All posts tagged "immigration"

'Alarmed and dismayed': Trump's nemesis judge returns to hit admin with scathing ruling

A U.S. district judge slammed President Donald Trump and his administration in a scaling ruling this week over the "cavalier acceptance" that a group of migrants who were removed in the U.S. and deported to Ghana and their home countries are “more likely than not” to face persecution, torture or even death.

Judge Tanya Chutkan — who oversaw the now-dismissed election interference case against Trump — called out the administration for denying due process to these migrants, Politico reported. She also said that the court's "hands are tied," and that she cannot help the migrants the administration is deporting.

"For over three decades, through five presidential administrations, this country has adhered to its obligations to treat refugees humanely and to comply with the Constitutional requirement of due process, which is afforded to all persons present in this country, regardless of their citizenship status," Chutkan wrote in the ruling.

She added that the "court does not reach this conclusion lightly," but it could not issue a temporary restraining order to force U.S. officials to stop the repatriation.

The five plaintiffs in the case, who were identified by initials due to safety concerns, have been deported to Ghana and are "now being repatriated to their home countries."

"It is aware of the dire consequences Plaintiffs face if they are repatriated," Chutkan wrote. "And it is alarmed and dismayed by the circumstances under which these removals are being carried out, especially in light of the government’s cavalier acceptance of Plaintiffs’ ultimate transfer to countries where they face torture and persecution. But its hands are tied."

Chutkan called out the administration's harsh immigration policies and ongoing efforts to target migrants.

"In recent months, the government has embarked upon a series of deportations which signal a drastic change of course. In several cases, authorities have rounded up — often at night and with little or no notice — men, women, and children being held in detention facilities, hastily put them on planes and transferred them to other countries, where they have no connections, do not speak the language, and are unable to contact family or counsel. This case involves a similar scenario," she wrote.

'Welcome to 1984 folks': Florida's reward for snitches draws backlash

Former Rep. Joe Kennedy (D-MA) reacted strongly Wednesday, saying "welcome to 1984 folks," after viewing several images of a roadside sign in Florida that urges people to snitch on undocumented immigrants, telling Sunshine State residents to call the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — in exchange for a $1,000 reward.

"Friend just sent this to me, apparently from Florida. Xi Jinping would be proud. Welcome to 1984 folks," Kennedy wrote on X.

The Department of Homeland Security announced last week it would reimburse state and local law enforcement agencies that help enforce the Trump administration's aggressive immigration raids to "arrest and remove the worst of the worst including murderers, gang members, rapists, terrorists, and pedophiles from American communities."

The reimbursement policy begins on Oct. 1, according to DHS. The funding is provided under Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill."

"Currently, state and local police are participating from 40 states, with 8,501 Trained Task Force Officers and over 2,000 additional officers in-training," DHS said in the news release statement on Sept. 2.

Participating law enforcement stand to gain reimbursement, including "the annual salary and benefits of each eligible trained 287(g) officer, including overtime coverage up to 25% of the officer’s annual salary." The department also indicates "law enforcement agencies will be eligible for quarterly monetary performance awards based on the successful location of illegal aliens provided by ICE and overall assistance to further ICE’s mission to Defend the Homeland." The agency lays out the plan to award bonuses based on a range of overall arrests, indicating that 90-100% would net $1,000 per eligible task force officer, 80-80% netting $750 per officer and 70-79% bringing $500 per officer.

It's also encouraging law enforcement agencies to sign a "287(g) agreement to help defend the homeland and to gain access to these reimbursement opportunities." It's unclear how many law enforcement agencies are motivated to sign on.

This senator just put the GOP's racist plan on plain display

Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

“That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…

“When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America — with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress today.

Schmitt offered no acknowledgment of the millions of enslaved Africans whose stolen labor helped build this country, no recognition of the generations of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa who contributed to our prosperity, no admission of the bloody sacrifices of those who fought for civil rights, equality, and inclusion.

Instead he spoke only of a singular people and a singular nation, implicitly white, implicitly Christian, and implicitly obedient to his party’s authoritarian vision.

This is not some isolated gaffe: it’s part of a pattern. At the same moment Schmitt was narrowing the definition of who counts as American, he’d chosen as his spokesman Nathan Hochman, who was forced out of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after circulating a promotional video featuring Nazi imagery.

That a man with such a stain on his record can walk comfortably into the Republican fold today says everything about the party’s trajectory. It’s no accident, no oversight, no slip. The GOP is nakedly embracing white supremacy and the Confederate neofascist ethos.

They’re not ashamed of it, either, as previous generations would have been, speaking in Nixonesque “law and order” code. Today, they flaunt it. They want to redefine America itself, not as a democracy where all people are “created equal,” but as a fortress where some people’s bloodlines, wealth, and religions entitle them to power while others are cast aside or erased from memory.

This assault is not simply rhetorical. The Trump administration has already shown us the template they’re using to deconstruct a democratic America and replace it with a whites-only neofascist ethnostate.

Their racist attacks on the Smithsonian and other national museums weren’t about efficiency or budgets — they’re about rewriting history, about stripping slavery, segregation, and genocide from the story of America, and replacing it with sanitized myths that glorify the Confederate ethos and erase the Confederacy’s victims.

They want future generations to walk through America’s most important cultural institutions and see nothing of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Sitting Bull, César Chávez, or Bayard Rustin. They want a nation of children raised on the lie that America was always a white, Christian ethnostate, that pluralism and democracy were well-intentioned but impractical mistakes to be corrected.

This is how authoritarian regimes always consolidate power: as George Orwell wrote in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which the GOP has apparently adopted as an instruction manual, control the narrative of the past and you control reality of the future.

But history refuses to be erased. The graves of the people who fought and died to end slavery and grant civil rights to nonwhite people and women are still here.

The gravestones of Black soldiers who charged Confederate lines at Fort Wagner, who bled and died under the Union flag, are still here. The blood of abolitionists lynched by mobs is still in our soil. The memories of those who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten nearly to death by racist sheriffs are still vivid.

