Trump administration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      How hardline anti-immigrant policies are threatening the right to education

      by

      As Donald Trump mounts escalating attacks on immigrants in the US in the first weeks of his second term, schools are increasingly in the crosshairs.He has already revoked protective status for schools and churches, so that immigration authorities can make arrests on school grounds, sending teachers scrambling to figure out ways to protect their students.Now, hardline anti-immigrant stances are being used to attack public education itself. In January, Oklahoma’s board of education voted to require citizenship information from parents enrolling children in school. The move threatens a longstanding constitutional right to public education for all children, regardless of their immigration status, established in 1982 by the US supreme court.Legal and policy experts say that while the rule is likely to be struck down in the courts as unconstitutional, the threat alone will cause damage and cause terrified parents to keep their children out of schools, which undermines a fundamental democratic institution: the right to education.“The purpose of our schools is to educate children, and to educate all our children,” said Wendy Cervantes, director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy (Clasp). “Immigration enforcement of any kind should stay out of our schools, period.”Requiring proof of citizenship for public school enrollment would severely disadvantage American immigrant families, including those with legal status, experts say. The impact would be vast: approximately one in four children (nearly 18 million in total) have at least one foreign-born parent.Most immediately, the rule will scare immigrant parents – especially those without documentation or whose cases may be pending – to the point that they keep their kids out of school entirely. This phenomenon, in which immigrant families turn inward and avoid critical resources when they perceive restrictions are tightening, is known in immigration policy circles as the “chilling effect”, and it is widely documented.“This is exactly the kind of thing that causes parents, very rationally, to hold their kids back and not send them to school,” said Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, emphasizing that the chilling effect will descend whether the rule is adopted or not. “There is harm done just in talking about this,” he said.View image in fullscreenEfrén C Olivares, director of strategic litigation and advocacy at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that the fear component was deliberate, and would disproportionately affect those whose status is in question. “By being put in the position of having to respond to this question, somebody who may not have regular status is going to really be threatened and be in a vulnerable position,” he said.For those children who are kept home out of fear, the effect is detrimental, experts say. Those children may opt to join the workforce. And if a child is not old enough for legal employment, or is not eligible for a work permit, they are more likely to be exploited or to work in an unsafe job, explained Melissa Adamson, an attorney at the National Center for Youth Law.The result is that their entire lives get sidetracked, and their potential – which schools are designed to nurture – quashed. “It cuts off their entire ability to succeed,” Adamson said.Restricting access to education would also deepen social divisions and negatively affect the entire American economy by exacerbating marginalization and impoverishment, explained Kristina Lovato, director of the Center on Immigration and Child Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. “Educational access empowers our children with the tools to lead productive lives and contribute to the economy and overall wellbeing of our communities, and every child in the US deserves this chance to reach their full potential,” she said.According to Cervantes, it is for these reasons that states have such stringent truancy laws in place.“A basic K-12 education is essential to preventing the creation of a permanent underclass,” she said. “It is in the best interest of not only children, but all of society, for children to be productive and learning.”The Oklahoma effort is spearheaded by Ryan Walters, the Republican state superintendent who has railed against the presence of “woke ideology” in schools, believes that the Bible should be required learning and has claimed that the 1921 Tulsa massacre – in which 300 Black people were murdered by their white neighbors – was not motivated by race.While the proposal is singular in its content, the rule sits squarely within the far-right playbook.Mixed messaging surrounding the measure’s aims contribute to confusion, which experts cite as a core strategy of Trump’s approach to immigration. The text of the Oklahoma rule claims parents’ citizenship information will be used to inform how resources can be better allocated to serve students’ tutoring, language and transportation needs. But Walters has publicly stated that Oklahoma schools would give federal agencies the information so that “families can be deported together”.View image in fullscreen“I don’t see how knowing that a student’s parent holds a passport from a different country helps the state understand that student’s needs in the classroom,” said Adamson, decrying the rationale as nonsensical. “We live in a very diverse world. A parent’s nationality doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about their child’s educational needs.”The measure also politicizes schools, which are already at the frontline of culture wars. “I’m also not surprised that we are seeing some more culture-war battles penetrating schools as they relate to immigration,” said Valant.Perhaps most critically, the proposal represents a tolerance for the undermining of long-held democratic institutions and values – namely, the free and equal right to public education.For Olivares, the crux of the matter lies in the fact that the measure would also deny that right to millions of US-citizen children whose parents are foreign-born. That, he says, reveals the rule’s racist underpinnings. “They’re going to be the children of US immigrants whose skin is a certain shade of dark,” he said. “They were born in this country. What does that say? What values does that reflect about a society?”What’s more, it puts the right to education itself on a slippery slope. Valant said there was no reason to think that students with disabilities or transgender kids wouldn’t become future targets.“Who do we pull out of the community next?” he asked.From a legal standpoint, the feasibility of asking parents for citizenship information remains murky, most notably because the 1982 Plyler v Doe case enshrining the right to education for all children regardless of citizenship creates a substantial constitutional hurdle. For that reason, most legal and policy experts anticipate the Oklahoma measure to be struck down if passed into state law.“It was unwise public policy then to adopt policies that may harm children’s access to schooling, and that has not changed,” said Debu Gandhi, senior director of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress.They also caution against putting too much faith in the constitution, especially given the track record of this supreme court. Although Plyler has been settled law for nearly 43 years, the court has overturned other cases with even longer legacies, such as Roe v Wade, the 1973 landmark case protecting the constitutional right to abortion, Olivares explained.Regardless of whether this particular measure takes effect, the situation unfolding in Oklahoma is probably a preview of similar efforts that will be undertaken in school districts around the nation, warned Valant.“This is a particularly aggressive move when it comes to immigration enforcement in schools, but I don’t think it’ll be the last,” he said. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Elon Musk’s gutting of US agencies is illegal, experts say. How do you muzzle Doge?

