The Fifth Circuit Court of Apoeals ruled in favor of Trump’s deportation policy, even for immigrants who had committed no crimes and lived in this country for decades. In a split decision, 2-1, the Court gave Trump a victory in his efforts to remove immigrants.
A federal appeals court Friday night backed the Trump administration’s policy to lock up the vast majority of people it is seeking to deport without offering a chance for bond, even if they have no criminal records and have resided in the country for decades.
A divided three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the administration’s view — a reversal of every administration’s position for the last 30 years — is the correct interpretation of the federal government’s power to detain people targeted for deportation.
“That prior Administrations decided to use less than their full enforcement authority … does not mean they lacked the authority to do more,” Judge Edith Jones, a Reagan appointee, wrote for the 2-1 majority.
The matter could soon be headed for Supreme Court consideration.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement adopted a new view of the law in July, prompting an explosion of arrests and detentions — and a flood of lawsuits from detainees who argued that they were illegally locked up without due process.
The vast majority of judges across the country have rejected the administration’s approach. A POLITICO review of thousands of ICE detention cases found that at least 360 judges rejected the expanded detention strategy — in more than 3,000 cases — while just 27 backed it in about 130 cases.
Jones was joined in the decision by Judge Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee. Judge Dana Douglas, a Biden appointee, said in a dissent that the panel’s view would require the detention of as many as 2 million immigrants residing in the United States without bond — “some of them the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.”
So, it seems that the brutal tactics of ICE have won approval by the Fifth Circuit Court of Apoeals. The masked men may continue to break into homes, smash car window, and handcuff their prey, without due process, even though most of those they arrest have not committed crimes, and some are American citizens. It’s not the “worst of the worst” that Trump is deporting but people who are gainfully employed, who contribute to their communities, and who are good neighbors. Their “crime” is that they have not been able to master the maze of attaining citizenship.
Several years back, I employed a handyman who was very responsible and efficient. He was from Guatemala. He was very active in the local Catholic Church. He was a good worker on construction jobs, and his employer paid him $25 an hour. He did not have papers. I called an immigration lawyer and asked if I could help Jose get papers. He said “the only way you can help him get papers is to marry him. There is no other way.”
The problem was that I was married already, and so was Jose. Two years ago, Jose went home to Guatemala. His timing was excellent.
Italia Fittante is a high school literature teacher in Minneapolis. This essay was published by Education Week. Trump promised during his campaign to deport “the worst of the worst,” criminals, rapists, murderers. Instead he has put a target on the back of every immigrant, no matter how long they have lived here, no matter how much they have contributed to society. Our children are experiencing a reign of terror.
One of my seniors walked into my classroom after school yesterday. He needed an extension on his final project, and I could see he’d been working up the nerve to ask me.
His parents haven’t left the house in over a week for fear of being stopped by immigration agents, which means someone has to work. At 17, that someone is him. After school every weekday and all day on weekends, every week, because the bills don’t stop.
He carries his U.S. passport everywhere now, tucked in his pocket, transferred from his jeans to his school uniform and back again, refusing to let it out of his sight even in my classroom. He’s been stopped twice on his walk home from work by masked men and women in unmarked cars, demanding he prove his right to exist in the country where he was born.
He wants to go to medical school; he’s always dreamt of being a doctor. He told me about the university in Mexico holding a spot for him, the contingency plan he never thought he’d need. Just in case things get worse here and he has to follow his parents across the border, just in case his future is decided by policy instead of potential.
I told him to forget the deadline.
Another one of my seniors came to me early Tuesday morning before class started, her eyes hollowed out and bloodshot from lack of sleep. She was concerned about making up a reading quiz she had missed the day before.
In tears, she explained to me that she was working the register at a fast-food restaurant over the weekend when ICE agents burst through the doors midshift. They pushed past her, forced their way into the back of the restaurant, and violently detained two of her co-workers. Nobody knows where they went, when they’re coming back, or if they’re coming back at all.
She told me she hadn’t slept since the raid. This student, who immigrated with her family to the United States just three years ago, described being paralyzed with fear.
I told her to forget the quiz.
