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      Trump’s H-1B visa fee is a death sentence for US healthcare | Eram Alam

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      The Trump administration announced last week that every new H-1B visa will now cost $100,000. Framed as a crackdown on Silicon Valley, the policy will devastate American hospitals. Its real casualties will be poor and rural Americans in need of medical care, but with no one left to provide it.One in four US physicians is foreign-trained. Many enter through the H-1B program, disproportionately staffing rural and underserved hospitals where American graduates rarely go. In some facilities, every single doctor is an immigrant. These are the physicians who deliver babies in Mississippi Delta towns, staff emergency rooms in the Dakotas, and run primary care clinics in the Bronx. By raising visa costs from a few thousand dollars to $100,000, the administration is functionally cutting off their pipeline.The consequences will be immediate and severe. In this year’s residency match, international graduates filled more than 6,600 positions, with the vast majority in internal medicine and family medicine – the unglamorous workhorses of primary care. American graduates consistently avoid these specialties, preferring higher-paying and more prestigious fields. Without immigrant physicians, safety-net hospitals will be unable to fill residency slots, rural areas will lose their only steady doctors, and wait times for basic care will stretch our even further than they already are. The result will not be new jobs for Americans; it will be shuttered clinics and lives lost.The administration claims that cutting off immigrant doctors will catalyze domestic production of physicians. But training a doctor takes at least a decade, and requires investments in medical education that both major US political parties have consistently refused to make. Since the 1960s, Congress has chosen not to expand medical school and residency capacity in line with population growth, instead treating immigrant doctors as a convenient – and far cheaper – stopgap.When Medicare was created in 1965, lawmakers agreed to fund graduate medical education precisely because hospitals argued they could not sustain the high cost of residency training on their own. But funding was capped in the 1990s, and despite repeated warnings about looming shortages, Congress has failed to lift those limits. Today, the Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortfall of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036. That crisis is not the product of immigration policy. It is the predictable result of decades of underinvestment in training the workforce Americans need.As I show in my forthcoming book, the Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, the US has always yoked the fate of immigrant physicians to the health of American patients. After the second world war, when new public insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid expanded access to care, lawmakers turned to foreign doctors to fill the gaps. The 1965 Hart-Celler Act, passed the same year as Medicare, was explicitly designed to recruit highly trained professionals from abroad. Within a decade, tens of thousands of physicians – overwhelmingly from India and other postcolonial nations – were staffing hospitals across the United States.This arrangement was hailed as mutually beneficial: the US got the doctors it needed, and immigrant physicians got training and opportunity. But the costs were exported. Countries like India, with far fewer doctors per capita and vastly greater health burdens, lost tens of thousands of their best-trained clinicians. American lawmakers knew it. In 1967, Senator Walter Mondale called it a “national disgrace” that the US was siphoning lifesaving workers from countries “where thousands die daily of disease” in order to staff American hospitals. Yet the practice persisted, institutionalized as a structural feature of US healthcare.What Donald Trump’s new policy does is break even with this pragmatic, longstanding “America-first” tradition with which the country has long prioritized its own convenience over an honest accounting of its effects on the poorer nations from which it continually extracts value. Instead of using immigration policy to stabilize the system, it weaponizes it for exclusion. The $100,000 fee is not simply a labor market reform. It is a political message: immigrant doctors are expendable, and so are the patients they serve.The American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and 53 leading medical societies have already urged the administration to exempt physicians from the new fee. But carving out exceptions misses the point. Relying on temporary waivers and emergency visas has always been a precarious way to run a healthcare system. Immigrant physicians are not a contingency plan. They are the backbone of American medicine – and they deserve stability, not discretionary exemptions subject to the whims of Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.The deeper crisis at play is not immigration at all. It is America’s refusal to build a sustainable pipeline with which to ensure care for its citizens. For 60 years, policymakers have papered over severe underinvestment in medical education and poor rural and urban communities by exploiting immigrant labor. Now, instead of repairing that rotten foundation, the administration is simply dynamiting the patchwork that has kept the system functional. Wealthy hospitals in big cities may find ways to absorb the costs. Rural and safety-net hospitals cannot. Patients in those communities – disproportionately poor, rural, and minority – will be the ones left sacrificed in service of Trump’s indulgence for dramatic, nonsensical proclamations without accounting for their very real consequences for American communities.The lesson of this moment should not be that immigrant doctors need another exception. It is that Americans cannot afford to keep treating healthcare labor as a disposable commodity, imported when convenient and scapegoated when politically expedient. What we need is structural reform: expanding medical school and residency capacity, investing in primary care, and ensuring that immigrant doctors who already sustain the system have a predictable, efficient and permanent route to practice.Immigrant physicians have long been America’s safety net. To slam the door on them now, without fixing the underlying shortages, is more than shortsighted. It is a policy of exclusion disguised as reform – and it will cost lives. America first, in this case, will make Americans die.

