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      Manzanar teaches about Japanese American incarceration in the US. That’s in jeopardy under Trump

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      At the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, more than 200 miles (320km) outside Los Angeles, in what feels like the middle of nowhere, is Manzanar national historic site. It marks the place where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the second world war, crowded into barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights, and patrolled by military police.Since then, Manzanar, which now has a museum and reconstructed barracks that visitors can walk through, has been transformed into a popular pilgrimage destination for Japanese Americans to remember and teach others about this history. (Manzanar was one of 10 concentration camps where the US government forcibly relocated and held more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent during the second world war.)But recently, under the direction of the Trump administration, National Park Service (NPS) employees have hung new signs at Manzanar that historians and community advocates say will undermine these public education efforts. The notices encourage visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features” via a QR code. The signs, which have been posted at all national parks, monuments and historic sites, were displayed in support of Donald Trump’s executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.Historians, national park advocates and community leaders say they’re alarmed by the move, in what they see as the most recent example of the Trump administration’s attempt to “whitewash” US history.View image in fullscreen“Any attempt to constrain or sanitize the stories that are told at Manzanar should concern every American,” said Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, executive director of Densho, an organization that documents the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were held in concentration camps. “I’m incredibly disappointed that this is happening in the United States because museums, monuments and memorials are public spaces where we can explore difficult history, confront our past, engage with what’s uncomfortable and then be able to imagine the future that we want to collectively share.”Earlier this year, government agencies compiled hundreds of words to be erased from federal recognition such as “diversity”, “cultural heritage”, “marginalized”, “racial inequality” and “ethnicity”.“I think the sign is clearly trying to create a chilling effect in the telling of these stories,” said Dennis Arguelles, the southern California director of the National Parks Conservation Association, which supports national parks and opposes planned changes to alter historical facts. “These are moments in our history and it’s very dangerous for us to try to pretend it didn’t happen.”The NPS, which has already been under pressure due to funding cuts, hiring freezes and forced resignations, has a legal mandate to preserve, protect and interpret American history. By posting the new signs across all 433 parks, monuments and historic sites, park visitors can act as government informants, although Arguelles said he has heard anecdotally that people have used the QR code to express support for Manzanar and ask that the administration let park rangers do their jobs.View image in fullscreenNPS units have been tasked with reviewing all “inappropriate content” on display by 18 July, and parks will receive direction about what to do with it by 18 August.Arguelles said that fears of public education at Manzanar being stifled are not unfounded. The park service has already stripped the contributions of transgender people from the Stonewall national monument’s website. And the US army deleted a webpage dedicated to the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the nation’s most decorated military unit, which was composed of thousands of Japanese Americans whose families were forcibly incarcerated by their own government. After public outcry, the page was partially restored.The Trump administration has also threatened funding for colleges and universities offering ethnic studies programs as part of their DEI purge. Cultural institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum that focus on education, culture and storytelling have lost grants (some have since been temporarily restored). Among the cuts was a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that funded a workshop that helped teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration that benefitted roughly 20,000 students a year.“As a historian, you can see a pendulum swing between a very narrow and exclusive vision of America as a white Christian nation and a more open, multi-ethnic America,” said Duncan Ryūken Williams, director of the University of Southern California’s Shinso Ito Center and co-founder of of the Irei Project, which, for the first time, compiled the names of 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry who were unjustly incarcerated during the second world war. “We’re obviously in one part of that spectrum now.”The preservation of this part of Japanese American history is about more than remembering the past. In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act – the very law that served as the basis for some of the arrests and roundups of Japanese Americans during the second world war – against Venezuelan nationals as young as 14 whom the administration claims are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. In cases challenging the executive order, every judge except one has found the Trump administration’s use of the act to deport people without due process to be illegal.When the US last invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it began a period of escalation that resulted in the supreme court deferring to unsubstantiated claims from the executive branch, which led to everyday people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, losing their families, jobs, homes and freedoms. (It wasn’t just the Alien Enemies Act; most people of Japanese descent were detained, under the auspices of martial law in Hawaii and otherwise under Executive Order 9066.)Williams said that, like today, the way the Alien Enemies Act was used during the second world war was prejudicial since people of Japanese heritage were seen at the time as being “unassimilable racially and religiously”, recalling racist tropes from the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.View image in fullscreen“Currently, we are seeing people being picked up and detained and moved immediately away from their families,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of 60 Asian American organizations that filed an amicus brief supporting the fight against Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. “We’re hearing reports of even green card holders having been deported without any process, without a hearing. It’s really, really disturbing.”She connects the lack of due process many immigrants are experiencing today to what most Japanese Americans experienced during the second world war. “This is the same playbook,” Kohli said. “The government suppressed evidence and made false claims to justify incarceration in WWII and today’s administration is doing the same thing. They’re invoking this law with no evidence.”While it remains to be seen how the courts will rule on the Alien Enemies Act and how the NPS will handle complying with the administration’s orders about the content at sites like Manzanar, Japanese American community organizations are determined to teach the lessons of the past to show how quickly civil liberties can be taken away, particularly for communities of color.“The slogan Make America Great Again is sort of calling back to the past that didn’t exist,” said Densho’s Kawamura. “We’re going to do our best to protect and safeguard this history so that young people still have access to it even if the federal government itself is making it more difficult for us to do our work.” More

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      California violated Title IX by allowing trans athletes on girls’ teams, Trump administration says

