RIGHT SPEAK: Our Post-Deportation Future; DHS Pushes Back on Media Narratives: ‘Six Months of Keeping America Safe’

Our Post-Deportation Future:

A lot of drivers in Los Angeles are now posting Google Maps and Waze screenshots of improved commutes as empirical evidence that deportations are working. No red lines at rush hour? Just thirty minutes from Calabasas to Century City?

Big if true. Is this effect real? How many deportations did it take to perform this miracle?

According to Google AI, quite a few: “In June 2025, immigration judges in Los Angeles County completed 126,930 deportation cases, resulting in 45,902 removal orders and 3,676 voluntary departure orders, according to TRAC Immigration. This means that approximately 39.1% of the completed cases in June resulted in deportation, either through removal or voluntary departure.”

In June, 1,600 people were captured by ICE for deportation; a relatively small number. After all, there are officially almost one MILLION illegal aliens in L.A. County alone—ten percent of the county’s total population—and that number is almost certainly too low to account for all the people who came in during the waning days of the catastrophic Biden presidency.

But is traffic actually better? According to my husband, who commutes east to west and back, it is not. His commute is zero percent improved. Your mileage may (literally) vary, but this is what he tells me. I wouldn’t know; I’m a work-at-home housewife. The farthest I go in a day is a mile to the grocery store and back.

But let’s say it’s true. What if a million Los Angeles residents really do leave? What would the city look like?

First, here’s what it would not do: it would not make Los Angeles American again; that ship has sailed. Legal immigrants and their children now make up almost forty percent of the county’s total population.

Would the price of houses go down? I doubt it. Most illegal immigrants are unlikely to be able to afford a single family home anywhere in the city. Native-born Los Angeles citizens who make six figures can’t afford one either! --->READ MORE HERE

DHS Pushes Back on Media Narratives: ‘Six Months of Keeping America Safe’:

The percentage of criminal alien arrests remains the same, but the president’s opponents aren’t happy because he’s arresting more aliens, period

DHS pushed back this week against media narratives claiming its deportation efforts under the current administration have been lackluster with a fact sheet titled: “Six Months of Keeping America Safe Under President Trump and Secretary Noem”. For some historical perspective, here’s a dive into the current stats — and a few from the past.

Darien Gap Migration Plummets

The one immigration enforcement effort that even the president’s most implacable opponents agree has been a success is securing the Southwest border, where apprehensions of illegal migrants have dropped to all-time lows.

That fact sheet notes that, “Daily border encounters have plunged by 93% since President Trump took office”, but that is somewhat old news I have been reporting on for months now.

Much newsier is the fact that “migration through Panama’s Darien Gap is down 99%”, which may be the single biggest humanitarian achievement of Trump II. Let me explain.

As the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) described the region in June 2024:

The Darién Gap is an imposing obstacle on one of the world’s most dangerous migration routes. The remote, roadless crossing on the border between Colombia and Panama consists of more than sixty miles of dense rain forest, steep mountains, and vast swamps. It is the only overland path connecting Central and South America. Over the past few years, it has become a leading transit point for migrants in search of work and safety in the United States, as authorities have cracked down on other routes by air and sea.

Many [migrants] pay to be led by local guides, or “coyotes.” Along the route are smugglers and criminal groups, including members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the Gulf Clan, a paramilitary group and Colombia’s largest drug cartel. These groups often extort and sexually assault migrants. “Deep in the jungle, robbery, rape, and human trafficking are as dangerous as wild animals, insects and the absolute lack of safe drinking water,” Jean Gough, then regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said in an October 2021 news release.

I would take issue with CFR’s claim that the Biden administration “cracked down” on migrant air routes into the United States given the then-president was allowing up to 30,000 inadmissible aliens to fly into this country monthly on CHNV parole, but otherwise that is a pretty apt description of the gap.

My erstwhile colleague Todd Bensman was in the vanguard of reporting on the surge of “extra-continental” migrants pouring through the gap on their way to the United States, but other U.S. outlets followed suit, and they almost universally agreed that it was a humanitarian nightmare.

The Wall Street Journal, for example, went from describing transit through the gap as a migrant “rite of passage” in 2015 (when 2,000 of them passed through annually) to detailing widescale rapes of migrants in the region in September 2021 (when roughly 8,000 migrants transited — per month), to hailing a limited crackdown on crossings in March 2024.

More than 300,000 migrants crossed through the gap in 2024, but in May, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees announced that there were just 2,831 crossings between January and March — “a 98% decrease compared to the previous year”.

Trump’s border policies should receive all of the credit for that decline, as they remove the incentives for migrants to risk rape, robbery, and murder (and accidental death) to traverse one of the hemisphere's most dangerous places by mandating that illegal entrants be detained and (usually) removed.