Donald Trump wears his heartlessness on his sleeve.

When I worked for him, the president cared far more about "mass deportations" than he did threats of "mass destruction" against the U.S. This week showed the consequences.

When a nuclear-capable missile tore through the sky (a weapon built to reach American soil), the national security world went into crisis mode. But Donald Trump was distracted. He was making phone calls — trying to figure out how to kick legal migrants out of America.

Some of you have heard me tell this story before.

It’s worth referencing again today, because the Supreme Court just made it matter more than ever.

Let me take you back to a day in November 2017. I was in the middle of a doctor’s appointment, when my phones started lighting up. Government phone on one side. Personal phone on the other. Buzz buzz buzz. The buzzing wouldn’t shut up.

At the time, I was working inside the Trump administration, helping to lead the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and a military aide to the secretary was trying to reach me. I finally picked up. Something had happened, he told me breathlessly. I needed to get back to headquarters as fast as humanly possible. The aide couldn’t say what the problem was over an open line. But scanning the messages on my other phone, I already knew.

I got in the car and raced toward Northwest Washington, past the cop cars dotting Embassy Row, watching the news alerts pile up on my screen. North Korea had launched an intercontinental ballistic missile. Its most powerful one yet and reportedly its first projectile capable of reaching anywhere in the world, including the city I was speeding into.

At DHS, I found our acting secretary, Elaine Duke, sitting in a secure conference room. We’d spent weeks preparing for exactly this moment. The defense secretary had pulled me aside not long before and told me to get ready as if we were going to war and that DHS should assume the homeland was in mortal danger. A missile could be fired any day, headed our direction, and as a country we had to be on hair-trigger alert. The president was in the midst of a free-wheeling confrontation with North Korea, and his team was genuinely worried he could get us into an accidental war.

Trump wasn’t bluffing as a “3D-chess” way of calling Kim Jong Un’s bluff. He seemed almost indifferent about whether his angry Tweets sparked an actual nuclear conflict.

So when I sat down across from our DHS chief, I expected to talk with her about the missile. Instead, I saw she was fighting back tears.

“This isn’t why I came back into government,” she said.

I asked her what happened.

Trump had called. As a nuclear-capable ICBM ripped across the sky, the president’s mind was on the border. He rang Elaine urgently to tell DHS it was time to “deport them all.” The president was pressuring her to rip up something called Temporary Protected Status, pulling the DHS chief away from monitoring a situation that had real life-or-death implications and which the president himself should have been paying attention to more than anything on earth.

The missile, thankfully, failed. Its re-entry vehicle broke apart and crashed into the ocean off the coast of Japan, according to reports. The thing that did not fail was the president’s obsession. While the rest of us were war-gaming the unthinkable, he was fixated on kicking out people from America who weren’t even here illegally.

Here’s what Temporary Protected Status (TPS) actually is, because the administration is counting on you not knowing, amidst the Supreme Court’s decision this week to let Donald Trump move forward with the sick plan he called us about in November 2017.

TPS is a humanitarian program Congress created in 1990. It lets people from countries shattered by war, earthquakes, or disaster live and work here legally until their home country is safe enough to return to. Fully vetted. Work-authorized. Taxpaying. They’re not here against the law. They’re here by an act of Congress.

But it was never about that for Trump. For a time, I was in denial about his deep-seated animus toward migrants, until I saw it up close. Surely, accusations that he was a “bigot” were overblown; he was an immigration hardliner, but that was just a policy position, right? Wrong. In meeting after meeting, I saw that Trump carried a deep, abiding, almost cartoonishly obvious animosity toward foreigners. He wanted them gone, even if it meant deporting people back to countries our own State Department said were unsafe for anyone to travel to.

I’ve never seen someone so red-faced, beady-eyed, foaming-at-the-mouth angry over any single issue in my life as Trump was on anything related to migration. On TPS, in particular, he wanted to rip up the promise we’d made to these people. They were “moochers,” he said. Trump wasn’t interested in the law’s requirement that we assess the danger of sending those people home first. Just get them the hell out, he demanded.

“No,” we said. The law required us to assess whether a country was safe to go back to before we stripped people of their humanitarian protections and marched them home. We weren’t going to break the law. However, I didn’t need intelligence and foreign policy analysts to do the assessments for me (though our DHS analysts did it anyway). I could just read the headlines. Many of these TPS countries were far too dangerous to visit, let alone resettle within.

