Trump’s Immigration Façade
On this episode of The Nation Podcast, Ray Suarez says that Trump’s bark masks a more cynical, and contradictory, bite.

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The No Kings 3 protests this Saturday are going to be big – maybe the biggest day of protest in American history. Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-director of Indivisible, will explain—starting with the plans for St. Paul, site of the day's flagship event.
Also: Trump has renewed his year-long campaign against universities that have been resisting his authoritarian rule – he’s focused his attacks on the most prestigious private university, Harvard, and the most prestigious public university, UCLA, suing each of them in the past week for – “antisemitism.” David Myers, who teaches Jewish history at UCLA, comments
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Protesters are arrested and put into a police van after refusing to leave the intersection while walking through the streets to demonstrate against U.S. President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office on April 30, 2025 in Washington, DC. Multiple groups throughout D.C. blocked off intersections around the Capitol during morning rush hour traffic while chanting, “No Trump, no deportation, no more fascist occupation.”
(Kayla Bartkowski / Getty Images)On this episode of The Nation Podcast, editor D.D. Guttenplan talks to veteran journalist and broadcaster Ray Suarez about the gap between Donald Trump’s maximalist immigration rhetoric and his actual enforcement policy. Ray’s article appears in our June issue.
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Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
In its heyday, the Bush Terminal industrial complex spanned several city blocks along Brooklyn’s waterfront and employed more than 35,000 people. Built by Irving Bush in the late nineteenth century, it was an "early intermodal shipping hub." Goods arrived by water and left by rail. Bananas, coffee, and cotton came in through doors on one side of the warehouses and were loaded onto trains on the other.
But after World War II, as trucks replaced rail and shipping patterns changed, the Terminal’s purpose faded and the vast complex slipped into disuse.
Today, Bush Terminal is again at the center of New York’s vision for urban reinvention— and a debate around development, displacement, and the future of work in the city.
Joining us on a deep dive into Bush Terminal is veteran architecture critic and writer Karrie Jacobs. Her essay, “On the Waterfront,” appears in our December issue of the Nation.
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Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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