Thursday, December 11, 2025. Chump continues to be at war with everything -- including the truth -- is Kristi Noem about to be fired or will she continue to oversee terrorizing the nation?
This morning, Ben's covering a lot at MEIDASTOUCH NEWS -- including censorship at Head Start where Chump's created six pages of 'banned' words -- including such 'offensive' words as "race" and "women."
Chump is destroying the country and has focused on attempting to divide it. But Kinsey Crowley (USA TODAY) explains how Chump's unpopularity might be the only thing binding the nation together at this point:
Now it's President Trump who's trying to persuade the public that the state of the economy is sound, after prices rose 3% in the 12 months ending in September and with consumers spending less on big-ticket items.
Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan, says making that argument could be a tall order in the face of rising costs for a number of goods and services.
While the prices of some items such as gasoline have fallen on Trump's watch, the overall cost of living has continued to climb. For example, grocery costs are up 2.7% for the year ending in September and electricity costs have jumped more than 5%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
"Trump's claims about inflation are false," Stevenson said, "and you can go to the grocery store and see it yourself."
But, in a wide-ranging speech to supporters on Tuesday, Trump both defended his administration's track record on the economy and said that talk of affordability was overblown. Trump told the crowd in Mount Pocono, Pa., that he believed the term "affordability" was a "hoax" perpetrated by Democrats. Trump's recent assertions dismissing inflation are not backed by official government economic data.
President Donald Trump’s approval on the economy and immigration have fallen substantially since March, according to a new AP-NORC poll, the latest indication that two signature issues that got him elected barely a year ago could be turning into liabilities as his party begins to gear up for the 2026 midterms.
Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy, the poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds. That is down from 40% in March and marks the lowest economic approval he’s registered in an AP-NORC poll in his first or second term. The Republican president also has struggled to recover from public blowback on other issues, such as his management of the federal government, and has not seen an approval bump even after congressional Democrats effectively capitulated to end a record-long government shutdown last month.
Today, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Ranking Member of the Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee, joined a bicameral spotlight forum to denounce the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) unlawful arrests of U.S. citizens. U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Ranking Member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and U.S. Representative Robert Garcia (D-Calif.-42), Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, convened the forum to receive testimony from five of these American citizens, including three Californians, whom DHS agents have violently arrested and detained.
DHS continues to lie about its treatment of American citizens. In October, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem falsely claimed, “[t]here’s no American citizens that have been arrested or detained,” and the account @DHSgov posted just last week, “ICE does NOT arrest or deport U.S. citizens.” On the contrary, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in California and across the country have repeatedly arrested and detained American citizens, including veterans, at times using violent physical force.
Padilla emphasized that the Trump Administration’s militarization of American cities, starting with Los Angeles, to conduct indiscriminate immigration enforcement was the test case for President Trump’s mass deportation campaign across the country. ICE and CBP agents have repeatedly violated due process rights and profiled individuals — including U.S. citizens — who they claim “look like” noncitizen enforcement targets.
Padilla asked all five U.S. citizens at the spotlight forum what they would say if President Trump, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, or other Trump Administration officials were in front of them. He heard emotional pleas from California witnesses to stop scapegoating immigrants and racially profiling American citizens. The witnesses included:
- Javier Ramirez (California): Mr. Ramirez was violently assaulted by DHS agents and held for four days, where he was denied adequate treatment for diabetes, leading to severe complications.
- George Retes (California): Mr. Retes is a U.S. Army veteran who was violently arrested and detained during a raid at his job site in Southern California and detained for three days, during which he was refused the ability to contact his family and missed his daughter’s birthday.
- Andrea Velez (California): Ms. Velez was on her way to work in downtown Los Angeles when she got caught up in an immigration raid and was falsely charged with assaulting an officer, a charge that was later dropped.
- Wilmer Chavarria (Vermont): Mr. Chavarria, a school superintendent, was detained after returning to the United States from visiting family overseas, interrogated for hours, and even faced demands to search his personal and school district devices, which contained sensitive information about students and faculty.
- Dayanne Figueroa (Illinois): Ms. Figueroa was sideswiped while driving to work and then violently pulled from her car by DHS agents who pointed guns at her; while detained for hours, she suffered internal trauma, having recently undergone two kidney surgeries weeks before the incident, as well as injuries to her wrists from being handcuffed.
Padilla also heard from Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, about how the Trump Administration’s diversion of resources to immigration enforcement makes all Americans less safe.
Key Excerpts:
- PADILLA: If you had the Administration up here, if you had Donald Trump, if you had the Secretary of Homeland Security, if you had other officials from the Trump Administration up here, what would you tell them?