Trump didn’t care. In his mind, it was up to him whether a country was too dangerous. And even though he’d personally said such places were “hellholes,” he changed his tune when it came to deportations. If it meant sending people out of America, well, then those places were suddenly just warm vacation spots! “But sir, Haiti is in freefall.” Who cares. Send them back. “But sir, Syria is still being ripped apart by war and chemical weapons attacks and airstrikes.” Who cares. Send them back.

Yesterday, in a 6–3 decision, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the president to do what he’s been dying to do. They ruled that Trump can strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The Court majority didn’t rule that a place like Haiti is safe, by the way; it ruled that courts basically can’t second-guess Trump on whether it’s safe. Never mind that more than 2,300 people have been killed by gangs there this year and 1.5 million have been driven from their homes.

The Court took the coward’s way out.

You think this doesn’t matter for you. You might read all of this and not know a single immigrant in this country and say, “That’s too bad.” But I think you deserve the truth, coming from someone who’s spent years working on these issues, including for the man in the White House. These coming deportations will hit you hard, too.

Everything in your life is about to get more expensive (again). The hundreds of thousands of the people about to be sent home are the workers holding up your daily life. The ones cooking your food, staffing your hospitals and nursing homes, framing your houses, harvesting what you eat. If you pull that many people out of the economy, you will feel it at the register. That ain’t my compassion talking. That’s just basic arithmetic.

But here’s the most important thing for you to understand. Your president is distracted. So much so, it’s mentally debilitating. He can’t focus on his other responsibilities.

He obsesses over “foreigners,” day and night. He slurps down the social-media slop about migrants eating cats and dogs. He beams at what he calls the “straight out of central casting” ICE agents he’s hired to round those people up (sizing up the beefiest ICE guys during photo ops, sometimes with an admiring warmth that lasts a little too long and a weird twinkle in his eye that we’d whisper about). He laps up the Fox News segments on border “invasions.” I remember him waking up the DHS secretary and our team late at night with fevered phone calls to tell us we needed to watch Lou Dobbs re-runs, recounting crackpot fears about America being “taken over” by Trojan Horse foreign plots — and the videos he’d just seen of a caravan crossing the border.

“Mr. President,” we’d tell him. “They’re using B-roll. Old footage. There’s not a migrant caravan crossing the border right now. Go back to bed.”

Here’s the fine point of it. Donald Trump cares more — far, far more — about “mass deportation” than he ever did about the dangers our country faced from “mass destruction.” He’s failed to do his other jobs. He’s failed to protect you. In just the past 18 months, his Justice Department has dropped tens of thousands of criminal cases, terrorism investigations, and other national-security probes to focus resources on immigration. He’s reassigned tens of thousands of analysts, intelligence operatives, and law enforcement agents, redirecting them to spend their time hunting down and deporting people or focusing tracking border flows.

In doing so, he’s left us dangerously defenseless against cyber criminals, foreign spies, jihadist groups, and beyond.

To the sitting American president, kicking out foreigners comes before everything. Doesn’t matter if they’re here legally or not. So, of course he thinks this week’s ruling is good news. The judges sided with him and said, in effect, that it’s up to Trump whether he can send people back home. Even if that means telling them to walk the plank, which in some cases, it will. Some of these migrants will be sent home to their deaths.

What Trump doesn’t realize, perhaps, is that he’s just handed us another reason to beat him in November. Congress can do something about all of this. And they will, once power changes hands. Donald Trump may wear his heartlessness on his sleeve, but we’ll be wearing “I voted” stickers on ours — right after we kick his ass in the midterms. See you at the polls, Mr. President.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor
P.S. Help spread the defiance by sharing this post.

THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST

We are tracking these stories today.

