Global Intifada, Local Mayor

By Abe Greenwald

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

Last Thursday, the New York Times released an interview with Zohran Mamdani in which the New York City mayor said that he was figuring out the legalities of ordering the NYPD to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu on his next visit to the city. On Tuesday, Mamdani released a video statement saying that while he didn’t have the power to arrest Bibi, the prime minister is a war criminal, and New Yorkers should protest his appearance at the UN. The video received more than 90 million views, and many of us warned that Mamdani was summoning certain violence against Jews.

 

It didn’t take long.

 

Yesterday, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a man yelling “Allahu Akbar” allegedly stabbed two men. One victim was Moshe Yezhak Grunhaus, a visibly Jewish man (he wears a yarmulke) coming from Tisha B'Av services. Afterward, Mamdani made a boilerplate statement about the perils of mental illness and hate having no place in this city.

 

Today, local Jewish community figures and elected officials held a press conference outside of the Jewish Center, the Modern Orthodox synagogue where Grunhaus had prayed before the attack. New York State Assemblyman Micah Lasher and others urged Mamdani to “take the temperature down.”

 

On social media, I’ve noticed many outraged calls for Mamdani to respond to the security needs of New York’s threatened Jews. And in the wake of today’s press conference, some were equally outraged that Mamdani hadn’t appeared outside the synagogue standing in support of the Jewish community.

 

A lot of people continue to miss the point of Mamdani’s mayoralty.

 

The prospect of Mamdani arriving at the scene of an anti-Semitic hate crime put me in mind of a comic event from my youth. There was a very wild and reckless kid in my high school—bad grades, drinking, drugs, the works. One day, he was told that he was so low on community-service credits that he might not be able to attend graduation. So he scrambled to join whatever student club meeting was being held that afternoon and start racking up points. It was a meeting of Students Against Drugs, and when he walked in the door, the entire room froze for a second, stared at him, and then broke out in hysterical laughter.

 

Mamdani’s appearance at the scene of the crime would be a joke, an opportunistic ploy for community-service credits. But, unlike most politicians, he doesn’t seek such credits.  

 

Mamdani sought the mayoralty in order to raise the temperature. That was the idea, and it’s going according to plan. He wants to make the city—and the world—unbearably hot for Jews. He’s been deliberately raising the temperature since he took office. His office accused a synagogue under attack of encouraging the violation of international law by hosting an event on the practicalities of making Aliyah. He refused to attend the Israel Day parade. He’s called AIPAC “monsters,” set the pitchfork brigade on Netanyahu, and much more.  

 

The movement to globalize the intifada is itself already global. It’s reached every corner of the world. But it requires people to serve in command positions at the local level. In New York, that’s Mamdani.

 

Yes, he was elected as the head of the city’s government. Accordingly, he lives in Gracie Mansion and works out of City Hall, so people expect him to act in keeping with the responsibilities of the office. But it’s less valuable to think of Mamdani as a mayor than as the regional emissary of the worldwide campaign to globalize the intifada. He’s the local face of a global enterprise. Mamdani has alluded to it himself. When he said on Wednesday that his embrace of a “universal politics” is behind his push to arrest Netanyahu, he was consciously speaking the rhetoric of a borderless ideological movement.

 

His first allegiance is to that movement, and his mayoralty is devoted to advancing its aims. Judged by that standard, he’s a runaway success.

AOC’s Latest Dual-Loyalty Hoax Is a Doozy

By Seth Mandel

Friday, July 24, 2026

 

This week Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her fellow Democrat and prospective presidential candidate Ro Khanna in elevating a dual-loyalty smear that will have longstanding consequences for American Jews.

 

While the idea didn’t originate with AOC (what idea has?), the socialist star’s endorsement of it, at a moment of increased institutionalized suspicion toward Jews and Israel, promises to amplify it and perhaps solidify its place in the mainstream narrative.

 

The concept has to do with the annual defense bill, which just passed the House and still has to go through the Senate. The bill contains language that addresses the fact that the U.S. is changing the form that its military aid to Israel will take in the future. Instead of money that Israel must use to purchase supplies from American defense manufacturers, the two allies will undertake more joint development projects. To oversee this process and to certify it is taking place properly, there will be a coordinator in charge of all affected cooperative programs.

 

Such joint-defense programs are normal, but Israel’s critics are incapable of matching that normalcy. Instead, they have created a very strange talking point that the bill would “merge” the two countries’ militaries.

 

While one is tempted to laugh, unfortunately a mark of our era is that the dumbest, least-believable conspiracies become instant ideological dogma. Khanna added to this ridiculousness the idea that the bill represented a loss of American “sovereignty,” thus placing those who support it in the category of turncoats and traitors.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former GOP congresswoman who has been embraced by the left for her critiques of President Trump and of Israel, has said exactly that. So has left-wing commentator Cenk Uyghur. The rest of the tinfoil hat brigade stuck with slightly less bloodthirsty terminology.

