Her six-figure TV ad campaign, launched in mid-May, includes a spot titled “Never Backs Down” — a declaration that the Rockland County legislator and frontrunner in New York’s competitive 17th Congressional District Democratic primary doesn’t flinch when it comes to ICE. Patch

Her personal financial disclosure tells a different story.

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$395,000 in the Companies Arming ICE

Davidson introduced the “Safety and Dignity for All Act,” a bill that would limit how sheriff’s deputies and other county employees work alongside ICE. What she doesn’t mention in her ads: she holds stock in three companies that have made the agency’s enforcement operations possible. CBS News

As of May 2026, Davidson and her family reported owning up to $395,000 in Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle — three corporations with active ICE contracts. She also collected up to $12,300 in dividend income from those holdings since the start of 2025.

Microsoft’s ICE relationship alone is substantial. The Guardian reported earlier this year that ICE deepened its reliance on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform as it ramped up arrest and deportation operations — more than tripling the amount of data it stored there. Amazon’s relationship with the agency is just as lucrative: Forbes reported that ICE spent a record $25 million with Amazon over just an eight-month period in the first year of the second Trump administration. Oracle, meanwhile, has landed ICE cloud infrastructure contracts through federal procurement channels.

Davidson is not just a passive shareholder. She is a candidate running immigration enforcement oversight as a central promise — while collecting dividend checks from the companies making that enforcement possible.

Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment before publication.

The Bill That Went Nowhere

Davidson, alongside Majority Leader Alden Wolfe, Deputy Majority Leader Dana Stilley, Public Safety Committee Chair Paul Cleary, and Legislator Jesse Malowitz, introduced the Safety and Dignity for All Act in February — timed to follow national outrage over ICE’s deadly operations in Minneapolis. Rcbizjournal

“We have already seen Rockland’s vibrant and diverse communities, including small businesses and nonprofits, impacted by ICE’s presence,” Davidson said in a statement at the time. “We’re seeing chronic absenteeism in our schools because students are afraid that they or their parents will be picked up and deported.” The Center Square

The bill drew a packed house. Hundreds of people gathered outside and inside the county legislative building in New City to debate it. Advocates showed up. The community showed up. Davidson had her moment. CBS News

Then the bill stalled.

Lawmakers did not move forward with a vote to schedule a public hearing on the proposed Safety and Dignity for All Act after the item was removed from the agenda during the Feb. 3 legislative session. Rockland County Legislature Chairman Jay Hood said the legislation was pulled after concerns were raised by the Rockland County District Attorney’s Office and the Rockland County Sheriff’s Office, both of which were not comfortable proceeding. Daily Voice

That’s a supermajority that couldn’t muster a public hearing. Democrats hold a 12-5 supermajority in the Rockland legislature. Westchester County had already passed comparable legislation years earlier. Davidson had the votes, the moment, and the public support. She pulled back. Ballotpedia

Since then: nothing. No revised bill. No renewed push. No floor vote.

Millions More — and Questions About Who She’ll Fight For

The ICE contractor stocks are not the only conflict embedded in Davidson’s financial life. Her May 2026 personal financial disclosure shows she and her family hold more than $5 million in direct stock across 21 companies.

During her congressional run, she sold off holdings in UnitedHealth — one of the nation’s largest health insurance companies — collecting up to $19,000 in dividends and capital gains while the company faced intense scrutiny over patient care denials. She also sold stock in Thermo Fisher Scientific and Eli Lilly, two pharmaceutical giants, and in NextEra Energy, which is becoming the largest utility monopoly in the world, pocketing thousands more in proceeds.

She additionally sold off stock in Vertiv, a major data center infrastructure company — at the same time Rockland County residents were fighting back against data centers driving up their electric bills.

None of those conflicts appear in her ads.

The Race and What’s at Stake

Davidson entered the primary with measurable advantages in visibility, favorability, and early support, with 84% of respondents saying they would be likely to support her after hearing a brief description of her background and record — including, notably, her opposition to immigration enforcement. NY-17 is one of the most competitive House districts in the country, making this primary a national Democratic priority for the 2026 midterms. The winner faces Republican incumbent Rep. Mike Lawler in November. PatchLines.com

Davidson’s brand is the fighter who delivers. But the record in Rockland is a bill that never got a hearing, a portfolio that profits from the machinery of deportation, and a TV ad telling Hudson Valley voters she never backs down.

The primary is June 23. Migrants in Rockland County will be watching.

