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This morning, President Donald Trump used the standard diplomatic channel—his Truth Social account—to announce retaliation against Canada for Ontario’s new electricity tariffs, which were themselves retaliatory.

“I have instructed my Secretary of Commerce to add an ADDITIONAL 25% Tariff, to 50%, on all STEEL and ALUMINUM COMING INTO THE UNITED STATES FROM CANADA, ONE OF THE HIGHEST TARIFFING NATIONS ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. This will go into effect TOMORROW MORNING, March 12th,” Trump wrote. The rest of the message is much stranger, again promising the annexation of Canada: “The artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear, and we will have the safest and most beautiful Nation anywhere in the World.”

Earlier this evening, Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, pulled back the electricity tariffs after securing a meeting with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the White House dropped its threat. Ford likely recognized that no matter how belligerent a stance Trump takes, he can be easily induced to change his mind.

Consider what’s happened with tariffs over the past 45 days. On February 1, Trump announced 25 percent tariffs on both Canada and Mexico, to take effect on February 4. On February 3, he announced a one-month pause in implementation. On February 26, he said he might not actually impose the tariffs until April 2; the next day, he said they’d start on March 4. On March 2, Lutnick suggested that the tariff situation was “fluid.” On March 4, the tariffs went into effect after all.

Confused yet? We’re just getting started. That afternoon, with stock markets reacting poorly, Lutnick suggested that the tariffs might be rolled back the next day. Indeed, on March 5, Trump announced that he was suspending parts of the tariffs related to auto manufacturing until April. And then, on March 6, he suspended all of the tariffs until April. Trump once told us that trade wars are “easy to win.” Now he seems unsure about how to fight one, or whether he even wants to.

If the defining feeling of the start of the first Trump administration was chaos, its equivalent in this term is whiplash. The president and his aides have been changing their minds and positions at nauseating speed.

Many of the reversals seem to come down to Trump’s caprices. On February 19, he called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “a dictator.” About a week later, he disavowed that. “Did I say that? I can't believe I said that,” he told reporters. “I think the president and I actually have had a very good relationship.” The next day, Trump berated Zelensky in the Oval Office, sent him packing, and began cutting off military help to Ukraine. This afternoon, the U.S. restarted military and financial aid once again.

Another leading cause of whiplash is Bureaucrat in Chief Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service. Last week, the General Services Administration put up a list of more than 400 buildings that the cost-cutting crew had deemed inessential for government operations. The inventory included some eye-raising entries, including the Robert F. Kennedy building—headquarters of the Justice Department—and the main offices of the Labor Department and the FBI, but also some peculiar ones, such as steam tunnels underneath Washington, D.C. (One imagines that the wrong buyer could cause a great deal of mayhem with those.) Within hours, more than 100 entries had been removed from the list; by the next day, it was gone entirely, replaced by a “coming soon” message—though not before revealing a semi-secret CIA facility.

DOGE and other efforts to slash the federal workforce keep overstepping and requiring reversals. In some cases, officials seem to be discovering that the things Trump wants are either impracticable or too politically toxic to effect. Musk posted on X that if federal workers didn’t respond to an email, it would be tantamount to their resignation. Then the threat was removed. Then Musk sent another email. Thousands of federal workers have been laid off, only to be called back to work. Some workers who accepted a buyout offer were then fired; others had the offer rescinded. Musk tittered over canceling and then uncanceling Ebola-prevention programs, though some officials dispute that they were actually uncanceled. The administration planned to shut down the coronavirus-test-distribution program, then ultimately suspended but did not end it; it killed but then resuscitated a health program for 9/11 survivors.

Trump isn’t just going back on specifics. Some of his core campaign propositions are also looking shaky. Despite campaigning on the deleterious effects of inflation, he now says that it’s not a top priority. He promised booming wealth for Americans; now he can’t rule out a recession and is warning that people will need to endure some pain (for what higher purpose, he hasn’t made clear). And even though Trump has long said that he won’t cut Medicare or Social Security, Musk is now targeting them and calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme.

This kind of vacillation creates an obvious credibility problem for the president and his administration. As I wrote during Trump’s first presidency, foreign leaders quickly concluded that he was a pushover, easily convinced by flattering words. Trump practically always folded in a negotiation. This history, combined with his mercurial moods, mean that counterparts don’t assume they can take him at his word. In the case of Canada, Trump seems to have come out with the worst possible outcome: Canadian leaders believe he’s deadly serious about annexing the country, a quixotic goal, but they have no reason to take his bluster about tariffs, which he can actually impose, all that seriously.

