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      Trump picks venture capitalist David Sacks as AI and crypto ‘czar’

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      Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he was nominating podcaster and former PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks to be his White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar, continuing a pattern of rewarding big donors with political power.Sacks, a venture capitalist and Silicon Valley insider, hosted big spenders at his San Francisco mansion in June to support the Trump campaign, with tickets ranging up to $300,000 a head. The event reportedly raked in more than $12m.A host of the popular podcast All-In, Sacks shares the mic with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg in weekly episodes that focus on “all things economic, tech, political, social and poker”.He has also been closely linked with Elon Musk and helped to back his bid to acquire Twitter, the social media platform renamed X. The two tech titans reportedly joined together to push the president-elect to name JD Vance as his running mate.Trump clearly heeded the advice. And now he has welcomed Sacks into the federal government to offer guidance and leadership to bolster the crypto industry and artificial intelligence, “two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness”, according to Trump’s post.Along with this new position as an advisor, Trump has tapped Sacks to head his council of advisors for science and technology, an independent committee of experts historically charged with helping presidents make important decisions and developing evidence-based recommendations on policy.Their work affects a range of specialized areas, from energy and the environment to public health and national security.The committee is currently co-chaired by three esteemed scientists, including Dr Arati Prabhakar, an engineer and applied physicist and former director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.Sacks will take on a specific set of priorities, according to Trump’s post, which did not delve into if science will play a part.“He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship,” Trump continued. “He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the US.”The Sacks announcement came among a slew of posts shared in the evening on Thursday as Trump named other allies of his to the incoming administration.David Perdue, a former Senator and long-time Maga loyalist who faced federal scrutiny over his stock trading while in office, was named as the ambassador to China – a key diplomatic role as Trump stokes trade tensions.Rodney S Scott, the former chief of the US Border Patrol and a border-wall advocate, was picked for US Customs and Border Protection commissioner. Caleb Vitello, who currently serves as assistant director of the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs was selected as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Former Border Patrol agent Brandon Judd was named ambassador to Chile. Ice special agent Tony Salisbury was chosen for deputy homeland security adviser. More

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      Bahamas rejects Trump proposal to take in deported migrants

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      The Bahamas has rejected a proposal from the incoming Trump administration to take in deported people, as the president-elect seeks to follow up on pledges to slash immigration.Donald Trump’s team has drawn up a list of countries to which it wants to deport migrants when their home countries refuse to accept them, according to NBC News.But the Bahamas said it had “reviewed and firmly rejected” the plan.Prime Minister Philip Davis’s office said his government had received a proposal from the Trump transition team “to accept deportation flights of migrants from other countries”.“Since the prime minister’s rejection of this proposal, there has been no further engagement or discussions with the Trump transition team,” the statement added.Other countries that Trump is considering include Turks and Caicos, Panama, and Grenada, sources told NBC.The president-elect based his successful White House run on vicious anti-immigrant rhetoric, blaming them for a supposed national crime wave and promising to carry out mass deportations.Trump’s team made no immediate comment on Thursday about the Bahamas’ rejection of the proposal, which appeared to reveal one part of how he plans to enact radical immigration reform when in office.The deportation plan could mean that people are permanently displaced in countries to which they have no links.It is not clear if the deported people would be allowed to work – or what pressure Trump may apply to get countries to agree, NBC reported.The US government has struggled for years to manage its southern border with Mexico, and Trump on the campaign trail targeted voters by claiming an “invasion” is under way by migrants he says will rape and murder Americans.At rallies, Trump repeatedly railed against undocumented immigrants, attacking those who “poison the blood” of the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe has vowed to tackle migrant gangs using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 – which allows the federal government to round up and deport foreigners belonging to enemy countries.Trump also promoted the fictitious story that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.The incoming president last month said he was bringing back the hardline immigration official Tom Homan to oversee the country’s borders.Homan led immigration enforcement during part of Trump’s first administration.A British plan to deport its asylum seekers to Rwanda was dropped earlier this year when the Labour party took power under Keir Starmer after ousting the Conservatives. More

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      If Trump’s tariffs start a trade war, it would be an economic disaster | Mark Weisbrot

