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      For many Palestinian Americans, Trump’s Gaza plan evokes legacy of displacement

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      For Palestinian Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, like Zaynah Jadallah and her family, displacement and loss have become central elements of her family heritage.Her family members were teachers in Al-Bireh in what is now the occupied West Bank during the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and land by Zionist paramilitaries, and then the Israeli army, in the war surrounding Israel’s creation.“They fled the attacks in two cars for Jordan. One of the cars made it, the other was bombed and they were burned alive,” she says.“None of them survived.”So when Donald Trump, standing alongside Benjamin Netanyahu, suggested last week that Palestinians in the devastated Gaza Strip leave their homes and that it be turned into a “riviera” for “the people of the world”, comments he has since doubled down on, Jadallah was livid.“The president of the United States calling for ethnic cleansing and the continued genocide of Palestinians,” she says.“It’s outrageous.”For many Palestinian American residents of Dearborn such as Jadallah, the responses to the US president’s proposals follow a similar line: defiance, anger, but not much in the way of surprise.“He has a history of being loyal to the Zionist movement of genocide and colonizing [of the] the Palestinian people,” she says.“It wasn’t surprising, but it was outrageous.”A photo on the front cover of the Dearborn-published Arab American News’s 1 February edition portrays thousands of Palestinians walking along a sea front to their destroyed homes in northern Gaza. The caption reads: “The Great March of Return”.“Gaza’s history is one of both pain and pride,” reads the newspaper’s lead article on the topic.It continues: “It stretches back to ancient civilizations and includes great resistance against invasion, such as the three-month siege by Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army in 332 BCE.”Trump’s announcement upended decades of international consensus and threatened fragile talks to extend a delicate ceasefire in Gaza. It was met with glee by much of the Israeli prime minister’s ruling coalition and other far-right elements in Israel.More than half of Dearborn’s 110,000 residents are of Arab heritage, making it home to one of the largest Arab communities outside the Middle East. Many Palestinian American residents have lost family members during Israel’s onslaught on the Gaza Strip, which killed more than 46,000 people.“Nobody is really shocked. Everybody is disgusted,” says Amer Zahr, a Palestinian American comedian and activist whose family was displaced from Nazareth, Jaffa and Akka (Acre) during the Nakba.“I’m really angry at the notion that we’re talking about the thing that Trump said on Tuesday like it’s new or novel or unique. It is not,” he says.“It is the policy of Israel to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, and that policy has been fully supported and funded by the United States.”He also finds that it’s only when Trump makes such comments that liberals and the Democratic party “finally reject the notion of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians”.“I guess it has a different ring to it when Trump says it.”Trump won more votes in November’s presidential election in Dearborn than the Democratic party’s Kamala Harris or Green party candidate Jill Stein, the first time a Republican party candidate won the city in 24 years.While Harris declined to campaign in Dearborn, Trump had lunch at the Great Commoner, a café owned by an Arab American businessperson, just days before the election.“A lot of people [in Dearborn] voted for him secretly,” Zahr says. “They are the ones who have gone silent now.” Zahr voted for Stein.But some are doubling down on their support, not inclined to take Trump’s words at face value. Bishara Bahbah, a Palestinian American born and raised in Jerusalem, campaigned extensively in Michigan and other swing states through the group formerly called Arab Americans for Trump. (The group changed its name last week to Arab Americans for Peace.) He says Trump’s comments were just a “testing of the waters”.“I think the president threw out this idea as a trial balloon. There can never be a displacement of Palestinians from their homeland. It’s counterproductive,” he says.While members of his family were forced to flee Jerusalem during the Nakba in 1948, and he himself has since been banned from living in the city of his birth, Bahbah continues to believe peace in the Middle East is Trump’s main goal.“I know the president wants a legacy of peace and wants to be known as a peacemaker. For him to do that, the only path is a two-state solution which he told me he would support.”He says he has faced a backlash for supporting Trump that has included “messages on X that could be interpreted as death threats”, but that he’s been told by Trump’s advisers that Trump did not mean to suggest that Palestinians in Gaza be forcibly removed from their homes and land.“I believe that the president will come to the conclusion that what he said publicly is just not workable,” he says. He says the rebrand of his group to Arab Americans for Peace, announced hours after Trump’s comments, had been in the works for months.For Jadallah, Trump’s alleged plans for Israel to turn over the Gaza Strip to the US are an obvious contradiction to what he campaigned for president on.“It really shows his intention to serve a foreign government before the American people, right?” she says.“Because if he wants an America first agenda, he would talk about how we can spend our hard-earned tax dollars to improve our healthcare systems and our schools.”She says the resilience Palestinians in Gaza have shown following 15 months of bombardments and continued displacement lead her to believe that it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s plan to remove people from Gaza would succeed.“They’ve endured genocide, hunger, been displaced multiple times from the north to the south,” she says.“There’s still 2 million people residing in Gaza and they’ve told us that they don’t want to leave because they are the rightful owners of the land.” More

