On April 14, Mohsen Mahdawi arrived at a government immigration office in Vermont for a citizenship interview. After 10 years as a "legal" US resident with a "green card," he wanted to officially become an "American." Instead, he found himself handcuffed, hooded, and whisked away to a cage pending deportation. He was finally released on bail two weeks later.

On April 15, Kasper Eriksen arrived at a government immigration office in Tennessee. Eriksen also a "green card" holder, with a family and pregnant wife in Mississippi, also thought he was attending a citizenship interview. He was also arrested and caged pending deportation. As of this writing, he has yet to receive bail.

On April 30, Ming Li Hui, better known to her friends and neighbors in Kennett, Missouri as "Carol," found herself summarily ordered to report to an immigration office in St. Louis. Carol arrived in the US as a refugee from Hong Kong in 2004. Twenty years later, she's gainfully employed, a convert to Catholicism, and has a family including three children. The US government locked her up pending deportation back to Communist China.

One of her local friends, Vanessa Cowart, interviewed by the New York Times, puts it bluntly: "I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves. This is Carol."

Why are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, some even seeking to become American citizens, finding themselves in cages and facing deportation?

Let's not kid ourselves: It was going to come to this eventually. Authoritarian police states never stop looking for victims and scapegoats. They eventually collapse, thankfully, but until they do it's open season on enemies, real and imagined.

But why so soon? Because Donald Trump's promise to deport millions of immigrants has, so far, proven itself an epic fail. At the moment, the US government is deporting people at half the pace of the Obama regime.

In late May, Axios reports, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the Trump regime's top immigration thugs in for a dressing down. They're unhappy with the slow rate of immigrant abductions and want it tripled to 3,000 per day.

And there's your answer: It's easier to reach an artificial "quota" by kidnapping immigrants who show up to appointments on demand than it is to track down a handful of real criminals in their lairs, or nab foreign-born workers quietly making their livings (and making our lives better) while avoiding contact with "law enforcement."

In the opening salvos of his first administration's nativist push, Donald Trump groused about immigrants from "sh*thole countries."

Now he's discovering that the only way to stop immigration to the US is to turn it into one of those sh*thole countries that no one wants to live in.

He's doing his best to accomplish that, and even his supporters are starting to notice.

originally published at the Garrison Center

Trump Alienates Even His Own Supporters With Desperation Play on Immigration