      Eram Alam is a historian of medicine and migration in the department of the history of science at Harvard University. She is the author of the Care of Foreigners: How Immigrant Physicians Changed US Healthcare, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press in October 2025 More

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      ‘It’s hard to know what day it is’: families tell of grim Ice detention in Texas

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      At the South Texas Family Residential Center, guards allegedly refer to detained immigrant families as “inmates”, spouses aren’t allowed to hold hands, and children don’t know where they can kick around a ball without getting in trouble, according to a stark court filing.Yet those are minor indignities compared with accounts given to outside monitors of a lack of clean drinking water, sleep, healthy food, privacy, hygiene supplies and appropriate healthcare. Alongside government admissions of what attorneys called “prolonged unexplained detention” at the facility in the remote town of Dilley, Texas anxiety levels for detainees are high.“It is hard to know what day it is because we have been at Dilley for so long,” one 35-year-old parent told watchdogs who had been sent in to assess the conditions.Legal experts made a barrage of allegations about illegal deprivations, violations of basic detention standards and humanitarian concerns at the only known Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) center in the US currently holding immigrant families, as initially detailed in part one of the Guardian’s report.“My main question is: when can I get out of here?” asked an 11-year-old child who had already been detained at Dilley for 53 days, far longer than the general 20-day legal limit for immigrant children in unlicensed facilities, according to the filing in federal court in Los Angeles.The detainees’ accounts were published earlier this month by attorneys acting as outside monitors for standards of child detention, who visited Dilley four times since it reopened as a family detention facility after Donald Trump returned to the White House with his mass deportation agenda.The center is run for Ice by the private corrections and detention company CoreCivic, which declined requests for comment on conditions at Dilley and referred the Guardian to Ice, which then referred on to its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), from which the Guardian also requested comment but none was forthcoming.However, CoreCivic, in response to similar allegations made by detainees at a different facility, in California, company spokesperson Brian Todd said that all its facilities “operate with a significant amount of oversight and accountability, including being monitored by federal officials on a daily basis, to ensure an appropriate standard of living and care for every individual”.Families held at Dilley gave accounts of their experiences, with their names and countries of origin redacted in the publicly available court documents. Some described a “prison-like” environment, even though immigration proceedings are civil matters in the US, not criminal. Detainees spoke of the many rules they endure under lock and key.“I got in trouble for touching my mom,” one 13-year-old said. “The lady [staff member] said: ‘You can’t touch her.’ And I said: ‘But she’s my mom.’ And she said: ‘You can’t touch her.’”The Dilley center is surrounded by a metal perimeter fence.Within, families live in “isolated, cell-like trailers”.“I tried to sit outside to look at the moon and stars one time, but they wouldn’t let me,” the 13-year-old said.Adults lamented the struggle to parent and comfort their children without autonomy over their lives, unable to fulfill a kid’s simple requests, like going to a playground to break the monotony, or providing a banana to eat.
      “It feels so hard to be a good mother here, where there is so much stress and we have so little control over what happens to us,” said one parent, adding: “I am doing all I can to be strong for my children and take care of them. They do not understand why we have to be in this prison. It is impossible to be a good parent in this place.”Detainees described a lack of potable water, even when it’s supposedly filtered.“We just don’t trust that the water is cleanly dispensed and sometimes the water really smells bad. Maybe that is why so many people here are sick,” said one parent.The paid commissary sells bottled water, but its cost – over a dollar per bottle – is out of reach for many of the families. One parent, who had been detained at Dilley for 42 days, said the available free water “has a strong smell of bleach”. The parent bought bottled water for their toddler but could not afford more for personal consumption. “The staff here will not drink the water, but we do not have any other choice,” the parent told the visiting attorneys, according to the court filing.The 11-year-old who had been detained for 53 days and asked when they could get out, described the food as “the same, the same, the same”. Another family said they “eat just enough to survive”.“I don’t eat a lot here and I’ve lost weight since being at this center. I usually do not want to eat because I feel so much anxiety,” a 16-year-old said.Similarly, a 14-year-old already detained for 54 days with their seven-year-old brother said “the chicken tastes like plastic” and “if I don’t like the food that day, I usually just have bread and water and that’s it”. Their brother had stopped eating, they said, and “my parents had to almost beg the medical staff to give him PediaSure”, a nutritional drink for children.“Being here has affected my little brother a lot,” the 14-year-old added. “He doesn’t sleep well. He cries all night. Yesterday he had an attack where he would not stop crying from 7pm to 9pm, and he was outside the room crying that he didn’t want to go back in, and he wanted to be free.”Several families described their children falling behind on their education and development. The onsite school consists mainly of coloring, drawing, painting and doing basic worksheets, with only one hour a day of class for each age group, they said. Many of the children got so bored they stopped attending.“My parents are so worried for me that we are not studying or able to do anything to support our future here,” said a 13-year-old.In terms of health, families described inadequate care and medical staff who downplayed illnesses or even disabilities, according to the filing. One nine-year-old with autism was so sensitive to cleaning chemicals and other odors in the bathrooms that he would vomit when he entered.“Because he would not want to go in there, he would hold it and hold it, and then eventually he would pee his pants. Some days, I would need to change his clothes five or six times,” his parent said, describing the ordeal as “heartbreaking”. The boy started soiling himself and “was in the bathroom crying and yelling and hitting himself”. They had to resort to diapers for the first time since he was two, the court document said.Meanwhile sleep was chronically elusive for many. One family described frequent checks by guards.“They come in and out of the room without knocking. Some are polite, but others barge in without warning … They do not turn off the lights at night. It is difficult for my son to sleep because of the lights and … the staff talk on very loud walkie-talkies throughout the night.”When they did sleep, some families also reported that children suffered from nightmares, but when they went to see the resident mental health staff, they were just told to pray, do breathing exercises and participate in activities.“The psychologist did not ask what the nightmares were about,” said a parent, whose sons aged eight and 10 were having “so many” bad dreams. “She didn’t check if the boys were thinking about hurting themselves or if they had thoughts about wanting to die. She just said nightmares are normal.” More

