#Penal Administration

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Nevertheless, the system persisted, and without basic changes. For all the public clamor and widespread dissatisfaction, parole survived relatively unscathed. How could failure and unpopularity have had so little impact on the continuity and structure of policy? The answer is to be found, first, in the functions that the program did fulfill for several types of officials within criminal justice. The day-to-day advantages that they gained from administering the system far outweighed (for them) its apparent defects.

The most vigorous champions of parole, those who gained the most from its operation, were the prison wardens. Their support was critical to the survival of the system and it was unwavering, despite some gradual diminution of their authority over parole decisions. Before 1925, wardens dominated the parole boards. They usually served as one of the three members; the meetings were held on their grounds, at the prison; and at least at the start, the inmate’s record of institutional conduct probably counted for most, if for no other reason than as a carry-over from the time when parole was defined as a reward for the good inmate. After the mid-1920’s, however, the parole system built up its own bureaucracy. It became more independent of the department of corrections and moved away from the warden’s direct control. He no longer served on the committee, the final decisions were more frequently made in the state capital, and institutional behavior ranked well behind an inmate’s prior record in importance as a release consideration.

As Warden Lewis Lawes of Sing Sing told a New York investigatory committee:

‘I have never attended a meeting of the Parole Board. I have never been requested to. . . . I did attempt at first to make a good warden’s report and recommendation; but when I found they didn’t read it or pay any attention to it I will admit my efforts became very perfunctory.’

The Wilcox study in Pennsylvania found that “good conduct in prison does not inevitably lead to parole, nor do minor disciplinary infringements always prevent release. Eighty percent of those paroled at the minimum had perfect prison records. But it is also noteworthy that 80 percent of those refused parole had maintained good conduct in prison.” And the Attorney General’s survey cautioned that

Parole should not be used as a device for solving some of the problems of prison administrators. Prison administrators . . . are liable to employ it as a good time regulation or reward rather than as a correctional device.

Nevertheless, wardens had good reasons to continue to support the program and to resolve in their national meetings that parole was “an essential element in protective penology.” Some of them did manage to keep the boards under their sway: in such states as New Hampshire, Connecticut, and New Jersey, the warden still had the most to say about who went out on parole. In many cases, too, a warden could persuade a board to take into account his own prejudices in any one particular instance. Hence, the following dialogue in the Montana parole board meeting:

Case of Fred Albo, a Mexican, was considered. The Clerk read the history. Governor: Hold him I think. Secretary of State: Go to it. Attorney General: It makes no difference if he is a Mexican. Clerk: The Warden hates Mexicans and recommends him. He must be a good man. Governor: All right, don’t hold him.

(One cannot be certain, of course, whether the warden was very impressed by this inmate or whether he simply wanted to get rid of a noxious Mexican.)

More important, whatever the boards assumptions about the significance of the prior record, the warden could thwart the opportunity for release for any especially troublesome inmate. Boards would not pay attention to minor infractions or necessarily release someone who minded his own business inside. However, the inmate who was far out of line would suffer, and wardens as well as convicts understood this. Wardens, or their principal keepers, were very often present throughout board deliberations; but at any rate it was they who made up the dockets and so they had ample opportunity to tell the board about the bad cases. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the inmate who “carried coffee from the mess hall, cursed an officer, refused to enter his cell, and stole and drank shellac,” did not win release at the minimum. In effect, wardens had a veto power, and their ability to blackball was sufficient to serve their own disciplinary ends well.

“Complex and difficult as is prison management under the best conditions,” insisted one Indiana official, “it would be immediately more difficult without the parole law. The prisoner looks upon the parole as the reward for good conduct and steady industry and does his best to earn it.” Or, as Pennsylvania’s Wilcox concluded: “The power possessed by the state under parole laws . . . provides penal administrators with a club which is even more effective than the old ‘good time’ laws in inducing internal discipline. Prison managers generally favor parole for this reasons.

Moreover, wardens found themselves locked into the system once it was in operation. They were compelled to favor its perpetuation for the critical reason that any talk of a diminution in the availability of parole (let alone its outright abolition) provoked substantial inmate hostility - and wardens did not enjoy suppressing riots. Under indeterminate sentences, any effort to restrict parole had to mean significant increases in time served. Almost invariably, then, wardens were eager to see more and more paroles granted to keep peace among the inmates. Joseph Moore, chairman of the New York State Board of Parole, complained that wardens were directing inmates’ anger at parole boards and away from themselves. “The Parole Board finds it advisable to hold a large percentage of prisoners beyond their eligibility for release and we have abundant evidence that prison officials disapprove of this. Unfortunately, this feeling whether purposely or not is conveyed to the prisoners and it is permitted to be a general idea among them that so far as the prisons are concerned they would be glad to release them but the hard-boiled Parole Board holds them up.”

In much the same way, the warden of the penitentiary in Washington State kept up a running battle with parole board members. Because they were (in his view) too strict about release, his own job of preserving good order was more difficult. In fact, the warden “usually placed about five or ten men on the Docket who had served a long time, but who had no present chance for release. Why? Because when a ‘con’ has put in a lot of time and is denied any chance for a hearing before the Board, resentment occurs, and if there is enough of that, trouble occurs inside.” That same warden resisted all efforts to abolish parole for three-time losers: “Such prisoners could not be controlled . . . [and prison administration would be impossible.” The warden of the Illinois State Penitentiary at Stateville, to choose one case from many, knew the truth of that argument first-hand: in 1937, responding to a newspaper crusade, the parole board cut back on releases (granting only 3 from 274 applications), and in short order the warden had to contend with a hunger strike. Or, to turn the point around, the warden at Charlestown, Massachusetts, consistently recommended parole “because he expected it to improve discipline. He proved correct in his anticipation as there has not been a riot or outbreak in State Prison since parole went into effect.” In sum, the wardens were parole’s warmest friends. They supported the system and were eager to keep the numbers granted parole as high as possible - always excepting that cult case which had to be made into an object lesson.

Legislative committees investigating parole found the wardens’ conclusions not only well-taken but almost unanswerable. No matter how critical they were of one or another part of the system, they were reluctant to restrict release procedures for fear of undercutting prison officials’ power. The New York Crime Commission, a tough group with little good to say for parole, moved very cautiously for fear of disturbing the wardens’ authority. Not only the wardens but representatives of the state parole board took pains to inform the Commission just how critical parole was to discipline. “It is your opinion,” Senator Caleb Baumes, the chairman of the Commission, asked the head of the parole board, “that you create and maintain a better morale, if you please, amongst the prisoners generally, if they know that system is in vogue?” To which the chairman replied: “Absolutely.” The Commission accepted the argument, and as eager as some of its members were to abrogate the board’s right to release inmates immediately at the minimum, they did not dare do so. “If you tell 3,000 men in the prison,” concluded one of the most law-and-order-minded members of the Commission,

that they are likely to be held from months to five or six years more, you will make a hell on earth of every prison in the State. . . .3000 men expect . . . from all the years of practice by the Parole Board . . . that they will be released at the end of the minimum, and if you tell them that now it is likely or probable that their time will be extended beyond the minimum . . . they are going to insurge and feel vicious, and you can not blame them, no matter how heinous was their original offense.

