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      Trump says military members will be paid despite government shutdown

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      Donald Trump claimed on Saturday that he has found a way to pay US military troops despite the ongoing federal government shutdown, saying he has instructed his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, to release funds.Posting on his Truth Social platform, Trump wrote: “I am using my authority, as commander-in-chief, to direct our secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, to use all available funds to get our troops PAID on October 15.”Trump said he had identified the funds to make the payments happen, adding: “I will not allow the Democrats to hold our military, and the entire security of our nation, HOSTAGE, with their dangerous government shutdown. The radical left Democrats should OPEN THE GOVERNMENT.”The recent federal government shutdown began on 1 October and is the first since a 35-day closure that happened in December 2018 and extended into the new year during Trump’s first presidential term. The shutdown came as Democrats were looking to regain their footing with voters, who re-elected Trump last year and relegated them to the minority in both chambers of Congress.More than 1.3 million military personnel across the country would not have received their first post-shutdown paychecks this month, only getting paid for the 21-30 September period. An estimated 750,000 federal employees have also been furloughed.As the Hill reported, however, federal workers are generally paid once a shutdown ends, whether they are furloughed or working. After the last shutdown in 2018, Congress wrote into law that federal workers must be paid once the government reopens.On Thursday, the US Senate remained deadlocked on legislation to end the shutdown, even as Trump repeated his threat to make Democrats pay for the funding lapse that has closed federal agencies and furloughed employees across the nation.Speaking to Punchbowl News, the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, expressed confidence in the strategy, saying: “Every day gets better for us.”The White House announced the layoffs of federal workers on Friday, following through with a threat it made to initiate the mass firings of government employees.A document filed with a federal court on Friday evening revealed that hundreds of layoffs took place across the executive branch, including about 315 at the Department of Commerce, 466 at the Department of Education and 187 at the Department of Energy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnion leaders warned the layoffs would have “devastating effects” on services relied upon by millions of Americans, and pledged to challenge the moves in court.“It is disgraceful that the Trump administration has used the government shutdown as an excuse to illegally fire thousands of workers who provide critical services to communities across the country,” said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which represents 800,000 federal and DC government workers.After Russell Vought, the director of the White House office of management and budget, wrote on social media that “RIFs have begun”, referring to the government’s reduction-in-force procedure to let employees go, the AFL-CIO, the largest federation of labor unions in the US, responded, saying: “America’s unions will see you in court.”In a repost of Trump’s delivery of the news that he proposes to pay the military by 15 October, Hegseth responded: “President Trump delivers for the troops.” More

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      National guard begins Memphis patrols as senators in Illinois are turned away from Ice facility

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      As national guard troops patrolled in Memphis – Tennessee’s second-largest city – for the first time on Friday, Democratic US senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth said they had been barred from visiting an immigration enforcement building near Chicago.The senators stopped by the facility in suburban Broadview on Friday, requesting a tour of the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility and to deliver supplies to protesters who have been demonstrating at the site for weeks.Their visit coincides with a ruling that the fencing installed at the site must be taken down. A federal judge late Thursday ordered Ice to remove an 8ft-tall (2.4 meters) fence outside the Broadview facility after the Village of Broadview said it illegally blocks a public street.Both senators spoke to the local NBC News affiliate while there and have pushed for answers and called for oversight into the conditions inside the facility.“We just want to go in and look at the facility and see what the conditions are and they would not let us in. It is shameful,” Duckworth said.“They’ve refused to tell us this information,” Durbin stated. “I’ve done this job for a few years now, I’ve never had this stonewalling by any presidential administration.”“What are you afraid of?” Duckworth said to reporters, referring to the government. “You don’t hide, you don’t run away when you’re proud of what you’re doing.”The senators said they have congressional oversight authority.