‘Phase one’ was quality control. ‘Phase two’ needs to be quantity control.



Everyone in America has an opinion on what has gone right or wrong at the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection. To answer the Talking Heads lyric “Well, how did I get here?” would yield a thousand different answers. I have a pretty good sense of what happened. Even before President Trump returned to the White House, I argued that meeting his bold deportation goals would require very different enforcement tactics than the ones the administration chose.

That debate makes for great fodder for finger-pointing. But a better question is: Where do we go next?

The administration needs to move its attention from sanctuary cities to sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs.

To answer it, some of the nation’s leading immigration policy and legal experts, former senior and rank-and-file law enforcement officials, and advocates are coming together to devise a way forward. Details will be announced in the days to come, but the goal is straightforward: President Trump can and will meet his core campaign promise to “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Last year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported about 230,000 illegal aliens from the interior of the United States. That is a far cry from the 1 million figure some administration officials floated as a projection — and far below other totals the administration has suggested at various points. Making analysis harder, the Department of Homeland Security stopped releasing enforcement data for the first time in decades.

President Trump promised to exceed the deportation efforts of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, by the most conservative estimates, removed about one-third of the illegal population in 1954. Any way you cut the data, even using the lowest-end estimates of the total illegal population in 2025, the administration is not on pace.

One reason: In its first year, the Trump administration prioritized a particular subset of illegal aliens — criminals. People can debate whether that was the right call, but that’s what happened. Prioritizing criminals means concentrating resources on fewer targets, and it has produced high-profile standoffs in cities like Minneapolis and Los Angeles. I will refer to that 2025 effort as “worst first,” as Border Czar Tom Homan has sometimes called it — phase one.

RELATED: Federalism cannot be a shield for sanctuary defiance

Photo by Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images

We can credit the Trump administration for highlighting the issue of criminal illegal aliens, removing many, and forcing the hand of radical Democrats, some of whom have taken the absurd position of rioting in defense of rapists and murderers. They are who we thought they were.

Now phase two can begin: widening the aperture of immigration enforcement and placing quantity above the perceived “quality” of deportations. The goal was mass deportations, not the “best” deportations. In short, the public wants commas in the numbers.

The Trump administration can, at minimum, quadruple last year’s totals. It can do it quickly if it shifts priorities — especially by refocusing on worksite enforcement. The administration needs to move its attention from sanctuary cities to sanctuary farms, factories, and industrial hubs.

Deportation is a contact sport — not only between ICE and illegal aliens, but between the Trump administration and special interests that value cheap labor, politicians who need cheap talking points, and activist judges and violent mobs. Those forces can be overcome, and in the coming weeks and months, we will show how.

The goal is to help President Trump deliver on what he promised — and to surpass President Eisenhower’s historic efforts. To do that, President Trump needs support from the base and the right, not a constant drumbeat of consultants, pollsters, and “moderate” Republicans trying to undermine him. Those forces are coming together, and I believe the result will be less drama and more commas.

Americans deserve a road map to move from phase one into a more successful phase two.

A Nation That Won’t Enforce Immigration Laws Isn’t A Nation At All

It may be that the next few years will decide whether America remains a sovereign nation or succumbs to subversion from within.

Sad but True: Resistance Libs Are Showing MAGA Bros What Real Courage Looks Like

It's time to admit the #Resistance is winning. Donald Trump's MAGA loyalists have been outclassed by their liberal adversaries on every front. We might disagree with their politics, but that doesn't mean we can't applaud their unyielding passion and remarkable courage in the face of adversity.

The post Sad but True: Resistance Libs Are Showing MAGA Bros What Real Courage Looks Like appeared first on .

Mehdi Hasan, Joy Reid, and Jim Acosta Walk Into a Therapist’s Office

It's hard being a liberal in Washington, D.C., when a Republican is president. You're angry all the time, and you don't get invited to the fancy White House parties anymore. You end up settling for thin gruel, trudging through the cold on a Wednesday night to watch Mehdi Hasan and the #Resistance all-stars validate your grievances for three hours.

The post Mehdi Hasan, Joy Reid, and Jim Acosta Walk Into a Therapist’s Office appeared first on .

How Do You Do Fellow Kids?: NYT Acknowledges Biggest Problem With Left’s ‘Resistance’ Against Trump

'All measures of civic health are lower'

Iran’s freedom fighters put America’s No Kings clowns to shame



Liberals in the United States keep pretending to “resist” a democratically elected president they smear as an “authoritarian.” Meanwhile, real resistance fighters push back against a real authoritarian regime — in Iran.

