SAN JOSE, Calif. (KGO) — When Santa Clara County poet Laureate Yosimar Reyes was commissioned to write a play by Teatro Vision, he knew what he wanted it to be about.
“I wanted to write a love letter to the people that inspired me to be the poet that I am today,” said Reyes, who grew up in the Mayfair neighborhood of East San Jose.
That play, ‘No Llegamos Aquí Solos’, (translated as “We Did Not Arrive Here Alone”) is premiering this month at the Mexican Heritage Plaza.
It tells the story of Ignacio, a young activist who wants to organize his undocumented neighbors against immigration raids but finds out many have other priorities.
“He’s going around trying to convince them but the reality is his grandmother just wants to celebrate her birthday,” explains Reyes. “So there’s this tension between how do you prepare and how do you live in the moment.”
Reyes, who was named poet laureate in 2024, is undocumented but protected under the Obama-era program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).
He was brought to the United States from Mexico when he was three years old.
The play draws from his own experience living with and caring for his grandmother.
In the play, the protagonist, Ignacio, also lives with his grandmother and questions her about why they never pursued legal residency.
Ignacio learns how his grandmother and other undocumented people push aside fear and instead focus on the things that bring them joy.
“A lot of them lived through Proposition 187, so there’s been like waves of immigration movements that they’ve lived. And so the best way that they survive has been through staying focused on just trying to pay the rent,” said Reyes.
The play was commissioned by Teatro Vision. It was originally supposed to be about the gentrification of the Mayfair neighborhood but the focus shifted as fear of immigration raids and deportations rose since President Donald Trump began his second term.
“We’re telling this story that if feels so current, so written for this moment,” said Rodrigo Garcia, artistic director of Teatro Vision.
Garcia was also undocumented before legalizing his immigration status. He sees the play as a powerful statement.
“It’s an act of resistance to be on stage because according to society, we’re not supposed to be, we’re not supposed to exist right now. The government is trying to erase who we are, our legacy, and for me, it’s an act of resistance,” said Garcia.
Reyes wants his community to see themselves reflected in the play and to let them tell their own story.
“There’s nothing physical about being undocumented. There’s nothing in my hair, my eyes, my skin. It’s social conditioning. And I think that is the difference that I want to showcase in this play. We’re not just undocumented people, we’re thinkers, we’re philosophers, we’re small business owners. We have lives and joy is an essential part of the lives that we live,” explained Reyes.
The Trump administration said a large number of undocumented immigrants are choosing to voluntarily leave the country before ICE steps in.
The federal government is now paying $2,600 to undocumented immigrants to self-deport if they use the Customs and Border Protection Home App. That’s up from $1,000 when the initiative started a year ago. On top of that stipend is a free flight to their home country.
The big bump was announced in celebration of President Trump’s first year in office, which apparently included a huge number of undocumented immigrants voluntarily leaving.
If you ask the federal government, 2.2 million people have self-deported since January 2025. That equates to roughly 14% of the total estimated number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., according to the Center for Immigration Studies.
Several research groups have questioned the Department of Homeland Security’s data. The Center for Migration Studies did a deep dive into how the DHS came up with 2.2 million.
The Center for Migration Studies estimates the true number of self-deportations to be around 200,000 in the past year, roughly one-tenth of what the federal government claims.
WCCO reached out to DHS to understand how its data is sourced, but has yet to hear back.
The Brookings Institution released a report last month regarding DHS’s deportation numbers, stating the federal agency’s data “should not be considered a serious source for an estimate of net migration.”
With the new $2,600 stipend, DHS said the cost of a single self-deportation is $5,100. That’s significantly less than the cost to arrest, detain and deport an undocumented immigrant, which DHS said costs more than $18,000.
“There’s other ways to self-deport without using that app. There’s also ways to request something called voluntary departure,” said Kelly Clark, an immigration attorney who has helped clients voluntarily leave the country.
Under the previous presidential administration, Clark said undocumented people who wanted to self-deport would simply leave, especially if they didn’t have any active court cases related to their immigration status.
The CPB Home app, however, is the only way to get money and a free flight when self-deporting. Those with criminal records are not eligible to register.
“There are some certain circumstances where I would probably have to advise that by putting their information in that system, they are notifying the government of where they are and who they are. And if they do have some kind of negative immigration history or depending on their criminal record, they could make themselves more of a target by registering,” Clark said.
While she couldn’t speak to the DHS claim of 2.2 million self-deportation cases, Clark said the number of clients contemplating self-deportation is rising. That includes people with legal work permits or pending asylum cases. She said they’d rather leave on their own accord than risk an ICE arrest.
“Some people who feel like they’re stuck in their homes and they’re not able to work, they just don’t know how they’re going to survive if they stay here,” she said. “That is a deep fear with our client community, their friends and family, is that even though they might have some kind of case pending or work permit, they’re really not protected.”
Two former employees of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractor are alleging a toxic environment at the Sacramento ICE facility where the former employees say, some case specialists routinely abused and sexually harassed fellow employees and undocumented immigrants.
In sworn declarations filed to the California’s Civil Rights Department, Sandy Nogales and Jorge Zinzun are described as former employees of BI Incorporated, which develops electronic monitoring systems for ICE and other government agencies. Nogales said in her declaration that she worked for BI Incorporated for eight years and was in charge of the Sacramento office where some ICE contractors, “start out with good intentions, but over time, the absolute power granted them over (undocumented immigrants) makes some of them start to feel superior over the people they are monitoring.”
Nogales identified a BI Inc. employee named Luis Ruiz in her declaration as a “predator preying on the people he is supposed to be helping.” Zinzun declared under penalty of perjury that he was fired by BI Incorporated in December 2023 as retaliation after reporting Ruiz’s aggressive behavior to his superiors.
Nogales and Zinzun came forward publicly after reading in The Sacramento Bee that Ruiz and BI Incorporated were among the defendants named in an October lawsuit filed by Sacramento area undocumented woman alleging that Ruiz harassed her over the course of 18 months.
‘I felt I needed to come forward’
The declarations were filed in support of the 14-page suit in which Silvia Reyna claims that Ruiz texted her nude photos of himself and made many aggressive and unwanted advances during her mandated meetings with Ruiz at the Sacramento ICE facility between March 2023 and November 2024.
“I started paying attention to the news and I thought, ‘Wait a minute. I used to work there,” Zinzun said in an interview with The Bee. “I felt I needed to come forward, to share what I witnessed.”
In October, a representative of BI Incorporated told The Bee in a prepared statement that it has a “zero tolerance” policy against sexual harassment.
“BI takes all allegations of sexual abuse and harassment with the utmost seriousness,” said Christopher V. Ferreira, director of corporate relations for BI Incorporated, which is owned by The Geo Group Inc, according to the complaint.
In the last week, representatives of BI Incorporated have not responded to requests for comment on the allegations made by Nogales and Zinzun. Ruiz has not been reached for comment.
In his sworn declaration, Zinzun said he worked in an office next to Ruiz’s office while at BI Incorporated. Though he does not recall a specific incident of Ruiz mistreating Reyna, Zinzun said in his declaration he could hear Ruiz, “loudly verbally abusing, cursing and berating,” the undocumented people assigned to him by BI Incorporated.
“We were in charge of monitoring 170 to 200 participants,” Zinzun said in an interview. “We had direct contact with ICE officers, but we had a lot of independence.” Nogales states in her declaration that Ruiz was accused of sexual harassment by other BI Incorporated employees before Silvia Reyna filed her lawsuit against Ruiz and BI Incorporated.
“When I read in the paper about the complaints made against Ruiz, I was not surprised,” Nogales states in her declaration. “A female employee at BI offices in Stockton complained about Ruiz. She reported that Ruiz had repeatedly sent her unwanted sexually-explicit texts and emojis about her buttocks and used sexually coded and squirting emojis to crudely proposition her, which made her very uncomfortable.”
Nogales and Zinzun both state the Geo Group, parent company of BI Incorporated, did not act on sexual harassment complaints against Ruiz and at least one other employee.
“Ruiz was allowed to continue working without having to answer for the consequences of his actions and, we were basically directed to ignore the complaint,” Nogales says in her declaration.
Reyna, 52, is a mother of eight and raised her kids in the Tehama County town of Corning. Reyna was allowed to stay in the U.S. and surrender to ICE custody in November. She remains in ICE custody, while her family seeks justice for her.
“We had gotten a court-approved emergency stay before her removal (on Oct. 25),” Reyna’s son, Francisco Govea, a U.S. Army veteran, said to The Bee. “It’s been horrible.”
Nogales and Zinzun both expressed sympathy for Reyna and stated in their declarations that she inspired them to speak out about what they saw while working for BI Incorporated.
“I came forward…because I wanted to do the right thing,” Nogales says in her declaration.
In an interview, Zinzun said he was moved by a photo of Reyna’s family that included a photo of Govea in his Army uniform.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Zinzun said. ”Here her son served in our armed forces, and we are treating her this way?”
Israel Ramirez, a Sacramento-based lawyer representing Reyna in her lawsuit, said he hopes the declarations from Nogales and Zinzun will trigger an investigation by California’s Civil Rights Department.
