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      Top Democrat accuses Trump of dismantling efforts to prosecute sex crimes

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      A top House Democrat on Tuesday accused Donald Trump of “systematically dismantling” efforts to prosecute sex crimes and hunt down traffickers, as the president faces continued pressure to make public investigative files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.The memo from House judiciary committee ranking member Jamie Raskin and his staff, shared exclusively with the Guardian, said that beyond refusing the demands for transparency around Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, Trump has also undercut efforts to hold people accused of similar crimes accountable by “systematically dismantling the offices and programs we rely on to combat human trafficking and prosecute sex crimes”.“President Trump in office has repeatedly taken the side of criminal sex predators and violent abusers against their victims, and this pattern goes well beyond his strenuous efforts to bury the Epstein Files,” Raskin wrote in the memo.“Far from aiding victims and survivors, President Trump consistently sides with their abusers,” he said. “His all-of-government policy to aid traffickers and sex criminals and abandon survivors has made American women dramatically less safe.”White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers called the accusations “total nonsense” before criticizing former president Joe Biden and his handling of immigration. “Their party’s president spent the last four years coddling and apologizing for criminals and sexual predators. Joe Biden’s wide open border allowed hundreds of thousands of innocent children to be kidnapped across the southern border by smugglers and gang members illegally residing in our communities,” Rogers said.She added that Trump had “totally secured our border to stop the trafficking of children” and “implemented tough-on-crime policies to hold these disgusting monsters accountable to the fullest extent of the law”.Raskin’s memo to Democratic members of the judiciary committee comes in advance of testimony scheduled for Wednesday by FBI director Kash Patel, at which Democrats are expected to press him for details on the bureau’s handling of its investigation into Epstein.Appearing before the Senate judiciary committee on Tuesday, Patel acknowledged shortcomings in how an investigation into Epstein was handled that led to the financier pleading guilty in 2008 to charges related to procuring a child prostitute. However, the director insisted that court orders prevented him acceding to Democrats demands to release more files related to Epstein.In the memo, Raskin argues: “The Trump Administration’s sympathetic alignment with powerful sex traffickers and rapists goes far beyond its efforts to suppress the truth of what happened in one explosive case,” and pointed to several policies Trump implemented that he believes help criminals.Among those are its dismantling of USAID, which he described as one of the most effective agencies at documenting trafficking routes and undermining efforts to use forced labor to scam Americans.“Closing USAID has blinded federal law enforcement to developing threats overseas, allowing trafficking networks to strengthen in power, influence, and size, almost certainly leading to an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into the United States,” Raskin said.About half of the federal law enforcement personnel who would normally be investigating criminals and terrorists are now focused on deportations as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants, the memo said. This includes one in five FBI agents, almost two thirds of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and three quarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration, among other agencies.“By diverting extraordinary amounts of money and personnel to its immigration crackdown, the Trump Administration has undermined the investigation and prosecution of nearly every other law enforcement priority, including human trafficking and child exploitation,” Raskin wrote.Trump has also cancelled hundreds of grants to local law enforcement agencies and non-profits that were used to help victims of such crimes, according to the memo. Federal funds are no longer flowing to trainings of sexual assault nurse examiners in disadvantaged areas or victim advocates employed at rape crisis centers, nor to American Sign Language interpretation for survivors of domestic violence.Trump’s immigration crackdown has intruded into efforts to help trafficking survivors, with the memo saying one organization has been told it cannot use grant money to help anyone in the country illegally. Such a notice may violate federal law, and the groups receiving the grants typically have no way of knowing their clients’ immigration status, Raskin said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAnother group that received federal funding to work with child abuse victims had its funding terminated after more than three decades, then partially restored with instructions that “its affiliates to never again mention race, class, and gender diversity in it training materials”.“These findings reveal the Trump Administration’s structural bias in favor of human traffickers, rapists, and sexual violators and against their victims, survivors, and opponents. The question of why this alignment exists cannot be answered in this memo, but the pattern is unmistakable,” Raskin wrote.He also noted that several top officials, including defense secretary Pete Hegseth and health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, have been accused of inappropriate conduct, while the Trump administration acted to facilitate the return of “misogynist influencer” Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from Romania, where they faced charges including rape. Dozens of those who were pardoned of charges related to January 6 had also faced trafficking and sex abuse charges before and after the insurrection, Raskin said.The memo comes amid a spike in interest in the Epstein case, which began in July after the justice department released a report concluding that his death was a suicide, and saying no further information about the matter would be released. The assertions flew in the face of conspiracy theories Trump and his senior officials have encouraged that held Epstein was at the heart of a wide-ranging conspiracy involving global elites.A bipartisan group of lawmakers is circulating a petition in the House of Representatives that would force a vote on legislation mandating the release of the Epstein files. The petition needs just one more signature to succeed.Trump opposes the effort, calling it a “Democrat hoax”, but sent a deputy attorney general to interview Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and petitioned unsuccessfully for release of grand jury transcripts related to the financier’s indictment.The House oversight committee is also investigating the Epstein matter, and earlier this month released a “birthday book” containing a sexually suggestive drawing Trump appears to have made for his one-time friend. More

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      ‘It seemed like a ghost town’: LA food vendors on how Trump’s Ice raids affected business

