I. The calendar

By July 2025, border crossings had dropped to a record low of 4,592, according to the CBP.^1,2 Congress appropriated $74.85 billion to ICE anyway.³

July’s low was preceded by a record high of 249,741 in December 2023.^2,4 2024 was a productive year, seeing an 81% drop from the peak.² In December 2024, border crossings were only 47,320.²

Why crossings fell

One reason, explained by the Congressional Budget Office, was Biden’s executive order, Proclamation 10773, “Securing the Border,” signed June 3rd, 2024, which used section 212(f) of the immigration law, the same power Trump used for his travel bans.^5,6,7 The proclamation barred asylum for crossers unless “exceptionally compelling circumstances” applied, like a threat to life or a medical emergency.⁷ Previously, agents would ask whether they feared going home.⁷ Now, only fear that migrants show on their own gets a screening, without being asked outright.⁷ They stopped asking because “it is DHS’s experience and assessment that asking questions is likely to lead individuals to answer yes, even if they do not actually” have a fear.⁷ In 2024, releases into the United States to await a hearing dropped from 80,000 per month to 20,000 per month.⁵

Mexico did its part even more aggressively than the United States in enforcing border patrol.^8,9 In 2021, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador agreed with Biden to keep 10,000 on Mexico’s southern border.¹⁰ Mexico caught more than Border Patrol every month May 2024 to March 2025.⁸

In January 2025, crossings dropped further to 29,105.² On Inauguration Day, January 20th, 2025, Trump signed a proclamation called “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion”, the “Invasion” proclamation (10888), which barred asylum at the border “until I issue a finding that the invasion… has ceased.”¹¹ The same day, he declared a national emergency at the southern border, Proclamation 10886, which was renewed in January 2026.¹² Existing appointments were cancelled for those awaiting asylum in Mexico.^13,14 CHNV was cancelled.¹³ This was a Joe Biden program that allowed people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly in legally on parole.⁸ Trump’s executive order 14165 “Securing Our Borders”, ended it for new people.¹³ On March 25th, 2025, DHS cancelled the parole of people already here, about 532,000 people.¹⁵ They were told their status would be lost by April 24th, 2025.¹⁵

On February 3rd, 2025, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum sent 10,000 National Guard troops to the border, just before Trump’s 25% tariffs were due.¹⁶ Trump then paused the tariffs for 30 days.¹⁶ This happened before in 2019 when Mexico sent about 15,000 troops to the US border under threats of tariff enforcement.¹⁰

In his first term, Donald Trump fathered the “Remain in Mexico” program aka the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” which mandates asylum seekers wait in Mexico for their US court dates instead of inside the US.¹⁷ From 2019 to 2021, about 68,000 enrolled but only 732 won asylum.^17,18 Three people enrolled in the program in January 2025, and then zero every month from February through September 2025.¹⁹ With asylum already shut down by the Invasion proclamation, there was no one left to enroll.¹¹

In February of that year, United States Border Patrol nationwide apprehensions averaged about 330 per day, the lowest in CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection) history.²⁰ That month saw only 8,349 border crossings.² The yearly release count dropped from 540,000 in 2024 to 20,000 in 2025.⁵ There were zero releases for nine months going into 2026, according to CBP.²¹

By 2025, the border was the most controlled it’s been since 1970, with record low crossings, but the money came anyway.^22,23 On July 4th, 2025, $74.85 billion was appropriated by Congress to ICE under Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill.^3,24 Border crossings afterward were about 6,000 to 10,000 per month.² In June 2026, another $69.5 billion was appropriated to ICE, CBP and DHS.²⁵

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II. The ratchet

The government benefits off of the influx of migrants by using them to grow government with emergency powers, welfare programs and tax sources.

“Government grew suddenly much bigger with the onset of each great crisis; after the crisis it receded but usually not to the precrisis level.”

Robert Higgs, economist, 1985

Robert Higgs, who wrote Crisis and Leviathan, released in 1987, compared the crisis of government emergencies to a ratchet: every time there’s a crisis, the ratchet clicks, but you can’t reverse the click.²⁶ In a 1985 paper, he wrote that “government grew suddenly much bigger with the onset of each great crisis; after the crisis it receded but usually not to the precrisis level.”²⁶ When you give government emergency powers, it keeps them indefinitely, and the freedoms traded are never returned.

Follow the money

United States taxes go to the US Treasury.²⁷ Congress appropriates the money to the Department of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. Those agencies then hand it out as grants to city governments, nonprofits and church charities.

FEMA awarded about $1.7 billion for migrant food, shelter and transport in fiscal years 2019 to 2024, mostly to city and state governments, along with nonprofit groups.²⁷

From fiscal years 2019 to 2023, FEMA sent $715 million to feed, house and transport migrants that DHS had released at the border, through a board of six national charities chaired by FEMA.²⁷ These charities include the American Red Cross, Catholic Charities USA, the Jewish Federations of North America, the National Council of Churches, the Salvation Army and United Way Worldwide.²⁸ The board passed it to local groups and city governments.²⁷

In fiscal year 2023, $425 million of the board’s money went out.²⁷ In April 2026, the Inspector General found the board “disbursed advanced funding directly to the non-Federal entities’ bank accounts” but “did not have access to these accounts, so it could not monitor or report on how the funds were used.”²⁷ FEMA required quarterly spending reports and never collected one.²⁷ Nobody checked whether the people served were even eligible.²⁷ The Inspector General listed the entire $425 million as “questioned costs,” meaning spending nobody could document.²⁷

A second FEMA program, the Shelter and Services Program, awarded about $1 billion more in fiscal 2023 and 2024 ($363.8 million and $640.9 million), mostly to city governments like New York, Chicago and Denver.²⁷ Most of it was pulled back when the program was ended in 2025, and about $123 million had actually been paid out as of October 2026.²⁹

The United Nations refugee agency’s Mexico office (UNHCR Mexico) gives prepaid cash cards to asylum seekers registered in Mexico who say they intend to stay in Mexico, for up to four months.³⁰ In 2023, about 17,000 people got them, about $4 million worth.³⁰ In 2024, the US government gave UNHCR Mexico $50.3 million, about 81% of the money donors earmarked for that office.³¹

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.”³²

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s White House chief of staff, November 2008

Chicago

Chicago spent $639.7 million on migrants from August 2022 to December 2024, serving over 46,000 people, with more than 15,000 in city shelters at the peak.³³

In September 2022, Mayor Lori Lightfoot hired Favorite Healthcare Staffing, a Kansas staffing company, to staff the city’s migrant shelters.³⁴ By October 2023 it had been paid over $57 million, and one nurse’s 12-hour shift was billed at $2,700.³⁴ Her successor, Mayor Brandon Johnson, called it one of the “expensive emergency contracts” he inherited.³⁴

New York and DocGo

Between July 2022 and November 2025, New York City spent $8.77 billion housing and caring for migrants, under an emergency declaration that let it skip normal competitive bidding.^35,36 From this, $432 million was awarded to a company called DocGo, with no competing bids.³⁷ The city’s own comptroller refused to approve it, and his audit found that nearly 80% of the $13.8 million DocGo was paid was “inadequately supported or not allowed.”^37,38 DocGo is a medical transport and COVID-testing company.³⁷ The contract was signed under the name “Rapid Reliable Testing NY LLC.”³⁷ It was not a housing company.