The past few weeks in Minnesota have been marked by relentless federal immigration operations. Agents operate openly and without restraint. This week alone, ICE detained multiple students from a neighboring district, one as young as 5 years old. Children and teenagers have been taken on their way to school, from driveways and from cars. My students live with the constant awareness that anyone they love could be taken at any moment. They themselves could be next.
What we’re asking these kids to do seems impossible. Show up. Focus. Read about the American Dream in Advanced Placement Literature while you wonder if your father will be deported before graduation. Solve for x while you’re solving how to pay the electric bill. Write your college application essay about overcoming adversity while doubting you’ll survive it.
They already come to school knowing they might die there. We’ve made peace with that somehow. Lockdown drills and barricading doors are routine. My students can tell you the difference between shots fired in the building versus shots fired nearby. At the beginning of the school year, two elementary students were killed during mass at a Catholic school just miles from us. Before the media even covered it, my students were calling their parents. I could hear them crying in the halls, in my classroom.
Some of them knew the victims. Now, they come to school and know which corner of each room has the best cover. They are 17 years old and fluent in survival tactics.
My students carry U.S. passports in their pockets like keys to a house where the locks keep changing, navigating their own city like it’s hostile territory. Their walks to and from school are haunted by the persistent possibility that they’ll come home to silence, their parents taken by masked strangers who leave no forwarding address.
We’re creating a generation of students from immigrant families who understand exactly how little this country values their safety.
They’re learning the lesson we’re teaching, even if it’s not the one we claim to be giving. They understand the message we’re sending when we demand their labor and their silence and their gratitude, all while treating their existence as conditional and their families as disposable. How can we expect them to love their country when those in power have made it clear their country doesn’t love them back?
The curriculum is clear. Documentation determines dignity, and borders determine which families matter. Authority needs no accountability, not when violence can be rebranded as policy if it advances “our” goals.
My students understand what’s happening because they’re living it. The stakes are clearer to them than to most adults I know. They don’t need explanations or sympathy or platitudes or extensions. They need safety without surveillance, because this country is theirs, too. No child should have to carry identification to prove their right to exist.
What sort of nation terrorizes children and calls it enforcement? That demands loyalty while offering nothing but fear? My students already know the answer. They learned it the moment they started carrying passports in their pockets.
Heather Cox Richardson pays attention to the rhetoric of President Trump’s close advisor Stephen Miller. She hears echoes of the Confederacy. Miller thinks that immigrants should never be allowed to be on a path to citizenship. If that had been the policy when his great-grandparents arrived from Belarus in the early 20th century, little Stephen would be a serf, a slave, or a laborer, not a well-educated white nationalist advising the President to expel millions of immigrants and close the door to others.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted on social media this morning:
“Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare & the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”
After his call for a “labor class” excluded from citizenship and a voice in government, Miller went on to reject the idea that Haitians living and working legally in Ohio should be described as part of Ohio communities. Calling out Democratic former senator Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate again this year, for including them, Miller posted: “Democrats just flatly reject any concept of nationhood that has ever existed in human history.”
History is doing that rhyming thing again.
In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond (D-SC), a wealthy enslaver, rose to explain to his northern colleagues why their objection to human enslavement was so badly misguided. “In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life,” he said. Such workers needed few brains and little skill; they just had to be strong, docile, and loyal to their betters, who would organize their labor and then collect the profits from it, concentrating that wealth into their own hands to move society forward efficiently.
Hammond called such workers “the mud-sill of society and political government.” Much like the beams driven into the ground to support a stately home above, the mudsill supported “that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” The South had pushed Black Americans into that mudsill role. “We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves,” he said. The North also had a mudsill class, he added: “the man who lives by daily labor…in short, your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”
But Hammond warned that the North was making a terrible mistake. “Our slaves do not vote,” he said. “We give them no political power. Yours do vote, and, being the majority, they are the depositories of all your political power. If they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided…by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”
Hammond was very clear about what he believed the world should look like. Black Americans should always be subordinate to white men, of course, but white women, too, were subordinate. They were made “to breed,” as “toy[s] for recreation,” or to bring men “wealth and position,” he had explained to his son in 1852. Hammond’s promising early political career had been nearly derailed when he admitted that for two years he had sexually assaulted his four young nieces, the daughters of the powerful Wade Hampton II (although he insisted he was being wronged because he should get credit for showing any restraint at all when faced with four such “lovely creatures”).