“Something is going on in there they don’t want us to see,” Durbin said. “I don’t know what it is.”To the south, in Tennessee, at least nine armed guard members began their patrol at the Bass Pro Shops located at the Pyramid, a Memphis landmark, about a mile (1.6km) from historic Beale Street and FedExForum, where the NBA’s Grizzlies play.View image in fullscreenThey also were at a nearby tourist welcome center along the Mississippi River. Wearing guard fatigues and protective vests labeled “military police”, the troops were escorted by a local police officer and posed for photos with visitors.Trump has sent or discussed sending troops to other cities as well, including Baltimore; the District of Columbia; New Orleans; and the California cities of Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The federal government says the troops support immigration agents and protect federal property.The guard troops in Memphis remain under the command of the Republican governor, Bill Lee, who supports their use to further a federal crackdown on crime.By contrast, Trump has attempted to deploy national guard troops – including some from Texas and California – in Portland and Chicago after taking control of them himself, over objections from state and local leaders who say such interference violates their sovereignty and federal law. Federal courts in Illinois and Oregon this week blocked Trump’s efforts to send troops out in those cities.The US district judge April Perry in Chicago said the Trump administration had violated the 10th amendment, which grants certain powers to states, and the 14th amendment, which assures due process and equal protection, when he ordered national guard troops to that city.In a written order Friday explaining her rationale, Perry noted the nation’s long aversion to having military involvement in domestic policing.“Not even the Founding Father most ardently in favor of a strong federal government” – referring to Alexander Hamilton – “believed that one state’s militia could be sent to another state for the purposes of political retribution,” Perry wrote.“The court confirmed what we all know: there is no credible evidence of a rebellion in the state of Illinois. And no place for the national guard in the streets of American cities like Chicago,” the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, said.An earlier court battle in Oregon delayed a similar troop deployment to Portland. The 9th US circuit court of appeals heard arguments in that case Thursday.Lt Cmdr Teresa Meadows, a spokesperson for US northern command, said the troops sent to Portland and Chicago are “not conducting any operational activities at this time”. More

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      Before Trump, ‘Dreamers’ were shielded from deportation. Here’s what’s changed

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      The Trump administration has once again put Dreamers on a rollercoaster ride.The federal government is sending mixed signals about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), a popular program devised under Barack Obama that had until recently allowed undocumented immigrants brought to the US as children to live and work legally without serious risk of deportation.On one hand, in a new court filing, the federal government suggested it may eventually resume official consideration of initial Daca applications for the first time in years, which could let tens of thousands of people finally have their petitions processed.On the other, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has claimed that immigrants who say they are under the Daca umbrella “are not automatically protected from deportations”, as the program “does not confer any form of legal status in this country”.Such an approach has been used by Trump officials to justify detaining about 20 known Daca recipients during the new administration so far – despite no White House or DHS memo, regulation or executive order revealing a policy change.“We started hearing from those detained that when they tell Ice [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents that they have Daca, the Ice agents say: ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter any more’,” said Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, a spokesperson for the immigrant youth organization United We Dream.Here’s what to know about Daca, the “Dreamers” it protects, and how Donald Trump’s hardline immigrant agenda is upending that protection.Who are dreamers?“Dreamers” is a nickname for immigrants brought stateside as children, who do not have legal status. One estimate counts almost 2.5 million Dreamers in the US.The moniker refers to the Dream Act, proposed legislation that has been deliberated for decades in an attempt to offer Dreamers a pathway to legal immigration status. Lawmakers have introduced at least 20 iterations of the bill, but despite bipartisan support, no version has cleared both chambers of Congress.So-called Daca recipients are the subset of Dreamers who have been able to qualify for the Daca program. There are more than 525,000 active Daca recipients nationwide, the vast majority from Mexico, though beneficiaries come from countries around the globe.Daca recipients’ average age is 31 years old. California and Texas host the largest Daca populations by far, with 147,440 and 87,890 respectively.In 2023, more than nine out of 10 Daca recipients who were surveyed by national immigrant-focused organizations were either employed or in school. They reported that having Daca protections had made it possible for them to find jobs that paid better, work in fields that reflected their education and long-term career goals, get professional licenses and reach economic independence. The program had also opened the door for