The situation might be even more dangerous if observers took Trump at his word. His dithering has given markets the jitters, but the economic impacts might be more dire if traders acted as though they expected him to follow through on all of his tariff threats. (After he said this past weekend that a recession is possible, markets plunged. Did investors believe he had some secret plan up his sleeve until then?)

Uncertainty is bad for markets, but the problem is larger than that. One of the most fundamental roles of the state is to create a sense of consistency and stability for society. That provides the conditions for flourishing of all kinds: economic, artistic, cultural, scientific. Trump is both seeking to seize more power for himself and refusing to exercise it in a way that allows the nation to flourish.

Today, my colleague Adam Serwer wrote about the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University who has not been charged, much less convicted, of any crime. This, too, calls into question the stability of the rule of law—specifically, the long-standing fact that the First Amendment and due process apply to legal permanent residents. (Last month, I wrote that Trump’s actions were showing that his commitment to free speech was bogus. He seems determined to prove me right.) The first months of the Trump presidency have been whiplash-inducing, but in the long term, the failure to set and follow consistent rules threatens national pain much worse than a sore neck.

Related:

Mahmoud Khali’s detention is a trial run. The free-speech phonies

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

His daughter was America’s first measles death in a decade. ICE isn’t delivering the mass deportation Trump wants. The only question Trump asks himself

Today’s News

Ukraine has agreed to an immediate 30-day cease-fire if Russia accepts the plan proposed by the United States. Ontario suspended its 25 percent electricity surcharge for some U.S. states after Donald Trump threatened a 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum for Canada. The former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who started a widespread crackdown on drugs, was arrested on an International Criminal Court warrant for crimes against humanity.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing,” Annie Lowrey writes. Maybe don’t invite a recession in.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Kent Nishimura / Bloomberg / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty.

Anti-Semitism Is Just a Pretext

By Jonathan Chait

The [Trump] administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

On my evening to-do list once I finish this newsletter: Pick up my copy of my colleague Olga Khazan’s Me, but Better at my local bookstore. In 2022, she wrote one of my favorite Atlantic stories ever about her three-month attempt to change her own personality. In the book, which is out today, she goes deeper. Olga is a very funny writer and great at sorting through and explaining complicated science, but for me, what makes her such an outstanding journalist is her ability to see and question a lot of the things that most people take for granted. I feel safe guessing that her research didn’t change that part of her personality.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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President Donald Trump says tariffs are key to U.S. economic dominance.

Read more...

Sharp words for the US president from Canada’s incoming prime minister.

US President Donald Trump faces increased pressure to stimulate economic growth after a brutal market selloff on Monday indicated rising recession risks.

Last week, Mother Jones reported that Kingsley Wilson, the deputy press secretary for the Defense Department, has posted in recent years a long string of bigoted far-right posts—including endorsing the claim that Leo Frank, a Jewish man lynched in 1915 in one of the most ghastly anti-Semitic killings in American history, was a rapist and a murderer.

In light of this disturbing news, the Trump administration leaped into action to combat anti-Semitism … on campus. The administration announced that it was slashing $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” It followed up this action by detaining Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian anti-Israel activist who led protests at Columbia as a grad student last year. The arrest was carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

One can question the effectiveness of Columbia’s actions to combat anti-Semitism, but the allegation that it has failed to act is simply untrue. After the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks began tearing the campus apart, the school commissioned a task force on anti-Semitism. It called in police to clear out a building takeover by anti-Israel activists. Just a few weeks ago, two Barnard students were expelled after disrupting an Israeli-history course and distributing flyers depicting a Jewish star being stepped on by a jackboot.

[Adam Serwer: Mahmoud Khalil’s detention is a trial run]

The Trump administration, by contrast, really has done nothing about anti-Semitism in its own ranks. The administration is threatening more arrests of foreign-born campus activists, and more funding cuts, all supposedly to contain anti-Semitism, at the same time that it is elevating anti-Semites to newfound prominence and legitimacy. Donald Trump opposes left-wing anti-Semitism because it is left-wing, not because it is anti-Semitic. And his campaign to supposedly stamp it out on campus is a pretext for an authoritarian power grab.