1. A JUDGE JUST ORDERED THE DOJ TO RELEASE MORE EPSTEIN FILES, INCLUDING MATERIALS MENTIONING TRUMP. A federal judge ordered the DOJ Thursday to release additional unredacted Epstein records or explain by July 2 why it can’t. Among the materials allegedly withheld: 36 mentioning Trump. The lawsuit, brought by legal analyst and journalist Katie Phang, also alleges the DOJ under acting AG Todd Blanche redacted the names of “co-conspirators” in a draft indictment and the names on email exchanges regarding a “torture video” involving minors. Trump has denied wrongdoing and has not been charged. The same DOJ that quietly transferred Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison is now being ordered to stop hiding the files. They have until July 2 to comply. We look forward to hearing that explanation next week.

2. TRUMP IS NOW CONTROLLING WHICH AI MODELS AMERICANS GET ACCESS TO. The Trump administration intervened to restrict OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-5.6, limiting its release to a small group of government-approved partners. OpenAI changed course at the White House’s request, with CEO Sam Altman telling staff it wasn’t the company’s “preferred long term” approach. This comes after a federal export-control directive forced Anthropic to pull its two most advanced models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, and after Trump signed an executive order asking AI companies to submit models for a “voluntary” government review 30 days before release. So much for voluntary. The administration that promised to prioritize innovation over regulation is now effectively deciding who gets access to new AI. A former Trump AI policy adviser put it bluntly: “The whole AI industry in America is effectively frozen from new public releases.” The rules, he noted, “change constantly and are always a secret, even to the administration itself.”

3. ACT OF DEFIANCE — A JUDGE JUST BLOCKED TRUMP FROM CUTTING OFF LOANS FOR NURSES AND THERAPISTS. A federal judge blocked part of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill on Wednesday that would have lumped graduate students in nursing, physical therapy, public health and other fields under a $100,000 loan cap — far short of what their degrees actually cost — by excluding them from the “professional degree” category. The judge found the Education Department had overstepped its authority and warned the move would be “detrimental to the public, particularly in underserved communities that may face a shortage of healthcare and other critical professional services.” In other words: Trump’s bill would have kneecapped the future healthcare workforce. The courts stepped in… as they keep having to do… to check Trump.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT — A WEEK OF DEFIANCE

Here were our shows and articles this week!

• We’re releasing a documentary about Trump’s crimes before the midterms. DEFIANCE.org is joining the team behind the landmark 2020 film UNFIT to co-produce its sequel, UNFIT TOO, putting the case against Trump’s criminal enterprise and his co-conspirator Republicans in front of every American, free on our YouTube channel, before a single midterm ballot is cast. Sign up to host a watch party at www.DEFIANCE.org/watchparty.

• What a loser. Trump spent his whole career sorting the world into winners and losers, and this week he became the thing he feared most, racking up defeat after defeat across the courts, Congress, and the country, with his approval cratering to 30 percent. And it was only Wednesday when we wrote the piece.

• They want to jail journalists. We will not let them. Trump’s DOJ tried to drag Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporters in front of a grand jury to unmask their sources, then quietly folded when the papers fought back — an ominous preview of an assembly line of press oppression that traces back to the “treason” probe opened against me.

• Trump will likely lose a major Supreme Court case. You helped beat him. The high court looks ready to strike down Trump’s illegal order ending birthright citizenship, a case backed by the Democracy Defenders Fund, whom DEFIANCE.org members voted to fund back in December. You all read about the threat, you got fired up, and you did something real about it.

• You can find this week’s DEFIANCE Daily episodes HERE, including the most recent one, below.
  

WHAT’S COMING UP

• TODAY — WEEKLY COFFEE — Come one, come all! But only Members can ask questions. Join us on Substack or at DEFIANCE.News every Friday at 2p ET. Replays available afterwards.

• TODAY — DEFIANCE DAILY (+ MAGA LOSSES!) — Every weeknight @ 5pm ET, you can watch our hour-long podcast LIVE on our DEFIANCE.News page, YouTube, or X — and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fridays are special because we go over the MAGA LOSSES of the week and let you vote on the DONALD J. TRUMP SOLEMATE AWARD winner.

• NEXT WEDS — MONTHLY MEMBER MEETING — This is a members-only meeting of DEFIANCE.org. We get together… review the previous month’s actions… and talk about how we’re going to hold Donald Trump’s corrupt, bone-spurred feet to the fire. Come with ideas.

• ADD US TO YOUR CALENDAR — You can access the DEFIANCE.org Google Calendar here. That way, you’ll never miss a meeting, event, or broadcast.