“One of the saddest things about this whole affair is the way BI, Incorporated is recruiting young, bilingual, college-educated Mexican-Americans and using them to prey upon their own people,” Ramirez said. “Some of these BI Incorporated employees are the children of immigrants and I highly doubt their parents are proud of what they are doing.”
This story was originally published December 23, 2025 at 4:49 PM.
Marcos Bretón oversees The Sacramento Bee’s Editorial Board. He’s been a California newspaperman for more than 30 years. He’s a graduate of San Jose State University, a voter for the Baseball Hall of Fame and the proud son of Mexican immigrants.
Thursday morning, Jose Gomez left his Eden Prairie, Minnesota, apartment with his 13-year-old son, Jose. They went out to complete a task familiar to most Minnesotans: moving the car after a snowstorm.
After days of lying low, this task brought Gomez face-to-face with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, his family tells WCCO. They believe he was randomly targeted in an incident where ICE also restrained his teenage son, who later said he had an abnormal heartbeat thanks to the ordeal.
Jose sat down with WCCO alongside his mother, Karina. A family friend, Marion Vazquez, was there to help tell their story in English.
“She [Karina] thinks it’s unfair that they treated her son in that manner, even put him in handcuffs, when he wasn’t a threat,” Vasquez said.
Jose said that he was in the car with his father when an unmarked SUV pulled up alongside them. When the police lights came on, he said that his dad told him to run as a second SUV arrived. Jose said that he was tackled, restrained and put into one of the cars operated by ICE. He said he was questioned about his legal status, but his dad argued that he was only a minor and couldn’t respond.
Both Jose and Gomez are undocumented, originally from Mexico. But Karina said that to her knowledge, ICE did not have a warrant for Gomez’s arrest. She believes he was instead profiled by ICE randomly patrolling the area; she was on the phone with Gomez at the time of the detainment, and she said she overheard ICE agents asking him for paperwork and citizenship.
Karina told the story through tears, holding their 20-day-old baby girl, the sole American citizen in the family. She said that Gomez first arrived in the United States about three years ago. She said that she and the kids joined last year, beginning the asylum-seeking process through the CBP One app established under the Biden administration. Karina said that back home in Mexico, criminals threatened her family with violence to extort money from them.
“She was even robbed at gunpoint at one point,” Vasquez said. “They were also just trying to get money off her.”
With Gomez still in ICE custody, 13-year-old Jose said that ICE was willing to drop him off at his aunt’s house around the corner.
The family provided a video that they say shows the moments right after, with masked agents conferring with one another at the foot of the driveway.
Jose said that he then suffered from an abnormal heartbeat; he has an existing heart condition, and the stress from ICE detaining him and his father led him to need medical attention. The family showed WCCO documents indicating he received care at St. Francis Regional Medical Center. The documents list “victim of assault and battery, chest wall pain,” and abrasions of both wrists under “diagnoses.”
Karina said that she doesn’t know where her husband was taken, but knows that the family has now lost their sole provider.
WCCO reached out to ICE about this incident and has not heard back.
WCCO is working to learn more about a federal immigration enforcement operation on Wednesday afternoon in northern Minnesota.
St. Louis County Sheriff Gordon Ramsay said agents with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Border Patrol joined members of the Lake Superior Violent Offenders Task Force during a drug bust at a Hibbing restaurant off East 18th Street and Third Avenue East just after noon.
Ramsay said one person was arrested for selling cocaine and illegal firearm possession as part of an ongoing investigation that began last month. The suspect was “also in possession of several fake identification documents,” according to Ramsay.
But after the arrest, a restaurant employee told Northern News Now ICE agents began detaining anyone without proper documents. It’s unclear how many people were detained.
“The Sheriff’s Office is aware that federal law enforcement took additional actions during this search warrant,” Ramsay said. “The federal investigation is independent of this case; therefore we have nothing further to add.”
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem visited Minneapolis to discuss ICE operations in Minnesota, stating more than 4,300 people who were “committing crimes and here illegally in this county” have been arrested in the state since January. Noem said 3,316 of those arrestees have criminal histories.
Noem said ICE agents have been “demonized” in Minnesota, and more agents are headed to the state.
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie announced Wednesday he has directed city officials and departments to coordinate the city’s response to any federal law enforcement action in the city.
Lurie’s directive includes the activation of an Incident Coordination Call by the city’s Department of Emergency Management to coordinate response and information sharing among city departments. In addition, the order directs the City Attorney’s Office to monitor developments and pursue legal action against the Trump administration when necessary, and to include the San Francisco Unified School District in interdepartmental coordination to support immigrant students and families.
“We have longstanding sanctuary policies in our city that prohibit local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement,” said Lurie. “Those policies help build trust between police and communities, and they help keep people comfortable reporting crimes … We can’t prevent federal officials from enforcing immigration laws, but we’re going to keep our local law enforcement focused on ensuring your safety.”
There was no immediate word on what type of operations the CBP agents would be carrying out. CBS News Bay Area has reached out to CBP for more information on the mission. Two U.S. officials told CBS News that Border Patrol official Gregory Bovino is expected to be involved in the operation. He’s currently leading Border Patrol arrests in Chicago, and oversaw the agency’s controversial raids in Southern California this summer.
CBP is the largest federal law enforcement agency of the Department of Homeland Security and is the country’s primary border control organization.
The Alameda Police Department released a statement on Wednesday saying it was not a part of the operation, and that the department does not enforce federal immigration laws or related civil warrants. Alameda police also urged people to avoid interaction with federal law enforcement and referred residents to the city’s website for resources and information on immigrants’ rights.
Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee issued a statement Wednesday, saying the city was actively monitoring the situation.
“Oakland remains a proud sanctuary city committed to standing with our immigrant families, ” said Lee. “We will notify our community with as much information as possible about any federal deployment. Real public safety comes from Oakland-based solutions, not federal military occupation.”
The developments come on the same day Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would deploy the state National Guard to help staff food banks amid the ongoing government shutdown. Newsom said the National Guard would not be acting as law enforcement during the mission, mirroring his deployment of the Guard in the early days of the COVID pandemic, also in support of food banks.
Trump has argued that troop deployments to U.S. cities are necessary because of what he characterizes as high levels of crime and unrest, as well as shielding federal agents from attacks during immigration enforcement operations. California, Illinois and Oregon have sued the Trump administration over the deployments, arguing they are politically motivated and violate state sovereignty, that there is no insurrection to justify them, and they violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the U.S. military to enforce domestic laws except where expressly authorized by Congress.
A plan to give undocumented immigrants access to Maryland’s state health insurance marketplace next year has been put off until 2028 by state officials, citing recent federal policies affecting immigrants as well as overall uncertainty in health care markets.
The delay was the one of the biggest changes outlined for state lawmakers Thursday by health care and health insurance officials discussing the impact of recent Trump administration policies on Maryland’s health care system.
The joint virtual meeting of the Senate Finance and the House Health and Government Operations committees went over policies that are expected to increase health insurance costs, create barriers to access plans and reduce federal funding to Maryland, among other effects. The briefing also laid out the ways in which Maryland might respond to those changes.
Michele Eberle, executive director of the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange, said one of the changes she was the “most unhappy about” was a delay in the implementation of the Access to Care Act, in light of recent federal developments.
Currently, undocumented immigrants can purchase health care plans directly from insurers. But they are barred from using the Maryland Health Benefit Exchange to compare plans and find the most appropriate insurance for their households.
The 2024 Access to Care Act would have changed that by opening the marketplace to undocumented residents, allowing them access to the marketplace, where they could comparison-shop health plans from different providers. It was to take effect next year if the state could get a waiver from the federal government, which is got while President Joe Biden was still in office.
The law would not have given undocumented residents access to the federal subsidies to make health care affordable for many customers. But, for those who could afford to buy individual plans without a subsidy, it would at least have given them a chance to use the online marketplace as a tool to weigh their options.
But with the Trump administration’s antagonistic approach toward undocumented immigrants, along with significant changes to health care funding, Eberle said the exchange decided to delay opening the marketplace to undocumented residents until 2028.
“We worked really hard under the last [Biden] administration to make sure that it was approved — and we were all set to go,” Eberle said. “We did not anticipate at that time that we would have the Marketplace Integrity Rule or HR 1 that would throw up a whole bunch of new requirements that we would have to put in place in short order.”
The rule and the bill — also known as the One Big Beautiful Bill — overhaul parts of the Affordable Care Act and other federal health regulations, and states like Maryland are having to focus their resources on complying with those changes.
The Marketplace Integrity Rule also revoked a Biden-era decision that classified immigrants covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — for undocumented immigrants who were brought to this country as children — as “lawfully present” individuals. Being lawfully present would have given DACA recipients access to the federal subsidies that help make health care coverage affordable for many.
Without the classification, DACA recipients lose access to the subsidies, a change that is set to affect about 300 DACA recipients in Maryland currently benefiting from those subsidies.
But federal decisions targeting Maryland’s undocumented and immigrant populations were just part of what Insurance Commissioner Marie Grant called “gloomy but important” health care-related updates under the Trump administration.
Grant noted the significant rise expected next year in insurance premiums — due in part to the anticipated expiration of pandemic-era federal tax credits that bring down costs of individual plans purchased through the Affordable Care Act.
