John Oliver returned late Sunday night with one hell of a Thomas Jefferson-style “so what was I missing?”
Last week Tonight premiered Season 13 on Sunday night after a three-month hiatus, with Oliver admitting that little had happened.
“We’ve been gone for the past three months, and we’ve missed a lot. And I mean a lot, a lot,” said Oliver before quickly repeating the news, from the recent release of the Epstein files to Donald Trump threatening to take over Greenland / Iceland, Zohran Mamdani being elected mayor of New York to the Norwegian athlete Sturla Holm Lægreid accepting the Winter Olympics.
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Then, in one of his signature, 30-minute deep dives, Oliver took on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), examining their massive budgets and the media’s $100 million “wartime recruitment” blast that Oliver called a “disturbing pattern of what appears to be a white dog whistle.” The host noted that Last week Tonight He reached out to the department about this.
“We contacted DHS for comment and they angrily refused any dog whistles, adding ‘We will not apologize for using patriotic messages and symbols in our ads,'” he said. “They also told us, and I quote, ‘One could say, we are Homelandmaxxing by removing illegal aliens and securing our borders’ a sentence that I don’t feel comfortable saying out loud.”
Oliver also spent time dissing Donald Trump’s DHS secretary, social media opportunist, and avid cosplayer Kristi Noem, who faced intense criticism from Republicans and Democrats after the fatal shootings of citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis.
“Noem was put in charge of DHS at a time when it’s receiving unprecedented funding,” Oliver explained. “Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill last summer basically doubled DHS funding for the next four years, and it’s worth looking at where all that money is and, equally, not going. Because DHS resources are now being directed at immigration more than ever before, to the point where it’s been called the ‘Real Department of Deportation.’ ICE alone was given an additional $75 billion to spend under Trump, doubling its annual budget. “
Oliver ends the segment with a strong statement about the future.
“We need to get rid of ICE, period. Public trust in it right now hovers somewhere between Purdue Pharma and the Titan submersible. It’s unsalvageable,” he said.
“And if you think, well, who’s going to enforce immigration law when ICE is gone? I don’t know, maybe the agencies that did it decades before 2003? As for DHS as a whole, I would argue that it’s no longer viable in its current form. And while it is possible there is an argument for having a large agency that coordinates different organizational departments, it should be reorganized from the ground up – and deliberately, this time, not by suddenly putting together org charts.”
“Even if you take Kristi Noem out, you should, Stephen Miller is going to be there,” Oliver continued. “And even if you get rid of him, this administration will stay. But even if they’re 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 did. Millions of people are going to continue to be vulnerable, because, as we’ve discussed many times before on this show, our current immigration system makes it difficult for many to leave one place.”