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      From early morning to late at night, food vendors are feeding the people of Los Angeles. They offer nearly anything – tamales, fried fish, crispy tacos, mole, pupusas, fresh fruit, esquites, bacon-wrapped hot dogs – to Angelenos as they start their commutes or head home after the bars have closed.Taco trucks and food vendors are a vital part of the city’s celebrated culinary scene, one that came under attack this summer as Donald Trump ordered mass immigration raids across the city.Shannon Camacho, a senior policy associate at Inclusive Action for the City, a non-profit in the Boyle Heights neighborhood that focuses on community economic development, says that many street vendors made the painful calculation between risking losing much-needed income or being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).“Vendors are in a particularly vulnerable situation, given that they have to work outdoors,” Camacho said. “They rely on foot traffic. They rely on busy neighborhoods and streets … This was something intentional that the Department of Homeland Security was doing – targeting vendors that were outside, understanding that many of them are immigrants and many of them are undocumented.”The LA Vendor Street Campaign, which includes Inclusive Action and three other organizations, has been advocating for the rights of vendors long before this summer. The LASVC led efforts to create a statewide policy decriminalizing street vending throughout the state. Recently, it raised around $100,000 of direct cash assistance for street vendors across Los Angeles county.Still, Camacho says more is needed.“There are thousands and thousands of street vendors, even just in the city of Los Angeles,” Camacho said. “And that’s not even including other parts of Southern California. We don’t have enough to support everybody.”The Guardian spoke to three food business owners in LA about the summer of Ice, and how it’s affected their families and businesses.Juan Carlos Guerra, Taqueria FronteraIt’s Los Angeles … you drive anywhere on the street, you’re going to see pop-ups. You’re going to see street vendors. But it just seemed like a ghost town during that time. No one was out on the street.I was going to open the new Silver Lake location of Taqueria Frontera at the beginning of June. And then the raids happened. It didn’t seem like we should have a celebration or a grand opening.I reached out to Javier Cabral from [the hyperlocal news site] LA Taco, and I said to him, “I want to try to help out. Whatever I can do. Do you know a good organization?” And he said: “Oh, yeah. CIELO is a great organization.”I talked to someone at CIELO, Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo (Indigenous Communities in Leadership). I was just like: “Taco Tuesday is usually a thing. Is it okay if I set up something saying that all proceeds of our trompo [taco] – which is what we sell the most – is going to be donated towards fundraising for CIELO so they can help immigrant families during this time?”We did Taco Tuesday with a purpose, and we ended up raising $4,000 from selling the trompo that day alone.Everyone was pretty supportive about it. And not just that day – a lot of people would come in just to check up on us, on my employees, see how they’re doing, how they’re feeling. There’s no way you could live in Los Angeles without being affected by this. And a lot of my clients were like: “I can’t believe this is going on.” Who doesn’t have a friend or family member or co-worker that isn’t undocumented here in Los Angeles?Street vendors are back out now and more people are outside eating. But I think that it’s still in the back of their minds. Could this happen at any time again? Right now it’s pretty calm, but what happens a month from now if they decide to do it again?Bulmaro, street vendorWhen we started the business, there weren’t many jobs out there. We knew how to make tamales, which is what we sell. Due to the lack of jobs and opportunities, we decided to do what we know how to do. From there, business grew and we started getting more clients, little by little. It’s our sole source of income.Because of the raids, everything stopped. We stopped selling for about a month, without working or anything. We just started working again a little more about two weeks ago. A lot of people don’t go out to buy things anymore because they’re scared. Sales have gone down a lot because of the raids. More than half of the clients we had haven’t come back to buy anything because of the fear that continues.We haven’t had phone orders, either. We just bring the day’s supply, and sometimes we come back home with tamales or with atol that didn’t sell. It’s never going to be the same as before the raids.View image in fullscreenIt’s me, my wife and another employee – three of us depend on the business. There’s nothing we can do, we have to keep working. We need to pay rent and bills, even though we’re going outside with fear. There’s no other way. The rent isn’t going to wait. The bills, and the food we need to buy, aren’t going to wait either.Alejandra Rodriguez, Alex Foods and Cemitas PoblanasA lot of our customers stopped coming. They were scared because a lot of them are Latino. Even at the local restaurants in the city of West Hollywood, [the workers] have their visas to be here, but they were still scared because of everything that was going on. They were saying that even if you had a visa, even if you had permission to be here, everybody was still getting kicked out. Our sales dropped more than 70%.Even on the street, there was nobody walking, nobody coming. It did take a very big toll on us … the local people that work at the restaurants, the chefs or the servers or the valet guys, they weren’t coming in to work.We closed down for about 10 days because it wasn’t worth coming out here. And luckily, we had a little bit of money saved up. Usually, when we leave on trips, customers will still call us to place orders. But no, the whole 10 days we were gone, we didn’t go to work. We didn’t get any calls or people asking us when we were going to come back.I had to let one of my two employees go. I couldn’t afford it anymore. And we’ve just slowly been climbing back. We have customers from the local car washes, and they told us that Ice actually got there at that car wash and took about four people. People are still aware. People are still scared. Any time they see a police officer pass by or a sheriff’s department or just somebody, they would flinch.People are just trying to get to work and come back. I know they were able to stay away, maybe for a couple of weeks, but everybody has to pay rent. More

