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Jan Resseger: Trump Is Obliterating Civil Rights Laws

By dianeravitch
July 14, 2025 //
4

Jan Resseger is a social justice warrior who worked for the United Church of Christ. In retirement, she writes lucid, carefully researched articles about social policy and its effect on the nation’s most vulnerable people.

I should post everything she writes but I miss some. Here is Jan on Trump’s Big Ugly Bill and how it will hurt the neediest children and families.

This article about Trump’s assault on civil rights law was posted by the National Education Policy Center.

She writes:

On Wednesday, April 23rd, President Donald Trump released an executive order banning the use of disparate impact when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigates disparities in school discipline under the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Under the concept of disparate impact, officials in the Office for Civil Rights have been able to document discrimination by measuring the effects of a school’s or school district’s discipline practice on the mass of the  school’s or school district’s students even when there is no proof that staff members intended to punish some students mores severely due their race or ethnicity or sexual orientation. Staff at the Brookings-Brown Center on Education Policy, Rachel Perera and Jon Valant, define “disparate impact”: “Disparate impact is the idea that school discipline policies that disproportionately harm students of color may constitute illegal racial discrimination even if those policies are… applied in an evenhanded way.”

Academic researchers have been examining unjust school discipline policies for decades. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA described groundbreaking work to define “the school-to-prison pipeline” as a metaphor for disparate impact in discipline policies across many U.S. public schools. Researchers documented differences in the kind of punishment imposed on students based on their race or ethicity or disability: “The Civil Rights Project has been working on the school discipline issues since 1999, under the leadership of Daniel Losen. Research from CRP’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies… finds that far too many districts suspend students in droves, while many others have little or no racial disparities and adhere to the common sense philosophy that suspensions, expulsions and arrests are strictly measures of last resort.”

In her new book, Original Sins, sociologist Eve Ewing describes how a punitive, prison-like, school culture, including systemic disparate impact, can infuse a school’s treatment of different groups of students because individual teachers and staff just get caught in the system in which they operate every day: “As sociologist Carla Shedd has written, the ‘routines and rituals’ created by carceral logic—everything from interacting with police officers in schools to strict uniform codes of conduct—become integral to the way a school functions, and can ultimately undermine the ostensibly educational purpose of the school building by making students feel unsafe… From within the space of the school, such regimes of discipline can become so routine that they escape notice by those who are accustomed to them.” (Original Sins, pp, 156-157)

For decades, disparate impact in school discipline has been at the heart of many of the complaints filed and consent decrees established between school districts and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. But on April 23, as the NY Times’ Erica Green reports, “President Trump has ordered federal agencies to abandon the use of a longstanding legal tool used to root out discrimination against minorities, a move that could defang the nation’s bedrock civil rights law. In an expansive executive order, Mr. Trump directed the federal government to curtail the use of ‘disparate-impact liability,’ a core tenet used for decades to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by determining whether policies disproportionately disadvantage certain groups… ‘This order aims to destroy the foundation of civil rights protections in this country, and it will have a devastating effect on equity for Black people and other communities of color,’ said Dariely Rodriguez, the acting co-chief counsel at the Lawyers Committee For Civil Rights Under Law….”

Green explains: “The disparate-impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities… Mr. Trump’s order resurrects a last-ditch effort made in the final days of his first term to repeal disparate-impact regulations through a formal rule-making process… Now the Justice Department’s embattled civil rights division has halted the use of disparate-impact investigations altogether, officials said.”

It is important to note that the Trump administration has not attempted, so far, to change the law itself, but instead to amend the federal guidance and rules that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has used in its investigations.  The Washington Post‘s Kim Bellware explains: “Trump’s order directs federal agencies to ‘deprioritize enforcement’ of statutes and regulations that include disparate-impact liability, which has long enabled courts to stop policies and practices that unfairly exclude people on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, gender, and disability.”

