Idaho’s Simpson ignores Trump’s shocking actions, hoping for crumbs | Opinion
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- ICE arrests in Idaho rose ninefold in 2025, mostly targeting nonviolent migrants.
- Rep. Simpson endorses Trump policies despite reports of unlawful deportations.
- Some deportees face torture abroad, often without trial or judicial oversight by the U.S.
A recent op-ed penned by Rep. Mike Simpson pours praise on President Donald Trump’s immigration policy and obsequiously suggests that it was probably Trump’s idea to expand guest worker programs to solve the growing farm labor crisis those same policies have sparked.
“President Trump recently emphasized his commitment to protecting America’s farmers while removing violent criminals who have no place in our country,” Simpson wrote. “He is absolutely right. Our focus should remain on deporting dangerous criminals, not law-abiding farmers and ranchers.”
Simpson’s Farm Workforce Modernization Act is a good policy that should become law. And Simpson’s strategy could work: Flattering the dear leader is a proven means of getting what you want, and Simpson has long wanted immigration reform that would expand temporary guest worker programs.
But it is shocking the degree to which Simpson can ignore what is happening around him.
According to an analysis by The New York Times, Idaho has seen the steepest spike in immigration arrests in the country, over a nine-fold increase in arrests relative to 2024 levels.
Isn’t it mainly violent criminals who are being removed?
No, the opposite is true.
The most comprehensive independent analysis to date, performed by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, found that about two-thirds of those arrested by ICE nationwide had no criminal convictions, and only about one in 15 had a violent criminal conviction. Further, it appears the proportion with no convictions is rising, not falling, over time.
And many of these deportations, intentionally carried out in ways designed to skirt judicial review and the rule of law, have been orchestrated in ways that are ostentatiously cruel. Undocumented immigrants are often not being sent back to their countries of origin. In the worst cases, and there are many, what’s being perpetrated are shocking moral crimes of the highest order.
The priorities were made clear recently by virulent racist and close Trump confidant Laura Loomer, who recently expressed hope that alligators surrounding a notorious detention center in Florida would get “at least 65 million meals if we start now.”
Apart from the abject cruelty of the statement, of a kind that would make Hitler blush, Loomer’s choice of 65 million is interesting.
It is not the number of immigrants in the country, nor the number of undocumented immigrants, but the number of Hispanic people. It is a figure that includes the U.S. secretary of state and Idaho’s attorney general.
The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man who was deported to El Salvador in direct violation of a court order and then confined in the dictatorship’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, is particularly telling.
Abrego Garcia’s account of what happened to him, detailed in a recent court filing in Maryland, is compelling because he is one of the only inmates who has ever been released from CECOT, and because it matches reports from human rights groups, journalists and other observers who’ve been to the torture center (it cannot be rightly called a prison).
He reported that he and other inmates were immediately beaten upon being taken into the prison and told that they will never be released.
They were forced to kneel for nine hours at a time and beaten if they moved or fell over. They are permitted to leave their severely overcrowded cells, where diseases are rampant and go untreated, for no more than 30 minutes per day.
Abrego Garcia lost 30 pounds in two weeks.
Guards threatened to put him into a cell with gang members who would “tear him apart.” He watched this happen to other inmates with no intervention from guards.
A local human rights organization investigated the bodies of dozens of former inmates.
“The investigation documented the deaths of 153 inmates between March 27, 2022, and March 27, 2023, attributing many to torture, beatings, mechanical asphyxiation (strangulation), and lack of medical attention. Autopsies revealed common patterns of lacerations, hematomas, sharp object wounds, and signs of choking or strangulation,” according to the filing.
Are the hundreds of people we’ve sent there members of the Tren de Aragua gang? Some might be. But that has never been proved in court. There have been no witnesses, no presentation of evidence, no right to face their accusers. Most of the “evidence” seems to be random government officials’ evaluation of the meaning of tattoos.
The demand is not that they receive amnesty, just due process.
The administration has been sending people to hell without trial, the presentation of evidence or the right to legal representation.
This is not immigration policy. It is a crime against humanity.
And make no mistake: It’s America’s crime, not only El Salvador’s.
As Fox News reported this week, El Salvador has told the United Nations that the United States continues to have sole custody of all those we have sent there.
Each day Trump’s government is making the decision that they should continue to be tortured, beaten, starved and so on. The instant it decides to instead bring them back and put them on trial, that is what will happen — exactly as happened with Abrego Garcia.
The most basic moral instinct is opposition to cruelty; abandon that and you become incapable of any kind of decency. These policies intend to wipe that instinct from the American character, to instead make cruelty essential to what we are.
And that is what Simpson has chosen to praise as “the necessary steps to remove dangerous illegal immigrants from our communities.”