 

“This amendment is an existential threat to American sovereignty and democracy,” declared Ocasio-Cortez.

 

How did we get here? The lie seemed to get off the ground in late May thanks to folks at the Quincy Institute, the isolationist activist forum, though it didn’t at first use the term “merge” but rather “integrate.” That word is important, because it also appeared in one of the sentences in the defense bill. Of course, the bill doesn’t say the militaries will be integrated, but conspiracy theorists decided it was one of the few straws they had in reach, so they’re grasping it.

 

A second conspiracy theory around the bill, pushed by the folks at Dropsite, the podcasters who were last seen trying to bully Ro Khanna into approving of October 7, is that a letter sent by Benjamin Netanyahu claims the bill was his idea.

 

In fact, Netanyahu sent a letter to a congressman who had written up a resolution that just said the two countries would move toward cooperation instead of the old aid model and called for a new Memorandum of Understanding. Netanyahu has been pushing this change for years, and he wrote that he was happy the two allies would now move in that direction.

 

So when you combine the two lies, you have: Israel is dictating U.S. laws, and the council of the Elders of Zion—Sorry, the Jewish state—now runs our military. Oh, and everyone who supported the U.S. defense bill is a traitor.

 

The purpose of this conspiracist fanaticism from AOC, Greene, Khanna, and the others is twofold. First, they are trying to close off any possible iteration of U.S.-Israel cooperation. No aid, no joint projects—they just want the alliance of democracies to fail. Russian and Qatari propaganda outlets have echoed their claims because they, too, want the alliance of democracies to fail.

 

The second reason is to take advantage of what we might call the Mamdani Moment, in which it is considered acceptable in polite company to question the loyalty of American Jews and anyone who works with them.

 

You can see why America’s enemies love this so much: If the final bill passes, they can now just blame literally everything the U.S. does on the Jews.

 

As for the American Jews who will be the target of violence inspired by such manic hallucinations: They will continue to fortify their houses of worship and educational institutions, and hopefully they will remember exactly who it was that made such measures necessary.

We Still Need More Ships

By Jim Talent

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

Nine years ago, I wrote a column for these pages called simply “We Need More Ships!” It was a cry from the heart — a lament for the fact that the number of U.S. Navy ships, which then stood at 275, had sunk to its lowest level since before World War I.

 

Well, we did and do need more ships, and the government finally has a real plan, backed up by real money, to do something about it, in the only way it can be done: by undertaking the enormous but necessary task of rebuilding America’s maritime industrial base.

 

President Trump signaled his priorities in his first address to Congress in March 2025, when he announced that a shipbuilding office had already been established in the Executive Office of the President. The next month, he issued his “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” executive order, which called for the drafting of a Maritime Action Plan that would expand every vital aspect of the maritime sector, including commercial shipping, shipbuilding, ship maintenance and repair, the maritime workforce, and port infrastructure.

 

Crucially, those announcements were immediately backed up by money. Last year, Congress included funding for 82 new vessels in the defense appropriations bill and the One Big Beautiful Bill. The Navy got 35 new ships; the other 47 were for the Coast Guard.

 

This year, the administration asked for $65 billion for its shipbuilding accounts, which, if approved by Congress, will be an increase of more than $20 billion above last year’s budget and the biggest increase in appropriations for shipbuilding since the Korean War. The request contained money for 18 new battle force ships for the Navy but also 16 non-battle force vessels, including additional sealift and supply vessels, a tanker, a hospital ship, and five fire boats — to prevent another catastrophe like the incineration of the USS Bonhomme Richard in San Diego in July 2020.

 

That big a buy for the Navy was itself extraordinary, but the request also included funding for non-naval ships: Coast Guard cutters, an Arctic research vessel for the National Science Foundation, two maneuver support ships for the Army, and — believe it or not — a ferry for the U.S. Park Service. The objective was not just to get ships for every government agency that needed them, but to grow the industrial base by sending business to smaller shipyards that cannot build naval vessels.

 

Then in February of this year, the administration released its promised Maritime Action Plan.

 

The plan is the product of a year of solid work: a comprehensive yet detailed strategy to rebuild the shipyard industrial base, grow the skilled workforce necessary to sustain it and man both commercial and naval vessels, and strengthen the security and resilience of the maritime sector.

 

While the shipbuilding office was compiling its action plan, it was canvassing the statutes to determine where it needed additional legal authorities to execute the plan effectively. That list of necessary statutory changes was sent to Congress several weeks ago; it could be included in the National Defense Authorization Act or, if necessary, in separate legislation.

