Rubio's 20-Country Network Is Bigger Than Anyone Reported

Secretary of State Marco Rubio dropped a significant number in a cabinet meeting this week: 20 countries have now signed "safe third country" agreements with the United States.

These aren't asylum deals. These are deportation agreements — meaning if a migrant refuses to go home, or their home country won't take them back, the U.S. can ship them somewhere else entirely. Rwanda. Uganda. Ghana. Panama. South Sudan. Congo.

Rubio explained the leverage this creates: "What often happens when you go to the person who's here unlawfully and say 'We're going to send you to this third country' is that all of a sudden they decide they'd rather go back to their home country instead."

The numbers support the approach. According to the Deportation Data Project, voluntary departures increased by 28 times compared to pre-inauguration levels. Breitbart reported that from January to March alone, roughly 80,000 migrants chose voluntary deportation rather than risk transfer to an unfamiliar country.

Eighty thousand people left voluntarily in three months — largely because the threat of being sent to Central Africa was real enough to motivate them.

The Interior Enforcement Surge Is Massive — and Largely Unreported

The Deportation Data Project, which pulls from federal enforcement records, documents what may be the most significant domestic law enforcement expansion in decades.

Interior deportations — meaning arrests made inside the U.S., not at the border — are now running at five times their pre-inauguration rate. Street arrests, meaning ICE agents picking people up in communities rather than pulling them from jails, are up 11 times.

ICE more than quadrupled the number of detention beds used for interior enforcement. The probability of deportation within 60 days of detention rose from 56 percent to 63 percent overall. For detainees without criminal convictions, that probability more than doubled — from 26 percent to 57 percent.

Mainstream outlets have covered individual raids and individual cases but have not stepped back to show the full scale of these numbers as a system.

The Delaney Hall Circus

New Jersey Democrats — Governor Mikie Sherrill, Senator Cory Booker, and Senator Andy Kim — spent Memorial Day protesting outside Delaney Hall detention facility, citing a reported hunger strike by detainees.

Booker posted on X: "Immigrants at Delaney Hall are on a hunger strike because they are fighting for their human rights."

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem told a different story at a White House briefing. According to Breitbart, Noem said the "hunger strike" was actually a handful of detainees refusing to eat because they wanted their native ethnic food — not a human rights crisis.

"This isn't Holiday Inn," Noem said. "We're giving them the calories they'd want."

While Democrats were outside holding signs on Memorial Day, ICE agents were making arrests. Among those picked up: Mosiah Wright of Jamaica, convicted of murder tied to drug trafficking in Bloomington, Minnesota. Joaquin Perez-Barajas of Mexico, convicted of attempted capital murder and manslaughter in Texas. Candido Arroyo-Bautista of Mexico, convicted of lewd acts with a child in California. Vidal George-Jimenz of Honduras, convicted on two counts of attempted rape and attempted sodomy in Oregon.

The timing of the protest, and who was actually being detained, received limited scrutiny from outlets that covered the Democrats' Memorial Day event.

ICE Arrested a Cuban Communist General's Daughter

One arrest that got almost no mainstream coverage: ICE picked up Alina Rosales Aguirreurreta in Florida. Her father is General Ulises Rosales del Toro, 84 years old, described by Cuba-focused outlets as part of the Castro regime's "old guard" — a man who served as vice president of Cuba's council of ministers, agriculture minister, and chief of staff of Cuba's revolutionary armed forces.

According to Martí Noticias, which confirmed the arrest with ICE sources, Rosales Aguirreurreta entered the U.S. in 2023 on a B-1/B-2 visitor visa issued in Havana and had been living in Miami attempting to adjust her immigration status.

Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL) said: "The henchmen of the Castro regime and their accomplices have no place in the United States."

The Economic Question Nobody Wants to Answer Honestly

NPR's Planet Money reported on a new working paper by University of Colorado Boulder economist Chloe East and co-author Elizabeth Cox titled "Labor Market Impacts of ICE Activity in Trump 2.0." Their finding: the crackdown is NOT creating more job opportunities for U.S.-born workers. East says it may actually be hurting working-class American men in construction and other industries heavily dependent on undocumented labor.

The argument is that immigrant labor — documented and not — helps grow industries, which creates downstream jobs. Remove that labor, and the industry contracts rather than substituting American workers at higher wages.

The administration has not seriously engaged with this data. If the government is spending billions on enforcement and the job market argument isn't holding up, taxpayers deserve an accounting.

NPR's framing, however, glosses over a distinction: violent criminal aliens, regime-connected elites gaming the visa system, and migrants who won't go home voluntarily are not the same population as undocumented construction workers. The economic paper doesn't separate those groups — a gap that matters for the policy debate.

What It Actually Means

The enforcement machine is real, it's large, and it's working on its own terms. Deportation numbers are up dramatically. Voluntary departures are way up. The third-country deal network gives the government leverage it didn't have before.

But whether "working on its own terms" translates to "producing the promised economic outcomes for American workers" remains an open question. The data on that does not favor the administration — yet.

Regular Americans deserve both truths: the border is being enforced more aggressively than at any point in recent memory, and the economic picture is more complicated than a campaign slogan.