White House’s crippling of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section: dismantling its staff, bypassing it on charging decisions, and stripping its authority to file new cases.
The Trump DOJ will only pursue a parred down range of foreign-bribery cases, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced. This come after a Trump executive order in February essentially froze cases under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
IMPORTANT: Déjà Vu All Over Again
The Trump White House is pushing hard for a rare and super controversial midterm redistricting in Texas to try to redraw the congressional map and give it a few more GOP seats so that it can hold on to the House majority.
In a sign of how serious the move is, the Texas House GOP delegation held an emergency meeting on the Hill last evening, the NYT reports. There’s a natural tension in such a scheme because drawing a map more favorable to the GOP overall means narrowing the partisan margins in the districts of GOP incumbents, which makes them more vulnerable.
You’ll recall that former Rep. Tom Delay (R-TX) muscled through a hugely controversial midterm redistricting in Texas in 2003 that shaped the national political landscape for years.
RFK Jr. Watch: Anti-Vax Edition
In an extraordinary move, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced in a WSJ op-ed that he has fired all 17 members of the committee that advises the CDC on immunizations. The decision directly contradicts a promise Kennedy made to Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the decisive vote during his confirmation hearings, when he said he would not alter the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the NYT reports.
The Last True Fascist
John Ganz on the recent passing of Michael Leeden:
Ledeen might appear like a mere callous political opportunist, a dirty trickster, and he was, but it seems to me he was also a secret idealist, holding on to a dream of a non- or even anti-Nazi fascismo vero, something he took very seriously as an ideological project as he strenuously rejected the “opera buffa” interpretation of Italian fascism.
Stephen Miller: Self-hating Jew goes full fascist. Marvelous, what could possibly go wrong with this perfect fit for Agent Orange?
Good post.