The Dictatorship
Trump has assembled a mass deportation dream team
President-elect Donald Trump has been busy all week rolling out the members of his incoming administration. There are three names that stand out for how effective his choices are likely to be in their mission: South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem for secretary of homeland security, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement head Tom Homan for “border czar” and top Trump adviser Stephen Miller for White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser.
Even as the rest of the administration may bumble about and clash with one another, that might not be the case when it comes to enforcing Trump’s dark immigration plan. Miller, Homan and Noem have the potential to be distressingly effective at working together. The only limit they will likely face is how much the public will allow to be carried out in its name.
Miller, Homan and Noem have the potential to be distressingly effective at working together.
In his new dual role, Miller will set the overall contours of American immigration policy. Homan will likely be charged with figuring out the operational details of Miller’s plans. And Noem will be tasked with implementing those policies and carrying out Trump’s promised deportation of an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants.
One of the few holdovers from the early Trump days, Miller was a speechwriter and senior counselor under Trump in his first term. By the end of Trump’s term, he held tremendous sway over immigration policy and had helped purge the ranks of officials he deemed not aggressive enough in deterring border crossings. He helped shape many of the harshest immigration policies Trump implemented, including the so-called Muslim travel ban and the use of Title 42 to shut down the border entirely.
His main skill has always been taking Trump’s worst impulses about immigrants and making them almost palpable for moderate listeners. But given a title to match his ambitions and a direct line to Trump, he’ll have little to prevent him from being as extreme as he’d always hoped. Among the plans that Miller is spearheading are mass deportation camps to hold those collected in ICE workplace sweeps while being processed for expulsion and reinstating Title 42 at the border.
Aside from cracking down on undocumented immigrants, he has his sights on limiting immigration, as well. Miller has supported an end to birthright citizenship and pledged to “turbocharge” his efforts to strip naturalized citizens of their legal status. He has also prepared to end parole programs for migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua and let Temporary Protected Status protections expire for more than 800,000 people.
While Miller forms the plans, it will likely be Homan working to coordinate carrying them out. Trump has indicated he’d like to see the military take part in the forced removal plans, which would require Pentagon buy-in and a likely transfer of money from defense programs to pay for a surge in detention facilities. There will be legal challenges that the Justice Department will have to defend against. Homan would be the point person making sure everyone is staying on the same page.
It’s worth noting that Homan’s job, such as it is, exists only as two words on paper right now, as there is no “border czar” job title in the federal system and no pool of resources for him to tap. It’s also fun to remember that he was promised, but never granted, a similar role in the first Trump administration. But Homan has the experience needed to carry out Miller’s wishes. He was hired to head ICE’s deportation arm before eventually becoming its director and implemented Trump’s “zero tolerance” child separation policy.
Immigration policy will be entirely top down with Noem in place, passing from Miller to Homan Noem’s orders to ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to carry them out
Meanwhile, Noem’s ascension is testament to how much all politics is national now. Leading South Dakota has given her little contact with the immigration system. According to the Migration Policy Instituteas of 2022 only 3.5% of the state’s population was foreign-born, far less than many parts of the country. But Noem has been extremely vocal about the supposed “invasion” taking place at the southern border, enthusiastically embracing Trump’s narrative and pulling stunts like deploying National Guard members to the Texas-Mexico border.
She would also be the only one of the three with any legal authority to carry out these deportation plans — or the money from Congress to do so. Immigration policy will be entirely top down with Noem in place, passing from Miller to Homan to Noem’s orders to ICE and Customs and Border Patrol to carry them out. It doesn’t matter if she herself doesn’t have any policy experience, not so long as she’s willing to be a figurehead for the White House and Senate Republicans are willing to confirm her.
There are still logistical problems that would have to be overcome should Miller’s deportation plan come to fruition. Homan said this week that he’d double the ICE presence in sanctuary cities like New York if needed, but ICE is already finding itself shorthanded. There’s also a shortage of immigration judges, whose courts face a massive backlog of cases. But that all supposes that there’s any interest from the administration in being efficient or precise in the process of forcibly removing millions from their homes.
