INCENTIVES WORK: DHS Touts Half-Century Low in Migrant Crossings

The Border Patrol recorded 237,538 encounters with migrants at the border with Mexico in the 2025 fiscal year, which began in October 2024 and ended in September 2025.

That was down from more than 1.5 million encounters in fiscal 2024, more than 2 million in fiscal 2023 and a record of more than 2.2 million in fiscal 2022.

The 2025 total was the lowest in any fiscal year since 1970, according to data covering the past half century from the Border Patrol.

Since February 2025, the first full month of Trump’s current term, the Border Patrol has recorded fewer than 10,000 encounters a month at the southwestern border, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Those are the lowest totals in more than 25 years of available monthly data. Recent totals have been even lower than the 16,182 encounters in April 2020, when international migration fell sharply in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

Impressive.

THAT SEEMS UNWISE: With Talks Set to Begin, Iran Is Acting as if It WANTS War with the U.S.

THE SCIENCE IS NEVER SETTLED: Is Jupiter on a diet? New measurements say it’s smaller than we thought.

JUSTICE: Would-Be Trump Assassin Sentenced to Life in Prison.

WELL, LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: ICE lodges detainer for illegal immigrant charged with rape of 14-year-old autistic girl in California. “According to DHS, Vasquez is accused of coercing the victim into his home on New Year’s Eve and sexually assaulting her. The Cathedral City Police Department arrested Vasquez after investigating the reported attack, DHS said. The victim’s name has not been released.”

BREAKING: SCOTUS Allows California’s Gerrymandered Map.

Ball’s in your court, state-level GOPs.

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Over 180 Vehicular Attacks on ICE, DHS Since Trump Took Office.

PLEASE LET THIS HAPPEN: Could Billie Eilish’s ‘Stolen Land’ Debacle End Land Acknowledgements?

Previously: An L.A. Eviction Lawyer Has a Message for Billie Eilish, and I Can’t Stop Laughing.

If anything could end these stupid, pointless land acknowledgments, a high-profile eviction case might do the trick.

COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE LEFTISM: Top Democrat Gives Anti-ICE Agitators Green Light to Shoot ICE Agents.

YES: When Even Lefties Discover the Utility and Practicality of Guns, We All Win. “It’s not that liberals have collectively decided that firearms are suddenly fun accessories — it’s that a real event, with real consequences, pierced the comfortable abstraction of ideology. The resulting responses reveal the underlying social psychology of belief revision: when reality bumps up hard against narrative, people recalibrate their mental models of the world.”

Well, they’re supposed to, at least.

WINNING! Newsom Win: High-Speed Rail Sort-Of Almost Nearly Ready to Connect Madera to… More Cows.

NOT GOOD: The U.S. Is Not Built for War or Peace: America’s Industrial Resilience Gap.

A minor power outage in San Francisco offered a quiet preview of a strategic vulnerability hiding in plain sight. As traffic signals went dark, dozens of autonomous Waymo vehicles stalled, unable to read the roadway. With hazard lights blinking, they gridlocked intersections and slowed large parts of the city to a crawl until tow trucks arrived.

That episode is a stark warning for military logistics. The same cascading failure that paralyzed civilian mobility could halt the movement of forces from fort to port. Friction emerges not from a single event, but from interdependent systems degrading in unison. Yet, American policymakers assume the industrial base is resilient, when it is actually brittle, optimized for just-in-time supply chains and just-enough capacity. When shocks hit (e.g., pandemics, wars, political instability, cyber incidents, or weaponized supply chains), Washington responds with emergency authorities and surge funding, confusing endurance with readiness. A system that merely limps through disruption is optimized for continuity, not crisis.

Over the past decade, resilience has meant restoring services after a shock. While this approach may prevent catastrophe, it does not prepare a country to compete, deter, or fight. The U.S. economy has been engineered for peacetime efficiency and consumption, not sustained production under pressure.

Redundancy might look like an inefficiency, but only until you really need it.

SARAH ANDERSON: The Real Reasons Why Latin America Is Moving to the Right. “I’ve seen a lot of you saying this was the work of Donald Trump, but the fact is that this was happening before he was even re-elected. I can’t discount the role he’s played — endorsing and supporting candidates, for example, and, you know, removing a whole dictator from a country overnight with more to come — but, much like our own 2024 elections, the reasons why this big shift is happening are largely domestic.”

Full story at the link.

CHANGE: Utah formally expands its Supreme Court by two justices.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has signed legislation expanding the state’s Supreme Court from five justices to seven.

The bill passed the Legislature with more than a two-thirds majority, allowing it to take effect immediately and bypass the usual waiting period for appointing new justices. Cox signed the bill on Saturday.