In September, the Maryland Insurance Administration approved an average premium increase of 13.4% across plans next year, less than what insurance companies initially asked for, but still a significant hit in monthly costs for many low- to middle-income families.
Health care advocates fear people will drop their coverage because they can no longer afford their plans if those credits expire. But carriers say the rate increases are needed to offset the number of people they expect will choose to go without health insurance — due to high costs.
The General Assembly approved funding this year that would partially replace the soon-to-expire federal tax credits for the coming year. But those state subsidies are only temporary fixes, analysts say, and even with that assistance plenty of people will still pay more each month for coverage than they did this year.
Congress could vote to extend those tax credits, which is at the heart to the current government shutdown debate. But Grant notes that time is running out to make that decision and have it effect 2026 health care plans.
“We’re expecting those enhanced tax credits to expire by the end of this year, unless Congress takes action to extend them,” she said. “The clock is ticking. It is … likely we’re getting to a point where, unless this extension happened in the next couple of days, it is likely too late to have carriers refile rates for 2026.”
How Huntington Beach is bucking California’s “sanctuary city” policies – CBS News
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The Southern California city of Huntington Beach draws millions of visitors to its sandy shores each year. But there is one group that is not welcome: undocumented immigrants. Adam Yamaguchi reports.
As National Guard troops patrol the streets of Washington, D.C., President Trump has threatened to send soldiers to other cities across the country to help stop crime, but are they legally allowed to perform law enforcement duties? The answer depends on who deploys them.
“We’re going to clean up our cities. We’re going to clean them up, so they don’t kill five people every weekend,” Mr. Trump said when asked about his intention to send National Guard troops to cities like Chicago.
Troops in Washington, D.C., are tasked with securing monuments, community patrols and area beautification, among other duties. But using the National Guard to “clean up our cities” is lined with legal red tape.
“National guard troops under the command of the governor of a state can perform law enforcement duties within that state,” Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, said.
That means if Gov. Tim Walz were to activate the National Guard in Minnesota, like what happened during the George Floyd riots in 2020, they could be authorized to act as law enforcement, including making arrests. That’s not exactly the case if the troops were activated by the president.
“National Guard troops under the command of the President of the United States have a status similar to the U.S. military and are prohibited by federal law from engaging in law enforcement activities in the U.S.,” said Painter before adding, “There are very few exceptions that would allow federal troops to be deployed for domestic law enforcement purposes.”
One of those exceptions is to enforce a federal court order, which happened in 1957 when President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops to Arkansas to enforce desegregation of schools.
“Attempting to take over policing in, say, Minneapolis, that is simply beyond the power of the federal government,” said Joseph Nunn, counsel in the Liberty and National Security program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
The rules for what federal troops can and can’t do are rooted in the Posse Comitatus Act from 1878.
“The Posse Comitatus Act bars the federal armed forces from participating in civilian law enforcement activities unless doing so has been expressly authorized by Congress,” Nunn said.
If National Guard troops are sent to Chicago, Nunn said it would be a similar situation to what occurred earlier this summer in Los Angeles, when the president sent the Guard as well as several hundred marines to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations as well as protect federal agents and property.
“If the government attempts to push beyond that, if the president actually tries to interfere in state and local law enforcement, you will absolutely see litigation,” Nunn said.
Litigation is what happened in California. Gov. Gavin Newsom sued in response to Mr. Trump’s deployment of California’s National Guard to quell protests against immigration enforcement.
Earlier this month, a federal judge in California ruled that Mr. Trump violated federal law with how troops were deployed in Los Angeles this summer.
It comes after the federal government released nationwide ads encouraging self-deportation through the CBP Home app. In the advertisement targeted toward undocumented immigrants, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem says, “You will receive financial assistance, a free flight, and the chance to come back to America legally.”
While there are big things promised in that process, it seems users are having difficulty. Boston 25 spoke with someone looking to self-deport. They said they went through the CBP Home app, filed an application, and were invited to go downtown for an interview where they provided all their personal information, including their fingerprints. However, after months passed by, they haven’t received an update.
Melissa Celli, an immigration lawyer with Strehorn Ryan & Hoose said she hasn’t seen much proof of the CBP Home app delivering on its promise.
“It is a very worrying time, and it’s getting kind of increasingly worrying,” Celli said. “We don’t have regulations. There is nothing in the Code of Federal Regulations. There’s nothing in statute because this is not a legally mandated program.”
Celli said this process has been taking an awfully long time. Long enough that people are starting to get worried.
“They have then given up a whole lot of personal information and now their names are out there, their addresses are out there, now their fingerprints are out there and there’s nothing to stop ICE from coming and grabbing them as low hanging fruit other than their word saying they’re not going to do this,” Celli explained.
It comes at a time when the federal government is ramping up immigration enforcement in Massachusetts. Governor Maura Healey said Monday that the enforcement campaign is negatively impacting hardworking people in Massachusetts.
“While they said they were after violent criminals, what we’ve seen far too often and in such great numbers here and across the country are construction workers and nannies and healthcare aids and agricultural workers who are being taken out of our communities,” Gov. Healey said.
Boston25 reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to learn more about the self-deportation process and exactly what metrics they’re seeing since the app’s launch.
DHS responded with the following statement:
“After successfully ending the invasion of our country and securing our southern border, President Trump established the visionary Project Homecoming in May to create a smooth, efficient process for illegal aliens to return home. By using the CBP Home App, illegal aliens will receive a complimentary one-way plane ticket home, a $1,000 exit bonus, and forgiveness of any fines previously assessed for failure to depart. Tens of thousands of illegal aliens have utilized the CBP Home app, and 1.6 million illegal immigrants have left the United States population since January 20.
Once illegal aliens submit their intent to depart through the CBP Home Mobile App and pass vetting, they will be deprioritized by ICE for enforcement action, detention and removal before their scheduled departure.”
A new immigration detention facility designed to house hundreds of undocumented immigrants convicted of serious crimes opened in Louisiana this week as part of what Attorney General Pam Bondi called a “historic agreement” between the state and federal government.
The new facility — which is located inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as Angola — is designed to house more than 400 detainees.
The facility was given the name Camp 57 after Republican Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry being the 57th governor of the state. Federal officials have also dubbed Camp 57 as “Louisiana Lockup.” In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security described it as part of a “new partnership” between the Trump administration and the state of Louisiana.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, center, tours “Camp 57,” a facility to house immigration detainees at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana, on Sept. 3, 2025.
Gerald Herbert / AP
U.S. Immigrations Customs and Enforcement officials said that 51 detainees had already arrived at Camp 57 as of Tuesday.
“This is not just a typical ICE detention facility that you will see elsewhere in the country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said during a news conference Wednesday in front of Camp 57, alongside Bondi and Landry.
She said some of the men who have already transferred there were convicted of serious crimes, including murder and rape.
“Louisiana is one of several states stepping up to solve these problems,” Noem said.
Noem also indicated that Angola’s “notorious” history was one of the reasons that it was chosen for Camp 57.
“This is a facility that’s notorious, it’s a facility, Angola Prison is legendary — but that’s a message that these individuals that are going to be here, that are illegal criminals, need to understand,” Noem told reporters.
An outside look at Camp 57, an immigration detention facility located inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana. Sept. 3, 2025.
CBS News
During Wednesday’s news conference, Landry said the facility is next to a lake “full of alligators” and surrounded by a “forest full of bears.” An officer with the Louisiana Department of Corrections told CBS News Wednesday there are alligators as big as 10 feet in the lake.
The lake outside Camp 57, an immigration detention facility located inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana. Sept. 3, 2025.
CBS News
Camp 57 has a chapel and law library, law enforcement officials familiar with the project told CBS News Wednesday.
The facility, which will house only men, is separated from the rest of the Louisiana state prisoners incarcerated in the Angola complex, which spans 18,000 acres.
Camp 57 was shuttered for many years before renovations started about a month ago. DHS officials said it was renovated into working order in about 30 days.
Prior to its closure, Camp 57 had been used for disciplinary actions against state prisoners, according to law enforcement officials familiar with the project.
Transferring ICE detainees between facilities isn’t new but has increased under the current administration. A CBS News analysis of government data found that more than half of immigrants detained by ICE between Jan. 20, 2025, and July 29, 2025, were transferred to another facility two or more times — a greater share than during the Biden administration, the first Trump administration or the second Obama administration.
Detainees are also getting shuffled further away during these transfers, CBS News found. Under the current administration, about 61% of detainees who started their stay were transferred more than 100 miles at least once. That’s also a higher figure than in past administrations.
Some immigration advocates are concerned this practice could make it more difficult for detainees to contact loved ones or their attorneys.
Asked about the increase in detention transfers and how and when ICE determines someone should be transferred, Noem said Wednesday that “this specific facility is going to host most dangerous criminal illegal aliens in the country, because it is so secure. Those individuals are being moved from other facilities around the country…because it is so secure behind these fences. I would say that we move people to other facilities for logistics, based on what country they’re being repatriated from, where their flights are going, what we need to do to build deficiencies, and we will continue to do that as we need to in order to deport them out of the country and take them back home.”
