Tag: Trump white supremacy

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.

The Supreme Court fight over Trump’s last-ditch effort to rig the census, explained

The Court must decide whether to follow the Constitution’s clear text — or to rubber-stamp an illegal effort by Trump.

Donald Trump will no longer be president in two months. But an unconstitutional memorandum he handed down last July could potentially shape both US policy and American elections for the next decade, if the Supreme Court, scheduled to hear the case on November 30, allows that memo to take effect.

The Constitution provides that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” Nevertheless, Trump’s memo claims that “aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status” should not be counted when seats in the House of Representatives are allocated following the 2020 census.

The memo, in other words, violates the unambiguous text of the Constitution, as well as federal laws governing who should be included in census counts. Continue reading.

U.S. border officials close Texas warehouse where chain-link ‘cages’ for migrants became a symbol of mistreatment

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials have shut down the South Texas warehouse where chain-link enclosures were deplored as “cages” during the Trump administration’s crackdown on migrant families and children. The facility will undergo renovations until 2022, CBP officials said.

The chain-link partitions will be removed, and the warehouse will be redesigned to provide detained migrants with more humane conditions, CBP officials said. The renovations will take 18 months or longer, leaving border agents without a large-volume facility if a new migration surge occurs next year.

“The new design will allow for updated accommodations, which will greatly improve the operating efficiency of the center as well as the welfare of individuals being processed,” Thomas Gresback, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s Rio Grande Valley sector, told The Washington Post. Continue reading.