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      “To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favorite word,” said Donald Trump last month. Pundits, politicians and financial markets are trying to figure out why, since he announced a week ago that he would impose tariffs on the United States’s three biggest trading partners: 25% for Mexico and Canada, and 10% for China.One theory is that tariffs can be a beautiful distraction. Trump, more than any previous US president, has fed on distractions for years, both to campaign and to govern. He can move seamlessly from one distraction to the next, like a magician preparing for the opportune moment to pull a coin from where it appears to have been hidden behind your ear.Although he still has seven weeks before he takes office, he could use a distraction that can start sooner. He has run into problems with cabinet and other appointments that require Senate confirmation. Of course he could easily find people who would do his bidding and be acceptable to a Senate with a Republican majority. But that would defeat the main purpose of nominating people who seem indefensible: to force Republican senators to display the abject subservience that Trump needs to be public, in order to ensure his unwavering dominance within his party.This is no small part of his governing strategy; it involves a big takeaway from the failures of his first term, from his point of view. The lesson is: loyalty to Trump first. Violators will be banished. And with small margins in the Senate and the House, things could begin to unravel if this core imperative goes unenforced.But the days before Trump actually takes office could also be the best time for him to use the threat of tariffs to begin bullying foreign governments for things that might benefit his allies, donors or himself. Other governments besides the three that he named are trying to figure out what they can offer Trump to avoid the economic disruption of tariffs. Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, who does not see Trump as a friend, has urged the EU to negotiate with him, rather than adopt a retaliatory, eg tariff, response.Trump’s two offered pretexts for the tariff threat – migration and drugs, in this case fentanyl – are not credible. About 18% of the undocumented people encountered by border patrol over the past year have been from Venezuela and Cuba, two countries that have been devastated economically by sanctions imposed by the US government. If reducing immigration were really Trump’s concern, he would not have deployed sanctions that have driven millions of people from their homes to the US border; and he could end these sanctions in January by himself.Broad economic sanctions are a form of economic violence which targets civilians in order to achieve political ends, including regime change. US congressman Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, made this clear in a letter that he wrote to Joe Biden asking for the sanctions on Venezuela to be dropped. The Trump sanctions in Venezuela in 2017 killed tens of thousands of civilians during the first year, and many more in the years that followed, including under Biden.As for fentanyl, about 75,000 people died from overdoses of this drug in 2023. But it’s difficult to see how Trump’s tariffs could help solve this problem. It’s a glaring example of how more than four decades of a failed “war on drugs”, based on criminalization of use and supply-side intervention, have made things worse. In this case the drug war has led to an innovation – fentanyl – that is vastly more powerful than heroin, much cheaper to produce, more addictive and easier to transport, distribute and produce.There is general agreement in the economic research on the effects of Trump’s trade and tariff wars in his first term as president, in which he placed tariffs on about $380bn of US imports. The overall impact on living standards for US workers and most Americans is found to be negative, with the cost of the tariffs being absorbed by US consumers. Employment overall did not increase, and may have fallen due to the negative impact of retaliatory tariffs.The economic research looking at the expected impacts of tariffs that Trump has talked about going forward also finds the impact on the US economy to be negative. And there is potential for much more damage if other countries respond with more retaliatory tariffs than they did in 2018-2020.Meanwhile, the productivity of Trump’s tariff offensive in generating distractions remains high. On Sunday he took a shot at the so-called Brics countries – Brazil, Russia, India, China and other economic powers: “We require a commitment from these countries,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “that they will neither create a new Brics currency nor back any other currency to replace the mighty US dollar or they will face 100% tariffs and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful US economy.”None of these things will happen while Trump is in office. Nor will threats like this deter the majority of the world, when it is ready, from replacing a system of global governance that is overwhelmingly run by one country with help from the richest people in other rich countries. Our current system is one in which the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar-based financial system bestows upon the US government gives the president the power to destroy whole economies with the stroke of a pen.But this is a longer story; for Trump it’s just another threat and another distraction in the post-truth world that he, as much as anyone, helped create. But he will need more than distractions to take this country further down the road toward de-democratization, which is what brought to him and his party the power that they now have.

      Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He is the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy More

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      Millions of Mexican Americans were deported in the 1930s. Are we about to repeat this ‘ethnic cleansing’?

