ALWAYS BE CLOSING

The Trump team just deported an aging Nazi:

At the order of President Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents removed 95-year-old Jakiw Palij from his Queens, New York, home on Monday.

Justice Department officials say Palij served as an armed guard at a death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland....

Palij was ordered to leave the country more than a decade ago, but deportation never happened during the Bush and Obama years:

First tracked down by investigators in 1993, Mr. Palij was stripped of his American citizenship 10 years later when a federal judge found that he had falsely claimed in his visa application that he had worked on his father’s farm in Poland and at a German factory during the period when he was actually serving the Nazis.

In 2004, a federal immigration judge ordered that Mr. Palij be deported. But for years, no country would accept him.

Germany had long refused to do so because Mr. Palij, whose birthplace was once in Poland and is now part of Ukraine, is not actually German. Poland and Ukraine refused to take him, saying he was Germany’s responsibility. On Tuesday, the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, acknowledged as much.

On Twitter, Sarah Sanders is gloating ("Past Administrations failed to deport him"). For once, I guess the gloating is valid. The administration got this done -- though I'm reminded of the Jack Johnson pardon, which was also an administration effort to conspicuously acknowledge past racism even as Trumpers fuel racism in the present day.

But the hottest take on this story goes to the right-wing news source IJR Red:

... Palij has been living in Jackson Heights, Queens for 13 years.

... Queens so happens to be the district that Democratic Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won.

Let's see: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is 28 years old. She was 14 years old in June 2004, when Palij was ordered to leave the country. Ocasio-Cortez currently holds no elected office. She's worked as a waitress, an education strategist, and the founder of a small publishing firm.

In none of these capacities did she have any responsibility for getting Nazis deported.

But if a large portion of your party's platform going into the midterms is "Eeeek! Eeeek! Hispanic socialist chick!," then you gotta go with it no matter what the news story is.

Oh yeah, I guess this is relevant, if barely:

... Ocasio-Cortez's platform includes abolishing ICE to “clear the path to citizenship, and protect the rights of families to remain together.”

... However, ICE agents were the one's helping in the deportation of the former Nazi.

“I think people don't realize how important and valuable ICE is,” Acting ICE Director Ronald Vitiello told Fox News on Monday.

He added that 20,000 Americans working for ICE risk their lives to protect the U.S.

Palij is a 95-year-old man who was removed from his home on a stretcher and has now been taken by ambulance to a Düsseldorf nursing home. I don't think any ICE agents "risked their lives" when they carried out this operation, and I'm sure it could have been carried out by employees of a different and better agency that behaves in a decent, humane manner toward people who aren't Nazis.