      by

      In 2022, the Pentagon proudly announced a committee on diversity and inclusion, with a marine veteran and senior director at Tesla, serving as a member. The same person, who spent nearly six years at Tesla, also helped push Elon Musk to make Juneteenth a company-wide holiday. But Musk is a notorious recipient of lucrative government contracts and changes with the winds of presidential administrations.Now in 2025, as a “special government employee” heading up the “department of government efficiency” (Doge), Musk is going to war with those kinds of government diversity and inclusion programs and slashing whatever he sees as a “waste” of public coffers.But legal resistance is mounting, as Doge faces countless lawsuits alleging everything from privacy concerns to free speech violations, which all leads to one important question: is any of this even legal?Laurence Tribe, one of the nation’s leading and preeminent constitutional scholars and a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, has already argued that much of Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders on the day of his inauguration disregards the US constitution. He told the Guardian he saw Musk’s actions as furthering that culture.On whether Doge and Musk can legally have this much power over an array of government departments, Tribe was emphatic: “NO.”Musk has applied a buckshot method across the government, offering CIA agents walking papers while appraising the Department of Education – all at the same time.Tribe said the lack of guardrails being placed on Doge’s maverick initiatives, raises “both” questions of illegality and ethical wrongdoing that can be challenged in court. As for Musk’s status as a federal contractor (such as his StarLink work with the Pentagon) and now a government employee, Tribe sees it as “absolutely” a legal conflict of interest.Musk is certainly facing roadblocks: protests at the buildings of USAid – another target of Doge he called a “radical-left political psy op” on X – have brought in hundreds and attracted broader Democratic backlash. But Doge continues unabated, honoring Trump’s campaign promise to rid the federal government of the “woke” Biden era.On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders went further, telling CNN: “What Musk is doing is illegal and unconstitutional.”Sanders explained how outright deleting an agency like USAid, which was itself a creation of Congress, requires congressional approval.“You can’t do it unilaterally,” he said.But with a Republican supreme court supermajority that almost always sides with the Trump administration, any of these lawsuits that do end up being tested in the highest US court risks rulings in favor of Musk and Doge. Many of these Doge-related lawsuits will go on for months and be heard by benches stacked with Trump appointees from his first presidency. Musk has also begun publicly chastising lower court judges who go against the spirit of the administration.Doge, nonetheless, will continue to be sued.It took only minutes after Trump was sworn in for a Maryland-based public interest law firm to file a 30-page lawsuit alleging Musk’s Doge should be considered a “federal advisory committee”, which makes it subject to government transparency laws and public scrutiny, which includes note keeping and meeting records, as required by law. So far, Musk has reportedly employed a team of very young programmers who brazenly took control of the treasury department payment system, which gave them access to the addresses, social security numbers and bank account information of Americans.Tribe says that act alone raises, “serious issues of privacy”. Doge is indeed already facing legal action for that treasury fiasco, with a judge approving a temporary hold on Doge from fully accessing the payment system, while another judge ordered a freeze on the deadline for federal workers to accept a buyout.Ultimately, the only real guardrails on Musk and Doge will be in the hands of the courts. Even if Doge is found to be violating labor laws, national security statutes or constitutional rights – cases will inevitably be gummed up in the legal process, which could allow enough time for some of these federal workers to relent and take buyouts.“Obviously what Musk is doing is illegal,” said Ed Ongweso Jr, a senior researcher at Security in Context, an international project of scholars housed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “And on some level it boils down to the world’s richest man – a child of apartheid who surrounds himself with sycophantic phrenologists – trying to consolidate control over as much of the state apparatus as possible.”Ongweso has been following the rise of the tech-bro class and its cozying up to presidential administrations. Musk’s Doge takeover is the latest iteration.“For years, both parties have fetishized Silicon Valley to varying degrees, eagerly swallowing the sector’s gibberish about making governance efficient via algorithmic rule via privatization,” he said.Ongweso pointed out that Musk is a veteran of the mass layoff and knows they come with lawsuits. But it hasn’t stopped him before.At Tesla’s Fremont, California, plant a Black former employee was awarded $3.2m in a racial harassment case, while the plant itself has been sued multiple times on racial discrimination and labor law grounds.“Learning that a key Doge staffer was a skull measuring eugenicist should come as no surprise given the rampant racism (slurs, swastikas, a hanging noose, etc) at Musk’s Fremont Tesla factory,” he said.And when it comes to laying off workers, Musk has the same recycled playbook.“He’s been sued for failing to provide advance notice for 2024 mass layoffs at Tesla and for 2022 Twitter layoffs that were a transparent attempt to get out of severance pay,” explained Ongweso.“It’s obvious lawsuits aren’t a deterrent for the world’s richest man – why would he stop mass layoffs, slashing and burning operations, or recruiting racists when it’s worked out so well for him that he’s now in firm control of America’s administrative state?” More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in US Politics

