Travel

Border crossings fall 93%, migrant kids wait in shelters, Taliban doesn't want the Afghans headed its way.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the evening edition, 2 November 2026

Today we are making a kept promise, which is a dish America does not often get to finish. In 2024 Donald Trump promised to end illegal crossings on the southern border; this week California's own figures confirm it. Arrests are down more than 93 percent from their peak under Joe Biden. You take the heat up, you take the liquid down, and you watch what is left in the pan.

You will need the promise itself, kept at better than 93 percent off its peak. You will also need the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which cares for migrant children who arrive in the country alone. At the end of the line sits Pakistan, through which Washington now plans to deport scores of Afghans on their way back to Afghanistan.

CLIVE: The end of the line. That's rather where my villanelle's been sitting too, except mine's waiting on a rhyme and theirs is waiting on a flight.

GARY: A flight. You've waited on a rhyme since July same as the shed door. I'll have that off its hinges by Friday.

ROB: Off its hinges. Always ends in a crowbar in this house, and nobody's thanked the damp for holding it up this long.

Now we come to the part that explains the front door. Washington closed the CBP One app, the legal pathway migrants had used to apply; by 10 September shelters on the Mexican side of the border were emptying out. Turn the 93 percent over and look underneath: it counts arrests at that door. It does not count what happens to everyone already inside it.

KEITH: The other side of it. There's an angle there, selling the waiting itself, if someone would let me put a label on it.

Now the hardest part to plate. The Office of Refugee Resettlement is supposed to care for children who arrive alone; new policies are stranding them in shelters instead, and their mental health is suffering for the wait. That is not the recipe going right. It went back in the pan, with the agency meant to hold the spoon watching it happen.

GARY: Holding the spoon. Nobody's held anything in this kitchen since the rota fell apart, and that was before the spoon went missing too.

France 24, which is what they read this week, has the arrests down 93 percent and calls the promise kept. RTÉ, which is what they have in Dublin, has it as the Taliban voicing concern over plans by Washington to deport scores of Afghans to Pakistan, aimed at their eventual return home.

This serves the number on the board in Washington. Everyone still inside the shelters, on either side of the border, pays for it.

KEITH: Pays for it. Everything in this house pays eventually — ask the meter, ask the boiler, ask whoever's turn it is to reduce the gas bill.

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Mayor threatens third lawsuit against ICE in a month, files none.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the morning edition, 2 November 2026

One job. Find the paper that says who owns the ground underneath.

Start at the start. October 2, the mayor threatens to sue Columbia University over College Walk, the footpath locked since the 2023 campus protests, unless the school reopens it. No ownership claim attached — the city doesn't hold title to a private university's sidewalk. Just a threat to sue, over a gate the letter says has stayed shut three years.

Fourteen days later, October 16, Mamdani and other New York Democrats send a different kind of letter, this one to private parking-lot owners, asking them not to rent space to ICE for staging raids. Not a lawsuit threat. A request with a return address, no court attached, aimed at property the city has no more claim to than it did at Columbia's sidewalk.

Monday the job changes shape. The mayor's letter to the Trump administration calls ICE's use of city-owned properties 'unauthorized and is therefore illegal,' property that 'endangers City residents, and sows fear among those who seek to access City property.' The planner studies the three letters side by side and likes what's finally sitting in this one: for the first time, the thing being defended and the authority doing the defending come from the same deed.

The tinkerer lays it out on the bench. Columbia: a locked gate, no ownership behind the ask. The lots: a courtesy request to owners who could have said no. City property: the mayor's own letterhead, citing the city's own title to the ground ICE is standing on. That's the part that was sitting in the toolbox the whole time, unused until Monday.

The muscle has been standing by since Columbia, a month now, waiting on an order to move. The pilot has a route planned to a courthouse a few blocks from City Hall, engine running.

Three letters. Two threats to sue. Zero dockets opened.

Nothing in the receipts says the suit wins. Nothing says it loses, either — no one has filed it to find out. What's on the bench is the one tool the mayor's office never had to borrow from anybody else to use. It just hasn't left the bench yet.