some beneficiaries to buy homes and cars.What is Daca?The Daca policy debuted on 15 June 2012 to address Dreamers’ need to work legally and be “lawfully present” in the US rather than hide from immigration enforcement and work under the table. To qualify, an applicant must have come to the country before they were 15 years old, have been aged 30 or younger on the date the Obama administration announced the program and have resided in the US since June 2007, among other requirements.Daca access is barred for anyone convicted of a felony, significant misdemeanor or three or more misdemeanors.Although the program has been a lifeline for many undocumented youth, it’s not a legal status or pathway to citizenship, and the antiquated cutoff dates for eligibility have made it so that Dreamers in high school now are less likely to qualify. At the same time, protracted litigation has long paused the processing of initial Daca applications.“I think it’s really important to understand how tragic it is that young people who are Americans in every sense but lack one piece of paper here not only aren’t getting a pathway to citizenship, but aren’t even getting these very basic and temporary deportation protections and work authorizations,” said Todd Schulte, president of the advocacy group FWD.us.Why Congress hasn’t done anything to provide more stability for Dreamers is the “billion-dollar question”, said Diana Pliego, senior strategist for campaigns at the National Immigration Law Center – especially, she added, when more than 80% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for them, and when it’s estimated that providing that would add about $800bn in US gross domestic product growth over a 10-year period.Where does the program stand now?Earlier this year, the fifth circuit court of appeals ruled in practice that Daca and work permit adjudications should restart as normal everywhere except Texas, where officials successfully argued the state was negatively affected by Daca recipients because of education and healthcare costs.The window has closed for appeals to the US supreme court, at least for the time being. Now, a district court will eventually decide how to implement the fifth circuit’s ruling, and in a recent court filing, the Trump administration outlined its vision for complying, in part through restarting initial adjudications of Daca petitions.Yet, simultaneously, the Trump administration said those proposals would “not limit DHS from undertaking any future lawful changes to Daca”, and for now, the status quo prevails.“This administration can do many things. So we’re just worried about creating an expectation or false hope for people with initial applications,” said Macedo do Nascimento.Trump tried to phase out Daca during his first administration but was ultimately stopped by the supreme court.What about Dreamers in Texas?Though they are likely to still receive deportation protections, there’s a risk that Texas Dreamers may lose both their work permits and their “lawful presence” designation, which would affect their economic prospects and could have larger immigration consequences.Who is being detained?Even as the Trump administration floats restarting initial Daca adjudications, it is arresting current Daca recipients as part of its mass deportation campaign.Evenezer Cortez Martínez – who came to the US when he was four years old and had a valid Daca permit through October 2026 – was deported to Mexico in March. He was eventually allowed to return to his wife and children in Kansas City, though he said: “I still have that doubt about whether it’s really true that I’m [back] here.”Similarly, in August, Paulo Cesar Gamez Lira was targeted in El Paso, Texas, in front of his children, his arm being dislocated during the chaos, before he was detained in New Mexico. DHS called him a “criminal illegal alien” because of a decade-old charge for marijuana possession as a teenager that was later reduced to disorderly conduct, and that had never stopped the agency from renewing his Daca protections.Cortez Martínez and Gamez Lira are two of 20 or so known Daca recipients who have been arrested, detained or deported this year.Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, has encouraged Daca recipients to consider voluntary deportation.To Pliego, that would be a loss for the US.“These are people who have built their lives here, who, you know, have been here since they were young kids,” she said. “This is their home. And so we’re losing longstanding community members who are contributing to the country, who are giving back in a lot of ways.” More

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      Joe Biden receiving radiation therapy for prostate cancer

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      Joe Biden is receiving radiation therapy for his prostate cancer that was diagnosed in May, a spokesperson for the former US president said on Saturday morning.“As part of a treatment plan for prostate cancer, President Biden is currently undergoing radiation therapy and hormone treatment, the spokesperson said. The news was first reported by NBC.The new round of treatment was expected to be spread over a five-week period, the spokesperson for Biden said to NBC, and marks a new point in the former president’s care. He had already been taking hormone medication in pill form, as he had previously mentioned in public when questioned in the spring about his illness.Biden was diagnosed in May with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that had spread to his bones, his personal office had announced. The Democrat had left the White House in January after Republican Donald Trump became the 47th president of the United States, following his 2024 election victory.Biden first spoke out in public about his diagnosis later in May, saying he was optimistic about his prognosis and that “the expectation is we are going to be able to beat this”.The president returned to his home in Delaware after his single term in office concluded, and he turns 83 next month.In September he underwent a procedure known as Mohs surgery to remove cancerous cells from his skin.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      Democrats refuse to fold over shutdown as Republican outrage builds

