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      The Guardian view on Trump and children: protect the innocent from this dark vision of the US soul | Editorial

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      “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children,” Nelson Mandela observed 30 years ago. Though the ugly heart of the Trump administration has hardly been hidden, there is an especially grotesque contrast between its vaunted family values and its treatment of the young.On the campaign trail, Donald Trump declared: “I want a baby boom.” JD Vance, his vice-president, says he wants “more happy children in our country”. Maga pro-natalists are pushing incentives for families to have more children.Yet Bruce Lesley, president of the advocacy organisation First Focus on Children, says that we may never have seen an administration “so laser-focused on targeting the nation’s children for harm”. Its dismantling of the Department of Education is on hold thanks to a judge. But it has already slashed staff at agencies overseeing key services such as child protection and the enforcement of child support payments. Mr Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget sacrifices the interests of babies for those of billionaires, slashing foundational programmes that provide healthcare and food to more than two-fifths of American children.One detail is telling: it would also deny the child tax credit to families with mixed immigration status. Mr Trump’s vision of the nation is the antithesis of Mr Mandela’s inclusivity. Unaccompanied migrant children as young as four are facing immigration hearings without lawyers. That’s unlikely to concern him: as many as 1,360 children separated from their parents at the border in his first term have never been reunited with them.An estimated 5.6 million US-citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent. Almost 4% are at risk of being left with no parent in their home in the event of mass deportation. Mr Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship makes explicit the belief that these children are not truly American either. They are what the historian Prof Mae Ngai has called “alien citizens”, whose standing is deemed suspect – if not denied – due to their race. Young US citizens have been deported alongside parents who say they were given no option to leave their children, one of whom had late-stage cancer. In another case, a two-year-old was sent to foster care when her parents were deported: this time, her mother was reportedly given no option to take her.The immigration crackdown will further encourage employers short of workers to turn to children – often those born to migrants – for badly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs. “Why do we say we need to import foreigners, even import them illegally, when teenagers used to work at these resorts?” asked Florida’s governor, Ron deSantis. Child labour laws are already too frequently ignored, yet Republicans have loosened them further in 16 states in the last few years, and sought to do so in many more.Florida’s House of Representatives recently approved legislation allowing children as young as 14 to work overnight without breaks. Yet the state Senate chose not to move the bill – and overall more states strengthened than diluted labour protections last year. For now at least, the administration appears to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education programme. Mr Trump and his allies are exposing their grim vision of a nation in which only some children deserve to be treated with care and basic respect. Others must continue to fight to protect the most vulnerable.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      in US Politics

      I crisscrossed America to talk to people whose views I disagreed with. I now have one certainty