The soldiers of my father’s generation who fell on Omaha Beach didn’t die so that a senator from Missouri could try to turn our country into a singular “nation and a people.” They died for liberty, for equality, for a world where democracy could flourish instead of fascism. To erase their sacrifices by redefining America as a white nation is to spit on their graves.

Where are the Republicans who once called themselves the Party of Lincoln? The ones who agreed with President Ronald Reagan when he famously said:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American. …

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Abraham Lincoln himself declared at Gettysburg that this was a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He didn’t say “all white men.” He didn’t say “all Christians.” He said all men, a word that at the time encompassed all people. He understood that America’s strength was not in its uniformity but in its aspiration to universality.

Have they all been purged from the GOP? Has the last Republican who believes in a multiracial democracy been driven into silence or retirement?

Watching today’s party leaders it seems so. The few who whisper their discomfort are drowned out by the roar of those who openly embrace bigotry, authoritarianism, and historical revisionism. The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, right down to Trump renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals and Klan leaders.

This is not a mere political dispute: it’s a struggle for the soul of America.

Our choice is between the pluralistic democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to protect, or an authoritarian nationalism that dehumanizes millions and threatens to dismantle our most cherished institutions.

When Schmitt stands before a crowd and offers them a vision of America as a singular people, he’s calling for the death of the American experiment itself. When Republicans bring men like Hochman into their fold, they’re saying right out loud that Nazi imagery and Confederate ideology are no longer disqualifying, but are welcome.

When Trump and his administration try to rewrite history in the Smithsonian, they’re declaring war on truth itself. And on the concepts and ideals that made America a great nation.

The outrage is justified because the stakes are existential. A party that embraces white supremacy and fascist ethos cannot coexist with democracy. A nation that allows its museums, its textbooks, its speeches, and its laws to be purged of pluralism cannot endure as a democracy.

America has faced down this poison before. We lost 700,000 people fighting a Civil War to crush it. We passed civil rights laws to dismantle its legal scaffolding. We buried tens of thousands of soldiers in Europe who died fighting against fascism abroad.

To let it rise again here at home, wrapped in the flag of one of our two great political parties, is the ultimate betrayal.

And to put a massive punctuation mark on it, on Monday Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a shadow docket opinion for his five corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court saying that it’s now perfectly legal for ICE and other federal, state, and local police authorities to engage in racial profiling.

Protesting Republicans bringing us fully into a “your papers please“ type of race-based fascism, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that because of the Republicans on the Supreme Court:

“The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

The question now is whether we’ll rise to the moment. Will we allow a senator’s words to pass unchallenged, a party’s racism to be normalized, a nation’s history to be rewritten? Or will we push back with the force of truth, with the weight of history, with the unyielding conviction that America belongs to all its people, not just those deemed acceptable by the far right?

Silence is complicity, both on the part of our media and our politicians of both parties. Pretending this is normal politics is complicity. It’s time for every American who still believes in the Constitution, in equality, in pluralism, in democracy itself to speak out in favor of an inclusive America.

This is not about left versus right. This is about democracy versus fascism, inclusion versus exclusion, truth versus lies.

Eric Schmitt and those like him want us to forget who we are. They want us to forget the Declaration’s promise, Lincoln’s dedication, King’s dream, and the sacrifices of millions of ordinary Americans who fought for liberty and justice. They want us to forget the very idea of America as a pluralistic nation.

We must not forget. We must not be silent. We must not surrender America’s future to those who would drag us back into the darkest chapters of America’s past.

These cases show how Trump keeps losing — bigly

US President Donald Trump is on a losing streak. Just look at the latest judicial decisions challenging his policies, from mass deportations to tariffs to his troop deployments to US cities.

The courts are proving to be a significant check on Trump’s thirst for absolute power.These cases illustrate the point:

Immigration

Over Labor Day weekend, Immigration and Customs Enforcement attempted to begin deporting up to 700 unaccompanied Guatemalan children. In the dead of night, the first children were loaded onto planes in south Texas.

“These are unaccompanied children who do not have a parent or a guardian with them,” Efrén Olivares, an attorney representing the minors, said on the Democracy Now! news hour.

At 1:00 am on Sunday, Olivares and his colleagues filed an emergency complaint with the federal court in Washington, D.C. Judge Sparkle Sooknanam was woken after 2:00 am, and by 4:00 am she issued a temporary restraining order blocking the deportations until the children had the immigration hearings to which they have a legal right.

Meanwhile in Texas, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, considered the nation’s most conservative, ruled that Trump’s use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport people was illegal.

Tariffs

The Appeals Court in Washington D.C. ruled that Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal and unconstitutional, noting that only Congress has the power to impose tariffs.

The ruling was “a sweeping decision that unequivocally rebukes President Trump’s idea that he can impose tariffs on American consumers on his own,” Neal Katyal, the attorney who argued the case, said on Democracy Now!

Military

Trump says, “We’re going in,” threatening to invade Chicago using, among other forces, the Texas National Guard.

But in California, a federal judge, invoking the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that bars the use of military in domestic law enforcement, ruled in favor of Gov. Gavin Newsom, finding Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard to the streets of Los Angeles, along with several hundred US Marines, was illegal.

Judge Charles Breyer, the brother of retired US Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, issued an injunction barring the Trump administration from “deploying, ordering, instructing, training, or using the National Guard currently deployed in California, and any military troops [from] engaging in arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”

Ask E. Jean

These are just a few of the recent court cases that have rebuked Trump as he attempts to subvert the US Constitution.

We recently got a personal glimpse into what judicial wins over Trump look like. In the high mountain air of Telluride, Colorado, we had a chance to spend time with E. Jean Carroll, the renowned advice columnist and journalist. She was at the Telluride Film Festival for the premier of the new documentary, Ask E. Jean.

Carroll had a long and storied career as the advice columnist for Elle Magazine, and has published several books. In recent years she became known as one of the most prominent women to accuse Donald Trump of sexual abuse, saying he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in the mid-1990s, in Manhattan.

The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people.

Carroll sued Trump in civil court, and a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing her.