For well-to-do white liberals, “resistance” amounts to a bumper sticker, a hashtag, a chant, and a safe protest march. No American faces arrest for opposing President Trump or his policies. Police never cracked down on thousands of No Kings demonstrators. The government never shut down the internet. No American risks execution for demanding new leadership.

Partisan voices push the false claim that Americans must choose between sending troops or doing nothing. Anyone who actually listens to Iranian dissidents knows better.

Iranian dissidents face all of that and more. Their resistance carries the cost of blood, freedom, and life.

Last weekend, I saw real resistance up close. More than 1,000 Iranian dissidents gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Free Iran Convention to plan for a future free from the mullahs’ rule. Panels featuring scholars, women, young activists, and even voices from inside Iran painted a picture of a regime on the brink.

As the regime clings to power, it leans harder on censorship, torture, and public executions to keep Iranians living in fear.

This crackdown unfolds against an economy collapsing under its own weight. More than 80% of Iranians live below the poverty line. Inflation punishes the entire country. Unemployment keeps climbing.

The harsher the repression, the more Iranians recognize the only path forward is regime change.

In 2018, 2019, and 2022, Iranians took to the streets in nationwide uprisings. Thousands died. Tens of thousands went to jail. As 2025 unfolds, the question no longer asks if another uprising comes — only when.

The West now faces its own question: Will we be ready to support the Iranian people when that moment arrives?

Here at home, partisan voices push the false claim that Americans must choose between sending troops or doing nothing. Anyone who actually listens to Iranian dissidents knows better.

A third option exists — the one championed by Maryam Rajavi and the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition that rejects both the shah’s dictatorship and the mullahs’ theocracy.

Rajavi, elected by the NCRI as president for the transitional period after the ayatollah's ouster, puts it plainly:

Neither appeasement nor war, but regime change at the hands of the Iranian people and their organized, legitimate, and just resistance. We do not seek money or weapons. We only ask that this resistance be recognized.

This resistance already lives and breathes inside Iran. The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran stands as the largest and best-organized opposition movement in the country. Resistance units operate in all 31 provinces. They have carried out thousands of attacks on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij — the regime’s main instruments of suppression.

These units organize protests, strikes, and anti-regime campaigns. Their intelligence network exposed Tehran’s clandestine nuclear program and uncovered terrorist plots funded by the regime.

RELATED: America’s addiction to Chinese money runs deeper than we care to admit

Photo Illustration by Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

The cost has been staggering. Since 1981, the regime has killed more than 100,000 PMOI/MEK members. Countless others have been imprisoned, tortured, or targeted in state-funded smear campaigns.

The idea of negotiating with the Iranian regime belongs to the realm of fantasy. No meaningful difference separates so-called hard-liners from so-called moderates. Both factions produce economic ruin at home and terrorism abroad. Young Iranians see the truth plainly.

During the Free Iran convention, Seena Saiedian — an Iranian American and law student at the University of Virginia — captured the desperation:

The landscape for the youth in Iran is bleak: hyperinflation, high unemployment, censorship, repression. Iranian youth see no hope for moderating or reforming the current regime. By every metric, life gets worse. The root cause of every challenge Iran’s youth face is the current regime.

The Iranian dictatorship will collapse. History guarantees that. The only question: Will the United States shorten the Iranian people’s suffering or extend the mullahs’ reign of terror?

If we want a secular, democratic Iran — one capable of fostering peace in the region — we must say clearly that no negotiation can salvage the current regime. No deal will reform it. No diplomatic fantasy can tame it.

We must tell the Iranian people and the brave resistance units operating inside the country that the United States stands ready to recognize their efforts and their right to chart a future for a free Iran.

The United States doesn’t need to send money, weapons, or troops. The regime is already on the brink of collapse. The Iranian people are already mobilizing. They need moral clarity from the West — not silence, appeasement, or more excuses.

Supporting freedom against tyranny is the American way. It always has been. And standing with the people of Iran honors the moral foundations that built this nation.

The Atlantic: Why, Yes, The Point Of Lawfare Is To Overturn Any Elections Republicans Win

The Atlantic reports the avalanche of leftist lawsuits are cut-and-paste operations designed to overturn election results Democrats don't like.