But the vote was only half the battle. The bill now moves to the House, where a GOP conference that has spent months fighting itself over the shape, size, and contents of this legislation is waiting.

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A Night of Votes That Changed Nothing

The vote-a-rama that stretched across Thursday and into Friday’s predawn hours was, at its core, a test of whether Senate Republicans would put limits on a separate controversy riding alongside the immigration money: Trump’s $1.776 billion anti-weaponization settlement fund — a payout mechanism tied to Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.

They wouldn’t.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., tried hardest. He spent hours in talks with the Senate Parliamentarian, searching for a way to redirect the fund’s payouts to law enforcement officers injured on Jan. 6, 2021. It would have been a pointed rebuke: Trump’s fund, by design, could flow to the same people who beat those officers. Cassidy’s amendment failed.

Before that, a Democratic motion to ban the settlement outright was held open for hours as vulnerable Republicans — including Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, both facing reelection — deliberated. Cassidy eventually voted against it, sealing its defeat. Husted and Sullivan voted yes, for whatever that was worth.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., offered a separate amendment that would have banned the fund and redirected the money to a Department of Justice anti-fraud account. Most Democrats voted against it anyway, and it died.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had the sharpest summary of where things landed: Republicans were leaving taxpayers to rely on a promise from “Donald Trump’s personal fixer. That is not accountability. That is a permission slip.”

What the Bill Actually Does

The $70 billion package funds ICE and the Border Patrol through the end of Trump’s term — roughly three years. Republicans used budget reconciliation to get around the 60-vote filibuster threshold, bypassing Democratic objections entirely.

Democrats had blocked ICE and Border Patrol funding since early this year, demanding policy reforms following the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January. Those demands — better officer identification, increased use of judicial warrants — went nowhere in negotiations. The rest of the Department of Homeland Security was eventually funded in late April with bipartisan support, but ICE and CBP remained without regular appropriations until Friday’s vote.

The House Is a Different Animal

Passing this bill in the Senate was always going to be easier than passing it in the House, and the history of this legislation makes that plain.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Andy Harris, R-Md., has already signaled his members aren’t in any rush. “There’s no emergency about moving it by June 1, except the president has thrown it out there,” Harris told reporters — and that was before the Senate even finished its vote. CBS News

The Freedom Caucus has been a recurring obstacle throughout this process. The group has called for fully funding the entire Department of Homeland Security in a single GOP-only reconciliation bill, rejecting leadership’s two-step approach that pairs the partisan ICE funding bill with the bipartisan Senate bill covering the rest of DHS. The Hill

Sequencing is Speaker Mike Johnson’s other headache. House Republicans have resisted passing the bipartisan Senate bill funding the rest of DHS and sat on it for weeks, insisting on securing immigration enforcement funding first. Now that the Senate has delivered that, Johnson still has to convince his conference that the two-track approach holds — and that a promised third reconciliation bill for other priorities will actually materialize. The Hill

The weaponization fund, which Senate Republicans spent all night failing to kill, is now the House’s problem too. GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., expressed “urgent concern” about the anti-weaponization fund, calling it a dangerous threat to institutional transparency — and said he will not support funding for it. He won’t be alone. CBS News

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., who shepherded the bill through a chaotic overnight session, offered a measured warning before the final vote: other parts of DHS may run out of money before the House finishes its work.

The fund survived. The Senate voted. Now the House decides whether ICE gets its money — and whether the slush fund that shadowed this bill across two chambers gets to survive the trip.

Ally Henny, a chaplain at a Chicago hospital and a religious leader on the city’s southeast side, told Migrant Insider she was preparing to leave for work around 6:40 a.m. when she heard a man’s voice cut through the morning quiet.

“Ayuda.”

She knew enough Spanish to know what it meant.

“You Are Not the Chicago Police”

Henny said she looked down the street and saw flashing lights and an unmarked black car. The agents on the scene were wearing tactical vests marked “POLICE” — but she knew immediately they weren’t CPD.

“I started yelling, ‘You are not the Chicago Police,’” she told Migrant Insider. She began calling out “ICE, ICE, ICE” to warn the neighborhood.

She said she asked one of the agents what the man had done. One told her to move. Another said they had a warrant. Then a third agent ran toward her.

“A third ICE agent ran over and tried to shove me to the ground,” she said. Watch a bystander video of the encounter here:

Henny and her husband captured the incident on two separate videos, which she provided to Migrant Insider.

“I Knew It Could Happen to Me Too”

Henny, who is Black, said her decision to intervene was as personal as it was moral.

