Jeff Danziger lives in New York City and Vermont. He is a long time cartoonist for The Rutland Herald and is represented by Counterpoint Syndicate. He is a recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons, a novel and a memoir. Visit him at jeffdanziger.com.
The Trump administration is offering undocumented immigrants a paltry $1,000 if they choose to “self-deport” in a “dignified” way.
A Monday release from the Department of Homeland Security said immigrants would be paid the stipend “after their return to their home country has been confirmed” through Customs and Border Protection’s Home App.
“This is the safest option for our law enforcement, aliens and is a 70% savings for US taxpayers,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a post on X.
The announcement is a new focal point of President Donald Trump’s ongoing and chaotic policy of mass deportation, with the goal of purging the United States—a nation formed by immigrants—of immigrants. The Trump administration has already been executing that policy by abducting people, some in broad daylight, and forcibly transporting them to foreign nations and the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador. Some, like Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, are legally qualified to be in the United States but have nonetheless been removed by Trump’s goons.
The notion that undocumented immigrants would go to such extraordinary lengths to come to the United States, only to upend the life they’ve built for a mere $1,000 is ridiculous on its face. Furthermore, immigration experts who have ridiculed such “self-deportation” policies in the past said migrants who take this offer would often be facing terrible financial straits, violence, or worse in their countries of origin.
Even nonexperts have said such policies are “crazy,” “maniacal,” and “mean-spirited”—at least, that’s how Trump himself described the idea when it was proposed by failed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the DHS claim in its release that people opting to take the stipend could possibly return to the U.S. after self-deporting was “wildly deceptive.”
“For many people, this is a lie. Leaving will make their cases much worse,” he wrote. Reichlin-Melnick noted that if a person took the offer, a deportation order could then be handed down in court for failing to appear in court.
Even more concerning is Trump’s long history of lying and misleading on matters both big and small. There is little guarantee based on his track record in the presidency and in his private life that Trump’s administration would fulfill a promise to a migrant.
There are also signs that the policy announcement was intertwined with efforts to promote pro-Trump propaganda on the right-wing Fox News network.
Fox reporter Bill Melugin posted on Monday that he had been given “exclusive” early access to the announcement. He then promoted the announcement in an on-air segment on America’s Newsroom. DHS official Tricia McLaughlin did an interview with that program’s hosts to tout the idea as well.
Fox News also pushed the policy in an online story.
Noem has become notorious for engaging in laughable cosplay while doing public relations appearances pushing Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. It looks like that hobby is a better use of time and taxpayer funds than the administration’s new and unworkable self-deportation plan.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
An order recently striking down an effort by President Donald Trump's administration to keep a man incarcerated in a foreign country without due process is piquing the interest of one legal expert -- who argues it may have been written for a very specific audience.
During a Thursday segment with CNN host John Berman, legal analyst Elie Honig — a former federal prosecutor — broke down the seven-page opinion issued by U.S. Circuit Court Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III (an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan), which was joined by two other judges on a panel from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.
That opinion denied the Trump administration Department of Justice's request for a stay on an order issued by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in the case of mistakenly deported Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, along with his request for a writ of mandamus (an order instructing a government official to perform a specific duty).Honig argued that Wilkinson — who he noted was a "widely respected conservative — was also writing his opinion "for the U.S. Supreme Court," as he is "one of the very few appellate court judges in the country who has real sway with the Justice Scalias, Alitos, Gorsuchs, et cetera," referencing three of the most conservative members of the High Court. He characterized Wilkinson's seven-page opinion as "a plea to rationality."
"I think he's anticipating, probably correctly, that this case will, one way or another, wind up at the Supreme Court," Honig said. "And I think he's inviting, exhorting the Supreme Court, 'we need you to get more firm and more specific here. The stakes are too high.'"
Last week, the Supreme Court handed down a 9-0 decision telling the administration it had to "facilitate" the return of Abrego Garcia, though Trump has yet to do so. Honig posited that Wilkinson is aiming to convince the six-member conservative supermajority on the Court by way of acknowledging their actions as the lodestar by which lower court judges like him base their decisions. And in doing so, Honig argued that SCOTUS could be pigeonholed into holding fast and adding teeth to their prior order.
"He acknowledges in the short term, the executive branch will do what it will do. And there's not a whole heck of a lot we, the courts, can do about it. We rely on the power of words, the power of suasion. but ultimately, the courts and the law will rule. when history looks back at this, it will not look fondly on you. executive branch, if you continue to defy the law," Honig said. "I think that's a very powerful way that he says it."
Watch below:
Reprinted with permission from Alternet
Days after a newly filed court brief unveiled, in painstaking detail, the duplicity of the Fox News network's coverage of the 2020 presidential election, calls have grown for its billionaire owner, Rupert Murdoch, to be deported.
Twitter users blasted Murdoch over the weekend after Dominion Voting Systems' bombshell brief Thursday showed the media mogul, along with his star hosts and executives at the right-wing network, broadcast baseless election fraud allegations they privately acknowledged weren't true.
