ICE Agents in Despair Under Stephen Miller’s Impossible Orders

A new report from The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff finds morale at Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suffering as the agency, under the direction of President Trump and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, targets undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes.

While the Trump administration may claim its deportation campaign prioritizes violent criminals and gang members, in reality, it has focused on arresting noncriminals, evidently to hit quotas passed down by Trump and Miller.

And while the administration may claim ICE agents are happier than ever, Miroff’s report—based on conversations with 12 current and former ICE personnel—shows that the change is frustrating many agents and officers.

One ICE veteran finds the job so “infuriating” that the agent is considering quitting. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” said the agent, who complained about having to focus instead on “arresting gardeners.”

A former agent told Miroff that “morale is in the crapper,” and “even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”

Another former ICE official suggested that this shift is vindicating criticisms the agency has faced in the past, observing, “What we’re seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and could always safely say, ‘We don’t do that.’”

One of Miroff’s interviewees was Adam Boyd, a young attorney who resigned from the agency’s legal department because it’s no longer focused on “protecting the homeland from threats.” Instead, he said, “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.”

Boyd told Miroff: “We still need good attorneys at ICE. There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

One former ICE official said that there are now “national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed,” as the agency moves staff from its Homeland Security Investigations division, focused largely on transnational crime, to its Enforcement and Removal Operations division—a move that many perceive as retaliation for HSI in recent years distancing itself from the agency’s deportation arm.

When Miller issued his demand for 3,000 arrests per day, he reportedly steamrolled any veteran officials who dared to speak up about its impracticality, which has led many to keep silent since then for fear of drawing his ire, Miroff writes. This means that “no one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” an ICE official told him. “The answer is just to keep banging the [ICE rank-and-file] and tell [them] they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.”

Former X CEO Linda Yaccarino suffered gross sexual harassment from none other than Grok, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence bot, shortly before she abruptly left her position. 

Grok went rogue earlier this week after engineers at xAI tweaked the robot’s code, and began espousing horrific antisemitic and white supremacist rhetoric—par for the course considering that Musk has turned the site into a breeding ground for hate speech.  

But that wasn’t all “MechaHitler” Grok was up to. The program also wrote disgusting sexual comments about Yaccarino in response to gross prompting from X users. 

The posts have since been removed.

On Wednesday, Yaccarino announced her sudden departure from X “after two incredible years.” It’s not clear that Grok’s statements contributed to her departure from X, which fell into massive turmoil during her tenure. Yaccarino gave no explanation for leaving, but a person familiar with the matter told NBC News it had been in the works for about a week. 

A right-wing commentator who has possibly tweeted about Hooters more times than anyone is now Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador to Malaysia.

“Mr. President, thank you for the honor of a lifetime. In your America, all dreams come true. It will be my honor to represent the United States of America in Malaysia,” Adams said Thursday on X. “To the esteemed Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I look forward to a confirmation process that is at the heart of the Constitution that has given me the freedom to pursue the American Dream.”

Nick Adams is an Australian who arrived on the U.S. political scene in 2016 as an early Trump supporter. He fell in with the Turning Point USA crowd and became an American citizen in 2021. Adams is also a stringent right-winger whose X account reads as a caricature of the entire manosphere. His views range from traditional white supremacy to comical hypermasculinity. His banner on X reads “President Trump’s Favorite Author,” in reference to Trump tweeting some praise from Adams in 2017.

“I’m a walking, talking masterpiece of masculinity. Testosterone levels spike when I enter a room,” Adams posted in 2023. “Everywhere I go, I leave a trail of awestruck admirers in my wake.”

Last year, Adams described his “ideal woman” as “10/10, Low maintenance, strong Trump supporter, no desire to interfere with my foursomes, picks me up from Hooters when I’ve had a few too many domestics with the boys, has dinner ready at 5pm, doesn’t ask questions when I’m out late with the boys.”

“I have already put together a team of billionaires and hundred millionaires to acquire Hooters—any additional investors interested in teaming up on this important venture to save Western Civilization?” he wrote this year in one of his countless posts about the overly sexualized restaurant chain.

Last month, he described the U.S. and Israeli bombings of Iran, which killed hundreds of civilians, as “life saving bombings.” And just this Wednesday, Adams said that “almost all of America’s economic and infrastructure problems are caused by illegal immigration.”

Regardless of how real you think Adams’s Andrew Tate–adjacent MAGA man schtick is, the most important takeaway is that Trump now has yet another mindless devotee with zero actual qualifications in a consequential Cabinet position. This is an administration made up entirely of yes-men.

Donald Trump announced a 50 percent tariff on copper, a move that is sure to slow production and make prices skyrocket.

“Copper is necessary for Semiconductors, Aircraft, Ships, Ammunition, Data Centers, Lithium-ion Batteries, Radar Systems, Missile Defense Systems, and even, Hypersonic Weapons, of which we are building many,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Tuesday night.

Trump said that the decision was the result of a “robust national security assessment” and indicated that the tariffs served to boost domestic manufacturing to make the United States competitive with China. “America will once again build a DOMINANT copper industry,” he wrote.

The U.S. currently produces just over half of the refined copper that it consumes, with two-thirds of that copper coming from Arizona, according to Reuters. The rest is imported, mostly from the Americas. Canada, Chile, and Peru accounted for more than 90 percent of refined copper imports last year.

China also gets the majority of its copper from Chile and Peru, as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Beijing has made significant investments to expand its copper mining operation.

Carlos Miguel Gutierrez, who served as secretary of commerce under President George W. Bush, told CNBC that U.S. reliance on copper imports was a “vulnerability” but that the U.S. doesn’t have “the capacity right now to offset copper imports.” He said it would take the U.S. until at least 2027 or 2028 to build up the capacity to smelt enough copper for all of the country’s needs.

In the meantime, Trump’s tariffs will put a significant strain on domestic manufacturing by raising copper prices. Following Trump’s initial threat of a tariff on copper prices, the price spiked 13 percent, its highest one-day gain since 1989. By August, American consumers may end up paying as much as $15,000 per metric ton for copper, while the rest of the world pays only $10,000, according to an estimate from Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.

A federal judge on Thursday blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order nationwide.

Trump’s order, which seeks to deny automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants or those with temporary status, was set to go into effect in late July, in at least some states, after the Supreme Court last month lifted nationwide injunctions halting the order.

However, the Supreme Court left open the possibility that a judge could freeze Trump’s order by granting nationwide class action status to all children who would be affected by it. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups thus challenged Trump’s order and refiled their case as a class action lawsuit before U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee.

On Thursday, Laplante granted their request, certifying the class and issuing an injunction that stops Trump’s order in its tracks—or, at least, is set to do so after a pause of a few days, during which the president will have the opportunity to appeal.

“The preliminary injunction is just not a close call to the court,” LaPlante reportedly ruled from the bench. (He said he will issue a written decision later Thursday.) “The deprivation of U.S. citizenship and an abrupt change of policy that was longstanding” would cause “irreparable harm,” he said, calling citizenship “the greatest privilege that exists in the world.”

Laplante’s decision marks a significant, if temporary, victory against Trump’s anti-constitutional war on birthright citizenship.

This story has been updated.