- WILMER CHAVARRIA: I would say that we’ve seen this before. We see it right through you. We’ve seen leaders dehumanize entire communities, entire races, entire peoples. And we know why you dehumanize us. And I will say, we will come out of this, and we will come out of it stronger.
- JAVIER RAMIREZ: They should be ashamed of themselves. I don’t want to raise my kids in an America where they have to be careful, you know, just by being their skin color.
- PADILLA: Mr. Melnick, I know you come to this conversation from a different perspective given your role and expertise. Let me ask you a different question. … The argument from the Administration is that they’re going after the worst of the worst. We see in reality that that’s far from the case. The fear and intimidation they’ve stoked in so many communities across the country is clear in my mind. Has this mass deportation agenda made any community or country safer?
- MELNICK: There’s no evidence that this is making us more safe. In fact, it’s the other way around. I testified in front of Congress on this issue before. By diverting resources away from child exploitation, by turning ICE Homeland Security Investigations into just one other arm of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, they are making us less safe. They are taking counterterrorism operatives and telling them to go out on the street and arrest migrants. They’re taking people whose job it is to investigate pedophiles preying on children, and telling those officers to go round up dishwashers instead. And that doesn’t make us safer.
Video of Padilla’s remarks and questioning is available here.
Senator Padilla has been a leading voice in opposition to President Trump’s cruel and indiscriminate mass deportation agenda. He has denounced the Trump Administration’s stops, arrests, detentions, and deportations of U.S. citizens and pressed Secretary Noem on the wrongful targeting of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients. In July, Padilla joined a Senate Judiciary Immigration Subcommittee hearing to set the record straight on President Trump and Stephen Miller’s cruel mass deportation campaign, blasting the Administration for intentionally stoking fear and scapegoating immigrants. In September, Padilla joined 60 of his Senate and House colleagues in opening a new investigation into the Trump Administration’s arrests, detentions, and deportations of noncitizen service members, veterans, and military families.
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The image was grotesque.
In March, a camera-ready Kristi Noem posed in front of a group of shirtless, shaved, tattooed men crammed inside a metal holding cell in a foreign prison. The photo-op (and video message) was taken during the Homeland Security secretary’s tour of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, where the Trump administration had sent more than 230 Venezuelan migrants on flimsy evidence. Noem’s performance at CECOT was a triumphant show of ruthlessness as well as a warning: If you’re an immigrant unlawfully present in the United States, you too could end up shipped off to another country and held in one of the world’s worst prisons—perhaps indefinitely.
The administration’s apparent satisfaction in arranging the CECOT ordeal has been emblematic of the second Trump term’s ever-increasing callousness toward immigrants and willingness to treat the constraints of the law as mere suggestions. Last month, Human Rights Watch and the watchdog organization Cristosal documented evidence that the Venezuelans removed to El Salvador endured “torture” and “enforced disappearance.” (As we reported after their release, and confirmed by the report, men said that following Noem’s visit, they received more beatings and had their food taken away by the prison guards.)
That image of Noem and the saga of the Venezuelans the US government exiled to a notorious gulag—without a semblance of due process—should be seared into America’s collective memory. But in the months since it happened, and as those men are made to live with the trauma inflicted on them, I’ve wondered whether it will.
Displays of inhumanity were a normalized phenomenon in 2025. A peril of having punitive theater as a central tenet of governance is that, eventually, the shock factor and public outrage risk wearing out. The horror may never fully register. When there’s a barrage of previously-unbelievably-unconscionably-legally dubious acts and brutal policies, how does one begin to wrap their head around each uniquely reprehensible episode, let alone a year’s worth of anti-immigration cruelty?
The Department of Homeland Security just paid nearly $140 million to be in charge of managing its own deportation flights.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has signed a multimillion-dollar contract to purchase six Boeing 737 aircrafts from Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose owners already have ties to massive DHS contracts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously chartered planes to carry out deportations. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that owning its own planes would allow ICE to “operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.”
Now the agency would be responsible for managing its own fleet of aircraft, flight crews, and all the logistics involved in transporting immigrant detainees around and out of the country. But John Sandweg, former acting ICE director, said that dealing with all of this might be more trouble than it’s worth.
“It’s so much easier to issue a contract to a company that already manages a fleet of airplanes,” Sandweg told the Post. “So this move I’m surprised by because what the administration wants to accomplish, by and large, can be accomplished through charter flights already.”
But they've got big plans at Homeland. The administration won't help Americans with regards to healthcare but they'll build up a new fleet of planes for depurations.
And when they run out of all the money they've been given, Homeland Security just robs money from other departments. This is from Senator Elizabeth Warren's office:
Pentagon’s requested budget for 2026 indicates the Defense Department plans to spend at least $5 billion more for southern border operations alone
Warren: “It’s an insult to our service members that Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are using the defense budget as a slush fund for political stunts. Stripping military resources to promote a wasteful political agenda doesn’t make our military stronger or Americans safer.”