Judge Lewis Kaplan wrote, “Trump did in fact ‘rape’ Ms. Carroll as that term commonly is used and understood.”

She was awarded a $5 million settlement from Trump. After the verdict, he called her a liar. She then sued for defamation, and won an additional jury award of $83.3 million.

Carroll cut an elegant figure, walking along Telluride’s main avenue with the sweeping Continental Divide as a backdrop. Her film premiered to rave reviews, and, should there remain a film distributor in this country not cowed by threats of lawsuits from Trump, it should be available for viewing by a wide audience.

The film highlights the story of one courageous woman refusing to be defined as a victim of Donald Trump, providing inspiration, no doubt, to the hundreds of survivors of Trump’s old friend, the now-dead sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. Many of them spoke this week outside the U.S. Capitol, demanding the full release of the Epstein files. The Trump administration, which controls the files, is resisting.

Behind each lawsuit are impacted people, whether immigrant children pulled from their beds in the middle of the night and thrown on planes, or people standing up in the streets of LA confronting illegally deployed troops, whether sexual abuse survivors banding together, or federal workers fired en masse.

The courts are playing a central role in opposing the lawless Trump administration, but the core of the resistance are people–people at every level organized in opposition, defending democracy.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide.
Denis Moynihan has worked with Democracy Now! since 2000. He is a bestselling author and a syndicated columnist with King Features. He lives in Colorado, where he founded community radio station KFFR 88.3 FM in the town of Winter Park.

This ICE arrest in California reveals Trump's vast criminal scheme

An 18-year-old boy was kidnapped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside LA just days before he was to begin his senior year in high school. He was walking his dog when they came for him.

ICE never told his parents. For a week, they had no idea where he was. During that time, ICE had taken him to one facility, then another, then another, before sending him to Arizona, where he awaits his fate.

This story is being repeated across the country. Federal immigration authorities are taking from churches, schools, workplaces and courts people whose crime is coming, or staying, without authorization. Otherwise, they are hard-working, family-oriented and law-abiding.

A typical reaction to these stories is that they are at odds with Donald Trump’s campaign promise of getting rid of “the worst of the worst,” those who have committed serious crimes, especially violent ones.

To continue with that reaction would do more harm than good, however, as it accepts as true the belief that Trump cares about crime and about public safety, and that the solution is for him to pull back.

The president doesn’t care about crime, except as a pretext for doing what he wants, nor is he going to pull back, even if the pretext is proven lawless and false. Indeed, it will be used by his thugs as rationale for committing crimes even greater than the ones they claim to fight — like kidnapping an 18-year-old boy, violating his rights, frightening his parents and terrorizing his community — because crime, as they see it, is not about what you do, but who you are.

And as long as there are people in America who are walking their dogs while brown (or Black),Trump will see a “crime wave” so massive it justifies commandeering local law enforcement and replacing police with armed soldiers to do what needs doing to “keep the country safe.”

Are we safer thanks to ICE?

ICE conducted a raid in Connecticut recently. It detained about 65 people living in the country without authorization. The name of the raid was “Operation Broken Trust.” It was not only a comment on my state’s sanctuary laws. It was a warning, as if to say: We can do to your people whatever we want and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.

With exceptions, Connecticut’s Trust Act puts strict limits on how state and local police cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The law, like all so-called sanctuary laws, does not interfere with federal agents. It only forces them to do their work on their own. As the office of Connecticut Attorney General William Tong has said, the Trust Act “reflects the unremarkable proposition that immigration enforcement is the responsibility of the federal government.”

But by protecting brown people (read: “criminals alien offenders”), Connecticut’s Trust Act actually breaks the public’s trust, an ICE spokeswoman told the New Haven Register.

“Such laws only force law enforcement professionals to release criminal alien offenders back into the very communities they have already victimized,” she said.

The subtext here is that Connecticut, like all cities and states run by Democrats, is being hopelessly overrun by “criminals alien offenders,” that its leadership is weak, and that the only way to make things right is for the president to come in and enforce law and order. Two top state Republicans agreed that things are so bad they justified violating Connecticut’s sovereignty.

“Connecticut’s streets are now safer,” they actually said in a statement. “Violent offenders are now in custody.”

But are we safer thanks to ICE?

ICE said it took immigrants who had broken federal law, but did not cite federal crimes committed. The crimes it did cite were almost entirely state crimes — assault, rape, robbery, etc. ICE also said the immigrants it took had already been convicted of those crimes by the state. In other words, and in its own words, ICE suggests that Connecticut’s streets are safer because Connecticut enforces the law.

That ICE took them anyway tells you public safety and public trust are not its main concerns, nor is serving justice, as justice has already been served. Indeed, that they were taken anyway suggests their prosecutions were not enough, that something more had to be done, for some reason beyond criminal justice. And that should be telling.

It tells us their real “crime” isn’t what they did.

It’s who they are.

And it tells us that their very existence, according to this president, constitutes a national emergency requiring a national response such that no law should be able to stand in the way of victory. Trump will defeat these “criminal aliens” if he has to break every law to do it. If he has to become a criminal to beat “the criminals,” so be it.

Dictators are criminals

Trump benefits from the appearance of good intentions – that what he’s doing, no matter how horrible it seems, is in the people’s service.

But when you strip away the facade, as I hope I have done, and see that the “crimes” in question are not crimes but rather identities, it’s hard to continue giving Trump the benefit of the doubt (unless you long to see the explicit restoration of the white-power order in America).

And it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that what we are seeing, in the case of an 18-year-old boy in California and hundreds of other stories like his, is a massive crime wave. If I snatched a boy off the street while he was walking his dog, and kept him separated from his family for a week, then took him across state lines for unknown but presumably malign reasons, I would be prosecuted for kidnapping and more.

The regime wants us to quibble over the allegation that this boy overstayed his visa, but the visa question fades into the background when you bear in mind that the president does not care about preventing crimes but rather committing crimes, in order to grab more power for himself and others, who will commit more crimes.

After all, dictators are criminals first.

