Tag: Trump racism

As Supreme Court decision nears, lower court orders new look at census citizenship question

Washington Post logoA federal appeals court said Tuesday that a Maryland judge should examine new allegations that the Trump administration had a discriminatory intent in adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, on the eve of a possible Supreme Court decision on the matter.

The order was part of last-minute wrangling in the lower courts, in the Supreme Court and on Capitol Hill as the justices are set to vote on the issue before the end of their term, presumably this week.

The Supreme Court is considering lower-court decisions that said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross violated administrative law and the enumeration clause of the Constitution by proposing to ask the citizenship question of each household. Critics, even in the Census Bureau, say the question could cause an undercount of millions of people who would be afraid to return the form.

View the complete June 25 article by Robert Barnes, Felicia Sonmez and Tara Bahrampour on The Washington Post website here.

Commerce Dept. ordered ex-official not to answer House panel questions

A former senior Commerce Department official refused to answer more than 100 questions during an interview with the House Oversight and Reform Committee that centered on the Trump administration’s controversial decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, according to atranscript released Tuesday.

Commerce Department lawyers instructed James Uthmeier, who served as senior adviser and counsel to Secretary Wilbur Ross, not to answer the committee’s questions about his contacts with the White House and his conversations with Ross.

Uthmeier was also directed not to discuss the contents of a memo he wrote to a senior Justice Department official, John Gore, that purportedly outlines legal arguments surrounding the addition of a citizenship question to the census. On several occasions, Uthmeier was also blocked from disclosing details about his own conversations with Gore.

View the complete June 25 article by Andrew Desiderio on the Politico website here.

Despite new law, Trump administration has not given Puerto Rico emergency food stamp aid

Washington Post logoThe Trump administration has not yet given Puerto Rico $600 million in food stamp aid more than two weeks after the president signed the emergency funding into law, according to federal and territory officials.

Puerto Rico does not expect to be able to spend the emergency food stamp funding until September, most likely, six months after food stamp cuts began for the more than 1 million island residents who rely on the program, said Glorimar Andújar Matos, executive director of the Departamento de la Familia, the Puerto Rico government agency that administers the program.

While the reason for it was not immediately clear, the unexpected delay to Puerto Rico’s food stamp aid reflects the ongoing dysfunction in securing the release of federal funding for the U.S. territory that is still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria in fall 2017.

View the complete June 24 article by Jeff Stein and Arelis R. Hernández on The Washington Post website here.

Rep. Phillips Statement On Humanitarian Crisis At The Border

WASHINGTON, DC – Rep. Dean Phillips (MN-03) released the following statement today on the humanitarian crisis at the southern border:

“Earlier this month, I visited McAllen, TX on a bipartisan mission to see conditions at our southern border with my own eyes. What I saw was a very real and urgent humanitarian crisis. I witnessed children and families kept in overcrowded fenced cages, sleeping on concrete floors and with limited access to restrooms. I witnessed mothers with infants in outdoor fenced pens gathered under water misters that provided little relief from 107 degree heat. I witnessed young people fighting the flu and chicken pox held in overcrowded cells that all but guaranteed the rapid spread of both diseases. As a parent, I’ve seen little in my life that has horrified me more than the conditions on our southern border. As an American, I am appalled by the lack of leadership and action. Instead of taking accountability and working to fix these shocking problems, the Administration is arguing in court that children don’t need toothbrushes or soap to live in sanitary conditions. It is wrong, it is un-American, and it cannot be tolerated any longer.

 Nobody I spoke with at the border wants this to be the norm. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol treated the migrants they received with compassion. They simply do not have the resources, or oftentimes the training, to adequately handle the number of migrants entering the country. Our existing facilities were not designed to accommodate the number of people being processed. That’s why it is vital that the House pass this necessary emergency funding to provide relief. When people are suffering in inhumane conditions, we have a responsibility to act. Thus, I urge all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support today’s funding package in the House and begin the hard work of addressing our broken immigration system — so such human tragedy never occurs again.”

 

Trump makes yet another racist ‘both sides’ statement

On Tuesday, White House correspondent April Ryan asked Trump if he was finally ready to apologize to the so-called “Central Park Five,” given that they were exonerated after he called for their execution. Here is the president’s response.

Why would you bring that question up now? It’s an interesting time to bring it up. You have people on both sides of that. They admitted their guilt. If you look at Linda Fairstein, and if you look at some of prosecutors, they think that the city should never have settled that case. So we’ll leave it at that.

