the administration claims to have deported 605k immigrants in 2025. we don’t have official numbers from the dhs yet for any year past 2022, but comparing the administration’s claim to the years we do have provides some interesting insight. that is ‘only’ 21% more than his first term. obviously, the terror instilled by ice in the general population (and especially the most affected and most vulnerable populations) has ramped up under this administration. it is important to note, however, that the officer who killed renée good had worked with ice since 2016 and border patrol before that since 2007. the officer who killed alex pretti had been with ice since 2015. it is also important to be aware that the biden administration’s number of average yearly removals was 1,404k, 132% higher than the number of deportations last year. even the obama admin removed 656k per year on average. if you only listened to talking heads, liberal podcasts, or reddit you might not realize that the main difference between republicans and democrats isn’t the evil that is done, but how loud and public it is.
housing is another issue that democrats and republicans agree on in practice. they agree we can’t actually fix the housing crisis (even while they talk about how urgent it is that the problem be fixed). we can’t fix it, because neither party will ever allow real estate to be anything other than a commodity nor will either party prevent the price of that commodity to rise consistently over time (so that it can continue to serve as an investment). that is directly antithetical to making housing affordable in a truly irreconcilable way. it’s almost amusing when people like harris say “Many Americans work hard at their jobs, save, and pay their rent on time month after month. But they can’t save enough after paying their rent and other bills to save for a down payment – denying them a shot at owning a home and building wealth.” while pitching the standard democrat plan to throw a few thousand dollars at ‘first time home buyers’. who exactly do they think they are fooling? ironically, (using numbers from 2022) for less than the 10 billion harris proposed to use to help get 400k people 25k closer to their first house we could instead house every unhoused person in the country for a year - offering a new lease on life to 882k people. you will notice that neither party even entertains the idea aloud of doing anything like that, though. without the coercion provided by the fear of being unhoused, the capital class wouldn’t have /as/ much leverage over workers and that is, of course, wholly unacceptable to the uniparty.
it isn’t just housing and immigration. fisa has passed under both democrats and republicans - both loudly pretending they hate it when it isn’t their turn in power and it’s time to extend it again. the list could go on and on. obviously the parties differ in key ways. for republicans cruelty is the point; democrats just insist that a better world isn’t possible (while voting consistently in the interest of capital to make sure it isn’t). democrats at least argue about if the smart play is to throw trans people under the bus - the republicans drive the bus. still, if you have two parties where one always makes things worse and the other staunchly refuses to make them any better (other than the occasional performative, incremental patch-job), things only go one way.