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      When he sat down to talk about the US government shutdown with reporters from a closely read political newsletter this week, Chuck Schumer sounded as if he were relishing his standoff with the Republicans.“Every day gets better for us,” he told Punchbowl News. As the shutdown got under way, Schumer explained, the Republicans believed that Democrats would quickly fold and vote to reopen the government, but instead they had stuck to their guns for a week and a half, demanding an array of concessions on healthcare and other issues.Outrage followed from Republicans, who printed out the Senate minority leader’s remark on posters and condemned it before press conferences. The shutdown has prompted federal agencies to close or curtail operations nationwide, and forced hundreds of thousands of employees to stay home without immediate pay. Schumer, Republicans argued, was being callous.“I’ve been asked many times in interviews the last couple days: ‘You seem angry – you don’t get angry a lot.’ I don’t, but this is beyond the pale,” the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, said at a press conference on Friday morning, the 10th day of the shutdown. “What Chuck Schumer is doing right now, it’s sickening.”Hours later, the White House took it upon itself to increase the misery for government employees when Russ Vought, the director of the office of management and budget, began following through on his threat to carry out layoffs. The budget office said that more than 4,000 federal workers were being fired from a variety of agencies that had already shrunk in the second Trump administration, and the funding situation was “fluid and rapidly evolving”. Legal challenges are likely to follow, but still, now it was the Democrats’ turn to accuse the GOP of brutality.“Let’s be blunt: nobody’s forcing Trump and Vought to do this,” Schumer said in a statement. “They don’t have to do it; they want to. They’re callously choosing to hurt people – the workers who protect our country, inspect our food, respond when disasters strike. This is deliberate chaos.”It was the latest salvo in a battle that began when government funding lapsed on 1 October and has since degenerated into legislative trench warfare. Seven Senate votes have resulted in no breakthroughs, with lawmakers from both parties preventing the other’s proposals from reaching the 60-vote threshold needed to advance.Democrats are maximizing the leverage they have in the upper chamber by refusing to reopen the government until premium tax credits for Affordable Care Act health plans are extended into next year. They also want cuts to the Medicaid program for poor and disabled Americans reversed, funding to public media outlets such as PBS and NPR restored and Donald Trump’s use of “pocket rescissions” to slash spending curbed.Most of those are non-starters for Republicans, who insist government funding be restarted before negotiations take place. They’ve ascribed a variety of motivations to Democrats’ intransigence, from the rise of Zohran Mamdani as the Democratic nominee for New York mayor to the influence of a “far-left base” that has the party’s leaders in their thrall.On Friday, Johnson posited that Democratic senators were holding out because they were concerned about a “No Kings” protest planned for 18 October – which he called a “hate America rally” and where attendees might target party leaders if they decided to end the shutdown.“It is an outrageous gathering for outrageous purposes, but the Democrats in the Senate have shown that they’re afraid of that crowd,” Johnson said, alleging that “the antifa crowd, and the pro-Hamas crowd and the Marxists” would be in attendance.“They’re willing to hold the American people hostage so that they don’t have to face an angry mob – that’s a big chunk of their base,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere are indeed outside influences pressuring Democrats to stand firm on their demands, and so far they are happy with the results.“The Democrats, I think, have taken in the blowback, have understood where their folks want them to go, and are actually taking it and fighting back. And it’s a sight to see. It’s a welcome strategic shift,” Ezra Levin, co-executive director of progressive organizing group Indivisible, said.In March, Schumer opted to work with Republicans on keeping the government open, prompting Indivisible to call for him to step aside as minority leader. Months later, Levin says his group is coordinating with Schumer’s office on actions to support Democratic lawmakers as the shutdown wears on, and believes the party should not compromise on its demands.Not only are Democrats’ demands “wildly popular”, Republicans are not to be trusted to honor any agreement, he said. Trump and his allies in Congress have made clear their interest in rescissions packages, which can be passed on a party-line vote, to cut spending approved with bipartisan support. After passing one in July that clawed back $9bn in funding for public media and foreign aid, Johnson said he is considering putting together another.“This regime is treating the federal budget like a personal bank account for Donald Trump, and we should stop that,” Levin said. “No deal is a real deal unless you have rescission and payment language.“We’ve got the goods. We are fighting for popular things. The Republicans are closing rural hospitals, increasing costs and giving a lawless administration more power to do what it wants. That’s a losing hand, and we want to see Democrats fight back.” More

