As I write this, we’re exactly eight hours into a new year, the Persian new year, called Nowruz. It takes place each year at saale tahveel, the vernal equinox, the precise moment when the sun crosses the equator and the Earth literally turns towards spring.

But here in northern California, we’re suffering through a heat wave, with temperatures more like August than March or even April. My husband’s wearing shorts, I’ve stripped the covers off the patio furniture and the lemon trees, exhausted by the heat, are dropping their fruit.

It’s all too, too much and too early, too early. The familiar rhythm I’m used to — what my local Persian Center calls “the gentle unfolding of life” after the dark chill of winter — just isn’t the same.

And neither is the world beyond my door. How can anyone celebrate Nowruz, or Eid, or Gudi Padwa, Ugadi, Chaitra Navratri — the festivals that will shortly mark the Hindu new year — when there’s a war going on, no matter what anybody wants to call it, in Iran and in Lebanon? What does it matter what the sun says?

A military “excursion” three weeks ago that promised relief for ordinary Iranians has turned into a military juggernaut that may wind up reinvigorating a monstrous authoritarian regime. More than a million people in Lebanon are now displaced, sleeping in schools, on sidewalks and in emergency shelters. Countries are squabbling over whether or not it’s Iranian or Israeli weapons that are landing in Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Turkey. President Trump says one thing and oil prices tumble, like my lemons; he says another and they spike. His administration is seeking another $200 billion in military spending; The Washington Post reports that this may or may not be part of the 50 percent increase in the Pentagon budget Trump demanded before the war began.

Tehran is utterly ruined; Isfahan may be next. Here and there, the president has begun talking about Cuba.

This is the 21st day of the war with Iran and the zillionth day that I’ve woken up thinking about what it’s going to be like when I pick up my phone and see something there that scares me even more than what happened yesterday. Nowruz is a time of beginnings, of hope, of fresh starts. Ordinarily, I would be washing the rice, grinding the cardamom, turning those lemons into a tart. But now, obviously, is not that time.

Poetry is my go-to in times like these. The poem below, written some 800 years ago by the Persian and Sufi mystic Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, feels to me as if it could be current today.

For copyright reasons, all I can quote is just a few lines. But if it speaks to you as it speaks to me, please do find Coleman Barks’s beautiful translation of Rumi’s “Quatrains” in “The Essential Rumi” (find it here on Better World Books).

And as Rumi suggests, be round and open. Welcome spring. Whenever it comes to you, and for however long it lasts.

Quatrains

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the 
     ground.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other 
doesn’t make any sense. 

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
	Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want. 
	Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
	where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
	Don’t go back to sleep. 

—With thanks to Timothy Green and Rattle Poetry, which published this poem for its Poets Respond series.

The people need to get their power back.
All of this anger is beside the point.
So what else can he do but mount the joints
Of the electric pole that’s still intact

this morning, three steel crossarms at the top, 
a crucifix in concrete. Around him loose
wires dangle in leaden clouds of ash and soot,
plus rain. He’s used to rain. His tennis shoes

seek pockets in the stone as he ascends;
a safety rope tied to his belt reminds him
of what’s below. Now everything depends
on him to generate what used to flow

everywhere, in lamps and laptops and rice cookers,
ventilators, freezers and thermostats,
water pumps, alarm clocks, fans and chargers,
email, cellphones and WhatsApp chats.

Around him oil and water mix with air:
Who builds a girls’ school on a navy base?
Who bombs that base when girls are playing there?
A black rain falls; he rubs it off his face.

Two things may be told but you will not detect
the truth between them, not when children die.
What he can do is try to fix what’s wrecked.
He feels the weight of tools against his thigh,

keeps climbing. How can one man push against 
such passion for destruction? All this debris  
should tempt him to surrender. It’s immense,
this apocalypse, this Gethsemane.

Yet he is capable of miracles —
running power lines, replacing circuits —
for electricity’s a magical
necessity, like hope. You can’t live without it.

Mothers search the rubble for their daughters.   
A husband texts his wife inside a van.
The balconies are dark. There is no laughter. 
In London, someone’s calling Isfahan. 

He stops. Up fifty feet or more, transfixed
against an orange sun, he leans 
and pulls a wire to his chest. What happens next
is anybody’s guess. Yours, and mine, and ours.

—Inspired by “Fear and Hope for Iranians Trapped Between Bombs and Defiant Rulers,” The New York Times, 3/9/2026, including photos by Arash Khamooshi.

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It was an extraordinary moment in journalism — this was U.S. missiles falling into Baghdad, the first time Americans had seen such scenes in real time.

Captivated, I watched as CNN’s Bernard Shaw huddled in his hotel room, describing the beginning of a war that looked and felt like a video game: Green lights flashing against a night sky thousands of miles away from me in California, but only 500 miles south of my father’s family home near Tehran.

“The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated,” Shaw reported, with his characteristic reserve. Then came images I’ve never forgotten:

They say journalists write the first draft of history, but it was the casual disregard for casualties, and the absence of any plan beyond killing those we oppose, that struck me like a fist that morning and made me drop what I was doing so I could hurry off and write … a poem.

As if that would accomplish anything. But there didn’t seem to be any answers for the questions I had: What in the world was going on? And what could happen next?

It turned out that as wars go, Desert Storm was different than the wars that preceded it. As the military scholar Dave Deptula writes in a recent article for Forbes, Desert Storm was “a carefully conceived and executed campaign” that focused less on “a collection of targets” and more on a well-defined strategic goal, in this case, removing Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war.

The initial combat phase lasted 43 days, ending in a ceasefire on Feb. 28. Notably, Bush built support at home and abroad even before military action began, by means of an intense diplomatic initiative, plus an Oval Office address the day before the skies over Baghdad were illuminated.

Saddam may have been surprised by the full extent of what hit him, yet Americans knew what was coming.

Still, after Desert Storm came 9/11, and a series of military campaigns with chest-thumping names that eschewed specifics and almost guaranteed overreach: Operation Iraqi Freedom, which Bush’s son George hastily launched over NATO’s objections, and Operation New Dawn, in which the U.S. drew down from Iraq, leaving it dangerously vulnerable. Three years later, in 2014, U.S. forces returned with Operation Inherent Resolve, which is still battling ISIS.

Meanwhile, Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan was followed in 2015 by Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, then the politically disastrous pullout of U.S. military troops by President Joe Biden in August 2021, and finally Operation Enduring Sentinel, a portmanteau that at least has the virtue of being verbally consistent with everything we’ve named before.

Launched in October 2021 and aimed at countering terrorists threats in Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Sentinel “remains ongoing,” according to Congress’s own summary of American military conflicts. Not that Congress has anything to say, unfortunately, about the one we’re in now.

This latest operation is called Epic Fury; Israel’s name for it is Roaring Lion. The names may be new, but the bombing of a girls’ school last Saturday and growing fears that the Trump administration doesn’t have a day after plan for Iran feel like history repeating itself.

Or in my case, a poem repeating itself.

Here’s the one I wrote that long-ago morning, after the first desert storm.

What Comes After

I step outside to water the cyclamen
that I have been neglecting since the war
broke out, and CNN began to show
the footage of the missiles falling every night
like rain, into an ancient city —
the phosphorescent glow of the mosques
as glimpsed through high-tech goggles;
the panicked voice of the reporter
filing Armageddon from the Al Rasheed Hotel —
for weeks now, there has been no
breakfast, no email, no morning chores
 
But now, on my front porch
I see a filament of spider web,
the work of an entire night,
meticulous, impossible,
one end stuck delicately to the wall,
the other to the cyclamen,
a distance of perhaps two feet
to me, but to a spider, nothing less
than eternity —
 
Carelessly I brush it with my arm
and the fine line floats away,
untethered, ruined
 
I think of the colonel
at the Pentagon this morning,
briefing the reporters.
"We are not softening them up," he said
of the Iraqi guards,
and for a moment I did not understand:
 
"We are destroying them."

-30-

The ideal Do Now was dead simple and difficult to screw up. For example: Open your text to page 45 and begin reading, or Get out your journal and write down the first thought that came to mind when you woke up today.

I hated Do Nows. So did most of my students. It didn’t escape any of us, at the high poverty high school where I worked, that the real purpose of a Do Now was to make everybody shut up as soon as they walked into the classroom. Unstructured time was seen as dangerous, an open invitation for kids to mess around. You never knew what could happen: One student might amble into the room and say hello; another might light a fire in the wastepaper basket (both options were equally possible).

In my first year as a teacher, I actually tried the Do Now about what you were thinking about as you woke up. The responses I got felt a lot like my own: Why am I here? How long is it gonna be until I can go home?

Somehow, I stuck with teaching. And as my kids and I learned more about each other, I realized that the simplicity of a Do Now could sometimes reveal a truth invisible to an outsider. As in this Do Now, from a soft-spoken, seemingly unflappable 17-year-old named Tiffany:

I thought about those Do Nows yesterday when ProPublica published “The Children of Dilley,” a heartbreaking account of the infants, grade schoolers and teens being detained in an ICE family detention center 75 miles south of San Antonio.

An estimated 1,750 children have “cycled through” Dilley since it reopened following President Trump’s inauguration, ProPublica found. Reporters discovered the latest kids suffering in horrifying conditions.

“Moms told me that their kids had lost their appetites after finding worms and mold on their food, had trouble sleeping on the facility’s hard metal bunk beds in rooms shared by at least a dozen other people, and were constantly sick,” reporter Mica Rosenberg wrote. Some children were “so distraught they cut themselves or talked about suicide.”

A companion story, “I Have Been Here Too Long: Read Letters from the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility,” includes letters from eight kids that “convey the pain of feeling trapped with no end in sight”:

The raw truths of a Do Now leap from that letter. It seems unbelievable that America would treat children like this. And yet. The same questions I heard in my classroom have come full circle: Why am I here? How long will it be until I can go home? Until all of the wild, terrible, frightening things that are happening to me stop?

It’s been several years since I’ve been in a classroom, but I still think about the Do Now. These days, however, the words are political and practical.

As in, what do I do right now? How do I balance my one wild and beautiful day against the obligation to stand up to tyranny? Should I protest in front of my grocery store or go inside so I can buy something to cook for my elderly parents? What happens when the next organizing call for my local Indivisible chapter crashes into the day and time when I’m most likely to be writing? And why go on searching for beauty and truth anyway, when the world is afire with suffering?

Add to that the sheer impotence one feels at confronting an autocracy that’s thundering down the road like an 18-wheeler being driven by a crazy drunk in an Iowa whiteout, and it’s hard not to channel Lenin: What is to be done?

And yet it’s indeed the burning question of our movement: How to do something, and how to keep doing it, even when you have a job, a family, your own children and a mind whose health you are vainly trying to preserve.

All that made me think about those Do Nows. Indeed, they’re dead simple, and as is true of any simple thing task, like recycling, or flossing your teeth, it’s never apparent in the moment that what you’re doing will make any difference.

But to do one thing, however small, is not to do nothing. And since Operation Metro Surge set Minnesota ablaze, it does appear that and more and more people are indeed doing something.

So here’s a little Do Now I’m doing. It’s about children in ICE detention, and Senator Katie Britt (R-Ala.), who’s emerged as a self-professed advocate for the youngest among us.

That includes Liam Cornejo Ramos, the five-year-old Minneapolis boy in the bunny hat who was sent to Dilley and who apparently has caught Britt’s attention. A New York Times profile of Britt, published last week and entitled “The G.O.P. Senator Who Can’t Stop Thinking About The Boy ICE Detained,” noted that the mention of Liam’s name brought tears to Britt’s eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Britt reportedly said. “I just keep thinking about that child.”

I hope that’s true. Even though Britt has stumbled with an oft-repeated, facts-be-damned story blaming former President Biden for creating the conditions that led to the repeated rape of a victim of human trafficking, her focus on I.V.F. and the social harm of social media on children makes her a would-be advocate for kids. On the other hand, she’s called Democratic proposals for more restrictions on ICE activity “a ridiculous Christmas list of demands” that she won’t support.

The next few days will tell whether Britt is the teary empath she was in the Times piece, or the “killer for you” she promised Trump she would be when seeking his endorsement for her first Senate race.

Meanwhile, the children of Dilley, and all of the children in ICE hands, need our help.

Do this. Now.

Do Now: Katie Britt and ICE Kids

Resources needed: As George Orwell said, the evidence of your eyes and ears. Plus at least one of the following: 1) a computer, 2) a stamp, 3) a social media account, 4) a phone.