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      View image in fullscreenThe residential community was lodged near a national forest on the outskirts of Scottsdale, Arizona. Forbidding gates and sentry posts restricted access to the exclusive development and its elegant homes. But security here went much further.Each cul-de-sac in the colony had its own individual railway gate, and many of the homeowners had installed gates across their own driveways as well. Anyone coming in or out of those houses would have to clear three checkpoints that set them apart from the wider world beyond.I was astonished. But the security director at the gated community saw nothing unusual in such arrangements. “People shouldn’t be able to just walk into where you live. You should be able to defend yourself against the rest of the world.” Immigration officers were doing exactly the same thing along the country’s border, he added: defending us.I couldn’t help but think about what I had seen in the company of migrant aid volunteers earlier that week in southern Arizona, all the tattered clothes and humble belongings caught in the brush of a desert trail, attesting to the desperation of those who had fled through that harsh terrain.How could people be indifferent to such suffering, I asked one of the volunteers. “It’s like talking to a wall,” he replied.Over the last eight years, I have crisscrossed the United States as an anthropologist, trying to make sense of why the rifts in our national culture run so deep. I have talked with homebuilders in North Dakota and activists for housing justice in north Texas, with diesel truck enthusiasts in Iowa and pedestrian safety planners in Florida, with white nationalist demonstrators in Tennessee and environmental justice organizers in the Hudson River valley. I have logged many thousands of miles on local highways and country roads, striking up conversations with strangers on park benches and in derelict shopping malls.I recount those travels and their lessons in my new book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down. In it I argue that, in the US, we are at crossroads, poised between a politics of suspicion and retreat, and another founded on more expansive relationships of mutual aid and collective solidarity.In the many conversations and encounters that led to this book, I tried to approach people on their own terms, paying heed to their everyday commitments and concerns, often very different from mine. I have come away with a much better understanding of why things are as stuck as they are, and what it would take to truly change them.The challenges are real, as I saw one October in Shelbyville, Tennessee.View image in fullscreen“How are you feeling?” I asked the Nepali woman behind the counter of a gas station. She replied with a single word and a tight-lipped smile. “Scared.”Scheduled that Saturday morning in Shelbyville was a “White Lives Matter” political rally. Businesses downtown were shuttered. Police had cordoned off roads heading into the town. A pervasive thrum was in the air, from helicopters circling overhead. Dozens of officers in riot gear massed on the roofs of low buildings.The October 2017 rally followed the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where clashes between demonstrators and counter-protesters left dozens injured and one young woman, Heather Heyer, dead. The Shelbyville rally was organized by a southern separatist group called the League of the South, working with a larger umbrella of white nationalist groups called the Nationalist Front.“Which side are you on?” an officer asked as I approached the site. Long metal barricades divided the white nationalists from the counter-protesters who were also gathering that morning. I followed a handful of journalists into the security clearance area for the white nationalist demonstrators. I was hoping to talk with some of them, to try to understand why they had come to think of their own wellbeing in such starkly racist terms.Everyone was forced to mill around the checkpoint and submit to a pat-down in the name of safety. The process was long and arduous, so much so that it helped break the ice between a brown ethnographer and the white nationalists in his midst. Here was something we could complain about together, as if this was a painfully slow line at an airport terminal.View image in fullscreenI struck up a conversation with a bearded man who worked at a uniform factory in northern Alabama. He was wearing a red Maga cap, with an American flag draped around his shoulders – flagpoles had been banned. He admitted feeling stupid with a flag on his back. “What would look cool is a Swat vest and a gun,” he suggested, eyeing the officers nearby.Some of the demonstrators came down to the checkpoint in quasi-military formation, with helmeted young men in rows marching behind plastic shields as a ruddy-faced man with a thick white beard led them in a chant: “Closed borders! White nation! Now we start the deportation!” When they halted, I could see that some of them had swastikas and the letters “KKK” tattooed on their arms.Styled as foot soldiers, many startlingly young in age, these men were a deliberately provocative spectacle of fascist unity. They were also a minority among those who gathered for the white nationalist rally in Shelbyville. That left me curious about the other demonstrators who had joined in plain clothes. How did these ideas speak to them?I fell into conversation with a tall white man in a black Carhartt jacket. He didn’t want to divulge who he was, and nor, frankly, did I, but it turned out that he was raised in Brooklyn, not far from the Bronx borough where I was born. In his late 40s, with a salt-and-pepper beard, he had gone to the rally in Charlottesville and had come to Shelbyville for this event.“I have an affinity for this side,” he admitted. I introduced myself as a writer, and we wound up getting into a long discussion.“What do you think of this idea of an ethnostate?” I asked the man, bringing up the vision of a Balkanized white nation floated by rally organizers. “What would you do with people like me?”“What’s your heritage?” he asked.“My family is from India,” I said. “I was born and raised in this country, but my parents immigrated here.”“Aren’t you guys Aryans?” Both of us laughed uneasily.He asked when my family had come to the United States, adding that he had ancestors who came here during the revolutionary war era. “Our ancestors built this country for their posterity. We feel this is our inheritance.”“Let me tell you why I’m here,” I told him. “In the 1970s, there was a shortage of doctors in the United States. The government put out a call, and a whole bunch of them came from India. My dad’s a cardiologist. Over the years, he’s taken care of thousands of patients, saved a lot of lives. Does that give us a place here, or not?”“Yeah, that’s a part of our history,” he replied. “We can accept that. We can absorb a certain amount of other cultures.” The way he spoke, he seemed to be thinking of a national organism, its ability to tolerate some degree of foreign bodies in its midst.Still, the man from Brooklyn insisted, “there’s no living with the other.” What seemed to have gone missing here was the faith that one could live alongside others unlike oneself, sharing a collective life with them rather than living at the other’s expense.