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      To stop Trump’s Gaza plans, Palestinians need solidarity and support | Omar Barghouti

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      Egyptian and Greek mythologies mention a phoenix rising from ashes. Palestinians in Gaza have shown this is not entirely a myth. With the shaky ceasefire barely holding, hundreds of thousands of genocide survivors have emerged from the carnage in this land, whose civilization goes back 4,000 years, marching to north Gaza with hope, despite knowing that almost all their homes, roads, services, schools and hospitals have been wiped out. The real aspiration of most of them is to keep marching home, to where their families had been ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba. Palestinians, it seems, have presciently responded to “Donald Trump’s plan” even before he spat it out.Despite his sinister side, the US president has mastered the skill of dominating the airwaves and cyberspace through manufacturing dissent. With one outrageous statement after another, he has managed to preoccupy the minds of most nations, leaving almost everyone guessing what his next “unhinged” move may be. But he is not the first to indulge in pretending he is “crazy”. Richard Nixon did too. They subscribe to a “madman theory”, creating the perception of insanity, to achieve two simultaneous goals: throwing friends and foes alike off balance, to the edge, as a means of extracting from them prized concessions and normalizing the patently abnormal: an unmasked might makes right order.Trump’s recent proposal to “take over” and “own” Gaza after forcibly displacing millions of Palestinians must be seen in this light. It has been widely condemned, even by despotic Arab regimes and Germany, with many describing it as “criminal”, “illegal”, “immoral”, “impractical”, or “destabilizing”. This global dissent inadvertently normalizes the idea, making it merely controversial, debatable, not categorically dismissible.Inciting for the forced displacement of Palestinian genocide survivors constitutes a “continuation” of the genocide, as a Palestinian human rights organization puts it. Beyond depraved; it is sheer evil. It is a desperate attempt to normalize the commission of atrocity crimes and to achieve through US imperialist bullying what Israel’s military prowess has utterly failed to accomplish after 15 months of genocide. Indeed, only 4% of Jewish-Israelis believe that Israel’s goals were fully achieved in Gaza, according to a recent poll. The former US secretary of defense Lloyd Austin as early as December 2023 warned Israel of such a “strategic defeat”.Indeed, despite the typical militaristic bravado, it is far from evident that the Israeli establishment wishes to resume the ruthless bombardment and massacres in Gaza. Israel’s economy is experiencing what 130 of its top economists describe as a “spiral of collapse”, with an almost unprecedented “brain drain”, a nosediving tech industry and a credit rating that is near “junk” levels, according to Moody’s. Increasingly seen by investors as a shut-down nation, Israel has ranked dead last among 50 countries in the just released Nations Brand Index. The chairman of the Israel Export Institute admits, “BDS and boycotts have changed Israel’s global trade landscape.”As evidenced by repeated UN votes, the overwhelming majority of nations today see Israel as a rogue state that has not only exterminated tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and in a few weeks killed thousands in Lebanon and occupied large swathes of Syria, but is simultaneously bulldozing the very tenets of international law. Its prime minister is wanted by the international criminal court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The international court of justice in January 2024 decided that it is plausibly committing genocide and in July 2024 ruled that its occupation is illegal and it is an apartheid state.This all explains why Trump is now amplifying an old Israeli plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza to do Israel’s bidding. Days into the start of Israel’s genocide in October 2023, a leaked Israeli ministry of intelligence document revealed a plan for ethnically cleansing Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai at the end of the “war”. Not to be outdone, and to make forced displacement sound normal in comparison, on 5 November 2023, Israel’s minister of heritage (Jewish Power party), Amichai Eliyahu, suggested dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza “ghetto”.Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the 1967 occupied Palestinian territory, has warned: “If it is not forced to stop, Israel’s genocide of Palestinians will not be confined to Gaza. Mark my words.” The Israeli war minister, Israel Katz, has referred to the military attack on Jenin in the occupied West Bank as “the first lesson from the method of repeated raids in Gaza”. The Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist homophobe”, has incited fanatic colonial violence against Palestinians in the West Bank saying: “Nablus and Jenin need to look like Jabalia.”But wiping out Palestinian towns to forcibly displace their residents is nothing new in this ongoing Nakba. A recent error by Israel’s censors has accidentally revealed secret documents exposing David Ben-Gurion’s conscious decision to “wipe out” Palestinian villages during the 1948 Nakba, as a necessary condition to create what the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem today calls “a regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea”.While global outrage against Trump’s plan abounds, the Biden administration, the “lesser evil”, the main partner in arming, funding and shielding from accountability Israel’s genocide, has entertained Israel’s proposed ethnic cleansing plans without provoking similar media outrage. It has abortively applied immense pressure on the Egyptian regime to go along with the plan in return for large investments.Obviously, all settler colonies, not just Israel, have perpetrated forced displacement of Indigenous populations. US President Theodore Roosevelt towards the turn of the 20th century wrote, “[V]iewed from the standpoint of applied ethics, the conquest and settlement by the whites of the Indian lands was necessary to the greatness of the race and to the well-being of civilized mankind.” He added, “[A] conquest may be fraught either with evil or with good for mankind, according to the comparative worth of the conquering and conquered peoples.”Similarly, when asked about the rights of Palestinian Arabs in Palestine, British leader Winston Churchill in 1937 said: “I do not admit that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time … I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race, or, at any rate, a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”But just as the legendary sumud, resilience and resistance of the Palestinian people have defeated Israeli-US plans of ethnic cleansing, we know that our agency, our principled and strategic struggle, supported by tens of millions of people of conscience globally, can ultimately prevail over this latest plan. But without meaningful accountability measures, the Gaza ceasefire may lead to a continuation of the genocide in a less visible form. Unspeakable criminality and shameless complicity must be met with inexorable accountability. As we have learned from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, ending state, corporate and institutional complicity in Israel’s system of oppression, especially through the non-violent tactics of BDS, is the most effective form of solidarity with our liberation struggle.To defeat Trumpism and the rising wave of fascism worldwide, broad-tent, inclusive, anti-racist alliances are more important than ever. This is not just an ethically desired strategy to unite racial, climate, social and economic justice movements to build a critical mass of people power. The current threat to humanity shows that the intersectional unity of those struggles has truly become an existential need.The Palestinian phoenix of Gaza is emerging from under the rubble to reassert to the world that we shall never bow to oppressors; we shall continue to resist oppression and insist on defending our inalienable rights. But in mythology, a phoenix needs sunlight to resurrect itself, and in our case, that sunlight is blocked by dark, heavy clouds of complicity. Principled and strategic solidarity is crucial to dissipate these clouds so we can rise to our inevitable emancipation.

