A $1.2 Trillion ‘Rip Off’: Report Spotlights Massive Scale of Medicare Advantage Fraud

 

“These private insurer-run plans are more expensive AND lead to worse outcomes for patients,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal. “It’s time to rein in Medicare DisAdvantage and protect traditional Medicare.”

A report released earlier this month to little fanfare estimated that federal overpayments to privately run Medicare Advantage plans could total $76 billion this year—or potentially a staggering $1.2 trillion over the next decade if current trends persist.

The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), an independent congressional agency that advises lawmakers on Medicare, calculates overpayments by comparing spending on Medicare Advantage (MA) plans to what the federal government would have spent if MA enrollees were on traditional fee-for-service Medicare.   

In a report published earlier this month, MedPAC showed that overpayments to MA plans this year are projected to be around $76 billion. Roughly $22 billion of that total is due to coding practices by MA providers, which are notorious for making patients appear sicker than they are to receive larger payments from the federal government. MA plans are paid lump sums to cover expected future healthcare services for patients based on their risk scores.

Another factor driving overpayments to MA plans—which now cover 55% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries—is a phenomenon known as favorable selection. MA enrollees tend to be healthier on average than recipients of traditional Medicare, resulting in higher payments to Medicare Advantage plans than are necessary based on patients’ healthcare needs.

According to MedPAC, favorable selection will account for $57 billion of the expected overpayments to MA plans this year. The Trump administration gave Medicare Advantage plans a more than $25 billion boost in federal payments for 2026, even amid mounting bipartisan concerns about fraud in the program.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare (NCPSSM) said the MedPAC analysis “confirms that these private plans are bleeding taxpayers for billions of dollars more than traditional Medicare would cost for comparable enrollees.”

US Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote in response to the MedPAC findings that “Medicare DisAdvantage will rip off American taxpayers to the tune of $76 billion in 2026.”

“These private insurer-run plans are more expensive AND lead to worse outcomes for patients,” Jayapal, a leading supporter of Medicare for All legislation in the House, wrote in a social media post. “It’s time to rein in Medicare DisAdvantage and protect traditional Medicare.”

The MedPAC analysis was released days after Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee published a report revealing how UnitedHealth Group, the largest provider of MA plans in the US, “has turned risk adjustment into a major profit-centered strategy,” reaping massive payments from the federal government through upcoding.

NCPSSM noted that “while UnitedHealth... has emerged as the worst offender, it’s abundantly clear that many MA insurers are engaged in these shady practices.”

“Look no further than insurers’ reliance on prior authorizations for procedures and treatments that normally would be automatically covered in traditional Medicare,” the group said. “This includes denying skilled nursing care that jeopardizes older patients who have nowhere else to turn.”

-Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

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Time to Say Good-Bye by David Brooks

 

My grandfather Bernard Levy played a big role in my childhood. When we weren’t exploring New York City together, he was writing letters to the editor of The New York Times from his law firm’s office in the Woolworth Building in Lower Manhattan, and if memory serves, he might have even gotten a few published. He had died by the time I got hired as a columnist here, but he would have been my first call. That journey from the little tenement house he grew up in on the Lower East Side to my position at this newspaper is part of our family’s experience of the American dream.

It’s been the honor of a lifetime to work here, surrounded by so many astounding journalists. But after 22 wonderful years, I’ve decided to take the exciting and terrifying step of leaving in order to try to build something new.

When I came to The Times, I set out to promote a moderate conservative political philosophy informed by thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton. I have been so fantastically successful in bringing people to my point of view that moderate Republicans are now the dominant force in American politics, holding power everywhere from the White House to Gracie Mansion. I figure my work here is done.

I’m kidding.

In reality, I’ve long believed that there is a weird market failure in American culture. There are a lot of shows on politics, business and technology, but there are not enough on the fundamental questions of life that get addressed as part of a great liberal arts education: How do you become a better person? How do you find meaning in retirement? Does America still have a unifying national narrative? How do great nations recover from tyranny?