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      Why is this Fox News host speculating about AOC’s sex life? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and United States homeland security adviser, is one of the most influential people in the Trump administration. He is also such a hate-filled little man that members of his own family are publicly rebuking him.During Donald Trump’s first term, in 2018, Miller’s uncle, Dr David Glosser, wrote a piece for Politico calling Miller an “immigration hypocrite”. Glosser noted that if Miller’s hardline immigration policies “had been in force a century ago, our family [Jewish refugees who fled to the US from Europe to avoid persecution] would have been wiped out”.Then, in July, a woman called Alisa Kasmer, Miller’s cousin and former babysitter, wrote a viral Facebook post calling the Trump aide “the face of evil”. Miller’s cruelty, she said, left her feeling “ashamed and shattered”.While some of his extended family can’t seem to stand him, Miller does have a very enthusiastic cheerleader in the form of the Fox News host Jesse Watters. Last October, Watters claimed that his show’s audience believes that Miller is “some sort of sexual matador” and asked Miller to comment on this. The Maga-dor responded by telling young men to “be the alpha … show that you are not a beta … Be a proud and loud Trump supporter and your dating life will be fantastic.” This is terrible advice for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that gen Z women are the most liberal group in the US.I’m afraid it doesn’t end there; a couple of weeks ago, the Fox News host had Miller’s wife, Katie (a Maga bigwig in her own right), on his show to chat about how sexy Stephen is. “What is it like being married to such a sexual matador?” Watters joked. Very inspiring, apparently; he wakes up every morning excited about how he is going to “defeat the left”.It doesn’t even end there. This week, Watters once again sang his favourite man’s praises on TV, calling Miller a “policy savant”. He added: “Men who are high-value men, like Stephen Miller, take risks. They’re brave, they’re unafraid, they’re confident and they’re on a mission. And they have younger wives with beautiful children.”Watters went on to claim that the representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “wants to sleep with Miller … it is so obvious”. The whole spiel was so weird that even Watters’s colleague, Greg Gutfeld, appeared disturbed. “That was pretty creepy,” Gutfeld said.While Watters doesn’t seem to need an excuse to praise Miller, this week’s episode wasn’t entirely unprompted. Rather, Watters was reacting to an Instagram video in which Ocasio-Cortez called Miller a clown and urged people to laugh at Maga.“Miller looks like he is so mad that he is 4’10” that he’s taking that anger out at any other population possible,” AOC said in the video. “Laugh at them! Laugh at them!”It’s not particularly clever to mock someone’s height. (AOC has since said she loves “short kings” and was talking about how “big or small someone is on the inside”.) Nevertheless, the lawmaker is absolutely correct that the way to get under the skin of people in Maga-land is to laugh at them. Ghouls like Trump and Miller don’t care if you call them evil or hypocritical. They don’t care if you use facts and logic against them. What they care about is being laughed at. What they really can’t stand is being mocked. “Humor has long been one of the most effective weapons of anti-authoritarian politics,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar on fascism, noted last year after Democrats started calling Republicans “weird”.You can see how thin-skinned Maga is by the ridiculous amount of traction that AOC’s throwaway joke has had. Mediaite has reported that three primetime Fox News hosts factchecked Miller’s height: Watters, Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity. Ingraham even had Miller on her show and played the clip to him while he squirmed in discomfort. “What a train wreck, what a train wreck … that lady is a walking nightmare,” Miller replied. He also clarified that he is 5’10”. A very big boy.Steven Cheung, who is White House director of communications, also responded to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments with a post on his official Twitter account saying: “Sounds like @AOC is often used to the shorter things in life.” He added a pinching hand emoji, which is sometimes used to suggest a small penis.The Trump administration should not be underestimated by any means. They are organized, they are ruthless, and they are proving extremely effective at implementing their agenda. But while we shouldn’t underestimate Trumpers, it’s helpful to remember that they’re not invincible. AOC is right: we should laugh at them. It’s either laugh or cry.French appeals court increases sentence of Gisèle Pelicot rapistHusamettin Dogan contested his first conviction, telling the court Pelicot’s husband had invited him over so it was OK. The court found otherwise this week, increasing Dogan’s prison sentence to 10 years. Pelicot’s lawyer had told the court: “[C]onsent is personal, not delegated. Consent is obtained directly and not by proxy from a husband.”Women may carry a higher genetic risk of depressionNew research published in Nature Communications has found 16 genetic variants linked to depression in women, compared with eight in men.