QOTD: Don't Expect Improvements At DHS

 

The Guardian's Moira Donegan looks at what lies ahead for the Department of Homeland Security, now that Kristi "ICE Barbie" Noem was canned (apparently along with her alleged paramour Corey Lewandowski) and has moved on to a made-up job in the regime.  Her orders came from the sick bigot Stephen Miller, and her replacement is a muscle-headed goon who can be expected to carry out orders from the White House, too:

"Noem was incompetent, corrupt, and seemingly indifferent to both the law and to human suffering. But in this, she was not so much a liability for the Trump administration as a perfect embodiment of Maga governance. Her rule over DHS was marked by an aggressive pursuit of the mass deportation and ethnic cleansing campaign that Trump campaigned on heavily in 2024; she seems to have been heavily influenced in her decision-making by the advice of Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who is known for his hardline views on immigration and racial supremacy. “'Everything I’ve done, I’ve done at the direction of the president and Stephen,' she is said to have told one interlocutor.

Noem’s departure, then, seems unlikely to ring in a new era of responsibility, legality or professionalism at the department. In his post firing her, Trump said that Markwayne Mullin, a Republican senator from Oklahoma and a former MMA fighter, would be the next DHS secretary; technically, such an appointment requires Senate approval, but Mullin’s nomination seems unlikely to face much meaningful resistance in the Republican-controlled upper chamber. Mullin, a close Trump ally and immigration maximalist, is unlikely to mark much of a departure from Noem, either in policy substance or managerial savvy. The mass deportations, self-dealing and aggressive, even seemingly contemptuous approach to citizens and their rights seems likely to continue for as long as Trump, Miller and their allies control the vast apparatus of the DHS."  (our emphasis)

Mullin won't undo the damage done by the Malignant Fascist's cruel and illegal campaign of terror against immigrants; he'll continue it, perhaps only with some greater attention than his predecessor to the bad publicity it generates. The bad times will continue.

BONUS: Here's Markwaynesworld. Feel safe?

Meet the new Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin:

[image or embed]

— Home of the Brave (@ofthebraveusa.bsky.social) March 5, 2026 at 6:13 PM

(photos: Out with the old, in with the old/ Getty Images)

 

QOTD: "Freedom Being Taken Away"

Moira Donegan, writing in The Guardian, describes the fear and chaos that Florida's new abortion ban has brought to countless women in the state:

"By now the images are familiar. Similar scenes unfolded across many states in June of 2022, when doctors and nurses rushed to provide as much care as they could before the US supreme court issued its long-awaited Dobbs ruling, striking down the abortion right nationwide and rendering abortion immediately illegal in states with so-called trigger bans. Then the scenes played out again as ban after ban went into effect, either timed by statute or imposed by courts, removing women’s rights in one state after another.

The bans spread like an infection, creeping across the country irregularly, with access flickering in and out in the months that followed. But every new imposed law meant thousands of human catastrophes. Women sat in crowded waiting rooms, waiting to hear whether their lives and their bodies were still under their control, and state by state they learned, from clinic staff reading the news, from locked doors and apologies, or from the rushed translations of their fellow patients sitting beside them in vinyl chairs – that they weren’t.

What played out in Florida this past week was part of the anti-choice movement’s new sadistic regime for a post-Roe America: the display of lives being curtailed, of dignity being withdrawn, of health being imperiled. It is a public and deliberately humiliating spectacle for American women: one of freedom being taken away."  (our emphasis)

Never forget that the Malignant Loser / Al Caporn set this disaster in motion when he appointed three Supreme Court justices who passed the litmus test of being anti-choice, committed to taking Roe v. Wade down and replacing it with a state-by-state free for all. Far right state governments like those in Florida, Texas, and Indiana jumped at the chance to deny women the right to make their own reproductive choices. The Malignant Loser's party has been learning in referendums ever since Roe was struck down that Americans are opposed to their denial of reproductive choice. Despite that, the Malignant Loser strongly defends his reactionary anti-choice policies, bragging that he was responsible for eliminating Roe, and with it the Constitutional right for a woman to control her body.

(photo: Evelyn Hockstein/ Reuters)