The Persecution Never Rests: 10,000 Migrant Arrests in Five Days
ICE stormtroopers are doing a lot more than just counting their $70 billion
Now that the Resistance has forced ICE and its companion stormtroopers from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) into stealth mode such that they are no longer actively shooting protesters in the head, one would think, “Whew, glad that’s over.”
Right?
Nope.
The New York Times is telling us that more than 10,000 arrests have been made by regime stormtroopers in the last five days.1
Happy Fourth of July.
I’ll repeat that: 10,000 arrests. In five days.
Most of this has been through ICE.
The White House (Stephen Miller, probably) has issued another arrest quota: 2,000 per day. Miller had previously gunned for 3,000 per day, but despite the massive increase in resources, wasn’t able to hit that goal, in no small part because of Resistance forces in L.A., Chicago, Minneapolis, and Portland, Maine.
The regime also found that shooting white protesters while chasing brown people around town didn’t sit well with the general public.
So they changed tactics, first by dumping the easy target, Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem, who had become a dog-killing South Park meme, and replacing her with the equally unqualified, but quieter Markwayne Mullin.
Mullin announced that the regime would continue to send stormtroopers out into various cities, but this time they wouldn’t provoke local populations by giving the effort names like “Project Bust Chicago’s Balls” or “Midway Blitz.”
They snatched a nun
The result is a quieter form of domestic terrorism. Stuff like this (quoting the New York Times):
In South Texas, Sister Letty Ugboaja, a Nigerian nun, was arrested on her way to church on Sunday morning, according to Sister Norma Pimentel, her colleague. Ms. Ugboaja is a local nurse who also helps at a parish in the region. Ms. Pimentel called local leaders after learning of the arrest, and congressional officials soon got involved and pushed for her release.
On Sunday, she was let go from ICE custody, and Ms. Pimentel was there to greet her.
Ms. Pimentel said that Ms. Ugboaja was distraught upon her release.
“It took her awhile to be able to talk — she was crying,” she said.
In case you glossed over it because you read things the way I do, with one eye toward the next article in the queue, let me repeat this:
They arrested a nun.
On the way to church.
It turned out her paperwork was in order, but that’s how ICE stormtroopers operate. They arrest nuns, then ask questions later.
It was only a few weeks ago that the mainstream media was sanewashing stories about the latest Republican government shutdowns. After a few strongly worded memos from Democrats, the latest one resulted in Congress authorizing $38.5 billion for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). 2
This funding was cobbled together in June under the Orwellian Secure America Act, also referred to as the ICE First, Families Last Act, according to reliable observers3 who don’t sanewash everything this regime and its compliant Congress does.
It is part of a broader $70 billion spending package shared between ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Department of Homeland Security.
The size of the stormtrooper funding package is nearly impossible for those of us dealing with basic living costs to comprehend.
In the original funding bill that Republicans cynically called the Big Beautiful Bill, Congress authorized $170 billion for border and immigrant expulsions for the next four years4
This is more money than every law enforcement agency in the United States put together.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice:5
It is more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined.
It turns U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka ICE, which receives $49 billion, into the largest law enforcement agency in the nation, bigger than the FBI, which comes in at a comparatively meager $11.1 billion.6
The Brennan Center correctly calls the $170 billion in overall incarceration and deportation funding the beginning of a deportation industrial complex. I’ll call it the beginning of a prison industrial complex that the administration has already demonstrated a willingness to outsource overseas to countries like Libya and other dysfunctional, and often violent, foreign nations.
The never-ending case of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García is a highly publicized poster child for the regime’s behavior, but Stephen Miller and his fascist stormtroopers have been quietly sending Americans to concentration camps in other countries since Trump first showed up again at the Oval Office.7
The same tactics, but now with smaller, more tightly focused teams
Under new DHS chief Markwayne Mullin, stormtroopers have changed tactics. Instead of Operation Terrorize aimed at a city near you, the regime is spreading out its domestic terror across a wider net with smaller teams.
Nuns in South Texas. Fathers of terrified 13-year-old boys in Salt Lake City, where a 48-year-old Mexican man named Arturo was snatched from the streets while driving to a soccer game. Salt Lake City will lose his skills as a furniture maker, and mostly not notice, until it notices others missing, too.
While Atruro’s thirteen-year-old son anguishes about life without a father and his mother living in fear and misery, crops will rot in the fields, restaurant owners will jack up the prices of their food while looking for people willing to wash dishes for more than minimum wage, roofs will go unfixed, ever more construction sites will turn silent.
