The Shock-and-Awe Deportations Will Get WorseTrump’s immigration policy has quickly become a stain on the country. But it’s just getting started.
Last night, Donald Trump sounded relieved as he announced an Israel and Iran ceasefire. “CONGRATULATIONS TO EVERYONE!” he wrote. “This is a War that could have gone on for years, and destroyed the entire Middle East, but it didn’t, and never will!” A short time later, he sounded triumphant: “The ceasefire is unlimited,” he told NBC. “It’s going to go forever . . . I don’t believe they will ever be shooting at each other again.” A few hours later, he seemed worried: the “CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT” he announced, before warning, “PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT!” This morning, after Israel said Iran had already violated the ceasefire with another missile barrage—and that it would respond in kind—he seemed angry. “ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” he posted shortly before 7 a.m.¹ “IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!” And as he boarded a flight to the NATO summit, he was undeniably steamed, telling reporters he is “not happy” with Israel or Iran. Neither country, he said, “knows what the fuck they’re doing.” The pressure seems to have worked, at least momentarily: Axios reports that Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu responded by scaling back his planned response to Iran’s violation of the ceasefire. Whether that holds or for how long, we’ll see. Happy Tuesday.
Brutality Upon Brutalityby Andrew Egger Within hours of Narciso Barranco’s arrest on Saturday, the video had gone viral. Masked ICE agents had surrounded and tackled the Orange County, California landscaper, allegedly an illegal immigrant. In the video, his weed whacker lies discarded while they pin him to the ground and beat him around the head and neck. The more details came out, the worse the story got. Barranco’s son Alejandro told local news his father had been pepper sprayed and suffered a dislocated shoulder; in more than 24 hours since entering ICE custody, Alejandro said, his father had not received food, water, or medical care. Alejandro and his two brothers, Emanuel and José Luis, are U.S. citizens. They also happen to be U.S. Marines. Barranco’s arrest may have prompted the largest recent outpouring of indignation, but his is an increasingly common story—one that represents a stain on our collective consciousness and a black mark in our nation’s history. As they chase ever more stringent immigrant detention quotas—whipped along by mass-deportation ideologues like Stephen Miller—federal agents are increasingly abandoning the slightest concern for optics or basic human decency. Instead, they are bringing the hammer down on any migrant they can find. These are just some of the stories that we’ve seen in the last few weeks:
If anything, we should expect stories like these to multiply in the days ahead. On Monday, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration a remarkable assist in its efforts not merely to detain illegal immigrants, but to short-circuit their due process in order to quickly deport them. In an unsigned and unexplained ruling, the court’s conservative majority paused a ruling from a lower judge who had blocked the administration from deporting migrants to countries with which they had no connection without giving them a hearing to make the case they could face torture there. The immediate effect of the ruling was to give the White House clearance to move forward with deporting a clutch of convicted criminal aliens to South Sudan. Their deportations had been paused last month. But the ruling also seemed to cut in a different direction from other SCOTUS decisions this year, which have forced the White House to stop ignoring migrants’ rights to due process as they seek to deport as many as possible as quickly as possible. That’s all good news for the White House. The president and his aides have responded to every story of injustice in immigration enforcement with insistence that the media is either misrepresenting the story or ignoring other cases in which actual, hardened criminals are being taken off the streets. Now, they don’t need to pause all that long to differentiate between the immigrants they’re going after—if they were ever pausing in the first place. In fact, they seem poised to accelerate a deportation strategy of moving the maximum number of bodies allowed by law, no matter the individual circumstances of the migrants in question or the public reaction. “DHS can now execute its lawful authority and remove illegal aliens to a country willing to accept them,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement yesterday. “Fire up the deportation planes.” A Quick Note on the BraveOur fearless leader, Sarah Longwell, doesn’t spend all her time in focus groups or on Bulwark podcasts. Today, she and a group of likeminded Never Trump Republicans (or ex-Republicans?)—Bill’s among them as well—helped launch a new messaging campaign called Home of the Brave, intended to share the stories of everyday Americans who have been hurt by Trump’s policies. They’ve launched a $15 million ad campaign and set up a new Substack as well (all the cool kids are doing it). “We call America the Home of the Brave. But in the face of President Trump’s threats of retribution, many of our elite institutions are caving rather than pushing back when Trump attacks them,” Sarah said in a statement about the campaign. “But regular Americans aren’t afraid to speak out about what’s happening to our country. That’s why we’re launching Home of the Brave—to give regular Americans a place to tell their story about how the Trump administration is harming them, their communities, and their country.” AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsTHE NATO SCOLD COMETH: Donald Trump is inbound to the Hague this morning for the first NATO summit of his second term, and ABC News has the latest:
HERE COMES ZOHRAN: On the eve of New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary today, a shock poll has leftist candidate Zohran Mamdani inching ahead of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in a ranked-choice voting simulation for the very first time. The survey from PIX11 News, Emerson College, and the Hill found Cuomo still leading Mamdani in first-choice voting, 36.4 percent to 33.7 percent, and through most of the balloting rounds that follow. But when the ranked-choice dust settles and only the top two candidates are left, the poll finds Mamdani edging Cuomo 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent. Mamdani has clearly picked up momentum. But this has been happening over many weeks. One internal poll from another candidate found him narrowly ahead of Cuomo in first-choice ballots earlier this month when Cuomo was thought to still enjoy a comfortable lead. The race has also been shaken by a late development earlier this month: Mamdani and city comptroller Brad Lander, who is polling third, cross-endorsed one another’s candidacies, asking their own voters to rank the other second. THEY’RE BRINGING DRUGS. THEY’RE BRINGING CRIME. THEY’RE BRINGING PRAYER MATS: Right-wing conspiracy theories never really die—they just go into cold storage until they’re needed again. Yesterday, deportation czar Tom Homan, looking to make a connection between the threat of Iranian retaliation and border security, pried one conspiracy out of the back of the freezer. “Joe Biden let MILLIONS of unknown gotaways cross the border,” he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We don’t know who they are . . . but Iranian passports were found ditched south of the border with prayer mats.” The “Iranian passports” bit is some novel spice—that’s why they pay Homan the big bucks—but the “prayer mats” claim goes back more than a decade. Back in 2014, a Breitbart story credulously reported on internet rumors of “what American security contractors on the ground believe is a Muslim prayer rug found near the border in Arizona last week.” The story, sourced to a group called American Patriot, Three Percent and featuring pictures of a piece of fabric of unknown provenance, earned a Pants on Fire rating from PolitiFact at the time. (Even if the rumor were true, we feel compelled to note, there is nothing wrong with a Muslim prayer rug. There are 1.9 billion practicing Muslims in the world.) A few years later, in 2019, a rancher repeated the same rumor to a reporter for the Washington Examiner; her credulous write-up was quickly shared by President Trump. Now Homan is reaching for the same canard. Cheap ShotsIf you’re wondering how DHS is messaging on the filmed beating and arrest of Narciso Barranco:
1 You might think he’d have a more direct way to get ahold of world leaders. You’re a free subscriber to The Bulwark—the largest pro-democracy news and analysis bundle on Substack. For unfettered access to all our newsletters and to access ad-free and member-only shows, become a paying subscriber.We’re going to send you a lot of content—newsletters and alerts for shows so you can read and watch on your schedule. Don’t care for so much email? You can update your personal email preferences as often as you like. To update the list of newsletter or alerts you received from The Bulwark, click here.
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The Shock-and-Awe Deportations Will Get Worse
June 24, 2025
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