When disparate impact is cited, the disparities are regularly documented with large data studies.  For example, back in 2008, in his powerful book, So Much Reform: So Little Change, the University of Chicago’s Charles Payne described national data indicating the widespread disparate impact of discriminatory school discipline: “According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2004-2005 school year, African American students nationally are suspended or expelled at nearly three times the rate of white students. In Minnesota, Black students are six times as likely to be suspended as whites, but that seems downright friendly compared to New Jersey, where they are almost 60 times more likely to be expelled. In 21 states, the percentage of Black suspensions is more than double their percentage in the student body. These disproportions affect middle-class as well as working-class Black students and there is no reason to believe that they can be reduced to actual differences in student behavior. At least some of the discrepancy seems to be about teachers interpreting similar behaviors differently when they come from students of different races… We shouldn’t be surprised to learn that African American students perceive school climate less favorably than white students or staff.” (So Much Reform: So Little Change, p. 112)

In 2014, in its own “Dear Colleague Letter,” the Obama administration announced a formal policy affirming the use of “disparate impact” as evidence in school discrimination cases. Here is constitutional law professor, Derek W. Black, in a 2016 book, Ending Zero Tolerance: The Crisis of Absolute School Discipline: “On January 8, 2014, the Departments of Education and Justice went beyond individual enforcement actions and formally announced their policy on school discipline moving forward… The policy guidance distinguished between disparate treatment (treating minority students and whites differently in terms of discipline) and disparate impact (facially neutral policies that result in racially disparate outcomes). It came as no surprise that schools cannot suspend an African American student for fighting and only send his white classmate to study hall. But the (formal policy) guidance on racial disparities was significant.” (Ending Zero Tolerance, p. 84)

In 2018, the first Trump administration tried to end the use of disparate impact as a way to measure civil rights violations by ending Obama’s rules and guidance. Perera and Valant reported: “When the Trump administration rescinded the Obama Dear Colleague Letter in 2018… it dropped any reference to disparate impact theory and defined much narrower conditions (for) OCR investigations.”

Perera and Valant add that the Biden administration did, in another Dear Colleague Letter, try to restore Obam’s rules and guidance, but they write that Biden administration’s “letter lacks a definition of illegal discrimination, information about how the federal government will enforce civil rights law, guidance for school districts on mandated data collection, or suggested practices and policies to prevent discrimination.”

Nevertheless, despite the weak Biden policy statement, President Biden’s Department of Education continued to investigate and enforce civil rights violations in school discipline based on disparate treatment.

Here we are now in 2025 with President Trump’s new executive order that attempts to cancel the use of disparate impact in civil rights enforcement altogether. Fortunately Trump’s new executive order will likely face lawsuits.  Erica Green explains why: “Mr. Trump’s executive order, which is likely to face legal challenges, falsely claimed that the disparate-impact test was ‘unlawful’ and violated the Constitution. In fact, the measure was codified by Congress in 1991, upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2015 as a tool in the work of protecting civil rights, and cited in a December 2024 dissent by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.”

In the meantime in late March 2025, a month before Trump’s new executive order banning the use of disparate treatment in civil rights investigations, Trump’s Office for Civil Rights, in a move demonstrating Trump’s view of civil rights enforcement using “disparate impact,” dismissed a consent degree established in the Biden years to address discriminatory school discipline. The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler describes what happened in Rapid City, South Dakota: “For years, Native American students in the Rapid City, South Dakota, school district were more likely to be disciplined and less likely to enroll in advanced courses than their White peers. In 2010, the Education Department opened an investigation to see if racial discrimination was to blame… The original investigation found that Native American students in the district were twice as likely as White students to be referred for discipline, more than four times as likely to be suspended and more than five times as likely to be referred to law enforcement officials.”

Meckler continues: “The effort lingered until last year, when investigators came to a voluntary agreement with the district. In a 28-page letter signed last May, the federal government outlined its concerns that Native American and White students had been treated differently. The school district, which is the second-largest in South Dakota, agreed to take a number of steps, including staff trainings, better communication with parents and ongoing monitoring.”

At the end of March 2025, reports Meckler, “the Trump administration told the Rapid City Area School District it was terminating the agreement.”  But school district personnel in Rapid City did not consider the termination of the consent agreement to be a victory: “The Trump administration letter, sent March 27, came as a shock to the Rapid City Area School District, which did not ask for a change, a district spokeswoman said. She said the district plans to continue to abide by its terms, even though federal officials will not be monitoring to see if it does so. ‘While political priorities may shift, our core educational values remain steadfast,’ Cory Strasser, the district’s acting superintendent said in a statement. ‘Our mission remains to provide a safe, positive, and nondiscriminatory learning environment where all students can achieve their full potential.’ “

Categories Bigotry, Civil Rights, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Equity, Ethics, Extremism, Gender, Injustice, Trump

Trump Throws Global Economy into Chaos with On-again, Off-again Tariffs

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
7

The New York Times said bluntly that Trump has plunged the global economy into chaos with his wild and wooly tariffs. He doesn’t know what they are, who pays for them, how they affect trade. He is listening only to Peter Navarro, the tariff evangelist. Trump is not the master of “the art of the deal” (a ghost-written book). He is the master of obfuscation and chaos.

