#people who have been deported and came back

[harlequinfuckthisblue]

I have to take laundry over to my right wing, lunatic parents' house today, may the uncaring universe have mercy on my wretched soul and give me the strength not to say shit that will get me disowned.....

[historicity-was-already-taken]

I’ve been seeing a lot of what I’m going to term “Judenrat Behavior” from American Jewish organizations and individuals over the last week and a half; I am speaking, of course, as a member of the American Jewish community.

The Judenrat were councils of highly respected Jewish individuals the Nazis set up as governing parties in the Jewish ghettos of Poland, Lithuania, and the Western USSR.

They were expected to carry out any and all German orders regarding the Jews, while they simultaneously sought to protect their communities from those orders as much as possible.

Comprised of highly educated, respected men, when the kashariyot (the female functionaries I refer to in my book title as “the girl bandits”) started showing up with evidence of mass murders of Jews in the territories Germany occupied in the summer of 1941, the Judenrat were not having it.

When the male leaders of the organized Jewish youth argued that the evidence needed to be taken seriously, the Judenrat were still not having it. They refused to believe that “this” could happen right in the “middle of Europe,” in the middle of the "civilized world."

Therefore, went the Judenrat's thinking, these young women and men were nothing more than dangerous, hysterical provocateurs. The evidence was right in front of them, and the Jewish Councils refused to accept the reality of the fact that the Germans were carefully, deliberately, and methodically massacring the Jews of Eastern Europe.

We often conflate the Jewish Councils with the Jewish camp guards and ghetto police. I don’t think that’s fair; with the exception of Chaim Rumkowski, the Councils were comprised of individuals who simply couldn’t conceive of This happening in the world they thought they understood.

They weren’t the collaborators the ghettos saw them as. They weren’t putting their parents in deportation trains. They weren’t informing on other Jews. They were just people incapable of, and ultimately, unwilling to see what they were living through for what it was.

Today, we all have the benefit of these histories to learn from. Denying what we see, what we hear, what government officials say won’t get us anywhere, besides maybe dead.

Right now they’re coming for the Latin American and trans communities. And we can’t just all sit back and reenact Martin Niemöller's "First they came for..." We just can't.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private-sector Trumpism

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on WEDNESDAY (Apr 2), and in BLOOMINGTON on FRIDAY (Apr 4). More tour dates here.

Trumpism is a mixture of grievance, surveillance, and pettiness: "I will never forgive your mockery, I have records of you doing it, and I will punish you and everyone who associates with you for it." Think of how he's going after the (cowardly) BigLaw firms:

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/03/skadden-makes-100-million-settlement-with-trump-in-pro-bono-payola/

Trump is the realization of decades of warning about ubiquitous private and public surveillance – that someday, all of this surveillance would be turned to the systematic dismantling of human rights and punishing of dissent.

23 years ago, I was staying in London with some friends, scouting for a flat to live in. After at day in town, I came back and we ordered a curry and had a nice chat. I mentioned how discomfited I'd been by all the CCTV cameras that had sprouted at the front of every private building, to say nothing of all the public cameras installed by local councils and the police. My friend dismissed this as a kind of American, hyper-individualistic privacy purism, explaining that these cameras were there for public safety – to catch flytippers, vandals, muggers, boy racers tearing unsafely through the streets. My fear about having my face captured by all these cameras was little more than superstitious dread. It's not like they were capturing my soul.

Now, I knew that my friend had recently marched in one of the massive demonstrations against Bush and Blair's illegal invasion plans for Iraq. "Look," I said, "you marched in the street to stand up and be counted. But even so, how would you have felt if – as a condition of protesting – you were forced to first record your identity in a government record-book?" My friend had signed petitions, he'd marched in the street, but even so, he had to admit that there would be some kind of chilling effect if your identity had to be captured as a condition of participating in public political events.

Trump has divided the country into two groups of people: "citizens" (who are sometimes only semi-citizens) and immigrants (who have no rights):

https://crookedtimber.org/2025/03/29/trumps-war-on-immigrants-is-the-cancellation-of-free-society/#fn-53926-1

Trump has asserted that he can arrest and deport immigrants (and some semi-citizens) for saying things he doesn't like, or even liking social media posts he disapproves of. He's argued that he can condemn people to life in an offshore slave-labor camp if he doesn't like their tattoos. It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-28-trump-scrambles-pardon-corporate-criminals-townstone-boeing-cfpb/

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against the people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-administration-warns-european-companies-to-comply-with-anti-dei-order.html

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights are human rights' is a conservative."

Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights are human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left – it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' – on the grounds that private property owners have the absolute right to decide which speech they will or won't permit. Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

But while private censorship is often less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

https://locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doctorow-inaction-is-a-form-of-action/

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship – with the main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private rule has been in America since its founding, when Thomas Jefferson tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution. A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form. The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

This is especially true of our speech forums – the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

This is how things work at the US border, of course, where border guards are turning away academics for having anti-Trump views:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/europe/us-france-scientist-entry-trump-messages.html

It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also privacy law. The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy – like the failure to act on monopoly – has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action – every utterance, every movement, every purchase – to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course sold.

With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.

Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country. The company is notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents in which the company used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that was suing the company from entering any of its premises:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregion/madison-square-garden-facial-recognition.html

This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/madison-square-gardens-ban-on-lawyers-suing-them-can-remain-in-place-court-rules/4194985/

Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.

But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added their faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises. For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:

https://www.theverge.com/news/637228/madison-square-garden-james-dolan-facial-recognition-fan-ban

This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.

Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton. Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and they add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?

After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?

Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/funeral-homes-private-equity-death-care/

More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights – they're the ultimate human rights?

The old fears of Thomas Jefferson and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/31/madison-square-garden/#autocrats-of-trade

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[deadsetobsessions]

Once more the hallucinations hit, and once more I am here writing it out.

My brain is fucking terrifying and I want out, so bad. This came to me in the form of a nightmare.

Also, please don’t take the timeline into consideration, because I have no idea what’s going on. Again, nightmares and dreams tend to not have the best coherency when it comes to plot and timelines. The reincarnation doesn’t have a name, I was too busy feeling terrified. Shit in parentheses was how I experienced the nightmare. Everything else is just me adding sprinkle sprinkle.

——

Ra’s al Ghul.

Talia al Ghul.

Two names that she had been aware of, in the peripherals of her hyper fixation. Two characters meant to enhance the story of the Dark Knight. Side characters, on a good day. Perhaps, a main antagonist on a better day.

On a bad day?

Main characters. Real, living people. Real, living, breathing assassins.

Unfortunately, they’re her new family. One she remembered coming into, bathed in a pool of blood and screams.

She was not a baby.

She is now, a baby. The first of Talia al Ghul’s children. The eldest, once Damian al Ghul was born.

Swaddled in emerald green and gold silks, she was presented to a man with silver streaked hair and a receding hairline. He too, was robed in green and golds.

“A daughter, Talia?” He rumbled, the smooth Arabic flowing out of his mouth failing to hide the acrid disappointment. The child, past the haze of confusion of suddenly being deported from her own adult body into one of a helpless child, felt a stirring of irritation. It’s good she learned the language, because now she knew exactly how Ra’s felt about her. The child grumbled a displeased sound. Not that she would have ignored the fact that her grandfather was Ra’s al Ghul. (He smelled like moth eaten fabric and blood- but I think that was because my cat accidentally scratched me.)

“My apologies, father.”

“Do not tell the young detective of this. Had it been a son, perhaps things would have been different. No, a daughter would only hinder him.”

Talia bowed, hands tightening on her daughter. “May I raise her, father?”

“A resource is still a resource. Go ahead, Talia.”

“Yes, father.” Talia took the dismissal and bowed before leaving.

On her way back to the room with the reincarnation’s crib, Talia al Ghul stroked her daughter’s head.

“I wish you were born a boy, my daughter. I am sorry my beloved will never know of you.”

The reincarnation looked at her new mother. She’s young, the woman-child realized. A teenager.

“You’ll have to be useful, my daughter. Your grandfather is not so kind as to keep the useless. I… do not wish for your death,” her mother muttered.

Great. She got new life and it’s already in danger.

——

She learned to swing a knife. Swords. She learned and devoured the teachings. She learned to be useful.

But then they asked her to take the life of a man who did her no wrong.

Her baby blues clashed with her grandfather’s Lazarus green.

She was still young. A child.

“No.”

“No?”

“He did no wrong.”

“He failed, granddaughter.” Ra’s smiled down at her, patronizing. Cruel. “Perhaps you possess your father’s heart, and you are foolishly sentimental, as women and children tend to be. But in the end, you are an al Ghul and you will obey. Plunge in your blade and I will reward you.”

The reincarnation looked at the man kneeling in front of her, resignation and a hint of pity in what little she could see of his face.