Cover Letter to the Pentagon (PDF) | Text of Report (PDF)
Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Representative John Garamendi (D-Calif.) released a new report detailing the Trump administration’s diversion of funds and resources from the Department of Defense (DoD) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for immigration enforcement, and its impact on readiness and morale.
Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), along with Representatives Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) co-authored the report.
Under a second Trump administration, the U.S. military has become heavily involved in immigration enforcement. Senator Warren’s new report, the first detailed review of the Pentagon’s spending on immigration, found that DoD has committed at least $2 billion to support immigration enforcement through mobilizing and deploying troops to American cities and the Southern border, deporting and transporting immigrants on military aircrafts, detaining individuals on U.S. military installations, and more.
“It’s an insult to our service members that Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem are using the defense budget as a slush fund for political stunts. Stripping military resources to promote a wasteful political agenda doesn’t make our military stronger or Americans safer,” said Senator Warren. “Congress needs to step in and hold the Trump Administration accountable for mishandling billions of taxpayer dollars.”
“When President Trump recklessly diverts our military to support immigration enforcement, our armed forces pay the price. As this report shows, these disruptions come at a significant cost, in both dollars and readiness,” said Representative Garamendi.
Despite an unprecedented $170 billion budget allocated to DHS, it’s unclear how much DoD has received in reimbursement for any of its spending on immigration enforcement. Meanwhile, the military is funding these efforts in support of DHS with money allocated for other DoD projects including updates to barracks, maintenance hangers, and military construction projects in the Pacific. Concerningly, the Pentagon has requested an additional $5 billion for further immigration support in its budget request for 2026.
“Diverting the military from its existing missions and thrusting it into immigration enforcement does not make Americans safer. This multi-billion-dollar political stunt is an overt waste of taxpayer resources and undermines national security, military readiness, and resources for our servicemembers,” said the members.
The members’ report found that, in 2025, the Pentagon has committed:
- At least $1.3 billion for the deployment of troops and resources to the border;
- At least $258 million to support Trump’s orders to deploy troops to Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, and Memphis, along with plans to reassign 600 Judge Advocates (JAGs) as immigration judges;
- At least $420.9 million for detaining immigrants at domestic military installations and overseas bases like Guantánamo and Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti; and
- At least $40.3 million for military flights to deport and transport noncitizen detainees.
The report raised concerns that, in addition to the cost of the DoD immigration efforts, it has resulted in “servicemembers…being pulled from their homes, families, and civilian jobs for indefinite periods of time to support legally questionable political stunts,” wrote the members. The deployments also unnecessarily put our servicemembers in harm's way: in November, Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, was killed while her West Virginia National Guard unit was deployed to Washington, D.C, and Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe was critically injured.
The deployment of troops for immigration enforcement has also weakened the military’s ability to respond to emergencies. For example, the 101st Airborne Division — the U.S. Army’s only air assault division — deployed to the border instead of standing ready for national security missions. Additionally, leading into peak fire season, the California National Guard firefighting unit was “understaffed because roughly half its members (were) deployed to Los Angeles.” These deployments may also require units to miss key training exercises necessary to ensure combat readiness, as the Government Accountability Office found occurred during the first Trump administration.
The diversion of DoD funds is having a devastating effect on the military’s ability to improve services for troops and their families. Among the projects impacted by the prioritization of border operations is a $1 billion renovation of military barracks. Secretary Hegseth also diverted funding from elementary schools at Fort Knox and a U.S. military installation in Germany, an ambulatory care center and dental clinic to service Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, Washington, a jet-training facility in Mississippi, and Marine barracks in Japan.
During the first Trump administration, the DoD stopped deploying troops to the border after determining the deployments were hurting military readiness and morale. The border mission appeared to contribute to alcohol and drug abuse among service members, and may have even contributed to a number of tragic suicides among Texas National Guardsmen. The members raised concerns about similar issues arising again, particularly given the lack of clarity around how long deployments will last.
The report also slammed the administration’s failure to adequately inform Congress and the public about the diversion of funds. “The Trump administration’s secrecy leaves many questions unanswered. The administration has failed to provide clarity on basic questions about DoD’s role in supporting DHS,” said the members.
The coalition directed follow-up questions to Secretary Hegseth about the number of troops currently supporting immigration enforcement, how long military units will be supporting DHS, and whether DHS will reimburse the military.
On Thursday, December 11, 2025, the Senate Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on deployment of the National Guard across the United States.
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Time and again, this administration has been confronted with a test of decency and compassion and they have failed each and every times.
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