WEDNESDAY: More than a half million deportations!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 21, 2026

Plus, almost two million more: Based on captured comments at Mediaite, the idea that President Trump is experiencing some sort of cognitive decline is gaining a bit of traction around the dial—generally among people who aren't American journalists.

Mediaite has recorded comments by former Trump lawyer Ty Cobb, by former Trump assistant Stephanie Grisham, and by Whoopi Goldberg on The View. Very few American journalists seem to know how to handle this topic—and there's much, much more to say about the way such issues are assessed within the context of our frequently underwhelming and unimpressive high-end American journalism.

We expect to return to that general topic tomorrow. For today, we thought we'd call attention to a report by the New York Times about the vast number of deportations being carried out at this time.

The report appeared as a "Special Section" in Sunday's print editions. It tells a remarkable story—one which also strikes us as remarkably murky. Headline included, the lengthy retrospective report starts like this:

A Year Into Trump’s War on Immigration, Images of an Altered America

In just 11 months, about 500,000 people would be deported in an unrelenting campaign celebrated by those who saw it as long overdue and lamented by those who saw it as inhumane.

Over the year, the deportations forced Americans, even those who welcomed the stepped-up enforcement, to reckon with the human consequences of rounding up and expelling people from their streets.

Homes were emptied. Families were splintered. Neighborhoods were subdued...

From there, the report offered several capsule accounts of specific situations in which specific people have been deported. Soon, the authors offered this overview of the ongoing state of play:

Mr. Trump, catapulted back to the White House by voters whose views had shifted sharply against illegal immigration, was making good on his campaign promise to enforce immigration laws to their fullest extent.

Americans were confronted with a swelling deportation force that, under pressure to meet arrest quotas, traded targeted raids for sweeps that critics saw as indiscriminate and supporters as vital.

Protesters clashed with armed agents as the dragnet widened, sweeping up recent and longtime immigrants, those with criminal records and many without.

The all-of-government effort was stunning, an abrupt pendulum swing for a country that had just absorbed a record influx of migrants during the Biden era, overwhelming cities, souring voters and fueling Mr. Trump’s hard-line agenda.

For decades, a fragile, tacit understanding had allowed millions of undocumented immigrants to build lives here, largely without fear of deportation, so long as they worked hard and stayed out of trouble.

In less than a year, that status quo was upended.

According to the Times report, something like a half million people had been deported in the first eleven months of President Trump's second term. On the slightly over hand:

As of December 10, 2025, DHS had set the number at "more than 605,000," with "1.9 million illegal aliens [also having] voluntarily self-deported."

It seems to us that the remarkable size of this operation tends to go un- or under-reported. Much attention may go to the occasional individual case, with the massive size of the operation possibly being ignored.

We'll note one other question which frequently comes to mind:

To what extent could those half million or 600,000 people be "the worst of the worst?" On Fox News Channel programs, viewers are often told about specific alleged murderers, rapists and child molesters who have allegedly been arrested and deported. 

On the other hand, we Blue American often read about such real and potential deportations as this, as reported online, this very Monday, by the New York Times:

To Their Shock, Cubans in Florida Are Being Deported in Record Numbers

[...]

“I am scared of everything,” said Javier González, a 36-year-old salesman in the heavily Cuban city of Hialeah, northwest of Miami.

Mr. González and his family crossed the United States-Mexico border in February 2022, fleeing what he described as a threat to his life in Cuba, where he was a political dissident.

Mr. González and his wife, like hundreds of thousands of recent Cuban migrants, were released under what is known as conditional parole. That does not allow them to apply for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law that Congress passed in 1966, and leaves them vulnerable to deportation.

But Mr. González and his wife legally obtained Social Security numbers, work permits and driver’s licenses. He applied for political asylum and has a pending court date in 2028. He found work as an HVAC technician. Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to deport criminals seemed sound to him.

Then early last year, ICE officers, during regular check-ins in South Florida, started detaining Cubans with conditional parole. Now, to avoid immigration sweeps, Mr. González said he avoided unnecessary car rides and local Hispanic supermarkets. He cannot fathom the repression he might face in Cuba were he to return as a former dissident.

“Sometimes I tell myself, ‘Why do you have to feel as if you were a criminal when you are an upstanding person?’” Mr. González said. But, he added, “They can grab you and do whatever they want.”

Javier Gonzalez doesn't sound like the worst of the worst. It may seem odd to think that people allowed to apply for asylum are being deported in spite of that ongoing legal process.

The zone is being flooded on an hourly basis these days—but yes, President Trump actually was, for better or worse, "catapulted back to the White House by voters whose views had shifted sharply against illegal immigration."

Is the gentleman actually doing what he was elected to do? But in the larger sense, also this:

Is this overall situation "now too much for us?" The madness seems to be everywhere, along with the inability to keep track of what is happening in various arenas as the flooding continues.

According to DHS, 2.5 million people had already left the country as of December 10. In all honesty, the sheer size and complexity of this operation may simply be too much to cover—and the president is stumbling ahead, covered by journalists who don't seem to know how to discuss what seems to be sitting right there before them.

(That's been true for the past fifteen years.)

There's been a cognitive decline, some people have now said. There's also been a giant change in the huma landscape—not to mention a threat to wage war on the city of Nuuk in the days, weeks or months still ahead!