The New Yorker:

Public opinion is turning on the President’s policies, but it might not be enough to keep the country from entering a much darker phase.

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

A seemingly innocuous moment in a heated political summer: last Wednesday, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, was walking outside the White House when someone among a clutch of reporters asked if he had a few minutes for questions. Theatrically, Homan, who wore a dark suit in the brutal D.C. heat, his bald dome shiny as a hard hat, looked at his watch. Sure, he said, with a nod. One reporter asked him what he thought of iceBlock, an app that alerts its users to raids. “It’s only a matter of time before we’re ambushed,” Homan said. Another asked whether raids were escalating in D.C.; Homan said that raids were escalating everywhere—“a thousand teams out there every day.” Then Pablo Manriquez, of Migrant Insider, shrewdly asked, “On deportations, why were you able to achieve so much more for Obama than you have so far under Trump?”

This is, of course, true. For all the aggression and cruelty of the Trump campaign against migrants, the number of deportations is not especially high right now. Suddenly, there was a tiny crack in the veneer of authority. The Obama numbers had been inflated, Homan claimed; under Trump, “we got honest numbers.” Homan sounded defensive. “Despite what the media says,” he went on, “the vast majority of people we’re removing are criminals, and public-safety threats. I read every day that ice is arresting non-criminals, that ice got more non-criminals in detention than criminals. It’s a bunch of garbage.”

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