“You gotta put your own air mask on first,” he said. “You gotta take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else. You can’t help people if you cut your own throat.”View image in fullscreenPlaces of belonging can be conceived in defensive and xenophobic ways, as that white nationalist rally had in Shelbyville. But they can also be imagined and sustained in a more hopeful manner, as shared spaces of cultural resistance and transformation.I think, for example, of the members of the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship in north Texas, who led the effort to desegregate their town in the 1960s. I was privileged to meet some of these courageous women during my research.At the turn of the 20th century, the Black community of Denton was anchored in a prosperous enclave at the heart of the town, known as Quakertown. Like many other Black townships at time, Quakertown had thrived, with a school and many churches and businesses. Then, in the early 1920s, white civic leaders in Denton led a campaign to appropriate the Black township’s land, raze its buildings and place a public park for white families there instead.Many Black families were forced to leave Denton altogether, for other towns and states or farther afield. Those who remained rebuilt their community once again on a tract of land south-east of the town, past flour mills and two sets of railway tracks, a distant periphery that remains the nucleus of Denton’s Black population to this day.I met Alma Clark for the first time at the American Legion Senior Center in south-east Denton in 2017, when she was 89 years old. She scoffed at the ideas of health and sanitation used as rationale for Quakertown’s removal. “We went into the homes of white folk and cooked their food and cleaned their houses. We took care of their children. We were good enough for that,” she told me with a tart smile.However much labor the Black women and men of Denton contributed to the wellbeing of the town’s white residents, they had been cast into a space of public neglect. Under these circumstances, families in the community turned to strategies of collective support and caretaking.Women relied on one another to help with their children, as they juggled work and other responsibilities. Families added rooms to their own homes to house Black students admitted to Denton’s universities but denied a place in their dormitories.In the 1960s, Clark and other Black women in Denton came together with some white women in the town to create what came to be known as the Denton Women’s Interracial Fellowship. They began by opening their homes to each other, sharing meals for the first time. Eventually, their conversations led to public campaigns that drew dozens of active women in the town. The organization ensured that its membership remained Black and white in equal measure at any given time, and alternated its meetings regularly between Black and white homes.View image in fullscreenWomen in the fellowship made visible the harsh realities of racial segregation. They led a successful campaign to pave south-east Denton’s streets and equip them with streetlights. They organized voting drives to register new Black voters, and took to visiting local restaurants in interracial pairs to support their desegregation. They distributed cards that encouraged Denton city residents to sign a “good neighbor pledge” that affirmed the right of every person to rent, buy or build a home anywhere they wished, even as social and economic forces conspired to keep people mostly where they were.The legacy of the Women’s Interracial Fellowship remains widely visible in Denton today. A vivid mural depicting Clark and several other Black women activists with the organization spans both sides of the railway underpass leading into south-east Denton. An art installation commemorating their work for racial justice adorns a small downtown park, close to the central courthouse square from which a Confederate monument was finally removed in 2020. Contemporary antiracist organizing in the Black Lives Matter era has drawn from historical struggles in the town, on the more inclusive vision of home and community that activists have long summoned.“We had to help each other to survive,” Clark recollected to me in 2022, when I returned to Denton for the Juneteenth celebration that year.She went on to add a striking analogy. “It’s like making cornbread. You need meal, you need flour, you need baking powder, you need eggs. You need to put all those ingredients together to make that cornbread. You can’t do anything if you keep them separate.”View image in fullscreenAll of us have much to lose in the erosion of neighborly concern, the impetus to look out for others we don’t know that well. Neighborliness is a powerful image of collective belonging, especially in a world where relationships span the globe and the consequences of how we live extend to many distant and unseen places.In saying this, I don’t mean to idealize American neighbors and neighborhoods. Contemporary patterns of isolation draw on deep histories of racial segregation and systemic neglect in the United States, lines that have long been drawn between lives that matter and lives that don’t. At the same time, neighborliness has also long been practiced as a more expansive form of conviviality, equipping people to live with the reality of social difference and disagreement.One afternoon a few years ago, passing through a small town in southern Michigan, I went out to a park to catch up on some notes and phone calls. After some time, a white man in his 60s sat down on the bench beside me, and we fell into conversation. He was slightly drunk, a little red in the eye, and keen to talk. He had recently retired from work as a mechanic at a nearby plant. His wife was ailing, mostly bedridden at home, and he was worried about her medical care.I can’t remember how the subject of politics came up, but he told me that he had voted for Donald Trump in 2016. He also wanted me to understand that this didn’t change what he owed me as a newcomer to his town. No, he didn’t know me from Adam, but our meeting was the Lord’s blessing, he told me, and I ought to have someone around there to call on in case of trouble.He scribbled down his number and address on a scrap of paper and insisted that I take it. “I don’t care if you’re brown or red or whatever,” he told me, and I believed him.I was heading out the next morning, but I kept thinking about that unexpected gesture of kindness. It was like a flash of some other solidarity that still remained possible. I picked up a pie at a market nearby, meaning to drop it off for that man and his family. When I pulled up at the address he had shared, the shades were drawn, and no one seemed to be home. I left the pie and a note on the concrete landing of that small tract house clad in blue vinyl siding.I felt a bit nervous and exposed, walking back to my car. I was, after all, a stranger. But it felt like the right thing to do. He had treated me like a neighbor, and I wanted to reciprocate.Such aspirations will face serious tests in the years to come. How will people respond to the deportation of families who have lived beside them for decades, or the gutting of hard-won protections for clean water and air, or the removal of books meaningful to the most marginal members of their communities from local school curricula, or the deepening of media foxholes that celebrate masculine aggression and disdain for the struggles of others elsewhere?Xenophobic and authoritarian politics draw their power from a fear of foreigners and strangers, an idea that the dangers they pose are already around us, needing to be identified and rooted out. But as Toni Morrison observed, such ideas often reflect “an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging”. The problem lies less with the strangers among us than the strangeness within, the consequences of a feeling of radical estrangement from the world.In my writing, I try to show how everyday structures of isolation – at home and on the road, for the body and the mind – magnify the social and political divides we lament so often. These interlocking walls of everyday life sharpen the divide between insiders and outsiders, making it hard to take unfamiliar people and perspectives seriously, to acknowledge the needs of others and relate to their struggles.So much turns on the edges between the familiar and the foreign, these lines we’ve come to live with on a daily basis. Can we learn once again to take these edges as spaces of encounter, rather than hard divides between ourselves and the world beyond?It may be daunting, the idea of making a common life – in public space, in the pursuit of wellbeing on an imperiled Earth, even in the unpredictable span of a conversation – with others unlike ourselves. But we need to find our way back to the communion we may share with those beyond our bounds.We need to rekindle that open spirit of kinship once again.Anand Pandian is Krieger-Eisenhower professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Parts of this essay were adapted from his book, Something Between Us: The Everyday Walls of American Life, and How to Take Them Down, out now.Spot illustrations by Peter Gamlen. More

