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Intercept (7/8/25)

This week on CounterSpin: Along with many other hate-driven harms, the budget bill puts Stephen Miller’s cruel and bizarre mass deportation plan on steroids. $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers; that’s a 62% larger budget than the entire federal prison system.

The goons hiding their faces and IDs while they snatch people off the street? ICE’s “enforcement and deportation operations” get $30 billion. $46 billion for a “border wall,” because that’s evidently not a cartoon. And in a lesser-noticed piece: While courts are backlogged with immigrants complying with legal processes to access citizenship, the bill caps the number of immigration judges to 800, ensuring more people will be kept in vulnerable legal status.

The Economic Policy Institute tells us that increases in immigration enforcement will cause widespread job losses for both immigrant and US-born workers, particularly in construction and childcare: “While Trump and other conservatives claim that increased deportations will somehow magically create jobs for US-born workers, the existing evidence shows that the opposite is true: They will cause immense harm to workers and families, shrink the economy, and weaken the labor market for everyone.”

That’s without mentioning how ICE is telling people they’re being moved from Texas to Louisiana and then dumping them in South Sudan, as the Intercept’s Nick Turse reports. Or the puerile delight Republicans find in holding people in an alligator swamp, and forbidding journalists and public officials from seeing what goes on there.

It’s important to see that Donald Trump, while especially craven, is using tools he was given, in terms of the apparatus for mass deportations, including in the acceptance of prisons as economic boons for struggling localities. So the fight can’t be just anti-Trump, but must be rooted in policy and practice and law—and most of all, in community and shared humanity.

We’ll talk about standing up for human beings because they’re human beings with Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network.

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Texas floods.