Last month, a federal judge ordered that the Trump administration dismantle a state-run immigration detention center in the Florida Everglades dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” DHS began moving detainees out of the facility last week.
Regarding “Alligator Alcatraz,” Noem said Wednesday the White House will continue to appeal the judge’s orders, because she believes the judge “made the wrong decision.”
Kati Weis is a Murrow Award-winning reporter for CBS News based in New Orleans, covering the Southeast. She previously worked as an investigative reporter at CBS News Colorado in their Denver newsroom.
How many undocumented immigrants have left the U.S. this year? – CBS News
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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed earlier in August that 1.6 million immigrants without legal status have left the U.S. since January. But is that figure accurate? CBS News Confirmed data journalist Julia Ingram dug into the numbers.
With nine days until Election Day, former President Trump has stepped up his attacks on the Biden-Harris administration’s record on illegal immigration and pledged that, if elected, he’ll conduct the largest deportation in American history.
There are more than 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.…about 3% of the population. Nearly 80% of them have lived in the country for a decade or more.
How realistic is this mass deportation campaign promise? What would be the human and financial cost?
We took these questions to one of the people Donald Trump has said would join him if he wins a second term – Tom Homan… who led immigration enforcement during the first Trump administration when thousands of migrant children were separated from their parents at the border.
Tom Homan: I hear a lot of people say, you know, the talk of a mass deportation is racist. It’s– it’s– it’s threatening to immigrant community. It’s not threatening to the immigrant community. It should be threatening to the illegal immigrant community. But on the heels of [a] historic illegal immigration crisis. That has to be done.
At the Republican National Convention this summer… Tom Homan, a Fox News contributor, was the proud pitchman of mass deportation…
Tom Homan speaking at the RNC: I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden’s released in our country. You better start packing now.
Over three decades, he worked his way up from border patrolman to acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement – the agency known as “ICE” — during the first year and a half of the Trump administration.
Tom Homan
60 Minutes
This election cycle, former President Trump has mentioned mass deportation at nearly every rally…
Donald Trump: We will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country because we have no choice
Cecilia Vega: What would the largest deportation in American history look like to you?
Tom Homan: Well, lemme tell you what it’s not going to be first. It’s not gonna be– a mass sweep of neighborhoods. It’s not gonna be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous.
Cecilia Vega: But if mass deportation is not going to be, as you said, massive sweeps and concentration camps
Tom Homan: It’ll be concentrated
Cecilia Vega: What is it?
Tom Homan: They’ll be targeted arrests. We’ll know who we’re going to arrest, where we’re most likely to find ’em based on numerous inve– you know, investigative processes.
Former President Trump’s running mate JD Vance said it would be reasonable to deport a million people a year…
Trump’s top immigration advisor Stephen Miller told a conservative audience that deportees would be removed from the country in a massive military air operation…
Stephen Miller : So you grab illegal immigrants and then you move them to the staging ground and that’s where the planes are waiting for federal law enforcement to then move those illegals home. You deputize the National Guard to carry out immigration enforcement
Cecilia Vega: Stephen Miller said that this will involve large-scale raids.
Tom Homan: He– I– I don’t use the term “raids,” but you’re probably talking about work-site enforcement operations– which this administration pretty much stopped
Cecilia Vega: Workplace enforcement, that’s a roundup.
Tom Homan: And that’s gonna be necessary. Work-site enforcement operations just not about people who’s working illegally in the country and companies that hire ’em that’s gonna undercut their competition that has U.S. citizen employees. It’s where we find a lot of trafficking cases you know, women and children who are forced into forced labor to pay off their smuggling fees.
A study by the American Immigration Council found that mass deportation could result in the removal of millions of construction, hospitality and agriculture workers– reducing the GDP by $1.7 trillion.
Cecilia Vega: Can you just limit it to criminals and national security threat though?
Tom Homan: If I’m in charge of this, my priorities are public safety threats and national security threats first.
Cecilia Vega: First implies others follow, though, right?
Tom Homan: Absolutely.
Cecilia Vega: So game that out for me. What’s the scenario
Tom Homan: It’s not OK to enter a country illegally, which is a crime. That’s what drives illegal immigration, when there’s no consequences. The Biden-Harris administration has proven this, You can get to the border, turn yourselves in, get released within 24 hours
Cecilia Vega: So you are carrying out a targeted enforcement operation. Grandma’s in the house. She’s undocumented. Does she get arrested too?
Tom Homan: It depends
Cecilia Vega: Which
Tom Homan: Let– let the judge decide. We’re gonna remove people that– a judge’s order deported.
Homan’s suggestion that grandma might face arrest would mark a major shift in policy. Under President Biden, ICE is mostly targeting those deemed national security or public safety threats — and people who just crossed the border illegally.
The majority of the 4 million deportations carried out by the Biden administration have occurred at the southern border, where an unprecedented influx of migrants created scenes of chaos, a humanitarian crisis and one of Vice President Harris’ biggest political vulnerabilities.
Homan says mass deportation is the solution.
Cecilia Vega: How many people would be deported?
Tom Homan: That’s– that’s– you can’t answer that question.
Cecilia Vega: Why not?
Tom Homan: How many officers do I have?
Cecilia Vega: Is there a written plan on this?
Tom Homan: Not that I know of.
Cecilia Vega: If there’s no memo, if there’s no plan, is this fully baked?
Tom Homan: We’ve done it before.
Cecilia Vega: But not– a deportation of this scale.
Tom Homan: ICE is very good at these operations. This is what they do
To see what they do, we went to Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC … where earlier this month, ICE agents gathered in a parking lot before dawn …
Cecilia Vega and Matt Elliston
60 Minutes
It’s what ICE does every day… and has been doing for many years.
Their task this morning– locate and arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal histories including assault, robbery, drug and gun convictions…
… identified by ICE as a threat to public safety
Matt Elliston, director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, told us the goal was to catch the first target by surprise..
Cecilia Vega: You’ve been f– watchin’ him? He– you know– you know his routine?
Matt Elliston: Yeah, we know his routine. We’ve been watchin’ him for a couple days.
Sure enough, a white van soon appeared to pick him up. But they didn’t get very far…
The man they arrested was a 24-year-old Guatemalan with an assault conviction, who had been ordered deported by a judge five years ago.
The ICE agents discovered that the driver of the van was also in the country illegally. They told us he’d been deported once before.
Matt Elliston: He has no criminal record. He was picking up his employee to go to work. It doesn’t make sense to waste a detention bed on someone like that when we have other felons to go out and get today.
Cecilia Vega: A lotta folks might hear you and say like, “Hold on, you’ve got an undocumented immigrant who comes face-to-face with ICE, who’s responsible for deporting folks from this country, and you let him go?”
Matt Elliston: We utilize immigration law to enhance public safety. It’s not to just aimlessly arrest anyone we come across, right? We do targeted enforcement at ICE.
It took a team of more than a dozen officers 7 hours to arrest six people …. and that doesn’t include the many hours spent searching for them.
Cecilia Vega: So how would it even be possible then for ICE to arrest a million people in this country if that mass deportation plan were to take effect?
Matt Elliston: I could say here in Maryland, we would never be able to resource or find th– find that amount of detention, which would be our biggest challenge. Right? And just the amount of money that that would cost in order to detain everybody– you know, it be, you know, at– at the Department of Defense level of financing.
Jason Houser: It’s insane to think about it at this sort of scale.:
Jason Houser, ICE chief of staff during the first two years of the Biden administration, says it costs $150 a night to detain people like those we saw arrested. The average stay as they await deportation is 46 days. One deportation flight can cost a quarter of a million dollars. And that assumes the home country will accept them…. Many like Cuba and Venezuela rarely do.
Cecilia Vega: ICE currently has some 6,000 law enforcement agents. How much manpower would it take to arrest and deport a million people?
Jason Houser: You’re talking, 100,000 official officers, police officers, detention officers, support staff, management staff
Trump adviser Stephen Miller has said staff could come from other government agencies like the DEA.
Jason Houser: The idea that you’re gonna take the FBI, or the Marshal Service, or the Bureau of Prisons, or the Security Service, or FEMA off of their mission sets that protect– and protect our communities will not make us safer.
Immigration enforcement requires specialized training and language skills that most military and law enforcement officers don’t have.
Cecilia Vega: There’s this discussion out there that makes it sound like it’s just an easy swap.
Matt Elliston: It is not an easy swap. So– what I can tell you in, from the Immigration and Nationality Act, immigration law is second to the U.S. tax code in complexity
60 Minutes
Cecilia Vega: We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year.
Tom Homan: I don’t know if that’s accurate or not.
Cecilia Vega: Is that what American taxpayers should expect?
Tom Homan: What price do you put on national security? Is it worth it?
Cecilia Vega: Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?
Tom Homan: Of course there is. Families can be deported together.
Monica Camacho Perez and her family worry about that. They have lived and worked in the country since coming illegally from Mexico more than 20 years ago.
Cecilia Vega: What scares you the most?
Monica Camacho: I think of– of my nieces and my nephews that they’re gonna get separated from their parents.
They made a life in Baltimore where Monica, who’s 30, teaches English as a second language.
Monica Camacho Perez: We are a normal family, like anybody else, right? We go to church. We work, every day. We pay taxes
She’s among the more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children who are protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program- known as DACA.
