Trump's Rantings Can't Hide That We're All Poorer, Sicker, and Less Safe Because Of His ...

“Recent polling shows majorities of Americans believe Trump’s ICE operations go too far, recognize mass deportation makes us less safe and strongly support ICE and CBP reforms and accountability”

During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Donald Trump launched into the same old tired and racist diatribes that we’ve been hearing nonstop since he descended the golden escalators of Trump Tower more than a decade ago to launch his political career by slandering Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.” But while his allies may have hooted and hollered and begged for an autographed tie inside the chambers of Congress last night, outside in the real world, the American public could not be more diametrically opposed to his chaotic and abusive agenda.

“Recent polling shows majorities of Americans believe Trump’s ICE operations go too far, recognize mass deportation makes us less safe and strongly support ICE and CBP reforms and accountability– including judicial warrants, protecting sensitive locations, and ending the practice of racial profiling,” as America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas wrote this week. “Americans are realizing what immigration advocates warned all along: attacks on immigrants were the opening act of broader assaults on citizens’ rights and freedoms.”

The facts: not only is support for our undocumented neighbors higher today than ever – a record 79% of Americans say immigration is good for our country – we’re all hungrier, poorer, and less safe precisely because the administration is obsessed with targeting the contributors that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe should have an opportunity to apply for legal status.

Just look at last year’s massive infusion of taxpayer funds that the Republican-controlled Congress handed over with no strings attached to de facto President Stephen Miller to turbocharge his mass deportation agenda. During a time when working families are struggling to pay their rent, electric bill, childcare, and keep their fridges stocked, this megacheck totalling $170 billion could have instead paid for the expenses that keep worried Americans up at night.

Take the entirely solvable issue of hunger, for example. $170 billion could pay for nutritious meals for our nation’s schoolkids for a full decade or end hunger for our nation two times over by 2030 – with money left to spare. “A short-term investment of US$ 27 billion annually is needed to bring 500 million people out of hunger by 2030,” the HESAT2030 initiative said in 2024. “Reducing hunger and malnutrition for 700 million people will increase costs to US$ 90 billion per year.”

When it comes to working families unable to afford a place to live – another issue we can solve if those in power would just commit to it instead of Miller’s fever dreams – $170 billion could help end homelessness by providing shelter for every unhoused American 17 times over. The National Alliance to End Homelessness estimated last year that $9.6 billion could provide “Rapid Re-Housing or Permanent Supportive Housing to everyone in a homeless shelter unable to access housing in a single year.”

$170 billion could also keep millions of working families healthier by doubling funding for Community Health Centers for more than a decade. Since first opening in 1965, Community Health Centers have made healthcare more accessible for more than 32 million Americans, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. “Health centers help increase access to crucial primary care by reducing barriers such as cost, lack of insurance, distance, and language for their patients,” the association said.

Instead, this funding makes ICE the highest funded U.S. law enforcement agency while sacrificing the health and safety of Americans. Not only are private prison profiteers thrilled that the federal government is poised to waste

nearly $40 billionof our money on massive camps in order to imprison our immigrant neighbors – last May, GEO Group’s CEO

saidhe was “excited” about this agenda – mass deportation has been robbing crucial resources from investigations into child predators, drug and gun traffickers, and actual national security threats.

In just one example, the Department of Homeland Security under Sec. Kristi Noem has diverted agents from their critical investigative work into criminals who target children and instead deployed them into neighborhoods to abduct our immigrant neighbors.

“The shift has had consequences,” The New York Times reported in November. “Homeland security investigators worked approximately 33 percent fewer hours on child exploitation cases from February through April compared to their average in prior years, according to a NY Times analysis of data obtained through the F.O.I.A. lawsuit.” MS Now reported in September that this reckless diversion has affected investigations into members of 764, a “nihilistic violent extremist” group that coerces vulnerable children “to post graphic sexual imagery of themselves and then blackmails them to post more imagery, including images of self-harm.”

Hany Farid, a computer scientist who helped create software that aids agents in their investigations, called this diversion of resources heartbreaking. “You can’t say you care about kids when you’re diverting actual resources that are protecting children,” he told The NY Times. Mass deportation in fact threatens all of us, after the federal government diverted critical resources from counterterrorism investigations in order to help realize Miller’s goal of a white America.

“A national security probe into the black market for Iranian oil sold to finance terrorism has been slowed down for months because of the shift to immigration work, allowing tanker ships and money to disappear,” The NY Times continued. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted, nearly one in every five FBI agents who were tasked with conducting “complex” investigations into espionage, terrorism, cyberattacks, and transnational gangs were reassigned to abduct immigrant moms and dads. “ICE returned some terrorism investigators to the FBI in June after a terrorist attack, effectively admitting they had compromised national security,” the Cato Institute said.

Remember that despite claims that ICE is targeting “the worst of the worst,” less than 14% of individuals arrested in the first year of the second Trump administration have a serious criminal record. What we should be afraid of are the flood of armed, unqualified agents that the administration is rushing into our streets, as an ICE whistleblower told members of Congress this week.

“New cadets are graduating from the Academy, despite widespread concerns among training staff that even in the final days of training, the cadets cannot demonstrate a solid grasp of the tactics or the law required to perform their jobs,” said Ryan Schwank, a whistleblower and former ICE instructor who resigned in protest from the agency just two weeks ago. He alleged that ICE’s basic training is “now deficient, defective, and broken,” and that officials are lying about the training time that cadets now undergo.

Schwank further alleged that ICE has removed hours of classes that teach cadets “how to use their weapons correctly and safely,” and that other courses going over the rights of protesters have been whittled from a two-hour program into just ten minutes.

The whistleblower’s testimony comes just weeks after masked federal agents brutally shot and killed Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, and just days after the previously undisclosed March shooting of another U.S. citizen, Ruben Ray Martinez, was acknowledged by the administration. “Without reform, ICE will graduate thousands of new officers who do not know their constitutional duty, do not know the limits of their authority and who do not have the training to recognize an unlawful order,” Schwank continued. “That should scare everyone.”

Unlike Trump, Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger’s response laser focused on issues that concern Americans in addition to the wellbeing of their immigrant neighbors, including affordability and economic issues. Still, she didn’t shy away from addressing immigration, noting that Trump “has sent poorly trained federal agents into our cities where they have arrested and detained American citizens and people who aspire to be Americans … Our broken immigration system is something to be fixed, not an excuse for unaccountable agents to terrorize our communities.”

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The American people certainly recognize that. But the president and his allies are choosing to ignore it and only continue to double-down on their destructive – and self-defeating – agenda.

“President Trump has further isolated himself from the real needs of the American people,” Cárdenas responded Wednesday. “Instead of speaking to the American majority last night, President Trump threw red meat to his dwindling number of supporters and ignored the priorities and clear preferences of the majority of Americans. The contrast with the clear-eyed vision articulated by Gov. Spanberger on immigration, the economy and affordability, was striking. The Governor spoke for the needs of the majority of Americans; the President for a shrinking base of support. This is the clearest indication yet that underscores why this Presidency and his party are rapidly losing political altitude.”