John Oliver Unleashes ‘Absolute Outrage’ at Trump’s Deportations

It’s Been a Busy Week

It was a short preamble tonight, as John Oliver rushed through the week’s events, pausing only to marvel at the Canadian election results, where Donald Trump’s threats and bullying saw the underdog liberals wage an historic comeback, largely on the back of their solemn campaign pledge to tell Donald Trump where to shove it. Oliver also couldn’t resist playing that one clip of a nice Canadian lady apologizing on her way out of the polls before calling Trump an “assh*le,” because that’s just good TV.

Our Main Story Tonight

The thing Oliver couldn’t wait to get to Sunday was immigration. Specifically, the Trump administration’s attempts to follow through on Trump’s campaign promise that he would keep his white followers safe from the existential threat of scary brown people. Okay, that’s not how Trump phrased his xenophobic policy goals precisely, and yet… yes, yes it was. As Oliver noted in his own pitch that this administration is waging an “arbitrary, racist, and cruel” campaign of terror against non-white immigrants, “This is the inevitable result of a campaign of fear-mongering about immigrant crime.”

Speaking of viral clips, Oliver summed up just how farcical has become by playing Trump’s recent interview with ABC’s Terry Moran, where the president repeatedly pressured the interviewer to concede that the hand tattoos of wrongfully kidnapped Kilmar Abgrego Garcia clearly spelled out his involvement with infamous gang MS-13. The thing is, the awkward kerning of “MS-13” on Garcia’s hand were due to the letters being superimposed there as supposed proof of the Maryland father’s nonexistent gang involvement by someone in the administration for emphasis—and do not appear on the actual Garcia’s hand. No matter to Trump, as he, in what Oliver termed “the most drunk IHOP conversation I’ve ever heard,” just wouldn’t succumb to the evidence that his clumsy deportation scheme had sent the wrong man to a foreign prison.

Oliver went on to name other wrongfully abducted people like Andre Hernandez Romero, a hairdresser who sought asylum in the U.S. because of anti-gay persecution now sitting in the infamous El Salvadoran prison and “hell on earth” CECOT becase of his tattoos and social media posts. (Scanning said posts of the glamorous Romero, Oliver could only conclude that the overwhelming evidence Trump officials found there constituted “a genuine threat to unaccented cheekbones.”) Then there’s fellow asylum seeker Jerce Reyes Barrios, sent to the same foreign prison on the basis of what turns out to be a tattoo celebrating his favorite soccer team Real Madrid, and a decade-old photo of him making the thumb-and-pinkie hand gesture known to hard rock fans the world over.

All this would be laughable if not for the fact that Trump’s ICE goon squads are seeking to meet top-down racial quotas which see armed agents swooping in to smash car windows of the wrong person as they wait for their lawyer to arrive (helpfully caught on camera), and engaging in what Oliver termed a “SEAL Team Six” raid on a nice middle-aged couple whose only crime was living at the old address of someone hanging up anti-ICE fliers. As Oliver summed it up, Trump’s promise to protect people from the “existential threat” of the exaggerated “migrant crime wave” he himself used as a campaign boogeyman has seen him and those in his administration wrongfully invoke obscure legal statutes to justify detaining innocent people without due process. And subsequently hijacking them to foreign prisons like CECOT, where one Salvadoran official proudly proclaimed prisoners’ “only way to leave is in a coffin.” That’s a terrible advertisement for even a coffin emporium, said Oliver, let alone an extrajudicial hellhole.

Oliver, as ever, offered up some solutions, as daunting as this authoritarian and racist campaign appears. Noting that even Republican politicians in deep red districts have been getting vocal pushback from constituents in town halls (91-year-old Chuck Grassley got an earful from Iowa farmers pissed that Trump is defying a Supreme Court order to return Kilmar Abgrego Garcia), Oliver urged viewers to do the same should their representatives bother to appear in public. He also reminded people of the effectiveness of public pressure over the phones (should your GOP reps, as has been the increasing policy, chicken out from facing their constituents in person). He also suggested donating to your local immigrant legal aid organizations, since denying people due process is central to the whole fascism thing.

As Oliver concluded by quoting former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist in saying that even judges can be swayed by “great tides of public opinion,” Americans at all concerned with the Bill of Rights and this not becoming the white supremacist dictatorship of Donald Trump’s dreams need to constitute “a f”cking tsunami” of “absolute outrage.”

And Now This…

Look, things are bad. But as John Oliver posited in the back half of his show tonight, there’s always room, even on the darkest night, to praise the dawn of a truly stupid American tradition. One such tradition being the proliferation of “official days,” dubiously declared holidays where a particular thing is solemnly honored. At least for long enough to take up some valuable local news airtime.

