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      Trump’s new travel ban is a gratuitously cruel sequel | Moustafa Bayoumi

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      I’m not much for horror movies, but I have just read that the film Black Phone 2 “will creep into cinemas” in October and that, compared to the original, it’s supposed to be a “more violent, scarier, more graphic” film. I’ll pass on the movie, but that description seems pretty apt to what living under this Trump administration feels like: a gratuitously more violent sequel to a ghoulish original.Consider the Muslim ban. Back in late 2015, candidate Donald Trump called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on”. He signed the first version of the Muslim ban on 27 January 2017, and protests erupted at airports across the nation at the revival of a national policy, similar to the Chinese Exclusion Act, that bars entry of whole swaths of people based on our national prejudices. It took the Trump administration three attempts at crafting this policy before the supreme court tragically greenlit it.While Joe Biden later reversed the policy, congressional moves to restrict the president’s ability to institute these blanket bans – such as the No Ban Act – have not succeeded. And on the first day of his second term, Trump indicated he was prepared to institute a wider-reaching travel ban. He has now done just that. The new executive order will “fully restrict and limit the entry [to the US] of nationals of the following 12 countries: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen” and will also “partially restrict and limit the entry of nationals of the following 7 countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela”.Yes, there are key cutouts in the latest travel ban that make it a different animal from the original 2017 ban, but it still derives from the same family. Green-card holders, those with valid visas issued before the executive order was proclaimed, and professional athletes representing their countries in the forthcoming World Cup, for example, are exempt, illustrating how the administration has learned to write more litigation-resistant immigration exclusion orders.But make no mistake. Such a policy is alienating, counterproductive and simply racist. For one thing, Trump claims that the ban is necessary because the selected countries exhibit either “a significant terrorist presence”, a lack of cooperation in accepting back their nationals, or high rates of visa overstays. According to the Entry/Exit Overstay Report for fiscal year 2023 (the last one available), the number of people from Equatorial Guinea, a small African country, who overstayed their B1/B2 visas (travel to the US for business or pleasure) was 200. From the United Kingdom, it was 15,712.It’s true that the percentage (as opposed to the number) of people overstaying their visas from Equatorial Guinea is significantly higher than UK overstays. But Djibouti, which hosts the primary US military base in for operations in Africa, has an even higher percentage of B1/B2 visa overstayers than Equatorial Guinea – yet it isn’t part of the ban, illustrating how much it is based on narrow political calculations and cheap theatrics.The capriciousness of the policy was immediately evident after Trump released a video explaining his decision. “The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed for our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstayed their visas,” he said, adding: “We don’t want them.” Yet, as everyone knows, the suspect in the Boulder, Colorado, attack is an Egyptian national, another key US ally. And Egypt is not on the list.Nor should it be, because these lists of banned countries collapse individuals into vague categories of suspicion and malfeasance. Why should the actions of one person from any given country mark a completely different person as inadmissible? Trump may sound tough to his supporters when announcing the ban, but such broad-brush applications against basically all the nationals of comparatively powerless countries is hardly the flex that Trump thinks it is. In the eyes of the rest of the world, the new policy mostly makes the administration look like a bully, picking on a handful of Muslim-majority countries, a few African and Asian states, a couple of its traditional enemies, and Haiti.Meanwhile, the rest of the world also sees how the Trump administration has withdrawn temporary protections from more than 500,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and Nicaragua, suspended refugee resettlement from around the world, and yet welcomed in dozens of white Afrikaners from South Africa to the United States as refugees. The ethnocentrism of the policy is as naked as it is opportunistic.The truth is that the damage from Trump’s first-term Muslim ban was long-lasting and had all kinds of collateral impact, including on the mental health of family members living in the United States. And immigrant advocacy organizations are already sharply criticizing this latest version. AfghanEvac, a non-profit organization that facilitates the resettlement of Afghans who worked with American troops, stated that the new ban “is not about national security – it is about political theater”. To include Afghanistan among the banned countries, even as thousands of Afghans worked alongside American forces, is to Shawn VanDiver, the group’s founder and president, “a moral disgrace. It spits in the face of our allies, our veterans, and every value we claim to uphold.”Trump’s latest travel ban, his ramped-up immigration deportation regime, his international student crackdown, and his all but ending asylum in the United States add up to a clearly a concerted attempt to stave off the inevitable while vilifying the marginal. Demographers have been telling us for years now that the US will be a “majority minority” country around 2045, a prospect that has long frightened many of the white conservatives who make up Trump’s base. In response, Trump is pursuing a policy that draws on the most basic kind of nativism around, and one we’ve seen before in the United States.The 1924 Immigration Act severely restricted immigration to the US to keep America as white and as western European as possible. Only in 1965 were the laws finally changed, with the national immigration quotas lifted, laying the foundation for the multicultural society we have today. That earlier movie of epic exclusion lasted some 41 years. So far, this sequel is violent, scary and authoritarian. It had better be a short film.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump travel ban comes as little surprise amid barrage of draconian restrictions

