Thursday, June 19, 2025

Their cruelty toward immigrants is truly astonishing

FIFA, the international soccer (what the rest of the world calls football) federation, has started a tournament of 32 teams to be played in a dozen US locations over the next month. This is a team World Cup, separate from the country World Cup to be played in the US, Canada, and Mexico next year. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote Thursday a week ago:
On Tuesday, Customs and Border Patrol posted on social media that CPB agents would be acting as security for Saturday’s opening match in Miami at the Hard Rock Stadium. “Let the games begin! The first FIFA Club World Cup games start on June 14th in Miami,” the post read. “CBP will be suited and booted and ready to provide security for the first round of games.” What a nice, breezy way to make sure immigrants know that not only are they not welcome, but they will also be actively targeted! Of course, because everything this administration does is a shambolic mess, CBP later deleted the post. At the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told an NBC Miami affiliate that ICE would be there and that non-Americans need to bring proof of their legal status. So maybe agents will be there, or maybe they won’t. Either way, the Trump administration has already sown the fear it intended.
Football is a game loved by lots of people around the world, including the countries in Central and South America. So a stadium with 64,000 in a city (Miami) that is 70% Latino sounds like an easy way for ICE to make its daily quota of detaining 3,000 people. ICE has a problem in that there aren’t enough undocumented murderers and rapists to fill that quota, though that’s who the nasty guy said was his target. And if they’re going after soft targets like people showing up at scheduled immigration hearings, why not a stadium full of football fans? As for the big tournament next year the vice nasty has already issued a threat: Please come. Then go home – or have a chat with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. And what about the Olympics in 2028, which the US is hosting? A week ago Friday Needham talked of other ways the nasty guy is making life hard for immigrants. He ended a program that allowed a half million immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to legally remain in the country. Though the case involving 350,000 Venezuelans on Temporary Protected Status is still in the courts the Supreme Court says the nasty guy can start deporting anyway. Another dozen immigrants were detained at Guantanamo Bay, which means their lawyers aren’t nearby. The nasty guy has declared a strip of land along the border to be a “national defense zone” so when a migrant crosses, they can be accused of trespassing on a military installation. Already a New Mexico judge has thrown out over 100 of these cases. ICE raided a meatpacking plant in Omaha and half of the 140 workers were detained and others didn’t show up out of fear. Would Sen. Ted Cruz, or any member of Congress, want their children to work in such a plant?
The Trump administration’s capacity for cruelty toward immigrants is truly astonishing—not just in terms of the government resources it is deploying, but in terms of how it acts from a space of bottomless hate, an infinite ability to revel in the harm they can cause. It’s the only work that Trump and his minions actually want to do.
Also on Thursday a week ago Emily Singer of Kos reported the nasty guy tweeted an exemption to deportation raids. He realized that farming and hospitality need lots of immigrant labor, so those places won’t be raided. I’ve heard since that the tweet had no effect on the actions of ICE agents and the White House has said there has been no actual change in policy. Kos of Kos wrote last Saturday:
Donald Trump doesn’t want to lead. He wants to rule. There’s a distinction. This week, we’ve crossed the line from authoritarian flirtation to autocratic overreach. The events of this past week—the illegal deployment of the National Guard in California, the arrest of California Sen. Alex Padilla, the ignoring of yet more judicial orders, and the chilling preparations for Trump’s grotesque birthday parade—undeniably show that Trump and his acolytes have abandoned all pretense of adhering to democratic norms. We knew this would happen, we warned people this would happen, and now we’re watching in horror as Trump shreds our norms, laws, and institutions. All the while, the Republican Party kowtows to him when it isn’t outright cheering him on.