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      ‘This country’s gonna fall on its face. There’s nobody coming to save us’: Boston punks Dropkick Murphys take on Maga

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      Backstage at the Rock la Cauze festival in Victoriaville, Canada, where Boston punk-rock institution Dropkick Murphys are headlining, founding bassist/singer Ken Casey is experiencing an uncharacteristic moment of anxiety.“We have concerns about going back over the border tonight,” he says, gravely – not for the illicit reasons touring musicians usually fear border crossings, but because Casey’s regular on stage rants against Donald Trump have gone viral. “We’re not worried about being arrested,” he adds. “But we have a show in New York tomorrow. Are we gonna get harassed or held up? We used to come over that border and they’d be, ‘Dropkicks! Come right through!’ But what’s it going to be like now?”By “now”, Casey means during the second Trump presidency, which has brought the political element always present within Dropkick Murphys’ bolshie, Pogues and Clash-influenced bruisers to the fore. The group’s resistance has found its sharpest expression at their shows, where their anthem First Class Loser is accompanied by videos depicting Trump and former chum Jeffrey Epstein, while Casey’s skirmishes with a vocal minority of Maga Dropkicks fans in the mosh pit have lit up social media. He admits these fans often provoke the worst in him. “How do you know if someone’s in a cult? They hold up a hat all fuckin’ night,” he rages in one clip.“People tell me, ‘You didn’t use-ta soapbox like this’,” he says on our video call, gathering steam. “Well, we didn’t use-ta be in the midst of an authoritarian takeover!”Dropkick Murphys are still commanding big blue-collar crowds as they approach their 30th anniversary in 2026. Over the years they’ve scored numerous US Top 10 albums, Bruce Springsteen collaborations and a platinum-seller in the form of civic anthem I’m Shipping Up to Boston, boosted by its appearance in Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. But their value system, Casey says, hasn’t changed since the now seven-strong band formed with the aim “to be a voice for working people”. Class and the labour movement are key to the 56-year-old’s identity. “My father died when I was very young. I was raised by my grandfather, a labour organiser who instilled in me the value of a union. In the Boston suburb where I was raised, everyone owed their lives to a union job. It put a roof over our head.”View image in fullscreenThe Boston of Casey’s youth was heavily Irish-American. “The English love to call us ‘plastic paddies’, but I’ve never thought of myself as Irish – I’m Boston Irish, the people that fought against the most Wasp-y, keep-the-Irish-down place that ever existed,” he says, referring to how Irish refugees fleeing the great famine of 19th-century were targeted by anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant groups and scorned by the English Protestant Puritans who had settled America. “To go from those trenches to positions of power in city hall, on the railroad and in the utility companies led to my generation being able to have the middle-class life.”He pauses for a second, but he’s not finished: Casey would make a great labour organiser himself. “When that’s your story, you need to be willing to aid the culture that’s coming next. One immigrant culture can’t close the door behind them, especially not in America. We’re all immigrants here.”A tearaway in his youth, Casey quit drink and drugs before he reached 21, “because otherwise I’d be in prison,” he says. “I had a big problem as a teen.” He ploughed his energies into the hardcore punk scene surrounding Boston venue the Rathskeller, AKA the Rat. “Punk-rock was the soundtrack to my friggin’ mayhem. I was a rebellious kid, I liked the underdog vibe.” In 1996, now booking shows at the Rat, a co-worker bet him $30 he “didn’t have the balls to start a band on three weeks’ notice”. Never one to back down from a wager, Casey formed Dropkick Murphys.His identity was stamped all over the group. Before they even used Celtic instrumentation – the Dropkicks are the rare punk band to field a bagpiper – he says the embryonic Dropkicks “sounded like [1960s Irish folk group] the Clancy Brothers meets the Ramones – the delivery, the melodies, the lyrical content. It just naturally poured out of me.”Their beginnings were hardscrabble: pressing their own singles, booking their own shows and touring in an old Boston transit bus, for reasons of poverty and pride. “We peeled the roof off under a low bypass,” he grins. “We toured for two more years with that roof open like a convertible. When it rained, I held an umbrella over the driver.”By the 21st century, they had become staples of the US punk-rock circuit, their annual St Patrick’s Day shows among Boston’s hottest tickets, performing and recording with their heroes. “We play Billy Bragg’s There Is Power in a Union over the PA every night before we go on stage,” Casey says. “He opened our St Patrick’s show last year with it and then played Worker’s Song with us. Afterwards, he said, ‘I felt like I was in the fuckin’ Clash for three minutes!’” Springsteen, another member of the Dropkicks’ extended family, recorded their Rose Tattoo for a charity single after the Boston Marathon bombing, and sang Peg O’ My Heart with Dropkicks in Boston, “back when my grandmother Peg was still alive”, says Casey. “He came on with her for the encore – we had to pry her off Bruce’s arm to get her off the stage. I’m almost shocked a guy of that level was so down-to-earth. But he’s always had an affinity with punk. Bruce still walks the talk.”“Walking the talk” matters to the Dropkicks; their merch is made in the US by union-approved manufacturers, while their Claddagh Fund supports non-profit organisations across Boston. “We were pretty beloved in our city, whether people liked our music or not, because we gave a lot back to the community,” Casey says. Not any more, however. “Now a lot of people in my circles say ‘Fuck Dropkick Murphys’,” he adds, lantern jaw clenching. “Although never to my face. They despise me and the band.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt’s clear that, for Casey, the political is personal. His sense of betrayal regarding “the many rank-and-file union members who are now Trump voters” is palpable. “They don’t think Trump’s coming for the unions, but he’s coming for the unions, trust me. I tell Maga friends of mine: Trump wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. It’s about total control for the rich. It’s class war.”What is the magic spell Trump has managed to cast over a demographic who were until recently, Casey says, “in lockstep with Dropkicks’ beliefs”? “Trump offered them a chance to say out loud things people used to have to whisper to their friends,” Casey spits. “Racism, cruelty, jokes about disabilities. A lot of white people in America believed whites will not be in control any more, especially after Obama. This is their last, desperate grasp to hold control.”The Dropkicks have met this grim moment with records that have transformed their previously cartoonish riot music into something more sober, biting and heartfelt. Two acoustic albums – 2022’s This Machine Still Kills Fascists and 2023’s Okemah Rising – set unrecorded Woody Guthrie polemics to their music. “Woody’s grandson Cole told his mom Nora, ‘Grandpa would’ve liked these guys’,” Casey beams proudly. “It made us better musicians, doing it all acoustic. But that left us with a hunger to go electric and be a punk-rock band again.” Which brings us to this year’s For the People, which opens with Who’ll Stand With Us? A key lyric: “The working people fuel the engine / While you yank the chain.”View image in fullscreenIn another viral clip from a recent show, Casey bets a fan in a Maga shirt $100 that it wasn’t manufactured in the US; it was, inevitably, manufactured in Nicaragua, and Casey swapped the offending garment for a union-made Dropkicks T-shirt.“If America is ever going to go back to some semblance of normal, we have to bring the temperature down, we need to be able to talk to each other,” Casey says, referencing that night. “I talked to that guy afterwards, and he said, ‘I don’t let politics get in the way of family, and I consider you family’. I could have jumped down his throat, but he seemed open to reason.” He pauses. “That’s rare for Maga, though. Other days, I’m like, ‘Fuck this, I don’t even want to know these people, if this is how they think and behave’. Do I want to have a dialogue with these people? No. I’m just hoping the fever will break. I don’t need them to have a ‘come to Jesus’ moment on the difference between right and wrong – I just need them not to support what’s happening.”Does he fear blowback for his outspokenness, like that suffered by Stephen Colbert – or worse?“Unlike Stephen, we have no parent company, so we can say what we want,” he says. “Regarding our safety … whatever,” he snarls, disdainfully. “I’ll never have a security guard or anything like that. But you gotta keep your head on a swivel a little bit. Back in the day, we always had a Nazi element gunning for us, but you could see them coming. Now you don’t know who’s who. I’m not sure what’s keeping other people quiet, though, especially in punk-rock. Where’d everyone go? They had the balls to speak out against Bush back in the day. But Bush didn’t have an army of trolls that come after you. Speaking out against Bush wasn’t going to cost you half your fanbase, potentially.”In his darker moments, Casey reckons “within a year, this country’s gonna fall on its face, and people are gonna feel the pain: recession, inflation, unemployment. There’s nobody coming to save us.” He says he feels “no excitement or happiness” in the group’s anti-Trump screeds winning them newfound fame. “But maybe there’s a slight sense of validation,” he adds. “I talk to the fans every night. One night, an immigrant told me, ‘I moved here, and my partner is American, we have children, and I live in fear of being deported. My own friends have turned on me, they say I’m taking American jobs.’ He was actually in tears at the end. But he said, ‘I feel like someone is speaking on my behalf’. From the earliest days of this band, we wanted to be involved in something that mattered. So we are. I wish it was a different subject and not quite so important, but …”He sighs. Maybe the border tonight will be a shitshow, but it won’t change how the Dropkicks operate in this darkest of moments. “We’re sticking our neck out and getting a lot of negative attention,” he adds. “But if we don’t do it now, it might be too late.” More

