ICE Deaths Surge As Trump Demands Hospital In White House
Also: Bari Weiss's latest 60 Minutes shenanigans; American farms in peril; and ICE deaths and detentions rise
Good morning.
The White House is now arguing Trump’s $400 million ballroom is also a hospital, a bunker, and a matter of national security. Bari Weiss is about to take a wrecking ball to 60 Minutes as the Ellison family tightens its grip on CBS. American farmers are warning Trump’s war on Iran is on the verge of triggering a 1980s-style farm crisis. And ICE detention deaths are on pace to set yet another record, with nearly 50 people now dead in custody since Trump returned to office. Let’s get into it.
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Trump’s Ballroom Gets a New Pitch: Presidential Hospital
The White House is now arguing that the $400 million ballroom Trump wants to build at the executive mansion isn’t just an entertainment venue. It’s a medical facility. And a bunker. And a matter of national security.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche filed court documents this week calling the project a “gift to the People of the United States” being blocked only by preservationists with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The filing revealed for the first time that the structure will include, in Blanche’s words, “a state-of-the-art hospital and medical facilities” for the 79-year-old president.
The pitch has shifted dramatically since Trump first announced the project last July as a privately funded entertainment venue. When a federal judge ruled that non-security-related construction required congressional approval, the White House reframed the entire thing as urgent national security infrastructure. Trump’s allies in the Senate are now seeking $1 billion in federal funding for the project — after Trump promised it would cost taxpayers nothing.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to stop construction after the East Wing was demolished without required approval. Blanche publicly pressured the organization to drop the lawsuit following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting in April. They refused. Trump called a female reporter who questioned the project’s price tag a “dumb person” this week. He expects the ballroom finished by September 2028.
The Ellisons Are Coming for 60 Minutes
60 Minutes is the most-watched news program on American television. The April 12 episode featuring Pope Leo and a story on great white sharks pulled in 10.1 million viewers. The show is having one of its strongest broadcast seasons in years.
That’s about to end.
A Guardian investigation published Saturday reports that CBS News insiders are bracing for drastic changes to the show after the current season wraps on May 17. Layoffs are widely expected. Staffers told the paper there is real, growing fear that something monumental is about to happen at the network’s most prestigious broadcast.
The “monumental” thing has a name: Bari Weiss.
Weiss is the heterodox opinion writer who was installed as CBS News editor-in-chief last October after David Ellison’s Skydance completed its takeover of Paramount. She had no television experience. Larry Ellison, the Trump-aligned billionaire who controls Oracle and now CBS, is the man bankrolling the whole operation. Weiss has already shelved a Sharyn Alfonsi segment on Trump deporting Venezuelan migrants to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, reportedly because she felt the piece needed to better reflect the administration’s view.
Alfonsi went public last month. Receiving the Ridenhour prize for courage on April 30, she condemned the spread of “corporate meddling and editorial fear” at her own network. Her colleagues now widely presume she will not be back for season 59.
Rome Hartman, a longtime 60 Minutes producer who retired last year, told the Guardian that letting Alfonsi go would be “direct retaliation for having the temerity to tell the truth.”
The pattern is familiar. Anderson Cooper already left the show in February. Bill Owens, the longtime executive producer, resigned last year in protest of what he called corporate cowardice and meddling. Owens said CBS’s owners had been working to censor 60 Minutes and stop the broadcast from covering difficult stories.
CNN’s Christiane Amanpour put it bluntly last week, warning of the potential destruction of 60 Minutes and the ideological realignment of CBS News under the Ellisons.
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Trump’s War Is Destroying American Farms
Farmers are warning that the damage from Trump’s war against Iran hasn’t fully landed yet. When it does, they say it will be catastrophic.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz cut off a waterway that historically carries 20% of the world’s oil and more than 20% of global fertilizer trade. Mark Mueller, president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, said this week that conditions are the worst he’s seen since the 1980s farm crisis. Bankruptcies are rising. Lenders are pulling back. Farmers can’t get supplies.
A survey of nearly 6,000 farmers across every state found an overwhelming majority couldn’t purchase enough fertilizer to get through the year. Nearly 8 in 10 farmers in the South were unable to afford all needed supplies — raising serious concerns about food availability in the months ahead.
Mueller’s bottom line: there will be fewer farmers next year than there are today.
People Are Dying in ICE Detention. The Numbers Are Getting Worse.
Jose Guadalupe Ramos had lived in the United States for nearly three decades. He was arrested by ICE in February after appearing at a courthouse for a minor citation. He had no prior criminal record. He worked at an industrial laundromat to support his family.
On March 25, Ramos struggled to breathe in his cell at a detention center in Southern California. His cellmates screamed for help. It took ten minutes for medical staff to arrive. The oxygen tank they brought malfunctioned. Ramos was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital shortly after.
He was 52.
Ramos is one of nearly 50 people who have died in ICE custody since Trump returned to office. More detainees died in 2025 than in any year in at least two decades. 2026 is on track to be worse.
A CNN investigation found that a significant number of those deaths appear to have been preventable. A report from the California attorney general’s office found the Adelanto detention center — where Ramos died — had fewer physicians and advanced practitioners in July 2025, when it held more than 2,000 detainees, than it did in February 2021, when it held fewer than 100. State inspectors found “crisis-level health care understaffing” at a second facility.
DHS policy has made it harder to release elderly and sick detainees. A Trump executive order rescinded previous guidelines that allowed for compassion-based releases. Now only the ICE director, not local leadership, can authorize a release. The result is an older, sicker population packed into facilities built for far fewer people.
A DHS spokesperson said detainees receive “proper medical treatment” and that “for many illegal aliens this is the best healthcare they have received their entire lives.”
Ramos’ widow, Antonia Tovar, lives in the same Los Angeles-area house where they married 29 years ago. She has two children.
“We want justice,” she said. “My husband did not deserve to die.”
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So, Walter Reed hospital is not good enough for poopie pants! He should be made to rebuild it exactly as it was and he should pay for it out of his own pocket since he has grifted so much money from the American people. No money for this boondoggle, ice, ai centers, detention centers, etc.
Does anyone else suspect that Trump may try to remain in power by installing himself in the bunker, permanently to avoid prosecution?