THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

In the second Trump administration, immigration policy is made with big round numbers. There’s a formula: First the White House sets an ambitious goal—1 million deportations a year, 3,000 immigration arrests a day. Then it presses the federal workforce to meet the target. Last year, Trump officials pledged to double staffing at ICE by adding 10,000 new deportation officers by January 2026. Stephen Miller treated the recruitment drive as a priority on par with the deportation push, demanding daily updates on the pace of hiring. Immigration and Customs Enforcement held job expos in multiple cities and dangled $50,000 bonuses, student-loan forgiveness, and other perks before potential recruits.Just after New Year’s Day, the Department of Homeland Security declared victory, celebrating an ICE hiring spree that “shattered expectations” and achieved a “120% Manpower Increase.” DHS said it received more than 220,000 applications (many candidates applied for three or four different jobs) and… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In 2023, the Department of Justice released a blistering report on the patterns and practices of the Minneapolis Police Department. The police force responsible for George Floyd’s death three years earlier, the DOJ wrote, regularly “uses unreasonable deadly force,” “unlawfully retaliates against people who observe and record their activities,” and “fails to adequately discipline police misconduct.” The department also engaged in the “inherently dangerous and almost always counterproductive” practice of shooting at moving cars. In one case, an officer who had the time and space to move out of the path of an escaping vehicle instead fired four shots at it. The officer’s use of force, the report said, “was reckless and unreasonable.”The Justice Department this month opted against conducting an investigation into the death of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed after an ICE officer fired shots into her moving Honda Pilot. The government is instead reportedly pushing to… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

The first year of Donald Trump’s second term has made two things clear. First, the MAGA coalition is not breaking up any time soon. Even after the especially chaotic events of the past few weeks, Trump supporters are sticking by their man. Second, faith in Trump’s leadership is not driven by his adherence to a coherent political ideology. Trump, who, as part of his “America First” policy, once declared that he would be “getting out of the nation-building business,” has now declared that the U.S. “will run the country” of Venezuela for the foreseeable future. An administration that promised to look out for the “working man” has handed billions of tax dollars back to America’s wealthiest households while stripping health care from the most vulnerable.If ideological consistency can’t explain the enduring loyalty of Trump’s base, what does? A new study by More in Common, the nonprofit research organization where we… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Heinrich Himmler and other Third Reich occultists in the 1930s latched onto the strange idea that the Aryan race was not the product of evolution but descended from semidivine beings who left the heavens and established a secret civilization on Earth, possibly beneath Central Asia. Himmler, the head of the SS, was so enthralled by the possibility of what he considered celestial proof of the superiority of the white race that he provided funding for an SS expedition to Tibet in 1938 in the hope of locating his utopia, according to Black Sun, a 2001 history of Nazi occultism by the British historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke.Almost a century later, this idea of a lost Aryan civilization, called Agartha, has caught on again, this time with teenagers posting memes online. If you’re older than 25, you likely missed it. But over the past year, memes about Agartha—a mystical, underground city in the… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Betting money puts the odds of constitutional collapse in the United States at about one in 25. Anyone can wager three or four cents on Polymarket, Kalshi, or PredictIt that will pay out $1 if Donald Trump wins a third term in the 2028 election—an impossibility, according to the plain text of the Twenty-Second Amendment: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic strategist, thinks that the chance of political apocalypse is about 20 times higher—and that Americans need to start preparing now. He recently secured dual citizenship for his family on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and is obsessively thinking through how people should respond if Trump tries to maintain power with the threat of force. He styles himself a doomsday philosopher of this worst-case scenario.On a Tuesday last month, this effort brought him to a co-working space… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.