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      Stakes are high for US democracy as conservative supreme court hears raft of cases

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      A year has proved to be a long time on the scales of US justice.Less than 12 months ago, the US supreme court was in serious disrepute among liberals following a series of ethics scandals and a spate of highly contentious, conservative-leaning rulings. It culminated in a ruling last July vastly expanding a president’s immunity from prosecution, virtually guaranteeing that Donald Trump would escape criminal censure for the 6 January 2021 insurrection and retaining classified documents.So far had the court’s stock with Democrats fallen, that Joe Biden called for radical reforms on how the court was run and a constitutional amendment asserting that no president was above the law or immune for crimes committed in office.Now, with a re-elected and vengeful Trump having run rampant over democratic norms by issuing a fusillade of often illegal and unconstitutional executive orders, the same court – with the same nine justices on the bench – is being cast in the unlikely role of potential saviour of American democracy.Critics who once derided the judicial consequences of the court’s six-three conservative majority hope that the justices will show enough fealty to the US constitution to mitigate the effect of Trump’s all-out assault on a range of rights, from birthright citizenship to basic due process appeals against deportation, and preserve the constitutional republic’s defining contours.“The court is certainly a very important institution at this moment since Congress is completely pliant and not asserting its own prerogatives and the executive branch doesn’t seem to be guided by any internal legal constraint,” said Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University and a former high-ranking justice department official in the Biden administration.The court has already adjudicated in several high-profile cases since Trump’s return – notably ruling against the administration in ordering it to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Maryland resident wrongly deported to El Salvador.But it has ruled in Trump’s favour, at least temporarily, in several others.The stakes are about to be raised further still as a spate of cases arising from rulings against the administration by lower-court judges awaits the supreme court’s final say before its current term ends this month.These include: the rights of lower courts to issue injunctions against Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed in the constitution; an attempt by Tennessee to ban or limit transgender care for minors; a complaint by parents in Maryland against allowing LGBTQ+ books in elementary schools; the need for insurers to cover preventive healthcare costs under the Affordable Care Act; and attempts to cut off public funding for Planned Parenthood.Added to that daunting schedule, the justices can expect additional unaccustomed summer workload in the shape of seemingly unending emergency cases generated by Trump’s no-holds-barred attempt to transform government.Most experts believe the court will ultimately rule against Trump’s attempt to undermine birthright citizenship rights, given that they are so clearly defined in the 14th amendment of the constitution. Yet the devil may be in the detail. Some analysts believe the court has already lent the administration’s case unwarranted credibility by agreeing to consider its challenge against lower courts’ powers to issue nationwide injunctions on the subject. Perhaps tellingly, the court has not called for a supplemental briefing on whether Trump’s 20 January executive order was legal.Hopes that the current court can act as a brake on Trump seem forlorn given its conservative majority and the fact that three of its members – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – were appointed to the bench by Trump himself. In addition, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito consistently take hardline positions that seem predisposed to favour Trump.Yet speculation that the chief justice, John Roberts, and Coney Barrett have become disenchanted by the brazenness of Trump’s actions has fueled optimism. Some believe they could vote with the court’s three liberal justices, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who consistently issue dissenting opinions on rightwing rulings – frequently enough on key occasions to form an effective bulwark.But Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan and author of a book on the court entitled Lawless: How the Supreme Court Runs on Conservative Grievance, Fringe Theories, and Bad Vibes, is sceptical.A recent ruling upholding the president’s firing of the head of the National Labor Relations Board, Gwynne Wilcox, which gave Congress the power to limit a president’s ability to remove officials from independent agencies – shows the conservative justices’ reverting to type, she said.“Some people wondered: ‘Was the court going to have second thoughts about, for example, their immunity decision giving Donald Trump such leading powers, including powers to act outside of the law and above it?’” Litman argued. “I think the Wilcox ruling underscored that the answer is definitively no.”Underpinning the conservative justices’ approach is the unitary executive theory, which posits that the president has sole authority over the government’s executive branch, allowing him to fire members of nominally independent agencies without cause.“They have been pushing this theory for over three decades and now they have a chance to make a pretty muscular version of it the law,” Litman said. “Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett understand that the court can’t let Donald Trump get away with everything, including usurping Congress’s power or obviously depriving individuals of due process. But short of that, I don’t think they are having any kind of second thoughts about their own views of executive power or about the law more generally.”The few cases of the court standing up to Trump, argues Litman, have been “overplayed” and pale in importance compared with other rulings that have emboldened the president, including upholding the stripping of temporary protected status from about 300,000 Venezuelans.Greene defined the court’s approach as “formalist” and ill-suited to counter Trump’s lawbreaking. He contrasted it with the much bolder ethos under Chief Justice Earl Warren’s leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, when the court became renowned for creatively enforcing racial desegregation and civil rights orders in the south.“Trump’s modus operandi is to exploit what he perceives as weaknesses in the system of enforcement and accountability,” Greene said. “If he thinks that courts are not going to be able to step in, he will try to exploit that as much as he can, unless and until he’s stopped by some political actor or an actor with more power.“The Trump administration is exploiting the formality and the lack of creativity of courts in general, but the supreme court in particular.”The court’s writ has already been exposed as limited by Trump’s failure to comply with its order to facilitate the return of Ábrego García to the US.According to Greene, the White House’s failure to police its own actions to ensure they are in line with the law and the constitution already amounts to a constitutional crisis, because the courts lack the time and resources to counter unbridled violations.That puts added onus on the supreme court to fulfill its role as ultimate arbiter, argues Litman.“We should continue to demand that they actually do uphold the law,” she said. “I don’t think we should just give up and give in to their inclination to not enforce the law and allow Donald Trump to get away with legal violations. If they don’t, force them to expend the capital and pay a price in their public approval rating.” More