Eventually, the Resistance will figure out how to fight this. But for now, the losses are piling up again.
The good fortune of incompetence
The resistance does have one bit of luck on its side: The incompetence of the terrorists and insurrectionists we do battle with in the courts.
Others have documented the court record of the American Clown Show well enough that it’s sufficient to say here that they’re getting hammered on almost every front, aside, sadly, from the one at the highest level, the corrupt and complicit Supreme Court. I’ve talked about this institution before:
The Federalist Society’s War Against Americans
Note: This substack article may be too long for your email. I recommend you click the title or "View entire message" and read it on the web. Thanks!
But lower courts have not been kind to the regime. Some of them have exposed the regime to such large degrees of malfeasance and corruption that the DOJ itself has had to issue the occasional mea culpa.
Consider the case of the Broadway Six in Chicago.
For years, the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office was one of the Department of Justice’s most successful and reputable prosecution units.
These days, it’s run by a Trump appointee named Andrew Boutros, who has, in the wake of a grand jury-rigging scandal, thrown 20-year veteran Assistant U.S. Attorney Sheri Mecklenburg (take note of the gender) under the bus by ordering an investigation of more than 100 cases she’s handled since 2007.
Technically, Boutros is the 42nd U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (often referred to as the Chicago U.S. attorney’s office by the media). He was chosen by the Grifter in Chief for the office in a bit of DOJ subterfuge involving an open-ended appointment that avoids that nasty business of Senate approval, although why the PedoFührer went that route is a curiosity, given that the Republican Senate would probably approve the clone of Al Capone if the Grifter nominated him.
Boutros oversees about 130 criminal and civil attorneys in the Chicago office. Most of these are career lawyers and prosecutors, including Sheri Mecklenburg. But it was Mecklenburg who was accused of grand jury tampering in the Broadview Six case.8
The Broadview Six case involved Michael Rabbitt, independent journalist and former congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, Andre Martin, and three others who participated in protests outside the Broadview, Illinois ICE concentration camp during the government’s “Midway Blitz” terror campaign of 2025.
The Broadway Six were accused of blocking an ICE concentration camp transport vehicle, but the case was dismissed with prejudice (meaning it’s over) when Mecklenburg was allegedly discovered talking to grand jurors outside of grand jury proceedings involving the federal indictment. Federal prosecutors were also accused of additional grand jury tampering.
Now that Bouros has ordered a deep dive into Mecklenburg’s past cases, one of two things is probably true: Mecklenburg has a long history of jury tampering, and Bouros is a dedicated reformer, or Mecklenburg is a victim of a Trump appointee’s corruption and was acting on his orders, and he’s trying to bury her for it.
Bouros has the misfortune of being that Trump appointee and has, unlike previous U.S. Attorneys in the Chicago office, lost the benefit of the doubt by his association with the world’s most corrupt regime.
Joyce Vance repeatedly points out that judges and other participants in the U.S. justice system have long trusted the ethics of U.S. Attorneys and the DOJ, but that has changed under this regime.
We’ll find out how this plays out. Either way, the Northern District of Illinois is on its heels where it belongs as long as it keeps fighting against the people it’s supposed to protect.
The regime even tried to prevent a USMNT World Cup goal
I stole that line. I did. I’m not ashamed. I copped it from SF Gate, a San Francisco Bay Area digital news platform run by Hearst. Its headline:9
Donald Trump fought to prevent USMNT’s first Bay Area World Cup goal
How? Remember the Supreme Court decision this week that barely kept alive birthright citizenship, which is explicitly spelled out by the 14th Amendment, by a freaky 6-3 vote?
Well, that case was prompted by the Mad Clown’s attempt to issue an Executive Order squashing that amendment, which, if successful, would have presumably sent USMNT striker Folarin Balogun packing to Nigeria.
Balogun’s story is both interesting and fun. We should be embracing this kind of story with love and excitement during this 250th anniversary. Instead, we find ourselves doing everything we can to avoid TrumpleThinSkin’s various empty festivals.
Turns out Balogun’s parents were en route to England. Airline personnel, noticing that his mother’s tummy had the approximate shape and size of a dinosaur egg, prevented her from boarding a plane home from New York to the U.K., where she lived at the time.