She’s already died before. What did she have to be afraid of?

“No.”

They tried to beat the weakness out of her. It didn’t work.

——

The reincarnation stared at the mirror, left alone in an opulent cage of gold and emeralds and precious stones that meant little to her now.

Her hands traced her back, small fingers finding purchase in soft skin. Her mouth opened fruitlessly, noise refusing to escape. She still felt the burning magic, the brand her own blood had carved into her skin and soul because she refused to kill. The chains her grandfather had shackled around her with magic and cruel amusement.

She had killed him, in the end. Obey, or be punished. Her body had moved without her permission, the reincarnation a prisoner in a body that refused to do as she commanded. The knife swung, a life taken, her hands dipped in red.

She learned a valuable lesson that day.

There were things worse than death.

��This is an order, granddaughter.”

The Magic had flared a searing heat at her neck, forcing her to kneel on broken legs. Ra’s loomed above, authority in his voice. She was bound to obey, regardless.

“You will never speak another word of affection, you will never speak another word to anyone unless I allow it. Perhaps this will teach you of your folly, and your place in this world.”

The loss of her freedom and the fear that came with it was a bitter and devastating lesson.

——

Ra’s al Ghul was so much worse than what little she knew of him.

She was right to be afraid for herself.

Her mother had worried, when she’d withdrawn and refused to speak to her. Even if she could, the reincarnation would not have wanted to. The reincarnation had felt furious, back then, when she thought of Talia. Her mother who refused to protect her. Her mother, who claimed she loved her but refused to see the chains Ra’s wrapped around her neck. She who plied the reincarnation with a supportive hand but forced her into the fighting pits.

But, as the reincarnation stumbled out on bruised and used legs from Ra’s al Ghul’s meeting chambers where he had allowed his business partners to partake in her, she realized that Ra’s was a monster in a human’s body and her mother was a victim of his making.

The lesson Ra’s taught her that day was that if she was not useful, if she did not kill, he would take what was left of her and make use of her.

Hate flared in her heart, and the beginning of Ra’s downfall began the day he let her go from the chambers alive. Injured, but alive. Injured and violated, but alive and furious.

——

She carved her hate and rage and helplessness and fear in the bodies of the people he bid her to kill. Her silenced screams were expressed in the way she splattered blood, the way she covered herself in it. A killing machine first, a stress reliever second, and a child… wasn’t on the list of things she was allowed to be.

His enemies were felled, one after another. He gave her his approval, something she detested.

But still, she continued, bodies racking upwards, tens turning to hundreds, hundreds edging into thousands.

The red in her ledger became ichor and guilt. Her language became violence and obedience.

“You have become a sharp tool, granddaughter.”

She was a genius, after all. And now, she could not disobey. A blade that Ra’s believed will never point towards him. She kneeled. She obeyed.

“Thank you, grandfather.” Her words were only allowed to come out- without searing, terrible pain- when she was thanking him. She tried not to do it as often as he wanted. He thought he broke her when he read the obedience she carved into her body language.

But she never bowed. Never. Not to him. Never.

——

“My weapon could learn much from your granddaughter,” David Cain sat across from Ra’s, wine in their stupid goblets. How she detested the green and blacks he’s seen fit to dress her with. She’s dressed provocatively, not of her own choice. She doesn’t have much of those- doesn’t have much in ways of choices- these days.

She was twelve, and Ra’s al Ghul deserved to die.

“Her combat is a higher form of what my daughter has achieved. How did you do it?”

When Ra’s began to reply, she slipped away.

She found the girl. She found… the cage- the black box- the child was placed in. The child flinched from her when she opened the metal box, fear only easing as the reincarnation kept her body language neutral and kind. (It was pitch black, and about the size of like, a closet. No light. Only from whatever door the box had.) (Cass’ hands hurt from banging on the walls to be let out)

David Cain’s daughter, her mind whispered, the memories of another life once more making itself known.

“Cassandra.” She whispered, regretting it immediately when pain wracked her body. She fell to her knees as the punishment for disobeying an order slammed into her.

The girl looked at her in concern, but did not move closer. The reincarnation stared at this girl and saw a reflection of herself.

David Cain would be here for a month. She will free Cassandra in those days.

——

The weapon stared at the girl in front of her, kneeling in pain.

She did not understand.

-

The girl came back. Water. Food. Kind.

The weapon felt warm. The girl was quiet. No sounds. Good. The weapon knew the girl understood. The weapon thinks that the girl is a weapon too.

-

The girl comes back, again. This time, she makes a sound. It hurt her, but she did it again. The weapon understands when the girl points at herself and repeats the sound. The sound means the girl. The girl expects something from the weapon.

The weapon makes the sound, flinching to see if the owner will come to punish it. The girl purposefully sits, relaxed but vigilant… and protective. Of the weapon?

The weapon relaxed. It repeated the sound, pointing at the girl.

The girl smiles, in pain. But approval. The weapon feels- the weapon is warm, like under the blanket. Approval.

The girl teaches her to make sounds but the weapon communicates without it. It does not like the sounds, does not need them, but the girl seems to think it’s important.

The weapon likes the girl, so the weapon learns. They still understand through no sounds, through reading each other.

-

The girl comes back, silently. Secretly. The weapon does not notify the owner. The weapon feels- does not want to.

The girl- the girl with the sound- she says a different sound. Her body tells the weapon that it’s important, this sound.

And when the girl points at herself and says her own sound, then points at the weapon and says that new sound again, the weapon begins to understand.

The girl had given the weapon her own sound.

“Cass—n- ra.”

“Cass,” the girl said, and Cassandra understood.

“Cass.” Cassandra pointed to herself.

-

The owner wanted- wanted Cassandra to end a life. Cassandra watched the owner kill and gesture to the dead thing.

Cassandra did not want to.

When Cassandra is placed back into the pitch black box, she waited for the girl.

The girl came.

“Don’t want.” Cassandra clung to her, reading the welcome and the sadness in the girl’s body. Cassandra tucked her face into the girl’s shoulder. She is cold. The girl is warm.

The girl hugged her back. The girl understood. Sadness hardened into lines of determination. Cassandra felt… light. Felt hope.

-

Cassandra slipped away from the place, water in her pack for the dessert and money to run from the country. The girl stayed behind, seeing her off. The girl tells her to never come back.

Cassandra did not want to leave the girl behind, but the girl could not go.

“Be free, Cass.” The girl had whispered through the pain. “For the both of us.”

——

Her grandfather knew. He allowed David Cain to break her, not kill because she was of use to him still, as a lesson. She found that she hated his lessons. But, she hated his attention more.

And still, she could not regret. How could she, when Cass trusted her with what fragile hope she had?

So, she lets him beat her, and provokes him with smirks and fearless eyes because the longer he’s focused on her, the more time Cass has to run.

Then, he gets too angry, and insults Ra’s, whose eyes grew cold. Her grandfather gestured and while she usually hated the command that followed that gesture, she could not feel that hatred now.

She got back up, legs broken and arms twisted once more, and attacked David Cain.

Ra’s would not follow Cass. Not when she was not his business to deal with, and not when David Carin’s fury amused him so.

David Cain would not follow Cass. Not while she still drew breath. The reincarnation stood, and threw herself at one of the best assassins of the century.

She tore his throat out with nothing but her teeth. She felt, for once, not like a monster. Not even when Ra’s nodded in approval and ordered for David Cain’s broken body to be cleaned up.

——

She’s been granted a mission in New Jersey, once her months of discipline- of torture- ended. She does not get ordered to find Cassandra. She’s fourteen now, and as silent as ever. Her mother had adjusted to her silence by then- long ago, actually, taking it as a quirk her daughter had developed. She hadn’t been a terribly vocal child, after all. Talia praised her for being useful even as a woman- the self degradation something the reincarnation had no doubt Ra’s had insidiously trained into Talia- and for being loyal to Ra’s.

Sometimes, she hates Talia for being- for-

Never mind. She couldn’t afford to hate anyone else.

She killed her targets early, determination and wistfulness urging her movements into sharp . Then, she made her way to Gotham and slipped into the city of darkness- where her father was.

She watched as he hid in the shadows almost as easily as she did. She watched as he flew and glided with the younger Robin. (He was younger than her by a year. She checked.) He was free. They were free.

She wished…

As she turned away, she saw a child tumbling from the edge of a roof. It was an instinct she’d thought Ra’s had managed to bury after the months he’d spent making sure she killed only children.

She hated him.

She caught him, swooping in and tucking him against her side as she plucked him from the air and plopped him back onto the crumbling roof of Gotham’s slums.

“Oh, thank you! So much- are you a vigilante?” The boy asked, looking at her masked face. It’s a good thing she wasn’t exactly dressed like a regular League operative.

She shook her head. Her eyes fell onto his camera, faint memories rising once more. She had an inkling-

“I’m- uh- Tim!” The boy introduced himself nervously, edging away from her silence. “Thank you for saving me…?”