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      Seth Meyers: ‘Trump clearly has no answer to Putin’s aggression’

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      As several late-night hosts take a break for the Emmys – which went to the Late Show with Stephen Colbert on Sunday night – Seth Meyers looked into Donald Trump’s lack of international leadership.Seth MeyersOn Monday’s Late Night, Meyers pointed out the hypocrisy behind the Trump’ administration’s foreign policy agenda. “Trump and the GOP spent years whining that Democrats were supposedly leading from behind, and have now declared that America will be setting the world’s agenda,” he explained. “No more waiting for other countries to act – America acts first and other countries follow us. You got that, world?”Except earlier this week, Trump announced on Truth Social that he was ready to enact sanctions against Russia for flying drones into Poland’s airspace … but not until all Nato nations had agreed to stop buying oil from Russia. As he put it: “I am ready to do major Sanctions on Russia when all NATO Nations have agreed, and started, to do the same thing.”Meyers had to laugh. “I thought America was back? And now you’ll only act if everyone else does it first?” he said. “Trump is using the same logic for American foreign policy that eighth graders use for smoking pot in the local school parking lot – ‘I’ll do it first if you do it first.’ ‘No way, man, you first!’ ‘OK, let’s do it at the same time. I’m ready to go when you are, just say when.’”Meyers also wondered: “Why does the president of the United States write with the uneven grammar and syntax of a scammer sending you a fake job listing?”The sanctions talk heated up because Russia invaded Poland’s airspace with drones, “a dangerous incursion”, Meyers explained, given that Poland is a Nato ally. “But don’t worry, the president reassured everyone and put our minds at ease.”Well … not quite. Asked last week what he thought about Russia’s actions, Trump answered: “It could’ve been a mistake. But regardless I’m not happy about anything having to do with that whole situation. But hopefully it’s going to come to an end.”“What do you mean ‘hopefully’? I thought you were going to end the war on day one and get the Nobel peace prize!” Meyers laughed. “Now you’re talking in vague generalities like a dad whose daughter is dating a biker who did doughnuts on your front lawn – ‘As for the doughnuts, it might have been a mistake, I don’t know. Also might’ve been a mistake when he was screaming fuck you old man and giving me the finger.’”It’s not that Meyers was against sanctions – “I would love it if we had a president who actually pursued serious diplomacy and got Putin himself to come out and reassure the world after encroaching on Nato airspace and threatening global conflict,” he said. “Instead, we have a president who’s less concerned with the boundaries of Nato than he is with the boundaries of the White House ballroom.”“Trump clearly has no answer to Putin’s aggression,” Meyers concluded. “Diplomacy is good, de-escalation is good, but you can’t have either without competence and leadership, and those are just not Trump’s strong suits.” More

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      California nurses decry Ice presence at hospitals: ‘Interfering with patient care’

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      Dianne Sposito, a 69-year-old nurse, is laser-focused on providing care to anyone who enters the UCLA emergency room in southern California, where she works.That task was made difficult though one week in June, she said, when a federal immigration agent blocked her from treating an immigrant who was screaming just a few feet in front of her in the hospital.Sposito, a nurse with more than 40 years of experience, said her hospital is among many that have faced hostile encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents amid the Trump administration’s escalating immigration crackdown.The nurse said that the Ice agent – wearing a mask, sunglasses and hat without any clear identification – brought a woman already in custody to the hospital. The patient was screaming and trying to get off the gurney, and when Sposito tried to assess her, the agent blocked her and told her not to touch the patient.“I’ve worked with police officers for years, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Sposito said. “It was very frightful because the person behind him is screaming, yelling, and I don’t know what’s going on with her.”The man confirmed he was an Ice agent, and when Sposito asked for his name, badge, and warrant, he refused to give her his identification and insisted he didn’t need a warrant. The situation escalated until the charge nurse called hospital administration, who stepped in to handle it.“They’re interfering with patient care,” Sposito said.After the incident, Sposito said that hospital administration held a meeting and clarified that Ice agents are only allowed in public areas, not ER rooms and that staff should call hospital administration immediately if agents are present.But for Sposito, the guidelines fall short, as the hostility is unlike anything she has seen in over two decades as a nurse, she said..“[The agent] would not show me anything. You don’t know who these people are. I found it extremely harrowing, and the fact that they were blocking me from a patient – that patient could be dying.”Since the Trump administration has stepped up its arrest of immigrants at the start of the summer, nurses are seeing an increase in Ice presence at hospitals, with agents bringing in patients to facilities, said Mary Turner, president of National Nurses United, the largest organization of registered nurses in the country.“The presence of Ice agents is very disruptive and creates an unsafe and fearful environment for patients, nurses and other staff,” Turner said. “Immigrants are our patients and our colleagues.”While there’s no national data tracking Ice activity in hospitals, several regional unions have said they’ve seen an increase.