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Justice Department targets 65 officials for holding ICE accountable, stops sharing its own evidence on ICE killings

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 2 November 2026

I need some help understanding this one, and I don't mean that as a trick to get your attention. The House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department are supposed to be the experts on accountability this year. They're the ones doing it, over and over, to other people. So I'd like to ask them something plain, if they have a minute for me.

Truthout reported it on November 2nd: since January, the Committee and the Department have targeted sixty-five state and local officials for trying to hold ICE accountable. Not for breaking a law that I can find. For asking questions about what ICE did. What, exactly, does an official have to do to end up on a list like that?

I went out to the car to sit with it for a minute, because that's usually where I end up when something doesn't add up and I don't want to stare at it indoors. I've got a glovebox full of paper I never look at — an expired registration, a gas receipt from a station I can't place anymore, an old inspection sticker curling at the corner. None of it's organized. But I don't throw any of it out, because the whole arrangement of a glovebox is that the paper stays put in case somebody with a badge wants to see it.

Minnesota is investigating two deaths from the crackdown there earlier this year — Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both killed by federal officers. Alex Pretti died in January; he was thirty-seven, a nurse. The state sued the federal government back in March for the materials on both cases. In court filings this October, Minnesota said the federal government had paused handing that material over. If the Committee can put that many officials under review for asking ICE a question, what's the review called for the agency that stopped answering a state's questions about two people who are dead?

Susan and Michael Pretti held a press conference on October 27th — their first public remarks since their son died in January — and accused federal officials of stonewalling them and shielding his killers. They weren't trying to get anybody added to a list. They were trying to get the Department to hold somebody accountable for what happened to their son. Do they get the file?

I've got a dog in the yard who's barked at the same mail carrier for six years running, and nobody at the Postal Service has ever opened a file on him either way. I bring him up only because I'm trying to find the actual line between who gets looked at and who doesn't, and from where I'm sitting, I can't find it by myself. Could the Committee draw that line for me, in writing, the way they apparently already have for everybody else on their list?

I keep thinking about the glovebox, honestly. Not because it's a clever comparison. Because it's the only place I've got where I understand the rule: the paper stays, in case somebody asks. Minnesota asked in March. By October they were still waiting. I don't know what you call that, and I was hoping the Committee could tell me, since they seem to have a name for everything else this year.

Oh — before you go, one more thing. I'm sorry, I told myself I'd leave this alone, but I keep landing back on it wrong. Sixty-five people got put under a microscope this year for asking ICE to answer for something. How many has anybody put under one for refusing to answer Minnesota?

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Justice Department targets 65 officials for holding ICE accountable, holds none of its own accountable.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the evening edition, 3 November 2026

The chief put one item on the bench before assigning anything: the tool the Justice Department is supposed to carry for days exactly like this one, and asked whether it actually works.

On October 23rd, Minnesota officials told a court the federal government had stopped handing over evidence in their investigation of two fatal ICE shootings, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Four days later, Pretti's parents said what it looked like from the outside: Trump officials shielding his killers. The planner studied that pause and admired the craftsmanship — stopping a routine evidence transfer takes the same kind of deliberate work as building anything else.

On November 2nd, Truthout filled in the rest of the assembly: since January, the House Judiciary Committee and the Justice Department have targeted sixty-five state and local officials for trying to hold ICE accountable. Not the officers. The people asking about the officers.

Then, on October 30th, a grand jury in Harris County, Texas — a county, not the Department — indicted ICE officer Mario Alberto Morales on a felony count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, for allegedly driving his SUV into Miguel Parra, a man who had lived in the state for decades and spent weeks afterward in the hospital. Washington didn't ask Harris County to do this. The county reached for the plain tool every county already owns and used it on a federal officer exactly the way it uses it on anyone else. The tinkerer took the whole mechanism apart afterward just to check: a grand jury hears what happened, decides a crime occurred, indicts. No new law required. No list of sixty-five. It's the one gear in this machine that still turns when you crank it.

On Monday, Morales turned himself in and was released on bond — a year-plus into the job, NBC noted, in the middle of what reporters are calling Trump's hiring surge, now itself under review. The muscle's job here was simple: clear away the obstruction — the stalled evidence, the sixty-five names — so the pilot could see what was actually left standing. One grand jury. One county. Zero help from the agency whose whole job this is supposed to be.

