We Went to a Yacht Party for the Most Pro-Deportation People in DC

At the far end of a dock on the banks of the Potomac, past protesters yelling SHAME! and holding signs like DEPORT HATE NOT PEOPLE, up a ramp, across a gangway and up a flight of stairs, about 200 of the most hard-line, anti-immigration people in Washington boarded a boat Thursday afternoon. It was, they believed, time to party.
 
The organizers of the event wanted to call it the U.S.S. Deportation, but no such boat was available, so they had to settle for renting out the Potomac Spirit — a massive, three-story yacht with open bars on every level that would attract lines throughout the evening. “Ahoy! This is the captain speaking,” piped a cheery voice, not emanating from an actual captain, but rather a video of a former DHS staffer in a captain’s hat. “Where are we going on this boat? Hopefully, to a political and policy destination of two commas in the deportation numbers.”

The boozy gala attracted conservatives who have served in Congress, the Justice Department and ICE — all of whom share a goal of deporting an unprecedented 1 million-plus people a year. Former GOP Reps. Steve King and Tom Tancredo reminisced about their time as rabble-rousers in the House, like when King literally built a border wall on the House floor to demonstrate the government could, too. Scott Mechkowski, the former deputy ICE field director in New York, held court on the rooftop deck, trading battle stories about his two-and-a-half decades leading deportation operations. Jeffrey Clark, the former acting assistant attorney general, mingled with an entourage, some of them wearing multicolored leis and flipping through printed-out policy playbooks from the Mass Deportation Coalition, as the group calls itself.

“To influence D.C., you need to speak the language of professional D.C.,” said Mike Howell, the brains behind the event. “One of the modes of language in D.C. is convening with some pomp and circumstance — and what better way to do that than on a boat, touring the sights and smells of Washington, D.C.?”

Howell, a pugnacious lawyer with rosy cheeks and a well-coiffed comb-over, wore a captain’s hat for the evening, bouncing from floor to floor with a drink in hand. The Mass Deportation Coalition is largely his handiwork, a makeshift group of conservative power-players and organizations like his own Oversight Project, which earned a name in conservative circles going after the Biden administration. Other members include the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute, former acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince. Their goal is to pressure President Donald Trump into living up to his campaign promise to deport more people than any U.S. president in history.

Like many of his fellow boaters, Howell had been frustrated with what he saw as Trump’s first-term failure to deliver the sweeping immigration enforcement he’d promised. He left a job at Homeland Security in Trump’s first term because “we weren’t building the wall,” he told me.

Then Trump, emerging from the wilderness after his 2020 electoral defeat, returned with a red-meat campaign promise for hawks like Howell: deportations, and lots of them. “We’ll carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” Trump said at a rally in Iowa in September 2023, and then again and again, until it became a signature promise of his reelection bid and an arena full of delegates at the Republican National Convention waved signs reading MASS DEPORTATION NOW! Maybe this time, Howell and his folks thought, luck would be different: Every Republican in Washington would see the urgency, and every spineless special interest would confess that this is what American voters really want.

Trump’s return to power in 2025 felt like utopia to Howell. Then Minneapolis happened: With two American citizens dead at the hands of immigration officers and public sentiment plummeting, the president quite literally called off the troops. The White House’s politics shop urged House Republicans to stop messaging on mass deportations and instead talk about removing the “worst of the worst.” Official White House social media soon abandoned the term “mass deportations” altogether.

Howell was furious. “I don’t give a damn what the political consultants and the lobbyists and the special interest lobby say,” he said. “They’re not going to hijack this agenda. Like, we, the people, are going to stay the course.”

Thursday night, that course led southbound down the Potomac as Queen’s “We Are the Champions” boomed from loudspeakers. “We’re just trying to push a positive vision of America, you know? I mean, no one here is, like, against immigration,” said Micah Farmer, a Young Republicans of Texas leader with floppy blonde hair who flew in just for the party. He’d pinned a Jerusalem cross to his suitcoat, which he wore all night, even as temperatures neared 100 degrees. “America wasn’t made by Muslims, you know? It was European Christians. … They came in, they assimilated. That’s all that matters.”

Europe was a frequent topic onboard, despite some programming issues. Howell had planned to screen a trailer for a documentary called “Replacing Europe” — EUROPE IS BEING INVADED, the trailer says, over images of Muslims in prayer — but according to the Mass Deportation Coalition, the boat company spiked it, saying it did not “meet their standards.”

“The case study of the alternative, and maybe our trajectory in the United States, is what we see in the United Kingdom, specifically London, where it’s become a global city, a global population, and it’s just changed the character of England,” said Morgan Knull, a real estate broker who sat on the ship’s deck with a cigar in one hand and a glass in the other. “Maybe that is a desirable thing, but I’m not sure anyone voted for that.”