So, luckily for some flight attendants, Balogun was born in Brooklyn instead of on a plane, and instantly became an American citizen courtesy of the same 14th Amendment TrumpleFilthSkin tried to destroy with his outlandish Executive Order.
Sidebar: The Executive Order, of course, triggered a court case that flew quickly into the arms of the Supreme Court. It should have been a 9-0 decision to squash Trump’s authoritarian effort.
Instead, there were 3 votes in favor of ignoring the 14th Amendment and thus overturning part of the U.S. Constitution. This kind of thing, I suppose, requires its own post, but not from me.
I recommend legal beagles like Jay Kuo and Joyce Vance for that, but, honestly, you don’t really need to read legal arguments behind such a basic topic. All I’ll add to the online discussion and outrage is that the three justices who ruled in favor of shredding the Constitution should be impeached forthwith, post haste, and yesterday.
Even worse, though, was Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s affirming opinion in the case, which suggested to Congress, “You know, you guys could just write a law overturning the 14th Amendment! Think about it!”
Lucky for us, Trump’s effort failed as soon as it began, and Balogun is part of U.S. World Cup lore.
Thanks for reading!
Notes
For a truer picture of America, one Stephen Miller doesn’t want you to see, take the time this holiday weekend to read this review of immigration in America:
🎁 Ruminato Gift Link:
Yes, I know. It’s the sanewash kings at the New York Times. But when they’re right, they’re right.
Footnotes
Hamed Aleaziz. “Immigrant Arrests Surge to 10,000 in 5 Days as ICE Clamps Down.” The New York Times, July 2, 2026.
🎁 Ruminato Gift Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/us/politics/ice-immigrant-arrests-surge.html. 🎁
NILC. “What’s in Congress’s New ICE Funding Law?,” June 11, 2026. https://www.nilc.org/articles/whats-in-congresss-new-ice-funding-law/.
averyr. “Our Federal Budget Is Showing Us That Congress Is Putting ICE First and Families Last. It Should Be the Other Way Around. - Institute for Policy Studies.” Institute for Policy Studies, June 29, 2026. https://ips-dc.org/our-federal-budget-is-showing-us-that-congress-is-putting-ice-first-and-families-last/.
Arrington, Rep. 2025. “Text - H.R.1 - 119th Congress (2025-2026): One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Congress.gov. 2025. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1/text.
11762. 2025. “Big Budget Act Creates a ‘Deportation-Industrial Complex.’” Brennan Center for Justice. February 14, 2025. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/big-budget-act-creates-deportation-industrial-complex.
We really don’t want Kash to have more money, so it’s okay! News, PBS. 2025. “WATCH: Patel Says FBI Needs More Funding than What White House Budget Proposes.” PBS News. May 8, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-fbi-director-patel-testifies-on-2026-white-house-budget.
The regime at one time proposed sending Kilmar Armando Ábrego García, who has since been released, to Eswatini, a landlocked country within the borders of South Africa, a place where Ábrego García has no family or friends. The hard work of immigration lawyers saved him from that grim fate.
Kim, Minho. 2025. “Judge Signals She Is Likely to Order Ábrego Garcia’s Release Soon.” Nytimes.com. The New York Times. October 11, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/us/politics/abrego-garcia-hearing.html.
On June 22, a federal judge (in Tennessee!) called Ábrego Garcia’s case “vindictive,” “selective” and “in violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause” and ordered the DOJ to release him. The DOJ immediately appealed.
Staff, NBC Washington. “DOJ Appeals Dismissal of Human Trafficking Charges against Abrego.” NBC4 Washington, June 22, 2026.
The Department of Homeland Security also continues to maintain propaganda against Abrego Garcia with the headline: THE REAL STORY: Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an MS-13 Gang member with a History of Violence
U.S. Department of Homeland Security. “Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is an MS-13 Gang Member with a History of Violence | Homeland Security,” 2026.
UNSAFE LINK (visit at your own risk)
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/04/16/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-gang-member-history-violence.
Meisner, Jason. “‘Broadview Six’ Blowback to Heat up for US Attorney in Coming Weeks.” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 2026. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/07/02/broadview-six-blowback-us-attorney
Fernandez, Gabe. “Donald Trump Fought to Prevent USMNT’s First Bay Area World Cup Goal.” SFGATE, July 2, 2026. https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/trump-usmnt-goal-folarin-balogun-22329566.php
How did I miss this? Great column....and it makes me sad and angry...and weary. It is embarrassing to be an American right now. :(
You missed it because I write too many posts lol. 😂