His conclusion was clear: “If we are to go ahead on any rough and ready method of extending sentences and taking that definite hope away from them, the consequences will be extreme.” True, public opinion (and his own instincts as well) would prefer to “make them serve indefinitely.” But “we cannot do it without smashing prison discipline.” It was this kind of reasoning that helped to preserve parole, no matter how poor its reputation or inadequate its practice.

- David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Revised Edition. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2002 (1980), p. 183-187.

Image is from the Handbook of the New York Reformatory at Elmira, showing the parole board finishing a meeting and releasing an inmate - on the left hand side. c. 1916.

[fatehbaz]

was thinking about this

To be in "public", you must be a consumer or a laborer.

About control of peoples' movement in space/place. Since the beginning.

"Vagrancy" of 1830s-onward Britain, people criminalized for being outside without being a laborer.

Breaking laws resulted in being sentenced to coerced debtor/convict labor. Coinciding with the 1830-ish climax of the Industrial Revolution and the land enclosure acts (factory labor, poverty, etc., increase), the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 establishes full-time police institution(s) in London. The "Workhouse Act" aka "Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834" forced poor people to work for a minimum number of hours every day. The Irish Constabulary of 1837 sets up a national policing force and the County Police Act of 1839 allows justices of the peace across England to establish policing institutions in their counties (New York City gets a police department in 1844). The major expansion of the "Vagrancy Act" of 1838 made "joblessness" a crime and enhanced its punishment. (Coincidentally, the law's date of royal assent was 27 July 1838, just 5 days before the British government was scheduled to allow fuller emancipation of its technical legal abolition of slavery in the British Caribbean on 1 August 1838.)

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"Vagrancy" of 1860s-onward United States, people criminalized for being outside while Black.

Widespread emancipation after slavery abolition in 1865 rapidly followed by the outlawing of loitering which de facto outlawed existing as Black in public. Inability to afford fines results in being sentenced to forced labor by working on chain gangs or prisons farms, some built atop plantations.

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"Vagrancy" of 1870s-onward across empires, people criminalized for being outside while being "foreign" and also being poor generally.

Especially from 1880-ish to 1918-ish, this was an age of widespread mass movement of peoples due to the land dispossession, poverty, and famine induced by global colonial extraction and "market expansion" (Scramble for Africa, US "American West", nation-building, conquering "frontiers"), as agricultural "revolutions" of imperial monoculture cash crop extraction resulted in ecological degradation, and as major imperial infrastructure building projects required a lot of vulnerable "mobile" labor. This coincides with and is facilitated by new railroad networks and telegraphs, leading to imperial implementation or expansion of identity documents, strict work contracts, passports, immigration surveillance, and border checkpoints.

All of this in just a few short years: In 1877, British administrators in India develop what would become the Henry Classification System of taking and keeping fingerprints for use in binding colonial Indians to legal contracts. That same year during the 1877 Great Railroad Strike, and in response to white anxiety about Black residents coming to the city during Great Migration, Chicago's policing institutions exponentially expand surveillance and pioneer "intelligence card" registers for tracking labor union organizing and Black movement, as Chicago's experiments become adopted by US military and expanded nationwide, later used by US forces monitoring dissent in colonial Philippines and Cuba. Japan based its 1880 Penal Code anti-vagrancy statutes on French models, and introduced "koseki" register to track poor/vagrant domestic citizens as Tokyo's Governor Matsuda segregates classes, and the nation introduces "modern police forces". In 1882, the United States passes the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1884, the Ottoman government enacts major "Passport Nizamnamesi" legislation requiring passports. In 1885, the racist expulsion of the "Tacoma riot".

Punished for being Algerian in France. Punished for being Chinese in San Francisco. Punished for being Korean in Japan. Punished for crossing Ottoman borders without correct paperwork. Arrested for whatever, then sent to do convict labor. A poor person in the Punjab, starving during a catastrophic famine, might be coerced into a work contract by British authorities. They will have to travel, shipped off to build a railroad. But now they have to work. Now they are bound. They will be punished for being Punjabi and trying to walk away from Britain's tea plantations in Assam or Britain's rubber plantations in Malaya.

Mobility and confinement, the empire manipulates each.

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"Vagrancy" amidst all of this, people also criminalized for being outside while "unsightly" and merely even superficially appearing to be poor. San Francisco introduced the notorious "ugly law" in 1867, making it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view". Today, if you walk into a building looking a little "weird" (poor, Black, ill, disabled, etc.), you are given seething spiteful glares and asked to leave. De facto criminalized for simply going for a stroll without downloading the coffee shop's exclusive menu app.

Too ill, too poor, too exhausted, too indebted to move, you are trapped. Physical barriers (borders), legal barriers (identity documents), financial barriers (debt). "Vagrancy" everywhere in the United States, a combination of all of the above. "Vagrancy" since at least early nineteenth century Europe. About the control of movement through and access to space/place. Concretizing and weaponizing caste, corralling people, anchoring them in place, extracting their wealth and labor.

You are permitted to exist only as a paying customer or an employee.

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #24

June 21-28 2024

The US Surgeon General declared for the first time ever, firearm violence a public health crisis. The nation's top doctor recommended the banning of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, the introduce universal background checks for purchasing guns, regulate the industry, pass laws that would restrict their use in public spaces and penalize people who fail to safely store their weapons. President Trump dismissed Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy in 2017 in part for his criticism of guns before his time in government, he was renominated for his post by President Biden in 2021. While the Surgeon General's reconstructions aren't binding a similar report on the risks of smoking in 1964 was the start of a national shift toward regulation of tobacco.

Vice-President Harris announced the first grants to be awarded through a ground breaking program to remove barriers to building more housing. Under President Biden more housing units are under construction than at any time in the last 50 years. Vice President Harris was announcing 85 million dollars in grants giving to communities in 21 states through the  Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing (PRO) program. The administration plans another 100 million in PRO grants at the end of the summer and has requested 100 million more for next year. The Treasury also announced it'll moved 100 million of left over Covid funds toward housing. All of this is part of plans to build 2 million affordable housing units and invest $258 billion in housing overall.

President Biden pardoned all former US service members convicted under the US Military's ban on gay sex. The pardon is believed to cover 2,000 veterans convicted of "consensual sodomy". Consensual sodomy was banned and a felony offense under the Uniform Code of Justice from 1951 till 2013. The Pardon will wipe clean those felony records and allow veterans to apply to change their discharge status.

