The Victors

August 13, 2026
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
AUG 14





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Today Trump’s handpicked Kennedy Center board voted to put Trump’s name back on the Kennedy Center, this time in letters saying the building was “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump.” Trump is the chair of the Kennedy Center board; his loyalists elected him to that position.

Administration loyalists are not only cashing in as Trump’s power wanes, they are also grabbing ideological ground.

Although a YouGov poll released two days ago shows that only 40% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, the administration has ramped up its attacks on immigrants. Hamed Aleaziz and Miriam Jordan reported in the New York Times at the end of July that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has teamed up with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to enable ICE officers to arrest individuals with expired visas, many of whom are waiting for visa extensions or green cards and have valid work permits.

In the past, those people were usually detained only if they had committed crimes. But the Trump administration considers all those who have overstayed a visa to be criminals. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) hopes to arrest 2,000 immigrants a day, sweeping in foreigners newly married to Americans, an engineer waiting for an extension of his work visa, and so on.

The administration is also moving cases through immigration courts as quickly as possible, leading to people missing court dates in historically high numbers. Having missed their court date, they are being ordered immediately deported. Valerie Gonzalez and Cybele Mayes-Osterman of the Associated Press reported on August 1 that overworked judges are often deciding hundreds of cases a day, often making decisions in less than five minutes.

The administration allowed a contract for legal representation for immigrant children to expire on July 31, then offered a $150 million no-bid contract to a small Texas law firm with no experience in the field but with close ties to Trump. When the story broke, outrage led the law firm to decline the contract.

Yesterday federal officials said a third immigrant detained at New Jersey’s Delaney Hall has died. They said Jose Chajon-Raxon experienced a medical emergency on July 19 and died in the hospital. As part of a new policy to stop reporting the deaths of detainees released from federal custody, DHS said Chajon-Raxon had been “released from ICE custody on July 22.”

On August 10, ICE published a notice that it would spend up to $20 million on shock gloves that deliver a painful charge of electricity to subdue individuals. Jeremy White of Wired reported today that the glove is supposed to subdue someone in three seconds or less and the manufacturer warns that the device should not be used for longer than 15 seconds; no more than one pair should be used at the same time on one person; that operators must touch only arms or legs, strictly avoiding head, face, throat, chest, and groin; that gloves must not be used on the elderly, children, pregnant women, or people with severe disabilities; and that the technology must not be used to stop people from talking back, as punishment, or to torture.

Senator Angus King (I-ME) released a statement saying: “At a time when the majority of Americans believe that Immigration and Customs Enforcement…has been irresponsible in its use of force, the new ICE announcement touting shock gloves begs a crucial question: is ICE genuinely focused on de-escalation or, what appears more likely, intimidation of anyone critical of their often unlawful conduct?

King urged “every single one of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to stand up, assert our constitutional authority, and demand immediate answers from ICE on their hiring practices, training, and tactics.”

He continued: “I never thought I would see the day when masked and armed men in unmarked cars would be roaming the streets and neighborhoods of America, acting in utter disregard of the legal constraints that are basic to our freedoms.

“It’s becoming more and more clear that the stated basis for this gross violation of our rights—that they are ridding our communities of ‘the worst of the worst’—is a lie, and the real purpose is to establish a national police force to do the bidding of a corrupt and lawless administration.”

“It is past time for Congress to do its duty and, for once,” he said, “put country ahead of party.”

The symbol of the administration’s immigration crackdown is the attack on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who came to the U.S. legally under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program. During the 2024 presidential campaign, both Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance, then a senator from Ohio, claimed falsely that the Haitian immigrants who had come to Springfield to fill jobs in manufacturing and food packaging were eating the pets of their native-born neighbors. Although Republican governor Mike DeWine defended the immigrants, crediting them for the city’s economic renewal, Trump and Vance’s claims set off neo-Nazi marches and threats that forced schools to close.

Former DHS secretary Kristi Noem declined to renew TPS for Haitians and Syrians, and in June the U.S. Supreme Court upheld her determination, stripping about 350,000 Haitian immigrants of their legal status.