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      US justice department sues Minnesota over sanctuary city policies

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      The justice department has sued the state of Minnesota over its sanctuary city immigration policies, making it the latest locality to face legal threats as the Trump administration attempts to carry out the president’s campaign promise of mass deportations.“Minnesota officials are jeopardizing the safety of their own citizens by allowing illegal aliens to circumvent the legal process,” Pamela Bondi, the attorney general, said in a statement.The justice department added that Minnesota’s policies of refusing to cooperate with immigration authorities are illegal under federal law and have resulted in the release of so-called “dangerous criminals”. Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention.The Minnesota cities of Minneapolis, St Paul and Hennepin county join the ranks of Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and the states of New Jersey and Colorado: Democratic led jurisdictions which are facing similar lawsuits over their sanctuary city policies.A Trump administration court filing in June – amid demonstrations against immigration raids – called Los Angeles’s sanctuary city ordinance “illegal” and asked that it be blocked from being enforced to allow the White House to crack down on what it calls a “crisis of illegal immigration”.Over the summer, the justice department sent letters to 13 states it classified as “sanctuary jurisdictions”, including California and Rhode Island, and 22 local governments, from Boston to Seattle, informing their leaders that they could face prosecution or lose federal funding for “undermining” and “obstructing” federal immigration agents.Last month, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funding to 34 “sanctuary cities” and counties, according to an executive order Donald Trump signed at the beginning of his second term.Trump campaigned for the presidency on a promise of deporting millions of immigrants from the US. His administration has argued that sanctuary city laws, which limit a locality’s participation with federal immigration agents, violate federal law. Brett Shumate, an assistant attorney general at the justice department’s civil division, said in a statement that “shielding illegal aliens from federal law enforcement is a blatant violation of the law that carries dangerous consequences”.Representatives from Minnesota’s governor and attorney general’s offices, the Hennepin sheriff’s office, and the mayors’ offices for St Paul and Minneapolis had not immediately responded to Reuters’ requests for comment. More

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      Oregon sues to block ‘illegal’ deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland

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      The state of Oregon filed a lawsuit in federal court on Sunday seeking to block the deployment of 200 national guard troops to Portland, arguing Donald Trump’s characterization of the peaceful city as “war ravaged” is “pure fiction”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, said at a news conference that she had been notified by the Pentagon that the US president had seized control of the state’s reservists, claiming authority granted to him to suppress “rebellion” or lawlessness.“When the president and I spoke yesterday,” Kotek said, “I told him in very plain language that there is no insurrection, or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland.”A Pentagon memorandum dated Sunday and signed by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, obtained by the Washington Post, said: “200 members of the Oregon National Guard will be called into Federal service effective immediately for a period of 60 days.”Trump’s action, in asserting federal control of the state’s national guard troops, is clearly “unlawful”, Oregon’s attorney general, Dan Rayfield, said, given that it was not taken in response to a foreign invasion or mass anarchy, but one small protest by dozens of activists outside a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Portland.“Let’s be clear, local law enforcement has this under control,” Kotek, said. “We have free speech demonstrations that are happening near one federal facility. Portland police is actively engaged in managing those, with the federal folks a the facility, and when people cross the line, there’s unlawful activity, people are being held accountable.”The state’s lawsuit notes that the president’s false claims about the Ice facility being “under siege”, and life for Portland resident being “like living in Hell”, appear to be based on a single Fox News report broadcast earlier this month, which mixed social media video from a conservative journalist of the current protest with video of much larger protests in 2020, in another part of the city.“The problem is the president is using social media to inform his views,” the attorney general said, either because he was trying to mislead the public intentionally, or is “relying on social media gossip” about the actual conditions in a US city.Kotek added that she had tried to inform Trump, during a phone conversation on Saturday, that he had been badly misled about current conditions in Portland, which is once again a vibrant and peaceful city a half-decade on from the pandemic-era racial justice protests.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“What I said to the president is: ‘I don’t understand what information you have.’ When he says to me that the federal courthouse is under attack, that is absolutely not true,” Kotek said. Video featured in the recent Fox News report on Portland did show images of a 2020 protest outside the federal courthouse in downtown Portland that were wrongly described as recorded during the current anti-Ice protest.“Some demonstrations happening at one federal facility, that are being managed on a regular basis by local law enforcement, if that is the only issue he’s brining up, he has been given bad information,” Kotek said.“We cannot be looking at footage from 2020 and assume that that is the case today in Portland.” More

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      Illinois senator demands to meet with Ice amid clashes at immigration facility

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      After days of clashes between federal officers and protesters at an immigration jail in his home state of Illinois, Democratic US senator Dick Durbin on Sunday renewed demands to meet with Trump administration immigration officials.Durbin wrote on X that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) must be “accountable for its actions” amid the administration’s “cruel immigration crackdown”. The post on Sunday morning came after Saturday night protests and arrests at an immigration detention center in Broadview, Illinois.For the preceding few days, federal officials have arrested protesters at the Broadview facility as Ice operations have escalated in Illinois.Durbin, along with Illinois representative Delia Ramirez and other Democrats, have been pressing for a congressional oversight visit to the Broadview facility for weeks in connection with reports of poor conditions.According to a letter written by Durbin and Ramirez on Friday, Democratic members of Congress have been unable to access the Broadview facility nor meet with immigration officials, as they have requested.Durbin and Ramirez informed Ice earlier in September of an upcoming oversight visit to the facility, which members of congress are allowed to do. But Ice in Chicago told Durbin and Ramirez they were “unable to support a visit”, according to the letter, and instead offered a meeting to the Democratic delegation. Ice on Friday postponed that meeting “to an unconfirmed date in October”, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.The Democratic pressure on Ice comes as protesters have clashed with officials at the Broadview site in recent days. On Saturday night, officials deployed pepper spray and rubber bullets and arrested a number of protesters outside the controversial immigration jail.In one video posted online on Saturday night, US border patrol officials, who have been dispatched to the area to assist in the Ice operations, can be seen deploying what is colloquially referred to as teargas on protesters standing outside the facility.On Sunday afternoon, a CBS Chicago reporter posted on Instagram that an Ice official “took a direct shot” at her car, saying that the official deployed gas into her open window. “Been puking for two hours,” the reporter said, adding that there were no protesters at the time and that she was just driving by the facility to check out the scene.Another local reporter in Chicago posted on X that the village of Broadview has opened a criminal investigation into that matter.View image in fullscreenThe Trump administration has called the protesters “rioters”, accusing them of inciting violence. On Saturday afternoon, Ice posted on X: “Rioters will not deter Ice from its law enforcement mission. All those assaulting or obstructing will be held accountable. Full stop.” In another post on Sunday morning, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said 11 people were arrested outside the Ice facility – and that officials had confiscated two guns during the arrests.In response, the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, decried the force used by federal officials at the site. He also called on protesters and bystanders to “document what you see with your phones and cameras”.“The suggestion that chemical agents like tear gas or pepper spray could be used indiscriminately against peaceful demonstrators, or even first responders, is unacceptable and not normal,” Pritzker posted on X. “By observing and recording peacefully, we can ensure that any violations of the law are brought to light and those responsible are held accountable.”Tensions in the Chicago area have been escalating in recent weeks after the Trump administration and DHS launched an operation they dubbed Midway Blitz. The operation led to an increase in the number of federal officials in the area targeting immigrants.Already, the operation has led to a number of scandals for Ice and the Trump administration. Earlier in September, Ice shot and killed an immigrant they were trying to arrest in the Chicago area. Despite DHS saying an officer was “seriously injured” by the immigrant before the shooting, video later released seemed to contradict DHS’s claims.A recent court filing by immigrants rights groups has also claimed that US citizens have been rounded up during the immigration enforcement operations in the area.DHS says it launched Midway Blitz to target immigrants in the state, alleging that Pritzker and his “sanctuary policies” – a term meant to describe limitations on local police’s cooperating with federal immigration agents – welcomed undocumented immigrants.The Trump administration has made immigration enforcement arrests a top priority since it returned to office in January after Joe Biden’s presidency.Top DHS officials, in fact, instructed Ice to arrest at least 3,000 people daily throughout the US. As the Guardian reported on Friday, due to the Trump administration’s intense escalation, immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in Ice detention. More