“Because I know it could happen to me too,” she said. “I’m an African American woman. This could very easily happen to me. If it happened to me, I would hope that my neighbors would step up and say something.”

She didn’t flinch in her assessment of the administration behind the agents who shoved her.

“I think it’s wrong that the Trump administration is going after migrants,” she said. “I think that it’s wrong the ways that the Trump administration is treating my neighbors. And I’m not going to stand for it.”

When asked what she wished she had done differently, Henny had one regret — and it wasn’t stepping in.

“I wish I had made more of a ruckus than I did, even after ol’ boy put his hands on me,” she said. “There were people outside watching and I would have tried to get those people to rally, intervene, or react.”

South Shore Has Seen This Before

Tuesday morning’s confrontation did not happen in a vacuum. Henny lives approximately a mile from the M75 apartments, which were raided by federal immigration agents last year.

South Shore is one of several Chicago neighborhoods that have been repeatedly swept during Operation Midway Blitz — the DHS-branded enforcement campaign that began in September 2025 and produced an estimated 1,600 arrests, with roughly 81 percent of those detained carrying no prior criminal convictions, according to data later analyzed by The Marshall Project.

The operation brought together ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, ICE Homeland Security Investigations, CBP tactical units, and U.S. Marshals task forces — often operating from unmarked vehicles with mixed insignia, the same configuration Henny described encountering on her block Tuesday morning.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker created the Illinois Accountability Commission in October 2025 specifically to investigate federal immigration enforcement conduct during the Blitz. The commission, chaired by former federal judge Rubén Castillo, has since conducted 16 independent investigations and reviewed hundreds of hours of video, including body-cam footage of violent arrests in Evanston and the shooting of Chicago resident Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by federal officers last fall.

A federal judge in February 2026 ordered the release of four individuals as test cases out of 615 people identified as likely having been arrested without proper warrants during the Blitz — in possible violation of the Castañon Nava consent decree, which limits ICE’s authority to conduct warrantless vehicle stops and collateral arrests across six Midwestern states.

Despite all of it, as Chicago alderpersons have been warning residents in ward-level briefings: deportation operations in the city remain ongoing.

The identity of the man taken from Henny’s block Tuesday morning has not yet been confirmed. Migrant Insider is continuing to report.

“I just knew a man was crying for help,” Henny said, “and so I tried to help.”

She had one message for the agents who put their hands on her.

“I hope the ICE agents feel really bad for what they did.”

Migrant Insider has been the most independent news outlet in the Washington press corps since we launched in October, 2024. If you’ve read this far, please consider supporting us by subscribing to the site:

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It was his first appearance before Congress since his confirmation in March. It will not be his last uncomfortable afternoon under the lights — the House Homeland Security Committee picks up where the Senate left off Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. in 310 Cannon.

“Chilling.”

The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security opened its hearing on the Trump administration’s Fiscal Year 2027 DHS budget request, but the sharpest exchange had little to do with line items.

Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the subcommittee, asked Mullin a simple question: will DHS comply with court orders even when judges rule that the department is acting illegally?

Mullin wouldn’t say yes.

He offered, instead, that DHS will “never break the Constitution” and “won’t break the law” — formulations careful enough to leave open the door he was being asked to close. When Murphy pressed the point, Mullin turned the attack: if the courts weren’t “politicized,” he said, he could probably answer differently. Some judges, he suggested, use the bench for “political opinion, not just the rule of law.”

Murphy called the answers “chilling.” He warned that an administration that picks which court orders to honor based on whether it likes the judge is laying the groundwork for every future administration to do the same.

The exchange didn’t happen in a vacuum. A Republican-appointed judge had already found, in a Minnesota ruling, that ICE had violated nearly 100 court orders in roughly a month. Mullin’s response to that documented record of non-compliance was to suggest that lower-court rulings get overturned and that this proves politicization — implying, in effect, that DHS should not treat every district court order as binding until the “upper courts” weigh in.

The Money Fight Is Now a Rule-of-Law Fight

The hearing’s official subject — DHS’s FY 2027 budget — never really separated itself from the court-orders fight.

Republicans came ready to align with Trump’s mass-deportation push, rallying around a request for roughly $72 billion in additional ICE and Border Patrol funding over three years, layered on top of approximately $170 billion in immigration enforcement spending already approved in 2025. Mullin pressed the case that Congress, Democrats specifically, had failed to “fund his officers.”

