Tag: ice
Mass Deportation

Lies, Damned Lies, And Mass Deportations

Donald Trump returned to power apparently convinced that America is being overrun with violent immigrant criminals. So all he had to do was order ICE to start rounding up these evildoers and kick them out.

However, tracking down undocumented immigrants who are also criminals has turned out to be a slow affair, because the great majority of immigrants — like the great majority of people in general — are law-abiding. In fact, the available evidence suggests that undocumented aliens are less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. Things move a little faster if ICE ignores due process and just sends people it imagines might be criminals to overseas prisons. But this means sending people who may well be innocent — and legal residents — to horrifying gulags. And while such things don’t bother Trump or his top aide Stephen Miller, they do in fact bother many Americans.

Yet Miller, by all accounts, has been deeply frustrated at the slow pace of deportations. So the administration began just rounding up people who look to them like illegal immigrants. Again, the abandonment of due process and rule of law clearly didn’t bother them.

But the loss of an important part of the labor force bothered business interests. And so last week Trump suddenly announced that he wouldn’t be going after immigrant workers in agriculture and the hospitality industry, who are “very good, long time workers.”

What this meant, I guess, was that the dragnets will be limited to industries that employ large numbers of undocumented immigrants, but in which these immigrants are not a crucial part of the work force.

So I wondered how long it would take Trump to realize that there are no such industries. I mean, wait until he learned about who does the hard, dangerous work in the construction industry.

Sure enough, it only took a couple of days for the administration to reverse its policy of exempting farms and restaurants from immigrant raids. Anti-immigrant hardliners realized, even if Trump didn’t, that going easy on immigrants who are crucial to the economy would in effect mean abandoning the whole idea of mass deportation.

As often, it’s useful if disturbing to read what Trump says, unfiltered by media sanewashing.

Notice that Trump is still going on about “our crime ridden and deadly Inner Cities,” oblivious to the reality that homicides in major cities have plunged — in New York, where immigrants make up 37 percent of the population, murders were 83 percent lower in 2024 than in 1990, and have continued to fall rapidly this year. Note also that Trump has gone full Replacement Theory, claiming that Democrats are deliberately bringing in illegal aliens to “expand their voter base” (undocumented immigrants can’t vote.)

But in the context of Trump’s temporary move on farm and hospitality workers, the line that struck me was the one about how immigrants were “robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens.” Which “good paying Jobs and Benefits” did he have in mind? Agricultural field work? Scrubbing toilets? Installing drywall?

Incidentally, not only do undocumented immigrants often do the most physically demanding and unsafe work, they are often deliberately misclassified as independent contractors, which means that they “do not have access to health insurance, medical leave, workers’ compensation insurance coverage, and safe workplace protections.”

The point is that in general undocumented immigrants don’t take good jobs away from native-born Americans. By and large they take jobs the native-born don’t want or would only take at much higher wages. This means that immigrants are complements, not substitutes, for native workers. They increase, not reduce, native-born wages. And mass deportation, if it really gets going, will be an economic as well as a human catastrophe.

Which doesn’t mean that it won’t happen. TACO doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump chickens out from bad policies. Sometimes it means chickening out from good, or in any case less bad, policies. In this case he has chickened out in the face of MAGA hardliners, retreating from a policy change that would have limited the damage from anti-immigrant fanaticism.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Violent Protests In Los Angeles Serve Up Trump's Midterm Propaganda

Violent Protests In Los Angeles Serve Up Trump's Midterm Propaganda

Democrats had better start getting their shit together. In pitting the National Guard and now the U.S. Marines – he mobilized 700 Marines from Camp Pendleton, CA today – against anti-ICE street protesters in Los Angeles, Donald Trump created the question that will be asked every time a Democrat steps in front of a camera for the next 18 months: which side are you on, the violent rioters or the troops? Today, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) spelled out Trump’s strategy in two sentences: “Americans have a choice between Republicans’ law & order vs. the Democrats’ car-burning, illegal alien rioters. So far, every Senate Democrat who has spoken out has backed the rioters.”

