“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” —George Orwell, “1984”

The photographs spread quickly across the internet: Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.) outside Delaney Hall, the ICE detention facility in Newark, washing pepper spray from his eyes.

Kim had publicly demanded the facility’s closure since December 2025. He has repeatedly painted ICE as an instrument of “lawless” violence weaponized by Stephen Miller and Donald Trump against U.S. citizens.

The violence that occurred outside Delaney Hall was not provoked by ICE agents enforcing the law. It was instigated and organized by leftist protesters, activists, aligned organizations.

On May 24, Sen. Kim released a statement with Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) in which he described the food as disgusting and argued that detainees were experiencing inhumane treatment.

Kim proudly proclaimed, “Cruelty is what this administration, what [U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement] is trying to do.”

The next day Kim visited the facility. Upon exiting, he encountered ICE officers there for protection and a crowd of protesters blocking entrances and exits. Kim intervened in front of the cameras, positioning himself as someone who was trying to de-escalate the situation.

Shockingly, the riotous crowd did not listen to Sen. Kim, and during ICE’s attempts to disperse the crowd, he was hit with pepper spray.

The imagery was perfect for the narrative he wanted. Andy Kim spent months fanning the flames of outrage at Delaney Hall, then had the audacity to pose as the firefighter trying to extinguish the fire he helped start.

Andy Kim and others, include Gov. Mikie Sherrill (D), painted Delaney Hall as a starvation camp. Yet the DHS published the menu detainees received, including oatmeal, pancakes, scrambled eggs, grilled potatoes, milk, coffee, chicken legs, turkey stir-fry, beef burritos, vegetarian beans, fajitas, vegetables, and commissary access.

Sen. Kim has also claimed there is a lack of medical care for detainees at Delaney Hall. The DHS directly disputes this claim and points out the fact that the moment an alien enters ICE custody, he has access to medical, dental, and mental health services as available and access to 24-hour emergency care.

It is easy to acknowledge that freedom is preferable to detention; the claims of forced starvation are meritless and ignore the fact that the detainees are alleged to have violated our immigration laws and are subject to deportation.

It is notable that no elected representative is able to make the argument that illegal alien detainees are subject to worse conditions than American citizens who are detained over the January 6 protests.

In fact, no representative who has protested against Delaney Hall has been able to point to any U.S. citizen being mistakenly detained there, despite vocal claims by leading Democrats that citizens are being wrongfully detained.

RELATED: The anti-weaponization fund is not just for J6. It is for the rest of us too.

JDawnInk/Getty Images

The detainees are individuals who have violated our immigration laws. These are not random migrants caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. These are detainees awaiting removal proceedings, many with pending charges or prior convictions.

Kim’s selective empathy paints law enforcement as the villain and lawbreakers as martyrs.

The facility itself operated as an ICE detention center under the Obama administration from 2011 to 2017. The groundwork for its current contract was laid during the Biden years, with solicitations issued in 2024. Democrats who now decry it as an affront to humanity were silent, or complicit, when similar facilities operated under their own president.

Most importantly, the violence that occurred outside Delaney Hall was not provoked by ICE agents enforcing the law. It was instigated and organized by leftist protesters, activists, aligned organizations, and politicians who turned a lawful detention facility into a battleground and a political photo op.

By amplifying falsehoods and refusing to acknowledge the source of the latest example of political violence, they encourage precisely the chaos that logically followed: more riots, more assaults, more threats, and more division.

What purpose do these lies and the theater serve?

They distract from the Biden-era border policies that flooded the system and the Trump administration’s necessary corrective action. They continue to paint immigration enforcement as racist theater rather than the enforcement of duly passed laws. They virtue-signal to progressive donors and voters while eroding trust in federal institutions.

Performative visits coupled with distorted rhetoric do not solve problems; they inflame them.

The evidence is there for anyone willing to see it. The question is whether the Party will allow it.

​Donald trump, Immigration enforcement, Ice, Delaney hall, Andy kim, Rob menendez, Dhs, Mikie sherrill, Opinion & analysis 

Democrats have worked desperately to defund or at least hinder President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration and mass deportation campaign. Their efforts have proven again to be in vain.

Last summer, congressional Republicans circumvented the various obstacles presented by their leftist colleagues, using budget reconciliation to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included $75 billion in new funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and tens of billions more for other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.

