The  Chagos giveaway is coming to its reckoning. At last.

What Sir Keir Starmer once presented as a neat diplomatic housekeeping exercise has turned into a rolling crisis of strategy, law, and political competence.

The Prime Minister’s decision to surrender the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius, while leasing back Diego Garcia, now collides with parliamentary upheaval, American anger, and a growing sense that the government has blundered into a trap of its own making.

Against this misjudgment, a small but determined resistance took shape.

The Great British PAC, chaired by Advance UK’s leader Ben Habib, recognised early that the issue went far beyond post-colonial symbolism.

It treated the proposed transfer as a question of national security and democratic legitimacy.

The PAC funded legal challenges on behalf of Chagossians who had been shut out of negotiations, mobilised public pressure, and forced MPs and peers to examine a deal the government hoped to slide through unchallenged.

Most significantly, the PAC was instrumental in helping organise the formation of a Chagossian government-in-exile, giving displaced islanders a coherent political voice for the first time.

What began as an obscure territorial adjustment became a cause with human faces and constitutional consequences.

The House of Lords proved more awake to those consequences than Downing Street expected.

With the U.S. capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro in a bold Jan. 3 military raid and a large naval force still prowling the southern Caribbean to ensure that Maduro’s successors cooperate with the Trump administration, other subtle, but key, developments in the region can be overlooked.

Among under-the-wire events is a December 2025 agreement between the United States and Venezuela’s neighbor, Guyana.

That agreement could have profound implications, not only in the immediate context of unfolding events in Venezuela, but also for the long-term execution of the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, unveiled in November 2025 by U.S. President Donald Trump.

A U.S. delegation led by senior Pentagon adviser Patrick Weaver and Acting Deputy Assistant Secretary of War Joseph Humire met with Guyanese President Irfaan Ali in the nation’s capital, Georgetown, on Dec. 9.

Ali told Guyanese media outlets that the nations had signed a statement of intent to “expand joint military cooperation,” a process that will be “evolving ... in the coming months.” He stated that there “will be greater discussions on more levels of cooperation and the integration of [the two countries’] work.”

The statement of intent is not a formal mutual defense treaty, he said, calling it a “reinforcement” of long-term training and collaboration between the United States and Guyana.

But such a pact could be on the table, Ali hinted, referring to the U.S. military effort dubbed Operation Southern Spear.

The Trump administration has been using all available resources to track down and then imprison or deport the “worst of the worst” illegal aliens in America, the ones whose criminality extends beyond living illegally in this country.

However, for the New York Times, there’s a problem with Trump’s efforts to make America safer: He’s using DHS resources, which Congress intended to be used...to make America safer.

And if you think that’s nonsense, you’re right, but it’s the Times, not I, that’s nonsensical.

When Trump took office, he turned the DHS loose on illegal aliens who’ve engaged in murder, rape, drug dealing, sex trafficking, pedophilia, and other vile and violent crimes.

By mid-March 2025, ICE had already arrested staggering numbers of criminals:

“In the first 50 days of the Trump Administration, Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) has made 32,809 enforcement arrests. To put this figure into perspective, in the entire fiscal year 2024, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations made 33,242 of these at-large arrests.

As of Tuesday, ICE has officially made more at-large arrests in the first few weeks of President Trump’s presidency than the entire last year under the previous administration.

Charlotte, N.C., is making headlines this week because dozens of construction sites have gone silent. ICE swept through the region, and the labor force evaporated almost instantly.

A major American city discovered, in real time, that its building boom was being held together by workers who couldn’t legally be there.

Watching that footage hit me hard, because I’ve seen it before — not on the evening news, but in the slow collapse of my own childhood community.

I grew up forty miles north of Louisville, Ky., in a one-stoplight town held together by tobacco, construction, and the kinds of gritty jobs that built the region’s character.

My dad ran a small construction contracting business and held a small tobacco base, which gives you the legal right to grow a certain weight of tobacco.

My brothers and I worked tobacco as teenagers, starting at 12 or 13, and my brothers did construction with Dad as soon as we were old enough to hold a hammer.

Then illegal labor arrived, and things began to shift.