Look at this fool. Remember this photograph. Come November, it’s going to count.

It was taken today of Trump signing another of his entirely meaningless – except to himself – executive orders, this one renaming Lake Ontario as “Lake America.” He is apparently under the mistaken impression that he is sticking a finger in Canada’s eye. He’s not. He signed a document that will serve to remind everyone why they are paying higher prices for their toilet paper, Christmas wreaths, plywood from Home Depot, video game consoles, and yes, hockey sticks – all of which Trump put 50 percent tariffs on this week.

Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada isn’t going to let it go. His counter-tariffs are polling in the 70’s, up there in the northern part of North America. He’s never been so popular as when he stood up to Donald Trump and called his bluff. Trump’s egotistical stupidity has given him a free ride, and man, is he going to take it. Carney will use every opportunity between now and November to remind everyone on the U.S. side of the border what a utter fool Donald Trump is.

Companies in this country that are hurt by Trump’s tariff war will be filing lawsuits to stop his idiocy. Every day the tariffs are in place will cost U.S. companies money, and Trump has already lost once in the Supreme Court on the question of his tariff powers. Lawyers are out there stapling big signs to billboards offering their services to take a new tariff case to court. The lawyers will get rich and Trump will end up refunding the tariffs again.

Trump could have left Canada alone and gathered the press around him for another painful stroll outside to view the magnificent mess he’s made out of the White House, front and back. People travel hundreds, even thousands of miles to take their children sightseeing in Washington D.C. to see the White House and the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial. Now, all they’re going to see is a rectangular scar on the Mall that was once a reflecting pool and a construction zone that was once the People’s House.

He wants to put his mark on the nation’s capital. That isn’t working, either. The Kennedy Center sits there with big striped tarp covering up the place where Trump tried to put his name, and already the tarps are being referred to as the Kennedy Center diaper. Everyone in Washington D.C. knows who is so famous for wearing one that the shoulder bag carried by his closest aid is being called the diaper bag.

Trump wanted a quick, in-and-out war on Iran. Six months and a plethora of stories about an aircraft carrier wounded not by enemy fire but by Pentagon incompetence, Trump’s war isn’t working either. Out in the middle of the country, reporters can be seen in diners and coffee shops dutifully interviewing farmers who are declaring they will vote Democrat for the first time in their lives because Trump’s war on Iran has sent the prices they pay for fertilizer and diesel fuel, two of their biggest costs, through the roof. In Texas – Texas – voters are telling pollsters and anybody who will listen that they are against Republican support of data centers that are increasing the price of electricity and are thinking about voting Democrat for the first time in twenty years. Right this very minute, Trump is out there at a rally in Texas trying to drag Republican Senate candidate Ken Paxton out of the hole he’s in versus Democrat James Talarico. These kinds of rallies don’t usually start happening until after Labor Day, but a recent poll by Texas Opinion Research has Paxton seven points behind with just two months to go until the election. I’ll say it again: In Texas.

Over in the Middle East, Iran is threatening to launch a new offensive against its Persian Gulf neighbors for their support of U.S. military bases in the region. Trump is putting up Truth Social posts with maps of the Strait of Hormuz marked as “U.S. Territory.” Iran is laughing out loud as they manufacture new Shahed drones and ballistic missiles in the underground facilities that Trump’s big war tried and failed to destroy.

None of Trump’s lunacy is working. He tried to bully Canada. A day later, the Canadian Prime Minister was being referred to as the “new leader of the free world” because he stood up to Trump. He tried to bully Iran with bombs and missiles. It didn’t work. The United States of America got run out of the Gulf region by Iranian drones that damaged every military base from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.

