John Oliver returned to late night on Sunday with one hell of a Thomas Jefferson-style “so what’d I miss?”
Last Week Tonight premiered Season 13 on Sunday night after a three-month hiatus, with Oliver acknowledging that quite a bit has happened.
“We’ve been off for the last three months, and we have missed a lot. And I mean a lot, a lot,” Oliver said before quickly recapping the news, from the latest release of Epstein files to Donald Trump threatening to take over Greenland / Iceland, Zohran Mamdani being elected New York mayor to Norwegian athlete Sturla Holm Lægreid confessing to cheating at the Winter Olympics.
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Then, in one of his signature, 30-minute deep dives, Oliver ripped into U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), examining their colossal budgets and $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ media blast that Oliver called a “disturbing pattern of what sure seems like white nationalist dog whistles.” The host noted that Last Week Tonight did reach out to the department on this.
“We reached out to DHS for comment and they angrily denied any dog whistles, adding ‘We will not apologise for using patriotic messaging and symbolism in our advertisements,'” he said. “They also told us, and I quote, ‘One could say, we are Homelandmaxxing by removing illegal aliens and defending our borders’ is a sentence I genuinely feel dumber for saying out loud.”
Oliver also spent time unpacking Donald Trump’s DHS secretary, social media promo opportunist, and insistent cosplayer Kristi Noem, who has faced fierce criticism from Republicans and Democrats after the fatal shootings of civilians Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
“Noem’s been put in charge of DHS at the moment when it’s experiencing an unprecedented funding surge,” Oliver explained. “Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill last summer essentially doubled DHS’ funding over the next four years, and it’s worth looking at where all of that money is and, equally importantly, isn’t going. Because DHS’ resources are now being pointed at immigration more heavily than ever before, to the point that has been called a ‘veritable Department of Deportation.’ ICE alone was handed an extra $75 billion to spend over Trump’s term, tripling its annual budget.”
Oliver concluded the segment with a strong statement about the future.
“We need to get rid of ICE, period. Public trust in it right now is hovering somewhere between the Purdue Pharma and the Titan submersible. It is just not salvageable,” he said.
“And if you’re thinking, well, who will force immigration law if ICE is gone? I don’t know, maybe the agencies that did it for decades before 2003? As for DHS as a whole, I would argue it’s no longer tenable in its current form. And while maybe there is an argument for having a larger agency coordinating different federal departments, it should probably be redesigned from the ground up — and deliberately, this time, not by suddenly gluing together org charts in a blind panic.”
“Even if you get rid of Kristi Noem, which you should, Stephen Miller will still be there,” Oliver continued. “And even if you get rid of him, this administration will remain. But even if they are gone and we get rid of ICE and DHS, we’re still going to be left with the broken immigration laws that gave them permission to do what they have done. Millions of people will continue to be vulnerable, because, as we’ve discussed repeatedly before on this show, our current immigration system makes it somewhere from difficult to impossible for many to come in ‘the right way.'”
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