Inside Trump’s $75B ICE gulag nightmare | Will Bunch Newsletter

The great thing about turning 100 is that you get to celebrate...a lot. After the quiet satisfaction of the Philadelphia Daily News’ actual centennial on March 25, scores of alums of the 1925-born People Paper gathered Saturday night at the iconic Pen and Pencil Club to toast cent’anni and the dream that in-your-face tabloid-style journalism will survive — one way or the other — for another century.

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One of the worst things about the Donald Trump era is the immigration horror story of the day, although most days now you’ll see three or four, or more, of these if you spend enough time on social media.

This weekend, for example, you might have read about the 64-year-old New Orleans woman, Donna Kashanian, who fled a tumultuous Iran 47 years ago, volunteered to rebuild her battered Louisiana community after Hurricane Katrina, never missed a check-in with U.S. immigration officials — and was snatched by ICE agents in unmarked vehicles while she was out working in her garden and sent to a notorious detention center.

Or you’ve probably seen the video of a squad of screaming, heavily armed, camouflaged immigration agents surging toward the door of a home in Huntington Park, Calif., and then blasting off the front door with powerful explosives — searching for a man the feds claimed rammed their vehicle during an earlier raid. He wasn’t even there, but his wife and two little children got the scare of a lifetime.

Now imagine 20 or 30 stories like this, taking place every day not just in Los Angeles but in multiple cities from Philadelphia to Honolulu, with a vast network of hastily constructed tent cities and other makeshift detention camps overflowing with thousands of new arrestees.

If the unholy, 940-page blitzkrieg of legislation that Donald Trump calls his “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB), which passed the Senate on Tuesday, becomes law, as the 47th president is so eagerly hoping will happen on or around July 4, you won’t need to imagine a hyper-police state on the streets of the United States.

Make no mistake: There are many truly horrendous things inside the so-called BBB, including a scheme to slash the American safety net of healthcare and food assistance to pay for more tax cuts for the very wealthy, as well as the destruction of programs that fight climate change. But no item defines the moral stench of the Trump regime and the very dark place he seeks to take the nation than its $75 billion in new money for immigration enforcement.

Just by the numbers, what Trump and his chief deportation minions — including deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and immigration czar Tom Homan — expect from the legislation that now awaits final House approval is staggering. For example, the $45 billion to build new immigration detention facilities is a 13-fold increase over the current budget. Not 13%. Thirteen times! Currently, an all-time record of roughly 56,000 people are in U.S. immigration custody, many in overcrowded and allegedly squalid conditions. The $45 billion could mean 100,000 beds, more than doubling ICE’s capacity.

But where would Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and its sister agencies get the people to fill those hard, lumpy mattresses? Don’t worry (lol...worry!), the BBB also calls for $29.9 billion in new funding for hiring thousands of new ICE agents, including huge signing or retention bonuses because these masked goons have become “essential workers” in a fascist America. These dollars will also pay for more airlines like Avelo to offer more grim, shackled deportation flights to places like El Salvador or Djibouti. Critics say the proposed new money for ICE is greater than what all 50 state prison systems spend, combined, and greater than the budget of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Now would be a great time to invest in a company that manufactures ski masks, but I digress...

The late Joseph Stalin surely would have toasted this budget, for this is more than enough money for Trump to create his own gulag archipelago of detention camps across a United States that’s becoming increasingly hard to recognize. And while the goon squads from ICE, Homeland Security Investigations and the Border Patrol now roving Southern California and elsewhere may act like a tyrannical president’s secret police, Trump is openly celebrating the looming reign of terror.

On Tuesday, the 47th president is slated to return to his adopted state of Florida to attend the opening of a hastily constructed yet somehow $450-million-a-year tent prison camp for up to 5,000 immigrant detainees on a desolate, swampy airstrip in the Everglades. State officials have gleefully dubbed it “Alligator Alcatraz” after the critters they claim would devour would-be escapees. And it turns out that when America embraced fascism, it came wrapped in a flag, carrying a crucifix — and selling a ton of merch.

