Trump’s ICE Gestapo Is Back and It’s Bigger and Meaner than Ever

Trump is distracting you from his Gestapo by trying to name everything after himself

“I was in pain, crying like a little kid.”

This is the testimony from Leonardo Sánchez, a Cuban migrant snatched from the streets of the United States, shackled in ankle and chest chains, and sent on a 14-hour plane ride to Liberia, a place he knows nothing about.

The New York Times today released an article detailing Sánchez’s story:¹

Leonardo Sánchez wailed in pain for hours on the deportation flight from Louisiana to West Africa, he and six other detainees said.

He’d been cuffed around his wrists and ankles. A chain around his waist dug into his grossly protruding abdomen — the result of years-old wounds and surgeries that doctors said left his intestines barely inside his body.

Mr. Sánchez, a 49-year-old Cuban, begged for medical attention from several of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on the aircraft.

“I was in pain, crying like a little kid,” he said. But the agents wouldn’t remove his chains or let him use the toilet, he and other detainees said. He wet himself.

Like many of the more than two dozen deportees on the flight with him, Mr. Sánchez said he did not know where he was being taken. Several panicked when they suspected it was Liberia, after one of them saw it written on a sheet of paper held by an ICE official in Louisiana.

When some protested, they were beaten by agents, five of the deportees said. Some were slammed to the ground or struck with blows, several said. One showed cuts along his wrists and bruises around his neck, which he said he received after resisting getting on the plane. Another said some deportees were left screaming in pain.

As you can see, Kristi Noem is gone, but the cruelty not only remains, but has become reenergized to the extent that the United States is officially a terrorist state, the kind we complained about during the Before Times.

I wrote about shock gloves a couple of weeks ago:

That article barely scratches the surface of what Stephen Miller, the Gestapo chief who hides in the White House directing traffic away from the prying eyes of the lamesteam press, has been building while Trump renames everything, thus distracting us from what’s important.

You see, my friends, it’s easy to rename things he’s renamed. Tearing down his legacy will be simple.

Repairing the lives of people like Leonardo Sánchez? Not so much.

What and Where is Liberia?

Liberia is a West African country with a unique origin story: It is the result of a fantasy by Confederates to ship all of America’s Blacks back to Africa. From 1822 to 1861, 15,000 African Americans and 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans migrated from the United States in a wild attempt to fulfill this fantasy.

The migration was achieved in large part through a group called the American Colonization Society (ACS), which consisted of slaveholders and some Quakers who thought repatriating slaves to their origin continent might somehow help eclipse the evils of slavery.

Eventually, the ACS helped ship 13,000 people of color to Liberia. There, the ACS began a systematic campaign to wipe out indigenous Liberian culture to such an extent that Americans still consider the spiritual practices of all Africans “witchcraft,”² thanks to an accompanying campaign of propaganda in the United States.

Western history, also known as Colonial history, describes Liberia as the first African nation to achieve independence. This, of course, is a ludicrous concept, as anyone who reads Isaac Samuel’s excellent Substack, African History Extra, will tell you:

This colonial narrative pretends that Africa wasn’t a massive continent of thriving nations before Western gunpowder demolished it. I’ve written about that in the past, too. Not as well as Isaac Samuel, but in my defense, I was not yet familiar with his work:

The Briefest History of African Colonialism Ever (paywall-free link)

But that independence claim is the story, and American historians tend to stick to it.

It’s only been a little more than twenty years since Liberia was torn to shreds by Charles Taylor, its president at the time, who embarked on an epic campaign of terror that resulted in the Second Liberian Civil War and helped introduce the world to the concept of child soldiers.³

The country is still considered one of the most corrupt in the world, in large part because its main economic engine, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, made it so.

Put simply, Liberia is a mess. It is in no position to accept one single migrant from south of the border, much less the 1,200 that the Trump regime is planning to send as part of an agreement it established with the government of Liberia.

Take a moment, if you don’t mind, to reflect upon this for a moment.

