Opinion
By Jeff Childers, 4-30-25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup today includes: it took some work, but we disassembed the latest immigration sob story and discover the ugly baby underneath, along with the media’s infantile lying and dissembling; key Trump U.S. Attorney announces new election integrity task force with mid-term primaries right around the corner; Florida announces special office dedicated to enforcing parental rights; and long-overdue, top-to-bottom restructuring coming for the State Department and the world lets out a sigh of relief.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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We begin with another lesson in detecting sneaky journalistic malfeasance. Yesterday, Politico ran the widely covered story headlined, “Judge says 2-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported with ‘no meaningful process.’” The sub-headline added, “The girl was deported Friday with her mother to Honduras, despite her father’s efforts to keep her in the United States.”
Now take a mental snapshot of the scene you have in your mind. Jackbooted thugs, toddlers ripped from the arms of hysterical parents, assault rifles aimed at babies, and so forth. It was probably worse than that time the Democrats forcibly deported young Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba. Oh wait, forget about that. Politico did.
They take advantage of us because it takes time to track down the real facts of these cases. So I did it for you.
Here’s what Politico said happened. After four years of ICE supervision and exhausted asylum appeals, a Honduran woman attended an immigration appointment in Louisiana last week, only to discover she had been scheduled for deportation. The ICE folks took her into custody along with her 11-year old daughter— and her two-year-old daughter, VML. The twist was, baby VML was born in Baton Rouge, and thus a U.S. citizen.
Nevertheless, the three ladies were headed for Honduras before you could say “cigar factory.”
VML’s apparently well-connected father sprang into action, immediately recruiting a legion of activist lawyers. With more help from his ‘sister-in-law,’ Trish Mack, and his courageous lawyers, he first tried to talk INS into returning his daughter, and when they refused, his team of free lawyers filed an emergency motion for habeus corpus relief— in other words, to order the government to immediately release VML.
I must pause for a moment, to point out that all these free toddlers-rights lawyers were completely AWOL back when two-year-old citizens were subject to mask mandates and became experimental human pincushions. These lawyers are political hacks; a disgrace and a pox upon the profession; and they should be shunned and ostracized by honest society. But anyway.
🔥 For its part, the government said the mother —the custodial parent— said she wanted the kids to go with her. But Judge Terry Doughty seemed skeptical of the government’s claims and set a hearing for May 16th to find out more about what’s going on. He said —the quote that made international news— he hoped the evidence presented at the May 16 hearing will “dispel our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
(In another pandemic callback, Judge Doughty was the Louisiana judge who blocked Biden’s vaccine mandate and cracked down on Biden’s censorship operation. So there’s that.)
In any case, if you read Politico’s article (or any of the many others) you would think that a plucky dad is fighting for his young daughter who was swept up in Trump’s mass deportation disaster. They are now asking the federal court to order the child to be brought back immediately, and are talking to media like the Rapture is scheduled for next Wednesday afternoon.
That all sounds awful, very Elian Gonzalez-like. Until you actually read the court filings, that is. Which even a Politico reporter could have figured out how to do, maybe with a little Googling or AI-assistance and another Jolt cola.
🔥 As usual, the media’ fairy tale begins falling apart almost immediately. I relied on the activist lawyers’ own court filings for most of this information. Here’s a link to the initial petition.
First of all, VML’s parents are not married. VML has always lived with her mother, “Jenny” Carolina Lopez Villela. But —and this is the part that will blow your mind— VML’s biological father is also an illegal Honduran alien, and is also subject to immediate deportation whenever ICE catches up with him. It’s right in his own petition (Note that ‘Harper’ is a New Orleans INS agent):
In other words, according to Adiel, New Orleans INS offered him a free flight to Honduras so he could go with his daughter. Apparently, he didn’t like that option. Good thing he had free lawyers helping him.
In its response, the government said it offered for the father, Adiel, to come in and prove his identity as the father, but he declined, since he’d be deported. INS said it wasn’t about to turn over a 2-year-old baby to an unidentified man. The INS also said that Jenny said she wanted VML to stay with her, and signed a handwritten statement to that effect (albeit without counsel).
But Daddy had another, bigger problem. As a non-citizen, it is doubtful he had standing to bring the case. So his lawyers arranged a neat legal trick, a judicial switcheroo. Daddy’s activist lawyers got him to sign a form temporarily assigning his parental rights to his ‘sister in law,’ Trish Mack. Trish, a U.S. citizen, could bring the action, and they all filed about ten seconds later.
