The holidays don't bring a halt to Chump's multiple wars on the people. Guy Trebay (NEW YORK TIMES) reports:
“He is one of those people that make this small town click,” said Nelson Hammell, who runs an antiques shop in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Mr. Hammell was referring to José Gonzalez, the manager and public face of Bice Ristorante, an upscale Italian restaurant in Palm Beach, the winter home to President Trump and some of the world’s wealthiest people.
On Dec. 10, Mr. Gonzalez, 53, was stopped by Florida Highway Patrol while driving a nephew’s pickup truck. The apparent offense was having tinted car windows. Mr. Gonzalez was arrested and turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Then, as has happened to thousands of others in Florida, he was taken deep into the Everglades to the state-run immigration detention center known as Alligator Alcatraz.
This is the biggest scam in the world. Chump pretends to protect the country as he attacks innocents. DHS insists that these people are the worst of the worst and have various charges against them but it turns out that th majority do not. It's all smoke and mirrors intended to make Chump look better while people suffer -- innocent people suffer. Treybeh's article notes:
“What I have been hearing from people in the community, most of whom are Trump supporters, is that it went too far,” said Eddie Schmidt, the owner of Table26, a restaurant in West Palm Beach. “When we’re not talking about deporting gang members, drug dealers, pedophiles but members of the community, faces we all know, it’s harder to turn your back.”
The lies were obvious for many from the start. The number of people who can see reality has only increased throughout 2025. If Chump really thinks he can continues these attacks for a four year term, he is rudely mistaken.
It's all spectle and falsehoods which is why Kristi Noem is so perfect to lead the corrupt department. Melissa Gira Grant (THE NEW REPUBLIC) notes:
Before the 2024 election, the idea that Kristi Noem would someday head the Department of Homeland Security seemed beyond unlikely. But her cruelty once handed this power was foreseeable. If Noem’s name rang any bells for most people before the Senate confirmed her to head DHS this January (to their enduring shame), it was because she shot her 14-month-old dog to death in a gravel pit and included the grisly scene in her election-year memoir. She defended the book, No Going Back, as “a blueprint for America of what citizens can do here to take their country back.” In the past year, she has emerged in what will likely go down in history as her true form: an entity first caught on camera in March 2025 in a torture prison in El Salvador, and now shorthanded as “ICE Barbie.” Heavily made-up, styled in a tight white shirt, $50,000 Rolex watch, and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ball cap atop long, flowing locks, she stood in front of cells filled with men imprisoned on her orders, and delivered a direct-to-camera threat to immigrants in the United States: “This facility,” she said, “is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
Under Noem, ICE has become the most lavishly-funded law enforcement agency in the United States. ICE agents have arrested around 220,000 people, between Trump taking office and October 15. (That doesn’t include arrests by Border Patrol agents, a separate DHS agency who often accompany ICE; since January 20, the administration has claimed to have arrested 595,000 immigrants.) On any given day, Noem’s DHS is responsible for holding around 65,000 people in immigration detention—a record high. Breaking another record, ICE has detained at least 600 children this year. The agency claimed to have deported more than 600,000 people since Trump returned to office. Noem has overseen the opening and expansion of several new immigrant detention facilities and camps; two Florida facilities notorious for employing torture techniques borrowed from CIA black sites are now under her purview. Other DHS agencies have indefinitely suspended immigration applications from a growing number of countries Trump has targeted, and abruptly canceled immigration ceremonies. Noem has purchased planes for DHS to use for deportation flights, including two new luxury G700 Gulfstream jets for $200 million, and ten Boeing 737’s from a bankrupt budget airline, each without an engine. DHS press releases are now filled with open taunting of immigrants; their social media accounts are dominated by white nationalist slop. Noem has since admitted she directed the removal—more a mass abduction than deportation—of 261 people to the prison camp in El Salvador in March, in defiance of a court order.
