An investigation into the machinery of Donald Trump's second administration reveals how a core group of advisors—Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Susie Wiles, Dan Scavino, Karoline Leavitt, James Blair, and Vince Haley—are translating presidential authority into concrete policy through immigration enforcement, military operations, personnel control, and institutional reorganization. Miller's documented influence has produced more than 200 executive orders targeting immigration, while Hegseth faces bipartisan congressional scrutiny over a Pentagon Inspector General report finding he violated protocols by sharing classified information on Signal and over controversial Caribbean military strikes. Scavino now controls "almost all positions in government" through the Presidential Personnel Office. This examination of Trump's first eleven months back in office documents how loyalty-based staffing, agency reorganizations, and centralized decision-making are reshaping federal institutions in ways that may outlast this administration.
Tag: immigration enforcement
From Robert Charles to ICE: Echoes of State Violence and Resistance in America
The summer heat bore down on New Orleans that July night in 1900 when gunfire first cracked the air. Robert Charles, a Black laborer who had dared to sit on a porch in a white neighborhood, would be dead within four days—his body riddled with bullets, then mutilated by a mob drunk on the kind of rage that newspapers cultivated and police sanctioned. Before he fell, Charles killed several officers in what he surely understood would be his final stand. The city erupted. White mobs roamed the streets hunting Black residents. At least 28 people died, most of them Black civilians guilty of nothing more than existing in the wrong place during a wave of sanctioned terror. The rhetoric that summer was familiar: dangerous criminals, threats to public safety, the necessity of force. Charles was not portrayed as a man defending himself against a violent arrest in a society that offered him no legal protection. He was a monster to be exterminated, and the Black community that harbored him deserved collective punishment. More than a century later, the same language of fear and control echoes through the detention centers and deportation raids of today.