‘All that Democrats have achieved by their shutdown is a useful reminder to the American people of their support for open borders.’

The war over immigration policy and funding heated up in subsequent months, featuring a pitched battle in which Democrats partially shut down the DHS for 75 days, only to then unconditionally surrender, passing funding for the DHS in the wake of the longest government shutdown in its history.

On Tuesday, Democrats were dealt another significant defeat.

Days after it was passed by the U.S. Senate in a 52-47 vote, the Secure America Act went to a vote in the House.

Ahead of the vote, the White House said in a statement, “The Secure America Act puts an end to Democrats’ political games by fully funding ICE and Border Patrol through President Trump’s term and providing the resources needed to keep our border secure, combat human trafficking, stop the flow of deadly drugs, dismantle criminal cartels, and enforce America’s immigration laws.”

RELATED: Republicans took ICE hostage — then bragged about saving it

Kent NISHIMURA/AFP/Getty Images

“It is imperative that Congress immediately passes the Secure America Act to fully fund these critical components,” said DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

“It has been more than 100 days since congressional Democrats defunded ICE and Border Patrol in a radical attempt to protect violent criminal illegal aliens and undermine President Trump’s highly successful border security agenda.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), among the Democrats who futilely signaled their opposition to the bill, stated, “As if ripping health care and nutritional assistance in the One Big Ugly Bill wasn’t enough, Republicans have now come back for more to give ICE and Donald Trump’s violent mass deportation machine another $70 billion blank check with no oversight, no accountability, and no guardrails.”

“As Democrats, we rise in strong opposition to this Republican scheme. Waste of taxpayer dollars,” added Jeffries.

To Jeffries’ chagrin, the Secure America Act passed in a 214-212 party-line vote.

This funding bill will allocate $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to Customs and Border Protection, and $5 billion in additional funding to the DHS through September 2029.

Following the vote, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) emphasized that “Washington Democrats gained **NOTHING** from their RECKLESS CRUSADE to return our country to OPEN BORDERS and UNFETTERED MASS MIGRATION. Republicans will ALWAYS stand with America’s law enforcement.”

“All that Democrats have achieved by their shutdown is a useful reminder to the American people of their support for open borders and keeping criminal illegal immigrants in American communities — policies that have been soundly rejected by the American people over and over again,” wrote Johnson. “We hope this episode serves as a future reminder to Democrats that when they shut the government down, they will receive less than nothing in return.”

President Trump is set to ratify the Secure America Act in the Oval Office on Wednesday.

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​Immigration, Illegal alien, Ice, Us immigration and customs enforcement, Border, Donald trump, Funding, Democrats, Hakeem jeffries, Mike johnson, Politics 

Digital age verification is a hot topic right now, with lawmakers pushing for legislation that would ban users from accessing their favorite apps, webpages, and even their devices without showing an ID. As I previously covered, these bills are largely a government power grab disguised as child protection. What if there was a better solution — a way to give lawmakers the verification they crave without sacrificing the privacy and security of American citizens? Here’s what it would take to get the best of both worlds.

Efforts to sign age verification into law

The age verification bills permeating the House and Senate right now are a double-edged sword. On one hand, they protect underage users from online adult content that they shouldn’t see on various platforms and apps. On the other hand, these bills give Big Tech and the government a pathway to capture, digitize, and store users’ real government-issued IDs — the makings of a digital ID database that links online activity to user identities.

The war on age verification has even become a bipartisan effort, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle pushing for federal legislation. Most notably, you have Democrat Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) proposing the Parents Decide Act, which would require operating system developers, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, to verify the ages of their users any time someone sets up a new device. On the right, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) champions the GUARD Act, which would require users to show an ID to access AI chatbots, possibly leading to broader restrictions on the internet at large as AI expands into every corner of the web.

Both bills aim for age verification to protect children, and both would restrict Americans’ rights to freely access their devices, the internet, and online information without an ID.

Apple and Google actually built a way to handle the most personal and private information.

Make no mistake. If these bills pass, the government will limit or even revoke your access to your favorite apps, services, and devices unless someone finds a better solution — one that still enables age verification without actually giving your ID to tech companies and federal agencies.

Luckily, there is a possible solution, if Big Tech chooses to build it.

