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    ‘I would not feel safe’: Americans on the sorrow – and relief – of leaving Trump’s US for Europe

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    The scramble began in November as news broke that Donald Trump had been re-elected. Benjamin and Chrys Gorman had long said they would leave the US before seeing Trump inaugurated again, giving them exactly 76 days to sell their home, cars and most of their belongings and move four people, three dogs and two cats to Barcelona.“I was saying: we’ve got more time than that, it won’t go that fast,” said Gorman. “My wife said no, we need to be out of here – not just on inauguration day, but a few days before. And she was so right.”Within hours of taking office, Trump signed an executive order defining sex as only male or female. The change was to be reflected on official documents, sowing confusion over what it meant for Americans with the non-binary identification of “X” in their passports.Relief gripped the Gormans as they watched it play out from afar. “Our kid’s passport has an X gender marker,” said Gorman. “So we managed to escape just in time.”View image in fullscreenSince Trump’s return to power, relocation firms from London to Lisbon and Madrid to Milan say they’ve seen a surge in inquiries from Americans. Undaunted by the gains made by the far right across the continent, many Americans cite a desire to escape the US’s increasingly polarised climate and an administration whose wide range of targets has included immigrants, diversity measures and political opponents.Statistics suggest that the barrage of interest is translating into action; in the first two months of the year, US applications for Irish passports were at their highest level in a decade – up 60% from the same period last year. In the first three months of the year, France reported a rise in the number of long-stay visa requests from Americans, while in March, the number of Americans who had solicited British citizenship in the 12 months before surged to its highest since record-keeping began in 2004.While the figures remain relatively small given the size of the US population, the movement has been galvanised by a steady drip of celebrity announcements. Rosie O’Donnell said in March that she had moved to Ireland, describing it as “heartbreaking to see what’s happening politically” in the US, while Ellen DeGeneres recently cited Trump’s re-election to explain why she and her wife, Portia de Rossi, had moved to the Cotswolds in 2024. Earlier this month, Jimmy Kimmel revealed that he had acquired Italian citizenship, saying that the US under Trump was “just unbelievable”.Across Europe, governments and institutions have sought to capitalise on the exodus, launching programmes aimed at attracting stateside talent or, in the case of one enterprising Italian village, seeking to bolster its population with disgruntled Americans.Among the first was France’s Aix-Marseille University, which in March put out an offer of “scientific asylum” for researchers reeling from Trump’s crackdown on academia. Three months later, the university said it had received more than 500 inquiries for the 20 spots.View image in fullscreenThose selected included Lisa, a biological anthropologist who was preparing to move her husband, a school teacher, and two children across the Atlantic. “When Trump was re-elected, the feeling was: ‘We gotta go,’” she told the Guardian earlier this summer. She asked that her last name not be used to protect her university in the US from reprisals.The sentiment had strengthened as she watched the Trump administration take aim at universities, dismantle research funding and undermine science. “We’re months into this presidency, and a lot has already happened. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen in another three and a half years.”The opportunity to swap the northern US for southern France was welcome, but not without its drawbacks. “It is a big pay cut,” she said. “My kids are super gung-ho. My husband is just worried that he won’t find a job. Which is my worry too, because I don’t think I’ll be able to afford four of us on my salary.”In January, as thousands of Trump faithful turned up in Washington DC for a televised viewing of his inauguration, Deborah Harkness knew the time had come to act on her longstanding dream of moving to southern Spain. “As soon as he was inaugurated, I started making plans,” she said.Months later she was in Málaga, watching as Trump’s administration sought to drastically reshape the judiciary, public broadcasting, higher education and immigration. “What frightens me most is how normalised it’s all become,” she said. “The chaos, the cruelty, the disinformation – that’s how authoritarianism takes hold.”The view was echoed by Monica Byrne, who in 2023 left North Carolina for Cork, Ireland. Trump was a factor in her decision, but only in that she saw his rise to power as a symptom of the bigger issues facing the US. “I didn’t know whether Trump specifically was going to come back, but I knew fascism was,” she said. “So it was more about the abject failure of the Democrats and knowing they weren’t going to protect us from fascism generally.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s re-election cemented her decision to remain abroad and enrol in a master’s programme in Ireland. “I get frustrated when people say: ‘You’re very lucky or you must be happy you’re not there,’” she said. “There is some degree of that, but 90% of the people I care about and love are in the States and are affected.”In Barcelona, Gorman and his family have been slowly settling into the rhythms of the city. “So many things have just been shockingly better,” he said. “For example, my wife was saying that the other day she was walking along La Rambla and a car backfired. And she was the only person who ducked.”While they were thrilled to have left behind the gun violence and shooter drills of the US, the challenge was now in explaining to their loved ones that they were unlikely to return home once Trump’s term ends. “I don’t foresee this movement ending with the end of the Trump administration … I think that the rot is much deeper,” said Gorman.“If he wouldn’t have a huge base of support, Trump is just, you know, your crazy uncle yelling things on a porch. That base of support needs to be addressed. Why was there support for this kind of fascism?” he added. “And that’s a much deeper question. I would not personally feel safe going back to a country that doesn’t fully reckon with its fascist impulses.” More

