A soldier is seen on top of a U.S. Army Stryker armored vehicle in Sunland Park, New Mexico on March 27, 2025. The troops can oversee Ciudad Juárez, Mexico from this vantage point. Omar Ornelas / El Paso Times
A soldier is seen on top of a U.S. Army Stryker armored vehicle in Sunland Park, New Mexico on March 27, 2025. The troops can oversee Ciudad Juárez, Mexico from this vantage point. Omar Ornelas / El Paso Times
Who’s in charge? The dark prince of racism and xenophobia, Stephen Miller himself? It’s sure as hell not Donald Trump. He’d rather be out cheating at golf.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Let’s just take a look at a few of the ideas that over the past few days have floated out of the ruptured cesspool that is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s the latest one to pop up: NBC News is reporting that the Trump administration plans to deport one million Palestinians from Gaza to Libya. Who, I ask you, could have come up with that one?
Or how about this: The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is considering running a television reality show about immigrants competing for the chance to become an American citizen. The “challenges” the immigrant contestants would compete in are “based on various American customs and traditions,” the New York Times reported early this afternoon. “It’s important to revive civic duty” and “what it means to be an American,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS told the Times. Again, I ask you, who does she sound like a mouthpiece for?
Here’s a plan anyone would look forward to seeing happen in their neighborhood: DHS has asked the Pentagon for 20,000 members of the National Guard to “help with immigration enforcement,” according to a report on CNN today. Let’s see…when you think about that plan, what images come to mind? How about this: Helmeted soldiers in full combat gear wearing bulletproof vests and “tactical” gloves carrying M-4 fully automatic rifles climbing out of combat assault vehicles to walk through the downtown streets of Detroit and Los Angeles and Denver and Nashville with the mission of rounding up people who have brown skin, fitting them with plastic handcuffs, and shoving them into special busses commandeered for the purpose of hauling them off to barb-wire enclosures manned by other National Guard soldiers.
Why do those images feel so familiar? Do the words shock-troops come to mind?
I mean, a reality game show with desperate immigrant contestants trying to keep themselves out of deportation concentration camps and flights to hell-hole torture chambers in foreign countries or Guantanamo. Our own State Department, on its website, advises American citizens not to travel to Libya “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded landmines, civil unrest, kidnapping, and armed conflict.”
Describing the plans for deporting citizens from Gaza, NBC News reports that “every potential method for transporting them from Gaza to Libya—by air, land and sea—is being considered, according to one of the people with direct knowledge of the effort.” One suggested mode of transport of Palestinians from Gaza is using the A-380 Airbus, the largest passenger airplane ever made. Moving a million Palestinians using the A-380 would take 1,173 flights, according to NBC. That would be after they had been transported by bus from Gaza to the closest airport not located in Israel, which has no interest in Gazans being moved through their territory. That would be the airport in Cairo, more than 200 miles from Gaza. Using typical passenger buses that hold about 50 people, it would take 20,000 bus trips to move a million Palestinians from Gaza to Cairo. If you wanted to move them overland to Libya by bus, it would take the same number of trips of more than 1,000 miles to move a million Palestinians from Gaza to either Tripoli or Benghazi in Libya.
NBC points out that adding one million Palestinians to the 7 million population of Libya would be equivalent to the United States, with a population of 330 million, accepting 46 million new migrants.
Leaving aside the problems of housing and feeding one million Palestinians, no matter where they are, the kind of stuff the Trump administration is actively considering involves the movement of people from places where they now live to places they don’t want to go. In this country, Trump has variously said he will oversee the deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants, or 20 million, or 22 million. He doesn’t know how many. Nobody in the Trump administration knows how many undocumented people are in the United States. They don’t know. They don’t even care.
Moving just 11 million immigrants out of this country by air on A-380’s would take 13,000 flights. Using buses would take 220,000 trips from all over this country to Mexico…if Trump could talk Mexico into accepting 11 million people traveling across the border on more than 200,000 buses.
DHS doesn’t have a plan. They don’t have enough ICE holding facilities to accept the few thousand people they have already arrested. To Donald Trump, it’s all a game. He may want deportations, but he’ll settle for images. That’s why he’s got DHS Secretary Kristi Noem dressing up in camouflage and combat vest and going on “raids.” That’s why they want 20,000 National Guard soldiers on American streets. It’s why they’ve sent several Stryker combat battalions and 9,000 active-duty troops to the southern border. They’re not stopping people from crossing the border, because anyone on the other side of the border can see the Stryker combat vehicles driving around and move to a section of the border where they aren’t doing patrols.
Who’s in charge? The dark prince of racism and xenophobia, Stephen Miller himself? It’s sure as hell not Donald Trump. Whack-a-mole doesn’t begin to describe what’s going on with immigrants here and Gazans there. Sixteen Power Point slides filled with statistics at some briefing Trump won’t attend anyway isn’t something he can understand. He’d rather be out there on the links cheating.
But a reality television program supposedly showcasing American values and traditions using desperate immigrants who just want a job and a place to live? That is a nightmare conjured from the depths of a dark brainpan Donald Trump could get behind in a New York minute.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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