The Department of Transportation announced $1.8 Billion in new infrastructure building across all 50 states, 4 territories and Washington DC. The program focuses on smaller, often community-oriented projects that span jurisdictions. This award saw a number of projects focused on climate and energy, like $25 million to help repair damage caused by permafrost melting amid higher temperatures in Alaska, or $23 million to help electrify the Downeast bus fleet in Maine.

The Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion to support domestic sources of nuclear fuel. The Biden administration hopes to build up America's domestic nuclear fuel to allow for greater stability and lower costs. Currently Russia is the world's top exporter of enriched uranium, supplying 24% of US nuclear fuel.

The Department of Interior awarded $127 million to 6 states to help clean up legacy pollution from orphaned oil and gas wells. The funding will help cap 600 wells in Alaska, Arizona, Indiana, New York and Ohio. So far thanks to administration efforts over 7,000 orphaned wells across the country have been capped, reduced approximately 11,530 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions

HUD announced $469 million to help remove dangerous lead from older homes. This program will focus on helping homeowners particularly low income ones remove lead paint and replace lead pipes in homes built before 1978. This represents one of the largest investments by the federal government to help private homeowners deal with a health and safety hazard.

Bonus: President Biden's efforts to forgive more student debt through his administration's SAVE plan hit a snag this week when federal courts in Kansas and Missouri blocked elements the Administration also suffered a set back at the Supreme Court as its efforts to regular smog causing pollution was rejected by the conservative majority in a 5-4 ruling that saw Amy Coney Barrett join the 3 liberals against the conservatives. This week's legal setbacks underline the importance of courts and the ability to nominate judges and Justices over the next 4 years.

[black-fist-order]

BREAKING: The New York Times fearlessly fires back at Donald Trump after he threatens them with legal action for daring to report on his efforts to extort Paramount Global.

This is exactly how you stand up to this fascist bully and his corruption...

"President Trump’s post today follows a long list of legal threats aimed at discouraging or penalizing independent reporting about the administration. The law is clear and protects a strong free press and favors an informed American public," the Times told The Hill.

"The New York Times will not be deterred by the administration’s intimidation tactics," the outlet added. "We will continue to pursue the facts without fear or favor and stand up for journalists’ First Amendment right to ask questions on behalf of the American people."

They were referring to a deranged Truth Social post that Trump fired off this morning about the massive lawsuit he's conducting against Paramount over an interview that 60 minutes aired with Kamala Harris.

Trump has alleged that the interview was deceptively edited, but most commentators agree that Trump is just trying to bully the company for interacting with his political enemy.

In his post, Trump accused the company of having "cheated and defrauded the American People at levels never seen before in the Political Arena," adding that 60 Minutes "perpetrated a Giant FRAUD against the American People, the Federal Elections Commission, and the Federal Communications System."

"Despite all of the above, and Paramount’s/CBS’/60 Minutes’ admittance to this crime and, with other similar corrupt removals of answers to questions, the Failing New York Times, which is Fake News both in writing and polling, claims that 'people' said that the case is baseless," Trump continued.

"They don’t mean that, they just have a non curable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, possibly to the point where the Times’ interjection makes them liable for tortious interference, including in Elections, which we are intently studying," he went on.

"The bottom line is that what 60 Minutes and its corporate owners have committed is one of the most egregious illegalities in Broadcast History," wrote Trump.

"Nothing like this, the illegal creation of an answer for a Presidential Candidate, has ever been done before, they have to pay a price for it, and the Times should also be on the hook for their likely unlawful behavior. It is vital to hold these Liars and Fraudsters accountable!" he concluded.

The lengthy and lie-riddled outburst was prompted by a report in the Times in which they covered the scheme by Trump's lawyers to extract a settlement from Paramount over the 60 minutes segment. The outlet wrote that "legal experts have called the suit baseless and an easy victory for CBS."

This entire sordid affair is complicated by the fact that Shari Redstone — the controlling shareholder of Paramount — is trying to sell the company to Hollywood studio Skydance. In order for that sale to happen, she needs permission from Trump's Federal Communications Commission.

In other words, it appears to many experts that Trump is holding out on having his FCC grant permission in order to use it as leverage in the settlement discussions. This is corruption of the most clear cut form. He's abusing the powers of the presidency to enrich himself and in a sane country, this would be an impeachable offense...

[allthegeopolitics]

Femicide will be struck from Argentina’s penal code, according to a vow from the administration of Javier Milei, the president. It is his administration’s latest attack on women’s rights. Mariano Cúneo Libarona, the justice minister, said the government will “eliminate the figure of femicide from the Argentine penal code” adding that feminism was a “distortion of the concept of equality”. “This administration defends equality before the law enshrined in our national constitution. No life is worth more than another,” Cúneo Libarona said.

Continue Reading

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Lisa Needham at Public Notice:

You’re forgiven for forgetting about TikTok for the last couple of days, what with the horrorshow avalanche of executive orders and gleeful deployment of Nazi salutes (plural!) from the world’s richest man. Nonetheless, TikTok is ostensibly banned in the United States as Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly voted only nine months ago to outlaw the app unless its parent company, ByteDance, agreed to sell it. The US Supreme Court even upheld the law just last week. However, TikTok lives, thanks to the whims of Donald Trump, the same person who, in August 2020, issued an executive order giving ByteDance 45 days to sell the app or see it banned. Trump has been extremely transparent that he flip-flopped on TikTok because the app helped him win the election last year, in part because it became a hotbed for criticism of Biden’s support for Israel. “We won young people and I think that's a big credit to TikTok,” Trump told Newsmax earlier this month (even though he in fact lost the youth vote). “So I'm not opposed to TikTok ... I had a very good experience with TikTok." Lost in the current discourse about TikTok is an important conversation about whether it violates the First Amendment to ban a social media app based on national security concerns about its Chinese-owned parent company. Also lost is a debate about whether it’s fair to single out TikTok over worries about user privacy, data harvesting, and manipulative algorithms when such issues are common to all social media platforms. There’s also a discussion to be had about whether singling out TikTok is racist — though there’s a good argument it is. Instead, what’s happening here is the creeping oligarchy of companies and capital aligning around an authoritarian president, with everyone fully aware that sucking up to Trump personally, ideally along with staggering sums of cash, is the only way to evade scrutiny.

[...]

The art of the deal

To be scrupulously fair to Trump, he isn’t the only person who reversed course on TikTok. Once it was clear that the public opposed the ban and that the Supreme Court might not step in to save legislators from themselves, the Biden administration spent last week trying to figure out how to keep TikTok alive. Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Markey introduced legislation to delay by 270 days the initial January 19 deadline for TikTok to be sold, despite having voted for the ban in the first place. The problem these efforts faced, however, is that TikTok wasn’t interested in working with the Biden administration or Senate Democrats to fix the problem. And why would they be, when Democrats are hobbled by a persistent inclination to actually follow laws rather than treat everything as an episode of The Apprentice, where flattering Trump as a master dealmaker is all that matters?