      Omar Barghouti is co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights and co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award More

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      Trump to announce 25% aluminum and steel tariffs as China’s levies against US come into effect

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      Donald Trump has said he will announce new 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports into the US on Monday that would affect “everybody’, including its largest trading partners Canada and Mexico, in another major escalation of his trade policy overhaul.Trump’s pre-announcement came as China’s retaliatory tariffs, announced last week, came into effect. The measures target $14bn worth of products with a 15% tariff on coal and LNG, and 10% on crude oil, farm equipment and some vehicles.The US president, speaking to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, also said he would announce reciprocal tariffs – raising US tariff rates to match those of trading partners – on Tuesday or Wednesday, which would take effect “almost immediately”. “And very simply, it’s, if they charge us, we charge them,” Trump said of the reciprocal tariff plan.The move on steel and aluminum brought a swift reaction from Doug Ford, the premier of the Canadian province of Ontario, who accused the US president of “shifting goalposts and constant chaos” that would put the economy at risk.Monday’s tariffs would come on top of existing metals duties.The largest sources of US steel imports are Canada, Brazil and Mexico, followed by South Korea and Vietnam, according to government and American Iron and Steel Institute data.By a large margin, Canada is the largest supplier of primary aluminum metal to the US, accounting for 79% of total imports in the first 11 months of 2024. Mexico is a major supplier of aluminum scrap and aluminum alloy.During his first term, Trump imposed tariffs of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum, but later granted several trading partners duty-free quotas, including Canada, Mexico and Brazil.Joe Biden extended these quotas to Britain, Japan and the European Union, and US steel mill capacity utilization has dropped in recent years. White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said that the new tariffs would come on top of the existing duties on steel and aluminum.Trump’s rollout of tariffs has been widely criticised and prompted volatile market reactions and fear of more to come. Beijing has lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organisation, but otherwise has been muted in its response. The tariffs imposed by Trump are far below the level he had threatened during the election campaign, and analysts have said China was prepared for them.Beijing’s actions – which also include investigations into several US companies including Google – were seen by analysts as measured and allowing room for negotiation.Amid wider pushback against Trump’s economic heavy-handedness, French President Emmanuel Macron warned in an interview broadcast on Sunday that he was willing to go “head-to-head” on tariffs with the US president. “I already did so, and I will did (sic) it again.”Macron told CNN that the EU should not be a “top priority” for the US, saying: “Is the European Union your first problem? No, I don’t think so. Your first problem is China, so you should focus on the first problem.”Macron said tariffs would harm European economies but also the US, given the level of economic ties. “It means if you put tariffs on a lot of sectors, it will increase the costs and create inflation in the US. Is it what your people want? I’m not so sure,” he said.He said the EU must be ready to react to US actions, but stressed that the 27-nation bloc should mainly “act for ourselves”. “This is why, for me, the top priority of Europe is competitiveness agenda, is defence and security agenda, is AI ambition, and let’s go fast for ourselves.“If in the meanwhile, we have [a] tariff issue, we will discuss them and we will fix it.”Trump has long complained about the EU’s 10% tariffs on auto imports being much higher than the US car rate of 2.5%. He frequently states that Europe “won’t take our cars” but ships millions west across the Atlantic every year.The European Commission said on Monday it would react to protect EU interests, but said it would not respond until it had detailed or written clarification of the measures. “The EU sees no justification for the imposition of tariffs on its exports. We will react to protect the interests of European businesses, workers and consumers from unjustified measures,” the commission said in a statement.Trump has also flagged tariffs against Taiwan’s semiconductor industry – which he has repeatedly and without evidence accused of stealing US business. Taiwan now appears to be scrambling to prevent that happening. This week senior economic officials will fly to the US to meet their counterparts. Taiwan’s government and state-run petroleum company are also reportedly taking steps to buy more US gas and oil to reduce Taiwan’s trade surplus – a key factor cited by Trump in enacting tariffs.Reuters contributed to this article. More

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      How Trump made ‘diversity’ a dirty word – podcast