This afternoon, the Associated Press ran a story with the headline, “Patriot Missile stocks in Europe are “beyond critical” due to Iran war, officials say.” Where did all those Patriot missiles go? They got used up shooting at Iranian missiles and, incredibly, at $25,000 dollar drones during Trump’s misbegotten war. U.S. Patriots are the only defensive missiles that can shoot down Russia’s high-speed ballistic missiles. If Russia were to attack a European military installation or power plant right now, European countries “would be forced ‘to take punch after punch in the mouth,’” according to a defense official quoted by the AP.

The situation for NATO countries is apparently so dire that CIA Director John Ratcliffe was dispatched to Moscow week for high level meetings with his counterparts to warn Russia not to think of attacking Europe. Everyone wondered what the CIA director was doing in Moscow until that little gem leaked earlier this week, and now with the AP story about Patriot missile shortages in Europe, we know why. Trump’s war on Iran didn’t just exhaust our supply of missiles. It emptied out Europe’s too.

Democrats are calling for a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing to put Hegseth under oath so he can be questioned about why there is a shortage not just of Patriot missiles, but of every U.S. missile in our arsenal, including ATACMS short range ground to ground ballistic missiles, the stockpiles of which were nearly emptied by Trump’s war on Iran that managed to accomplish only one thing: the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the strangling of international oil shipping that has increased fuel prices everywhere around the world.

Give him a Sharpie and an audience of lickspittles in the gold-plated Oval Bordello, and the next thing you know, he’ll be renaming the Persian Gulf as Lake Trump, as if it is the new water hazard at his Dubai Trump International Golf Course. Donald Trump wants us to see him as the most powerful man in the world.

Have a look at the Reflecting Pool. It’s not working.

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Trump is such a man of the people, he wants to dump cheap, toxic ground beef on the market for the peasants to buy! Everyone celebrate their benevolent overlord and his brilliant plan to lower the cost of groceries! Please ignore the renewed trade war with Canada, which will send the price of toilet paper through the roof.

Truly, Trump is a political genius of unparalleled mastery of the economy!

And if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you for a song, buddy…

Anyway, big episode this week, so come join the Ogre Nation Conversation!

Please support this work by becoming a paying subscriber. This podcast is free and will always remain free, but it still takes time and effort to produce. Your support means everything to us. For just $5 a month or $50 a year (a 17% discount!), you can keep the OgPod going. Thank you!

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Ogre Nation News Update

Main Stories (2:51 - 20:35)

2:51 - 9:40 The bad news (and good!) about the infinitely corrupt SCOTUS ruling on Trump’s infinitely corrupt (and unconstitutional) mail-in ballot executive order.

9:41 - 20:35 The leopards are eating the faces of Trump-supporting beef farmers! Have a hamburger made from questionable foreign beef to celebrate!

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE (20:36 - 28:53)

20:36 - 24:10 ICE arrests a mother in front of her 18-month-old baby at a routine immigration hearing. More proof that cruelty is the point.

24:11 - 27:24 Green card applicants will be placed under increased “public charge” scrutiny, meaning children will go hungry and without medical care. Republicans: The party of “pro-life.”

27:25 - 28:53 Immigration arrests reach a record high under Markwayne Mullin. So why are Trump and MAGAland still mad at him? We explain.

Headlines for Short Attention Spans (28:54 - 43:01)

28:54 - 31:48 In his never-ending quest for self-glorification, Trump insults a Black WWII hero.

31:49 - 36:14 Trump goes all in on data centers. How will that go over with his base, who absolutely HATE data centers?

36:15 - 37:39 Republican gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds is blaming immigrants in Florida’s measles outbreak. Guess who is actually the cause?

37:40 - 38:12 Ed Martin, one of Trump’s legal goons, is ready to litigate the midterms! What could possibly go wrong?!

38:13 - 40:25 What did Trump know about how badly a war with Iran would go, and when did he know it? We have the answer, and it’s worse than you thought.

40:26 - 41:37 Trump is wildly unpopular across the country. How unpopular? Come find out!

41:38 - 43:01 The NYT isn’t sugarcoating it: Republicans are in trouble in the Senate.