He didn’t just refuse to apologize, he pointed to the teenage boys’ coerced confessions and held up the Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor who handled the case. Repeating his response to neo-Nazis marching violently in Charlottesville in 2017, he claims that there are two sides to the Central Park case.

The incident in question happened 30 years ago and the facts demonstrate that one side has been completely exonerated while the other has been disgraced. The boys Trump wanted to see executed were not only proven to be innocent of the rape and assault charges by a confession from the actual perpetrator combined with DNA evidence, they won a $41 milli

View the complete June 19 article by Nancy LeTourneau of The Washington Monthly on the AlterNet website here.

Trump vows mass immigration arrests, removals of ‘millions of illegal aliens’ starting next week

President Trump said in a tweet Monday night that U.S. immigration agents are planning to make mass arrests starting “next week,” an apparent reference to a plan in preparation for months that aims to round up thousands of migrant parents and children in a blitz operation across major U.S. cities.

“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States,” Trump wrote, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “They will be removed as fast as they come in.”

Large-scale ICE enforcement operations are typically kept secret to avoid tipping off targets. In 2018, Trump and other senior officials threatened the mayor of Oakland, Calif., with criminal prosecution for alerting city residents that immigration raids were in the works.

View the complete June 17 article by Nick Miroff and Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.

The Youngest Child Separated From His Family at the Border Was 4 Months Old

Baby Constantin spent five months of his first year in a foster home. His family got a painful look at America’s experiment with family separation as an immigration policy.

KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The text messages were coming in all day and night with only two data points: Gender and age. With each one that arrived, the on-call caseworker at Bethany Christian Services in Michigan had 15 minutes to find a foster home for another child who was en route from the border. On a brisk winter day in February 2018, Alma Acevedo got a message that caught her breath: “4 months. Boy.”

Since the summer of 2017, the 24-year-old social worker had been seeing a mysterious wave of children arriving from the border, most of them from Central America. Those who were old enough to talk said they had been separated from their parents. “The kids were just inconsolable, they’d be like, ‘Where’s my mommy? Where’s my daddy?’” Ms. Acevedo said. “And it was just constant crying after that.”

None of them had been this young, and few had come this far. When he arrived at her office after midnight, transported by two contract workers, the infant was striking, with long, curled eyelashes framing his deep brown eyes. His legs and arms were chubby, seeming to indicate that he had been cared for by someone. So why was he in Michigan?

View the complete June 16 article by Caitlin Dickerson on The New York Times website here.

US-Mexico deal offers few new solutions, political victory

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s deal to avert his threatened tariffs on Mexico includes few new solutions to swiftly stem the surge of Central American migrants flowing over America’s southern border.

But it delivers enough for Trump to claim a political win.

The decision — announced by tweet late Friday — ended a showdown that business leaders warned would have disastrous economic consequences for both the U.S. and one of its largest trading partners, driving up consumer prices and driving a wedge between the two allies. And it represented a win for members of Trump’s own party who had flooded the White House with pleading calls as well as aides who had been eager to convince the president to back down.

View the complete June 9 article by Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller and Colleen Long on the Associated Press website here.

DHS watchdog finds spoiled food, nooses at multiple immigration detention centers

The results confirmed suspicions that ICE is routinely violating the human rights of the individuals in its custody.

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report Thursday detailing the horrific conditions at immigration detention centers across the United States. Inspectors found “immediate risks or egregious violations of detention standards” including nooses in detainee cells, overuse of solitary confinement, and spoiled food, among other issues.

DHS OIG inspected four Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, including the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California, the Aurora ICE Processing Center in Colorado, the LaSalle ICE Processing Center in Louisiana, and the Essex County Correctional Facility in New Jersey.

According to the report, the “inspections of the four detention facilities revealed violations of ICE’s detention standards and raised concerns about the environment in which detainees are held.”

Trump administration cancels English classes, soccer, legal aid for unaccompanied child migrants in U.S. shelters

The Trump administration is canceling English classes, recreational programs and legal aid for unaccompanied minors staying in federal migrant shelters nationwide, saying the immigration influx at the southern border has created critical budget pressures.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement has begun discontinuing the funding stream for activities — including soccer — that have been deemed “not directly necessary for the protection of life and safety, including education services, legal services, and recreation,” said Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mark Weber.

Federal officials have warned Congress that they are facing “a dramatic spike” in unaccompanied minors at the southern border and have asked Congress for $2.9 billion in emergency funding to expand shelters and care. The program could run out of money in late June, and the agency is legally obligated to direct funding to essential services, Weber said.

View the complete June 5 article by Maria Sacchetti on The Washington Post website here.