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      US immigrant population down by more than a million people amid Trump crackdown

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      The immigrant population of the United States, which has been growing for more than 50 years, has declined by more than a million people since Donald Trump took office in January and defined immigration as a threat to the nation, not one of its strengths.According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, there were a record 53.3 million immigrants in the US in January, when Trump took office for the second time. By June, that number had dropped to 51.9 million.Among all US residents, 15.4% were immigrants as of June 2025, down from the recent historic high of 15.8% in January.The Pew survey also found that 750,000 immigrant workers had dropped out of the US labor force since January, which is now 19% foreign-born.The center pointed to several policy changes that have affected immigrant populations across the US, including Joe Biden’s restrictions on asylum applications in 2024, which led to a significant decrease in border crossings involving immigrants seeking asylum.Additionally, the center pointed to Donald Trump’s 181 executive actions targeting immigration, including the arrival of new immigrants and the mass deportation of noncitizen immigrants.The center noted that the change in the data could be due to a declining survey response rate among immigrants.Mexico remains the largest origin country among US immigrants. As of mid-2023, more than 11 million US residents were born in Mexico, marking nearly a quarter, or 22%, of all immigrants nationally. Nevertheless, immigration from Mexico has declined since 2007 and the Mexican-born population in the US has dropped. From 2010 to 2023, the Mexican share of the US immigrant population dropped from 29% to 22%, according to Pew’s research.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe second-largest immigrant group was from India, at 3.2 million, or 6% of the total immigrant population, as of mid-2023. The next largest immigrant groups were from China, at 3 million, or 6%, followed by the Philippines, at 2.1 million, or 4%, and Cuba, at 1.7 million, or 3%.In July, a Guardian analysis of arrest and deportation data revealed how Trump has “supercharged the country’s immigration enforcement apparatus – pushing immigration officials to arrest a record number of people”.The analysis found that average daily arrests were up by 268% compared with June 2024 and that the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice) was targeting all unauthorized immigrants, including people with no criminal records.The analysis also found that the US has deported more than 8,100 people to countries that are not their home country.Trump’s crackdown on immigration has shown no signs of stopping, with the state department announcing this week that it is reviewing the records of more than 55 million foreign citizens with visas allowing them to visit or reside temporarily in the US for potential revocation. More

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      Eswatini opposition attacks US deal as ‘human trafficking disguised as deportation’

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      Civil society and opposition groups in Eswatini have expressed outrage after the US deported five men to the country, with the largest opposition party calling it “human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal”.The men, from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Yemen and Cuba, were flown to the small southern African country, an absolute monarchy, last week as the US stepped up deportations to “third countries” after the supreme court cleared them last month.Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, is landlocked by South Africa and Mozambique and has a population of about 1.2 million. It is Africa’s last absolute monarchy and has been ruled by King Mswati III since 1986.The government estimated the five men would be held for about 12 months, a spokesperson, Thabile Mdluli, said, adding: “It could be slightly less or slightly more.”She said Eswatini was ready to receive more deportees, depending on the availability of facilities and negotiations with the US, which has also deported eight people to South Sudan after holding them for weeks in a shipping container in Djibouti, and more than 200 Venezuelans to El Salvador.Officials have said the men, who were put in solitary confinement, were safely imprisoned in Eswatini. However, they have refused to disclose the terms of the deal, other than to say the US was footing the costs of keeping the men locked up and that they would work with international organisations to deport them to their home countries.View image in fullscreenMany civil society organisations and politicians were not convinced. “This action, carried out without public consultation, adequate preparation, or community engagement, raises urgent questions about legality, transparency, and the safety of both the deported individuals and the people of Eswatini, especially women and girls,” said a coalition of seven women’s groups.The organisations delivered a petition to the US embassy on Monday calling for the US to take back the deportees, for the deportees’ human rights to be respected, and for Eswatini not to become a “dumping ground for unresolved problems from elsewhere”.The groups’ leaders held a protest outside the US embassy on Friday, where they sang, danced and held up signs with messages including: “Whose taxpayers?”, “Eswatini is not a prison for US rejects” and “Take the five criminals back to the US!!”Eswatini’s largest opposition party, the People’s United Democratic Movement (Pudemo), said in a statement: “Pudemo vehemently condemns the treacherous and reckless decision by King Mswati III’s regime to allow the United States of America to dump its most dangerous criminals on Swazi soil.“This is not diplomacy but human trafficking disguised as a deportation deal. It is an insult to all Emaswati who value peace, security, and the sanctity of our homeland.”The coordinating assembly of NGOs, an umbrella group, said the situation was “deeply alarming” and condemned the “stigmatising and dehumanising language used by US officials”. It called for the Eswatini-US agreement to be made public and to be suspended pending “genuine public consultation and transparent national dialogue”.View image in fullscreenTricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary at the US Department of Homeland Security, said in a post on X on 16 July that the men, who she said had been convicted of crimes including child rape, murder and burglary, were “so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back”.She added: “These depraved monsters have been terrorising American communities but … they are off of American soil.”Eswatini’s prime minister, Russell Dlamini, told local media on Friday that the government was confident it would safely manage the prisoners. “Eswatini is currently holding inmates who have committed more dangerous crimes than those attributed to the five deportees,” he said.A prison service spokesperson, Baphelele Kunene, said the country’s citizens should not be afraid. “We can confirm that the five inmates in question have been admitted to one of our high-security centres where they are responding very well to the new environment,” he said. “Even though they come from the US, there is no preferential treatment for them as they are guided by the same prison regulations, eat the same food as others and are also expected to exhibit the same and equal amount of respect for prison protocols.”The US state department’s most recent human rights report on Eswatini, in 2023, said there were “credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; [and] political prisoners or detainees”.Political parties are banned from taking part in elections, which the system’s advocates argue makes MPs more representative of their constituents. In September, Pudemo’s leader, Mlungisi Makhanya, was allegedly poisoned in South Africa. The party said it was an assassination attempt, which Eswatini’s government has denied.The Department of Homeland Security has been contacted for comment. More