Security in the enclave

Whether you trust Big Tech with your data or you lock your phone in a Faraday cage at night, Apple and Google actually built a way to handle the most personal and private information about its users years ago. The key is found in a tiny locked vault stored in the processing chip in your phone. It’s disconnected from the internet, it’s never backed up in iCloud or Google Drive (you have to set it back up every time you wipe and restore your phone), and it’s encrypted.

Apple calls it the Secure Enclave. Google named it the Trusted Execution Environment. Together, they’re both “dedicated secure subsystems” that do the same thing: store your biometric data.

If you’ve ever unlocked your phone with your face or your fingerprint, you’ve used this subsystem (which we’ll refer to as “vaults” for the sake of simplicity). The best part about it is that it’s fast, efficient, and completely private. Through these vaults, Apple and Google can save your biometric data, but they can’t see it or access it themselves, and neither can third-party apps. The only thing the system can reveal is whether the face or fingerprint of the person holding the device matches the version saved privately in the system. That’s it.

We need a similar solution for age verification.

RELATED: Hackers easily fool Instagram’s new AI identity verification, humiliating Meta once again

Fotkam/Getty Images

The age verification solution we need

Instead of giving Big Tech a plain copy of your ID, what if there was a way to save it in the vault? Just like setting up FaceID on iPhone or your fingerprint on Android, your phone could prompt you to take a photo of your ID and store it inside the vault as part of your biometric data. To make sure the ID is real and that it belongs to an adult, the vault could include on-device authentication software that checks for the user’s birth date, the official Real ID star, barcode on the back, and any other unique state identifiers.

Once saved, ID-backed age verification would work in the same manner that facial and fingerprint authentication works today. When you log into an app, service, or device that requires ID, the system would prompt the vault to verify the information stored inside. If the system agrees that you’re an adult, it will let you through. If the ID belongs to a minor or is missing entirely, the system could then place restrictions on the user as mandated by law. In this way, the vault serves as a bridge between the user’s ID and websites, services, and apps, providing only authentication while keeping the user’s actual identification private.

The future of age verification

To make this work, of course, both Apple and Google need to adopt this technology and integrate it directly into their operating systems. Then the government would have to accept this technology as a valid form of verification that satisfies the new laws. Lastly, major tech companies would have to accept this form of verification, which they ultimately would, as long as they know Apple’s and Google’s solutions are legitimate, just like they do with face and fingerprint password protection today.

If we must turn over our photo IDs, locking them inside the secure subsystem is the only solution that makes sense. It would give politicians the government control over device access that they so desperately desire while enabling citizens to maintain their anonymity and privacy.

Or — and I might be asking a lot here — the politicians could just stop trying to hamper our rights and leave our devices alone. I like that one better.

​Tech, Return, Age verification, Surveillance, Online privacy, Big tech 

Steven Spielberg this week will drop “Disclosure Day,” his long-awaited engagement-bait alien movie. On cue, the internet is abuzz — with soyfacing and fangirling, dunking and slop farming, chin-stroking and opining, opining, opining. Somehow, therefore, more, but also dramatically less, needs to be said.

I was early to the disclosure discourse. Five years ago, as the topic began to heat up in earnest, I tried to get ahead of the conversation by focusing on the religious dimension. Back then, that wasn’t center stage. The alien thing was still mostly Joe Rogan- and “X-Files”-coded, disclosure a cause célèbre for freedom-minded individualists sure that the evil secret government was hiding the TRUTH that only heroically skeptical intellectual rebels could force to come to light.

In the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived.

To me, that felt incomplete. At best. The American experience with “alien encounters,” I underscored, had always been depicted and acculturated religiously — not just as a matter of “having a religious experience,” good or bad, but of actual theology.

Its manifestation as popular culture belied not secular origins but spiritual ones: When your religious belief is that “organized religion” is bad and the only authority you can really trust is your own, you’ll see what’s at stake in the alien debate as the ultimate nature of the universe, one where perhaps everything we thought we ever knew about God and our relation to Him could be completely debunked.

The desire to overthrow the authority or even the existence of the unbroken Christian church, that is, doesn’t stem fundamentally from secular principles. It actually stems from a desire to actualize a much different, ostensibly higher or ultimate, spiritual order.

