In an identically titled article, I noted that the federal workforce in the Philadelphia metropolitan area had significantly through now-former employees voluntarily leaving on their own. At least some of them wouldn’t have left if Kamala Harris Emhoff had won the election, but it is nevertheless great news:
Since January 2025, the federal government has cut -12% of its headcount, or -345,000 jobs.
Federal jobs now account for 1.68% of total employment, the lowest percentage since at least the 1930s.
Meanwhile, the federal job openings rate fell -0.5 percentage points in March, to 2.7%, the 2nd-lowest since the 2020 pandemic low.
And guess what? The great news is continuing!
Record number of immigration cases now ending in voluntary departure, report says
The number of migrants receiving “voluntary departure” decisions is way up.
By Laura Romero | Tuesday, May 12, 2026 | 7:40 PM
Immigrants are giving up their claims in immigration court and opting to voluntarily leave the U.S. in exponentially higher numbers under the current Trump administration’s immigration crackdown than at any time previously, according to a new report based on federal data.
The report by the Vera Institute of Justice shows that the number of people in removal proceedings receiving “voluntary departure” decisions has risen dramatically — particularly among those held in federal detention.
That, of course, is the whole point of immigration detention: make the illegals realize that they aren’t going to simply be released, so they just give up and go home. By voluntarily leaving, they don’t have a deportation on their records, so they could apply for legal immigration in the future.
“This is widespread across the United States,” said Jacquelyn Pavilon, one of the authors of the report. “In three-quarters of U.S. states and territories, the number of voluntary departure decisions increased more than fivefold since the end of Biden’s term.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not tired of winning yet.
Voluntary departures in immigration court — in which a formal request to depart the country is approved by a judge, assuming the requester is legally permitted to leave — is different from self-deportations arranged through the Department of Homeland Security, in which migrants inform DHS they’re leaving the country in order to avoid potential detention or removal.
The report’s co-author told ABC News that while the number of voluntary departures is rising, it does not necessarily mean people want to leave the U.S.
No, of course, they don’t really want to leave, but we American citizens want them to leave, and 77,302,580 of us voted for them to leave.
“Many of those people may have legal avenues to remain in the United States,” Pavilon said. “Voluntary departure decisions do not mean that you do not have legal rights to remain. People are under harsh conditions and making very difficult decisions.”
According to the report, voluntary departures surged from roughly 800 per month at the end of the Biden administration to more than 8,800 by February 2026.
By those numbers, Donald Trump is an eleven times better President than Joe Biden, but that’s an admittedly low bar to surpass.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of Homeland Security under President Biden, finally admitted that that Administration should have ramped up border controls sooner:
In an interview at the POLITICO Security Summit, former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who became a lightning rod of Republican criticism for the Biden administration’s alleged mishandling of a historic wave of migration to the United States, placed most of the blame on a “broken immigration system” that set a “low bar” for admission to the country for those with “credible fear of persecution.”
Asked if earlier steps from the Biden administration on border security — including raising the bar for migrants claiming “credible fear” of returning to their home country — would have prevented President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Mayorkas replied: “I am not in a position to speculate, but I will tell you that I would be far more better rested and less punched.”
Mayorkas, who was impeached by the House in 2024 on claims that he intentionally did not enforce U.S. immigration laws, also emphasized that the Biden administration did, eventually, act to address the migrant influx at the border.
“I was very pleased that in June of 2024, we took executive action that, I thought, made reforms that were sensible and that proved successful,” Mayorkas said. “Our tougher border stance in June of ‘24 was coupled with an increased focus on providing lawful pathways for people to arrive at the United States outside the hands of smugglers — more secure and more humanitarian. Those two combined — our numbers dropped 70, 75 percent.”
The rare comments from Mayorkas, who has only spoken publicly a handful of times since leaving DHS in January 2025, speak to the tensions that existed within the Biden administration about what balance to strike between enforcing U.S. immigration laws amid a major influx of migrants to U.S. ports of entry after the Covid-19 pandemic and adopting a humane posture toward people fleeing genuine hardship and plights around the world.
77,302,580 of us said that we were not at all interested in a “humane posture” toward the wave of immigrants. What we want is for them to improve their lives in their home countries. Our immigration policies should be based on admitting people who will benefit the United States, not just feel sorry for them. Far, far, far too many of the illegal immigrants have been a huge burden on our government and our communities, and a major factor in street crime as well.
Had Secretary Mayorkas and President Biden and “border tsarina” Kamala Harris Emhoff done their f(ornicating) jobs and enforced our immigration laws, an enforcement system that was working and which they inherited from President Trump’s first term, we wouldn’t have had the huge problem Mr Trump inherited in his second term, and be having to be as aggressive to solve the problem. If the Biden Administration had done its job, there wouldn’t be two stupid Minnesotans who are now stone-cold graveyard dead for interference with law enforcement, all because leftist thinking didn’t have their brains working Pretti Good.