Tag: Trump racism

Minnesota town votes to allow white supremacist church

Anonymous City Council vote gives Asatru Folk Assembly a Midwest hub in the Swift County town of 275 residents. 

Voting anonymously, the Murdock, Minn., City Council granted a permit allowing a white supremacist church to use an abandoned Lutheran church as its third gathering spot in the United States.

The vote Wednesday night came after the council was advised that rejecting the Asatru Folk Assembly’s request could violate its religious rights.

Meeting online because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the council kept its video camera turned off, meaning that other meeting attendees couldn’t see the members’ faces. Despite repeated requests from the online audience, council members refused to identify who voted for or against the permit, passing it on a voice vote without a roll call. One member on the five-person council could be heard voting no. Continue reading.

Judge orders Trump administration to restore DACA, accept new applicants

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A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to fully restore the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors from deportation, scoring a key win for immigrant advocacy groups.

The ruling from U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis, a Clinton appointee, restores the Obama-era program and also mandates that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) post a public notice by Monday saying it is accepting new applicants.

It would mark the first time since 2017 that the government has admitted new immigrants into the program. Continue reading.

Census delays could push apportionment to Biden administration

Internal census documents reveal errors involving more than 900,000 records nationwide

Internal documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee show the Census Bureau has run into far more problems than publicly disclosed in its rush to finish tabulating results from the 2020 count, possibly resulting in delays that would let the incoming Biden administration have final control over results.

The documents identify errors involving more than 900,000 records across the country. The problems vary from calculating ages correctly to missing or double counting thousands of people. Agency officials have also identified problems in tens of thousands of records in states on the verge of gaining or losing congressional seats, such as Texas and California.

Correcting those problems will require several delays, according to the documents the committee released Wednesday as part of three sets of internal Census presentation slides dated mid-to-late November. Continue reading.

Biden plans to spurn Trump immigration restrictions, but risk of new border crisis looms

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President-elect Joe Biden will take office under pressure to repudiate and rescind many, if not most, of the more than 400 executive actions President Trump has used to tighten the U.S. immigration system. But Biden also will start his term in a bind that could make such changes difficult to accomplish in short order.

Biden’s administration will inherit an enforcement system cracking under the strains of the coronavirus pandemic, a crippling immigration court backlog and a demoralized workforce at the Department of Homeland Security, where leadership instability and administrative chaos have been signatures of Trump’s tenure.

At the U.S.-Mexico border, tens of thousands of migrants with pending asylum claims are waiting to enter the United States, some in squalid tent cities that resemble refugee camps. U.S. border agents have been making arrests at a soaring rate — more than 2,000 per day in recent weeks — as the economic fallout from the pandemic and devastating hurricanes in Central America threaten to trigger a new wave of illegal migration to the United States. Continue reading.

Trump threatens to veto major defense bill unless Congress repeals Section 230, a legal shield for tech giants

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President Trump on Tuesday threatened to veto an annual defense bill authorizing nearly $1 trillion in military spending unless Congress opens the door for Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites to be held legally liable for the way they police their platforms.

Trump delivered his ultimatum — calling for the repeal of a federal law known as Section 230 — in a pair of late-night tweets that transformed a critical national security debate into a political war over his unproved allegations that Silicon Valley’s technology giants exhibit systemic bias against conservatives.

“Section 230, which is a liability shielding gift from the U.S. to ‘Big Tech’ (the only companies in America that have it — corporate welfare!), is a serious threat to our National Security & Election Integrity,” Trump tweeted. Continue reading.

ICE expelled group of children under Stephen Miller policy just minutes after judge blocked it

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A federal judge’s ruling earlier this month blocking the Stephen Miller-led public health policy that the Trump administration has used to quickly kick out children should have immediately stopped the expulsion of a group of 33 kids who sat on a flight bound for Central America that same day. Should have. Instead, officials continued on with the flight.

BuzzFeed News reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement claims that agents didn’t know about the ruling, which came shortly before the flight took off for Guatemala. It’s hard to believe that ICE wasn’t aware of an impactful decision stopping a policy that’s already expelled children at least 13,000 times, or that a ruling was coming. I guess they don’t carry phones or walkie talkies. It’s also hard to believe ICE when it has a history of lying to both the courts and us.

ICE claims that agents became aware of Judge Emmet Sullivan’s ruling only after they’d landed in Guatemala, but instead of keeping these children in custody and turning right back around for the U.S., they left them, BuzzFeed News continues. “It is unconscionable that they are leaving the kids there and that they did not immediately bring them back,” Migration Policy Institute analyst Sarah Pierce said in the report. Continue reading.

Conservative justices seem prepared to let Trump proceed with immigrant census plan for now

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The Supreme Court on Monday seemed reluctant to issue an immediate ruling that would halt President Trump’s plan to count — and later subtract — immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally from the once-per-decade population count. 

The court, which has a new 6-3 conservative majority due to Trump’s three appointments, appeared to signal that it would let the Trump administration tally at least some of the country’s undocumented population as part of the 2020 census.

But a majority seemed inclined to defer future challenges over how that data could be used to determine House seats among the states, a key part of taking the census and a motivator in the Trump administration’s desire to exclude undocumented workers from census counts. Continue reading.

Behind Trump’s final push to limit immigration

Since Election Day, staffers have pushed through changes to visa processing and the citizenship test. Some aides even urged Trump to go after birthright citizenship.

Donald Trump is not done with immigration yet. 

Since Election Day, the president’s staffers have pushed through changes that make it easier to deny visas to immigrants, lengthened the citizenship test and appointed new members to an immigration policy board.

Some aides even urged Trump to sign an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for the children of immigrants, said two people familiar with the discussions — a legally dubious tactic given that birthright citizenship is enshrined in the Constitution. A third person said the idea had recently been dismissed. Continue reading.

‘We will exterminate you’: Proud Boys and other right-wing Trump diehards confront counter-protesters at Raleigh rally

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A band of COVID deniers, neo-Confederates and pro-Trump diehards, augmented by a 50-strong Proud Boy security detail, marched around the Governor’s Mansion in downtown Raleigh on Saturday, firing up a far-right coalition to carry on the fight as their president faces the reality of leaving office.

The post-Thanksgiving rally was co-organized by Joshua Flores of Stop the Steal NC and Latinos for Freedom, who brought in Reopen NC to help him promote it on Facebook. But the Proud Boys — referenced by Flores as his “private security” in a Facebook Live video two days prior to the event — took the most prominent position in the rally as they spread out along a block of East Jones Street and taunted antifascist counter-protesters. Continue reading.

Trump’s bid to exclude undocumented immigrants from reapportionment arrives at Supreme Court

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President Trump will swing for the fences in his last immigration legal battle at the Supreme Court, where he claims authority for the first time in the nation’s history to exclude undocumented residents when deciding the size of each state’s congressional delegation.

Opponents of his plan say it is foreclosed by more than 200 years of practice, the text of the Constitution and the authority granted the president by Congress. Three lower courts have ruled against Trump, and a fourth said the time was not ripe for a decision on the question’s merits.

But the president’s lawyers will tell the Supreme Court on Monday that it is up to the president to decide whether undocumented immigrants should be counted, a decision that could have far-reaching implications for a state’s representation in Congress and power in the electoral college, and for billions of dollars in federal funds. Continue reading.