It’s exactly the latter approach that TikTok took. The ban required Google and Apple to remove it from their app stores or face steep fines for each user who downloaded the app. What it did not do, however, was penalize anyone who already had the app on their phone or accessed TikTok on the web. So the real financial peril would initially fall on Google and Apple if they kept the app available. After the Supreme Court decision last week, the Biden administration suggested it would not penalize those companies for continuing to host the app, a move TikTok said didn’t provide them enough “necessary clarity and assurance,” and they would therefore shut down in the United States on January 19. Thus began the public kayfabe of TikTok pretending that only Trump could fix it, knowing full well that he would happily go along. So the app went abruptly, ostentatiously dark on the evening of the January 18, only to pop back up some 12 hours later on January 19 with a gushing message to Trump: “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive.”

One might note, of course, that Trump was not president on January 19. One might also note that what Trump did promise — basically, that he would not enforce a law passed by Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court — is not functionally any different than what Biden or Markey were trying to offer, albeit without a demand the company show them personal fealty. But if TikTok had simply left the lights on for those 12 hours and waited for the incoming administration to decide how to enforce the ban, it would have missed the opportunity to let Trump be the savior who brought the app back from the dead. And the one thing social media companies have learned about Trump is that their success will rise and fall with his impulses.

When social media platforms let Trump and his hangers-on say and do whatever they like, he loves them. Once X was purchased by president-unelect Elon Musk, it became transformed into a MAGA megaphone and no longer faces scrutiny from Trump. That’s a change from January 2021, when Trump complained that then-Twitter was “not about FREE SPEECH” after it banned his account following the insurrection. Though Meta didn’t change hands, it still transformed — or more accurately, perhaps, deformed — to meet the new Trump era. CEO Mark Zuckerberg got rid of third-party fact-checking on Facebook, calling it “politically biased,” and revised its hateful speech policy to explicitly allow for attacks on trans people. Zuckerberg donated $1 million to the inauguration, went to church with Trump Monday morning, and hosted a reception Monday night. For the inauguration itself, Zuckerberg, along with Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Google head Sundar Pichai, was basically in the front row. Nothing says “incipient oligarchy” like an inauguration dominated by the richest men in the world, private citizens all.

TikTok’s cozying up to Donald Trump is a bad thing.

[mariacallous]

Pedro Escobar Blanco, one of two hundred and thirty-eight Venezuelans deported by the Trump Administration to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador on March 15th, never met the lawyer who is representing him in U.S. immigration court. They haven’t spoken by phone or texted or communicated through an intermediary. He almost certainly isn’t aware that he’s being represented at all. Yet, a month after he entered Salvadoran custody, an immigration judge in Southern California held a hearing on his asylum case. Escobar Blanco wasn’t in attendance—no one has seen or heard from him since he was sent to El Salvador—and the judge, citing his absence, ordered him removed from the country.

Judges regularly issue deportation orders in absentia for people who are on what’s called the non-detained docket. These individuals have already been released from detention on the condition that they later appear in immigration court. However, if a person is in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as Escobar Blanco had been since October, 2024, he cannot possibly show up for a court date unless the government lets him. The judge’s logic—penalizing him for not being there—made little sense. It also meant that he would be barred from entering the U.S. for the next ten years. “I objected,” Andreana Sarkis, Escobar Blanco’s lawyer, said in a subsequent declaration. “His ‘failure to appear’ was through no fault of his own, but rather through ICE’s failure to produce him.”

The government had deported Escobar Blanco on the basis of a proclamation that Donald Trump had signed in secret, on March 14th. Escobar Blanco was accused of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, the government claimed that, in effect, it didn’t need to present the actual evidence against him. Sarkis could only surmise that the allegations were related to his tattoos, which included a nautical star on each shoulder, and the names of his parents and his two children, who are ten and thirteen.

The majority of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had pending cases in U.S. immigration courts. In the weeks since their disappearance, lawyers across the country have mobilized to represent as many of them as possible. The work mainly consisted of showing up to hearings in their place and explaining to judges where their clients are. To date, the Trump Administration has refused to share the names of the men it has sent to El Salvador. The current list, which is the result of reporting by CBS news and whose accuracy the government still won’t confirm, is incomplete.

“Ghosts” is how one attorney involved in the advocacy effort described her clients. By such standards, Escobar Blanco is considered lucky: a lawyer was at least available to appear on his behalf in immigration court (many of the men lack even that), and the judge issued an order that can theoretically be challenged (other outcomes can be harder to contest). Sarkis, who in six years of practicing law has never before represented a client with whom she couldn’t speak, took on Escobar Blanco’s case two days before the hearing. When Escobar Blanco entered the country, in July, 2024, he did so exactly as the U.S. government had instructed, scheduling an appointment with border authorities. In his case, this led him to wait in Mexico for ten months before he was finally interviewed, screened, and eventually allowed in. He seems to have been apprehended in a worksite raid near San Diego last October; it isn’t fully clear why he wouldn’t have had work papers at the time. “What’s so shocking to me is that I’m seeing no criminal history, no affiliation with any criminal organization,” Sarkis said. “He did everything he was supposed to.”

At the center of the initiative to organize legal representation for the Venezuelans is Michelle Brané, an attorney and longtime immigrants’-rights advocate who helped lead the effort to locate the families separated at the border during the first Trump Administration. When Joe Biden entered the White House and promised to reunite them, Brané joined the Department of Homeland Security, as the executive director of the Family Reunification Task Force. Now she works at Together and Free, a nonprofit that describes its mission as providing “emergency and ongoing support to asylum seeking families impacted by federal immigration policies.”

In February, before the Alien Enemies Act went into effect, Brané and her colleagues were trying to identify a group of nearly two hundred Venezuelans whom the Trump Administration had sent to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The White House had described the men, without evidence, as criminals and threats to public security, and held many of them in the same units once reserved for alleged Al Qaeda terrorists. Brané, who’d begun hearing from the detainees’ family members, connected them to litigators at the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit.

The A.C.L.U. sued the Trump Administration again on March 15th, hours after the President invoked the Alien Enemies Act. A federal judge promptly ordered the government to halt the first deportation flights and to turn around any aircraft that had already left Texas, where the detainees were being held. The Administration ignored the order, and three planes full of men landed in San Salvador in the hours that followed. Early the next morning, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, posted videos of them being marched into a notoriously brutal Salvadoran prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center. “The calls came in immediately,” Brané told me. “The first few cases were primarily people who saw a video and said, ‘My brother or my son was in there.’ Then we started to hear from people who hadn’t seen their family member in a video, but the pattern fit.”