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLatvia may withdraw from international domestic violence treatyWomen’s rights activists protested outside the Latvian parliament this week following a decision by lawmakers last month to start a process that could lead to withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention, which aims to standardize support for women who are victims of violence and to promote gender equality.Almost 55,000 preschool children in Gaza are acutely malnourishedThat’s according to a new study published in the Lancet, which shows a clear link between Israel’s aid blockade and malnutrition. Even if a ceasefire holds and adequate food is allowed into the strip, these kids will probably have serious poor long-term outcomes from being starved in their critical years. It is hard to defend deliberately starving babies – which is why Israel is spending hundreds of millions on propaganda efforts including, according to Drop Site News, $45m on a Google advertising campaign promoting Israeli government talking points.UK universities offered to spy on students on behalf of weapons companiesAccording to emails obtained by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates, a number of UK universities reassured arms companies worried about campus protests that they would monitor students’ social media accounts. Per the Guardian, one university “appeared to agree to a request from Raytheon UK, the British wing of a major US defence contractor, to ‘monitor university chat groups’ before a campus visit”.The week in pawtriarchyFrancine is a calico cat who lives at a Lowe’s home improvement store in Virginia. Or she did until she decided to jump on a truck and go on an out-of-state adventure. CCTV was scrutinized and thermal drones brought in to find Francine. She is now back in Virginia, delighting customers with her a-mew-sing antics. Cat-astrophe averted.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump is ‘obsessed’ with seeming pro-worker – but his actions suggest otherwise

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      Unpaid forced leave and mass firings are hardly the first things to spring to mind as hallmarks of a golden age of the American worker.Yet these were the possibilities floated by Donald Trump this week as he addressed a government shutdown that began on 1 October and is showing no imminent sign of ending as Democrats and Republicans attempt to stare each other down in a dispute over funding priorities.As reports emerged of a White House memorandum suggesting that furloughed federal workers might not receive back pay, Trump – who ostentatiously posed as the champion of American workers during last year’s presidential election campaign – was quick to twist the knife.“I would say it depends on who we’re talking about,” he told reporters. “There are some people that really don’t deserve to be taken care of, and we’ll take care of them in a different way.”On Friday, office of management and budget director Russell Vought – who infamously said he wanted to put federal workers “in trauma” – posted on X that “the RIFs [”reductions in force”, administration terminology for federal job cuts] have begun”, and within hours, agencies began confirming that notices had gone out.That promises to heap more misery on a federal workforce already decimated and demoralized following job losses imposed by the unofficial “department of government efficiency”, also known as Doge, in the early months of Trump’s presidency.Analysts say this tells the true story of the US worker’s plight under Trump 2.0.While voicing the rhetoric of blue-collar solidarity in his election campaigns and public appearances, Trump has enacted policies that have worsened the economic realities of the working person in myriad ways, they argue.The tax-and-spending provisions in Trump’s flagship “big beautiful bill” (passed by Congress in the summer), tariffs and the administration’s agenda of mass deportation of undocumented people are all taking a toll on workers’ living conditions, by raising costs and driving down wages.“Trump is obsessed with a lot of the aesthetics of being pro-worker,” said Samantha Sanders, government affairs director at the Economic Policy Institute, a thinktank.She cited an appearance at the White House in April in the company of coal miners and a giant banner of Trump’s face hung from the Department of Labor building in Washington DC.“But when it comes down to actual actions, we know, from his personal life to his policy life, he just does not deliver on those things,” she said.Trump’s protestations of being on the ordinary worker’s side conceal a multitude of policy sins that make their lives worse while acting as a friend and ally to the wealthy, the powerful and big business, say critics.