Time commitment: 50 minutes

Step 1: Read this “The G.O.P. Senator Who Can’t Stop Thinking About the Boy ICE Detained,” by Caroline Kitchener, The New York Times, Feb. 5, 2026 (14.28 min). Who does Britt care about most? What makes her the perfect person to do something about the children in ICE detention now?

Step 2: Listen to “The Children of Dilley” (23.15 min.), Pro Publica, Feb. 9, 2026. What are the ages of the children now being detained? What type of conditions are the children of Dilley experiencing?

Step 3: Send a message to Katie Britt:

• Email her

• Snail mail your letter to one or more of her offices

• Call Britt’s Senate office in Washington, D.C., at 202-224-5744 and talk to a staffer or leave a voicemail with your message

• Post on your social media and tag Britt on Instagram @senkatiebritt, on Twitter at @SenKatieBritt or find her on Facebook

Suggested message:

Dear Senator Britt:

A recent New York Times article called you “The G.O.P. Senator Who Can’t Stop Thinking About the Boy ICE Detained.” In it, you shared your concern for Liam Cornejo Ramos, the five-year-old Minneapolis boy who was sent to an ICE detention facility in Dilley, Texas. The story quotes you as asking your staff urgently to “look into this.”

I’m reaching out to ask you to look into the situation of all children being held now at ICE facilities, including Dilley.

The situation is inhumane. In fact, it flies in the face of a Republican party that you have called “the party of parents, the party of families.” A ProPublica investigation of Dilley this week reported children suffering from insomnia, malnutrition and depression; some have attempted self-harm and suicide. There have been similar reports from other ICE detention facilities.

You are a wife, a mother and a United States senator. Your position and your influence with President Trump give you an opportunity to protect those who can’t protect themselves.

Please ask President Trump to order the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees immigrant minors through its Office of Refugee Resettlement, to release all of the immigrant and U.S. citizen infants, children and teenagers now in custody.

Take a stand. Do it now.

Sincerely,

(sign your name)

Optional/do later: Read Flores v. Reno, the 1997 Supreme Court case that set basic standards for the custody, care and release of any child who is in federal custody, including unaccompanied minors. This explainer from the National Immigrant Justice Center describes how the Biden administration tried to replace the protections in Flores with its own regulations, and how the first and second Trump administrations have sought to weaken and/or abolish it.

Extra credit: Donate to ProPublica here.

Whether people liked it or not, June spoke her mind. She had a discerning, razor-sharp intellect; she was a trailblazing city attorney who tilted at windmills and often won. In the office, she was brilliant and vibrant; at home, she was a terrible cook, capable of making only one recipe, a tried-and-true brisket, at a time when women of her generation were prized for their skills in the kitchen.

June wasn’t patient or passive. She was passionate about baseball and the game of politics; early on, she pegged Donald Trump as a first class idiot and a boor. She had a terrific laugh and loved being the center of attention; at the same time she could spend hours by herself, sorting beads to string necklaces, or working on puzzles.

The first time my fiancé brought me home, the level of conversation at June’s dinner table astonished me. The discussions, involving June, my future father-in-law Steve (a pioneer in nuclear medicine) and their two sons (both attorneys) were like nothing I’d ever encountered. Literally nothing was off the table — modern art, Cleveland city politics, HMOs and health care, Zionism and the state of Israel, and most of all what the current resident of the White House might be up to.

Often the talk at the table grew heated; sometimes there were epic blowouts, intellectual red-faced wildfires, a kind of verbal war I’d never experienced.

I liked it. Sometimes I wished we could just eat like other people. Sometimes I ran for cover.

Speaking up doesn’t come naturally for an immigrant kid, as I was; you step carefully when you’re connected to a country only by a green card. Growing up, I practiced taquiyeh, Arabic for the art of never showing on the outside what you feel on the inside. Eventually, as a journalist I found that taquiyeh was an asset in the newsroom, where your personal point of view is the very first thing that your editor tells you to leave at the door.

I did as I was told. My very first assignment as a reporter was covering a proposed neo-Nazi rally in Skokie, Illinois, home to more than 40,000 Jews, including many Holocaust survivors. The story I wrote afterwards gave equal time to both sides, the small group of skinheads loudly threatening to march, and the hundreds of Jewish grandmothers just as loudly threatening to chase them away (ultimately, the march took place in Chicago).

After a career in the newsroom, now I find myself on the other side. And in Minneapolis, as in Chicago again, the voices are loud and growing louder.

For a newswoman, speaking your own mind can feel a bit like losing your virginity, something that can be enjoyable, or painful, but either way, you never get it back. I’m scared of losing my objectivity, my instinctive response to mirror both sides of an issue. But I’m more scared of what will happen when ICE comes to my racially diverse, multiethnic, immigrant-rich home of Oakland, California.

Vice President JD Vance has urged protesters to write op-eds or go on social media to share their views instead of taking to the streets. That tells you something. It says you that writing a story like this one goes only so far. It shows that whistling and shooting videos on your cellphone is already shaking a monarch.

Last Saturday, the day that Alex Pretti was murdered in Minneapolis, was the day I set for myself to remember June in all the good ways she was. I spent the afternoon at an Indivisible work party, making SALT (Safety Alert and Legal Toolkit) packets for Oakland schoolteachers and their immigrant students.

The tasks were simple but painstaking, a bit like June sorting beads: I carefully cut out 481 “know your rights” cards (yes, we had to count them) and organized 3D-printed whistles by color, orange and red.

As I worked, I chatted with a young woman I’ll call May who likes to sew; she was knotting lengths of string into lanyards. Her light brown curls and peaceful vibe seemed perfect for a Saturday afternoon. The conversation turned to quilting and I asked May if she’s on Facebook, where a lot of quilters share their work.

She shook her head. “I hate social media,” she said, “it’s so angry. It makes me crazy. I can’t take that.”

I had to agree. And yet I couldn’t help myself; my phone had buzzed just minutes before and I was bursting with what I’d seen: A video of another killing in Minneapolis. This time it was Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, who had just been shot while exercising his First Amendment rights to speech and freedom of assembly, and his Second Amendment right to legally carry a gun.

Had May noticed how Pretti was protecting a woman when ICE agents attacked him and doused him with pepper spray? Did she know ICE agents knocked him to the ground and fired at him four times, then pumped six more bullets into his body as he lay there?

Indeed, May and the others around our work table had heard the news; there were sighs and a few mumbled words of sorrow. But then the talk died down. For a moment, I felt embarrassed, as if I had violated an unspoken rule, but then I understood: Even at this Indivisible work party, everyone was staying away from talking about Trump, because he’s so incendiary that even people on the same side of a political issue are afraid that even just mentioning his name will blow something up.

No more. What ICE has done and is doing in Minneapolis has burned all the objectivity out of me. I’m not seeing both sides right now, not when it comes to murders of peaceful protesters who are risking bodily injury along with having their faces, locations and biometrics harvested as they document the activities of out-of-control government agents in their neighborhoods.

I feel anger, immediate and inflammable. It’s not measured or considered. I have developed a tendency to blurt out the news when nobody is asking for it. I erupt. I’m not polite.

June would have recognized that; she would have appreciated it. Given her own point of view, she would have demanded it.

Heading into an election year, with midterms now just 10 months away, outrage is our first and most obvious strength. We need more than that, of course — a policy and platform that will convince voters that Democrats (for lack of an alternative) can offer something more than shock and revulsion at the transformation of U.S. cities into border towns, the crypto corruption, the staged cruelty on social media, the horrifying memes and the escalating economic fuckery of Trump tariffs. But in these heartbreaking days, it’s good to feel a consensus building, a shared sense of decency, an instinctive response that’s neither blue nor red. It’s civic, and it’s strong, and polls show it’s coursing through the American bloodstream.

What ICE is doing in Minneapolis is inhumane. Even JD Vance’s sophistry isn’t enough to explain how a five-year-old boy gets caught up in an ICE sweep and then incarcerated in Texas. And it’s not going to soothe the shock of an ICU nurse bleeding to death in the snow. A line has been crossed that even Trump can’t erase.

There are times when the ability to scream, shout and curse is not only the proper thing to do, it’s the only thing to do, the necessary answer to a frightening authoritarian who is, no matter how many memecoins to his name, nothing more than an old-fashioned con man. And words, as we’re seeing, have a way of getting under his thin skin.

This is that time. And today is the day to put down our tools, close our wallets and speak out with everything we’ve got — all of the passion and intellectual firepower we can muster for the country that this America doesn’t feel like right now, but could still be.

June, if you’re listening, this one’s for you.

— “Iran report says 16,500 dead in ‘genocide under digital darkness,” The Sunday Times (UK), Jan. 17, 2026

In Persian history, when a shah or another person of power wanted to get rid of an enemy while keeping him alive, the preferred method was blinding. The great Nader Shah was famous for this; he blinded his uncle, his brother, four of his brother’s sons and two grandsons. Shah Abbas the Great followed in his footsteps. So did Shah Rukh. The victims of these shahs lived, but haltingly and incompletely; unable to read or write, incapable of acting with confidence and purpose, often they spent the rest of their lives in the harem, that crazy place of lust and intrigue, listening to the screams of the new virgins being deflowered, the laughter of the wives in good standing, the tears of those who had fallen out of favor, and the cries of their babies, oblivious and fussy.

The old, broken mistresses who were too exhausted for love anymore were the law of this closed world, their only confidantes. And thus did the blinded survive, but in darkness.

In modern times, when an ayatollah or a mullah or an Iranian revolutionary guard or basiji wants to get rid of an enemy while keeping him alive, he blinds his children. The great Supreme Leader is famous for this: He takes phones from teenagers, then searches their photos. They gather at movies, on gaming sites and in chat rooms; they come out onto the streets. He seizes their Starlinks. A new kind of darkness falls. The guards get on motorbikes; they have rubber bullets, pellet guns and live ammunition. They aim for the eyes. Some of these victims will live, but haltingly and incompletely; unable to read or write, incapable of acting with confidence and purpose, they will spend the rest of their lives in prison, that crazy place deaf to their pleas, listening to the screams of new inmates pacing their cells, the laughter of the guards, the tears of those who can’t sleep, and the cries of the next generation, trying to flee.

The old, broken ophthalmologists who donate their blood to save who they can are the last hope of this closed world, their only confidantes. And thus do the blinded survive, but in darkness.

A few days ago I was listening to an MSNBC interview with former Obama adviser and ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, talking about new revelations about Joe Biden’s fragile physical and psychological state during the last two years of his presidency and his re-election campaign. Stressing the need for fresh leadership, Emanuel ended his segment in a way that made me cringe: Memorial Day’s coming up, he said. It’s a good time to remember the empty seat at the table, he said, the empty chair in the room.

Ironically, it was Joe Biden who made that metaphor famous, not Emanuel. It was Biden’s empathy, his personal understanding of loss, that made that phrase more than a signoff. It was his lived experience: The first wife, the first daughter, the first son he lost.

I wasn’t early to the Biden party; when he announced he was running for president, I thought he was too old, too been-there and gaffe-prone to take on a resurgent Trump. But COVID was still claiming thousands of lives a day, and the first time I heard him talk about that empty chair, it resonated like a bell. Biden had seen that empty chair; he had sat in it, he had held his head in his hands at that empty table and contemplated how to go on living after loss.

For me that made Biden not only a potential commander-in-chief but the bearer of grief, a person who could describe it better than most. Biden knew from loss. For all the exposes about the tragic collapse of the Biden presidency, we forget that Joe was the one who muscled us through COVID and kept us going. He took us into the future, however dark and uncertain it is now.

This ability to grieve, and to feel loss — something we learned during COVID, if not in other ways — is something we’re in danger of losing right now.

CBS’s 60 Minutes closed out its season last week with a profile of Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril, which manufactures autonomous drones, submarines and airplanes, such as the Fury, an unmanned combat aircraft now being tested for use by the Air Force. Though such weapons are designed to work in “collaborative combat” with subs, planes, drones and other craft and systems controlled by humans, the idea is that Anduril’s “smart weapons” will more quickly harvest data in, over, under and around the battlefield, and more effectively identify, select and eliminate targets.

Luckey, a boy genius who sold his virtual-reality company Oculus to Facebook in 2014 and got fired two years later, allegedly for making a $10,000 donation to the Trump campaign, makes a good argument for smart weapons:

"There's no moral high ground to making a land mine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor,” he told CBS. “It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons."