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      One sunny afternoon in February, a large group of plainclothes federal agents descended on Los Angeles’s La Placita Park, a sanctuary and bustling cultural hub for the city’s growing Mexican diaspora. Wielding guns and batons, they barricaded the park and demanded proof of citizenship or legal residency from the congregants trapped within.Those who failed to produce papers were arrested. More than 400 people were detained and forced on a train back to Mexico, a place many had never been.It’s a scene many fear will come to pass in president-elect Donald Trump’s second term, especially after he doubled down on a campaign promise to “launch the largest deportation operation” in US history, and confirmed he would use the military to execute hardline immigration policies.But this particular episode happened in 1931, as part of an earlier era of mass deportations that scholars say is reminiscent of what is unfolding today.The La Placita sweep became the first public immigration raid in Los Angeles, and one of the largest in a wave of “repatriation drives” that rolled across the country during the Great Depression. Mexican farm workers, indiscriminately deemed “illegal aliens”, became scapegoats for job shortages and shrinking public benefits. President Herbert Hoover’s provocative slogan, “American jobs for real Americans”, kicked off a spate of local legislation banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent. Police descended on workplaces, parks, hospitals and social clubs, arresting and dumping people across the border in trains and buses.View image in fullscreenNearly 2 million Mexican Americans, more than half US citizens, were deported without due process. Families were torn apart, and many children never again saw their deported parents.Hoover’s Mexican repatriation program is, among mass deportation efforts in the past, most similar to Trump’s stated plans, said Kevin R Johnson, a professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, School of Law.“This was a kind of ethnic cleansing, an effort to remove Mexicans from parts of the country,” Johnson said. “This episode had a ripple effect that lasted generations, and a long-term impact on the sense of identity on persons of Mexican ancestry.”In Los Angeles, Johnson said, it was a common practice for Mexicans to deny their Mexican ancestry and claim Spanish or European heritage to avoid suspicion. Well into the 1960s, Johnson said, people were afraid to leave home without a passport or identification papers lest they be arrested. More than 400,000 Mexican Americans were deported in California alone, but the legacy of repatriation went unacknowledged for many decades. Finally, in 2005, California state senator Joseph Dunn helped pass legislation apologizing to people who suffered under the program.Since his first presidential run, Trump has invoked President Dwight D Eisenhower’s mass deportation program as a blueprint for his own agenda. During the second world war, the US and Mexican government enacted the Bracero program that allowed Mexican farm hands to temporarily work in the US. But many growers continued to hire undocumented immigrants because it was cheaper. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration cracked down on undocumented labor by launching “Operation Wetback”, a yearlong series of raids named after a racial epithet for people who illegally crossed the Rio Grande.Border patrol agents used military-style tactics to sweep up laborers from farms and factories and send them back to Mexico. More than 3,000 people were expelled every day, and many died under inhumane conditions in detention and transport. The government said it deported more than 1 million people in total, though historians have put the actual number at closer to 300,000.The politics of deportation have always contained an important “racial dimension”, said Mae Ngai, a historian whose book Impossible Subjects explores how illegal migration became the central issue in US immigration policy.View image in fullscreenTrump has deployed racist tropes against various ethnic groups, including Mexicans as drug-dealing “rapists” and Haitians as pet eaters, while lamenting a lack of transplants from “nice”, white-majority countries like Denmark and Switzerland. Last month, sources close to the president told NBC News that he could prioritize deporting undocumented Chinese nationals.“He’s been very clear about going after people of color, people from ‘shithole countries,’” she said, referring to a 2018 remark from Trump about crisis-stricken nations like El Salvador and Haiti.Trump could plausibly deport a million people using military-style raids of the Eisenhower-era, Ngai said, but it is unlikely that he can expel 11 million undocumented immigrants. (According to an estimate by the American Immigration Council, deporting 1 million people a year would cost more than $960bn over a decade.) Still, Ngai said, his rhetoric alone could foment fear and panic in immigrant communities.But Eisenhower’s immigration approach also differed from Trump’s in notable ways, Ngai said. Though the administration did launch flashy raids, it also allowed farm owners to rehire some deportees through the Bracero program, essentially creating a pathway for authorized entry into the US. So far, Ngai said, Trump has hammered down on deportations without providing an option for legal immigration or naturalization. “He doesn’t know the whole story of ‘Operation Wetback’,” she said.Deportations also appear to have harmed the local economy. Far from protecting jobs for white Americans, the repatriation of Mexicans “may have further increased unemployment and depressed wages” in the 1930s, according to a 2017 academic paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Economists today predict a similar outcome: expelling millions of undocumented construction, hospitality and agriculture workers could shrink the GDP by $1.7tn, according to a study by the American Immigration Council.Johnson said there’s little evidence to suggest that the mass deportation efforts of the 1930s and 1950s were successful at curbing illegal immigration. The number of undocumented immigrants has tripled since the 1990s, he said, despite a steady rise in border security measures and patrol agents. “It’s a mistake to think building a wall or engaging in nasty deportation campaigns will end undocumented immigration,” Johnson said. “As long as people can obtain work legally or illegally, they’re going to keep coming.”But fearmongering may be the true legacy and intention of mass deportations campaigns, Johnson said. Self-deportation has been the policy preference for establishment Republicans, he said, including former presidential candidate Mitt Romney. “Part of the strategy,” Johnson said, “is making the lives of undocumented immigrants so unpleasant that some will just leave, and discourage others from coming”. More

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      ‘Harm to children was part of the point’: a harrowing film on US family separations