“We’ve heard from members recently about Ice agents or Ice contractors being inside hospitals, which never occurred prior to this year, ,” said Sal Rosselli, president emeritus of the National Union of Healthcare Workers.Turner said nurses have reported that agents sometimes prevent patients from contacting family or friends and that Ice agents have listened in on conversations between patients and healthcare workers, actions that violate HIPAA, the federal law protecting patient privacy.In addition, Turner said, nurses have reported concerns that patients taken away by Ice will not receive the care they need. “Hospitals are supposed to discharge a patient with instructions for the patient and/or whoever will be caring for them as they convalesce,” Turner said.The increased presence of immigration agents at hospitals comes after Donald Trump issued an executive order overturning the long-standing status of hospitals, healthcare facilities and schools as “sensitive locations”, where immigration enforcement was limited.Nurses, in California and other states across the nation, said they fear the new policy, in addition to deterring care at medical facilities, will deter sick people from seeking care when they need it.“Allowing Ice undue access to hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and other healthcare institutions is both deeply immoral and contrary to public health,” said George Gresham, president of the 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, and Patricia Kane, the executive director of the New York State Nurses Association in a statement. “We must never be put into positions where we are expected to assist, or be disrupted by, federal agents as they sweep into our institutions and attempt to detain patients or their loved ones.”Policies on immigration enforcement vary across healthcare facilities. In California, county-run public healthcare systems are required to adopt the policies laid out by the state’s attorney general, which limit information sharing with immigration authorities, require facilities to inform patients of their rights and set protocols for staff to register, document and report immigration officers’ visits. However, other healthcare entities are only encouraged to do so. Each facility develops its own policies based on relevant state or federal laws and regulations.Among the most high-profile cases of Ice presence in hospitals in California occurred outside of Los Angeles in July. Ming Tanigawa-Lau, a staff attorney at the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, represents Milagro Solis Portillo, a 36-year-old Salvadorian woman who was detained by Ice outside her home in Sherman Oaks and hospitalized that same day at Glendale Memorial, where detention officers kept watch in the lobby around the clock..Solis Portillo was then forcibly removed from Glendale Memorial against her doctor’s orders and transferred to Anaheim Global Medical center, another regional hospital, according to her lawyer. Once there, Ice agents barred her from receiving visitors, denied her access to family and her attorney, prevented private conversations with doctors and interrupted a monitored phone call with Tanigawa-Lau.“I repeatedly asked Ice to tell me which law or which policy they were referring to that allowed them to deny visits, and especially access to her attorney, and they never responded to me,” Tanigawa-Lau said.Ice officers sat by Solis Portillo’s bed and often spoke directly to medical staff on her behalf, according to Tanigawa-Lau. This level of surveillance violated both patient confidentiality and detainee rights, interfering with her care and traumatizing her, Tanigawa-Lau said.Since then, Solis Portillo was moved between facilities, from the Los Angeles processing center to a federal prison and eventually out of state to a jail in Clark county, Indiana.In a statement, Glendale Memorial said “the hospital cannot legally restrict law enforcement or security personnel from being present in public areas which include the hospital lobby/waiting area”.“Ice does not conduct enforcement operations at hospitals nor interfere with medical care of any illegal alien,” said DHS assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. “It is a longstanding practice to provide comprehensive medical care from the moment an alien enters Ice custody. This includes access to medical appointments and 24-hour emergency care.”The federal government has aggressively responded to healthcare workers challenging the presence of immigration agents at medical facilities. In August the US Department of Justice charged two staff members at the Ontario Advanced Surgical center in San Bernardino county in California, accusing them of assaulting federal agents.The charges stem from events on 8 July, when Ice agents chased three men at the facility. One of the men, an immigrant from Honduras, fled on foot to evade law enforcement and was briefly captured in the center’s parking lot, and then he broke free and ran inside, according to the indictment. There,the government said, two employees at the center, tried to protect the man and remove federal agents from the building.“The staff attempted to obstruct the arrest by locking the door, blocking law enforcement vehicles from moving, and even called the cops claiming there was a ‘kidnapping’,” said McLaughlin. The Department of Justice referred questions about the case to DHS.The immigrant was eventually taken into custody, and the health care workers, Jesus Ortega and Danielle Nadine Davila were charged with “assaulting and interfering with United States immigration officers attempting to lawfully detain” an immigrant.Oliver Cleary, who represents Davila, said a video shows that Ice’s claim that Davila assaulted the agent is false.“They’re saying that because she placed her body in between them, that that qualifies as a strike,” Cleary said. “The case law clearly requires it to be a physical force strike, and that you can tell that didn’t happen.”The trial is slated to start on 6 October. More