The president seems to understand the downside of being seen as a criminal. During an Oval Office meeting last week, in which he talked about sending troops to Chicago, because it’s “a killing field,” he said:

“They say, ‘We don't need him, freedom, freedom. He's a dictator. He's a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and I’m a smart person. When I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops, and instead of being praised they're saying you're trying to take over the republic. These people are sick.”

Trump hasn’t committed enough crimes to establish enough control over the population and suppress enough dissent against him to declare himself a dictator.

“I’m not a dictator.” But he’s getting close.

And he may get there if we continue to accept the lie rather than insist on the truth. There really is a massive crime wave. It really deserves a national response. But it has nothing to do with an 18-year-old boy.

Only one top Dem knows how to turn the tables on Trump and his sniveling minions

The president has been working hard trying to convince Americans that crime is so bad right now that he has no choice but to send armed military to patrol major cities to restore law and order, in the process stripping citizens of rights and liberties in the name of public safety.

Unfortunately, the reaction among Democratic leaders has been mixed, to put it mildly, but I think California Governor Gavin Newsom has shown a way forward. He said that if Donald Trump truly cared about crime, he would “invest in crime suppression” in states like “Speaker Johnson’s state and district.”

Look at the murder rate in Louisiana, he said. It’s “nearly four times higher than California’s.”

The implication, of course, is that neither Trump nor the Republicans in the Congress actually care about crime. They only say they do as a smokescreen for trying to subdue, control and “own” their perceived liberal enemies residing in cities and states governed by Democrats.

And because Newsom’s allegation — that Trump and the Republicans care less about crime than they do political oppression —rang so loudly and clearly, the House speaker was asked on Fox to respond. What I want to tell you is that it was a sight to behold!

“We have crime in cities all across America and we are against that everywhere,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually. We’ve got to address it everywhere that it rears its ugly head, and I think every major city in the country, the residents of those cities are open to that, and anxious to have it, and we’re … the party that’s going to bring that forward.”

Amazing! Why? Because in that brief moment, the Republican leader of the United States Congress sounded just like a Democrat would sound after being attacked by a Republican.

Johnson does not counterattack. He did not say Newsom was lying (Newsom was not lying). Instead, Johnson did what his counterpart Hakeem Jeffries often does after a Republican lays into him. He retreated to a “reasonable man’s” position to show that his party is the party that really cares about crime.

How did this happen?

First, Newsom told the truth. Red-state crime surpasses blue-state crime.

Second, by telling the truth, he questioned Trump’s intentions. If crime is such an emergency in Washington and Chicago that he has to send in the military to restore public safety, why isn’t he doing that in Louisiana? Why isn’t the House speaker demanding law and order? The implied answer is they don’t really care about law and order, only whether what they say about it leads to the subjugation they desire.

But importantly, Newsom did not accept as true anything Trump and the Republicans say about crime and public safety. He did not validate any of their lies. He did not concede any ground to them. He did not say to himself, “Well, Americans really are concerned about crime and Democrats shouldn’t ignore that.” He knows Trump does not care, and did not cover up bad faith with good faith. Most of all, he did not, as historian Timothy Snyder often warns, surrender in advance.

The result?

Johnson retreated. In the face of attack, he tried making himself seem like “the adult in the room.”

“We’ve got to address [crime] everywhere that it rears its ugly head.” He did what Democrats do. That’s amazing.

Most Democrats do not have the megaphone that Newsom has. Most are not going to force Fox to ask high-level Republicans to respond to them. Even so, what Newsom is doing is replicable. Do not accept in any way the lies told by Trump and the GOP, even when, or especially when, those lies come out of the mouths of independent voters. The Republicans do not mean what they say. They do not act in good faith. Overlooking this fundamental truth inevitably makes things worse.

This is why I see potential disaster in efforts by a “new coalition” of more than 100 “new Dems” in the House to show voters they really care about immigration reform. The Washington Post reported on the group’s “bipartisan” proposal, a mix of increased “border security” and more ways for immigrants to reside legally. And while that may sound reasonable, it’s not, because it accepts as true the allegations against undocumented immigrants: that they are committing serious crimes.

They are not. Entering the US without authorization is a misdemeanor on par with reckless driving and breaching the peace. Because it’s also a civil offense, judges hear cases in immigration court, not criminal court. “Unlawful entry” doesn’t rise to a felony unless it’s been done many times over, and most immigrants, once they come, they stay.

This is not news to the Democrats, but they have ceded this ground over and over for decades in the mistaken belief that it was better to compromise with the Republicans than to fight them head on, even though the Republicans, especially after 2016, did not act in good faith.

They said the immigration issue was about “law and order.” They said it was about “border integrity.” They said it was about an important thing that mattered to everyone. It was never so. The immigration issue was always about maintaining the dominance of white people in America.

But by accepting the Republicans’ lies in “the spirit of bipartisanship,” the Democrats made the lies real. They also made themselves complicit in turning immigrants into threats so monstrous that the president was justified in creating a secret police force (ICE) that is now breaking the law and profaning the Constitution to expel “the criminal aliens.”

Worst of all perhaps is that while finding “common ground” with liars and bigots, the Democrats have not mounted an unadulterated defense of immigration. It is good, in and of itself – for our economy, our communities and our culture. We should want more immigrants to become Americans. We should make it easier for them, not harder. And we can do that by upholding the true meaning of law and order.

That immigration is an essential good is implicit in recent polling that shows the uglier Trump gets with immigrants, the less popular he gets. To me, that suggests an opportunity for the Democrats. But before they move ahead, they should follow Gavin Newsom’s example in believing bipartisanship does not require surrendering in advance.

This single ICE detainment shows the depth of Trump's disgrace

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainment of J.R. Tucker High School student Armand Momand constitutes a constitutional outrage.

Because of his father’s service to the U.S. government in Afghanistan, Momand has legal U.S. immigration status. Yet ICE agents took him into custody Aug. 8 after convictions in an Henrico County court for driving more than 20 miles an hour over the speed limit and disorderly conduct, both misdemeanors.

Now, the government that Momand’s father risked his life to serve in fighting terrorism wants to deport his 19-year-old son, despite the young man’s lawful presence in the United States.