Stephen Starr of The Guardian reports that DHS has recently begun ordering Haitian immigrants in Springfield to come to a DHS facility, where they are fitted with ankle monitors. DHS did not answer Starr’s inquiries about why they were using the monitors, answering only: “Every day, DHS is conducting law enforcement activities across the country to keep Americans safe. DHS does not discuss ongoing or future operations.”

The administration claims to be building its border wall in Texas by bulldozing its way through Big Bend National Park, a remote area larger than the state of Rhode Island that receives only about 1% of the nation’s unauthorized border crossings. As Ed Lavandera, Ashley Killough, and Rachel Clarke of CNN reported today, in February, Noem waived federal laws related to wildlife protection, historic preservation, and the environment, saying there was “an acute and immediate need to construct additional physical barriers and roads” there.

Thaddeus Cleveland, a former U.S. Border Patrol officer and the Republican sheriff of Terrell County northeast of the park, told the CNN reporters that there had previously been little if any talk of a border barrier there. “We didn’t have to worry about any type of barrier. We had a God-made barrier,” he said. “But that’s definitely changed.”

The federal government has allotted $1.72 billion for the destruction, planning to add steel walls, hundreds of miles of new roads, and vehicle barriers. Retired park superintendent Bob Krumenaker called the whole project “insane.” “It’s just a tremendous erosion, if not violation, of the agreement that Texans and the American people made when they established that national park. The federal government that I worked for for 41 years is disrespecting its citizens in a huge way.”

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Brad Heath, and Kristina Cooke of Reuters reported today that because of staffing shortages, funding cuts, and reassignment of agents to immigration enforcement as the administration attempts to purge the nation of Brown people, the Department of Justice’s investigations into sex trafficking have stalled, with charges falling to their lowest pace since 2010. The Justice Department has also dropped prosecutions of those involved in crimes like tax evasion and drug trafficking to focus on immigration.

Rebecca Beitsch of The Hill reported today that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), who is the top-ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, and Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) want to know more about the purchase of twelve new planes, including one that came “fully equipped with a bedroom and other luxury amenities like a shower, kitchen, bar, and flatscreen TVs”—although the bedroom has apparently been removed—to ferry Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director Kash Patel and Trump’s border advisor Tom Homan. The FBI already has a plane for the director.

“This administration has lit taxpayer dollars on fire by acquiring new and unnecessary planes to jet Trump officials around in extreme luxury that the vast majority of Americans will never experience,” Murray and Murphy wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is also grabbing ideological ground. Although he gained Senate confirmation by assuring Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a medical doctor, that he would not change the nation’s vaccine schedule, he began reworking it almost as soon as he was confirmed.

States have the authority to determine which vaccines will be required for attendance at public school, but in January the administration cut the number of vaccines the government recommended for children, ceasing to recommend vaccines against influenza, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis or RSV.

On Monday, even as measles outbreaks are growing in the U.S., Trump issued an executive order to force states to revise their recommendations on childhood vaccinations. The order calls for recommending that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine be separated into three single-disease shots to be administered at separate appointments, although such separate vaccinations aren’t even available in the U.S.

While Trump falsely claimed that “there could be a possibility that” the vaccines are “quite lethal” in an MMR shot—utter nonsense—he said that separating the vaccines means they will be “very effective.” In fact, years of evidence have proved that the MMR vaccine is safe and effective.

But what separating the vaccines would do is to guarantee that fewer children would be fully vaccinated. Separate vaccines mean more visits to the doctor, often spaced at specific intervals. Studies show that separating the vaccines makes children from poor families less likely to get the full schedule of vaccines, leaving them and their communities more vulnerable to disease than wealthier Americans.

The executive order will not change the recommendation of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or, probably, insurance coverage. What it will do is sow confusion over vaccines, as Kennedy has done for years. Trump called the announcement a “major victory for parents rights, religious and constitutional rights, and for the gold standard science.”

When asked if he regretted his vote to confirm the anti-vaccination activist Kennedy to head the nation’s health department, Cassidy told CNBC’s Squawk Box: “If you’re going to tell me I was, somebody didn’t tell me the truth, and I should’ve, like, you know, seen in the future they were not gonna tell the truth, you can say, ‘Oh, Bill you should’ve seen into the future,’ in which case I’d be on your show talking about the futures of stocks as opposed to vaccine policy.”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-13-2026?r=2knd56&utm_medium=ios