No More Money For Masked Men

Congress has a responsibility to check ICE extremism

Ten years ago today, Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator of Trump Tower in New York City and announced his candidacy for President of the United States with a lie.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best… They’re sending people who have lots of problems and their bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.

For the past decade, Trump’s political career has been fueled by this false claim that the challenges we face as a nation were sent from elsewhere via an illegal invasion. He’s used it to justify the dismantling of democratic norms and the rule of law.

This lie has sent masked men to terrorize American communities.

It has been used to justify disappearing people without due process.

It is at the root of false charges against judges and elected representatives.

It is why US troops are illegally occupying a US city.

This lie about an imagined criminal invasion of the United States has created a Constitutional crisis in America. And after a weekend of historically unprecedented defiance against Trump’s tyranny at more than 2,000 No Kings Day protests, this tired old lie is what Trump has predictably turned to again. From his social media post on Sunday evening:

ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve the very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History…. [We] must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities.

Why does Trump always come back to this lie, especially when he is vulnerable?

The short answer is because this lie has worked. Millions of people who go to work every day and try to make ends meet know that something is wrong in America. They aren’t doing as well as the generation before them. They struggle to make ends meet. They’re saddled by debt, and they don’t know what they can do about rising prices. 78% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck. The same percentage of all Americans - 78% - did not vote for Donald Trump in 2024, yet he eked out a majority of a deflated electorate by telling working people that he would fight for them.

Trump has not kept that promise. Since his big, ugly budget was introduced in Congress, Moral Mondays In DC have highlighted how vulnerable people will be hurt by this bill’s massive cuts to healthcare, nutrition assistance, and green jobs. This bill slashes essential funding for Americans who already don’t have enough to make ends meet. It is an attack on the very people Trump promised to fight for.

But it is also a massive investment in Trump’s lie.

In the text that passed the House just before Memorial Day, this big, ugly bill includes funding for Kristi Noem to recruit and hire 10,000 new masked men to fulfill Trump’s mandate to deliver a mass deportation program.

It proposes a 1300% increase in funding to build camps where ICE could detain up to 100,000 people.

And it would give ICE a 500% increase in deportation funding - $15 billion to transport and remove people from our communities.

At a moment when public support for his handling of immigration is at an all-time low, Trump is doubling down on his extremism and asking Congress to essentially write Kristi Noem a blank check to create chaos in US cities for what he hopes will be his political resuscitation.

David Zalubowski / AP

Trump’s lie always depends on convincing his base that WE are not THEM. It’s why he has deployed troops to a city whose elected leaders are Democrats while directing ICE to back off on enforcement actions at farms in red states. Of course, Trump knows from his business experience that the construction and hospitality sectors of the economy in American cities depend on immigrant labor as much as farms do. But his lie depends on distracting people from this fact by desperately trying to demonize cities.

Democrat, Republican, or Independent – urban or rural – every American has an opportunity to ask their US Senators this month to reject Trump’s lie.

Under Trump’s leadership, the Department of Homeland Security is using every dollar appropriated by Congress to weaponize immigration enforcement and terrorize our communities with raids led by masked men. It’s time to ask which Senators are willing to stand up to the lie and say, “No more money for masked men.”

A moral fusion movement must stand up for every person who would be harmed by the cuts this bill proposes. At the same time, we must make the connection between the lies that are told to divide us and the cuts that hurt us all. It’s not only possible to do both. It’s a necessity.

Here’s what we know: moral fusion movements have the power to change the conversation about what’s possible in politics and revive the heart of American democracy. The extremism that has power today is weakened every time we stand together, disrupt the lies, and invite unlikely allies to build something better together.