But the line that accompanies the description of those weapons — “No operator is required” — is frightening.

No operator may be required, but you can’t have a war without casualties. More than that, up until now, we haven’t had wars without what we honor on Memorial Day — pain, grief, and even the deep, unavoidable moral unease that lingers after even a “good” war is fought, and which may be the only reason we give second thought to beginning another.

So much of forced migration begins with the wars we fight that others have lost: Think Desert Storm, which followed in the footsteps of the Soviets, who invaded and failed to conquer Afghanistan, its relentless mountain ranges, its dark valleys. Subsequently, Obama’s drone war tried to do from the skies what couldn’t be done on the ground, and though this more targeted approach to locating terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen resulted in hundreds of airstrikes and the killing of Osama bin Laden, deep gaps remain in our understanding as American citizens of what happened. Maybe that’s because it was drones that did the killing, and you don’t honor fallen drones on Memorial Day.

I was a child in 1968 when CBS’s Walter Cronkite decided to show footage of body bags coming through Dover Air Force Base during the Vietnam War. I never forgot the shocking impact that had, and not only in my family’s living room, but everyone else’s I knew. Cronkite understood that the photos and video would bring the war home to Americans in a way they hadn’t yet seen. The decision marked a turning point in the war and in Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. The human cost of war became real, because it came into our homes, where we saw it over dinner and heard it as we ate.

It wasn’t lived experience, not on the level of the loss that Joe Biden experienced when he lost his son, Beau. But it was more than enough.

Autonomous, artificial intelligence-powered weapons being created by Anduril, along with Palantir, which has partnered with the Trump administration to develop AI tools targeting undocumented Americans, and with Israel in its war on Gaza targeting Palestinians, may spare us that kind of loss. And not only death, but the lasting damage that war does to the bodies and minds of those who come back; Biden believes that Beau’s glioblastoma brain cancer may have resulted from his exposure during his military service to burn pits in Iraq.

And yet pain, death and damage are valuable, priceless. You can’t buy what they create in us. Loss explodes with understanding; it triggers empathy. Having grieved, for ourselves or for others, we think twice before we raise a gun, press a button, call in a strike. Having glimpsed empty chairs, we don’t create a list of names; we send our precious young men and women overseas to figure out where the names are, the real terrorists, and to make sure the innocent aren’t caught in the crossfire.

If that sounds naive or impossible or ridiculous, it is. Wars are costly, imprecise, ineffectual and uncontrollable, as Israel’s war in Gaza has proved. Preventing war in the first place, not developing sophisticated robots to conduct it for us, seems like the stage of evolution we should be in right now.

We in the West enjoy the singular luxury of contemplating tragedy before it happens. No war is bloodless. Joe Biden called his campaign for the presidency a battle for the nation’s soul. The rise of autonomous, artificially-intelligent weapons is that kind of battle. How and when we use them will determine what kind of people we want to be.

Will we still put our lives on the line when it’s needed, sacrificing in a way that costs us, or will we automate our anger and shrug our shoulders when the collateral damage comes due? What exactly will we do on days like today? Will we think of the lives lost? Who will we thank? Whose names will we call? Will there be graveyards and poppies to remember them by?

On this Memorial Day, maybe that’s what we should be thinking about.

Called “War Rugs: Afghanistan’s Knotted History,” it’s about how weavers incorporated successive military conflicts into their work, beginning with the Soviet invasion in December 1979, through Operation Enduring Freedom and the U.S. and British occupation after the 9/11 attacks on New York.

At first glance, the rugs are beautiful, in a familiar way — the deep crimson and brilliant yellows, the bold geometric borders and the pretty white tassels. But a closer look reveals that these are no ordinary objects d’art; there’s something else going on.

The coaster above depicts a helicopter; the British Museum dates it as produced sometime during the mid-1990s, after the collapse of a Soviet-backed government and before the Taliban first took power. Below is a small mat, woven a decade later, picturing another helicopter, this time with a Kalashnikov assault rifle and a grenade:

The failure of the Soviet invasion is celebrated in the rug below, which could be easily dismissed as a map of Afghan provinces, except for the plethora of rocket launchers, jets, machine guns and attack helicopters hovering overhead, along with the date that the Russian-backed government of Mohammed Najibullah collapsed:

Every rug I saw was a piece of art, incorporating history, journalism and political commentary. Each embedded, sometimes obviously and sometimes slyly, the kind of ground truth possessed only by people living in conflict zones. People under fire, who keep their eyes open.

The specificity of detail in the rug below is a good example: It shows rocket launchers and Kalashnikov machine guns trained at vehicles and helicopters leaving Afghanistan, “including several types of anti-aircraft guns labeled by name,” as the British Museum dutifully notes, specifically “a 12.7mm M1938 DshKM heavy machine gun, known as a 'Dashika' (i.e. 'DASHAKA' on the rug) and a 14.5 ZGU-1 air defence weapon nicknamed 'Zigroat' (i.e. 'ZIGORK').”

There are more rugs, too many to show here, depicting the history of a land that has been weaponized by repeated invasion, occupation and war. Not surprisingly, over time Afghans have accounted for the largest share of the world’s refugees.

Which brings me to today, and the Trump administration’s latest experiment in autocracy.

While I was perusing rugs, the Department of Homeland Security canceled temporary protection status for Afghans, including military translators and others forced to flee after the U.S. military pullout in August 2021.

The decision takes effect May 20, eight days from now. This could impact up to 9,000 Afghans resettled throughout the U.S., including 900 now living in Iowa.

In a terse post on X, Afghan Evac, a coalition of more than 200 organizations that has worked tirelessly to identify, vet, rescue and resettle Afghans who defied the Taliban to help American forces, called the move “unconscionable.”

Also today, 59 white South Africans — descendants of Dutch settlers, called Afrikaners — got off a private charter flight at Washington Dulles International Airport. There, they were welcomed with open arms, even though Trump all but closed America’s door to refugees and others seeking asylum on his very first day in office.

The Afrikaners were spared the strict 14-step, three-and-a-half year long vetting process that Afghans who worked for the U.S. military had to undergo before receiving legal permission to settle here. Trump called the Afrikaners, white farmers who are contesting South Africa’s new land appropriation law, even though they have yet to lose any land themselves, victims of “genocide” and said their race “makes no difference to me.”

The Episcopal Church declined to help the Afrikaner families resettle. President Trump said he would “essentially” extend them citizenship, which sounds like the kind of promise Biden made about saving translators, drivers and others with Special Immigrant Visas, and didn’t keep.

It was yet another horrible split-screen moment, the kind of cognitive dissonance we’re all getting used to. Planes fall off the radar over Newark while Trump accepts the gift of a $400 million luxury jet, for instance. Or, I spend my morning appreciating Afghan art, while Afghans get letters telling them “it’s time” to leave.

If you sense some guilt there, you’re right. There has been so much debate in my writerly community about the limits of art — or more precisely, whether or not it is possible or even ethical to be trying to make art while the world is in such dire peril. While DOGE is data-raping Social Security and Medicare. While the Christian manosphere is trying to bring back the Latin Mass and the Department of Justice is trying to get rid of habeas corpus.

Or while we wait for the Supreme Court to consider, in oral arguments this Thursday, whether or not a federal judge has the power to issue a nationwide injunction. Should a majority of the high court say no, we would become nation of laws, indeed — in the plural. From state to state, different laws, for everything from abortion to public education and fresh air and water. Not one nation under law, as our pledge of allegiance would have us believe.

What a mess we’re in. No wonder the novelist George Eliot believed artists had to protect themselves against the world if they wanted to be able to create anything:

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

― George Eliot, Middlemarch

But the British Museum’s exhibit suggests something different — that art can exist within life’s roar, that it can even capture it and preserve it in a way that is uniquely artful, and consequently, more enduring.

Certainly, George Orwell, with his lived experience fighting fascism in Spain, knew this; “1984” is a better road map to what we’re living now than anything any politician or pundit can write.

On a more modern note, some of the rugs in the museum’s collection were woven by Afghan refugees in Pakistan, a memory of what they endured. Many were likely produced by women and children, the most likely to suffer at the hands of the Taliban and the least likely to be able to tell anyone about it.

Art was how their stories survived. What they saw, they wove — their ordinary, extraordinary human lives. And what they created, piece by piece, was not only beautiful, or even heartbreaking. It was history.

I still don’t always know how to balance art and life. My phone, my social media, my television get in the way of the precious silence I crave. But the Afghan rugs I saw today show that you can live in terrible times and still create something of beauty.

Yes, they say, people die, and cognitive dissonance thrives. Yes, humans are capable of incomprehensible cruelty, arrogance and stupidity. But you don’t have to ignore it. Reject it, argue with it, hate it, but use it. Roar, if you will. Because art, in fact, is how you and I will come to understand such things one day.

The British Museum’s exhibit, which has been paused due to renovation work, reopens in June. But you can visit the collection online here.

This has been a tough week: Just watching and reading the retrospectives of the first quarter of Trump 2.0, I kept rubbing my eyes, not from fatigue, though doomscrolling into the wee hours will do that to you, but in the feeble hope that if I blinked really hard, the world might magically restore itself to what it was just 100 days ago.

Nah, not gonna happen. Or so says, I think, the exhausted Lady Liberty on the cover of this week’s New Yorker:

The chaos kids — the Donald Trump we elected, the Elon Musk we did not — are toying with revered institutions, longstanding legal precedents, and the mortgage payments of thousands of federal workers. Worse, they’re finding new and ever more inventive ways of shredding our common sense of right and wrong, and more often than not, by mistreating the most vulnerable and defenseless among us, for example, deporting an American-born child with Stage 4 cancer.

Immigrants — once seen as the hard-working heart of a nation that gave safe haven to the world’s hungry and poor, and praised for their entrepreneurial zeal (as one Elon Musk could attest) — have become Trump’s victims and villains. The FBI is arresting judges; ICE is chasing people up trees. But though Trump’s approval ratings have slid underwater, polls show diminished but still durable support for deportations, so it’s no reach to say that we’ll see more circus-like cruelty between now and Day 200.

Already, signs of what will come next are clear, given the 139 executive orders President Trump has signed since Jan. 20, the 215 court cases (some involving multiple lawsuits) now in process, and the massive administrative and policing infrastructure that’s being set up to deport 1 million people per year, a promise Trump is determined to keep.

If there’s one bright spot in this whole deportation mess, it’s that the numbers aren’t there. According to the New York Post, which puts the best possible gloss on such things, only (and I can’t believe I’m writing “only”) 100,000 people have been deported since Trump took office, 10 percent below the pace set during the Biden administration, according to Syracuse University’s well-regarded Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse, which tracks immigrant removals.

The Bulwark’s Adrian Carrasquillo, who covers immigration on Substack at Huddled Masses, has called Trump’s deportation push “a failure”:

The Bulwark

100 Days In, Mass Deportation Is a Failure

DURING THE 2024 CAMPAIGN, Donald Trump promised to “launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America” on his first day in office, telling Time “15 million and maybe as many as 20 mi…

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a year ago · 496 likes · 76 comments · Adrian Carrasquillo

And yet, despite DOGE’s valiant efforts, it seems that we still employ an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters over at the Department of Homeland Security. Let me tell you, they’re busy. And the play they’re writing is tragic.

Donald Trump’s chief superpower is unpredictability, which may drive our economy over a cliff, but it also keeps writers humble. One thing I do feel confident saying is that this is a good time to pull your socks up, as the British say — to rest, reflect, and commit to the fight ahead.

Martin Luther King, Jr., did that on his way along Jefferson Davis Highway in Alabama in March of 1965. The great civil rights photographer Bob Adelman caught him, in this powerful photo, sitting in a field and changing his white gym socks. He’d just led 3,000 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. They were on their way to Montgomery, a distance of 54 miles. It would take them five days to get there.

A society at peace that can live with its conscience: I wish we had that today. But until that happens, it’s up to us. So pull your socks up, keep your marching shoes on, and read on for five things that just might happen next.