Self-care of the Week (43:02 - 48:40)

The Unedited Hotmess Livestream

Welcome back, teachers, to another productive year. As you know, we here at the West Hell School District like to pack these pre-student days with lots of professional development because, here in the administrative offices, we believe deeply in looking like we're getting something done, and for these few days, the only people we can do things to are the professional staff. Here are some of the selections for the upcoming PD sessions.

Welcome Icebreakers

Some of you may think it's silly to play games to help you get acquainted with people you have worked with for years, but the real purpose here is to get you reacquainted with the feeling of being treated like a child instead of a grown-ass adult. 

New Procedures Overview

We have taken those internal procedures that you barely got used to last year and changed them again. You'll need to throw out the forms piled up in your desk and/or uninstall the software on your computer to make room for the new procedural materials. This is sure to be a labor-and-time saving new procedure, by which we mean it will save us time and labor in the office by shifting the time and labor to you. Let all that excitement about teaching students suffocate under the load of soul-crushing administrative minutia. 

New Software Platform Introduction

We have adopted a new software platform for use in the district because the software we promised you we would use forever just finished its free trial period over the summer. We have not tested this new software yet, so if you run into any problems, just forward a note to the office and we'll pass that along to the company and I'm sure we'll hear back from them some time. Please do not question the usefulness of ethical concerns that come with our tech overlords; in particular, don't try to ask about the ethical or educational issues involved in the AI we're forcing into your classroom. We have heard that it is inevitable and must be accepted. Besides, it's totally free.

Terrifying Legal Stuff

A lawyer will be in to tell you some terrifying stories of teachers who did seemingly ordinary things and ended up facing billions of dollars in fines and decades in a gulag somewhere. Just try not to touch students, hand students anything, or make direct eye contact with them and you'll probably be okay.

New Stupid Social Media Tricks

A law enforcement officer will be in to scare you with tales of the newest social media trends and how to spot trouble with them in your classroom. This would be scarier except that all of these trends ended weeks ago to be replaced with new ones.

Textbook Program Training

A publisher's rep will be in to tell you how to do your job, based on the two years they spent in the classroom before giving up because they couldn't take it any more and wanted to do something cushier like pimping for a publisher. The rep will refuse to answer any questions about how to adapt the program to your classroom, and will instead offer useful advice about how she would use it if she were a teacher, and how you can use a simple 90 minutes from your thirty minute planning period to prepare materials. 

Data Session

Teachers will hunch over computer screens and try to find something useful buried in the piles of test scores from the state. There will be charts and graphs, and lots of forms to fill in with numbers and stuff, but no answers to questions like "Exactly what was this question on the test that most students got wrong?" If we just keep finding new ways to process the weighing of the pig, we are sure it will get bigger. 

Some Damned Useless Thing

We needed to block out the data time for everyone who teaches reading or math, so here's some placeholder for everyone else, because we didn't have time to find something useful for you.

Discipline

Administration wants teachers to know that they have been heard on the issues of student discipline and teacher morale, and they plan to do implement an assortment of new acronyms and programs this year that continue to put all the responsibility on the classroom teacher. Administration wants you to know that you have their full support, as in they fully support the idea of you handling this stuff yourself and not asking them to do something useful. 

Morale

Administration has heard that some of you are unhappy, and administration would like you to just shut up about it. Also, because one teacher made a procedural error last year, the full staff will now be berated like disobedient children. Thanks a lot, Brenda.

At Least One Hour of Cognitive Dissonance

No day of PD is complete without a self-contradictory. A session about how you shouldn't just use direct instruction, delivered entirely through direct instruction. A session about questioning strategies that uses none of those strategies. "Don't just read off the Power Point slide," reads the presenter off the Power Point slide.