If women and Black people were at the bottom of society, southern white men were an “aristocracy” by virtue of their descent from “the ancient cavaliers of Virginia…a race of men without fear and without reproach,” “alike incapable of servility and selfishness.” By definition, whatever such leaders did was what was good for society, and any man who had not achieved that status was excluded because of his own failings or criminal inclinations.
The southern system, Hammond told the Senate, was “the best in the world…such as no other people ever enjoyed upon the face of the earth,” and spreading it would benefit everyone.
The next year, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience at the Wisconsin state fair in Milwaukee that he rejected Hammond’s mudsill theory. Lincoln explained that Hammond’s “mud-sill theory” divided the world into permanent castes, arguing that men with money drove the economy and workers were stuck permanently at the bottom.
For his part, Lincoln embraced a different theory: It was workers, not wealthy men, who drove the economy. While men of wealth had little incentive to experiment and throw themselves into their work, men on the make were innovative and hardworking. Such men could—and should—rise. This “free labor” theory articulated the true meaning of American democracy for northerners and for the non-slave-holding southerners, who, as Lincoln reminded his listeners, made up a majority in the South. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him,” he explained.
In the election of 1860, southern Democrats tried to get voters to back their worldview by promising they were reflecting God’s will and by using virulent racism, warning that Black Americans must be kept in their place or they would destroy American society.
But, in a nation of immigrants and men who had worked their way up from day laborers to become prominent men, Lincoln stood firm on the Declaration of Independence. He warned that if people started to make exceptions to the idea that all men are created equal, they would not stop. They would “transform this Government into a government of some other form.” “If that declaration is not the truth,” Lincoln said, “let us get the Statute book, in which we find it and tear it out!” To cries of “No! No!” he responded: “[L]et us stand firmly by it then.”
Miller’s white nationalism is not the concept on which this nation was built. The United States of America was built on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the sweat and blood of almost 250 years of Americans, often those from marginalized communities, working to make those principles a reality.
The hierarchical system Miller embraces echoes the system championed by those like Hammond, who imagined themselves the nation’s true leaders who had the right to rule. They were not bound by the law, and they rejected the idea that those unwilling to recognize their superiority should have either economic or political power.
The horrors of the Epstein files show a group of powerful and wealthy men and women who sexually assaulted children and showed no concern either for their crimes or that they might have to answer to the law. The public still does not know the extent of the horrors or the human-trafficking business in which Epstein and others were engaged. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters yesterday that the Department of Justice was not releasing any item from the Epstein files that showed “death, physical abuse, or injury.”
“You [know] the biggest problem with being friends with you?” Dr. Peter Attia wrote in an email to Epstein in response to an email with the subject line “Got a fresh shipment.” Attia answered his own question: “The life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I can’t tell a soul.”
Trump echoed Hammond in a different way tonight on Air Force One as he traveled to Florida. Asked by a reporter how he would handle being on both sides of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, he suggested that taking the money of the American people into his own hands would enable him to use it for the public good. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he said. “We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.”
Another story tonight indicated the degree to which the president sees himself as part of a wealthy caste that is above the law. Sam Kessler, Rebecca Ballhous, Eliot Brown, and Angus Berwick of the Wall Street Journal published a blockbuster report showing that four days before Trump’s 2025 inauguration, men working for an Abu Dhabi royal signed a secret deal with the Trump family to buy 49% of their brand-new cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. The investors would pay half immediately, sending $187 million to entities held by the Trump family and at least $31 million to entities held by Steve Witkoff, a co-founder of World Liberty Financial whom Trump had named U.S. envoy to the Middle East weeks earlier.
The deal was backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is the brother of the president of the United Arab Emirates and oversees more than $1.3 trillion that includes the country’s largest wealth fund. Tahnoon has wanted access to U.S. AI technology, but the Biden administration blocked access out of concern it could end up in Chinese hands. The Trump administration, in striking contrast, has committed to allowing the United Arab Emirates to buy about half a million of the most advanced AI chips a year.