If you wish to understand the thought process that led to this point, a good place to begin would be a short missive written last month by Christopher Rufo, an influential conservative activist and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Rufo argued that the ascendant right needs to reject left-wing “cancel culture,” but not settle for returning to liberal norms. “All cultures cancel,” he wrote. “The question is, for what, and by whom.” This echoed, either consciously or unconsciously, Vladimir Lenin’s famous dictum, “Who, Whom?,” by which he defined politics as entirely a question of which class would dominate the other, rejecting any possibility of liberal accommodation.

Rufo chose as his explanatory example the case of Marko Elez, a DOGE staffer who resigned after his exposure for having written openly racist posts (including, literally, “I was racist before it was cool”), only to be rehired after a public intervention by Elon Musk and J. D. Vance. “The vice president rejected the calculus of left-wing cancel culture,” Rufo explained, “demonstrating instead that forgiveness, loyalty, and a sense of proportion should be part of the decision-making process in such controversies.”

The key term here is loyalty. Protection would be afforded only to allies. “We should propose a new set of values that expands the range of acceptable discourse rightward,” Rufo argued, which would enable the right to “protect its own members from unjust cancellation attempts” and “enforce just consequences on political opponents who violate the new terms.”

[Yair Rosenberg: The anti-Semitic revolution on the American right]

The sole guiding principle at work is the defense of allies and the punishment of foes. Trump and his allies may purport to be following other values, but they barely bother with even the pretense of consistency. Trump will claim to defend free speech while launching a campaign to punish campus demonstrators on the basis of their viewpoints. (Many anti-Israel protesters have espoused ghastly political views, including support for the October 7 murders, but free speech means nothing if not preventing the government from punishing ideas it disagrees with.) He will occasionally justify his repression as simply a crackdown on disorder and other forms of misconduct, while granting sweeping pardons to the perpetrators of a violent mob assault on the Capitol.

That spirit of pure will to power—who, whom—has defined the administration’s gleefully selective approach to “combating” anti-Semitism, which in practice seems to mean using anti-Semitism as a pretext to intimidate its opponents while simultaneously cultivating its own anti-Semitic faction.

Trump’s rise over the past decade has broadened the Republican coalition in many ways—including by pulling in far-right activists previously considered too racist to be permitted in the tent. During his first campaign and presidential term, Trump courted these factions with wink-and-nod rhetoric: calling his movement “America First” (a label previously used by the isolationist right before World War II), gesturing toward the “Great Replacement” theory (the idea, circulated by white supremacists, that mass immigration is a left-wing plot to transform American politics and culture), attacking his Republican critics as “globalists,” and refusing to denounce even virulently racist figures, such as David Duke, who supported him.

During his second term, the embrace is far less subtle. Winks and nods have been replaced by public Nazi salutes. Andrew Tate, the notorious manosphere influencer and alleged sex trafficker, recently received a special intervention from the White House allowing him to travel to the United States, presumably because he is loyal to Trump. (The president has denied involvement in that decision.) His extensive list of moral abominations includes overtly anti-Semitic statements, including praise for Hamas and the October 7 attacks.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Trump has turned the GOP into a white-supremacist or Nazi party. The still-disturbing reality is that he has brought white supremacists and Nazis into the coalition. As such, they receive his protection.

Right-wing anti-Semitism has exploded as a consequence of the Trumpist no-enemies-to-the-right principle. Elon Musk has made X both more central to conservative messaging and distinctly friendlier to anti-Semitic messages. Just this past week, the popular podcaster Joe Rogan credulously interviewed a notorious anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

It is true that anti-Semitism has also surged on the left, frequently disguised as anti-Zionism. The key difference is that it has utterly failed to gain legitimacy within the Democratic Party. Indeed, the movements that have given comfort to anti-Semitism on the left have exuded hostility toward the Democrats, sometimes even expressing a preference for Trump. Democrats have managed to keep left-wing anti-Semitism marginal because they recognize that it exists. By denying right-wing anti-Semitism, Republicans have allowed it to spread.