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      When Trump comes to UK, normal rules of state visits will not apply

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      Donald Trump has repeatedly described Keir Starmer as a “good man”, distancing himself from the attacks on the UK prime minister mounted by other figures on the US far right such as Elon Musk.One of the many known unknowns, however, of a Trump state visit is what kind of Trump will show up when a microphone is placed in front of him.The US president is often a bundle of contradictions. During his first state visit in 2018 most UK diplomats said he was a picture of affability, yet he took it upon himself to conduct an interview with the Sun in which he insulted Theresa May, and said Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister. He seemed unaware he might have caused offence.Starmer as host will have to grin and bear whatever brickbats Trump sends his way about the state of free speech in the UK, recognition of the state of Palestine, immigration, or the possibility that Reform will lead the next government in the UK. The one thing the Foreign Office knows is that the normal rules of state visits do not apply.An added loose mooring will be the absence of the former UK ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson, who was dismissed for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Ambassadors are known to personally visit every site of every stop on a state visit. Their job is often quite literally to look round corners for what might be coming. Lord Mandelson, a stickler for detail, would have been poring over every angle of the state visit in conjunction with Buckingham Palace and the White House. Fortunately, most of it will have been battened down weeks ago. But his knowledge of the mood inside the Trump administration in the days before the visit will be missed.Behind the formal glamour, and pre-cooked agreements on tech and nuclear power cooperation, Starmer will have to choose how to spend his limited political capital. The two most pressing foreign policy issues are ones on which the UK and the US cannot agree: Israel’s future relationship with the Arab world, and the threat posed to Europe and Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. But it is the latter on which Starmer hopes to make progress.Speaking at the weekend in Kyiv, Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser, gave a glimpse of current Downing Street thinking. “Putin’s sport is judo. He likes to counterbalance the action with reaction. He likes having options. If we can close his options off and leave him with only one, he will take it,” Powell said.“The main message we should be sending is real pressure to convince [Putin] the war will go on for a long time if he doesn’t make peace. His summer campaign more or less has failed already, the Russian economic position is not good, the whole economy is a war economy. If we can apply the pressure the US president is talking about in terms of targeted sanctions, and tariffs that he put on India, we might bring him to the table.”But Powell skirted around whether Trump’s latest proposal for sanctions was serious or a smokescreen to avoid doing anything. After months and months of patience-sapping delay, Trump has set out in the past fortnight new preconditions that would need to be in place before the US would ever massively sanction Russia. He said he would only do so if every Nato country, including Turkey, stopped importing Russia energy and also punished China with 50%-100% tariffs for its imports of Russian energy. Trump has already put 25% tariffs on India, the other great importer of Russian energy.The Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has spent a lot of time trying to blend the European and US approaches to Russia, explained on Sunday: “We have tried the red-carpet approach. It is not working … It is now time for the Europeans to follow President Trump’s lead to go after India and China – if China and India change their practices towards Putin, this war will end.”Starmer intends to test Trump on whether 50% tariffs on China, which would rupture China-Europe trade, is a deal-breaker. Concerted transatlantic sanctions might yet be possible if Trump demanded a ban on Russian crude imports by Hungary and Slovakia, or of imports of fuel made from Russian crude refined in third countries such as India. A ban on seaborne Russian crude oil has already cut the EU’s Russian oil imports by 90%, but Hungary and Slovakia still import it via a pipeline.Starmer’s task will be to steer Trump to more targeted sanctions on Chinese and Indian refineries, as well as yet more measures against the Russian shadow fleet. Trump’s Ukraine special envoy, Keith Kellogg, said: “If you look at the strength of sanctions from a scale of one to 10, we’re at a six. But we are at an enforcement level of three.”Starmer will also try to convince Trump the incursion of about 20 drones into Polish airspace by Russia was not the accident that Trump has suggested. Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, ridiculed the accident theory in Kyiv, saying: “We don’t believe in 20 mistakes at the same time.”Behind this argument is the fundamental discussion that Starmer tries to avoid in public – whether Trump knows Putin is stalling on a ceasefire but does not greatly care, since he believes Ukraine will lose the war and inevitably will have to cede large tracts of its territory.That requires going back to the very first principles about the victim and aggressor in Ukraine. More

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      in US Politics

      Americans have 400 days to save their democracy | Timothy Garton Ash