      How Trump made ‘diversity’ a dirty word – podcast

      by

      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

    • 175 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

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

      by

      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

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump says he has spoken with Putin about ending Ukraine war

      by

      Donald Trump has said he held talks with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, over a negotiated end of the three year Russia-Ukraine war, indicated that Russian negotiators want to meet with US counterparts.Trump told the New York Post that he had spoken to Putin, remarking that “I better not say” just how many times.In comments to the outlet on Friday aboard Air Force One, Trump said he believed Putin “does care” about the killing on the battlefield but did not say if the Russian leader had presented any concrete commitments to end the nearly three-year conflict.Trump revealed that he has a plan to end the war but declined to go into details. “I hope it’s fast. Every day people are dying. This war is so bad in Ukraine. I want to end this damn thing.”Last month, Trump estimated that approximately 1 million Russian soldiers and 700,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since the invasion began – an estimate far in excess of numbers that Ukrainian officials or independent analysts have presented.The Post said the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, joined the president during for the interview.“Let’s get these meetings going,” Trump said. “They want to meet. Every day people are dying. Young handsome soldiers are being killed. Young men, like my sons. On both sides. All over the battlefield”.Waltz would not confirm that Trump had spoken with Putin, telling NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday that “there are certainly a lot of sensitive conversations going on” and that senior US diplomats would be in Europe this week “talking through the details of how to end this war and that will mean getting both sides to the table”.Ending the war, Waltz added, had come up in conversations with India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, China’s president Xi Jinping and leaders across the Middle East. “Everybody is ready to help President Trump end in this war,” Waltz said, and repeated Trump’s comments that he is prepared to tax, tariff and sanction Russia.“The president is prepared to put all of those issues on the table this week, including the future of US aid to Ukraine. We need to recoup those costs, and that is going to be a partnership with the Ukrainians in terms of their rare earth (materials), their natural resources, their oil and gas, and also buying ours.”But Waltz reiterated what he said was the Trump administration’s “underlying principle” that the Europeans “have to own this conflict going forward. President Trump is going to end it, and then in terms of security guarantees that is squarely going to be with the Europeans.”During his presidential campaign, Trump made repeated vows to end the war quickly if he was re-elected, often pointing to the loss of life on the battlefield.Last month, Trump said “Most people thought this war would last about a week, and now it’s been going on for three years,” and said the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, had expressed interest in a negotiated peace deal.During the interview on Friday, Trump again expressed sorrow for the loss of life in the war and compared the young men dying to his own sons.“All those dead people. Young, young, beautiful people. They’re like your kids, two million of them – and for no reason,” Trump told the Post, adding that Putin also “wants to see people stop dying”.The Kremlin on Sunday declined to confirm or deny the report of the phone call. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told TASS state news agency he was unaware of any such call.“What can be said about this news: as the administration in Washington unfolds its work, many different communications arise. These communications are conducted through different channels. And of course, amid the multiplicity of these communications, I personally may not know something, be unaware of something. Therefore, in this case, I can neither confirm nor deny it.”The Kremlin has previously said it is awaiting “signals” on a possible meeting between Trump and Putin. The head of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs, Leonid Slutsky, has said that work on preparing contacts between Moscow and Washington “is at an advanced stage”.The US president also ventured into the current stand-off between Israel and Iran, saying he “would like a deal done with Iran on non-nuclear” and would prefer a negotiated deal to “bombing the hell out of it… They don’t want to die. Nobody wants to die.”If there was a deal with Iran, he said, “Israel wouldn’t bomb them”. But he declined to go further on any approach to Iran: “In a way, I don’t like telling you what I’m going to tell them. You know, it’s not nice.”“I could tell what I have to tell them, and I hope they decide that they’re not going to do what they’re currently thinking of doing. And I think they’ll really be happy,” Trump added. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Relief for immigrants as legal services restored after Trump-induced chaos