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

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

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

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      Supreme court allows White House to revoke temporary protected status of many migrants

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      The US supreme court on Friday announced it would allow the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants living in the United States, bolstering the Republican president’s drive to step up deportations.The court put on hold Boston-based US district judge Indira Talwani’s order halting the administration’s move to end the immigration humanitarian “parole” protections granted to 532,000 people by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, potentially exposing many of them to rapid removal from the country, while the detailed case plays out in lower courts.As with many of the court’s emergency orders – after rapid appeals brought the case to their bench – the decision issued on Friday was unsigned and gave no reasoning. However two of the court’s three liberal-leaning justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, publicly dissented.The court “botched” its assessment of whether the administration was entitled to freeze Talwani’s decision pending the litigation, Jackson wrote in an accompanying opinion.The outcome, Jackson wrote, “undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending”.Jackson also said that “it is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum pre-decision damage.”She added that those living under parole protections in this case now face “two unbearable options”.One option is to “elect to leave the United States and thereby, confront ‘dangers in their native countries,’ experience destructive ‘family separation’ and possibly ‘forfeit any opportunity to obtain a remedy based on their … claims”, Jackson wrote.The other option is that they could remain in the US after parole termination and “risk imminent removal at the hands of government agents, along with its serious attendant consequences”.To Jackson, “either choice creates significant problems for respondents that far exceed any harm to the government … At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgement regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to the kind of practical impact.”Immigration parole is a form of temporary permission under American law to be in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit”, allowing recipients to live and work in the US. Biden, a Democrat, used parole as part of his administration’s approach to handling migrants entering at the US-Mexico border.Such a status does not offer immigrants a long-term path towards citizenship but it can typically be renewed multiple times. A report from the American Immigration Council found that halting the program would, apart from the humanitarian effect, be a blow to the US economy, as households in the US where the breadwinners have temporary protected status (TPS) collectively earned more than $10bn in total income in 2021 while paying nearly $1.3bn in federal taxes.Trump called for ending humanitarian parole programs in an executive order signed on 20 January, his first day back in office. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) subsequently moved to terminate them in March, cutting short the two-year parole grants. The administration said revoking the parole status would make it easier to place migrants in a fast-track deportation process called “expedited removal”.The case is one of many that the Trump administration has brought in an emergency fashion to the nation’s highest judicial body seeking to undo decisions by judges impeding the president’s sweeping policies, including several targeting immigrants.The supreme court on 19 May also let Trump end TPS that had been granted under Biden to about 350,000 additional Venezuelans living in the United States, while that legal dispute plays out.Jackson was the only justice to publicly dissent then, while House Democrats condemned the supreme court’s decision.In a bid to reduce unauthorized border crossings, Biden starting in 2022 offering limited extra pathways to come to the US legally, allowing Venezuelans who entered the US by air to request a two-year parole if they passed security checks and had a US financial sponsor. Biden expanded that eligibility process to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those countries.The plaintiffs in this case, a group of migrants granted parole and Americans who serve as their sponsors, sued administration officials claiming they violated federal law governing the actions of government agencies.Talwani in April found that the law governing such parole did not allow for the program’s blanket termination, instead requiring a case-by-case review. The Boston-based first US circuit court of appeals declined to put the judge’s decision on hold and the government appealed.The justice department told the supreme court that Talwani’s order had upended “critical immigration policies that are carefully calibrated to deter illegal entry”, effectively “undoing democratically approved policies that featured heavily in the November election” that returned Trump to the presidency.The plaintiffs told the supreme court they would face grave harm if their parole is cut short given that the administration has indefinitely suspended processing their pending applications for asylum and other immigration relief.They said they would be separated from their families and immediately subject to expedited deportation “to the same despotic and unstable countries from which they fled, where many will face serious risks of danger, persecution and even death”.Speaking at the White House on Friday afternoon, Donald Trump praised the decision, saying “a couple of hours ago we had a great decision from the supreme court that’s very important”.Reuters contributed reporting More