On July 29, 2022, New York City’s social services department declared a purchasing “emergency” under the City Charter, “an unforeseen danger to life, safety, property, or a necessary service” that “cannot be met through the normal procurement methods,” which let city agencies hire companies without competitive bidding, in “no-bid contracts.”³⁶

In May 2023, under that emergency, the city’s housing agency gave DocGo a one-year, $432 million contract with no competing bids, to house and care for asylum seekers in hotels, including upstate.³⁸

On Sept. 6, 2023, Comptroller Brad Lander refused to approve it, the first emergency contract his office had refused; it had approved the other 303.³⁷ “The agency’s contract submission to our office fails to describe how the $432 million price tag was reached. There was little evidence to show that this company has the experience to provide the services it has been contracted for.”³⁷ Mayor Eric Adams’s administration overrode him.³⁸

An Aug. 6, 2024 audit of the first two months found that nearly 80% of payments, $11 million of $13.8 million, were “unsupported and should be recouped.”³⁸ 40,219 extra security hours were billed at $50 an hour, over $2 million overpaid, “including $583,274 in profit.”³⁸ The city paid a flat $170 per room per night whether anyone slept there or not, about $1.7 million for empty rooms in two months.³⁸

Governments “spend stolen money on no-bid contracts for anything they can get us to believe will help the poor.”³⁹

Adam Kokesh, FREEDOM!

Fort Bliss

RDI saw its no-bid contract grow from $198 million to $3.5 billion from March 2021 to July 2023.⁴⁰ On March 24, 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services signed a contract with Rapid Deployment Inc., a disaster contractor from Mobile, Alabama, to run an emergency shelter for migrant children at Fort Bliss, the Army base in El Paso, Texas.⁴⁰ The contract was not competed.⁴⁰ The federal record lists it as “only one source,” justified by “urgency,” with one offer.⁴⁰ It started at $197,952,017.⁴⁰ That starting price was already $67.3 million above what the government’s own contracting officer had estimated the job would cost, which was $130.7 million, according to the HHS Inspector General.⁴¹

Then the contract grew. On April 17, 2021, it reached $488.2 million. On August 27, 2021, $996.1 million. On September 10, 2021, $1.136 billion. On March 31, 2022, $2.128 billion. On July 20, 2023, $3.505 billion.⁴⁰ By September 30, 2025, HHS had committed $3.516 billion to it, all without a competing bid.⁴⁰

In 2021, the agency that runs the child shelters, the Administration for Children and Families, awarded 62 contracts worth $4.8 billion “without using a competitive bidding process,” according to the HHS Inspector General.⁴¹ The Inspector General also found why there was no time to compete them: the agency’s own “insufficient planning and inaction to compete the contracts earlier ultimately created the urgency.”⁴¹ In other words, the government waited until it was an emergency, then used the emergency to skip the competition.

The crackdown money

In July 2025, Congress gave ICE $74.85 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, plus $46.55 billion for the border wall.^3,24 In June 2026 it passed another $69.5 billion for border enforcement, $38.5 billion of it for ICE.²⁵ ICE detention grew from about 39,314 people held to 67,180, and ICE officers from about 10,000 to 22,000.^42,43

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III. The draw

The welfare state

Here’s how big the welfare state is. In fiscal year 2025, the federal government spent $7.01 trillion, according to the US Treasury.⁴⁴ Social Security took $1.58 trillion of that.⁴⁴ Medicare took $997 billion.⁴⁴ Health programs, mostly Medicaid, took $979 billion.⁴⁴ Income security, which covers food stamps, disability checks, refundable tax credits, unemployment and housing aid, took $702 billion.⁴⁴ Together that’s $4.26 trillion.⁴⁴

According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey of Latinos, 81% of Latino immigrants preferred “a bigger government providing more services.”⁴⁵ Among their children born in the US, 72%.⁴⁵ Among their grandchildren, 58%.⁴⁵ Among all Americans, 41%.⁴⁵ Immigrant preference for bigger government fades by the third generation. In June 2024, Pew Research Center polled US adults asking if government “is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals”: White adults 54%, Asian 34%, Black 31%, Hispanic 29%.⁴⁶ And 58% of Hispanic Republicans favor a larger role for government, compared with 21% of White Republicans.⁴⁶

People here illegally are already barred from nearly all federal benefits.⁴⁷ The exception is emergency Medicaid, which pays for emergency hospital care.⁴⁷ Green card holders wait 5 years for most federal benefits, under the 1996 welfare law.⁴⁷ Their US-born children are citizens that qualify. In 2024, the Center for Immigration Studies found that 53% of US households headed by an immigrant used at least one major welfare program, such as Medicaid or food stamps, compared with 37% of households headed by someone born in the US.⁴⁸ For households headed by an illegal immigrant it was 61%, mostly because their US-born children qualify.⁴⁸ CIS counts the whole household as using welfare if anyone in it does.⁴⁸ In 2023, the Cato Institute found that immigrants used 24% less welfare and entitlement money per person than people born in the US.⁴⁹ The disparity in the welfare statistics is that CIS counts household use, while Cato counts individual use.^48,49

“It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Milton Friedman, economist

Milton Friedman said, “It’s just obvious you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”⁵⁰ He also said, “It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But it’s only good so long as it’s illegal.”⁵⁰

Gotaways

“Gotaways” are people that the Border Patrol saw or detected but didn’t stop.⁵¹ Official DHS figures for fiscal 2011 to 2020 ranged from about 85,000 to 171,000 a year.⁵¹

Fox News reported 606,131 Gotaways in fiscal year 2022 and 670,674 in fiscal 2023.⁵²

The Congressional Budget Office records about 270,000 in fiscal 2024 and about 50,000 in calendar 2025.⁵³

Why crossings rose

There have been many international factors playing a role in the rise in border crossings from 2021 to 2023. People left collapsing countries, new air and jungle routes made the trip possible, and once here, work was waiting and the court system was years behind. Smugglers turned it into a $13 billion business.⁵⁴

1. Why people left home

In 2014, Venezuela’s economy began collapsing when oil prices crashed.⁵⁵ Its government had run its state oil company into the ground.⁵⁵ US sanctions started in 2017 and hit the oil company in 2019.⁵⁶ By August 2023, 7.7 million Venezuelans had left the country, which the UN refugee and migrant platform R4V called “the largest displacement crisis in the world.”⁵⁷ Most went to other South American countries first, and many later headed north.^57,58

In fiscal year 2023, 51% of border encounters were people from countries beyond Mexico and the three northern Central American countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, compared with 12% three years earlier, according to the Migration Policy Institute.⁵⁹

2. How they got here

In November 2021, Nicaragua’s government dropped visa requirements for Cubans.⁶⁰ This opened up Cuban immigration from exclusively Floridian sea crossings to a land route. By 2023 there were about 50 charter flights a month from Havana to Managua.⁶⁰ More than 421,000 Cubans reached the US border.⁶⁰

Ecuador let people fly in without a visa, which opened a route for Chinese migrants.⁶¹ In 2023, Customs and Border Protection had encounters with 37,440 Chinese nationals, about 54 times from 689 two years prior.⁶² On July 1st, 2024, Ecuador ended visa-free entry for Chinese travelers.⁶¹

The Darien Gap is a roadless jungle between Colombia and Panama that migrants cross on foot. In 2021, about 133,000 people crossed it.⁵⁸ 2022 saw about 250,000.⁵⁸ 2023 saw a record 520,085 (328,650 of them Venezuelan, 57,250 Ecuadorian, 46,422 Haitian, 25,565 Chinese).⁵⁸ That fell to 302,203 in 2024 and only 3,091 in all of 2025, according to Panama’s migration service.⁵⁸

3. What drew them

US job openings hit a record 12.0 million in March 2022, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.⁶³ There was work, and employers needed the help.