      by

      Immigrants and asylum seekers caught up in Donald Trump’s mass enforcement crackdown will at least have a better chance at knowing their legal rights – for now – after a court intervened to restore some vital advice services.Last month, the federal government issued a stop-work order targeting programs that provide information and guidance to people facing deportation, via services such as independent legal help desks.But the administration was promptly sued and a temporary court order was issued that restarted four programs that had been abruptly halted by the Department of Justice.Even though short-lived, that unexpected break in legal services took its toll, after a chaotic week and a half of furloughs, cancelled detention visits and general confusion created a domino effect of inefficiencies within the US’s overloaded immigration court system.The temporary court order restoring business as usual may be just that – temporary – as the Trump administration and its allies continue to fixate on attacking the few federal programs that secure some semblance of due process for immigrants.“Often the people providers meet with are fleeing violence. They are just trying to protect their families and stay with their communities. They’re just trying to attend church, they’re just trying to attend school. So I don’t know in what world this makes sense,” said Kel White, associate director of learning and development at the Acacia Center for Justice, which administers the four programs targeted by the justice department’s stop-work order.Across the US, about two-thirds of people fighting in the courts against being forced to repatriate are unrepresented. Some are behind bars in remote, isolated facilities with restricted access to the internet. And they have no right to appointed counsel, like in the criminal court system, which makes hiring an attorney a costly and often untenable prospect.So when contracted legal service providers received the justice department’s order to pause three federally funded legal orientation programs and one legal representation program on 22 January, some of the country’s most vulnerable people lost access to their first or only touchpoints with credible legal advice.“What we’re really concerned about is that this is perhaps more intentional and part of a broader effort to ensure that people don’t have access to information, and don’t have access to counsel,” said Laura St John, legal director for the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project.On the ground, fallout was swift: posters with details about where to receive legal help were pulled down at detention centers. Organizations serving immigrants were denied permission to do group presentations for detainees, even on their own dime.Vulnerable children traveling alone were no longer being assigned lawyers. And even as affected legal service providers sued for reinstatement of the programs – in a separate lawsuit from one that ultimately restored operations – some were also being forced to consider layoffs.“Why create these inefficiencies? Why impact our communities in this way?” White asked. “These are very basic, simple programs that provide essential information about due process.”When, for example, the Florence project gives group legal orientations to detainees in Arizona, presenters start with the fundamentals: why people are detained, what they should expect in the courtroom, and what the judge’s and government attorney’s roles are. They also describe non-citizens’ rights during hearings. Then they explain eligibility requirements for a vast array of immigration pathways – all the way up to US citizenship.“It’s making sure people understand what’s available to them, but also when there is nothing available, which does happen with some regularity, that people don’t waste their time, effort and energy fighting for a case that doesn’t exist,” St John said.Similarly, in Chicago, the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) runs a court help desk – one of many nationwide – where people in immigration proceedings arrive knowing very little. So help desk staff do information sessions, file mandatory forms before deadlines and keep immigrants from being wrongly deported through appeals. Overwhelmed judges and court personnel often refer confused families their way.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Taking away the immigration court help desk, the legal orientation programs, all of this is really engineered to create the kind of chaos that will lead to unlawful deportations,” said Azadeh Erfani, policy director at the NIJC.One of the documents the NIJC’s staffers often help to file updates someone’s outdated or erroneous court location, so that, for instance, a mother with a five-year-old child doesn’t have to drop everything and travel from Chicago to Denver for court – or worse, miss her court date and be ordered to leave the country as a no-show.Without programs like the NIJC’s, untold numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers would probably be deported without ever seeing a judge, all because of an unfiled form.“I think what’s lost sometimes is that people have risked their lives to get to this point,” said Adela Mason, director for two of the targeted orientation programs at Acacia. “They’ve traveled across multiple countries, often in life-threatening circumstances. People aren’t trying to evade their court date. They’ve fought for sometimes years to get before a judge and present their claim.“And so for them to lose that opportunity … because they didn’t know that they had to fill out X form as part of asking to change their case to X city, it’s just so unjust.”During the programs’ freeze, legal service providers got very little information from the justice department. Even now, some detention centers have delayed rescheduling visits. Legal providers are having to renegotiate to get their informational posters back on the walls, and they are still waiting for rosters to know who is new to the facilities where they are contracted for orientations.Meanwhile, some organizations are bringing back whiplashed staff members who were just furloughed, and judges will need to reschedule court dates after missed consultations.“We’re celebrating that we are back providing services to our immigrant community who needs those services, and to our courts who need that efficiency,” White said. “But we are living in a world of uncertainty now.” More