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Trump has dragged the US to the abyss and Nigel Farage would do the same to Britain. Here’s how to stop him
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 16:02
The march towards the darkness is becoming a sprint. In the US, warnings about the autocratic ambitions of Donald Trump that were once dismissed as hyperbole and hysteria now seem, if anything, too mild. Faster than most imagined, he has moved to weaken institutional checks on his power – whether the courts, the universities, the civil service or the press – and now has set to work gagging his critics, even, it seems, to outlaw large swathes of the opposition.This week saw the suspension by a major broadcasting network, Disney-owned ABC, of a late-night talkshow, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, following remarks Kimmel had made about the killing of the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk. Kimmel did not criticise Kirk himself – an act now considered all but blasphemous in the US – but rather Republicans’ reaction to his murder, especially their eagerness to “score political points from it”.That was enough to prompt Brendan Carr, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission – the body that grants, or revokes, licences to broadcast – to come on like a wannabe Tony Soprano, all but cracking his knuckles as he said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” The threat worked: Kimmel is off the air.Of course, this is no one-off. Trump is also trying to cow the US’s biggest newspaper, filing a $15bn lawsuit against the New York Times, accusing it of “spreading false and defamatory content”. The NYT has the resources to resist, but smaller US papers will have got the message. They could hardly be blamed if they now pull their journalistic punches, if only because they do not have the money to pay for a protracted legal battle against a billionaire president.But the Trump administration is not confining its assault to the media. The Kirk killing has handed it an opportunity to crack down on dissent itself. Witness the promise Trump aide Stephen Miller made this week – on the Charlie Kirk podcast – to take on those left-of-centre organisations whose “messaging” is “designed to trigger and incite violence”. It is hardly a stretch to assume that Miller will define that category very broadly, so that it sweeps up most of those who express opposition to Trump. If that seems alarmist, recall that, even before Kirk was killed, Miller was calling the Democratic party a “domestic extremist organisation”.View image in fullscreenIn the UK, we like to think we can watch all this with, if not smug distance, then a measure of relief. It’s true that we are a long way from the precipice to which Trump has taken the US. But last week between 110,000 and 150,000 Britons took to the streets of London, heeding the summons of the rightwing agitator and serial convict who goes by the name of Tommy Robinson.It’s worth stressing that this was not a Reform or Conservative rally that was hijacked by Robinson. This was his event. Britons know who Robinson is and what he represents – and yet up to 150,000 of them marched behind him. They were undeterred by those who had labelled it a far-right protest and, indeed, by the racist rhetoric that came from the platform. Britain has an admirable history of confining the far right to the margins, ensuring that it had not, until now, demonstrated this kind of strength in numbers. So last Saturday should be understood as a watershed.Not least because of one speech in particular. Elon Musk, via video link, told the crowd “violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.” He added that the Labour government, democratically elected a year ago, needed to be brought down. This was one of the most powerful men in the world issuing a call that may not have broken the law but which seemed to give approval in advance for rightwing political violence in Britain.And yet the British prime minister did not rush to condemn this incendiary intrusion into our politics. Indeed, Downing Street said nothing at all until prompted by reporters’ questions, and MPs’ demands, the following day. We often fault those guilty of overreaction. But, at a moment like this, underreaction is the greater sin.The polls are telling a very stark story. Absent a dramatic shift, a party of nationalist populism is on course to beat both Labour and the Conservatives at the next election, and very probably form the next government. Nigel Farage may be no fan of Tommy Robinson, but he is Trump’s loudest UK cheerleader; he does not condemn the current US gallop towards authoritarianism but rather stands alongside those responsible for it. If we want to prevent Farage doing to Britain what Trump is doing to the US, we need to halt the advance of Reform.The first move in that effort is to puncture Farage’s core claim: that he somehow speaks for the British people, that his views reflect the “commonsense” views of the silent majority. It’s not true. On issue after issue, including those that define him, Farage is an outlier, articulating the positions of a noisy but often small minority.He was the chief advocate of Brexit, a decision so calamitous that only 31% now say it was the right move. Indeed, a healthy majority, 56%, favour its reversal and want to rejoin the EU. Farage is on the wrong side of that number.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has long banged the drum for leaving the European convention on human rights. If you read the rightwing papers, you would assume that is now a majority view. Wrong. Support for staying in the ECHR is close to 60% and has actually increased as the subject has been debated. Farage is out of step with the British people.But surely on the issue he has made his own, immigration, he is in tune with the public? After all, Labour seems to have built its entire political strategy on that assumption. And yet, the numbers tell a different story. While 81% of Reform voters believe migrants have undermined Britain’s culture, only 31% of Britons in general believe that. Ask about the effect of migrants on the economy and you get a similar picture. It’s Reform that is badly out of touch.You can keep doing this – and Labour must, pointing out that Farage speaks for the fringes not the centre. Britons don’t support handing Afghan refugees back to the Taliban, as Farage advocates. They do not agree that Britain has become North Korea – and they don’t regard as a patriot someone who sits in Washington and tells a committee of American politicians that we have. They don’t reply to the question, “Which world leader do you most admire?”, with the words “Vladimir Putin”, as Farage did. And nor do they think that the Liz Truss measures that sent the UK economy spiralling represented “the best Conservative budget since 1986”, to quote Nigel Farage.Reform’s opponents need to expose every one of these gaps between Farage and the electorate, recasting Farage as a figure of the fringes. But this can’t be a task for Labour or the Liberal Democrats alone. Any party that claims to value democracy, including what remains of the Conservatives, and that sees how swiftly nationalist populism leads to authoritarianism, needs to engage in the same effort and fast. We all do. As Americans are learning to their cost, you cannot delay – otherwise the freedoms you thought would last for ever can vanish, in the blink of an eye.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist. His new nonfiction book, The Traitors Circle: The Rebels Against the Nazis and the Spy Who Betrayed Them (£25), is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £22 More
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Trump cuts threaten futures of 250,000 children of migrant farm workers: ‘We felt like crying’