She nodded. She pointed to the camera, tilting her head.

“Oh- you… want to see it?” He clutched his camera closer. Oh, he did have some sense of self preservation. She wondered why a seven year old was allowed to roam these streets… but she did worse at seven.

She held her hand up and back up. The boy hesitated, and then showed her the camera. “Uh- I took pictures of Robin and Batman!”

They sat on that roof for hours, and she let Tim Drake tell her stories about her father and his son. Ward. Son.

She could tell that Tim didn’t have anyone to listen to him.

She didn’t have long until she had to go back or risk severe punishment, but… she could make time for Tim, to listen to him.

She wondered if Cass managed to escape completely. She wondered if her sister all but in name and blood learned how to smile.

——

Tim had never had a friend before!

She listened to him! And gave him hugs the one time he was brave enough to ask! And she seemed to like Batman and Robin as much as he did! No one who didn’t like them would listen to his endless rambling otherwise, right? (Tim was super skinny, like ribs poking out skinny. He looked like a sickly Victorian child and he was kind of cold)

“And then, Robin went like this,” he pantomimed the awesome punch Dick Grayson did on a Joker goon. “And the guys got knocked out just like that!”

His new friend nodded, looking interested.

“Sorry, am I talking too much?” Tim asked anxiously. He didn’t want to make his friend hate him!

She shook her head, and gestured for him to continue.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded.

His new friend was so cool! She even taught him how to throw a punch and to fight!

——

When she had to leave, she prepared Tim for it.

“Do you have to go?”

She nodded and placed a hand on his head, ruffling his hair. Her other hand held a duffle bag with an assortment of weapons she carefully kept from him. (One of the blades still had guts on it, which, ew.)

“Try not to fall off anymore roofs, little photographer.” She said, smiling at his shocked look before leaping away.

“Wait, you can talk?!” He shouted at her back. She smiled a little wider.

——

“A son, this time.” Ra’s al Ghul’s voice echoed in his disgustingly flashy throne room. It rings of approval.

The reincarnation stood behind her mother, eyes cast downwards.

“Well done, Talia. I finally have a worthy heir.”

Damian al Ghul cooed.

The reincarnation was scared. But… she could not allow her younger brother to be trapped like she was. She’s fifteen now, a decade of slavery having worn her down and nearly broken her. But with her brother… no, she could not allow it.

She met her mother’s eyes and knew then that they agreed. Protect Damian, at all costs.

She ignored the sting of envy. So what her mother could not find it in herself to protect her daughter? So long as she protected Damian, it didn’t matter.

Maybe she didn’t matter. Maybe she wasn’t worth anything. Maybe- maybe- maybe.

She also ignored the seed of disgust she had for mother’s actions in conceiving Damian. She couldn’t do anything about it. Talia was also a victim.

A louder voice in her asked if she could really excuse that, when Talia had a choice and she chose to hurt and violate Bruce Wayne like that. She wondered if she could truly ever forgive Talia. She wondered if Bruce Wayne got therapy.

——

She stared at the tome in front of her, eyes blank. (Actually, she had no eyes. Like? Empty sockets, but then later she had eyes???)

The brand- the shackles- the chains could only be broken if Ra’s died. She wasn’t opposed to that. But if he died, so did she. She couldn’t even kill herself to get out, because the chains would be there even if she died. If she was revived- a high chance, thanks to the fucking pits- then the chains would still be there.

Perhaps… she could use the pits?

Her mind turned and turned.

——

“This is your ukht.” Her mother pointed at her. Damian stared up at her, and she melted. Her brother was too damn cute.

“Ukhti?”

She nodded as her mother smiled in joy. “Yes, habibi.”

She was better at hiding the pain, now. She was better at enduring it, too, that fucking burning feeling. She spoke more, but only to Damian.

It would not do for her brother to grow up not knowing how to receive verbal expressions of affection. Not like she did, in this life.

Still, it hurt to speak. But then, she had an idea, based on Cassandra.

She could not speak, but speaking wasn’t the only way of communication. She’ll teach Damian sign language- standard, as commanded- but also her own version. Yes, she could do it. It wouldn’t be hard.

She was a genius, after all, and creating languages wasn’t as hard as people seem to think.

——

Damian copied her, small fingers patting his hand four times.

She did it back to him. “I love you.” She tells him, with sounds and with motions.

He does it back, excitedly, because he had a secret with ukhti!

——

Sometimes, she dared not to touch Damian. She wants to ruffle his hair and give him hugs but the ichor on her hands reminds her to not get to greedy. She did not deserve it.

Not when her hands were stained with the lives of so many people.

——

Another mission.

She was twenty now, and not much closer to escaping her bonds. Though, once she hit her majority, Ra’s lost interest in her in that way. A blessing, even if she had to seduce his “business partners” into giving him better deals more often now.

She stops by Bludhaven. The Robin she watched so many years ago- six, by her count- had grown new wings and moved. She wanted to see if he could fly still.

He could. He flew as free- no, freer than his days as Robin.

She dipped away to complete her mission (nuclear weapon trading, really?) and swings back to see a spider trying to break the former Robin’s wings.

“No.” Nightwing whispered, staring upwards at the cloudy sky blankly. “Please, stop.”

She didn’t need to hear any more. She saw red, and dove feet first straight onto the spider’s head, knocking her out.

She picked up a near-catatonic Nightwing, and helped him to his apartment. She left Tarantula in the rain and felt zero guilt about it.

He changed mechanically, some kind of instinct keeping him from removing his domino, but it was a bit pointless considering she escorted him to his personal apartment.

She watched as Nightwing slipped into an exhausted sleep before leaving. She had a spider to squish, and traces to hide.

——

Dick wakes up, drained and exhausted. He… someone saved him.

He sees a scrawled note, handwriting impeccable enough to be a font, written with his pen. He picked it up from his table, and his eyes tiredly read the message.

“Don’t worry about Tarantula. Or your identity.”- A friend.

He remembered- the mask- the mask of the stranger that saved him vividly. He’d remember. And he’d thank them if they ever came back.

——

She was in charge of training assassins, these days. A year and a half later after Bludhaven, she was back in Nanda Parbat, and she’s devoured every magical tome she could get her hands on. They all say the same things.

Her assassins were trained well, and Ra’s praises her with more responsibilities as he followed the pit in his obsessions. Her mother began to splinter the group, not knowing that as Ra’s began his descent into madness, people looked towards her instead of Talia for leadership. They did not know that her unwavering presence by Ra’s side wasn’t voluntary but it is their true that she became his right hand out of pure skill. And flawless obedience, of course.

Then, someone new joins.

Someone with pit rage and empty eyes that goes rigid when she approaches.

Then again, most of the operatives freeze up when she walks towards them.

Her memories roar. A child.

He bowed, and her eyes followed the streak of white hair at the forefront of his skull.

She gestured at him to follow, and ignored the pitiful eyes the rest of the assassins gave to the kid- they act like her training was hard when she went easy on them (it was)- and led the kid towards the training rooms.

She knew who he was, even if her grandfather and mother didn’t think she knew.

Her… Bruce Wayne would probably appreciate his son being returned relatively sane.

But first, she had to beat the Pit out of him. Then, she could assign body guarding duties to him, in an attempt to protect him.

——

“Grandfather, I will take Damian’s punishment.”

���A whipping girl, granddaughter?” But he nodded anyways. He made Damian watch.

She kneeled and allowed the punishment. She couldn’t always protect him from Ra’s, but this she could do anytime. It’s not like she was unfamiliar with the torture. (The whip had barbs. Rusty. And they sprinkled salt.)

——

“I liked poetry….” Jason Todd tells her after a training session. “I think.”

“Sure. I’ll call you Grave, then.” Pain. But she was used to it.

He tilted his head, eyes going blank once more. She sighed. There went his memories again. (His eyes were blank and glazed. Like looking at someone you love and knowing they’re looking through you.)

——

“I would not trust her,” she says to the air, next to a Red Hood emerging from Talia al Ghul’s chambers. She could see it, the beginnings of Gotham’s new crime lord. But still, “Talia al Ghul is known for her lies.”

She pushed away from the wall. It was up to Grave if he listened. It was out of her hands now.

——

She’s twenty-five, and she’s helping Damian pack for his first meeting with Bruce Wayne.

“You must not tell him about me.” Because he’d come rushing here, and she had worked too hard to save Damian for her fool of a father to come and ruin all of that effort.

“I promise.” Her little brother said solemnly. Ukhti said it out loud, which meant it was important and she expected him to keep that promise.

The only other time he’d heard her speak was to tell him she loved him.

The reincarnation smiled and told him through their special sign language, to treat the current Robin with respect and to try his best to get the current Robin to pass down his title.