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      He thought he was working in the past tense, making a film about what one Republican-appointed judge described as “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country”. Then Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Now Errol Morris’s documentary about family separations at the US-Mexico border looks like a dreadful premonition.“It’s interesting how things have radically changed,” Morris says via Zoom from a book-lined office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “The movie, which presumably is recounting past history, seems to be a crystal ball into what may happen next and that was not clearly imagined at the outset. But it is clearly suggested now.”Separated is based on the NBC News correspondent Jacob Soboroff’s book Separated: Inside an American Tragedy (“one of the best collaborations I’ve ever had”, says the Oscar-winning Morris) and premieres on the MSNBC network on 7 December. It is an excruciatingly timely reminder of how Trump ripped 5,500 children from their parents (up to 1,400 of whom are not yet confirmed as reunited).The 93-minute documentary forensically details how the first Trump administration’s policy of family separations was deliberate, systematic and intentionally inhumane, leaving children in wire-mesh cages with feelings of fear and abandonment. Trump said with casual cruelty: “When you have that policy, people don’t come. I know it sounds harsh but we have to save our country.”Wearing white shirt and spectacles, sipping from a white coffee mug and speaking slowly in honeyed tones, Morris reflects: “The separations was an abomination. It was racist, was cruel, was unnecessary. As one of the interviewees in my film says, there were other levers that we could pull. This seemed to be something we did not need to do.”Trump had come into office promising a crackdown on illegal immigration including the construction of a border wall. The pre-existing catch-and-release scheme (which had allowed migrants to remain in the country until their immigration hearing) was ditched in favour of something more draconian.Family separations under his administration began as early as March 2017 under a pilot programme in El Paso, Texas. The fact it is was happening covertly undermines the notion that it could act as a deterrent.A “zero tolerance” policy, officially announced in spring 2018, marked a significant escalation. It mandated the prosecution of all adults crossing the border illegally. Anyone who did not arrive at a designated port of entry and claimed asylum would be arrested.While the policy never specifically called for children to be taken from parents, separation became inevitable because the adult was detained and charged. Since children were not allowed to be held in a federal jail, they were taken from their parents and placed in the care of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).Jonathan White, a civil servant who worked at the ORR and fought against the policy, says in the film: “Harm to children was part of the point. They believed it would terrify families into not coming.”Images of children held in cages in a McAllen, Texas, facility triggered outrage in June 2018. But Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen denied that there was a policy of separating families at the border and sought to shift blame to Congress, even though the enforcement of laws happens at the president’s discretion. The Bush and Obama administrations had largely allowed families to stay together.Morris comments: “There was a totally fatuous claim that is made by Kirstjen Nielsen in the film: we’re just following the law – if you arrest a criminal and they have a child with him or her, you separate them.“There have been miserable policies towards immigrants from probably every administration, the first Bush on through to Donald Trump. But none of those administrations felt the need to do what he did. It was considered to be a step too far, a no-no, and yet they embraced it anyway.”He continues: “There are a lot of things that get to me but what really appalls me is that they would separate nursing infants from their mothers. This is clearly not right. What’s the word I’m searching for? This is wrong.”For Morris, the child separation saga pointed to a wider issue. “It’s an issue about racism and what I see as the racist rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and his acolytes. I find it repulsive. I often like to remind people that racism is disgusting and it’s also bad manners. Haven’t we been taught not to act like that? Isn’t that part of the repertoire of being a civilised, cultured human being?“I hate analogies, but like everyone else, I can’t avoid using them. I like to tell people, as an American Jew, I always wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, more specifically to be a Jew living in Germany in the 1930s. Now I know a lot more about what it must have been like.”Morris’s works include The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, American Dharma and My Psychedelic Love Story. Separated came with some distinct challenges. Much of the separation process happened away from TV cameras; the director compensations with dramatisations to portray a Guatemalan mother and son experiencing the border crossing, separation and reunification.View image in fullscreenIt was also hard to get interviews with those involved. Morris explains: “There are all kinds of impediments to getting people to talk; I’ve never seen anything this severe. If you’re working for the government, for example, like Jonathan White was working for the government, you’re constrained. You’re not allowed to talk without getting the permission of your superiors.