 

So in the last year and a half, the administration has established maritime dominance as a presidential priority, created a shipbuilding office to coordinate activities across agency lines, submitted budgets with large increases in the shipbuilding accounts, developed a comprehensive plan to address the range of deficiencies in the maritime sector, and asked for the additional authorities it needs to carry out the plan.

 

It’s a whole-of-government approach designed to trigger a whole-of-nation response. We may be thankful for that, because nothing less has a chance of success. To explain why, a little history is necessary.

 

After the Berlin Wall fell, the George H. W. Bush administration did a thorough evaluation of the military force structure that would be necessary to protect America’s interests in the post–Cold War world. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney projected that the Navy would need 451 ships. This was during the most peaceful time in recent history, when China was weak, Russia was friendly (or at least neutral), North Korea had no nukes, narco-terrorism was not a significant problem, Islamic radicalism was in its early stages, and Iran had no nuclear program, no proxy networks, and very little ballistic missile capability.

 

It’s a big world, and most of it is ocean. Even in that relatively stable era, naval planners thought we needed 450 ships to adequately protect America’s interests, advertise our power, and support our diplomacy around the globe.

 

In calculating the necessary size of the fleet, it’s important to remember that the Navy can only deploy approximately one third of its vessels at any given time, because ships need time in maintenance depots, and sailors need time at home to rest, see their families, and keep their training current. A greater fraction of the fleet can be surged in times of emergency, but if too much of the Navy is consistently at sea, it leads inevitably to a “material death spiral” — the cascading decline in naval readiness as a result of the stress on ships and men that results from long deployments.

 

Unfortunately, after the first President Bush left office, the requirement for the fleet was reduced to 346 ships, and even that number was never adequately funded. The number of ships went down and down, except for a small increase during the first Trump administration. Currently, there are 293 ships in the Navy.

 

Even worse, the shipbuilding industrial base declined as well — the inevitable result of consistently underfunding ship acquisition. When the Navy buys only a few ships annually over a long period of time, shipbuilders consolidate and shipyards close. As I wrote at National Review five years ago, the United States had nine major shipyards during the Cold War; today there are only five.

 

Here’s a fact that will focus the mind: There is a single Chinese shipyard with more capacity than all of America’s yards combined.

 

While the focus up until now has been on naval shipbuilding, the commercial sector is no better off. In the 1970s, the United States produced 5 percent of the world’s commercial seagoing vessels. The number today is around 0.2 percent.

 

So the government must not only buy ships; it must also grow smaller shipyards, create new ones, and increase depth and resiliency in maritime supply chains and the maritime labor force. Which is the point of all this furious activity by the Trump administration. The administration hopes that the private sector will respond with the necessary investment, in energy and creativity as well as money, to rebuild the maritime sector, just as the government’s similar focus on drone production has produced a surge of investment and activity in that industry.

 

In short, the President’s Maritime Executive Order, coupled with the sizable budget requests last year and this year and the announcement of a clear plan for the future, are all designed to send a powerful demand signal to shipyards, manufacturers, capital markets, and trade unions that shipbuilding is once again a growing business with a profitable future for both firms and skilled employees.

 

To be sure, nobody should expect large numbers of ships to flow out of the yards right away. Power is the product of intention and capability; and while intention can change quickly, capability cannot. That is especially true for shipbuilding, which requires huge capital investment, the most sophisticated technology and manufacturing processes, and thousands of skilled workers.

 

You can’t flip a switch and produce a ship, much less a shipyard. But at least the government has now decided to engage the enormous reservoirs of latent power in the American economy in behalf of rebuilding, not just the United States Navy, but the entire maritime industry.

 

A commitment like that is absolutely necessary — and long overdue. America is, has been, and always will be, a maritime nation. Our history and future are tied irrevocably to the seas; we must have access to the oceans of the world to protect our security, move our goods, and ensure the continued prosperity of our people — and we cannot sail the oceans without ocean-going vessels.

 

I’ll repeat what I wrote nine years ago: We do indeed need more ships. Now, for the first time since the Reagan administration, the government is serious about getting them.

Troy Jackson Is Just as Radical as Graham Platner

National Review Online

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

A few weeks after the implosion of the Graham Platner campaign, Maine Democrats have selected another candidate to challenge Senator Susan Collins. To avoid the appearance of the party bosses’ imposing a new candidate on voters à la Kamala Harris, they created a makeshift process, which included a debate and a vote by delegates. The resulting convention, which took place on Saturday, kicked off with a land acknowledgment recognizing the Maliseet, Mi‘kmaq, Passamaquoddy, and Penobscot tribal nations as the original stewards of the State of Maine. Then, delegates nominated Troy Jackson, a former state senate president and failed gubernatorial candidate.