Cavalcade of Cliches

Do you remember your why? Have you got your grit and rigor packed? Can you focus on all this inspirational language, or are you just wishing you could get some work done in your classroom? Sometimes these really do stir the soul a bit, until some admin pops up at the end to scold everyone about copier use and getting your lunch lists in on time.

Classroom Prep Time

Teachers are invited to finish preparing their rooms for the students any time after 3:30. 

Dolly Parton, you have probably heard, died this week at 80. I am rarely affected by celebrity deaths, and yet I found myself crying in the kitchen this morning listening to “I Will Always Love You.”

I teared up again reading the lyrics to Coat of Many Colors:

My coat of many colors
That my momma made for me
Made only from rags
But I wore it so proudly
Although we had no money
I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

So with patches on my britches
And holes in both my shoes
In my coat of many colors
I hurried off to school
Just to find the others laughing
And making fun of me
In my coat of many colors
My momma made for me

And oh, I couldn't understand it
For I felt I was rich
And I told 'em of the love
My momma sewed in every stitch
And I told 'em all the story
Momma told me while she sewed
And how my coat of many colors
Was worth more than all their clothes

What a woman. What a generational talent. What a loss. What a gift.

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Dolly was a feminist icon, even if she rejected the term. She wrote and sang about women working pink-collar jobs all day just to line men’s pockets, about the judgment heaped on unmarried women who got pregnant and how none was laid at the feet of men who impregnated them, about the toughness and love of the Appalachian women she knew whose lives and stories were ignored or mocked by so much of society. She adopted the trappings of hyperfemininity, dressing in a way I can only describe as drag, and one got the feeling that she did it not because she thought it was the way all women should be but because she was, at her core, a performer, and this was her globally recognizable costume that she frankly thought was pretty fun to put on. Dolly was not standing next to Gloria Steinem demanding abortion on demand. But she was just as crucial a part of the broader feminist cause: A woman who made legible the lives and struggles of women most powerful people are happy to never consider, let alone empathize with.

I’ve been thinking about why Dolly’s death has been so deeply felt by so many, and I think it’s at least partly because she showed us how to live well. She clearly had fun being famous — she didn’t complain; she didn’t saddle herself with the obligation to be a spokesperson for one group or another.

She did strive for decency and humility. In 2018, an event she was a part of took some heat because it was called “Dixie Stampede;” Parton renamed it “Dolly Parton’s Stampede,” and explained to Billboard magazine: “When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, ‘Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede,” she said. “As soon as you realise that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is. I would never dream of hurting anybody on purpose.”

“Don’t be a dumbass” and “don’t hurt anyone on purpose” are pretty good rules to live by.

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Dolly was generous. Her Imagination Library has sent more than 200 million books to children and babies around the world — 200 million. She spent millions helping disaster victims, giving to at-risk young people who graduated from high school, and funding hospitals and scientific research (she helped fund the Moderna Covid vaccine). She was a devout Christian and a devoted defender of LGBT rights.

The anecdotes going around about her on social media speak to this fundamental goodness:

I hate the word “authentic,” but Dolly Parton was somehow intentionally one of the most artificial-looking women on the planet, and also one of the most authentically herself people in the world. She came from poverty and she embraced her background, forgoing not only shame, but any resentment. She embodied the women who are both envied and stigmatized, who provoke both desire and disgust:

Her life was not just rags-to-riches (or “rags-to-rhinestones,” as the Times aptly put it). She struggled. She spoke frankly about being able to do all she did because she didn’t have children — that if she had been raising a family, she would not have had the time or energy for the tens of thousands of songs she wrote and the thousands of shows and events she performed at — but also of the grief of wanting children and not being able to have them. She held unmet desire alongside gratitude for what filled in that space.

And she was funny as hell:

As is now so often the case when a celebrity dies, the worst people on the internet are plumbing her life for some evidence that she was “problematic” or even just kinda imperfect. I can pretty much promise that if Dolly was asked, she’d tell you she’s about as imperfect and problematic as any of us. Very few human beings contribute as much to this world as Dolly Parton did. She was not a perfect woman, but she was an extraordinary one. And we would probably all be better off if we emulated her humor, her humility, her decency, her generosity, and her insistence on taking responsibility for her own life — and having a lot of fun with it.

I have nothing particularly profound to add, except that like so many people around the world, I loved and admired Dolly Parton. I am sad she’s gone. I am glad she knew she was so widely beloved. I hope I can live even a little bit like her.

xx Jill

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You really have to go back and look hard to find a more incompetent asshole Secretary of Defense than Pete “I used to be a National Guard Major” Hegseth. Even the incompetent ones, like McNamara and Rumsfeld, weren’t as much assholes as they were just plain bad at their jobs.

Hegseth, however, ticks all the boxes. In his confirmation hearing, he had to deny that he had sexually abused a random woman he met at a Lake Tahoe hotel. He had to deny that he had showed up drunk on the job in his three previous places of employment, including his stint as a weekend chat-host on Fox News. Ultimately, he had to swear to Senators that he would stop drinking alcohol if they made him Secretary of Defense. Even then, the vote to confirm him in the full Senate was 50-50. The Vice President had to bestir himself from his Bible-thumping and travel down Pennsylvania Avenue to preside over the Senate and cast the tie-breaking vote to put his falling-down-drunk compatriot in the Pentagon, in charge of the largest and most expensive military in the whole world.

Having been installed in his office on the E-Ring of the Pentagon, Hegseth set about doing all the important stuff that awaited him. He renamed army posts after Confederate generals. He took down photos of previous Secretaries of Defense and Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whom he didn’t like. He instituted a monthly Christian prayer meeting in the Pentagon, in clear violation of the First Amendment’s bar to the establishment of religion by the government. Hegseth himself attends every Christian prayer meeting, and I can assure you that he looks around and notices who attends, and who doesn’t, who bows their heads in prayer, and who is just showing up because they know that roll is being taken.

Hegseth started firing generals and admirals right away, beginning with women and Blacks. Less than a month into his job, Hegseth fired General CQ Brown Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He fired Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first female Chief of Naval Operations, the highest-ranking admiral in the Navy. Both were exception officers with spotless records. He gave no reason for either firing.

Then he moved on to firing more generals, especially those in the Army. In April, Hegseth fired General Randy George, the Chief of Staff of the Army, in what was described as a 15 second phone call. Hegseth cited no cause for the firing, although it has emerged that General George got on Hegseth’s bad side by standing behind an investigation into the flight of two Army combat helicopters past the Tennessee home of Kid Rock three days before George was fired. Hegseth, told of the unapproved helicopter “flyby” at extremely low altitude, which violated multiple Army regulations regarding helicopter flight over civilian areas, later told the pilots involved, “Carry on, patriots.”

The plot thickened today when it was revealed that the Vice Chief of Staff, General Chris LaNeve, had told General George that Hegseth did not want the pilots investigated for their ill-advised “flyby.” Since Hegseth fired the Army Chief of Staff, , Trump nominated LaNeve to the position. He is currently serving in two four-star positions, Vice Chief of Staff and Acting Chief of Staff. Hegseth fired the previous Vice Chief of Staff, General James Mingus, last October, a full year before his term was due to be up, again for no stated reason.

LaNeve came to the attention of both Trump and Hegseth when he placed a congratulatory phone call from his station in South Korea to Trump on the night of his inauguration. It is unheard of for active-duty general officers to place such a phone call to the President of the United States for any reason, much less one that is so nakedly political in nature. Hegseth made LaNeve his senior military aide shortly after Trump spoke highly of him because of his ass-kissing phone call.