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      The Trump administration has found that the California department of education and the state’s high school sports federation violated civil rights law by allowing transgender girls to compete on girls sports teams.The federal education department announced the finding Wednesday and proposed a resolution that would require California to bar transgender women from women’s sports and strip transgender athletes of records, titles and awards. It’s the latest escalation in the Republican administration’s effort to bar transgender athletes from women’s sports teams nationwide.If California rejects the proposal, the education department could move to terminate the state’s federal education funding.“The Trump administration will relentlessly enforce Title IX protections for women and girls, and our findings today make clear that California has failed to adhere to its obligations under federal law,” Linda McMahon, the education secretary, said. “The state must swiftly come into compliance with Title IX or face the consequences that follow.Title IX is a 1972 law forbidding sex discrimination in education.California education and sports officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.Federal officials opened an investigation into the California Interscholastic Federation in February after the organization said it would abide by a state law allowing athletes to compete on teams consistent with their gender identity. That followed an executive order signed by Donald Trump that was intended to ban transgender athletes from participating in girls and women’s sports.In April, McMahon’s department opened an investigation into the California department of education over the same issue.Both investigations concluded that state policies violated Title IX. The administration has been invoking the law in its campaign against transgender athletes, launching scores of investigations into schools, colleges and states. It’s a reversal from the Joe Biden administration, which attempted to expand Title IX to provide protections for transgender students. A federal judge struck down the expansion before Trump took office in January.The administration’s proposed resolution would require California to notify schools that transgender athletes should be barred from girls athletic teams and that all schools must “adopt biology-based definitions of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’”. The state would also have to notify schools that any conflicting interpretation of state law would be considered a violation of Title IX.Athletes who lost awards, titles or records to transgender athletes would have their honors restored under the proposal, and the state would be required to send personal apology letters to those athletes.A similar resolution was offered to Maine’s education agency in a separate clash with the administration over transgender athletes. Maine rejected the proposal in April, prompting a justice department lawsuit seeking to terminate the state’s federal education funding.Under federal guidelines, California’s education office and the sports federation have 10 days to come into compliance or risk enforcement action.The federation separately tested a pilot policy at a state track meet in May, allowing one extra competitor in three events featuring high school junior AB Hernandez, who is trans. The organization announced the change after Trump took to social medial to criticize Hernandez’s participation. The justice department said it would investigate Hernandez’s district and the state to determine if Title IX was being violated. More

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      Militarized LA: troops here to stay as Trump doubles down on deployments