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 15:00
When Regina Zarate-Garcia was a child, she recalled being uprooted from one school district and planted in another as often as the seasons changed.Zarate-Garcia, now 18, was born in Salinas, California, to farm workers from Mexicali, a city just south of California on the US-Mexico border. “I remember my parents getting home and seeing their pants splashed in strawberries, mixed with that familiar smell of pesticides,” she recalls.Her family’s life followed California’s planting and harvest seasons: starting school in Monterey county, where her parents worked April through November in the strawberry fields, then moving to Inyo county near the Nevada border – or sometimes back to Mexico – while her parents chased winter jobs or tried to live frugally while unemployed.It took a toll on her. She described the isolation of struggling through a disrupted school curriculum alone, while her parents, exhausted from long days in the fields, and unable to read English, could offer no help. “My kindergarten teacher told my mom that I was gonna flunk,” Zarate-Garcia said.Then came a turning point: her mother learned about the Migrant Education Program (MEP), a federal initiative that supports children whose families move from place to place for seasonal agricultural work.From first grade onward, Zarate-Garcia went to after-school tutoring, Saturday school, summer enrichment, speech and debate tournaments, college readiness workshops, and was provided lunch, snacks, mentors and a community of kids who were navigating similar educational disruptions, cultural and language barriers, as well as social isolation.“I didn’t feel like I had two different worlds coming against each other, and I felt more like a cohesive world that we were building together,” said Zarate-Garcia. The MEP opened up the doors that got her where she is now: studying biology as a freshman at University of California San Diego.But the future of this safe haven for the more than 250,000 eligible migratory children and youth, like Zarate-Garcia, is now in jeopardy and could be slashed under the Trump administration. If this happens, Zarate-Garcia fears the American dream will be out of reach for future generations of kids whose parents’ labor forms the backbone of the country’s economy and food system.View image in fullscreenTrump’s 2026 budget, which is set to be debated by Congress this fall, proposes eliminating all funding for the MEP, a program that has been in place for nearly 60 years. (This budget is separate from the Republican budget bill passed this summer, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.)‘The migrant program changes lives’The MEP was also thrown into chaos this summer, when the Trump administration abruptly froze nearly $7bn in congressionally approved education funds from the 2025 budget. The funds were eventually released in late July after a coalition of 24 states, including California, sued the Trump administration, and 10 Senate Republicans signed a public letter urging the White House to release them.Nowhere would the impact of these proposed cuts be felt more than in California, where one out of three migrant students in the US lives. In California, the MEP serves nearly 80,000 youth ages three to 21, most of whom live in rural areas. In Monterey county, an agricultural region about two hours south of San Francisco where Zarate-Garcia was born, there are more than 10,000 students who are eligible for this support.“The migrant program changes lives,” said Constantino Silva, senior director of migrant education services at the Monterey county office of education in Salinas.He knows this firsthand; Silva too went through the program. Born in Michoacán, Mexico, Silva remembers his family traveling to the US embassy in Mexico City when he was six to obtain green cards before resettling in King City, California, where his father laid the pipes to irrigate crops.“We have the misfortune of having the word ‘migrant’ in our title,” Silva said of the cuts to the MEP.The justification for targeting the migrant program’s funding is that it is deemed costly, ineffective and harmful to students’ stability, arguing it encourages mobility and allows ineligible non-citizens to strip resources from US university students.But that’s not true, Silva says, explaining that agricultural work is by its nature seasonal and migratory.“Being migratory is really difficult,” Silva said, describing the toll on children who are always “the new kid”, out of place, and struggling with disrupted schooling. Families often live two or three families to a house, moving whenever work dries up. Farm labor, he added, is grueling, low-paid and unpredictable, leaving entire families at the mercy of the weather and crop cycles.Food insecurity, inadequate or nonexistent healthcare, and chronic absenteeism combined with inconsistent credit transfers from one school district to another often puts these kids at high risk of school failure or dropout. A number of studies have found migrant children and youth to have high rates of grade repetition and about 50% drop out of high school.The US Department of Education doesn’t track graduation rates for students in the Migrant Education Program, so it’s hard to get accurate data on how many kids follow their parents into the fields versus moving on to better-paying jobs. US federal labor law allows farm worker children to pick crops with their parents’ consent, outside school hours, from as young as age 12.The program was set up to address some of these disadvantages. Silva said he flourished in the program and runs through a list of teachers, vice-principals, principals, program directors, assistant superintendents and a superintendent, all of whom found success in education because of their childhood experience in the program.“We look back on it and say: ‘Had it not been for that, I don’t know that I would be where I am today.’” said Silva. “‘This is where I can be myself and not feel out of place, where I’m safe to say that I don’t know, that I’m not sure, that I have questions.’ That’s the type of environment that we create for the migrant students.”Support beyond the classroomSilva says the key part of the program – along with all the tutoring, socializing and yummy snacks he got – was that his mother also received parent education services that helped her advocate for him as they navigated the US education system, even after he no longer qualified for the program.Starting at three years old, Silva’s team visits children’s houses to get parents reading bilingual books to their children, empowering “parents to be the first teacher”.Silva said they don’t check children’s legal status before providing services, but said that many students are US citizens, like Zarate-Garcia, or residents with legal status, like him.