Ice is cracking down on Trump's own supporters. Will they change their minds?
Even as they witness friends and family members hurt by this administration's immigration clamp-downs, some Trump supporters appear resistant to doing a full 180.
Bradley Bartell, whose wife, Camila Muñoz, was recently detained, says he has no regrets about voting for Trump. Muñoz is from Peru and overstayed a work-study visa that expired right when Covid hit. She was trying to get permanent residency in the US when she was detained.
'I don't regret the vote,' Bartell told Newsweek. His rationale? Trump is a victim of a bad immigration system that his administration inherited. 'He didn't create the system but he does have an opportunity to improve it. Hopefully, all this attention will bring to light how broken it is.'
For Jensy Machado from Manassas, Virginia, things are a bit more complex. Machado, a naturalized US citizen, was driving to work when, according to NBC 4, he was stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, who brandished guns and surrounded his truck. According to Machado, a man facing a deportation order had given Machado's home address as his, and when Machado assured agents that they had the wrong person and offered them his Virginia driver's license, they ordered him to leave his car and handcuffed him.
'I was a Trump supporter,' Machado, who is Hispanic, said. 'I voted for Trump last election, but, because I thought it was going to be like … against criminals, not every Hispanic, Spanish-lookalike.'
'They will assume that we are all illegals,' he continued. 'They're just following Hispanic people.'
Machado said his support for the administration has been shaken. Others have been rattled by how and where Trump's policies are being applied.
That dissonance is well articulated in a recent New York Times piece about a small Missouri town that supported Trump – and is now grappling with the effects of his decisions.
Many residents of Kennett, Missouri, were stunned when a beloved neighbor, Carol, was arrested and jailed to await deportation after being summoned to Ice offices in St Louis in April. According to the government, Carol came to the US from Hong Kong in 2004, and has spent the past two decades trying to secure legal stay in the country, ultimately being granted a temporary permission to stay known as an order of supervision. Carol's most recent order of supervision was supposed to be valid through August 2025, but on the day of her arrest, she was told it was being terminated.
Now, despite the fact that she's spent the last two decades building a life and community in this small town, getting married and buying a house, she's spent weeks moving between jails as she awaits a final decision on her deportation.
'I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,' said Vanessa Cowart, who knows Carol from church. 'But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves … This is Carol.'
That last line – and the Kennett story as a whole – reveals a deeply American way of thinking about law and order and civil liberties: that anything is fair game once someone is considered a 'criminal'. It's an idea that has been sent into overdrive in the Trump years, where 'criminal' has become a catch-all for the most evil, dangerous and undesirable in our communities, and shorthand for referencing anyone society doesn't want to deal with.
Trump ran on a campaign of hate, and the voters who helped cement that hatred and codify it into policy are now encountering the kind of state-sanctioned violence they endorsed at the ballot box.
Still, to say 'I told you so' in a moment like this is not only useless, it feels like a cruel understatement when the thing you were warning about is so destructive.
So what can we learn from this? US leadership is clearly invested in the destruction of vulnerable American lives. If people who have been directly affected by Trump's behaviour still find reasons to rationalize his leadership, it's a reminder that ousting this regime will require the rest of us to speak out against tyranny and the establishment politics that got us here in the first place.
Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
22 minutes ago
- The Independent
Off-duty Border Patrol agent shot in a Manhattan park in apparent botched robbery, police say
An off-duty U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer was shot in a Manhattan park on Saturday following an apparent robbery gone wrong, New York City police and federal officials said. The 42-year-old officer was in stable condition Sunday and expected to survive. There was no indication that he was targeted because of his employment, New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said. The officer, who was not in uniform, had been sitting with a woman in a park beneath the George Washington Bridge when two men approached on a moped just before midnight. The passenger got off and approached the officer, who realized he was being robbed and drew his service weapon, Tisch said. The two exchanged gunfire and the off-duty officer was shot in the face and arm. The perpetrator was injured before he and the moped driver rode off, police said. A person of interest, identified as Miguel Mora, a 21-year-old undocumented immigrant with an extensive criminal past, was taken into custody after arriving at a Bronx hospital with gunshot wounds to the groin and leg, Tisch said. It was unknown if Mora had an attorney. The police commissioner said Mora's injuries were consistent with what was seen on surveillance video of the shooting shared by the Department of Homeland Security. The search for his alleged accomplice continued Sunday. Mora entered the country illegally through Arizona in 2023 and had two prior arrests for domestic violence in New York. He was wanted in New York to face accusations of robbery and felony assault, and in Massachusetts over a stolen weapons case, Tisch said. In a social media post Sunday afternoon, President Donald Trump seized on the shooting as evidence of Democrats' failures to secure the border. 'The CBP Officer bravely fought off his attacker, despite his wounds, demonstrating enormous Skill and Courage,' Trump added. The shooting comes as federal officials warn of a surge of attacks on agents carrying out Trump's mass deportation agenda. As enforcement efforts have ramped up in recent months, many officers have chosen to cover their faces with the goal of avoiding harassment in public and online. On Sunday, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Todd Lyons, said he would allow agents to continue covering their faces as a safety measure. 'If that's a tool that the men and women of ICE that keeps themselves and their families safe, then I will allow it,' Lyons said.