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      In the immediate aftermath of January’s Potomac River tragedy, the deadliest US air disaster since 9/11, few might have expected Donald Trump to point so quickly to one alleged culprit: DEI policies. But as the Guardian US reporter Lauren Aratani explains, Trump’s comments were just the latest chapter in the long fight against diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.Lauren tells Helen Pidd that DEI policies were born in the 1960s as part of an effort by employers to broadly address injustice and exclusion. Today they are based on actively considering a person’s identity (race, gender, sexuality, disability, class etc) when engaging with them, and they arguably reached their peak in the flurry of corporate announcements that emerged after the 2020 killing of George Floyd.But, as Lauren explains, for decades conservative opposition to DEI has been growing, arguing instead for “colour blindness” over what is seen as “anti-meritocractic reverse discrimination”. This backlash has been spearheaded by activists, such as Edward Blum, making successful legal challenges to affirmative action policies within college admissions, as well as a growing cultural movement that blames more and more of the US’s problems on the push for diversity.Lauren explores whether the second Trump presidency will finally mean the end for DEI and its particular approach to equality and fairness. More

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      Trump predicts ‘billions’ of dollars of Pentagon fraud in Fox News interview

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      Donald Trump said that he expects Elon Musk to find “billions” of dollars of abuse and fraud in the Pentagon during an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier that aired before the Super Bowl on Sunday.“I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education. … Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military,” the US president told the host from the rightwing Fox News, adding: “We’re going to find billions, hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”In the last few weeks, Musk’s “department of government efficiency” has been trying to dismantle numerous federal agencies in Washington DC, going through data systems, shutting down DEI programs, and in some cases, attempting to eliminate entire agencies.Last week, Musk and Trump attempted to put thousands of workers of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) on leave, but a judge on Friday temporarily blocked the effort.Without providing any evidence, Trump said in the Baier interview: “You take a look at the USAid, the kind of fraud in there … We’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of money that’s going to places where it shouldn’t be going … It’s crazy. It’s a big scam.”Trump went on to reiterate his wish for Canada to be the 51st state.“I think Canada would be much better off being a 51st state because we lose $200bn a year with Canada and I’m not going to let that happen,” he added. “It’s too much. Why are we paying $200bn a year, essentially in subsidy to Canada? Now, if they’re a 51st state, I don’t mind doing it.”Trump is the first sitting president to attend the Super Bowl, which has served as the finale of the NFL season since 1966, although it is not unusual for a president to be part of Super Bowl programming.Presidents have traditionally given interviews to the network hosting the Super Bowl, although both Trump and Joe Biden declined some requests during their first terms.Biden skipped the Super Bowl interview in 2024, in a move that some Democratic insiders saw as a missed opportunity to speak directly to Americans. Biden’s aides said he eschewed the interview because he felt voters wanted a break from political news.This year’s interview is somewhat unusual. Fox is hosting the Super Bowl, and has assigned Baier to host the interview. Baier is seen as less rabidly pro-Trump than some of his colleagues, but the move suggested from the beginning that the interview might not be as adversarial as one conducted by a less-partisan network.Trump, a lifelong New Yorker who moved to his members-only club in Florida after alienating much of his home state, has not indicated which team he will support. More

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      The greatest scandal is individual power | Brief letters

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      Scandalous as Donald Trump’s actions may be, they do not constitute the greatest scandal (Trump’s foreign aid cuts could be ‘big strategic mistake’, says Lammy, 7 February). That lies rather in the fact that a system purporting to display democracy to the world allows so much power to be concentrated in one individual’s hands. The eventual departure of the individual person will do nothing to rectify that colossal democratic deficit.Keith GrahamEmeritus professor of social and political philosophy, Bristol “Robert works hard, not always with success”, a Cardiff secondary school teacher once wrote on my report (Letters, 6 February). Another noted that my essays “would be improved with the inclusion of facts”. Fair play.Rob SkinnerChalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire Isn’t hiding train departure times minutes before scheduled departure (‘So patronising’: rail bosses spark anger by hiding train departure times, 6 February) to avoid platform rushes rather like removing the last carriage to avoid casualties in rear-end collisions?Prof Alan AlexanderEdinburgh Re the assertion the Elon Musk put a chip in a man’s brain (Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed man’s brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed – or terrified?, 8 February), did he also put the engine in my neighbour’s Tesla? Please don’t exaggerate his superhero credentials.Caroline Newland-SmithStewkley, Buckinghamshire Yes, the PSA test probably does promote stress and anxiety (Letters, 5 February). But so does prostate cancer.Greg Shurgold(Radical prostatectomy 2017), Oxford More

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      Thousands protest against Trump’s war on immigrants after Ice raids: ‘Fight for our neighbors’

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      Thousands took to the streets on Wednesday and Saturday last week following a series of dramatic raids by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) throughout Denver as protesters expressed solidarity with the undocumented and rage at Donald Trump’s war on immigrants.“We’re here to fight for our neighbors, to stand together and say no to the threats from the Trump administration,” Amanda Starks, a local artist at a rally on Saturday who’s been handing out literature to immigrants on their legal rights.She added: “I think this is worse than in 2016, when we thought the GOP would stand up to Trump. Now they’re all Christian nationalist yes-men, and we’re up against something greater this time around. But it’s bringing this community together.”The US president has taken a special interest in the historically immigrant-friendly state of Colorado, calling his deportation plan for alleged gang members Operation Aurora, named for the Denver suburb claimed by him and echoed by conservative media to have been “taken over” by the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua (TdA).One of the executive orders signed on Trump’s first day in office was to cut funding and send a stop-work order to the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network (Rmian), a Colorado non-profit offering free legal services to the undocumented. Due to the large volume of those in need, Colorado has one of the lowest rates of legal representation for undocumented immigrants.Then last week heavily armed Swat teams began storming apartment complexes around Denver and Aurora in the early hours of the morning – sometimes with a Fox News crew embedded with the teams – though with 30 arrests in all, only one gang member has been confirmed to be in custody.View image in fullscreenWith around 155,000 undocumented immigrants in Colorado fearing for their safety, many local residents have rallied to show their support however they can.Despite their setbacks, last week the Rmian was able to offer a crash course in immigration law to 100 Colorado attorneys who, despite not working in that field, have volunteered their legal services.Whenever Ice raids are spotted, volunteers from groups like the Immigrant Legal Resource Center often are on hand to offer literature on the legal rights of those under siege. At Saturday’s rally outside the state capitol building in Denver, activists with megaphones led a call-and-response chant of legal advice, prompting the crowd with “When Ice shows up?” followed by a collective roar: “Don’t open the door!”The protester and artist Starks, along with many others, have been attending weekly gatherings at a local Methodist church on how to best serve the legal needs of immigrants. One organizer placed the turnout at a meeting last Monday at more than 1,500 people.View image in fullscreenMany of the activists speaking at Saturday’s rally expressed contempt for New York-based property management company CBZ Management, which oversee several properties in Aurora and Denver that have been fined or shut down for squalid and neglectful living conditions. Last August, Zev Baumgarten of CBZ Management, accused of being “an out of state slumlord” by the Aurora mayor, claimed one of their Aurora apartment buildings had been overtaken by TdA gang members, which was why they were unable to provide needed repairs and services.This unfolded just in time for Trump to parrot the claims during his presidential debate against Kamala Harris weeks later, eventually making Aurora an unlikely campaign spot for the Republican candidate, since Colorado has been a reliably blue state since 2008.For decades Colorado has cultivated a reputation for welcoming immigrants who have come across the US-Mexico border, especially when they’re under siege from many across the rest of the nation.In the 1990s, when Democrats were being pulled to the right on issues like immigration, Denver’s mayor, Wellington Webb, pushed against that tide, criticizing federal persecution of immigrants in a 1998 executive order and declaring the state capital would “welcome all to share in Denver’s warm hospitality”.He insisted: “We must respect this diversity and ensure the rights of all our residents are protected,” and Denver “would not tolerate discrimination in any form”.However a movement of hard-right, anti-immigrant activists in the Republican party found representation at this time in Colorado, such as in the form of congressman Tom Tancredo, who built his political career attacking Denver libraries for stocking Spanish speaking books, calling for the deportation of a Denver high school student, stripping “sanctuary cities” of their federal funding, and calling on America to reject the “cult of multiculturalism”.View image in fullscreenTancredo’s decade as a congressman from 1999-2009, along with his failed bids for the presidency and governorship, helped build the narrative architecture of what would become the Make America Great Again conservative movement’s anti-immigrant rage.Despite the protests last Wednesday and Saturday in Denver, portions of the state still hold enough conservative voters to keep Trump loyalists like Representative Lauren Boebert in office.Boebert recently joined forces with two other Colorado representatives to pressure the state’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, to repeal a series of laws protecting immigrants rights in Colorado. Often referred to as a “Democratic libertarian”, Polis has endorsed the core of Trump’s deportation plan.“Hey Polis, where are you? We have courage, how about you?” the crowd at Saturday’s rally chanted, as it moved away from the capitol building and through downtown Denver.The march eventually made its way peacefully back to the capitol, where more literature was handed out and future gatherings were announced.“We take these threats [from Trump] very seriously,” said Katie Leonard, one of the days’ speakers and an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has been documenting Ice raids and posting their locations on social media, leading to the arrival of more volunteers, often shouting advice to residents about their rights through megaphones or blasting the neighborhoods with informative leaflets.“But the decisive factor in what happens here, when these Ice raids come and indiscriminately round up people, is whether the community is prepared, whether the people know their rights,” she said. More