The immigration court backlog, meaning cases waiting for a judge, went from 1.39 million in fiscal 2019 to 2.81 million in fiscal 2023 peaking at 3.92 million in fiscal 2024.⁶⁴ A person released with a court date could wait years for a hearing.⁶⁵ People expelled under Title 42 could just try again with no penalty, which also pushed the numbers up.^66,67

4. Who made money on it

Human-smuggling revenue went from about $500 million per year in 2018 to about $13 billion in 2021, according to Homeland Security Investigations.⁵⁴

A Cuban could pay $10,000 to $15,000 in travel and smuggling fees to fly to Nicaragua and go overland to the US border.⁶⁸ Officials told NewsNation that cartels charged $35,000 to $40,000 per person to smuggle Chinese migrants.⁶⁹ On June 27, 2022, 53 people died of heat in the back of a tractor-trailer in San Antonio, Texas.⁷⁰ They had paid between $12,000 and $15,000.⁷¹ In 2025, a federal judge sentenced two of the smugglers, one to life in prison and the other to 83 years.⁷⁰

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IV. The fix was bigger government

Beds and buildings

On January 20, 2025, 39,314 people were held in ICE detention; by July 30, 2026, it was 67,180, up 71%.⁴² Detention facilities in use rose from 134 to 272 by July 23, 2026.⁴² ICE officers increased from about 10,000 to about 22,000, a “120% increase … in just about four months,” per DHS’s own January 3, 2026 press release.⁴³ 469 facilities were used, against 208 listed, according to the Vera Institute of Justice.⁷²

ICE bought 11 warehouses to turn into detention centers for about $1.07 billion.⁴² It now plans to sell 7 of them.⁴² At least $20 million can’t be recovered.⁴² More than $2.5 billion in facilities has no plan for how to pay to run them after fiscal 2029, when the lump sums run out, according to GAO.⁴²

In 2025, 47.6% of private prison company GEO Group’s revenue came from ICE, and 35% of CoreCivic’s.^73,74 Those are the two largest private prison companies in the country.⁷⁵

On July 2, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security bought two detention centers from CoreCivic.⁷⁶ One in California City in California for $732.6 million and one in Otay Mesa near San Diego for $739.2 million.⁷⁶ In August 2026, it bought two more, in Minnesota and Kansas.⁷⁷ The government paid CoreCivic $2.2 billion for four facilities and 7,187 beds, about $307,000 a bed, according to CoreCivic’s own filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.⁷⁷ CoreCivic says it expects to keep running all four under its contracts with ICE.⁷⁷

The shelter money became detention money

“FEMA used funds appropriated for shelter facilities and services to relieve overcrowding in U.S. Customs and Border Protection holding facilities to develop the detention support program, according to FEMA officials.” – GAO⁴²

Money Congress set aside under Biden to shelter migrants, through the Shelter and Services Program ($800 million in fiscal 2023, $650 million in fiscal 2024 and nothing in fiscal 2026), was used to build a program that pays to jail them (the Detention Support Grant Program).⁴² Florida was the only state eligible.^42,78 On September 30, 2025, its award of $608.4 million was signed: the money behind Alligator Alcatraz.⁷⁹

The money was simply repurposed.

ICE’s typical median cost is $92 per bed per day.⁴² It costs Alligator Alcatraz $249 per bed per day.⁴²

Section 287(g)

Section 287(g) of the immigration law was added in 1996 under President Clinton.⁸⁰ It lets ICE deputize local police and jailers to enforce immigration.⁸¹

There are three kinds: the jail model, which checks the immigration status of people already booked into jail; warrant service, which serves ICE warrants on people in jail; and the task force model, in which local officers make immigration arrests during everyday policing.⁸¹

Since October 1st, 2025, the federal government has paid the full salary and benefits of local officers doing 287(g) work, plus performance awards.^24,82

Local police are supposed to answer to the people who elect their sheriff, as a check on Washington. When Washington pays the deputy’s salary, the deputy answers to Washington. The sheriff is supposed to be the last local check on federal power.

On January 20th, 2025, there were only 135 287(g) agreements throughout the states and territories.⁸³ That rose to 2,612 as of October 1, 2026.⁸¹

Emergencies that never end

On January 6th, 2023, Governor DeSantis declared an immigration emergency using executive order 23-03.⁷⁹ It’s been renewed about 19 times, most recently September 18, 2026.⁸⁴ It suspends 25 state rules.⁸⁵ Florida’s emergency management agency spent about $989 million in fiscal year 2025-26, about $568 million of it on immigration, more than on any other emergency.⁸⁶

Governor Abbott’s border disaster proclamation dates to May 31, 2021 and is renewed every month, most recently September 14, 2026.⁸⁷ Operation Lone Star, his border program, has cost about $11 billion.^88,89 There was a ten-billion-dollar reimbursement fund, with $7.5 billion going to Texas on September 18th.⁹⁰

Trump’s national emergency at the southern border, declared January 20, 2025, under Proclamation 10886, was renewed for another year in January 2026.¹²

The lump sums expire on September 30th, 2029.²⁴

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune.

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V. The tools reach citizens

Your home

In 2012, in United States v. Costello, a federal appeals court in Chicago reviewed the case of a US citizen convicted of “harboring” an illegal immigrant.⁹¹ Her crime was that she let her boyfriend, who had been deported before, live with her for about seven months.⁹¹ The court threw out her conviction.⁹¹ Judge Richard Posner wrote that harboring means giving someone “a place to stay in which the authorities are unlikely to be seeking him,” and that “simple sheltering,” just giving someone a place to stay, isn’t the same thing.⁹¹ But other federal courts read it more broadly.⁹¹ There’s one exception written into the law.⁹² A church can bring in an immigrant who is already in the US to work as a volunteer minister or missionary, if he’s been a member for at least a year.⁹² A homeowner gets no exception at all.⁹²

The IRS opened your file

ICE asked the IRS for the home addresses of about 1.28 million taxpayers it suspected were here illegally, according to the Congressional Research Service.⁹³

On November 21, 2025, a federal trial court in Washington, D.C., blocked the sharing.⁹³ On September 8, 2026, the federal appeals court in D.C. upheld that block, finding the sharing broke the federal taxpayer-privacy law (26 U.S.C. 6103).⁹³ The court stopped it, but only after 47,289 addresses had already gone to ICE.⁹³