While DHS anti-immigration agents may hide their faces in balaclavas, Noem is front-and-center promoting the agency and Trump’s promised mass deportations. ICE Barbie is somewhere between the enabler and the cover for the agency’s campaign of “assault and kidnapping”—the words used by one woman who was grabbed by masked, armed agents on her commute in Chicago. Tens of thousands of people have been taken by masked and armed men working for DHS on the streets of Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Baltimore, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Charlotte, and others. Thousands of people across the country have been vigilant in identifying and tracking these agents as they terrorize their neighbors. In the last few weeks alone, federal immigration agents loosed an attack dog on a Washington state resident, according to his senator; chased a Louisiana woman (a U.S. citizen) while she was walking home from the corner store; unleashed pepper spray on residents in a Somali neighborhood in Minneapolis; violently yanked a Key Largo woman from her car on her way to work, still wearing her hospital scrubs; and chased a man out of a Home Depot parking lot and into the street, where he was reportedly hit by a car.
If you celebrated Christmas today, how did you celebrate it? Shared time with loved ones? Well there's no love in Kristi's faux heart so she celebrated it with a shooting. Sarah Fortinsky (THE HILL) reports ICE admits to shooting a man in a car in Baltimore.
That's all she knows. And it would be great if she'd stick to what she knows and not try to masquerade that she's teasing out a press release from DHS as actual reporting. It's not. The two people injured? They're not quoted. Witnesses? They're not quoted. Its all what Homeland Security says -- Homeland Security run and staffed by known liars with a record for lying to the people and to the courts.
Sarah does some strong work. This isn't strong work. This is pathetic. It's a betrayal of journalism. Maybe she was on the clock and didn't want to be? I don't know. I don't care. In 2026, we're going to start putting a real spotlight on those journalists who repeat Homeland Security's lies without (a) noting they're claims and not factual proven statements and that (b) Homeland Security lied non-stop in 2025 and so they aren't to be believed.
That is how it works and that is why you're told not to lie. If you are caught lying -- and Homeland Security has been caught lying repeatedly in 2025 -- no one has to believe you. It's a truism that the courts are beginning to enforce. It's a shame that journalists -- who are supposed to traffic in the truth -- are so slow to note a habitual liar when were talking about the government.
Meanwhile, Melissa Cooney (NBC CONNECTICUT) reports:
A Meriden 16-year-old is back in Connecticut after being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for six months.
With the help of three law firms in Connecticut, one in Texas, and a senator, Maloney High School graduate Kevin is released from one of the federal government's ICE detention facilities in Texas.
"I’m happy, very happy,” Kevin said. “Thank you all,” he said in Spanish.
You might remember Kevin’s story. He was detained at a scheduled, non-criminal immigration hearing in Hartford in June with his father. It happened days before his high school graduation, sparking outrage in the community from his classmates, teachers, and city officials, who held a march in his honor and left his seat open at the graduation ceremony.
“ICE took Kevin in the middle of the night with his father to deport him in secret. The agent told him he could make one last call, and he called me. While other kids might have called their family or friends, he made a call to his lawyer at 3 a.m.,” said Meagan Faitsch, one of Kevin’s attorneys.
16 years old, kidnapped and imprisoned. What a proud moment for Kristi and Chump.
Still on Texas, Berenice Garcia (TEXAS TRIBUNE) reports:
One morning in mid-November, Mario Guerrero, the executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, was checking a group chat when a video of federal agents detaining people from a construction site popped up.
He watched the video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detaining workers who were pouring cement in front of a home in an idyllic neighborhood here in the Rio Grande Valley.
For nearly a year, Guerrero had seen similar videos or read news reports of arrests and raids. This was the last straw.
The raids and the specter of more to come have struck fear in construction workers, causing many to stay home. ICE agents have arrested more than 9,100 people in South Texas — nearly one-fifth of all such arrests in the entire state since Trump took office, according to government data provided by ICE in response to a FOIA request to the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by the Texas Tribune.
Without enough workers, construction has slowed, sending a ripple effect throughout the economy. Economists suggest that this will drive housing costs up — even as Texas officials focus on bringing such costs down.