The New York Times reported:

Six months into his new administration, President Trump’s assault on global trade has lost any semblance of organization or structure.

He has changed deadlines suddenly. He has blown up negotiations at the 11th hour, often raising unexpected issues. He has tied his tariffs to complaints that have nothing to do with trade, like Brazil’s treatment of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, or the flow of fentanyl from Canada.

Talks with the United States were like “going through a labyrinth” and arriving “back to Square 1,” said Airlangga Hartarto, the Indonesian minister for economic affairs, who met with U.S. officials in Washington on Wednesday.

The resulting uncertainty is preventing companies and countries from making plans as the rules of global commerce give way to a state of chaos.

“We’re still far away from making real deals,” said Carsten Brzeski, global head of macroeconomics at the bank ING in Germany. He called the uncertainty “poison” for the global economy.

Gone is the idea that the White House would strike 90 deals in 90 days after a period of rapid-fire negotiation, as Mr. Trump pledged in April. Instead, Washington has signed bare-bone agreements with big trading partners including China, while sending many other countries blunt and mostly standardized letters announcing hefty tariffsto start on Aug. 1.

Categories Accountability, Disruption, Economics, Economy, Extremism, Stupid, Trump

Trump Budget Guts Scientific Research

By dianeravitch
July 11, 2025 //
3

William J. Broad, science writer for The New York Times, reports on the Trump administration’s draconian cuts to scientific research. As the U.S. cuts back on investments in basic research, China is increasing its spending.

I invite anyone who reads this to try to explain why this administration is reducing spending on scientific research.

Broad writes:

President Trump’s budget plan guts federal science funding for the next fiscal year, according to an overview published by an external group. Particularly at risk is the category of basic research — the blue-sky variety meant to push back the frontiers of human knowledge and sow practical spinoffs and breakthroughs in such everyday fields as health care and artificial intelligence.

The group says it would fall by more than one-third.

The new analysis, made public Wednesday by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a general scientific society based in Washington, D.C., added up cuts to the budgets of hundreds of federal agencies and programs that do scientific research or provide grants to universities and research bodies. It then compared the funding appropriated for the current fiscal year with the administration’s proposals for fiscal year 2026.

For basic science research, the association reported that the overall budget would fall to $30 billion from $45 billion, a drop of roughly 34 percent. For science funding overall — which includes money for basic, applied and developmental work, as well as for facilities for research and development — the analysis found that the federal budget would fall to $154 billion from $198 billion, a drop of 22 percent.

The new analysis shows that the Trump administration’s budget plan, if adopted, “would essentially end America’s longstanding role as the world leader in science and innovation,” said Toby Smith, senior vice president for government relations and public policy at the Association of American Universities.

His group, Mr. Smith added, is working with Congress to develop “a funding plan for strategic investment that would help to sustain continued American scientific leadership rather than destroying it.”

Mary Woolley, president of Research America, a nonprofit group that promotes science, said the new analysis showed that the budget plan “is threatening not only science but the American public. If approved by Congress, it will make the public less safe, poorer and sicker.”

Victoria LaCivita, a spokeswoman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, did not reply to a request for comment on the new analysis.

In early May, the White House unveiled a budget blueprint that listed proposed cuts to a handful of science agencies. For instance, it sought a reduction in the budget of the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much basic research, to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 55.8 percent.

Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the science association, said in an interview that the comprehensive analysis drew on several hundred proposed budgets from federal science agencies and programs, as well as figures supplied by the White House Office of Management and Budget. In May, the budget office made public the rough sketch of the administration’s overall proposal for next year but included only a small number of science agencies and figures.

The Gutting of America’s Medical Research: Here Is Every Canceled or Delayed N.I.H. Grant. Some cuts have been starkly visible, but the country’s medical grant-making machinery has also radically transformed outside the public eye.

Ms. Zimmermann added that the association’s new compilations would be updated as new budget data from federal agencies and programs became available. However, she said, the group’s estimates of cuts to federal basic research are “not going to be undone by a minor number change.”

The science group has long recorded the ups and downs of the federal government’s annual spending on science. Taking inflation into account, Ms. Zimmermann said the administration’s proposed cut of $44 billion would, if approved, make the $154 billion figure the smallest amount that the federal government has spent on science in this century…

In May, science appeared to be high on the list for significant funding cuts, while large increases were proposed for the Pentagon and Homeland Security. Until the science association updated its reports on the proposed presidential budget for fiscal year 2026, however, the public had no clear indication of the overall size of the federal cuts.