Your vote

SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) is a federal database run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that answers a single question for other agencies: is this person a citizen, or here lawfully?⁹⁴ It was built to check eligibility for benefits.⁹⁴

It’s now being used on lawful voters. Through October 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services ran 205 million status checks, compared with 25 million in all of 2024, according to a November 3, 2025 USCIS press release.⁹⁴ Of those 205 million checks, 46 million were on voters.⁹⁴

As told to the Supreme Court by the Solicitor General, SAVE “verified more than 65 million voters across 26 States as U.S. citizens, while flagging 28,635 potential non-U.S. citizens.”^95,96 That’s only potential non-U.S. citizens. In Texas, 2,724 were flagged and 117 referred for investigation.⁹⁵

The Supreme Court let DHS keep using SAVE for voter checks while the case continues (DHS v. League of Women Voters).⁹⁶ States can now check citizenship with just the last four digits of a Social Security number.^94,97 In May 2025, SAVE was hooked up to Social Security’s master records for bulk checks, with no public privacy notice until Oct 31, 2025.^96,97

On July 17, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security announced it had found “over 250,000 potential non-citizens illegally registered to vote in just 4 U.S. states.”⁹⁸ It said it matched public voter lists against its own immigration files by name, birth date, address and Social Security number.⁹⁹ Here’s the inconsistency: public voter lists don’t carry Social Security numbers.^99,100 On July 23, 2026, California’s Secretary of State wrote back that her office “has not shared our statewide voter registration list with DHS or any other federal agency,” and asked who had.¹⁰⁰ On July 30, 2026, Nevada’s Secretary of State asked the same thing.⁹⁹ DHS never answered with a method or a source.⁹⁹ By its own letters, only 118,003 of the names matched DHS’s files on name, birth date, address and Social Security number.¹⁰¹ If the government is running the private records of millions of voters through its databases, the public deserves to know where it got them. The public deserves a paper trail.

Your land

From January 20, 2025 to September 30, 2026, the federal government filed at least 39 eminent domain cases in South Texas to take land for the border wall, according to court records.¹⁰² Under George W. Bush, it filed more than 360 along the border.^103,104

Citizens held and deported

From January 20 to about October 5, 2025, immigration agents held US citizens “more than 170” times, a count ProPublica says is “almost certainly incomplete” because “the government does not track how often immigration agents hold Americans.”¹⁰⁵

About 130 were accused of assaulting or impeding officers, mostly at protests and raids.¹⁰⁵ In nearly 50 of those, charges were never filed or were dropped.¹⁰⁵ More than 50 were questioned about their citizenship and held, “almost all Latino.”¹⁰⁵ About two dozen said they were held more than a day without a phone call.¹⁰⁵ Nearly 20 were children.¹⁰⁵

From fiscal 2015 to March 2020, ICE arrested at least 674 “potential U.S. citizens,” detained 121 and removed 70, according to GAO report GAO-21-487.¹⁰⁶ Of the 674 arrests, 263 were in fiscal 2015 and 2016.¹⁰⁶

Mark Lyttle, a US citizen, was deported.¹⁰⁷ Lyttle was born in North Carolina.¹⁰⁷ He had cognitive disabilities but spoke no Spanish.¹⁰⁷ According to his federal lawsuit (Lyttle v. United States, 2012), ICE’s own database checks “revealed records showing Lyttle was a U.S. citizen with a valid Social Security number.”¹⁰⁷ In December 2008, under George W. Bush, he was deported, “sent off on foot into Mexico with only three dollars in his pocket.”¹⁰⁷ He wandered Mexico and Central America for 125 days, “imprisoned and abused in Mexico, Honduras, and Nicaragua,” until he reached the US Embassy in Guatemala.¹⁰⁷ He later settled for $175,000.¹⁰⁸

In 2002, Davino Watson became a citizen automatically when his father naturalized; ICE later matched him to the wrong man and held him 1,273 days.¹⁰⁹ The federal appeals court said, “It is arresting and disturbing that an American citizen was detained for years.”¹⁰⁹

Deaths in custody

Deaths in ICE custody, by fiscal year (October to September), counted from ICE’s own published death reports:¹¹⁰

On July 11, 2026, 70.6% of the 65,765 people in ICE detention had no criminal conviction, according to TRAC, Syracuse University’s immigration data project.¹¹¹

Lost in the system

On about September 15, 2026, ICE’s public online detainee locator, which families and lawyers use to find someone in custody, stopped listing people with final deportation orders, according to three current and former ICE officials speaking anonymously to the Associated Press.¹¹² The locator started in 2010.¹¹² Before that, families had to phone around.¹¹² One legal group said all 17 of its clients with final orders vanished from it.¹¹² The ACLU said eight Somali men held at Guantanamo Bay were among those removed.¹¹²

On May 21, 2026, Sen. Katie Britt introduced a bill to require E-Verify for every job.¹¹³

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VI. The watchers: surveillance and data centers

Face scans

In 2022 (updated 2025), Georgetown Law’s privacy center (“American Dragnet”) found ICE had run face recognition on “around 1 in 3 (32%) of all adults'” driver’s license photos, had access to the driver’s license data of “3 in 4 (74%)” adults, and spent about $2.8 billion on surveillance from 2008 to 2021.¹¹⁴

On May 12, 2025, a DHS privacy review of Mobile Fortify, ICE’s face-scanning phone app, said photos are “stored for 15 years, regardless of immigration or citizenship status,” and “ICE does not let people decline to be scanned.”¹¹⁵

On September 24, 2025, ICE launched a similar app for local 287(g) officers.¹¹⁶ Its privacy form says every photo, “regardless of match,” is kept 15 years, “regardless of citizenship or immigration status.”¹¹⁶

Axon and Carbyne

On February 18, 2026, Axon, the American company behind the Taser and police body cameras, finished buying Carbyne, an Israeli company that makes 911 emergency-call technology, for about $549.7 million.¹¹⁷ Axon already owned about 10.7% of it.¹¹⁷ From 2008 to 2026, ICE and Customs and Border Protection gave Axon 85 contracts and orders worth about $177.5 million.¹¹⁸ In July 2026 alone, ICE ordered about $30.9 million in Axon body cameras.¹¹⁸ Carbyne’s software lets a 911 center see a caller’s GPS location and live video from the caller’s phone camera, and by July 2025 it ran in nearly 300 emergency centers in 23 US states and six other countries.^119,120

Carbyne started in April 2015 under the name Reporty.^121,122 At least three of its five co-founders came out of Unit 8200, Israel’s signals-intelligence agency: its CEO, Amir Elichai; Lital Leshem; and Pinchas Buchris, the unit’s former director.^123,121 Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak invested at its founding and chaired its board.¹¹⁹ In 2015, Jeffrey Epstein put $1 million into Reporty through Barak’s company.¹²⁴ Barak paid for much of his stake through an Israeli partnership called Sum (E.B.) 2015, in which Epstein was a partner, according to Haaretz.¹²⁵ Buchris admitted he set up the deal to hide Epstein’s role.^125,123 In July 2019, after Epstein was arrested again, Barak dissolved the partnership.¹²⁵ Carbyne’s CEO says Epstein’s estate and Barak no longer hold stock.¹²⁴