10 Dead People Jim Acosta Should Interview Next

Jim Acosta managed to do the impossible this week. The disgraced former CNN host got some of the most deranged liberal psychopaths (BlueSky users) to agree with Donald Trump. They seem to have finally realized that Acosta is "a major sleazebag" and "one of the worst and most dishonest reporters in journalistic history," as Trump so eloquently stated earlier this year when Acosta "quit" his job to start his own #Resistance program on Substack.

The post 10 Dead People Jim Acosta Should Interview Next appeared first on .

Sanctuary cities fail — but Karen Bass keeps pushing the lie



In yet another low point for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D), she marched into the drug-ridden chaos of MacArthur Park — press corps in tow — to join a protest last week against federal immigration enforcement. She demanded that agents leave the area immediately. The stunt accomplished nothing beyond generating a photo op and pushing the false narrative that Bass stood for her city’s “honor.”

In reality, her appearance exposed a familiar truth: Sanctuary city mayors like Bass offer no real solutions to the crises they helped create. Worse, they routinely display ignorance of how federalism actually works.

The 2024 election was a clear rebuke of sanctuary city policies and the broader anti-borders agenda that Bass represents.

The Supremacy Clause — Article VI, Clause 2 of the Constitution — makes clear that federal law overrides state and local laws when they conflict. Immigration policy, long upheld by the courts as a federal responsibility, lies squarely within Washington’s authority. In Arizona v. United States (2012), the Supreme Court reaffirmed that states and localities cannot pursue policies that obstruct federal immigration enforcement.

By declaring Los Angeles a sanctuary city and demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stand down, Bass didn’t just express a policy preference. She tried to seize power that the Constitution explicitly grants to the federal government.

This isn’t a symbolic squabble. Immigration enforcement involves national security, public safety, and international diplomacy. Local governments lack both the authority and the expertise to handle these matters on their own.

Sanctuary cities in crisis

The leftist mayor’s public campaign against ICE is especially galling considering that the agency’s presence in Los Angeles stems directly from the city’s sanctuary policies. For years, Los Angeles has limited cooperation with federal immigration authorities, refusing to honor ICE detainers and withholding information when illegal aliens are released from custody.

Bass and her predecessors created the very conditions that now require federal intervention. Far from “overstepping” in L.A., ICE is responding to a city government that harbors people who violate federal immigration law, including those with serious criminal records.

RELATED: Karen Bass says LA anti-ICE riots ‘never happened’ as the media reported them

Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The consequences of sanctuary policies have been devastating. Los Angeles, once a beacon of prosperity and opportunity, is struggling with high crime rates, strained public services, and a ballooning budget deficit.

According to the Los Angeles Police Department, violent crime in the city increased by 11.6% from 2020 to 2022, with homicides spiking to levels not seen in over a decade. The city’s homeless population, which includes a significant number of illegal aliens, has surged to more than 75,000, overwhelming shelters and defiling public spaces.

Sanctuary policies worsen the crisis by cutting off cooperation with federal immigration authorities, giving criminal elements more room to operate unchecked. The burden on public resources grows heavier by the day. Los Angeles expects a $400 million budget shortfall in 2025, yet city leaders continue pouring funds into programs for illegal aliens, including legal aid and housing. These decisions reflect an ideological agenda that leaves taxpaying citizens footing the bill for rising crime and collapsing public services.

Bass’ posture isn’t just another act of left-wing defiance. It’s a warning sign of a national policy failure. Cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York have followed the same sanctuary script, and the results are as predictable as they are destructive: higher crime, strained infrastructure, and a public rapidly losing faith in its leaders.

In New York City, for instance, the influx of immigrants has pushed the city to the brink, with Mayor Eric Adams admitting in 2023 that the crisis could “destroy” the city. New York is no outlier. It is what happens when a city abandons order for lawlessness.

Enough is enough

Americans have had enough. The 2024 presidential election was a clear rebuke of sanctuary city policies and the broader anti-borders agenda that Bass represents. The L.A. mayor’s defiance of ICE is not just a legal overreach; it is a rejection of the democratic will of the American people, who have made it clear that they want safe streets, secure borders, and accountable leaders.

Instead of confronting the crime, homelessness, and fiscal crises fueled by her city’s policies, Bass chose to cling to a failed ideology. Her call for ICE to leave is not a defense of compassion but a surrender to anarchy. Americans deserve leaders who respect the Constitution rather than cling to a discredited sanctuary city experiment.