 

In Jackson, Democrats decided on somebody who shares Platner’s left-wing politics but — they hope — comes with less baggage. When Jackson was running for governor earlier this year, he campaigned alongside Platner. He supports a government-run health care system to be branded as Medicare for All; he has called for abolishing ICE; he wants to establish a federal right to abortion; and he wants to cut off all U.S. support for Israel in the name of ending the supposed “genocide in Gaza.”

 

Jackson’s radical ideas will provide plenty of ammo to Collins, a Republican who has survived in a blue state for 30 years as a centrist. Take his support for Medicare for All. The Urban Institute, a liberal think tank, estimated the ten-year cost of a Medicare for All proposal by Senator Bernie Sanders would be close to $40 trillion. But that was back in 2018, for the years between 2022 and 2031. Given inflation in the intervening years, any fresh estimate would almost certainly be higher.

 

Regardless of what the updated numbers look like, the broad trade-offs remain the same. Financing such an expensive program would require significant tax increases on the middle class, something even Sanders has conceded. Jackson, meanwhile, is also running on “tax cuts for the working class.” It will be easy for Collins to tease out the natural contradictions in these two priorities. Additionally, a Medicare for All plan along the lines of Sanders’s would require the elimination of Americans’ current private insurance policies, which would affect the majority of Americans who receive health care through their employers, as well as the millions of senior citizens with Medicare Advantage plans. The only way to contain costs in such a system would be to impose harsher restrictions on access to care and limit access to doctors.

 

It’s also not at all clear that Jackson is free of his own baggage. In the Maine Senate, he was prone to bouts of anger, according to the New York Times, which recounted an incident in which he threw a water bottle across the room during a heated argument with a female state senator.

 

As the failed Harris switcheroo showed, nominating a candidate who didn’t win popular support in a primary carries a risk. Jackson came in third place in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, with the same electorate that overwhelmingly supported Platner, who had identical policies. That points to Jackson’s underlying weakness as a campaigner.

 

Donald Trump remains highly unpopular in Maine, and even though it would be hard to credibly portray Collins as MAGA, she has voted with the president enough times for Jackson and the Democratic ad makers to make hay of it. It also doesn’t help to be running for a sixth term during an anti-incumbent year. This is still likely to be a close race.

 

Still, a lot of smart people have lost a lot of money over the years betting against Susan Collins.

The Quiet Force of Moderate American Muslims

By Ayaan Karan

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

If we were to believe Republican Reps. Andy Ogles and Brandon Gill, all 4 million American Muslims are wholly radicalized, inclined to violence, and unassimilable. Indeed, back in March, Ogles stated that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.” Around the same time, Gill said, “Importing Islam will annihilate America as we know it.” While radicalization within the American Muslim community is undeniable, this broad claim of complete unassimilability is untrue and puts American Muslims at risk of violence.

 

After October 7, Palestinian flags populated the downtowns of major American cities as Muslims and non-Muslim leftists alike took to the streets in jubilation. Earlier this year in New York City, hijab-clad women led chants in support of Hezbollah and Hamas. After the death of Iran’s tyrant, Ali Khamenei, a mosque in Manassas, Virginia, held a memorial for him. At University of California, Berkeley—where I currently study—the Muslim Student Association holds rallies and posts on social media in explicit favor of Hamas and Palestinian terrorism. A Pew poll of American Muslim adults shows a staggering 37 percent approval of Hamas, in contrast to 8 percent of all American adults.

 

Some Muslims, then, are definitely extremists. But how do Muslims themselves view this type of extremism? As the writer Pradheep J. Shanker put it in March, “those Muslims that want to live peacefully are silent, because they are scared to speak because of extremists in the community.” Indeed, let’s remind ourselves that 58 percent of American Muslim adults disapprove of Hamas. But we never see this group of Muslims on the news or speaking for the Muslim community. This “third force” of Muslims is alive in America. But third-worldist institutions within their own community suppress them.

 

The dichotomy between third-worldist and third force Muslims runs deep, and not just within the United States. Third-worldism and its subsidiary ideologies, like much of pro-Palestinianism, contend that the West is an imperialist force that exploits the third world and its people. Developed out of the anticolonial movements of the mid-20^th century, it advocates for the unity and solidarity of all third world peoples to participate in violent resistance against the West. Third-worldism, as Hudson Institute fellow Zineb Riboua put it, is “a global theory of power that divides the world between oppressive Western structures and the communities that resist them… This universal script—oppressor versus oppressed.”

 

Notably, the worldview isn’t well developed beyond third-world unity, violent resistance, and grievance. This lets third-worldism bend and take different forms. In the Muslim world, third-worldism simply adopts the lexicon of Islam while pushing the same ideas. For example, the leader of the Islamist terror group Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, wrote in 2007 that “Resistance for us is a societal vision in all its dimensions. … It is the resistance of the people and the mujahidin.” The same third-worldist worldview that organizes the world as “oppressed vs. oppressor” is simply painted over with Islamic rhetoric.