Carbyne’s advisers included Michael Chertoff, a former Secretary of Homeland Security, the department that runs ICE.¹²⁶ In August 2018, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund invested in Carbyne.¹²⁷ In March 2025, Founders Fund also put money into Flock, the license-plate camera company.¹²⁸

Flock

Flock Safety is a private company founded in 2017 in Atlanta.¹²⁹ It sells license-plate-reading cameras to local police. By 2026 it had more than 120,000 cameras in about 6,000 communities across 49 states, reading “more than 20 billion” vehicles a month.^129,130 It was valued at about $8.3 billion.¹³¹ Earlier research on plate readers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, using 2016-17 data, shows that 99.5% of plates captured weren’t tied to any public-safety interest when captured.¹³² There were over 4,000 immigration lookups through Flock.¹³³

The Border Patrol actually scraped data through a back door of Flock. From May 9 to August 24, 2025, Flock gave Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, a free “pilot” with no contract.¹³⁴ On August 25, 2025, 404 Media reported CBP “regularly searched more than 80,000” Flock cameras, and at least one police department didn’t know it was sharing.¹³⁵ On August 25, 2025, Illinois’s Secretary of State said an audit found a CBP pilot “Flock leadership was unaware of,” “a clear violation of the state law.”¹³⁶ The same day, Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, wrote: “We clearly communicated poorly.”¹³⁷ Flock paused all federal pilots.^136,137 On October 21, 2025, a University of Washington study found 8 Washington police agencies shared directly with Border Patrol and 10 more had “back door” access they never authorized.¹³⁸

There were a lot of errors and mistakes. In Roseville, California: 71% of 1,427 alerts reported by Flock were misreads, according to the local department’s own count.¹³⁹ In 2023 and 2024, Flock sent Roseville police 1,427 alerts.¹³⁹ 1,011 of them involved a misread plate.¹⁴⁰

At least 184 police contracts with Flock have been canceled since August 2025, according to the advocacy group Secure Justice’s tracker.¹⁴¹ On September 23, 2026, Sen. Josh Hawley held a hearing called “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.”¹⁴² The CEOs of Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada all declined to testify.¹⁴²

About 53% of Republicans support the cameras, whereas 33% of Republicans oppose, and 32% of Democrats support and 52% oppose, according to YouGov.¹⁴³ 38% of all Americans support and 46% oppose.¹⁴³ On ICE using plate-reader data to track undocumented immigrants: 36% of all Americans support, 50% oppose; 70% of Republicans support, 18% oppose; 14% of Democrats support, 77% oppose.¹⁴⁴

The contractors

Since 2011, ICE has signed 12 contracts with Palantir worth $450 million.¹¹⁸ Back on January 7, 2019, Motorola bought Vigilant Solutions, one of the big license-plate-reader companies, for $445 million.¹⁴⁵ In September 2022, under Biden, Palantir landed a contract worth $170.8 million to run ICE’s case-management system, the software agents use to build cases on people.¹¹⁸ In May 2026, under Trump, it received another $86.3 million to modernize deportation operations.¹¹⁸ In December 2025, Anduril received $363 million to build surveillance towers for Border Patrol.¹¹⁸ In September 2025, Clearview AI, the face-recognition company, received $7.69 million from ICE.¹¹⁸ Elbit America has pulled in about $568 million from Border Patrol, and on March 3, 2026 it signed its biggest deal yet, $243.6 million for “persistent surveillance and detection” at the border.¹¹⁸ And Cellebrite, the Israeli-founded company that cracks into phones, has taken about $82.7 million from ICE since 2010.¹¹⁸

In 2023, Israel’s Ministry of Defense was 16% of Elbit’s revenue, 25% in 2024 and 28% in 2025.¹⁴⁶ On April 19, 2024, an Israeli strike on a home in Rafah killed nine people, six of them children.¹⁴⁷ Amnesty International identified the bomb as an MPR 500 made by IMI, a company Elbit bought in 2018.^147,148 Elbit also makes the Hermes drones Israel flies.¹⁴⁹ On September 9, 2026, Elbit America renamed itself Twenty-Six Defense, “drawing inspiration from the atomic number of iron.”¹⁵⁰ Elbit’s sites have faced years of protests.^151,152

Data centers

“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor.”

Donald Trump¹⁵³

The Department of Homeland Security uses Amazon for a biometric system.¹⁵⁴

HART, DHS’s biometric database which holds the fingerprints and the faces of more than 270 million people, runs on Amazon’s government cloud, AWS GovCloud.¹⁵⁴ From July 2025 to January 2026, ICE’s storage on Microsoft’s cloud grew from about 400 terabytes to almost 1,400, and ICE used Microsoft’s AI tools to search and analyze images and video.¹⁵⁵ In September 2026 ICE signed an $18.3 million Amazon cloud order.¹¹⁸ In August 2026 DHS signed a $12.3 million Oracle cloud order.¹¹⁸

A Heatmap poll shows that Republicans did support data centers in August 2025 a little bit, but that fell significantly this last August compared to the year before.¹⁵⁶ Heatmap News conducted a poll about data center support.

In August 2025, Americans were split, 44% support and 42% oppose, with Republicans 14 points more for than against.¹⁵⁶

By August 2026, 75% opposed, and Republicans were 43 points more against than for.¹⁵⁶

A Pew Research study from July 20 to August 9, 2026 asked 10,548 adults.¹⁵⁷ 54% now say data centers are mostly bad for the environment (up from 39% in January), 50% mostly bad for home energy costs (up from 38%), 49% mostly bad for quality of life nearby (up from 30%).¹⁵⁷

“How dare the peasants complain about data centers stealing their water and driving the cost of electricity!!”

Marjorie Taylor Greene¹⁵⁸

“Our citizens should not be subsidizing the exorbitant power usage of AI data centers.”

Ron DeSantis¹⁵⁹

“They can absolutely afford to pay for their own electricity, and they should.”

Josh Hawley, February 11, 2026¹⁶⁰

“I have not seen any issue in modern American life that, at the populist level, unites disparate elements of our country more than this.”

Steve Bannon, as quoted by the Jerusalem Post, September 3, 2026¹⁶¹

Watching the protesters

On May 26, 2026, WIRED reported on more than 1,000 pages of unpublished reports from DHS, the FBI and state fusion centers, which are the offices where local police and federal agents pool intelligence.¹⁶² The reports tracked something they called “anti-tech violent extremism,” a label that “does not appear in any publicly available DHS or FBI domestic extremism reports.”¹⁶² Northern Virginia’s fusion center documented protests at an Arlington County budget meeting and a Fairfax County School Board meeting.¹⁶² It also kept tabs on an event held by Eject Elbit, a group pushing investors to drop Elbit Systems, the Israeli military contractor.¹⁶² Show up at your school board, and you can end up in an intelligence report.

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VII. The children

Children are affected by immigration enforcement on many levels, and the government’s own inspectors have documented much of it.