Federal agents acting for the Trump administration are trying to enforce the authority of those like Miller, tear-gassing, arresting, and killing American citizens. Thousands marched peacefully in Portland, Oregon, today but, as Alex Baumhardt of the Oregon Capital Chronicle recorded, “federal officers outside the ICE facility in Portland…indiscriminately threw loads of gas and flash bangs” at marchers, including children. Portland, Oregon, city councillor Mitch Green reported: “I just got tear gassed along with thousands of union members, many of whom had their families with them. Federal agents at the ICE facility tear gassed children. We must abolish ICE, DHS, and we must have prosecutions.”
Tim Dickinson of The Contrarian wrote: “Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they’re doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps.”
And yet, in another echo of the 1850s, MAGA Republicans are reversing victim and offender, blaming the people under assault for the violence. Trump officials insist that community watch groups and protesters are engaging in “domestic terrorism.” Greg Jaffe and Thomas Gibbons-Neff of the New York Times flagged that Representative Eli Crane (R-AZ) told right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson on Monday that those people protecting their neighbors from the violence of federal agents want “revolution.” “They want to fundamentally remake and tear down the institutions and the culture of this country.”
In an order requiring the release of five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from detention, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery noted that in their crusade against undocumented immigrants, U.S. officials are ignoring the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. “[F]or some among us,” the judge wrote, “the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.”
Judge Biery signed the order after saying he was putting “ a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.” Under his signature, he posted the now-famous image of the little boy detained in his blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, along with the notations for two biblical passages: “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these,’” and “Jesus wept.”
Tonight, voters flipped a seat in the Texas Senate from Republican to Democratic in a special election. Democrat Taylor Rehmet, an Air Force veteran and machinist, defeated right-wing Republican Leigh Wambsganss for a seat that Republicans have held since the early 1990s. Robert Downen of Texas Monthly noted that in the final days of the campaign, the Wambsganss campaign spent $310,000 while Rehmet spent nothing, and Daniel Nichanian of Bolts Mag posted that overall, Wambsganss spent nearly $2.2 million more than Rehmet in the campaign. Both Texas governor Greg Abbott and Trump himself publicly supported Wambsganss.
And yet, as G. Elliott Morrisof Strength in Numbers noted, voters flipped a district that Trump won in 2024 by 17 points to Rehmet, electing him by a 14.4-point margin. After removing the minor-party candidates in the vote, the swing from the Republican in 2024 was 32 points toward the Democrats. In Texas.
—
Notes:
James Henry Hammond, Speech on the Admission of Kansas, March 4, 1858, in Selections from the Letters and Speeches of the Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina (New York: John F. Thrown & Co., 1866), pp. 301–322.
Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), pp. 37–104, 312–314.
The image of ICE arresting the child wearing his Spiderman backpack and his bright blue hat with bunny ears spread across the Internet. He and his father were arrested and sent to a detention center in Texas. Today, a federal judge ordered ICE to release them both.
A federal judge on Saturday ordered the release of a 5-year-old boy and his father from immigration custody, condemning their removal from their suburban Minneapolis neighborhood as unconstitutional.
The image of Liam Conejo Ramos, wearing a Spider-Man backpack and an oversize fluffy blue winter hat as he was detained by officers earlier this month, spurred outrage at a moment when many were already incensed by the Trump administration’s harsh immigration tactics in Minnesota and elsewhere across the country.
In a blistering opinion, Judge Fred Biery of Federal District Court for the Western District of Texas condemned “the perfidious lust for unbridled power” and “the imposition of cruelty.”
The boy’s father, Adrian Conejo Arias, was also arrested and the pair were taken to an immigration detention center outside San Antonio.
Judge Biery, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton, said both Liam and his father must be released from custody by Tuesday. His brief but fiery ruling chastised the government’s “ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence” and called for “a more orderly and humane policy than currently in place.”
At the bottom of his three-page ruling, he included the photo of Liam, standing in front of a car, as well as two Bible verses. It was ordered, he wrote, “with a judicial finger in the constitutional dike.”
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop harassing and detaining immigrants who were in this country lawfully. Trump’s deputy policy director, Stephen Miller, was outraged by the decision.