Among us

That is why in 2021 I emphasized that aliens are so often interpreted as proof that Christianity is not the truth that will save us — that the Christian era is over, Christianity is defunct, a new religion is not only “needed now” but has arrived, whether we like it or not. “The invaders are here,” I summed up the claim, “and they impose on us the responsibility of accepting a new age from which there is no turning back. Humans are but one organism, a weak and inferior one, whose only hope of salvation is in satisfying whatever it is the aliens herald and demand.”

I went on to push back on this master narrative by way of Father (perhaps soon to be Saint) Seraphim Rose. He got ahead of the disclosure discourse decades ago, citing key scholars who showed the overwhelming pattern among “alien encounters” is of experiences impossible to distinguish from encounters over the millennia with spiritual entities — specifically fallen angels. Demons, in other words.

“Aliens,” Rose explained, do not behave like angels, who appear as holy messengers cautioning people at once to not be afraid. Instead, like demons, they zoom around at will, produce terrifying illusions, and violate and persecute victims in their bodies and minds.

Nevertheless, as anyone knows who grew up in the spiritual anarchy of the 1980s — where the lines blurred dangerously between “progressive” Christianity, New Age cults, and straight-up demonic occultism — there was already back then a huge and growing swath of alien believers who nursed a kind of syncretism with Christianity or some kind of “biblical” religion.

That was what troubled Rose the most. Today, many people speak of the Antichrist and the apocalypse, topics very close to Christ’s warning that in the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived that He has returned or the end is nigh.

RELATED: It’s not easy being pope — Leo’s big new tech encyclical proves it

ANDREAS SOLARO/Getty Images

Yes, millions of people may now be catching up to what counted as the frontier of the disclosure debate in 2021. X is full of eager, Spielberg-fueled arguments over whether aliens are compatible with Christianity, with both sides producing scripture, doctrine, lore, and receipts in the now-familiar style of the “global public square,” where every question is debated until it has been pulverized.

Even alien-skeptical Christians, or those aligned with Michael S. Heiser-style caution, can find serious authorities noting that the cosmos exceeds human comprehension. The existence of other rational created beings somewhere in that vastness cannot simply be ruled out.

But that is precisely the point. Some matters are best left to God. The human mind can crack them open with curiosity, only to find itself wandering a vast mental labyrinth — and once there, easy prey for delusion, pride, and disbelief.

Take, for one example making the rounds today, the question of whether He has perfect knowledge of all possible counterfactuals — a question that first made the rounds centuries ago thanks to Luis de Molina, a Jesuit theologian who touched off a furious and protracted round of discourse and debate, an effusion of energy that might well have been better spent in other ways.

What other ways? Well, here is where the new frontier of the disclosure debate appears.

Haunted halls

In theaters right now is a film called “Backrooms.” It’s close to being the opposite of “Disclosure Day,” at least in the sense that “Backrooms” is about the danger, and ultimately the tragic horror, of today’s deepening temptation to understand on our own terms the things that confuse and weaken us the most — things of our own flawed and falsely independent mental constructs.

Today the foremost of these false realities — what the ancient monks called logismoi — is the creepy combination of depression and pride that makes people curious to know “for themselves” what is really good and what is really evil.

Rather than trusting God on this matter or trusting God to sort it out and seeking refuge in humble self-denial of what even secular medicine calls the call of the void, we are all being carried along on a massive wave of belief that we somehow must subject all things to intellectual processing in order for us to function.

Increasingly, we treat human beings as if our only real function is intellectual processing. Everything becomes reducible to intelligence, or optimized as an operation of intelligence. Intelligence becomes the only thing that matters because it is treated as the only thing that truly exists. Everything else — the body, the soul, love, worship, suffering, memory, family, place — becomes merely an expression or construct of intelligence.

Under this view, nothing remains for us to do except intellectualize everything. We keep refining thought, language, and computation until we produce an intelligence so pure and complete that it no longer needs the rest of the human person at all, except perhaps for a time as fuel.

RELATED: ‘Backrooms’ is horror for a self-justifying age

A24

This insane belief has become compelling because it fits the modern mind. It is becoming a new “organized religion,” even among people who most loudly hate organized religion. We entered the current stage of technological development already convinced that spiritual truth could be uncovered, created, or replaced through endless discourse: talking, writing, printing, disseminating, propagandizing, discussing, debating, and filling the world with more and more words.