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      The chaos Elon Musk and Doge are leaving behind in Washington

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      Elon Musk formally exited his role in the Trump administration on Wednesday night, ending a contentious and generally unpopular run as a senior adviser to the president and de facto head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge). Though he promised efficiency and modernization, Musk leaves behind a trail of uncertainty and reduced functionality.The timing of Musk’s departure lines up with the end of his 130-day term limit as a “special government employee” but also plays a part in an effort by the billionaire to signal a wider shift away from Washington as he faces backlash from the public and shareholders. Musk has recently made a show of refocusing his efforts on his tech companies in interviews, saying that he has spent too much time focused on politics and plans to reduce his political spending in the future.As Musk moves on, he consigns a mess of half-realized plans and gutted agencies to his acolytes installed in key positions across the federal government. His departure throws Doge’s already chaotic impact on the government into an even grayer limbo, with questions over how much power the nebulous taskforce will have without him and who, if anyone, might rebuild the programs and services it destroyed.Doge’s debrisMusk’s initial pitch for Doge was to save $2tn from the budget by rooting out rampant waste and fraud, as well as to conduct an overhaul of government software that would modernize how federal agencies operate. Doge so far has claimed to cut about $140bn from the budget – although its “wall of receipts” is notorious for containing errors that overestimate its savings. Donald Trump’s new tax bill, though not part of Doge and opposed by Musk, is also expected to add $2.3tn to the deficit, nullifying any savings Doge may have achieved. Its promises of a new, modernized software have frequently been limited to AI chatbots – some of which were already in the works under the Biden administration.The greater impact of Doge has instead been its dismantling of government services and humanitarian aid. Doge’s cuts have targeted a swath of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization, which handles weather and natural disaster forecasting and plunged others such as the Department of Veterans Affairs into crises. Numerous smaller agencies, such as one that coordinates policy on homelessness, have been in effect shut down. Doge has brought several bureaus to their knees, with no clear plan of whether the staff Musk leaves behind will try to update or maintain their services or simply shut them off.In one early example of its cuts and the holes in government they have created, Doge targeted the government tech group that partnered with federal agencies to provide tech solutions, known as 18F.When Doge staffers entered the General Services Administration agency that housed the 18F Office, former employees have said they appeared to fundamentally misunderstand how the government operates and the challenges of creating public services.Former 18F director Lindsay Young, who is now part of a legal appeal that contends the firing of 18F violated legal requirements, is concerned that Doge’s cuts will have long-lasting effects on government functions.“In government, it’s just so much easier to tear things down than it is to build things up,” Young said.The mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services represented a similar loss of institutional knowledge that Doge does not seem intent on replacing.Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has been tracking Doge’s cuts, used the agency’s tobacco unit as an example, which was severely affected by the cuts. “The loss of so much expertise, especially in the healthcare area will mean that more Americans will become sick or die earlier than they might have,” he said. “It also may take many years and great expenditure of resources to restore that experience and expertise.”Musk’s gutting of USAid, formerly the world’s largest single provider of humanitarian aid, is one of the starkest examples of the disarray and harm that Doge’s cuts have caused. The US canceled approximately 83% of USAid programs, imperiling services around the world aimed at humanitarian assistance and disease prevention. One pioneering program under USAid, Pepfar, which coordinates the US HIV/Aids response, has seen its services reduced worldwide and its staff left in confusion over what they can still do for people who relied on their organization. Doge’s cuts to the program have likewise threatened the rollout of a new anti-HIV drug that researchers have hailed as a “miracle” for its effectiveness.As Musk returns to Tesla and SpaceX, the agencies he laid waste to are left to pick up the pieces.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Doge staffers still holding sway in governmentWhile Musk is returning to his tech empire, many of the former employees and inexperienced young engineers whom he hired to work for Doge are set to remain part of the government. One of the largest questions about what Doge’s future looks like is whether these staffers, some of whom gained near unfettered access to the government’s most sensitive data, will retain the same powers they enjoyed under Musk.Doge staffers, such as billionaire investor and Musk ally Antonio Gracias, have embedded themselves at key agencies such as the Social Security Administration and Federal Aviation Administration. They have worked as a sort of parallel government task force, operating with a lack of transparency as their attempts to access databases and migrate data has caused disarray and technical problems. Whether Trump and agency heads allow them to continue on with carte blanche remains unseen.Already at least two prominent Doge staffers have followed Musk to the exit. The billionaire’s longtime top lieutenant Steve Davis, who was running the day-to-day operations of Doge, left his role on Thursday. Spokesperson Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, also left the White House to work full-time for Musk, according to CNN.Some of Musk’s dictates have already been rolled back since he left Washington earlier this month, including a much-derided mandate that required federal employees to send a list of five things that they accomplished each week. The weekly email, which was initially introduced with the threat of being fired for non-compliance, was largely ignored and viewed by many as pointless busywork. On Wednesday, the Pentagon formally announced that it would halt the practice.Doge is not being left leaderless, however. Taking over for Musk, according to the Wall Street Journal, is Christian nationalist and key figure in the rightwing Project 2025 manifesto Russ Vought. A longtime believer that the president should have sweeping executive powers, Vought has said that he wants federal employees to be left “in trauma” and to slash federal funding.Musk has praised Doge’s work and pledged that it will continue without him, and as recently as this week is still removing veteran officials it disagrees with from federal agencies. Even at reduced numbers, Musk’s allies also still have access to immense amounts of sensitive and confidential data they are reportedly intending to use to surveil immigrants.What seems farther away than ever in the chaos, however, is Musk’s promise to make the government more efficient and better serve the public.“You don’t need that many people to decide to just cut things,” 18F’s Young said. “But if you actually want to build things, that takes thought. It takes effort.” More