The proposed drop in federal funding for science research, if approved by Congress, could let China match or take the lead in global science investments, Ms. Zimmermann said.

In April, the science group published figuresshowing that China had greatly increased support for its scientific enterprise in the past two decades. As of 2023 — the most recent year available for comparisons — China’s investment was close to equaling that of the United States.

Experts say it could take years of data gathering to know if China is pulling into the lead.

Categories Budget Cuts, Economy, Extremism, Funding, Health, Research, Science, Stupid, Trump

Stephen Miller: A Life and Career Driven by Hate and Ruthless Ambition

By dianeravitch
July 10, 2025 //
10

The New York Times published a long article about the rise and power of Stephen Miller. Miller is one of Trump’s closest aides. His title is Deputy Chief of Staff but he seems to be in charge of immigration policy and many more areas. His goal is to deport every immigrant out of the U.S.

This is a gift article, so you should be able to open it and read it.

Here are a few choice selections.

About the turmoil in Los Angeles, where Trump nationalized the state Guard and sent in hundreds of Marines, which generated protests:

The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

There is much truth to the conventional wisdom that the biggest difference between the first and second Trump presidencies is that, in the second iteration, Mr. Trump is unrestrained. The same is true of Mr. Miller. He has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most powerful, and empowered, adviser. With the passage of the big policy bill, ICE will have an even bigger budget to execute Mr. Miller’s vision and, in effect, serve as his own private army. Moreover, his influence extends beyond immigration to the battles the Trump administration is fighting on higher education, transgender rights, discrimination law and foreign policy….

Mr. Miller is more obdurate when it comes to domestic policy, particularly immigration. For Mr. Trump’s second term, he has led the president to stake out a series of maximalist positions, from the ICE raids to the use of the Alien Enemies Act to raising the possibility of suspending habeas corpus for people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. Mr. Trump seems to enjoy having Mr. Miller play the heavy on immigration. During his first term, he jokingly told people who urged him to take more moderate stances on immigration that Mr. Miller would never go for them. Last year, he reportedly quipped during a campaign meeting that if it was up to Mr. Miller, the population of the United States would be only 100 million people and they’d all resemble Mr. Miller. The humor, however, underscores something serious: On immigration, Millerism is a more consistent ideology than Trumpism.

While Mr. Miller is an ardent restrictionist, seeking to reduce all immigration to the United States, Mr. Trump has at times backed H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers; created a wait-list for a proposed special visa, called a Trump Gold Card, that wealthy immigrants could buy for $5 million apiece; and expressed regret about the impact ICE raids were having on the agriculture and hospitality industries. Indeed, the backlash to the ICE raids was so great that in early June, Mr. Trump reversed himself and declared the agriculture and hospitality sectors off-limits to that sort of strict immigration enforcement — before, after intense lobbying from Mr. Miller, he reversed himself again. Still, the hiccup was enough to hint at a broader potential rupture, especially if Mr. Miller’s immigration policies continue to prove unpopular. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 57 percent of Americans disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of immigration, once his greatest political strength.

Categories Bigotry, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

Dan Rather: Robert Kennedy Jr. Is a Public Menace

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
4

Dan Rather and his team at Steady writes fearlessly about the dangers posed by Trump and his unqualified Cabinet.

In this post, he discusses the scandal of appointing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has no medical or scientific qualifications. He is a lawyer whose head is filled with conspiracy theories. Worse, he has used his position to cancel major scientific studies and fire scientists.

Rather writes:

The last person this country needed to address the many public health issues we face was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man Donald Trump chose to helm the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy is an alarmist, a conspiracy theorist, and a disinformation disseminator who is putting American lives at risk. His convenient amnesia and lack of a medical or science background — he is a lawyer by training — has led to confusion, fear, and poorer health outcomes. He has been HHS secretary for only five months.

And this guy’s HHS leads a country that now has the lowest life expectancy and the highest maternal and infant mortality rates among Western countries while offering absurd options to help us. It’s about to get worse.

The budget reconciliation bill that Donald Trump gleefully signed into law on July 4 will drastically and dramatically impact Americans’ health. An estimated 17 million will lose health insurance. Millions more will see their premiums balloon. Hundreds of hospitals and nursing homes will close. The legislation will cause the largest reduction in food assistance ever, disproportionately impacting children. This will result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths a year.