‘Robin is earned. They have different rules, over there. Try your best to learn those rules.’

Her brother was sheltered. She loved him, but he was spoilt and sheltered. Of course she was worried. Talia barely mothered him.

“I know. You do not have to remind me so often, ukhti.”

She smiled, and patted his head.

“Be safe,” she whispered. “I will miss you.”

Damian darted in for a hug. “Of course. Goodbye, sister. See you soon.”

She hoped not. It was hard enough to convince Ra’s that Damian would learn more under Bruce Wayne.

(She was locked in a small closet- like Cass- for about a week, because she brought up the idea first.)

——

She found it.

The answer to pit rage laid in an old, all but crumbling tome from Atlantis- answers “from a ghost.”

——

Bruce Wayne died. Months after Damian came to live with him. That- irritating- she sighed and worked with her mother to turn Ra’s al Ghul’s attention away from Gotham, lest he called Damian back in Bruce Wayne’s absence.

The little photographer caught grandfather’s attention. She stood vigil as he played chess with Ra’s. His interest in Damian wavered. Anticipation blurred in her veins.

She saved his friends. Her assassins. She let them go, telling them to wait for the little photographer’s plan. (Y’all miss girl had fucking bloody handprints on her pants like someone tried to grab it.)

The first few people who had an inking she might not be loyal to Ra’s… and it was them.

When her other assassins attacked Red Robin, she cut them down before they could touch him, helping him with a furious League of Spiders or whatever operative. She hated spiders.

“What…?”

“You’re a lot of trouble, little photographer.” She sighed. His jaw dropped.

“It’s you!”

“Go,” she cut him off. “Blow this place up. I left a surprise for you outside.”

——

“Owens?! Z?!” Tim trembled, exhaustion and shock and wonder hitting him at once.

“Heya, boss!” Z chirped. Owens helped Tim up while Z helped Tam. Pry walked around them, looking out for further threats. “The nightmare trainer let us go. She knew you, I think.”

Tim smiles, all shark teeth and zero hero. (In the background, the song zero to hero from Hercules 2, played in reverse.) “Tell me more.”

——

Damian grunted, bracing himself for the magical creature’s attack.

“Robin!” His father barked out, panicked. Damian hoped he’d survive-

Shhhlk!

He looked up and there stood his ukht. She bounded forwards, using the odd fauna of the magical plane to bolster her movements as she sliced the creatures apart with her swords, magic humming brightly as she cut through them… and the magicians attacking them.

“What- what are you doing here?” He asked. She greeted him, three fingers curled over her shoulder.

‘My question is,’ she signed. ‘Why were you here without a magical weapon.’

Damian sighed as father stepped in between them.

“Who are you.”

“Batman. Cease your excessive worry. I trust her with my life,” Damian snapped. He stepped around a shocked Batman, looked him in the eyes, and unsheathed his katana. He handed it over to his ukht, who took it with amusement.

‘See?’ His eyes seemed to say. Father tensed when his sister unsheathed her own blade and handed it to him.

‘Are you here for a specific reason?’ His sister signed to him.

“Uh, you gonna introduce us, little man?”

Damian sent the Flash a derisive look and ignored him.

“We’re looking for a magician. He set a squadron of demons loose into D.C. last night. He has a tower.” Damian added.

“Robin,” Father growled. “Who is this.” Damian shot him a look and turned back to his sister.

The reincarnation tilted her head. ‘Tower… it’ll have to be that way.’

“Could you take us there?” Damian asked. Truthfully, he could find the way himself. But he wanted more time around his ukht. She nodded and Damian straightened.

“I feel like we should be concerned that Robin’s friend just murdered a bunch of people.”

His sister glanced back and ignored them.

“Silence, incompetents. Speak another word against her, and Batman’s no killing rule will be applied creatively.” He hissed. (The fucking surroundings hissed with him y’all what the fuck)

He turned when his sister ruffled his hair (Superman muttered a super shocked “what the fuck.”) and Damian allowed it. He had missed his sister.

——

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

They told her she was just spending the night in Miami.

No warning. No lawyer. No time to pack. Just steel cuffs wrapped around her wrists, cinched tight across her chest, chained to a waist belt so snug she couldn’t breathe. A bus with no food, no water, no bathroom—just a puddle of piss soaking the floor. The guards told her to go ahead and urinate where she sat. She did.

Then they pushed her into Krome.

Krome, the Miami processing center where men with criminal records are supposed to be held—not immigrant women with no charges, no convictions, no voice. Krome, where she and 26 others were stuffed “like sardines in a jar,” forced to sleep on concrete, offered one three-minute shower in four days, and told by guards to pretend to have a seizure if they wanted medicine. One woman actually had a seizure. They came for her. The rest they ignored.

Three people are now dead in ICE custody. Three. In just over a month. Genry Ruiz-Guillen, 29, from Honduras, died January 23. Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, 45, from Ethiopia, died January 29. Maksym Chernyak, 44, from Ukraine, died February 20.

No convictions. No due process. No protection. Just death under fluorescent lights.

And while the bodies pile up, the architects of this system are laughing.

THE ARCHITECTS OF SUFFERING

Tom Homan—now officially Trump’s Border Czar—is no longer just shouting from Fox News panels. He’s in charge. And he’s promising “deportations every day,” vowing to expel millions. He’s pushing to build new detention camps on military bases and at Guantanamo Bay, to outsource incarceration to local jails, and to lower federal detention standards across the board. He wants to hand over human lives to any sheriff with a cage and a budget. This isn’t law enforcement—it’s a national purge.

Kristi Noem is no longer the governor of South Dakota. She’s been promoted to Secretary of Homeland Security, overseeing ICE, CBP, and FEMA. She’s already begun reshaping disaster policy and immigration enforcement with the cold efficiency of someone who never cared about the human cost. She’s toured detention centers abroad and proposed funneling more power and funding into the machine that’s already killing people. This is the woman now in charge of protecting the homeland—and she’s treating it like a battlefield.

And Stephen Miller—the alabaster goblin behind Trump’s first wave of xenophobic terror—is back inside the West Wing as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. He is not hiding. He is not softening. He is laying the groundwork for mass deportations, family separations, and the total militarization of immigration enforcement. Miller’s strategy is simple: flood the system, break it, and make cruelty look like order.

This isn’t mismanagement. This isn’t politics. This is state-sanctioned human suffering.

ICE has 46,269 people in custody—far above its legal bed count of 41,500. Congress just rewarded them with another $430 million. Detention centers are overflowing. Guards are whispering, “It shouldn’t be like this.” But they keep turning the key. They keep locking the doors.

Because this system wasn’t designed to rehabilitate. It wasn’t designed to deter. It was designed to break people.

And it’s working.

CORPORATE PROFITEERS OF THE GULAG

Akima Infrastructure Protection—remember that name. That’s the private contractor running Krome under a $685 million federal contract. Your tax dollars. Your country. Your name on the invoice. And Akima didn’t just ignore the reports of overcrowding, abuse, and death—they didn’t even respond. Because they don’t have to. In America’s immigration gulag system, accountability is optional, profits are mandatory.

Akima isn’t alone. The privatized detention racket is a booming business. The worse the conditions, the higher the margins. More detainees equals more beds, more guards, more federal payouts. These aren’t just prison contractors—they’re war profiteers in a domestic war against the poor, the brown, the undocumented, and the disposable.

And while three human beings die in government cages in thirty goddamn days, ICE puts out a statement saying they can’t verify the abuse without the women’s names. That’s like watching a house burn down and saying you can’t help unless the flames file a formal request.

What ICE really means is this: unless you hand us their names, we can’t retaliate.

FEAR, SILENCE, AND THE NEW AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

These women are afraid to speak because they know what happens to people who tell the truth in a system built to erase them. Their fear isn’t paranoia. It’s wisdom. Because in Trump’s America, the immigration system is no longer civil. It’s punitive, predatory, and lethal.

And while this slow-motion horror show unfolds behind steel bars and security checkpoints, the rest of the country scrolls past it—too tired, too numb, too wrapped in talking points to see what’s right in front of them:

The United States is running concentration camps again.

Not in secret. Not in shadows. In Miami. In Arizona. In Texas. With full congressional funding. With bipartisan indifference. With the open approval of a political movement that cheers cruelty like it’s patriotism.

And unless we name it, scream it, and rage against it, it’s only going to get worse.

Because this administration has made it clear: they don’t want to fix the system. They want to break more people. Faster. Cheaper. Louder.

And if that means more body bags? So be it. To them, that’s not a failure.

It’s the plan working exactly as intended.

WHAT THE HELL DO WE DO?

We stop pretending this is normal. We stop calling it a “broken system” and start calling it what it is: a weapon.

We hold the names. We name the dead. We say Genry. Serawit. Maksym. Not as footnotes, but as proof that silence is complicity.