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      Shortly before last November’s presidential election, before anyone could envision him defying his “America first” political base and launching a bombing raid on Iran, Donald Trump offered a preview of how and why he would want to deploy the military on US soil.It was, the president said, to deal with “the enemy within”.“We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” he said in a Fox News interview that prompted widespread condemnation at the time. “I think it should be very easily handled by … national guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”Trump did not specify what it was he didn’t want to let happen – only that while he promised to put an end to America’s “forever wars” overseas, he regarded domestic political adversaries, perhaps like the ones who have been protesting in massive numbers in Los Angeles and across the US this month, as a national security threat worthy of a military response.When thousands of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles earlier this month to protest against his administration’s heavy-handed immigration sweeps targeting workers in factories and car washes, he wasted little time making good on what he had promised.The reality of Trump sending thousands of national guard troops and US marines into LA earlier this month has not matched his rhetoric – yet the shock of it may have been dulled by the headlines coming out of the Middle East. The troops have largely kept a low profile, their duties restricted to guarding federal buildings and, at least according to the administration, accompanying immigration enforcement agents and other federal officials as they go about their business.Still, as the dust settles on two weeks of impassioned street protests and occasional vandalism and violence in downtown Los Angeles, the deployment continues to unnerve California’s political leaders, national Democratic party figures worried about who might be next, as well as many ordinary citizens and influential figures within the military itself.“The US military exists to defend the nation from foreign threats, not to police American streets or intervene in political disputes at home,” a group of retired four-star generals and admirals and high-profile former Pentagon officials said in a statement, signalling just how far Trump has strayed from precedent.The group, including a former secretary of the army, a former secretary of the navy, and Michael Hayden, a retired air force general who led the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency under presidents of both parties, are part of a lawsuit seeking to reverse the deployment, which they say “puts both service members and civilians at risk of harm and violates longstanding constitutional limits on government power”.Some observers have gone further, seeing a direct link between Trump’s willingness to send troops into American city streets and his decision to involve the United States in the growing conflict between Israel and Iran. “That kind of authoritarian aggression [rarely] stays inside the country’s borders,” Julia Ioffe, a national security expert and founding editor of Puck News, said of the California deployment on 11 June. “Didn’t think I’d be right so soon,” she wrote on Friday, as Trump’s war plans for Iran were ramping up.The Trump administration has vowed to keep the troops in place for at least 60 days, to ensure – as Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, told a House defense appropriations subcommittee – “that those rioters, looters and thugs on the other side assaulting our police officers know that we’re not going anywhere”.The threat of a more muscular military confrontation with “the enemy within” has not gone away, either, though one of the questions remaining is whether the military or the many agencies under the control of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – immigration enforcement, border patrol, FBI – are more likely to take the lead.Two days before the No Kings rallies, Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, was in Los Angeles and said the federal government’s goal was not just to maintain order on the streets but “to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country”. Seconds after delivering these lines at a news conference, FBI agents under Noem’s authority manhandled and handcuffed Alex Padilla, a California senator who interrupted her to ask a question.Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar”, has threatened to arrest the governor, Gavin Newsom, and LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, if they stand in the way of the immigration sweeps. At least two elected officials, the New Jersey congresswoman LaMonica McIver and New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, have indeed been arrested for alleged interference in Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations.The military has so far stayed out of these headline-grabbing events, their role largely eclipsed by continuing immigration raids conducted by masked federal agents refusing to disclose their names or badge numbers, but experts and constitutional scholars say their very presence risks destabilizing what is already a volatile and politically charged situation. “The risk of escalation, or of someone making a mistake, is always present and in these situations actually quite high,” said Chris Mirasola, a national security expert at the University of Houston Law Center. “Just the deployment itself is escalatory.”View image in fullscreenIn deciding to take charge of the California national guard, over Newsom’s objections, Trump stopped short of invoking the Insurrection Act used by past presidents to help quell civil unrest, most recently during the 1992 LA riots when marines rode alongside southern California police patrols in burning neighborhoods.Rather, he invoked a rarely used power to mobilize the military to “temporarily protect” federal property and personnel. Lyndon Johnson used the same protection power to guarantee the safety of civil rights demonstrators in Alabama in 1965, in defiance of the state’s segregationist governor, George Wallace, and Richard Nixon used it in an ill-fated attempt to get the national guard to deliver the mail during a postal strike in 1970. But scholars said they were not aware of it being used any time since.Mirasola said he was a little perplexed, given the vehemence of Trump’s rhetoric about “violent, insurrectionist mobs”, that the president opted for this softer approach. “Maybe he just wanted the theatrics of getting the military on the streets,” Mirasola said. “This is a way of doing that while still preserving some space to continue to escalate.”It was also possible, he suggested, that Trump could not talk his military commanders into taking a more aggressive approach. “The military establishment is extremely allergic to the Insurrection Act,” he said. “It’s one of the few things bred into every single officer.”According to veterans and advocacy groups for service members being deployed to Los Angeles, the military also prides itself on being entirely apolitical and has no appetite to be drawn into a political conflict involving Trump or anyone else. Perhaps for this reason, the national guard and the marines have been barely visible in Los Angeles.At the first big downtown protest, on 8 June, the Los Angeles police moved protesters away from the national guard’s staging area at a federal courthouse complex and parked their patrol cruisers in such a way that the guardsmen could not come out and intervene.Six days later, in the final stages of the No Kings protest, a hard core of protesters briefly faced off against a line of marines stationed on the front steps of the downtown federal building. “Leave LA!” the crowd chanted, prompting the marines to deploy riot shields and push the protesters away from the building. The Los Angeles police quickly issued a dispersal order, sent in officers on horseback, and fired volleys of teargas to send most of the crowd scattering.Otherwise, the only reported incident has involved a military veteran who inadvertently crossed a line of police tape outside a federal building in west Los Angeles. One of the marines on guard wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him, but he was released shortly after and told reporters he was treated “very fairly”.California has sued the Trump administration over the military deployment and seemed to score an early win in court last week when a district judge said the president had exceeded his authority and needed to return control of the state national guard immediately. An appeals panel has since reversed that ruling, however.Part of California’s problem in arguing its case is that the national guard has been pressed into non-traditional activities with increasing frequency in recent years, undermining the notion of a strict separation between military and civilian activities.Several states, under both Republican and Democratic leadership, have drafted the guard into border patrol duties despite severe morale issues among the troops and opposition from the military brass. New Mexico has asked its national guard to work as substitute teachers in understaffed schools. Florida has had them filling in as prison guards, and New York has seconded its guard to police the New York City subway.Supporters of California’s lawsuit argue that none of these scenarios are appropriate. And deploying the national guard for non-military purposes is even more inappropriate, they say, when it happens for an overtly partisan purpose over the objections of the state governor. “The military shouldn’t be in the business of domestic law enforcement. That’s not what they’re trained to do,” said Beau Tremitiere, a lawyer with Protect Democracy, an advocacy group supporting the suit.“If Americans weren’t aware of the risks posed by politicized domestic deployments by the military before the events in Los Angeles, they certainly are now. Healthy and respectful civil-military relations are yet another bulwark of US democracy that the president is trying to erode. We’re all on notice.” More

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      ‘I’m scared to death to leave my house’: immigrants are disappearing from the streets – can US cities survive?