Daily Mail
23 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Trump calls for Obama's arrest with jaw-dropping Truth Social post after Tulsi Gabbard claimed ex-president was behind 'years-long coup'
President Trump has called for Barack Obama to be arrested after spy chief Tulsi Gabbard claimed the former leader was behind a 'years-long coup' against him. Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, declassified hundreds of documents on Friday related to the investigation in to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. She claimed the emails reveal a conspiracy by Obama to try and subvert Trump's win by using 'manufactured and politicized intelligence' to make it seem like bad actors may have influenced the result. 'Their goal was to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup with the objective of trying to usurp the President from fulfilling the mandate bestowed upon him by the American people,' Gabbard said. Her claims were reiterated by Trump who republished her interviews with Fox and several others about the issue on Truth Social. And on Sunday, he escalated things further by reposting an AI-generated TikTok which showed Obama being apprehended and placed in handcuffs along with the message, 'No one is above the law'. Gabbard released an 114-page document she says shows the Obama administration was aware that there was no threat of Russia 'directly' manipulating the vote in 2016. She called for an investigatio n into and potential criminal prosecution of anyone who took part – which may include the ex-President and James Comey, the former FBI director. The documents revealed insider discussions among top Obama officials about Russia's much-debated role in the 2016 US elections. Although many of the documents are highly redacted or completely blacked out, they show conversations among favorite Trump targets including former intel chief James Clapper, as officials debated how to describe Russian election activity. The documents found that there was 'no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means'. But Gabbard says the documents show that Democrats chose to ignore that - or even promote the opposite narrative - to try and take down Trump. 'Their egregious abuse of power and blatant rejection of our Constitution threatens the very foundation and integrity of our democratic republic,' Gabbard in a blistering statement accompanying the document release. 'No matter how powerful, every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, to ensure nothing like this ever happens again.' Several of the documents put out by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) show officials found that Russia either wouldn't try or wouldn't be able to shift the outcome of a US vote. 'Russia probably is not trying to going to be able to? [influence] the election by using cyber means to manipulate computer-enabled election infrastructure,' reads one draft line by the then-deputy director of ODNI. Documents show officials crafting a document saying there wasn't an indication Russia could manipulate the vote count The administration unsealed the documents amid the fury over the Jeffrey Epstein files By December 9, following Trump's stunning win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, a document to top intelligence officials tasked them with creating an assessment 'per the President's request' about 'tools Moscow used and actions it took to influence the 2016 election' 'We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,' according to a January 2017 report titled 'Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections.' The report then mentioned Russian cyber operations against both political parties. Of the material Gabbard released, one new August 31, 2016 document by an official with their name blacked out states that the 'thrust of the analysis is that there is no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count through cyber means.' Democrats have responded by claiming that Gabbard's declassification is designed to deflect from the Department of Justice's decision to close its investigation into the handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. In response Trump has instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to disclose grand jury testimony files, pending court approval.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Trump news at a glance: president goes on offensive over NFL and MBL team names
Donald Trump has weighed into a new fight – this time with two sports teams. The president wants Washington's football franchise the Commanders and Cleveland baseball team the Guardians to revert to their former names, which were abandoned in recent years due to being racially insensitive to Native Americans. Trump said on Sunday on Truth Social that: 'The Washington 'Whatever's' should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team …. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past.' Josh Harris, whose group bought the Commanders in 2023, said earlier this year the name was here to stay. The Guardians' president of baseball operations, Chris Antonetti, indicated before Sunday's game against the Athletics that there weren't any plans to revisit the name change. Donald Trump has said that he would move to block the Commanders' plans to build a new stadium at the old RFK Stadium site in Washington DC unless they changed their name. It is unclear if Trump would be able to do so. The RFK Stadium site was once on federal land but Joe Biden signed a bill earlier this year – one of his final acts in office – transferring control to the DC city government for a 99-year term. Trump also posted that the call to change names applied to Cleveland's baseball team, which he called 'one of the six original baseball teams'. Read the full story An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead. According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, longtime Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. He and his wife booked an appointment to get it replaced and when he arrived at the office on 20 June he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing. Read the full story The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday he would keep allowing the controversial practice of his officers wearing masks over their faces during their arrest raids. As Trump has ramped up his unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country, Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force. Legal advocates and attorneys general have argued that it poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear. Read the full story Scores of scientists conducting vital research across a range of fields from infectious diseases, robotics and education to computer science and the climate crisis have responded to a Guardian online callout to share their experiences about the impact of the Trump administration's cuts to science funding. Many said they had already had funding slashed or programs terminated, while others feared that cuts were inevitable and were beginning to search for alternative work, either overseas or outside science. So far the cuts have led to a 60% reduction in Johnson's team, and fear is mounting over the future of 30 years of climate data and expertise as communities across the US are battered by increasingly destructive extreme weather events. Read the full story Ever since Donald Trump began his second presidency, he has used an 'invented' national energy emergency to help justify expanding oil, gas and coal while slashing green energy – despite years of scientific evidence that burning fossil fuels has contributed significantly to climate change, say scholars and watchdogs. It's an agenda that in only its first six months has put back environmental progress by decades, they say. Read the full story Trump said he would help Afghans detained in the United Arab Emirates for years after fleeing their country when the US pulled out and the Taliban took power. Polls released on Sunday showed falling support among Americans for Trump's hardline measures against illegal immigration, as the Republican president celebrated six months back in power. Polls from CNN and CBS show Trump has lost majority support for his deportation approach. A growing group of African Americans are ditching corporate big-box retail stores that rolled back their DEI programs and instead are shopping at small, minority- and women-owned businesses they believe value their dollars more. Catching up? Here's what happened on 19 July.