What to watch for:

1. COMING TO A BASE NEAR YOU: Following the collapse of the Trump administration’s plans to stand up a mass deportation facility at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, several military bases in New Jersey, New York and Utah, Buckley Space Force Base near Aurora, Colo., and a moldy, dilapidated women’s prison in Dublin, Calif., all are being eyed and/or prepared for use as ICE detention facilities; Travis Air Force Base in northern California just got added to the list. ICE has already made a play for police and sheriffs to provide more beds in local jails. ICE’s existing 41,000 beds are full and more will be needed as operations move away from the southern border and deeper into the U.S. interior. Look for ICE to reach out to empty public schools, commercial warehouses, facilities no longer in use by FEMA, and other spaces typically used in emergency situations.

2. MISSION CREEP: One of Trump’s first executive orders raised the possibility of using the Insurrection Act to prevent an “invasion” of the U.S. at the southern border. Trump went one step further on April 11, seizing a strip of land along the California, Arizona and New Mexico borders, designating it as a “National Defense Area” and creating a new 170-square-mile U.S. military installation under the control of the U.S. Army base at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The Posse Comitatus Act prevents the use of military troops on U.S. soil; concerns that the Trump administration was stretching the act were raised earlier this year after The New York Times reported that U.S. soldiers were guarding alleged Tren de Aragua deportees at Gitmo. Yesterday brought news that U.S. soldiers are now arresting migrants in the new zone for trespass. New Mexico-based ACLU attorney Rebecca Sheff told Phoenix station KJZZ that U.S. citizens that live near the border could be prosecuted for doing the same. Together with the Insurrection Act, using the military to police civilians is a move that could be replicated elsewhere, for instance, in sanctuary cities (the Trump administration is drawing up a list).

3. TRAVEL BAN 2.0: One of the “promises made” but not yet kept is a stiff ban on travel that would build on the one Trump imposed in 2017 during his first term, which targeted travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries. A new ban has been in the works and was expected in March, in line with an executive order signed on Jan. 20. Surprisingly, it didn’t materialize. According to draft copies obtained by The New York Times, Reuters and other news organizations, the new order could ban or restrict travel from as many as 43 countries. It also groups countries by color — red for banned, orange for restricted and yellow for countries that will get 60 days to improve “deficient” systems for vetting travelers. If and when a new travel ban is announced, expect it to add to the economic pain of Trump tariffs. The number of overseas visitors to the U.S., already down nearly 12% in March, in part on reports of tourists forcibly detained by U.S. customs agents, will likely slump even further, The Guardian reports.

4. EARLY DECISION: The Supreme Court has scheduled oral arguments for May 15 on the Trump administration’s request to end birthright citizenship, with a decision by late June or early July. That hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from already deporting children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents. The matter before the court, however, isn’t about birthright citizenship per se, which is guaranteed under the 14th Amendment. It’s about the ability of federal district judges to impose nationwide injunctions, a narrower question that could nevertheless dictate how and where birthright citizenship and other constitutional rights are recognized. A decision in this case could accelerate the Trump administration’s larger plan, as outlined in a Jan. 20 executive order, to deny citizenship to any child born after Feb. 19, 2025, if neither parent has U.S. citizenship or a green card.

5. NATURALIZED, OR NOT? The Trump administration’s goal of one million deportations per year will demand some creative approaches, and de-naturalizing citizens may be one of them. Trump has said that he wants to take a second look at Americans who were born abroad but who went through the lengthy process of establishing residency and applying for citizenship in the U.S., even those without any criminal records, as possible targets for deportation depending on their political speech. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s summary revocations of student visas without warning or due process based on past or potential free speech could be seen as a first step here. Trump ramped up so-called “denaturalization” referrals to the Justice Department by 600 percent during his first term and created a new unit to investigate naturalized citizens, according to the National Immigration Project. Trump’s Jan. 20 “Protecting” order calls U.S. citizenship “a priceless and profound gift,” not a right, implying that it can be easily revoked. According to the National Immigration Forum, it also “break(s) from more than a century of legal precedent” by trying to overturn “the longstanding guarantee of citizenship for ‘all persons born or naturalized in the United States.’”

When it came to refugees, migrants and especially children caught in war, poverty and the worst that the world can do, there wasn’t a better angel in the world than a soft-spoken priest who packed his bags and paid his own hotel bill before heading over the Vatican, where he’d just been elected pope.

Pope Francis died today after rallying from a long illness to address thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square in Rome on Easter Sunday. The Buenos Aires-born son of Italian immigrants, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was often called “the parish priest to the world,” a humble man who tangled with a brutal authoritarian regime in his home country and then employed charm, humor and grit to do the same on behalf of the poor and marginalized wherever they were.

One of Francis’s first acts after ascending to the throne of St. Peter in 2013 was to travel to the Italian island of Lampedusa, where he celebrated Mass on an altar made out of a painted boat and decried “a culture of comfort” that left people blind to the thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who had suffered and drowned getting there.

“Has anyone wept?” Francis asked, in words so plain they could exist in any language. “Today, has anyone wept in our world?”

In December 2015, as the Syrian war worsened and refugee flows accelerated, Francis proclaimed an extraordinary “year of mercy,” calling on all Catholics to take “visible and tangible” efforts to help those in need.

In 2016, he went to Lesbos, another migrant purgatory, returning to Rome with three families including six children, all facing deportation, a “humanitarian” gesture that enraged Vatican conservatives.

Also in 2016, he celebrated Mass in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where he said that building a border wall was “not Christian,” prompting then-presidential candidate Donald Trump to call Francis “disgraceful” and to warn he wouldn’t help if and when ISIS knocked on the Vatican’s doors.

Francis’s actions irked the elites and inspired the masses. He washed the feet of refugees, including Muslims and Hindus. In a first for popes, he took on climate change, describing it through the eyes of the poor and marginalized who would pay the heaviest price for what the wealthy overconsume, and calling on rich nations to do more to save “our common home.”

More recently, however, Francis drew headlines for a proper theological scolding of JD Vance after the vice president twisted a Catholic teaching called ordo amoris into an excuse for why the Trump administration was blocking Afghans who’d helped U.S. troops and were already cleared to resettle in the U.S. from getting on flights, literally stranding them at distant airports.

“You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country,” Vance, a self-described “baby Catholic” who converted in 2019, told Fox News. “And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Afterwards, Vance helpfully urged his followers on X to “just Google (ordo amoris)” if they were confused.

The outcry, especially from Catholics, was immediate. But in an interview with CBS, Vance doubled down.

“I don’t really care” about Afghan refugees, Vance told CBS’s Margaret Brennan. “I don't want that person in my country and I think most Americans agree with me.” His words echoed those on a jacket that Melania Trump wore in 2018 to a migrant children’s detention center in McAllen, Texas: “I don’t really care do u?”

But Francis did care. Days after Vance’s comments, Francis published a lengthy, closely reasoned and sharply critical letter to U.S. bishops, saying:

I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality. At the same time, one must recognize the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival. That said, the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness.

Francis went on to define ordo amoris as he saw it:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. (Luke) 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

Love without exception: Vance’s interpretation of ordo amoris is literally self-centered. Ultimately, it’s self-serving, short-sighted and cheap. But Francis, who went to where refugees were dying, took them home and washed their feet, even commissioning a sculpture in St. Peter’s Square to remind himself and others daily of those among us who don’t fit neatly into circles, did more.

Boldly, right up until the moment he died, Francis lived the order of love. And it made us care: Monica Attias, coordinator of the Human Corridors program, which helps refugees from Afghanistan get to safety, told The National Catholic Reporter that Francis’s visit led to real change: “The cry of the pope in Lampedusa was the beginning of everything.”

Vance was perhaps the last politician Francis met with before he died. Reports say their meeting lasted 17 minutes and touched on migration issues. In his final Easter blessing, Francis remarked on “how much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants! On this day, I would like all of us to hope anew and to revive our trust in others, including those who are different than ourselves, or who come from distant lands, bringing unfamiliar customs, ways of life and ideas! For all of us are children of God!”

I wonder if Vance heard that. God knows, he needs to. We need to.

I wish we could say one and done: Last Saturday’s massive “Hands Off” protests were stunning — 1,400 of them nationwide, with 3.1 million people participating, according to the Alt National Park Service, a grassroots offshoot of the National Park Service, which used to do such crowd counts (something Donald Trump handily abolished for his second inaugural).

But instead of real change, last week’s protests will be followed tomorrow by … more protests, many of them taking place in the same cities, and pushing the same heavy boulders up the same immovable mountain. That includes the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father who continues to languish in a brutal supermax prison in El Salvador despite a staged photo opp Thursday that reportedly included fake margaritas.

After a pause on Sunday, week 13 of Trump 2.0 began in the usual way, with Trump blaming Ukraine for letting itself be invaded by Russia, Trump pondering more tariffs (and more exemptions), and then Trump freezing $2 billion in funding for Harvard while telling Salvador president Nayib Bukele to get cracking on five more prisons so he can start deporting American felons, or in his words, “the homegrowns.” A face slap from a federal judge warning that the Trump administration is sliding into lawlessness, and a whistleblower report that DOGE has made off with gigabyte after gigabyte of Social Security data, were almost afterthoughts.

But you have to have faith. Day after day, week after week, the protests that MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow has called “speed bumps in the road” that Trump is taking to an authoritarian state have become much more than a signal or stop sign. If nothing else, last Saturday’s turnout proved they’ve grown into an organic outpouring of outrage, a remarkably reliable machine capable of churning out thousands of people at Fighting Oligarchy stops, but also nimble enough to include college students, working parents and retirees hitting Social Security offices, Tesla dealerships, entrances to public parks and basically any other place where yet another confusing and heartless budget cut is taking effect, and someone gets royally pissed off.

I’d like to stick with this good news, but 88 days of Trump 2.0 has taught me that good news is fleeting and preparing for bad news is wiser. Which brings me to the next speed bump: Perhaps the scariest landmine planted in the 129 executive orders Donald Trump signed on Jan. 20 is the one directing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Department Secretary Pete Hegseth to report within 90 days “about the conditions at the southern border of the United States and any recommendations regarding additional actions that may be necessary to obtain complete operational control of the southern border, including whether to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807.”

According to the nonprofit Brennan Center, the Insurrection Act gives the president the power to allow the military “to take over the role of civilian government in an emergency." The Act, which the center calls “dangerously vague and in urgent need of reform,” effectively allows a president to declare martial law, something that hasn’t happened since the Civil War.

Think, for a moment, about the possibility that Noem and Hegseth will do the unthinkable and deliver a report that says that since migrant flows at the southern border have essentially dwindled to zero, no such authoritarian action is needed. Recall, if you will, Noem’s penchant for pairing bulletproof vests and ICE baseball caps with full-mane blowouts, and Hegseth’s much-publicized bro move on Signal, where he helpfully shared war plans to bomb Yemen.

Now mark your calendar. The deadline for their report is this Sunday. Yes, Easter Sunday.

What would happen if the Insurrection Act is invoked goes far beyond the national emergencies that Trump has declared so far at the U.S.-Mexico border and against America’s trading partners. The Insurrection Act would bring Trump’s assault on America right to our doors.

The Trump administration has already created the infrastructure and deployed resources to similar ends, for example, sending military troops and planes to arrest migrants at the southern border, and to guard prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Trump could pull that lever again, to deploy military troops in Colorado to incarcerate migrants, as has been feared, at Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora, or round up and detain foreign-born students at U.S. universities. Four military bases already are being prepared for migrant arrivals, including whole families, and not only from Florida, New York and Texas, but other states with high numbers of undocumented immigrants, such as Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Any state with a sanctuary city is likely to get hit hard, as outlined in a 2017 executive order during Trump 1.0 that explicitly pointed to sanctuary cities as targets for mass deportations.

But it’s also the homegrowns who will suffer. Until he was rebuffed by then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump lobbied for 10,000 active duty troops to be sent to Washington, D.C., in 2020 to shoot demonstrators protesting the murder of George Floyd. The “Hands On” and other protests have been remarkably peaceful so far. But given how Trump is already deporting people without due process, and using AI to come up with the bizarre math behind his tariff policy, it’s possible he’ll invoke the Insurrection Act without any reason at all. And the Supreme Court, in its current incarnation, may discreetly stay silent.

There’s been a lot of discussion in recent days about whether or not we are here, that is, are we now in some altered state of democracy, or perhaps beyond democracy. It’s a question that can take different forms: Are we in a constitutional crisis? Have we crossed over into an authoritarian state? Is the new normal the real normal? The cover of The Atlantic’s May issue, headlined “It’s Later Than You Think,” suggests that the answer to all of those questions is yes. And if that’s true, then coming days will be a test of faith, not only in ourselves but in the only option we seem to have right now, which is continued, daily, laborious, humble protest by people in tennis shoes holding funny cardboard signs.