“Most people who are still working in some capacity for the government simply would not talk and it didn’t matter how much begging and how much cajoling I might do. Jonathan would and that represents an extraordinary act of courage on his part.“He felt that the issues were so important that he had to talk. Call him a whistleblower. Call him whatever you want to call him. He did something that was incorrect and greatly appreciated by me. He took risks in order to tell a story which I believe needed to be told. A hero.”In his interview White describes Scott Lloyd, the head of the ORR, as “the most prolific child abuser in modern American history”, given White’s disturbing lack of awareness of the trauma inflicted on children under his care.Morris reflects: “Why is he doing the job? He’s a political appointee. He was known for his anti-abortion activism and that was his chief concern: preventing any of the women in ORR custody from ever getting abortions, even though at that time Roe was the law of the land.“Was Scott Lloyd interested very much in the care of people in his charge? I don’t know. It seems to me – I hate to make these inferences but I don’t hate them so much that I’m unwilling to make them – that he was currying favour with the administration. He was interested in self-advancement. He was ambitious and perfectly willing to do the bidding of the hardliners in the Trump administration.”Separated is also a study in the bureaucratic machinations behind how the sausage is made. “There is a very strong theme running through this about bureaucrats and bureaucracy, good bureaucrats and bad bureaucrats. Most interesting to me in the story is how pliable our morality is.“If we need to find a way to justify the most appalling behaviour, we somehow find a way to do it. You can listen to Kirstjen Nielsen braying like a donkey that she is just following the law – you wouldn’t want me to break the law, would you?“Well, I don’t look at it that way and, when it’s suggested that she might be separating families as a deterrent to immigration, she gets outraged. I can’t even believe you would suggest such a thing. This is all Looney Tunes. It’s people living in some strange nimbus of self-deception.”The film highlights the role of civil servants who challenged the policy and fought to reunite families – courageous individuals such as White and Jallyn Sualog who worked within the system to mitigate its harmful effects. And it offers a reminder of the mass street protests – plus worldwide condemnation from the pope and others – that ultimately compelled Trump to back down: the one significant policy reversal of his first term.Yet a scandal that has been called “torture”, and by Morris himself as leading to “state-created orphans”, gained relatively little attention during this year’s presidential election campaign. Democrats were on the defensive on the border issue and tried to avoid the subject.Morris says: “People were scared to talk about immigration. The Democrats were and the Republicans weren’t scared to talk about it as long as they could frame it in the most draconian, repulsive terms: we’ll deport everybody.”View image in fullscreenHe was denied a chance to help put the issue on the agenda when Separated was not scheduled for TV broadcast until after election day. Morris complained on the X social media platform: “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election? It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”Trump claimed that undocumented migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and asserted, without evidence, that Haitians were eating pet cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio. He pledged the biggest mass deportation in US history and has already announced a team including the immigration hardliners Tom Homan and Stephen Miller, both of whom were instrumental in family separations during the first term.Will there be another public revolt this time or, given Trump’s victory in the national popular vote, are people demoralised and desensitised? Morris asks: “Did people in Germany all know that there was antisemitism? Well, yes. Did they know that they were involved in genocide? Probably not everybody.“On the part of the public, there’s a concept I’m very fond of: anti-curiosity. I sometimes say to myself, how much will it cost me to know less? There’s denial, there’s self-deception, there’s willful disbelief and on and on and on and on and on. I often say Homo sapiens: very bad and most certainly a compromised species.”But a mass deportation operation will be costly, logistically difficult and likely to produce harrowing images on TV that could reignite the anti-Trump resistance. At a recent screening of Separated in Washington, an audience member interrupted Soboroff and others on a panel discussion by shouting: “We’re not going to let him make our federal government the Third Reich of the US! We’re not going to let him make our National Guard people the Gestapo of the United States! We are not going to let that happen!”The sequel is always worse. Mass deportations would mean a return to child separations by another name. Some 4.4 million US citizen children lived with at least one undocumented parent as of 2018. The return of Trump has left Morris thinking about questions of justice.“What happens when you have crime without punishment?” he asks. “We all have this kind of quasi-religious model that moral transgressions have to be punished. There has to be some kind of societal reply. But what if there isn’t? What if crime goes unpunished?“I was just in Ukraine and I kept wondering – they’ve recorded over 100,000 war crimes by Russian soldiers – will these go unpunished? Will there ever be any kind of accountability? My answer to that is: ask America about crime without punishment and what ultimately that does to a society.”