“It’s worth investing in these children’s future, because it’s America’s future,” said Silva, whose own job is now on the line due to the cuts.In Salinas, many children of farm workers assume they will follow their parents into the fields; becoming an attorney or doctor seem beyond their possible horizons. But starting in third or fourth grade, Zarate-Garcia said the MEP drew a different path – literally – on the floor out of chalk to change these narratives.Each summer, MEP staff sketched a giant game of hopscotch in chalk, each square a milestone: grades one through five, middle and high school and graduation. A student volunteered to stand there in a cap and gown waving at Zarate-Garcia as she hopped across a milestone, living proof of what was possible. Beyond that, new boxes branched out – college, university, trade school, the military – options that once felt out of reach.For Zarate-Garcia this unlocked possibilities: “It showed you the timeline of everything and really put it into perspective for the kids.”View image in fullscreenAfter-school tutoring provides students with academic support, meals like flautas and burritos, and a safe place to be while parents work, while also engaging parents through monthly activities and parent-teacher nights.Zarate-Garcia spent seven years doing speech and debate tournaments, which taught her about teamwork, how to write argumentative essays, do research backed by credible sources, defend her claims, enunciate, project her voice and debate in a way that is respectful.Zarate-Garcia found that she loved public speaking, storytelling and improvising speeches on the spot: “I could make my voice into something powerful. I could make a language that I always struggled in, into something powerful.”The program also helped students buy presentable outfits for their debate tournaments.Her team even won second and third place at county and state level speech and debate tournaments over the years. Now, Zarate-Garcia aspires to become a pediatric oncologist.“The power of your voice is something that nobody else can take away,” she said. Once you have an education, nobody can take that away from you.”When Zarate-Garcia found out about the budget cuts, she was volunteering in the MEP’s summer program and the kids were all practising a dance to show their parents. “Honestly, we felt like crying,” she said, realizing that all the kids she coaches in speech and debate – kids who look up to her – may never thrive without the crucial support that she benefited from.“You meet these kids that have so much potential, but their potential can’t be tapped into because they don’t have that support at home … It’s just so disappointing.” More
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When even Ben & Jerry’s can’t speak out, it’s clear: the era of corporate responsibility is over | Austin Sarat
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 14:00
When the history of this era is written, there will be much to say about the behavior of large corporations. And none of it will be good.As the Trump administration has ramped up its assault on American democracy, many corporations have chosen to look the other way or to curry favor with the president. They have fired employees who were too outspoken in their criticism of Donald Trump – ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talkshow, after Kimmel’s remarks about Maga’s reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk, is the latest example.Or corporations have muted their brand’s identification with progressive causes.One casualty is Jerry Greenfield, co-founder and namesake of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream. This week, he resigned from the company.He did so because, he said in a statement, the politically outspoken company had been “silenced”.The consumer goods company Unilever acquired Ben & Jerry’s in 2000, for a reported $326m. At the time, it agreed to respect the company’s independence.No more, according to Greenfield.“Standing up for the values of justice, equity, and our shared humanity has never been more important,” Greenfield noted in explaining his resignation. But, he said: “Ben & Jerry’s has been silenced, sidelined for fear of upsetting those in power.”Ben & Jerry’s crossed swords with Unilever last year when it sued the company for allegedly fighting its calls for a Gaza ceasefire and an end to US military support for Israel.The 2024 suit claimed that Unilever had threatened to dismantle the ice-cream company’s independent board and punish members if Ben & Jerry’s issued a call for a ceasefire. (Unilever said it rejected “the claims made by B&J’s social mission board”. Its motion to dismiss the lawsuit is pending.)Another flare-up occurred in March of this year, when, according to Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever fired its chief executive, David Stever, over his work to advance the company’s “social mission”.If those allegations are true, Unilever would not be alone in trying to avoid offending the Trump administration or its supporters. This is just the latest sign that the era of corporate social and political responsibility is over.Ice-cream lovers will now have to choose between their taste buds and their consciences.Corporate social responsibility (CSR) requires that business leaders recognize, as Harvard Business School explains, that they “have a responsibility to do more than simply maximize profits for shareholders and executives. Rather, they have a social responsibility to do what’s best – not just for their companies, but for people, the planet, and society at large.”The CSR movement really took off about 40 to 50 years ago when businesses realized that they could carve out a niche and attract investment from people who wanted to make money and stay true to their values. Ben & Jerry’s was founded in 1978 during the heyday of CSR, by Greenfield and Ben Cohen.It was upfront about the issues it cared about and the values it sought to promote. The list was long, but it included racial justice, refugee rights, climate, LGBTQ+ rights and democracy.The Association of Corporate-Citizenship Professionals traces the roots of CSR back to the 18th century. At that time, religious groups would not invest, and would urge their members not to invest, in businesses that did not advance their values. Those included the slave trade and businesses that supplied the instruments of war.Fast forward to the start of the 20th century, when in 1928, the Pioneer Fund became one of the first mutual funds to promote socially responsible investing, which meant avoiding companies producing alcohol or tobacco, or promoting gambling. Almost a century later, the Business Roundtable included in its statement on the purpose of a corporation the following: “We commit to … supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.”Some progressives have criticized CSR, describing it as a charade and a public relations tactic that left the profit motive intact and did not require substantial changes in the way companies did business. But Ben & Jerry’s did more than brand itself as interested in social justice and political equality.As its 2024 lawsuit made clear, Ben & Jerry’s has wanted to take political stands even if it meant that it would lose some customers. A year earlier, in March 2023, as Newsweek reports, Cohen “shocked many” by speaking out against the US providing military aid to Ukraine.” (An ally said he opposed Russia’s invasion but wanted a diplomatic solution.)While from time to time, the company has been accused of not living up to its values, not surprisingly, conservatives have targeted Ben & Jerry’s for being “woke”. Some have tried to organize a boycott to protest what they see as its radical left politics.That’s perhaps why Unilever apparently wanted to pull back Ben & Jerry’s activism.What we are witnessing now in the way of corporate acquiescence to the rise of authoritarianism is a familiar story. There are plenty of examples.Take Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. There, as the political economist Gábor Scheiring argues: “Since 2010 Orbán has been using the momentum created by popular anger at the failures of liberal policies to build up his own system: authoritarian capitalism. A system that is deeply illiberal but capitalist: private property and the profit logic still dominate, but the state bureaucracy and its institutions are subdued to the enrichment of the preferred national economic elite.”There is ample evidence that Trump is succeeding in that same endeavor. That’s why the era of corporate social responsibility is over. Greenfield’s departure is just the latest evidence.