 

These calls for “unity and resistance” are often symptomatic of failed Islamic governance like in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Gaza Strip. These transcend innocent calls for communal unity among different Muslim sects; instead, they call for the unity of all Muslims around a third-worldist political cause to distract from domestic crises. What develops is a culture of grievance where all Muslims are victims of the West.

 

The third force Muslims are different. Coined by British writer Alistair Horne, the phrase “third force” originally referred to the politically moderate Muslims of French Algeria. Today, the third force is characterized by a general disdain for extremism and fundamentalism, as well as ideologies that ruin the image of Islam as a religion of peace. It favors pragmatism and is suspicious of movements that promote violent uprising. However, being a third force Muslim is not indicative of an ideology per se; it’s indicative of a reserved and pragmatic demeanor toward politics. During the Algerian War (1954 to 1962), the third force sought colonial reform over armed struggle, rejecting the ideological extremism and increasing violence of the Front de libération nationale (FLN), a terrorist organization whose methods to achieve Algerian self-determination included targeting civilians.

 

Applied today, the label suggests that the average third force Muslim likely supports Palestinian self-determination, but refuses to follow the path of violent resistance or stubborn extremism. Simply put, third force Muslims reject the far-left idea of violent revolution and align with most Americans in participating in politics peacefully.

 

So why are these third force Muslims absent from the conversation? To their political loss, third force Muslims—like many pragmatists—lean quietist. Their levelheaded disposition toward politics leaves them unable to organize effectively against the populist exhortations of the third-worldists.

 

In addition to this disadvantage, the Muslim community must also contend with ideological purity tests. From the beginning of the conflict in Palestine in the 1920s, the Zionist cause was portrayed by Arab Palestinian leaders as the most egregious example of Western colonialism and Jewish aggression. Over time, that image was burned into the minds of successive generations of Muslims by Arab leaders trying to build mass support for their case against the Jewish state. Today, that image has been successfully laundered into Muslim identity worldwide.

 

The real-world effects of this are serious. For example, in 2025, a Shia Muslim cleric from the United Kingdom by the name of Sayed Ali Abbas Razawi had a planned religious lecture at a Houston mosque. Before he could begin his lecture, a portion of the attendees walked out in protest. Why, you may ask? Because Razawi signed the Drumlanrig Accords, a 2025 pact of respect and tolerance between senior U.K. Muslim and Jewish leaders. Razawi was thereafter labeled a “Zionist” for even discussing religious dialogue with Jews who supported Israel’s continued existence. In 2022, Saudi Arabia’s decision to appoint Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa, a staunch opponent of antisemitism, as the imam to deliver the sermon during the annual hajj pilgrimage sparked outrage from many Muslims because he visited Auschwitz with the American Jewish Committee and some Israeli Jews as a symbol of Jewish-Islamic solidarity.

 

The solution to this fear-based echo chamber is empowering the third force. During the Algerian War, the French rejection of the third force as a political ally only polarized Muslims more toward the FLN. It therefore seems logical that the political establishment embrace the third force, not only in the interest of stamping out extremism, but also properly representing Muslim citizens in a republic.

 

But ever since October 7, Republicans have increasingly rejected the notion that Muslims have any place in America. The sitting lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, has said, “I hate Islam. It’s a demonic death cult.” The aforementioned Reps. Ogles and Gill have continually painted American Muslims as terrorists or terrorist sympathizers. This flawed view assumes that third-worldism and extremism are essential parts of Muslims. But as we saw with the poll on Hamas, that’s clearly untrue.

 

Most American Muslims oppose the group, and a Pew poll from 2017 found that 8 in 10 Muslims are concerned about terrorism done in the name of Islam. By saying that an entire group is somehow incompatible with America, we concede that American culture and its founding principles are unable to inspire and assimilate all groups. American Muslims are distinctly American in culture and attitude, evidenced by 9 in 10 American Muslims saying they are proud to be American. To drive the point home, nearly 6,000 Muslims serve in the United States military. This differs from the United Kingdom, where at one point more British Muslims (around 600 per one count) joined the Islamic State than served in the British military. In the United States, however, only around 300 American Muslims have joined the Islamic State.

 

What throws another wrench in the GOP’s idea of Muslims being subversive is that third-worldism is embraced by more than just Muslims. A Harvard CAPS/Harris poll found that 40 percent of young people in America, regardless of religion, support Hamas over Israel, compared with only 8 percent of people 65 and older. Indeed, protests at UC Berkeley didn’t just concern the war in Gaza—they fully embraced violence against civilians with chants like “Intifada! Intifada!” Nor did the Berkeley protests, or any other campus protests, involve only Muslims.