      Separated will air on MSNBC in the US on 7 December More

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      ‘He loves to divide and conquer’: Canada and Mexico brace for second Trump term

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      Stone-faced as he stared into a gaggle of cameras on Tuesday, the leader of Canada’s largest province laid bare how it feels to be America’s northern neighbour and closest ally this week.“It’s like a family member stabbing you right in the heart,” said Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford. A day before, president-elect Donald Trump had pledged hefty tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the US’s two largest trading partners. “It’s the biggest threat we’ve ever seen … It’s unfortunate. It’s very, very hurtful.”For both Mexico and Canada, whose economic successes are enmeshed in their multibillion-dollar trade relationships with the United States, the forecasted chaos and disruption of a second Trump term has arrived. And the first salvo from Trump has already forced leaders from Mexico and Canada to revisit their relationship with the US – and with each other.Both have maxims to describe living in the shadow of the world’s largest economic and military superpower, which sees nearly $2tn worth of goods and services pass through its two land borders.“Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau told then US president Richard Nixon. “No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.”For Mexicans, it is the words of the 19th-century dictator Porfirio Díaz: “Poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.”The vagaries of the relationship were tested again this week when Trump threatened in a social media post to apply devastating levies of 25% on all goods and services from both countries, and to keep them in place until “such time as drugs, in particular fentanyl, and all illegal aliens stop this invasion of our country!”Although in 2018 the US, Canada and Mexico renegotiated the Nafta trade pact that Trump had long blamed for gutting US manufacturing, the three countries still have deeply intertwined supply chains – especially an automotive industry that spans the continent – making a levy of that magnitude potentially devastating to all.In Canada, Trump’s demands have left the government scrambling to make sense of the threat – and how seriously to take it.“‘Good-faith negotiator’ is not usually a descriptor of Donald Trump. He loves to disrupt it. He loves to divide and conquer,” said Colin Robertson, a former senior Canadian diplomat who has had numerous postings in the US. “Trump is determined to truly make his mark. Last time he was disorganized. This time, he’s certainly started off demonstrating a high degree of organization.”Even before Trump’s announcement, the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, and a handful of provincial premiers had mused openly about cutting Mexico out of future trade talks, instead pivoting towards a Canada-US trade pact – a move that Mexico’s lead negotiator called a “betrayal”.On Wednesday, Trudeau held an emergency meeting with all 10 premiers to push a “Team Canada” approach to the confrontation, pledging hours later to invest more in border security – a nod to Trump’s criticism of Canada’s patrolling of its border.A challenge for Canada is a need to approach Trump with skepticism, but also to take the threats seriously, says Robertson, adding that Canada’s trade relationship with the US is immensely lopsided. “The reality is, we need them. They’re big, we’re small.”Still, Trump’s demands “are perverse, but unfortunately predictable”, says Roland Paris, director of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and former foreign affairs adviser to Trudeau.He notes that only a sliver of the fentanyl entering the US comes from Canada, a figure so small the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) does not even mention Canada in a report from 2020. As for migrants entering the US, Canada’s federal minister says yearly interceptions are similar to a “significant weekend” at the Mexico border.“This is [Trump’s] modus operandi,” said Paris. “He’s not wasting any time throwing America’s principal trading partners off balance, before he even enters office.”Ottawa’s efforts to smooth things over with Trump are also hampered by domestic politics. Trudeau remains immensely unpopular in polls, and the rival Conservatives have cast the prime minister as weak and ill-equipped to both preserve what Nixon called Canada’s “special relationship” with the US and to face off against a mercurial president.Paris imagines the prime minister’s cabinet, especially veterans of bruising negotiations with Trump during his first term, as “determined” to manage relations with a country that for decades has remained a staunch ally. He says years of close work has produced a significant overlap in policy goals for the two nations, including skepticism of China and a need to secure critical mineral and energy supply chains.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Canada is going to need resolve, patience and the most far-reaching advocacy campaign this country has ever conducted in the United States,” he said. “But everybody knows that Trump is so unpredictable that there’s no saying what he might do this time.”For Mexico, which has long borne the brunt of Trump’s ire, Monday’s tariff threat comes amid already tense relations, including a reform to elect almost all judges by popular vote that has drawn sharp criticism from the US. At the same time, the arrest in July of two top Sinaloa cartel bosses in Texas, a move that surprised Mexican officials, has triggered a bloody gang war that the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, blames on the US.On Wednesday, Sheinbaum spoke with Trump, a conversation which the US president-elect characterised as “wonderful” after he claimed the Mexican president pledged to “stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”. Sheinbaum later gently clarified that she wouldn’t close the border, but that the call was “very kind” and had convinced her that no tariffs would happen.Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US, said Trump’s tariff suggestion has kicked off “panic” in the Mexican community living in the US. “How can you hit your partners in a free trade agreement with tariffs 25% higher than what you put on the rest of the world? It’s crazy,” she said.“What was his ceiling is now his floor,” she said of his previous negotiating position on trade. “The lesson? Never yield to a bully.”Alejandro Celorio Alcántara, a Mexican diplomat who oversaw migration when Trump first came to power, says the bombast of the next US president can be easier to work with than more traditional allies.“The Biden administration is a little more diplomatic, but this can actually make the discussion more complicated, because you don’t know what the terms of negotiation are,” he said. “Maybe it’s just my style of negotiation. It’s simpler when it’s more open. They put the cards on the table: ‘This is what we want.’ Then you can respond.”Both Mexico and Canada have scores of diplomats already experienced with Trump, but both sides also expressed concern that many of the key figures in Trump’s first term, who acted as a “check” on the president’s whim-based policy decisions, will be absent from the second administration, replaced by loyalists and idealogues who will do whatever he says.Still, for Mexican officials, there is a glimmer of hope that those in positions of power are more reasonable when they’re not in the media spotlight. Alcántara noted that “border czar” Tom Homan, who recently pledged to carry out a “mass deportation’, is known for his controversial positions, “but if you take the facts to him and explain them, he understands. He has a certain discourse in the media that’s very aggressive, but when you sit down together, you can talk.”For Mexico and Canada, a recognition that their fates remain tied to the US has forced them to redouble their efforts, not to reconsider their relationship.“In the end, we need to bet on a strong North America,” said Alcántara. It’s simple: make North America great again. As a region, not just the United States.” More