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      Donald Trump’s first travel ban in 2017 had an immediate, explosive impact – spawning chaos at airports nationwide.This time around, the panic and chaos was already widespread by the time the president signed his proclamation Wednesday to fully or partially restrict foreign nationals from 19 countries from entering the United States.Since being sworn in for his second term, Trump has unleashed a barrage of draconian immigration restrictions. Within hours of taking office, the president suspended the asylum system at the southern border as part of his wide-ranging immigration crackdown. His administration has ended temporary legal residency for 211,000 Haitians, 117,000 Venezuelans and 110,000 Cubans, and moved to revoke temporary protected status for several groups of immigrants. It has moved to restrict student visas and root out scholars who have come to the US legally.“It’s death by 1,000 cuts,” said Faisal Al-Juburi of the Texas-based legal non-profit Raices, which was among several immigrants’ rights groups that challenged Trump’s first travel ban. “And that’s kind of the point. It’s creating layers and layers of restrictions.”Trump’s first travel ban in January 2017, issued days after he took office, targeted the predominantly Muslim countries of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. The order came as a shock – including to many administration officials. Customs and Border Protection officials were initially given little guidance on how to enact the ban. Lawyers and protesters rushed to international airports where travellers were stuck in limbo. Confusion spread through colleges and tech companies in the US, and refugee camps across the world.This time, Trump’s travel ban came as no surprise. He had cued up the proclamation in an executive order signed on 20 January, his first day back in the White House, instructing his administration to submit a list of candidates for a ban by 21 March. Though he finally signed a proclamation enacting the ban on Wednesday, it will not take effect until 9 June – allowing border patrol officers and travellers a few days to prepare.The ban includes several exemptions, including for people with visas who are already in the United States, green-card holders, dual citizens and athletes or coaches traveling to the US for major sporting events such as the World Cup or the Olympics. It also exempts Afghans eligible for the special immigrant visa program for those who helped the US during the war in Afghanistan.But the policy, which is likely to face legal challenges, will undoubtedly once again separate families and disproportionately affect people seeking refuge from humanitarian crises.“This is horrible, to be clear … and it’s still something that reeks of arbitrary racism and xenophobia,” Al-Juburi said. “But this does not yield the type of chaos that January 2017 yielded, because immigration overall has been upended to such a degree that the practice of immigration laws is in a state of chaos.”In his second term, Trump has taken unprecedented steps to tear down legal immigration. He has eliminated the legal status of thousands of international students and instructed US embassies worldwide to stop scheduling visa interviews as it prepares to ramp up social media vetting for international scholars.The administration has arrested people at immigration check-ins, exiled asylum seekers to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, and detained scholars and travellers at airports without reason. Although Trump’s travel ban excludes green-card holders, his Department of Homeland Security has made clear that it can and will revoke green cards as it sees fit – including in the cases of student activists Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The first Muslim ban was very targeted, it was brutal, it was immediate, and it was massive,” said Nihad Awad, the executive director at the Council on American–Islamic Relations. “Now, the administration is not only targeting nations with certain religious affiliations, but also people of color overall, people who criticise the US government for its funding of the genocide in Gaza.”And this new travel ban comes as many families are still reeling and recovering from Trump’s first ban. “We’re looking at, essentially, a ban being in place potentially for eight out of 12 years,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “And even in that period where the Biden administration lifted the ban, it was still very hard for Iranians to get a visa.”Iranian Americans who came to the US fleeing political persecution back home, who couldn’t return to Iran, have in some cases been unable to see their parents, siblings or other loved ones for years. “You want your parents to be able to come for the birth of a child, or to come to your wedding,” Costello said. “So this is a really hard moment for so many families. And I think unfortunately, there’s much more staying power for this ban.”Experts say the new ban is more likely to stand up to legal challenges as his first ban. It also doesn’t appear to have registered the same intense shock and outrage, culturally.“The first time, we saw this immediate backlash, protests at airports,” said Costello. “Now, over time, Trump has normalized this.” More

