I’d say the answer can be found in the full text of what Machado said after the meeting. This has some historical heft that is missing from the CBS report above: “I presented the president of the United States the medal … the Nobel Peace Prize, and I told him, ‘Listen to this, 200 years ago, General Lafayette gave Simón Bolívar a medal with George Washington’s face on it’ as a symbol of the partnership between the people of the U.S. and the people of Venezuela and their shared fight for freedom against tyranny. And 200 years in history, the people of Bolívar are giving back to the heir of Washington a medal—in this case, the medal of the Nobel Peace Prize—as a recognition for his unique commitment with our freedom / to our freedom.”
The signature policy of the Biden administration, and the one that was most opposed by the American public, was Biden’s disastrous opening of our southern border to countless millions of unvetted illegal aliens, including dangerous criminals, many of whom were transported and housed at extravagant expense using taxpayer funds. Biden abandoned border security, relocated Third World refugees en masse, and generally surrendered our national sovereignty. A nation without secure borders is not a nation. Biden’s reckless immigration policies took the nation to the brink of doom.
Americans were furious, especially since President Trump had managed to lock down our borders in his first term. Biden and his inept VP, Kamala Harris, claimed that border enforcement would be impossible without passing an amnesty bill. This was a lie, and Americans knew it. So, President Trump was elected to a second term in 2024 based in large part on his vow to stop illegal immigrationand deport the millions of illegal aliens. Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump 2.0 quickly shut down the flood of illegal immigration through tough border enforcement. Not a single illegal alien managed to cross the border, in contrast to the hordes welcomed by Biden-Harris. Americans were jubilant.
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I’ve noted already that this cartoonish bad guy behavior feeds a sense that ICE is both illegitimate and not entirely real — people really do treat them like Star Wars stormtroopers whom they, the rebel hero, can freely antagonize while protected by good guy plot armor. But also—the complete lack of gravitas from the Trump/DHS/ICE camp is also, separately, just a massive communications failure.
There is the genuinely stunning fraud scandal, recently revealed, that happened on Walz’s watch. And there is the long shadow of George Floyd. But to understand both the crackdown and its stakes, it’s also worth revisiting a speech Trump gave in the city in November 2016, two days before the election that would first deliver him to the White House.
“Except the part where he says the fraud was “recently revealed” (with a link to a NYT story, as tho it’s not real until they report it)”
Let’s not forget that the Biden administration also sued Texas to stop them from securing the border
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Amy Klobuchar in 2006 calling for ‘a fence’, accounting for inflation ‘a wall’ and ‘order at the border’
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In 2015, Barack Obama awarded Tom Homan the the Presidential Award for Service for Making America Safer at ICE…
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(Side note: Democrats are historically much better at mass deportations than Republicans, as they take a whole-of-society approach to it, and persist with it over decades, and do it silently and nonviolently. That’s how Republicans were pushed out of university faculties, media companies, and California itself. It was once a dark red state, and now it’s deep blue.)
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The executive who oversees that team, along with a bunch of other DEI initiatives, is the Chief Equity officer, who makes a base salary — see pg. 8 here — of $357,000 a year. Here, watch her define the healthcare system’s most important goal, and notice that it isn’t “healing sick people,” which apparently is less important: “Nneka Sederstrom, the health system’s chief equity officer, said budget challenges put the hospital’s core mission of reducing health disparities at risk. The county declared racism as a public health crisis in 2020.” The healthcare system that treats racism as a medical problem now regards itself as a provider of total lifestyle support, not merely medicine, and provides benefits like this (see pg. 24): “Pre-packed bags of food available to patients at clinic visits.”
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I served as a pastor there for 8 years. This is a normal Baptist Church. They worship Jesus. They love each other. They seek the good of their neighbors.
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My greatest analytical error was a failure to see that there would be little organized opposition to the Left. Only now have the first glimmers appeared (e.g., Kirk’s Turning Point USA, increasing radicalism among the young right). Hence the Left’s series of mind-blowing victories. The right’s weak institutional support means their occasional wins only slow the Left. Trump discovered this in his first term and is re-learning it in his second, hence the pivot to foreign affairs.