[Conor Friedersdorf: How colleges should address anti-Semitism]

Jew hatred is now crossing a threshold of political viability such that even prominent Republicans in safe congressional seats hesitate to denounce it. Consider this telling response by Senator Lindsey Graham to Kingsley Wilson’s anti-Semitic invective: “I’m not gonna tell them who to hire, but I do know that Trump doesn’t believe any of the things she’s talking about, and I’ll leave it up to them to determine if they think she’s the right spokesperson. If what you say about these posts are true, then she’s completely off-script with President Trump.”

Graham is trying to signal, as tepidly as possible, that the White House should fire Wilson by calling her “off-script with President Trump.” But by saying he won’t tell Trump whom to hire, he frees the president from any standard of accountability. Graham opposes anti-Semitism, but his opposition must yield to the highest imperative, Trump is always right.

The rise of anti-Semitism on campus since October 7, 2023, is real. But the Republican campaign to use it as a justification to extend political control over universities has nothing to do with protecting Jews, and everything to do with undermining liberal democracy.

On the campaign trail last fall, President Donald Trump promised a “new era of soaring income, skyrocketing wealth, millions and millions of new jobs, and a booming middle class. We are going to boom like we’ve never boomed before.” On Fox News this weekend, he promised a “period of transition.” He added: “It takes a little time. But I think it should be great for us. I mean, I think it should be great.” When the host asked, “Are you expecting a recession this year?” he didn’t say no.

The White House has traded a message of prosperity now for a message of prosperity soon, forecasting that the budget cuts and tariffs the Trump administration is implementing will redound to the country’s welfare in the near future: Businesses will bring their overseas operations back to America; a leaner government will leave more income for American firms and households. But economists doubt that the Trump administration’s policy changes will promote growth. And Trump’s message isn’t inspiring confidence among businesses and consumers. That alone might be enough to pitch the country into a downturn.

Already, Trump’s policies are slowing down the economy. The administration has kicked off a global trade war. It announced tariffs on Canada and Mexico, spurring the Canadian government to retaliate with its own tariffs, which then spurred Washington to retaliate for the retaliation; abruptly reversed some of the levies; increased tariffs on China, causing China to impose tit-for-tat measures; added tariffs to aluminum and steel products; proposed “reciprocal” tariffs on countries with taxes on American goods; and floated the idea of putting export tariffs on American agricultural products.

The tariffs are slowing trade and increasing costs for American consumers. Companies including Best Buy, Target, and Walmart have warned that they will have to bump up prices as import costs rise. Moreover, the unpredictability around the implementation of the tariffs has led to chaos in the markets. An index of policy-related uncertainty hit its highest-recorded level, aside from the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses are less sure of the country’s prospects now than they were after 9/11 or during the housing-market collapse in 2007. Manufacturing firms are pulling back on investment; companies are slowing down mergers and acquisitions; firms are downgrading their earnings estimates. The stock market has lost $4 trillion in value, as traders dump equities for safer investments.

Asked to clarify the White House’s trade policies this weekend, Trump responded: “We may go up with some tariffs. It depends. We may go up. I don’t think we’ll go down, or we may go up.” Businesses should stop whining about needing policy certainty, he said: “They always say that we want clarity,” but they “have plenty of clarity.” The real issue, he argued, was that “our country has been ripped off for many decades, for many, many decades, and we’re not going to be ripped off anymore.”

Beyond new taxes on businesses and consumers, the Trump administration is rescinding federal contracts and firing tens of thousands of federal workers, in many cases illegally. These cuts have not yet shown up in the jobs report, but economists expect them to, starting next month. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement firm, estimates that the government has let more than 60,000 workers go—enough to wipe out nearly half of the employment gains the economy notched last month—and notes that private businesses are amping up layoffs as well.

The Trump administration argues that the country has to go through a “detox period,” as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent put it. Yet the administration is not just cutting waste and eliminating fraud. The cuts at the IRS, for instance, are likely to reduce federal revenue by denying the government the resources it needs to audit high-income taxpayers. The Social Security cuts could interfere with seniors’ ability to access their retirement benefits.

The chaos emanating from Washington comes at a time when the economy is already slowing. Consumers are still being battered by high prices, particularly for housing; credit-card debt and default rates are climbing; the labor market is seizing up, with workers afraid to quit their jobs and hiring rates falling. As a result, indexes of consumer sentiment and small-business optimism are plunging. Last month, households became more pessimistic about current labor conditions, future business conditions, future income, and future employment prospects, the Conference Board reported.

