MaddowBlog-In back-to-back reversals, the Trump administration folds under pressure

[LetMyPeopleVote]

On ICE warehouses and an ocean monitoring system, the White House intended to stand its ground — right up until it changed its mind.

Over the course of the same afternoon, Team Trump reversed course on ocean monitoring and ICE warehouses.

Larger point: To see the president and his team as immovable objects is a mistake. These guys succumb to pressure all the time.
www.ms.now/rachel-maddo...

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-06-22T15:20:08.709Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-administration-folds-ice-warehouses-ocean-monitoring

The story the White House expects Americans to believe is that Donald Trump and his team are impervious to pressure. The president does what he wants when he wants, and the more people urge him to choose a different course, the more likely he is to stand his ground......

At least that was the original idea. Last week, a bipartisan group of senators took steps to block the administration from dismantling the system, insisting the move would be both illegal and damaging to coastal communities. One day later, Team Trump announced the observation system would remain in place after all.

As it happens, it was not the only such reversal to reach the public on Thursday afternoon. The Times also reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement last year moved forward with plans to purchase more than a dozen empty warehouses, which would be used to detain and effectively imprison undocumented immigrants, as part of the administration’s mass-deportation agenda. In all, ICE spent $1 billion in taxpayer money to buy 11 such facilities.

That is, until plans changed. From the article:

In a major turnabout, the agency is planning to offload seven warehouses purchased for more than $700 million by either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.

The decision to sharply scale back the warehouse plan is a rejection of a signature initiative under the previous homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, who pushed the boundaries of what the government can do to aggressively round up potential deportees. The new secretary, Markwayne Mullin, who had privately expressed skepticism about the plan, has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.

.....This was clearly a significant move in its own right, but there are broader lessons here. ICE’s plans for human warehouses sparked widespread protests, even from Republican voters generally aligned with the Trump White House.

“It seems obvious that there’d be more pressure in Democratic-led states such as Minnesota against new ICE facilities,” MS NOW’s Hayes Brown noted in February. “But a stronger-than-expected pushback from areas under Republican control underscores a widespread discontent with President Donald Trump’s deportation blitz.”

The pushback from rank-and-file GOP voters mattered, as did concerns from congressional Republicans, who similarly told the administration not to utilize warehouses in their home states, to the point that Team Trump ultimately decided to start dumping the properties it had already purchased.

Rachel Maddow deserves some credit for the opposition to these warehouse prisons