The Justice Department owns the identical tool — authority to prosecute, the practice of sharing what it collects with the states doing the same work. It used neither this year. Harris County used its copy without waiting to be asked. The fix the crew is pricing out isn't exotic: give the Department the same orders it already gave the county, for free, with no memo required.

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DOJ's only ICE indictment this cycle covers a vehicle; 65 local officials are targeted for holding it accountable.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the evening edition, 3 November 2026

The chief opened the file the same way twice this year: a government tool built for exactly this day, and whether anyone had touched it. In August, Pretti's family called the government's description of their son — "assassin," "domestic terrorist" — what it was. On October 23rd, Minnesota officials told a court the federal government had stopped turning over evidence in its own investigation of both deaths. Four days later, Pretti's father stood in Minneapolis, nine months after the shooting, and said the names out loud himself: Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa, CBP officer Raymundo Gutierrez. The planner studied the sequence and admired its symmetry — evidence stops flowing the same week the only channel left open is a father reading names into a microphone because no prosecutor has.

The tinkerer laid the sole federal indictment of an ICE officer this cycle next to those two names, and it did not match: a Texas officer charged for running down an immigrant with his SUV, who turned himself in on October 30th. Not Ochoa. Not Gutierrez. A different officer, a different state, a different weapon — the one piece of federal machinery that moved this cycle moved somewhere else entirely.

The muscle went looking for the matching tool and found it aimed the wrong direction: the Justice Department has sixty-five local officials in its sights for holding ICE accountable, and as of this week, zero ICE officers in its sights for the deaths in Minneapolis. The statute exists either way; the Department chose which end of it to use.

The pilot flew it to where the voters already were. On Tuesday, Minnesotans walked up to the memorial sites for Pretti and Good and left their "I Voted" stickers there, beside the flowers, beside the names the father had to supply himself nine months in. No press release announced it. No subpoena required it. Just a sticker, on a grave marker, standing in for the paperwork the Justice Department still has not filed.

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ICE promised only criminals, swept up the neighbors, got voted out Tuesday.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the morning edition, 6 November 2026

Benny Melendez, a business owner in Weslaco, Texas, said he expected ICE's raids to catch people with criminal records. Instead the agents came for his relatives. His employees. People his sheet had never flagged. The gap between the filing and the promise is a count, and as of this week nobody in Washington has published one.

That gap is now showing up in a different ledger. National school enrollment was already set to fall by 2 million students by 2030, and NPR reports this week that deportations of parents and children are accelerating that drop — emptying desks in the same communities ICE said it was only clearing of criminals.

The warning signs sat in the polling for months. On September 21, Trump's approval hit 32 percent, a record low in either term, while diesel prices climbed and the war in Iran dragged on. Two weeks later, on October 5, the same 32 percent held — this time with the poll naming the slippage specifically among Latino voters who had backed him in 2024.

One day before the vote, the administration closed its own books on a different project: a $14 million renovation of the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, unveiled by the president as his final appeal to voters before Tuesday's election.

On Tuesday, Hispanic Americans turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds, and the party suffered what the wire calls an explosive rout. Melendez put it plainly: "He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party."

Two balance sheets closed the same week. One measured in dollars poured into a reflecting pool. The other measured in desks going empty because the families who used to fill them were gone. Neither number ran in the same story until now. Both are real, and only one of them got a press conference.

The schools will file their enrollment counts to the state on the usual schedule, through 2030. ICE has not filed a count of how many people it targeted turned out to have no criminal record at all. The voters filed theirs on Tuesday, and the filing cleared.

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Houston calls it a "new model," built entirely from authority police had the whole time.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the afternoon edition, 6 November 2026

The chief opened the toolbox Mayor John Whitmire already owned: the discretion a police department holds, stop by stop, over whether to pick up the phone and call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Houston's department had carried that discretion for years, sitting unused while Governor Greg Abbott's order stood over it, steering cities toward cooperation. On Tuesday, Texas Democrats won the governor's mansion for the first time in decades. By Friday, Whitmire told Houston police to stop notifying ICE during routine stops.