Escobar Blanco’s wife, children, and sister fell into the latter camp: none of them had spotted him in any of the footage. His sister Mariela, who lives in Venezuela, told me that she and Escobar Blanco had spoken nearly every day since he left for the U.S. The only time they lost touch had been when he was travelling through the Darién Gap, a treacherous stretch of jungle between Colombia and Panama. One night in early March she received a call from him. “I don’t understand anything, Mari,” he said. He’d just been transferred from California to Texas, and he told her that the government was planning to deport him and a group of other men to Venezuela because “they were related to the Tren de Aragua gang.” He and his sister are from the state of La Guaira, on the northern coast of Venezuela. “We didn’t have the remotest idea of who these people really were,” she told me, of the gang. A few days later, she stopped hearing from her brother altogether.

On the night of March 14th, a friend that Escobar Blanco had made while in custody called her with an update. The detainees were about to board a plane at the airport—bound for Venezuela, they were told—when ICE officers led them back to the detention center because of bad weather. “He’s still in line because they have to re-register us to bring us back inside,” the friend told her. “There are a lot of us, so it’ll probably take a while. But they told us that any moment, between Sunday and Monday, we’ll be in Venezuela.” Mariela told me, “They didn’t arrive, and the rumors began about the flights to El Salvador. I said to myself, ‘Wow, my brother has to be there because where else is he? Why isn’t he in touch with us?’ ”

Brané and her team began compiling lists based on the calls they received. This was almost exactly how her work had begun during the family-separation crisis in 2018. Then, as now, the government didn’t have a credible or comprehensive account of who it had swept up while executing its plans. In 2018, the cause was a mix of incompetence, negligence, and a general lack of political will; this time, it appears to be more calculated. “All of this is about power,” Brané said. “It’s about showing they don’t have to play the game.”

Brané and the other advocates at her organization began building out detailed profiles of about fifty names on their list. They obtained copies of the men’s Venezuelan I.D.s, spoke to their family members, conducted background checks in Venezuela, coördinated with gang experts and investigative journalists, and searched an Interpol database. They also conducted research in Chile, Colombia, and Peru, where some of the men had lived or travelled before reaching the U.S.

The men were initially detained for a range of different reasons. Some were picked up during traffic stops; others had been apprehended as “collaterals” when ICE had been looking for someone else. The overwhelming majority of the men that Brané and her team looked into had no criminal records. In many instances, the advocates and researchers turned up minor or ambiguous infractions. Two men had once been accused of robbery in a Venezuelan news article, but were apparently never charged. One teen-ager had a marijuana charge in Chile. There were a few exceptions: two men had records of domestic violence, and someone else had been arrested in an alleged hit-and-run incident. One case involved a man in New York who had been charged with the possession of a firearm, but the charge was dropped. “He was held at Rikers Island and handed over to ICE, thanks to the new position of the New York Mayor,” Brané said.

The advocates kept spreadsheets with basic information about each individual and the date and time of any upcoming court hearing. The idea was to try to keep cases open for as long as possible, then to get them formally paused. But at the hearings, the lawyers were frequently stunned by how government attorneys described the whereabouts of the men in question.

On March 19th, Monique Sherman, a managing attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, attended a proceeding at an ICE detention center in Aurora, Colorado, for a man named Jefferson Laya Freites, whose case was eventually dismissed. “The judge called his name and he didn’t walk forward, because he wasn’t there,” she told me. Sherman told the judge that Laya Freites’s wife had recognized him in a video from the Salvadoran prison. But when the judge asked the D.H.S. attorney to respond, according to a report in USA Today, she said only that Laya Freites had been released to “local authorities.” Sherman told me, “D.H.S. said three times that he was in local-law-enforcement custody. I said I was in touch with the man’s wife. She’s desperate to be in touch with him. If he’s in law-enforcement custody, can the government tell us where he is? The D.H.S. attorney said that, for privacy reasons, she couldn’t.”

Margaret Cargioli, of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, was representing Miguel Rojas-Mendoza, who had Temporary Protected Status when he was deported to El Salvador. His mother told me that she had called him after Trump won the election last year, and begged him to be careful. He was living in Louisiana at the time. “Don’t worry, mama,” he replied. “I’ll be fine. I have T.P.S.” Local police records from January and February indicate that he had been arrested for driving with an expired license plate and without a proper license. When Cargioli got Rojas-Mendoza’s file, the day before a virtual hearing, on April 8th, she hadn’t yet seen photos of him. After the judge appeared, another box popped up on her computer screen showing a room at the Winn Correctional Center, in Louisiana, where Rojas-Mendoza had been held before his transfer to Texas, the previous month. “I see a man, a little distant from the screen, sitting at a table,” Cargioli said. “Next to him was a detention officer. He was holding a piece of paper.” For a fleeting moment, Cargioli thought the advocates might have made a mistake; her new client appeared to be in the U.S. Then the detention officer said, “Oh, no. This is the wrong person.” The screen in Louisiana clicked off. During the hearing, Cargioli asked the D.H.S. lawyer where Rojas-Mendoza was. “I don’t have any information,” the lawyer replied.

It is possible that, in the days after the first three planes of deportees left for El Salvador, some government lawyers didn’t know where the men in their cases were. ICE has a detainee locator that shows only where someone is being held in the U.S.; once that person is deported he no longer appears in the system. After news organizations such as CBS started publishing lists of names, however, the government appeared to take a more deliberate stance. By the end of March, Sherman told me, D.H.S. lawyers were using a “canned” phrase about the men “not being here” and asking to hold cases “in abeyance.” They rarely elaborated or departed from the script.

In the last several weeks, government lawyers may have developed a new strategy—to persuade judges to dismiss cases. “It’s sneaky and it’s wicked,” Ann García, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Project, told me. “The D.H.S. attorney is saying either ‘We no longer want to pursue this case for deportation and we’re exercising our prosecutorial discretion to withdraw the charges here’ or ‘We request dismissal of the case because the immigrant is no longer in the United States,’ which is ridiculous because ICE disappeared the person.” In the case of a removal order, like the one Escobar Blanco received, there is a legal path within the immigration system to file a motion to reopen the case. Dismissals essentially remove cases from the immigration courts. You can technically appeal a dismissal, but, as García said, “it’s unlikely the current immigration appellate body would review that decision fairly.” Without a removal order, she went on, “a federal court of appeals is unlikely to have jurisdiction.”

On April 7th, the Supreme Court delivered a mild rebuke to the President. Those who were charged as “alien enemies,” the Justices found, still had to be notified before they were deported. But the Justices didn’t specify what such a notice was supposed to include, or how men in custody, with limited access to lawyers, could actually respond. A few weeks later, after a federal judge in the southern district of Texas issued a temporary restraining order against the government, preventing it from deporting more Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, the Administration moved one group of detainees to a facility in the northern district of Texas. ICE then distributed notices to them in English, hours before trying to take them to an airport. The notices provided no information about what the prisoners could do to see or to dispute the evidence against them.