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      Sanctuary cities respond to Trump deportation plans: ‘We’re preparing to defend our communities’

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      Mike Johnston, the mayor of Denver, joined a drumbeat of local leaders in left-leaning cities across the country earlier this month to say he’s willing to protest the incoming Trump administration’s expected mass deportation efforts.He told local outlet Denverite that Denver police would be “stationed at the county line” to keep federal authorities out. “It’s like the Tiananmen Square moment with the rose and the gun, right?” he said. He then walked back the comments about using local police, but still said he would protest deportations – even being willing to go to jail for it.“I’m not afraid of that and I’m also not seeking that,” he told 9News.Donald Trump’s “border czar”, Tom Homan, said that’s one area where he and Johnston agree. “He’s willing to go to jail, I’m willing to put him in jail,” Homan told Fox on Tuesday.The back and forth is indicative of what’s to come, as liberal cities and states plan to push back against Trump’s mass deportation plans. The resistance will likely come with a backlash from Trump, who could withhold federal funds or, as Homan threatened, arrest local leaders who stand in his way. Trump’s team is reportedly figuring out ways the president could unilaterally remove federal resources from Democratic cities that don’t go along with deportation plans.The stature is not new for some cities. Some have had so-called “sanctuary city” policies in place since before Trump’s first term, promising not to aid federal immigration and customs enforcement agents as they seek to detain and deport immigrants. Some additionally have programs to provide support to migrants and to manage what data they collect on undocumented populations.Other cities and states choose to cooperate with agents by providing them information and resources to identify and detain migrants – and some state laws bar cities from adopting sanctuary policies. Texas, for instance, has offered up state land to use for deportation facilities.Sanctuary policies can slow deportations and, local officials hope, deter immigration agents from targeting their communities because operations there would encounter organized resistance and cost more money to carry out.“They work – that’s why the Trump administration hates them,” said Naureen Shah, the deputy director of government affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The Biden administration doesn’t like those policies either.”For his second term, Trump and his appointees have threatened a more forceful and broad deportation plan, though they have not offered details on what it will look like. Trump has said he will activate the military to carry out deportations, and there are likely to be flashy raids in Democratic cities that defy him.ICE has limited resources and has historically preferred to conduct raids in localities where it has local cooperation, though in his first term, Trump still sought to deport people from cities that opposed deportations. Immigration advocates expect a blend of these two strategies – with some showdowns in “sanctuary” places as a show of force.“Some of the raids will be in the red states where they have a lot of support from state and local law enforcement, because that’s just going to help them reach the numbers that they want to reach,” Shah said. “They’re also going to want to make people feel very afraid and very unsafe in the blue states. They’re going to want to create that sense that there is no safe sanctuary. That’s part of their game. So I don’t think that we should be comfortable in any part of the country.”What cities are doingAround the country, mayors and city councils are discussing how they can protect local immigrants from a mass deportation campaign. Cities cannot stop federal authorities from deporting people, but depending on state laws, they can refuse to use local resources or voluntarily provide information to assist in these operations. In Los Angeles, the city council approved a sanctuary policy earlier this month, with one council member saying the city would be “hardening our defenses” against Trump.Homan spoke out against the city on Newsmax. “If you don’t wanna help, get the hell outta the way,” he told the rightwing outlet. “If I gotta send twice as many officers to LA because we’re not getting any assistance, then that’s what we’re going to do. We got a mandate. President Trump is serious about this. I’m serious about this. This is gonna happen with or without you.”Chicago’s Democratic leaders have reignited trainings similar to those communities there went through during Trump’s first term. The trainings are designed to teach people how to spot and respond to immigration enforcement actions.Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, an alderman on Chicago’s city council, said a local training in mid-November drew nearly 600 people – six times as many as the first training in 2017. The group is also getting started earlier.“Trump is promising massive deportations on day one, and we’re preparing to defend our communities on day one,” he said.During Trump’s first term, hundreds of people in Ramirez-Rosa’s ward were ready to stand against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) using tactics such as bicycle brigades, which ultimately were not needed at that time. Still, being organized can serve as a deterrent to immigration agents, who want the lowest cost and easiest operations possible, he said. “Ultimately, the organized community is the safest community,” Ramirez-Rosa said.Slowing down deportations means fewer people are deported, though he acknowledges the policies can only go so far. “At the end of the day, nothing can preclude federal immigration agents from coming into your community, pulling people over, knocking on people’s doors. No local law can prohibit the federal government from enforcing immigration law in your community or in your neighborhood.”He said local officials should make sure policies are ready when Trump takes office, but also preparing the community to organize against deportations and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. They should also be figuring out what local resources they can use to help migrants through legal clinics or cash assistance, while being mindful about the data they collect and how it could be accessed by federal authorities to find and deport migrants, he said.“We, as residents, as US citizens, really do need to be thinking about how do we leverage our collective power to defend our immigrant neighbors?” Ramirez-Rosa said. “Do we surround Ice vehicles when they come into our neighborhood? Those are all risks that US citizens in particular should be thinking about taking at this time. But of course, doing that in a way that is strategic and organized, peaceful and really mitigates the harm, particularly towards undocumented people.”What Trump could do in responseTrump has said he will call a national emergency and then use the military to help carry out a mass deportation campaign. The use of the military, in particular, would bring up a host of legal questions.“The use of the military on domestic soil should worry all of us, but there’s plenty of harm that the Trump administration could seek to do just by using state and local law enforcement as the force multiplier to mass deportation,” Shah said. “And so sealing off access to the extent possible is going to be significant. It slows them down. It stymies their ability to act at the scale and speed that they want to.”The Trump administration is likely to try to deny federal funds to cities and states to get them to play ball. One idea floated in Project 2025, the conservative manifesto, called for withholding federal emergency assistance grants as a way to compel cities to detain undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes.The second Trump administration is coming into office emboldened by a strong electoral college win and a US supreme court ruling that granted a president immunity from criminal charges for actions taken in his official capacity.But the Trump administration will still need Congress’s help to expand their authority. A key test will be whether Congress agrees to take away funding from cities that don’t want to participate in deportation efforts, Shah said.“We’re going to be firing on all cylinders, and we’ll answer their blitz of policies with our own blitz.” More