The deportation debacle ordered by President Donald Trump has turned into a nightmare of lies and unconstitutional behavior.

Trump’s demonization of immigrants in the name of nationalism doesn’t get much worse than betraying those who placed themselves in harm’s way to support this country.

On its website, ICE lists criminal convictions which would cause the service to detain an immigrant because they pose “a public safety or national security threat.”

The list includes burglaries and robberies. It includes kidnapping, homicide, sexual assault, and weapons offenses. It includes drug trafficking, and human trafficking.

What the list does not include are Momand’s convictions for reckless driving for going more than 20 miles an hour over the speed or misdemeanor disorderly conduct, a charge which prosecutors reduced from an original felony charge for eluding or disregarding police.

To detain an immigrant, federal law requires ICE to have “probable cause” to believe the immigrant has committed a federal crime or is illegally residing in this country.

Momand has done neither, his lawyer, Miriam Airington-Fisher, told me in an interview.

Public records that I looked at show that a Virginia district court judge gave Momand no jail time for his state convictions on August 8. Yet ICE detained him to consider for deportation.

According to Airington-Fisher, Momand is a legal resident of this country who is pursuing permanent legal status and eventually U.S. citizenship.

Momand was born in Afghanistan. Momand’s father received a Special Immigration Visa to bring his wife and children to America because he helped the U.S. military during its fight against Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan. The visas granted to Momand’s father and his family come with extensive vetting and reflect the deadly Taliban retribution faced by Afghanis who worked with Americans.

Virginia court records show no other criminal history for Momand. Airington-Fisher told me that is because the teenager has none. Ironically, Momand’s continued detention by ICE forced him to reschedule a green card interview set for Aug. 14, Airington-Fisher said.

ICE has offered no legal explanation for Momand’s imprisonment to his lawyers or family, Airington-Fisher added.

“We received a notice to appear at a hearing to initiate deportation,” she explained.

That Aug. 25 hearing was postponed because of a “crowded” court docket, Airington-Fisher told me a day later. Now, to argue for bond, Momand, a legal U.S. resident, must wait until a rescheduled hearing on Sept. 8. He must spend a month in a federal detention center and miss the first two weeks of school. This is what passes for a speedy trial in Trump’s nationalist crackdown on a legal teen immigrant.

Momand, his family, and lawyers remain “completely in the dark” about the legal justification for the young man’s imprisonment, Airington-Fisher said.

“ICE can’t dissolve his visa status,” Airington-Fisher told me. “We do not believe his detention is legal.”

The ICE detainee database shows Momand is being held at the Abyon Farmville Detention Center.

On Aug. 19, I asked ICE if Momand had been charged with any crimes, and if so, what crimes. The media office acknowledged my request, but has yet to get back to me with an answer.

“You can’t just arrest someone and then figure out whether they did anything wrong,” immigration lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, a partner with the firm Murray Osorio, said in an interview on Aug. 19. “What was the probable cause to think this person committed a federal crime or was illegally in the country?”

Sandoval-Moshenberg represents Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the man ICE seized and was mistakenly deported by the Trump administration to a brutal El Salvadoran prison in defiance of a federal court order.

As Momand’s Aug. 25 hearing was being postponed in Virginia, ICE was again detaining Abrego Garcia for deportation three days after a judge ordered his release from custody as he awaits trial on federal criminal charges by the Trump administration.

Sandoval-Moshenberg stressed that situations like Momand’s are very different from the Abrego Garcia case, which involves allegations of criminal felonies.

Momand’s case deals with basic constitutional rights such as being told of the charges against him and the right to a bond hearing so he could go to school between legal hearings and the constitutional requirement that the government must justify its legal right to deport him.

Most of all, Momand’s case involves the Trump administration’s detention of immigrants living legally in the United States without probable cause.

Finally, Momand’s case deals with Trump’s disrespect for the Special Immigration Visas meant to protect people who faced death constantly to help America fight ruthless terrorists. This is why the law provides Special Immigrant Visa holders an opportunity to get a green card and an eventual path to American citizenship.

Asked about Momand’s detention by journalists, Virginia Gov. Glen Youngkin treated the young man as a dangerous criminal who deserved to be in custody while he is investigated for charges that had already been litigated and resolved.

Youngkin got it backwards. And he took the position that misdemeanor convictions in a traffic incident qualify as proof of a national security risk.

Under Trump’s indiscriminate immigrant removal policies, immigrants can no longer rely on being in the U.S. legally to protect themselves from being harassed and possibly deported, Adam Bates, senior supervisory lawyer for the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me.

“People now do everything they are supposed to, but they get grabbed off the street for doing nothing wrong,” Bates told me.

I have met two Afghans who worked with the American government and who currently live in the U.S. One barely eluded capture by the Taliban as he set up forward communications systems for U.S. Marines. The other risked attack each day for translating in public for an American military contractor.

They, and others like them, worked knowing the fate of people like Sohail Pardis, an Afghani interpreter beheaded by the Taliban for aiding the American government.

The system for granting immigrants who helped America fight terrorism special visas is exhaustive and time-consuming.

For the Trump administration to now turn its back on foreigners who risked their lives on America’s behalf to pursue a nationalist deportation policy that demonizes all immigrants is cruel and self-destructive. The policy betrays constitutional and moral principles, not to mention national security.

“It is horrific the extent to which we put people in mortal danger to help with our war effort and then toss them aside like used candy wrappers,” said Sandoval-Moshenberg. “It is going to have disastrous long-term foreign policy consequences.”

In Virginia, the ICE handling of Arman Momand should also have consequences.

If it proves anything, it proves that immigrants are not and have never been America’s enemy.

I was a teenage Trumper: How a first-gen immigrant fell out of love with MAGA

At 21, Steve Vilchez is much like any other senior at Illinois State University. Studying biology teacher education, he aspires to teach high school science.

But, Vilchez has an unusual story to tell. From 2016 until the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, he was a passionate teenage Donald Trump fan.