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      At Hector’s Mariscos restaurant in the heavily Latino and immigrant city of Santa Ana, California, sales of Mexican seafood have slid. Seven tables would normally be full, but diners sit at only two this Tuesday afternoon.“I haven’t seen it like this since Covid,” manager Lorena Marin said in Spanish as cumbia music played on loudspeakers. A US citizen, Marin even texted customers she was friendly with, encouraging them to come in.“No, I’m staying home,” a customer texted back. “It’s really screwed up out there with all of those immigration agents.”Increasing immigrant arrests in California have begun to gut-punch the economy and wallets of immigrant families and beyond. In some cases, immigrants with legal status and even US citizens have been swept into Donald Trump’s dragnet.The 2004 fantasy film A Day Without a Mexican – chronicling what would happen to California if Mexican immigrants disappeared – is fast becoming a reality, weeks without Mexicans and many other immigrants. The implications are stark for many, both economically and personally.“We are now seeing a very significant shift toward enforcement at labor sites where people are working,’ said Andrew Selee, president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “Not a focus on people with criminal records, but a focus on people who are deeply integrated in the American economy.”In California, immigrant workers comprise bigger shares of certain industries than they do for the nation overall. Here, the foreign-born make up 62% of agriculture labor and 42% of construction workers, according to the American Immigration Council. About 85% of sewing machine operators in garment factories are foreign-born. Fully 40% of entrepreneurs are foreign-born.Nationally, about a quarter of workers are foreign-born in agriculture and construction, according to the American Immigration Council. More than half of drywall hangers, plasterers and stucco masons are foreign-born. And in science, technology, engineering and math – the so-called Stem fields – nearly a quarter of workers are foreign-born, said the council.The current enforcement trend, Selee said, will “lead to a strategy that will have big economic implications if they continue to go after people who are active in the labor force rather than those who have criminal records”.In both California and across an ageing nation, about half of the foreign-born are naturalized US citizens – a crucial defense in immigration raids and arrests.View image in fullscreenSelee said the current strategy was launched when “the Trump administration realized they weren’t getting large numbers by following traditional approaches to pursuing people who are priority targets for deportation”.Now the threat and chilling effect from immigration raids can be felt in disparate communities from Dallas to El Paso to rural Wisconsin – among migrants and, in some cases, the employers who hire them.In the small town of Waumandee in Wisconsin, dairy farmer John Rosenow said he can’t find US citizens who can withstand the rigors of dairy work.“Fact of the matter is if you want to eat or drink milk you are going to need immigrant workers,” he said.“Yes, we want to get rid of the people who are bad actors,” Rosenow said. “But the people I know, people who are working in the dairy farms, are just hard-working people, getting things done, doing jobs Americans don’t want to do.”In California’s San Joaquin valley, rancher and melon-grower Joe Del Bosque has heard reports of US agents chasing workers in the strawberry fields south of his operation.The San Joaquin valley, known as the food basket of the world, is heavily dependent upon foreign-born workers, especially at harvest time, Del Bosque said. He currently has 100 people working for him and that number will double as the harvest picks up in the coming weeks.“They’re going to disrupt the harvest and food chain. This will hurt the American consumer,” Del Bosque said. “These people are hard workers. They come to work, especially if they have families here or in Mexico.”In a surprise pivot late last week, Trump said there would be an easing of the crackdown in agriculture and the hospitality industries. The New York Times first reported that new guidance from a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) official called for a “hold on worksite enforcement investigations/operations” in the agriculture sector and restaurants and hotels. The Ice guidance, issued in an email, also said agents were not to make arrests of “noncriminal collaterals”, a key point for those who note that many detained immigrants have had no criminal record. However, the Department of Homeland Security told staff it was reversing that guidance on Monday.Some business leaders and immigrants remain scared and confused.View image in fullscreenRaids, or the threat of them, are also taking an emotional toll on families and generating protests in Chicago, Seattle, Spokane, New York, San Antonio, Dallas and elsewhere. Bigger protests are expected in days to come.In El Paso, protesters flipped the White House script that undocumented immigrants were “criminals”. They waved mostly US flags and shouted “No justice, no peace. Shame on Ice.”Among the protesters was Alejandra, a US citizen and a junior at the University of Texas at El Paso. She asked for partial anonymity for fear of reprisal against her mixed-status family.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe said she took to this border city’s streets to honor the sacrifice of her grandparents who migrated from Ciudad Juárez. “All it takes is for you to look at who took that first step to bring you the life you have currently,” Alejandra said.In the Dallas area, a Guatemalan worker said he had been absent from construction sites for days.“There’s too much fear, too much to risk,” said Gustavo, 34, requesting his surname be withheld because he is undocumented. “I fear tomorrow, tonight. I may be deported, and who loses? My family back in Guatemala.”Tough immigration enforcement has been the top-polling issue for Trump. But favor may be slipping. A poll released this week by Quinnipiac University showed Trump had a 43% approval rating on immigration and a 54% disapproval rating. That poll was conducted between 5 and 9 June – after several days of protests.Meantime, back in Santa Ana, a city of about 316,000 in southern California, shop owner Alexa Vargas said foot traffic had slowed around her store, Vibes Boutique, with sales plummeting about 30% in recent days.On a recent day, the shop’s jeans and glitzy T-shirts remained un-browsed. Metered parking spots on the usually busy street sat empty. A fruit and snow cone vendor whom Vargas usually frequents had been missing for days.“It shouldn’t be this dead right now,” Vargas, 26, said on a Tuesday afternoon. “People are too scared to go out. Even if you’re a citizen but you look a certain way. Some people don’t want to risk it.”Reyna, a restaurant cook, told her boss she didn’t feel safe going to work after she heard about the immigration detentions at Home Depot stores in the city.The 40-year-old, who is in the US without legal status, said she fears becoming an Ice target. Current immigration laws and policies don’t provide a way to obtain legal status even though she’s been living in the US for more than 20 years.“I need to work but, honestly, I’m scared to death to leave my house,” she said.For now her life is on hold, Reyna said.She canceled a party for her son’s high school graduation. She no longer drives her younger children to summer school. She even stopped attending behavioral therapy sessions for her seven-year-old autistic son.Reyna said she can’t sleep. She suffers headaches every day.Early on Tuesday, she said, immigration agents in an unmarked vehicle swept up her husband’s 20-year-old nephew, who is a Mexican national without legal status. The scene unreeled across from her home.Her autistic son, a US-born citizen, has begged her to allow him to play on the front yard swing set.“No, honey. We can’t go outside,” Reyna told him.“Why?” he asked.“The police are taking people away,” she explained. “They are taking away people who were not born here.”This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative, a bilingual non-profit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high-quality, fact-based news and information from the US-Mexico border. More

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      The US is woefully underprepared for wildfire season, say insiders: ‘The stakes are life and death’