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More
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How Trump has turned the legal system ‘on its head’ to meet deportation goals
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 13:00
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The Cuban asylum seeker referred to in court papers as EC could not believe his luck, and neither could his lawyers.They had come to immigration court in Miami in late spring expecting only incremental progress in a case that had been grinding away for more than three years. Yet here was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyer telling the judge the government was dropping its deportation demands. It seemed EC had won, eligible at last for a green card and permanent residency in the United States.“I was a little taken aback that they were essentially conceding the point,” his lawyer, Javier Taveras, said. “But it was very welcome news.”The judge granted the dismissal and instructed EC, whom the Guardian is not identifying in line with his lawyers’ desire to protect his identity, to wait in the next room while court staff drew up a written order.EC’s team did not know, though, that just the day before, the DHS had issued guidance to its attorneys to look for cases that could be dismissed – not because the government intended to relax its hardline stance on deportations but rather the opposite. The Trump administration was looking to short-circuit the normal judicial procedure and make it easier to arrest, detain and deport migrants by taking them out of the jurisdiction of the court system and reclassifying them as emergency cases requiring immediate enforcement action.In other words, down was suddenly up, and what a day earlier would have been an unequivocal victory for EC was now very bad news indeed. Agents with US Customs and Immigration Enforcement (Ice) slapped him in handcuffs directly outside the courtroom. Taveras’s team raced back to the judge to demand that the case be reopened on the grounds that their client had been deliberately misled, still hoping that the judge might feel similarly himself.“As an officer of the court, the government lawyer can’t argue one thing knowing that what is intended is another,” Taveras charged. “They basically lied to the court.”The judge, though, refused to revisit the decision. Days later, EC’s lawyers and his American wife learned he was in detention at the opposite end of the country, in Tacoma, Washington, under threat of “expedited removal” – a category that, before Trump, was largely reserved for new arrivals, most of them apprehended at or near the border, not people like EC who have been in the country for years and have given the authorities no cause for concern.Chaos in immigration courtsIt wasn’t just EC and his lawyers who were blindsided. In case after case, starting in late May, immigration lawyers around the US have been stunned to see cases they have worked on for years disappear into a black hole and their clients subjected to perils they never imagined. Lawyers from four different states and multiple jurisdictions described how the world they knew – of fixed rules and procedures even in a messy, heavily backlogged system – had in effect vanished overnight, leaving hundreds of thousands of migrants, many of whom have spent years working their way through the courts, at risk of an abrupt reversal in their fortunes.“I was shocked,” Taveras said. “If they can change the rules and move the goalposts mid-game, what are we even doing here?”Dismissing cases in this way may just be the beginning. According to a broad cross-section of immigration professionals, including lawyers, former judges and former federal officials, the administration’s full ambition is not just to bend the rules to fulfill deportation quotas, but to dismantle the immigration court system as it has been configured for the past 40 years – and with it an important plank of the justice system as a whole.“This is about making the executive branch the dictator,” said Ashley Tabaddor, a former president of the National Association of Immigration Judges who served as a senior DHS lawyer under the Biden administration.View image in fullscreenThe attack, Tabaddor and others say, is being mounted on multiple fronts: eliminating courthouses as safe spaces where immigrants can appear in good faith without fear of arrest; eliminating the possibility of bail for immigrants ordered into detention; gutting the infrastructure of help desks and orientation programs designed to help immigrants who cannot afford a lawyer and cutting funds that provide legal representation to unaccompanied children; limiting the independence of immigration judges and firing those who do not appear to be in line with the administration’s desire to hasten deportations; and eroding if not eliminating a carefully erected firewall between the DHS, which is in charge of immigration enforcement, and the justice department, which administers the immigration courts.“All of this shows a callousness and complete disregard for people’s humanity,” Tabaddor added. “They want to be able to deport people like they are shooting fish in a barrel.”In response, the justice department office responsible for the immigration courts confirmed it had rescinded more than 20 policies, which it argued were “unfounded in law or discouraged the timely completion of cases” and added: “Reducing the immigration court backlog is one of the highest priorities for the agency.”The DHS, for its part, defended the arrest of immigrants at courthouses, calling the policy “common sense” since Ice could be sure of finding its targets there and could be sure, too, that they were unarmed since they had passed through courthouse metal detectors.“We aren’t some medieval kingdom,” the DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said. “There are no legal sanctuaries where you can hide and avoid the consequences for breaking the law. Nothing in the constitution prohibits arresting a lawbreaker where you find them.”The second Trump administration began making some of these moves out of the gate, but the big shift, immigration professionals say, came in May, when Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff in charge of immigration policy, demanded a dramatic increase in deportations from a few hundred to 3,000 a day.While Ice began aggressive new sweeps of immigrant workers, starting in Los Angeles, administration officials issued policy guidelines greatly diminishing the leeway many of those immigrants had to be able to stay in the country.Days after the DHS told its lawyers to press for dismissals of slow-moving asylum cases so they could be reassigned as emergency deportations, two senior immigration court administrators, one in Los Angeles and another in Florida, issued instructions on behalf of the justice department’s executive office of immigration review (EOIR) essentially ordering judges not to stand in the DHS’s way.EC’s family told him about the transfer to Washington state three days later. The government, he said, did not update him.Taveras and his team also made every effort to be with EC when he was summoned for a “risk interview” to assess the dangers he might face back in Cuba. But they were given no notice, and their client was told he would have to face the interview alone if he didn’t want to wait several more weeks in detention for a new date.View image in fullscreenEC is one of tens of thousands of immigrants that the Trump administration has moved long distances around the country, a Guardian investigation has found, a practice at odds with past Ice protocols that immigration advocates say seems designed to limit detainees’ access to their constitutional rights.Another bewildering change that Hayden Rodarte, an immigration specialist with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, and other immigration lawyers say they have seen involves the government’s handling of residency permits for family members once an immigrant has been granted asylum. By law, spouses and minor children have the same right to stay in the US, but increasingly they are subject to close scrutiny and multiple in-person interview appointments, any one of which can lead to arrest and expedited deportation proceedings for reasons that can be hard to anticipate.Rodarte said he now advises close family members they might be better off remaining undocumented, because the risk of claiming their legal due has become “huge”.