Trump Border Czar Heckled by Protester in “Ultra MAGA” T-Shirt

Border czar Tom Homan’s speech at this weekend’s Turning Point USA convention was interrupted by a heckler who seemed to draw attention to the administration’s spurious efforts to justify its deportation campaign.

“Are you an MS-13 member?” a man shouted from the audience.

Sporting a T-shirt that read, “I IDENTIFY AS ULTRA MAGA,” and a Trump 2024 campaign hat, the heckler brandished a large poster depicting Homan with “MS-13” digitally added onto his knuckles—seemingly a reference to the Trump administration’s dubious attempts to frame Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador, as a leader of the criminal gang.

During the Trump administration’s scramble to tie Abrego Garcia to MS-13, one purported piece of evidence it invoked was an image of four tattooed symbols on the man’s fingers.

The Trump administration took the questionable position that the four symbols represented “M,” “S,” “1,” and “3,” and the White House accordingly published an image in which the tattoos were digitally annotated with text reading “MS-13.” Trump, however—in a moment revealing either his characteristic penchant for lying or his digital illiteracy—insisted that plainly photoshopped characters were the actual tattoos themselves.

At the summit on Saturday, Homan laid into the heckler, who also was jeered by conservative convention-goers as he was escorted out.

“Why don’t you come up here and hand me that picture?” Homan asked, before beginning a “USA” chant with the crowd.

“They got morons like this all over the country,” Homan continued. “This guy wouldn’t know what it’s like to serve this nation. This guy ain’t got the balls to be an ICE officer. He hasn’t got the balls to be a border patrol agent.”

“If you’re such a badass, meet me off stage in 13 minutes and 50 seconds,” Homan said, as well as hurling a number of insults (“I guarantee you he sits down to pee,” “This guy lives in his mother’s basement,” and “The only thing that surprises me is you don’t have purple hair and a nose ring.”)

After the brief interruption, Homan continued to tout the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. The border czar’s other recent defenses include a Friday appearance on Fox News, in which he seemed to advocate for Immigration and Customs Enforcement practicing racial profiling.

The Texas Newsroom requested records of all correspondence between Governor Greg Abbott and billionaire Elon Musk from their legislative session this year. After initially approving the request and charging the newsroom $244 for the records, Abbott’s office refused to share any documents, stating that the exchanges between Musk and Abbott were too “intimate and embarrassing” to be released.

“Section 552.101 encompasses the doctrine of common-law privacy, which protects information that is … highly intimate or embarrassing, the publication of which would be highly objectionable to a reasonable person and not of legitimate concern to the public,” a letter from Abbott’s counsel read.

“Embarrassment” is a ludicrous reason to block the public release of messages between one of the country’s most powerful Republican governors and the richest man in the world, who has plenty of his own political motivations. And as ProPublica notes, that “common law privacy” doctrine is usually only levied in situations that involve highly personal information, health data, or children, not to very wealthy, public, and powerful men.

Were Musk and Abbott chatting about bringing a Grok data center to Texas? Were they planning a trip to Mars? Were they flirting? What could be so embarrassing and intimate about these messages?

We’ll likely never know, as a recent ruling from the Texas Supreme Court has granted more protections to public officials who are asked to divulge public records. Abbott’s office has yet to elaborate.

Donald Trump is still just becoming wise to the notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin might not be a good-faith actor on the international stage.

On Sunday, the president announced plans to send an unspecified number of Patriot air defense missiles to Ukraine, and all but admitted that Putin has hitherto charmed and strung him along.

“We will send them Patriots, which they desperately need, because Putin really surprised a lot of people,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews. “He talks nice, and then he bombs everybody in the evening. So there’s a little bit of a problem there. I don’t like it.”

With his promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours now broken by almost 175 days, Trump is slowly becoming disabused of his perception of the Russian president as a reliable partner.