Democrats pressed back in the only logical direction: why appropriate billions more to an agency whose secretary won’t commit to obeying a judge?

Murphy put the equation plainly: the money debate and the rule-of-law question are the same question. You cannot authorize a deportation machine and simultaneously shrug at the judicial limits designed to constrain it.

Newark, the World Cup, and the Art of the Threat

Senators also took up Mullin’s recent threat to pull Customs and Border Protection officers from Newark Liberty International Airport — a move he floated publicly as leverage against what he called “sanctuary city” politicians and as a response to protests outside the Delaney Hall ICE detention facility in New Jersey.

The practical stakes are significant: travel and business groups have warned that reassigning CBP passport-control officers from Newark could cost around $8 billion a year in lost tourist revenue and cause cascading disruptions at a major international hub — with the FIFA World Cup’s U.S. matches beginning in a matter of weeks.

At the hearing, Mullin walked back the threat’s immediacy, saying state and local law enforcement are now cooperating more and the operational pressure has eased. But he defended the underlying posture: DHS, in his telling, is simply reallocating resources to protect ICE staff from protesters.

Democrats framed it differently. If DHS will threaten airports to punish jurisdictions that resist its immigration agenda, and call the courts “politicized” when they rule against it, and describe state health inspectors attempting to visit a detention facility as politically motivated — then the pattern is not enforcement. It’s retaliation dressed up as administration.

What the House Is Watching For

Democratic sources on the House Homeland Security Committee tell Migrant Insider that among the questions members are prepared to put to Mullin Wednesday is a direct one about Jonathan Ross — the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis on January 7.

Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, was shot at close range in her SUV in a residential neighborhood as she attempted to drive away from a group of federal agents conducting door-to-door enforcement operations. Ross — placed on just three days of administrative leave after the shooting, and since transferred to a different state where he continues to work in both an administrative and investigative capacity — has not been charged. The Trump administration moved early to sideline Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from the investigation, leaving it solely to the FBI, whose probe has proceeded slowly and under a cloud of controversy.

Democratic members want to know: Is Ross still employed by ICE? In what capacity? And when, if ever, will DHS conduct its own internal affairs review — or does the agency intend to run out the clock behind the FBI investigation indefinitely?

The question will force Mullin, who positioned himself Tuesday as a more “subdued” executor of the mass-deportation program than his predecessor Kristi Noem, to account for what accountability inside his agency actually looks like.

Other likely flashpoints in today’s House session: members from New York, New Jersey, and other World Cup host cities pressing for specifics on the Newark threat and whether similar leverage is on the table for Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, or Seattle; close questioning on detention conditions at Delaney Hall, including state health inspectors’ access; and, again, the question Mullin ducked in the Senate — yes or no, will DHS follow court orders?

He had one hearing to answer it cleanly. He chose not to. He gets another chance today.

The hearing begins at 10 a.m. Eastern in 310 Cannon House Office Building and will be livestreamed on C-SPAN.

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Three separate rulemaking actions, all traceable to HR-1 or the administration’s broader anti-immigration executive agenda, are now winding through the regulatory process. Together, they signal something bigger than any single policy change: a deliberate effort to make immigration consequences permanent, expensive, and nearly impossible to escape — even for people who are already gone.

The $18,000 Penalty for Missing Court

Start with the largest number: $18,000.

That is the mandatory civil fee the Department of Homeland Security has proposed for any noncitizen who was ordered removed in absentia — meaning they missed a court date — and is later arrested by ICE. The current fee is $5,130. Under the proposed rule, citing new statutory authority created by HR-1, the fee would more than triple overnight.

The rule is non-waivable. The only escape is if the in absentia order itself is vacated — and the grounds for that are narrow: lack of proper notice, or exceptional circumstances. If neither applies, the $18,000 is owed, on top of detention and deportation.

To understand the scale of who could be affected, look at EOIR’s own numbers embedded in the rule: in absentia removal orders jumped from 62,510 in 2022 to 222,920 in 2024 — a 257% increase — and then to 309,700 in 2025. That last figure is not a historical curiosity. It is the pool of people this fee is designed to reach the moment ICE finds them.

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Jean Wilson Brutus was Haitian. He arrived at Delaney Hall and was dead within 24 hours. ICE waited a week to say anything publicly.

A pregnant woman currently inside the facility is in excruciating pain. She has no access to an OB-GYN.

Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., has been documenting conditions like these since last May. She spoke to Migrant Insider this week as a coordinated hunger and labor strike by roughly 300 detainees enters its second week — and as the Trump administration pursues felony charges against her for showing up.