Eventually, we looked around and saw only language. Not merely spoken language, but language as thought itself. Reality had been swallowed by interpretation. And once everything became words, it was only a matter of time before we mistook the processing of words for the fullness of being human.

In 1962, Beat Generation drug hellion William S. Burroughs, author of “Junkie” and “Queer,” wrote that language is a virus from outer space — in other words, an alien. Any Christian must know that, in reality, the Word, the Logos, is the opposite of a deadly xenomorph. But severed from the divine Word, the merely human word swiftly becomes something alien, monstrous, devouring. (“Time to leave the Word-God behind,” Burroughs wrote in his final doped-up years.)

That is why the frontier of the disclosure debate now expands from the recognition that being sucked into the disclosure debate, by the “Disclosure Day” debate and all the alien debates, is a labyrinth with a minotaur inside our own delusional creation. This is the not-too-cryptic message of “Backrooms,” a message most strongly conveyed in the film by what’s also the cure for our servile and self-destructive yapocracy: silence. Holy silence.

​Antichrist, Apocalypse, Opinion & analysis, Popular culture, Theology, Demons, Christianity, Faith, Steven spielberg, Disclosure day, Aliens, Tragedy, Horror, Movies, Seraphim rose, William s. burroughs, Language, Knowledge, Thought, Backrooms 

Last Friday, the stock market had an abysmal day, losing well over $1 trillion. It was the worst single-day drop of 2026 for the S&P 500 and the worst day in over a year for the Nasdaq, which fell over 4%.

This sudden and dramatic dip surprised many because it occurred immediately after a jobs report revealed that May saw the addition of 172,000 new jobs — over twice the amount that experts forecasted. Unemployment also stayed the same at 4.3%

The report showed that “by every plain English measure, Americans are working; things are good,” says Glenn Beck.

“So why did the market panic on news that you and I would call encouraging?” he asks.

On this episode of “The Glenn Beck Program,” Glenn unpacks “the whole game” that is the Federal Reserve and Wall Street’s addiction to cheap money.

“For two years, Wall Street has been betting on one thing above all else … but it’s not [AI],” he begins.

“It’s the Federal Reserve about to make money cheap again, and they love cheap money.”

Wall Street, Glenn explains, was expecting the government to slash interest rates soon. But when the job market came in strong, those hopes were suddenly dashed.

“Have you ever leaned on a door that you thought was closed or unlocked, and you fell through? It was kind of like that on Friday,” he analogizes.

On top of that, the AI trade was already experiencing a backslide.

Wall Street, having had high hopes for AI growth, discovered just days before the stock market plummet that Broadcom (a prominent AI chip maker) did not raise its future predictions as many had anticipated — even though Google’s parent company had just announced it was raising a massive $85 billion to buy more AI chips and build data centers.

As a result, its stock dropped significantly, and it brought several other tech/AI stocks down with it.

“So understand what actually happened here,” says Glenn. “It wasn’t the good news that scared everybody Friday. It was the truth that the Fed is not riding in to rescue the overpriced stocks, and maybe, just maybe, the AI miracle has a price tag attached to it that somebody should check before buying stock.”

This is tough news to stomach, he admits.

“That 401k or pension that you’re counting on rides on the market, and days like Friday took a big bite out of it. Also, you want a mortgage on the house. The 10-year is now above 4.5%. The rates are punishing,” Glenn sighs.

“It’s going to stay that way. Your grocery bill, your gas, your rent. Inflation is at 3.8% means they’re not coming down soon, and a Fed that has to say ‘tough on the price inflation’ and is going to — that means it’s going to be tough for a while,” he continues.

But there’s a silver lining we can’t ignore.

“America’s strength … has never come from cheap money or get-rich-quick fevers. It never has. Pain always comes from that — always,” Glenn declares.

“Where America has always rallied, done well, and fixed herself is when people who make things, fix things, grow things, show up and are encouraged to do what they do best.”

Glenn urges his listeners to stop “[hanging their] hope on the Fed or on Washington or the next shiny thing the market is chasing.”

“Get out from under your debt wherever and however you can; build something that doesn’t depend on a rate cut; strengthen your family and the people around you,” he implores.