As of this writing, it’s 563 days and 13 hours until the midterms. It’s 1,298 days and six hours until the next presidential election, assuming there is one.

America is a nation of linear thinkers; it’s what drew immigrants like me and my family here. Americans are goal-oriented and hardworking; they keep their eyes on the prize, their dreams. But faith is different. Faith depends on doing something now and not seeing the results right away, and maybe not at all. Unfortunately, Americans are impatient. We want the future, and we want it in a hurry.

That’s why, in normal times, it can feel like faith is the province of saints or philosophers. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote that faith is like taking a step when you can’t see the whole staircase. The poet John Keats, a sick young man who had a pretty good idea that he wouldn’t make it out of his 20s, described the faith required to make art as negative capability, that is, the ability to exist (or to write) while “being in uncertainties, (m)ysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, says faith and reason must work together, or not at all: “To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.” The American monk Thomas Merton cautioned that faith is only the beginning of asking questions, not the answer, and that the journey of faith is not one we take by ourselves: “We do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone — we find it with another.”

Someone I met while writing a piece on a halfway house for drug addicts said it another way, which has stuck with me for years now: “I get up in the morning and put one foot in front of the other, until it feels normal.”

Putting one foot down again and again until it feels normal: It doesn’t feel like much. But I have faith. It might be enough.

‘OOPSIE, TOO LATE’: A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to explain by noon Tuesday why a group of 137 migrants was deported Saturday evening under a wartime law that suspends due process, despite his verbal and written orders not to do so and to return any deportation flights already in the air.

In a tense hearing at 5 p.m. ET on Monday, Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. district court in Washington, D.C., questioned government lawyers about deportations of alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang that took place after he issued an emergency restraining order Saturday blocking the removals, The New York Times reported.

The Trump administration had tried to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act in order to deport the migrants without due process, on the grounds that they were members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang and were “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.”

According to the Associated Press, government lawyers during the Saturday hearing told Boasberg that two planeloads of migrants, one heading to El Salvador and another to Honduras, were already in the air. Some, but not all, of the migrants were being deported under the Alien Enemies Act, while others had gone through a legal deportation process.

Nevertheless, Boasberg ordered the government to call the planes back, according to a transcript of the hearing, quoted in a brief filed Monday by the ACLU and Democracy Forward.

“Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States,” Boasberg said. “However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane … I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

However, the AP reported that Boasberg’s written order, issued less than an hour after the hearing, did not mention the two planes already en route. And after the New York Post posted on X about Boasberg’s injunction, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele commented “Oopsie…Too late.” El Salvador has agreed to hold up to 300 migrants in its prisons for $6 million per year.

On Monday Boasberg ordered the government to report to him on “exactly what time the government believes his order stopping the deportation flights went into effect,” The New York Times reported.

“You’re saying that you felt that you could disregard it because it wasn’t a written order,” Boasberg said, according to NBC. Boasberg called the Justice Department's argument "a stretch."

Even though a Justice Department filing said the Trump administration won’t invoke the Alien Enemies Act if his decision isn’t overturned, Border Czar Tom Homan said Americans should expect “another flight every day.”

“We’re not stopping,” Homan said, in an appearance on Fox News, as reported by the online news site Mediaite. “I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

But Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants” Rights Project, said it will continue to fight back.

“A lot of people throw around the words ‘constitutional crisis,’ but we’re really moving towards that if we allow the Trump administration to ignore the judge’s words,” Gelernt said, in an appearance on MSNBC. “El Salvador is almost serving like a private prison for the U.S., with the U.S. footing the bill … We’re for sure going to be asking to get these men back.”

U-TURN IN BOSTON: A federal judge abruptly canceled a hearing Monday morning into the case of a kidney specialist at Brown University who was refused entry into the U.S. and deported on Friday after customs agents at Boston’s Logan Airport learned that she had been in Lebanon for the funeral of Hassan Nasrallah, a Hezbollah leader, according to CNN and ABC affiliate WCVB.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorotkin ordered that Dr. Rashah Alawieh be held in the U.S. pending a complaint filed by her cousin, claiming that Alawieh had not been been given access to an attorney after she was detained last Thursday.

Alawieh, who recently received an H-1B visa to work as an assistant professor of medicine at Brown, attended Nasrallah’s funeral on Feb. 23 and told customs and border agents that she was a follower of his spiritual teachings.

A Department of Homeland Security post on X described Nasrallah as “a brutal terrorist … responsible for killing hundreds of Americans over a four-decade terror spree” and said that it is “commonsense security” to deny visas to people “glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans.”

Sorokin, who ordered a hearing after Alawieh was deported, said he was delaying it until later this month at the request of lawyers who were representing Nasrallah’s cousin but withdrew from the case “as a result of further diligence.”

Separately, New York Magazine reported on four more cases of green card holders detained or deported as they arrived home from overseas, including the wife of a Trump voter in Wisconsin who was returning from their honeymoon in Puerto Rico.

CLOCK TICKS ON TRAVEL BAN: The New York Times and Reuters reported that the Trump administration plans to issue a travel ban in coming days that will ban or restrict travel from as many as 43 countries, compared with just seven during the ban issued during the first Trump administration.

The new ban, which reportedly groups countries by color — red for banned, orange for restricted and yellow for countries who will get 60 days to improve the way they vet travelers — is based on a Jan. 20 executive order directing the administration officials to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.”

The departments of defense, homeland security and state, along with the director of national intelligence, were given until this Thursday to complete their report. The Times and Reuters each obtained a draft copy.

Reuters reported 41 countries will be covered by the ban according to its copy of the draft , including East Timor (yellow), which was not in the Times’s tally. The Times has 43 countries on its list, including Russia (orange), plus Mali and Zimbabwe (yellow), which were not part of the Reuters count.

A travel ban imposed by the Trump administration in 2017 targeted five predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia — plus travelers from North Korea and government officials from Venezuela. It had an abrupt, chaotic rollout but was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

How dual citizens will be treated under Trump’s second and much more expansive ban is unclear. The Telegraph, a UK newspaper, noted that travelers from the UK during President Trump’s first travel ban who had dual citizenship from the UK and from a banned country were not prevented from entering the U.S.

While the draft ban could see change, groups advocating for refugees in crisis already are speaking out.

In an Instagram post, AfghanEvac, a coalition of more than 200 groups working to rescue some 15,000 Afghan translators and their families, accused the Trump administration of “gutting the resettlement system from within” and stranding “tens of thousands” of Afghans who fought alongside U.S. troops, including many who’ve already passed the strict vetting process required for special immigrant visas.

If you’re like me, you’re having a tough time keeping up with all of the news that’s out there. Even if you care passionately and personally about a subject like immigration, as I do, this week delivered some body blows.

Whole families are getting deported now. Kids with brain cancer, too. Detention centers are full. And do I even have to mention tariffs on wine, angry Canadians and a stomach-turning stock market?

If you’ve read even this far, congratulations. Because it’s a sorry mess out there, and the last thing I want to do is make you endure more of it than you can mentally stand.

So here’s the deal: This week’s wrap is a triage, chunked in a way I hope will meet the moment. If you have thirty of those moments, go ahead and spend them on a few in-depth stories below that are well worth reading. If you have fewer moments, consume what you can.

In times of crisis, I think that just keeping up with the news counts as a civic duty. Reading, listening, thinking as deeply as possible what’s happening and to whom. In a word, caring.

If you like, take a step further and subscribe to the newsroom that produced one of the stories you see below. Even if you can’t always keep up with what’s happening out there, you can support the journalists who do.

You have 30 minutes: Intriguing, in-depth stories you may have missed

1. How hard will Trump's immigration raids hit red states? - POLITICO (8.11 minutes)

2. The new economics of immigration - ECONOMIST (4.2 minutes)

3. How Should AI Be Used in Immigration? Cautiously, Experts Say - FORDHAM NEWS (4 min.)

4. Trump’s USCIS Pick Has Track Record of Tough Immigration Vetting - BLOOMBERG LAW (3.7 min)

5. ICE Isn’t Delivering the Mass Deportation Trump Wants - THE ATLANTIC (9.1 min.)

Fifteen minutes: The Mahmoud Khalil case turned a spotlight this week on green cards and what rights holders are entitled to (or not). Here’s more on that:

1. Effort to deport Columbia student rests solely on Rubio decision - WASHINGTON POST (6 min.)

2. The Trump Administration Says This Law Allows It to Take Away Green Cards. What to Know - WALL STREET JOURNAL (3.4 min)

3. The History of the Green Card in the United States, U.S. Customs & Immigration archives (3.2 min).

4. The Alien Enemies Act, Explained (VIDEO), The Brennan Center (2 min.)

Ten minutes: Take your pick — what’s happening beyond the Beltway

1. Wisconsin: We surveyed all 72 Wisconsin sheriffs about their stance on immigration enforcement. Here's what they said (MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)

2. Adams County, Wash.: Eastern WA county accused of aiding in federal immigration enforcement (WASHINGTON STATE STANDARD)

3. South Bend, Ind.: Sheriff Redman gains local support council nixes immigration agents (SOUTH BEND TRIBUNE)

4. Honolulu: Alarm Sounded Over Big Island Police Pacts With Federal Immigration Agency (HONOLULU CIVIL BEAT)

5. Tampa, Fla.: What to know about the ICE immigration program Florida police are signing onto (TAMPA BAY TIMES)

Eight minutes and 32 seconds: A French senator’s address on Tuesday went viral this week and for good reason: Claude Malhuret’s crisp, clear takedown of the last six weeks of the Trump presidency — delivered in a measured monotone for which French politicians are not necessarily known — sounded a surprising vote of confidence in American democracy, including the ability of ordinary citizens to fight “a jester high on ketamine charged with purging the civil service” (take that, Elon).

Watch Malhuret’s video here (a hat tip to my friend Aline, who shared it with me).

ACTION ON ALIEN ACT SEEN: Frustrated by slow progress so far on his plans to deport up to 1 million people per year, President Trump is getting ready to invoke a wartime law that would give him sweeping powers to evict people from the U.S. without the constraints of due process, CNN and the New York Times reported Thursday.

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, one of four laws passed in preparation for a war with France, gives the president wartime powers to deport undocumented immigrants with little or no due process.

Citing “four sources familiar with the discussions,” CNN reported that a decision to invoke the act could come as soon as Friday and would “pave the way for quicker removals of certain immigrants,” including members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang recently designated by the Trump administration as a terrorist organization.

According to the New York Times, the law “would empower the Trump administration to arrest and remove immigrants age 14 or older without providing them a court hearing or an asylum screening.”

Whether or not the law could be invoked against a criminal organization, and not a foreign government, is not clear.

According to the nonprofit Brennan Center, the Alien Enemies Act has been invoked three times, first during the War of 1812. In World Wars I and II, “the law was a key authority behind detentions, expulsions, and restrictions targeting German, Austro-Hungarian, Japanese, and Italian immigrants based solely on their ancestry (and is) best known for its role in Japanese internment, a shameful part of U.S. history for which Congress, presidents, and the courts have apologized.”

CRACKDOWN ON FAMILIES: A grim chapter is repeating itself with news that Trump officials are reopening two family detention centers shut down by the Biden administration and sending undocumented families there, including children and infants.

Fourteen families with children as young as one year of age are being held in a detention facility in Karnes County, Texas, near San Antonio, The Hill reported Thursday. RAICES, a nonprofit group that has been in contact with the families, said they are not recent arrivals but migrants who came into the U.S. from Canada or had been living in the interior U.S. and were “swept up” in an ICE raid. The families are originally from Colombia, Romania, Iran, Angola, Russia, Armenia, Turkey and Brazil.

NBC’s Julia Ainsley reported last week that ICE is planning two new operations, one targeting adults and minor children who entered the country together and have orders of deportation, and another targeting unaccompanied children.

President Joe Biden ended the practice of family detention and closed the Karnes facility and another one in Dilley, Texas, in 2021 following reports of sexual abuse, psychological trauma, and lack of heat, food and medical care. News Nation reported last week that the Dilley facility is being reopened and readied for use.