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      Trump administration sets quota to arrest 3,000 people a day in anti-immigration agenda

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      The Trump administration has set aggressive new goals in its anti-immigration agenda, demanding that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day – or more than a million in a year.The new target, tripling arrest figures from earlier this year, was delivered to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) leaders by Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, in a strained meeting last week.The intense meeting, first reported by Axios and confirmed by the Guardian, involved Ice officials from enforcement and removal operations (ERO) and homeland security investigations (HSI) – both separate offices within DHS. ERO is in charge of immigration enforcement, including arrests, detention and deportation, while HSI typically focuses on investigating transnational crime, such as drug trafficking, human smuggling and the spread of online child abuse.The 21 May meeting in Washington DC is the latest example of the increasing pressure being placed on officials nationwide to increase the number of arrests of immigrants, as the administration doubles down on its anti-immigration agenda.The latest phase of the crackdown includes new tactics, such as mandating federal law enforcement agents outside Ice to assist in arrests and transports, more deputizing of compliant state and local law enforcement agencies, and arresting people at locations that were once protected, like courthouses.“ This administration came into office with the illusion that they had been given a broad mandate to effectuate an aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, and they are doubling down now on that agenda,” said Nayna Gupta, policy director for the American Immigration Council. “ Public polling is showing decreasing support for Trump’s immigration agenda, as Americans wake up to the reality that mass deportation means arrests of our neighbors and friends, masked agents in our communities and people afraid to go to work and show up to school, in ways that undermine our local economies.”Helter-skelter action has led to citizens caught up in the dragnet, Ice skirting due process – to the chagrin of the supreme court and lower courts – over-crowding in detention centers, arrests based on ideology and officials deporting people to third countries.“The sweeping Ice raids and arrests are hitting families, longtime residents, children and communities in a way never seen before,” said Jesse Franzblau, associate director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center.As the number of people crossing the border into the US without authorization has plummeted even further than after the final Biden crackdown, operations in the US interior have increased.“Under Secretary Noem, we are delivering on President Trump’s and the American people’s mandate to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens and make America safe,” Tricia McLaughlin, the homeland security assistant secretary, said in a statement.But even if the new target is fulfilled, it’s a far cry from Trump’s election campaign pledges to deport 15m to 20m people, which itself is more than the estimated 11m undocumented population.Agents with the FBI, HSI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and other federal law enforcement agencies have been co-opted from normal priorities to carry out immigration enforcement work. Current and former federal officials told the Guardian there is concern that important non-immigration-related investigations are falling by the wayside as a result.There has also been a huge escalation by local police and sheriff’s departments assisting, deputized by Ice to perform federal immigration arrests under a program called 287(g).Ice has also been targeting unusual places.On Tuesday, Ice and several other federal law enforcement agencies arrested roughly 40 people on the Massachusetts islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. The US Coast Guard transported those apprehended, Ice said, angering some residents, local media reported.The agency has also been arresting people at courthouses throughout the country – a trend that has troubled advocates and policy analysts.“We’re seeing the Trump administration take the unprecedented step of arresting non-citizens who are following the government’s rules and procedures, and showing up for their court hearings,” said Gupta. “ They are desperate to reach a certain number of arrests per day. And the only way they can find non-citizens easily and quickly is to go to the courthouses, where they [immigrants] are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.”On Wednesday, sources told the Guardian that officials had arrested people at two separate immigration courts in New York City. The outlet the City observed seven people arrested in a lower Manhattan court.Internal documents accessed by the Washington Post show Ice officers in more than 20 states have been instructed to arrest people at courthouses immediately after a judge orders them deported or after their criminal cases are dropped and they try to leave.The number of people held in detention by Ice reached 49,000 by 18 May, an increase of more than 10,000 since Trump took office, with the agency using local jails and federal prisons to hold immigrants, amid overcrowding.Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University who closely tracks immigration detention data, said of the 3,000 daily arrest quota: “ The big question for me is: where are they going to put people?”Meanwhile, last month, the Trump administration ordered immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases by denying asylum seekers a hearing. The directive “has nothing to do with efficiency – it’s about slamming shut the courthouse door on people who have the right to seek asylum and a fair day in court”, Shayna Kessler, the director of the Advancing Universal Representation initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.On Capitol Hill, the major spending bill passed by the House would balloon spending for immigration enforcement, at the US-Mexico border and in the interior, while cutting everyday services.“The administration is on a reckless spending spree, counting on Congress to bail them out for overspending hundreds of millions of dollars in private prison contracts with ties to top-level officials,” Franzblau said.He concluded: “It is beyond cruel to superfund Ice’s rampant violations of constitutional protections and expand the deadly immigration detention and enforcement apparatus.” More

