This is the America informed voters with long-term memories warned those who thought Donald Trump was on their side, would become, if the twice impeached, 34-time convicted, found to be a sexual assaulter, David Duke-endorsed, and serial liar was given the keys to the Oval Office again.
Just look at what has been happening in the last week to ten days.
- The creation of a slush fund, from taxpayer money, to pay for the January 6 domestic terrorist insurrectionists. They are even deleting the records of the January 6 arrests in a grotesque attempt to rewrite history. Even sane Senate Republicans are going crazy about this, bolting from Washington, D.C., rather than having to vote on it along with Trump’s anti-immigrant funding requests.
- The continued obsession with having Congress provide taxpayer dollars to fund a ballroom while people starve and go sick because Trump and his Republican loyalists cut off food and health assistance programs.
- Southern Republican controlled states, after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, launched a return to the Confederacy by gerrymandering Black House-led districts out of existence.
- Trump is continuing a purge of Republican ranks in favor of MAGA loyalists who will not ask questions like what is in the Epstein Files or why should we gerrymander mid-decade, with at least one of them, Ken Paxton of Texas, being an election-denying, state-impeached, scandal-prone, pedophile-protecting, adulterer kindred spirit.
- People continue to pay higher prices at the gas pumps while Trump pursues Netanyahu’s ill-advised war of choice against Iran. Trump says a peace deal is imminent. How many times has he said that over the last two months? This is getting like his infamous pledges to ‘have my health care plan out in two weeks.’ Does anyone want to bet that he winds up with a worse peace deal than the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran?
- Trump backed down from issuing an Executive Order on mandating mild A.I. regulations after tech donors to his coffers bellyached to him.
While Trump is continuing to run the United States into the ground like one of his many bankrupted businesses, including a casino, Trump Steaks, and Trump University, his white nationalist besties and private prison corporate donors are profiting off MAGA’s and Project 2025’s cruel anti-immigrant policies and the unconstitutional and brutal criminal treatment of innocent people in America’s Concentration Camps.
Just last week, ICE apprehended a 29-year-old DACA recipient, Karla Toledo, at her home on what can be described as flimsy at best justifications and placed her first in a Tucson ICE facility and then the Eloy Detention Center.
The outcry from Tucson’s leaders and populace against what ICE did to Toldeo was immense.
Representative Adelita Grijalva helped lead the way in calling for Toledo’s release, saying what ICE did was another example of America’s Gestapo “terrorizing our communities,” equating ICE’s assertion that Toledo was a criminal with the bogus “gaslighting” charge that Alexi Pretti was a domestic terrorist before they gunned him down, and calling their treatment of the 29 year old “an absolute disgrace.”
Tucson Mayor Regina Romero released the below Instagram Post:
So did LD 21 State Representative Consuleo Hernandez.
Fortunately, Toledo was released just before the Memorial Day Holiday Weekend on a $1500 bond. It was the same day the federal courts dropped, as Representative Yassamin Ansari wrote, “bullshit” charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man Trump’s Gestapo wrongly deported to El Salvador.
Talking to News Four, Tucson, Representative Grijalva commented on Toledo’s release:
“Her bond was $1,500. That is not the bond that you put on a high criminal. That is this administration acknowledging that they did something wrong. What happened? Why did they enter her home without a warrant? All of those are things that we need to understand, because I don’t want people that are here legally in this country to be afraid to go out of their homes.”
What happened was that Donald Trump’s untrained goons are going after people based not on any facts or credible accusations of criminal activity, but on the color of their skin and what their surnames are.
On Toledo’s release, Senator Ruben Gallego posted:
“My office worked to make sure that Karla got back home to her family. It’s good news, but this shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
The Trump Administration needs to stop targeting DACA recipients who have known no other home than the U.S. They are our neighbors, essential workers, and patriots. Enough is enough.”
During the same time period that Toledo was being detained on bogus charges, Arizona’s two other Democratic House Representatives, Yassamin Ansari and Greg Stanton, paid a second surprise visit to the Mesa Detention Facility by Mesa Gateway Airport.
The two Representatives had visited the facility on April 9 with Congresswoman Grijalva and reported horrendous overcrowding and living conditions.
After making the second surprise visit, Ansari and Stanton held a brief presser outside the facility, conveying better but still inhumane conditions that only improved resulting from their first surprise visit and the City of Mesa threatening action for the detention center for violating health and safety standards.
Below is a transcript of their revelations to the public:
Representative Stanton: “…One thing we learned, we talked about earlier, is that your advocacy, our advocacy is actually working. They know the pressure is on, that they can’t keep treating people the way they have inside the facility, which was only built for 12 hours. They’re aware that we are paying close attention to the number of people inside this facility and the way that they are treated inside this facility, which, though better today, is still not where it needs to be.