“He’s applied tariffs, in an un-nuanced way, and deported people that were supposedly taking American jobs and filling their schools,” said Sanders, who said Trump had been “honest and dishonest” about his intentions to a segment of voters who sought clear solutions to their economic problems and had, in many cases, become disaffected with the Democrats.“But the other promises, like addressing the cost of living, bringing back jobs, saying ‘I’m going to increase wages’, etc, there’s clearly no strategy or policy plan to make any of that happen in a sustained way.”A White House press release issued last month to mark Labor Day painted a rosy picture of “surging native-born employment and rising blue-collar wages … [and] innovative workforce initiatives like expanded apprenticeships and trade school funding”.But Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said the administration’s assault on federal workers had knock-on effects.“The federal workforce serves American workers, low- and moderate-income families,” he said. “You think about the Veterans Administration, Social Security Administration. I used to work for Department of Agriculture, and we had a missionary project focused on rural communities and rural development. That workforce is getting decimated, which is going to impact those things.”Trump’s across-the-board tariffs – a trademark policy that he has hailed as a revenue-boosting device that could also revive long-lost US manufacturing – disproportionately affects workers while big corporations are afforded protections, according to Ajilore.“Look at the range of tariffed goods: fertilizer, steel, aluminum, pharmaceuticals, heavy trucks, lumber, furniture,” he said. “It’s almost like, you name it, there’s a tariff on it. That raises cost for consumers. At the same time, tariffs on these goods are inputs towards businesses, which have to raise their costs.“He’s talking about bringing back manufacturing, but tens of thousands of jobs have gone from manufacturing in the past couple of months and a lot of it is because of increased costs from tariffs. When businesses make adjustments to maintain their margin, labor is always the first to go.”Yet while manufacturing workers took a hit, Apple – many of whose computer products are made in China and other Asian countries – was granted an exemption, Ajilore pointed out.Deportations of undocumented people had created a rising climate of fear among many in the agricultural sector – which has traditionally attracted many immigrant workers – said Antonio De Loera, spokesperson for the United Farm Workers (UFW).Compounding that effect, the Trump administration last week changed the rules governing wage levels for documented workers on temporary, non-immigrant H-2A visas, in effect allowing them to be paid less than laborers already living in the US.The UFW estimates that the change will cost workers across the entire US farm sector $2.46bn in wages a year, as farmers react by hiring cheaper guest workers in place of higher-paid existing laborers, US citizens as well as undocumented workers.De Loera, who warned that the impact would be to drive wages down across the sector, said farm workers were being made to pay the costs of a bailout the administration was preparing for farmers – who have complained about the impact of tariffs and a labor shortage caused by deportations.“We know that there’s discussions of a big farm bailout coming, but in the meantime, this is one of the things that they’ve done to keep the farmers happy,” he said. “They’re taking more money out of the pockets of some of the hardest-working and poorest-paid workers in America to give it to wealthy landowners who are politically well-connected.”Ajilore said others sectors were suffering from a wider economic problem caused by the administration’s policies, adding up to a grim outlook for workers generally.“The American worker is struggling,” he said. “The labor market is frozen. There hasn’t been a lot of layoffs, but there’s very little hiring and so there’s very little churn, which is one reason why the US labor market is normally so robust – people lose a job but are able to get new jobs.“The long-term unemployment, people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, has gone up from 20% to 25% of the jobless. And a larger share of them are college graduates, who would normally be able to get jobs. So workers aren’t able to experience mobility or progress – and at the same time, costs are going up.” More

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      The quiet toll of Trump’s legal immigration crackdown: ‘I’m trying to stay afloat’

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      Kim Xavier, a senior associate at CoveyLaw, an immigration law firm based in New York, has spent much of the last year bracing herself for any Friday announcements that might affect her clients.So when Donald Trump announced on a recent Friday that he will impose a $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, the timing was not totally surprising.“Every day, it’s like I’m trying to stay afloat. And every Friday, I’m just like, now what?” Xavier told the Guardian.Though headline after headline has highlighted the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, Xavier said many Americans don’t realize the heightened uncertainty legal immigrants are facing – something that immigration attorneys like herself have to confront every day.