We pressure Congress to defund ICE, to end private detention contracts, to shut down Krome and every facility like it. We demand independent investigations, criminal accountability, and media that covers these stories like lives are on the line—because they are.

We support immigrant-led organizations. We raise hell at town halls. We show up with signs, with lawsuits, with cameras, with righteous fury. We flood their offices. We write until our fingers bleed. We organize, we protest, we resist.

And if you’re in a position of power—if you’re a staffer, an attorney, a journalist, a human being with a platform—you use it. This is not a drill. This is not a moment to stay neutral.

The machine is killing people. The people running it are proud of that. And history will not forgive anyone who stood by and watched.

Raise your voice. Wreck their silence. And don’t stop until the cages are empty.

[Bill Adkins]

[focaccia-nose]

I love how one of my favorite artists just posted that Israel literally faked a terrorist attack and murdered their own civilians, which is just Holocaust denial but in a different font.

One of my favorite creators just posted about how a valid "solution" is for every Israeli to deport themselves and go back to where they came from. We already tried that. We continued to get killed. This whole thing proves that we are not safe anywhere.

I love how white leftists have determined that all of the media/narrative is controlled by Israel (cough sound familiar?) and are refusing to vote.

People I know and love are still regularly posting dog whistles on their Instagram stories.

Former friends still dm me accusing me of being a zionist for allowing room to grieve for all the civilians that were lost.

These tears are not "crocodile tears" or "white tears." Not only are we going through a huge collective trauma and watching genocide occur in real time, but somehow it's every Jewish person's fault for purely existing.

I'm not sleeping. I'm not eating. I'm so angry and so fucking sad and now my forms of escapism aren't safe anymore either.

I don't know how I'm ever going to recover. I have been fundamentally changed while people are posting purely to vertue signal and feel better about themselves. I just hope that I can learn how to trust people again. I hope I can learn how to be soft again.

I refuse to be a "good jew." I'm so proud of who I am and I will never shut up about it ever again.

[mariacallous]

When the Trump administration announced a hazy plan in January to begin sending some 30,000 people pegged for deportation to Guantánamo Bay, the first thought that came to my mind was a closet-sized press room at the Pentagon where I once sat nearly 10 years ago, straining to hear the distant voice of a prisoner begging for his release through crackling phone lines. 

The prisoner, who had a long history of mental illness, was Mohammad al-Qahtani, one of the first people the Bush administration detained at the prison in Cuba and someone the government said narrowly missed being the 20th hijacker on Sept. 11. He was also the only person the government ever formally acknowledged was tortured at Gitmo. He was released in 2022 and sent back to his home country of Saudi Arabia for mental health treatment.  

Even with Pentagon officials having set up access for a literal handful of reporters to hear him clearly, we could not. We were told it was a common occurrence and this is just how it is when you’re trying to access Gitmo from afar. We were lucky, I heard, that the connection worked at all and we should be grateful for good weather that kept lines open, shoddy as they were.

So, when a lawsuit seeking to stop a forced deportation to Guantánamo by a group of 10 migrants came across my desk this week — none of whom appear to be terrorists but have been flagged by the Trump administration as “the worst of the worst” for alleged criminal gang behavior — I thought back to al-Qahtani. 

Were these people like him, either in their alleged crimes or their circumstances? Would their experiences mirror his? Would they be tortured? Would they lack consistent, reliable access to lawyers? Would they too be consigned to pleading for their freedom with few to no witnesses to report out what is happening to them? 

Many of those detained are now being held in facilities in Texas, Arizona and Virginia, having come to the U.S. seeking asylum with their families. They don’t contest being removed, but their lawsuit challenges where they are potentially being removed to. Their lawyers say longstanding immigration laws mean no immigrant detained by the government can be shipped off to Guantánamo.  

Gitmo has a long history of alleged abuse of inmates, including both physical and mental torture. And as I read the lawsuit filed this week, it was the words “punishment chair” that leapt off the page. 

Immigrants already sent to Gitmo by the Trump administration have told their lawyers that guards are allegedly withholding water as punishment, the suit notes. They allege that when they speak up about the poor conditions or treatment, some people have been tied to a chair, as punishment, for hours. One man claimed a guard broke his hand. Others, like al-Qahtani years ago, became suicidal or tried to self-harm, the lawsuit notes.

With so many lawsuits involving the administration flooding the zone, a herculean effort to keep a handle on what the government is doing and to whom is required. But for the migrants staring down the possibility of detention at Guantánamo Bay — and not just these 10 individuals, but the tens of thousands that the Trump administration has said it intends to send there — time is of the essence.

There are only literal days left until these 10 individuals are shipped off to Gitmo barring court intervention. It’s a world where they, and whatever happens to them, are mostly, if not entirely, hidden from the public’s view.

[labelleizzy]

Update from Democracy Action Network:

Despite his dreams, Trump is not a King. Marisa Kabas may have again broken the news. The Washington Post writes: "The White House budget office on Wednesday rescinded an order freezing federal grants, according to a copy of a new memo obtained by The Washington Post, after the administration’s move to halt spending earlier this week provoked a backlash."

He didn't back down because it was a good idea. It wasn't a change of heart. It wasn't a feint. It was a genuine administrative coup that — for now — has been thwarted.

He backed down because people pushed back — getting media to do their job and alert us to an impending problem, calling Senators who (more or less) found their spines, lawyers challenging the coup, telling the story of the many who would suffer under such an order, joining last-minute DC protests…

We'd like you to pause before your inner cynic speaks up (the one that says "he'll try another version" or "look at all the other things he's destroyed and people suffering").

The point is stunningly important: Trump can lose when we fight. He is not invincible and he is not all powerful.

It doesn't mean we will win every fight. But it does mean that anyone who is telling you it's hopeless is wrong. Folks need to get this message: our feelings are valid, but any conclusion that says it's over is wrong. They, too, will get a chance to join and we hope they do.

To us, the biggest stories not being told are the many, many acts of resistance all over. We wish we had journalists covering this. For example:

Teachers rejecting ICE raids ("we jump in front of bullets for our students")

Folks rejecting President-in-action-but-not-elected Elon Musk's potentially illegally sent and possibly illegal buyout offer to 2 million government workers (comments are fire: "I'll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible, RTO be damned. Hold the Line!")

National trainings teaching people how to organize and strengthen community when workplace raids happen (we recommend these!) or Teen Vogue's story on ICE Watch Programs Can Protect Immigrants in Your Neighborhood — Here’s What to Know

Lawyers standing up for the rule of law — like 22 state attorneys general sued Trump over birthright order or ACLU suing fast-track deportation policy or Quakers suing to stop ICE out of worship services

The internet spamming the DEI snitch tipline

Greenlanders refusing to give up free healthcare and education and rejecting any US takeover or Colombian President Petro staring down Trump and winning the "dignity" of returnees he asked for (the US media let Trump claim victory — but international press report this very differently, like here or here or read Petro's full statement)

Groups like Civil Service Strong helping government workers sort through their decisions in these trying times and the many people finding their path in these times.

Yes, we know the overwhelm is still there. There's a reason. It's called Shock and Awe. The goal is chaos and constant crisis to push through radical changes. The goal is to push our cognitive limits to overload, so we get paralyzed.

One implication of this: to stay active, many of us will need to limit our attention. Doing so is not a rejection of other issues. It's that in a time of rapid chaos, none of us can do it all. Let's give ourselves that permission. And then let's extend that grace our allies — for not joining the causes most central to us or for picking a strategy that we think isn't most effectual. It's okay to pick your lane and focus on that. In fact, we need you to. (We have this video to help remind people of different paths they may take.)

An overwhelmed teacher asked us what they should be doing to help their students. After an extended conversation that included their basic rights to keep out ICE, it came down to this: "The thing they most fear is an educated population. Teach your students." Do what you do best. We knew there would be a lot of loss in this time, and there is. We'll have to keep planting seeds for a better future.

We want to thank Democracy Forward for its leading lawsuits. Again, thanks to journalists like Marisa Kabas (an independent journalist at The Handbasket) and Anand Giridharadas (who quoted us in The Ink). Please support our independent journalists who did not downplay this administrative coup and raised their voices right away. Thanks Rebecca Solnit who first pulled our attention to this.

Some things we're going to go do: Eat some ice cream, pet a cat, and tap some maple trees with our kid. And then keep fighting the best we can.

Warmly,

- Choose Democracy

[bezslutpiercing]

ok so Trump wants what? To ban immigration all together? All the appointments set for Political Asylum Request have been cancelled and there's no intention of giving immigrants waiting on the border any mean to cross it legally.

This is PREVENTING LEGAL IMMIGRATION, what does Trump think? That the soldiers and border patrols won't get bribed? And let someone in? Or does he perfectly know this so he's gonna use people coming into the US illegally as "proof" of them having (in his opinion) no right to be there.

