Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images, Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images, and United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which if officially BACK from hiatus and is ready to see if the news is now “good” again. [Checks out the ol’ news.] Ah well.

We may be a little rusty, so bear with us. This week, Donald Trump fantasized about which Western Hemisphere landmasses he can conquer next. Tim Walz can’t catch a break ever since he inserted himself into national politics. A solution for expired health care subsidies remains mired in the limbo of a dreaded Senate working group.

And while we were hoping to lead with a “fun one” in this return edition, that wasn’t in the cards.

1. Stephen Miller

ICE is becoming too big to fail.

On Wednesday in Minnesota, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was in her car, perpendicular to traffic, during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation in Minneapolis. An agent approached her and demanded she get out of the car. As that officer began trying to open her door, another approached from the other side. Good tried to drive away, turning her wheels right to avoid the officer who had approached from the other side. As the officer tried to get out of the way, he fired multiple shots from feet away and killed Good. We can’t predict how a court of law would judge the officer’s self-defense argument. But the naked eye tells that this was an overuse of force.

This administration, though, can’t afford you believing the naked eye. It has a lot riding on ICE. Anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller, who runs White House policy—or, really, just runs the White House—pushed with all of his might to secure a mammoth expansion of ICE capacity and personnel in last summer’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. A supersized ICE is Miller’s tool to implement mass deportations. And so, a scandal in which an ICE officer unnecessarily shoots someone in the face, which could threaten public support for Miller’s grand ICE project, is not something the administration can afford.

This is why the administration went from zero to she was a terrorist in about 10 seconds. Miller described Good’s driving as “domestic terrorism,” intended to run over officers, a line echoed by the Department of Homeland Security’s spokesperson and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem herself. Vice President J.D. Vance performed a hammy scolding of the media for daring to question the officer’s actions during Thursday’s White House press briefing. The response was quick and well over-the-top. It was high-stakes crisis communications to protect Miller’s dream for America.

2. Donald Trump

We really shouldn’t buy Greenland, either.

Feeling his imperialist oats after having kidnapped a head of state so that he could take the country’s natural resources, Trump has once again turned his attention to Greenland, a large ice sheet controlled by the Kingdom of Denmark that Trump wants to annex because it looks really big on a distorted map. Trump reiterated early in the week that “we need Greenland” and his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, observed that “utilizing the U.S. military is always an option” that Trump could use to........

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