Trump Forced to Acknowledge Everyone Hates His Immigration Plan

President Donald Trump is reportedly realizing that his sweeping, murderous “mass deportation” policy might not be a good idea.

The Wall Street Journal wrote Thursday that after speaking with advisers—and his wife—Trump has begun to cool on the draconian campaign. He’s complained about the bad press he received under Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and chief of staff Susie Wiles and border czar Tom Homan have apparently attempted to temper the federal militia optics of ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Trump has apparently realized the negative connotation of “mass deportations” and wants Republicans to talk more about “criminals.”

This supposed shift has not been accompanied by any kind of policy change, and the White House itself has maintained that it will be staying on message regarding its primary issue. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has yet to kick off another massive federal operation like in Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. And immigrant arrests have gone from 1,500 to 1,200 per day since the Minneapolis operation.

This meager trend has some immigration hard-liners concerned that Trump is going soft.

“Republicans need to turn out their base for the midterms, and not talking about President Trump’s promises, his signature campaign promise, is not the way to turn them out,” Immigration Accountability Project co-founder Rosemary Jenks told the Journal. Jenks’s organization is also part of the “Mass Deportation Coalition,” made up of conservative anti-immigration groups who are pushing for Trump to move on to “phase two” of mass deportations rather than step back.

But once again, none of these reported reversals have resulted in any concrete policy change. Even if Trump has finally realized that masked federal agents kicking down doors and killing people in the street is a bad look for the midterms, Stephen Miller is still in the room.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the media that the families of troops killed in the war on Iran offered their full support, telling him to “finish the job.” The father of one of the U.S. service members told NBC News that that was an outright lie.

“What I heard through tears, through hugs, through strength, and through unbreakable resolve was the same from family after family. They said, ‘Finish this. Honor their sacrifice. Do not waver. Do not stop until the job is done,’” Hegseth said Thursday morning.

Charles Simmons—father of 28-year-old Tech. Sgt. Tyler H. Simmons, one of six service members who died in a refueling plane that crashed in Iraq last week—told a very different story.

“I can’t speak for the other families. When he spoke to me, that was not something we talked about,” he told NBC News later Thursday, rejecting Hegseth’s claim that he told him to keep fighting. “No, I didn’t say anything along those lines.… Who wants war? … Sometimes it’s a necessity, and I just don’t know what’s going on.”

While Simmons did note that both Hegseth and President Donald Trump extended genuine compassion and condolences to him, it’s impossible to ignore that Hegseth lied about “family after family” coming up to him to tell him to keep bombing Iran. He used flowery, sentimental language—while misrepresenting the voices of at least one grieving parent—to continue to drum up support for an incredibly unpopular war that has already killed thousands of civilians in Lebanon and Iran.

Republican Senator Katie Britt tried to claim that New York City requires identification to shovel show in an attempt to defend the SAVE Act Thursday.

At a press conference on Capitol Hill, the Alabama politician tried to argue that because many regular parts of daily life require people to produce identification, Republicans’ extreme voter ID bill is just par for the course.

“You can’t rent a home, you can’t go to work, you can’t shovel snow in New York City without an ID, and you can’t get into [Senator] Jon Ossoff’s campaign event. So, I’m pretty sure as we look to try to achieve the American dream, whether that’s getting insurance, whether that’s getting a car, whether that’s signing your kid up for school, you need an ID,” Britt said.

Leaving aside the fact that most Americans don’t have an aspirational dream of buying an insurance policy, Britt is likely piggybacking on Republicans’ jab at a specific New York City government program to help clear the city of snow.

That program hired temporary snow shovelers in severe weather, and, thanks to federal employment laws, required two forms of identification as the job pays up to $30 an hour—a living wage Britt and her fellow Republicans are unfamiliar with. You can shovel all the snow you want in the city without an ID—you just won’t get paid by City Hall.

And all of the parts of the “American dream” Britt mentioned, including getting insurance for some reason, aren’t rights enshrined in the Constitution. Voting is a right guaranteed to all eligible American citizens, and requiring people to produce their passports, passport cards, or their birth certificates, as the SAVE Act mandates, is costly, burdensome, and an illegal poll tax.

Say what you will about our grifter in chief, but during his second term, Donald Trump has managed to slap his name and likeness on more objects than anyone could have imagined.

The newest entry in the crowded field of Trumpjunk, reports The Washington Post, is a commemorative gold coin, approved on Thursday by the Commission of Fine Arts. The coin features an unusually svelte Trump bending over to press his fists down onto a flat surface—presumably a desk, but with some imagination, one could also see it as a railing overhanging a steep cliff face, or a pommel horse that Trump is preparing to vault.

It should be unsurprising to hear that the Commission of Fine Arts, one of the few federal arts commissions Elon Musk didn’t take the time to gut, is entirely filled with Trump appointees. These include Roger Kimball, whose “commentary” on Trump has for years been impressively servile, as well as one of Trump’s former assistants, a 26-year-old named Chamberlain Harris judged by the Post to have “no notable arts expertise.”

But it was another commission member, James McCrery II, who earned the title of Biggest Trump Bootlicker by reportedly spearheading the effort to approve the coin. McCrery told his fellow coin-heads that Treasury officials should print the coin “as large as possible, all the way to three inches in diameter.”

Thankfully, the American people may be spared from having a physical Trump coin in their lives, as the bipartisan Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, or CCAC, also needs to sign off on the design before it can go to the U.S. Mint—and that committee rejected the coin last month. While Trump could theoretically try to produce the coin anyway, he “would probably face legal challenges,” according to the Post.

Retired basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who served on the CCAC a decade ago, told the Post he was “not enthusiastic about memorializing Mr. Trump on a coin because he has done so much damage to our country.” Michael Moran, a Republican first nominated to the CCAC in 2011 and reappointed by Senator Mitch McConnell in 2025, similarly denounced the coin. “It goes against American culture and the traditions that drive what we put on our coinage,” Moran said. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

Join the club, Mike!

The federal government is dropping its case against Aliya Rahman, a U.S. citizen with autism and a traumatic brain injury who was dragged from her car and arrested by ICE agents while on the way to a doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis in January.

Rahman was recently arrested by Capitol Police for “disruption of Congress” while attending the State of the Union as Representative Ilhan Omar’s guest. She was facing up to six months in prison for her silent protest.

“The government did the right thing today when it ultimately decided not to file any criminal charges against Aliya,” Jessica Gingold, Rahman’s lawyer, told HuffPost, which first reported the news. “Aliya should never have been arrested in the first place—she committed no crime and did nothing wrong.… While we celebrate that no criminal case will go forward, the experience of being singled out for standing and roughly arrested has not been without its costs to Aliya and is now yet another thing from which Aliya must heal.”

“The impact of this arrest has been a weight on me since the State of the Union,” Rahman said in a statement, “a particularly heavy weight considering the fact that for the second time in two months I was arrested in a heavy-handed way for committing no crime.” Rahman said, “I am grateful that the government chose not to file charges. I will continue my steadfast focus on helping my community in Minneapolis and healing from the wounds inflicted on me by my own government.”