“The real security was never something that was printed on a building on Constitution Avenue. It was built in your home with your hands and with your character.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Federal reserve, Wall street, Stock market 

A California homeowner was visiting with his neighbors when he heard gunshots and screaming coming from his house and rushed back to find a shocking threat.

Riverside County Sheriff’s deputies were called to the residence on Heron Way in San Jacinto on Friday just before 10:30 p.m. on reports of gunshots being fired.

‘His goal was to get his daughter out safely, regardless of what happened to him.’

They found a man with gunshot injuries and declared him dead at the scene, according to the Los Angeles Times. They identified the deceased male as 45-year-old Ismael Martinez.

The father of the home told them that he had rushed to the house after his wife said a home intruder was firing a gun. The homeowner armed himself with a gun from his garage and exchanged gunfire with Martinez.

Martinez was struck, but no other injuries were reported.

A police investigation found that Martinez assaulted his 52-year-old girlfriend with a knife before running off to attack the family at the Heron Way home. The woman was found inside a vehicle and transported to a hospital for treatment. She was reported to be in stable condition.

Police said there was no evidence that Martinez or his girlfriend had any connection with the residents of the home he allegedly invaded.

A neighbor named Frankie Aguilar said the husband and wife of the family had been at his home when the incident unfolded. He said the wife had gone back to her house to charge up her phone when she found the armed intruder.

“When she was screaming, he was shooting at her with a shotgun,” Aguilar said.

Aguilar added that his neighbor’s teenage daughter was also in the home during the shooting and home invasion.

“His goal was to get his daughter out safely, regardless of what happened to him,” another neighbor named Robert Dorame said to KTLA-TV.

RELATED: Intruder violently breaks down door of home with family inside — and gets justice from the end of a gun

“I’m shattered for them because they’re good people,” he added.

Police said the shooting would be referred to the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office for review.

Neighbors said they believed the homeowner had acted in self-defense. A friend of the family has opened a GoFundMe donation account to help them deal with the costs associated with the incident.

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​California, Home invasion, Self defense shooting, 2nd amendment, Crime 

It has been a pitiful few weeks for the United States Senate, which means senators are now pretending they saved Immigration and Customs Enforcement, fought for the SAVE Act, and still care about victims of government weaponization.

None of that is true.

Do not buy the celebratory social media posts from Senate Republicans. Get to work electing new ones instead.

This is a geriatric form of professional wrestling kayfabe. But instead of heroic wrestlers in tights, the actors are young communications staffers tweeting victory on behalf of their bosses while those bosses fly home.

Before we unpack what happened, we should understand how we got here. To his credit, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) recently summarized the problem well: “We made a huge mistake by not funding ICE and CBP in January. We NEVER should have funded the Democrats’ thousands of earmarks without funding ALL of homeland security. It is time to fund ICE and CBP NOW!”

It was a mistake, except that it was intentional. Still, Scott acknowledged the major point his colleagues would rather hide. Forthrightness in the Senate is rare, so we should welcome it when it appears.

The story begins in January, after two protesters were killed obstructing ICE. In the media-driven hysteria that followed, Congress did something unusual: It split off the Department of Homeland Security from the funding package that covered other agencies.

At the urging of Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and top Democrat appropriator Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), Republicans caved and agreed to put DHS in a stand-alone funding posture. In congressional funding terms, that means danger.

For decades, government funding has largely moved through omnibus and minibus bills that force lawmakers into take-it-or-leave-it votes. Members may dislike parts of the package, but they swallow the whole thing to avoid shutting down large portions of the government. When DHS stands alone, Democrats have a much easier time voting no.

In February, DHS funding shut down. Airport lines grew. Employees went without pay. DHS changed secretaries. Democrats continued blasting ICE, deportations remained low, and the Trump administration retreated on parts of the deportation agenda.

In other words, Democrats gained concessions while holding DHS funding hostage.

Then, in April, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) began negotiating with the hostage-takers in earnest. They offered another major concession: separate ICE and Customs and Border Protection from DHS, making ICE and CBP a stand-alone within a stand-alone. For funding purposes, it is hard to imagine a worse fate.

RELATED: Polarization may be the cure — and the clarity — America needs

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images

Congress funded the rest of DHS, ending a roughly 76-day shutdown. Politicians breathed a sigh of relief because airline lobbyists would stop pestering them about long lines at airports. ICE and CBP, meanwhile, would have to be funded through another mechanism: reconciliation.