“What looks at first like a blessing turns into safety planning,” he said. “The administration is using systems that are supposed to protect people as traps and is weaponizing as many pieces of the immigration system as possible to put people on Ice’s radar for the sheer purpose of removing them.”Rodarte likened these tactics to the family separation policy that the first Trump administration pursued in 2017-18, the difference this time being that the separation is not occurring at the border but in homes, workplaces, schools and courthouses. “The upshot is the same,” he added. “This is about cornering humans and making them suffer as much as possible.”Administration critics say it is also making a mockery of the very concept of immigration law. “Defending people against removal proceedings is the heart of what we practice,” said Lisa Anderson, a lawyer in Los Angeles. “If you change that, people are no longer being afforded due process.”A similar argument is at the heart of a federal lawsuit, filed in July, which calls the new courthouse guidelines “arbitrary and capricious” and accuses the Trump administration of breaking multiple federal laws as well as violating the constitution’s due process clause. (The government is yet to respond.)EC is one of eight lead plaintiffs named in the suit, which the Chicago-based National Immigrant Justice Center is spearheading on behalf of two other immigrant rights organizations. It estimates that “hundreds and possibly thousands” of immigrants had their cases dismissed in immigration court and were reassigned for emergency deportation between late May and mid-July. The total number at risk is likely to be much higher – as high as 300,000, according to Tabaddor, based on the number of people working their way through the system.“It’s the first time we’ve seen anything like this at this magnitude,” she said.It was also the first time, she said, that an administration had taken aim at immigration judges. In memo after memo from the justice department’s EOIR, judges have been told that if they do not stick to guidelines of what Trump’s justice department regards as impartial decision-making and “fidelity to the law” they risk losing their jobs – and many of them have.Out of about 750 immigration judges who were serving in January, more than a hundred have been fired, according to court dockets and data collected by a professional union. To address what was already a chronic backlog of cases, the administration has proposed sending in hundreds of military lawyers to serve in their place, offering just two weeks’ training to familiarize them with the relevant areas of the law.View image in fullscreenMany of the veteran judges who have been dismissed granted asylum in a high percentage of cases – sometimes 90% or higher, according to a Syracuse University website that tracks the data. Immigration experts say those rates can depend on jurisdiction as much as personal temperament, but the justice department has decried them as “statistically improbable outcome metrics” for which the judges involved merit professional discipline.The judges themselves were given no reason for being fired, according to at least half a dozen who have shared the short email they received, other than article II of the constitution, which details the president’s executive powers. Some have spoken out to denounce their treatment as arbitrary, unfair and an attack on the rule of law.It’s a sentiment that Tabaddor echoed based on her own 15-plus years on the immigration court and, before that, as a lawyer representing the federal government. “My entire life has been dedicated to the principles of justice and integrity … and humanity, and it feels like I just watched my child being murdered,” Tabaddor said. “Everything has been turned on its head. What’s happening in immigration court is just another symptom of a full-frontal assault and takeover of the Department of Justice. This is not normal. This is not defensible.”The justice department declined to respond.Targeting the judges themselvesThe immigration courts as they are known today were created in 1983 to separate out the functions of immigration enforcement, then still housed within the justice department, and the adjudication of cases. In other words, judicial independence and the constitutional right to due process were the core reason for the courts to exist at all. “They did a study and concluded it doesn’t pass the laugh test to have the same people wearing the enforcement hats and making the final decisions about people’s future,” Tabaddor recounted.The system was far from perfect, and immigration judges enjoyed only what the EOIR described as “quasi-judicial functions”, meaning they were regarded as legal administrators more than full justices. Still, they enjoyed significant job protections and could only be removed for cause.That began to change during the first Trump administration, which pushed to decertify the National Association of Immigration Judges, essentially the judges’ union, that had acted as a guarantor of the judges’ job security and with it their independence. The lone Democrat on a key federal review body denounced the decertification as an exercise in “legal gymnastics”, but it went through at the tail-end of Trump’s first term on a party-line vote.View image in fullscreenThe second Trump administration came in with guns blazing, immediately firing the top leadership of EOIR. It also went after immigration judges themselves, as it did against large swaths of federal workers, designating them “inferior officers” – meaning they needed to defer to more senior political appointees confirmed by the Senate – and firing large numbers of them at will.It wasn’t just senior judges with high asylum approval rates that came under the axe. Senate Democrats noticed the administration was failing to convert roughly half of the newest judicial appointees at the end of their probationary period – in almost all cases ditching the ones who had previously worked as lawyers representing immigrants and keeping the ones who had worked in immigration enforcement.Then, starting in May, came a series of unprecedented rulings and memos from the EOIR. One stripped judges’ ability to grant bail in detention cases. Another set a dauntingly high standard for determining whether Salvadorian nationals faced a legitimate fear of imprisonment and torture if returned home – despite that country’s well-documented history of human rights abuses.The upshot was, once again, to constrain rank-and-file immigration judges’ room for maneuver. An 22 August memo from EOIR’s acting director, Sirce Owen, warned that judicial independence “is not a license to ignore a clear directive from a proper appellate authority … [Immigration judges] do not possess intrinsic, free-floating equitable authority”.The instruction to allow the government to reassign asylum and other ordinary immigration cases, even without cause, fits into the overall pattern of imposing limits on how judges can rule while nominally continuing to defer to their independent authority. Immigration lawyers now routinely petition judges to allow their clients to appear in court remotely so they don’t have to run a gauntlet of Ice agents at the courthouse. But judges are increasingly denying those requests.