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      Judge blocks Trump’s ban on Harvard’s foreign students from entering the US

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      A district judge in Boston has blocked the Trump administration’s ban on Harvard’s international students from entering the United States after the Ivy League university argued the move was illegal.Harvard had asked the judge, Allison Burrough, to block the ban, pending further litigation, arguing Trump had violated federal law by failing to back up his claims that the students posed a threat to national security.“The Proclamation denies thousands of Harvard’s students the right to come to this country to pursue their education and follow their dreams, and it denies Harvard the right to teach them. Without its international students, Harvard is not Harvard,” the school said in a filing to the judge.The filing also argued that the national security argument was flawed as the ban did not stop the same people from entering the country, it only barred them from entering to attend Harvard.Harvard amended its earlier lawsuit, which it had filed amid a broader dispute with the Republican president, to challenge the ban, which Trump issued on Wednesday in a proclamation.White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson earlier called Harvard “a hotbed of anti-American, antisemitic, pro-terrorist agitators”, claims that the school has previously denied.“Harvard’s behavior has jeopardized the integrity of the entire US student and exchange visitor visa system and risks compromising national security. Now it must face the consequences of its actions,” Jackson said in a statement.The suspension was intended to be initially for six months but can be extended. Trump’s proclamation also directs the state department to consider revoking academic or exchange visas of any current Harvard students who meet his proclamation’s criteria.The Trump administration has launched a multifront attack on the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university, freezing billions of dollars in grants and other funding and proposing to end its tax-exempt status, prompting a series of legal challenges.Harvard argues the administration is retaliating against it for refusing to accede to demands to control the school’s governance, curriculum and the ideology of its faculty and students.Trump’s directive came a week after Burroughs announced she would issue a broad injunction blocking the administration from revoking Harvard’s ability to enrol international students, who make up about a quarter of its student body.Harvard said in Thursday’s court filing that the proclamation was “a patent effort to do an end-run around this Court’s order”.The university sued after the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, announced on 22 May that her department was immediately revoking Harvard’s student and exchange visitor program certification, which allows it to enrol foreign students.Noem’s action was temporarily blocked almost immediately by Burroughs. On the eve of a hearing before her last week, the department changed course and said it would instead challenge Harvard’s certification through a lengthier administrative process.Wednesday’s two-page directive from Trump said Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries”, including China.It said Harvard had seen a “drastic rise in crime in recent years while failing to discipline at least some categories of conduct violations on campus”, and had failed to provide sufficient information to the homeland security department about foreign students’ “known illegal or dangerous activities”.The school in Thursday’s court filing said those claims were unsubstantiated. More

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      Why the reaction to Trump’s travel ban is different this time