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      ‘Like the Gestapo’: trailblazing immigration judge on Ice brutality and Trump’s damage to the courts

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      Dana Leigh Marks had the kind of career most immigration judges dream of.At 32, she won a precedent-setting supreme court case that made it easier to claim asylum in the US. In the decades that followed, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges to gain collective bargaining rights, fought to protect immigration courts from political meddling and blazed a trail for a generation of female judges.Now retired at 71, she’s seen her share of political ups and downs over her 10 years as an immigration lawyer and 35 years on the bench. But nothing could have prepared her for what she’s seen the Trump administration do to the court systems she once served.“I have seen my entire career destroyed by Trump in six months,” said Marks, reflecting on the state of her profession while sipping coffee near her home in Marin county, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where she spent much of her career. “I’m flat out terrified on all fronts.”Whip-smart, with a shock of white curls, Marks can speak more freely than a sitting immigration judge. And the picture she paints is alarming.Trump’s immigration crackdown has thrown the already backlogged courts into chaos. More than 100 immigration judges have been fired since Trump was sworn in, including roughly a third of the judges in San Francisco, home to one of the largest immigration courts in the country. People across the US are routinely arrested outside their court hearings by Ice agents “acting like the Gestapo”, Marks said.She described her former colleagues as under siege. “If I were an immigration practitioner now, I’d tell my clients that they have to act like they’re in a war zone,” she said. “Be prepared for any eventuality, because it is so random and so chaotic.”Despite the grim subject matter, Marks is full of wisecracks and seems to have her spirits permanently set on high – gushing at every passing dog and baby.“Immigration judges do death penalty cases in a traffic court setting” is among her oft-quoted zingers.She describes the frenetic work of an immigration judge as like “the guy behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz”: managing dockets, juggling courtroom tech and interpreters, typing verbatim notes while monitoring audio recording levels, then issuing immediate oral rulings with few clerks and barely any time to think. It’s an already frenzied job, and one she believes the Trump administration is intentionally trying to make harder.Humor aside, her message for the public is a serious one: that the Trump administration is “attacking” immigration courts “on all fronts” in order to eliminate them entirely by proving they’re “dysfunctional”. There’s a backlog of 3.6m cases waiting to be adjudicated, and Marks believes the courts have been purposefully starved of resources.“I feel like the immigration courts are the canaries in the coalmine,” she said, “and what’s happening to them is an illustration of what might happen to other court systems if we don’t stop it.”A critical eye and an open mindMarks’ interest in refugees and the immigrant experience comes from her own family’s lucky escape to America.“I was raised with an awareness of immigration to begin with,” said Marks. Her Jewish grandmother fled pogroms in Lithuania and was on one of the last boats to the US before the first world war severely restricted transatlantic migration. By the 1920s, the US enacted laws imposing strict quotas on refugees from eastern and southern Europe that almost completely shut down legal pathways for Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust.View image in fullscreenMarks grew up in a diverse part of west Los Angeles, and spent a year in Chile after Salvador Allende’s election, where she learned Spanish and saw first-hand the dissonance between US media coverage of his presidency and how Chileans talked about politics around dinner tables. She learned to read and listen to many perspectives with a critical eye and an open mind.She wanted to be a social worker, but went to law school and nearly dropped out before falling in love with immigration law. “You met the world coming into your office,” she said, describing her years in private practice.In 1987, at the age of 32, she won the supreme court case known as INS v Cardoza-Fonseca, which expanded asylum eligibility by granting relief to those with a “well-founded fear” of persecution. The morning after that victory, she started her training to become a judge.Alongside her work in court, she led the National Association of Immigration Judges for nearly two decades and recruited half a dozen female judges to the bench. She prided herself on using compassion and humor to lower the tension in her courtroom: when people feel heard and judged fairly, they’re more likely to accept your decisions, she said, even when you rule against their claim.View image in fullscreenMarks retired in 2021 to become “Nana Dana” and care for her grandchild, but she remains deeply engaged in the field, speaking at conferences, advising the National Association of Immigration Judges, educating law students, officiating weddings and serving on the advisory board of the non-profit Justice Connection.What’s been playing out now in courtrooms, in policy memos and on the streets has chilling echoes of the authoritarian eras her Jewish ancestors fled.Among her more recent concerns is the push to recruit hundreds of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges. In late August, the Trump administration scrapped the rule requiring temporary immigration judges to have spent a decade practicing immigration law before qualifying for the bench. Days later, 600 military lawyers were cleared to fill vacant judge seats. All of this is “absolutely unprecedented”, said Marks. “I don’t want to slam military lawyers, but there is the concern that they’re being picked because there’s a perception that they will just follow orders.”Political interference in the courtFor Marks, political encroachment on immigration courts has been “a slow creep that now has gone to light speed”.A hallmark of American democracy is the separation of powers and an independent judiciary. But this has never been so for immigration courts, which are overseen by the Department of Justice, a part of the executive branch rather than the judicial branch.“Deep in my bones, I always felt the placement of the immigration court in the Department of Justice was wrong,” she said. “The boss of the prosecutor should not be the boss of the judge.”The court’s placement has led to political interference and underfunding by both parties in power, and Marks wanted to fight back. She spent decades advocating for the nation’s immigration court system to be moved out from under the political whims and meddling of the justice department and into an independent judiciary. In 2022, the congresswoman Zoe Lofgren introduced a bill that would have created an independent immigration court system – but the bill ultimately died. Marks thinks reviving that bill should be a top priority for Democrats.She believes everyone across the political spectrum should be incensed by the current level of meddling with due process: from firing immigration judges, to pressuring them to toss out asylum cases so they can be reassigned as emergency deportations, to turning courthouses into traps where Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scoop up immigrants to meet deportation quotas, and more.“Americans were raised with the golden principle that everybody deserves due process, and I really think the majority of Americans believe that, and that that’s what makes us exceptional in the world,” she said.“What kills me, as a lawyer, is that Trump turns everything on its head and blows through clearly established legal precedent as if it doesn’t exist. Fealty to precedent is the core of our legal system.”If there’s a silver lining for her, it’s that she predicts the administration’s embrace of chaos will ultimately backfire. For example, she thinks that dropping military reservists on to the bench for six-month stints is a recipe for failure. Rather than expediting the backlog of asylum cases, it will unleash chaos, “screw up the records” and “make appeals go wild”.“If you build by chaos, even if you’re right in what you construct,” she quipped, “it’s going to crumble.” More

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      The US government is facing a crisis of legitimacy | Daniel Mendiola