The Florida Republican Party, mind-melded with “Alligator Alcatraz” architect Gov. Ron DeSantis, is raising money by selling shirts and hats hailing the Sunshine State’s first concentration camp. I’m sure that the Jan. 6, 2021 rioter with the “Camp Auschwitz” sweatshirt is interested! Perhaps feeling left out, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security this weekend posted to X an AI-produced image of a row of alligators in ICE hats in front of a barbed-wire prison, with the message: “Coming soon!”

But the terror is already here. Even as Homeland Security struggles to reach a White House-demanded quota of 3,000 immigrant arrests a day, which would surpass more than 1 million this year, the high-profile seizures that have occurred have been enough to keep farm and restaurant workers and schoolchildren at home for their own safety, reportedly “hiding like Anne Frank.” The looming multiplication in Trump’s bill is ultimately less about the numbers and more about the climate of fear that will permeate the air of American cities, suffocating every aspect of a normal daily life.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, the Georgetown University philosopher, posted on Bluesky that “this is the level of funding where all the possibilities for American politics that have been described as hyperbolic over the past decades — the comparisons to Nazi Germany and other nightmares of the 20th century — become logistically possible and politically likely.”

Sure, it’s outrageous that the Trump regime wants to pay for this blizzard of ICE dollars by cutting programs such as life-or-death cancer research, and additional science funding — among other warped priorities. But the greater outrage is just the very existence of this mass deportation program, which is wrecking once hopeful human lives from construction workers to high school soccer stars, all to meet a quota of racist hatred.

Which is why I was frankly disappointed with the quality of the debate as it dragged on this week on the floor of the Senate. Some have hailed North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis as something of a hero for planning to resign his seat as the price for opposing Trump’s bill, based on his view that the deep cuts to health programs like Medicaid are unconscionable.

He’s not wrong about that, and yet it boggles the mind that neither Tillis nor a gaggle of fellow Republicans who could shoot down the BBB before week’s end have said one negative word about the ICE funding bonanza. Apparently these esteemed senators have no problem with an America ringed by barbed-wire, alligator-swarming prison camps while bands of thugs cruise around in broad daylight looking for harmless people to fill them. They are lacing America’s 249th birthday cake with a poison that will kill the very soul of our nation.

Question: Why is Hakeem Jeffries? — @lawliberg.bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: OK, yes...I cheated slightly this week by egging on questions about the increasingly embattled House minority leader, arguably the most powerful Democrat on Capitol Hill. Which isn’t saying much these days. To be fair, Brooklyn’s Jeffries is doing the job that his predecessor Rep. Nancy Pelosi picked him to do, which is to give the occasional strong speech while ultimately defending the rich and powerful status quo. That’s meant a stunningly tepid and passive response to the fascism of Donald Trump’s regime, most notably promising a response to the rogue president “in a time, place, and manner of our choosing.” Not surprisingly, that time and place hasn’t been chosen yet. But Jeffries went from disappointing to downright disgusting this weekend by refusing to endorse his own party’s presumptive New York mayoral nominee, with an unsupported smear against Zohran Mamdani. In a healthy democracy, Jeffries would be forced out and replaced. Instead, we are stuck with him...and a political nightmare.

Last week’s question about artificial intelligence, or AI, drew a robust response, and most of you feel almost exactly like me: That the potential good from these super-computers is dwarfed by the downsides of excessive energy use, the rotting of the American mind, and the concentration of way too much power with Silicon Valley billionaires. “BAD!,” wrote Bobbie Harvey. “I believe only a very small minority of computer scientists understand how dangerous unregulated AI can be, and Trump’s repeal of Biden’s executive order on the safe use of AI makes this situation all the more dangerous.” Added Ray Davis: “Real AI, should it ever come into existence, might be another story. But what’s being successfully marketed as ‘AI’ is auto-generation of convincing [baloney].”