Breaking with Trump and the Republican party he dominates was a slow and challenging process, Vilchez said, particularly since Trump surged back to power this year.

Vilchez has found support in Leaving MAGA, an online community of former Trump supporters of which, he said, he’s by far the youngest member.

Setting out to tell others about his experiences, Vilchez told Raw Story: “I'm doing much better now than I was when I was in MAGA.”

‘The other side’

Back in 2016, while classmates played video games, Vilchez obsessed over politics and the U.S. presidential election.

He couldn’t vote. Just 13, he was still a middle-schooler in Berwyn, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. But he saw himself as a “very staunch Democrat,” all the same.

He called himself a “Bernie bro,” backing Bernie Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, for the Democratic presidential nomination. When the party nominated the former New York senator and U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Vilchez swallowed his disappointment, excited to witness the anticipated election of the first female U.S. president.

History had other ideas, so when Trump won, Vilchez decided to give him a chance, first by learning more about “the other side.”

“I was a little bit concerned about how my future was going to be, how my parents’ future was going to be,” said Vilchez, who says he is a "Hispanic, first-generation immigrant.”

Steve Vilchez (Photo courtesy of Steve Vilchez)

“But … I wanted to see if maybe Donald Trump really isn't as bad as the Clinton campaign would say.”

Vilchez decided to do some research. That led him down a rabbit hole, lined with YouTube videos and social media posts.

Drawn to younger conservative commentators like Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens, he also found Tucker Carlson, then a primetime Fox News star.

“Very quickly,” Vilchez “abandoned” his previous news diet of NBC, ABC, Vice, Vox and CNN, in favor of Fox News, One American News Network and Breitbart.

“It quickly became like an echo chamber for myself. I was only willing to hear things that supported Trump and Trump only,” Vilchez said.

“It was kind of like a downward spiral from there.”

As Vilchez became a “very, very hardcore Trump supporter,” some friends stopped talking to him.

Still, he found half-a-dozen other Trump fans to eat lunch with at school.

“Each day we would all talk about Trump, saying how he's this great person, and just repeating the same things over and over, just parroting each other and saying like a bunch of ‘what ifs’, and ‘Trump's gonna drain the swamp. He's gonna find the corruption,’” Vilchez said.

Vilchez listened to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. He came to believe some “conspiracies that MAGA was saying.”

“If someone says a lie enough, people are going to believe it, and this lie was propagated so many times that I bought into it,” Vilchez said.

“I bought into this lie that there was this somehow a deep state that Trump was going to expose, and Trump keeps talking about it to this day that there's a deep state, but he hasn't done anything about it.”

‘Question my allegiance’

Vilchez stayed on the MAGA bandwagon throughout Trump's first term.

But in 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, he began to “really question my actual allegiance to Trump.

“Seeing Donald Trump practically downplay it, and in a sense calling it ‘Kung Flu,’ ‘the China virus,’ and ultimately, when he reached a point where he was telling people to inject bleach in the body, [advising taking] hydroxychloroquine [and other medicines not proven against COVID], [and saying,] ‘You could shine a light through the body,’ that made me very upset.”

“Even though I didn't know much about immunology and disease prevention, I knew that these things were dangerous. I knew that some people might get hurt, and in rare cases, they might die.”

Vilchez said he started to further “question my faith with MAGA” when he considered the movement’s climate change denialism.

Despite such doubts, Vilchez remained a supporter through the 2020 election and at first “bought into” Trump’s claims the election was stolen by former vice president Joe Biden, the victorious Democratic nominee.

Vilchez liked a thousand tweets in three days, as “so-called evidence,” he said.

Now, he wants to “unlike those, so that I don't have to remind myself of those, but also I kind of do like seeing those in my memories because it reminds me of the change I've made.”

A “seed began to plant” in terms of doubts about MAGA, Vilchez said, and “as the days got closer to the insurrection, more water was being added to that plant.”

Watching the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, on live news coverage shown in his high-school English class, Vilchez said he was struck by the hypocrisy of Trump and his supporters.

Both said they “back the blue, blue lives matter,” Vilchez said, but “at the same time, they were completely complacent and tolerating many rioters and insurrectionists violently attacking and ultimately causing the death of Capitol police officers, so I was very taken aback by that.”

After that, Vilchez “made a vow to myself to not support Trump, but I still remained a pretty firm conservative.”

He didn’t fully leave the Republican party until the 2022 midterms.

“I was seeing the evidence happen real time, and as much as it pained for me to realize that maybe Trump was wrong, I had to take that pill,” Vilchez said.

“Very reluctantly, I made that choice to realize Trump isn't this godly figure that people claim him to be.”

‘I’m done’

Vilchez said the last straw was continued false claims of election fraud.

“Seeing [Trump Senior Adviser] Kari Lake kind of go back to that 2020 tactic of, ‘Oh, I lost, so it must be rigged.’ At that point, I was like ‘I'm done with the Republican Party,’” Vilchez said.

“This is what you're going to keep doing? You guys lost 2020, just admit that as much as it sucks, you guys lost.”

Lake lost her runs for Arizona governor and the U.S. Senate. Still a fervent Trump supporter, she is now overseeing the attempted closure of Voice of America.

Vilchez voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in his first presidential election and considers himself a “center left-leaning” voter.

But he retains some “conservative-ish” beliefs.

He’s a “big supporter of guns,” and “pro-life,” but he also wouldn’t “force my opinion” if his future wife wanted an abortion, he said.

He believes in health care for all, the need to meet the challenge of climate change and the benefits of giving children free school lunch.

“As much as people might call that socialist, I disagree,” Vilchez said. “I think it's called being a good person.

“In MAGA, we were all kind of living in fear of other people. That's the way that MAGA seems to operate is they like to run by fear … Donald Trump knows how to weaponize fear very, very well. It's very scary that he knows how to do it.”

Under the second Trump administration, Vilchez said, raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have prompted tough conversations with his parents.

“It reached a point where my parents sat me and my brothers down and talked to us, saying, ‘Hey, if we get deported, this is what's going to happen,’” Vilchez said.