In June, without citing a cause, and only 18 months into his command, Hegseth fired General Christopher Donahue, the commander of the Army in Europe and Africa. On the same day he fired General George, Hegseth fired General David Hodne, who was in charge of the Army’s Transformation and Training Command. Hodne had been in the job only eight months. He was fired without cause. Earlier this month, General LaNeve announced that a special battalion that had been studying drone warfare with the aid of the Ukrainian military would return to regular duty as an infantry unit, ending the modernization push that had been underway.

In Ukraine, fully 80 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian combat casualties are being caused by armed drones. It has become obvious to everyone, with the exception of Hegseth and LaNeve, that drone warfare is the way wars will be fought in the future not to mention right now. LaNeve has instituted a “back to basics” approach for the Army. Having ordered the dissolution of the lone drone battalion in Army service, LaNeve said the battalion will “refocus on its core warfighting tasks as an airborne infantry battalion.”

Let me tell you what their obsession with “warfighting” means. Back to digging foxholes and shooting rifles at human silhouette targets and eating MRE’s. Drones? What are they?

All this comes on the heels of the Army, Navy, and Air Force having to abandon all their military bases in the Middle East after they had been hit by waves of drone attacks by Iran. The U.S. military has been left with no presence in the region of the Persian Gulf after only six months of war. They have closed up shop, because they were not prepared to repel attacks by Iranian drones and missiles.

Not to worry, however. Hegseth has been busy reaching down into the promotion systems of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, removing women and Black officers who were slated for promotion from Colonel to Brigadier General. No reason was given for the meddling by the top official in the U.S. military in a promotion system that has studiously avoided political influence for more than 70 years.

It’s obvious. Hegseth has written two books taking on the military for so-called “DEI” policies that he contends have led to the promotion of women and people of color. Hegseth apparently believes that white men can handle the leadership positions in a military comprised of about 18 percent women and 20 percent Blacks.

But hey! Hegseth’s favorite preacher, a fundamentalist known as Doug Wilsont, who heads up an outfit called the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, wants to repeal the 19^th Amendment and create a system of “family voting” where men would have the vote and women would quit their jobs and get back in the kitchen. So, who needs women in the military, anyway? They’re going to be back home having babies and doing the cooking and cleaning while men get killed on a battlefield completely dominated by drone warfare that Pete Hegseth doesn’t want the U.S. military to be prepared for.

Imposing a right-wing political agenda on the U.S. military has real consequences. Zev Shalev of “The Narativ” reported today that applications for conscientious objector status have increased six-fold since Hegseth took over as head of the U.S. military. Applicants for C.O. status used to be young soldiers who had a change of heart about their religious beliefs after becoming soldiers. Now the soldiers who are applying to get out of their service commitments as conscientious objectors have multiple years in the Army, some with ranks as high as major, and many are graduates of the service academies.

Young soldiers aren’t stupid. They’ve all got cell phones. They can log onto the internet and read the news on CNN and the Associated Press and other outlets that have covered Hegseth’s purge of the generals. Why should they stay in the military and try to get ahead if their religion isn’t fundamentalist Christian? If they didn’t vote for Donald Trump? If they’re women or their skin color isn’t white?

Hegseth is running out of generals and admirals. He has fired all the generals who came up through the ranks the old fashioned way. Now he’s appointing military hacks like LaNeve, but he’s running into opposition in the Senate. LaNeve hasn’t got the votes to get his appointment as Army Chief of Staff out of the Armed Services Committee. Even Republican Senator Joni Ernst from Iowa opposes him. With the defection of even one Republican Senator, LaNeve can’t be confirmed. Hegseth is going to find himself stuck with “acting” commanders all the way down to division level in the Army.

Hegseth is an incompetent asshole who works for an incompetent asshole who thinks if he can’t win a shooting war against Iran, maybe he can win a trade war with Canada. Donald Trump is losing that one, too.

Let’s hope that Trump doesn’t start up the shooting war with Iran again. Iran has tens of thousands of drones and a military that is skilled in using them. We’ve got Pete Hegseth, who just disbanded the one drone warfare battalion we had and fired the general who was in charge of warfare planning.