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      Rubio moves to strip US visas from eight Brazilian judges in Bolsonaro battle

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      The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has reportedly stripped eight of Brazil’s 11 supreme court judges of their US visas as the White House escalates its campaign to help the country’s former president Jair Bolsonaro avoid justice over his alleged attempt to seize power with a military coup.Bolsonaro, a far-right populist with ties to Donald Trump’s Maga movement, is on trial for allegedly masterminding a murderous plot to cling to power after losing the 2022 election to his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro is expected to be convicted by the supreme court in the coming weeks and faces a jail sentence of up to 43 years.As the day of judgment nears, Trump has been increasing pressure on the court and President Lula’s administration. On 9 July, the US president announced he would impose 50% tariffs on all Brazilian imports as of 1 August, partly as a result of the supposed persecution of his ally. The move triggered an outpouring of nationalist anger in the South American country, with Lula describing it as “unacceptable blackmail”.On Friday, after federal police raided Bolsonaro’s house and fitted him with an electronic tag to stop him absconding, Rubio announced further moves in support of the defendant, who he claimed was the victim of a “political witch hunt”.Writing on X, Rubio said he had ordered visa revocations for the judge leading the investigation into Bolsonaro, Alexandre de Moraes, as well as “his allies on the court” and their family members. Rubio did not name his other targets but the Brazilian newspaper O Globo identified them as Luís Roberto Barroso, José Antonio Dias Toffoli, Cristiano Zanin, Flávio Dino, Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha, Luiz Edson Fachin and Gilmar Ferreira Mendes.Two other judges who were nominated to the court during Bolsonaro’s 2019-23 presidency, André Mendonça and Kassio Nunes Marques, reportedly avoided the sanction, as did a third judge, Luiz Fux.Lula denounced what he called “another arbitrary and completely groundless measure from the US government”.“Interference in another country’s justice system is unacceptable and offends the basic principles of national sovereignty and respect between nations,” the president said on Saturday, adding: “I’m certain that no kind of intimidation or threat – from whoever it may be – will compromise the most important mission of our nation’s powers and institutions, which is to act permanently to defend and safeguard the democratic rule of law.”The Trump strategist Alex Bruesewitz welcomed Rubio’s announcement, calling Bolsonaro’s treatment “sick and wrong”.Bolsonaro’s congressman son, Eduardo, thanked Rubio for his decision. “Thank you very much for this fight in favor of free speech, we do believe in the same values,” tweeted Eduardo, who has been living in the US since February and has reportedly been lobbying officials there over his father’s plight.Trump’s interventions have appalled millions of Brazilians who hope to see their former leader held responsible for the alleged coup attempt, which culminated in the 8 January riots in Brasília.Lula’s institutional relations minister, Gleisi Hoffmann, called the visa cancellations “an aggressive and petty retaliation” and “an affront to the Brazilian judiciary and national sovereignty”.Even influential rightwing voices have criticised the US’s attempt to meddle in one of the world’s most populous democracies by imposing 50% tariffs.On Saturday, the conservative Estado de São Paulo newspaper described Trump’s behaviour as “unacceptable external interference in Brazil’s domestic matters”. “Trump has not only attacked our national sovereignty … [but also] stained the history of diplomatic relations between the two largest democracies in the Americas,” the newspaper’s editorial board wrote.While the Bolsonaros have hailed Trump’s actions, they also appear to have grasped how the announcement of tariffs has backfired, allowing Lula to pose as a nationalist defender of Brazilian interests and paint the Bolsonaro clan as self-serving “traitors”.Lula, who had been facing growing public disillusionment and an uphill battle to win re-election next year, has enjoyed a bounce in the polls since Trump launched his trade war, the brunt of which will be borne by coffee producers and cattle ranchers in Bolsonaro-voting regions, such as São Paulo.Celso Rocha de Barros, a political columnist, said he suspected the Bolsonaros had been blindsided by the scale of Trump’s attack.“I think [Bolsonaro] wanted some kind of penalty – something he could use to say: ‘Look, Brazil’s being punished because of Bolsonaro’s persecution. But [the tariffs] went far too far … [they] screwed Bolsonaro’s base,” said Rocha de Barros, pointing to their potential impact on agribusiness.On Friday night, Bolsonaro’s senator son, Flávio, post on X, calling on Trump to suspend the tariffs and replace them with individual sanctions. Soon after, however, he deleted the post. More