“I never thought that I’d have to have that conversation, but given that it's a reality from any point until Trump's term ends, it's kind of grim.”

His previous support for Trump, he said, “goes to prove that very young minds are very impressionable, and if they're not guided correctly, then these things can happen.

“Since I'm trying to become a teacher, I should make sure that I teach students how to check their sources.”

This Trump tactic is a dire warning of something awful

In April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old construction worker near Bryan, Texas, was grabbed, detained, and ultimately deported in shackles to Venezuela under false charges that he was a member of the Tren de Aragua gang.

His story was detailed last week by the Texas Observer. He’d worked for the same employer, a Venezuelan Pepsi affiliate, for nearly two decades, and had no criminal history or record of gang activity. The arresting officers claimed his Air Jordans — a brand 24 percent of sneaker wearers in the U.S. reportedly own — were a symbol of gang membership.

Federal agents in President Donald Trump’s high-profile military occupation of Washington, D.C. are zeroing in on food delivery drivers, many of them on mopeds, making them easy targets for abduction, the Washington Post reports.

Gabriel Ravelo Torrealba, 22, needed hospital treatment for hand and leg injuries inflicted in his arrest.

Christian Carías Torres, shot with a stun gun during his arrest, was branded a “suspected gang member,” an allegation, the Post noted, “the Trump administration has repeatedly used without providing evidence.”

Those rounded up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal policing agencies are far from the “worst of the worst” boasted by Trump in his campaign mass deportation pledge. ICE’s own data shows 72 percent of those detained “have no known criminal convictions or pending criminal charges,” as Fortune magazine reported in July.

To meet his arbitrary quota of seizures, deportation fanatic Stephen Miller scuttled any emphasis on the “worst” by racially profiling ordinary working people at Home Deport parking lots, farms, other work sites, and outside court hearings they’d attended to meet legal obligations. Numerous legal immigrants and even citizens continue to be grabbed.

“The President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here,” Escalona Mújicas said one of his arresting agents told him.

Similarly, in the D.C. operation, ICE and other federal agents are avoiding “the city’s high-crime areas,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie wrote.

“There are soldiers patrolling the National Mall; armored vehicles parked at Union Station; and ICE agents manning checkpoints on U Street, an area known for its bars, restaurants, and nightlife. They’re not there for safety, but for show.”

“If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of D.C. residents, I would see National Guard in my neighborhood. I’m not seeing it, and I don’t expect to see it,” one resident of D.C.’s Congress Heights neighborhood told Times reporter Clyde McGrady.

“I don’t think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in Southeast.”

Corollary consequences for the Gestapo-style raids and domestic military campaigns extend to the distortion of federal budget priorities. The D.C. occupation alone is costing $1 million a day, according to an analysis by Hanna Homestead of the National Priorities Project.

One less publicized provision of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” was the gift of $75 billion in extra funding for ICE, “making it by far the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the federal government,” CBS News reported.

National Nurses United researchers found far more useful ways to allocate that funding rather than on terrorizing immigrant families and communities.

For the same $75 billion, we could eradicate all medical debt accrued by 31 million people, cover over two years of universal pre-K for all 3- and 4-year-olds, pay for nearly all tuition and fees for students in public universities across the U.S., and substantially reduce the costs of child poverty in the nation or most of the homeless crisis in California. The same amount could also end both extreme and chronic hunger around the world for two years.

The militarization has a deeper, malevolent purpose, wrote Monica Potts in The New Republic.

“Trump isn’t actually worried about crime. He’s not trying to make the district safer for its residents, and he’s certainly not weighing the data and evidence when he calls on governors to send guardsmen. Parading troops through an American city is a brazen authoritarian power grab.”

"There is not a crime crisis in D.C.," former D.C. Metropolitan reserve police officer Rosa Brooks who now teaches at Georgetown Law School told NPR, which reiterated Justice Department data that crime in Washington has plummeted with violence reaching a 30-year low last year.

"This is police state territory, banana republic police state territory," Brooks said.

Potts notes: “This is what it means to learn to live in an authoritarian police state, and people are using the only tools they have: cell phones and sandwiches. The longer ICE raids and military takeovers go on, the more they will inspire protests around the country, which may be the only excuse Trump is waiting for to claim that cities are full of disorder and then crack down even harder.”

Trump says he is targeting Chicago and New York next for his next Democratic majority-city occupations. He may also have in mind “an intimidation tactic to try to suppress voters in cities ahead of the 2026 midterm,” Potts observes.

“It’s definitely part of Trump’s only true and unwavering project: consolidating power (Italics added). Even as he’s posting on Truth Social about crime in D.C., he’s cheering efforts in Texas to redraw district maps to elect more Republicans to the House next year and launching an effort to get rid of mail-in ballots.”

As with Trump’s march to autocratic power, the parallels with Hitler and Nazi Germany are unmistakable and should be chilling to everyone. Within two months of being handed power by the conservative old guard Weimar Republic in January 1933, Hitler made two major moves, as Peter Fritzsche describes in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.

First, he persuaded his conservative coalition partners to call for new elections by early March.

Then, the Nazis engineered or at least exploited a fire in the Reichstag in late February, Germany’s Capitol building, to invoke emergency decrees. They served, Fritzsche notes, to “suspend civil liberties, expand protective custody” and other authoritarian powers that “symbolized the death of representative government and the rule of law.”

It also gave the Nazis the opening to complete a takeover of German policing to engage in arrests, detention, and violent assaults on all political opposition.

Coupled with the election, in which the Nazis increased their political power through domination of the media, mobilization of state resources, demonization of their version of “enemies from within” (mainly Jews and Communists), and the traumatizing impact of an increased militarization, Hitler and the Nazis had the means to manufacture mass consent, silence dissent, and cement fascist rule.

Potts is unimpressed with much of the Democratic leadership response. She cites Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s dismissal of Trump’s takeover of D.C. as a “political ploy” and an “attempted distraction” from problems like the tariffs and Epstein files. But, she emphasizes, “the federal agents and troops are not the distraction. They are the whole point — quite literally the spear in Trump’s increasingly fascist assault on American democracy.”