WASHINGTON, Jan 28 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked a recently announced Trump administration policy targeting the roughly 5,600 lawful refugees in Minnesota who are awaiting green cards.
In a written ruling, U.S. District Judge John Tunheim in Minneapolis said federal agents likely violated multiple federal statutes by arresting some of these refugees to subject them to additional vetting.
“At its best, America serves as a haven of individual liberties in a world too often full of tyranny and cruelty,” Tunheim wrote. “We abandon that ideal when we subject our neighbors to fear and chaos.”
Tunheim issued a temporary restraining order blocking federal agents from arresting lawful refugees in Minnesota who have not been charged with immigration violations. The judge said the ruling would remain in place until he can hear additional legal arguments by civil rights groups challenging the policy.
The Trump administration sent thousands of immigration agents to Minneapolis and Saint Paul beginning in December in what officials described as an operation to enforce immigration laws and stop fraud.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration agenda, criticized Tunheim’s ruling on X, saying: “The judicial sabotage of democracy is unending.”
The order was a major setback to “Operation PARRIS,” a program announced by the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month and billed as “a sweeping initiative reexamining thousands of refugee cases through new background checks.”
Tunheim said his order does not affect DHS’s ability to reexamine refugee applicants and that it “does not impact DHS’s lawful enforcement of immigration laws.”
The attraction of ICE to white supremacists — and now their open appeal to racists in their recruiting messages — didn’t start with George W. Bush adopting the word “Homeland” on October 8, 2001, the first time it’d been publicly used by a mainstream politician in American history. It arguably started on September 5, 1934, with a speech by Rudolf Hess, introducing Adolf Hitler at the Nurnberg Rally.
I have a weird connection to that speech, and it’s always haunted me. For more than half of my life I’ve been a volunteer for a German-based international relief organization that was founded by Gottfried Müller, who’d been an intelligence officer in Hitler’s army until he was captured in Iran and spent virtually all of WWII in a prison camp. There, he had a conversion experience and dedicated his life to helping “the least of the least of this world, as Jesus taught us.”
Müller told me how he was there for that Nuremberg Rally, in which Hess introduced Hitler with the following speech:
“Danke irher Führung wird Deutschland sein Zeil erreichen. Heimat zu sein. Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. (“Thanks to your leadership, Germany will reach its goal: to be a homeland. A homeland to be for all Germans of the world.”)
This use of Heimat (“Homeland”) was intentional on the part of Hess and Hitler. “Homeland” suggested a racial identity, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf when he speaks of the German people as a racial organism with the German land (Boden) and hereditarily German people (Volk) inseparable:
“The German Reich must gather together and protect all the racially valuable elements of Germandom, wherever they may be.” (Volume II, chapter 13)
As Herr Müller told me, Hitler wanted to create an identity that went beyond language and culture. He wanted to posit a pure “German race,” and have Germany be that race’s “homeland,” all so he could sell to the German people their own racial superiority and use that to justify exterminating others.
Throughout American history, our leaders have avoided that type of language:
— Thomas Paine wrote: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” — Abraham Lincoln said that our Founders had created: “a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal…” — Woodrow Wilson used the word “democracy” instead of “homeland” during WWI: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” — FDR simply used the name of our nation on December 7, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked…”
Across 220+ years, during revolution, civil war, global war, and even the attack on Pearl Harbor, American presidents systematically avoided homeland-style language that implied ancestral ownership, ethnic belonging, or insiders versus outsiders.
Instead, they used words like: republic, nation, people, citizens, democracy, and country to describe America. This wasn’t accidental: it was the core distinction between American civic nationalism, and 19th century European whites-only ethno-nationalism.
George W. Bush blew that all up when he announced the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. I immediately called it out, writing more than 20 years ago that using that word would lead America in a dark direction.
And here we are.
ICE is now openly using white supremacist slogans, memes, and advertisements to recruit men who’re enthusiastic about chasing down Black and brown people. As the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Hatewatch project documents:
“The increase in white nationalist content [from ICE] appears to originate with a June 11, 2025 post. That day, DHS’ official X and Instagram accounts posted a graphic of Uncle Sam hammering up a sign with the caption: “Help your country … and yourself … REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS.” A hotline number for ICE accompanied the post.