Cecilia Vega with Monica Camacho Perez and her family
60 Minutes
Monica Camacho Perez: I’m the only one right now that’s, like, protected, while my parents are not, my brothers are not. My brothers have– children that are born here. So if they were to get deported, what will happen to their kids. Although I have my life here, I think that I would take the decision to go back with my parents, to take care of them.
Cecilia Vega: You would?
Monica Camacho Perez: Yes.
Cecilia Vega: You own a home here. This is the city you grew up in.
Monica Camacho Perez: But…They’re also part of my American dream. And I can’t imagine living here without them.
Like Monica’s nieces and nephews…more than 4 million U.S.-born children live with an undocumented parent.
Cecilia Vega: Why should a child who is an American citizen have to pack up and move to a country that they don’t know?
Tom Homan: ‘Cause their parent absolutely entered the country illegally, had a child knowing he was in the country illegally. So he created that crisis
While Homan ran ICE — in what became one of the most controversial policies of the Trump administration– at least 5,000 migrant children were forcibly separated from their parents, who were prosecuted for crossing the border illegally.
Cecilia Vega: You’ve been called the “father of Trump’s family separation policy.” How does that sit with you?
Tom Homan: Not true. I didn’t write the memorandum to separate families. I signed the memo. Why’d I sign the memo? I was hopin’ to save lives. While you and I are talkin’ right now, a child’s gonna die in the border. So we thought, maybe if we prosecute people, they’ll stop comin’.
And if Trump wins a second term?
Tom Homan: I don’t know of any formal policy where they’re talkin’ about family separations.
Cecilia Vega: Should it be on the table?
Tom Homan: It needs to be considered, absolutely.
Cecilia Vega: Do you think a mass deportation plan would deter other people from coming to this country illegally?
Monica Camacho Perez: No, I don’t think so. Regardless, people are still going to try to come for a better life.
Produced by Andy Court, Annabelle Hanflig, Camilo Montoya-Galvez. Broadcast associate, Katie Jahns. Edited by Craig Crawford.
The federal government says it has been dealing with an unprecedented number of rumors surrounding the recent hurricanes, Helene and Milton. CBS News immigration and politics reporter Camilo Montoya-Galvez speaks with the head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection about one of those false claims. Then, CBS News national security contributor Sam Vinograd joins with further analysis.
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As the whirlwind of an upcoming presidential election approaches, immigration is once again a pivotal issue on the minds of many voters. Often, those against immigration argue that undocumented immigrants are “stealing jobs” and not contributing to the U.S. economy.
In some states — such as New York, Florida, and Texas — contributions by undocumented immigrants exceed $1 billion annually.
Nationally, undocumented immigrants contributed $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022, with $37.3 billion going to state and local governments. Providing work authorization to all current undocumented immigrants would increase their tax contributions by $40.2 billion per year.
“This study is the most comprehensive look at how much undocumented immigrants pay in taxes. And what it shows is that they pay quite a lot,” Marco Guzman, ITEP Senior Policy Analyst and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “The bottom line here is that regardless of immigration status, we all contribute by paying our taxes.”
Furthermore, the study found that for every 1 million undocumented immigrants residing in the country, public services receive $8.9 billion in additional tax revenue, money that would be lost if these individuals were deported. Additionally, more than a third of the tax dollars paid by undocumented immigrants go toward payroll taxes dedicated to funding programs like Social Security and Medicare, which these workers are unfairly not allowed to access.
In Michigan, undocumented immigrants pay a higher state and local tax rate of 8% compared to the top 1% of Michigan households, which pay 5.7%.
A press release noted that “while this study is the most comprehensive analysis of taxes paid by undocumented immigrants, it is worth noting that it does not attempt to quantify broader impacts that flow from the increased economic activity created by these individuals.”
Considering the ripple effects, it is likely that undocumented immigrants have an even larger significance to public revenue.
“This study is another reminder that undocumented immigrants are contributing to our economies and our shared public services,” the press release continued. “Immigration policy choices made in the years ahead will have significant consequences for public revenues.”
The victim? Senate Bill 1231. The Republican-controlled House was so enamored with the bill that it suspended its rules on Wednesday and rushed it to a 31-28 vote a week after its 16-13-1 approval in the Senate.
Hobbs greeted the legislation with a veto.
“The bill does not secure our border, will be harmful for communities and businesses in our state, and burdensome for law enforcement personnel and the state judicial system,” Hobbs said in her veto statement.
“Further, this bill presents significant constitutional concerns and would be certain to mire the State in costly and protracted legislation,” she added.
SB 1231 — titled the “Arizona Border Invasion Act” — allowed local police to arrest migrants suspected of crossing into the state at places other than ports of entry and charge them with a misdemeanor. A first offense carried a jail sentence of up to six months. The bill also shielded law enforcement from civil liabilities
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted a nearly identical new law in Texas that also empowered local police to arrest people suspected of crossing the border illegally.
SB 1231 is one of three measures targeting immigration that Republicans are pushing through the legislature. House Bill 2821 is similar to SB 1231, while House Concurrent Resolution 2060 is a ballot measure that would bar undocumented immigrants from obtaining many taxpayer-funded social benefits.
In a video statement on Monday, Hobbs dismissed the bills as an effort to “score cheap political points.”
‘Blatantly unconstitutional and extreme’
Republicans blasted Hobbs’ veto, while progressive groups, including the ACLU, praised her action.
State Sen. Janae Shamp, SB 1231’s sponsor, said in a statement from Senate Republicans that the veto “was a slap in the face” to law enforcement.
“The Legislature did its job to protect our citizens, but Governor Hobbs failed to do hers,” Shamp said. “Vetoing the Arizona Border Invasion Act is a prime example of the chaos Hobbs is unleashing in our state while perpetuating this open border crisis as Biden’s accomplice.”
“SB 1231 was a blatantly unconstitutional and extreme anti-immigrant measure that would have sent Arizona back to a time when racial profiling ran rampant, and the state’s reputation and economy took a brutal blow,” said Noah Schramm, border policy strategist for the ACLU of Arizona.
“SB 1231 has no place in Arizona where immigrants are our friends, family and neighbors; but rather than protecting Arizona communities, extremist lawmakers are only concerned with inciting hateful divisions,” Schramm added.
Living United for Change in Arizona, a political organization known colloquially as LUCHA, said the veto was a blow to the “Republicans’ hate-filled agenda.”
“SB 1231 doesn’t solve the humanitarian crisis at the border, and it would have inflicted tremendous harm to Arizona communities,” Alejandra Gomez, LUCHA’s executive director, said Monday in a prepared statement. “While Republicans have abandoned morality and democratic principles, today is a reflection of the power of democracy and the power of people when they come together to fight against racism, hate and just plain bad policy.”
Here are all the bills Katie Hobbs vetoed in 2024 (so far)
Will Hobbs break her own veto record? She’s off to a slow start. In 2024, her first veto didn’t happen until March 4. By that point in 2023, Hobbs notched 15 vetoes on her way to 143 for the year.
Hobbs’ vetoed the bill on March 4. The measure allowed local police to arrest non-U.S. citizens suspected of illegally crossing the border between Arizona and Mexico even though border enforcement is a federal issue. “This bill presents significant constitutional concerns and would be certain to mire the State in costly and protracted legislation,” Hobbs said in her veto letter.
Republicans in the Arizona House passed a bill to put a controversial immigration measure on the ballot in November that would require local governments to check a person’s immigration status before providing access to public health care, housing assistance and employment programs.
Both chambers also passed identical versions of an immigration bill that is expected to be vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs once they reach her desk.
House Concurrent Resolution 2060 is the brainchild of House Speaker Ben Toma, who is running for a Valley Congressional seat in a crowded race. The House approved the bill on Thursday in a 31-28 vote, and it now goes to the Senate, which is likely to pass it. If voters approve it in November, undocumented immigrants would be barred from obtaining many taxpayer-funded social benefits starting in 2026.
The bill is designed to ensure “Arizona taxpayers do not bear the financial burden of paying for the federal government’s failure to control illegal immigration at the border,” Toma said Monday during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
The irony of the proposed law is that undocumented immigrants are Arizona taxpayers. The nonpartisan American Immigration Council found that in 2021, undocumented immigrants in Arizona paid $647.9 million in state, local and federal taxes. Despite helping fund government programs, undocumented families would not be allowed to benefit from them, even if they have lived in the state for decades.
Opponents of the initiative criticized Republican lawmakers for trying to bypass Hobbs. They also noted that the law could have a negative impact on the economy and would increase anti-immigrant sentiment in the same way the infamous SB 1070 law did after the legislature passed it in 2010.
“Anti-immigrant laws like SB 1070, like HCR 2060, do nothing but negatively affect our labor market, cause national disgrace and lead to heightened discrimination of people of color,” said Lena Avalos, policy director at Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) during a House Appropriations Committee hearing for the bill on Monday.
Though the initiative would further marginalize undocumented immigrants in Arizona, it’s worth noting that it would make no changes to immigration enforcement or border security.
Gov. Katie Hobbs is likely to veto Republican legislation that targets undocumented immigrants.