Voters’ fear of a “detox period” or a “period of transition” could itself force the country into a literal vibecession, as households, feeling dour, pull back. Consumer spending makes up roughly two-thirds of the economy, and consumers make spending decisions not only on the basis of their own finances but also on their sense of where the country is headed. Reading the headlines on tariffs and hearing about DOGE-related job cuts, some families might put off the purchase of a new car. Others might cut short a summer vacation, decide to wait on a home-improvement project, or quit ordering pizza on Fridays. At the same time, firms might decide to wait on building a new plant or expanding into a new region, reducing employment gains and sapping revenue from other firms.

A downturn could result—or, even worse, given the tariffs’ impact on prices, a period of stagflation. Congress and the Federal Reserve would be faced with the choice of increasing spending and lowering interest rates to help create jobs, or lowering spending and increasing interest rates to hold down prices, incapable of doing both at the same time. The Trump White House might compound the pain by, as Elon Musk suggested, slashing Medicaid and Social Security benefits to finance tax cuts for rich households.

“It takes a little time,” Trump said of his promised boom. “But I think it should be great.” Instead, we might have a recession. We might have it soon. It definitely won’t feel great.

The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest.

Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class. One Maryland doctor who treats patients with cancer and chronic pain from worksite injuries told me that many are skipping appointments. “They’re terrified,” he said.

That much, according to Trump officials, is going to plan, backed by a $200 million messaging campaign called “Stay Out and Leave Now.”

The results of the actual deportation push appear to be more modest, though not for lack of effort. ICE officers, some working six or seven days a week, made about 18,000 arrests last month, according to internal data I obtained. (ICE stopped publishing daily-arrest totals in early February as its numbers sagged.) By comparison, the agency tallied roughly 10,000 arrests in February 2024. The latest government data show that deportations were actually higher toward the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, when ICE was removing a larger number of migrants picked up along the Mexico-U.S. border.

[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]

At its current pace, ICE is nowhere near delivering what Trump promised. The president made mass deportations a centerpiece of his campaign and said during his inauguration speech that ICE would deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens.” Vice President J. D. Vance said that the administration would “start with 1 million.” But ICE doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do what Trump wants. The agency has fewer than 6,000 enforcement officers nationwide. Much of their work is essentially immigration case management—ensuring compliance with court appointments and monitoring requirements—not kicking down doors in tactical gear or staging mass roundups in the streets.

ICE has never deported 1 million people in a year, let alone half that many. Tom Homan, the White House “border czar,” who has been working out of an office at ICE headquarters in Washington, told me on Friday that the mass-deportation campaign remains on track and just needs Congress to cough up the money to allow it to kick into a higher gear.

Trump is happy with the results so far, Homan insisted. “The president has never told me he’s not happy,” Homan said. “I’m not happy.”

Administration officials are considering ways to help ICE boost its numbers, including legal tools to potentially give officers new authorities to enter homes. But in the meantime, the gap between Trump’s expectations and reality has senior officials in immigration enforcement on edge. The administration is churning through ICE leaders, blaming them for failing to deliver results. ICE staff members were stunned last month when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the demotion of the agency’s acting director, Caleb Vitello, barely a month into the job.

Vitello, a career ICE official who is also a certified mindfulness coach, had been viewed by his colleagues as a solid pick to steer the agency through a stressful time of intense scrutiny. He had worked in the White House with Stephen Miller during Trump’s first term. ICE officials figured he’d be as capable as anyone of managing the agency’s many masters—Miller, Noem, and Homan.

ICE started off the new administration with a conspicuous show of force, but the enforcement blitz soon began to fade. Vitello tried to issue daily quotas for the number of immigrants officers should arrest, but ICE teams were coming up short. They had burned through the lists of names and addresses they’d compiled prior to the inauguration, and they were too busy trying to make their quotas to research new targets. More and more people were refusing to answer the door when ICE knocked, leaving agents waiting outside.

The administration targeted several “sanctuary” cities that limit cooperation with ICE, but their big operations brought underwhelming results.

Noem blamed internal leaks and “crooked deep state agents” at the FBI for the relatively modest figures. It was a baffling claim. She and Homan had been conducting ICE raids on live television, even bringing along Dr. Phil to publicize the effort. Everyone knew they were coming.

