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On a sunset party cruise on the Potomac River on a recent evening, the focus was on protecting and expanding President Donald Trump's mass deportation campaign.
"It is a perfectly fair question to ask: Why are you on the boat, and why are you celebrating the cause of mass deportation?" Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project who organized the outing, told more than 150 guests right after the Pledge of Allegiance.
But the answer is "pretty simple," said Howell, who wore a gold-embroidered captain's hat. "Everyone on this boat hasn't forgotten that this country was invaded not too long ago. The consequences of that we see every single day, and they get worse every single day."
An American flag stood in front of a large banner emblazoned with the logo of the cruise's sponsor - the Mass Deportation Coalition, a group of more than 100 conservative organizations, including Howell's. The guests gathered at long, cloth-covered tables with floral centerpieces and bound copies of a 107-page report the coalition published in the spring. The report focuses on the millions of undocumented immigrants who entered the country under former president Joe Biden, a wave of arrivals that Trump and his base consider an invasion.
Trump was elected to fix that, Howell said, but the deportation numbers are lagging. At the same time, public sentiment has soured as the enforcement effort has swept up immigrants without criminal records who have lived in the country for years.
"D.C. needs to understand us," he said. While some might view the cruise as "mean-spirited" or "gratuitous," Howell said, he sees it differently.
"It's about love for this country that's provided so much to us, and we're going to get it back," Howell said.
Before the Potomac Spirit left the dock, a handful of protesters heckled the passengers, holding signs reading, "Immigrants make America great" and "We support mass deportation for you & your friends." Two cruise guests sarcastically posed in front of them with the thumbs-up sign, prompting one of the protesters to call them "Stephen Miller clones" - a reference to the White House deputy chief of staff and architect of the deportation agenda.
As the sun began to set, sending a ribbon of bright orange reflection across the water, guests sampled a buffet that included beef tri-tip, salmon, pasta and jerk chicken. Most wore suits, khakis or sundresses, though some opted for more patriotic garb, like the man in a baseball cap with a bald eagle coming out of the front and another sporting a star-spangled blazer.
The crowd was mostly young and overwhelmingly White, a mix of coalition members, supporters, think tank leaders, conservative social media personalities and former politicians. Jennica Pounds, whose investigations of government waste on X have gained her nearly 1 million followers and attention from Elon Musk, was there, as were former congressmen Steve King (R-Iowa) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado), two of the most prominent anti-immigration voices from a previous generation of political leaders.
In 2013, King drew the ire of establishment Republicans, including then-House Speaker John A. Boehner, when he compared undocumented immigrants known as "dreamers," who had come to the United States as children, to drug runners with "calves the size of cantaloupes" who traffic marijuana through the desert. Years later, after King questioned why the terms "white nationalist" and "white supremacy" had racist connotations and GOP leadership removed him from House committees, he lost his reelection bid in 2020.
But on the Potomac Spirit, King rediscovered his voice with a new constituency.
Addressing the crowd, he ticked through his Capitol Hill highlights, including a proposal to end birthright citizenship and a 2006 stunt on the House floor in which he built a model replica of a 12-foot-high wall he envisioned for the U.S.-Mexico border.
He told the crowd the immigration debate is about defending Western civilization and Christian values.
"We have to take them on at every level," he said of any groups threatening that way of life. "There's a fleet of Western civilization. We're the flagship for that fleet."
Outside on the rear promenade, Jack Lyle wasn't sure about everything he had heard so far. He's president of the College Republicans at Clemson University, where he is a rising senior. He was invited on the cruise by a friend and made it just in time despite a six-hour flight delay from South Carolina.
Lyle supports Trump and his immigration agenda, but he's also politically minded and wants Republicans to maintain power in the midterm elections. He said he worries some of the party's immigration rhetoric and enforcement tactics might have gone too far for the general public, potentially spoiling the GOP's chances.
"At the federal level, they're trying to prep for the midterms, and it's a bad look," Lyle said. "The killings [by federal officers] are a bad look. Even just the deportations are a bad look. Everything. The whole thing about the operation is a bad look."
Howell and the other leaders of the Mass Deportation Coalition have the opposite view. They are alarmed at what they feel is a retreat from Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on Trump's enforcement agenda. Public outrage over the fatal shootings in Houston and Maine prompted Mullin to order a temporary pause on officers making vehicle stops. Trump promptly overruled the policy amid backlash to Mullin from his far-right base.
In an interview, Howell said his goal is to turn the coalition into an electoral force and make mass deportations a "single-issue litmus test" for Republican candidates, citing the pro-life, gun rights and pro-Israel movements as examples. Howell's coalition has held seminars in states including Texas and Indiana, and he joined colleagues on a trip to London last month for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, a gathering of right-wing policymakers and commentators.
"I think a good litmus test is: Should illegal aliens be deported? You know, no caveats," he said.
As the sun went down and the boat passed the Washington Monument, people made their way to the party deck to take group photos. Guests received swag bags as the yacht approached the dock.
The bags held key chains and baseball caps emblazoned with "Mass Deportation Coalition," along with a copy of a children's book self-published by Howell and Ryan Neuhaus, former chief of staff at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. The title is "Diego the Dingo Finds His Way Home," and it tells the tale of an Australian dog who leaves behind the Outback for the promise of a better life in the United States, only to be exploited by a coyote smuggler as his family crosses the border.
Facing hardship in New York City, Diego is approached by a friendly iguana named Iggy who is dressed in an ICE jacket and tells them that "ICE is NICE." Iggy explains gently to Diego and his family that they are illegally in the country. "Countries need borders and rules," Iggy says, before sending them back to Australia.
Neuhaus said the aim is to counter pro-immigrant children's literature produced by liberals. He has given copies to immigration officers and plans to distribute them to ICE detention facilities.
"I think if you read the story, you'll come to understand that it's not actually meant to be, you know, demeaning towards these families," says Neuhaus, who served as a Mormon missionary in Bolivia for two years. "It's actually supposed to be about family reunification. Like, there is a place called home."
Departing the boat with leftover swag bags in his arms, Neuhaus pronounced the evening a success.
"It's good spirit, happy spirit," he says. "The work we do should be fun. It should feel uplifting. It shouldn't be negative, right? We just need to have hope for the future."
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