When I think about how the world has changed since I joined The Times, the master trend has been Americans’ collective loss of faith — not only religious faith but many other kinds. In 2003, we were still relatively fresh from our victory in the Cold War, and there was more faith that democracy was sweeping the globe, more faith in America’s goodness, more faith in technology and more in one another. As late as 2008, Barack Obama could run a presidential campaign soaring with hopeful idealism.

The post-Cold War world has been a disappointment. The Iraq war shattered America’s confidence in its own power. The financial crisis shattered Americans’ faith that capitalism when left alone would produce broad and stable prosperity. The internet did not usher in an era of deep connection but rather an era of growing depression, enmity and loneliness. Collapsing levels of social trust revealed a comprehensive loss of faith in our neighbors. The rise of China and everything about Donald Trump shattered our serene assumptions about America’s role in the world.

We have become a sadder, meaner and more pessimistic country. One recent historical study of American newspapers finds that public discourse is more negative now than at any other time since the 1850s. Large majorities say our country is in decline, that experts are not to be trusted, that elites don’t care about regular people. Only 13 percent of young adults believe America is heading in the right direction. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they do not believe in the American dream.

Loss of faith produces a belief in nothing. Trump is nihilism personified, with his assumption that morality is for suckers, that life is about power, force, bullying and cruelty. Global populists seek to create a world in which only the ruthless can thrive. America is becoming the rabid wolf of nations.

Nihilism is the mind-set that says that whatever is lower is more real. Selfishness, egoism and the lust for power drive human affairs. Altruism, generosity, honor, integrity and hospitality are mirages. Ideals are shams that the selfish use to mask their greed. Disillusioned by life, the cynic gives himself permission to embrace brutality, saying: We won’t get fooled again. It’s dog eat dog. If we’re going to survive, we need to elect bullies to high places. In 2024, 77 million American voters looked at Trump and saw nothing morally disqualifying about the man.

It’s tempting to say that Trump corrupted America. But the shredding of values from the top was preceded by a decades-long collapse of values from within. Four decades of hyper-individualism expanded individual choice but weakened the bonds between people. Multiple generations of students and their parents fled from the humanities and the liberal arts, driven by the belief that the prime purpose of education is to learn how to make money.

We’re abandoning our humanistic core. The elements of our civilization that lift the spirit, nurture empathy and orient the soul now play a diminished role in national life: religious devotion, theology, literature, art, history, philosophy. Many educators decided that because Western powers spawned colonialism — and they did — students in the West should learn nothing about the lineage of their civilization and should thereby be rendered cultural orphans. Activists decided persuasion is a myth and that life is a ruthless power competition between oppressors and oppressed groups. As a result of technological progress and humanistic decay, life has become objectively better but subjectively worse. We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.

The most grievous cultural wound has been the loss of a shared moral order. We told multiple generations to come up with their own individual values. This privatization of morality burdened people with a task they could not possibly do, leaving them morally inarticulate and unformed. It created a naked public square where there was no broad agreement about what was true, beautiful and good. Without shared standards of right and wrong, it’s impossible to settle disputes; it’s impossible to maintain social cohesion and trust. Every healthy society rests on some shared conception of the sacred — sacred heroes, sacred texts, sacred ideals — and when that goes away, anxiety, atomization and a slow descent toward barbarism are the natural results.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, according to one Harvard survey, 58 percent of college students say they experienced no sense of “purpose or meaning” in their life in the month before being polled. It shouldn’t surprise us that people are so distrusting and demoralized. I’m haunted by an observation that Albert Camus made about his continent 75 years ago: The men of Europe “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world and in living man; the secret of Europe is that it no longer loves life.”