There you go, folks. You can say what you will about Trump provoking worse riots by federalizing the CA National Guard without asking Governor Gavin Newsom, but he has framed his politics for the mid-terms. He was always going to use immigration as an issue. Now he can say it’s us against them and point to the riots in L.A. and not just talk about amorphous “illegal immigrants.” Last night on Truth Social, Trump called them “Radical Left protests, by instigators and often paid troublemakers.” At mid-afternoon, returning from a weekend meeting at Camp David, Trump called the protesters “insurrectionists.” The New York Times reported that the word “may become a rationale for him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act.”

Last night, protests spread to San Francisco, where 150 were arrested in clashes with police. Videos of the protests showed men in all-black outfits, wearing hoodies, masks, and backpacks, breaking the windows of downtown buildings with a hammer and vandalizing a SFPD patrol car.


The video images were almost identical to video taken of the Ferguson riots after the police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 showing a man wearing black pants and a black hoodie and a backpack systematically breaking the windows of an auto parts store. He was followed by another man dressed identically who threw Molotov fire bombs into the store, setting it on fire.

In Los Angeles, several Waymo driverless cars were set on fire by protesters. There is one photo (above) of a masked man standing atop a vandalized Waymo car between two burning cars waving a Mexican flag. More photos showed a vandalized LAPD car with a broken windshield surrounded by paving stones that had been hurled at the police cars.

It is obvious, at least to me, that the men breaking windows and vandalizing the police car in San Francisco are provocateurs. Regular citizens don’t go to a protest wearing black hoodies and masks and backpacks, carrying hammers. These people were dressed that way and equipped with the tools they needed to commit premeditated destruction of private and public property.

I’m going into detail about the photos from both riots, because these are exactly the images Trump has been looking for. So far, images of ICE arrests have depicted federal agents kitted out in combat gear and masks handcuffing individual undocumented immigrants. He can’t run on those images. They may seem extreme but they depict lawful arrests. But he can run on the riots, and that is exactly what he is going to do. Trump and Republican candidates for the House and Senate will use still photos and video footage of the riots during their campaigns in midterm elections next year.

In the meantime, Democrats had better start thinking of what they’re going to do at the “No Kings” protests this coming weekend. There will probably be a great deal of pressure to turn the whole thing into anti-ICE demonstrations in solidarity with L.A. and San Francisco protests and other protests if they spread further around the country this week, as I think they are likely to do.

Donald Trump is a master at this kind of provocation-reaction-more provocation stuff. He has already used Title 10 to call out the National Guard. They haven’t announced what law they will cite in the deployment of active-duty Marines to the L.A. riots. But as the Times pointed out, invoking the Insurrection Act is his obvious next step.

Which raises the question I have seen in my newsfeed and am getting in emails and direct messages: Will Trump “declare martial law?” Some people are even raising the specter of Trump using “martial law” to step in and take over elections during the midterms.

The term “martial law” refers to a situation where the armed forces step in and assume not only law enforcement but governance of an area. There is no federal law or provision in the Constitution for the President to declare martial law. Martial law has been imposed by states more than 60 times since the nation’s founding, because of war or invasion, civil unrest, labor unrest, and natural disaster. Abraham Lincoln imposed martial law on the country during the Civil War, from 1862 to 1866. Franklin Roosevelt approved a declaration of martial law for two years over the territory of Hawaii after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Other impositions of martial law were done by state governors due to riots. Several times, one of them after the Tulsa race riot in 1921, an Army general imposed martial law until order could be restored, which in the Tulsa case was four days.

Trump is of course notorious for ignoring norms and the law and would probably seek to use the Insurrection Act as a de facto imposition of martial law over blue states such as Illinois, New York, California or others. How far he would go beyond putting troops in the streets of cities, such as he has done in Los Angeles, is something we will have to contend with if or when he tries to make it happen. It is unlikely that either federal or state courts would be amenable to having their jurisdictions cancelled or interfered with in an area over which Trump attempts to impose martial law. That would mean military courts or tribunals would take over the judiciary in the states affected, and that military prosecutors would assume the function of a state attorney general and local district attorneys. It would seem to be a bridge too far even for Donald Trump, but he has exploded a lot of bridges over the last eight years, and it would be foolish to suppose that he wouldn’t at least try.