Let’s not forget that the family separation policy was a humanitarian disaster. The conditions that families were held in were terrible, surpassed in the lack of care shown only by the failure of recordkeeping by the administration. DHS said in a report this year that there are still 1,360 children “without confirmed reunifications” with their families. We could call it incompetent if the goal had been to provide humane shelter for migrants being detained or speed their processing through the immigration system. But that wasn’t the goal. The goal was to make other migrants too afraid to cross the border.
Similarly, in this case, the goal isn’t to be efficient or precise. Miller is likely unconcerned about how long people might have to wait in hastily built camps before being deported. The odds seem high that there will be citizens who are rounded up and forced to prove their right to stay in the country. Homan has suggested avoiding family separations by deporting whole familiesproblematically hinting that children born in America would be illegally expelled, as well.
There is no way to carry out the kind of operation that Miller and his associates have in mind ethically or humanely — and so they won’t try to do so. In practice it will more likely be a deliberately cruel assault on human rights and dignity. But mass deportation doesn’t have to be done well to make Trump’s vision a reality. It just needs to be done.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for BLN Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.
The Dictatorship
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving Trump’s Cabinet
WASHINGTON (AP) — Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is out of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, the White House said Monday, after multiple allegations of abusing her position’s power, including having an affair with a subordinate and drinking alcohol on the job.
Chavez-DeRemer is the third Trump Cabinet member to leave her post after Trump fired his embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in March and ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this month.
In a statement posted on social media, Chavez-DeRemer praised Trump and wrote, “I am proud that we made significant progress in advancing President Trump’s mission to bridge the gap between business and labor and always put the American worker first.”
Unlike other recent Cabinet departures, Chavez-DeRemer’s exit was announced by a White House aide, not by the president on his social media account.
“Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer will be leaving the Administration to take a position in the private sector,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said on the social media site X. “She has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives.”
He said Keith Sonderling, the current deputy labor secretary, would become acting labor secretary in her place. The news outlet NOTUS was the first to report Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation.
Labor chief, family members faced multiple allegations
Chavez-DeRemer’s departure follows reports that began surfacing in January that she was under a series of investigations.
A New York Times report last Wednesday revealed that the Labor Department’s inspector general was reviewing material showing Chavez-DeRemer and her top aides and family members routinely sent personal messages and requests to young staff members.
Chavez-DeRemer’s husband and father exchanged text messages with young female staff members, according to the newspaper. Some of the staffers were instructed by the secretary and her former deputy chief of staff to “pay attention” to her family, people familiar with the investigation told the Times.
Those messages were uncovered as part of a broader investigation of Chavez-DeRemer’s leadership that began after the New York Post reported in January that a complaint filed with the Labor Department’s inspector general accused Chavez-DeRemer of a relationship with the subordinate.
She also faced allegations that she drank alcohol on the job and that she tasked aides to plan official trips for primarily personal reasons.
Late Monday, on her personal X account, Chavez-DeRemer posted, “The allegations against me, my family, and my team have been peddled by high-ranked deep state actors who have been coordinating with the one-sided news media and continue to undermine President Trump’s mission.”
Both the White House and the Labor Department initially said the reports of wrongdoing were baseless. But the official denials got less full-throated as more allegations emerged — and when Chavez-DeRemer might be out of a job became something of an open question in Washington.
At least four Labor Department officials have already been forced from their jobs as the investigation progressed, including Chavez-DeRemer’s former chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, as well as a member of her security detail, with whom she was accused of having the affair, The New York Times reported.
“I think the secretary demonstrated a lot of wisdom in resigning,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., said Monday after her departure was made public.
She enjoyed union support — rare for a Republican
Confirmed to Trump’s Cabinet on a 67-32 vote in March 2025, Chavez-DeRemer is a former House GOP lawmaker who had represented a swing district in Oregon. She enjoyed unusual support from unions as a Republican but lost reelection in November 2024.
In her single term in Congress, Chavez-DeRemer backed legislation that would make it easier to unionize on a federal level, as well as a separate bill aimed at protecting Social Security benefits for public-sector employees.
Some prominent labor unions, including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, backed Chavez-DeRemer, who is a daughter of a Teamster, for Labor Secretary. Trump’s decision to pick her was viewed by some political observers as a way to appeal to voters who are members of or affiliated with labor organizations.