“Some court judges seem to be in collusion with immigration officials to make these arrests,” said Priscilla Olivarez, a San Antonio-based attorney with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center. She said she routinely sees between 10 and 15 Ice officers in the hallways of one of the courthouses where she appears. “It is clear this is calculated,” she added, “to stoke fear in our communities, create misinformation, and prevent people from accessing their right to seek asylum and the different types of relief that stem from it”.The DHS did not respond directly to the charge that it was coordinating with judges, saying only: “The average illegal alien gets far more due process than most Americans.”Recategorizing asylum cases and expediting deportation was not unheard of before this summer, but advocates say it would happen on a case-by-case basis and usually when the contours of a case had changed in a fundamental way – for example, if evidence emerged of a past violent crime. Sometimes, incoming administrations have instructed immigration courts to prioritize certain cases in line with their policy goals – a practice known as “docket shuffling” – but never in a way that threatened the futures of hundreds of thousands of people.View image in fullscreen“All concept of what we as attorneys do, of the rule of law, of what is ethical and what is legal – they’ve blown past all of that,” said Rodarte, the San Francisco lawyer. “They’re even blowing past court orders. They’re doing what they want and saying if you don’t like it, come at us … They’re turning a blind eye to the rules to meet their deportation goals at whatever cost.”What the government’s own immigration lawyers make of the sweeping policy changes they are expected to carry out is not entirely clear. In appearances at two different Los Angeles-area immigration courts recently, some demonstrated a maximalist approach to arguing against asylum, pressing for deportation no matter what, while others took time to show understanding for migrants who have been in the country a long time and face challenges from the burden of paying for an immigration lawyer to caring for sick family members.In one of the hearings, the DHS lawyer, whom the Guardian is not naming because of concerns that her job might be at risk, said the government had no issue with a Mexican couple arguing to stay in the United States because their deportation would create “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” for their US-born disabled son.As the hearing was winding down, Anderson, the lawyer representing the family, turned to her opposing counsel and said: “I imagine you guys are quite busy.”The government lawyer, mindful perhaps of the announced presence of a reporter, offered a nervous giggle, but no answer. 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Trump’s take on a court decision on tariffs is bonkers – even for him | Steven Greenhouse
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 11:00
Just hours after an appeals court ruled that it was illegal for Donald Trump to impose his unpopular across-the-board tariffs on dozens of countries, he posted a frantic, over-the-top rant that declared: “If allowed to stand, this Decision would literally destroy the United States of America.”So here the president of the United States was asserting that if the courts torpedoed his tariffs, then the US, the most powerful nation on earth, would be destroyed, would “literally” be kaput. Trump seemed to suggest that court rulings that blocked his beloved tariffs would have the destructive power of, say, 100 hydrogen bombs.Call me naive, but I never cease to be amazed when Trump says such egregiously false and ludicrous things. OK, I sometimes forget that he’s the guy who said that noise from wind turbines causes cancer. After narrowly winning the presidency a second time notwithstanding the 30,573 Trump lies, falsehoods and misleading claims in his first term, Trump evidently thinks he can say anything, no matter how false or foolish, and get away with it. As part of his tariff fight, Trump also blurted this absurdity: if the courts don’t uphold his tariffs, “we would become a Third World Nation.”Trump’s statement that ending tariffs will destroy the US is totally bonkers because the US became the world’s richest nation and has largely prospered for nearly 250 years (despite occasional slumps) before Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April. In the months before then, the US had solid GDP growth, low unemployment and declining inflation – the Economist magazine even called the US economy “the envy of the world”. But now Trump says that if the courts give a thumbs down to his favorite plaything – I mean weapon – to bang other countries over the head with, it would end the US. Even Ramesh Ponnuru, editor of the conservative National Review, called that “lunatic stuff”.The truth is that if the courts block Trump’s across-the-board tariffs, that would be good news for the US economy. It would prevent Trump’s tariffs from further pushing up inflation and slowing economic growth. By giving a thumbs down to Trump’s tariffs, the courts might be doing him a huge economic and political favor because his tariffs, and the inflation they are fueling, have been dragging his dismal approval ratings even lower.On 29 August, the US court of appeals for the federal circuit in Washington DC ruled that Trump overstepped his authority when he invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose his Liberation Day tariffs. The court said that act doesn’t give presidents the authority to slap sweeping tariffs on other countries. Trump has appealed the ruling to the supreme court, which might rule on the tariffs this fall.The court of appeals repeatedly noted that the constitution gives Congress, not presidents, the power to impose tariffs. It further noted that the Emergency Act doesn’t mention the word “tariffs” even once among the tools the act authorizes presidents to use to deal with emergency trade problems. (That appellate ruling overturned the bulk of Trump’s tariffs: the blanket 10% to 50% tariffs on exports from more than 70 countries. The court didn’t rule on Trump’s product-specific tariffs on steel, aluminum and auto parts.)As part of his conniptions over the appeals court ruling, Trump also warned of fiscal disaster, complaining that the US would lose hundreds of billions of dollars if his tariffs were halted. But Trump conveniently forgets that it’s embattled US consumers who will be paying most of those hundreds of billions as they pay Trump’s tariffs, essentially import taxes on furniture, cars, coffee, electronics and other foreign goods.In using his hysterical language, Trump evidently had one audience in mind: the supreme court’s six conservative justices who have repeatedly ruled his way. Trump’s goal is evidently to scare the bejesus out of those justices – he hopes that by shrieking “You’ll Destroy the Country If You Rule Against Me,” that will persuade them to overturn the appellate court’s decision and uphold his tariffs. (The appellate court let the tariffs remain in force to allow time for appeal.)So far in his second term, Trump has a remarkable batting average with the supreme court’s six rightwing justices, who seem astonishingly subservient and supine vis-a-vis the most authoritarian, power-grabbing president in US history. The justices have used their emergency docket to grant Trump administration requests 18 times in a row, often vacating injunctions that lower