In April, in response to the notion that Russia may be intentionally stalling negotiations with Ukraine to end the war, Trump insisted, “Nobody’s playing me.”

But later that month, when Putin conducted deadly strikes on Kyiv, the president posted exasperatedly on Truth Social, “Vladimir, STOP!” and, the following week, Trump wrote that “there was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days. It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along.”

At a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump vented in a similar tenor to his Sunday remarks, saying, “We get a lot of bullshit thrown at us by Putin, if you want to know the truth. He’s very nice all the time, but it turns out to be meaningless.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed Sunday that reports that she’d kneecapped FEMA’s response to the deadly flooding in Texas were “fake news.”

During an appearance on NBC News’s Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker asked Noem to respond to a New York Times report that found thousands of calls for assistance from flood victims to FEMA call centers went unanswered because the secretary had failed to renew contracts to keep call center employees in place until nearly a week later.

“Why did it take so long to extend those contracts?” Welker asked.

“It’s just false. Those contracts were in place. Nobody—no employees were off of work. Every one of them were answering calls. So false reporting, fake news,” Noem said.

“And it’s discouraging. It’s discouraging that during this time, when we have such a loss of life, and so many people’s lives have turned upside down, that people are playing politics with this, because the response time was immediate. And if you talk to anyone in Texas who was there, that was part of this operation, they would say the federal government and President Trump immediately responded,” she continued.

“Just to be very clear, on July 7, 15.9 percent of calls were answered,” Welker pressed. “I mean, does that concern you that only 15 percent of calls were answered? These are people in a desperate state, FEMA often the first call that they make. Only 15 percent were answered on July 7, several days after the floods?”

But Noem wouldn’t hear it.

“That report needs to be valid-ified,” she said. “I’m not certain it’s accurate, and I’m not sure where it came from. And the individuals who are giving you information out of FEMA, I’d love to have them put their names behind it. Because, the anonymous attacks to polit-ili-cize the situation is completely wrong.”

The New York Times reported that on July 5, as the floodwaters in Texas began to recede, Noem failed to renew contracts with the four companies staffing FEMA call centers, leading to hundreds of contractors being fired. Documents showed that on July 6, FEMA received 2,363 calls and answered 846, about 35.8 percent. The next day, on July 7, the agency received 16,419 calls and answered only 2,613, roughly 15.9 percent.

By July 8, Noem still hadn’t renewed the contracts. “We still do not have a decision, waiver or signature from the DHS Secretary,” one FEMA official wrote in a July 8 email to colleagues, according to the Times.

This isn’t the first report that Noem botched the response to the flooding in Texas. Noem reportedly delayed FEMA’s initial response by instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. FEMA officials, who were unaware of the new rule, didn’t receive Noem’s go-ahead until Monday, at which point floodwaters had been raging for more than 72 hours. Meanwhile, she posted on Instagram asking her followers to vote for their favorite portrait of her to be used as her official governor’s portrait.

There’s been a mass exodus at the DOJ’s Federal Programs Branch—a unit specifically tasked with defending Trump’s most aggressive policies in court.

Of the 110 lawyers at the Federal Programs Branch, 69 have either already quit or announced that they’re quitting since Trump won in November, according to Reuters. Many of them left because they felt overwhelmed by the workload (they’re fighting an “unprecedented number of lawsuits,” one DOJ spokesperson said). Others felt ideologically compromised by the positions the administration was forcing them to defend, like the end of birthright citizenship, massive DOGE cuts from Elon Musk, or the countless extrajudicial deportations carried out by ICE.

“Many of these people came to work at Federal Programs to defend aspects of our constitutional system,” one of the outgoing lawyers told Reuters. “How could they participate in the project of tearing it down?”

The Federal Programs Branch plays a crucial role in pushing Trump’s agenda forward, and the Justice Department is working actively to refill the positions with individuals more inclined to mindlessly carry out the president’s will, no matter how blatantly unconstitutional.