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      Summer temperatures are rising and the US is bracing for another hot, dry and hectic wildfire season. But with the promise of extreme conditions in the months to come, federal fire crews are also growing concerned that a series of changes brought on by the Trump administration have left them underprepared.Severe cuts to budgets and staff have hamstrung the agencies that manage roughly 640m acres of the nation’s public lands, leaving significant gaps in a workforce that supports wildfire mitigation and suppression. The administration’s crackdown on climate science and the dismantling of departments that provided world-class research and weather forecasting, may also undermine early warning systems, slowing response and strategic planning.Donald Trump has championed firefighters and called for bolstering preparedness for the a year-round fire season, using the devastating fire storms that leveled communities across Los Angeles at the start of the year as a call to action. But in the six months since, the administration has only added obstacles to addressing the key issues.There are also fears that Trump’s new wildfire directive to bring the country’s federal firefighters together under a new agency will be rushed, adding another layer of uncertainty and chaos just as crews are trying to prepare for another grueling season.Many areas have had an exceptionally warm spring following a dry winter. The south-west and Pacific north-west are already experiencing sizzling heatwaves, and on landscapes across California, Montana and Texas, there’s a high danger for ignitions to turn into infernos. Climate forecasters are predicting the potential for forest fires is higher this year than in the previous two years.“If this turns out to be a major fire year, it’s going to be a shit show,” said Dr Hugh Safford, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Davis, who spent more than two decades working for the US Forest Service (USFS) before retiring in 2021.Five federal firefighters, who spoke with the Guardian under the condition of anonymity because they are barred from speaking publicly, echoed Safford’s unease. When asked if their agencies were ready for the season ahead, the answer was a resounding “no”.And it’s already getting busy.Homes and businesses were lost to the flames in Oregon this week, and dozens of blazes are tearing through Canada – where more than 8.5m acres have already been consumed by fires – brought the rising risks forming across the continent into sharper focus.During a Senate appropriations committee hearing last week, Tom Schultz, the chief of the USFS, which currently employs the bulk of the US government’s fire workforce, said his teams are well-positioned for the months ahead.Many fire experts, firefighters and lawmakers don’t agree.“The reality is on the ground we have lost workers whose jobs are absolutely essential,” Patty Murray, a US senator, said during the hearing, sharing that an estimated 7,500employees have been pushed out of the USFS this year. That includes scientists, maintenance staff and administrators who support wildfire response, and workers who had qualifications to fill in as firefighters on blazes when they were needed.“The stakes are life and death here – and this raises serious alarms about this agency being ready for this critical fire season.”A fraying firefighter workforceFears are mounting that the loss of support staff could mean a range of needs, from meals to medical services, will not be in place during large fires when they are needed most.“Those agencies were already understaffed,” Lenya N Quinn-Davidson, director of University of California Agricultural and Natural Resources Fire Network, said. “Now they are skeletal.”Already, there have been reports of crews being left without power for weeks due to cut maintenance workers, paychecks being late or halved because administrative roles were left empty, or firefighters having to mow lawns outside their offices, manage campsites, and do plumbing work at their barracks in addition to their other duties.Access to purchase cards that teams typically rely on for everything from bathroom supplies to fuel for chainsaws were revoked. District offices couldn’t buy ink or paper for their printers. Others struggled to get safety and tactical supplies for the season, including radios and fire shelters.A squad leader for the USFS said some newly hired firefighters had had to go for months without healthcare and seasoned ones were left waiting on backpay because the human resources department has less than a quarter of the staff it did previously. Another firefighter said thousands of cases are lagging in HR because people haven’t gotten paid properly and promotions aren’t being processed.“I think we have taken those people for granted for a long time,” the squad leader added. “Now that they aren’t around we are going to be in for a shock.”View image in fullscreenCapacity will probably be crunched on the fire line too.The forest service is going into the summer with fewer firefighters and teams than it had last year, when overwork led to an increase in injuries and burnout.Schultz confirmed the agency has hired 11,000 firefighters, roughly 900 fewer than last season, and that there are 37 incident management teams, down by five. Those teams are a crucial need for responding to complex and large-scale disasters, and there may not be enough to go around.“It is just another example of the administration making these kneejerk reactions and truly not understanding what it takes to respond to wildfires and other disasters,” said Riva Duncan, a former manager and firefighter in the USFS and vice-president of ​​Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a non-profit advocacy group. “Come August, when more geographic areas are on fire, I think we are going to see some glitches in the system.”Roughly 4,800 USFS workers have signed on to a program offering workers paid administrative leave through September if they opted to resign or retire, pushed by the Trump administration as a way to rapidly shrink the federal government. That figure includes 1,400 people with so-called “red cards”,trained to join operations on the fire line if needed.Schultz told senators that, because the offer to leave was voluntary, the USFS didn’t do an analysis ahead of time to strategically make cuts or keep staff who might be needed when emergencies strike. Now in an effort to get some of those workers back, the Department of Agriculture, which the USFS falls under, has called for volunteers willing to take fire assignments until their contracts end.A spokesperson for the USDA said it was a top priority for Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, to “ensure the entire agency is geared to respond to what is already an above normal summer fire season”, and claimed the forest service was well on its way with 96% of its hiring goals met. They cited the program to bring those on administrative leave back to active duty as an indication that the USFS “is operationally ready for the fire season ahead”.Even if some do opt to sign on for the summer, time is running short to reposition resources and get them ready.