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      Many of Donald Trump’s critics may have become so inured to the treadmill of iniquities that his second presidency has brought, that a long-expected travel ban announced against citizens of a dozen countries failed to register the same intense shock and outrage as his similar move made during his first presidency.Of course, there was condemnation. Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, accused the president of “bigotry”, while Chris Murphy, his Democratic colleague from Connecticut, suggested the timing may have been designed to deflect attention from the negative economic impact of his “Big Beautiful Bill” currently wending its way through Congress.But the denunciations seemed to carry a rote, lost-in-the-noise quality.It is easy to forget the storm of opprobrium that initially greeted the proposal for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” when then candidate Trump first made it nearly a decade ago. Even some of his fellow Republicans on the primary campaign trail at the time denounced the idea of a “Muslim ban” as “unhinged”.The context then was a spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks, first in Europe and then, in December 2015, in the California city of San Bernardino, where a radicalized husband and wife shot and killed 14 people at a health workers’ Christmas party.The policy met fierce legal and popular resistance after Trump tried to impose it immediately after taking office in January 2017, targeting seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen.Chaotic scenes ensued, as protesters descended on US international airports. Only after the administration retooled the policy following protracted courtroom fights was it able to implement it – only for Joe Biden to rescind it in 2021 as “a stain on our national conscience”.The immediate and narrow backdrop to the latest ban is similar: an attack in Boulder, Colorado, this time by an Egyptian citizen, on an event in support of hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza.“The recent terror attack in Boulder, Colorado, has underscored the extreme dangers posed to our country by the entry of foreign nationals who are not properly vetted, as well as those who come here as temporary visitors and overstay their visas,” Trump said in a video message announcing the policy. “We don’t want them.”Yet the broader context is vastly different – and illustrative of how successful the president has been in shifting the Overton window of political acceptability compared with eight years ago. This new ban is taking place against a backdrop of creeping authoritarianism, brutal government cuts and an ideological attack on civic institutions ranging from universities to scientific and cultural organisations.Effective legal challenges to the travel ban this time round seem much less likely, experts believe. “They seem to have learned some lessons from the three different rounds of litigation we went through during the first Trump administration,” Steve Vladeck, a professor at the Georgetown University law center, told the New York Times.The length of time taken in preparing the restrictions – in contrast with the hastily imposed 2017 ban – and the varied character of the 19 countries singled out make it less susceptible than its predecessor, Vladeck said.Strikingly, Egypt – a signatory to the 1979 Camp David peace accords with Israel and a recipient of US military aid – is absent from the list of countries affected, strongly suggesting that last weekend’s attack was merely a pretext for a move already in the works.Of the 12 included on the main ban list, some are predominantly Muslim, but five – Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea – are not. The others are Iran, Afghanistan, Chad, Somalia, Libya, Sudan and Yemen. Of course, all are non-white and part of the developing world.Additionally, less stringent restrictions have been imposed on another seven countries: Cuba, Venezuela, Laos, Togo, Burundi, Sierra Leone and Turkmenistan – but only the last two have Muslim majorities.Rather than being based in Islamophobia, the latest crackdown is playing out on a wider canvas of xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment, manifested most visibly in Trump’s drive to carry out mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Some groups, namely Venezuelans and Haitians, have already lost temporary protected status in a move that has been upheld by the courts.It is also happening in tandem with a prohibition issued against Harvard University from enrolling foreign students as Trump resorts to all levers available in an effort to prevail in a power struggle with the world’s wealthiest higher education institution.Yet the ban has roots in prejudices that emerged early in Trump’s first term, when he railed at an Oval Office meeting with congressional leaders against immigration from “shithole countries”, an unflattering description which, according to the New York Times, included Haiti.“Why do we want people from Haiti here?” Trump said in the January 2018 meeting, when told that they were among those who could benefit from a proposed immigration bill. At the same gathering, the president lamented the failure to woo immigrants from white European countries like Norway.At an earlier meeting, he complained – based on a policy paper given to him by Stephen Miller, now the White House deputy chief of staff – that 15,000 Haitians had entered the country since his inauguration, adding that “they all have Aids”. Similar complaints were issued against the entry of 2,500 Afghans.The anti-Haitian animus re-emerged in last year’s presidential election campaign. Trump, in a debate with Kamala Harris, his Democratic presidential opponent, issued his notorious “they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the dogs” accusation against a Haitian immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, based on a false internet rumor that police had previously officially denied.That backdrop will surely condemn Trump in the court of public opinion, whatever rulings the judiciary may decide.Amid a chorus of condemnation from Democrats, many of whom compared this ban to his first “Muslim ban”, Amnesty International captured the more universal principle at play.“Trump’s new travel ban is discriminatory, racist, and downright cruel,” the organization said. “By targeting people based on their nationality, this ban only spreads disinformation and hate.”Even if judges issue future rulings upholding the policy, it seems a fitting judgment likely to stand the test of time, if not the strict letter of the law. More

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      What is Trump’s new travel ban, and which countries are affected?