He increased border controls, he wants to DEPORT people back into the countries they came from for the most various reasons, he wants to eliminate the right (written in the Constitution, 14th amendment, sec 1) of every person born/naturalized in the US to be a US citizen.

And if people ask me "Oh but you're Italian, living in Italy, how does that affect you?" Ok so first of all this is called worrying out of COMMON SENSE cause fucking hell it's absurd to even think this. Secondly US are a MAJOR example for the whole world, as I already said, and given MY country is currently ruled by a fascist party with a fascist leader, who enjoys giving out the citizenship to criminals like Milei and has direct contacts with Trump, sorry but I am fucking scared because what if we're next? You'd be shocked to know how many people here would vote for that excuse of a man.

And once again, I worry and talk about it because one cannot possibly think their country for as far as it can be from the US is excluded from what's happening or is not affected by it somehow.

[rotzaprachim]

Many have such little comprehension and empathy for what it was to be a refugee from a communist dictatorship in the kind of 30’s-90’s period in the U.S. and Western Europe. (They also have such little comprehension and empathy for what it was to be a refugee from a right wing capitalist us-backed dictatorship as well, but in some specials and other ways.)

like. These were people who were often working between multiple extremely dysfunctional, systematically unfair immigration regimes. The U.S. functionally shut immigration from everywhere but smallll portions of Western Europe and small groups of people from those areas at that in the 1920’s and things stayed, with fluctuations, roughly the same for decades - simple “economic migrants” from almost the entire world were simply banned. People had to come up with a political reason to flee, and it had to sound good to the authorities, especially when a lot of them were on the exact lists that U.S. immigration did not like - Southeast Asians, Muslims, Jews, central and Eastern Europeans, Latines. They often but not always had the exact professions and backgrounds that the U.S. did not like, especially in peak Cold War 50’s-70’s hysteria - intellectuals of all sorts, psychologists, professors, artists, scientists, researchers.

Or they were running from repercussions from political actions, which were often political actions the United States was not a particular fan of, such as attempts at independent trade unionization - because remember, you likely came from a country with (1) total trade union which was a government entity and the government was your employer, so there wasn’t a single way to raise a workers’ rights complaint - or attempts at non-aligned peace and demilitarization movements - because if you lived in Eastern Europe there was still a massive chance that your labour was going towards some kind of violence abroad - or towards academic intellectual freedom or just some way of tallying your figures to go hmmm something doesn’t add up here. all of these often ended up glossed as “bourgeois capitalism” where they were running from, but were considered kinda suspiciously red in the U.S. where they were trying to go. What do you do?

And then they got to the U.S., and due to the haphazard and brutal nature of U.S. immigration policy, they often came over as individuals and then were desperate to get the rest of their family over as well - keep in mind too that the exact regimes they were running from often punished the families of those who left or marked them as regime traitors who deserved punishment. So if you arrived in the US, not only were you on the ground begging for your own documentation or else keeping very very silent, you were also either desperately telling the authorities about the most dreadfullllll terribleeeee communist spectacle you were running from and how every day you prayed to mcdonalds and j edgar Hoover and our lord almighty Dwight d Eisenhower that you could bring your children to the cleansing light of capitalism.

or you were keeping very, very silent.

like, we need to appreciate that there are appreciable ways in which U.S. border policy has hardened since the, say, 1950’s (although there has been an awful and cyclical policy of border based deportations), anti immigrant hysteria and mass deportation and closed borders have been a feature of U.S. policy since at least the 1920’s in a very systematic way, and these were the Bad Ones. People were playing with multiple very very unfair systems.

It’s in this context I see extremely …. Extreme stuff about members of various exile groups in the U.S. let’s be clear - many of the people above who I mentioned became very publicly conservative. I don’t believe anyone’s particular background justifies conservatism in any way, or that conservatism is understandable when anyone supports it. But I do think it’s underrated how, while very certain figureheads became conservative, an unbelievable number of the people who went through this system just went silent. They voted quietly and worked quietly and did not become loudly or physically involved with that which might deport them again, might make them become again arrested. And many others became conflicting bitter about the whole thing, and never did really wave the flag and cheer because this land of Golden Arches had so much of what they were running from, and they saw it in other people. In Jewish and/or Eastern European and in Asian exilic communities I grew up with and knew all those people. All of them.

it’s a strange place to be in, at this moment in history. On the one hand, the U.S. memory of anti-communism never really includes the people who ran and had to sit at the American visa office. On the other, I see obsessive hatred of a lot of these groups from the American and Western European lefts as the like, ultimate evil capitalists or some such, their exilic culture as the ultimate in evil capitalism, to an extent that far outstrips how they see local and more wasp or nationally-majority oriented areas that are more conservative leaning. And I don’t think they’ve maybe sat down to think about why that is. The U.S. wanted the end of the communist threat to their particular capitalist and political system. That doesn’t ever mean they wanted the people.

[beardedmrbean]

New York City residents in Hispanic and black communities that supported President Trump in huge numbers in the 2024 election hailed Tuesday’s local immigration raids that nabbed scores of suspected heinous criminals.

Starting in the Bronx — where Trump’s support surged 35% between 2020 and 2024 — heavily armed federal immigration agents stormed through the city, targeting migrants with warrants for murder, kidnapping and other heinous crimes, police sources told The Post.

Among those arrested was Anderson Zambrano-Pacheco, 25, an alleged ringleader of the notorious Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua whom immigration officers took into custody at an Ogden Avenue apartment in the Bronx.

“Oh, thank God they got him,” said a resident who lives near the complex, visibly relieved that the violent thug was taken off the streets.

Elsewhere in the borough, locals expressed similar sentiments.

“Get them the hell off the street! Get them the hell out of the street so people don’t have to walk in fear,” said Evelyn Brown, 80, a Bronx resident from Jamaica who voted for Trump.

“Take the damn bad ones away!”

A resident of the Knickerbocker apartment complex in Washington Heights in deep-blue Manhattan, where Trump gained 5% in 2024 over his 2020 showing, said he’s happy to see some action being taken against criminals but added that he still hopes some deserving migrant families are offered a path to safety.

The resident — who didn’t want to give his name — said he voted for Trump the first time but didn’t make it to the polls in 2024.

“Too many people came over the border at once, and now it has to be a whole operation,” he said of the raids.

“I don’t want dangerous people on the street, especially if we’re paying for it. People getting hurt on the street. Why should they get a pass?”

“But some of them are families,” he added of migrants who could end up eventually being deported, too, because of their illegal status.

“I don’t want to see them separated or hurt back home.”

“It’s all a mess.”

In Queens, where the president saw his support grow by nearly 10.5% from 2020 to 2024, according to Board of Election results, residents said they were glad to see criminals taken off the street.

Jason Rodriguez, 41, a forklift driver and security camera installer, told The Post while in Jackson Heights that he’s glad Homeland Security is going after Tren de Aragua gangbangers, but added that the ICE raids are also having a chilling effect on hardworking, law-abiding migrants who fear being deported.

“Honestly, it’s good to get Tren de Aragua off the streets because they’re dangerous. Trump should deport the criminals,” said Rodriguez, who was born at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Brooklyn to parents who came from the Dominican Republic in the 1960s.

“Their jails in their own countries are a lot worse than here. They don’t care about being locked up here, so they should be deported,” he added.

But “there are a lot of undocumented, hardworking people busting their ass doing 14- and 16-hour days to support their families,” too, he said.

“They’re doing it right. They’re contributing to society, unlike the criminals.”

Electrical engineer Damso Vargas, 52, of Elmhurst moved to the US from the Dominican Republic in 2001 and has since become a US citizen.

He once worked in the control tower at Punta Cana International Airport but came to the US for a higher-paying job.

Vargas said the vetting of newly arrived migrants had been too lax under President Joe Biden and believes the criminal element needs to be snuffed out.

Although he supports Homeland Security conducting targeted raids on criminal migrants, he said he doesn’t want ICE to conduct sweeping searches and deportations.

“If you come to this country, you need to show respect and work hard. You don’t come here to do gang bulls–t,” Vargas said.

“If you come to my country, I’d expect you to do the right thing.”

Vargas said there are large swaths of the borough that have rapidly gone downhill due to the influx of criminal migrants.

“I remember in 2010, you could walk around Roosevelt Avenue and enjoy yourself, but now I’m scared to walk around because there are a lot of newly arrived migrant criminals,” he said.

Dolphin Chung, 57, is a Peruvian green-card holder from Jackson Heights who sells jewelry under the 82nd Street-Jackson Heights subway station. He’s previously owned and run jewelry stores in Harlem and Staten Island.

He supports deporting foreign criminals but does not want mass deportations of migrants.

“The foreign criminals are dangerous, so it’s good to get rid of them,” Chung said.

