Extreme Commanders

He voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center.

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell's now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

"Are you an American citizen?" asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn't. She's from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

Millions of Americans, including Bartell, had voted for President Donald Trump's promise to crack down on "criminal illegal immigrants." But eight weeks in, the mass deportation effort has rapidly expanded to include immigrants whose application for legal status in the country is under review.

Even those married or engaged to U.S. citizens are being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, USA TODAY has learned.

Bartell and Muñoz wore their wedding rings for the flight home, secure in the knowledge that the U.S. government knew they had applied for her green card. She had overstayed her original visa but, they reasoned, she had been vetted from the start, worked on a W-2 and paid her taxes.

"If an individual is overstaying their visa, they are therefore an illegal immigrant residing in this country, and they are subject to deportation," Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, said in a January news conference.

Click on the link for the full article

Emir of Schmoe wrote: Sun Mar 09, 2025 7:40 am

I didn’t realize steel jobs returned to the US. I was referring to the return of the shuttered plants/factories. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm going to assume the steel jobs that returned were to existing plants/mills. Essentially these sites were getting back the capacity they lost which returned the jobs? I could be wrong, but I don't think they were building new facilities.
I just don't believe industries that have moved overseas will return. The areas where they would build new plants/factories (typically rural) don't have the infrastructure to support them. Nor the labor. Textile production of the mid-1900s isn't returning in the foreseeable future. Those mills are gone. So are the pharma plants. And on and on. Even if they do, it's a long, long way away.
Thanks for the article - I need to check it out.

We do build new steel mills and obviously people get jobs there. It was big news recently because one is being built in CA (a big thing given the environmental regulations there).

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/03/07/calif ... -50-years/

They might not come back exactly where they were, because of shifts in population, government subsidies, etc.

The problem is that you can't bring them back and support and export based economy like what we had. The tariffs are going to make it expensive to bring things like aluminium and steel into the country propping up those industries, but that then makes it harder for essentially every other industry to export their goods.

The US used to produce raw material cheap, make things from them (Trenton Makes. The world takes.) and then export them. Partly, this was a result of WWI and WWII wiping out large swath of industries and the work force in Europe.

At some level, you could bring back any one of those industries if you were willing to put high enough tariffs on them. It would almost certainly come with the costs of hurting the average American consumer and other industries. You'd never achieve the level of what they were in the past, because the ability to export wouldn't be there. But at some level, in terms of domestic consumption they are gone because we decided to let them go.

The easiest one of the things you've listed to bring back would be Pharma. That would just require strengthening the Bayh-Dole Act and stop giving out waiver exceptions. Doing that would also probably not hurt exports too much too.

Trump-loving Alaskans are paying the price—literally

Alaska is big and divorced from the contiguous 48 states. Three-fourths of the state’s communities, comprising as much as 25% of the state’s population, aren’t even on the state’s road system. As such, it is expensive to stock its grocery shelves. Americans may complain about high grocery prices, but Alaskans, in particular, face even bigger bills.

“As an example, [Mike Jones, an economics professor at the University of Alaska-Anchorage,] said a half gallon of milk that would cost about $2.80 in Anchorage or Fairbanks could cost about $6 in rural communities, particularly in the west and southwest,” according to The Shelby Report, which covers the supermarket industry. “Infant formula that would cost about $18 in Anchorage could cost up to $30 for the same size in the rural areas. A five-pound bag of rice, priced at $5 in Anchorage could cost closer to $15 in many rural communities.”

According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the U.S. city average for a gallon of whole milk is around $4. Half gallons aren’t half the cost; the math isn’t that simple. But generally speaking, and especially once you get out of the bigger Alaskan cities, groceries are extremely expensive.

In 2024, 55% of Alaska’s voters backed Donald Trump over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, who received 41%.

In 2025, Trump decided to pick a fight with Canada for no logical reason at all. And the thing is, no matter how insulting Trump and his minions are toward Canada, our friends to the north are not powerless to deliver serious retaliatory pain.

Take British Columbia, the land gateway from the lower 48 states to Alaska, for example.

“British Columbia is hitting back at economic threats from the United States by introducing tools to impose fees on U.S. truck traffic travelling through the province on the way to Alaska,” reported the Canadian Broadcast Company. “Premier David Eby said the tolls may not be used, but warned that Canada needs to have tools available to fight the threat of tariffs coming from President Donald Trump until he backs down from his plans altogether.”

This action would come on top of already enacted provisions like “removing alcohol from Republican-leaning states from B.C. Liquor Store shelves, de-prioritizing U.S. contractors on government contract bids, and fast-tracking the process through which energy and resource projects are vetted for approval in order to improve the province's self-reliance and trade relationships with other nations,” according to the CBC.

In response, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, victim-blamed Canada like an asshole.

“My hope is that the federal governments between our two great countries work out solutions to the tariff issues, and provincial and state governments refrain from making unilateral decisions that may have negative consequences that negatively impact discussions at the federal level as they find solutions,” he told the Alaska Beacon.

And a Republican Alaska lawmaker whose day job is trucking sounded the dire warning. “It’s going to be a big deal for two things,” he said to the Alaska Beacon. “Fresh produce—the vast majority of our fresh produce … for most of Alaska gets trucked up. The other major issue that I could see is with the oil industry. If you want to get something up here fast, you put it on a truck, not a barge.”

The executive director of the Alaska Trucking Association was equally alarmed, saying, “Such measures will significantly increase transportation costs, disrupt supply chains, and raise prices for essential goods that Alaskans rely on. … We strongly urge provincial policymakers to maintain the great relationships and commonalities they share with Alaska while our federal governments work towards solutions to avoid tariffs.”

Alaska Republicans could show kinship with Canada by standing with their neighbor against Trump’s dangerous belligerence. They could blast Trump’s efforts and call out just how much it would hurt regular Alaskans.

But nah, better to chastise B.C.’s provincial government for standing up for their rights?

Oh well. Fuck around and find out, right?