Elias Weiss
Bills make it state crime to cross the border
Republicans in both chambers also approved legislation — House Bill 2821 and Senate Bill 1231 — that allow state and local officials to enforce immigration policy, even though that enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government. The measures, which also protect protect law enforcement from civil liabilities, are modeled after a recent, highly controversial Texas law that critics say will lead to more policing with less accountability.
Jennifer Holder, an attorney for the House Rules Committee told lawmakers on Monday that many of the provisions in HB 2821 were likely to be deemed unconstitutional.
Still, Republicans are willing to take their chances. “Frankly, I think this Supreme Court will back the protection of the borders of the United States,” said state Sen. John Kavanagh, a Scottsdale Republican.
The House voted to pass HB 2821 in a 31-28 vote on Thursday. SB 1231 passed on Wednesday in a 16-13 vote in the Senate. The bills now go to the other chamber for consideration. Also Thursday, the House passed HB 2748 — which is similar to HB 2821 and SB 1231 — in a 31-28 vote. Hobbs is expected to veto the bills if they reach her.
“We know the outcome of this. It will be promptly vetoed,” said state Rep. Marcelino Quiñonez, a Phoenix Democrat. “In the interest of saving us all time, I would ask all of my members on the other side who are in support of this to not bring these things up.”
During debate in the House, Republicans lamented a lack of action from the federal government to slow the surge of migrants entering the country, a statement with which many Democrats agreed.
The criticism comes after top Republicans in Washington, D.C., rejected a bipartisan Senate bill that provided $20 billion in funding for the border after former President Donald Trump asked them to ensure the bill’s demise and not give President Joe Biden a political win.
“Congress finally has the strongest immigration reform bill that we’ve seen,” said state Rep. Lorena Austin, a Mesa Democrat. “The ink is barely dry on this bipartisan bill, an agreement that would provide resources that the border needs but has been cast aside because Republicans are refusing to take action on the issue they say they care about the most.”
State Rep. Joseph Chaplik, a Scottsdale Republican, is the sponsor of HB 2748 and a co-sponsor of HB 2821. “I stand for legal immigration, but we as a country cannot sustain this kind of volume coming through our border,” Chaplik said Wednesday.
He also spoke at length about immigrants entering the country, insinuating that the U.S. is being overrun by enemies of the state and criminals.
Chaplik mentioned Raad Almansoori, who was arrested this week at Scottsdale Fashion Square. Police say he stabbed two women in the Valley after killing another in New York City. Chaplik cited Almansoori as an example of the criminals entering the country illegally.
“Recently, in Scottsdale, they arrested a gentleman, Raad Almansoori, who murdered a woman in New York allegedly. He just got picked up. Hours before the arrest, he attacked an employee in a bathroom in McDonald’s in Surprise. He stabbed a woman in another stall three times in the neck. And the police say he’s suspected of stabbing another woman at a robbery with a knife,” Chaplik said. “This is what’s coming across our border.”
Yet Almansoori is an American citizen who was born in Arizona, according to police documents.
Former Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce sponsored SB 1070, which opened the door to racial profiling of Latinos when it became state law in 2010.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
‘I remember the fear in my mother’s eyes’
Opponents of the bills have taken to collectively calling them “SB 1070 2.0,” a reference to the infamous “show me your papers” bill that was signed into law in 2010 and allowed local and state law enforcement to crack down on illegal immigration, creating a culture of fear in Latino communities. The law sparked boycotts and had a detrimental economic impact on Arizona, which became a national disgrace before three of the bill’s four provisions were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2012.
Alejandra Gomez is the executive director of LUCHA, a progressive Latino advocacy group that was founded in the wake of SB 1070. She called the bills racist and divisive in a press release.
“Speaker Ben Toma and Republicans are launching an assault against the diverse fabric of Arizona by targeting immigrant communities, and dismissing their contributions to the state’s culture, and economy,” Gomez said. “Speaker Toma is choosing politics over the welfare of Arizona, just to score political points or for a fundraising pitch. Playing politics with Arizona’s economy and threatening families is not what Arizonans do, and should be unequivocally rejected.”
During debate on the bill,state Sen. Rosanna Gabaldón recalled the oppressive aftermath of SB 1070. “Within 12 months, I was pulled over more than 10 times by law enforcement,” she said.
She also told a story about her mother, an immigrant who became an American citizen.
“My mother would carry her passport with her because she was so afraid that someone was going to stop her and ask her questions. My mom, who worked very, very hard to become an American citizen and was proud when she became an American citizen, is being stopped by law enforcement,” an emotional Gabaldón said.
Gabaldón added that she told her mother to put her hands on the dashboard of the car and not give officers a reason to do anything to her.
“I remember the fear in my mother’s eyes. This is gonna begin again,” Gabaldón said.
Several Democratic lawmakers also cited SB 1070 as a primary reason for getting active in politics and government and noted the law fueled a progressive movement.
“I probably wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for SB 1070,” said state Sen. Juan Mendez during a vote on one of the bills.
“I think sometimes my colleagues on the other side of the aisle underestimate the consequences to their seats,” said state Sen. Anna Hernandez, a Phoenix Democrat. “This bill is going to mobilize the new wave behind that, and there’s going to be a whole new generation of activists, of youth, of immigrants, that are going to get involved.”
Hernandez also spoke directly to her Republican colleagues.
“So in the future, when you wonder when Arizona starts voting more and more Democrats into office at every level of government, remember that it is going to be tied to SB 1231 and policy like it,” Hernandez said.
With the 2024 election approaching, HCR 2060 could be on the ballot along with a measure allowing the state to vote on enshrining reproductive freedom in the Arizona Constitution.
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Confrontations over immigration and border security are moving to the center of the struggle between the two parties, both in Washington, D.C., and beyond. And yet the most explosive immigration clash of all may still lie ahead.
In just the past few days, Washington has seen the collapse of a bipartisan Senate deal to toughen border security amid opposition from former President Donald Trump and the House Republican leadership, as well as a failed vote by House Republicans to impeach Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for allegedly refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws. Simultaneously, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott, supported by more than a dozen other GOP governors, has renewed his attempts to seize greater control over immigration enforcement from the federal government.
Cumulatively these clashes demonstrate how much the terms of debate over immigration have moved to the right during President Joe Biden’s time in office. But even amid that overall shift, Trump is publicly discussing immigration plans for a second presidential term that could quickly become much more politically divisive than even anything separating the parties now.
Trump has repeatedly promised that, if reelected, he will pursue “the Largest Domestic Deportation Operation in History,” as he put it last monthon social media. Inherently, such an effort would be politically explosive. That’s because any mass-deportation program would naturally focus on the largely minority areas of big Democratic-leaning cities where many undocumented immigrants have settled, such as Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, and Phoenix.
“What this means is that the communities that are heavily Hispanic or Black, those marginalized communities are going to be living in absolute fear of a knock on the door, whether or not they are themselves undocumented,” David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told me. “What he’s describing is a terrifying police state, the pretext of which is immigration.”
How Trump and his advisers intend to staff such a program would make a prospective Trump deportation campaign even more volatile. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, has publicly declared that they would pursue such an enormous effort partly by creating a private red-state army under the president’s command. Miller says a reelected Trump intends to requisition National Guard troops from sympathetic Republican-controlled states and then deploy them into Democratic-run states whose governors refuse to cooperate with their deportation drive.
Such deployment of red-state forces into blue states, over the objections of their mayors and governors, would likely spark intense public protest and possibly even conflict with law-enforcement agencies under local control. And that conflict itself could become the justification for further insertion of federal forces into blue jurisdictions, notes Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Liberty & National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School.
From his very first days as a national candidate in 2015, Trump has intermittently promised to pursue a massive deportation program against undocumented immigrants. As president, Trump moved in unprecedented ways to reduce the number of new arrivals in the country by restricting both legal and illegal immigration. But he never launched the huge “deportation force” or widespread removals that, he frequently promised, would uproot the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants already in the United States during his time in office. Over Trump’s four years, in fact, his administration deported only about a third as many people from the nation’s interior as Barack Obama’s administration had over the previous four years, according to a study by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
Exactly why Trump never launched the comprehensive deportation program he promised is unclear even to some veterans of his administration. The best answer may be a combination of political resistance within Congress and in local governments, logistical difficulties, and internal opposition from the more mainstream conservative appointees who held key positions in his administration, particularly in his first years.
This time, though, Trump has been even more persistent than in the 2016 campaign in promising a sweeping deportation effort. (“Those Biden has let in should not get comfortable because they will be going home,” Trump posted on his Truth Social site last month.) Simultaneously, Miller has outlined much more explicit and detailed plans than Trump ever did in 2016 about how the administration would implement such a deportation program in a second term.
Dismissing these declarations as merely campaign bluster would be a mistake, Miles Taylor, who served as DHS chief of staff under Trump, told me in an interview. “If Stephen Miller says it, if Trump says it, it is very reasonable to assume that’s what they will try to do in a second term,” said Taylor, who later broke with Trump to write a New York Times op-ed and a book that declared him unfit for the job. (Taylor wrote the article and book anonymously, but later acknowledged that he was the author.)
