DHS touts most deportations in history, still can't say where it put one of them.

…(cont) October 9: Markwayne Mullin, the Homeland Security secretary, calls New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's criticism of ICE "dangerous," after Mamdani said the agency has "killed far more of our neighbors than they could ever have claimed to save."

October 23: 60 Minutes reports that the government has been sending deportees to third countries — places they have no ties to, places immigration judges had already ruled they couldn't go because they'd likely face persecution or torture there.

November 4: Mullin, the same week Democrats sweep the midterms partly on a promise to abolish his agency, posts that deportations will continue.

November 13: DHS announces the highest deportation numbers in its history, more arrests than three Biden-era fiscal years combined. The same day, Mullin says that the agency has been "unleashed." The same day, nearly two months after Lodi, Ann Lawani's own dean is still asking the public to help bring her home.

That's the list, same order it happened in. I didn't put anything in front of it, and I'm not going to put much behind it either.

Here's what I keep circling back to, and I apologize, because I know I just gave you the dates — Lawani has been held, per her university, in detention centers in three states. California. Texas. Louisiana. The order hasn't been made public, and I'm not going to guess it, because guessing is how you end up wrong in print. Is three the kind of number an agency that just bragged about its own total ought to be able to account for, state by state?

I've got a toll plaza by my house, the one with the orange barrels that never come down even though construction's long finished. That plaza will tell you, down to the car, how many vehicles went through this year — it's on a sign. Biggest year yet, the sign says, like it's something to be proud of. Go up to the booth, though, and ask where one particular car is right now, not how many, just the one, and watch how long it takes to get that answer back. The total and the name are not the same kind of fact. One's easy to get. One, apparently, isn't.

So DHS has its number. Highest in the agency's history, Mullin said, bigger than three years of the last administration put together. That's a fact, and I believe it, because they said it themselves, and they said it the same week Democrats swept the midterms running partly against this exact agency. Mullin's answer, right after that election, was that the deportations continue. That's a fact too.

And somewhere inside that number, not separate from it, not an asterisk on it — inside it — is a woman who taught nursing students in San Francisco and who has not been home since September.

Say, before you run off — one more thing. Go back to October 9th. ICE had opened fire on somebody in New York, and when the mayor criticized the agency, Mullin called the mayor's words "dangerous." I've got those two words from the same man about the same agency, written down inches apart on the same page. Is Ann Lawani the thing the first word was warning you about, or is she what the second word bought?