A few weeks ago, I wrote: “Everyone in America has an opinion on what has gone right or wrong at the Department of Homeland Security and its component agencies, particularly Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection.” I added — a little too coyly — that I had “a pretty good sense of what happened.”

That restraint served a purpose at the time. It also left too much unsaid.

The mass deportation agenda remains central to Trump’s legacy. Markwayne Mullin has a chance to deliver what the last year only promised. We’re counting on him.

Now that President Trump has removed Kristi Noem as Homeland Security secretary and nominated Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to replace her, it’s worth putting real detail behind the diagnosis. Not to salt the wound, but to fix what needs fixing. Trump’s signature promise — “the largest deportation operation in American history” — matters too much for anyone to pretend the last year went smoothly.

Start with the numbers. They’re too low to fulfill the promise.

ICE stopped releasing deportation data. The congressionally mandated annual report still hasn’t arrived. In the vacuum, we’ve been left with third-party estimates — the New York Times put removals at about 230,000 in 2025 — and with shifting DHS press-shop claims that bounce between hundreds of thousands and “millions.” The Times figure sits closer to reality than the chest-thumping.

Instead of mass deportations, we got mass communications.

The department’s strategy leaned heavily on television ads, memes, charged language, and inflated-sounding claims meant to create the impression that deportations were happening at historic scale. The result landed in the worst possible place: It antagonized the left and the media without delivering results big enough to justify the noise. I don’t lose sleep over angry leftists. I do care when the administration absorbs political heat without gaining operational ground.

Trump World isn’t immune to polling, media narratives, and the feedback loop they create. A loud rollout without the matching numbers gave activists, consultants, and industry a pretext to flood weak-kneed Republican offices on Capitol Hill. Those calls turned into pressure on the administration. The incentive became delay, and delay followed.

Then came the optics problem.

Turning the DHS secretary role into a traveling cosplay routine didn’t land, and it didn’t project command. Instead, it projected awkwardness — and in a department built for seriousness, that matters.

The larger issue was always fit. Excitement around Trump’s cabinet picks made people charitable, and that’s understandable. The president earned that deference. But putting Noem in charge of DHS — the department most central to the core thesis of Trump’s campaign — never quite made sense. People in the enforcement world tried to build working relationships. Many got brushed off. Meanwhile, operational leaders inside DHS did what Noem didn’t: They cultivated the advocates who could help the mission move.

RELATED: ‘Phase one’ was quality control. ‘Phase two’ needs to be quantity control.

Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images

The divide became public. Post-Minneapolis, Tom Homan’s profile rose quickly as Trump tapped him to manage the response. Inside DHS, the camps had already formed. Anyone in Washington with a foot in the enforcement world knew who was on “Team Kristi and Corey [Lewandowski]” and who wasn’t. Leaks followed. Finger-pointing followed. Journalists got fed a steady diet of dysfunction. Morale dropped as firings and reassignments became the department’s background music.

What drove most of the internal warfare was money — specifically, contracts — and the scramble to control tens of billions authorized through the One Big Beautiful Bill.

DHS adopted a policy requiring Noem personally to review and sign off on contracts over $100,000. Combined with stripping authority from agency heads, that amounted to centralized control in the secretary’s office.

In practice, the authority filtered through a small circle and ran through Corey Lewandowski in a “special government employee” capacity. The backlog became delay, and the delays hit the mission: Border wall contracts sat for months while steel prices rose. Detention capacity grew slowly because leadership chased flashy, low-capacity facilities with catchy names — Cornhusker Clink, Speedway Slammer, Louisiana Lockup — announced with social media fanfare but built at higher cost, higher litigation risk, and lower throughput than traditional providers.

It looked like a communications strategy pretending to be a detention strategy.

Personnel choices compounded the problem. Noem brought in people with little operational or policy experience in immigration enforcement. Her decision to install a late-20s former Wildlife and Fisheries official as deputy ICE director raised eyebrows. Outside the formal chain of command, an equally inexperienced cast appeared in spaces normally reserved for officials who have spent years in homeland security. Over time, allegations of self-dealing spread — and the pattern made it harder to dismiss them as rumor.

The best example was the $220 million ad campaign that prominently featured Noem. Reports of unusual processes and favored vendors circulated. When lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — pressed for answers, Noem did little to restore confidence. Given the broader self-promotion pattern, any benefit of the doubt evaporated.

Then came the hearings. They were brutal.

RELATED: Memo to Trump: Stop negotiating and ramp up deportations

Photo by Sean Bascom/Anadolu via Getty Images

Before both the House and the Senate, Noem failed to convince members that she could lead the department, and she struggled to answer accusations of scandal and self-dealing. But the fatal error came when she violated the one rule for any Cabinet witness: Don’t drag the president into your mess.