“We don’t want the foreign gangs here. But there a lot of people around here who don’t have papers but work very hard. They work from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m., seven days a week.”

On Staten Island — a Republican stronghold by city standards, going for Trump in three consecutive elections — Kevin Morales, 43, a construction worker who voted for the president in 2024 but not in 2020, drew a distinction between hardworking migrants and those being rounded up in the raids.

“Listen, there’s too many people here that aren’t looking to make a better life for themselves. Instead they are robbing, shooting and raping. Those are not the kind of immigrants we want here,” he told The Post at Greenridge Plaza in Great Kills.

“I’m an immigrant and come from a family of immigrants, but we work. We came here to work and make a better life for our children.” 

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Jesse Duquette

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

March 18, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Mar 19, 2025

On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ordered that the Trump administration stop deporting anyone from the United States under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and that the planes carrying individuals to prison in El Salvador be turned around. Despite the order, the administration declined to bring the planes back, and administration officials appeared to mock the order, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposting the message of Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that read, “Oopsie… Too late,” along with a laughing emoji.

On Sunday, lawyers from the Department of Justice suggested that the planes were outside the jurisdiction of the U.S. when Boasberg issued the order, or that the order didn’t take effect until it was entered into the electronic docket, although his verbal order that he said had to be “complied with immediately” came about 45 minutes earlier, before at least one of the planes landed.

On Monday the Justice Department unsuccessfully asked a federal appeals court to remove Boasberg from the case. In a hearing, Boasberg asked the administration to clarify its actions after it appeared to defy the court by rushing the planes off the ground and to El Salvador. In response to the Justice Department’s claim that the judge’s orders had no authority over the flights once they left U.S. airspace, the judge noted that the power of the federal courts does not end at the end of U.S. airspace. Boasberg also appeared to reject the claim of the DOJ lawyers that there is no judicial order until it is published in a written filing. The DOJ also refused to tell Boasberg anything about the flights, saying that even their number was a question of national security, although the administration had talked extensively about them on public media.

Boasberg scheduled another hearing today to get the DOJ lawyers to answer the questions they had refused to address.

This morning, President Donald Trump took to social media to call Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, was not elected President—He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING! I WON FOR MANY REASONS, IN AN OVERWHELMING MANDATE, BUT FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION MAY HAVE BEEN THE NUMBER ONE REASON FOR THIS HISTORIC VICTORY. I’m just doing what the VOTERS wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

Trump’s post sounds as if he is nervous about the increasing unrest over his policies and is trying to convince people that he has a mandate although in fact more people voted for other candidates in the 2024 election than voted for him. But it was his suggestion that any judge with whom he disagrees should be removed that sparked pushback from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts, who issued a statement saying: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

Roberts wrote the Trump v. United States decision of July 1, 2024, establishing that presidents cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of their official presidential duties, and it seems likely that Trump did not expect a rebuke from him.

U.S. District Judge Theodore D. Chuang also sought to stop the administration’s power grab. In a scathing 68-page decision, Chuang found that the actions of Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency” to destroy the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, “likely violated the United States Constitution in multiple ways.” Chuang explained that the destruction of USAID hurt not only the 26 current or recently fired employees and contractors of USAID who had filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk and the “Department of Government Efficiency.” That destruction also hurt “the public interest, because they deprived the public’s elected representatives in Congress of their constitutional authority to decide whether, when, and how to close down an agency created by Congress.”

While the question of who is in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency is such a mystery that it has spawned its own social media hashtag—WITAOD, for “Who is the administrator of DOGE?”—Chuang clearly identified Elon Musk as the person in charge. Trump “identified Musk as the leader of DOGE,” he notes, and “Trump and Musk held a joint press conference in the Oval Office to answer reporters’ questions about DOGE.” Chuang noted the many, many times when Trump called Musk DOGE’s leader.

In the lawsuit, USAID employees argued that Musk has acted as an officer of the United States without having been duly appointed to such a role. The Constitution provides that the president can appoint such officers, who exercise “significant authority,” but that they must be confirmed with the advice and consent of the Senate. Musk, quite obviously, was not. The White House has tried to get around this issue by claiming that Musk is only an advisor to the president, but Chuang wasn’t buying it. “[B]ased on the present record,” he wrote, “the only individuals known to be associated with the decisions to initiate a shutdown of USAID…are Musk and DOGE team Members.” Musk therefore “exercises actual authority in ways that an advisor to the President does not.”

Chuang ordered that parts of USAID must be restored, although what effect that will have is unclear since the agency has been destroyed.

Trump continued his attack on the rule of law today when he fired the two Democratic commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission, which protects consumers from collusion and anti-consumer practices. The firings leave only two Republicans on the commission and leave it without a quorum to do business. Beginning with the 1935 case of Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the courts have established that the president cannot fire officials in agencies created by Congress without a serious reason like neglect of duties. Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern wrote: “Trump’s action here is brazenly illegal under any interpretation of the law as it stands.”

Trump held a phone conversation today with Russian president Vladimir Putin, allegedly about a proposed ceasefire in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump boasted that he would end Russia’s war against Ukraine in a day, and he is now eager for any end to the hostilities. But Putin seems less eager to reach a solution than to demonstrate his dominance over Trump. Today, when the phone call was scheduled, Putin was on stage at an event. When his interviewer asked if he needed to go because he would be late for the call, Putin dismissed the question and laughter broke out. Brett Bruen, president of the Global Situation Room public relations firm wrote: “Making leaders wait is an old Putin power play. But, this is pretty brutal. Putin is publicly mocking Trump.”

While Trump’s team portrayed the conversation as productive, Putin maintained that Ukraine was the aggressor in the war, although it was Russia that invaded Ukraine. Putin also demanded that the U.S. and allies must stop all military aid and the sharing of intelligence with Ukraine, conditions that would hamstring Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion.

Finally today, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has proposed addressing the H5N1 bird flu that is decimating U.S. poultry and cattle farms by simply letting the disease run rampant. He suggests such a course would permit scientists to discover birds that are immune to the disease.

But veterinary scientists say that letting the virus sweep through flocks is “a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” as Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told Apoorva Mandavilli of the New York Times. Chickens and turkeys don’t have the genes to resist the virus, and every infection is a chance for the virus to mutate into a more virulent form, one of which could mutate so it could spread among humans. If H5N1 were permitted to infect 5 million birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen told Mandavilli.

The danger of this shoot first, ask questions later attitude of administration officials was on display today in articles about the men deported to El Salvador. A Washington Post article by Silvia Foster-Frau followed the story of four Venezuelan friends who had come to the U.S. illegally. They shared a townhouse in Dallas, where immigration officials picked them up last Thursday. The men signed deportation papers, expecting to return to Venezuela, but although there is no record that the men committed crimes in the U.S. and their families insist they are not affiliated with the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang whose members White House officials claim were on the weekend’s deportation flights, the men are shown in the videos of those deported to prison in El Salvador.

A Reuters story by Sarah Kinosian and Kristina Cooke reported that family members who suspect their loved ones have been sent to El Salvador have launched a WhatsApp helpline.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tomorrowusa]

From Day One, Donald Trump would not have been able to usurp power without the grinning assistance of Capitol Hill Republicans. They share the blame for the destruction and chaos of the last few months.

The fundamental story of Trump’s second term has been his usurpation of powers traditionally granted to the legislative branch. Congress created the networks of federal agencies and programs that help govern the country; Trump has asserted the power to shut them down at will. Congress has the constitutional power to set tariffs and other taxes; Trump has unilaterally imposed them on most of the world in ways that are not only economically ruinous but likely illegal as well. [ ... ] Over the last three months, we’ve seen something even more ominous: Republican senators and representatives acting as willing partners in the destruction of their own branch of government’s power, all on Trump’s behalf. The Constitution is designed for tension between the three branches of government; it cannot function if one branch proclaims its supremacy and the other two give up without a fight.

Even the judicial branch has had more cojones about curbing executive branch power.

The Supreme Court, to its partial credit, took steps to preserve its own authority in recent weeks. (I only give them partial credit because they created this monster in the first place.) Their order last month to immediately halt Alien Enemies Act deportations came from an unmistakable concern that the Trump administration was trying to evade judicial review. The same thing can’t be said for Congress. Republican lawmakers may think that they are following their constituents’ wishes by reflexively obeying Trump’s whims. Allowing a president to usurp the powers of one branch and ignore the orders of another one is not in anyone’s long-term interest—and especially not theirs.

If you want to stop Trump, you have to do it via Congress. That means putting pressure on Capitol Hill Republicans that goes beyond the ineffectual mantra of "call or email your representative or senator".

I've said this before and I'll say it again...