According to Dominion, Fox News hosts Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity repeatedly ridiculed then-President Donald Trump and his allies for alleging without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen — false charges the hosts simultaneously peddled on air at the time.
As of Sunday, neither Fox nor the New York Post — two arms of Murdoch's media empire — had reported on the damning revelation. On Friday, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal branded Dominion's $1.6 billion lawsuit a "case [that] primarily centers on false theories pushed on Fox programs by associates of [Trump]." The report named Carlson and Ingraham twice and glossed over Hannity altogether.
What all three news outlets have done in copious amounts since President Joe Biden took office, however, is rail against his administration's immigration policies.
Fox, for example, has published over 40 reports on "border security" since Monday, February 13, a search on its website for the keyword showed.
In one of his late-night shows last July, Carlson blasted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This decades-old federal law eliminated a quota system limiting the number of people from a nation who could migrate to the United States.
Ranting about a George Soros-linked organization he said was "helping young border crossers avoid deportation," Carlson asked, "Why is some foreign-born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally?"
"Actually, Tucker, the bigger question is whether or not you remember who signs your paychecks," Rolling Stone's Kat Bouza wrote at the time.
\u201cTucker: Why is some foreign born billionaire allowed to change our country fundamentally?\u201d— Acyn (@Acyn) 1658276215
Carlson's boss, Murdoch, is an Australian-born entrepreneur. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1985 to bypass an American law that barred foreign nationals from owning more than 20 percent of an American broadcasting license.
Murdoch and Carlson secretly ridiculed Trump's voter fraud claims, which hit the airwaves even before election night was over, the New York Times reported Thursday.
In private communications, Carlson called Trump, the peddler-in-chief of the Big Lie, a "demonic force who excels at "destroying things."
"He’s the undisputed world champion of that. He could easily destroy us if we play it wrong," Carlson wrote, according to The Guardian.
“Terrible stuff damaging everybody, I fear, ” Murdoch wrote to Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott after watching an unhinged press conference by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell on November 19, 2020.
Murdoch, text messages in Dominion's filing further showed, thought the fraud allegations were "really crazy stuff" and that it would be “very hard to credibly claim foul everywhere," reported the Washington Post.
Ingraham called Powell "a complete nut," while Carlson branded the "Kraken" attorney an “unguided missile” and “dangerous as hell.”
Other top executives of the network shared Murdoch's view of the false fraud claims but, like their colleagues, kept mum about the truth for fear of losing viewers to nascent far-right news channels publicly endorsing the baseless claims of fraud.
Bill Sammon, the network's Washington bureau chief at the time, privately remarked on Fox's 2020 election coverage, writing, “It’s remarkable how weak ratings make good journalists do bad things.”
In a brief filed Thursday, Fox said Dominion had “cherry-picked quotes stripped of key context" to buttress what it said was the voting machine maker's flawed view of defamation law.
“There will be a lot of noise and confusion generated by Dominion and their opportunistic private equity owners, but the core of this case remains about freedom of the press and freedom of speech," the network said.
The revelation has, nevertheless, spurred calls for the U.S. government to deal Murdoch the same hand that his news organizations have advocated for other less-powerful immigrants.
"Denaturalize and forcibly deport: [Rupert Murdoch]. §1481.(7) ...violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States," a Twitter user wrote on Friday.
\u201cDenaturalize and forcibly deport:\n\n-= Rupert Murdoch =-\n\n\u00a71481.(7) ...violating section 2384 of title 18 by engaging in a conspiracy to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States.\u201d— \ud835\udc13\ud835\udc22\ud835\udc26\uea00\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8#VOTE\ud83d\uddf3\ufe0f \u00ae\u2122\ufe0f (@\ud835\udc13\ud835\udc22\ud835\udc26\uea00\ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\uddf8#VOTE\ud83d\uddf3\ufe0f \u00ae\u2122\ufe0f) 1676650434
Several others in the Twitterverse had echoed the call.
\u201cAustralian born Rupert Murdoch, owner of FOX NEWS, became an American citizen in 1985. He was 54.\n\nHow did he show his love for America? He lied and shit on the American people, all the while filling his pockets $.\n\nRevoke his Citizenship, deport the 92 yr old GREEDY BASTARD\u201d— Duke of Earl 3 \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 \ud83d\udeab NO DM's or LISTS (@Duke of Earl 3 \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 \ud83d\udeab NO DM's or LISTS) 1676703341
\u201cWhen Fox \u201cNews\u201d poses as journalism but is actually a disinformation operation (as proven in new court filings), it\u2019s engaged in a sinister plot to increase racism and division in the U.S. and usher in fascism.\nDeport Rupert Murdoch.\u201d— Mark Jacob (@Mark Jacob) 1676608529
\u201cAt what point does America deport Rupert Murdoch and family members who work at Fox "News" back to Australia??\nhttps://t.co/UD1EMQbdCj\u201d— Make America Relax Again (@Make America Relax Again) 1676649106
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