The Flores settlement, a 1997 consent decree renegotiated in 2022 after three Guatemalan children in government custody died within months of each other, set standards for the treatment of children detained by federal authorities. The standards were set to expire shortly after President Trump took office on Jan. 29 but were extended by federal judge Dolly Gee until July 2026.

BEHIND THE BOOST: The Census Bureau reported Thursday that the U.S. population is bouncing back from “pandemic-era lows” and is growing at its fastest pace in more than two decades. But the reason isn’t babies — it’s international immigration.

The U.S. population reached 340.1 million as of July 1, 2024, up 0.98% from 336.8 million on July 1, 2023 — the highest year-over-year increase since a jump of 0.99% between 2000 and 2001, “a significant turnaround from the meager population gains” beginning in 2000,” the Bureau said in a statement released along with the data.

It also noted that growth in cities “outpaced the nation,” with all 387 metropolitan areas reporting positive net international migration between 2023 and 2024.

“Increasingly, population growth in metro areas is being shaped by international migration,” said Kristie Wilder, a demographer in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. “While births continue to contribute to overall growth, rising net international migration is offsetting the ongoing net domestic outmigration we see in many of these areas.”

The Migration Policy Institute released a report Wednesday noting that “immigration accounted for the entire growth of the total U.S. population between 2022 and 2023—the first time this has happened since census data collection on nativity began in 1850.” It estimated the foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population at 14.3 percent, with nearly three-quarters of immigrants in the U.S. “legally present and almost half are naturalized.”

But a report by the Center for Immigration Studies estimated the foreign-born population share at 15.8 percent, its highest ever. “No U.S. government survey or census has ever shown such a large foreign-born population,” the CIS said.

Stateline, an online news site published by the nonprofit States News Service, reported that the census data released Thursday show that immigration was “the biggest factor” in population gains among Sun Belt counties as well as “a large swath of the Midwest,” including Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota, as well as Louisiana and Massachusetts. A Pew Research report earlier this month found that Florida had the highest rate of international migration between July 2023 and July 2024, followed by Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Texas and Washington.

O, CANADA: A new policy that seeks to fill in the gaps in rules for travelers who overstay their visas while visiting the U.S. is confusing Canadians, multiple news outlets reported.

Under an executive order signed Jan. 20 by President Trump, anyone in the U.S. for 30 days or more must register and submit fingerprints to the Department of Homeland Security. Canadians, who share a frequently traveled border with the U.S. and don’t need visas to enter, assumed they’d be exempt.

But fears rose this week amid escalating trade tensions between Canada and the U.S. CBS Miami reported worry among snowbirds, retirees who spend winter months in Florida. Rudy Buttignol, president of the Canadian Association of Retired Persons, told Radio Canada that snowbirds “are really shocked to be treated like aliens.”

An exemption to the rule published Thursday by the Department of Homeland Security clarifies that Canadians won’t have to submit fingerprints, though they’ll need to register online with the U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Service and submit a new “biographic” form with personal information. Canadians will also be required to carry their evidence of registration with them at all times.

IN BRIEF: ICE facilities in the U.S. have run out of room to house deportees, with an estimated 47,600 men, women and children now in custody (NBC, Reuters) // The U.S. arrested more immigrants in February 2025 than in any other month during the last seven years (The Guardian) // ICE flew its last 40 detainees out of Guantánamo Bay yesterday to a detention center in Louisiana (Washington Post). Some 290 detainees from 27 countries have been held at the base since February, at a cost of $16 million (New York Times).

KHALIL CASE CONTINUES: In what’s being seen as a key test of First Amendment and due process rights for green card holders, a federal judge in New York on Wednesday extended an order blocking the Trump administration from deporting a Palestinian activist who led protests at Columbia University last year against Israel’s military actions in Gaza, Reuters reported.

Judge Jesse Furman also directed that Muhmoud Khalil, who was arrested on Saturday, be allowed to make two one-hour-long phone calls to his attorneys, one today and another one on Thursday.

“We literally have not been able to confer with our client once since he was taken off the streets of New York City,” said Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for Khalil, as reported by CNN.

Furman’s order indicated that he wants more time to consider if Khalil’s arrest is constitutional. But government attorneys argue that Furman may not have jurisdiction over Khalil’s case, as he was transferred to a New Jersey detention facility immediately following his arrest on Saturday outside his Columbia University apartment in Manhattan. Khalil was moved again, to an ICE deportation facility in Jena, La., which Kassem called “further retaliation” for filing a habeas corpus petition to protect his rights to legal counsel.

“He was taken by US government agents in retaliation, essentially, for exercising his First Amendment rights, for speaking up in defense of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for being critical of the US government and of the Israeli government,” Kassem told reporters on Wednesday, CNN reported.

According to a BBC profile, Khalil caught the public eye last spring, serving as a mediator between university officials and student protesters. Pro-Israel activists have accused Khalil of leading Columbia University Apartheid Divest (Cuad), a student group that demanded that Columbia cut financial ties to Israel, which Khalil has denied.

A White House spokeswoman told the Associated Press that Khalil’s arrest is “in support of” President Trump’s executive actions prohibiting anti-Semitism and said Khalil “led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization” but did not provide details.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the Attorney General has the right to deport “any illegal alien” convicted of a criminal offense. Khalil, 30, came to the U.S. legally in 2022, has a green card, is married to an American and has not been charged with any crimes.

But another provision allows the deportation of any non-citizen who endangers public safety, national security, or engages in “any activity a purpose of which is the opposition to, or the control or overthrow of, the (g)overnment.”

Remarks by Secretary of State Marco Rubio outside the court hearing on Wednesday and reported by Time magazine suggest that Khalil’s case won’t be about what Khalil may or may not have said or done.

“This is about people that don't have a right to be in the United States to begin with,” Rubio said. “No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card."

The Trump administration cut $400 million in funding to Columbia last Friday over what it said was "continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

NBC quoted White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt as saying that the Department of Homeland Security is using intelligence to identify more “pro-Hamas” students and has provided Columbia University with the names of others who she said “engaged in pro-Hamas activity.”

So far, Columbia has declined to help DHS, according to Leavitt.

GRACE PERIOD FOR ‘ALIEN’ FORM: After pushback from lawyers and advocates for legal immigration, the Trump administration is giving immigrants more time to re-submit applications using new forms altered to align with the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.

According to Newsweek, the new forms, which were to take effect on March 3, replace the words “foreign national” or “noncitizen” with “alien,” and also restrict gender choices to “male” and “female” only.

The changeover, which was imposed on Jan. 20 without the public notice required by law and without a customary grace period for applications already in the pipeline, could affect thousands of people in the legal immigration process who are trying to secure permanent residency or citizenship.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association sued the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service last Friday, citing “multiple” attempts to seek clarification on the forms, which were launched “effective immediately with no grace period for previous versions.”

The forms were updated a day later to include a new 30-day grace period to “at least early April.”

BY THE NUMBERS: ICE arrested more than 32,000 undocumented immigrants in the U.S. since Jan. 21, the day after President Trump was inaugurated, according to Department of Homeland Security numbers released today, ABC reported. That works out to about 640 arrests for each of the 50 days since Trump has been in office, a far cry from the minimum 1,200 arrests per day that President Trump called for on Jan. 27.

A senior ICE official said that the number includes more than 14,000 convicted criminals, 9,800 migrants who have pending criminal charges, 1,155 suspected gang members and 44 foreign fugitives.

Meanwhile, the number of immigrants deported by Trump in February was 11,000, below the 12,000 deported by then-President Biden in February 2024. Most of the Biden deportations involved arrests of people trying to enter at the U.S.-Mexico border, where crossings since Trump took office have dropped to their lowest level in 25 years.

“GET HERE,” AFGHANS WARNED: The head of AfghanEvac, a nonprofit coalition formed to rescue Afghans who’d helped the U.S. military but were left behind after the U.S. pullout in 2021, urged those who have legal permission to enter or to live in the U.S. to “get here as soon as you can” or risk a Trump travel ban, which could come within days.

“We don't know when the ban, if there is one, will be implemented, so we are encouraging every single person with a U.S. visa in their passport, and green card holders that are outside the United States, to get back into the United States,” said Sean VanDiver, president of Afghan Evac, in an Instagram video posted Monday. “So if you have a visa or green card, get here as soon as you can.”

An executive order signed by President Trump on Jan. 20 gave his homeland security and intelligence team until March 21 to report on counties whose vetting process is "so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries.” But Reuters reported last week that the report could be released as early as this Wednesday, and that Afghanistan and Pakistan are on the list of banned countries.

The report also said that a request by a State Department office that oversees Afghan resettlement for an exemption for special immigrant visa holders “is not assumed likely to be granted.” The office itself has been told to develop a plan to be shut down in April, Reuters reported last month.

But in his video VanDiver said the continuing resolution passed by the House last week includes 20,000 additional special immigrant visas, which are granted to Iraqi and Afghan translators, as well as a two-year extension of the December 2025 deadline for SIV applicants. “Those two things combined show us that Congress has a deep sense that they want to continue” accepting refugees, VanDiver said.

AfghanEvac’s “Enduring Welcome” program has resettled more than 200,000 Afghans in the U.S. since 2021, working with a bipartisan group of 250 partner organizations and the U.S. government to legally move Afghans into the U.S., including subjecting applicants to a strict vetting process. The coalition says ending the program would strand another 200,000 Afghans in Afghanistan and Pakistan who are ready to travel as well as 3,000 family members of active-duty U.S. military.

Trump’s 2017 travel ban targeted five predominantly Muslim countries — Iran, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia — plus travelers from North Korea and government officials from Venezuela. It had an abrupt, chaotic rollout but was ultimately upheld by the Supreme Court.

Separately, The New Arab, an online news source, reported Monday that the Trump administration has begun cancelling visas retroactively for travelers from several Muslim-majority countries” in preparation for a travel ban. It said several Libyan students both in Libya and already in the U.S. had been informed that their student visas had been retroactively revoked.

The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Group also issued a “travel alert” advising people from countries that could be banned to “avoid international travel and return to the United States immediately,” or consult with an attorney. According to the ADC, countries that may be impacted by a travel ban include Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and possibly some Caribbean nations.

JUDGE BLOCKS DEPORTATION: A federal judge in New York halted the deportation of a prominent pro-Palestinian activist and green card holder, ordering both sides to appear in court on Wednesday, the Washington Post reported. Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student who played a prominent role in protests at Columbia University over the Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, was arrested as he and his pregnant wife returned from visiting a friend.

President Trump praised immigration agents for apprehending Khalil, saying his arrest was “the first arrest of many to come” and threatening other non-citizens who engage in political activity deemed contrary to U.S. interests. The Independent reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared an Associated Press story about Khalil on X and added a comment saying that “(w)e will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.”

Legally, green cards can and have been revoked for offenses such as application fraud or for criminal offenses, such as murder, rape or drug trafficking. But even migrants without green cards have rights under the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment, which protects free speech and the right to assembly. The National Immigration Law Center released a statement Monday denouncing Khalil’s arrest as a “politically motivated attempt to silence Mr. Khalil by locking him away and threatening to revoke his green card without due process.”

CBP (GO) HOME: The CBP One mobile app that was eliminated minutes after Donald Trump took the oath of office on Jan. 20 hit the App Store and Google Play on Monday as a retooled “CBP Home,” with options for undocumented immigrants to deport themselves. Originally intended as a way for asylum-seekers to book appointments at the U.S.-Mexico border, the app developed by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol now instructs migrants in the U.S. on how to submit an “intent to depart” document that allows them to leave without facing “harsher consequences,” the BBC reported. The app has two features, one allowing travelers to report and pay arrival and departure fees using an electronic version of the standard I-94 form, and another to request an inspection for perishable cargo entering the U.S. More features will be rolled out later this year, according to CBP.

LEADERS, LEAKERS AND LIE DETECTORS: Frustrated by low deportation numbers in February, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has replaced two senior officials and is ordering lie detector tests of DHS employees in an effort to identify and prevent leaks to the media, according to the Associated Press.

In an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Noem said that she will use “every single one” of the “extensive” authorities that she has as DHS secretary, including polygraph tests. Border czar Tom Homan has repeatedly complained about media reports of impending immigration actions, which have forced ICE to scrap its plans.

