Commentary by Heather Cox Richardson
Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez of NBC News reported today that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s rush to get new recruits onto the street has meant they have pushed into their training program more than 200 people who have disqualifying criminal backgrounds, fail drug testing, or don’t meet the academic or physical requirements.
The budget reconciliation measure the Republicans passed in July—the one they call the “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act”—included more than $170 billion over four years for immigration and border security. The law tripled ICE’s annual budget, giving it “more than the annual expenditures on police by state and local governments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia combined,” according to Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center, a nonpartisan pro-democracy law and policy institute.
Part of that money was to hire about 10,000 deportation officers. As O’Herron notes, a 2017 report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General found that to hire 10,000 officers would require vetting 500,000 applicants. Currently, law enforcement agencies have been having trouble finding enough applicants. O’Herron notes that ICE can bypass the usual requirements for federal employees, but in the past, when the government tried to hire 5,000 Customs and Border Patrol officers quickly, the result was dramatically higher corruption rates, including for bribery by trafficking and smuggling operations.
In August, ICE began to offer a $50,000 signing bonus and got rid of its age limits. To fill the ranks, Ainsley and Martinez note, ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. They report that nearly half of those dismissed from ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups.
Sociologist Ian Carillo called attention to a 2020 article by political scientists Adam Scharpf and Christian Glässel looking into why secret police agents are often “surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect.” By examining the 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina from 1975 to 1983, they discovered that the ranks of secret police are filled by those who perform poorly in merit-based systems. Facing firing for their poor performance, they turn to more burdensome secret police work.
Today Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker established the “Illinois Accountability Commission” to compile evidence against federal agents who have harassed, intimidated, brutalized, and detained American citizens and legal residents in Illinois. “None of this is about crime or safety,” Pritzker said. “If it were, there would be coordination with local law enforcement and judicial warrants…. Under normal circumstances,” he said, “federal agency supervisors and inspectors general would enforce proper legal procedures and protocols and hold accountable those who violate them.” But Trump has fired 17 inspectors general and installed cronies at the Department of Justice, while MAGA congress members refuse to hold hearings or conduct oversight. Administration officials are acting as if they are “immune from investigation or accountability,” Pritzker said “They are not.”
The commission will create an official public record of “[e]very instance of abuse, or law-breaking, or…violations of rights.” While “states have limited abilities against federal immunity,” Pritzker said, “we must remind everyone that…[t]here will come a time where people of good faith are empowered to uphold the law. When the time comes, Illinois will have the testimony and the records needed to pursue justice to its fullest extent.”
Dictators also enforce loyalty by protecting those who have been found guilty of crimes in the nation’s nonpartisan justice system. Last week Trump commuted the sentence of former representative George Santos (R-NY), ending his seven-year sentence for fraud with just three months served and removing his obligation to pay $373,749.97 to the victims of his crimes. Trump has pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 people, far more than most presidents do in four years.
Those convicted of crimes related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol received most of the president’s clemency, but former assistant U.S. attorney Jeffrey Toobin notes in an essay for the New York Times that Trump has been free with pardons or commutations for criminal supporters. Toobin notes Trump’s social media post after commuting Santos’s sentence: “Santos had the Courage, Conviction, and Intelligence to ALWAYS VOTE REPUBLICAN!”
Today, Trump announced a pardon for Changpeng Zhao, the founder of the Binance cryptocurrency exchange, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to money laundering, paid a $50 million fine, and served nearly four months in prison. His company paid a $4.3 billion penalty. Gram Slattery and Chris Prentice of Reuters note that in May, Binance accepted the stablecoin USD1, put out by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial crypto venture, as payment for an investment in Binance made by an investment firm from Abu Dhabi. The deal enables World Liberty Financial to keep any profits from the $2 billion investment, likely worth tens of millions of dollars a year, and it significantly boosted the venture.
Trump’s full and unconditional pardon enables Zhao to return to the business. On social media, Zhao posted that he was “deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.” He added: “Will do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto.”
This afternoon, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins asked Trump about the pardon and whether it had anything to do with Zhao’s involvement in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture.
“Which one? Who is that?…. The recent one? Yes, the? I believe we’re talking about the same person because I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know, he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that—are you talking about the crypto person?—A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did, well, you don’t know much about crypto. You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news. But let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But I’ve been told a lot of support. He had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime. It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, uh, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.”
The White House today released a list of those donating to Trump’s ballroom that he intends will replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. The list includes the Altria Group Inc., Amazon, Apple, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Coinbase, Comcast Corporation, J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul, Hard Rock International, Google, HP Inc., Lockheed Martin, Meta Platforms, Micron Technology, Microsoft, NextEra Energy Inc., Palantir Technologies Inc., Ripple, Reynolds American, T-Mobile, Tether America, Union Pacific Railroad, Adelson Family Foundation, Stefan E. Brodie, Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, Charles and Marissa Cascarilla, Edward and Shari Glazer, Harold Hamm, Benjamin Leon Jr., The Lutnick Family, The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation, Stephen A. Schwarzman, Konstantin Sokolov, Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher, Paolo Tiramani, Cameron Winklevoss, and Tyler Winklevoss.
Economist Robert Reich notes that the list includes “Google, whose CEO thanked Trump for [the] ‘resolution’ of an antitrust case[;] Palantir, which has lucrative contracts with ICE[; and] Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, who would profit from Trump’s regulatory rollbacks for private equity.” Reich commented: “Pay-to-play.”
By definition, those who could not make it in a merit-based system and who are dependent on the good will of an authoritarian leader have neither the skill nor the priorities to deliver good government for the country.
Today economist Paul Krugman noted that the administration’s $20 billion gambit to save Trump ally Javier Milei’s government in Argentina, with another $20 billion in the works, is a visceral wake-up call for parts of rural America in a way that cuts to social welfare programs have not been, despite the fact that rural areas depend on those programs more than urban areas do. Now Trump is talking about importing beef from Argentina. Farmers were already upset that Trump’s tariff war ended Chinese imports of U.S. soybeans; now ranchers are outraged at Trump’s focus on Argentina rather than on Americans.
Trump responded by insulting them: “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil. If it weren’t for me, they would be doing just as they’ve done for the past 20 years—Terrible! It would be nice if they would understand that….”
But someone in the White House must have paid attention to yesterday’s news that a survey from the Public Religion Research Institute (PPRI), a nonpartisan independent research organization, found that 56% of Americans agree that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy,” while only 41% see him as “a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”
Today, after threats to send what he called a “surge”—a military term—of agents to San Francisco, Trump announced he had changed his mind. Trump attributed his change of course to “friends of mine who live in the area.”
On November 4, 2025, California voters will go to the polls to vote on Proposition 50, which would redraw the state’s congressional map to create more Democratic-dominated districts until 2030 in response to Texas’s new Republican-skewed maps.
ICE agents storming the streets of San Francisco two weeks before the vote would likely have added votes in favor of Prop 50.