He stopped himself. “I mean, there are benefits to that. I love the restaurants around the world. I mean, talk about English food. I mean, it’s inedible.” He took a puff of his cigar. “I travel for art shows. I like art exhibitions. So Italy and London are the places I go for that. France, Paris sometimes.” Another puff. “In Western Europe, it’s a little bit flammable. And you see that in England. They’ve had the different riots over crime incidents. Paris, it happens all the time. So I would just think that that’s a cautionary tale to those of us in the United States. Like, do we want this as our future?”

King, the former member of Congress, certainly doesn’t. “There’s a fleet of Western civilization. We’re the flagship for that fleet,” he said. “And if they can sink us, the entire civilization goes down.” He pointed at the floor for emphasis. The boat rocked, ever so slightly.

In Trump’s Washington, the Mass Deportation Coalition knows it is making enemies, but its members are unbothered: That’s the price for influence, they say, and they reason they have plenty of it.

This month, when federal regulators urged banks and credit unions to crack down on loans to undocumented immigrants, the coalition took credit, pointing to the debanking platform in its policy playbook. Earlier this week, when Trump reversed a DHS decision that briefly ceased ICE traffic stops after a fatal ICE-related shooting in Maine, the coalition again took a victory lap: “I think it’s proof that the Mass Deportation Coalition and our allies who agree with us outside of the coalition have significant sway still,” Howell said. “Like, I’m not sure the policy would have been reversed if not for the very fervent outcry.” (In response to Howell’s claim, Homeland Secretary Markwayne Mullin said in a statement, “President Trump and I are on the same page. We want our ICE officers to have all options available to keep them safe while executing our mission of deporting as many illegal alien criminals from our country as possible.”)

Official administration social media pages are using the term “mass deportations” again unabashedly. The Department of Homeland Security said it deported more than 600,000 individuals in 2025, and Mullin claims those figures are “way up” this year. But the coalition isn’t buying it: This month, it sued to extract deportation figures from DHS.

The coalition claims Americans are on their side, pointing to a pair of polls — one commissioned by the coalition itself and conducted by Trump’s pollster, and another by Harvard/Harris — that show majority support for deporting all individuals present in the country illegally. “The millions upon millions of Americans who voted for Trump in 2024, who voted based on the issue of mass deportation, they’re going to go to the polls [in November], and they’re going to ask themselves, ‘Has this happened?’” said Gabe Guidarini, former acting president of the College Republicans of America, over the hum of the boat’s engine.

But plenty ofother pollingsuggests mass deportations will be a political liability for Republicans, particularly among Hispanic voters, a key swing voting bloc increasingly alarmed by the crackdown. “When people feel targeted and feel insulted, there is no money that will buy that vote back, unless you show with policy that we care about them,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), an immigration pragmatist who has become one of the coalition’s top enemies. (Salazar, for her part, said she hasn’t heard of the coalition: After hearing a brief description of their policy playbook during a hallway interview at the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday, she said, “They’re completely out of reality.”)

The coalition shrugs off those concerns. “Mass deportations — it’s an ugly word. It’s an ugly word, right?” said Mechkowski, the former ICE agent, a towering figure with slicked-back hair and a New York accent. But it’s not as ugly in practice as the media would have you believe, he said. He shared an example of a removal procedure for an undocumented parent with U.S.-born children: “It’s very fucking simple. You have a child. That child is a U.S. citizen, but that doesn’t affect your status in any way, right? So we’re dealing with you,” he explained.

“The media likes to frame it to where, you know, a little guy’s getting on the plane, and we’re kicking his fucking kids out with him. It’s not true. And I’ve done this — listen, I did it for 20-plus years, and I would tell people all the time, like, ‘Look, I get it. You know what I mean? Like, but you fucking created the situation, not me. I’m, fucking, the facilitator here. Like, I’m executing this warrant of fucking removal, and this is your set of problems now.’”

Mechkowski, a third-generation American of Italian descent, was adopted by a Polish and Puerto Rican couple. “My father, my mother, my fucking uncle, aunts and uncles, the whole Puerto Rican side of my family, the entire Puerto Rican side is all Democrat, right?” he said. “And now they find out that, like, I’m doing this shit, and they’re like, ‘What the fuck happened to you?”

Downstairs, as attendees sipped white wine, Ryan Neuhaus pitched them on his new children’s book, coauthored with Howell, that tells the story of a young dingo named Diego whose parents brought him illegally to the U.S. “Why should the left write all of our children’s books in America? Why should they have all the fun in indoctrinating our kids?” asked Neuhaus, the former Heritage Foundation chief of staff who shouldered the blame for a controversial video defending Tucker Carlson.

The book teaches that “ICE is nice,” mass deportations are “good for the whole” and true kindness means “helping families return safely to where they belong.”

What happens to Diego?

“Diego gets deported,” Neuhaus said. The crowded erupted in cheers and applause. A couple in the back of the room, laughing, clinked their glasses. The “U.S.S. Deportation” sailed on.

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