DL Open Thread: Friday, July 11, 2025

‘Perhaps We Were A Bit Too Hasty…’:

For months, President Donald Trump and his homeland security secretary have saidthe Federal Emergency Management Agency could be eliminated. But as the president heads to Texas to view the impact of last week’s deadly floods, administration officials say abolishing the agency outright is not on the agenda.

A senior White House official told The Washington Post that no official action is being taken to wind down FEMA, and that changesin the agency will probably amount to a “rebranding” that will emphasize state leaders’ roles in disaster response.

We know what that ‘rebranding’ will give us:  ‘Red State FEMA’.  At best.

‘Even ICE Thugs Get The Blues’:

ICE occupies an exalted place in President Donald Trump’s hierarchy of law enforcement. He praises the bravery and fortitude of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers—“the toughest people you’ll ever meet,” he says—and depicts them as heroes in the central plot of his presidency, helping him rescue the country from an invasion of gang members and mental patients. The 20,000 ICE employees are the unflinching men and women who will restore order. They’re the Untouchables in his MAGA crime drama.

The reality of Trump’s mass-deportation campaign is far less glamorous. Officers and agents have spent much of the past five months clocking weekends and waking up at 4 a.m. for predawn raids. Their top leaders have been ousted or demoted, and their supervisors—themselves under threat of being fired—are pressuring them to make more and more arrests to meet quotas set by the Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Having insisted for years that capturing criminals is its priority, ICE is now shelving major criminal investigations to prioritize civil immigration arrests, grabbing asylum seekers at their courthouse hearings, handcuffing mothers as their U.S.-citizen children cry, chasing day laborers through Home Depot parking lots. As angry onlookers attempt to shame ICE officers with obscenities, and activists try to dox them, officers are retreating further behind masks and tactical gear.

Despite Trump’s public praise for ICE officers, several staffers told me that they feel contempt from administration officials who have implied they were too passive—too comfortable—under the Biden administration.

Some ICE employees believe that the shift in priorities is driven by a political preoccupation with deportation numbers rather than keeping communities safe (ya think?). At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”

Let’s pause for a second while I try to conjure up sympathy for the poor misunderstood ICE agent. Oops, mission aborted.  Here’s one of many reasons why.  People whose jobs consist of inflicting terror deserve zero sympathy.  Quit and go pick crops, you assholes.

A Well-Timed Divorce Filing.  Are there any stronger grounds than ‘biblical grounds’?:

State Senator Angela Paxton of Texas, the wife of the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced on Thursday that she had filed for divorce, saying she made her decision “on biblical grounds” and “in light of recent discoveries.”

The divorce petition, filed by Ms. Paxton in Collin County on Thursday morning, lists among the grounds for divorce that the “respondent has committed adultery” and that the couple has not lived together “as spouses” since June 2024.

Mr. Paxton, in a parallel announcement on social media, said the couple had decided to “start a new chapter in our lives,” and suggested that the pressures of public life and “countless political attacks” had precipitated the rupture.

“I ask for your prayers and privacy at this time,” Mr. Paxton said.  (Request denied.)

The announcement of the divorce filing could roil Texas Republican politics, where the couple has been a fixture for years, and where Mr. Paxton’s primary challenge to United States Senator John Cornyn has already caused significant rifts ahead of the 2026 midterm campaign.

In her statement, Ms. Paxton said that she did “not believe it honors God or is loving to myself, my children, or Ken to remain in the marriage.”

The couple, both Republicans who frequently refer to their Christian faith, have been married for 38 years, she said. During that time, Ms. Paxton stood by her husband as he faced criminal investigations into securities fraud, a federal investigation into corruption and abuse of office, and in 2023, a two-week public impeachment trial at the State Senate. She was present but not able to vote because of her conflict of interest.

A key part of the impeachment trial was the question of whether Mr. Paxton had used his office to do favors for an Austin real estate investor who had helped the attorney general conceal an extramarital affair.

Please, sir, can I have some more?

Today’s Mic Drop:

Venture Capital Company Opts For The WildWild West.  Spare me the mumbo-jumbo.  They want to do whatever they want in unfettered fashion:

Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital [VC] firms in the country, announces Wednesday it will be reincorporating in Nevada despite recent Delaware corporate law changes made to appease concerned companies.

Andreessen Horowitz’s team commends several of the changes made within SB 21, but they argue the legislature’s actions “fail to take full measure of the problem.”

“In particular, Delaware courts can at times appear biased against technology startup founders and their boards. Litigation – even where successfully defeated – is costly and time consuming, particularly for the tech startups that need every penny they raise to build innovative companies. The resulting legal uncertainty is a real cause for concern for entrepreneurs and their professional investors who often sit on their boards. As a result, many of the companies we fund and the entrepreneurs that we talk to are taking a second look at whether they should incorporate in other jurisdictions,” the statement reads.

Read the bolded portion again.  They want to be somewhere that will brook no interference over their operations.  In this case, Nevada it is.

Appo–The $8 Million Accounting Error:

Less than a day after the Appoquinimink Board of Education approved a 10% local tax rate increase to rectify major accounting errors, three New Castle County Council members who represent the area are calling for a state audit of the district.

Councilmen David Carter, David Tackett and Kevin Caneco, who represent the Middletown-Odessa-Townsend area served by the Appoquinimink district, sent letters or made public calls for State Auditor Lydia York to investigate how such significant accounting errors occurred in one of Delaware’s largest school districts, including why checks-and-balances meant to ensure the integrity of its books failed.

They also decried the lack of transparency that from the district, which first publicly disclosed that it had identified nearly $8 million in accounting errors that would jeopardize the financial future of the district that serves more than 13,000 students on June 25. Less than two weeks later, the school board voted to approve a 10% increase – without voter approval under the terms of a first-in-a-generation reassessment process – after months of telling the public that wouldn’t be necessary.

Couldn’t agree more.  Conduct the audit.

What do you want to talk about?