Under questioning from Sen. John Kennedy about the ad campaign, Noem told him the president personally approved the spending. Kennedy looked stunned. Trump later denied it — and the claim never made much sense in the first place. That answer ended whatever internal support remained. In the middle of a sudden war, it still managed to blow up the news cycle. With few defenders inside the building or outside it, the wagons never circled.

So what now?

Markwayne Mullin has a massive job ahead of him. He inherits some real wins — especially the restored control of the southern border — but he also inherits a department bruised by internal warfare, low output numbers, and credibility damage.

A few suggestions, offered plainly:

First, “commas, not drama.” Let the mission speak louder than the messaging. Raise the deportation numbers. If the numbers move, everything else gets easier.

Second, cauterize the past. If Mullin doesn’t create distance from what happened before, he’ll spend the next year answering for it — including under subpoena if Democrats take the House.

Third, build a firewall through oversight. Let Trump-appointed Inspector General Joseph Cuffari review the controversies. Put the facts on paper, separate the department from the personalities, and move forward. Mullin needs the ability to say, credibly, that he’s fixing the mission, not protecting a mess he didn’t create.

Fourth, trust the serious people already inside DHS. The department has highly capable operators. Back them. Empower them. Leadership requires followers, and followers don’t materialize through threats, leaks, and infighting.

The mass deportation agenda remains central to Trump’s legacy. Mullin has a chance to deliver what the last year only promised.

We’re counting on him.

​Trump, Immigration, Border security, Ice, Mass deportations, Border patrol, Dhs, Markwayne mullin, Kristi noem, Opinion & analysis, Corey lewandowski 

An awful vaccine side effect has allegedly sidelined a baseball player for the rest of his life.

Isaiah Carranza was drafted by the Chicago White Sox in 2018 but never made it to the major leagues. Now, Carranza is suing his former organization, saying it denied his vaccine injury after he was “coerced” into getting the shot.

‘Isaiah complied with the mandate, reported serious adverse symptoms almost immediately, and repeatedly sought help.’

Carranza played two years in High-A, the third-highest level of minor league baseball in the United States. However, 2022 was the last time he appeared in a game, and the former pitcher has since alleged that team officials warned him he would be “blacklisted” if he didn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Carranza claimed if he did not get two doses, his organization would not release him from his contract so that he could pursue other teams. At the same time, he was allegedly told he had “no prospects of moving up” within the White Sox’s organization.

After getting the Pfizer vaccine, Carranza says he soon began suffering “extreme dizziness, nausea, near-fainting, and wildly fluctuating heart rate,” but the team told him it was simply dehydration, anxiety, and “rookie nerves.”

RELATED: ‘A form of art’: NBA star Draymond Green defends strip-club night at Hawks game as ‘inclusive’ promotion

Carranza also allegedly began experiencing severe pain and dysfunction in his pitching arm.

“After receiving the vaccine, Plaintiff suffered severe adverse health reactions with little to no support from Defendants, who denied him necessary accommodations,” the lawsuit said, according to Newsmax.

Carranza also claimed that the injury impaired his ability to throw at a professional level and essentially ended his career. He is reportedly seeking $19 million in damages and has an estimated $557,000 price tag in future medical expenses.

The MLB did not have an official vaccine mandate but encouraged players to get vaccinated through its union and the league.

Carranza’s legal team said on its website that minor league players lacked union representation and the financial security to safely speak out against the “condition of employment.”

RELATED: Michael Jordan shocks NASCAR by doing something no one has done in 77 years

“Isaiah complied with the mandate, reported serious adverse symptoms almost immediately, and repeatedly sought help. Instead of receiving appropriate medical care or legally required accommodations, his symptoms were dismissed, misdiagnosed, and minimized,” the law group wrote.

Peter Law Group claimed Carranza’s professional baseball career was cut short and that he now has a permanent autonomic nervous system disorder.

The White Sox and the league have not given public statements, and a White Sox spokesman declined to comment on the matter to the Chicago Sun-Times. Blaze News was unable to reach the team for comment.

Pfizer did not respond to a request for comment.

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​News, Sports, Pfizer, Covid vaccine, Covid 19, Mlb, Baseball, Chicago white sox, Vaccine, Politics, Vaccine injury 

Last week, President Trump announced that Kristi Noem would be replaced as Secretary of Homeland Security by Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) and reassigned to the newly created position of Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas.

“Let me translate what this usually means in Washington and may mean this time,” Glenn Beck says.

“When a president moves somebody into a job that hasn’t been fully defined yet, it usually means one of two things: either A, yeah, bye-bye, you’re being pushed aside, or B, you’re being moved in to run something that is bigger but isn’t public yet.”