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      Nearly five months into his second term, Donald Trump has announced a new sweeping travel ban that could reshape the US’s borders more dramatically than any policy in modern memory. The restrictions, revealed through a presidential proclamation on Wednesday, would target citizens from more than a dozen countries – creating a three-tiered system of escalating barriers to entry.The proclamation represents one of the most ambitious attempts to reshape the US’s approach to global mobility in modern history and potentially affects millions of people coming to the United States for relocation, travel, work or school.What is a travel ban?A travel ban restricts or prohibits citizens of specific countries from entering the United States. These restrictions can range from complete visa suspensions to specific limitations on certain visa categories.Trump’s day one executive order required the state department to identify countries “for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries”.His travel ban proclamation referenced the previous executive order, as well as the recent attack by an Egyptian national in Boulder, Colorado, upon a group of people demonstrating for the release of Israeli hostages in Gaza.What is a presidential proclamation?A presidential proclamation is a decree that is often ceremonial or can have legal implications when it comes to national emergencies.Unlike an executive order, which is a directive to heads of agencies in the administration, the proclamation primarily signals a broad change in policy.Which countries are listed in the travel ban?The following countries were identified for total bans of any nationals seeking to travel to the US for immigrant or non-immigrant reasons:

      Afghanistan

      Myanmar

      Chad

      Republic of the Congo

      Equatorial Guinea

      Eritrea

      Haiti

      Iran

      Libya

      Somalia

      Sudan

      Yemen
      He’s also partially restricting the travel of people from:

      Burundi

      Cuba

      Laos

      Sierra Leone

      Togo

      Turkmenistan

      Venezuela
      Why were these countries chosen?The proclamation broadly cites national security issues for including the countries, but specifies a few different issues that reach the level of concern for the travel ban.For some countries, such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Venezuela, the proclamation claims that there is no reliable central authority for issuing passports or screening and vetting nationals traveling out of the country.For other countries, such as Myanmar, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Burundi, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo and Turkmenistan, the proclamation cites a high rate of immigrants overstaying their visas in the US.Finally, there are several countries that are included because of terrorist activity or state- sponsored terrorism, including Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and Cuba.How does this travel ban differ from the one in 2017?The 2017 ban initially targeted seven predominantly Muslim countries before expanding to include North Korea and Venezuela. This new proclamation is broader and also makes the notable addition of Haiti.During his 2024 campaign for the presidency, Trump amplified false claims made by his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were “eating the pets of the people that live there”. The proclamation falsely claims that “hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian aliens flooded into the United States during the Biden administration” and this “influx harms American communities”. In fact, about 200,000 Haitians were granted temporary protected status, which gives legal residency permits to foreign nationals who are unable to return home safely due to conditions in their home countries.Also notable are the restrictions on Afghans, given that many of the Afghans approved to live in the US as refugees were forced to flee their home country as a result of working to support US troops there, before the full withdrawal of US forces in 2021. The agreement with the Taliban to withdraw US troops was negotiated by Trump during his first term.Last month, homeland security secretary Kristi Noem announced “the termination of temporary protected status for Afghanistan”, effective 20 May. More

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      Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won’t stop that | Steven Greenhouse