The danger we face right now is if unrest in the streets of L.A. and San Francisco and other blue cities provides Trump with the opportunity to deploy Reserve, National Guard, or active-duty soldiers to quell unrest that Trump can define as a rebellion or insurrection. The images I’ve seen from L.A. and San Francisco are giving him all the propaganda he needs. No matter who is out there demonstrating against ICE or Trump himself, anarchist provocateurs are likely to take this opportunity to sow chaos and cause more violence than the legitimate demonstrators.

This is an ugly situation, it’s likely to get uglier before it gets better, and there is one person we can count on to make sure that happens: Donald Trump.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Labor Movement Enraged By ICE Arrest Of California SEIU Chief

Labor Movement Enraged By ICE Arrest Of California SEIU Chief

Unions across the United States have been rallying against the detainment of California labor leader David Huerta, who was arrested at an immigration protest on June 6 and released Monday afternoon on a $50,000 bond.

UPDATE: David Huerta was just released from custody!

[image or embed]

— SEIU California (@seiuca.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 10:50 PM

Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California was injured during the arrest and charged on Monday for purportedly impeding Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

The Trump administration triggered protests by rounding up immigrants in the Los Angeles area in an effort to increase its deportation numbers.

“What happened to me is not about me; This is about something much bigger. This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening,” Huerta wrote in a statement on June 6. “Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice.”

The Trump administration’s decision to arrest and charge Huerta is serving as a rallying point for labor unions, immigrants, and minority communities that are being targeted.

“They have woke us up,” Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, told the Los Angeles Times.

With more than 750,000 members, SEIU California called for Huerta’s immediate release during a rally in downtown Los Angeles Monday. Similar rallies also occurred in Washington, D.C., Seattle, Boston, and Chicago.

Other unions lent their voices to the cause, too.

“The nearly 15 million working people of the AFL-CIO and our affiliated unions demand the immediate release of California Federation of Labor Unions Vice President and SEIU California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta,” the AFL-CIO wrote in a release on June 7.

Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, accused ICE agents of violating Huerta’s First Amendment rights by arresting him in the first place.

“AFSCME stands in unwavering solidarity with our union brother David Huerta. We demand his immediate release, and we will not be silent until justice is done,” Saunders wrote in a statement on June 8.

The arrest was also condemned by lawmakers like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who, in a statement released Sunday, said that the arrest of Huerta was “unacceptable.”

“This is the United States of America and we will not be intimidated by a wannabe dictator in the executive branch,” Jeffries wrote in a statement on June 8.

President Donald Trump spent much of the weekend attempting to escalate the situation in Los Angeles, particularly by deploying National Guard troops to the area over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Trump and his border czar Tom Homan also promoted the idea of arresting Democratic leaders for opposing the Trump administration’s mass deportations.

In addition to vocal opposition from multiple unions and political leaders, other Democrats have criticized the escalating conflict created by the Trump team.

“Governors are the Commanders in Chief of their National Guard and the federal government activating them in their own borders without consulting or working with a state’s governor is ineffective and dangerous,” 22 Democratic governors wrote in a statement released on Monday.

“Further,” they continued, “threatening to send the U.S. Marines into American neighborhoods undermines the mission of our service members, erodes public trust, and shows the Trump administration does not trust local law enforcement.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

'No Kings Day': Americans Defending Democracy -- And Health Care

'No Kings Day': Americans Defending Democracy -- And Health Care

I’ve spent much of the past few days mulling the significance of the Trump regime sending National Guard troops into Los Angeles. Gov. Gavin Newsom did not ask for them. Mayor Karen Bass did not ask for them. The tens of thousands of city and state police available to Newsom and Bass were more than adequate to curtail the vandalism perpetrated by some demonstrators during the weekend’s protests against the large-scale ICE raids in the city.

Trump’s action has only one precedent in recent history. In March 1965, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the National Guard into Alabama against the wishes of Gov. George Wallace. LBJ felt compelled to act to protect civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, who had been viciously attacked and beaten the previous week by state and local police.