Imagine being sent to a region of the world with an extremely grim recent history full of child soldiers and rapacious warlords committing enough atrocities to land them in prison for fifty years after being found guilty of war crimes by an international tribunal.⁴

Liberia is in recovery mode now, in the middle of another experiment with democracy, but it’s in no position to handle 1200 maltreated guests courtesy of the Stephen Miller Gestapo, which is using its Liberian deal as a template for similar agreements with other countries.

50,000 immigrants were deported in July

While Trump was busy renaming things, 50,000 immigrants were deported in July.⁵

50,000. In one month.

Trump might be demented, he might even be little more than an orange, corpulent corpse, but Stephen Miller is quite aware and thriving in the West Wing, where he’s directing his newest minion, Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to inflict maximum damage to the immigrant population of the United States.

Since Mullin’s appointment, massive funding has entered the picture for ICE. Mullin has seized the opportunity with gusto, but he’s doing it more quietly than Kristi Noem, who tended to beat her chest like a wild ape whilst sending immigrants out of the country to various concentration camps around the world.

There are no more highly publicized “operations.” You won’t see another “Operation Midway Blitz,” which gained so much attention in Chicago that it was forced to retreat.

That retreat was short-lived.

Mullin was smart enough to split his operations into smaller units. Instead of sending convoys of vehicles around American cities, which gain the attention of literal whistleblowers, he has directed his forces to hunt in smaller teams.

These hunters are showing up in places like courthouses and airports, where people can’t protest, and snatching as many immigrants as they can, with no regard to the claims made by Trump during his campaign and even after the election that they’d be going after criminals.

During Operation Midway Blitz, eight out of every ten abductees had no criminal history, according to a report released by the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ today.⁶

They’re still seizing and kidnapping people off the streets, too, but they’re doing it much more quietly, enough so that it’s happening right under your eyes without you noticing. 50,000 times in July.

Nobody is arguing that some criminals are getting swooped up, too. An argument can be made that they should be asked to leave, but processes have been in place for a long time for that. What’s going on now has nothing to do with criminal behavior.

They’re still eating the pets!

In Springfield, Ohio, which was made famous by an idiot saying something that should have disqualified him permanently from the minds of voters but may have actually helped him win an election (“they’re eating your cats, they’re eating your dogs”), the cruelty of Miller’s Gestapo is making its way around the city’s Haitian community.

Haitians who have been following the law and the instructions of immigration judges are being asked to show up in court for updates, where they are promptly arrested, with deportation to Haiti the likely outcome.

Haiti is currently the kind of place where the most well-worn necklace is a burning tire around your head. And it doesn’t much matter whether or not you’ve offended a local street warlord.

It’s all about mood within the gangs who control the streets. If a local warlord, or gangster, or whatever you want to call him, decides that he’d like to see a burning tire around your neck, then a necklace you shall have.

Effectively, there is still no government in Haiti. The place is run by criminal gangs, despite the efforts by the international community to establish a police presence during the last few years. Most of these efforts have failed abysmally for a variety of reasons beyond the scope of this article.⁷

Miller’s Gestapo regime is sending Haitians back to this kind of scenario:

The killings in Kenscoff began late Sunday, when armed men descended on the farming community in the hills overlooking Haiti’s capital, setting homes ablaze and attacking residents. By Monday, bodies lay in the streets and survivors were searching for missing relatives.

The entire country is a war zone. By May of this year, according to the U.N., “nearly 1.47 million people were internally displaced across Haiti, more than half of them children.”⁸

That’s why many Haitians arrived in the U.S. in the first place. About 350,000 Haitians were granted legal status to live in the United States in 2010 by the Obama administration under something called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) after a devastating earthquake that Haiti never recovered from.

TPS is a temporary immigration status given to citizens from other countries when conditions in their country make it unsafe to return.⁹ You can learn more about it and how foreign nationals qualify by clicking the cute little raised footnote number here:¹⁰

The Miller Gestapo regime decided to revoke the TPS status for Haitians and, for grins, said that all 350,000 were now subject to immediate deportation.