All of our US reps and senators have one or more offices back in their home districts and states. If your GOP senator is up for re-election next year or if your GOP rep won by a relatively narrow margin in 2024, pay a visit to that office during business hours. Post about your visit online. If the visit is unsatisfactory, return with a few dozen like-minded voters from the same district or state and conduct some sort of legal protest; informational picketing, street theater, or prayer vigils can work well. Tailor your protest to the local community.

Only pressure on individual Capitol Hill Republicans can do anything at this point. That means: 1] calling them out very publicly for colluding with Trump's gutting of our American system AND 2] doing precinct work to pave the way for their electoral defeat in 2026. The era of slacktivism and fundraging is over. It's time to become more directly involved in the political process.

People who live in US House districts won by Republicans with margins of 9% or under in 2024 have more influence than most of us. If you live in one of these districts then you have a great amount of leverage over your rep.

If just five of those reps stood up to Trump then the entire Trump autocracy project would get derailed.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

What Donald Trump did on Friday should make the hair on the back of your neck stand on end. Trump literally fabricated evidence in an effort to keep Ábrego García in a prison in El Salvador. You must understand that Trump would do that very thing to imprison anyone he wants to “disappear” --including you or your family. I can say that with 100% confidence because Trump is following the fascist playbook and that is what they have long done to critics or anyone else they simply want to make vanish. This is where we are as a nation. We have all seen Trump lie to support his claims. But the way his regime has defended the unconstitutional deportation of García means we have entered a new and far more dangerous for all of us. And I’m not talking about a “constitutional crisis,” I mean far worse. It began a few weeks ago with Trump and his regime claiming García was a “convicted” member MS-13 despite García never having been charged with any crimes since he came to the U.S. in 2011—let alone convicted. However, as we know, facts don’t matter to convicted felon Trump. So when the courts including the U.S. Supreme Court ordered that the corrupt Trump regime should “facilitate” García’s return to the U.S. because they failed to provide “due process,” they began to escalate their lies because it plays well with the MAGA base. Soon we had Attorney General Pam Bondi on Fox News claiming that García was “one of the top MS-13 members" and "a terrorist." Yes, she called him a terrorist as did others in Trump world. Then on Friday, Trump did something we never saw before from a US President. He posted a clearly fabricated photo of García’s hand with a tattoo on it that reads, “MS-13.” Trump wrote on the social media post accompanying that photo, “This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such “a fine and innocent person.” Trump then added to make sure people looked closely at the photo, “They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles…” You can see the post below.

That photo is a fake. It’s a phony. It’s made up. Garcia does not have a tattoo that literally reads MS-13 on his hand as Trump wrote and his fabricated photo depict. If he did, the very first piece of evidence the Trump regime would have cited in this several week episode would have been that. It would have been the defining image of this case. And every Republican and Trump official would have been citing that tattoo in the media.

Backing that up are photos of García’s hand when he met Sen. Chris Van Hollen two days ago that show no such tattoo on his hand. (For example, see photos below from journalist Matt Novak who is a reporter at Gizmodo)

And García’s own lawyer on CNN Friday night confirmed he has no such tattoo. This should be bone-chilling. Trump has now fully embraced the dictator playbook be it people from the past like Hitler and Chile’s Pinochet to more contemporary figures like Saudi Arabia’s MBS and Trump’s close ally Vladimir Putin. They all have utilized trumped up charges and fabricated evidence in support of disappearing people they wanted gone. And it’s 100% what Trump is doing now.

[...] The goal of the Trump regime is exactly what a Ronald Reagan appointed federal judge wrote in a U.S. Court of Appeals opinion this week on the García case. As the judge noted, Trump regime wants the “right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.” The ruling continued, “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” We are watching Trump accuse a person of a crime then peddle lies and even fabricate evidence to support imprisoning that person. That is the power Trump and his regime are openly fighting for to use against anyone. And that is why for the sake of our freedom—and our families’—we must fight back.

The Trump Regime is fabricating evidence to falsely paint Kilmar Ábrego García as a “member of MS-13” to make the baseless and lawless justification to imprison Ábrego García in El Salvador and deny his return to the US even after the Supreme Court ruled against Trump ordering him back to the US.

[argumate]

i think you're missing a big picture view on immigration. unless it's done slowly and carefully - which isn't what you argue for - there are huge social and economic consequences, and this is what drives xenophobia and racism up.

mass immigration -> drop in wages (supply and demand) and general COL rises, especially rent - it's impossible to keep uo housing demand that fast -> public resources get stretched thin (education, transportation, healthcare).

the only ones who benefit from big waves of "unskilled" labor (no such thing obviously, but they're the ones easy to exploit) are big companies. they get to pay them less than a native would accept, while the city and state govt who are already incredibly inefficient at best, let the whole place decay.

i have literally seen it happening in real life in my hometown. the first wave of immigrants in the 2010s (haitians) were generally welcomed and the population had a positive outlook on them. now, in the 2020s, the huge mass of venezuelan immigrants are very looked down upon because of the reasons i said above.

obviously it's not /their/ fault, bc they're also being exploited by the system.

also, there is a cultural and language factor! they play a big role in this, too. my oarents neighborhood HAS gotten more rowdy and dangerous after the venezuelans came in.

immigration only works if there is integration, but we can't say that w/o getting accused of xenophobia and racism. you cannot have a functioning harmonious society without a minimum amount of social cohesiveness. there is a reason culturally homogenous countries are the happiest - and i genuinely mean culturally, not racially.

i used to believe in Free Immigration For All until i experienced this in real life. there are no spots in school for kids and teens, the buses are full, the healthcare has gotten horrible, wages are incredibly low and rent js crazy high. obviously this isn't the immigrants fault - it's a simple question of supply x demand + government inefficiency. but to be quite honest? not even the most best equipped mayor would've been able to build enough schools and hospitals when you're constrained by the bureaucracy of things.

not to talk about the fact how they have access to social benefits, like our own version of ssi for vulnerable people without contributing anything to it nor needing to be a citizen when public pension style of social benefits (what we have) are already stretched thin by low birth rates!!!!!

im not in the usa, and this is my perspective in a 200k hab city. i cannot imagine how this is like in a larger city and the impacts it has ln the local population.

also, i will say one thing about the usa immigration issue: there are plenty of reasonably safe countries people pass before getting to the border. they dont HAVE to go there. they want to go there bc it doesn't matter to them that it's a low paying job, that money is still worth a lot back in their home country. that is why to them it's worth to cross the ocean and be at risk at the border. that, and it's only way to claim asylum is being physically there - after they're in waiting for a court date, it doesn't matter anymore whether they're legsl or not. they already have a job and are making 2 dollars an hour which is worth 83737373737383838282 back home.

yes fixing housing policy is essential for so many other things, but you're kind of mixing a bunch of random things here: if low birth rates are a problem then young immigrants help with that, low wages are less of a problem when immigrants don't need to fear deportation, etc.

[rjzimmerman]

Here we go, before the mf is even sworn into office he's scaring the shit out of a whole bunch of people, including ordinary Americans who fear for their country's future, such as me. Does this mean that anybody who might be walking down the street and speaking English with a foreign accent are potentially subject to snatching by the US Army?

Excerpt from this story from Rolling Stone:

Donald Trump‘s determination to conduct mass deportations of undocumented immigrants is very real, and he wants to start cracking down immediately. One of the ways he plans to do so is by declaring a national emergency that will enable him to use the military to help boot migrants out of the United States.

The president-elect on Monday responded “TRUE!!!”  to a Truth Social post about reports that his incoming administration is “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

The confirmation came at 4:08 a.m.

Trump built his 2024 presidential campaign around a vow to lock down the border and forcibly — and violently — deport the undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. He spoke repeatedly about an “invasion” of migrants who are “poisoning the blood” of the nation, and even claiming that undocumented immigrants have been “conquering” American cities.

He’s been insistent since winning the election that immigration is his top priority, telling NBC News that his administration will spare no expense when it comes to deportation. “It’s not a question of a price tag,” he said. “It’s not — really, we have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”

There will certainly be a price tag, however, and it will be high given the logistical implications of removing millions of people from the nation. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is not currently equipped to carry out Trump’s deportation agenda, which calls for quadrupling the number of deportations the agency carries out every year. 

Politico reported Monday on some of the tactics the administration plans to start cracking down, noting that deportations will commence within Trump’s first 100 days in office, and that his team is looking for ways to expedite the process that will withstand any legal challenges from rights groups. Trump is also expected to quickly do away with a Biden administration policy that prioritized deporting migrants who threatened public safety and national security, and directed ICE officers to take “the totality of the facts and circumstances” into consideration before deporting migrants with criminal convictions.

Tom Homan, the immigration hardliner Trump recently tapped as his “border czar,” has said criminals will be the first to go, while teasing the administration’s aggressive approach to deportation. “I got three words for them: shock and awe,” Homan told Donald Trump Jr. of the administration’s approach. “Shock and awe. You’re going to see us take this country back.”