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      Between anti-immigrant zeal and a general disdain for any rules whatsoever, the Trump administration has shredded the constitutional order that makes government legitimate.This is now a legitimacy crisis.There are different philosophical approaches to government legitimacy, but in the United States, the most straightforward explanation is the social contract. Often associated with Enlightenment philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau and extremely influential with US founders, the social contract refers to the idea that the government requires the consent of the governed to be legitimate.Crucially, in exchange for this consent, the government accepts certain limits on what it can do. In other words, the government also has to follow the rules.The US has suffered crises of legitimacy before. Arguably, the 1964 Civil Rights Act emerged from just such a crisis. At a base level, the act conceded that to be legitimate, the government needed to actually recognize the rights of all its citizens – not just those of a certain race. It didn’t fix everything, but it was an important step in creating a stronger social contract for the next generation.The Trump administration, however, has reversed course on civil rights, abandoned limited government and eviscerated the social contract beyond recognition. From defying courts, to attacking judges, to capriciously revoking legal immigration statuses, to executing suspected drug smugglers, there is no shortage of examples.One example that deserves a lot more attention than it is currently receiving, however, is the horror story of Trump’s collaboration with a megaprison in El Salvador.To summarize, in March, the Trump administration forcibly sent more than 250 people, mostly Venezuelans accused of having ties to the Tren de Aragua gang, to El Salvador to be detained in a paid arrangement with Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele. Investigative reporting quickly confirmed that the entire operation – ostensibly to target dangerous criminals – was based on lies: only a small percentage of the targets had any criminal record at all, accusations of gang affiliations came from spurious evidence, and many of the detainees had followed the rules to enter the country legally.Nonetheless, instead of enjoying the rights guaranteed by US law, they suddenly faced imprisonment and alleged torture. Lower courts tried to halt the flights, but the Trump administration acted anyway.All of this would be horrifying enough as an isolated incident, but the legal saga surrounding the case has further disturbing implications. At first, the administration justified its actions through a controversial 18th-century law allowing the government to expel “alien enemies” in times of war – even though the country was not at war, and these were not “alien enemies”.However, the administration soon switched to a different argument that might be described like this: it doesn’t matter how many laws we broke – as long as the victims end up in a prison in a foreign country, US courts have no power to stop us. Also, we may do the same to US citizens.When the Trump administration first made these claims, news agencies covered them with much alarm. However, commentators since have avoided stating an uncomfortable truth: the administration was right. Apparently, it didn’t matter how many laws they broke. No one stopped them, nor have they faced any consequences.Significantly, the supreme court has played a critical role in this legitimacy crisis, not only by giving the Trump administration an unprecedented series of wins – often employing mind-boggling logic and blatant distortions of plain text – but also gutting the mechanisms that courts have to stop the executive branch when it gets caught doing illegal things.Here the battle over injunctions is revealing. In normal times, if the government gets caught doing something illegal, then judges have the power to issue an injunction to make the government actors in question stop. Government officials may appeal to a higher court, but in the meantime, the injunction prevents them from continuing to do harm while the case plays out.Now, think about a reality where injunctions don’t exist. If courts can’t issue an injunction to stop the government from doing illegal things, then no matter how blatantly the government is violating people’s rights, it can keep doing it unimpeded so long as the case stays tied up in appeals – a process that often takes years. In this scenario, law exists in theory, but there are