The planner admired how little the mayor had to build to get there. No bill moved through the legislature. No budget line opened. The authority already sat inside the department Whitmire runs; what changed was who was watching from Austin. Whitmire called it "a new model" of immigration enforcement, and he drew the line himself, in his own words, not through a spokesperson: officers would still refer to ICE immigrants who "pose a danger," not those "going about their family business, work and education."

The tinkerer built the mechanism from parts already on the shelf. One phone call, redirected. One standing instruction, amended. One danger standard, set by the mayor on the record. That is the whole apparatus — an existing discretion, pointed somewhere else.

The muscle went after the old structure first. Abbott's order had stood as the backdrop for the department's old habit, cooperation as the default setting. Abbott lost his seat Tuesday. The order he signed stayed on the books, technically, and Whitmire moved anyway. Fox News framed it as the mayor bolting early, acting before any new administration was even sworn in. Call it early. Either way, the discretion moved the same week the governor's mansion did.

The pilot flew it to where it lands: a department that will keep making routine stops, every one of them now a choice about whether a call to ICE happens at all. Houston didn't wait for a new statute, a new court ruling, or a new line item. It used the keys that were already in the drawer, the week the locks on the mansion changed hands.

That's the whole caper.

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THE PROMOTION

Trump loses both chambers, promotes the aide his party calls a megalomaniac, who pledges him loyalty within hours.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the morning edition, 7 November 2026

Today we are making a chief of staff, which is a job you can lose and regain within the same administration over here, it turns out, so I shall go slowly. The dish needs a president who has just lost both chambers of Congress, a deputy already in the building, and one pledge, delivered within hours of the appointment going out.

You will need Susie Wiles, who is out, and Stephen Miller, who is in, named on Truth Social the same Friday Trump told 60 Minutes to expect changes to his team. You will also want a record on Miller running back further than Friday, if you want the whole dish and not the garnish.

CLIVE: Loyalty within hours. I've had three stanzas rejected this month and this man gets a desk for one sentence.

GARY: It's not a career, it's a job description. You've had the same stanza since March; at least his got him a desk.

On the nineteenth of October, before any of this was official, Sarah Matthews, a former White House deputy press secretary, called the prospect of Miller replacing Wiles "terrifying."

ROB: Terrifying's a lot of weight for one appointment to carry. Anyone here actually frightened, or is it just the word going round?

KEITH: I'm not frightened, I'm interested. A White House this rattled licenses anything, and there's money in moving first.

On the thirtieth, Public Citizen found what it called "glaring inconsistencies" in Miller's financial disclosures, touching his reported stock sales and his children's, the kind of paperwork error the administration has otherwise used to target immigrants and political opponents.

Republicans lost both chambers on the third. On Friday the seventh, hours after Trump told 60 Minutes to expect a shake-up, he announced on Truth Social that Miller would replace Wiles, confirming she had been ousted.

CLIVE: Ousted. I've been ousted from two flats this year and neither landlord so much as texted the group chat.

GARY: You've been ousted from the shower rota, Clive, and you announced that one yourself, twice, at volume.

In his first speech as chief of staff, Miller pledged "absolute loyalty" and "unwavering commitment" to "President Trump and the country."

You take a chief of staff the way you take a chicken, by both ends, turned over to see what's underneath. Underneath this one is the deputy France 24 names as the architect of the administration's immigration crackdown, the one Le Monde calls a "reactionary ideologue and white supremacist," and the one House Republicans are calling, Fox News reports, a "megalomaniac."

KEITH: Megalomaniac sells. I'd have it on a mug before the recess ends.

Le Monde has him as a "reactionary ideologue and white supremacist"; the Guardian has Democratic lawmakers calling him a "hatemonger," a "xenophobe," "vile."

You will be looking for the vote that confirms him. There is no vote; a chief of staff answers to no one but the president, which this week is the whole of the point.

This serves a president who just lost the two chambers that might have stopped him. The bill goes to whichever watchdog is left counting the inconsistencies in the paperwork of the man now closest to him.

GARY: Checked by. We've had two emails about the boiler since September and still no parts; at least his paperwork gets read eventually.

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