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      ‘A failed experiment’: the racist legacy of California governor Pete Wilson

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      Pete Wilson backed efforts to exclude undocumented immigrants from public services and ban affirmative action. California voters will soon reconsider the banJoin us for a live digital event with former attorney general Eric Holder to discuss voter suppression in 2020, Thursday at 5pm ET. Register nowFormer California governor Pete Wilson left the governor’s mansion in 1999, but his legacy lived on in the anti-diversity policies he championed and helped enshrine into California law.As governor, Wilson used his pulpit to push reforms that were widely viewed as racist – including a ban on affirmative action, a prohibition on bilingual education, and an effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from public services. Continue reading… More

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      The Fight review – a walk-and-talk with the activists tackling Trump

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      The title is apt for a documentary about the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who got their always combative existence stepped up a notch with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Now they found themselves fighting with the White House itself. This film features an Aaron Sorkin-style walk-and-talk tour around the ACLU offices in Brooklyn, New York, with its array of talented lawyers and heroic idealists.It concentrates on four cases fought by them: the right of a migrant to an abortion, the right of transgender people to serve in the military, the right of migrants not to be separated from their children, and the right of US residents not to answer a new census question about whether they are US citizens. This apparently innocuous query was cunningly designed to reduce the ostensible population size (and federal aid budgets while creating space for tax cuts etc) as migrants fearfully decline to answer.It also, insidiously, is intended to start a media row on this very point and crank up a value-for-money Kulturkampf against the alien outsider, a census question costing so much less than a wall. It should also be said – and this film could and should have said it – that the grotesque policy of separating migrants from their children was specifically designed to create a spasm of horror in the media (and the ACLU) for its deterrent effect, certainly, but mostly, yet again, to provide raw material for the Fox News Theatre of Cruelty.This film is a lively and watchable account of the full-tilt battle being fought by the ACLU, with its chief lawyer, Lee Gelernt, at the helm, a man addicted to Diet Coke and stress, at one point heading to emotional meltdown as he realises he doesn’t know where or how to plug in his smartphone charger. The film’s structural flaw is that it doesn’t quite know how to handle the most controversial moment in ACLU history: sticking toughly to the principle of free speech for all, it defended the right of racist Charlottesville protesters to rally in 2017, an event that led to a fatality. Maybe the whole film should have been about that one case. Well, the census-question case gives this its rousing finale. It creates, however, a possibly misleading impression of victory.• The Fight is available on digital platforms from 31 July. More

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      Trump administration to give one-year Daca extension to some recipients

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      The Trump administration will allow so-called Dreamers to renew deportation protections for a year while it reviews a supreme court ruling before a fresh attempt to kill the program in question, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.Hundreds of thousands of Dreamers live in the US without documentation, after entering as children. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) was put in place by Barack Obama and some 644,000 people are enrolled.The Trump review follows the ruling last month that found the administration had erred in the way it decided to end the program.The administration plans to continue its existing policy of not accepting new applicants, in place since 2017, the official told Reuters. But the administration will extend eligibility by a year for those whose protection from deportation was due to expire, as long as they do not have a criminal record.“For anyone who refiles, if they are eligible and were set to expire, we will renew them on a case-by-case basis into the next year for an extension,” the official said.The decision means the program will remain in place through the presidential election, in which Trump is fighting for a second term against Democrat Joe Biden. Trump has made his hardline stance on legal and illegal immigration a central platform of his presidency and his re-election campaign.Daca is increasingly supported by the public. A February Reuters/Ipsos poll found 64% of US adults supported its core tenets. A similar December 2014 poll found 47% support.The supreme court left the door open for Trump to attempt again to rescind the program, ruling only that the administration had not met procedural requirements and its actions were “arbitrary and capricious”.The administration is due to file paperwork with the district court in Maryland on Tuesday. The decision to not accept new applications will probably face more legal challenges.The official said the administration would conduct “an exhaustive review” of the memos it initially used to justify winding down the program.“We’re going to review all of that and all the underlying communications that informed those documents, so that when the administration next acts on Daca, it will be anchored on this comprehensive review,” the official said.The official said it was unclear how long the review would take.In an interview with Noticias Telemundo earlier this month, Trump said he would soon unveil an immigration measure that would include some protections for Daca.“We’re working out the legal complexities right now,” he said, “but I’m going to be signing a very major immigration bill as an executive order, which the supreme court now, because of the Daca decision, has given me the power to do that.”Trump’s interpretation of the meaning of the supreme court ruling – that it can allow him to govern without Congress – has proved highly controversial. More