 

Repudiating radicalization is necessary. But such repudiations must be armed with facts and not sweeping generalizations that imply that some of our countrymen are invariably radical due to their faith or ethnic background. It’s clear that third-worldism has embedded itself within the American Muslim community and helped develop a purity mentality that silences voices of dissent and pragmatism. But it’s also true that this worldview is separate from Islam as a faith and instead seeks to brainwash swaths of the electorate, Muslim or non-Muslim.

 

The cautionary tale of French Algeria informs us that if the political establishment doesn’t take notice of the third force Muslims, they will cease to exist as a force and extremists will continually be observed as the representatives of all Muslims. The current strategy of assuming Muslims are all deranged radicals won’t lead to any good. Similarly, if we continue to frame this battle as one between America and Islam, we should consider ourselves guilty of providing the fuel that’ll burn down the third force. While there’s no clear panacea, the first step requires the GOP to abandon blatant anti-Muslim rhetoric and instead ally with the third force against the third-worldists.

MAGA Isn’t Buying the Deportation Numbers

By Grayson Logue

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

It’s the second year of the president’s second term, and a vocal part of his base is beginning to publicly break with the administration over immigration enforcement. Allied activists have become fed up with White House and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deportation policies they see as failing to live up to campaign promises.  

 

That’s where President Barack Obama found himself in 2014 as he faced a growing rebellion from immigrant advocacy groups that had dubbed him the “deporter-in-chief.” Part of the reason tensions reached a boiling point then was the way the Obama administration presented its deportation numbers, combining removals at the border with interior deportations in order to appear tougher on immigration enforcement to Republicans. The numbers fueled backlash from advocacy groups and Republicans, and immigration hawks said the administration was juicing the stats.

 

President Donald Trump is in a similar political position, only inverted. His administration has pursued maximalist enforcement for more than a year—with deadly consequences—while also claiming the deportation campaign is prioritizing the “worst of the worst” criminals. DHS has repeatedly said its enforcement policies have resulted in a record-high number of deportations, but the agency has stopped releasing the underlying data that would substantiate—or possibly undermine—its claims. A vocal contingent of mass-deportation activists don’t believe the topline numbers coming from DHS and argue the administration is failing to honor Trump’s promise to deport millions of people.  

 

“I’m confused, I’m frustrated, and quite frankly, I’m angry because I believe we’re being intentionally misled,” Mark Morgan, a former Customs and Border Protection (CBP) acting commissioner and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acting director during Trump’s first term, said in an interview this week on the administration’s most recent deportation claims. Morgan is a part of the Oversight Project, an activist group lobbying for mass deportations that recently sued the administration to get access to enforcement data DHS used to publish regularly.

 

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has stopped releasing data tables from the DHS statistics office that break down how many people have been removed from the country, under what circumstances, and by which enforcement agency. Other agency-specific data sources have also not been updated since Trump took office, including the ICE statistics portal, which was previously updated quarterly.

 

DHS has instead put out topline totals claiming hundreds of thousands of deportations and millions of “self-deportations,” a new designation created when Kristi Noem was DHS secretary. In September 2025, DHS claimed it had deported 400,000 people since the beginning of last year. That number rose to 527,000 the following month and to more than 605,000 by early December. Last August, Noem announced that the population of illegal immigrants in the country had declined by an estimated 1.6 million—the agency now puts the number at more than 2 million. Significantly, this number was not based on actual records DHS has of millions of people leaving. DHS cited a Center for Immigration Studies researcher’s analysis as the source of the initial number, but has not explained how it has calculated the subsequent increases; the researcher, Steven Camarota, told The Dispatch last fall that how DHS has used the estimate doesn’t add up.

 

Immigration analysts and researchers have tried to piece together a picture of overall deportation numbers using data obtained from Freedom of Information Act requests and the limited data on ICE detention statistics that the administration has continued to release, though with some interruptions. Border Patrol, CBP’s Office of Field Operations, and ICE all conduct different kinds of removals and returns, many of which have not previously been treated as deportations. ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division is the primary agency responsible for apprehending noncitizens inside the country and removing them. This kind of interior enforcement is what many analysts treat as deportations as opposed to returns at the border or a CBP agent turning someone away at an airport because of paperwork or visa issues. Based on the available data, many observers have concluded that the administration has likely been adding all these different totals on top of ICE interior enforcement to inflate its topline deportation numbers.  