courts put in place to stop what they saw as Trump’s rampant lawlessness. In repeatedly siding with Trump, the supreme court has scrapped lower court injunctions in several highly controversial cases, provisionally letting Trump fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board, gut the federal Department of Education, and give Doge – with its staff of twentysomethings – access to the highly private social security information of hundreds of millions of Americans.Trump is no doubt worried that the supreme court, though submissive so far, will overturn his tariffs. Many conservative and libertarian scholars and lawyers oppose his tariffs as both harmful and illegal. Not only do they dislike the tariffs for pushing up inflation and disrupting global supply chains, but they see Trump’s tariffs as anti-free market and mucking up the US and world economies.When Trump announced his Liberation Day tariffs, he invoked a national emergency, saying the US trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs were urgent problems undermining the US economy. Admittedly the trade deficit and other countries’ tariffs are a problem, but in no way do they constitute a national emergency, especially since the US economy was seen as “the envy of the world” before Trump went hog wild with his tariffs. (There’s no denying that the flood of imports from China and other low-wage nations badly damaged many communities in America’s industrial heartland two and three decades ago.) Wouldn’t it be great if, in this tariff litigation, the supreme court stood up to Trump and issued a candid ruling that told him: “Sorry, Mr President, your supposed national emergency is hogwash, a pretext for you to pursue your destructive tariff obsession”?The supreme court’s justices shouldn’t let themselves be cowed, bullied or fooled by Trump’s talk that the nation will be destroyed if they nix his tariffs. Trump is like the boy who cried wolf, forever crying catastrophe if he doesn’t get his way. It’s time for the court and the nation to wise up to Trump’s lies, hype and shenanigans.Virtually every non-Trumpian economist agrees that Trump’s tariffs have hurt the US by increasing inflation, undermining GDP growth, creating huge headaches for corporations and seriously damaging the US’s relations with other nations. The justices shouldn’t buy Trump’s calamitous warnings that if they overturn his tariffs, the world will end.If the justices declare his tariffs illegal, it certainly won’t be a “disaster” for the US, as Trump has claimed. But it might be a disaster for Trump’s ego and for his dangerous dream of having an authoritarian presidency wholly unchecked by the other branches of government.If the supreme court rules against Trump’s tariffs, let’s hope that will serve as a much-needed first step to the court’s developing the backbone to rule many times more against Trump’s authoritarian and lawless actions.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More
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in US Politics
They managed to get accepted to US universities. But they’re still stuck in Gaza
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 11:00
Within days of 7 October 2023, much of Maryam’s world had been wiped out: her home in Gaza City, her children’s schools, and the Islamic University of Gaza, where she was a graduate student in physics, were all destroyed by airstrikes. In early December, Maryam’s mentor – Sufian Tayeh, a prominent Palestinian scientist and president of the Islamic University of Gaza – was killed along with his family in an Israeli strike.The professor has been a “father figure” to her, Maryam told the Guardian. When she learned of his death, she remembers closing the physics notebooks she had grabbed as she fled her home and thinking her studies would be over. “My entire world had collapsed,” she said.But as she repeatedly fled Israel’s bombs, Maryam sought ways to keep not only her family alive, but also her dream of becoming a physicist. While living in a tent in Rafah, with no stable access to internet or electricity, she learned of a spot near the border where she could get a faint internet signal from Egypt. Despite the risks, she started going there to research opportunities abroad, eventually managing to earn admission to a fully funded PhD program at the University of Maryland. After deferring her start date by a year, she was meant to start this month.But Maryam remains in Gaza. She is one of dozens of students from the devastated territory who have been admitted to US universities and colleges but are stuck, advocates say, after the Trump administration suspended nearly all non-immigrant visas for Palestinian passport holders.As part of its campaign against US universities, the administration has made it more difficult for international students to travel to the US, and claims it has revoked the visas of thousands of foreign students already in the US over unspecified violations.But for Palestinians in Gaza, the policy change is uniquely devastating.“I will never forget the moment I received the message confirming my acceptance into a fully funded PhD program. I rushed back to our tent to hold my children tightly and tell them the good news – that we would survive this nightmare,” said Maryam, who is using a pseudonym to protect her and her family. “Everything came crashing down again when I heard about the suspension of visa processing. It felt like my dreams had been destroyed once more.”Leila, a 22-year-old from Gaza City, was four years into a five-year engineering program when the war started. She would walk up to two hours a day to find wifi, relying on solar power to charge her phone, and managed to apply and be admitted to a university in the north-western US as a transfer student. (Leila is also a pseudonym, and she asked that the Guardian not publish the name of the university.)Then came the news that all visas were suspended. “We are just stuck in Gaza right now,” she told the Guardian in a series of voice memos.A spokesperson for the state department said in a statement that the department had suspended the processing of nonimmigrant visas for Palestinian Authority passport holders “while we conduct a full and thorough review of the process and procedures used to vet individuals from Gaza” and that it will “take the time necessary to conduct a full and thorough review”.“Every visa decision is a national security decision,” the spokesperson added.According to a cable viewed by the Associated Press, department officials said the new restrictions were intended “to ensure that such applications have undergone necessary, vetting, and screening protocols to ensure the applicants’ identity and eligibility for a visa under US law”. The suspension doesn’t apply to Palestinians who hold passports from other countries – unless they are found to have ties to the Palestinian Authority, or the Palestine Liberation Organization.The Student Justice Network, a US-based collective formed after Donald Trump signed orders in January targeting international students, has been supporting students from Gaza who are seeking to continue their interrupted studies abroad. But of the dozens of students the group says it has helped with university and visa applications, only a handful have made it to the US. (They declined to provide more specific numbers.)Securing a visa to travel to the US from Gaza was an arduous process even in quieter times. Before the war, Palestinians in Gaza had to secure appointments at US embassies outside the territory – usually Egypt or Israel. Obtaining a permit to travel to Israel has been impossible since the war began, while the border with Egypt has remained largely closed.International students have been targeted with a series of federal