We could use better political leadership, of course, but the crucial question facing America is: How can we reverse this pervasive loss of faith in one another, in our future and in our shared ideals? I do not believe that most people can flourish in a meaningless, nihilistic universe. Despite what the cynics say, I still believe we’re driven not only by the selfish motivations but also by the moral ones — the desire to pursue some good, the desire to cooperate, to care for one another and to belong. Life is about movement, and the flourishing life is the same eternal thing, some man or woman striving and struggling in service to some ideal.

Where do people and nations go to find new things to believe in, new values to orient their lives around? Where do they go to revive their humanistic core? They find these things in the realm of culture. In my reading of history, cultural change precedes political and social change. You need a shift in thinking before you can have a shift in direction. You need a different spiritual climate.

By “culture,” I don’t just mean going to the opera and art museums. I mean “culture” in the broadest sense — a shared way of life, a set of habits and rituals, popular songs and stories, conversations about ideas big and small. When I use the word “culture,” I mean everything that forms the subjective parts of a person: perceptions, values, emotions, opinions, loves, enchantments, goals and desires. I mean everything that shapes the spirit of the age, the moral and intellectual moment, which constitutes the shared water in which we swim. In this definition, every member of society has a role in shaping the culture. We all create a moral ecology around ourselves, one that either elevates the people we touch or degrades them.

Edmund Burke argued that culture, which he called “manners,” is more important than politics. Manners, he wrote, “are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in a great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

The good news is that culture changes all the time as people adjust to meet the crises of their moment. In the 1890s, the Social Gospel movement, with its communal emphasis, displaced the social Darwinist culture, with its individualistic, survival-of-the-fittest emphasis. That cultural shift eventually led to political change: the Progressive era. American culture also shifted radically between 1955 and 1975, producing a culture that was less conformist, less sexist and racist, more creative than the one that came before, though also one that was more atomized. The culture war that began in that era produced both the modern left and the modern right. American culture today is already vastly different from how it was during the Great Awakening of 2020.

We Americans went through hard times before, and we have always recovered through a process of cultural rupture and repair. Some old set of values and practices has to be torn away and some new ones embraced.

Trump is that rare creature, a philistine who understands the power of culture. He put professional wrestlers onstage at the last Republican convention for a reason: to lift up a certain masculine ideal. He’s taken over the Kennedy Center for a reason: to tell a certain national narrative. Unfortunately, the culture he champions, because it is built upon domination, is a dehumanizing culture.

True Humanism, by contrast, is the antidote to Nihilism. Humanism is anything that upholds the dignity of each person. Antigone trying to bury her brother to preserve the family honor, Lincoln rebinding the nation in his second Inaugural Address, Martin Luther King Jr. writing that letter from the Birmingham jail — those are examples of humanism. Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs singing “Fast Car” at the Grammys — that’s humanism. These are examples of people trying to inspire moral motivations, pursue justice and move people to become better versions of themselves.

Humanism comes in many flavors: secular humanism, Christian humanism, Jewish humanism and so on. It is any endeavor that deepens our understanding of the human heart, any effort to realize eternal spiritual values in our own time and circumstances, any gesture that makes other people feel seen, heard and respected. Sometimes it feels as if all of society is a vast battleground between the forces of dehumanization on the one side — rabid partisanship, social media, porn, bigotry — and the beleaguered forces of humanization on the other.

If you want to jump in on the side of humanization, join the Great Conversation. This is the tradition of debate that stretches back millenniums, encompassing theology, philosophy, psychology, history, literature, music, the study of global civilizations and the arts. This conversation is a collective attempt to find a workable balance amid the eternal dialectics of the human condition — the tension between autonomy and belonging, equality and achievement, freedom and order, diversity and cohesion, security and exploration, tenderness and strength, intellect and passion. The Great Conversation never ends, because there is no permanent solution to these tensions, just a temporary resting place that works in this or that circumstance. Within the conversation, each participant learns something about how to think, how to feel, what to love, how to live up to his or her social role.