virtually no limits to what the government can do in practice.This is shockingly close to the reality that the supreme court has now created. By rushing to overturn injunctions with no regard to who is being harmed, as well as creating seemingly arbitrary technicalities to prevent future injunctions, the message from the supreme court is clear: It doesn’t matter how many laws they broke. Now that Trump is in office, courts are simply not supposed to stop executive officials from putting Trump’s agenda into practice, regardless of how unlawful those practices might be.The extreme inability of our government to police itself becomes even clearer when it is placed alongside Brazil – the second-largest democracy in the Americas – where the former president Jair Bolsonaro was recently convicted for an attempted coup: after losing re-election in 2022, Bolsonaro tried a variety of tactics to stay in power, including inciting his followers to swarm government buildings to physically stop the peaceful transfer of power. If that sounds familiar, that’s because it was, indeed, strikingly similar to what Trump did in the January 6 riots after losing the 2020 election.Now, consider the difference in how our respective constitutional systems handled this. In the US, the supreme court not only blocked any potential trial for Trump’s role in the highly visible attempt to overthrow the government; it also took the opportunity to give him sweeping immunity for just about anything else. According to the logic of the majority decision, it doesn’t matter how many laws he broke. Being president is hard, and it is even harder if he has to worry about getting in trouble for breaking the law. So he should just have a virtual license to commit crimes. That way, he can take “vigorous, decisive” action.The Brazilian supreme court took a strikingly different approach. Apparently, it does matter how many laws Bolsonaro broke. Prosecutors presented strong evidence that he broke the law, so the supreme court decided that he should be prosecuted.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTellingly, this infuriated the Trump administration, which heaped criticism and sanctions on Brazilian judges in response. Brazilian courts refused to back down, however, and the trial ultimately resulted in a conviction.After watching this play out, I can’t help but wonder: what would it look like if my country had the courage to hold a lawless executive accountable?Here I want to be clear that in posing this question, I am calling for peaceful action. People will have to decide for themselves what this peaceful action looks like, though there is strength in numbers, and I think those numbers exist. As I have written previously, the nationwide protests against capricious and unlawful immigration raids are a testament to how many people are already fed up, and looking for ways to remind the government that it owes us rights.I also don’t think that questioning the government’s legitimacy right now is radical, partisan or even unpatriotic. In fact, nothing I am saying here contradicts what I was taught about legitimate government in my fifth grade social studies class at a conservative, patriotic public school in rural Texas. It is simply our civic duty to call out the government when it strays from the social contract.What’s giving me hope nowIn the classic Latin American protest anthem Me Gustan los Estudiantes, the celebrated Chilean composer Violeta Parra lauds the indomitable spirit of students. “Long live the students!” the song declares. They are the “garden of our joy” because they fearlessly defend truth, even when those in power try to force them to accept lies.Students give me hope as well.Overwhelmingly, the students that I have worked with over the years have shown themselves to be insightful thinkers with an unyielding dedication to truth, empathy, and solidarity. This is hopeful for many reasons, not the least of which being that this seems to terrify the people in power. Indeed, the same architects of our legitimacy crisis are also waging an aggressive campaign to squash campus protests, restrict institutional autonomy, and generally abolish academic freedom. Clearly, academic institutions have the potential to serve as a counterweight to government abuses. Otherwise, why would a lawless government be trying so hard to suppress us?Sadly, too many university leaders are now sacrificing academic legitimacy by caving to government pressure. The situation is bleak on this front as well, yet the battle is far from over.Our best hope: we need to be as fearless as our students.