 

The Obama administration was criticized for counting returns at the border as deportations, something Obama himself described as “a little deceptive.” Border czar Tom Homan appeared to reference the practice in an interview in May in which he said DHS has deported more than 800,000 people in Trump’s second term. “We’re trying to do the same thing we did during the Obama administration, looking at the numbers, pull the numbers together,” he said. In the same interview, Homan said he has pushed for more data transparency, noting that he looks at the numbers every morning and that “[t]here’s no reason we shouldn’t be sharing that with American people.”

 

Immigration hard-liners in the House sent a letter to DHS last month requesting detailed data releases, citing conflicting reports on the numbers of deportations and the lack of transparency in how the agency is calculating self-deportations.

 

Earlier this month, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin—Noem’s successor—said that there were 442,637 deportations in 2025 and more than 400,000 deportations so far in 2026. The first number matches the topline figure for ICE returns and removals in fiscal year 2025 (October 2024 through September 2025) that the agency cited in its budget request earlier this year. ICE also published updated detention statistics last week—the first such release in months—that pointed to 356,000 removals thus far in fiscal year 2026. It’s unclear exactly what kinds of removals are included in these numbers, and DHS did not respond to The Dispatch’s request for clarification. “In President Trump’s first year back in office, more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations,” an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

 

Ironically, the latest release of detention data has provided the clearest sign that immigration arrests have reached their highest levels of the term, exceeding more than 1,300 arrests a day in June and 1,400 a day during the beginning of July. But after more than a year of DHS circulating unsubstantiated and conflicting data, deportation hawks seem unimpressed and disinclined to believe the numbers. Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project and head of the Mass Deportation Coalition, pointed out last week that the 356,000 includes exits and removals other than from interior deportations. “The numbers are also strikingly out of step with press releases claiming deportations cresting one million and self-deportations exceeding 2 million,” he added.

 

Some MAGA influencers have echoed the disappointment. Tomi Lahren, a Fox commentator, dedicated her podcast show last week to criticizing DHS for fudging the numbers and producing underwhelming results. Deportation advocates like Lahren and Howell argued that even taking the latest 356,000 figure at face value, or as Mullin claimed, 400,000, it’s still a far cry from the expectations set by Trump during the 2024 campaign when he promised the largest deportation campaign in history that would remove millions and millions of people from the country.

 

“The public deserves to know what all of this money is being spent for,” Rosemary Jenks, the co-founder and policy director of the Immigration Accountability Project, a deportation advocacy group affiliated with Howell’s coalition, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast last week. “We just gave billions and billions of dollars to ICE, and we’re happy for that, we supported that, and we want to cheerlead for ICE and for the Trump administration, but we need the numbers in order to do that.”

 

“I think the numbers aren’t as good as they want them to be,” she added. “That’s really the only conclusion we can get to.”

Who Is Darline Graham?

By John McCormack

Monday, July 27, 2026

 

About a year ago, Sen. Lindsey Graham was walking down the street in Washington, D.C., with his sister Darline when the skies opened up and it began to pour. A man with an umbrella came rushing toward the two South Carolinians, who were expecting a chivalrous gesture—until the man placed the umbrella squarely over the head of the powerful senator.

 

“Lindsey, being the gentleman, puts it over Darline,” Kevin Bishop, Lindsey Graham’s longtime adviser, said in an interview with The Dispatch. “In a lot of ways, that sums up Washington, and I think in a weird way it sums up Lindsey, too.”

 

Since Lindsey Graham died on July 11 and Darline was appointed two days later to serve out the remaining five months of his term, many more people have learned about what Bishop described as the Grahams’ “unusually close” relationship. They came from modest means, working as children for their parents in a bar and pool hall called the Sanitary Cafe in Central, South Carolina. A little over a year after cancer killed their mother, their father died of a massive heart attack. Darline was 13, and Lindsey was 22. Darline went to live with an aunt and uncle, but Lindsey legally adopted her and came home every weekend from law school to visit. When Lindsey ran for president in 2016, the lifelong bachelor said that if he were elected, his sister would fulfill the duties of first lady.

 

“Darline understands Washington, D.C., very well,” said Bishop, who worked for Lindsey Graham for 27 years until retiring as communications director in 2024. Bishop observed the senator on the phone with his sister perhaps “every day, every other day. They talked all the time.” They spoke about everything, including Lindsey’s lifelong passions of politics and policy.

 

“It’s been a little strange for some of us because I got to hear one side of the conversation for years,” Bishop said. “Now you get to hear the other side.”

 

***

 

On July 17, a day after Darline Graham met President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Trump publicly offered her his “Complete and Total Endorsement,” writing in a Truth Social post that he had asked her to run during their meeting. She had to make a snap decision because of the upcoming July 28 filing deadline—the day of her brother’s funeral service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., and the day before his burial in South Carolina—for the August 11 special primary election. On July 20, Darline Graham announced in an interview with Sean Hannity that she would seek the Republican nomination for a full six-year Senate term so that she could carry on her brother’s legacy.