Richard Nixon didn’t order the National Guard onto the campuses of Kent State and Jackson State during protests against the Vietnam War in the spring of 1970, which resulted in the deaths of six students. Ohio’s Gov. James Rhodes and Mississippi’s Gov. William Winter were responsible for those unnecessary and ultimately tragic actions.

Trump’s order — unjustified, lawless, a gross violation of California’s rights — raises the serious question, as much as anything that he has done to date, of whether we still live in a free country. On a number of fronts, the Supreme Court has allowed his flagrantly illegal actions to proceed unimpeded despite lower courts ruling them either illegal or unconstitutional. Congress lays supine.

The checks and balances envisioned by this country’s founders are no longer operative. They are not providing the basic protections on which freedom depends, which includes above all the government adhering to the rule of law and our elected leaders upholding the Constitution they swore to defend.

Yesterday morning, Newsom promised to sue the federal government. He raised the specter of witholding federal taxes should Trump follow through on his threat to withold government payments to the state (which would be a net plus for California like most heavily blue states, which send more to the federal government than they receive in return).

Those of us who live in major urban areas with large immigrant populations worry that our cities and our states may become the next targets of large-scale ICE raids, which will inevitably provoke a reaction from justifiably outraged young protesters. Let’s not forget that urban economies (as well as many rural agricultural and meat-processing areas) are heavily dependent on the 11 million undocumented workers the Trump regime wants to deport.

Even if a narrow majority of the general public (about 55 percent) back stricter enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws, a far larger majority backs adherence to the rule of law. A Pew Research Center poll in April found 78 percent of Americans wanted the Trump administration to follow federal court rulings, which included 91 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of Republicans. The overall number rises to 88 percent for Supreme Court rulings.

This coming Saturday, while Trump holds a Soviet-style military parade in downtown Washington, there will be mass protests across the country. People will be carrying banners declaring “No More Kings.” I’ve volunteered to be a marshall to help assure that no misguided demonstrators or agents provocateurs provide a pretext for police action. I encourage all my readers to take part.

But protests are not enough. Only an engaged citizenry can defeat the reactionary forces here at home that threaten the values that truly made America great: equality, fairness, compassion, and equal justice before laws that everyone, including the president of the United States, adheres to.

Health care on the line

With that thought in mind, I hope that you will take time over the next few weeks to let your Senators know that you oppose the vicious cuts to Medicaid and Obamacare subsidies included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The Congressional Budget Office last week predicted just those sections alone will result in around 15 million people losing health insurance over the next decade.

Let’s put that number in perspective. There are currently around 28 million uninsured in the U.S. or about eight percent of the population, which is down from 17 oercent when Barack Obama took office in 2009. The 2010 Affordable Care Act, for all its flaws (which I won’t go into here), was tremendously successful in achieving its main goal of reducing the U.S. uninsured rate. Add 15 million more people to the ranks of the uninsured and that rate will soar back to at least 12 percent.

Who will pay for the costs of those people when they show up in the emergency room needing health care that they can’t pay for? You and your employers, who will wind up paying higher rates for private health insurance to pay for the cost of hospitals’ and physicians’ uncompensated care.

Rural hospitals, which are heavily dependent on Medicaid funding, will get hurt the most because states where most of those hospitals are located cannot afford to make up for the cutbacks in federal support. The destitute elderly in nursing homes will also suffer as their staffs get cut due to the proposed law’s ending of the Biden administration’s minimum staffing rule.

And to what end? The work requirements that Republicans claim are merely aimed at getting shirkers off the rolls is a smoke screen to hide the bill’s true intent: To keep alive unnecessary tax breaks for the most well-off people in this country. That $4 trillion-plus giveaway is so large that even after making massive cuts in health care and other domestic spending, it will still increase the federal deficit by over $2 trillion over the next decade.

Merrill Goozner is a former editor of Modern Healthcare, where he writes a weekly column. He is a former reporter for The Chicago Tribune and professor of business journalism at New York University. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News.

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