$5,000,000 Green Cards, Criminal Migrant Children, and Anti-Immigrant Militias
From gold green cards to targeting migrant children instead of criminals, the Trump administration seems to be struggling with its immigration plans
Since the election, the Trump administration has been flooding the news cycle with outright madness. The idea isn’t just to take attention away from what they’re doing behind the scenes but to exhaust people who are speaking out against its Christian white nationalist polices. News media focusing solely on Trump and Elon Musk means they’re not covering the biggest story of inhumanity in the U.S. in decades: the state-sponsored targeting of Latino immigrants.
Many independent journalists, like myself, while struggling to keep up, are doing the best we can to take up the slack from legacy media’s sensationalized political coverage. And we're doing an amazing job covering it all, particularly the stories mainstream news is missing, whether intentionally or not. As more media outlets continue to appease the Trump administration in advance – a key sign of fascism setting in – independent journalists need your help to keep us going. Make sure to support your favorite reporters.
With that said, let's take a look at the latest.
On Sale Now! $5,000,000 Green Cards
President Donald Trump introduced the idea of a “Gold Card” to replace the current EB-5 immigrant investor program. Currently, the program requires a minimum investment of about $1,000,000 with a targeted employment area investment of $800,000. Once all requirements are met, the program allows investors, their spouses, and unmarried children to apply for a green card (lawful permanent residence).
Instead, Trump wants to replace the current program and create a Gold Card with a $5,000,000 price tag. He provided no specifics about requirements or limitations.
"We are going to be selling a gold card," Trump said. "We are going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million. It's going to give you green card privileges plus it's going to be a route to (American) citizenship, and wealthy people would be coming into our country by buying this card."
Trump said details about the plan will be out in two weeks. Without knowing what the pieces of the scheme are, it’s difficult to understand what the regulations would be even if it feels like a ruse. We should, however, expect cash flow restrictions for people from specific countries (Iran, China, etc), much like the current policy is now. Whether the requirement to create no less than 10 permanent jobs for qualified U.S. workers will change is also unclear.
Anti-Immigrant Militia
A recent report from POLITICO details a 26-page memo being passed around by several military contractors, including war criminal Erik Prince. The plan estimates the cost of the operation to be about $25 billion. If you had any doubts about human lives being used for politics, you can stop doubting. The plan proposes rapidly deporting 12 million immigrants before the 2026 midterms, or 500,000 per month.
Prince being involved is not surprising. I reported on his plans to raise $100 million to overthrow the Venezuelan government over the summer. Since that failed miserably – he raised only 1% while multiple weapons shipments and mercenaries were intercepted in Venezuela – Prince has been looking for something else to sink his teeth into from his mansion in Miami.
Even more concerning is knowing hundreds, if not thousands, of civilians have already been trained since 2014 in Citizens Academies – run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) – to perform surveillance on immigrants, use high-powered weapons, and conduct raids. It seems that deputizing civilians will be far too easy.
Read my investigative report on Citizens Academies here.
From Criminals to Children
Trump and his cronies have emphasized how they plan to target so-called “criminal aliens” for months. However, when considering that immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native-born citizens, they seem to be having a hard time finding them. This would somewhat explain the targeting of non-citizens that aren’t criminal and turn out to be here legally.
Since ICE seems to be having trouble meeting arrest totals set by Border Czar Tom Homan, they now plan to target unaccompanied minors – most of whom have been with family for years or are now adults. The goal of using horrifying family separations and advertising them as a deterrent is the same as it was when Trump tore families apart during his last term.
While the administration still pushes the false claim that 300,000 children went missing under Biden, those children are who they plan to target. Those “missing” children are no longer being tracked by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) because they are either adults or living with family. In an act of seeming frustration, the administration is now investigating the vetting policies that allowed these children to be reunited with their families.
ICE Is Still Coming Up Short
A recent press release from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) claims that ICE arrests have increased by 672% under Trump. Many data points dispute this claim and Tom Homan’s frustrations focused on people knowing their rights and refusing to talk to ICE, also highlight the failure to meet dubious goals set by propagandists.
“President Trump and this Administration are saving lives every day because of the actions we are taking to secure the border and deport illegal alien criminals. Hundreds of thousands of criminals were let into this country illegally. We are sending them home, and they will never be allowed to return.”
According to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the facts disagree with DHS. To make such a claim as countless reports indicate the administration is struggling to meet its goals, is interesting. They seem to be struggling with fulfilling the political theater – the nonexistent issues that were broad talking points and being used to feed the base red meat. There are much fewer so-called “gang members” than they claimed just as there are far fewer “illegal” or “criminal” immigrants than their fearmongering suggested.
“As ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) have acknowledged, arrest levels then dropped in February – so much so that the Trump administration discontinued publishing daily numbers,” reads the TRAC website. The 724 ICE arrests per day during the first 8 days of February were in fact below – down 4.7 percent – from the average daily number of 759 arrests during all of FY 2024 under the Biden administration.”
TRAC publishes “comprehensive information about staffing, spending, and enforcement activities of the federal government.” Part of that program tracks immigration arrests, among many other key data points. Journalists and researchers have relied on TRAC since 1989 as its exhaustive data is invaluable, especially in times like these.
Cubans Protest U.S. Occupation
As many as 50,000 Cubans turned out in Guantanamo, Cuba to protest the U.S. occupation of the island. Not only were Cubans protesting the occupation, but they were also protesting the unilateral U.S. embargo, the more than 240 sanctions, and the Trump administration’s plans to house as many as 30,000 migrants at the base in Guantanamo Bay.
The use of the base in Cuba has been a failure as the Venezuelan migrants sent there were better served by being sent back to Venezuela, thus eliminating the exorbitant costs of housing them on the island – a question I asked the administration about daily until they finally sent all the migrants home. Now, questions about inhumane treatment have become the focus of migrants being sent to Guantanamo.
Worth Mentioning
In light of the failure in attempting to use the base in Guantanamo to house migrants, Core Civic, a private prison company with expansive migrant detention facilities, has signed a new contract with ICE expanding its detention capacity at four of its prisons, according to Axios.
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