Officials at DHS successfully resisted many of Miller’s most extreme immigration ideas during Trump’s term, Taylor said. But with the experience of Trump’s four years behind them, Taylor told me Trump and Miller would be in a much stronger position in 2025 to drive through militant ideas such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented migrants. “Stephen Miller has had the time and the battle scars to inform a very systematic strategy,” Taylor said.
Miller outlined the Trump team’s plans for a mass-deportation effort most extensively in an interview he did this past November on a podcast hosted by the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. In the interview, Miller suggested that another Trump administration would seek to remove as many as 10 million “foreign-national invaders” who he claims have entered the country under Biden.
To round up those migrants, Miller said, the administration would dispatch forces to “go around the country arresting illegal immigrants in large-scale raids.” Then, he said, it would build “large-scale staging grounds near the border, most likely in Texas,” to serve as internment camps for migrants designated for deportation. From these camps, he said, the administration would schedule near-constant flights returning migrants to their home countries. “So you create this efficiency by having these standing facilities where planes are moving off the runway constantly, probably military aircraft, some existing DHS assets,” Miller told Kirk.
In the interview, Miller acknowledged that removing migrants at this scale would be an immense undertaking, comparable in scale and complexity to “building the Panama Canal.” He said the administration would use multiple means to supplement the limited existing immigration-enforcement personnel available to them, primarily at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE. One would be to reassign personnel from other federal law-enforcement agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the DEA. Another would be to “deputize” local police and sheriffs. And a third would be to requisition National Guard troops to participate in the deportation plans.
Miller offered two scenarios for enlisting National Guard troops in removing migrants. One would be in states where Republican governors want to cooperate. “You go to the red-state governors and you say, ‘Give us your National Guard,’” he said. “We will deputize them as immigration-enforcement officers.”
The second scenario, Miller said, would involve sending National Guard forces from nearby Republican-controlled states into what he called an “unfriendly state” whose governor would not willingly join the deportation program.
Even those sweeping plans understate the magnitude of the effort that mass deportations would require, Jason Houser, a former chief of staff at ICE under Biden, told me. Removing 500,000 to 1 million migrants a year could require as many as 100,000–150,000 deputized enforcement officers, Houser believes. Staffing the internment camps and constant flights that Miller is contemplating could require 50,000 more people, Houser said. “If you want to deport a million a year—and I’m a Navy officer—you are talking a mobilization the size of a military deployment,” Houser told me.
Enormous legal resources would be required too. Immigration lawyers point out that even if Trump detained migrants through mass roundups, the administration would still need individual deportation orders from immigration courts for each person it wants to remove from the country. “It’s not as simple as sending Guardsmen in to arrest everyone who is illegal or undocumented,” said Leopold, the immigration lawyer.
All of this exceeds the staffing now available for immigration enforcement; ICE, Houser said, has only about 6,000 enforcement agents. To fill the gap, he said, Trump would need to transfer huge numbers of other federal law-enforcement agents, weakening the ability of agencies including the DEA, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service to fulfill their principal responsibilities. And even then, Trump would still need support from the National Guard to reach the scale he’s discussing.
Even if Trump used National Guard troops in supporting roles, rather than to “break down doors” in pursuit of migrants, they would be thrust into highly contentious situations, Houser said.
“You are talking about taking National Guard members out of their jobs in Texas and moving them into, say, Philadelphia and having them do mass stagings,” Houser said. “Literally as Philadelphians are leaving for work, or their kids are going to school, they are going to see mass-deportation centers with children and mothers who were just in the community working and thriving.” He predicts that Trump would be forced to convert warehouses or abandoned malls into temporary relocation centers for thousands of migrants.
Adam Goodman, a historian at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of The Deportation Machine, told me, “There’s no precedent of millions of people being removed in U.S. history in a short period of time.” The example Trump most often cites as a model is “Operation Wetback,” the mass-deportation program—named for a slur against Mexican Americans—launched by President Dwight Eisenhower in 1954. That program involved huge sweeps through not only workplaces, but also heavily Mexican American communitiesin cities such as Los Angeles.Yet even that effort, despite ensnaring an unknown number of legal residents, removed only about 250,000 people, Goodman said. To deport the larger numbers Trump is promising, he would need an operation of much greater scale and expense.
The Republican response to Texas’s standoff with the Biden administration offers Trump reason for optimism that red-state governors would support his ambitious immigration plans. So far, 14 Republican-controlled states have sent National Guard troops or other law-enforcement personnel to bolster Abbott in his ongoing efforts to assert more control over immigration issues. The Supreme Court last month overturned a lower-court decision that blocked federal agents from dismantling the razor-wire barriers Texas has been erecting along the border. But Abbott insists that he’ll build more of the barriers nonetheless. “We are expanding to further areas to make sure we will expand our level of deterrence,” Abbott declared last Sunday at a press conference near the border, where he was joined by 13 other GOP governors. Abbott has said he expects every red state to eventually send forces to back his efforts.
But the National Guard deployments to Texas still differ from the scenario that Miller has sketched. Abbott is welcoming the personnel that other states are sending to Texas. In that sense, this deployment is similar to the process under which George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden utilized National Guard troops to support federal immigration-enforcement efforts in Texas and, at times, other border states: None of the governors of those states has opposed the use of those troops in their territory for that purpose.
The prospect of Trump dispatching red-state National Guard troops on deportation missions into blue states that oppose them is more akin to his actions during the racial-justice protests following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. At that point, Trump deployed National Guardsmen provided by 11 Republican governors to Washington, D.C., to quell the protests.
The governors provided those forces to Trump under what’s known as “hybrid status” for the National Guard (also known as Title 32 status). Under hybrid status, National Guard troops remain under the technical command of their state’s governor, even though they are executing a federal mission. Using troops in hybrid status isn’t particularly unusual; what made that deployment “unprecedented,” in Joseph Nunn’s phrase, is that the troops were deployed over the objection of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
The hybrid status that Trump used in D.C. is probably the model the former president and Miller are hoping to use to send red-state National Guard forces into blue states that don’t want them, Nunn told me. But Nunn believes that federal courts would block any such effort. Trump could ignore the objections from the D.C. government because it’s not a state, but Nunn believes that if Trump sought to send troops in hybrid status from, say, Indiana to support deportation raids in Chicago, federal courts would say that violates Illinois’ constitutional rights. “Under the Constitution, the states are sovereign and coequal,” Nunn said. “One state cannot reach into another state and exercise governmental power there without the receiving state’s consent.”
But Trump could overcome that obstacle, Nunn said, through a straightforward, if more politically risky, alternative that he and his aides have already discussed. If Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which dates back to 1792, he would have almost unlimited authority to use any military asset for his deportation program. Under the Insurrection Act, Trump could dispatch the Indiana National Guard into Illinois, take control of the Illinois National Guard for the job, or directly send in active-duty military forces, Nunn said.
“There are not a lot of meaningful criteria in the Insurrection Act for assessing whether a given situation warrants using it, and there is no mechanism in the law that allows the courts or Congress to check an abuse of the act,” Nunn told me. “There are quite literally no safeguards.”
The Insurrection Act is the legal tool presidents invoked to federalize control over state National Guards when southern governors used the troops to block racial integration. For Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to instead target racial minorities through his deportation program might be even more politically combustible than sending in National Guard troops through hybrid status during the 2020 D.C. protests, Nunn said. But, like many other immigration and security experts I spoke with, Nunn believes those concerns are not likely to dissuade a reelected Trump from using the Insurrection Act if courts block his other options.
In fact, as I’ve written, a mass-deportation program staffed partially with red-state National Guard forces is only one of several ideas that Trump has embraced for introducing federal forces into blue jurisdictions over the objections of their local leaders. He’s also talked about sending federal personnel into blue cities to round up homeless people (and place them in camps as well) or just to fight crime. Invoking the Insurrection Act might be the necessary predicate for those initiatives as well.
These plans could produce scenes in American communities unmatched in our history. Leopold, to take one scenario raised by Miller in his interview, asks what would happen if the Republican governor of Virginia, at Trump’s request, sends National Guard troops into Maryland, but the Democratic governor of that state orders his National Guard to block their entry? Similarly, in a huge deportation sweep through a residential neighborhood in Los Angeles or Chicago, it’s easy to imagine frightened migrant families taking refuge in a church and a Democratic mayor ordering local police to surround the building. Would federal agents and National Guard troops sent by Trump try to push past the local police by force?
For all the tumult that the many disputes over immigration are now generating, these possibilities could prove far more disruptive, incendiary, and even violent.
“What we would expect to see in a second Trump presidency is governance by force,” Deana El-Mallawany, a counsel and the director of impact programs at Protect Democracy, a bipartisan group focused on threats to democracy, told me. “This is his retribution agenda. He is looking at ways to aggrandize and consolidate power within the presidency to do these extreme things, and going after marginalized groups first, like migrants and the homeless, is the way to expand that power, normalize it, and then wield it more broadly against everybody in our democracy.”
If Donald Trump has benefited from one underappreciated advantage this campaign season, it might be that no one seems to be listening to him very closely anymore.
This is a strange development for a man whose signature political talent is attracting and holding attention. Consider Trump’s rise to power in 2016—how all-consuming his campaign was that year, how one @realDonaldTrump tweet could dominate news coverage for days, how watching his televised stump speeches in a suspended state of fascination or horror or delight became a kind of perverse national pastime.