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      We’re becoming inured to Trump’s outbursts – but when he goes quiet, we need to be worried | Jonathan Freedland

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      In the global attention economy, one titan looms over all others. Donald Trump can command the gaze of the world at a click of those famously short fingers. When he stages a spectacular made-for-TV moment – say, that Oval Office showdown with Volodymyr Zelenskyy – the entire planet sits up and takes notice.But that dominance has a curious side-effect. When Trump does something awful and eye-catching, nations tremble and markets move. But when he does something awful but unflashy, it scarcely registers. So long as there’s no jaw-dropping video, no expletive-ridden soundbite, no gimmick or stunt, it can slip by as if it hadn’t happened. Especially now that our senses are dulled through over-stimulation. These days it requires ever more shocking behaviour by the US president to prompt a reaction; we are becoming inured to him. Yet the danger he poses is as sharp as ever.Consider the events of just the last week or so, few of them stark enough to lead global news bulletins, yet each one another step towards the erosion of democracy in and by the world’s most powerful country.On Wednesday, Trump threatened to impose 50% tariffs – yes, he’s climbed back on that dead horse – on Brazil, if the judicial authorities there do not drop the prosecution of the country’s Trump-like former president Jair Bolsonaro, charged with seeking to overturn his 2022 election defeat and leading a coup against the man who beat him, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. As concisely as he could manage, Lula explained, via social media, that Brazil is a sovereign country and that an independent judiciary cannot “accept interference or instruction from anyone … No one is above the law.”This is becoming a habit of Trump’s. He made the same move in defence of Benjamin Netanyahu last month, hinting that Israel could lose billions in US military aid if the prime minister continues to stand trial on corruption charges. In both cases, Trump was explicit in making the connection between the accused men and himself, decrying as a “witch-hunt” the efforts to hold them to account. “This is nothing more, or less, than an attack on a Political Opponent,” he posted, of Bolsonaro’s legal woes. “Something I know much about!”It’s easy to make light of the transparent effort by Trump to forge an international trade union of populist would-be autocrats, but he’s not solely moved by fraternal solidarity. He also wants to dismantle a norm that has long applied across the democratic world, which insists that even those at the top are subject to the law. That norm is an impediment to him, a check on his power. If he can discredit it, so that a new convention arises – one that agrees that leaders can act with impunity – that helps his animating project in the US: the amassing of ever more power to himself and the weakening or elimination of any rival source of authority that might act as a restraint.He is being quietly assisted in that goal by those US institutions that should regard themselves as co-equal branches of government – Congress and the supreme court – and whose constitutional duty is to stand up to an overmighty executive. Republicans in Congress have now approved a mega bill that they know will leave future generations of Americans drowning in debt and deprive millions of basic healthcare cover. Even so, they put aside their own judgment and bowed to the man who would be king.Less discussed was the bill’s extraordinary expansion of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or Ice. Its budget has been increased by a reported 308%, with an extra $45bn to spend on detention and $29.9bn for “enforcement and deportation”. It will soon have the capacity to detain nearly 120,000 people at any one time. And, remember, latest figures show that about half of all those detained by Ice have no criminal record at all.No wonder even conservative critics are sounding the alarm. The anti-Trump Republicans of the Bulwark warn that within months, the “national brute squad” that is Ice will have twice as many agents as the FBI and its own vast prison system, emerging as “the primary instrument of internal state power”. In this view, Trump has realised that corrupting the FBI is a tall order – though still worth trying – so he is supplanting it with a shadow force shaped in his own image. As the Bulwark puts it: “The American police state is here.”Those most directly threatened might share clips of masked Ice agents snatching suspected migrants off the streets and manhandling them violently, just as reports circulate of appalling conditions in Ice premises, with people held in “dungeon-like facilities”, more than 100 crammed into a small room, denied showers or a chance to change clothes, and sometimes given only one meal a day and forced to sleep on concrete benches or the floor. But it is hardly a matter of national focus. Because it is not accompanied by a neon-lit Trump performance, it is happening just out of view.The same could be said of a series of recent decisions by the supreme court. They may lack the instant, blockbuster impact of past rulings, but they accelerate the same Trump trend away from democracy and towards autocracy.On Tuesday, the judges gave Trump the green light to fire federal workers en masse and to dismantle entire government agencies without the approval of Congress. Earlier, the supreme court had ruled that Trump was allowed to remove Democrats from the leadership of government bodies that are meant to be under politically balanced supervision.More usefully still for Trump, last month the judges limited the power of the lower courts to block the executive branch, thereby lending a helping hand to one of the president’s most egregious executive orders: his ending of the principle that anyone born in the US is automatically a citizen of the US, a right so fundamental it is enshrined in the constitution. In ruling after ruling, the supreme court is removing restraints on Trump and handing him even more power. Small wonder that when one of the dissenting minority on the court, Ketanji Brown Jackson, was asked on Thursday what kept her up at night, she answered: “The state of our democracy.”Meanwhile, Trump is succeeding in his goal of cowing the press, extracting serious cash from major news organisations in return for dropping (usually flimsy) lawsuits against them, a move that is having the desired, chilling effect.It all adds up to the steady erosion of US democracy and of democratic norms whose reach once extended far beyond US shores. Even if it is happening quietly, by Trump’s standards, without the familiar sound and fury, it is still happening. The work of opposing it begins with noticing it.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist More