In a video post on X on Friday, Noem said two DHS employees identified as having disclosed information have been referred to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

CBS also reported last week that workers at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, which handles legal immigration, are being asked to sign up for 60-day “volunteer” stints with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which works on illegal immigration and deportations. An email obtained by CBS read that "(e)mployees from any job series and grade may apply, but ICE particularly needs employees with relevant experience to support its operations, including immigration officers, immigration services officers, refugee officers, and mission and operations support personnel.”

Six weeks into Trump 2.0, and the numbers are stunning: Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency cut 62,242 jobs across 17 federal agencies in February, with thousands more expected next week as part of a once-in-a-lifetime downsizing directed by President Trump.

Fingers crossed, so far the U.S. economy appears to be holding fast: The Labor Department reported today that employers added 151,000 jobs in February, slightly fewer than expected, with unemployment up only 0.1 percent to 4.1 percent. However, February also marked the highest number of layoffs since 2020, with 172,017 jobs cut by private employers, a 245 percent increase from January, according to a report Thursday by Challenger, Grey & Christmas, an outplacement firm.

At just 3 million workers, not counting the military, the federal labor force is tiny compared with the private sector’s 171 million. One economist called DOGE cuts so far only “a modest headwind.”

So why are so many Americans so upset? Why do polls show rising worry despite a strong labor market? Why are Trump’s approval ratings slipping? Why did thousands of people show up, at the National Mall in Washington and in dozens of rallies nationwide today to “Stand Up For Science”?

All that noise must have reached Trump’s ears: According to Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, a hastily called cabinet meeting today turned “explosive” with Musk and Secretary of State Marc Rubio fighting bitterly over Musk-directed mass layoffs at the U.S. Agency for International Development, part of the State Department. Trump ultimately told cabinet secretaries that they’re in charge of job cuts from now on, and reportedly instructed them to use a scalpel, “not a hatchet.” Even so, why Trump gave Musk such a big chainsaw in the first place isn’t clear.

Was squeezing the life out of foreign aid just gleeful, wanton cruelty, or part of a plan? Why identify people who perform complicated, critical jobs requiring substantial expertise and lived experience, such as park rangers, meteorologists and nuclear engineers, and fire them? What’s the upside of demanding a whopping $175 billion in next year’s budget for mass deportations of undocumented workers who already pay nearly $100 billion annually in federal, state and local taxes?

Maybe it’s a little off-topic, but Ezra Klein’s conversation this week with Ben Buchanan, Joe Biden’s special adviser for artificial intelligence, connected the dots for me in a way I didn’t expect.

In a nutshell: According to Buchanan, we’re in a hinge moment, with a rare consensus between the outgoing Biden administration and the new Trump team over the idea that government work as we know it is about to be transformed by artificial intelligence. And more specifically, artificial general intelligence, the kind that not only computes and processes in a way easy to accept (at the end of a long day when you’re hustling to put dinner together, it’s helpful to have a rice cooker that’s smarter than you are), but can accelerate and execute complex decisions that echo human reasoning but exceed human capabilities.

If you’re like me, you’re taking a deep breath. But consider how this vision might explain what’s happening right now.

DOGE’s first target was an easy one: Rubio’s USAID. Freezing funds and forcing layoffs at America’s global aid agency was undeniably and spectacularly cruel: It immediately hurt people, stranding food aid in ports and putting millions of women and children and families around the world at risk of dying from diseases for which a pennyworth of medicine could have been had from the local USAID-supported clinic.

The headlines were brutal. But they quickly sparked an even more impactful understory of untruths: Woke shipments of condoms to Gaza (didn’t happen). FEMA diverting $59 million in disaster relief funds to luxury hotels in New York to house migrants (not so). Trump calling former USAID administrator Samantha Power “the woman who walked away with $30 million,” basely alleging that Power, a best-selling author married to an equally wealthy spouse, and whose combined net worth didn’t change during her tenure, is guilty of corruption (Musk had no evidence, either).

This understory created a third and ultimately most dangerous narrative: That government doesn’t work, and the people in government jobs are replaceable.

The key word there is not “people” but “jobs.” The way that people are getting fired expressly makes the point: Not personally, which would be the case if a human was the issue, but via a series of idiotic automated emails, the kind Musk used after he bought Twitter. Then came forced retirements, layoffs and outright firings, punctuated by resignations, and not among rank-and-file workers, but skilled agency leaders, the kind of people you’d fire last, not first. When they leave, so does institutional knowledge. History gets erased. Truth gets erased. Entire departments get erased. Jobs are erased and aren’t posted again. It’s as if nothing ever happened.

Once you see those gears working, the headlines, however diverse, begin to converge: Laying off or forcibly retiring experienced IRS agents in the midst of tax season. Knowledgeable park rangers as summer approaches. Highly trained meteorologists with hurricane season set to start. Kash Patel moving 1,500 of FBI agents out of Washington without any plan for what they’ll do, while informing his staff that he’ll now be working from home in Las Vegas.

Even Volodymyr Zelensky, kicked out of the Oval Office last week for tutoring a clueless JD Vance on the history of ceasefires: Agreements don’t matter. Loyalty doesn’t matter. Those photographs you’re showing me are irrelevant; every war has victims. You should quit.

For me, this is where Trump’s brutal, mystifying approach to immigration, both illegal and legal, comes in. Trump has a goal of deporting 1 million people per year. That equals the amount of legal immigrants the U.S. typically accepts. But except for Trump’s new $5 million “gold card,” the U.S. is simultaneously closing off more and more legal pathways to entry. Even if we follow JD Vance’s helpful advice to get busy making babies, it’ll take at least 20 years for them to enter the workforce.

Who’s going to fill that gap in the meantime? Where will “the most successful job-creating people from all over the world” who buy those gold cards find the workers they’ll need? One of America’s true trump cards up till now, a powerful economic engine that struggling economies like Germany’s don’t have, is the fact that we’ve been accepting immigrants, at least until Trump took office. Why would a country deliberately do things that will wind up shrinking its own labor force?

The conversation between Klein and Buchanan suggests it: Trump and Musk are clearing the decks for AI. It will be a great replacement, in other words, and not the alt-right screed about immigrants replacing native-born Americans, but artificial intelligence replacing human workers. And for that kind of transformational change to occur, a certain coarsening of our culture is necessary, a hardening of the national arteries.

The fact is, we still have too much heart. Because it was easy, Trump and DOGE went global first, stranding refugees on their way to the U.S. and stripping legal counsel from migrant kids in diapers. And some people were okay with that.

But now there’s outrage everywhere, not only in big cities but in rural areas, where government services such as postal service and national parks and health clinics are real lifelines connecting communities. There’s real anger — not whipped up by party elites, but bubbling up at town halls and Tesla charging stations — over the lost jobs, the lost sense of self, the loss of pride, the loss of social consensus. Nate Vince, a 42-year-old park ranger and locksmith who literally held the keys to every restroom, storage locker and other buildings in Yosemite National Park, has become a folk hero.

Six weeks and four days into Trump 2.0, we’re at a crossroads. If we accept what happens to the least of us — the tiny proportion of federal workers in those far-off agencies in Washington, say, or the 15,000 Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, sheltering in place for fear they’ll be deported — then we can accept much more. Gutting the Veterans Administration by firing actual veterans will be easy.

It’s important not to blame AI itself for what’s happening; algorithms aren’t inherently evil. A better argument for AI is possible, for example, reading and synthesizing climate data or preventing the next COVID, cancer or Alzheimer’s case. It’s a pity that AI has become so weaponized we can’t see its promise.

At the end of their conversation, Klein asked Buchanan for book recommendations and one was a surprise: George Saunders’s “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” in which Saunders breaks down seven short stories by Russian writers and explains why they’re classics.

“What strikes me about this book is that it’s fundamentally the most human endeavor I can think of: He is taking great human short stories, and he’s giving a modern interpretation of what those stories mean,” Buchanan said. “And when we talk about the kinds of cognitive tasks that are a long way off for machines, I hope, at some level, this is one of them — that there’s something fundamentally human that we alone can do. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I hope it’s true.”

That was a bright spot in a very serious conversation, and it kept me going as a writer all week.

While we’re on the subject of work: Eighteen immigration judges accepted buyouts today, bringing the total number of judges who’ve left since Trump took office to 40, the New York Times reported. Judges typically handle between 500 to 700 cases a year, and the current backlog of cases is 3.7 million. The Times quoted Matthew Biggs, a union official, as saying that the departures will slow, not speed, the mass deportations that are so important to the Trump agenda.

“This makes no sense,” Biggs said.

UNFROZEN: In a move that offers a glimpse of fights to come, a closely divided Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid pending a case-by-case review of contracts signed before Trump took office, The New York Times and multiple news outlets reported.

The one-paragraph order released Wednesday morning, hours after President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress, said simply that the Trump administration’s plea was “denied” and that it should comply with U.S. District Judge Amir Ali’s order on Feb. 25 to release payments for work already performed under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

The vote in favor of the order was 5 to 4, with Justice Samuel Alito adding a blistering eight-page dissent calling the order “a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.”

President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, arguing that “the United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values” and freezing all spending on global programs pending a 90-day review.

A Feb. 10 lawsuit filed by the AIDS Vaccine Development Coalition and the Journalism Development Network and another a day later by the American Bar Association along with several health, refugee aid and democracy nonprofits disagreed, saying that Trump had no power over money approved by Congress for USAID grants and contracts signed before Trump took office.

Judge Ali issued a temporary restraining order on Feb. 15 that prevents the Trump administration from going ahead with its funding freeze. That injunction is set to expire on March 10.

HALT ON GITMO, SPENDY FLIGHTS: The Trump administration is rethinking plans to create housing for 30,000 undocumented migrants at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, due to the high cost of rebuilding infrastructure up to ICE standards for detention, reported Julia Ainsley of MSNBC on Wednesday. Among the obstacles cited were lack of air conditioning, electricity and running water. A Feb. 12 lawsuit filed by refugee aid groups and the ACLU also alleged a lack of access to attorneys and communication with family.

Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported that using military aircraft to fly deportees to Guantanamo Bay and other locations was paused last Friday, also for cost reasons. Military C-17 aircraft have been used to transport migrants to Gitmo; a Journal investigation found that some flights transported a dozen migrants to the base at a cost of $20,000 per person.

NO SANCTUARY FOR MAYORS: The mayors of Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York City testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, facing tough questions during a six-hour hearing about sanctuary cities, with one lawmaker promising to call on the Department of Justice to launch a criminal investigation of policing policies that restrict local cooperation with federal deportation efforts.

“I do not think you guys are bad people, but I think that you are ideologically misled, which is why unfortunately, based on your responses, I'm going to be criminally referring you to the Department of Justice for investigation,” said Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), reported Denverite, an online news site. “And as soon as I leave here, (I) will be going over to (Attorney General) Pam Bondi. I'm not doing that in an effort to bully you guys, but I do believe that your policies are hurting the American people.”

Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who told Fox News last November that he was prepared to go to jail to protect undocumented immigrants, came in for especially tough treatment, according to Axios.

Reps. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jeff Crank (R-Co.) questioned Johnston over giving ICE only two hours’ notice last week before releasing a suspected Venezuelan gang member from jail (an ICE post on X later said he’d been arrested in a public parking lot). Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo) criticized Johnston for hiring the white-shoe law firm of Covington & Burling to help the city with Congress’s sanctuary inquiry, at a cost of $2 million.

By contrast, Mayor Eric Adams was spared GOP ire, the New York Times reported, though three Democrats called on him to resign in the wake of the Trump administration’s efforts to get federal bribery and corruption charges against Adams dropped in exchange for his help, including reopening ICE’s office on Rikers Island, the city’s biggest jail. “This right here is the four-alarm fire that everyone must be paying attention to,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago, a city whose “welcoming” policies are well-established and have been repeatedly criticized by border czar Tom Homan as “roadblocks” to deportation efforts, attempted a steady tone, telling the committee that "(o)ur policies toward civil immigration matters help to prevent and solve crimes."

"Put simply, any actions that amplify fears of deportations make Chicago more dangerous,” Johnson said, as reported by ABC7. “Those fears cause witnesses and victims to avoid cooperation with police."

But it was a fiery Michelle Wu, mayor of Boston, who turned the tables, criticizing border czar Tom Homan, who recently threatened to “bring hell” to Boston unless local officials transferred nine “child rapists” he said were in Boston jails to ICE (Homan has declined to provide names or other details).

“Let’s talk about Tom Homan. Shame on him for lying about our city, for having the nerve to insult our police commissioner, who’s overseen the safest Boston's been in anyone’s lifetime,” said Wu, who brought her one-month-old daughter, Mira, with her to the hearing.