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      It’s hard to keep track of all the temper tantrums that Donald Trump has had because he’s so ticked off that one judge after another has ruled against his flood of illegal actions. In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president’s lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration.Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against “judicial activism”, while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a “judicial coup”. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing “USA-hating judges”. On Truth Social, he said: “How is it possible for [judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP’? What other reason could it be?”Trump is acting like the 10-year-old bully who pummeled a dozen classmates in the schoolyard, but when his teacher called him out for his thuggishness, he burst into tears and screamed: “This is so unfair! Why are you picking on me?”A word of advice to Trump: you should realize that dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you have flouted the law more than any previous president and because you and your flunkies keep misinterpreting and stretching the nation’s laws far beyond their meaning.Take Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, when he announced steep, across-the-board tariffs against 57 countries. On that day, Trump became the first president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose tariffs. To Trump’s dismay, three judges on the US court of international trade unanimously ruled that he had overstepped his authority and gone far beyond what that 1977 law allows presidents to do. The trade court wrote that the constitution gives Congress, not the president, power over tariff policy and that the 1977 law didn’t give Trump “unbounded” authority to impose tariffs.After that 28 May ruling, Trump’s latest tantrum began.Then, there’s his chest-thumping, cold-hearted rush to expel as many immigrants as possible. To accomplish that, Trump became the first president to invoke the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. twisting that law’s language to declare that several dozen gang members from Venezuela constitute a war-like invasion force, similar to an enemy army, who could therefore be deported without due process. But several sane, sober judges told Trump that he is full of it. There’s no war-like invasion here.And then there’s Trump’s effort to stomp on several prestigious law firms that have done things or hired people he doesn’t like. Trump became the first president to essentially put a gun to various law firms’ heads to try to make them submit to him. He sought to undermine those firms’ business with astonishingly vengeful executive orders that not only said that their lawyers couldn’t enter federal buildings and would lose their security clearances, but that their corporate clients might lose their federal contracts. And then there was the unspoken threat that Trump would block corporate deals that those firms’ lawyers were working on. This is poisonous stuff, punishing law firms for doing what our legal system has long called on firms to do: represent clients, even unpopular ones (even ones Trump doesn’t like).Here, Trump was engaging in a shakedown, in effect saying: “That’s a nice law firm you have. It’s a shame if something happens to it. (So you’d be smart to submit to my demands.)” Again, several judges told Trump he’s full of it, that the law firms hadn’t done anything wrong to warrant such illegal shakedown efforts.There are cases galore in which judges found that Trump acted illegally. Judges have provisionally blocked his push to bar international students from attending Harvard and ordered the release of several immigrant graduate students his administration arrested. Judges have ruled against Trump’s dismantling of the Department of Education, his freezing up to $3tn in funding for the states and his firing thousands of federal civil servants.Hating to see judges rule against his boss, Stephen Miller absurdly asserted: “We are living under a judicial tyranny,” while Leavitt carped that judges have “usurp[ed] the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him”. (What mandate? Trump didn’t even receive 50% of the vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.5 percentage points. Nor did Americans vote for Trump’s tariff chaos or his all-out war against universities.)What we’ve heard from Trump (and mouthpieces Leavitt and Miller) is dangerous stuff. Trump is essentially rejecting the idea of judicial review. Like many authoritarian rulers, he hates having judges weigh whether his actions have violated the law. Trump forgets that under the constitution, judges (not the president) are the umpires who rule whether the president or Congress is following or flouting the law. As Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Trump, said: “Trump’s attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers. It’s an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.”Trump’s attacks against the judiciary are dangerous in another way – they have literally endangered judges’ safety. In the five months before 1 March, 80 judges received threats, but after Trump’s tirades against judges began to crescendo in February, the number of threats soared: more than 160 judges received threats in the six weeks after 1 March. On Memorial Day, Trump loosed another rant, calling judges who ruled against him “monsters who want our country to go to hell”.With these diatribes, Trump is seeking to delegitimize the judiciary and turn the public against judges, just as his unrelenting attacks against the news media have helped cause many people to lose faith in the media, no matter that many news organizations are as accurate and fair-minded as ever (and far more truthful than Trump).Trump’s war against the judiciary has taken another form – his administration has evaded, skirted and ignored numerous judicial orders – stonewalling a judge’s request for information in an immigration case, failing to comply with the US supreme court’s call to “facilitate” the return of a wrongly deported immigrant, dragging its feet in restoring funding that had been illegally frozen.After the trade court’s ruling, Leavitt griped that judges issued more “injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years”. Leavitt is blind to the obvious reason for this – Trump, in churning out more than 150 executive orders, a record number – has far too often violated the law and the constitution with abandon, while Biden was far more scrupulous in complying with the law.Trump and cronies should recognize that there’s a very simple way to get judges to stop overruling his actions. All Trump has to do is stop taking all these illegal, vindictive actions and stop issuing all these destructive, lawless executive orders. What’s more, considering that Trump once tweeted: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he needs to stop acting like a modern-day king or Napoleon who is above the law.