“A lot of those folks have missed their fire refreshers, they have missed taking their fitness tests, they are behind the curve,” Duncan said “And, not everybody is willing to come back.”A fire planner at the USFS, who also asked not to be named, said he did not expect many to sign up. He said the loss will result in heavy “brain drain”, as people with decades of experience are now missing from the agency’s roster.View image in fullscreenTeams are bracing for another round of cuts expected to come. An executive order signed by Trump last week directing the government to combine federal firefighters under a new agency in the Department of Interior is shaking up the workforce just as the season enters full-swing. The order gives departments just 90 days to formulate plans.Federal firefighters have spent years advocating for the move, but there are concerns the process will be rushed and mismanaged. Leaders were told the consolidation wouldn’t happen until next year.“It seems like a joke if you can’t even pay my guys or get them insurance,” the squad leader said of the administration’s aim to merge departments while pressing needs of their crews go unaddressed. He added that the idea of a new agency – one that puts firefighters in positions to make key decisions – is promising. “But I don’t have faith in these people putting it together.”It’s a feeling the other firefighters who spoke to the Guardian share.There have long been challenges at the agencies they work for, especially at the USFS. Now there are fears that the administration’s answers to those problems are ignoring firefighters’ needs. Morale has continued to plummet.One USFS firefighter said the lack of workforce planning “could be catastrophic”: “I am not seeing our interests being represented.”An anti-science agendaBeyond the personnel shortage, grants that support important forest health and fire mitigation work are being phased out, leaving more landscapes vulnerable to burning.Schultz told senators during the hearing that those grants – including funds that support wildfire risk reduction on state, local and tribal lands, as well as a program that helps private landowners maintain their trees – were halved this year so that more than $43m could go toward the program incentivizing early resignations and retirements. In next year’s budget, the grants are completely closed out.Some funds appropriated by Congress were not distributed at all. Murray, the senator, highlighted that $97m budgeted to support state, rural and volunteer fire departments in wildfire reduction work was withheld by the agency this year.The effects of these deep cuts are expected to be far-reaching and long term, especially due to the loss of science and research capacity that support land management work and wildfire mitigation.“The administration’s budget for Forest Service research is $0 – this for the world’s most important forest research organization,” Safford said. It’s not just new research being squashed; Trump has enforced an anti-science agenda across the government that will leave the US less prepared as the climate crisis unfolds.The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), which saw large-scale layoffs earlier this year, may also be less able to provide important forecasts and data used to plan prescribed burns, warn the public and pre-position crews during extreme weather events. National Weather Service stations no longer have the staff for round-the-clock monitoring, especially in high fire-prone regions in California and the Pacific north-west. The overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) could leave gaps in response and recovery.View image in fullscreenThe USFS is also returning to a “full-suppression” ethos that has shocked ecologists and firefighters alike. Rather than letting some backcountry blazes burn – wildfires that can be healthy for forests that evolved with fire – Schultz ordered the agency to revert to a strategy widely recognized as a key culprit in the increase in catastrophic fire. The USFS chief has also placed higher restrictions on prescribed burning.“We have known since the late 1960s that full-tilt suppression is reactive and does nothing to solve the underlying issues,” Safford said. A push to put all fires out immediately, regardless of their ecological benefit or risks to communities, “wastes extraordinary amounts of money, puts firefighters at risk, and additionally has all sorts of negative environmental and ecological repercussions in both the short and long term”.Plugging the shortfallsStates are now scrambling to fill the gaps left by the federal government.California issued nearly $72m in May to support land management projects in the state and fast-tracked projects in partnership with tribes, private landowners and local districts.In Colorado this spring,Jared Polis, the governor, issued $7m in state wildfire mitigation grants. “Forest fires aren’t going to take four years off just because of who’s in the White House,” he told Politico at the time. “So it’s really important that states up the bar on preparation.”This is, in part, by design.“There’s going to be a shift to put greater reliance on state and local governments to cover those costs on their own without direct federal support,” Schultz told lawmakers at the hearing.For Quinn-Davidson, these moves speak to the importance of community-based work and leadership. With less federal support, it will fall to individuals and local groups to do the important work needed in their own backyards to prevent the worst fires.Quinn-Davidson, who oversees programs helping communities conduct prescribed burns, thinks they will be up for the challenge. She lamented the loss of passionate federal workers but said people were jumping at the opportunity to get involved and do what’s required to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire in their own backyards.“The more involved people can be at the local level, and the more we can empower communities to have leadership on fire,” she said, “the more resilient we will be in the face of disaster.” More