One of the most exciting things in American life today is that a humanistic renaissance is already happening on university campuses. Trump has been terrible for the universities, but also perversely wonderful. Amid all the destruction, he’s provoked university leaders into doing some rethinking. Maybe things have gotten too preprofessional; maybe colleges have become too monoculturally progressive; maybe universities have spent so much effort serving the private interests of students that they have unwittingly neglected the public good. I’m now seeing changes on campuses across America, from community colleges to state schools to the Ivies. The changes are coming in four buckets: First, a profusion of courses and programs that try to nurture character development and moral formation. Second, courses and programs on citizenship training and civic thought. Third, programs to help people learn to reason across difference. Fourth, courses that give students practical advice on how to lead a flourishing life.

I look at these efforts with growing admiration and enthusiasm. My questions are: How can I get involved? Where do I go to enlist? (In my particular case, the answer turns out to be New Haven, Conn.) And of course, the forces of humanization are needed not just on campuses but also within every company, community and organization where people are engaged in the vital search for good conduct, ethical leadership and a greater wisdom about what is truly significant. My books have been attempts to bring humanistic thinking to popular audiences, and wherever I go I confront people who long to feel uplifted, who hunger for the wisdom that has been handed down by sages and prophets through the centuries.

If you’ve read my columns, you may know that one of my favorite observations from psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. People need a secure base. Part of that base is emotional — unconditional attachments to family and friends. Part of that secure base is material — living in a safe community, with a measure of financial stability. Part of that secure base is spiritual — living within a shared moral order, possessing faith that hard work will be rewarded, faith in a brighter future.

My friends in the abundance movement say that America has a housing crisis, and they are right. But more elementally, America has a home crisis. When people do not believe they have a secure emotional, physical and spiritual home, they become risk averse, stagnant, cynical, anxious and aggressive.

This is not the way America is supposed to be! For centuries, foreign observers have complained that, if anything, Americans are too idealistic, too optimistic, too naïve, always rushing off to try new ventures without anticipating the cost. The most astute of those observers have always noted that beneath the crass, striving materialism of American life, there is a propulsive spiritual wind, driving Americans to move, innovate, self-improve, venture boldly into the future. This is Lin-Manuel Miranda’s energy infusing the musical “Hamilton”: “I’m just like my country. / I’m young, scrappy and hungry.” This is John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.”

If America could once again restore its secure emotional, material and spiritual base, maybe we could recover a smidgen of our earlier audacity. Oscar Wilde joked that youth is America’s oldest tradition. Maybe it’s time the country matured, and combined youthful energy with the kind of humility and wisdom that Reinhold Niebuhr packed into one of his most famous passages:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

I’ll miss a lot of things about being a Times columnist — the readers, the colleagues, the endless learning that the job involves. The job title alone is good for my ego! But I think I’ve found a project and a cause that are worth devoting the final chapter of my career to.

Thanks a million, everybody.

-David Brooks

"Trump supporters say, 'We suffered Eight years under Barack Obama.' Fair enough. Let’s take a look":

The day Obama became president; the Dow closed at 7,949 points. Eight years later, the Dow had almost tripled. General Motors and Chrysler were on the brink of bankruptcy, with Ford not far behind, and their failure, along with their supply chains, would have meant the loss of millions of jobs. Obama pushed through a controversial, $80 billion bailout to save the car industry. The U.S. car industry survived, started making money again, and the entire $80 billion was paid back, with interest.

While we remain vulnerable to lone-wolf attacks, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed a mass attack here since 9/11. Obama ordered the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. He drew down the number of troops from 180,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan to just 15,000, and increased funding for the Department of Veterans Affairs.                     

He launched a program called Opening Doors which, since 2010, has led to a 47 percent decline in the number of homeless veterans. He set a record 73 straight months of private-sector job growth. Due to Obama’s regulatory policies, greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 12%, production of renewable energy more than doubled, and our dependence on foreign oil was cut in half.   

