Trump and Miller have completed all the pieces they promised on immigration. Ask your self one query: is your life any higher?
This can be a visitor submit by Matt Hildreth, Govt Director of Rural Organizing.
Final week in Biddeford, Maine, a 25-year-old father named Johan Sebastián left his home to go to work. He had a piece allow. He had a Social Safety quantity. He had a three-year-old child in his automobile.
An ICE agent shot him lifeless on the street.
Johan Sebastián wasn’t even the particular person ICE was searching for. Homeland Safety Secretary Markwayne Mullin admitted as a lot to U.S. Senator Angus King (I-ME). The brokers have been staking out an handle to serve a deportation order on another person, and when Johan Sebastián drove away from his own residence, they blocked his automobile and opened hearth. A neighbor who watched it occur stated he heard Johan Sebastián say, “I attempted to cease.”
The brokers weren’t sporting physique cameras. The administration’s personal price range request for ICE this yr reduce packages that might’ve elevated transparency, whereas including cash for practically all the pieces else.
Biddeford is a city of twenty-two,000 individuals. It’s the form of place the place the sound of gunfire on a summer season morning brings neighbors out onto their porches. By that night, a whole lot of individuals have been standing in Biddeford’s Mechanic Park whereas one other vigil was underway in Portland’s Monument Sq. with Mainers holding flowers and candles for a person most of them had by no means met.
Six days earlier, ICE brokers in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a 52-year-old development enterprise proprietor who had lived on this nation for greater than 30 years. He had no felony file. He had utilized for residency. He was driving his crew to a job website when unmarked automobiles began chasing him. His brother says it took 20 to half-hour for an ambulance to reach.
And the toughest factor for many People to simply accept is that these killings aren’t outliers or fringe examples of the system breaking down. For Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and MAGA Republicans, that is precisely how their immigration system is designed to work.
In Could 2025, Stephen Miller and then-Homeland Safety Secretary Kristi Noem referred to as ICE management into a gathering and demanded 3,000 arrests a day, triple what brokers had been making. Miller stated the quantity aloud on Fox Information and later advised CNN the quotas have been “a flooring, not a ceiling.”
There was an issue with that quantity. There aren’t 3,000 violent criminals a day to arrest, and there by no means have been. So Miller directed ICE to cease specializing in individuals with felony convictions and begin staking out work websites, House Depots, and metropolis streets. Senior ICE officers emailed officers telling them to “flip the inventive knob as much as 11” and inspired them to seize “collaterals,” which means anybody they occur to come across whereas searching for any individual else. A former ICE official summed up the brand new directive plainly: amount over high quality.
Johan Sebastián and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo are the individuals ICE is focusing on with their quotas. A development employee driving his crew to a job website is precisely who you catch if you cease searching criminals and begin staking out work automobiles with a view to get your numbers up. Johan Sebastián was a “collateral.” He wasn’t the goal. He was the person who drove away from an handle brokers have been watching, and underneath the quota system, that was sufficient to finish his life.
In different phrases, the system is working precisely because it was designed. After the homicide of Johan, Maine Senator Susan Collins (R), who voted to provide ICE and CBP a further $70 billion, issued a press release claiming she had satisfied Secretary Mullin “stop all non-urgent automobile stops.” She then took credit score, “I’m inspired that the Division has agreed to take action.” Semafor touted this as a “present of clout” by Collins.
That “clout” lasted lower than a day as a result of Trump blasted the concept in a Fact Social rant, claiming that “We CANNOT hand over certainly one of ICE’s most vital & efficient Crime Preventing instruments, THE TRAFFIC STOP! As soon as we do, we’re taking part in proper into the felony’s palms. The Radical Left Dumocrats want to see this performed, however it received’t occur on my watch. ICE…return and do your essential job.”
Trump and Miller name the pictures on immigration coverage from the White Home. They’ve gotten all the pieces they wished from Republicans in Congress. Each greenback. Each coverage. Each authority. They wished mass deportation, they usually’re doing it. They wished the border sealed, they usually sealed it.
The White Home brags that greater than 605,000 individuals have been deported and that 2.5 million individuals have left the nation in complete. America had destructive internet migration in 2025, the primary time that has occurred in at the very least half a century. Detention hit a file 71,000 individuals in January. CBP has awarded contracts for 587 miles of recent border wall.