Look no further than Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda as one of the main causes of the hard-right shift. MAHA has emphasized real health issues facing Americans, such as chronic disease, obesity, and poor nutrition, but has offered wrong-headed solutions.

Rather than looking for common sense or legislative options, Kennedy has weaponized his fear-based wellness campaign, preying on people’s rightful concerns about their health. He blames corruption in the food industry and gets people to focus on things like removing food dye or the “dangers” of canola oil (it’s safe), rather than address the real culprits: income inequality, lack of access to health care, environmental pollutants, and now the “big, ugly bill” and its anti-health agenda.

Beyond the bill, there are pressing public health crises affecting Americans. The surging measles outbreak that started in Texas could and should have been contained back in January. Yesterday, the CDC confirmed 1,277 cases in 38 states, a 33-year high. Many believe those numbers are low because of underreporting. Remember that in 2000, the World Health Organization declared measles eradicated in the U.S. Now our country is on track to lose that status.

Kennedy initially downplayed the outbreak, saying, “We have measles outbreaks every year.” The U.S. does have measles cases every year, usually fewer than 200, and they are typically attributed to unvaccinated people contracting the disease abroad.

The best defense against this highly contagious and preventable disease is vaccination, according to the American Medical Association (AMA). The MMR vaccine is one of the safest and most beneficial on the market. It is 97% effective and usually lasts a lifetime. Prior to 1963, when the measles vaccine was introduced, the U.S. saw 3 to 4 million cases a year.

Kennedy, a vocal vaccine skeptic, has been lukewarm at best at encouraging people to vaccinate against measles.

At a congressional hearing in May, Kennedy was asked if he would vaccinate his own children against measles. He replied “probably.” Then added, “My opinions about vaccines are irrelevant. I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” We agree.

His skepticism about vaccines in general, and the MMR vaccine specifically, has led to a drop in immunizations and a prolonging of the current outbreak.

But it’s much more than measles. Last month, in an unprecedented move, Kennedy fired all 17 members of the nonpartisan Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Formed in 1987, the committee is made up of doctors and public health professionals who help the CDC determine best practices for vaccine usage.

Kennedy quickly replaced eight of the members with unvetted candidates. Several are avowed anti-vaccine advocates. One new member has been on the committee before. During his first tenure, he made 12 conflict-of-interest disclosures, which is curious since Kennedy said he fired the original members because they were “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” A review of the committee’s disclosures found few conflicts, and all were communicated.

Kennedy’s distrust of vaccines has international implications. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) is recognized as one of the most successful public-private health alliances ever. GAVI was founded in 2000 by the United States, Great Britain, and the Gates Foundation with the goal of increasing vaccine access around the world. It has been credited with significantly reducing infant and child mortality globally. GAVI delivered 2 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses.

Kennedy has halted America’s financial contribution to GAVI, which accounts for 12% of its funding, because of (his) concerns about vaccine safety and what he calls a “disregard for scientific evidence.” That is rich coming from a non-scientist who disregards anything that does not align with his narrow and unfounded beliefs.

Though a Democrat for most of his life, Kennedy has fully embraced the MAGA strategy of lying with impunity. The list of his lies is long. Here are some highlights:

  • HHS released a long-awaited MAHA Report in mid-May. The report called for an aggressive assault on chronic disease. But there were two problems. One, several studies cited by the report do not exist; they were simply made up. And others were misrepresented. Oh, and the Trump administration had pulled funding for any of Kennedy’s initiatives.
  • During an appearance on “The Tucker Carlson Show,” Kennedy mentioned a 1999 CDC study on the correlation (not causation) between the hepatitis B vaccine and autism risk, citing a “1,135% elevated risk of autism” among vaccinated children. The “1,135%” figure has been bouncing around the anti-vax community for years, but it was never actually published in a study. It also ignores the years of research debunking any connection between vaccines and autism. No wonder parents are scared and confused.
  • Kennedy has claimed that half the population of China has diabetes. Again, a seemingly crazy notion made up out of whole cloth. And it was. According to The Lancet, the actual prevalence is just over 12%.
  • Kennedy said COVID-19 was a bioweapon developed by China.

While the reckless whims of Donald Trump represent a clear and present danger to every American’s mental health, the dangerous actions of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. risk their physical health. It is a sad day when the person in charge of this nation’s health could also be described as a public menace.

Categories Extremism, Fake, Health, Ignorance, Science, Trump

Michael Tomasky: What Will ICE Do with Its Enormous New Budget ?