He signed The Lilly Ledbetter Act, making it easier for women to sue employers for unequal pay. His Omnibus Public Lands Management Act designated more than 2 million acres as wilderness, creating thousands of miles of trails and protecting over 1,000 miles of rivers.

He reduced the federal deficit from 9.8 percent of GDP in 2009 to 3.2 percent in 2016. For all the inadequacies of the Affordable Care Act, we seem to have forgotten that, before the ACA, you could be denied coverage for a pre-existing condition, and kids could not stay on their parents’ policies up to age 26.

Obama approved a $14.5 billion system to rebuild the levees in New Orleans. All this, even as our own Mitch McConnell famously asserted that his singular mission would be to block anything President Obama tried to do.

While Obama failed on his campaign pledge to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, that prison’s population decreased from 242 to around 50. He expanded funding for embryonic stem cell research, supporting groundbreaking advancement in areas like spinal injury treatment and cancer.

Credit card companies can no longer charge hidden fees or raise interest rates without advance notice. Most years, Obama threw a 4th of July party for military families. He held babies, played games with children, served barbecue, and led the singing of “Happy Birthday” to his daughter Malia, who was born on July 4. Welfare spending is down: for every 100 poor families, just 24 receive cash assistance, compared with 64 in 1996.

Obama comforted families and communities following more than a dozen mass shootings. After Sandy Hook, he said, “The majority of those who died today were children, beautiful little kids between the ages of 5 and 10 years old.”

Yet he never took away anyone’s guns. He sang Amazing Grace, spontaneously, at the altar. He was the first president since Eisenhower to serve two terms without personal or political scandal. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

President Obama was not perfect, as no man and no president is, and you can certainly disagree with his political ideologies. But to say we suffered? If that’s the argument, if this is how we suffered for 8 years under Barack Obama, I have one wish: may we be so fortunate as to suffer 8 more."

A post to remind those that so conveniently forgot. - Teri Carter.
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Tell Google & YouTube: Take down vile ICE recruitment ads now

 

Tell Google & YouTube: Take down vile ICE recruitment ads now.

The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to hire 10,000 new ICE agents to supercharge the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. To do it, DHS is pouring $100 million into what it calls an “aggressive” recruitment campaign—one steeped in wartime imagery and overtly anti-immigrant rhetoric. ICE recruitment ads are being targeted at listeners of right-wing and so-called “patriotic” podcasts, as well as people who express interest in guns and tactical gear. The messaging leans heavily on militarized language, invoking a “sacred duty,” the need to “defend the homeland,” and warnings about “foreign invaders.” After artists including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and SZA condemned ICE for using their music without permission, DHS shifted tactics again—this time turning to “niche music beloved by neo-Nazis,” openly courting white supremacist aesthetics and audiences. As one researcher put it, “In the past, those dog whistles were coming from supporters. Now they’re coming directly from the administration.” While most of the spending is aimed at recruiting new ICE agents, DHS has also shelled out nearly $3 million for Spanish-language ads on Google and YouTube. These ads target Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. with harassment and intimidation, telling people to “go home.” No corporation in America should be enabling ICE—let alone accepting its money and profiting from this campaign of fear and dehumanization. Demand Google and YouTube take down these vile ads and stop accepting money from ICE. Send a message to the CEOs of Google and YouTube now.

TAKE ACTION

Thanks for taking action, The whole Common Dreams team

 

The Trump administration is immoral and unjust

The Trump administration is immoral and unjust. When we talk about morality, we are also talking about justice. We are talking about rights, duties, and mutually agreed principles based on trust and compassion, and how and why we should live moral and just lives through an interdisciplinary understanding of philosophical ethics, social and political psychology, evolutionary biology, and theology to create a framework and identification with morality and justice.

The Trump administration have failed. They do not care about how morality serves an important function in our lives as individuals and in our community. They do not care about what maximizes the well-being of others. They do not care about moral rights. They do not care about ethical principles that reconcile self-interest with the common good and promote personal integrity and respect for legitimate rights. They do not even care about children’s rights.