actions aimed both at Palestinian students specifically and the broader community of more than one million foreign nationals studying in the country.The state department has enlisted consulates overseas into the effort. Earlier this year, it paused all student visa appointments. They have resumed, but prospective students are now being subjected to additional vetting for, among other things, “anti-American” views.But for Palestinians the restrictions are blanket. “Every single one of them has been impacted by this,” Majid said of the students her group has been helping who were meant to start their studies this fall. “There’s no clear understanding as to when their applications will be processed, and this affects their ability to attend their universities on time – and in some cases it could actually impact whether or not they’re able to maintain their scholarships.”Looking elsewhereThomas Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Maryland, told the Guardian that Maryam was one of two physics students from Gaza admitted to the university last year. But getting them out of Gaza proved so difficult that the university ended up deferring the students’ admissions by a year as they tried to get visa appointments.Maryam was able to book an interview at the US embassy in Egypt, and Cohen offered to personally pay for her way there – but the border was shut down when Israeli forces took control of it in May 2024. She was still looking for a way out when the US announced the suspension of visas for Palestinians.Cohen said he tried all he could to help Maryam and the other student – because their academic records earned them a spot at the university but also because he understood that the opportunity could save their lives. He spoke of the Holocaust survivors in his own family, and those who “didn’t survive because they had no way to leave” Nazi-occupied Poland.Cohen is now advising the students to pursue opportunities in Europe or Canada. Even if they were to get a visa to the US, “the political climate we’re in, it’s dangerous for Palestinians”, he says.Majid, of the Student Justice Network, said the group had also been encouraging the students they support to pursue options in other countries. But even if they gain admission elsewhere, the border with Egypt remains sealed shut as Israel has intensified its military campaign.“These are students who have gone through two plus years without an educational infrastructure,” Majid said, noting that all of Gaza’s universities have been destroyed.“Think about having applied to university when you were 17 or 18, and then think about applying under bombardments, and starvation, and with limited resources, and having your documents destroyed, and having lost your family members,” she added. “To yank these fully funded opportunities away from them is devastating.” More
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in US Politics
For comedians around the world, the laughs often end as democracy fades
by Evelyn Reynolds 19 September 2025, 06:40
The exiled Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef has experienced firsthand how intolerant governments can silence political satire. And he had a short message this week for those living in an age of Donald Trump’s free speech clampdown: “My Fellow American Citizens,” he wrote on X. “Welcome to my world.”In his attacks on the most prominent of American satirists, the US president has joined a cadre of illiberal and sensitive leaders around the world who will not tolerate a joke.The latest target of what critics say is a campaign to silence dissenting voices was Jimmy Kimmel, who had his late-night ABC talkshow suspended after government pressure. The removal, weeks after the rival network CBS cancelled Stephen Colbert’s satirical show, follows other Trump-led crackdowns on media and academia.Political foes of the US president say the diminishing space for free speech shows Trump’s America is moving towards authoritarianism. Senator Bernie Sanders, speaking to MSNBC, said the country was on a path towards becoming more like oppressive regimes in Russia and Saudi Arabia. “This is just another step forward,” he said.From Egypt’s military ruler, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, to India’s populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, the laughs often end for comedians as democracy dwindles.One of the most famous global comedians to have his life turned upside down by his political satire is Youssef, who first found fame with a TV show panning the Egyptian regime.Known as the “Egyptian Jon Stewart” in reference to the US talkshow host whom he was inspired by (and looks like), Youssef is a former heart surgeon who became a household name.But his satire made him the target of two opposing governments. He was first arrested in April 2013, accused of insulting Islam and Egypt’s then president. Months later, when Sisi took power by force, Youssef had to cancel his show and flee the country.View image in fullscreenYoussef has said his struggle was as much against Egypt’s cloying, conservative culture as its repressive leaders. “We didn’t have a space for satire in Egypt. We carved out our own space. We had to fight for it,” he said in a 2015 interview.“And because there’s no platform, no space or infrastructure for that kind of satire to be accepted, we were basically pushed out … We are up against generations of people who don’t have this kind of mindset. That’s why it was an uphill battle for us.”Comedians elsewhere have often found themselves caught up in nationalist fervour.In India, which has a history of a lively and relatively free public discourse, critics of Modi argue space to criticise the policies of his rightwing nationalist government is shrinking.Comedians and comedy venues have increasingly been caught in the crosshairs since the rise of his Hindu Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), which has ruled for more than a decade.A Muslim comedian was detained by police for weeks in 2021 for allegedly vulgar jokes insulting Hindu gods – despite never having performed at the show. The comedian Vir Das faced a backlash later the same year and police reports filed by BJP officials after a monologue that dealt with the country’s contradictions on women’s rights and religion.View image in fullscreenPolice in Mumbai registered a criminal case against a comedian in 2017 over a tweet of a photo of Modi modified by Snapchat’s popular dog filter, giving him a canine nose and ears.Similar cases have come out in Russia, including a standup of Azerbaijani origin and a citizen of Belarus, Idrak Mirzalizade, who was detained for 10 days and later banned from the country for a joke about open racism in Russia.Comedy, it seems, can also be treated by some as a transnational crime.The Turkish government asked for the prosecution of a German comedian in 2016 for performing a satirical poem about its president. In the late-night programme screened by the German state broadcaster ZDF, Jan Böhmermann sat in front of a Turkish flag beneath a small, framed portrait of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reading out a poem that accused the president of repressing minorities and “kicking Kurds”.View image in fullscreenErdoğan’s lawyer Michael Hubertus von Sprenger wanted to enforce a complete ban on the poem, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor at the time, was widely criticised for appearing to give in to Ankara’s demands.Böhmermann said at the time he felt Merkel had “filleted me [and] served me up for tea” to Erdoğan, and that she risked damaging freedom of speech in Germany. Charges brought against him were later dropped and he was given police protection. More

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