Deep-staters threaten to use color revolution tactics against Trump admin: Report



Despite delays in mass layoffs ordered by a Clinton judge, the Trump administration has already managed some significant housecleaning at the U.S. State Department.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has, for instance, fired scores of contractors who supposedly worked abroad building up civil society and democratic practices, and shuttered the rebrand of both the censorious Global Engagement Center and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

These actions, coupled with Rubio's plan to can thousands of State Department employees, have enraged all the right people — including the Democratic lawmakers in Congress who claimed in a June 27 letter that large-scale reductions in force of America's diplomatic workforce would "leave the U.S. with limited tools to engage as a leader on the world stage during this critical juncture."

It appears that the changes have angered bad actors besides those in Congress — some of whom intend to respond with something more serious than sternly written letters.

'They've done a very foolish thing.'

A number of anonymous former USAID and State Department officials recently told the Allbritton Journalism Institute's publication NOTUS about their plans to undermine the Trump administration.

While it largely sounds like a revival of the "resistance" that undermined the first Trump administration, this group of would-be saboteurs appears keen on using nation-destabilizing tactics practiced abroad on their own government.

RELATED: 'Nothing to be proud of': State Department spits on USAID's grave following Bono, Obama eulogies

Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

According to NOTUS, some jilted establishmentarians who were previously "stationed across the globe actively supporting opposition movements in autocratic nations" are now building a network of federal workers who are "willing to engage in even minor acts of rebellion in the office" — what BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre and other critics have alternatively characterized as "treason."

"They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions," a currently employed federal official told NOTUS. "But they've done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime."

Color revolutions — such as the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and the 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan — are political upheavals aimed at toppling supposedly illegitimate or abusive regimes and replacing them with supposedly liberal democratic regimes.

Blaze News previously highlighted that in many cases, color revolutionaries were afforded help and direction by state actors and/or by nongovernmental organizations.

The Washington Post's David Ignatius described such efforts plainly in a 1991 column about successful efforts undertaken at the time in Russia, noting that instead of engaging in Cold War-style covert operations, overt operatives "have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private — providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule."

Although the current Republican administration was given a clear mandate by the American people to rule, it may have repeated the error made by other sovereign governments targeted by color revolutions: Its agenda is not aligned with that of a clique of unelected bureaucrats in the District of Columbia.

RELATED: Flipping cars for ‘justice’ — then back to poli-sci class

oxinoxi/Getty Images

Those now plotting against the American government were once paid by the federal government to push Latin American militants to overthrow supposed dictators and to support African secessionist movements. They also apparently helped kick off "an ultimately successful uprising in the Middle East," according to the NOTUS report.

It's unclear whether that "successful" Middle Eastern uprising is the same one that resulted in both a civil war that claimed the lives of over 600,000 people and Islamic terrorists running Syria.

'Today it starts with four, but tomorrow it's 10.'

Former State Department officials told NOTUS that they are holding "noncooperation" training sessions, attempting to set the stage for a nationwide general strike, and circulating copies of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which notes that "acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizen-saboteurs, can be an effective weapon against the enemy" and will "demoralize enemy administrators."

The manual provides tips for interfering with organizations and productions, such as bringing up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible; haggling over the precise wordings of communications, minutes, and resolutions; advocating caution and generally slowing down processes by any means; demanding written orders; deliberately misunderstanding orders; waiting until current stocks of necessary materials are exhausted before ordering new materials; giving incomplete or misleading instructions to new workers; and holding "conferences when there is more critical work to be done."

Rosarie Tucci, the former deputy assistant administrator of the now extinct USAID Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization, is apparently operating "in this space," co-leading a group called DemocracyAID with fellow USAID alumna Denielle Reiff. Their group is reportedly running workshops with those still employed by the federal government.

"The whole point of it is to start off slow," Tucci told NOTUS. "You're building up that muscle and that bravery, and you're building up your numbers. Today it starts with four, but tomorrow it's 10. We're helping them understand that is the organizing, and that is the process to get to a massive strike."

Blaze News has reached out to the State Department for comment.

White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement to Blaze News, "It is inherently undemocratic for unelected bureaucrats to undermine the duly elected President of the United States and the agenda he was given a mandate to implement."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!