 -Glen Brown

Shame on the Immoral and Illegal Trump Administrative Goons

A five-year-old child — Liam Conejo Ramos — was taken from his home and sent hundreds of miles away to a detention facility for-profit concentration camp in Texas. He was never accused of a crime, didn’t cross our southern border alone, and is so young he barely understands what’s happening to him; odds are he has no understanding of why he’s being treated with such brutality.

Nobody told little Liam about Tom Homan and Stephen Miller being so eager to punish brown-skinned immigrants, delighting in their pain, rationalizing it as a “deterrent” to “illegal immigration” that’s “poisoning the blood” of white America, as Donald Trump himself pointed out on the election trail.

He’s confined to a cell in a cold, concrete facility where the lights are kept on day and night. There’s no school for him to attend, nobody to hold him and reassure him, his medical care limited, and the food so bad he’s struggled to keep it down.

His lawyer says his health has declined while in government custody. But this isn’t really about immigration; it’s about power. And how stories and language facilitate the exercise or restraint of that power. It’s about what happens when a nation starts talking about its own people (and the people seeking refuge here) as if they’re enemies in a war.

As Radley Balko noted on BlueSky: “I’m coming to Boston and I’m bringing hell with me.” — Tom Homan in February: “Do I expect violence to escalate? Absolutely.” — Tom Homan in March: “I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room…” — Tom Homan in July, referring to a Democratic congressman who’d offended him.

This week, during a press briefing, Homan again used the language of war to describe immigration enforcement against brown-skinned people, and resistance from blue states. Words like “fight,” “battle,” “theater,” and “invasion.” When asked how many of his masked goons were still in Minneapolis, he said: “3,000. There’s been some rotations. Another thing I witnessed when I came here, I’ll share this with you, I’ve met a lot of people, they’ve been in theater, some of them have been in theater for eight months. So there’s going to be rotations of personnel.” [emphasis added]

“In theater”?!? That’s how Eisenhower used to talk about taking on the Nazis in Europe. That’s not how law enforcement talks; it’s how invading armies speak of invading the territory of their enemies.

That’s no accident by Homan, nor is it the mere use of “colorful phrasing.” When he uses that kind of language, he does it explicitly as a political weapon. And history tells us exactly where that leads.

Nixon taught us this lesson when he declared a “war on drugs” and then used it to spy on and persecute antiwar and civil rights leaders: the language of warfare changes the moral rules. Dan Baum chronicled how it works — and why — in 1994 when he interviewed Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, about Nixon’s “war on drugs” effort, and Ehrlichman said: 

“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people. You understand what I’m saying?

“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

”We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

In war, suffering is normal. In war, collateral damage is unfortunate but socially acceptable. In war, the people caught in the middle stop being human beings with rights and start being obstacles to be managed, broken, or, as in the cases of Renee Good and Alex Pritty, killed dead.

Five-year-old Liam, one of hundreds of children Trump and Homan have shipped off to Texas, is now living inside the consequences of that shift in language, that “war” rhetorical frame. This is absolutely unnecessary. The United States has laws for immigration enforcement. We have courts, due process and longstanding legal standards for the treatment of children in government custody.

I recently wrote about a friend who was deported during Obama’s administration by ICE agents in windbreakers with badges and ID, who politely gave him a month to get his affairs in order. Obama actually deported more people than Trump in any given year, including 2025, and nobody had their window smashed in or suffered 10 bullets in the back.

We’ve been enforcing immigration laws since 1924 when the Border Patrol was created, and never before have we needed an armed force with a larger budget than the FBI or the Marine Corps to pull it off. And we’ve deported a hell of a lot of people:

Syracuse University’s TRAC data attribute more than 3.1 million deportations over Obama’s eight years, with a peak of over 407,000 removals in FY 2012.​ By comparison, the first Trump administration (2017–2020) carried out fewer than about 932,000 deportations total, peaking at roughly 269,000 removals in 2019.​ After Trump’s return to office last year, ICE reported about 290,000 removals through late 2025 and mid‑FY 2026, which is still far below Obama’s cumulative total.​

In other words, Obama deported more “illegals” than Trump in any year, including last year with ICE going full force, and he did it with courtesy and the law. No masks or guns, no people being shot, no cars being chased and rammed.