Original image of Stephen Miller by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Image of skulls licensed from Adobe Stock; image smashup by author;

There are a lot more groups on Miller’s hit list. One million of the 1.3 million or so foreign nationals that have TPS have quietly been booted from the program.

The DHS rampage

DHS is on a rampage campaign to collect everyone with expired TPS and send them out of the country.

These include nationals from the following nations:¹¹

• Venezuela (2023): Termination effective on May 19, 2025. 352,190 people affected.

• Afghanistan: Termination effective on July 22, 2025. 11,700 people affected.

• Cameroon: Termination effective on August 5, 2025. 5,200 people affected.

• Nepal: Termination effective on August 20, 2025. 1200 people affected.

• Honduras: Termination effective on September 8, 2025. 72,000 people affected.

• Nicaragua: Termination effective on September 8, 2025. 4,000 people affected

• Venezuela (2021) : Termination effective on November 7, 2025 252,825 people affected.

• Yemen: Termination effective on July 20, 2026. 1,380 people affected.

• Syria: Termination effective on July 27, 2026. 6,132 people affected.

• Haiti: Termination effective on August 4, 2026. 348,187 people affected.

• South Sudan: Termination effective on August 7, 2026 210 people affected.

• Burma: Termination effective on August 7, 2026. 7,300 people affected.

• Somalia: Termination effective on August 14, 2026. 705 people affected

• Ethiopia: Termination effective on August 18, 2026. 12,800 people affected.

• El Salvador: Termination effective on Sept. 9, 2026. 170,125 people affected.

• Sudan: Termination effective on Oct. 19, 202. 1,790 3,950 people affected.

• Ukraine: Termination effective on Oct. 19, 2026. 101,150 people affected.

• Lebanon: Termination effective on Nov. 27, 2026. 11,000 people affected.

This results in stories like these, quoting Scripps News Service:¹²

Wesly Simon, who owns a popular Haitian restaurant in Brooklyn’s Little Caribbean neighborhood, told Scripps News he was forced to fire longtime workers after the TPS designation ended.

“It’s like I’m firing the whole family,” Simon said. “I’m firing the kids, I’m firing their wife. I’m firing them.”

The impact of the decision extends beyond his workforce. Haitian immigrants across the country now weigh every trip outside against the risk of deportation, keeping customers home and away from businesses like his.

“They’re just in limbo, working around, whatever, living on their savings,” Simon said about his former employees. “Now, some of them never go out.”

Simon said the situation is more damaging for business than the COVID-19 pandemic, which is when he opened his restaurant.

So even if most Americans don’t care that Haitians are being sent back to receive their own personal tire necklaces, one would hope that they’re affected by business closures and higher construction costs.

These higher costs don’t result from higher-wage Americans replacing deported immigrants. You won’t see anybody in a red hat slinging shingles in the Dallas heat. The higher costs come from business closures, work slowdowns, and missing supplies from an increasingly fragile supply chain.

One obvious problem with TPS is that the solution, granting temporary residence in the U.S., is a little like Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. The beneficiaries of the program often fairly quickly find a comfort zone in their new country. Then they are asked to leave. It’s an inherently unfair proposition.

One thing Democrats must do as soon as they get the nation back is to remove “Temporary” from the name of the program. What’s left of it.

ICE officials have admitted that they are targeting people who have found comfort zones. Per the New York Times:¹³

In July, ICE arrests jumped to nearly 50,000 people, and the administration has focused on deporting people who have been able to remain in the country for years with court orders protecting them from being sent home, another official added.

Meanwhile, according to another New York Times article, “The share with a past violent criminal conviction fell to less than 4 percent.”¹⁴

The new data contains details on every ICE arrest through Aug. 5 and offers the fullest picture yet of how the agency’s activities have shifted since public backlash forced a retreat from the aggressive tactics seen in Minneapolis early this year. It was obtained by the Deportation Data Project, an academic group, through a public records lawsuit and analyzed by The New York Times.