By dianeravitch
July 9, 2025 //
10

From Day 1 of the Trump administration, the strategy of the Trumpers was to “flood the zone.” That is, to roll out so many new policies that the public could not keep track, and the media couldn’t deal with them all. Trump’s staff had the blueprint in Project 2025, and they were prepared with dozens of executive orders. That, plus the depredations of Elon Musk’s DOGE kids made it seem as if we had suddenly been swarmed by an invasion from outer space of aliens intent on destroying our government.

Now that Congress has passed Trump’s One Big Ugly Bill, we are in the same situation. The near 1000-page bill has so many policy reversals that no one knows all of its contents. The goal seems to be to wipe out anything that Biden or Obama accomplished.

Michael Tomasky, editor of The New Republic, insists that we pay attention to the dramatic increase in funding for ICE. Will we have labor camps spread across the country where detainees can be hired out to farmers to perform the labor they used to be paid for?

Tomasky writes:

One aspect of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill that didn’t get enough attention until Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elevated it over the last few days is the massive amounts of money it directs to the apprehension and detention of immigrants. On Thursday, right after the bill passed the House, AOC posted on Bluesky:

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion – making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social)July 3, 2025 at 2:58 PM

The next day—the Fourth of July, as fate would have it, when President Trump signed the bill into law—historian Timothy Snyder posted a columnon Substack under the blunt headline “Concentration Camp Labor.” If AOC’s post and Snyder’s headline sound hyperbolic to you, consider what’s actually in this new law.

It includes $170 billion for immigration enforcement: about $50 billion to build a wall on the Southern border; $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and $45 billion for detention camps.

A little perspective: ICE’s existing annual budget has been around $8 billion, so $30 billion is nearly quadruple. As AOC noted, it will make ICE into a huge police force that will indeed be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined.

What is ICE going to do with all that money? One thing, obviously, is that it will try to hire enough people to hit MAGA apparatchik Stephen Miller’s target of rounding up 3,000 people a day. That’s a target it apparently still hasn’t even hit. On June 5, NBC News reported that ICE hit a then-record of 2,200 detentions that day. That included hundreds of people who showed up at regional ICE offices to check in as required by the release program they were enrolled in—a program under which these people were deemed not to be threats to public safety and whose movements were already monitored by ankle bracelets or geo-locator apps.

In other words, ICE has already been detaining thousands of people who, yes, entered the United States illegally, but ever since just lived, worked, and even paid taxes. Some may have gotten into some trouble with the law, but they’re wearing monitors and showing up for their appointments. Others have had no scrapes with the law at all. And now ICE is going to have the resources to detain thousands more such people.

And no—the American public emphatically does not support this. A late June Quinnipiac poll found that 64 percent of respondents said undocumented people should be given a path to citizenship, and only 31 percent said they should be deported. And that 64 percent is up from 55 percent last December, meaning that people have watched six months of Trump’s immigration policies in action and turned even more strongly against deporting everyone.

So that’s what ICE is going to do with its $30 billion. Now think about $45 billion for detention camps. Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost $450 million a year. Right now, a reported 5,000 detainees are being held there. The Trump administration says the new $45 billion will pay for 100,000 beds. So that’s 20 more Alligator Alcatrazes out around the country. But it’s probably even going to be worse than that, because the state of Florida, not the federal government, is footing the bill for that center. If the Trump administration can convince other states to do the same, or pay part of the freight, we’re looking at essentially a string of concentration camps across the United States. Besides, there’s something odd about that $450 million a year price tag. (Here’s an interesting Daily Kos community post asking some good questions about that astronomical cost. The math doesn’t add up.)

Forty-five billion will build a lot of stuff. As a point of comparison: In 2023, the United States budgeted $12.8 billion to build new affordable housing. We’re about to spend nearly four times on detention centers what we spend on housing.

Open the link to finish reading.

Categories Accountability, Cruelty, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Immigration, Trump

IRS Rules That Churches May Endorse Political Candidates

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
26

Trump and the Republican Party have long advocated for changes in federal law to allow churches to engage in political activities. The Johnson Amendment, enacted in 1954, limited the ability of churches and other religious institutions from issuing endorsements from the pulpit. Trump’s base includes evangelical churches that wanted this ban lifted. Trump didn’t have to change the law. He just had to appoint the Director of the Internal Revenue Service.

The New York Times reported:

The I.R.S. said on Monday that churches and other houses of worship can endorse political candidates to their congregations, carving out an exemption in a decades-old ban on political activity by tax-exempt nonprofits.