On February 11, Noem ousted Vitello’s key deputies at ICE. Ten days later, she tried to demote Vitello. Noem wanted to bring in a trusted former aide and GOP political operative, Madison Sheahan, the head of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, who’d gotten that job in 2023 at age 26.

Noem wasn’t aware that ICE leadership roles typically require years of law enforcement or litigation experience, according to one senior DHS official who spoke with me on condition of anonymity. Although Sheahan had restored black-bear hunting to Louisiana and scored federal dollars for oyster farms, she wasn’t a lawyer or a cop. Vitello remained in the acting-director role, leaving ICE staff puzzled about who was in charge. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

[Gisela Salim-Peyer: The ‘right way’ to immigrate just went wrong]

On Sunday, two weeks after Vitello’s demotion was announced, ICE named a new acting director, Todd Lyons, a veteran official Noem had promoted less than a month earlier to oversee enforcement operations. Sheahan was named to the deputy-director role. Noem called the pair “work horses” who would deliver “results” and “achieve the American people’s mandate.”

The leadership stumbles point to the core problem with Trump’s grandiose deportation plan, which has the potential to become the “Build the Wall!” equivalent of his second term. Trump wants ICE to erase the immigration wave of the past decade and spearhead a MAGA social and cultural transformation. He has ordered federal law-enforcement agencies from across the government—the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, even the FBI—to drop what they’re doing and help ICE catch more immigrants.

Homan’s mission is twofold: stopping illegal migration and ramping up deportations. One of those things is already undermining the other.

Illegal border crossings hit record levels under Biden but declined sharply last year as his administration shut off asylum access and worked with Mexico to crack down on unlawful crossings. Trump’s return to office—which has been accompanied by the deployment of thousands of U.S. soldiers and the threat of a one-way ticket to Guantánamo—has sent the border numbers plunging in recent weeks to levels not seen since the 1960s.

Fewer border crossings leaves ICE with a smaller number of easy deportees. That puts more of an onus on ICE to find deportees in U.S. cities and other communities nationwide, a much more resource-intensive task.

Not every ICE arrest leads to a deportation, and so far, Trump’s removal numbers are lagging behind last year’s, when Biden deported more than 271,000 people during the 2024 fiscal year, the highest total in a decade. Most of those deportees were migrants taken into custody along the Mexico-U.S. border, not immigrants arrested by ICE well inside the United States.

Homan was at ICE in 2012, when the agency set its high-water mark with 409,000 removals and Barack Obama was derided as the “deporter in chief” by immigrant advocates. Homan speaks of that era with nostalgia, a time before the sanctuary movement pushed Democratic mayors to eschew cooperation with ICE. During the past decade, the agency has lost much of its ability to work with police and jails in the big U.S. cities that ICE considers its most “target-rich” environments.

Now one of the challenges for Homan, Miller, and others is to get the president to turn his attention to enforcement metrics besides deportations, such as higher numbers of ICE arrests and fewer crossings at the Mexico-U.S. border.

“People have focused on deportations, but they got to remember we’ve secured the border,” Homan said. Under Biden, millions of migrants who crossed the Mexico-U.S. border were released into the United States with pending asylum claims and temporary residency, he noted. Biden curbed access last year, but Trump has ordered that the doors be slammed shut.

Yesterday, DHS said that it will roll out a new mobile-application tool called “CBP Home” for migrants to tell the government when they voluntarily leave the United States. Its name is a play on the CBP One app that Trump pilloried on the campaign trail: Biden officials used CBP One as a queue-management tool for asylum seekers and migrants from Mexico trying to schedule appointments to arrive at border crossings.

Trump has made CBP Home one more way to scare people into leaving. “Self-deportation is the safest option,” the department said when announcing the new app.

The administration is trying a variety of strategies to raise its deportation figures closer to what Trump wants. Other approaches for getting more aggressive are under review but haven’t been attempted yet.

Homan says that ICE’s “aperture”—the demographics of the immigrants it wants to arrest—will widen once the agency finishes tracking down “the worst of the worst.” ICE told Congress last summer that there were about 650,000 immigrants with criminal records on its docket—a pool of potential deportees large enough to keep officers busy, Homan said. ICE data show that the top-three criminal categories in that group are traffic offenses, which include drunk driving; immigration violations, such as illegally reentering the United States; and assault.