As you can see, today’s ICE violence is more about the skin color of the deportees than about enforcing the immigration laws or ridding the country of undocumented persons.

None of those systems require keeping children locked in facilities where the lights never go off. None of them require denying a child a hug or an education. None of them require the conditions that lawyers and doctors have repeatedly warned cause physical and psychological harm to both children and adults but that Miller, Homan, Trump, et al insist on using.

The conditions of this child’s confinement aren’t a bureaucratic accident; they’re the predictable result of a system designed around the use of violence, isolation, terror, and pain directed at people with nonwhite skin as a brutal way of enforcing “deterrence” to Make America White Again. A system designed to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to private prison operators on the assumption they’ll recycle a good chunk of that back as campaign contributions and “gifts” to Republican politicians.

For years now, Republicans and rightwing media figures have described immigrants as if they’re part of an invasion. A “flood,” or a “threat” to be repelled. When leaders and the press talk about human beings that way, people find it easier to treat them as less than human. It becomes easier to cut corners, ignore the suffering, and to look away when a child gets sick or even dies behind locked doors.

And — like Nixon’s war on drugs — it doesn’t stop with migrants. Trump’s war on immigrants is as phony as was Nixon’s War on Drugs. Blacks are again the victims, but now instead of the young white men and women who took LBJ and Nixon down, he chose brown-skinned children. This is a sickness.

When that same war language is turned against Blue states, states that disagree with grandstanding politicians and brutal, inhumane agendas, something even more dangerous happens. Political disagreement becomes treason. Federalism becomes defiance. And America itself starts to look like a battlefield.

If we accept that it’s normal to treat migrant children this way because we’re at war during an invasion, what else becomes acceptable? What happens the next time a governor refuses to comply with a federal directive? What happens the next time protesters take to the streets, or a reporter chronicles a demonstration? Who gets labeled the enemy then?

This is not hypothetical. We don’t even have to reach back to the 1930s in Europe; we’ve seen this movie before right here in America. The “war on drugs” gave us mass incarceration and militarized police. The “war on terror” gave us torture, secret prisons, and ongoing surveillance.

Every time we let wartime language redefine our domestic policy debates, the result is the same. Rights shrink, power concentrates, and dissidents, members of the media, and the most vulnerable alike pay the price.

Children are supposed to be the line we never cross: they’re the moral stress test of any society. If a system refuses to protect its children, it isn’t a system worth defending. Little Liam locked up in that Texas facility behind concrete and razor wire is not a symbol: he’s a child who should be in school. Who should be sleeping in his own bed at home, tucked in by a loving parent. Who should be held by people who see him as a human being, not a person with brown skin to be exploited to satisfy the racist bloodlust of the MAGA base.

Supporters of these policies will say that enforcement is necessary. That the private, for-profit facilities they use meet legal standards. That Homan’s rhetoric is just “tough talk.” But it’s all bullshit. Enforcement doesn’t require cruelty. Following the law doesn’t require dehumanization. And words are never just words when they come from people with power. Language shapes policy. Policy shapes systems. Systems shape societies.

That’s the through line from Homan’s bizarre press briefing filled with war talk to a small child lying awake hungry, shivering, and crying under fluorescent lights. A nation that truly believes in liberty and justice doesn’t have to declare war on children to enforce its laws. It doesn’t need to turn sovereign states into enemies in order to govern effectively or imprison reporters for doing their jobs. And it doesn’t need to abandon its humanity to keep its citizens safe.

The question this regime confronts us with isn’t one of how to enforce or not enforce immigration law; it’s what kind of society we’re willing to become in the process.

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