Ghiblifying the Fent Trafficker Deportation

Plus: New York state cut off from federal funding, Phil Magness on tariffs for JAQ, and more...

Studio Ghibli memes beaten to death: Bear with me as I attempt to explain something extremely online that nevertheless carries some political significance.

You may be familiar with Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio helmed by Hayao Miyazaki, behind classics such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. Open AI, the creators of ChatGPT, recently released another higher-quality image generator that people have realized allows images to be rendered in the Studio Ghibli house style. Note that this is contra Miyazaki's own wishes ("I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself," the 84-year-old said of overly incorporating technology into art) and possibly a copyright violation, but that's sort of the least of our worries here. The main controversy now is that people have been putting all kinds of famous images into the meme generator—George W. Bush being told about 9/11, Tony Montana in Scarface, etc.—and that the White House has, uh, decided to throw some images of their recent deportations in there too.

So here's a Studio Ghibli version of the deportation of Dominican woman Virginia Basora-Gonzalez, a 36-year-old fentanyl trafficker who illegally reentered the country and was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers on March 12:

https://t.co/PVdINmsHXs pic.twitter.com/Bw5YUCI2xL

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 27, 2025

Lots of art is political, and lots of political messaging is tasteless, but this type of move by the White House is worth opposing on two fronts.

The first, less serious front: This is horrible art. It's lazy and just jumping on a sort of boring and already played-out meme format. It's cruel, and there's no discernible deeper meaning. She's fat and crying and engaged in the illegal drug trade—of a very serious drug that has claimed many victims—and thus easy to make fun of on all counts.

The second, more serious front: We're in the midst of a large-scale deportation effort by the federal government. If they want enduring public support for such a thing, they need to wholly change their demeanor as well as their practices. Deportation is not funny and light; it's using the power of the state to forcibly evict people from their homes, schools, workplaces, and communities. In some cases—like with Basora-Gonzalez or actual violent Tren de Aragua gang members—it is warranted, and the public supports it. In other cases, though it may be legally permissible, the wider public feels conflicted or opposes it: Think of those ICE raids at Mississippi chicken processing plants during Trump's first term and the havoc it wreaked on the industry and those communities—all for what? And regardless of the morality/public sentiment side, the way this is happening is contra what Vice President J.D. Vance explicitly said would happen: "I think that if you deport a lot of violent criminals and frankly if you make it harder to hire illegal labor, which undercuts the wages of American workers, I think you go a lot of the way to solving the illegal immigration problem," he told an ABC News anchor last August. He said the administration would start with deporting 1 million, and prioritize those who are violent criminals.

Tell that to 24-year-old barber Francisco Javier García Casique or to 34-year-old Rasha Alawieh, a physician and Brown University professor from Lebanon on an H-1B visa, or to 30-year-old Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk. Whether it's Salvadorans with tattoos getting swept up and assumed to be gang members or Middle Easterners being punished for their speech, the administration isn't just targeting violent criminals. Maybe you think that's fine or that this type of culling is welcome, but what is actually being done is very different than what the vice president claimed. And getting migration under control could have been kind of a layup for this administration: Toward the end of President Joe Biden's term, Pew Research Center found that about 80 percent of Americans (including a shocking 73 percent of Democrats!) believed the U.S. government was doing a poor job handling the migrant influx. It's possible that simply following Vance's stated plan would have resulted in decent public approval, unlike the inhumane, haphazard, unfocused scheme that has actually played out.

Deportation is not Ghibli. Treating it as such is taking the easy way out. It is harder to carefully sift through evidence to determine who is actually a true threat. But it's important to be scrupulous and thorough because we're talking about the state upending people's lives—throwing them in holding facilities and, in some cases, sending them back to countries where they face punishment or danger, if they have a country to return to at all.

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Scenes from New York: New York state's budget assumes it will be receiving some $90ish billion from the federal government. It's increasingly looking like this won't happen, sending Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers scrambling.

"In the fiscal year ending this month, New York received an estimated $96 billion from the federal government, with roughly $57 billion going to the state's Medicaid program," reports The New York Times. "About $10 billion went to schools, about $4 billion to law enforcement and public safety and $2.5 billion to transportation programs."

My question, as a New York state taxpayer: How was the $54 billion in income taxes not enough? And the roughly $21 billion in sales tax? And the nearly $26 billion in business tax?

New York is the highest-taxing state and is the second-highest in spending (beat only by Alaska). "New York State and its localities spent 50 percent more per capita than the national average," reports the Citizens Budget Commission (using 2021 data). "Higher than California (7 percent), Massachusetts (24 percent), New Jersey (55 percent), Texas (71 percent), Connecticut (77 percent), and Florida (101 percent)." The state collected, on average, $10,331 in taxes per resident—about $4,000 more than the national average. Where is all this money going, exactly? Cry me a river, Kathy Hochul!

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QUICK HITS

• As promised yesterday, a thorough treatment of Trump's tariffs by us over at Just Asking Questions featuring special guest Phil Magness:

• "Is it safe to travel with your phone right now?" asks Gaby Del Valle at The Verge. "Recent high-profile deportations began with phone searches at airports. What are your rights? The answer: it depends."
• "When President [Donald] Trump convened CEOs of some of the country's top automakers for a call earlier this month, he issued a warning: They better not raise car prices because of tariffs," reports The Wall Street Journal. "Trump told the executives that the White House would look unfavorably on such a move, leaving some of them rattled and worried they would face punishment if they increased prices, people with knowledge of the call said." (It seems like we were getting price controls whether it was Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. Dark.)
• Luigi Mangione thirst has reached new heights. And the headline means I can't get Nirvana out of my head.
• "Top Democrats tell us their party is in its deepest hole in nearly 50 years—and they fear things could actually get worse," reports Axios. "The party has its lowest favorability ever; No popular national leader to help improve it; Insufficient numbers to stop most legislation in Congress; A durable minority on the Supreme Court; Dwindling influence over the media ecosystem, with right-leaning podcasters and social media accounts ascendant; Young voters are growing dramatically more conservative; A bad 2026 map for Senate races; Democratic Senate retirements could make it harder for the party to flip the House, with members tempted by statewide races." Since it's Lent, I'm gonna suppress this feeling of schadenfreude. (Also, it's not like the alternative—a muscular perma-GOP in power—is better, really.)