What One Week of Trump News Says About Our New Normal

Early Tuesday morning, ICE agents shot dead Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston resident who had, according to his family, been in the country for 35 years. Araujo was on his way to work at his construction job when he was killed.

As is now common practice after ICE shoots an immigrant, the agency immediately declared that Araujo had “weaponized” his vehicle and tried to run over agents. In response, agents shot him in the stomach, which in itself raises a host of questions—if they really were shooting in self-defense into a moving vehicle, how could they have shot into the car at an angle that would have hit Araujo in his abdomen?

At this point, we know the script well. We know in advance how ICE will explain a shooting incident: The agency’s spokespeople will immediately claim self-defense against a driver allegedly trying to run agents over; if there are rallies against the shooting, the government will label both the victim and the protesters as terrorists; and the Department of Homeland Security and White House will back up ICE. In short, we know that the Trump administration has given ICE a blank check to do its worst. And we know that the Department of Justice won’t even bother to pretend to investigate the killing.

We also know—or should, if we are paying attention—that even though ICE is no longer invading cities, as it did during the siege of Minneapolis, it is speeding up arrests and deportations. Last week, ICE hit a ghastly milestone, reaching 2,000 arrests per day for multiple consecutive days. If this pace keeps up, the administration could achieve one of its long-standing aims: a million immigrant arrests in a year, with tens of thousands warehoused in ICE detention sites around the country and hundreds of thousands deported, often without even a semblance of due process.

As a part of the escalating war on immigrants, the administration is ramping up its deportation of people to third countries as well as its illegal refoulement of deportees back to countries where there is a good chance they will be tortured or killed.

Immigration attorneys e-mail me regularly about such cases. Last week, I received one about a gay man from Egypt, who had faced torture in his home country and managed to escape to the United States. Under the provisions of the Convention Against Torture, the United States granted him initial protections, but while his case wound through the courts, ICE promptly detained him. This spring, just shy of six months into his detention, ICE moved him from a facility in California to one in Arizona and then, without his attorney being informed, to another one in Louisiana. Before his lawyer could intervene, he was quickly deported to Equatorial Guinea, a country to which he has no connection.

“This was in March,” the attorney wrote me, “and client remains in a decommissioned hotel in EG, surrounded by armed guards. Egypt will not provide him with a passport (and he couldn’t go anyway, without getting killed). So he has been there for months. With no end in sight. He updates us from time to time via WhatsApp. Most of the handful of people the US has sent there have been ‘refouled’ to the countries where they won protection. He has not. The guards have tried to persuade some of those detained to jump off of balconies to ‘end their misery.’”

Making this situation even worse, Equatorial Guinea is now reportedly quarantining individuals infected with Ebola in the same hotel—and is refusing to give the immigrant-detainees personal protective gear to protect them from exposure.

Another contact reached out to me about a Somali man from Charlotte, North Carolina, who was put on a multiday deportation flight that went from one city to another in Africa dropping off detainees. During the five days it took him to reach Somalia, he was chained at the wrists, waist, and ankles, was repeatedly beaten by agents, and was deprived of all but the minimum amount of food and water. His niece later posted a video in which she stated that he arrived in Somalia with broken bones and a body covered in bruises.

The man’s family also claims that he witnessed some detainees being forcibly sedated by their guards—a method ICE is alleged to have used since the early days of the War on Terror.

Meanwhile, hundreds of masked white nationalists belonging to a group called the Patriot Front marched in the center of DC to commemorate the Fourth of July and push their claims for the creation of a white ethno-state. Unless I’m missing something, not a single member of the administration mustered the moral clarity to condemn the group and its message. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum even went out of his way to defend their right to protest on First Amendment grounds. Now, I’m all in favor of the First Amendment, but how hard would it be to say something like, “These people are the worst of the worst. Yes, they have a constitutional right to protest and to state their case, but know that this administration stands solidly with those who reject the Patriot Front’s antidemocratic vision”? There was, of course, no such message out of the administration.

Not that that’s a surprise. In 2017, when the Unite the Right thugs descended on Charlottesville, it was enough of a shock that Trump at least felt compelled to address it—even if he ended up saying that some of the neo-Nazis were fine people. In 2026, a white nationalist demonstration in DC on the anniversary of the United States’ founding is just another ho-hum day in Trumplandia.

Why use the presidential platform to condemn neo-Nazis when there are far more important things in play? One can, for example, spend one’s time milking public office for vast private gain; Trump’s personal wealth has increased by over $2 billion since January 2025. And one can undermine the integrity of a major sporting event like the World Cup by putting pressure on FIFA to cut the US soccer team a break.

Trump’s combination of irrationality and authoritarianism was also on display in the run-up to, and during, this week’s NATO summit. He claimed that he needed a restraining order against Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni; he restarted hostilities with Iran, seemingly at least in part so that he could berate NATO allies for not doing their part in the Middle East; and he declared that he wanted to end all trade with Spain (spoiler alert: He can’t, unless he is willing to embargo the entire European Union). Spain, he added, was a “terrible” partner, a “hopeless” country, and filled with “bad” people. To top it off, he reopened his fight with Denmark over the ownership of Greenland.

In other times, such actions and words would be considered a causus belli; in the Trump era, they are business as usual. Beating up on immigrants, cheating at sports, attacking allies, profiteering off public office, standing by while neo-Nazis parade through the nation’s capital—it’s all just a week in the life of the leader of the free world.