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      Trump’s acting chief of federal financial watchdog orders staff to pause activity

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      Russell Vought, Donald Trump’s newly installed acting head of the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced on Saturday he had cut off the agency’s budget and reportedly instructed staff to suspend all activities including the supervision of companies overseen by the agency.Reuters and NBC News reported that Vought wrote a memo to employees saying he had taken on the role of acting head of the agency, an independent watchdog that was founded in 2011 as an arm of the Federal Reserve to promote fairness in the financial sector.Vought, who was confirmed on a party line vote last week to lead the office of management and budget, also announced on Saturday evening on Elon Musk’s social media platform X that he was zeroing out the CFPB’s funding for the next fiscal quarter, saying the more than $700m in cash on hand was sufficient.In his Saturday missive, Vought ordered staff to “cease all supervision and examination activity”, going a step further than a directive issued last week by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, whom Trump had briefly put in charge after firing Rohit Chopra.According to an internal email obtained by Reuters, the Washington CFPB headquarters will be closed for the coming week and all employees are to work remotely.The CFPB, which Congress created in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, supervises consumer-facing financial companies like banks, title lenders, mortgage originators and cash transfer services to prevent unfair, deceptive and abusive practices and other predatory conduct.Vought’s order leaves much of that business activity without federal government oversight.The weekend moves continued a lighting advance by Trump and billionaire Elon Musk to remake the federal government that drew protests from agency workers on Saturday morning and condemnation from top Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill.Musk, whose platform X is seeking to enter the consumer financial marketplace, has said in the past he would “delete” the agency responsible for consumer protection. Representatives of his “department of government efficiency” have been granted administrative-level access to all of the agency’s IT systems, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Union officials said on Friday that Musk was effectively seeking to seize control of his own regulator.In a statement, Dennis Kelleher, head of Better Markets, which advocates for stricter government oversight of the financial sector, accused Trump of throwing his own voters “to the financial wolves.“This latest attempt to kill the consumer bureau is another slap in the face for all Americans who depend on basic financial products and services, but especially for those in the multi-racial working-class coalition of Americans that helped elect President Trump,” Kelleher said. More