“Bring him here under oath, and let’s ask him some questions. I’m here to make sure that the city of Boston is safe. Others may want to bring hell. We’re here to bring peace to cities everywhere.”

FACT CHECK: President Trump’s one hour and 40 minute speech on Tuesday evening was yet another opportunity for fact checkers to prove that they’re the essential workers of journalism.

CNN checked Trump on a number of claims, from exposing transgender experiments on mice (they’re meant to test the side effects of hormones on humans, not to change boy mice into girls or vice versa) to terminating “the Green New Scam” (a nonbinding resolution, never a law) and the alarming assertion that 4.7 million people over the age of 100 are drawing Social Security benefits (the real number is about 89,000).

On immigration, the Los Angeles Times and the Associated Press took Trump to task, debunking claims that then-President Biden secretly flew migrants into the U.S. (in fact, Biden authorized flights for refugees who were given humanitarian parole and were able to pay their way); that the Federal Emergency Management Agency diverted disaster relief money to hotel housing for migrants (the money was administered by FEMA and paid on behalf of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol’s Shelter and Services Program); and that many migrants are violent criminals (a claim refuted by numerous studies, if not the Trump administration’s own inability to locate enough “worst of the worst” to maintain its daily arrest numbers).

OKAY, YOU GET 75 WORDS: Accompanied by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Vice President JD Vance visited the southern border Wednesday, helicoptering over Eagle Pass, Texas, meeting with local officials and praising a drop in border crossings. He also conducted a press conference that lasted one minute and 49 minutes and didn’t include questions. “We appreciate the press, but we’re gonna have a private conversation so get the hell outta here,” Vance said.

TRUTH IN NUMBERS: Today’s nationwide “Day Without Immigrants” demonstrations took a literal turn with news that illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border have fallen to a 25-year low.

According to CBS News, preliminary government data show that Customs and Border Patrol agents stopped 8,450 undocumented migrants in February, compared with 249,741 in December 2023, at the height of the migrant surge during the Biden administration. That monthly total works out to 8,324 per day, a little less than the number reported for last month.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), whose bipartisan immigration reform bill stalled last year after President Trump ordered lawmakers not to support it, tipped the drop on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” telling host Kristin Welker that “(w)e had a day this (past) week. We had less than 200 people try to illegally cross our border. Less than 200. It was just a little over a year ago (when) there were 12,000 people a day that were illegally crossing our border. So we've had a dramatic shift in what's happening on our southern border.”

When it comes to deportations, however, Reuters reported that the U.S. deported 37,660 people during Trump’s first month in office, “far less than” the monthly average of 57,000 people removed under the last year of the Biden administration. What’s more, even though the Trump administration touted arrests beginning in January as “the worst of the worst” of criminal migrants, only 29 percent of people in ICE detention as of mid-February had a criminal conviction, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

The nationwide demonstrations on Monday, in Atlanta, Tucson, and the San Francisco Bay Area, followed a similar “Day Without Immigrants” on Feb. 3. On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order indefinitely suspending the Refugee Admissions Program. The order directed the State and Homeland Security departments to report by April 20 as to whether resuming the program will be “in the best interests of the United States.”

ON TAP TOMORROW: Calling on the National Guard to assist in immigration enforcement, invoking the Insurrection Act allowing the use of military troops in U.S. cities,. and pushing Congress to pass a massive increase in America’s budget for immigration enforcement are among the possible actions that President Trump could take when he addresses the nation before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday.

"TOMORROW NIGHT WILL BE BIG. I WILL TELL IT LIKE IT IS!," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Monday morning, Axios reported.

Trump’s dislike of teleprompters and his tendency to veer off script make it difficult to predict what he’ll say. But it’s likely that he’ll push Congress for something high on his wish list — more money for deportations.

A budget blueprint that narrowly passed the GOP-dominated House last week aims to “supercharge” deportations with an “unprecedented” $175 billion for immigration enforcement, according to the American Immigration Council. By contrast, ICE’s budget for the entire fiscal year ending last September was miniscule — $8.5 billion, with a record $3.4 billion earmarked for enforcement.

Under the Biden administration, the number of undocumented immigrants removed from the U.S. almost doubled to a 10-year high of 271,484 in fiscal 2024, up 90 percent from 2023. But the Trump administration is aiming to quadruple that number, to 1 million deportations per year.

That has already pushed ICE to target more and more cities and towns in the interior of the U.S., with unpredictable results. Last week the ACLU filed suit on behalf of farmworkers and residents of Bakersfield, Calif., after border patrol agents from the El Centro jurisdiction located 300 miles south turned up in Kern County and began conducting surprise raids, stopping motorists and allegedly throwing a grandmother with a green card to the ground.

ICE has also had to hunt for local jails and prisons to house detainees as it’s bumping up against its existing capacity of 41,000-plus beds in the U.S. Hundreds of people turned out Saturday in Dublin, Calif., to protest plans for ICE to begin using an infamous federal prison that was permanently closed in December after paying $115 million to more than 100 women who suffered sexual abuse there, and where conditions include toxic mold and asbestos. As of today, four federal prisons are holding 700 immigrants.

FRANKEN-ICE: A German citizen refused entry after she tried to cross into the U.S. from Mexico is begging to leave a detention center in Otay Mesa, Calif., where she’s been trapped for a month, including eight days of solitary confinement.

“I just want to get home, you know? I’m really desperate,” Jessica Brösche, 26, told ABC affiliate News 10 in San Diego in a story updated Monday.

According to The Guardian, Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the U.S., and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin when she and her friend, Nikita Lofving, a U.S. citizen, arrived at the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry, which separates Tijuana, Mexico, from San Diego.

But customs officials accused Brösche, a body artist who was carrying her own tattoo equipment, of planning to violate the terms of her visa waiver by working in the U.S. According to Lofving, Brösche was then transferred to Otay Mesa, where she was placed into solitary confinement for eight days and offered anti-psychotic medication after she started “punching the walls.” Lofving said Brösche has described conditions at Otay Mesa as “like a horror movie.”

CoreCivic, the private company that operates Otay Mesa, said there is no solitary confinement at the facility though “restrictive housing” is used in some cases. An ICE spokeswoman on Friday said that Brösche's detention is related "to the violation of the terms and conditions of her admission." German consular officials are working with ICE and Brösche's family to get her released, according to ABC.

Set aside — for now — the particulars of the shouting match between Volodymyr Zelenskyy, president of Ukraine, and President Trump (along with the possibility that it was a setup, teed up by Vice President Vance). What I’m thinking about is the gulf between what was supposed to happen and what did, or in other words, between the performative power of bluster, and actual results, which applies not only to foreign policy but to the Trump crackdown on immigration.

Let’s take a step back. The supposed-to-be on Friday was what’s known as a “spray,” an opportunity lasting a couple minutes at most for the White House press pool to take photos, in this case, of two world leaders who are about to have lunch and then discuss an important mineral-rights deal.

Usually, there are one or two questions. Usually, the answers are quick. Cameras off, the pool leaves, the leaders depart, and the real work of governing — debating, arguing, compromising and eventually working things out legally and logistically — begins.

What actually happened — foreshadowed by visits earlier this week by French President Emmanuel Macron and the UK’s prime minister, Keir Starmer — was a brief welcome by Trump and then another predictable dive into “old stories” (as Goldberg might say), starting with the well-worn lie that the U.S. has spent $350 billion on Ukraine’s war (it’s actually $165 billion, and some of that military weaponry was about to be mothballed anyway).

Zelenskyy, as did Macron and Starmer, corrected Trump’s numbers. And that might have been it, even though Trump kept rambling on about “raw” earth (apparently confusing it with the rare kind).

Surprisingly, though, Vance jumped in, scolding Zelenskyy for seeking military support instead of diplomacy. Zelenskyy, who’s seen hundreds of thousands of his people die since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, then ticked off the agreements, deals and ceasefires that Russia’s ignored over the past 10 years. Almost as an afterthought, he warned that the “nice ocean” separating the U.S. from Europe might not spare us from the impact of a war there.

That woke Trump up. Loudly, he began to berate Zelenskyy, saying “you don’t have the cards” to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Vance began chiming in: “Have you said thank you once? (H)ave you said thank you?”

Valiantly, Zelenskyy tried to continue talking, but it was like a World Wrestling beat down: He couldn’t get a word in, even to assure Trump “I respect you.” A reporter asked what the U.S. would do if Russia violates a ceasefire again and Trump sneered: “What if a bomb falls on your head right now?” Seated next to Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio looked straight ahead and played dead. Ukraine’s ambassador to the U.S. put her head in her hands.

But as the “spray” ended and reporters began to disperse, Trump himself seemed pleased: “This is gonna be great television, I’ll say that.”

All that reminds me of Rube Goldberg. Born into the Machine Age, his cartoons were about solving simple tasks in the most overcomplicated, inefficient and hilarious way possible, for example, picking up a bar of soap, inventing a self-operating napkin, or creating “a simple appliance to stamp an envelope” (hint: It’s not simple). As early as 1931, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defined “Rube Goldberg” as “accomplishing by complex means what seemingly could be done simply.”

I first saw Goldberg’s work in college, on the cover of a book I had to read for a poli sci class:

The long, overly complicated title of that book is a witty play on Rube; in it, the authors take a similarly humorous approach to the ambitious but ultimately tortuous history of the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority (little did I know I’d wind up in Oakland, where we’re still looking for the way to San Jose).

But the quote that I’ve always remembered is this:

"Policy is rarely more than a skeletal design for future action; it is implementation that puts the flesh and blood onto policy objectives."

When it comes to immigration, we’re heading into an implementation problem. We’ve seen plenty of new policy since Jan. 20 — a blizzard of executive actions and administrative decisions, often backed up by blustery threats. But three telling stories from last week show implementation running into snags:

• Tasked by Trump to double daily arrest numbers to 1,500, ICE is moving beyond its “worst, first” strategy of deporting violent criminals (which polls show has broad public support) to arresting undocumented people (which doesn’t). Increasingly, this is happening in places like court hearings where immigrants show up for required check-ins, or in indiscriminate ways with a high error rate and propensity for blowback. Just last week, five residents of Kern County, Calif., along with the United Farm Workers, sued ICE after it conducted raids in and around Bakersfield, including allegedly throwing a grandmother to the ground and then letting her go after seeing her green card. In Las Cruces, N.M., ICE stopped a school bus taking student athletes to a swim meet, not arresting anyone, pissing off moms and school officials, and prompting Rep. Gabriel Vasquez (D-N.M.) to demand answers.

• After “recalcitrant” countries such as China and Iran refused to take migrants back, the U.S. began flying them to Panama and Costa Rica instead. Venezuelans imprisoned at Gitmo were flown to Honduras before being picked up for the final leg home. But out of sight was not out of mind: Last week those migrants spoke up, in stories reported from Panama City and Venezuela by The New York Times and the Washington Post, that detail their ordeals, including lack of access to attorneys and to medical care, violations under human rights law;

• The Pentagon scrapped plans for creating 30,000 beds for migrants at Guantanamo Bay due to a lack of electricity and air conditioning; military bases are being prepped instead. But there are concerns that housing migrants may impair military readiness, and the Pentagon is already facing budget cuts plus a “tsunami of layoffs” expected next week.

Like DOGE’s chainsaw approach to layoffs, the Trump administration’s bold new immigration policies face constant challenges, sometimes by courts, sometimes in town halls, sometimes with letter campaigns and sometimes just the complicated grind that is governing.

And that’s where I part with Rube. As much as I love those cartoons, I would much rather have a government with working gears, one that sweats the details and makes sure that grandmothers with green cards aren’t manhandled just because somebody has to make their arrest quota for the week. I would rather have that complex and sometimes infuriatingly slow government that will take the time to protect a person’s rights over a simple chain saw that slashes through a workforce and corrects itself later.

What happened in the Oval Office on Friday was not even policy — it was a skeletal design without regard for flesh and blood consequences. It’s actually the inverse of a Rube Goldberg cartoon, two guys in a hackneyed production creating a whole lot of baloney by insisting that a complex problem is more simple than it appears: Make the deal. Say thank you. Go home.

No two ways about it, ending the war in Ukraine is infinitely more complicated than that. So is fixing our immigration system. Bluster won’t do it. Careful, complicated, good governance might.