Southwest Key

The nonprofits didn’t protect the children. Southwest Key is a 501(c)(3), a tax-exempt charity that ran shelters for migrant children.^163,164 From fiscal 2015 to 2023, it received “over three billion dollars” from HHS, according to the Justice Department.¹⁶⁴

On July 17, 2024, the Justice Department sued Southwest Key.¹⁶⁴ The complaint says that “from at least 2015 through at least 2023, multiple Southwest Key employees have subjected unaccompanied children in their care to repeated and unwelcome sexual abuse,” including rape, and that the victims ranged “from as young as five years old to teenagers just shy of eighteen.”¹⁶⁴ It says Southwest Key knew and “failed to take appropriate action to protect the children in its care.”¹⁶⁴

On March 12, 2025, the Justice Department dropped the suit, after HHS stopped placing children with Southwest Key and moved the children out.^165,166 No court ever ruled on the abuse claims.¹⁶⁶

None of this is new

None of this is new. On January 28, 2016, a bipartisan Senate investigation (the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Claire McCaskill) reported on the egg farms of Marion, Ohio.¹⁶⁷ In 2014, over four months, HHS “allegedly placed a number of” migrant children “in the hands of a ring of human traffickers who forced them to work on egg farms,” “six or seven days a week, twelve hours per day.”¹⁶⁷ The traffickers “held the deeds to some of the families’ homes as collateral for the child’s journey.”¹⁶⁷

The Senate found HHS had failed to run background checks on the other adults in the sponsors’ homes, failed to visit any of the homes, and failed to notice that a group of sponsors was taking in multiple unrelated children.¹⁶⁷ Under HHS policy at the time, “no criminal conviction could disqualify a sponsor, no matter how serious.”¹⁶⁷ The report said “no federal agency accepts responsibility” for these children once they are handed to a sponsor who isn’t their parent.¹⁶⁷

Lost track

On February 25, 2023, New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier reported that more than 250,000 migrant children arrived alone in the US in 2021 and 2022, and that HHS “could not reach more than 85,000” of them on its follow-up calls after placing them.¹⁶⁸ Many were found working in factories and slaughterhouses.¹⁶⁸ The series won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize.¹⁶⁹

On April 26, 2023, Tara Lee Rodas, a federal employee who had volunteered at an emergency shelter for migrant children in Pomona, California, testified to the House Judiciary Committee.¹⁷⁰ She said, “Whether intentional or not, it can be argued that the US Government has become the middleman in a large scale, multi-billion-dollar, child trafficking operation.”¹⁷⁰ She described apartment buildings “where 20, 30 & 40 unaccompanied children have been released.”¹⁷⁰

In February 2024, the HHS Inspector General checked a sample of children’s case files from 2021 and found that in 16% of them, at least one required safety check on the sponsor “lacked any documentation.”¹⁷¹ In 22%, the follow-up call came late.¹⁷¹

The night flights

In 2021, over six months, more than 70 large passenger jets carrying migrant children landed at Jacksonville’s airport.¹⁷² A Florida statewide grand jury later wrote that these flights “arrived in the night time often after midnight, and landed not at the passenger terminal, but instead at an out-of-the-way commercial terminal used normally for shipping freight.”¹⁷² Florida’s state police records count 78 charter flights from April 22 to October 6, 2021.¹⁷³ Airport police “received very little notice that the flights were arriving, where they were from, or who was aboard.”¹⁷³ The jurors said, “If an operation were ferrying terrorists or large quantities of narcotics, this is what it would look like.”¹⁷³

The flights were civilian charter jets hired for HHS through a contractor, MVM Inc., which got $369.5 million on March 25, 2021 to “arrange travel and escort” for these children.^174,175 Nobody in government has explained the late hours on the record. HHS said only that it schedules flights for “child safety and wellness, travel time, and cost-effectiveness.”¹⁷³ The White House said it wasn’t sure the flights were “in the middle of the night.”¹⁷⁶ The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the HHS office that places the children, and its contractors refused the grand jury’s subpoenas.¹⁷²

Let’s look at what the flights delivered. On May 14, 2021, contractors arranged a 3 a.m. pickup of children at the Dallas convention center, bound for shelters in New York, according to HHS emails Judicial Watch got through a records request.¹⁷⁵ One passenger on a flight of children was a 24-year-old man, wrongly screened as a child, who was delivered to a sponsor falsely claiming to be his uncle.¹⁷² The 24-year-old man stabbed that sponsor more than 50 times, according to the grand jury.¹⁷²

The orphan trains

Charities and governments have been shipping other people’s children across this country for 170 years, and they have never been good at keeping track of them.¹⁷⁷ From 1854 to 1929, private charities, mostly the Children’s Aid Society, and also the Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, shipped orphaned and poor children from the streets of New York City to farm towns across the rural United States.¹⁷⁷ An estimated 200,000 to 250,000 children rode these orphan trains.¹⁷⁷

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VIII. Who pays, and nobody’s accountable

Let’s talk about Alligator Alcatraz.

On January 6, 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order declaring an immigration state of emergency.⁷⁹ On July 3, 2025, Florida used that order to open a detention camp in tents on an old training airstrip in the Everglades, near Ochopee.⁷⁹ People called it Alligator Alcatraz. Everyone held there was an ICE detainee.⁷⁹

On September 30, 2025, FEMA committed $608.4 million in federal money to Florida for it.⁷⁹ By May 15, 2026, $58.3 million of that had been paid out.⁷⁹

On January 21, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General made a one-day surprise inspection.⁷⁹ The camp failed 6 of the 8 standards the inspectors checked, including medical care, food service, hygiene and recreation.⁷⁹ Each fenced unit was built for 32 people, which works out to 28 square feet per person.⁷⁹ The standard is 75.⁷⁹ 6 of the 8 detainees interviewed said they had no clean drinking water.⁷⁹

There are these small metal enclosures resembling a shark tank. From July 17, 2025 to January 18, 2026, 79 detainees were put in them, for up to almost two hours, about an hour on average.⁷⁹ Staff called them “calming areas.”⁷⁹ The sign on them said “HOLDING CELL.”⁷⁹ The inspectors said using them “for any reason is unprecedented among ICE facilities inspected by OIG”.⁷⁹

Nobody could say which rules the place ran under. When ICE listed the detention standards the camp was bound by, it wrote “N/A.” One official told the inspectors it was “so gray as to whose place this is… and which standards to follow.”⁷⁹

On June 15, 2026, the camp closed.⁷⁹

Who ran it?

Who ran Alligator Alcatraz? Depends who you ask, and when.

In July 2025, an ICE official told a federal court under oath that ICE’s role was “limited to touring the camp” and that Florida decided who was detained there.⁷⁸

In October 2025, Florida told a different federal court that “ICE also decides whether to offer to the State every single detainee who ends up at Alligator Alcatraz, and ICE can summon them back at any time.”¹⁷⁸ On September 3, 2026, DHS told its Inspector General that “the state maintains authority over the day-to-day operations of that facility.”⁷⁹ Each side told a different audience that the other one was in charge.