The Republican governor will now nominate the two new justices, who must be confirmed by the state Senate. Once those seats are filled, Cox will have appointed five of the court’s seven sitting justices.

Republicans largely supported the expansion, arguing it will improve the court’s efficiency. Democrats united in opposition to the measure, suggesting the move was designed to give Republicans a political advantage in upcoming cases.

It’s only unfair court-packing when Republicans do it.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: DOJ Aims to Revoke Citizenship From Two Predators.

HOW TO SUCCEED IN DEMOCRACY WITHOUT ACTUALLY WINNING: Election Fraud 101. “It has come to my attention that, even though election fraud has been in the news regularly both at the end of 2020/beginning of 2021 and for the last six months, many people seem unaware of the methods by which election fraud is being perpetrated. So, here, are some basics for those who new to the subject.”

19 different varieties.

JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED: An L.A. Eviction Lawyer Has a Message for Billie Eilish and I Can’t Stop Laughing.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Mayor Mamdani is failing at his core job: keeping NYC functioning.

The snow and frigid temps have tested Gotham’s socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani and, alas, he has not risen to the occasion. Rather, he’s left the city a mess.

Everest-size mountains of garbage have popped up. Unremoved snow, ice and road salt have damaged Con Edison electrical equipment, contributing to power outages.

Most horrifically, 16 people have died on the street — 13 from hypothermia.

Chalk that up to a perverse ideology on the homeless or simple mismanagement, but either way, it represents tragic, unforgivable failure.

There’s more: Mamdani’s Upper East Side neighbors were beyond livid that his Gracie Mansion home was somehow trash-free while snowy, 8-foot garbage heaps went untouched on their streets.

It’s good to be the nomenklatura, as any good socialist could tell you.

Anyway, this is a New York Post editorial, so at least the rest of the country has four-to-eight years of great NYP headlines and front pages to look forward to.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: There’s Gotta Be a Lot of Beard Sweat in the Iranian Regime Right Now. “For the last several years that I was in Los Angeles, I lived in a neighborhood that had a lot of Persian Jews who fled Ayatollah Khomeini in the ’70s. I heard a lot of stories about what a magnificent country Iran was before the dark cloud of Islamic rule permanently descended up on it. The young people of Iran who are rising up don’t have any direct memories of the glory days, but they’re probably carrying around stories in their hearts about them. An imagined ideal can be a powerful motivator for the downtrodden.”

WISHCASTING: What Makes CNN Think the Right Is Pushing for Gun Control As Lefties Show Increased Interest in Gun Rights?

CHAT GPT’S 11-FIGURE PROBLEM: Buddy, Can You Spare $50 Billion?

AND HE’S JUST GETTING STARTED:

Mamdani is also telling the Queens DA not to prosecute the knife-wielding criminal.

Good job, New York. https://t.co/dkCNLi3HXS

— Amy Curtis (@RantyAmyCurtis) February 4, 2026

It doesn’t take much to embolden criminals or demoralize police, and we know how it ends.

CHANGE? Disney names parks boss Josh D’Amaro as new CEO to replace Bob Iger.

Josh D’Amaro, who chairs Disney’s hugely successful parks division, will succeed Bob Iger as The Walt Disney Company’s next chief executive next month.

Disney TV and streaming boss Dana Walden, who was thought to be the other leading contender for the CEO role, will become the company’s president and chief creative officer.

Disney announced the succession plan Tuesday morning, ending years of speculation about who would take the place of Iger, 74, atop one of the world’s biggest entertainment companies.

Disney Land under D’Amaro:

🇱🇷 Disneyland employs a bearded man in women's clothing, calling himself a 'fairy godmother', to help little girls choose an overpriced dress. Stop supporting EVIL…Boycott…. pic.twitter.com/PbnwKaumVj

— Frantruth 🇬🇧 (@frantruth) May 30, 2023

LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: Plastic Surgeons Become the First Major Medical Society to Renounce Gender Surgeries for Minors.

Update: Similar news from the AMA.

The American Medical Association agrees with the ASPS about surgeries.

If the AMA was wrong about surgeries, could it also have been wrong about hormones? pic.twitter.com/r79xtvP1r0

— Leor Sapir (@LeorSapir) February 4, 2026

And, yes, it’s more than fair to ask about the hormone treatments.

MACBETH WAS THE PLAY THAT GOT ME INTO SHAKESPEARE, COURTESY OF A TEACHER WHO INSISTED WE READ IT: Teens should read great (but hard) books: ‘Macbeth’ is better than ‘Hunger Games.’ “English teachers don’t assign many books these days, only 2.7 per year, according to a New York Times survey, she writes. When students are asked to read more than a brief excerpt, ‘the most common high school books tend to be short, relatively modern works like The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, and Night, as well as a smattering of Shakespeare.'”