I hope Hegseth’s fundamentalist preacher is praying hard, because we’re going to need it.

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The weekend arrest by the Border Patrol of Luis Manuel Aviles, 48, a Florida handyman whose son is one of those USS Abraham Lincoln sailors deployed near Iran now homeward bound, is kicking up the deportation fuss anew.

Aviles, who came to the U.S. from Nicaragua 19 years ago, has a work permit and no apparent criminal record.

The dissonant image of arresting a parent of a serving sailor, particularly one among a crew whose service for nine months aboard the aircraft carrier being recalled amid complaints about supply shortages and deteriorating mental health seems particularly stark and uncaring.

Joshua Aviles wrote on social media Saturday that he was still on the Lincoln “fighting for a country that has given me everything” when he got a call about his father’s detention, adding,  “This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly treated like a criminal.”

More broadly, the Aviles arrest comes as the Trump administration is rolling back immigration protections for military families to pursue its mass deportation agenda, detaining at least dozens of parents and spouses of active-duty U.S. troops, according to reporting by the Associated Press. The government naturally does not track deportations of military families, so reporters for AP set out to do so.

But one of the military’s most highly advertised immigration benefits is “military parole-in-place,” which allows the spouses, children and parents of active-duty service members and veterans to obtain legal immigration status from within the country. Not everyone qualifies Those who overstayed visas or who already applied for legal status at the border, for example, may not.

Say One Thing, Do Another

So, the military appeals to immigrant recruits, but is not moving to protect their families.

The Trump administration’s expanded immigration enforcement has led to the detention of dozens of spouses and parents of active-duty U.S. service members after ending protections previously available to military families, the AP investigation found.

Homeland Security said of Aviles’ arrest that “Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws,” adding that the Trump administration “does not pick and choose which laws to enforce.” Of course, it does. And it is doing so in this case with a determination that being a military family member did not matter.

The AP found that while immediate family members of U.S. troops had generally not been targets of immigration enforcement, now at least 52 military parents have  been detained, for months. At least six have been deported and one self-deported. At least eight immediate family members of U.S. service members remain in federal immigration custody.

The cases linger as families seek to adjust their legal status – even as the military recruits by advertising these benefits.

The wife of a U.S. soldier who spent more than a month in federal immigration detention, was removed from a deportation flight to Brazil after the AP’s reporting. An Army sergeant had to take personal leave to care for his five-year-old during the detention.

Obvious questions include the effect on military preparedness and mental health for those deployed while hearing such news from home. Or how the military explains its lack of protection from a Homeland Security deportation campaign apparently incapable of distinguishing families who have a serving military member.

The AP’s review is the first accounting of such detentions, and it’s likely an undercount. Reporters analyzed thousands of federal court records compiled by Habeas Docket, a project run by the Immigration Justice Transparency Initiative; by reviewing media coverage and by verifying information with family members and attorneys.

The Policies

Detention of military families is a reversal even from Trump’s first administration. A new policy, implemented in 2025, states that “military service alone does not exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”

Somehow, we need to reconcile Homeland Security statements that “DHS and ICE value the contributions of all those who have served in the U.S. military” with the reality for immigrant military families. The Pentagon has said nothing.

The policy of offering parole-in-place to immigrant military families was implemented under Republican George W. Bush during the U.S. war with Iraq in 2007 and codified under Democratic Barack Obama. DHS agencies have case-by-case discretion if someone had a serious criminal conviction, for example.

The AP found that family members of troops are being held in detention despite having pending military parole-in-place applications and some were detained while appearing at appointments to adjust their legal status.

Expressions of national disgust at the excesses of the mass deportation campaign are reflected in election polls and primary results. The insistence of a moribund Congress to even discuss alternative solutions is deafening. One would think that offering protection for military families who follow the rules would be a good start to undoing out-of-control arrests and deportations.

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