But other powerful labor leaders were skeptical when she was tapped for the job, unconvinced that Chavez-DeRemer would pursue a union-friendly agenda as a part of the incoming GOP administration. In her Senate confirmation hearing, some senators questioned whether she would be able to uphold that reputation in an administration that fired thousands of federal employees.
She was a key figure in Trump’s deregulatory push
Aside from reports of wrongdoing in recent months, Chavez-DeRemer had been one of Trump’s more lower-profile Cabinet picks, but took key steps to advance the administration’s deregulatory agenda during her tenure.
For instance, the Labor Department last year moved to rewrite or repeal more than 60 workplace regulations it saw as obsolete. The rollbacks included minimum wage requirements for home health care workers and people with disabilities, and rules governing exposure to harmful substances and safety procedures at mines. The effort drew condemnation from union leaders and workplace safety experts.
The proposed changes also included eliminating a requirement that employers provide adequate lighting for construction sites and seat belts for agriculture workers in most employer-provided transportation.
During Chavez-DeRemer’s tenure, the Trump administration canceled millions of dollars in international grants that a Labor Department division administered to combat child labor and slave labor around the worldending their work that had helped reduce the number of child laborers worldwide by 78 million over the last two decades.
In her statement Monday, Chavez-DeRemer said, “While my time serving in the Administration comes to a conclusion, it doesn’t mean I will stop fighting for American workers.”
The Labor Department has a broad mandate as it relates to the U.S. workforce, including reporting the U.S. unemployment rate, regulating workplace health and safety standards, investigating minimum wage, child labor and overtime pay disputes, and applying laws on union organizing and unlawful terminations.
___
Associated Press writers Steven Sloan and Will Weissert in Washington and Cathy Bussewitz in New York contributed to this report.
The Dictatorship
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The Dictatorship
GOP’s Mills faces expulsion effort launched by one of his Republican colleagues
Republican Rep. Cory Mills of Florida was already dealing with multiple, overlapping scandals when a judge issued a restraining order against the congressman last fall after one of his ex-girlfriends accused him of threatening and harassing her. Soon after, Mills found that even some of his allies were keeping him at arm’s length.
In December, Rep. Byron Donalds, a fellow Florida Republican, conceded“The allegations against Cory, to me, are very troubling. I’m concerned about him. I hope he gets his stuff worked out and cleaned up, but it has to go through ethics [the Ethics Committee]. And he has to, you know, basically do that hard work to clear his name, if it can be cleared.”
Donalds, a leading gubernatorial candidate in Florida, had previously suggested he saw Mills as a possible running mate, making the comments that much more potent.
It didn’t do Mills any favors when The Washington Post published a new report a few days ago highlighting body camera footage that showed police officers in Washington, D.C., who were prepared to arrest the GOP congressman after a woman accused him of assault last year, before a lieutenant ultimately ordered them not to when she changed her account. (Mills refused to comment, except to say that the woman’s initial claim was “patently false.”)
Two days after the Post’s report reached the public, one of Mills’ Republican colleagues announced an effort to kick the congressman out of office. NBC News reported:
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., introduced a resolution Monday to expel Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla., from Congress over accusations that include sexual misconduct.
Mills is being investigated by the House Ethics Committee in connection with allegations of ‘sexual misconduct and/or dating violence’ and campaign finance violations. He has denied any wrongdoing.
“The swamp has protected Cory Mills for far too long and we are done letting it slide,” Mace said in a statement. “We tried to censure him and strip him from his committee assignments. Both parties blocked it, but we are not backing down.”
By way of social media, the Floridian expressed confidence that he’d prevail if Mace’s resolution reached the floor, encouraging the South Carolinian to “call the vote forward.”
Time will tell whether the expulsion vote actually happens, but in the meantime, after NOTUS reported that Mills intends to respond with an expulsion resolution of his own targeting Mace, the congresswoman wrote online“Cory Mills lied about his military service, has been accused of beating women, has a restraining order against him, and has allegedly been stuffing his own pockets with federal contracts while sitting in Congress. As a survivor, I will always stand up and right the wrongs of others. He is only coming after me because he knows he’s next.”
It’s not often that Americans see members of Congress launch dueling efforts to kick each other out of office, but this is proving to be an unusually awful term.
Indeed, amid growing GOP anxieties about the upcoming midterm elections, there’s fresh evidence that the House Republican conference is both divided and unraveling.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
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