Representative Ansari: “…When we were here on April 9th, it was shocking and horrifying. Every cell was overcrowded by two or three times the number of people that should have been in there. People were really desperate to talk to us and explain to us that there was a lack of clean drinking water, that when people were sick, there was no on-site medical staff. So I was happy to see tonight that the numbers were much fewer. So there were 125 people here tonight, and when we asked why that was, the staff members had read public reporting that advocacy and local government advocacy, our advocacy, had made a difference in the pressure to bring those numbers down to par. But I still think there’s a lot of work to do. They are regularly keeping people here for longer than 12 hours. They admitted regularly for 36 hours, and I thought the showers were really notable.
Representative Stanton: “Well, there’s one shower, and as a practical matter, they don’t let the detainees use that shower. So people are here for three or more days and do not have a chance to actually clean their bodies, and that’s an unhealthy thing, not only for the individual but obviously for other individuals around. So that is, there’s a reason why this was built for only 12 hours and there’s a reason why there’s a significant cost to people’s health for staying three days or more in a facility that wasn’t built for them.”
Representative Ansari: “We have to keep the pressure on; that is very clear. We have to make it abundantly clear that this facility is not meant, is not designed to be, a long-term facility. They do not have the infrastructure, the health, and the safety of human beings who stay here. So we are going to keep advocating to make sure that our bill is passed and that ultimately no more money is given to ICE without major, major reforms nationally, and this is one of many examples of the problems that exist within ICE.“
Representative Stanton: “The purpose of the bill is 12 hours means 12 hours. A facility that was built for a certain length of stay should not get a categorical exemption to stay three days or more. That is bad for people’s health and I do want to give a shout out to the City of Mesa who has actually written to the landlord of this facility letting them know that the Mesa Fire Department, which is called when there’s medical emergencies, they don’t have on-site medical as Yassamin just said and so each and every time there’s a medical issue, it’s the City of Mesa that has to respond and it was the City of Mesa Fire that originally reported that there was significant overcrowding the facility behind us and so they’ve written that landlord and landlord seems to be actually taking actions because ICE is not exempt from city rules dealing with the life safety of the of the people who are in this facility.”
Arizona’s Democratic Congressional Delegation also condemned Mr. Trump’s regime for wanting to now make Green Card applicants, many of whom are living and working productively in the United States, to self deport and continue processing their applications from abroad.
How asinine is that?
Representative Ansari wrote:
“They’ve been lying when they say they support immigration “the right way.” This radical policy will target people here LEGALLY, including people married to Americans and parents of U.S. citizen children. It will separate families for months or even years, devastate communities, and kill jobs. We have to do everything we can to stop this insanity.
Representative Grijalva posted:
“This is outrageous. Trump wants people already living, working, studying, and raising families here to leave the country and gamble everything on a visa interview overseas? Imagine telling a mom, a student, or the spouse of a U.S. citizen to pack up, leave the country, and just hope they’re allowed back in someday. How many families will be separated? How many people will lose jobs or homes while stuck waiting overseas?”
Representative Stanton offered:
“Trump just made legal immigration harder — on purpose. America is able to attract the top researchers, doctors, & engineers because of our worker visa programs. Forcing these immigrants to now leave the U.S. before applying for citizenship will deprive us of their innovation, their tax dollars, & their contributions to our economy.”
Senator Gallego relayed:
“So this means that there will be American children who will be separated from their mom or dad for months or YEARS. This is anti-family. I’ll do everything I can to stop it.”
Ansari is right. This is insanity.
Grijalva is right: This is outrageous.
Stanton is right: This will hurt our local, state, and national economies.
Gallego is right. This is anti family.
Unfortunately, it is sad to say that this is not the worst examples of Trump’s White Nationalist Anti-Immigrant Agenda. Remember Minnesota this last winter.
Also, please watch the segment below from Morning Joe last week, where co-host Mika Brzezinski and Univision Journalist Lidia Terrazas reported that 145,000 American Citizen children have experienced the detention and, in some cases, deportation of one or both parents.
What is actually more horrifying and disgusting in this report is that some mothers, many of whom had pending immigration cases before they were taken away, were not allowed to breastfeed their children, with a reported 360 pregnant, postpartum, and breastfeeding women being subjected to detention and deportation during 2025 and 2026.
One woman developed mastitis.
Brzezinski rightly called what is happening to these women “horrendous” and “a huge toll on the families left behind with the babies.”
Terrazas warned that these detentions were becoming more commonplace after being rarely imposed.
This is not the America soldiers who were just honored this Memorial Day died for.
This is not the America most people voted for in the 2024 elections.
Donald Trump is trying to take this country backward to a pre-Progressive Gilded Age where the wealthy dictated policy, and Social Darwinism, Chauvinism, Racial Segregation, and Nativism were well-regarded belief systems.
This is not the America of 2026, and voters need to show that at the ballot box this November and defeat, as Blog editor Larry Bodine wrote, “the Mass Deportation Machine” of Trump’s White Nationalist-Fascist Goon Squad.
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