It took the Trump administration, the Edison Laboratory of fraud, to finally figure out how to steal billions from nonwhite foreigners without first bombing and landing troops around their oil refineries. Here’s how they did it. In June 2025, President Trump proclaimed an effective ban on citizens from 19 countries entering the United States, furthering the notion that American law should be a matter of proclamation, declamation and, above all, elimination. This was followed by a November decision by the director of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Joseph Edlow, to suspend the benefit applications of immigrants from those countries who were already in the U.S., while ordering a review of the applications of immigrants from those countries who had already been approved. These benefits included employment authorization, and it’s reasonable to assume that losing them is intended to pitch at least some of those with legal temporary status into economic free fall. The U.S. government has continued to cash the checks applicants send for the processing fees. Of course, it gets worse. In December, Trump proclaimed a 40-country ban on almost all permanent and temporary entry visas. In January of this year, Edlow followed by extending the earlier benefit suspension to those 40 countries as well. On top of that, the State Department froze visa applications from 75 countries, bringing the number of nations effectively totally banned to 92. As reported by the libertarian Cato Institute — which, in sunnier times, should be deciding whether debt cancellation “makes Fannie Mae a slave” — the U.S. government has continued to cash the checks applicants send for the processing fees without telling them that their applications are being tossed into the toilet. (Not just any toilet, but one of the big ones, like Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker’s prototype “ masculine toilet ,” for gentlemen extra full of shit.) Cato’s David J. Bier estimates that fees collected for a process that the Trump administration has no intention of ever resuming may have already reached $1 billion.
Many readers might be familiar with helpful graphics like “ What Part of Legal Immigration Don’t You Understand? ” produced by the Cato-affiliated magazine Reason, which is doing its own yeoman’s work against the administration’s prudishly totalitarian war on being able to see nudity online. Contrary to the conservative fever dream of Latinos streaming over the southern border into combination voting/gender reassignment booths, immigrating to the United States has always been incredibly hard. It can take decades, and the fees associated with the process can make up a ruinous percentage of the total assets of applicants, which only feeds the cynical narrative that these people show up poor and grasping. (If you want to sell $50 tour T-shirts, don’t let Ticketmaster charge $200 at the gate.) It is such a miserable and confounding process that even those who are somewhat familiar with the scope of the burdens involved are probably still underestimating the labor, expense and time involved by half.
There’s a lot of filing and refiling and refiling again. And you get to pay for the privilege! Bier broke down what even a basic receipt can look like by the time someone shows up at the door:
The fees stack up. For instance, to sponsor a spouse, a U.S. citizen must pay a $675 fee to USCIS to petition for their spouse to obtain lawful permanent residence. Then, the immigrant must pay $1,440 to adjust their status from temporary residency to permanent. That application process takes so long that people usually pay $560 for the spouse to receive an employment authorization document, so the total fees can add up to $2,675.
Again, these fees are still being applied to citizens of 92 nations, as part of a process that, without notice to them, has been thrown in the trash. Imagine weeks of haggling over the price of a house, clearing qualifications for loans, paying every associated fee, handing over thousands in down payment, only for the bank and real estate agents to abscond with everything and stop taking your calls. Imagine finally getting them on the phone and being told, “It’s actually illegal for you to go inside a house now. The president posted it on Truth Social. He thanked you for it, but I guess you didn’t give him YOUR ATTENTION ON THIS MATTER!!!” What would you do to retrieve what was taken from you? File a lawsuit? How much are you going to seek for being robbed when the people who robbed you can just forward the residential details you provided them to ICE? A couple of thousand dollars might mean everything to your family, but is it worth getting your arm dislocated in the produce aisle at the supermercado and shackled for an 80-hour flight to a country you’ve never been to, wishing the entire time that you could relieve yourself in a roomy Whitaker toilet? When all’s said and done, Donald Trump will have set the all-time record for American crime. He’ll be in first place like Secretariat in the home stretch at Belmont. When they do the necropsy, they’ll find his crime gland is twice the normal size. Given the overall scope of his violation and corruption, ringing him up for hoodwinking some of the most frightened and vulnerable people on Earth for $2,500 bucks at a time feels like Willard’s line in “Apocalypse Now” about how filing murder charges in Vietnam is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500. There is no law but Trump’s law, which is only ever what it wants or needs to be at a given time. One might think a bureaucratic heist like this can be blamed on some underling — a crime beneath Trump’s attention. But this skips past the depth of his record as a petty little shit. There has never been a worker or job so lowly that Trump didn’t have the time to reach down and stiff him on a contract. He is dedicated to not paying even the most inconsequential of bills, because the smallness of them only amplifies his contempt. During a billion-dollar-a-day war that he doesn’t even seem to care about , $2,500 stolen from an immigrant might seem like small change. But to that immigrant, $2,500 might be their whole world, and to date there is no nonwhite person’s world that Donald Trump is unwilling to crush.
More difficult to quantify is how much wealth is being extracted from aspiring citizens outside of a paperwork process. A subsequent Democratic administration will struggle to tabulate just how much cash and personal items have been transferred to the wives and girlfriends of Department of Homeland Security agents on the ground. Between billions in civil asset forfeiture and light-fingered shopping through an arrestee’s possessions, American law enforcement has always helped itself to the rare nice things that come into the possession of the underclass. The DHS is the angrier, less trained, less stable version. It does not take a very active imagination to picture this plundering process when applied to a secret police force told by the president that it has blanket immunity and a mandate to target a class of filthy, violent, subhuman scum that nobody will miss. Well, the bet is that nobody’s gonna miss Lucia or Isabella’s engagement rings either. If there is a message this communicates about the Trump administration — besides “we must seize their assets” and “ we can let them exit the prison for their burial ” — it is that there is no law but Trump’s law, which is only ever what it wants or needs to be at a given time. It can impound any money and any people. There are permanent rules — like “the only people who may immigrate to the United States are white and not too poor” — but laws are just interchangeable tools to shape the path to fulfilling them, flagstones you size and put down to mark the way to the promised land. You can change their orientation, but the trip is still the same.
The post Uncle Scam: Trump Taps Huddled Masses of Revenue appeared first on Truthdig .