[Adam Serwer: The deportation show]

ICE officers have been ordered to drop Biden-era rules that took a hands-off approach to immigrants who lacked legal status but hadn’t committed crimes. An internal memo sent to ICE officers last month that I obtained has instructed the agency to arrest more of the immigrants who report at ICE offices for mandatory “check-ins” as part of the terms of their provisional status in the United States.

That includes immigrants who entered the U.S. legally under one of the Biden administration’s “lawful pathways” programs, if they haven’t already applied for asylum protections. And it directs officers to take a new look at immigrants who aren’t eligible for U.S. residency but whose deportations have been deferred because they are at risk of torture or persecution in their home country.

The ICE memo urges officers to assess whether those immigrants can be sent to third countries, as Trump officials secure deals with El Salvador, Guatemala, and others to take immigrants that the United States can’t easily deport.

The well-worn ICE tactic known as “knock and talk” that attempts to convince immigrants to open their door for officers has had diminishing returns as the publicity around the deportation campaign has left more potential deportees on guard. Officers can’t force their way into a residence without a criminal warrant signed by a judge—a message that advocacy groups and social-media users have disseminated widely. (Homan has called for the Justice Department to consider whether Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others who share “know your rights” bulletins can be charged with impeding federal officers.)

Trump officials have been looking for a work-around to solve the problem of closed doors. Last month, DHS created a registration requirement for immigrants residing in the United States without legal status. Homan and two other DHS officials said that registry violations could allow ICE to bring criminal charges that would potentially give the agency a new way to enter a private residence without consent.

The administration is also working to get ICE more money, the lack of which has been perhaps the agency’s biggest impediment. Trump has backed a continuing resolution to fund the government through September that includes approximately $500 million in new money for ICE, equal to about 5 percent of the agency’s annual budget. The additional funds would allow ICE to continue adding detention capacity and removal flights incrementally, but they wouldn’t buy the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history.

[Rogé Karma: Why Democrats got the politics of immigration so wrong for so long]

That’s the goal of the budget-reconciliation package that GOP lawmakers in the House and the Senate are negotiating with each other and intend to pass without Democratic votes.

The sums they’re discussing are staggering. The bill advanced by Senator Lindsey Graham, the budget-committee chairman, would provide $175 billion for border security and immigration enforcement, roughly 20 times ICE’s entire annual budget.

One Democratic Senate staffer tracking the bill told me that it’s likely months away from a vote but could be approved this summer. “It’s effectively a blank check,” said the staffer, who was not authorized to speak to reporters on the record.

The money could finance the expansion of ICE capacity from its current level of about 45,000 detainees a day to Homan’s goal of more than 100,000. Most important, it would allow ICE to channel federal dollars to pro-Trump states and counties, where the agency can train more sheriff’s deputies and other local cops to make immigration arrests. That’s when Trump’s mass-deportation campaign could get a mass-deportation force to carry it out.

In this Fact Check, Al Jazeera’s @khalidmajzoubofficial examines claims made by Donald Trump about the war in Ukraine

Three U.S. senators are urging Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to disclose details about several private dinners he attended with Donald Trump and healthcare executives at Mar-a-Lago.

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The wonder of the American supermarket is the way it exists outside of seasons. Stroll into any major grocery store on a dreary winter day, and you’ll find a bounty of fresh summer fruits and vegetables waiting for you: avocados, tomatoes, berries, bell peppers, cucumbers, squash, and green beans. The American supermarket does not, however, exist outside of economics. These fruits and vegetables are largely grown in Mexico, meaning they are roped up in President Donald Trump’s trade war. Last week, he enacted 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico; two days later, he backtracked, suspending most of the tariffs until April 2. (His 20 percent tariff on products from China remains in effect.) Presuming that the president follows through, expect lots of goods to get more expensive: tequila, lumber, that $11 handheld vacuum you bought from Temu on a whim. But perhaps the most direct way that Americans feel the tariffs will be at the grocery store.

Nearly 60 percent of the fresh fruit in the United States is imported, as is more than one-third of the country’s fresh vegetables. Most of that travels in from Mexico, but Canada also plays a part in America’s food supply. Twenty percent of the country’s vegetables, by value, come from our neighbor to the north. For all the debate around what people should eat, one thing pretty much everyone agrees on is that fruits and veggies are good for you. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on a campaign to “Make America healthy again,” has promoted numerous dangerous ideas about the American diet—but he’s right that Americans aren’t eating enough greens. The tariffs will worsen the problem. “People are going to immediately eat less fruits and vegetables, and will more likely rely on processed foods,” Mariana Chilton, a public-health professor at Drexel University and the author of The Painful Truth About Hunger in America, told me. A direct consequence of Trump’s tariffs could be pushing Americans to eat worse than they already do.