Now, sometimes the thing in question is a concept, like National Wiggle Your Toes Day (August 6), or a universal injustice, like August 24th’s National Pluto Demoted Day. But a whole lot of these days were apparently dreamt up by people who just like yummy things in their tummy, as the calendar is dotted with days celebrating everything from glazed spiral ham (April 15), porridge (October 10), or even the lowly cheese doodle (March 5).

Which brings us to National Shrimp Scampi Day, which we all presumably missed on April 29. Not so your local news, however, as Last Week Tonight showed clips of intrepid talking heads extolling the virtues of the garlicky fish dish because what else are local news anchors supposed to talk about. Zoning? Snoresville. Instead, we got lots of shrimp puns about not skimping on the shrimp and so forth, even if one anchor called out his writers on air for making him make a “prawn stars” joke. Sadly, it’s not all delicious crustaceans in white wine, as one news team had to backpedal into another daily remembrance, in that case the onset of the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police officers caught on camera beating an unarmed Black man. That’s why they pay local news teams the big bucks, people.

Moving On

Sometimes you get the sense that John Oliver pulls one of his HBO/Max-funded stunts just to keep from going nuts. After a fun, relaxing, and restorative story about he length to which scrappy minor league baseball teams will go to increase merch sales and attendance (like, for example, changing your team name to the delightfully merchandisable Rocket City Trash Pandas), Oliver made his pitch for Last Week Tonght to sponsor its own minor league affiliate.

Asserting that he is 100 percent sincere (and possessed of enough of HBO’s cash to seal the deal), Oliver stated that any team willing to put its fate in his and his team’s hands—without question, notes, or input—would reap the benefits. Those being: a Last Week Tonight-determined team name, mascot, and theme nights, all dreamt up by Oliver and company’s “resources and stupidity.”

Does this seem like a lot of authority to yield to a British comedian who, in the past, has come up with figures like tobacco company mascot the diseased lung, suspiciously John Oliver-like anime mascot Chijon, and Mr. Nutterbutter? Sure. But, as Oliver notes, minor league teams are in constant need of reinvention and innovation to pay their bills, leading to such gimmicks as Ohio’s Lake County Captains installing a row of promotional toilet bleacher seats (non-functional), the Charleston River Dogs dedicating an entire game to winning over a single two-star internet reviewer on the aptly named Helen McGucken Night, or even the Chesapeake Oyster Catchers leaning into one of the most unfortunate logo redesigns in recent memory. (If you’ve seen the image of a pearl-laden oyster clutched in a baseball mitt and not figured out what all the hoopla was about, the fact that the team went ahead and dedicated proceeds to a local cervical cancer charity should get you there.)

So come on, minor league fans—if there’s one thing John Oliver knows how to do better than anyone it’s throw his entire late-night comedy machine behind something completely pointless and indirectly helpful. As Oliver put it, sometimes you just have to “shut the f*ck up and let things be fun.” Now play ball!

Cardus Endus

Of course, John Oliver is torn between his two countries when it comes to sports at least, so tonight’s title card went to Liverpool F.C.’s Mo Salah, who led Oliver’s beloved football club to the Premiere League title this week. Thanks to Ted Lasso, even some of us football-ignorant Americans know that’s a big deal, and thanks to Oliver’s stint on Community, we all know that dressing up in Liverpool’s red and white will grant us entrance into the pizza party at Jeff Winger’s apartment.

Last Lines Tonight

“We’re gonna dive straight in with our main story tonight, which concerns immigrants. Once again named group of the year by Right Wing Scapegoat Magazine.”

“I know you’ve got other questions to get to, but if the president of the United States is trying to tell you that this amateur hour photoshop is real, let him go get the picture and make him say it again. Point to that Helvetica-looking M and make the president say, ‘Yes, I believe that artless M that’s weirdly clearer and darker than all the other tattoos is real.'”

offering some advice to abc’s Terry moran

“As the head of one anti-immigrant group that advises the White House has put it, the plan is to do ‘everything all at once everywhere.’ Which sounds less like rational government policy and more like a knockoff DVD sold on the subway.”

“Right. And you should avoid low-hanging fruit. I try to do that. And if I were to constantly go for low-hanging fruit, I’d say that ‘worst first’ doesn’t describe Trump’s immigration policy so much as it describes his children.”

on the indiscriminate nature of trump’s ice raids

“Okay, first, Tom Homan can truly rot in hell. Although I’d expect nothing less from the man who clearly answers the question, ‘What would Shrek look like as a white ogre?'”

on trumps’ “border czar” boasting about deporting a 4-year-old american citizen with cancer

“But that’s not how anything works. You can’t just opt out of due process because it’s inconvenient. It’s why court orders don’t tend to end with, ‘If not, no worries, you do you!'”

on trump claiming that due process is too much trouble