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      Judge says Trump’s bid to deport Mahmoud Khalil is unconstitutional

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      The Trump administration’s bid to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist, is likely unconstitutional, a US judge has said.In a lengthy order issued Wednesday, Judge Michael Farbiarz wrote that the government’s primary justification for removing Khalil – that his beliefs may pose a threat to US foreign policy – could open the door to vague and arbitrary enforcement.Still, Farbiarz stopped short of ordering Khalil released from a Louisiana jail, finding his attorneys had not sufficiently responded to another charge brought by the government: that Khalil did not properly disclose certain personal details in his permanent residency application.The judge said he planned to issue an order shortly outlining next steps in the case.Khalil, a legal US resident, was detained by federal immigration agents on 8 March in the lobby of his university-owned apartment, the first arrest under Donald Trump’s widening crackdown on students who joined campus protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.He has been held for nearly 12 weeks at an immigration detention center in Jena, Louisiana, missing the birth of his first child and his recent graduation from Columbia University.Attorneys for Khalil argue his detention is part of a broader attempt by the Trump administration to suppress constitutionally protected free speech.In letters sent from the jail, Khalil has maintained that his arrest was “a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza”.The federal government has not accused Khalil of breaking any laws. Instead, they have submitted a memo signed by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, arguing that Khalil’s presence in the US may pose a threat to US foreign policy interests.The government has offered the same justification to detain other pro-Palestinian activists, including another student at Columbia, Mohsen Mahdawi; a Tufts University student, Rümeysa Öztürk; and a Georgetown University scholar, Badar Khan Suri. All three have won their custody in recent weeks as they continue to fight their cases.In Khalil’s case, the government also said he withheld information from his residency application about his involvement in some organizations, including a United Nations agency that resettles Palestinian refugees and a Columbia protest group.The judge on Wednesday said attorneys for Khalil had not properly responded to those allegations, but would be permitted to address the issue in the future.Nico Perrino of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called it a “mixed ruling” on Khalil’s motion for a preliminary injunction, because the judge wrote that he “is likely to succeed on his First Amendment claim, but likely to lose on a residency application issue. For that reason, the judge denied the request for a preliminary injunction, pending further briefing on the First Amendment issue.”Farbiarz’s ruling marked the first time a federal judge had weighed in on the constitutionality of Trump’s use of a law granting the US secretary of state the power to seek the deportation of any non-citizen whose presence in the country is deemed adverse to US foreign policy interests.The Newark, New Jersey-based judge said the law, known as section 1227, was vague because people would have no way of knowing what might get them deported.“An ordinary person would have had no real inkling that a Section 1227 removal could go forward in this way – without the Secretary first determining that there has been an impact on American relations with another country,” Farbiarz said in a 101-page ruling.Khalil and his supporters say his arrest and attempted deportation are violations of his right to freedom of speech under the US constitution’s first amendment. Farbiarz has blocked officials from deporting Khalil while his challenge to the constitutionality of his arrest plays out.He wrote that he would not rule for now on whether Khalil’s first amendment rights had been violated.In a statement, Khalil’s legal team said it would give Farbiarz the additional argument he sought as quickly as possible.“Every day Mahmoud spends languishing in an Ice detention facility in Jena, Louisiana, is an affront to justice, and we won’t stop working until he is free,” his lawyers said. More