📮 This week’s question: As predicted in last week’s newsletter, the rapid rise of young democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral election has sent lightning bolts through the Democratic Party and the national conversation. Is Mamdani just what the Democrats needed in connecting with the youth voters they’ll need for a comeback? Or are you terrified that his left-wing policies and controversial views on the Middle East will actually hurt the party? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Zohran Mamdani” in the subject line.

Jim Ryan, a veteran educator who’d led Harvard’s School of Education, took over as president of the storied University of Virginia almost one year after the campus and its hometown of Charlottesville was rocked by an extremist protest called Unite the Right. It was the August 2017 event that saw torch-bearing protesters chanting “Jews will not replace us” and an anti-racism activist, Heather Heyer, killed when a man intentionally plowed his car into a counter protest — which motivated an aging Joe Biden to run for the White House.

In many ways, the ghosts of Unite the Right loomed over all seven years of Ryan’s tenure at UVA. ““We must admit to mistakes, including those made last year, understanding — and trusting that others understand — that mistakes in times of crises are inevitable, some avoidable and some not," he said during a commemorative event in 2018. Ryan’s main idea for removing the stench of the protests was that UVA could be “both great and good.” It’s perhaps a vague mission, but he explained it with his actions: Encouraging students to get more involved in community service, recruiting more first-generation college freshmen, and supporting the notions of diversity that was so antithetical to the racist march that had crisscrossed the campus in 2017.

Yet tightrope-walking through the most politically fraught time in modern American history managed to anger folks on both the left and right. Last year, Ryan cited the tragic events of 2017 in aggressively shutting down a pro-Palestinian tent city, which resulted in 25 arrests. Yet angering progressives with that crackdown didn’t score any points with conservatives who want to see the Virginia campus remain a bastion of white privilege. “Pursuing social justice, as opposed to focusing on the core mission, means that instead of educating kids, he’s indoctrinating them,” conservative commentator Jim Bacon told the New York Times. Ryan’s problems multiplied when the man who ran against Unite the Right, Biden, was replaced in January by Donald Trump, who said famously that the Charlottesville protests “had very fine people on both sides.”

Trump’s Justice Department almost immediately launched an investigation into UVA and the school’s strong support for diversity, equity and inclusion policies, or DEI. In arguably its worst assault yet on academic freedom, the prosecutors insisted Ryan would need to resign if Virginia wanted to negotiate a settlement. On Friday, Ryan — who’d only planned to stay for one more year and probably didn’t have support from UVA’s conservative board — acquiesced to that demand. To stay on, the university president wrote, “would not only be quixotic but appear selfish and self-centered to the hundreds of employees who would lose their jobs, the researchers who would lose their funding, and the hundreds of students who could lose financial aid or have their visas withheld.”

But history has shown with the Trump regime that giving in only fuels additional demands, and it’s not hard to imagine that the Justice Department will push for changes in areas like admission or faculty hiring that will mirror the university crackdown by a Trump role model, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán. It’s likely that Ryan will regret not standing up for his moral principles, even if it led to his firing, and even if a battle to save diversity in a time of rising fascism would have made him a collegiate Don Quixote. Regardless of what seemed good for UVA in the short run, Ryan’s failure to stand up to a bully was...not great.

Once upon a time, I was obsessed with the right-wing radio host Glenn Beck. (Note: I identify him here as “right-wing radio host” because that’s how far Glenn Beck has dropped out of the news.) In 2010, Beck was the central character in a book I wrote about the rise of the Tea Party called The Backlash. I forced myself to listen regularly on WPHT, produced exposés about his gold advertisers, and — on this date 15 years ago — wrote about a very Trumpian move of launching “Beck University,” with a shield that included a bust of George Washington, and a buffalo. I wrote: “Of course, when there’s a buffalo, you always have to clean up behind it. And that messy task, my friends. is what the rest of us will have to do after Beck’s bogus Christianist and gold-coin-crazed fictional rewrite of American history becomes ingrained in his legion of followers.” Read the rest: “‘We are...Beck State!’ Introducing Beck U. (seriously).”

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