The Deportation Depot

Florida’s second camp, Baker Correctional Institution, nicknamed the “Deportation Depot,” opened in September 2025 and held 1,028 detainees as of August 27, 2026.⁷⁹ ICE lists its standards as “N/A” too.⁷⁹ ICE’s own inspection office has never inspected it, and has no inspection scheduled through fiscal year 2027.⁷⁹

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IX. Both parties built it, and the keys change hands

The Democrats laid the foundation

On September 29, 2006, the Senate passed the Secure Fence Act 80 to 19.¹⁷⁹ Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer all voted yes.¹⁷⁹

Obama laid the foundation for Trump. In 2013, all 52 Senate Democrats voted for a “border surge” of federal agents, written into that year’s immigration reform bill: $46.3 billion for 20,000 more Border Patrol agents and 700 miles of fence.^180,181

In fiscal year 2013, DHS removed 432,334 people, the most of any year on record.¹⁸² In 2014, the Obama administration built family detention at a scale of up to 2,400 beds in Dilley, Texas, to “expedite the removal of adults with children.”¹⁸³ His own coalition called him the “deporter-in-chief”: in March 2014, the head of the National Council of La Raza, the biggest Latino advocacy group, used it against him.¹⁸⁴

Secure Communities, the program that runs the fingerprints of everyone booked into a local jail against immigration records, started in 2008 under Bush.¹⁸⁵ On January 22, 2013, Obama finished rolling it out to all 3,181 jurisdictions in the country.¹⁸⁵ On November 20, 2014, his administration suspended it because local governments were refusing to cooperate with it, and federal courts ruled against it.¹⁸⁵ On January 25, 2017, five days into his first term, Trump switched it back on.¹⁸⁵

On June 26, 2019, more than 500 Wayfair employees walked out over about $200,000 worth of beds for a children’s shelter in Carrizo Springs, Texas, run by the contractor BCFS.¹⁸⁶ The same day, HHS put up to $300.8 million toward that shelter.¹⁸⁷

In March 2024, Congress funded 41,500 ICE detention beds for fiscal year 2024, up from 34,000 the year before and 16,500 more than the 25,000 Biden himself had asked for.¹⁸⁸ It came in a six-bill spending package that House Democrats voted for 185 to 22 and Senate Democrats 47 to 1.^189,190

Biden used Trump’s tools

Biden used Trump’s tools. In August 2021, the CDC re-issued Title 42, the COVID order that let Border Patrol expel people without an asylum hearing, and kept it until May 11, 2023.¹⁹¹ In October 2023, his administration waived 26 federal laws, including the main environmental law and the law that governs how agencies make rules, to build border wall in Starr County, Texas.¹⁹² Biden said the money had already been set aside under Trump and “I can’t stop that.”¹⁹³ On June 3, 2024, he signed a proclamation shutting most asylum claims at the border, using the same section of immigration law, 212(f), that Trump had used for his 2018 asylum ban.⁶

Follow the leader

People care who’s sponsoring the policy more than what the policy is. In 2024, 88% of Republicans wanted immigration decreased, according to Gallup.¹⁹⁴ In 2025, after their party took the White House, it dropped to 48%.¹⁹⁴ Gallup credits fewer border crossings, but the bigger change was which party held the White House.¹⁹⁴

In May 2024, under Biden, 11% of Republicans and 35% of Democrats said they trust the federal government to do what is right most of the time, according to Pew.¹⁹⁵ In September 2025, under Trump, it was 26% of Republicans and 9% of Democrats.¹⁹⁵ Trust in government tends to go up when your party holds office.¹⁹⁵ Same government, same agencies. The only thing that changed was who held the keys.

Britain ran the experiment

Britain ran the experiment. On June 23, 2016, British voters chose to leave the European Union, after a campaign whose slogan was “Take back control,” with immigration at the center of it.¹⁹⁶ Control changed hands. London got to set its own rules. Net migration then rose instead of falling, to a peak of 944,000 in the year ending March 2023, mostly from outside the EU under Britain’s own new visa rules, according to the United Kingdom’s Office for National Statistics.¹⁹⁶

Whoever builds the machine, the other side inherits it. Every tool you hand your guy, you’re handing to the next guy too.

Next in line

Some camps are okay with all of this. The National Socialist Movement publishes a 25-point program copied from the German Nazi party’s 1920 program.^197,198 It says “Only Whites may become citizens,” and it demands “the formation of a strong central power” and “unlimited authority of the central parliament.”¹⁹⁷

Nick Fuentes said on November 24, 2025 that “the president is the chief law enforcement officer of the country. That’s really the goal.”¹⁹⁹ He said, “I’m bringing the National Guard everywhere… It is going to be martial law.”¹⁹⁹ In October 2025 he said, “We need more detention centers. We need more militarization of the cities.”²⁰⁰

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X. Crime, race and who counts as white

Let’s set the record straight about migrant crime.

The courts

Start with the federal courts. In fiscal year 2025, 44% of people sentenced in federal court were non-citizens, according to the US Sentencing Commission.²⁰¹ But 79% of those non-citizens were sentenced for immigration offenses.²⁰¹ The 44% mostly counts people for the act of coming here.²⁰¹ Count everyone sitting in federal prison in 2026 and 84.2% are US citizens, according to the Bureau of Prisons.²⁰²

Locked up by age 33

On September 18, 2025, the Cato Institute followed Americans born in 1990 and counted how many had ever been incarcerated by age 33.²⁰³

Of everyone born here, all races together, 11% had been.²⁰³

Of immigrants, 3%.²⁰³ Broken out by race, the immigrants came in lower every time. Black Americans born here: 28%. Black legal immigrants: 1.6%. Black illegal immigrants: 8.6%. Hispanics born here: 11.8%; Hispanic legal immigrants: 1.9%. Hispanic illegal immigrants: 8.4%. Whites born here: 6.7%. White legal immigrants: 2.9%. White illegal immigrants: 2.4%. Asians born here: 3.2%. Asian legal immigrants: 1.3%. Asian illegal immigrants: 0.08%.²⁰³

Cato’s own caveat: non-citizens who are deported after prison can’t answer the survey anymore, so some immigrant incarceration goes uncounted.²⁰³ Economists going back through 150 years of census records found the same thing: immigrants have been about 60% less likely to be incarcerated than people born here.²⁰⁴

It holds inside each group Cato measured. Per 100,000 people ages 18 to 54 in 2024, 1,278 native-born Hispanics were incarcerated, against 486 Hispanic legal immigrants.²⁰⁵ Whites born here: 720, against 141 of white legal immigrants; and 3,349 Black Americans born here, against 351 Black legal immigrants.²⁰⁵ Illegal immigrants fall in between in all three groups, and those figures include people held in ICE detention for immigration alone.²⁰⁵ Cato’s 2024 study, a separate one from the chart above, has no Asian row, so it covers every group measured, not every race.²⁰⁵

The grandchildren

The children and grandchildren catch up. The National Academies of Sciences said in 2015: “crime rates for the second and third generation rise.”²⁰⁶ In one Southern California study of Mexican-American men ages 20 to 39 (Rubén Rumbaut), 88% of those who came as children had never been incarcerated.²⁰⁷ In the second generation, 80% of their children had never been incarcerated.²⁰⁷ By the third generation, 73%, a rate the author called “virtually identical to those for African American men.”²⁰⁷

Rumbaut found that “ethnicity washed out” once he accounted for education, a two-parent family and the neighborhood a kid grew up in.²⁰⁷ What rises from one generation to the next tracks American conditions, not ancestry. The same pattern showed up a century ago with European immigrants from 1900 to 1930.²⁰⁸

In Texas, US-born citizens were “over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes” than undocumented immigrants, according to a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.²⁰⁹

Who counts as white

The FBI counts most Hispanics as white. In 2021, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated that about 95% of Hispanics arrested for violent crimes were coded “White.”²¹⁰

Under the official federal standards, Hispanic is an ethnicity, a separate question from race.²¹¹ But in the FBI’s arrest data, ethnicity is often left blank, so most Hispanic arrestees land in the white column.²¹² That skews every race chart built on FBI arrest data.

