As Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem now presides over one of the most powerful bureaucracies in the federal government. An agency tasked with security, law, and human consequence. What a show. Kristi Noem is not governing so much as managing a lie that has grown too large to control. It is the lie that toughness is leadership, that cruelty is clarity, and that repeating something loudly enough—no matter how false—eventually turns it into truth. Her administration d

The Supreme Court handed down a decision in September that should terrify anyone who thinks showing an ID means they belong here. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Court's conservative majority allowed federal immigration agents to resume raids across Los Angeles after a lower court tried to stop them from targeting people based on race, language, workplace, and location alone. The Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion before law enforcement can detain you. That means

ICE is here. The inevitable is happening here in Starr County and all across the Rio Grande Valley. Social media is filled with photos of people being detained. There is impotence. There is anger. There is fear. And sadness. That suffocating feeling in the air has a name: anomie. South Texas is a border region. The people who live here know immigration enforcement. But this is different. Now people are being detained at gas stations, at stores, at churches. Now filming an arr

Elizabeth Warren fumbled the easiest question in progressive politics. Asked whether she'd continue funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Massachusetts senator offered a conditional yes—funding with restrictions on behavior. A technocratic answer that misses the entire point. The correct answer was no. ICE didn't materialize from Trump's fever dreams. The agency was created in 2003 under the Homeland Security Act, signed by Republican George W. Bush but supported b

Here's what you need to know about how federal agents are trained to kill people and call it self-defense. In February 2013, the Police Executive Research Forum delivered a report to Customs and Border Protection that should have ended careers. Instead, CBP tried to bury it. The nonprofit had reviewed 67 use-of-force incidents from January 2010 through October 2012 that left 19 people dead along the southern border. What they found was a pattern so egregious it read like a tr

Stephen Miller is the man who looks like every mall Santa’s lawyer, if that lawyer’s specialty was getting kids deported for crying in line. He is best known not for one bad policy or one ugly soundbite, but for a sustained, years‑long crusade to turn the immigration system into a weapon, especially against Latino families who dared to believe that “land of opportunity” was a promise and not a legally unenforceable slogan. He is the human embodiment of the “Do Not Enter” sign

The Rio Grande Valley just lost control over immigration enforcement in its own backyard. Hidalgo County confirmed full participation in the federal 287(g) program, not because officials chose cooperation but because Texas Senate Bill 8 gave them no alternative. The state law took effect January 1, 2026, requiring counties with populations over 100,000 to partner with ICE through 287(g) agreements. Hidalgo County already worked with federal agencies before the mandate, but SB