The agency made that statement in a court filing intended to settle a lawsuit filed by two Texas churches and an association of Christian broadcasters.

The plaintiffs that sued the Internal Revenue Service had previously asked a federal court in Texas to create an even broader exemption — to rule that all nonprofits, religious and secular, were free to endorse candidates to their members. That would have erased a bedrock idea of American nonprofit law: that tax-exempt groups cannot be used as tools of any campaign.

Instead, the I.R.S. agreed to a narrower carveout — one that experts in nonprofit law said might sharply increase politicking in churches, even though it mainly seemed to formalize what already seemed to be the agency’s unspoken policy.

The agency said that if a house of worship endorsed a candidate to its congregants, the I.R.S. would view that not as campaigning but as a private matter, like “a family discussion concerning candidates.”

“Thus, communications from a house of worship to its congregation in connection with religious services through its usual channels of communication on matters of faith do not run afoul of the Johnson Amendment as properly interpreted,” the agency said, in a motion filed jointly with the plaintiffs.

The ban on campaigning by nonprofits is named after former President Lyndon B. Johnson, who introduced it as a senator in 1954. President Trump has repeatedly called for its repeal.

Categories Ethics, Politics, Religion, Republicans, Trump

Trump’s Energy Department Hires Climate Change Deniers

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
0

Is the climate changing? Most scientists who study the environment believe that it is. They agree that human-caused pollution degrades the climate and that the health of the planet requires less reliance on fossil fuels. The Biden Administration passed landmark legislation to encourage the transition from oil and gas to electricity. Trump has rolled back whatever he could of Biden’s contribution to green energy. No more tax credits for electric vehicles or solar panels. Every program that promotes green energy has been dismantled.

The New York Times reported that the Department of Energy has added three scientists to its roster who are known for their criticism of mainstream climate science. The Secretary of Energy is Chris Wright, an entrepreneur who was CEO of Liberty Energy.

The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.

The scientists are listed in the Energy Department’s internal email system as current employees of the agency, the records show. They are Steven E. Koonin, a physicist and author of a best-selling book that calls climate science “unsettled”; John Christy, an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming; and Roy Spencer, a meteorologist who believes that clouds have had a greater influence on warming than humans have.

Their hiring comes after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how climate change is affecting the country. The administration has also systematically removed mentions of climate change from government websites while slashing federal funding for research on global warming.

In addition, Trump officials have been recruiting scientists to help them repeal the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which determined that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare, and which now underpins much of the government’s legal authority to slow global warming, according to two people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly…

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, expressed alarm that the Energy Department had hired the three scientists.

“What this says is that the administration has no respect for the actual science, which overwhelmingly points in the direction of a growing crisis as we continue to warm the planet through fossil-fuel burning, the consequences of which we’ve seen play out in recent weeks in the form of deadly heat domes and floods here in the U.S.,” Dr. Mann wrote in an email.

Dr. Mann added that the Trump administration appeared to have fired hundreds of “actual government science experts” and replaced them with “a small number of reliable foot soldiers.”

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said it would be troubling if these three scientists were involved in repealing the 2009 endangerment finding, which cleared the way for the government to regulate the planet-warming gases emitted by cars, power plants and other industrial sources.

Categories Biden, Environment, Extremism, Science, Trump

A Message to MAGA

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
25

It is sickening to realize that the US, our beloved country, is now aligned with Russia and Putin. It is sickening to realize that when the UN took a vote to condemn Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. voted “no,” allied with Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It is sickening to realize that the U.S. is now in cahoots with the enemies of freedom and democracy.

It is sickening to see the Justice Department turned into a weapon for Trump’s personal revenge. It is sickening to see Trump’s vicious assault on higher education and academic freedom. It is sickening to watch the arrest and detention of immigrants by masked men without ID without a semblance of due process. It is sickening to see the massacre of civilians in Gaza. It is sickening to see the Trump family scoop up billlions in real estate deals, crytocurrency and other ventures. It is sickening to see the Republican Party pass a budget that cancels the health insurance of millions of low-income Americans to pay for tax cuts for the richest Americans.

One man is responsible: Trump. He worries about Putin’s feelings, not about Russian bombs hitting Ukrainian schools, playgrounds, hospitals, homes, and its energy supply. He plays with tariffs as a way to humiliate other countries, carelessly wiping out the life savings of people who trusted him. Was it by accident that he excluded Russia, North Korea, Belarus, and Cuba from his tariff threats? Trump jokes about turning Gaza into a luxury resort instead of demanding an end to the war. The cruel budget that takes from the poor and gives to the rich was his budget. It is his massive ego that has turned the Department of Justice into his personal revenge and retribution machine.