In 1930, the census told its counters to mark “Mex” for people born in Mexico, or with parents born in Mexico, who were “not definitely white.”²¹³ Mexican-American groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens protested, and by 1940 the census instructions said “Mexicans are to be regarded as white.”^214,215 It lasted one census. Under the 1790 naturalization law only “free white persons” could become citizens, which is why being counted white mattered.²¹⁶

Under the federal standard from 1997, Arabs and North Africans are white: “origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa.”²¹¹ A 2024 revision would give them their own category, “separate and distinct from the White category.”²¹⁷ And the Census classifies anyone reported with both white and non-white ancestry as not white, which the sociologist Richard Alba says makes the white share look like it’s falling faster than it is.²¹⁸

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XI. The smaller the better

There’s a way out. The more local, the better.

Liechtenstein

Here’s a case study of Liechtenstein, which gives local municipalities powers. Liechtenstein is a tiny country between Switzerland and Austria, with 41,237 people in 11 municipalities.²¹⁹ Since 2003, its constitution has said any town can vote to start leaving the country: “The individual municipalities have the right to withdraw from the state.”²²⁰ The towns vote on who can become a citizen of the town.²²¹ After 10 years living there, the town’s own citizens decide whether you join them.²²¹ Three towns together can force a national vote on a law or on big spending, and the people can even vote to abolish the monarchy.²²⁰

It has its limits. The Prince keeps a veto over every law.²²⁰ No town has ever tried to leave.²²² 57.4% of the people who work in Liechtenstein commute in from Switzerland and Austria every day, without being allowed to settle there.^219,223

Switzerland is the scaled-up version. Citizenship there starts in one of more than 2,000 towns, then the canton, then the nation.²²⁴ It has a limit too. On July 9, 2003, Switzerland’s Supreme Court struck down the town of Emmen’s practice of voting on citizenship by secret ballot, because voters gave no reasons and the votes discriminated.²²⁵

The Levellers and the Diggers

“Every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety.”

Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants, 1646

The idea that a person owns himself goes back a long way. In 1646, Richard Overton, a Leveller, wrote in An Arrow Against All Tyrants that “every one, as he is himself, so he has a self-propriety.”²²⁶ On May 1, 1649, the Levellers’ Agreement of the Free People of England barred Parliament from ever trying to “level men’s estates, destroy propriety, or make all things common.”²²⁷ At the Putney Debates in 1647, the Leveller John Wildman said an admitted foreigner “has the same right as the natives but in this particular,” meaning the vote.²²⁸

“The great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury.”

Gerrard Winstanley, The True Levellers Standard Advanced, 1649

The Diggers came out of the same fight in 1649.²²⁹ Gerrard Winstanley wrote in The True Levellers Standard Advanced that “the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a Common Treasury,” and that “those that buy and sell land, and are landlords, have got it either by oppression, or murther, or theft.”²²⁹

Private-property borders

“The only legitimate borders, and they should be as strong as we could possibly make them, are private property borders.”

Adam Kokesh, 2018

If the earth is a common treasury, can anyone draw a border on it? That’s where Adam Kokesh lands. In 2018 he wrote: “The only legitimate borders, and they should be as strong as we could possibly make them, are private property borders.”²³⁰

Exit and build

“We are building the parallel economy, the parallel networks, and the parallel society.”

Derrick Broze, How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State

Here’s how you start without waiting for Washington. Derrick Broze puts it this way in his book How to Opt-Out of the Technocratic State: “We are building the parallel economy, the parallel networks, and the parallel society.”²³¹ He also wrote that “politics cannot and will not save us… The answer is to opt out, to Exit and Build.”²³² Instead of complaining and letting yourself be run down, exit where you are and build a new system. You can apply that to any part of life. Parallel systems are the key to building the world we want to live in.

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XII. Close

What the emergency brought

Money

Money came first. In July 2025, Congress gave ICE $74.85 billion.³ In June 2026, with crossings near record lows, it passed another $69.5 billion for immigration enforcement.²⁵

Beds

Then the beds. On January 20, 2025, ICE held 39,314 people.⁴² On July 30, 2026, it held 67,180, up 71%.⁴² By July 23, 2026, it was using 272 facilities.⁴²

Badges

The badges followed. DHS says ICE went from about 10,000 officers to about 22,000 in roughly four months, by its own count in January 2026.⁴³

Surveillance

Along with them came databases, face scans, license-plate readers and body cameras.

Children

Children landed in the government’s custody, and the government couldn’t keep track of them.

Keys

And the emergency brought keys. Every tool built in this emergency passes to whoever wins next, whichever party. It doesn’t matter who the person is. The power sits in the machine, and the machine stays.

The test

The lump sums run out on September 30, 2029.²⁴ That’s when the ratchet gets tested. Either Congress lets the money drop, or it makes it permanent. Robert Higgs, the economist, found that “government grew suddenly much bigger with the onset of each great crisis; after the crisis it receded but usually not to the precrisis level.”²⁶

So don’t wait for 2029 to find out. Exit and build.

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Sources

1. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Another record-setting month at CBP: Border continues to be most secure in history,” CBP, Aug. 12, 2025. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/another-record-setting-month-cbp-border-continues-be-most-secure ↑
2. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Southwest Land Border Encounters” (monthly data, revised), CBP, accessed 2026. https://www.cbp.gov/document/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
3. Congressional Research Service, “R48704: One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE funding,” EveryCRSReport, 2025. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R48704.html ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
4. Adam Isacson, “December 2023 Set a New U.S.-Mexico Border Monthly Migration Record,” adamisacson.com, Dec. 29, 2023. https://adamisacson.com/december-2023-set-a-new-u-s-mexico-border-monthly-migration-record/ ↑
5. Congressional Budget Office, “The Demographic Outlook: 2026 to 2056,” CBO, Jan. 7, 2026 (pp. 11, 33). https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61879 ↑ ↑ ↑
6. The White House, Proclamation 10773, “Securing the Border,” 89 Fed. Reg. 48487, Federal Register, signed June 3, 2024, published June 7, 2024. https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2024-12647 ↑ ↑
7. U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, “Securing the Border” (interim final rule implementing Proclamation 10773), 89 Fed. Reg. 48710, Federal Register, June 7, 2024. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2024-06-07/pdf/2024-12435.pdf ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑ ↑
8. Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, Doris Meissner and Andrew Selee, “Facing New Migration Realities: U.S.-Mexico Relations and Shared Interests,” Migration Policy Institute, May 2025. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/publication/new-migration-realities-us-mexico ↑ ↑ ↑
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