When Kristi Noem was shown the bottom of the bus by the maniacal mad clown, many people breathed a sigh of relief.
Unfortunate, because Stephen Miller is still around. I’ve been mentioning him for a lot longer than I wish. Here’s a little background story on America’s Nosferatu doppelganger in case you missed it:
Meet Stephen Miller — the Last Man Standing
If you work with Donald Trump, you’ll likely get fired. He even starred in a reality TV show about it. If you don’t get fired, you’ll probably quit because the man who brags about sexually assaulting women is insufferable.
He was not yet a household word when I wrote that. Now, almost everyone knows who he is, and never for a happy reason.
As long as he’s around, we’ll see headlines like these:
As of July 11, there were 65,765 people in immigration detention in the United States, many of them without a court hearing, which is a violation of constitutional rights.1
Compare that to November 3, 2024, when there were 38,863 immigrant detainees.
On August 3, one of Stephen Miller’s victims, Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, died in custody at a place called Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey. Delaney Hall has been working on its insipid reputation since Miller first clamped his fangs onto the American immigration scene.
Delaney has been the scene of repeated protests because it’s become a concentration camp with no accountability.
Lopez-Cornejo, 41, was a Salvadoran immigrant who wasn’t important enough for ICE to tell us his cause of death after “suffering a medical emergency” at Delaney Hall.2
He’s not the first.
According to Physicians for Human Rights, Lopez-Cornejo is the 53rd person to die in an ICE concentration camp under Stephen Miller’s watchful, sardonic gaze.3
Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, a Haitian immigrant, died in December 2025 after another “medical emergency.” The medical emergency, and his death, occurred one day after he entered the Delaney detention center. Even ICE admits he entered the facility in good health.4
Let me be clear here. With this regime, nothing they say can be trusted. A medical emergency should probably be considered a beating by guards until the regime can prove otherwise. Or, in Jean Wilson Brutus’s case, I don’t think you need to be a fiction writer like me to suggest that an ICE goon dropped some fentanyl into his stale peanut butter sandwich (look for clues in the footnote as to why I might concoct this crazy story).
The problem in these situations is that we can’t know. If Brutus was giving ICE goons some lip, the goons, already predisposed toward hate, could easily have dropped a little fentanyl sauce into whatever gross food they were giving him.
How would we know? It is impossible to know what goes on behind those locked doors. DHS won’t let anyone in to see what they’re up to.
Nobody is holding ICE accountable aside from the usual crowd of immigration lawyers and activist local politicians like Ras Baraka, Newark’s mayor. They try their best to shine a light on these cases, but if we’re honest, Americans are still not particularly outraged when immigrants are seized from the streets and killed unless it’s right in front of their faces.
And even then, let’s be more honest. They’re much more interested when it’s a non-immigrant taken down in the streets during an ICE operation.
This is why Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, has prioritized a stealthier campaign of abductions that focus on courthouses, smaller attack convoys, and airports.
At courthouses, the only people there are suing each other or waiting to see a judge for a variety of other reasons, usually uncomfortable ones. The last thing anyone is going to do when they see ICE in a courthouse is blow a whistle.
At airports, everyone is cranky and just hoping to sit through an uncomfortable, crowded, loud flight without clawing their fellow passengers' eyes out.
“How was your flight, love?”
“It was a win. I didn’t kill anyone.”
So Mullin, who is in trouble with the more radical insurrectionists, like Steve Bannon, anyway, for not lining the Woodrow Wilson Memorial Bridge with the heads of immigrants on pikes, came up with a new strategy: No more “operations” with names like Midway Blitz, where convoys of ICE goons attacked immigrants in broad daylight, which, in turn, lured armies of citizen avengers armed with whistles and camera phones.
Mullin didn’t pull back operations, though. He merely placed them into stealth mode. More arrests are being made now than ever. In July, there were 1,474 abductions per day in the first eleven days, which meant that Stephen Miller’s goal of 3,000 per day looked well on its way to fruition.5
Now, much smaller teams stalk the streets. Instead of five or six vehicles packed with ICE stormtroopers, one or two vehicles roam neighborhoods and much more quietly snatch their victims and flee the scene before anyone has a chance to respond.
And, as I mentioned, they’re in airports, too. You might think you’ll be boarding a flight at SFO (San Francisco), but instead, this happens while you’re looking for the latest Psalm of Vampires book at the airport book bin:
Your friendly TSA agents are helping the process by submitting names and birth dates of travelers to ICE.
This leads to scenes like this, via the New York Times:6
The woman and her 9-year-old daughter were walking through Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport on Sunday night, heading to their gate to fly to Miami to visit a relative, when a stranger in plainclothes approached.
“Angelina?” he asked.
“Sí,” she responded.
