Relax! It's Only A Police State For Some Of Us! Who, Exactly? Oh, You'll Find Out!
You have the right to have any rights the Regime lets you have.
It’s no fun being a fascist autocrat if you can’t have some designated scapegoats to blame all your country’s problems on, whether that makes any sense or not. The Trump administration keeps ramping up its highly performative cruelty against immigrants — while also erasing the “legal/illegal” distinction wherever possible, and teasing that it’ll send citizens to foreign torture prisons too — to make clear to the MAGA faithful that however high prices go, the top goal of mass deportations is going forward, making a little economic collapse entirely worth it. And look, those despised immigrants were the source of all our problems, so once we’ve deported or imprisoned or just plain disappeared enough of them, everything will be beautiful in America again. Say, mind if they fish through your tax returns too? When they say “Papers please,” they also mean your Form 1040.
Hey, remember after 9/11 when a lot of us were saying that “Homeland Security” sounded a li’l bit fascist? Talk about your nominative determinism!
Rubio: Deporting People For Wrongthink Is The American Way
The Trump administration is now insisting that Free Speech means that the government can strip you of your legal resident status and deport you if it thinks your ideas are bad. That’s the latest development in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, whom the feds arrested in March outside his home and want to deport because he organized protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza. An immigration judge ordered the government to turn over evidence justifying the deportation of Khalid, a Palestinian with Syrian citizenship who has/had a green card and is married to a US citizen.
In a court filing yesterday, the government instead submitted a two-page statement, signed by Secretary of Spinelessness Marco Rubio, that acknowledged Khalid and a second person, whose name is redacted, can be deported even though neither has committed any crime. Instead, the document claimed that the US can expel any noncitizen whose thoughts might be bad for America and its foreign policy.
[Rubio] said that while Khalil’s activities were “otherwise lawful,” letting him remain in the country would undermine “U.S. policy to combat anti-Semitism around the world and in the United States, in addition to efforts to protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.”
“Condoning anti-Semitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective,” Rubio wrote in the undated memo.
Notably, while the administration has publicly called Khalil a supporter of Hamas, the statement it filed in lieu of evidence doesn’t mention the group at all. And keep in mind that the administration is perfectly fine with antisemitism when it’s coming from Donald Trump’s white nationalist supporters.
Instead, it claims that Khalid’s legal exercise of free speech — his “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations” (emphasis added) — might cause negative effects, so that’s all the government needs to expel him. He must be expelled for prethoughtcrime, although the Trump administration isn’t even relying on the predictions of semicomatose psychics. OK, sure, there’s Pete Hegseth, but he can’t see the future.
The AP notes that, in an emailed statement, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wouldn’t answer questions about other possible evidence against Khalil, writing only that “DHS did file evidence, but immigration court dockets are not available to the public.” None of your business, OK?
Immigration Judge James Comans will hold a hearing today to determine whether the feds can continue to detain Khalil as his deportation case continues.
ICE Smashes Car Windows To Grab Immigrant Mom: ‘I Don’t Need To Show You The Order!’
Content warning: Fascist police terror.
On March 31, ICE agents surrounded a car carrying Salvadoran immigrant Elsy Noemi Berrios, 52, and smashed its windows so they could drag her off for the crime of being in the US without papers. ICE officers had previously shown up at the family’s home in Westminster, Maryland, and demanded that Berrios surrender herself, but the family knew their rights and demanded to see a judge’s warrant, so the officers left, according to her attorney, Halle Blitzstein.
On March 31, ICE returned, pulling over Berrios while she and her daughter drove to work. The incident was recorded by her daughter, 18-year-old Karen Cruz Berrios; it’s disturbing, so you can skip it if you’d rather not see Your Tax Dollars At Work.
The Baltimore Banner notes that even after pulling them over, the ICE agents refused to show Berrios the supposed warrant, because they didn’t wanna.
“I don’t need to show you the order,” an officer said in Spanish. […]
“I’m not going to give you the order, it’s in the car,” the officer said just before the mother was taken from the car.
“No!” the daughter screamed. “You guys cannot take her just because you want to.”
Berrios crossed the border without papers in 2017 and lives with her son, who’s 24, and with her daughter, Cruz Berrios. Cruz Berrios said her mother was fleeing gang violence and has applied for asylum. The government, however, insists that the 52-year-old seamstress is actually a super-dangerous criminal gang-banger with ties to MS-13, and those are the magic words that mean the government can do anything it wants. Why yes, it’s Tricia McLaughlin again!
“Americans can rest assured that she is off our streets and locked up. I hope the media will stop doing the bidding of these gangs that murder, maim, rape, and terrorize Americans, while ignoring the innocent victims,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote in an email. McLaughlin did not respond to a request for details of Berrios’ alleged gang behavior.
Oh, sure, Berrios received a work permit while her asylum case was going forward, but now Donald Trump needs to call everyone a terrorist gang member and deport them, so asylum, schmasylum. Those people are all liars anyway.
At least Ms. Berrios probably won’t be disappeared to that supermax torture prison in El Salvador without due process, because she has a court hearing on April 14. As of yet, the government hasn’t filed any court documents to suggest that she is a terrorist monster.