At this point, the Supreme Court intervened to halt the deportations. By then, some three hundred people had already been sent to El Salvador, including seventeen more men deported on March 30th, ten others deported in mid-April, and a Salvadoran father of three named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had been deported, on March 15th, by mistake. His case prompted a separate lawsuit that also reached the Supreme Court; in a nine-to-zero decision, the Justices ordered the Administration to “facilitate” his return to the U.S.

In the past few weeks, Brané and her colleagues have been learning about new, previously unreported instances of people sent to El Salvador. Late last month, the Times published a story about Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a thirty-two-year-old food-delivery worker living in Michigan who was sent to El Salvador on March 15th. He hadn’t appeared on the CBS list, flight manifests, or government accounts of recent transfers made from immigration custody. Neither had Neiyerver Adrian Leon Rengel, a Venezuelan living in Texas, whose disappearance was confirmed by reporting in the Miami Herald. As Brané put it, “Who knows how many more there are?”

Like Brané, Ann García has spent the last seven years trying to find all the families who were separated at the border during the first Trump Administration. “I still can’t tell you how many families were separated,” she told me. “One of the scary parts of the current situation is that the government won’t tell us anything.” At a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, a journalist asked Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, if he had spoken to the Salvadoran government about returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. “I would never tell you that,” he answered. “And you know who else I’d never tell? A judge.”

The Supreme Court never addressed what the men sent to El Salvador in March can do now. The A.C.L.U. has recently filed another brief in federal court, in Washington, D.C., to persuade a judge to order their return. In the court filing, the A.C.L.U. cites the Supreme Court’s instruction from the Abrego García case. “Family members of those in [El Salvador] maintain that they have no connection at all to TdA,” the lawyers wrote, referring to Tren de Aragua. “These errors are particularly devastating because many class members came to the United States precisely because of arbitrary arrests and detentions by their government, and have strong claims for relief under our immigration laws.”

Mariela, the sister of Pedro Escobar Blanco, told me that, long before her brother’s sudden deportation to El Salvador, he was in a state of shock. When he was first apprehended, last year, he couldn’t understand why the ICE officers who arrived at his worksite acted as if they were staging a Special Forces operation. “I thought it was a prank,” he told her at the time. “They arrived like they were looking for some criminal who was highly dangerous. They shouted at us to get on the ground, not to move. It almost seemed like a candid camera would pop out.” One day, about four months later, while he was still in ICE custody, he told his sister, “I’m just going to tell them to deport me because I can’t be a prisoner any longer. I’m not doing anything for my children or for you. I’m not even doing anything for myself. I’d prefer just to be sent back.”

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

The biggest myth regarding the campus anti-Semitism crisis is that it’s about speech. It is a self-serving myth: Institutions and activists that want to disregard their abuse of Jewish students will fall back on the claim that any attempt to hold them accountable for their actions is actually an attack on free speech.

Columbia University is learning what happens when that disingenuous trick starts to backfire: Students and professors take it as a license to do whatever they want, people end up in the hospital, and the government steps in to say this cannot continue to be done on their dime.

The Biden administration was fearful of standing up to the Hamas youth groups on campus. The Trump administration is happy to do so. Thus we have the announcement that three government agencies—Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration—will be reviewing federal contracts and grants with Columbia totaling around $5 billion.

Crucially, the announcement clearly avoids the penalizing of mere speech:

“Americans have watched in horror for more than a year now, as Jewish students have been assaulted and harassed on elite university campuses,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement. “Unlawful encampments and demonstrations have completely paralyzed day-to-day campus operations, depriving Jewish students of learning opportunities to which they are entitled. Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination. Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.”

Assault isn’t speech. Harassment, the definitions of which are laid out in these schools’ policy handbooks, doesn’t include “criticism of Israeli government policy,” as activists and well-meaning but foolish free-speech groups routinely claim. At Harvard, for example, “such aggression must be sufficiently severe or pervasive, and objectively offensive, that it creates a work, educational, or living environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive and denies the individual an equal opportunity to participate in the benefits of the workplace or the institution’s programs and activities. Unless sufficiently severe or pervasive, a single act typically would not constitute bullying.”

Last, discrimination is also not speech. I wrote about one such prominent example last week: George Washington University’s professional psychology program penalized Jewish students for their religious background and Israeli students on the basis of their national origin, a textbook Title VI civil-rights violation.

[anamericangirl]

I have to rant to someone who will understand how egregious and obnoxious this is because my friends are sick of me. The reaction to rural NC in this hurricane? This will be the norm if Tim Walz is VP. Walz has been dismissive, insulting, and malicious towards rural Minnesota. He said that there's nothing of value, nothing but rocks and cows. He has very clearly expressed antagonism towards rural values and culture. Tim Walz will brag about his education bills, yet he tracks down rural schools with high native populations and penalizes their funding and burdens their staff with unnecessary training and even legal threats because they punish "too high" a number of native students compared to white. I work among schools that are 99% native and they every year have mandated training to address their racial bias and face harsh penalties from the state for punishing too many native kids. They have to adapt to the loss of funding. Despite the rez saying they want to set a standard of excellence and they are proud to be breaking generational curses, Walz denies them crucial funding and punishes them for trying to help their kids learn to make the right choices. He recently signed in a bill requiring free lunches, and knowingly and purposefully did not modify the paperwork process many rural schools rely on to make up the missing our districts desperately need, which relies on students signing up for free and reduced lunches. This bill has devastated funding and left many rural schools scrambling. In addition, he continues to refuse to provide rural schools with more support to bus students, knowing that they cannot afford the costs of bussing over so many miles. Instead, he continues to pour funding into transportation for students in the cities. He has implemented bloated and wasteful mentor programs for teachers yet refuses to allow schools to take disciplinary action against students who directly threaten the lives and wellbeing of teachers. We had a gun threat at our school and the district did not expel the student who made the threat to shoot up the school because he was native and Walz's administration was likely to sue. He also refuses to do anything about our shitty retirement. We have the top (or did before he fucked us over) educators in the nation, and yet are ranked among the bottom 5 for benefits and retirement. But he refuses to fix retirement because nobody wants to teach in his schools, and if he actually fixes retirement, there will be almost no teachers left.

Walz is wrathful and vindictive to rural communities because they don't vote for him or like his policies, and he purposefully makes our lives harder. As his records show, he is a liar and a braggart. In true Minnesotan fashion, he'll underhandedly cut you while he smiles and calls you his neighbor. That man is a snake, and if you despise what you see with the hurricane response, know that he will never pass up an opportunity to make the lives of those who didn't and wouldn't vote for him a living hell, and this level of abuse of rural communities and vulnerable poor populations will get worse.

I’m obviously a little late to this but man it’s always worse than I think!