🔥 But Trish’s affidavit, attached to the Petition, doesn’t say she is Adiel’s sister-in-law. She’s just a ‘friend.’ She’s only known Adiel for about a year. It doesn’t say how she knows him. Based on the emerging pattern, my guess is Adiel was living in her casita. From the affidavit (linked here):
How well? Nevermind. The point is, Politico and the rest of corporate media are outright lying by calling her the sister-in-law, to conceal the troubling fact that she’s just some random friend with no relationship whatever to baby VML.
But wait. It gets even better. Trish might not know Adiel so well after all. In her affidavit, Trish admitted she doesn’t know all the facts, not really:
So … what on Earth is going on here? If the case succeeds, and baby VML is returned from Honduras and turned over to Adiel, they’ll both be immediately deported back to Honduras. How is that in the child’s best interest? Or, would Adiel return to Honduras, while VML would stay here with … who? Trish? Trish only accepted provisional placement. Best case, VML would wind up in Louisiana’s foster care system.
How is that in VML’s best interest?
The whole lawsuit is a sick joke wrapped in a fig leaf. What they really want —without ever saying it out loud or in print— is for VML’s mother to be flown back from Honduras under humanitarian parole so she can “care for” VML, while a long, noisy court case drenched in media coverage drags out. It’s not about protecting the child. It’s about buying time, slowing the mass deportations, and building headlines.
Thank goodness, for once, ICE didn’t blink and move on to easier targets.
The many corporate media stories about baby VML mention none of these complications or the readily available additional context. But I thought you should know the truth.
We really don’t hate the corporate media nearly enough.
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Yesterday, Trump’s former personal counsel and now US Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba posted a notice headlined, “U.S. Attorney’s Office Announces Task Force to Preserve and Protect the Integrity of Elections.” It was about time. Media ignored the announcement.
The new task force responds to President Trump’s March 25th executive order. It will begin by focusing on three critical election integrity goals, to:
- Set up a computer system allowing local, state, and federal offices to share information on voter registrations (and people who are ineligible to vote).
- Prioritize enforcement of criminal laws aimed at voter registration fraud, fraudulent ballots, non-citizen voting, people voting multiple times in the same election, and “foreign interference caused by foreign nationals donating to United States elections.”
- Ensure state compliance with the voter list maintenance requirements of the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act.
It might be the most consequential move yet in Trump’s second-term campaign to restore election credibility— or at least to enforce the law for once. Once again, we see Trump’s genius: he isn’t inventing new laws. He’s using ones already on the books. Previous administrations have ignored enforcement because it was “too political.” But now, the gloves are off.
For decades, the fragmented mess of voter rolls across 3,000+ counties has made duplicate registrations, dead voters, and phantom ballots nearly impossible to detect— by design. By linking systems, this task force will bring something that some election officials fear most: accountability through visibility. The days of voting in New York and Florida in the same election are coming to an end.
Though media ignored it —because they are sticking with election fraud doesn’t exist— the announcement thew up a bat signal, warning NGOs, dark money PACs, and foreign cash funnels that their drive-thru windows of impunity have now closed.
Biden’s administration chased soccer moms for scolding school board members. Trump’s administration is chasing voter fraud. So.
It is exactly what conservatives have long prayed for: someone to start cracking down on election fraud. The timing could not be any better, with the midterms looming on the election calendar. Another piece just dropped onto the strategic puzzle board to help ensure Trump holds Congress in the 2026 elections.
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Yesterday, the Florida Times-Union ran a story headlined, “New Florida AG Uthmeier creates Office of Parental Rights with first-in-country focus.”
I’m just saying, it’s nice to see government officials without tattoos, piercings, or bright hair colors.
According to a statement posted to its website, the Florida Attorney General’s office is setting up an online portal where parents can report violations of parental rights. Among other examples, the statement suggested parents can report things like school officials denying parents access to school records, “objectionable” materials in textbooks and libraries, and (shudder) “unauthorized healthcare.”
Now, alongside similar offices like civil rights, Florida is the first state in the country to have a special office for parent rights. Florida parents who were excited about the Parents’ Bill of Rights became frustrated when school boards openly defied the law, and there wasn’t much folks could do about it.