Minutes later, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez was on her knees, crying, as two immigration agents were handcuffing her in front of her daughter.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the DHS who seemed to relish her role as a Queen of the South determined to tear families apart during her tenure there, said at the time:7
“The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home.”
Did I mention that Ms. Lopez-Jimenez was arrested at the airport while her terrified 9-year-old daughter looked on? Republican family values, Queen of the South style.
Speaking of flights, Stephen Miller’s Gestapo regime sent 147 Venezuelans by charter to Venezuela just yesterday.8 This is one of the perks of kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and keeping him locked up in his own special cage.
Deportations, with the coerced and staged cooperation of a newly subservient Venezuelan government, worked out so well after a similar charter flight carrying 146 Venezuelans in June that the regime, clapping its hands in glee, sent more.
What became of those 146 Venezuelans isn’t entirely clear, because just eight hours after the charter plane landed, an earthquake hammered the city they arrived in, La Guaira, killing more than 5,500 people and leaving about 24,000 people homeless. The building the deportees were detained in collapsed, killing dozens of them.
It was a wet dream scenario for Stephen Miller, who reportedly had sex with his crazed wife while watching a snuff film of the event (I may have made that up, but would it surprise you?).
What better thing to do, this regime obviously pondered, than to send more charters to a land devastated by a major quake?
This is a regime that loves using AI for everything. It’s not unfair to wonder if someone poses questions like this to ChatGPT: “What is the shittiest thing we can do to our Venezuelan immigrants?”
ChatGPT:
I’m glad you asked that question. You’re so impressive with these amazing queries. Why not send immigrants directly into harms way? Venezuela just had a major earthquake, so its resources are quite strained. It is very unlikely they will be able to support a transport plane loaded with a hundred and fifty or so impoverished souls.
What a country we’ve become.
Notes
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Footnotes
S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. Syracuse, New York, U.S.; Tracreports.org, 2026.
https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/
Ley, Ana, Tracey Tully, and Mark Bonamo. “Immigrant Held at Delaney Detention Center Has Died, Officials Say.” nytimes. The New York Times, August 3, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/nyregion/ice-detention-center-death-delaney-hall-nj.html
Lerner, Dietlind. “Statement on the Death of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, 53Rd Known Death in ICE Custody.” PHR, August 4, 2026. https://phr.org/news/deaths-in-ice-custody/.
The timeline of Brutus’s death, in ICE’s own words:
On December 12, 2025, at approximately 1:25 p.m., a registered nurse (RN) completed Mr. BRUTUS’ intake screening, using a Creole interpreter, documented normal vital signs, his denial of any past medical history, and cleared him for general population.
On the same date, a custody officer announced a medical emergency when Mr. BRUTUS became sluggish and began hyperventilating while he was being escorted to his housing unit.
At approximately 4:28 p.m., medical staff and a custody officer responded to Mr. BRUTUS’ housing unit, noting he was in distress.
At approximately 4:32 p.m., a custody officer called 911 and requested emergency medical services (EMS).
At approximately 4:42 p.m., health staff initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR).
At approximately 4:45 p.m., health staff administered naloxone to Mr. BRUTUS intranasally.
At approximately 4:48 p.m., a staff member arrived at the scene with an automated external defibrillator (AED).
At approximately 4:50 p.m., EMS personnel arrived at the scene, assumed Mr. BRUTUS’ care, and continued CPR.
At approximately 5:03 p.m., EMS personnel departed the facility and transported Mr. BRUTUS to the University Hospital (UH) emergency room. [
At approximately 5:45 p.m., a UH emergency room physician pronounced Mr. BRUTUS deceased.
https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/reports/ddrJeanWilsonBrutus.pdf (PDF)
Valentino, Silas. “ICE Agents Arrest San Francisco Woman at SFO.” SFGATE, July 24, 2026. https://www.sfgate.com/travel/article/ice-arrest-woman-sfo-22358905.php
Hamed Aleaziz, and Heather Knight. “T.S.A. Tipped Off ICE Agents Before Arrests at San Francisco Airport.” nytimes. The New York Times, March 25, 2026.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/24/us/tsa-data-ice-deportation-san-francisco-airport.html. 🎁
Hamed Aleaziz. “T.S.A. Is Providing Air Passenger Data to Immigration Agents for Deportation Effort.” nytimes. The New York Times, December 12, 2025.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/us/politics/immigration-tsa-passenger-data.html. 🎁
Glatsky, Genevieve. “U.S. Sends Flight With Deportees to Venezuela for First Time Since Earthquakes.” The New York Times, August 4, 2026.
Ruminato Gift Link 🎁 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/03/world/americas/venezuela-us-deportation-flights-resume.html. 🎁
The is a U. S. Rep. Monica McIver from NJ still under charges for interfering with a federal officer (ICE). She was charged in early June 2025, and has not had her day in court. I’m hoping I can get someone to look into her case because everyone seems to have forgotten about her.