Last Friday evening, dozens of asylum seekers in the California city of Stockton, a 45-minute drive south of Sacramento, received text and e-mail notices informing them that they had to attend a check-in at the ICE building at 8 the following morning. When they turned up, ICE agents arrested 25 of them. These were people with open asylum applications and they were doing what they had been told to do: Instead of retreating into the shadows, they were attending a mandatory check-in. Had they chosen not to show up, their asylum claims would likely have been automatically dismissed, and they would have then become eligible for fast-track deportation.

This sort of quota-based arrest system, seemingly designed to fill Stephen Miller’s requirement that ICE and US Customs and Border Protection arrest at least 3,000 immigrants per day, is creating a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t conundrum for millions of immigrants, and it’s happening across the country.

The San Diego Union-Tribune recently reported on similar practices in San Diego, with the unfortunate arrestees being detained in a makeshift basement detention center that reportedly lacks even basic of amenities. Political representatives who have attempted to visit the site to investigate claims of inadequate food supplies and lack of access to medical care have been turned away. First ICE told them that they would have to apply for visitation rights a week in advance; then they were told that because of the government shutdown, such visits were being put on hold indefinitely.

In the Chicago area, roaming snatch-squads have picked up more than 1,000 immigrants in the past few weeks, and CBP chief Greg Bovino has all but flaunted his disregard for court orders restricting his agents’ use of chemical weapons against protesters. Despite judicial orders limiting this practice, agents have routinely been tear-gassing protesters, including in suburban residential neighborhoods. The CBP chief’s behavior has so outraged the judge presiding over the case that she has ordered Bovino to check in with her on a daily basis.

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October 2026 Issue

In New York City, heavily armed federal agents from ICE, the FBI, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, complete with military vehicles, paraded down Canal Street, in Lower Manhattan, arresting immigrant street vendors while horrified locals filmed them and berated them for their actions. As the burly masked agents went down the street, they pushed and hit the protesting residents. The display was clearly a deliberate demonstration of their power, impunity, and ability to humiliate and inflict indignity on anyone who stands in their way.

During the month-long federal government shutdown, these thugs who make up Trump’s secret police have not missed a paycheck. Thanks in part to a $130 million donation from the reclusive far-right donor Timothy Mellon, military personnel, presumably including those involved in carrying out Trump and Pete Hegseth’s grotesque, and patently illegal, assassination campaign of alleged drug runners in the Caribbean and Pacific have not missed a paycheck. The Customs and Border Patrol squads now also roaming the American interior are being paid on time. One assumes that the construction crews who were brought in at short notice to demolish the East Wing of the White House, without even the pretense of a planning review, and who are now preparing to build Trump’s vanity-project ballroom and triumphal arch, will also receive paychecks.

Trump’s Big Tech lackeys, including Meta, Apple, Amazon, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, and dozens of other corporations, have found the wherewithal to pony up $300 million to pay for the gaudy ballroom, allowing ground to be broken even while basic government functions wither on the vine.

While the security-and-vanity-state apparatus is humming along, hundreds of thousands of other federal workers are either furloughed or working unpaid. These include Transportation Security Administration and Federal Aviation Administration crews, public health workers, Veterans Affairs personnel, weather modelers, disaster-relief teams, workplace safety inspectors, anti-fraud investigators, and so on.

Compounding the damage, tens of millions of Americans who rely on SNAP payments to put food on the table are about to be cut off from this vital lifeline. The US Department of Agriculture disingenuously claims that “the well has run dry,” despite the department sitting on billions of dollars of contingency funds that could be tapped for just such an emergency. The Trump administration has warned states that if they try to backstop the SNAP payments, they won’t get reimbursed.

More than 40 million people use SNAP benefits, with the average amount each household receives being $332 per month, according to USDA data. During past government shutdowns, the government has firewalled this spending, ensuring that the most vulnerable Americans don’t have disruptions in their food supply while legislators blunder about trying to reach a deal to get the government back on its feet. But this time Project 2025 ideologues are manning the ship of state, and the administration is withholding food benefits in the hope that mass suffering will force Democrats to abandon their efforts to have health insurance subsidies restored for millions of Americans—many of whom, in addition to facing a doubling of their premiums in the next couple months, are the same people who are now about to go hungry because of the SNAP shutdown.

The last time this many Americans suddenly found themselves without access to stable food supplies was the Great Depression, 90 years ago. There is simply no way that food banks, pantries, religious institutions, and other charity efforts can fill a hole this large in the nation’s food security systems—even with states such as California releasing tens of millions of dollars to food banks and activating National Guard personnel to help distribute the food. Remove the federal government from the provision of SNAP benefits, and the outcome will be increased hunger, parents skipping meals so that children eat, and increased levels of vice, as desperate men and women try to cobble together income from whatever sources they can to buy food.

This isn’t government of, by, and for the people. It is raw oligarchy. The United States is now a place where billionaires fund presidential vanity projects to curry favor with those who can give or withhold government contracts, give or withhold tax breaks, and give or withhold relief from punitive tariffs. It is a place where masked men get government paychecks to break up immigrant families and where the military becomes the province of private philanthropists. It is a place where the government strips away healthcare and food benefits from poor people struggling to make ends meet. And we’re only a fifth of the way through Trump’s term.