“The facility is unfit to be open,” McIver said, “and what we’re seeing play out today is over a year-long stretch of this treatment of over 800 people who are detained there.”

What’s Happening Inside

Delaney Hall is a former county facility in Newark, reopened in 2025 under a contract between ICE and GEO Group — one of the country’s largest private prison operators — with roughly 1,000 beds. From the day ICE began housing detainees there, elected officials and immigrant advocates have been raising alarms. GEO and ICE have swatted those alarms away, describing critics as “sanctuary city and open borders politicians” running a “politicized campaign.”

What the detainees describe in letters bearing nearly 300 signatures is something else entirely: overcrowding, filthy bathrooms, abusive guards, worms and rotten food, threats of deportation wielded as leverage to pressure people into so-called self-deportation.

McIver has sat across from more than 100 detainees inside — face to face, table to table. Seniors in high school with valid Temporary Protected Status protections. People on approved student or work visas. Individuals detained at immigration court while waiting for their hearings.

“Food that they’re receiving, when they receive it, is spoiled,” she told Migrant Insider. “They’re also not getting access to medical care, so we have a ton of detainees there who have chronic diseases who do not have access to their medicine.”

On May 22, detainees launched a coordinated hunger and labor strike, refusing both meals and facility work assignments in protest of conditions and due process violations. Their demand, relayed through advocates and signed letters, is not cleaner bathrooms or better food. It is freedom.

DHS has publicly stated there is no hunger strike occurring at Delaney Hall.

The Men They Targeted

When detainees began organizing, Delaney Hall and federal authorities responded — not with food or medicine, but with transfers.

Martín Soto became one of the most visible faces of the strike. After he began organizing inside, advocates and family say he was subjected to prolonged interrogations and threats before being abruptly removed from the facility. Protesters outside — who had been warned a white van was coming for him — blocked it. Witnesses say they saw Soto dragged into the vehicle while he shouted and struck the window from the inside. As of this writing, his family does not know where he was taken.

Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., told local media that at least 13 detainees were transferred out of Delaney Hall shortly after the strike began — retaliation, he said, for their participation. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who visited the facility, reported that detainees who speak out about conditions or join the hunger strike are “being transferred and having their hearings delayed because they’re speaking about how horribly this facility treats them,” and that four detainees had been hospitalized.

The detainee letters describe the pattern in plain terms: complain, organize, or refuse food, and you risk transfer to a more remote jail, loss of visitation, or other punishments. People who speak to congressional delegations are warned they could lose visitation or have their hearings pushed back.

McIver was aware of the retaliation dynamic — and deliberately refused to name who organized the strike when asked.

“I don’t want to put any detainees on any type of public forum to have them be retaliated against,” she said. “That’s really a dangerous situation for them.”

Then there is Jean Wilson Brutus, whose name should not be forgotten. The Haitian national arrived at Delaney Hall in December 2025 and was dead within 24 hours. ICE did not acknowledge his death publicly for a week. The hunger strikers cite his case explicitly in their demands for the release of medically vulnerable detainees — a reminder, they say, of what “adequate care” looks like at this facility.

The Protesters in the Street

Outside the gates, the response has grown louder by the day.

Family members, immigrant rights organizations, and community members have organized daily protests, overnight vigils, and direct action — at times forming human chains and blocking vans in attempts to stop the transfer of hunger strike organizers. Federal agents have responded with tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls, and baton charges into crowds. Multiple people have been arrested and injured.

Among the protesters: a girl no older than 10, holding a megaphone outside Delaney Hall, demanding her father’s release.

McIver’s message to those in the street is direct — and comes from someone who knows what it means to have ICE come for you when you show up.

“My number one message to protesters is, one, to stay safe and be peaceful,” she said. “ICE, you know, they are so rogue and so dangerous that they need no reason to kill people and hurt them.”

She invoked Minnesota, where ICE operations turned fatal. “We don’t want to agitate the situation where it has people dying in the street like we saw in Minnesota.”

The Congresswoman Under Indictment

McIver has been to Delaney Hall before. That’s the problem, as far as the Trump administration is concerned.

On May 9, 2025, she joined fellow New Jersey Democrats Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman and Rob Menendez for an unannounced oversight visit. Congressional appropriations law explicitly bars DHS from blocking such visits. ICE and facility staff stalled their access anyway. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka attempted to join the delegation in his own city — and was arrested.

In the chaos, Acting U.S. Attorney Alina Habba announced McIver was being charged under 18 U.S.C. § 111(a)(1) — assaulting, resisting, impeding, and interfering with federal officers. If convicted on all counts, she faces up to roughly 17 years in prison. She has pleaded not guilty. She is currently pregnant with her second child.

Her legal team argues everything she did was protected under the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause — that demanding access, confronting ICE, and advocating for detainees is exactly what congressional oversight looks like. In November 2025, U.S. District Judge Jamel Semper denied her motion to dismiss all charges, allowing at least two counts to proceed to trial.

On the one-year anniversary of the Delaney Hall confrontation, McIver introduced the “No Delay for Immigration Oversight Act” with Watson Coleman and Menendez — legislation that would permanently codify Congress’s right to immediate, unimpeded access to ICE detention facilities and require the termination of federal contracts with any private operator that blocks a visit.

‘Cut the Shit Out’

Asked what she would say sitting across from DHS Secretary Mullen, McIver didn’t reach for diplomatic language.

“I would tell him that the things that are happening there are wrong, are wrong, and, you know, they need to cut, cut the shit out,” she said. “The facility needs to close. I would reiterate to him about the abuses that are taking place in this facility, and the way that they are responding, including him, who hasn’t even been on the job for more than 100 days, is irresponsible, it’s ineffective, it’s unprofessional.”

She drew a direct line from former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — famously a vessel for Stephen Miller’s agenda — to the current secretary.

“He was picked because he was the great guy that would take Trump’s orders at every beck and call,” McIver said. “Each secretary, whether it’s Noem or him at this point, they are enacting the president’s agenda. That’s all that they’re doing.”

McIver has not softened her position over the past year. If anything, the hunger strike and the people in the street outside Delaney Hall have confirmed what she has been saying since May 2025.

“I have said from the beginning last May that this facility should not be operating. It should be closed, it should not be open,” she said. “And honestly, it should be abolished. Nothing has changed from my tone of last May.”

Martín Soto is somewhere in the federal detention system, location unknown. Jean Wilson Brutus is dead. The pregnant woman on the inside is still waiting for a doctor.

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So when Símon Rios of WBUR asked me to join the New York Times and Boston Herald on a panel about mass deportations, I said yes. For the last five years, I’ve avoided this type of opportunity, choosing instead to focus on “the work”, as it were.

But sometimes focusing on the work means I’m getting out in the world beyond the Beltway bubble and meeting colleagues face to face who I’ve communicated with for years in DMs and group chats. Truth be told, I’ve become a bit of a hermit since I started Migrant Insider. My entire life since Trump returned to power has been lived in the two-square-mile between my home, the White House, and the Capitol.

The wider world I left for others to cover, and frankly, they’ve done a great job at it. When I launched this news site on Substack in October of 2024, there were fewer than a dozen skilled immigration reporters in the country. And that’s being generous.

Now there are hundreds of news professionals banging it out on the beat every week. Some are in print, others are in video, and others are in photography. I want to highlight one such news professional here this morning, photographer Michael Nigro, who is the subject of this excellent piece by Brian Edsall:

Underexposed by Brian Edsall

A Snapshot Into Darkness: Bearing Witness Inside 26 Federal Plaza

A small crowd congregates on the ground floor of the Jacob K. Javits building in New York City–also known as 26 Federal Plaza–following the conclusion of a naturalization ceremony that welcomes a new group of United States citizens…

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9 days ago · 52 likes · 30 comments · Brian Edsall

It’s definitely worth a read. A lot goes into covering this beat that we defined so thoroughly here last year, in some of the darkest days for migrants in American history. I also mentioned Edsall’s piece because I too have decided to take up photography as the next frontier in my news work.

Those of you who follow me closely know that I have begun shooting in 35mm, a craft that aligns well with my oil painting. I’ve even dedicated part of my art studio to building a dark room so I can develop prints in the old way. I like doing things in the old way because it takes me off my screens.

At one point last year, I was spending 8 to 10 hours a day on my screen tracking brutality by ICE and Border Patrol in videos and posts across the internet. I never left the Beltway for fear that I would be apprehended by the rising police state for my coverage by local police somewhere or at an airport security check.

Well, now I’m leaving the Beltway for forays into broader America, and maybe even abroad. Film photography is less anti-social than oil painting, and I think it has practical applications on the immigration beat and beyond. The medium also gives me the opportunity to post beautiful things on this website for a change, a website that has been a harbinger of bad news, necessary bad news, but bad news nonetheless, for the last year and a half since Trump returned to the White House.

My hope is to make this space more human, and less mechanically driven by news, through dispatches like this and snapshots into my life as the Migrant Insider. What do you think? If you’d rather be bombarded with news, I can, of course, do that too. Or are posts that are more introspective and process-based, like this one, of interest? Let me know in the comments and have a great weekend. As always, please consider supporting my work if you don’t already by subscribing below:

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WASHINGTON — She ran the ad. She made the claim. Now the record speaks.

Rep. April McClain Delaney, D-Md., the frontrunner in Maryland’s crowded Democratic House primary, is telling voters she “voted 100% against Trump’s ICE.” It is not true. Not close to true. And the receipts are sitting in the Congressional Record.

McClain Delaney has voted with Donald Trump roughly 22% of the time — nearly twice as often as any other Maryland Democrat — casting a string of pro-ICE votes that expanded the agency’s detention powers, handed it nearly $1 billion in fresh funding, and even thanked it publicly for carrying out the most aggressive mass deportation campaign in modern American history.

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The donation, first reported by Nick Schwellenbach of the Project on Government Oversight, was routed through a so-called “dark money” vehicle — a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that, by design, keeps its donors secret and faces no legal cap on contributions.

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Eleven Days

GEO’s $250,000 landed on July 15, 2025 — eleven days after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a law that nearly triples ICE’s budget and doubles immigrant detention capacity nationwide. GEO lobbied on the bill before it passed. Jordan was among its loudest champions, calling it the vehicle for “Big, Beautiful Deportations.”

The recipient, American Liberty Action Fund, shares its president, secretary, and treasurer with a Jordan-aligned…

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That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud. Somewhere between the first wave of Schedule F firings and the gutting of USAID, somewhere between the dismantling of the Department of Education and the methodical hollowing of the career civil service, the damage stopped being a scandal and became a condition. And nobody — not the press corps, not the think tanks, not the Democratic opposition, not the inspectors general who were fired before they could finish their reports — nobody was keeping a comprehensive, systematic record of exactly what was broken, what was shredded, and what was simply abandoned.

Which means the first post-MAGA White House will walk into a building and not know what’s missing.

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USCIS Policy Memo - May 21, 2026

355KB ∙ PDF file

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Adjustment of Status is a Matter of Discretion and Administrative Grace, and an Extraordinary Relief that Permits Applicants to Dispense with the Ordinary Consular Visa Process

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The USCIS Office of the Director issued Policy Memorandum PM-602-0199 on May 21 — a document that bears no individual signature. The unsigned memo instructs agency officers that adjustment of status — the process by which immigrants present in the United States apply for a green card without departing for consular processing abroad — is “a matter of discretion and administrative grace” and “extraordinary relief,” not a guaranteed legal process.

The memo directs USCIS officers to weigh immigration violations, employment history, and whether an applicant could have pursued a green card through a U.S. consulate overseas as adverse factors when deciding whether t…

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The footage, long buried and now surfacing publicly, shows Laurie Buckhout — who ran in North Carolina’s 1st Congressional District — telling the officer who pulled her over: “Tonight the two-star at the Pentagon asked me to stay late there to discuss our strategy for tomorrow.”

The arresting officer was unmoved.

“I can’t un-arrest you, because you’re under arrest,” the officer told her, according to the footage.

Buckhout had been stopped after failing to turn on her headlights. She initially refused a voluntary blood-alcohol test — a refusal that triggered her immediate arrest under Georgia law. When a breathalyzer was eventually administered, it returned a reading of 0.088 percent, just over the state’s legal limit of 0.08 percent.

The Pentagon name-drop didn’t work. Neither did anything else.

The initial DUI charge was later reduced through a plea agreement. Buckhout pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless driving, paid a $500 fine, and the case was closed. Her campaign later acknowledged the incident, with adviser Jonathan Felts saying she “deeply regretted” the decision to drive that night and praising the professionalism of the officers involved.

What the campaign didn’t address was what the bodycam showed: a retired colonel, accustomed to rank mattering, learning in real time that it doesn’t — not on the side of a Georgia road at night, and not with a breathalyzer reading above the legal limit.

The footage had circulated as a political weapon during Buckhout’s 2024 Republican primary, where opponent Sandy Smith repeatedly raised its existence. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee piled on, using the reckless driving plea to brand her as exhibiting an “appetite for lawlessness.”

NC-01 was rated a toss-up. She lost.

The footage, now in hand, shows something the campaign memos couldn’t fully capture: not just a candidate with a DUI on her record, but one who — in the moment of accountability — reached for her rank instead of her license.

The two-star wasn’t there. The officer was.

Migrant Insider doesn’t often break stories outside of the immigration beat, but I’m always open for tips like this one, so if you have any news to share, please send it my way. If you want to support my work, please subscribe below:

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The number is $7.3 billion.

That is what ICE spent in January 2026. In one month. On detention facilities.

To put that in terms that mean something: the entire annual budget of NASA is $24.4 billion. ICE spent nearly a third of that — in 31 days — building cages.

Kevin McNellis, a federal budget analyst who reads the documents the rest of Washington walks past, ran the numbers. What he found is not a leak. It is not a whistleblower. It is what happens when you sit down with OMB apportionment records, SF-133 obligation data, and Treasury’s Monthly Treasury Statements, and you add them up.

They add up to something that the Wall Street Journal and USA Today and the Associated Press have only begun to describe.

The $45 billion reconciliation appropriation for DHS detention expansion passed last year. Since September 2025, OMB has apportioned more than $25 billion of that money to ICE for detention facilities — more than the EPA’s entire annual budget. By March 2026, ICE had obligated $7.9 billion of it, locking in binding legal agreements at a pace that suggests someone had a list of warehouses ready before the ink dried on the law.

Then came January.

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ICE published a notice of proposed rulemaking on May 7 to raise the filing fee for Form I-246 — the application used to request a discretionary stay of deportation or removal — from $155 to $755. That’s a $600 jump. A 387 percent increase. And the first adjustment to that fee since George H.W. Bush was in his first year in office.

The rule is explicit about its ideological home. It ties the hike directly to President Trump’s executive order on “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Open Borders,” framing the fee increase as a cost-shift from “taxpayers” to “those receiving the direct services” — in this case, people who are already under final removal orders and, in many instan…

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Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised Wednesday that multiple sections of the package are subject to a 60-vote point of order under the Byrd Rule, effectively killing them under a process designed to require only a simple majority.

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The most consequential change targets the most vulnerable people in the system: children.

In June 2025, USCIS rescinded its policy of granting deferred action to recipients of Special Immigrant Juvenile Status — known as SIJS — who were unable to adjust to permanent residence because a visa number wasn’t yet available. The policy had been a lifeline since 2022.

Around 200,000 SIJS youth awaiting visas had been granted protection from deportation and work authorization under the old framework. These are not people who crossed a border illegally as adults pursuing economic opportunity. They are young people whom a state court has already determined cannot safely be reunified with a parent — due to abuse, neglect, or abando…

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It is not a famous door. Nobody has put a plaque on it. No tourists photograph it. But it is the most important door in American immigration enforcement, and a man named David Venturella has walked through it so many times in the last two decades that the hinges have learned his name.

On one side of the door: the federal government, with its badges and its databases and its authority to take a human being and put them in a cage. On the other side: GEO Group, which builds the cages and bills the government by the bed, by the day, for as long as the government keeps filling them.

Venturella spent thirty-plus years mastering both sides.

He started in 1986 with the old Immigration and Naturalization Service in Chicago, working his way up through arrests and deportations and removals, climbing the ladder of a bureaucracy that measures success by how many people it puts on planes. He ran Detention and Removal Operations at IC…

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A new working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research — the first comprehensive, causal national study of the labor market effects of Trump’s immigration enforcement surge — finds no evidence that heightened ICE activity has produced job gains for U.S.-born workers. None. Not in agriculture. Not in construction. Not in manufacturing. Not anywhere.

What it did find is a chilling effect so severe it is contracting entire industries.

New Study: Mass Deportations Are Job Killers For Native-Born

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Elizabeth Cox and Chloe N. East, economists at the University of Colorado Boulder, analyzed ICE arrest data from October 2023 through October 2025 alongside Current Population Survey labor data. They divided the country into “treated” areas — those that experienced sudden, large spikes in ICE arrests — and control areas that did not. The methodology is rigorous enough to isolate enforcement shocks from the noise of tariffs, seasonal shifts, and broader macroeconomic changes happening simultaneously in 2025.

Their core finding: in high-enforcement areas, likely undocumented workers still present in the United States — people who were not arrested, not deported, simply frightened — reduced their employment by 4 percent. Among men, who make up more than 90 percent of ICE’s arrest targets, the drop was 5 percent, with two fewer hours worked per week.

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