DHS simply introduced 13 straight months of zero releases on the border. Southwest border apprehensions are 94 p.c beneath the Biden-era common, the bottom ranges in additional than three a long time. This fiscal yr opened with the fewest border encounters ever recorded.
And observe the place the cash went. Congress has handed DHS roughly 1 / 4 trillion {dollars} for this undertaking since final summer season, greater than the budgets of the FBI, the DEA, and the U.S. Marshals mixed. That cash shouldn’t be sitting in a vault. It’s flowing to non-public detention companies changing warehouses into camps, to contractors constructing 587 miles of wall, and to county jails renting beds to ICE for per-diem income. Miller’s quota isn’t just a coverage. It’s a enterprise mannequin. Each arrest fills a billable mattress, and any individual’s quarterly earnings name will depend on holding these beds full. That is the oldest trick in American politics: they need you afraid of your immigrant neighbor so that you by no means ask who’s cashing the verify.
For ten years, Trump and MAGA Republicans promised that in the event that they ever bought to run immigration their manner, with no judges getting of their manner, no Congress holding again the cash, no bureaucrats slowing them down, life would enhance for the American individuals. And now that they’re working the whole present, solely 14% of People say the economic system is getting higher.
Probably the most excessive enforcement regime in trendy American historical past is absolutely in place. America isn’t any safer, and People are nonetheless struggling.
MAGANOMICS HAS FAILED BECAUSE ECONOMIC GROWTH IS BASED ON ADDITION, NOT SUBSTRACTION
In 2017, then-OMB Director Mick Mulvaney stated that “MAGAnomics” would develop the US economic system by three p.c yr after yr. The idea was that tax cuts, deregulation, tariffs, and immigration restrictions would rebuild American prosperity from inside Trump’s border wall.
9 years later, the quantity tells the story. Beneath Trump, financial development peaked at 2.9 p.c in 2018 and by no means reached 3 p.c. It ran 2.8 p.c in 2024, fell to 2.1 p.c in 2025, and practically stalled out on the finish of final yr. By the yardstick its personal architects set, MAGAnomics has failed each single yr it has been tried.
CNN’s Harry Enten added up the MAGAnomics invoice for American households lately. Tariffs have price People $231 billion. The warfare with Iran price one other $134 billion. The collapse in worldwide tourism price $8.4 billion extra. Altogether, that’s $373 billion since Trump took workplace, about $2,784 per family. Enten put that quantity in phrases any household can measure: three to 4 months of meals. And his estimate doesn’t even issue within the misplaced income from employees being deported or eliminated by Trump’s immigration agenda.
ENTEN: “I’VE RUN THE NUMBERS. HERE’S HOW MUCH TRUMP HAS COST AMERICA (SO FAR)”
The very fact is, you can’t promise development whereas eradicating the individuals who produce it. Mass deportation was at all times a key tenet of MAGAnomics. Trump and his workforce offered immigration restriction as a labor coverage, the concept fewer employees would imply increased wages for the remainder of us. However an economic system shouldn’t be a set pie with too many forks in it. Employees are additionally shoppers, taxpayers, enterprise house owners, and neighbors. While you deport the meatpacker, you don’t simply lose the meatpacker. You lose the lease he paid, the groceries he purchased, the varsity his youngsters saved open. Rural counties know this higher than anybody, as a result of we’re the locations the place one closed plant or one misplaced household exhibits up within the college enrollment numbers the subsequent fall.
MAGAnomics promised prosperity by subtraction. MAGA math stated that fewer imports, fewer employees, and fewer neighbors would equal more cash within the pockets of the American employee.
In small cities and rural communities, we all know that greater paychecks come from addition, not subtraction. We perceive that our cities which are rising are rising as a result of individuals moved in, together with immigrants who got here to work within the packing crops, the dairies, the orchards, and the nursing houses, who opened eating places on primary streets that had been darkish for years, who enrolled their youngsters in colleges that have been one consolidation vote away from closing.
Most Rural People, like me, consider broad-based prosperity, robust labor unions, and a strong social security internet create a extra secure, extra productive, and extra resilient society. We all know that when our neighbor has yr, the whole group advantages.
For the final a number of years, Trump and Miller have gotten all the pieces they wished. Each greenback, each coverage, each quota. And what did it add as much as?
The worst Rural Financial system in a era.