The only thing good people ever had to say about Walz was “free lunches 😍” but even that was shit when you actually look at what the policy was and the impact it had.

And instead of treating rural areas like trash because they don’t vote the right way maybe he should have been treating them better if he wanted the votes.

The response from him and Harris to the hurricane over here was abysmal and of course that just speaks to what kind of people they are and their treatment of us after that storm definitely lost them North Carolina.

Sorry you’re stuck with him over there, though.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"PRAISES PENITENTIARY," Daily British Whig (Kingston, Ontario). September 20, 1920. Page 2. --- Gen. W. S. Hughes Addresses Club Meeting At Ottawa. ---- Ottawa Journal. Brig. Gen. W. St. Pierre Hughes, superintendent of penitentiaries, raised the curtain on various penitentiary features, and, incidentally, made vigorous dénial of several statements regarding prison matters, in a most interesting address before members of The Kiwanis Club, of Ottawa, at Friday's luncheon of the club in the Chateau Laurier. General Hughes gave vivid comparisons between prison life of years ago and conditions now to be found in institutions of this type, particularly the one at Kingston, where he had spent twenty-two of his twenty-nine years as a penitentiary official. The consideration that is now extended to the in- mates was described by the speaker, and his remarks drew enthusiastic applause from the Kiwanians.

General Hughes took occasion to deny the allegation of a Montreal newspaper that prisoners were released from the Kingston institution in clothing that stamped them as ex-convicts.

General Hughes remarked that soldiers on active service during the recent war were well fed, but their rations were not so good as those the prisoners at Kingston enjoyed. The cells of Kingston penitentiary had all been remodelled, however, and the dungeons have been abolished. There is not a cell in the institution which the sun's rays do not reach at some portion of the day. General Hughes described the larger cells as nice bedrooms, and he went into details regarding their fittings

General Hughes told of the development in prison work since Kingston penitentiary was built by the British Government in 1833, when it was considered the greatest structure of its kind in the whole world. The plan of the building had actually been adopted in many countries since that time.

[political-us]

The Trump administration is looking to overturn a Biden-era rule limiting major banks’ ability to penalize customers with overdraft fees, a reversal that has major banking associations salivating at the mouth. Last week, House Financial Service Committee Chair French Hill (R-Ark.) and Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott (R-S.C.) introduced legislation to repeal the rule, which eliminated junk fees associated with account overdrafting — capping the penalty at $5 — and gave banks several options to manage overdraft costs without placing an excess burden on consumers. The Trump administration endorsed the legislation on Monday, with Office of Management and Budget Director and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Interim Director Russ Vought writing on X that he was “grateful” that the representatives had introduced legislation overturning the rule. “Passing this important legislation will immediately further President Trump’s deregulatory agenda,” he wrote. At the time the rule was passed, former CFPB Director Rohit Chopra wrote that the directive was expected to “add up to $5 billion in annual overdraft fee savings to consumers, or $225 per household that pays overdraft fees.” “Over the past few decades, these highly profitable overdraft loans have increased consumer costs by billions of dollars,” Chopra argued. “The loans have also led to tens of millions of consumers losing access to banking services, as well as facing negative credit reporting that has prevented them from opening another account in the future.” The rule angered major banking organizations. In December, the The American Bankers Association sued the Biden administration alongside a coalition of banking groups, accusing the CFPB of exceeding its authority and claiming that the regulations would harm consumers. On Monday, several banking associations once again called on the CFPB to withdraw the rule. In their announcement, Reps. Scott and Hill wrote that they have the “support of key stakeholders, including the Consumer Bankers Association, Independent Community Bankers of America, American Bankers Association, and America’s Credit Unions.” Under the auspices of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the CFPB has become a target of the Trump administration’s gutting of the federal workforce, which has included regulatory agencies providing oversight to major corporations. In a statement released earlier this month, the White House accused the CFPB of functioning “as another woke, weaponized arm of the bureaucracy that leverages its power against certain industries and individuals disfavored by so-called ‘elites.’” Musk added “CFPB RIP “ on X, writing that while the organization did “above zero good things,” they “still need to go.” Last week, Vought ordered all work at the bureau to cease, pending layoffs at the organization amid efforts to shut it down entirely. Over the weekend, a federal judge blocked the mass firing of CFPB staffers following a union challenge. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) torched the administration’s actions in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “ Donald Trump campaigned on lowering costs for working families ‘on day one,’ she said. “He is now sidelining the agency that over the last dozen years, has returned $21 billion directly to people who got cheated by giant financial institutions. In other words, his plan is to do nothing on reducing costs, but sure enough, put in place a plan to raise costs for people who are working hardest in our economy.”

[orv-random-quotes]

day 118

Kim Dokja: So what happened? Am I going to be penalized?

Bihyung: Where did you hear that?! Hey, do you know how hard I defended you?? "Administrator, please listen to me. Kim Dokja isn't a scammer or a strange person! He is just a very hard worker!"

He spoke in a convincing manner.

[thedystopianexperiance]

A short introduction to the goals of project 2025

Project 2025 aims to radically transform the federal government and advance a conservative political agenda. Some of its primary goals include:

1. Reorganization of Federal Agencies

- Eliminating the Department of Education: The project calls for transferring educational authority to states and removing federal influence, asserting that it promotes "left-wing" ideologies like critical race theory and gender policies.

- Reducing Environmental Regulations: Plans include disbanding climate change research programs, downsizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and promoting fossil fuels over renewable energy.

2. Promoting Conservative Social Policies

- Traditional Family Values: The initiative seeks to reinforce the nuclear family structure, opposing gender ideology, and restricting reproductive rights, including banning certain forms of research using embryonic stem cells.

- Restrictions on LGBTQ+ Rights: Proposals include limiting the recognition of transgender identities in schools and workplaces and opposing policies like allowing trans women to compete in women's sports.

3. Centralizing Executive Power

- Advocates for the 'unitary executive theory', which would grant the president more direct control over the federal government, including the ability to replace civil servants with political appointees loyal to the administration.

4. Economic Policies

- Tax Reform: Supporting pro-family tax cuts and eliminating taxes perceived to penalize marriage or large families.

- Medicare and Medicaid: Proposals suggest reducing the scope of these programs, emphasizing privatization over federal involvement.

5. Dismantling Bureaucracy

- Aims to significantly reduce the size of the federal government, decentralizing power to states and increasing accountability through stricter oversight of agencies.

These goals have sparked significant debate. Supporters view them as a return to limited government and traditional values, while critics argue the plan undermines democratic institutions, civil rights, and environmental protections.

[mariacallous]

The U.S. State Department plans to use artificial intelligence to detect students from abroad who support Hamas, with the goal of canceling their visas and deporting them.

That’s according to a report Thursday from Axios, which cited unnamed department officials who said they planned to use AI to surveil the social media of students on visas. The plan is called “Catch and Revoke,” a callback to the “catch and release” approach to managing illegal immigration that Republicans have decried.