 

But even with Trump’s endorsement and the outpouring of public sympathy following her brother’s death, Darline Graham is not a shoo-in. South Carolina Republicans paid little heed to Trump’s endorsement of Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette in the recent gubernatorial primary, in which she was trounced by state Attorney General Alan Wilson. (With polls showing Wilson running away with the nomination, Trump modified his “complete and total” endorsement of Evette to a co-endorsement of Evette and Wilson.) Graham is facing competition from sitting GOP Reps. Ralph Norman and Russell Fry, as well as former governor Mark Sanford. And a number of South Carolina Republicans are publicly objecting that they just don’t know enough about Darline Graham to entrust her with more than a caretaker role in the U.S. Senate.

 

“I don’t think that she has the experience, the track record to run for the full term,” South Carolina state Sen. Tom Davis, who is backing Sanford, told The Dispatch. “This is almost like calling somebody up from Little League to play in the World Series. I mean, this is six years in what’s ostensibly the world’s most important deliberative body.”

 

***

 

One big challenge for Darline Graham is that she’s not merely unknown to voters—even those in South Carolina politics who do know her lack a clear understanding of her views on the issues beyond a broadly Republican outlook.

 

Former state Sen. Katrina Shealy, for example, is a friend of Darline Graham’s who has spoken to her several times since Lindsey Graham’s death and encouraged Darline to run for a full six-year term. “I think all the naysayers, all the people saying she doesn’t have experience, need to get to know her,” Shealy told The Dispatch. “This is a great opportunity for the state of South Carolina for a change in leadership to give us something new.”

 

Darline Graham has served as the head of the South Carolina Commission for the Blind and worked with Shealy on disability-rights issues, including ending a law allowing a sub-minimum wage for the disabled. Shealy said the two would meet socially a couple times a year to drink wine on her back porch, but she still doesn’t know where Graham stands on many issues.

 

“She didn’t discuss with me where she disagreed with [Lindsey] on anything because … I don’t think she would discuss that with anybody,” Shealy said. “Darline was more of a friend and a business comrade as far as working on disability rights. We try not to talk about politics because when you get away from it, you don’t want to talk about it all the time.”

 

Shealy, who generally supports a legal right to abortion, lost a primary race in 2024 over her opposition to South Carolina’s current law that generally bans abortions later than six weeks of pregnancy. “As long as you don’t get an abortion just for birth control, I think women deserve some control over the body,” Shealy said when she spoke to The Dispatch on the morning of July 22, but she said she didn’t know where Darline Graham stood on the state’s abortion law.

 

Later that evening, Darline Graham issued a statement saying that one of her “core convictions” is “protecting the sanctity of human life at every stage.” She highlighted several pieces of pro-life legislation she would co-sponsor but did not mention the 15-week federal limit on abortion for which Lindsey Graham had been the lead Senate sponsor in Congress.

 

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told The Dispatch she wasn’t concerned by the omission because the bill had not been reintroduced in the current Congress. “I’d be shocked if there was any daylight between them,” Dannenfelser said.

 

Kimberley Tissot, president and CEO of Able South Carolina, who has also worked with Graham on disability-rights issues, told The Dispatch that Graham is “not political.” While the two had never discussed hot-button issues like gun control or abortion, Tissot said she has discussed Medicaid with Graham. “I do know that she is very passionate about Medicaid because she knows that without Medicaid, people can’t work,” Tissot said. “We have had conversations about the Medicaid cuts, and she said that would be detrimental to our community.”

 

In her own words, Darline Graham has suggested the difference with her brother would be more a matter of emphasis than substance. “I used to see him on the talk shows. I would watch him, and I’d be like, ‘Lindsey, are you just talking about national security all the time?'” she told Sean Hannity on July 20. “And I understand that’s important. Protecting our borders, national security, absolutely. I said, ‘But talk about also what matters to the average person. The price of groceries, the price of gas, healthcare. Insurance, those kind of things.’ That’s what I’m worried about.”

 

It’s unclear how exactly she will try to allay concerns of voters who don’t know her during the sprint toward the August 11 primary. Less than two weeks ago, Darline Graham had no expectation she’d ever run for statewide office. “This has been a really big shock for her,” Katrina Shealy told The Dispatch. “We expected Lindsey to be like Strom Thurmond and live until he was 101.”

 

One thing that could help voters get to know Graham, Shealy said, is a debate. “People want a debate. I think that it might be good,” Shealy said. “I think she can hold her own. I think people would be foolish to go after her because that’s going to make them look really bad.” She recalled the 2010 South Carolina GOP gubernatorial primary when Nikki Haley won. “When a bunch of men gang up on a woman,” Shealy said, “it hurts them worse than it hurts her.”