Now consider the fact that it’s been 14 months since Trump announced his entry into the 2024 presidential race. Can you quote a single thing he’s said on the campaign trail? How much of his policy agenda could you describe? Be honest: When was the last time you watched him speaking live, not just in a short, edited clip?
It’s not that Trump has been forgotten. He remains an omnipresent fact of American life, like capitalism or COVID-19. Everyone is aware of him; everyone has an opinion. Most people would just rather not devote too much mental energy to the subject. This dynamic has shaped Trump’s third bid for the presidency. As Katherine Miller recently observed in TheNew York Times, “The path toward his likely renomination feels relatively muted, as if the country were wandering through a mist, only to find ourselves back where we started, except older and wearier, and the candidates the same.”
Perhaps we overlearned the lessons of that first Trump campaign. After he won, a consensus formed among his detractors that the news media had given him too much airtime, allowing him to set the terms of the debate and helping to “normalize” his rhetoric and behavior.
But if the glut of attention in 2016 desensitized the nation to Trump, the relative dearth in the past year has turned him into an abstraction. The major cable-news networks don’t take his speeches live like they used to, afraid that they’ll be accused of amplifying his lies. He’s skipped every one of the GOP primary debates. And since Twitter banned him in January 2021, his daily fulminations have remained siloed in his own obscure social-media network, Truth Social. These days, Trump exists in many Americans’ minds as a hazy silhouette—formed by preconceived notions and outdated impressions—rather than as an actual person who’s telling the country every day who he is and what he plans to do with a second term.
To rectify this problem, I propose a 2024 resolution for politically engaged Americans: Go to a Trump rally. Not as a supporter or as a protester, necessarily, but as an observer. Take in the scene. Talk to his fans. Listen to every word of the Republican front-runner’s speech. This might sound unpleasant to some; consider it an act of civic hygiene.
Yes, there are other ways to familiarize yourself with the candidate and the stakes of this election. (And, of course, some people might not feel safe at a Trump event.) But nothing quite captures the Trump ethos like his campaign rallies. This has been true ever since he held his first one at Trump Tower, in June 2015. Back then, he had to stack the crowd with paid actors, prompting many in the press (myself included) to dismiss the whole thing as an astroturf marketing stunt. But the rallies, like the campaign itself, soon took on a life of their own, with thousands of people flocking to Phoenix or Toledo or Daytona Beach to witness the once-in-a-generation spectacle firsthand. What would he do? What would he say? I still remember the night of the 2016 Nevada caucuses, standing in line for Trump’s victory rally at the Treasure Island Hotel and Casino and overhearing one gawker enthuse to another, “This is a cultural phenomenon. We have to see it.”
Regardless of your personal orientation toward Trump, attending one of his rallies will be a clarifying experience. You’ll get a tactile sense of the man who’s dominated American politics for nearly a decade, and of the movement he commands. People who comment on politics for a living—journalists, academics—might find certain premises challenged, or at least complicated. Opponents and activists might come away with new urgency (and maybe a dash of empathy for the people Trump has under his sway). The experience could be especially educational to Republican voters who are not Trump devotees but who see the other GOP candidates as lost causes and plan to vote for Trump over Joe Biden. Surely, they should see, before they cast their vote, what exactly they’re voting for.
I recently undertook this challenge myself. As a reporter, I’ve covered about 100 Trump rallies in my life. For a stretch in the fall of 2016, I spent more time in MAGAfied arenas and airplane hangars than I did sleeping in my own bed. What I remember most from that year is the unsettling, anything-might-happen quality of the events. The chaos. The violence. The glee of the candidate presiding over it all.
But with the commencement of a new election year, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been to a rally since 2019. The pandemic, followed by a book project and a series of story assignments unrelated to Trump, had kept me largely off the campaign trail. I was curious what it would be like to go back. Had anything changed? Was my impression of Trump still up-to-date? So, one night earlier this month, I parked my rental car on a scrap of frozen grass near the North Iowa Events Center in Mason City and made my way inside.
A line had formed hours before Trump was scheduled to speak, but the people trickling in from the cold through metal detectors were in good spirits. They chatted amiably about their holiday travel and arranged themselves in groups for selfies. An upbeat soundtrack played over the speakers—Michael Jackson, Adele, Panic! at the Disco—and people excitedly pointed out recognizable faces in the media section. “You’re that guy from CBS!” one attendee exclaimed to a TV-news correspondent.
I found the wholesome, church-barbecue vibe a little jarring. For months, my impression of the 2024 Trump campaign had been shaped by the apocalyptic rhetoric of the candidate himself—the stuff about Marxist “vermin” destroying America, and immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country.” The people here didn’t look like they were bracing for an existential catastrophe. Had I overestimated the radicalizing effect of Trump’s rhetoric?
Only once I started talking to attendees did I detect the darker undercurrent I remembered from past rallies.
I met Kris, a 71-year-old retired nurse in orthopedic sneakers, standing near the press risers. (She declined to share her last name.) She was smiley and spoke in a sweet, grandmotherly voice as she told me how she’d watched dozens of Trump rallies, streaming them on Rumble or FrankSpeech, a platform launched by the right-wing MyPillow founder Mike Lindell. (She waited until Lindell, who happened to be loitering near us, was out of earshot to confide that she preferred Rumble.) The conversation was friendly and unremarkable—until it turned to the 2020 election, which Kris told me she believes was “most definitely” stolen.
“You think Trump should still be president?” I asked.
“By all means,” she said. “And I think behind the scenes he maybe is doing a little more than what we know about.”
“What do you mean?”
“Military-wise,” she said. “The military is supposed to be for the people, against tyrannical governments,” she went on to explain. “I hope he’s guiding the military to be able to step in and do what they need to do. Because right now, I’d say government’s very tyrannical.” If the Democrats try to steal the election again in 2024, she told me, the Trump-sympathetic elements of the military might need to seize control.
Around 8 p.m., Trump took the stage and launched into his remarks, toggling back and forth between what he called “teleprompter stuff” (his prepared stump speech) and the unscripted riffs that he’s famous for. Seeing him speak in this setting after so many years was strange—both instantly familiar and still somehow shocking, like rewatching an old movie you saw a hundred times as a kid but whose most offensive jokes you’d forgotten.
When he talked about members of the Biden administration, he referred to them as “idiots” and “lunatics” and “bad people.” When he talked about the “invasion” of undocumented immigrants at the southern border, he punctuated the riff with ominous warnings for his mostly white audience: “They’re occupying schools …They’re sitting with your children.” When he mentioned Barack Obama, he made a point of using the former president’s middle name—“Barack Hussein Obama”—and then veered off into an appreciation of Rush Limbaugh, the late conservative talk-radio host who taught him this trick. “We miss Rush,” Trump said to enthusiastic cheers. “We need you, Rush!”
I’d forgotten how casually he swears from the podium—deriding, at one point, his Republican rival Nikki Haley’s recent statement on the Civil War as “three paragraphs of bullshit”—and how casually people in the crowd swear back. Throughout the speech, two young men near the front repeatedly screamed “Fuck Biden!” prompted a wave of naughty giggles from others in the crowd.
If one thing has noticeably changed since 2016, it’s how the audience reacts to Trump. During his first campaign, the improvised material was what everyone looked forward to, while the written sections felt largely like box-checking. But in Mason City, the off-script riffs—many of which revolved around the 2020 election being stolen from him, and his personal sense of martyrdom—often turned rambly, and the crowd seemed to lose interest. At one point, a woman in front of me rolled her eyes and muttered, “He’s just babbling now.” She left a few minutes later, joining a steady stream of early exiters, and I wondered then whether even the most loyal Trump supporters might be surprised if they were to see their leader speak in person.
My own takeaway from the event was that there’s a reason Trump is no longer the cultural phenomenon he was in 2016. Yes, the novelty has worn off. But he also seems to have lost the instinct for entertainment that once made him so interesting to audiences. He relies on a shorthand legible only to his most dedicated followers, and his tendency to get lost in rhetorical cul-de-sacs of self-pity and anger wears thin. This doesn’t necessarily make him less dangerous. There is a rote quality now to his darkest rhetoric that I found more unnerving than when it used to command wall-to-wall news coverage.
These were my own impressions of the rally I attended; yours may very well be different. The only way to know is to see for yourself. Every four years, pundits try to identify the medium that will shape the presidential race—the “Twitter election,” the “cable-news election.” In 2024, with both parties warning of existential stakes for America, perhaps the best approach is to simply show up in real life.
Shortly before Trump began speaking, I met a friendly young dad in glasses who’d brought his 6-year-old son to the event. He’d never attended a Trump rally before and was excited to be there. When I asked if I could chat with him after Trump’s speech to see what he thought of the event, he happily agreed.
As Trump spoke, I glanced over at the man a few times from the press section. His expression was muted; he barely reacted to the lines that drove the crowd wild. The longer Trump spoke, I noticed, the further the man drifted backward toward the exits. Of course, I don’t know what was going through his head. Maybe he was just a stoic type. Or maybe his enthusiasm was tempered by the distraction of tending to a 6-year-old. All I know is that, halfway through the speech, he was gone.