Reconciliation funding creates operational problems that normal appropriations do not. That deserves more attention, though it falls deep into the procedural weeds. The key point is that ICE and CBP were isolated, weakened, and pushed onto a more perilous path.

As part of ending the shutdown for every part of DHS except ICE and CBP, President Trump demanded a reconciliation bill funding those agencies by June 1.

Negotiations began, then quickly collapsed after the May announcement of an Anti-Weaponization Fund that would compensate victims of government persecution. Republican senators revolted and learned the lesson Democrats had just taught them: ICE and CBP could be used as hostages.

They threatened to withhold ICE and CBP funding unless Trump agreed to kill the fund. Ultimately, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche did just that.

Despite acting as hostage-takers, Republican senators also used the reconciliation process to posture on the SAVE Act, which had no chance of passing through that mechanism. The SAVE Act, which is popular across party lines, includes voter ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a leading opponent of the Anti-Weaponization Fund but a proponent of his own right to recover damages for weaponization against himself, introduced a meaningless amendment on the SAVE Act. Knowing most voters do not understand Senate procedure, he styled the move as a valiant attempt to pass election integrity legislation.

“Mr. President,” Graham posted, “I was honored to lead the charge to pass the SAVE America Act, one of the most consequential pieces of legislation you and your team have created.”

RELATED: Trump’s anti-weaponization fund puts GOP cowards on trial

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This was insincere and unserious. The SAVE Act has no chance unless the talking filibuster is enforced. Everyone on the Senate floor knew that. But Graham maintains Trump’s endorsement in his upcoming primary, so perhaps it will not matter. We may be stuck with him even after Trump leaves the stage.

Much of the swamp remains undrained.

This whole drawn-out charade should be remembered for two reasons.

First, Senate Republicans crossed the Rubicon and went where Democrats had already gone: They held ICE hostage. Worse, they held ICE hostage to force the Trump administration to scuttle the Anti-Weaponization Fund. That is a double betrayal of the base: threaten immigration enforcement to hurt victims of government persecution.

Second, Senate Republicans helped create the most perilous funding path for ICE and CBP moving forward: complete isolation. With ICE and CBP now handled outside the normal appropriations process, they will face another shutdown unless this strategy is reversed. As soon as Democrats have enough votes, they will try to defund both agencies.

Do not buy the celebratory social media posts from Senate Republicans. Get to work electing new ones instead.

​Immigration and customs enforcement, John thune, Lindsey graham, Mike johnson, Opinion & analysis, Patty murray, Republicans, Save act, Senate, Voter id, Ice, Customs and border protection, Department of homeland security, Weaponization, January 6, Filibuster, Rino 

Trevor Preisel, the executive director at the New Castle Prism Initiative, said the LGBTQIA+ members of the center were upset by vandalism on their Pride flags.

The center is located at the Third Independent Presbyterian Church in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and is one of the only centers offering LGBTQIA+ support in the Shenango Valley area.

‘If people are doing things like this, if people are talking about you, it goes to show that what we’re doing is working.’

They were preparing for a Pride festival on Wednesday when they discovered the vandalism.

“People had torn down the progress flags and just thrown them on the ground on both sides,” said Preisel, who showed the destruction to WKBN-TV.

“There was also one in this general area, and someone had just completely stepped on and smashed the fence post, ripped the flag off, as well as down here, where those two flags are now. Those were just completely ripped off the rivets,” he added.

The center has replaced the flags and added surveillance cameras.

“We did feel targeted,” he added. “There was a police report that was filed.”

He went on to say the vandalism was evidence that they were making a difference in the community.

“Obviously, it does hurt in a sense, but to quote a lot of activists that have come before me, if people are doing things like this, if people are talking about you, it goes to show that what we’re doing is working, and what we’re doing is having an impact in this community,” Preisel added.

RELATED: Video shows teens cutting up Pride flags at gay bar during Pride Month — now they’re facing hate crime charges

The group posted images of the damage to social media and said the community responded through increased donations.

“We’ve had a lot of local businesses reaching out to us. We’ve had a lot of community members reaching out to us, a lot of people asking if they can donate toward putting new flags up,” Preisel added. “When things like this do happen, the community comes together.”

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​Lgbtqia, Pride flags, Pride month, Vandalism, Politics