Which category does Noem fall into?

Glenn speculates that it’s the latter.

“If you look at the timing, this doesn’t feel like a demotion,” he says.

Despite the “mixed signals” coming from Trump, who at times does appear “pissed at her,” Glenn believes that Noem’s reassignment has more to do with the “reorganization of the battlefield.”

“It’s the shield of the Americas. I know that doesn’t mean anything, but follow me on this. Right now, the United States is looking at a hemisphere and a hemisphere problem that most Americans still don’t fully understand or see,” he says.

“When Donald Trump was running for re-election, we were standing backstage someplace, and he was getting ready to go on. He said, ‘You want to look like a prophet? You know what you need to talk about? You just keep talking about Panama,”’ he recounts, noting that Trump’s words were deeply confusing to him at the time.

However, shortly after the election, the president sure enough divulged intentions to take back the Panama Canal.

“He understood what was happening with Panama and China. China had taken the entire Panama Canal and was controlling it,” Glenn says.

The Panama plans were soon followed by talk of Greenland, then Venezuela, Cuba, cartels in Mexico and Central America, Russia in Caracas, and Iranian proxies in the region.

“The southern hemisphere has become the new front line of great power competition. [President Trump] is declaring the western hemisphere is ours, OK? And DHS, the Department of Homeland Security, was not designed for that,” Glenn says.

What Trump is up against, he explains, is “hemisphere-level instability.”

“We have the migration waves. We have state collapse. We have cartels that are moving people and drugs and weapons and intelligence. We have foreign adversaries embedding themselves inside of all of that chaos,” Glenn explains. “So if you’re the president … you’re saying, ‘We have got to shore up America to make sure we last another 150, 250 years.’”

Perhaps Noem’s reassignment has more to do with this: “[making] sure that our darkest, Russia, China, Iran, are not running operations in this hemisphere.”

“Shield of the Americas. Think about the name. It’s not border control; it’s not immigration enforcement. It’s a shield of the Americas, the entire western hemisphere,” Glenn says. “That doesn’t sound like DHS. That sounds more like strategic security architecture for the western hemisphere, doesn’t it?”

To hear more of his theory on Kristi Noem’s reassignment, watch the video above.

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​The glenn beck program, Glenn beck, Kristi noem, Dhs, Shield of the americas, Panama canal, Markwayne mullin, Blazetv, Blaze media, Kristi noem out 

Last September, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned that the United States has “offshored our food, our beef cattle, our citrus.” She put the problem plainly: “If we can’t feed ourselves, this is a national security issue.” Fair enough. So why does so much of government land-use policy push projects that devour farmland — hyperscale data centers, utility-scale solar farms, and the sprawling infrastructure that comes with them?

If Washington wanted to drive up land prices, make farming harder, and funnel a generation of acreage into non-agricultural uses, it couldn’t improve on the current playbook. The uniparty does this everywhere, and red states often lead the charge.

Data centers: The ‘cloud’ that drains the water

Texas is suffering through a long drought. Yet Amarillo has approved an 18 million square-foot data center on what used to be cattle country. Land-grabs tell only part of the story. Data centers also drink water — and they don’t act like the kind of clouds that bring rain.

Reports indicate the Amarillo facility alone could use 912 million gallons of water per year. Large data centers can guzzle up to 5 million gallons per day, matching the daily use of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people. That kind of demand crowds out ranchers and farmers who already operate under tight margins and tight water allocations.

If food security is national security, then farmland is strategic territory. Let’s start acting like it.

Texas data centers used roughly 49 billion gallons of water in 2025, rising to 399 billion gallons by 2030 — enough to lower Lake Mead by more than 16 feet annually. Meanwhile, ranchers face reduced access, higher pumping costs, and deeper draws from shrinking aquifers. Less water means smaller herds, smaller harvests, and more pressure to sell.

That’s how the cycle locks in. Water becomes scarce. Ranching becomes less viable. Landowners get squeezed. Tech developers show up with wads of cash and tax incentives. Grazing land disappears for good.

On what planet does it make sense to trade the beef and food we need for speculative gains from chatbots and cloud-based generative AI?

Maybe Elon Musk has the right idea when he suggests building data centers in space. Texas doesn’t need them planted on top of its ranches.

Some red states now treat these projects as untouchable “economic development,” even when they wreck local quality of life. Ohio offers a telling example. An Ohio EPA draft permit for a data center states: “It has been determined that a lowering of water quality … is necessary to accommodate important social and economic development in the state of Ohio.”

That sentence says everything. Regulators will sacrifice water quality to accommodate the newest corporate appetite. Families and landowners can adapt.

