The headline was catnip to a Washington press corps that has spent much of the last decade desperately trying to normalize the mad, mad, mad, mad world of Donald Trump. With his poll numbers reeling after two Minneapolis killings by federal agents, the 47th president was “toning down” his mass deportation drive — perhaps pulling back.
There were symbolic gestures, for sure. The Nazi-style trench-coated unmasked face of Trump’s secret police force in Minnesota, Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, was dismissed and slinked home to California in a convoy of shame. His replacement, the alleged Cava bagman Tom Homan, talked of a drawdown of federal forces in the Gopher State, even as no one except Bovino and his inner circle of goons left town. There was an abrupt end to immigration raids in Maine, where the White House finally realized the wildly unpopular arrests might be dooming the GOP’s most vulnerable incumbent, Sen. Susan Collins.
But you see, there’s just one thing. Just as Ike and Tina Turner used to say that they never, ever did nothing nice and easy, the Trump regime never, ever does nothing nice and “toned down.” What America saw last week was what Richard Nixon’s Watergate coconspirators called a “modified limited hangout” — minor concessions to reality aimed at keeping the larger, diabolical enterprise afloat.
Toned down? Tell that to a few thousand marchers in a union-led “ICE Out” demonstration on Saturday in Portland, Ore. They were merely exercising their First Amendment protest rights — chanting “ICE out!” as they calmly marched past the federal building — when agents abruptly fired volleys of tear gas, pepper balls, and flashbang grenades into the crowd, which included young children brought by their parents to what had been a peaceful rally.
“Just experienced the most intense tear gassing of my life …,” journalist Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle posted. “There was no fast exit as they indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs. Children were in the crowd screaming.”
It sure didn’t look like any kind of “toning down” on a snow-draped road outside rural St. Peter, Minn., where a woman who was legally filming federal agents was blocked off by a car as three masked men brandishing high-powered firearms emerged, screaming, “Get out of the car!” before violently removing her, slamming her to the icy ground, and arresting her.
That the police chief of St. Peter — a friend of the woman’s husband, it turned out — made a phone call to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that got her promptly returned to town and released was the essence of last week’s modified limited hangout. The main message to would-be citizen ICE observers was unmistakable: There is no major pullback in Minnesota.
War, children. It’s just a shot away.
The idea that the irrepressible forward momentum of a historically inhumane mass deportation campaign — powered by more than $170 billion allocated last year to hire more masked goons and convert abandoned warehouses into modern concentration camps — could be so easily reversed was laughable. Even the alleged toner-down-in-chief, Trump, told reporters when he was asked about a Minnesota pullback: “No, no, not at all.”
This week, things could get much, much worse.
On Tuesday, some 350,000 Haitian refugees are slated — under a Trump regime order — to lose the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that was granted to them by the Biden administration and has allowed them to stay legally in the United States after fleeing an epidemic of gang violence and murder in their Caribbean homeland.
Advocates for the large Haitian diaspora are fighting Trump’s revocation in court, so there is a chance the move can be forestalled. However, top officials, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, have said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has plans in place to immediately swarm the industrial epicenter of Haitian migration — Springfield, Ohio — with a massive force of federal agents to begin deportation raids.
You probably remember Springfield from its prominence in the 2024 presidential campaign. Over the last decade, a surge of Haitian migrants into a once nearly comatose factory town — some 12,000 to 15,000 people, or now a quarter of the small city’s population — revitalized Springfield, yet triggered a moral panic among some white neighbors who shared utterly unfounded rumors of animal abuse.
In that fall’s nationally televised debate, opponent Kamala Harris and some in the Philadelphia audience giggled when Trump blurted out, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs.” This week, the president and his totally not toned-down minions, like top aide Stephen Miller and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, want to have the last laugh.
“The fear has been there” ever since Trump’s debate lies about Springfield, Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help and Support Center, told a local TV station. Now, with TPS likely to expire, he predicts the local community “not being able to leave their house, not being able to go to work.” Many are terrified they won’t survive gang violence if deported back to Haiti.
The giant question hanging over the looming Springfield raids — and, yes, it is largely a rhetorical one at this point — is simply: Why? In every city that’s been flooded with masked secret police, from Los Angeles to Minnesota, over-the-top DHS rhetoric about removing “the worst of the worst” murderers and rapists from America has been undercut by arrests of law-abiding day laborers or restaurant workers. That’s not to mention all of the detainments and the killing of two people.
In Springfield, Haitian refugees responded to a 2014 plea from business leaders to save a shrinking Rust Belt city, and the majority came here legally during the Joe Biden years — doing everything the right way, and getting a fleeting vision of the American dream. If anything, the crime rate in this hardworking and often deeply religious community is lower than in other areas that are predominantly made up of native-born Americans.
It’s hard to imagine any reason — economic, legal, or moral — for the mass removal of Haitians to their unsafe and unstable native country other than the color of their skin. And it’s hard to call this proposed operation anything else besides an ethnic cleansing on U.S. soil.
This is no surprise. It’s been the distinguishing feature of Trump’s mass deportation scheme since the early months of the regime, nowhere more so than most recently in Minnesota.
The DHS “Operation Metro Surge” has heavily targeted two ethnic groups. Are Somali Americans — refugees from a war-ravaged nation that, in a much different time, was the subject of what was supposed to be a humanitarian U.S. intervention in the 1990s — the focus of the raids because of a fraud scheme local authorities seemed to have a handle on? Or is it because Trump called the Somali people “garbage”?
And even if you buy the seemingly ridiculous argument that the immigration raids are connected to a mid-level fraud scam, what is the explanation for Bovino’s goon squads cruising the Asian American neighborhoods of Minneapolis asking, “Where the Hmong at?” The Hmong people of Laos aided the misguided U.S. war in Southeast Asia and fled communist reprisals to come to America with encouragement from both the federal government and faith leaders. Why target them now, decades later, after Hmong Americans have planted deep roots here?
For that matter, what on earth is the logic behind zeroing in on so many Venezuelans, who came to America to escape the rule of a man the Trump regime has now arrested as a criminal dictator of a nation the U.S. Department of State has deemed violent and unsafe? Why deport the thousands of Latinos who worked tirelessly to rebuild New Orleans after it was decimated by Hurricane Katrina?
Not only is Trump’s mass deportation not nabbing many violent criminals, but his unholy war is undoing the very foundation of the story America tells itself to live: that our willingness to accept the huddled masses fleeing political violence or persecution made us an exceptional nation. It was always an uneven narrative, but the regime’s masked men are now erasing it in service of unapologetic white supremacy.
In Florida, which has also been a migration magnet for Haitians, Jewish residents of the Sinai Residences senior complex in Boca Raton — including many who survived the Nazi Holocaust — are so alarmed that some have volunteered to hide Haitian staff members in their units. The center’s CEO said the crisis “reminds me of Anne Frank.”
This does not have to happen. Springfield isn’t nearly the size of Minneapolis, and all of us — not just Ohioans — need to begin thinking about what we can do to help avert a humanitarian disaster in the U.S. heartland. More importantly, Congress — which has slowly shown signs of life in response to the January killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good — needs to fight by any means necessary to make sure ethnic cleansing is prevented in Springfield, and ended everywhere else.
Then they came for the Haitians. What happens next is up to us.