“The perpetual fear that undocumented immigrants have dealt with their entire lives is now spread across the whole immigration system,” Xavier said. “This is something new, I think. This is something that a lot of people don’t understand.”Cracks and fissures have existed within the legal immigration system for years, long before Trump came into office. The last time Congress passed comprehensive immigration reform was 1986. In the nearly four decades since, those trying to immigrate legally often face ambiguous standards, outdated quotes and backlogs, along with other issues that appear administrative but can have a huge impact on a person’s ability to stay in the country.The difference seen over a generation is stark. “Even for people who have been through the immigration system, they’re like, ‘Oh, 30 years ago, I just came with a suitcase from Canada and I got my green card in three months’. It’s not like that any more,” Xavier said.The pathway to becoming a legal immigrant in the US is a narrow one. A person can get legal status through family – if a spouse, child or parent is a citizen – or through their employer, like H-1B holders, or through extraordinary talent. Though the US has offered legal status for humanitarian purposes, for asylum or refugees, the White House has dramatically cut down on these humanitarian pathways.The Trump administration has emphasizedthat its crackdown on immigration is targeted toward removing undocumented immigrants from the country.“Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: self-deport or we will arrest you,” assistant secretary for homeland security, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement last month.But the administration is reportedly trying to cut down on legal immigration too. A recent Reuters report said the White House is planning to cut the number of refugees the US takes in from 125,000 down to 7,500, with the majority of slots reserved for white South Africans.The administration also seems to be combing through the records of immigrants, including green card holders, for potential violations that weren’t considered deportable before his term. In September, an Irish green card holder living in Missouri was detained at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Kentucky because she wrote a bad check for $25 in 2015.Immigration attorneys like Xavier, who works solely with immigrants who have gone through the process legally, have seen how the ongoing scrutiny has had a chilling effect on legal immigrants who have lived in and even started families in the US.Hanging over the head of many of these immigrants is the threat of losing their legal status, even temporarily, because of what Xavier calls “operational inefficiencies”: ambiguous delays and unclear communication about applications have left lawyers scrambling to keep their clients’ legal status.Processing delays have been a major stress for Xavier’s clients, and can often leave legal immigrants in limbo. Lawyers don’t know when their client will hear back on an application, which can sometimes leave them stuck in the country.One client with a pending green card application applied for “advance parole”, which would allow her to leave the US and legally re-enter even as her green card application is under review. Because her father was undergoing quadruple bypass surgery, she applied for an expedited advanced parole to be with him after the procedure. But, “they still denied the emergency advanced parole,” Xavier said, so she couldn’t travel back home for his surgery.Xavier has also seen clients who have been living in the US for years and have had multiple visas get “soft denials” for renewals, meaning an application has been put on hold pending further documentary and scrutiny.Complicating the process for visa applicants is that the renewal process requires communication between two branches of the federal government: US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is under the Department of Homeland Security, and the consulate of their home country, which falls under the Department of State. Lawyers have said there can often be a lack of communication between the two that causes delays.Delays on application decisions can outlast certain “grace periods” the federal government gives to applicants for certain visas that allow them to legally stay in the country while they await renewal. This puts them at risk of being taken into custody or put into court proceedings when the grace period is up.The Trump administration also recently gave USCIS special agents law enforcement powers, including the ability to make arrests and execute search and arrest warrants, powers that the ACLU has said has never been given to the agency and is a way to “systematically restrict legal immigration and strip people of their legal status”.The added stresses and uncertainty has taken a heavy toll on both immigrants and their employers.“We hear about the erosion of legal immigrant pathways impacting Silicon Valley, but also innovative startups, it’s fashion designers who are using sustainable efforts, it’s architects. There are so many different industries that are impacted here,” Xavier said.Though the changes in immigration enforcement may seem insignificant for legal immigrants, the impact has been huge..“They seem little, they seem incremental, but it’s been a long time coming. It’s been built into the system, and now they are coming at lightning speed, often in different areas and under the radar of the mainstream public, that when taken together they are overwhelmingly detrimental,” Xavier said. “In Spanish, we have a saying that goes la gota que derramó el vaso – it’s the last drop that made the glass overflow. You have these little drops, but they’re coming, and by the time you know it, you’re flooded.” More