“Mother Jones reported the doctored graphic of Uncle Sam originated from an X user called ‘Mr. Robert,’ who is associated with white nationalist content. Mr. Robert’s bio highlights the phrase: ‘Wake Up White Man.’
Since then, it’s been a nonstop barrage of white nationalist and Nazi rhetoric and symbology, as compiled by Dean Blundell.
Thanks to Dean Blundell for compiling these images
— Kristi Noem behind a podium with the words “One of ours. All of yours.” Malcolm Nance noted:
“This is the order to kill all the people in the village of Lidice in Czech Republic when the sadist SS General Heydrich was ambushed and killed by the British SOE. THEY ORDERED 173 MEN MASSACRED. ALL WOMAN AND CHILDREN SENT TO AUSCHWITZ WITH THESE WORDS.”
— The US Department of Labor posting an image of George Washington with the words: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” an eerie echo of “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (One People, One Nation, One Leader).
— Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino, who showed up in Minneapolis last week, photographed for the ICE/CPB website in nearly-full Nazi drag.
Others consistently feature white people with slogans or images appealing to a white supremacist or nationalist base:
As political scientist Dr. Rachel Bitecofer noted in her excellent The Cyclenewsletter:
“‘We’ll have our home again’ is the emotional core of Great Replacement ideology, the white nationalist belief system that frames demographic change as dispossession and recasts the nation as something that has been stolen and must be taken back. This is the same worldview that produced the chant ‘You will not replace us’ at Charlottesville. The only thing that has changed is who is now saying it. …
“This ideology is not abstract. It has been articulated explicitly by mass shooters, embedded in white nationalist manifestos, and popularized by contemporary influencers who now operate openly in American political discourse. Figures like Nick Fuentes center their politics on the claim that the United States properly belongs to a single cultural and racial group, and that reclaiming it requires hierarchy, exclusion, and force.”
From Hess to Bush to Trump, here we are.
One of the regular themes of callers to my radio/TV show is the question:
“Are they hiding their faces behind masks so we can’t see that so many of these well-paid goons are open members of the Klan, Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Goyim Defense League, and J6ers?”
It’s as good an answer for the masks as any other I can come up with. Throughout American history, the only police agency known to conceal their identities were the Klansmen in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when they were routinely deputized in the South to police segregation laws.
The police officers who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner in Mississippi on June 21, 1964, for example, were all Klansmen, and that’s where Don Jr. went to give a speech on “states’ rights,” echoing Reagan’s first official speech on the same subject in the same place after he got his party’s nomination in 1980.
Yesterday, Congressman Jamie Raskin sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asking if their “white nationalist ‘dog whistles’” are being used in their recruitment campaigns that appear to target members of “extremist militias” like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Three Percenters:
“Unique among all law enforcement agencies and all branches of the armed services, ICE agents conceal their identities, wearing masks and removing names from their uniforms. Why is that? Why do National Guard members, state, county, and local police officers, and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines all routinely work unmasked while ICE agents work masked?
“Who is hiding behind these masks? How many of them were among the violent rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 and were convicted of their offenses? The American people deserve to know how many of these violent insurrectionists have been given guns and badges by this administration.”
Racism has been one of the animating themes of Trump’s three candidacies and two administrations; finally Americans and the mainstream media are waking up to it and calling it out.
We need a purge, and that begins by calling our elected officials at 202-224-3121 and telling them to vote “No” on funding DHS and ICE until there have been significant reforms.
Get rid of the masks and weapons of war. Require them to follow the law and the Constitution. No more arrests or home invasions without warrants signed by judges per the Fourth Amendment.
If America is a homeland, it’s only a homeland to the surviving Native Americans who Europeans haven’t entirely wiped out.
It’s far past time to end this use of white ethnonationalist rhetoric, rename the Department of Homeland Security, and purge that organization — and it’s ICE offspring — of their white nationalist bigots.
Stephen Miller is a case study in himself. He is a paradox. His family came to the U.S. over a century ago, for the same reason millions of other immigrants arrived: to find freedom, safety, and opportunity. Like so many other families from Eastern Europe, his family was impoverished. They worked and succeeded.
They were immigrants.