RELATED: Living human brain cells are training a chatbot to be ‘more like us’

Photo by Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Solar ‘farms’ crushing farmland

President Trump has criticized the solar agenda from day one. He has called utility-scale solar inefficient and ugly — and he’s right about the aesthetics. Yet the administration now treats solar as a power source for data centers, while some MAGA influencers and pollsters try to sell the right on the plan. Pairing solar with hyperscale AI facilities accelerates the transfer of land out of food production.

Utility-scale solar typically requires five to 10 acres per megawatt. A solar build meant to feed a one-gigawatt hyperscale facility can swallow 5,000 to 10,000 acres. Supporters respond with percentages: Solar uses only a small share of total farmland. That dodge ignores where developers build. They don’t chase scrub. They target flat, well-drained, high-quality fields with cheap and easy access to transmission.

Follow the incentives. In states such as Indiana and Illinois, solar leases reportedly offer $900 to $1,500 per acre annually — far above the average return from corn and soybean ground. Landowners take the deal. Young farmers get priced out. Rural communities lose working land and the local economies that depend on it.

Reuters reported that in Indiana counties such as Pulaski, Starke, and Jasper, solar projects have secured 4% to 12% of some of the most fertile cropland. That’s not “marginal land.” That’s the kind of ground America needs to keep producing.

Tax breaks pour gasoline on the fire. Federal and state subsidies for data centers, solar farms, and battery installations push up land values and rents. In Pulaski County, Indiana, cropland rents reportedly jumped 26% since 2020 amid solar growth, outpacing state and national averages. Young families trying to farm don’t compete with subsidized megaprojects.

Indiana Republicans have compounded the damage by greasing the skids for carbon capture pipelines and special regulatory favors tied to the “Mid-States Corridor,” which will take even more farmland out of service.

Indiana’s own Department of Agriculture reports the state lost roughly 345,000 acres of agricultural land between 2010 and 2022. Residential sprawl drives much of that loss. Industrial conversion is accelerating — and data centers paired with solar build-outs speed it up.

So what exactly are these conservatives conserving?

Imports keep climbing. In 2023, imports supplied 59% of fresh fruit availability and 35% of fresh vegetables — up from 50% and 20% in 2007. America has the land to feed itself and then some, yet policymakers keep nudging production overseas. Mexico alone accounts for over half of imported fruits and vegetables, valued at more than $20 billion.

God gave this country an abundance of fertile land. He gave sun and rain to grow food. Our leaders now treat that ground as a blank canvas for industrial build-outs that don’t feed anyone.

If food security is national security, then farmland is strategic territory. Let’s start acting like it.

​Data centers, Ai, Data center water use, Brooke rollins, Texas, Droughts, Ranches, Trump, Solar energy, Opinion & analysis, Beef, Prices, Affordability, Grocery prices, Artificial intelligence, Water, Big tech 

Police have arrested three people believed to be involved in the brutal beating to death of a homeless man found in a vacant home in Klamath Falls, Oregon.

The Klamath Falls Police Department said in a statement that officers found Kolton Esparza just before 11 a.m. on Feb. 26 while performing a welfare call.

‘I beat Kolton with a rock and stomped him out with my shoes.’

The homeless man was found naked, bound with rope, and beaten very badly. Police reported that he had signs of torture as well.

He was transported to a hospital, where he died a day later from his injuries.

After an investigation, police arrested two men and a woman for their involvement in his death.

Prosecutors say 49-year-old Jamie S. Harrington drove Esparza to the Eulalona Trailhead in Klamath Falls along with her brother, 34-year-old Reggie L. Townsend Jr., and a 39-year-old man named Wesley J. Powless, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Esparza was allegedly beaten by the men before he was able to run away, with them chasing after him.

Prosecutors say the men caught up to him near the vacant home and beat him with a brick or rock while kicking him. Powless and Townsend allegedly cleaned up the scene and left with evidence in a black garbage bag.

A medical examiner found that the man’s cause of death was “severe head trauma.”

Investigators claimed to have obtained a confession letter from Townsend to his girlfriend that read, “I beat Kolton with a rock and stomped him out with my shoes.”

KDRV-TV also reported that Townsend had been released only three months prior after serving a sentence for manslaughter.

RELATED: Elderly man confesses to killing his daughter and wife with an ax to avoid homelessness after losing his job, police say

Harrington and her brother were arrested on Feb. 27, while Powless was arrested in a later traffic stop.

Powless and Townsend were charged with second-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, and tampering with evidence. Harrington was charged with first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, tampering with evidence, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

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​Homeless man killed, Kolton esparza beaten to death, Brutal beating murder, Klamath falls murder, Crime