Ideally, tariffs could be offset by growing more produce in the U.S. That is precisely what Trump calls for as part of his “America First” agenda. But as The Atlantic’s Yasmin Tayag wrote last month, doing so would require an overhaul of the food system: “More land would have to be dedicated to growing fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and less of it to grains and sweeteners. It would also mean addressing labor shortages, increasing the number of farmers, finding suitable land, and building new infrastructure to process and ship each new crop.”

So how much more expensive will produce get? The tariffs apply to the value of a product at the border, not the retail price, so it’s not as simple as just slapping on a 25 percent surcharge on avocados. Over the course of the next year or so, if the tariffs take effect, the Budget Lab at Yale projects a 2.9 percent increase on fruits and vegetables. “These sound like small numbers,” Ernie Tedeschi, the lab’s economic director, told me. “These are not small numbers.” It’s the equivalent of “two years’ worth of fresh-food inflation in one fell swoop.” And that 2.9 percent increase is an average, meaning it encompasses all produce prices—including fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. If you’re a big tomato eater and you like a side of green beans, the tariffs are going to especially hurt.

The Budget Lab expects a 1.7 percent bump on food prices overall. But this, too, wouldn’t be evenly distributed. On the opposite end of the cost spectrum, packaged foods would be among those least affected. They are made with imported fruits and vegetables, some of which may be coming from Mexico and Canada, but the overall amount tends to be negligible. (There just isn’t that much tomato on a frozen pizza.) “There might be other things that those food companies may be importing,” David Ortega, a food economist at Michigan State, told me, such as packaging. But “the pressure there is going to be a lot lower than in the actual fresh produce.”

In other words, Twinkies may get a little more expensive, while tomatoes may get a lot more expensive.   That’s going to make it harder for people to eat healthy, Sarah Bowen, a sociologist at North Carolina State University, told me. In her research interviewing moms about their food choices, “one of the things that came up again and again was that people wanted to buy healthier food, and especially fresh fruit, but they couldn’t afford it,” she told me. “We asked moms, ‘If you had more money to spend on food, what would you buy?’ And by far the most common answer was fresh fruit, specifically strawberries, grapes, things that kids like.” Even if you can swing it, there is a point where the discerning—or even vaguely price-conscious—consumer hits a limit and thinks, You know what, no. “It’s clear that people are already very worried about food prices,” Bowen said.

Of course, these changes will happen only at the margins. Lots of people might still buy an avocado that costs an extra 50 cents. And tariffs could have a perverse and uncomfortable upside, Caitlin Daniel, a researcher at Harvard, told me. Among the first purchases to go when budgets get tight is food that “people want to cut anyway,” she said—salty snacks, cookies, soda. That would be a limited victory. “In general, you’re probably going to see a decline in consumption of fresh produce, and that’s not good,” she said. The millions of Americans who already don’t eat enough vegetables will have even more of a reason not to do so. Even before the tariffs, fresh fruits and vegetables made up only “roughly a tenth” of the average middle-class grocery budget, Tedeschi said, drawing on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Expenditure Survey data.

The solace is that Americans still have plenty of ways to cut their broccoli costs. “There’s some latitude for substitution,” Daniel said. Instead of buying fresh, people might buy canned or frozen options “with really no change in diet quality,” she said. America grows tons of other fruits and vegetables; most of the country’s spinach, for example, is already grown domestically.

Price alone cannot explain why Americans eat the way they do. But the tariffs could underscore just how fundamental it is for understanding the country’s diet. Daniel has found in her research that people go to great lengths to continue eating fresh produce even when cash-strapped. “Whether people cinch up at the level of trying to buy from cheaper retailers,” she said, “going in on more couponing, shopping at multiple stores in search of deals—all of these things are going to contribute to what the ultimate impact on health is.” Tariffs or no tariffs, telling people what to eat is less effective than ensuring that they’re actually able to buy it. For an administration that wants to “Make America healthy again,” raising the prices of fruits and vegetables might not be the place to start.