All that defiance created demand for a new state-level office. So, thanks, woke school boards.
Much work remains to make this a reality, but we just got one step closer.
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Last week, the New York Times ran a long article headlined, “Rubio Announces Major Cuts at State Dept., Accusing It of ‘Radical’ Ideology.” The new Secretary of State will collapse the agency’s unfathomable number of Byzantine bureaus and offices from 734 to 602, or -18%, and slash domestic staff levels by -15%. The result will be what the Times called “a drastic restructuring of the department.”
It would be fair to call the State Department the Deep State HQ. Its thousands of career bureaucrats are deeply embedded in globalist organizations like the WHO, WEF, IMF, United Nations, etc. It is often downright hostile to nationalist, populist, and sovereignty-first policies— not just here in the US, but all over the world.
The State Department functions as a policy-continuity machine. Trump spent scads of time scraping against State Department barnacles during Trump 1.0. Among other things, it undermined his efforts to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords and the WHO, it slow-walked and ignored his big diplomatic shifts, and leaked like a broken sieve whenever his policies departed from globalist dogma.
In other words, it is ripe for restructuring.
In a separate articleabout Trump’s first 100 days, the New York Times printed a graph that basically proves with a single statistic that President Trump has so far kept the State Department on lockdown. There have been fewer State Department press briefings under Trump 2.0 than any other modern administration:
🔥 The Times reported that the newly announced State Department overhaul is part of a larger Trump initiative “to reduce and reshape the government to a degree unseen in generations.” And they never saw it coming. Secretary Rubio said Foggy Bottom’s new comprehensive plan re-focuses the agency on “America’s core national interests.” In other words, transgender musicals and swanky Davos conferences are out.
In last week’s announcement, Rubio cited one example: the “bureau for democracy, human rights and labor.” He explained it had become a vendetta platform that left-wing activists used to wage soft wars against conservative foreign leaders, such as in Poland, Hungary, and Brazil. Another awful example, the “bureau of population, refugees and migration,” sent millions of taxpayer dollars to NGOs that had promoted mass migration all over the world, including “the invasion on our southern border.”
The Times struggled to find a downside. “Some State Department veterans,” the Gray Lady painfully admitted, “have long conceded that the department, with its many offices and tens of thousands of employees in Washington and overseas, would benefit from judicious streamlining.” The only concrete complaint it could muster was that DOGE employee Edward Coristine, 19, whose gamer handle is “Big Balls,” is currently assigned to the State Department.
Democrats can’t stand the idea, of course, because Trump. The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, Gregory W. Meeks (D-NY), complained without evidence that the restructuring had “less to do with streamlining the State Department and more to do with eviscerating American soft power.” Or maybe it’s both streamlining and eviscerating. Just saying.
Leaked restructuring memos cited by the Times suggested even bigger changes blinking on the radar, including potential budget cuts up to 50% and the possible closure of dozens of embassies, consulates, and other overseas offices.
This long-overdue restructuring —that even critics agree was necessary— is another terrific example of Trump’s ‘death by a thousand cuts’ strategy. I’ve been thinking a lot about why no other president has ever tried anything of this scale, with the individual Cabinet heads obviously empowered to act independently and quickly make radical changes inside their agencies. I can offer two observations.
First, I think most Administrations are structurally cautious, because of the politics of bad optics. They don’t want some Cabinet officer going too far and embarrassing the Administration, which can derail more important initiatives, tying them up in some unwanted media firestorm. Thus, in times past, every off-script revision must be first vetted and approved by the White House before anyone can do anything, bogging reforms down in bureaucratic molasses.
That dynamic is clearly absent from Trump 2.0, which, understandably, surprised everyone. No previous administration has ever dared delegate so much authority to its political appointees.
Second, and perhaps explaining the first, all the new Cabinet members seem to be working off a common plan. Maybe it’s ‘Project 2025.’ Or maybe Project 2025 was just a decoy. Either way, if I’m right that there is a central plan, it keeps them all playing off the same page of the hymnal, reducing chances for absonant errors and discordant decisions.
What will the world look like without the U.S. State Department getting in everyone’s hair all the time? We may soon find out.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll catch you all on the flip side tomorrow morning, for another roundup of essential news and commentary that will make you smarter instead of feeling anxious and depressed.Upgrade to paid
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