Kos wrote that while he’s all in favor of Democrats following the law there is no need for them to follow norms the nasty guy and Republicans have thrown out. The nasty guy is vulnerable in one way – he’s concerned about public opinion. And polls show he and his policies are not supported by Americans. On Monday Singer reported:
GOP lawmakers are lining up to support President Donald Trump’s declaration of war against Democratic-controlled cities, after he ordered Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers to specifically target undocumented immigrants in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York by spreading the insane and false conspiracy theory that Democrats use undocumented immigrants in those cities to hold on to political power. "We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, where Millions upon Millions of Illegal Aliens reside. These, and other such Cities, are the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State, robbing good paying Jobs and Benefits from Hardworking American Citizens," Trump wrote in a disturbing Truth Social post on Sunday night. Of course, undocumented immigrants cannot vote, so Trump’s claim is a bald-faced lie. Undocumented immigrants are also not taking jobs from American citizens, as Americans do not want to work the low-wage, back-breaking jobs immigrants are filling in meatpacking plants, restaurant kitchens, and farm fields.
In the rest of the article Singer documented Republican praise for the statement and the Democratic rebuttal. An Associated Press article from Thursday a week ago and posted on Kos reported that a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order directing the nasty guy to return control of the National Guard to California. The nasty guy had overstepped his bounds in ordering their deployment. Doubtful this will prompt him to obey. Andrew Mangan of Kos reported that before Musk broke up with the nasty guy he declared, “A new political party is needed in America to represent the 80% in the middle!” Musk is no centrist, so hard to tell what he means. But the idea of a centrist party that appeals to a broad middle has been the wish for quite a while, including the political group No Labels. A dream of the 80% middle is a naive dream. 80% of Americans will agree on only a handful of policies, such as the Food and Drug Administration inspecting food or requiring car companies to submit accident data on self-driving vehicles. Yeah, Musk hates that last one. But what if we built a party around ideas that have 60% approval? That’s still a sizable majority. What are policies such a party could run on, policies supported by 60% of voters?
A party of the 60% would increase taxes on billionaires and large corporations, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and pour more federal funding into affordable housing. Its economic agenda would also expand antitrust enforcement against Big Tech and advocate for stricter environmental regulations, even if they cost jobs and dent the economy. This hypothetical party would prioritize expanding wind and solar power over fossil fuels, and it would want to tax corporations based on how much carbon they release. Hell, this party would even favor making power plants completely eliminate carbon emissions by 2040. A party of the 60% would support abortion being legal in most or all cases. It would see the government as responsible for ensuring all Americans have health insurance. It would strongly support Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act. It would want to pour billions into research for women’s health and cap yearly out-of-pocket costs for prescription drugs on all insurance plans. It would support creating a public option for health insurance and lowering the enrollment age for Medicare from 65 to 60, though it wouldn’t be sold on Medicare for all. Nonetheless, this party would increase benefits for Social Security and Medicare.
Mangan provides links to surveys supporting what he wrote. Also with 60% popularity are support for legal abortion, access to contraception, and support for all Americans having paid family and medical leave. There would be support for banning assault rifles, implementing universal background checks and red-flag laws. There would be support for free college tuition of middle income families and below, vaccine requirements, and increased funding for public schools. Plus, support for legal recreational marijuana, increased food assistance, term limits for the Supreme Court, and many types of foreign aid.
Sound familiar? All of these policies are supported by at least 60% of respondents, and virtually all of them are parts of the Democratic Party’s platform—and reviled by the Republican Party.
I’m puzzled what exactly is meant by “parts of the Democratic Party’s platform.” Parts of each idea are in the platform? Various states have some of the ideas in their platforms? So what about immigration? Yeah, 55% want a decrease in the number of immigrants (note it is less than 60%). But over 60% oppose deporting undocumented immigrants who came as kids, are married to a citizen, or have children who are citizens. And majorities oppose raids at churches and schools. A very strong majority do want to deport immigrants who committed violent crimes. The nasty guy is doing the last – and all the others. But back to that praise for the Democratic Party. If the party agrees with 60% of the country – why didn’t they implement all those things when they had the chance? They had majorities during Biden’s first two years. I ventured into the comments for this one. A couple of the ideas: tuma: They’re popular only as long as they’re not labeled as Democratic policies. Anything Dems support is taken to mean benefiting black people. Teacherbill: Democratic policy is popular. Democratic politicians are not. In last Saturday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted a couple interesting tweets. Kareem Carr, Statistics Person tweeted:
The great irony is that “White America” itself is already a case study in multiculturalism: a near seamless fusion of ethnicities who spent centuries at war.