After his confirmation this spring, the secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, promised quieter but more effective enforcement. ICE now appears closer than ever to meeting a recent goal of 2,000 daily arrests.

“They have more officers, more money, more detention space, more local partners and better systems,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former senior ICE official. “And they’re finally putting all the pieces together to build out this deportation machine.”

Meanwhile, in Chicago…¹⁵

The boy who faced Immigration Court Judge Shawn Abraham needed the microphone lowered before his hearing could begin. His feet didn’t reach the floor.

He is 12 years old.

The lawyer and advocate who sat with him at the respondent’s table told Abraham that he had no caregivers in El Salvador, where Abraham would order him deported moments later.

As Trump keeps distracting us with name changes and other blowhardiness, the cruelty continues.

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Notes

I’ve been complaining about Miller since before the last presidential election. The result of my efforts? He’s more powerful than ever…

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Footnotes (all links are paywall-free or gift links)

1. “Deportees Recount Harrowing Journeys to Africa: Shackles, a ‘Freezer’ and Blows”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/world/africa/us-deportation-flight-ice-detention-liberia.html

2. Ballah, Henryatta L, 'Witchcraft in Liberia' (17 Apr. 2024), in Thomas Spear (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (New York, NY, online edn, Oxford Academic, 27 Feb. 2017 - ), https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.1466, accessed 31 Aug. 2026

3. Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “22Nd President of Liberia.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., June 6, 2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Taylor_(Liberian_politician).

4. Charles Taylor is currently residing at HM Prison Frankland in County Durham, England.

BBC News. “Liberia’s Charles Taylor Transferred to UK.” BBC News, October 15, 2013. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-24537834.‌

5. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/27/us/ice-immigrant-arrests-trump-deportation-dhs.html

6. FitzPatrick, Lauren, and Alden Loury. “Trump’s ‘Blitz’ on Chicago Targeting the ‘Worst of the Worst’ Detained Only 5 Murderers in 68 Days.” Chicago Sun-Times, August 28, 2026. https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2026/08/28/trumps-blitz-on-chicago-targeting-the-worst-of-the-worst-only-detained-five-murderers-in-68-days

7. UN News. “Haiti Ramps up the Fight against Gangs in the Capital, but Violence Spreads Elsewhere.” UN News, August 25, 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168203.‌

8. UN News. “Haiti Ramps up the Fight against Gangs in the Capital, but Violence Spreads Elsewhere.” UN News, August 25, 2026. https://news.un.org/en/story/2026/08/1168203.

9. American Immigration Council. “Granting Refuge: Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians in the United States - American Immigration Council,” January 22, 2010. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/granting-refuge-temporary-protected-status-tps-haitians-united-states/.

10. American Immigration Council. “Temporary Protected Status (TPS): An Overview - American Immigration Council,” August 28, 2026. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/temporary-protected-status-tps-overview/.‌

11. National Immigration Forum. “Temporary Protected Status (TPS): Fact Sheet - National Immigration Forum,” August 24, 2026. https://forumtogether.org/article/temporary-protected-status-fact-sheet/.

12. Tubman, Kadia. “Brooklyn Haitian Restaurant Owner Says the End of TPS Is ‘Worse than COVID’ for Business.” Scripps News, August 28, 2026. https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/immigration/brooklyn-haitian-restaurant-owner-says-the-end-of-tps-is-worse-than-covid-for-business.

13. “Deportees Recount Harrowing Journeys to Africa: Shackles, a ‘Freezer’ and Blows”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/30/world/africa/us-deportation-flight-ice-detention-liberia.html

14. ICE Arrests Soar as People With No Criminal Record Are Increasingly Targeted

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/08/27/us/ice-immigrant-arrests-trump-deportation-dhs.html

15. Buckley, Madeline, and Caroline Kubzansky. “Immigration Judges in Chicago Deporting Abused, Neglected Children in Violation of Their Due Process: Attorneys.” Chicago Tribune, August 26, 2026.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2026/08/26/chicago-immigration-court/‌