Year 2 begins

A tumultuous and frankly bizarre year ends as bizarrely as possible, and a new one begins on an ominous note.

January 20, 2026

The day after the 2024 election, I picked myself up and started a new project, a memo on the mass atrocity risks associated with Stephen Miller-led plans for mass deportations. It was not difficult to map out the terrain; Miller and Tom Homan were among the first people Trump picked, and many different people were talking about plans for an immigration crackdown – talking quite a lot. Here are a few of the things floated in the weeks after Trump became, again, President-Elect:

• Declaration of a national emergency to “allow the incoming administration to repurpose military assets to detain and remove migrants” (Wall Street Journal, 11/8/24, confirmed by the President-elect ten days later);

• Contracts with private prisons, which have excess capacity after the Biden Administration ended many contracts due to abusive conditions, to hold tens of thousands of deportees (Bloomberg, 11/7/24)

• Development of agreements with third-party countries to accept deportees from other countries (NBC News, 12/5/24);

• An announcement by Donald Trump that he would end “birthright citizenship” by executive order (Meet the Press, 12/8/24);

• Rescinding restrictions on deportation enforcement at “sensitive locations” like schools, hospitals and churches (Vanity Fair,12/11/24).

There was also discussion of using the military to facilitate speedy deportations, and no talk that I could discern of due process. I came away from the research with the distinct sense that mass deportations would be the spear tip of a wider authoritarian power grab.

Trump was sworn in, and that day he declared a state of emergency and issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship, and another ending the Refugee Resettlement program. And then, the next day… none of the plans discussed with baited breath in late 2024 were instituted on the scale that clearly was getting Stephen Miller out of bed in the morning.

Instead, for months, the focus was on Elon Musk and his gang of Never-Neverland pirates dynamiting essential federal services with a grotesque abandon. The complete destruction of the US Agency for International Development, and with it devastation that will claim millions of lives and destroy civil society institutions worldwide, was not on my bingo card. In those first months, it seemed as though the white nationalist faction of the Trump coalition was sidelined (though deportations were happening, and scaling up was probably taking place behind the scenes), and that they had lost the power struggle to the oligarch-techno-feudalists who bankrolled the campaign and were now moving fast and breaking things to enact their Ayn Randian fantasies of a libertarian paradise built on top of the ruins of the New Deal state.

Whether this represented a power struggle or a preliminary effort to weaken guardrails against autocracy within the government is an open question; likely, it was some of both. But in the months before I began this project, on April 18, the main news was institutional destruction. And by about 10:30 every morning, some novel egregiousness would show up on my screen as I worked, and I would mutter “every fucking day,” and I would click on the link, and disappear into a rabbit hole of malicious demolition, callous disregard for human rights, and sheer horror.

But I couldn’t look away. During the War on Terror years, I had something of a front-row seat to the abuses of human rights and the strain put on our democracy, and as part of my job, I followed the news very closely. It’s ingrained in me ever since, the obsessive need to follow and I guess bear witness. And anyway, when I did finally try to turn off the news, shutting down my wireless entirely to get work done, the news still found me. Everyone I know is watching just as closely. By 10:30 that day, the latest outrage arrived by text and I knew I would never escape it, not even for one fucking day.

One reason I started writing Every Effing Day, three months into Trump’s first year, was to limit my time in the rabbit hole, and to channel my obsessive attention into something more productive than doomscrolling.

Is it more productive? In any case, it has given me some of my attention span back.

Around the time I began writing, the mass deportation juggernaut was beginning to roll, and it was played out pretty much according to the plan that had shaped up by mid-December 2024. All of the steps proposed by Trump and those speaking for his transition team have come to fruition. And the fact that enforcement has targeted not states with the largest undocumented populations (California, Texas and Florida), or even New York, which has about half as many undocumented migrants as Texas, suggests the larger aim. California was targeted, as was Illinois, which ranks sixth on the list, with around half a million migrants, but if the goal is a million deportations or more per year, it would be much easier to target migrants in Texas and Florida, where governors and local law enforcement would be much more cooperative. The decision to target Minnesota, with something on the order of 130,000 undocumented migrants, cements the impression that the Administration is using ICE not primarily to effectuate mass deportations, but to foment chaos and instability, goading citizens and state and local governments into confrontations that can be used to justify further crackdowns. Immigration is, indeed, the spear tip.

Miller seems to have pivoted from an interest in persecuting domestic marginalized groups to articulating the imperial ambitions of the President, who himself sent a letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister that was so unhinged that most thought, even on the very last day of the most bizarre year in American history, that it must be a hoax. Anne Applebaum and many others are asking whether Republicans will finally take action.

They won’t. This morning, Migrant Insider is reporting that “Senate Republicans Steamroll Democrats on Another ICE Funding Increase,” adding more than $400 million “despite Democratic leaders’ claims they successfully cut ICE’s budget.”

That feeling in your gut is the spear.

We must stand up for immigrants because their human rights are at risk. We must stand up for immigrants because they are integral to American prosperity, past, present and future. We must stand up for immigrants because the attack on immigration is an attack on our democracy.

And here we go on Year 2.