      Daniel Mendiola is a professor of Latin American history and migration studies at Vassar College More

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      in US Politics

      Trump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raids

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      Donald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.The day before, Beckwith had received a phone call from Gregory Bovino, who leads the Border Patrol’s unit in El Centro, a border city 600 miles south of Sacramento. Bovino was planning an immigration raid in Sacramento and asked Beckwith who in her office to contact if his officers were assaulted, the Times reported, citing Beckwith.She informed Bovino that agents were not allowed to indiscriminately stop people in her district, north of Bakersfield, per a federal court order issued in April that prevents the agency from detaining people without reasonable suspicion. The US supreme court overturned a similar court order issued in Los Angeles earlier this month.In a 10.57am email on 15 July, Beckwith repeated her message, telling Bovino she expected “compliance with court orders and the constitution”. Less than six hours later, her work computer and cellphone no longer functioning, she received a letter to her personal email account notifying her that she had been terminated.Two days later, Bovino proceeded with his immigration raid at a Sacramento Home Depot.“Folks, there is no such thing as a sanctuary city,” he said in a video he shared from the California state capitol building.“The former acting US attorney’s email suggesting that the United States Border Patrol does not ALWAYS abide by the constitution revealed a bias against law enforcement,” Bovino said in a statement to the New York Times. “The supreme court’s decision is evidence of the fact Border Patrol follows the constitution and the fourth amendment.”On 8 September, the supreme court ruled that federal immigration agents can stop people solely based on their race, language or job, overturning the decision of a Los Angeles judge who had ordered immigration agents to halt sweeping raids there.Beckwith’s firing is one of a series of federal firings, including of prosecutors who did not abide by the president’s agenda. Last week, US attorney Erik Siebert resigned under intense pressure and Trump replaced him with his special assistant Lindsey Halligan just hours after ordering his attorney general Pam Bondi to do so in a since deleted social media post.Siebert had been overseeing investigations into Letitia James and James Comey. Beckwith has appealed against her termination, according to the Times.“I’m an American who cares about her country,” she told the paper. “We have to stand up and insist the laws be followed.” More