DHS Demands To Question LA School Kids, Lie About Having Families’ Permission
Federal agents showed up with no prior notice at two Los Angeles elementary schools this week, demanding to talk to five kids they claimed had previously crossed the border as unaccompanied minors. But it was only a safety check, they said! And the agents also said they had permission from the kids’ families, which was a lie, according to LA Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho. The agents were turned away by the schools’ principals without contacting the students, so we suppose that means some car windows will end up getting smashed soon enough.
What? Immigration cops lying? We can’t even imagine such a thing, said extremely unimaginative Trump supporters, who also can’t imagine that the Constitution even applies to noncitizens.
At a presser yesterday, Carvalho said four people identifying themselves as Homeland Security agents showed up at an elementary school in South LA Monday and wanted to see four students who were in the first through sixth grades. The principal said nothing doing, and then two hours later, agents arrived at a different school in the area, demanding to speak to a sixth-grader. That school’s principal also refused to let the agents question the student.
“They declared to the principals in both instances that the caretakers of these students have authorized them to go to the school,” Carvalho said. “We have confirmed that that is a falsehood. We’ve spoken with the caretakers of these children, in some cases parents, and they deny any interactions, deny providing authorization for these individuals to have any contact with these children at the school.”
Carvalho added that the visitors were not in uniform and that when the principals tried to write down their names, they only briefly showed identification as officers from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), ICE’s criminal investigations arm. He also said the district hasn’t yet confirmed that they actually were with Homeland Security. Well gosh, how paranoid of him!
The people who flashed their badges also didn’t offer any documentation from a court, because they’re asking for YOUR papers and don’t have to show you theirs. That’s how it works now, got it?
Carvalho was visibly incensed Thursday as he described the interactions. He recounted, as he has in the past, that he arrived in the United States as an undocumented teenager from Portugal.
“I’m still mystified as to how a first-, second-, third-, fourth- or sixth-grader would pose any type of risk to the national security of our nation that would require Homeland Security to deploy its agents to elementary schools,” he said. “Schools are places for learning. Schools are places for understanding. Schools are places for instruction, schools are not places of fear.”
Also, the LA Times reports, several families in LA have reported getting visits from HSI, according to Karina Ramos, an attorney for the nonprofit Immigrant Defenders Law Center. The agents also told those folks they were looking for unaccompanied minors. This is especially fishy! The government does try to keep track of unaccompanied minors who cross the border and are placed with sponsors, usually parents or other family members when possible. But such check-ins are normally done by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is tasked with placing immigrant minors. Not HSI.
“This is the investigative arm of ICE,” Ramos said of HSI agents taking on that role. “They have not been sent out to knock on doors and look for children before, not in my experience. Truly the way they’re going about it makes no sense.”
We’ll just add that it’s not at all unusual for sponsors of undocumented kids, who may be in families with mixed immigration status, not to answer the phone when ORR calls, because they fear being raided and deported. Those fears are especially realistic now.
But the fact that many sponsors are both good guardians and afraid of talking to the government has led to a rightwing myth about hundreds of thousands of “missing kids” and gross lies that they’re all being trafficked (by George Soros and Hillary Clinton) because there are no good immigrants, only sex traffickers. (And to complicate matters, some migrant kids are in fact exploited as child labor, a real problem the Right is happy to ignore except when calling for mass deportations.)
Kids, you are NEVER gonna guess who offered DHS’s take on ICE’s visits to LA schools. Yep, it was Tricia McLaughlin again, and we bet she has a great career ahead of her as a North Korean news anchor, or at Newsmax or OANN, one of those. She confirmed that officers were indeed from HSI, and we’ll just emphasize again that HSI is not a social services or child welfare agency; it’s supposed to do criminal investigations.
“These HSI officers were at these schools conducting wellness checks on children who arrived unaccompanied at the border,” she said in an emailed statement. “DHS is leading efforts to conduct welfare checks on these children to ensure that they are safe and not being exploited, abused, and sex trafficked.”
We suppose we should congratulate Ms. McLaughlin for selecting the right script and not claiming that the officers just wanted to ensure the schools were safe from infiltration by six-year-old Tren de Aragua gang members.
So far, no further school raids in LA have become public, but there’s no sign that any of this is getting better any time soon. And Jesus Christ on a gyroscopically stabilized electric unicycle, we didn’t even get to this brand new New Yorker story about the 48 people in New Mexico ICE scooped up in March and seem to have vanished from official public records. The government said at the time they were dangerous criminals, but no, it won’t release their names or their alleged crimes, or even where they went. The Salvadoran torture prison? No telling.
We have to keep standing up for the Regime’s targeted enemies, especially because in some cases, as in Sackets Harbor, New York, public protests really have resulted in people being released. We have to be making noise everywhere, every day, all at once.
[AP / Baltimore Banner / LAT / Bulwark / New Yorker]
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Schools, at all levels, need more administrators like Alberto Carvalho. He is a hero, in a position where there are all too many cowards.
Judge Xinis: I'm asking simply - WHERE IS HE?
Drew Ensign (DOJ): I don't have that information
Judge Xinis: What steps have you taken to get him back?
Ensign: Not prepared to share.
Judge Xinis: Okay, so they've done nothing? This is a yes or no question. Has anything been done?
Ensign: I am unable to answer as I don't know.