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      With his immigration bill, Canada’s prime minister is bowing to Trump | Tayo Bero

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      There are many stereotypes about Canada – that we are a nation of extremely polite people, a welcoming melting pot, and that we’re the US’s laid-back cousin who lives nextdoor.But right now, the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, is bucking all of that lore after pressure from the US in the form of Donald Trump’s “concerns” about undocumented migrants and fentanyl moving across the US-Canada border. In response, the recently elected Liberal PM put forward a 127-page bill that includes, among other worrying provisions, sweeping changes to immigration policy that would make the process much more precarious for refugees and could pave the way for mass deportations.If passed, Carney’s Strong Borders Act (or Bill C-2) would bar anyone who has been in the country for more than a year from receiving refugee hearings. That would apply retroactively to anyone who entered the country after June 2020. If they arrived on foot between official ports of entry, meanwhile, they would have to apply for asylum within 14 days of entering Canada – a disastrous outcome for people fleeing Trump’s persecution. The bill also gives the immigration minister’s office the authority to cancel immigration documents en masse.This bill has been widely condemned by politicians and advocacy groups such as Amnesty International and the Migrants Rights Network, who are rightly worried about just how much havoc a change like this could wreak. Jenny Wai Ching Kwan, a member of parliament for Vancouver East, told reporters the bill would breach civil liberties and basic rights.So what excuse does Canada have for this kind of 180 on its immigration legacy? According to the government, the aim of this legislation is to “keep Canadians safe by ensuring law enforcement has the right tools to keep our borders secure, combat transnational organized crime, stop the flow of illegal fentanyl, and crack down on money laundering”.In reality, Bill C-2 contains measures that the public safety minister, Gary Anandasangaree, has admitted were a response to “the concerns that have been posed by the White House”.“There are elements that will strengthen [our] relationships with the United States,” he said in a press conference. “There were a number of elements in the bill that have been irritants for the US, so we are addressing some of those issues.”Tim McSorley, the national coordinator for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, condemned the federal government over the senselessness of this move. “If the government is serious about addressing concerns regarding illegal gun and drug trafficking, it must introduce legislation specifically tailored to that goal, as opposed to a wide-ranging omnibus bill,” he said.The demonization of immigrants has been a talking point for populist leaders throughout the west, so it’s not surprising to see Carney lean into that rhetoric in order to appease Trump. Spurred on by the xenophobic rhetoric coming out of the US, Britain, and large swaths of Europe, anyone who comes from away is forced to bear the blame for the economic messes and ensuing societal erosion these countries have found themselves battling.By feeding directly into this pipeline, Carney makes Canada not the powerful country poised to beat Trump at his dangerous games (elbows up, my foot), but a cowardly ally in the US’s campaign of terror against immigrants.

      Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump officials create searchable national citizenship database

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      The US Department of Homeland Security has for the first time built a national citizenship database that combines information from immigration agencies and the social security administration.The database was created in collaboration with the “department of government efficiency” (Doge) in an effort to bridge the gaps between disparate information sources to make it easier to determine whether someone is a citizen, according to NPR, which first reported the details of the database.The database is the result of an expansion of the systematic alien verification for entitlements (Save) program, made up of smaller databases within the homeland security department, and an integration with information from the Social Security Administration. The centralized repository is searchable and can be accessed by state and local election officials to look up the names of anyone trying to vote to determine if they are citizens, according to NPR. Until now, election officials had to ask potential voters for documents verifying their citizenship or rely on a hard-to-navigate patchwork of databases.In response to a request for comment, the DHS said: “Integration with the Social Security Administration (SSA) significantly improves the service offered by Save.”Previously, agencies involved in voting were required to use numbers issued by the DHS to look up voter registrations, which they may not have had access to but may have been more likely to possess social security numbers, according to the statement. The citizenship database may also soon integrate state department of motor vehicles (DMV) data, NPR reported.The DHS statement also describes the motivations for the creation of the database: “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, USCIS is moving quickly to eliminate benefit and voter fraud among the alien population.” Voter fraud is rare in the US, experts say; consequences include fines or jail time.The citizenship database is one of the first results of Doge’s efforts to gain access to and merge information on Americans from agencies across the federal government, including the Internal Revenue Service, in the first few months of the Trump administration.Reports indicate Doge is attempting to create a single data hub that enables access to these vast troves of information on Americans in an effort to eliminate the separation of information in isolated or protected silos. The attempt to connect various sources of personal information, which Doge has said is needed to root out fraud, and allow it to be accessed in one place has sparked several lawsuits.In response, union members in Maryland have sued the office of personnel management, the treasury department and the education department for sharing personal information with Doge officials “who had no need to know the vast amount of sensitive personal information to which they were granted access”, according to their suit.“Defendants admit that the [Social Security Administration] granted Doge personnel broad access to millions of Americans’ sensitive PII [personally identifiable information],” US district judge Ellen Lipton Hollander of Maryland wrote in a decision ordering a temporary block on the Social Security Administration sharing information with Doge.“This intrusion into the personal affairs of millions of Americans – absent an adequate explanation for the need to do so – is not in the public interest.”The database in question was created with little engagement of the public, something that is requisite for building these types of mass surveillance databases. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires federal agencies to notify the public if there are new ways they plan to use or collect Americans’ personal information. Legal experts have also questioned whether this sort of a centralized database sidesteps many of the privacy and security protections implemented within each agency.The consolidation of personal information into a mass database is unprecedented and has sparked concern among immigration and privacy advocates. The creation of a centralized repository brings together pieces of information that were previously within the purview of separate agencies, and potentially makes it easier for government officials to look up individual’s data from across the government. Many worry about how else this database could be used.“The premise of noncitizen voter fraud is one that officials, including President Trump, have used as a pretext to discredit and intimidate entire communities,” said Citlaly Mora, spokesperson for immigration legal project Just Futures Law.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“This database is the latest iteration of Doge’s attempt to weaponize the data of the millions of people that live in the US They are building this database without transparency and without consulting the public about how their data will be used, a brazen violation of our privacy rights. Given this administration’s track record of failing to follow proper processes, we should all be concerned.”The rollout of the citizenship database, which is an upgraded version of an existing network of data sources, comes after the New York Times reported that software firm Palantir was selected to help develop a “mega-database” for the Trump administration.In a letter to the company, 10 Democratic lawmakers said the database, which would collect the tax and other personal information on all Americans in a single repository, would potentially be a violation of federal law.“The unprecedented possibility of a searchable ‘mega-database’ of tax returns and other data that will potentially be shared with or accessed by other federal agencies is a surveillance nightmare that raises a host of legal concerns, not least that it will make it significantly easier for Donald Trump’s administration to spy on and target his growing list of enemies and other Americans,” the letter reads.Palantir has repeatedly denied that it was building a master database.It said: “Palantir is neither conducting nor enabling mass surveillance of American citizens. We do not operate the systems, access the data, or make decisions about its use.” More

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      As Ice deports children, what futures do we lose? | Ariel Dorfman

