Fuck ICE. Save Grandma.

I had another fever dream last night that made me realize how stupid we are. Look, I’m going to lay this out for the uninformed one more time, but let’s be real: MAGA is currently doing a backflip into a dumpster fire.While you were trying to figure out if your neighbor’s TikTok dance was a deepfake, the global fraud industry officially hit its “industrial revolution” phase. Between 2024 and early 2026, internet crime stopped being a hobby for bored hackers and became a $16.6 billion-a-year empire. According to the FBI’s latest IC3 data, losses jumped 33% in a single year. We’re talking about $6.5 billion lost just to investment fraud and another $5 billion siphoned directly out of the pockets of people over 60.But here’s where the “snark” meets the “sad reality.”While American seniors are losing their life savings to “Pig Butchering” compounds in Southeast Asia—fortified “fraud factories” that generate nearly 40% of the combined GDP of countries like Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos—our government has decided the real priority is a different kind of border.The Great Budgetary Bait-and-SwitchIn 2025, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA). It’s a masterclass in misplaced aggression. They earmarked $170 billion for immigration and border enforcement. To give you some perspective, that’s more than the annual budget for every single local and state law enforcement agency in the U.S. combined.* ICE & CBP: Received a combined $140 billion through the OBBBA. ICE’s annual budget is now roughly $27.7 billion, which is triple what it was just two years ago.* The FBI: Meanwhile, the people actually tasked with chasing the $16.6 billion cyber-syndicates are facing a $545 million budget cut and the elimination of 1,500 positions.So, while we’re spending $45 billion to build new detention centers to hold people who are just trying to pick your produce, we’re effectively defunding the “Digital Border Patrol” that’s supposed to stop your retirement account from being liquidated by a bot in Myanmar.The Taxpayer IronyAnd let’s talk about those “hard-working immigrants” for a second. While they’re the primary target of this record-breaking $170 billion enforcement machine, they’re also the ones subsidizing the very system that’s hunting them.* In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in federal, state, and local taxes.* That includes $25.7 billion into Social Security—a program they literally aren’t allowed to use.Essentially, the government is using tax money from people who can’t access benefits to fund a massive deportation machine, all while leaving the “front door” wide open for AI-powered scammers to rob American citizens. It’s a bold strategy to prioritize hunting down a guy at a construction site over the “Smishing Triads” who used a $500 kit to scam millions of Americans via E-ZPass texts.The AI CatalystThe scammers aren’t exactly waiting for us to catch up. They’ve weaponized AI to make their operations 4.5 times more profitable than traditional scams. We’ve seen a 1,210% surge in AI-enabled fraud in just the last year. These “Pig Butchering” operations aren’t just scams; they’re human trafficking nightmares. Over 300,000 people are currently held in these compounds, forced to work 16-hour days sending you “wrong number” texts that lead to you losing your house.The bottom line? We are spending record-breaking billions to target a tax-paying workforce while the actual “threat to the American way of life”—the systematic siphoning of billions of dollars to transnational criminal syndicates—is being met with budget cuts and 1,500 fewer FBI agents. But hey, at least we’ll have a really expensive fence to look at while our bank accounts read zero.Would you like me to pull the state-by-state tax contribution data for Texas or Florida to show you exactly how much those “targets” are paying into the states currently getting hit hardest by fraud? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit misongrey.substack.com