Democratic leaders, Potts added on the Daily Blast podcast with Greg Sargent, “should start calling things like they see them and they should say, you’re not coming to our cities, you’re not coming to our towns with the military, you’re not going to turn this country into a dictatorship. The idea that there’s still time is really critical. And voters like it when elected leaders fight for them.”

That is the immediate challenge we face with Trump and Trumpism today.

Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members

This JD Vance stupidity is most damaging of all

The vice president was on the TV recently, and said something that was not only stupid but a bald-faced lie made more disgusting by the fact of its stupidity.

“As we've kicked illegal aliens out of our country,” JD Vance said, “you actually see housing costs start to level off."

Though the regime is snatching more immigrants from our streets, housing costs are not leveling off here in Connecticut. Someone like me, who makes a modest living, cannot find a modest house for under $350,000. Rents are worse, and they keep going up. Mine did. And none of this is due to the presence, or absence, of “illegal aliens.”

Vance is lying but he’s also asking us to be stupid. Are we supposed to blame the most vulnerable people for a policy problem? That’s what the housing crisis is.

For one thing, there’s not enough of it. (State and local laws inhibit new construction.) For another, bad actors are gaming the system (private-equity groups gobble up properties and use AI to gin up rents.)

One more thing: much of the blame for the housing crisis can be laid at the feet of the president. And JD Vance knows it.

High inflation leads to higher interest rates, which means people are not selling, because there are not enough buyers who want to buy at higher rates, which reduces an already-reduced housing supply. Meanwhile, people like me, who cannot afford to buy, must compete for apartments, which drives up rents. And lying beneath all that is something the vice president would prefer you did not think about.

Tariffs.

Donald Trump’s illegal national sales tax is keeping inflation high, because it pushes prices higher. The Federal Reserve won’t cut interest rates with inflation as high as it is, which means borrowing is more expensive, which means people are not buying, which means people are not selling, which means the housing supply keeps getting smaller.

In theory, I suppose you could say, as Vance does, that a solution to the housing crisis is just getting rid of “illegal aliens” so there are fewer people competing for housing.

But that’s stupid. A better solution is to stop taxing the essentials of life so inflation can ease, so interest rates can fall, so people can start putting their houses up for sale again. But it’s not just stupid. It’s disgusting. Getting rid of people should not be the solution to a policy problem. What we need is better policy.

To hear the vice president tell it, the Trump regime isn’t to blame for these problems, only a Democratic Party that allegedly puts “the rights of foreigners over the interests of American citizens.” And while they search for scapegoats for the problems they create, the problems they create continue to impoverish people like me. And that makes me mad.

Let me put it this way.

In the coming months, my health insurance premium is going to spike. By how much? I don’t know exactly, but it will be more than double. I buy coverage through Connecticut’s insurance exchange (Obamacare). In Trump's “big, beautiful bill,” the Republicans in effect repealed the federal subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. They are set to expire at year’s end, at which point I will face a kind of Sophie’s choice: Either I pay impossible rates every month or I just go without health insurance.

I won’t be alone.

“Nearly all of the roughly 24 million Americans enrolled in healthcare coverage via the ACA exchanges will face massive premium hikes – in many cases, three and four times higher than what they’re paying right now,” Charles Gaba told me recently.

“Millions will be priced out of being able to afford coverage at all,” Charles said, “while most of the rest will have to either eat the higher premiums, downgrade to a lower-quality plan with higher deductibles, higher copays, a worse provider network or all of the above. Or they’ll have to move to non-ACA coverage via so-called ‘junk plans,’ which have few if any of the patient protections required by ACA plans.”

Millions will be priced out. That almost certainly includes me.

The vice president would have us believe that whatever problems the people of this country face, the solution is getting rid of “illegals.”

Let me tell you something: no immigrant ever taxed me, illegally. No immigrant raised my rent. No immigrant made it prohibitive to buy a house. No immigrant made choices that resulted in my grocery and electric bills going up and up. No immigrant forced me to give up my health insurance. No immigrant lied about the injuries he caused.

And no immigrant tried to silence me.

The regime has established checkpoints in Washington, DC, to demand that residents prove who they are. It’s a model that could be replicated nationally at next year’s midterm elections.

“This will not start and end in DC,” said Attorneys General Kathy Jennings of Delaware and Kwame Raoul of Illinois in a statement. “The president has made his intentions very clear that he wants to abuse his powers to take over other cities, using these troops as a tool to advance his political agenda.”

If voter intimidation and harassment don’t work, there’s always cheating. Texas passed legislation that would redraw its congressional maps, giving the president five more House seats. Other red states are following suit. The governor of Texas has said he will sue in federal court to prevent blue state leaders from counterattacking.

In a democracy, we are supposed to be able to complain when our leaders and their policies do us harm. But Trump is creating conditions that are tantamount to those of rape, so he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, and all the rest of us can do is shut up and take it.

As you can imagine, I’m not in the mood for Democratic leaders to be equivocal about the injuries that are being committed by this regime.

I’m not receptive to Hakeem Jeffries, for instance, for saying New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s rent-controlled apartment is a “legitimate” subject of public concern, not when my own extortionate rent is very much a burden to me for the fact of it being out of control.

I’m not warm to Democrats accepting as true the total falsehood that Americans actually like the military occupation of Washington, DC.

And I’m not open to Democrats who pretend to believe the lies told by their enemies about virtually anything – whether the subject is crime or immigrants or other Democrats – not when inflation would be down, interest rates would be lower, housing would be more affordable and I would still have healthcare coverage had Kamala Harris been elected.

I am, however, interested in resentment, which is to say, I’m interested in any Democrat who can tell the difference between resentment based on nothing (the kind the vice president panders to) and resentment based on something (like mine).

I’m interested in any Democrat who has the spine to come to his own conclusions for the purpose of putting all that energy to good use. And I’m interested in any Democrat who is willing to speak the whole truth, saying that no immigrant has hurt Americans the way this president is hurting us.

No immigrant told me lies.

And unlike JD Vance, no immigrant asked me to be stupid.