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      Two children – a nine-year-old boy and his six-year-old sister – are playing at “house”, pretending to be their father and mother. Absorbed in the game, they repeat the words their parents have been whispering to each other when they thought their progeny were not listening.Playing like innocent children all over the world play and have played since the beginning of history. But, here and now, in America, the words some endangered children may be exchanging are far from innocent.What do we do if they come for you, my love, if I never see you again? Who do I call, who do I turn to? What if they also take me? And the children, what if they also come for the children?I can sadly envisage many boys and girls in this country today playing that game, asking each other questions like these while their undocumented family awaits the knock on the door, alert to the sound of a van outside ready to transport them away and rush them off to a distant land.It is not the first time I have had to imagine such a distressing situation. Almost 50 years ago, while in exile in Amsterdam, I wrote a story, My House Is on Fire, featuring a pair of siblings who ask precisely those questions while playing a similar supposedly naive game. I set the story in Chile, a land then under the savage boot of the military, using my fiction as a way of returning to the country forbidden to me as I tried to figure out how those children would cope psychologically with the threat of agents of the state roaming the streets in search of dissidents to arrest and disappear, what sort of permanent scars of dread would be carved into the souls and bodies of those kids forced to become adults before their time.It is tragic and disgraceful that the fate of a boy and a girl in yesteryear’s dictatorial Chile can resonate so perversely in today’s America, that their Latin American destiny of apprehension and mistrust echoes what is being perpetrated in so many homes across this land that once beckoned to foreigners to come and build a different sort of future.Though it is, alas, the current United States on to which I am projecting the Chilean experience of those conjectured children, other countries and other youngsters have come to mind over the past half-century as suffering parallel afflictions: Jewish children in the time of the Nazis and Palestinian children in the time of Israeli onslaughts, and Sudan and Brazil, Iran and Belarus, Turkey and Rwanda and Egypt and on and on, a deluge of nations where so many children have asked, at one time or another, what happens if they take away my parents, what happens if they come for me?It is likely that my identification with, and sympathy for, that array of unfortunate young victims may have stemmed from my own life experiences. Even if I had no recollection of what it meant to leave my Argentinian homeland at the age of two and a half when my rebellious father had been forced to flee to New York to escape the wrath of that country’s fascistic military, memories of that trauma must have resurfaced when – by then I was nine years old – the red scare in the United States instilled fear in so many families with leftwing ideas or activities, leading our own family to once again take flight, this time to Chile. And history was going to repeat itself when, after Augusto Pinochet’s coup of 1973, my six-year-old son, Rodrigo, followed his father and mother into remote realms, became himself a refugee. And the curse of banishment plagued us yet again in 1986, when I was arrested at the Santiago airport by Pinochet’s secret police, who proceeded to expel me from the country along with our seven-year-old son, Joaquín, already born into expatriation during our Dutch exile.Not strange, then, that I should be haunted by the tragedy of so many forsaken youthful lives being irreversibly twisted, what it does to each boy, each girl, to live in perpetual terror of deportation or death. But I have recently been troubled by a question about another kind of social repercussion: what do we lose, those who watch such persecution and do little or nothing to avert it, what does society lose by hunting down these children and, ultimately, removing them from our midst?We would, needless to say (and yet it must be said), find ourselves depreciated by the vanishing of even one of these defenseless minors, forfeiting the cosmic galaxy of skills and dreams and endowments that each of them promises, how they might enrich us for generations to come. Given that this self-evident truth has been insufficient to stir enough public opinion to get such maltreatment to cease, it might make sense, in our celebrity-driven and success-soaked society, to exemplify that loss in a more dramatic and spectacular fashion.Faced with that ominous question, what do we lose?, I answer with a name that cannot be indifferent or unrecognizable to anyone: Mozart, we risk losing future Mozarts. Can we deny that each deported child has within himself, within herself, the potentiality to become another Mozart?Instead of that musical genius I could, of course, suggest any number of other amazingly gifted human beings. There could be an Albert Einstein lurking inside the head of one of the boys being whisked right now to some unknown destination, there could be a Madame Curie inside one of the girls going through that ordeal. A Cervantes, a George Eliot, a Bob Dylan, a Taylor Swift, a Nelson Mandela, an Abraham Lincoln, a Harriet Tubman, a Simón Bolivar, a Garibaldi, a Monet, a Sappho, a Meryl Streep – who knows what miracles are being snuffed out with each stalked child?Let me insist, however, on Mozart as the most luminous paragon in this experiment bent on rattling consciences. True that, during his childhood, he never faced the threat of harassment by cruel authorities. And yet, I am sure he would understand the anxieties and uncertainties that trouble today’s migrant youngsters in the US. One can imagine, as I have done in my novel Allegro, what such a sensitive child must have felt when he was separated from his family and was forced to accept adult tasks and responsibilities, pondering who to trust in a world suddenly full of strangers. Like me at his age, like my own children, like so many imperiled children in the US, Mozart also must have worried about death, must have feared being abandoned at an early age.Who could better represent the latent aspirations and possible talents of many of those contemporary youngsters whose violent passing from among us should fill us with shame and grief? The most famous child prodigy of all time, composing music at the age of five, playing the piano for monarchs once he was seven: I can conjure up no more eloquent and renowned spokesperson for vulnerable children everywhere.Let us, therefore, call on the ghost of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart to return to Earth and excoriate those victimizers who are ordering and carrying out such acts of merciless repression against his young outcast counterparts in the US and beyond its frontiers.I can hear him telling them to beware of the consequences of terrorizing and deporting a child. You are not only, I can hear him say with that voice which once sang to the world some of the most immortal and consoling melodies ever created, committing a crime against humanity. You are, Mozart would warn them, committing a crime against beauty and the compassionate imagination of our species.