And Noah Smith added:
This is an incredibly important and underrated point. The reason people think "white" is this homogeneous bloc today is that America did such a good job erasing the distinctions between European ethnicities.
In the comments LJ Slater countered the claim that riots are raging through LA by posting a map of the city with one small red circle in a corner of the area marked Downtown. I hadn’t realized Los Angeles loops in and around other cities (such as Beverly Hills and Santa Monica) with a long slim corridor down to the neighborhood of San Pedro. In today’s pundit roundup Chitown Kev had some good quotes. Jazmyne Owens of the New America blog wrote about Juneteenth, which is today.
False distortions of history, especially to serve a political agenda, are not new. During the Civil War, propagandists across the South referred to the war as one “of Northern Aggression,” or “the War Between the States,” ignoring the role that slavery played in the Confederacy’s secession from the Union. While wholly untrue, that version of history, now known as “the Lost Cause of the Confederacy”—or simply “the Lost Cause”—took deep root in the South. [...] Reframing history to erase acts of violence against African Americans and other groups is seeing a resurgence today. In President Trump’s first term, his administration created the 1776 Commission to promote politicized narratives that historians have called inaccurate. In his second term, the administration is committed to weakening the public education system by dismantling the functionality of the Department of Education in an attempt to close it, and slashing funding for vital public education programs. It is also worth mentioning that the administration is currently receiving a lot of legal pushback against their actions, including over several executive orders that embody alarming government overreach by undermining civil rights enforcement and asserting federal oversight in schools and classrooms.
Alex Hinton of The Conversation:
After decades of research on numerous attacks that have left scores dead, we have learned that extremists are almost always part of a pack, not lone wolves. But the myth of the lone wolf shooter remains tenacious, reappearing in media coverage after almost every mass shooting or act of far-right extremist violence. Because this myth misdirects people from the actual causes of extremist violence, it impedes society’s ability to prevent attacks. [...] This was true long before the social media age. Take Timothy McVeigh. He is often depicted as the archetypal lone wolf madman who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. In fact, McVeigh was part of a pack. He had accomplices and was connected across the far-right extremist landscape.[...] How did the lone-wolf metaphor come to misinform the public’s view of extremists, and why is it so tenacious? Part of the answer is linked to white supremacist Louis Beam, who wrote the essay “Leaderless Resistance” in 1983. In it, he called for far-right extremists to act individually or in small groups that couldn’t be traced up a chain of command. According to his lawyer, McVeigh was one of those influenced by Beam’s call.
It isn’t just Beam’s call. It is a lot of conservative leaders using the “lone wolf” myth to shield themselves and their ideas from being held responsible for the lone wolf’s mayhem. Will Pattiz and More Than Just Parks of the “More Than Just Parks” Substack writing about a provision in the Big Brutal Bill that isn’t getting any discussion by mainstream media:
The Senate budget bill includes two provisions that would trigger the largest loss of public land in modern history. First, it mandates the sale of 3 million acres of federal land. This land will be sold, full stop. There is no requirement for public input, environmental review, tribal consultation, or resource assessment. It will be auctioned off whether the public wants it or not. Second, it grants the Secretary of the Interior authority to sell an additional 253 million acres at their discretion. That amounts to 40 percent of all federal public land. There are no rules on how much land can be sold, how fast it can be moved, or who can buy it. There is no guarantee of public review. There is no conservation filter. There is nothing in the bill that protects ecologically sensitive areas, sacred sites, or places used for hunting, fishing, or recreation. The language sounds sterile. “Disposal.” “Divestment.” “Asset management.” But make no mistake. This is a plan to break apart the public estate and transfer it to private hands.
In the comments are several cartoons and memes about Juneteenth and immigration, such as this one posted by exlrrrp and from Films for Action. It shows a Mexican man sitting on a white bucket with the caption:
Schrödinger’s Immigrant Lazily collecting all the welfare but somehow taking all the jobs.
And a meme posted by Liberal Jane showing a young woman with buttons showing all the minorities she supports and holding a sign that says:
I’d rather be hated for who I include that loved for who I exclude.

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