I wish he could watch Charlie Chaplin in this speech from his film The Great Dictator. It is only three minutes. Please watch. These thoughts are needed today more than at any time since 1945.

Categories Accountability, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Disruption, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, History, International, Trump

Alligator Alcatraz: Depravity in the Everglades

By dianeravitch
July 8, 2025 //
9

The editorial board of the Sun-Sentinel in Florida expressed shock and disgust at the creation of the detention camp for immigrants now called Alligator Alley. The existence of this hell-hole offended their sense of decency but they were offended even more by the casual glee that Trump, DeSantis, Noem and others expressed about the inhumanity of the detention center. Inmates will die of the scorching heat and humidity. That’s predictable. And these swells in their air-conditioned offices will laugh.

The editorial board wrote:

Unable to resist the political clickbait, President Donald Trump muscled Gov. Ron DeSantis and
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier out of the limelight Tuesday, to celebrate the opening
of a Florida first.

It is an armed camp where thousands of immigrants targeted as undesirables will be confined, possibly without hearings, under the brutal conditions of a swamp in the Everglades in a place most Floridians have never heard of, called Ochopee.

It wasn’t the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz” that brought the president to the camp.

It’s not Florida’s fast-tracking of construction that’s entrancing right-wing media, breathing new life into DeSantis’s national political dreams, and boosting Uthmeier’s reelection profile.

It is the savagery.

The headline-grabbing power of “Alligator Alcatraz” lies entirely in the imagery of brown people getting out of line and being ripped bloody by alligators or suffocated by snakes.

Strip out the celebration of suffering and grotesque inhumanity and it’s just a row of tents in the middle of nowhere.

No respect for the land

This is one more scar on land environmentalists are waging a decades-long battle to save.

It’s just one more insult to the Miccosukee Tribe, which called it home long before Uthmeier embraced it as a stepping-stone to his election campaign.The imagined torment of immigrants at this camp is not a glitch. It’s the main selling point.

This distinguishes it from World War II’s horrific internment of families and orphans of Japanese descent in tar-paper shacks, because they were of the wrong ethnicity at the wrong time. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt called them concentration camps.

But FDR didn’t hawk T-shirts emblazoned with images suggesting gruesome deaths or show AI-generated images of alligators in ICE hats. The Republican Party of Florida did. So did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The World War II White House did not mark the opening of an internment camp by breathlessly reporting a ravenous cannibal detainee said to be eating himself while in federal custody on a deportation flight. DHS did.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and internment cheerleaders want you to believe that comparisons to other inhumane camps is hysterical hyperbole, as if the cynical marketing of Alligator Alcatraz is not.

The heat and humidity

In a particularly vivid example of his trademark cluelessness, DeSantis rebuffed criticism of inhumane conditions by pointing out the new camp’s showers.

Of course it is inhumane. Of course Trump, DeSantis, Noem and Uthmeier will deny bathing in the specter of savagery, even as Trump’s GOP raised money off it, while sidestepping their role in likely deaths that will have much less soundbite potential.

As Floridians know so well, heat is among the deadliest of weather events. High humidity prevents the body from cooling. Combined, the two are lethal.

The detention camp will place thousands of immigrants in wire cages in a humidity-intense swamp that is all but inaccessible to hospital ambulances, and where the summertime heat index can soar above 100 degrees.

Evacuating in advance of severe storms presents its own dangers, especially as it does not take a hurricane to flood a swamp or the two-lane road running next to it.

On Tuesday, when a typical summer shower dumped less than two inches of rain during the opening tour, water seeped through the edges of buildings, walls shook and water spread across electrical cables, Spectrum News video showed.

On Wednesday, forecasters upped the odds of a major windstorm moving across Florida.

Trump has bigger plans

Environmentalists are suing to stop construction, but Trump has even bigger plans for detention.

It’s wishful thinking to believe South Florida’s immigrant communities within driving distance of Alligator Alcatraz will be exempted, regardless of citizenship status.Trump made clear during Tuesday’s tour that naturalized U.S. citizens — who live in virtually every community in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties — may be next to face detention and deportation.

“I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth,” Trump told reporters. “So maybe that will be the next job.”

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Categories Cruelty, DeSantis, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Florida, Immigration, Trump
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