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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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July 18, 2025

Fareed: Trump Deports Fewer Than Obama—but More Cruelly

As ICE raids prompt protests and unease, Fareed notes in his latest Washington Post column that President Donald Trump is actually deporting fewer undocumented immigrants per month than his predecessor Barack Obama did.
 
“Trump’s deportation dragnet is less effective than those of his predecessors because it is chaotic, theatrical and detached from the systems that work,” Fareed writes. “Rather than effectively coordinating with local law enforcement, following rules, laws and norms, or expanding and expediting legal processing, Trump has prioritized optics over outcomes. What his administration lacks in strategy, it tries to compensate for with spectacle—sweeping up schoolchildren, targeting families, broadcasting raids on social media. But this is a rare case of Trump’s Teflon wearing thin. Immigration was once his strongest issue politically. Today, it is fast becoming a vulnerability. According to a recent Quinnipiac University poll, Trump’s approval on immigration has dropped sharply, with 55 percent disapproving and only 40 percent approving. … Even more telling is the erosion of support among independents, many of them suburban voters who had once been sympathetic to a tougher border stance but are now recoiling at scenes of cruelty and overreach.”

The ‘World’s First Climate Visa’

Which country has launched the “world’s first climate visa,” a program that will allow some people fleeing the ravages of climate change (in a particular place) to immigrate there legally?
 
a) Canada
b) New Zealand
c) Australia
d) Japan

To see the answer, scroll to the end of this newsletter.

Syria’s Violent Setback

Violence between government-backed forces and Syria’s Druze minority have disturbed observers and marked a setback for the country’s transition onward from the brutal Assad dictatorship.

Israel launched strikes in response, saying it was intervening to protect the Druze minority in the southwestern Syria region that neighbors the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. The Israel Defense Forces struck both in that region and in Damascus, hitting the Syrian Defense Ministry headquarters and striking near the presidential palace.
 
Reuters reports: “One elderly man had been shot in the head in his living room. Another in his bedroom. The body of a woman lay in the street. After days of bloodshed in Syria’s Druze city of Suwayda, survivors emerged on Thursday to collect and bury the scores of dead found across the city. A ceasefire announced on Wednesday night brought an end to ferocious fighting between Druze militia and government forces sent to the city to quell clashes between Druze and Bedouin fighters.” The BBC’s Tess Mallinder Heron writes: “The violence is the first in the Druze-majority province of [Suwayda] since fighting in April and May between Druze fighters and Syria’s new security forces killed dozens of people. Prior to this, clashes in Syria’s coastal provinces in March were said to have killed hundreds of members of the Alawite minority, to which former ruler Bashar al-Assad belongs.”
 
The violence is part of a complicated transition for a diverse country. An important question for post-Assad Syria has centered on the coexistence of array of minority groups and various militant factions, many folded into the still-new government’s security apparatus. On that front, this week’s events have been not only deadly but dispiriting.

At New Lines Magazine, Cian Ward writes: “An arrangement between Damascus and local Druze notables that had prohibited the government security services from entering [this southwestern Syrian] region in any meaningful sense, alongside the security services’ inability to adequately control the roads into the region, left large swaths of Sweida’s borderlands a quasi-lawless zone. Over the last six days, the region has been engulfed in an escalating series of clashes. What began as communal violence between the province’s Druze and Bedouin communities mutated into something far more severe … The pot had been simmering with each cycle of escalation and de-escalation. It felt inevitable that it would boil over eventually.”
 
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board adds: “The talk of Syria joining the Abraham Accords, common as recently as last week, now appears premature, to put it lightly. … This [violence] halts the momentum of [interim President] Ahmed al-Sharaa’s new Damascus regime, which seems to have miscalculated and failed to restrain its own forces. Israel will also need to be careful wading into Syria’s sectarian conflict. It’s one thing to prevent a massacre by bombing Syrian forces advancing on the Druze-majority province of Sweida, and another to make ostentatious strikes on the Syrian capital.”

Big? Yes.

Beautiful? Well …

On last Sunday’s GPS, CNN contributor and Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar told Fareed that Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts that target the poor could spell disaster for the US economy.

The Epstein Effect

Is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal—and, more specifically, the surging controversy over demands to release more Justice Department “files” on him—turning Trump’s MAGA movement toward self-destruction?