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      Mexican president claims ‘no potential tariff war’ with US after call with Trump

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      Claudia Sheinbaum has said her “very kind” phone conversation with Donald Trump, in which they discussed immigration and fentanyl, means “there will not be a potential tariff war” between the US and Mexico.The president of Mexico spoke to reporters on Thursday following Trump’s threat earlier in the week to apply a 25% tariff against Mexico and Canada, and an additional 10% tariff against China, when he takes office in January if the countries did not stop all illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling into the US.Trump, in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, claimed that during the phone call with Sheinbaum she had “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border”.During her Thursday address Sheinbaum clarified she did not agree to shut down the border.“Each person has their own way of communicating,” Sheinbaum said. “But I can assure you, I guarantee you, that we never – additionally, we would be incapable of doing so – proposed that we would close the border in the north [of Mexico], or in the south of the United States. It has never been our idea and, of course, we are not in agreement with that.”She added that the two did not discuss tariffs, but that the conversation with Trump had reassured her that no tit-for-tat tariff battle would be needed in future.On Monday this week, Trump threatened to impose a 25% percent tariff on Mexico until drugs, including fentanyl, and undocumented immigrants “stop this Invasion of our Country”. He declared that Mexico and Canada should use their power to address drug trafficking and migration and, until they do, “it is time for them to pay a very big price!”The following day, Sheinbaum suggested Mexico could retaliate with tariffs of its own.On Wednesday, however, the conversation between Sheinbaum and Trump was “very kind”, the Mexican president said. She said she told Trump of the various migration initiatives her government has undertaken, including providing resources and support to central American countries and to migrants arriving in Mexico. Potential immigrants “will not reach the northern border, because Mexico has a strategy”, Sheinbaum said.Trump “recognized this effort” by the Mexican government, Sheinbaum added.She also said Trump expressed interest in the government-driven programs to address fentanyl addiction and overdoses in Mexico. And she raised the problem of American-made weapons entering Mexico from the US to be used by drug cartels.Sheinbaum further added that she encouraged Trump to stop the blockades against Cuba and Venezuela, since “people suffer and it leads to the phenomenon of migration”.Asked by a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine that quoted anonymous Trump-aligned sources discussing a “soft invasion” of Mexico by deploying the US military inside the country against drug trafficking groups, Sheinbaum dismissed the idea, calling it “entirely a movie”.“What I base myself on is the conversation – the two conversations – that I had with President Trump, and then, at the moment, the communication we will have with his work team and when he takes office,” Sheinbaum said. “We will always defend our sovereignty. Mexico is a free, independent, sovereign country – and that is above everything else.” More