Surely Stephen knows his family history, but he is nonetheless hostile to immigrants today. He wants to kick out those that are here and bar those who haven’t made it inside the nation’s gates.
He isn’t just hostile to immigrants. He hates them.
Trump’s Chief Bigot, Stephen Miller, said on Fox News this month that immigrants to the United States bring problems that extend through generations.
“With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller claimed. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”
In fact, the data show just the opposite. The children and grand children and great grandchildren of most immigrants are models of upward mobility in America.
In a new paper, Princeton’s Leah Boustan, Stanford’s Ran Abramitzky, Elisa Jácome of Princeton, and Santiago Pérez of UC Davis, used millions of father-son pairs spanning more than a century of U.S. history to show that immigrants today are no slower to move into the middle class than immigrants were a century ago.
In fact, no matter when their parents came to the U.S. or what country they came from, children of immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than their U.S.-born peers.
Stephen Miller’s great great grandfather, Wolf-Leib Glosser, was born in a dirt-floor shack in the village of Antopol, a shtetl in what is now Belarus.
For much the same reasons my great grandparents came to America — vicious pogroms that threatened his life — Wolf-Leib came to Ellis Island on January 7, 1903, with $8 in his pockets. Though fluent in Polish, Russian and Yiddish, he understood no English.
The family settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a booming coal and steel town, where they rose from peddling goods to owning a haberdashery, and then owning a chain of supermarkets and discount department stores, run by Sam, and Sam’s son, Izzy (Stephen Miller’s maternal grandfather).
Two generations later, in 1985, came little Stephen — who developed such a visceral hate for immigrants that he makes up facts about them that have no bearing on reality.
In a little more than eleven months, Stephen and his boss have made sweeping changes to limit legal immigration to America.
On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children born to undocumented immigrants and to some temporary foreign residents would no longer be granted citizenship automatically.
The executive order, which was paused by the courts, could throw into doubt the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of babies born each year. Miller and his boss want the Supreme Court to uphold that executive order.
After the horrific shooting of two National Guard members on August 26, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national, Trump halted naturalizations for people from many African and the Middle Eastern countries.
Trump is also threatening to strip U.S. citizenship from naturalized migrants “who undermine domestic tranquillity.” He plans to deport foreigners deemed to be “non-compatible with Western Civilization” and aims to detain even more migrants in jail or in warehouses — in the U.S. or in other countries — without due process.
In addition to the unconstitutionality of such actions, they stir up the worst nativist and racist impulses in America — blaming and scapegoating entire groups of people.
As they make their case to crack down on illegal and legal immigration, Miller and Trump have targeted Minnesota’s Somali community — seizing on an investigation into fraud that took place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in the state, to denounce the entire community, which Trump has called “garbage.”
Let’s be clear. Apart from Native Americans, we are all immigrants — all descended from “foreigners.” Some of our ancestors came here eagerly; some came because they were no longer safe in their homelands; some came enslaved.
Almost all of us are mongrels — of mixed nationalities, mixed ethnicities, mixed races, mixed creeds. While we maintain our own traditions, we also embrace the ideals of this nation.
You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won’t become a German or a Turk. But … anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. A person becomes an American by adopting America’s principles, especially those principles summarized in the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence, such as “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Reagan understood that America is a set of aspirations and ideals, more than it is a nationality.
Miller and Trump want to fuel bigotry. Like dictators before him, Trump’s road to tyranny is paved with stones hurled at “them.” His entire project depends on hate.
America is better than Trump or his chief bigot.
We won’t buy their hate. To the contrary, we’ll call out bigots. We won’t tolerate intolerance. We’ll protect hardworking members of our community. We’ll alert them when ICE is lurking.
We will not succumb to the ravings of a venomous president who wants us to hate each other — or his bigoted sidekick.
Trump promised to deport “the worst of the worst” when he campaigned for re-election. But everyone has seen that zealous ICE agents most of those arrested and deported have no criminal records. Most are hard-working immigrants who want to be good citizens. But there is no legal path to citizenship. Stephen Miller wants to rid the nation of all immigrants, especially if they have brown skin, no matter how exemplary their life has been.
The leadership of our country has initiated one of the darkest moments in American history.
Diane Ravitch's blog 