Separately, Fox News reported that the department has already revoked the visa of one student who participated in campus demonstrations against Israel amid the war in Gaza, that began which Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The student and campus were not identified.

And the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee told NPR this week that it had heard from at least a dozen students, including some from Gaza, who were unable to reenter the country after winter break because their visas were canceled without explanation.

Together, the developments signal that the Trump administration is moving aggressively to carry out President Donald Trump’s promise not to allow international students who support terrorism to remain in the country.

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you,” Trump said in a fact sheet that accompanied the executive order, repeating a pledge he made during his presidential campaign. “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.”

The executive order was billed as an effort to fight antisemitism and it has divided Jewish groups. Some say it reflects a dangerous erosion of civil liberties, while others have offered cautious support with the caveat that civil rights protections should be applied. Others yet have embraced the order and offered to help. The far-right group Betar US, which launched in response to the protests, says it has submitted the names of dozens of students it believes should be deported to the White House.

Thousands of students were arrested at campus pro-Palestinian protests and encampments last year. It is not known how many were on visas, though State Department officials are reportedly working to ascertain that information. The department says the Biden administration did not revoke any visas following those arrests.

The State Department has not detailed what kinds of demonstrations or social media posts would, in its view, constitute support for Hamas. Demonstrations on some campuses — including at Barnard College in New York City this week — have included open support and admiration for Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist group. The demonstrations have also featured many students offering vocal support for the Palestinians and intense criticism of Israel without open support for Hamas.

Civil rights advocates say they are concerned that the Trump administration will penalize pro-Palestinian students who have not violated any laws or expressed support for Hamas. They also are expressing concern about the use of AI, a new technology that has advanced even since Oct. 7, to surveil students.

Advocates for and against the administration’s efforts both say they expect them to wind up in court. For now, though, the crackdown is already creating a chill on college campuses, according to the NPR report, which found that some foreign students are increasingly hesitant about participating in any pro-Palestinian events, even when they are not demonstrations against Israel.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

By  Kassy Dillon

A group of Jewish Harvard University students filed a lawsuit on Wednesday accusing it of enabling anti-Semitism and selectively enforcing its own policies to avoid protecting Jews from harassment.

“Harvard permits students and faculty to advocate, without consequence, the murder of Jews and the destruction of Israel, the only Jewish country in the world,” the lawsuit by student Alexander Kestenbaum states. “Meanwhile, Harvard requires students to take a training class that warns that they will be disciplined if they engage in sizeism, fatphobia, racism, transphobia, or other disfavored behavior.”

Kestenbaum’s lawsuit, filed jointly with the group Students Against Antisemitism (SAA), accuses Harvard of violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and comes amid mounting criticism for its response to Hamas’ deadly October 7 massacre of Israeli citizens. Kestenbaum, a Jewish student at the Harvard Divinity School, is joined by five other unnamed students who are members of SAA in the lawsuit.

“Harvard, America’s leading university, has become a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” the lawsuit states. “Mobs of pro-Hamas students and faculty have marched by the hundreds through Harvard’s campus, shouting vile antisemitic slogans and calling for death to Jews and Israel.”

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the lawsuit references mobs occupying campus buildings, promoting violence, and assaulting Jews on campus. It also accuses administrators and professors of promulgating anti-Semitism and dismissing students who object.

“What is most striking about all of this is Harvard’s abject failure and refusal to lift a finger to stop and deter this outrageous antisemitic conduct and penalize the students and faculty who perpetrate it,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit argues that anti-Semitism has been a campus problem at Harvard for years, but claims Harvard is now enabling it. 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Carter Sherman at The Guardian:

Legislators in at least four states have introduced bills this year that would change the legal definition of “homicide” to include abortion ��� proposals that pave the way for states to charge abortion patients with murder. Pregnancy Justice, a group that tracks these kinds of efforts, says it has recorded more “homicide” bills this year than ever before. Abortion bans have typically penalized providers, rather than patients. “That raises significant alarm – both that we’ve seen more than we have in the past in a single legislative session already, and that they’re not generating the level of outrage or attention or scrutiny that they have in years past,” said Dana Sussman, senior vice-president at Pregnancy Justice. “The more of these kinds of bills that get introduced, people get numb to the idea of them, and they seem less and less radical.”

With Donald Trump returning to power in Washington DC, abortion rights supporters and opponents are waiting to see how the new president will handle one of the most divisive issues in US life. But red-state lawmakers have already filed a host of anti-abortion proposals over the last few weeks. In addition to the “homicide” bills, many of these bills target access to abortion pills – which account for more than 60% of US abortions – and seek to limit minors’ ability to obtain abortions. In at least two states, Montana and Missouri, lawmakers are also seeking to implement legislation that would in effect roll back the abortion protections guaranteed by recent ballot measures. Last year, when elections loomed over legislators’ heads, states passed fewer abortion-related laws than they had in the five years prior, according to the the Center for Reproductive Rights. But this year, Kimya Forouzan, principal state policy adviser at the Guttmacher Institute, suspects that lawmakers will take Trump’s victory in 2024 as a green light to pursue anti-abortion policies more aggressively. “There’s generally going to be an emboldening of state legislators who are opposed to reproductive and sexual health and rights, given the new administration,” Forouzan said.

‘Homicide’ and ‘fetal personhood’

Bills that redefine abortion as “homicide” strengthen a legal doctrine known as “fetal personhood”, which seeks to grant embryos and fetuses legal rights and protections – sometimes at the expense of the women carrying them. If fully enacted, fetal personhood would not only ban abortion but would rewrite entire arenas of US law, from traffic regulations to taxes. So far in 2025, lawmakers in at least six states have introduced bills to strengthen fetal personhood, while Trump has tucked fetal personhood language into one of his executive orders. [...]

Limits on abortion pills

In the years since Roe fell, anti-abortion activists have lobbed attack after attack on abortion pills, or medication abortion, which are increasingly facilitated by the mail. In spring 2024, more than 19,000 abortions were provided each month through telehealth appointments, which rely on the mail to deliver the pills, according to #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning. “Mailed medication abortion is an existential threat to the anti-abortion movement,” said Rachel Rebouché, the dean of Temple University’s law school. “It’s hard to police.” Red states, however, are going to try. Indiana, which bans virtually all abortions, has introduced three separate bills that would ban people from sending abortion pills to individuals in the state. One of those bills also outlaws the possession of abortion pills. Over in Oklahoma and Tennessee, which ban almost all abortions, lawmakers have introduced similar bills that would also ban people from mailing abortion pills – and, in the case of the Tennessee bill, hold them liable for $5m if those pills were used in an abortion.

With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, anti-abortion extremists are further emboldened to push extreme bills that would treat abortion as “homicide” and restrictions on abortion medications in the states.