      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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      Outcry after Boston teen arrested by Ice agents on way to volleyball practice

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      Trump administration officials sparked a huge protest on Sunday in a Boston suburb after immigration agents detained a high school student on his way to volleyball practice while they were seeking his father.The high schooler in question, 18-year-old Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, entered the United States on a student visa, according to a lawsuit filed on his behalf after his arrest. While his student visa status has lapsed, he is eligible for and intends to apply for asylum.Nonetheless, the head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on Monday defended his agency’s actions, saying the teen in question was “in this country illegally and we’re not going to walk away from anybody”.Gomes was arrested on Saturday in Milford, Massachusetts, where he lives.Ice’s acting director, Todd Lyons, and Patricia Hyde – who directs the agency’s enforcement and removal operations in Boston – acknowledged Gomes was not the target of the immigration investigation that led to his arrest and that authorities instead were seeking his father, who remains at large.But the Milford high school student had been driving his father’s vehicle when he was arrested following a traffic stop, Lyons said. Lyons said that when authorities encounter someone in the country illegally, “we will take action on that”.“We’re doing the job that Ice should have been doing all along,” he said. “We enforce all immigration laws.”The state’s Democratic governor, Maura Healey, said she was “disturbed and outraged” by Gomes’s arrest. And hundreds rallied in Milford on Sunday to protest against Gomes’s detention.A federal judge issued an emergency order on Sunday preventing authorities from transferring Gomes out of Massachusetts for at least 72 hours in response to his lawsuit arguing that he was unlawfully detained.Reuters contributed to this report More

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      US homeland security removes list of ‘sanctuary’ cities after sheriffs’ criticism

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      The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) removed a list of “sanctuary” states, cities and counties from its website following sharp criticism from a sheriffs’ association that said a list of “noncompliant” sheriffs could severely damage the relationship between the Trump administration and law enforcement.DHS on Thursday published a list of what it called sanctuary jurisdictions that it deemed were included in areas that have a policy of limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. The list prompted a response from the National Sheriffs’ Association, which represents more than 3,000 elected sheriffs across the country and generally supports federal immigration enforcement.Sheriff Kieran Donahue, president of the association, said in a statement on Saturday that DHS published “a list of alleged noncompliant sheriffs in a manner that lacks transparency and accountability”. Donahue said the list was created without input from sheriffs and “violated the core principles of trust, cooperation, and partnership with fellow law enforcement”.Donald Trump had called for his administration to tally apparent sanctuary jurisdictions, in a late April executive order, saying the lack of cooperation amounted to “a lawless insurrection”.The DHS website listing the jurisdictions was offline on Sunday, an issue that Fox News host Maria Bartiromo raised with the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on the talk show Sunday Morning Futures.“I saw that there was a list produced,” Bartiromo said. “Now, the list I don’t see anymore in the media. Do you have a list of the sanctuary cities that are actually hiding illegals right now?”Noem did not acknowledge the list being taken offline but said some localities had bristled.“Some of the cities have pushed back,” Noem said. “They think because they don’t have one law or another on the books that they don’t qualify, but they do qualify. They are giving sanctuary to criminals.”Leaders of some cities publicly questioned the sanctuary label this week, including jurisdictions in southern California, Colorado and Massachusetts.San Diego city attorney Heather Ferbert told local outlets that San Diego – named on the DHS list – had never adopted a sanctuary policy and that the move appeared to be politically motivated.“We suspect this is going to be used as additional threats and fear tactics to threaten federal funding that the city relies on,” she said.Immigrant advocates and some Democrats say sanctuary policies help build trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement so that residents will be more likely to report crimes.At a hearing before a US House of Representatives committee in March, mayors from Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York City, which vote majority Democrat, said sanctuary policies made their cities safer and that they would always honor criminal arrest warrants.Noem, who shares Trump’s hardline anti-immigration views, said the department would continue to use the sanctuary tally. DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The internet archive website Wayback Machine showed the list still online on Saturday. More