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      Pete Hegseth suggests he would disobey court ruling against deploying military in LA

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      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, suggested on Wednesday that he would not obey a federal court ruling against the deployments of national guard troops and US marines to Los Angeles, the latest example of the Trump administration’s willingness to ignore judges it disagrees with.The comments before the Senate armed services committee come as Donald Trump faces dozen of lawsuits over his policies, which his administration has responded to by avoiding compliance with orders it dislikes. In response, Democrats have claimed that Trump is sending the country into a constitutional crisis.California has sued over Trump’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles, and, last week, a federal judge ruled that control of soldiers should return to California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom. An appeals court stayed that ruling and, in arguments on Tuesday, sounded ready to keep the soldiers under Donald Trump’s authority.“I don’t believe district courts should be determining national security policy. When it goes to the supreme court, we’ll see,” Hegseth told the Democratic senator Mazie Hirono. Facing similar questions from another Democrat, Elizabeth Warren, he said: “If the supreme court rules on a topic, we will abide by that.”Hegseth was confirmed to lead the Pentagon after three Republican senators and all Democrats voted against his appointment, creating a tie vote on a cabinet nomination for only the second time in history. The tie was broken by the vice-president, JD Vance.There were few hints of dissatisfaction among GOP senators at the hearing, which was intended to focus on the Pentagon’s budgetary needs for the forthcoming fiscal year, but Democrats used it to press for more details on the deployment of troops to Los Angeles, as well as the turmoil that has plagued Hegseth’s top aides and the potential for the United States to join Israel’s attack on Iran.The Democratic senator Elissa Slotkin asked whether troops deployed to southern California were allowed to arrest protesters or shoot them in the legs, as Trump is said to have attempted to order during his first term.“If necessary, in their own self-defense, they could temporarily detain and hand over to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. But there’s no arresting going on,” Hegseth said. On Friday, marines temporarily took into custody a US citizen at a federal building in Los Angeles.The secretary laughed when asked whether troops could shoot protesters, before telling Slotkin: “Senator, I’d be careful what you read in books and believing in, except for the Bible.”An exasperated Slotkin replied: “Oh my God.”Trump has publicly mulled the possibility that the United States might strike Iran. Slotkin asked if the Pentagon had plans for what the US military would do after toppling its government.“We have plans for everything,” Hegseth said, prompting the committee’s Republican chair, Roger Wicker, to note that the secretary was scheduled to answer further questions in a behind-closed-doors session later that afternoon.In addition to an aggressive purge of diversity and equity policies from the military, Hegseth has also ordered that military bases that were renamed under Joe Biden because they honored figures in the Confederacy to revert to their previous names – but officially honoring various US soldiers with the same name.The Virginia senator Tim Kaine said that in his state, several bases had been renamed under Biden in honor of accomplished veterans, and their families were never officially told that the names would be changed back.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“You didn’t call any of the families, and I’ve spoken with the families, and the families were called by the press. That’s how they learned about this. They learned about it from the press,” Kaine said,He asked Hegseth to pause the renaming of these bases, which the secretary declined to do, instead saying: “We’ll find ways to recognize them.”Democrats also criticized Hegseth for turmoil in the ranks of his top aides, as well as his decision to name as the Pentagon’s press secretary Kingsley Wilson, who has repeatedly shared on social media an antisemitic conspiracy theory.The Pentagon head had a sharp exchange with the Democratic senator Jacky Rosen, who asked whether he would fire Wilson. “I’ve worked directly with her. She does a fantastic job, and … any suggestion that I or her or others are party to antisemitism is a mischaracterization.”“You are not a serious person,” the Nevada lawmaker replied. “You are not serious about rooting out, fighting antisemitism within the ranks of our DOD. It’s despicable. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”Rosen then asked if the far-right activist Laura Loomer was involved in the firing of a top national security staffer. Hegseth demurred, saying the decision was his to make, but the senator continued to press, even as the committee chair brought down his gavel to signal that she had run out of time for questions.“I believe your time is up, senator,” Hegseth said. A furious Rosen responded: “It is not up to you to tell me when my time is up. And I am going to say, Mr Secretary, you’re either feckless or complicit. You’re not in control of your department.” More

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      ‘Abducted by Ice’: the haunting missing-person posters plastered across LA

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      “Missing son.” “Missing father.” “Missing grandmother.”The words are written in bright red letters at the top of posters hanging on lampposts and storefronts around Los Angeles. At first glance, they appear to be from worried relatives seeking help from neighbors.But a closer look reveals that the missing people are immigrants to the US who have been disappeared by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Some of the faces are familiar to anyone who has been following the news – that missing father, for instance, is Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was deported to El Salvador in March without a hearing, in what the Trump administration admitted was an error. “Abducted by Ice,” the poster reads, under a picture of Ábrego García with his small son. “Did not receive constitutional protections. Currently being held in detention.”The missing grandmother is Gladis Yolanda Chávez Pineda, a Chicago woman who was taken by Ice when she showed up for a check-in with immigration officials this month. She had arrived in the US seeking a better life for her daughter and was in the midst of applying for asylum. “Lived in the US for 10 years,” the poster states. “No criminal history.”View image in fullscreenThe missing son is Andry Hernández Romero, a makeup artist who fled persecution in Venezuela. On arrival in the US, he was detained, with US authorities claiming his tattoos indicated gang membership. His family and friends say that’s ridiculous. He was among hundreds of people deported to the El Salvador mega-prison known as Cecot in March. “Currently being held in a concentration camp,” the poster says.The posters are just a few examples of a campaign of quiet resistance on the streets of Los Angeles. On Monday, a walk down Sunset Boulevard in the historic Silver Lake neighborhood meant encountering an array of flyers, artwork and spray-painted messages of support for disappeared immigrants and fury at the administration.The “missing” posters, which have also appeared in other neighborhoods, were particularly effective. Duct-taped to telephone polls amid ads for comedy shows, guitar lessons and yard sales, they reminded passersby of the individual lives derailed by Trump’s immigration crackdown – instead of names in the news, these were families and friends who might have lived just down the road.View image in fullscreenHumanizing people’s stories was precisely the goal, said the creators behind the posters.“I just wanted to reframe this idea of immigrants as criminals, and put into perspective that these are people – this is someone’s grandmother, this is someone’s father, this is someone’s son,” said Ben*, the posters’ 28-year-old designer. He worked with his friend Sebastian*, 31, to distribute them around town.What began as a friends-and-family effort expanded after Ben shared the PDF: “I shared it with a few friends, then they shared it, and so it kind of just blew up.”For Sebastian, the issue was personal. “I moved here from Colombia 14 years ago, and ever since the first Trump administration, I’ve seen my community being attacked,” he said. “So as soon as I saw these posters that my friend was doing, that I felt something in me that needed to go out and help.”While they worked, “people started taking photos, and I had a moment with this one elderly woman where she was looking at it, and she really just started tearing up,” Ben said. “At that moment, I was like, ‘OK, this is actually connecting to people.’”The images have appeared in recent days as the city has become a focal point for protests against Trump’s immigration policies, which began on 6 June amid raids targeting immigrants at several locations in the city.As the protests emerged in parts of LA, Donald Trump called in the national guard without the governor’s consent – an action no president has taken since 1965. Shortly afterward, he summoned hundreds of marines. Much news coverage painted the city as a kind of post-apocalyptic hellscape, with protesters facing off against troops and cars on fire, fueling Trump’s narrative of a lawless city hopelessly embroiled in chaos.In fact, much of the unrest was confined to a small area of downtown LA. Across most of the vast city and county, life continued as normal, the sun shining over familiar traffic jams, studio lots and suburban sprawl. Still, the protests – and the federal government’s wildly disproportionate clampdown – served as a spark that has helped to fuel a national outcry, as well as this subtler demonstration of local solidarity.Alongside the “Missing” posters were a series of alternative descriptions of Ice – rather than Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, stenciled messages on the pavement and shop windows condemned “Illegal Country-wide Embarrassment”, “Institution of Child Endangerment” and the perhaps less clear “Insecure Confused Ejaculation”.View image in fullscreenOther flyers advertised Saturday’s “No Kings” protests, while still others noted that “Undocumented hands feed you”, with an illustration of a person working in a field. Those latter posters were created by Sydney*, 29, who works in the music industry in Los Angeles. Her 9-to-5 job makes it impossible to attend protests, she said, so creating this image was an alternative way to participate in resistance. “You read something tragic every morning lately about the Ice raids,” she said.She was particularly moved by the plight of agricultural workers, toiling for low wages under the threat of immigration crackdowns. “I just felt very compelled to speak up for them in places that people probably don’t think about them, like Silver Lake and the city,” she said. “I am Latina. I have many family members that came here and are immigrants, and so it just touches home for me.”Inspired by a slogan she saw in protest photos and Mexican decor flags, Sydney created the stylized image as a social media post. “I just wanted to tie something beautiful with something very political and loud,” she said. A friend saw the post, asked if she could print it out, and plastered it around town.That DIY approach adds to the posters’ power: there is a sense of neighbors helping neighbors. As the administration conjures a tale of a city in crisis, the images – unpretentious and haunting – serve as a reminder of what the protests are actually about.* The Guardian is withholding full names for privacy reasons More