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      I return to Europe from the US with a clear conclusion: American democrats (lowercase d) have 400 days to start saving US democracy. If next autumn’s midterm elections produce a Congress that begins to constrain Donald Trump there will then be a further 700 days to prepare the peaceful transfer of executive power that alone will secure the future of this republic. Operation Save US Democracy, stages 1 and 2.Hysterical hyperbole? I would love to think so. But during seven weeks in the US this summer, I was shaken every day by the speed and executive brutality of President Trump’s assault on what had seemed settled norms of US democracy and by the desperate weakness of resistance to that assault. There’s a growing body of international evidence to suggest that once a liberal democracy has been eroded, it’s very difficult to restore it. Destruction is so much easier than construction.That’s why all democrats, irrespective of party or ideology, must hope the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives in midterm elections on 3 November 2026. Not because of the Democrats’ policies, which are a muddle, or their current leadership, which is a mess, but simply because US democracy needs Congress, the principal check on presidential power envisaged in the US constitution, to start doing its job again. That will not happen so long as the Republicans, dominated and intimidated by Trump, control both houses.Much has been made of comparisons to other authoritarian power grabs, from Europe in the 1930s to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, but I’m most struck by the distinctive features of the US case. To name just four: excessive executive power; chronic gerrymandering; endemic violence; and the way a would-be authoritarian can exploit the intense capitalist competition that permeates every area of US life.The danger of executive overreach has been there from the very beginning. Revolutionary war hero Patrick Henry (“give me liberty or give me death”) voted against the constitution at the Virginia ratifying convention in 1788 precisely because he thought it would give a criminal president the chance “to make one bold push for the American throne.” Throughout the 20th century, presidents of both parties extended the “executive power” that is so ill-defined in article 2 of that constitution. More recently, a conservative-dominated supreme court has given succour to the unitary executive theory developed by rightwing legal theorists, which gives the most expansive reading of presidential power. And now the Trump administration – well prepared, unlike in 2017 – has exploited every inch and wrinkle of existing executive power, as well as simply breaking the law and defying the courts to stop it.Tom Ginsburg, a leading US comparative constitutionalist, argues that the biggest single flaw of the unreformed US constitution is that it gives state legislatures the power to draw electoral boundaries. The word gerrymandering was coined as early as 1812. In recent times, partisan redistricting has become more extreme as US politics has become more polarised. And then, in 2019, the supreme court declared that it could not correct even the most blatant party-political gerrymandering (only that done on racial lines). So now, at Trump’s direct request, Texas sets out to change constituency boundaries explicitly to win five more seats for the Republicans in the midterms, whereupon California says it will counter-gerrymander to win five more for the Democrats. There’s no longer even a bare pretence of impartiality about the most basic procedure of democracy.No European society can compare to the US for the ubiquity of violence. Hardly a day passed this summer without the evening news reporting at least one violent crime, including yet another horrific school shooting. The US has more guns than people. France loves its pseudo-revolutionary political theatre, but the US had the 6 January 2021 mob assault on the Capitol. Now the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk has been shot. Before the identity of the killer was known, Elon Musk said “the left is the party of murder” and Trump blamed the hate speech of the “radical left”. It will be a miracle if the US avoids a downward spiral of political violence, as last seen in the 1960s. That in turn could be the pretext for Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act, bring more military on to US streets and further exploit an alleged state of emergency.Meanwhile, universities, business leaders, law firms, media platforms and tech supremos have utterly failed to engage in collective action in response. They have either kept their heads down, settled humiliatingly like Columbia University and the law firm Paul, Weiss, or fawned on the president, like Mark Zuckerberg. Why? Because they all follow the logic of fierce free-market competition and fear targeted reprisals. I never imagined I would see fear spread so far and fast in the US.Add in attempts to disqualify or intimidate voters, plus Trump’s threat to ban mail-in ballots, and there’s a real doubt how far next November’s midterm elections will be fully free and fair. The task for democrats of all parties is to ensure they are, so far as possible. The task for the Democrats (capital D) is to win them in spite of any such obstacles.The key to that will probably still be bread-and-butter issues. Here, in the economy, lies paradoxical hope. We’re already beginning to see Trump’s tariffs feed through into higher prices. The job numbers are weakening. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” will further increase an already gobsmacking national debt of $37tn (£27tn). Already in the 2024 fiscal year, servicing that debt cost more than the entire $850bn defence budget. But until a debt crisis actually hits, such macro-risks remain remote and abstract to most voters, rather as predictions of diminished GDP growth made little impact in the Brexit referendum debate.So the big question is whether the negative economic consequences of Trump will be palpable to ordinary voters before the midterms. One astute political observer suggested to me that Trump, flush with revenue from the new tariffs, could do a pre-election cash handout to voters, perhaps presented as compensation for the “temporary difficulties” of the transition to a Maga economy. That would be a classic populist move.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe single most important thing for the Democrats in the next 400 days is therefore to bring those economic costs irresistibly home to voters. Democrats won’t win just by talking about the defence of democracy, important though that is, let alone by engaging in culture wars. They need to follow the advice of former Clinton adviser James Carville and focus relentlessly on kitchen-table issues. In doing so, they will also show that they do actually care about the ordinary working- and middle-class Americans whose support they have lost over the last 30 years.Then there’s stage 2, the presidential election in 2028. But sufficient unto the day are the challenges thereof. Despite all the serious threats to democracy itself in the US, for now the first rule of democratic politics still applies: just win the next election.

      Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist More

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      Trump at first says he is ‘not familiar’ with Minnesota Democrat’s assassination

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      In response to a question about why he did not order flags lowered to half-staff to honor Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was assassinated alongside her husband this summer, Donald Trump initially said he was “not familiar” with the case.The question came up during a briefing in the Oval Office on Monday, in light of the president’s order last week to lower flags in response to the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.Trump was pressed on why he and Republicans continued cast blame the left for a rise in political violence when elected officials and activists from both parties have been targets.The exchange began when the reporter asked about the tributes paid by the White House to Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth activist group Turning Point USA and a close ally of the president and his family.“Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota house speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well?” asked Nancy Cordes, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News.“I’m not familiar. The who?” Trump replied, leaning in across the Resolute Desk.“The Minnesota house speaker, a Democrat, who was assassinated this summer,” she said.“Oh,” Trump replied. “Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that.”Trump did not mention the Minnesota governor Tim Walz – a Democrat and the vice-presidential nominee in 2024 – by name, but suggested that had he made the request, the White House might have obliged.“I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I would’ve, if somebody had asked me,” Trump said. “People make requests for the lowering of the flag, and oftentimes you have to say no, because it would be a lot of lowering.”At the time, Trump said that speaking to Walz, a close friend of Hortman, would have been a “waste of time”.“I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump said then, referring to Walz as “whacked out” and a “mess”.Kirk was fatally shot last week while speaking at Utah Valley University. In the wake of his death, Trump and other prominent conservatives have sought to place the blame for political violence squarely on Democrats, vowing to crack down on the left-wing groups and institutions they allege “fund it and support it”.As Republicans grieve the loss of Kirk, they have largely ignored the violence against Democrats, including Hortman’s assassination, the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a thwarted plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.House Republicans and a handful of Democrats gathered at prayer vigil for Kirk on Capitol Hill on Monday. In brief remarks, Representative Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, reflected on several recent incidents of political violence, including Hortman’s killing by “another evil coward” who also shot a second Democratic state lawmaker that night.Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign, denied on Monday that he had blamed just “one side” before accusing the “radical left” of causing “tremendous violence”.“The radical left really has caused a lot of problems for this country,” he said. “I really think they hate our country.”Earlier on Monday, vice president JD Vance, a close friend of Kirk’s, said he hoped for national “unity” while hosting the slain activist’s podcast. But then he insisted that this was not a “both sides problem” and that Democrats were primarily to blame, despite widespread condemnation of Kirk’s killing by party officials and elected leaders.During the lengthy episode, Vance made no reference to Hortman or other acts of political violence, such as the 6 January assault on the US Capitol.“Something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe – a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left,” he said, and committed to using the levers of the federal government to “dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”. More