Yes, essentially, according to the analysis of The New York Times’ Ezra Klein and journalist Will Sommer, formerly of The Washington Post and now of The Bulwark, who has covered conspiracy theories and authored the book “Trust the Plan: The Rise of QAnon and the Conspiracy That Unhinged America.” The two discuss the story on the latest episode of The Ezra Klein Show podcast.
 
As Klein sketches current Epstein-related political dynamics, Trump supporters including Vice President JD Vance stoked Epstein conspiracy theories by calling for the release of documents related to Epstein’s criminal prosecution and broader saga. The thing is, Klein and Sommer note, the known story of Epstein, his somewhat-mysterious wealth, his powerful connections and death in a jail cell really is weird. (Wild suppositions about power and pedophilia aside, Klein suggests, established media outlets would do a disservice by seeking to dismiss the strangeness of Epstein’s story, and the possibility that there could be more to it, out of hand.) Now, the whole saga is coming to bite Trump, as his supporters demand what influential MAGA figures had touted to them.
 
Now that the Trump administration has said there isn’t much there there, New York Magazine columnist Ross Barkin details the problem for Trump on the magazine’s Intelligencer blog: “The big question now is whether Trump himself will ever bear the brunt of MAGA’s wrath. They’ve already come for Attorney General Pam Bondi, a fierce loyalist the president has defended, and FBI Director Kash Patel, a noted Epstein conspiracy theorist. Laura Loomer, a MAGA activist tight with Trump’s inner circle, is demanding an appointed special counsel to perform an independent investigation. … It is true that Epstein offers more trip wires for MAGA than prior political battles, like those over the bombing of Iran. And while Trump finds it exceedingly simple, when it comes to most policy, to simply reorient MAGA around his own interests and obsessions, Epstein conspiracy theories are not so easily tamped down.”

Snatched by ICE,

Öztürk Tells Her Story

After coauthoring an op-ed in the Tufts Daily student newspaper calling on school leaders to heed student critics of Israel, Turkish citizen and Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk was arrested by plainclothes federal agents on the street in March. Öztürk spent six weeks in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana until her release in May.
 
Öztürk tells the story of that detention in an essay for Vanity Fair, writing of being “jostled” from place to place until arriving at the ICE facility in Louisiana.

On her arrival, Öztürk writes, other women held in the facility “taught me how to do laundry” while in detention, “making sure the bag is tight so the clothes don’t get lost, which would mean a lot of difficulty requesting more. One woman offered me cookies, while the other offered tea, and they both sat down to chat with me. ‘This place is the worst,’ they said, telling me about the times when they did not have access to female hygiene products or toilet paper, times when their questions were not answered, how they were constantly counted and lined up, how some officers raised their voices or, somehow even worse, did not even respond. How in the kitchen, they were forced to sit at another table without reason. They shared how cold they were in the wintertime, with no extra blankets, jackets, or proper shoes being provided. They shared stories of witnessing violence. The next chapter of my experience in prison began in that moment. Over the next six and a half weeks, I found myself immersed daily in the love, beauty, resilience, and compassion of these women.”

News Quiz:

The Answer Is …

Australia. Rising ocean levels are already threatening low-slung Pacific Island nations, some of which are situated atop atolls—ring-shaped coral reefs often surrounding lagoons—just a few meters above sea level. Nikkei Asia’s Sophie Mak reports that many citizens of one of them, Tuvalu, are “now hoping to acquire the world's first climate migration visa that will allow 280 Tuvaluans to move every year to Australia, where they will have the right to live, study, and work without restrictions. The inaugural ballot opened on 16 June and closes Friday. The most recent available official data show that as of July 11, a total of 5,157 applications had been submitted, accounting for nearly half of the small Pacific island nation's population of 11,000.”
 
Climate migration is expected to grow. In 2020, Fareed talked with journalist and author Abrahm Lustgarten about large migratory flows that are expected to be driven not only by rising oceans but also by extreme heat, violent weather, crop failure and other climate-related phenomena. Some of the world’s poorest countries and people, located in vulnerable areas and possessing the fewest resources to cope, are expected to be hit hardest and to be driven most urgently to attempt to emigrate. In November, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson wrote for Wired: “To date, most climate migration has occurred within nations, but as the regions affected by extreme weather expand, that will need to change. We will have to be vigilant about keeping xenophobia at bay, acknowledging the cruel injustice at play as the lowest greenhouse gas emitting nations, like the Pacific islands, are the first to be inundated.”