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      Appeals court likely to keep Trump in control of national guard deployed in LA

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      A federal appeals court on Tuesday seemed ready to keep Donald Trump in control of California national guard troops after they were deployed following protests in Los Angeles over immigration raids.Last week, a district court ordered the US president to return control of the guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom, who had opposed their deployment. US district judge Charles Breyer said Trump had deployed the Guard illegally and exceeded his authority. But the administration quickly appealed and a three-judge appellate panel temporarily paused that order.Tuesday’s hearing was about whether the order could take effect while the case makes its way through the courts, including possibly the supreme court.It’s the first time a US president has activated a state national guard without the governor’s permission since 1965, and the outcome of the case could have sweeping implications for Trump’s power to send soldiers into other US cities. Trump announced on 7 June that he was deploying the guard to Los Angeles to protect federal property following a protest at a downtown detention center after federal immigration agents arrested dozens of immigrants without legal status across the city. Newsom said Trump was only inflaming the situation and that troops were not necessary.In a San Francisco courtroom, all three judges, two appointed by Trump in his first term and one by Joe Biden, suggested that presidents have wide latitude under the federal law at issue and that courts should be reluctant to step in.“If we were writing on a blank slate, I would tend to agree with you,” Judge Jennifer Sung, a Biden appointee, told California’s lawyer, Samuel Harbourt, before pointing to a 200-year-old supreme court decision that she said seemed to give presidents the broad discretion Harbourt was arguing against.Even so, the judges did not appear to embrace arguments made by a justice department lawyer that courts could not even review Trump’s decision.It wasn’t clear how quickly the panel would rule.Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee, opened the hearing by asking whether the courts have a role in reviewing the president’s decision to call up the national guard. Brett Shumate, an attorney for the federal government, said they did not.“The statute says the president may call on federal service members and units of the Guard of any state in such numbers that he considers necessary,” Shumate said, adding that the statute “couldn’t be any more clear”.Shumate made several references to “mob violence” in describing ongoing protests in Los Angeles. But mayor Karen Bass lifted a curfew for downtown Los Angeles Tuesday, saying acts of vandalism and violence that prompted her curfew a week ago had subsided.“It is essential that this injunction be stayed, otherwise, lives and property will be at risk,” Shumate said.Harbourt argued that the federal government didn’t inform Newsom of the decision to deploy the guard. He said the Trump administration hasn’t shown that they considered “more modest measures to the extreme response of calling in the national guard and militarizing the situation”.Harbourt told the panel that not upholding Breyer’s ruling would “defy our constitutional traditions of preserving state sovereignty, of providing judicial review for the legality of executive action, of safeguarding our cherished rights to political protest”.Breyer’s order applied only to the national guard troops and not the marines, who were also deployed to LA but were not yet on the streets when he ruled.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNewsom’s lawsuit accused Trump of inflaming tensions, breaching state sovereignty and wasting resources just when guard members need to be preparing for wildfire season. He also called the federal takeover of the state’s national guard “illegal and immoral”.Newsom said in advance of the hearing that he was confident in the rule of law.“I’m confident that common sense will prevail here: the US military belongs on the battlefield, not on American streets,” Newsom said in a statement.Breyer ruled the Trump violated the use of title 10, which allows the president to call the national guard into federal service when the country “is invaded”, when “there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government,” or when the president is unable “to execute the laws of the United States”.Breyer, an appointee of former president Bill Clinton, said the definition of a rebellion was not met.“The protests in Los Angeles fall far short of ‘rebellion,’” he wrote. “Individuals’ right to protest the government is one of the fundamental rights protected by the First Amendment, and just because some stray bad actors go too far does not wipe out that right for everyone.”The national guard hasn’t been activated without a governor’s permission since 1965, when President Lyndon B Johnson sent troops to protect a civil rights march in Alabama, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. More