      Ariel Dorfman, an emeritus distinguished professor of literature at Duke University, is the Chilean American author of the play Death and the Maiden and, more recently, the novels The Suicide Museum and Allegro. More

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      Trump’s barbarism is turning his biggest strength into a liability | Osita Nwanevu

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      If you can bear to hear it, there are still more than 1,300 days remaining in the Trump administration. That’s an interminably long time given all the havoc the president has been able to wreak since January alone; the chaos and cruelty of the term so far also happen to have used up his political capital remarkably quickly. The New York Times average of polls, which found him at 52% approval on inauguration day, had him at 51% disapproval on Wednesday. That collapse is less a problem for Trump specifically ⁠– assuming, perhaps optimistically, that he won’t appear on a ballot again ⁠– than it is for the Republican party, which will have to answer for the mess he’s made in next year’s midterms and beyond. And one of the challenges they seem likely to face is a changed public opinion landscape on immigration ⁠– a strength that Trump’s barbarism, just as in his first term, seems to be turning into a liability.While it remains his strongest issue, polls have shown the public’s confidence in Trump on immigration declining steadily since January ⁠– averages suggest the public is newly and evenly split on his handling of it and some polls taken around the 100-day mark even found an outright majority of Americans disapproving. It’s no mystery why. The shock-and-awe campaign the administration is waging against immigrants legal and not has produced a steady stream of headlines that sound awful to all but Stephen Miller and the nativist fanatics driving Trump’s agenda. The deportation of a four-year-old citizen suffering from a rare form of cancer. The end of temporary protected status for 9,000 Afghan refugees even as the administration welcomes Afrikaners supposedly fleeing “white genocide”, a myth most voters who don’t frequent white supremacist forums are probably unfamiliar with. The use of the immigration enforcement apparatus to pursue and persecute critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Even as voters succumbed to a panic over the migrant surge under Biden, moves like this under Trump and a public backlash to them were inevitable.What should be especially dismaying to the president’s supporters ⁠– and especially heartening to the rest of us ⁠– is the administration’s absolute failure to win over the public on the Kilmar Ábrego García case. That battle was probably lost as soon as it was conceded that he was deported by mistake, but it’s notable that none of the efforts to muddy the waters and obfuscate the main issues at hand with lies and character assassination have worked. The escalatory rhetoric ⁠– Ábrego García is not an innocent man but a member of MS-13, not merely a member of MS-13 but one of “the top MS-13 members”, not merely one of “the top MS-13 members” but a terrorist ⁠– has been almost comic. The complaints that the media has been stretching the facts of the case have been pathetic. “Based on the sensationalism of many of the people in this room,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, fumed last month, “you would think we deported a candidate for father of the year”.The administration was surely pleased when the domestic violence claims made by Ábrego García’s wife several years ago, which she dismisses now, began picking up traction in the press. And it is just as surely disappointed that a majority of Americans believe Ábrego García should be returned to America anyway ⁠– which suggests that the principles at stake in the case matter more and matter to more people than cynics might assume. Wholly irrespective of who Ábrego García is ⁠or what he might have done – and there remains no solid evidence at all that he belongs to MS-13 – he is entitled to due process under the law and fair treatment by our government. The fact that many Americans remain committed to this ideal here ⁠– despite the president’s best efforts to render Ábrego García unsympathetic, despite all that’s been done to frame undocumented immigration as an invasion and a society-breaking crisis ⁠– is one of the brightest glimmers of light against the pall Donald Trump and the right have cast over this country.Bright as it is, there are Democrats who are determined not to see it. Infamously in Axios last month, one anonymous House member ⁠– some nameless, brainless invertebrate, croaking from the bottom of a boot ⁠– warned the party against defending immigrants like Ábrego García or the makeup artist Andry Hernández Romero, also deported as a gang member for having tattoos. Trump, they said, was “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it […] we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser”. In an appearance on Fox News Radio, the Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar argued that Ábrego García, in particular, was “not the right case” for Democrats to take up. “This is not the right issue to talk about due process,” he said. “This is not the right person to be saying that we need to bring him back to the United States.”Fortunately, most Americans disagree. And there is an opportunity here, for those with the good sense and courage to take it, to use the public’s dismay at the Ábrego García case and the realities of Trump’s immigration agenda to sell it on an alternative vision for our immigration policy and an alternative set of culprits for the problems immigrants have proven easy scapegoats for.Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents supposedly on the prowl for the thugs and thieves who’ve ruined communities and degraded our public infrastructure would be better off kicking down the doors of Congress than smashing the windows of asylum seekers. And, of course, if preserving law and order means that criminals who are sucking our public resources dry and who pose a danger to women ought to be dealt with harshly, we should insist on bringing the convict, grifter, and accused rapist in the White House to justice. The chief priority of his administration is terrorizing people for committing the crime of coming to this country and working harder for it than he ever has. His agenda here is corrosive to our values. It is degrading to our society. It materially profits no one. In important ways, it hurts us all.More and more Americans are wising up to this. Fewer and fewer are willing to stand for it.

      Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist More