White Americans, what? Nothing better to do
Why don’t you kick yourself out? You’re an immigrant too

— “Icky Thump,” The White Strips

Decades of cable “news” propaganda and talk radio programming have further eroded our ability to have empathy for each other and the world we share with a dwindling amount of other life. The rot remains deep. We cling to barbarity. It’s a brutal way to survive, for both us and Mother Nature.

On Sunday, a day after some 1,200 rallies across the country were held to protest the Mad King and his disgraceful cabinet, a federal judge wrote in a legal opinion that the regime’s decision to arrest a Maryland father and send him to a notorious prison in El Salvador appears to be “wholly lawless.”

The judge noted there is little to no evidence to support a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once an MS-13 gang member, according to U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis. In any case, she said, an immigration judge, in 2019, had barred the United States from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs.

A day later, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts paused a midnight deadline for the regime to bring Abrego Garcia, who has no criminal record, home. The temporary order came hours after a Department of Justice emergency appeal claimed Xinis overstepped her authority — something the regime does just about every day. Regime officials whined that the innocent father of three is no longer in U.S. custody and the government has no way to get him back.

The regime can’t get a wrongly imprisoned man out of a brutal El Salvadorian prison, but it can send Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to El Salvador to pose for pictures in front of a crowded jail cell in that very same prison.

I think our moral compass has been stolen — if we ever had one.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have admitted, in court filings, that Abrego Garcia was detained, deported, and taken to El Salvador because of an “administrative error.”

When asked about this blatant miscarriage of justice, the regime’s vice president showed no empathy. The empty ill-fitting suit noted Abrego Garcia had some traffic violations.

“He had not shown up for some court dates. This is not exactly Father of the Year here,” JD Vance said. “This is a person that we don’t think should be in our country.”

The regime’s never-truthful press secretary didn’t let ICE’s admission of a mistake ruin her fictional story.

“This individual was an MS-13 ringleader. This individual was also engaged in human trafficking,” lied Karoline Leavitt.

There is no evidence of any of that. In reality, the regime’s court filings didn’t come close to explaining the alleged evidence against Abrego Garcia.

“If you just saw the headline from the insane, failing Atlantic magazine this morning,” Leavitt continued, “you’d think this individual was the Father of the Year living in Maryland, leaving a peaceful life, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Despicable them.

Last week regime thugs detained a mother and three school-aged children who reportedly got caught up in the execution of a warrant by ICE agents for a person who was allegedly involved in some crime.

The upstate New York foursome, along with three others, who were, according to serial liars, in this country without the proper paperwork were detained and removed from the state to await being taken out of the country, perhaps to a prison camp in El Salvador.

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and Palestinian advocate, was detained March 8 and remains in ICE detention in Louisiana. The regime is seeking to deport him, but needs to manufacture a reason.

The acting ICE director has grand plans for the agency. Todd Lyons envisions squadrons of trucks rounding up immigrants the same way Amazon trucks deliver packages. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” he said at this week’s 2025 Border Security Expo, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

The federal government is spending huge amounts of taxpayer money running around kidnapping children, mothers, fathers, refugees, and at least one cancer patient and sending them to countries some have never been, or to gulags. Due process isn’t a suggestion.

This past weekend, an attorney returning from a trip with his family was reportedly detained at Detroit Metro Airport by federal agents, questioned about his clients, and asked to give up his cellphone.

Amir Makled, who is representing a pro-Palestinian demonstrator who was arrested at the University of Michigan last year, refused to surrender his phone during his 90-minute back-and-forth with two federal agents. Makled was finally released after agents got a look at his contacts list.

The regime is now targeting attorneys who are handling issues the Mad King doesn’t like or representing people MAGAs “don’t think should be in our country.”

Could a regime enabler please explain to me how this use of money, time, and resources to target, track down, detain, deport, threaten, and aggressively punish people who aren’t gang members, violent criminals, or drug dealers makes us great?

From any vantage point, it makes us weak, sick, and cruel. Also, governing isn’t supposed to be run like a business, especially by someone who has bankrupted six and couldn’t win a game of Monopoly. Nor should it be produced like a reality TV show or “Cops.”

While taxpayers pay for the Gestapo to bang on college dormitory doors looking for students sympathetic to Palestinian causes, we also foot the bill for the Mad King’s long weekends of golfing and the cosplay of pathetic regime officials — from Vance dressed in full sniper regalia to shoot a weapon at a military base to Noem dressing up as a firefighter at a Coast Guard station in Alaska.

In the meantime, while these bootlickers pretend to do jobs they are unqualified to hold, in both the real world and playtime, the regime randomly, unprofessionally, and often illegally fires those with experience and qualification, and then gleefully brags about hurting families and hampering responsive governance.

Governing is about public service, not breaking things the Mad King doesn’t like, understand, or use. But in the MAGA world of no accountability, improving public outcomes isn’t the goal. These authoritarian terrorists and hateful Christians do better in their life by serving those with the most who want more.

They are servants of narrow private interests. They abuse public office — i.e., taxpayer money and regulatory power — to benefit specific groups. It’s continuous giveaways coupled with extortion to benefit the few over the rest of us. Purposely crash the economy, to create a recession or even a depression, so the wealth class can buy up the remaining parts at a steep discount. Or, play games with tariffs, so Mad King insiders can manipulate the market.

Defunding and threatening libraries, museums, and universities is about erasing the past and controlling the future. The Mad King has issued an executive order ridiculously titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Like most of his idiotic declarations, it’s likely illegal. The president can only execute laws; he (hopefully someday soon, her) can’t himself decide how museums, libraries, and universities function or look.

The same rules of engagement apply to our national parks.

The more troubling aspect of this particular executive order is the implicit assertion that the current occupier of our White House has a monopoly on truth and sanity.

In response to the EO, the Organization of American Historians said it “represents a disturbing attack on core institutions and the public presentation of history” and “This is not a return to sanity. Rather, it sanitizes to destroy truth.”

“The directive seeks to limit the ways in which history is taught to the public and understood, especially by discouraging the incorporation of perspectives that might challenge simplified, one-dimensional, and biased views of American history,” according to the organization. “It proposes to rewrite history to reflect a glorified narrative that downplays or disappears elements of America’s history — slavery, segregation, discrimination, division — while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”

The U.S. Naval Academy has removed some 400 pieces of literature from its library that explored themes of white supremacy, race and racism, and diversity. The racist regime even edited the National Park Service’s webpage about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad to remove references to slavery and change descriptions about the issue and its brutal realities. (In the wake of news reports and public backlash over the changes, the regime restored the edits.)

Freedom means liberation from people who force their ideology down your throat, like the Afghan Taliban or the American version. It means not having to bow to a racist, misogynist liar who thinks he’s king and compares himself to Jesus — ironically, the type of person the Mad King would label a gang member and send to a foreign prison.

MAGAs are more easily defined by what they are against than what they stand for, which is mostly hate and greed. Their policy is fear and intimidation.

They are against diversity, in all forms. They’re against equality and equity. They’re against health care, unless it’s for them. They’re against public education. They lack compassion and understanding. They embrace ignorance and cruelty.

A considerable number of us, including regime supporters, are one lost paycheck or a health care emergency from homelessness. The regime doesn’t care. It takes money from food banks and slashes social safety nets to fund tax breaks for the wealth class.

The Mad King and his minions don’t care about public heath. In fact, they are actively working to make people sick, hungry, and thirsty.

The Mad King has frozen $4 billion that President Biden had set aside to help keep the Colorado River flowing. The river supplies some 40 million people with drinking water, is the foundation for a vital agricultural economy, and generates significant hydroelectric power.

The National Weather Service is no longer providing language translations. Nearly 68 million people in the United States speak a language other than English, such as Chinese, Vietnamese, French, and Samoan, at home, including 42 million Spanish speakers.

Petty people with power is a recipe for pain and suffering.

Measles recently claimed the life of another young child who wasn’t vaccinated and didn’t have any underlying health problems. On Sunday, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. visited the epicenter of West Texas’ still-growing measles outbreak, the same day the funeral was held for the second child killed by the disease in the past few months.

Kennedy has spent years questioning the safety of vaccines and falsely claiming they cause autism.

The outbreak, which started in late January, now has some 500 cases in Texas, plus cases from the outbreak have spread to Kansas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.

This tragic situation was made worse because of bogus medical advice peddled by a pretend health official. One of Kennedy’s measles cures, vitamin A, doesn’t work. But that didn’t stop the make-believe doctor from directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to update measles guidance to promote vitamin A use in fighting the infection.

Professional health care providers in West Texas have since had to address a second measles-related health problem: vitamin A toxicity in infants and children.

Meanwhile, the department Kennedy trashes, Health and Human Services, has eliminated or gutted multiple maternal and child health programs, despite the fact the United States continues to have the highest rate of maternal deaths of any high-income nation, 22.3 for every 100,000 live births. And within this wealthy (selectively) country, the rate is by far the highest for Black women, at nearly 50 deaths per 100,000. The vast majority of those deaths, about 80%, are likely preventable.

At the CDC, the staff that works on childhood lead exposure, cancer clusters, asthma, and air pollution has been fired. Children most at risk from lead poisoning are from low-income families or are Black or brown. People of color are 2.3 times as likely as white people to live in places with unhealthy levels of air pollution.

The regime is working to overturn hundreds of bans on highly toxic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS or “forever chemicals,” and other dangerous compounds in consumer goods.

Pure evil, and it has infected more people than I thought possible.

Note: To the inevitable emails and story comments claiming this piece has nothing to do with the environment and what ecoRI News is supposed to cover, you are incorrect. As I’ve written before, social justice and climate justice are joined at the hip. If we can’t show compassion and empathy for each other, the natural world doesn’t stand a chance.

Frank Carini can be reached at [email protected]. His opinions don’t reflect those of ecoRI News.