“President-elect Donald Trump has promised to halt refugees from coming to the US in his second term — a promise that will largely be within his power as president to keep.
Trump has said he plans to “suspend refugee admission, stop the resettlement, and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country” on his first day back in office. The rules for refugee admissions were established by Congress, including in the 1980 Refugee Act, but also via legislation directly following World War II. Therefore, any effort to formally end the refugee program would take an act of Congress. However, the president has lots of authority over refugee admissions — and Trump exercised that authority during his first term.
It is up to the president to decide how many refugees will be allowed to enter the US in any given year, and Trump significantly lowered the cap on refugee admissions during his first term. Presidents can also pause admissions, as President George W. Bush did in the wake of 9/11.
“Every president has used their powers to either expand or contract as circumstances might fit,” Eric Welsh of Reeves Immigration Law Group told Vox. “It’s something that is very, very susceptible to his influence.”
Given how significantly Trump eroded the US’ refugee program during his first term, it’s not unreasonable to fear that he would do even more damage this time around. While there are technically legal limits to how much Trump can do to dismantle the refugee program, there is plenty the administration could do practically to gut it.”
Unmanned drone technology is not yet able to replace the capabilities of a crewed plane like the F-35. Swarms of small drones have very limited ranges. Large drones will no longer be cheap and swarms would be too expensive. AI cannot yet fulfill the many tasks that a trained human pilot can.
“Take the case of Adam Burgoyne, a man from Montreal who, on the cusp of turning 40, suffered an aneurysm a week ago today. “Had a bit of a health scare last night, but thankfully it wasn’t a heart attack,” he wrote on December 5. “Not sure what it was, though, because once they made sure I wasn’t dying I was thrown out into the waiting room and 6 hours later I said f*ck it and went home. Canadian health care, folks. Best in the world.” He died the next day.”
“Unless Congress puts the country on a different fiscal course, Walker believes there is a 70 percent chance of a serious debt crisis before the end of the decade. That crisis would have “serious adverse economic security, national security, diplomatic, and domestic tranquility consequences,” he warned, adding that the middle class would “be affected the most on a relative basis” if standards of living are suddenly hit with a debt-induced shockwave.
This week’s hearing was intended to highlight bipartisan agreement on the seriousness of the federal government’s fiscal problems, said Rep. Jodey Arrington (R–Texas), the committee’s chairman.
“We’ve got major fiscal problems and a completely unsustainable fiscal trajectory. I haven’t heard anyone, Democrat or Republican, witness or member, that [sic] doesn’t accept that fact,” he said. “We won’t know when the dominoes fall on us in a sovereign debt crisis, it’s going to be difficult to put the pieces back together and maintain our global leadership.”
Those remarks echo warnings issued in recent years by governmental entities like the GAO and the Congressional Budget Office, as well as outside groups like the Penn Wharton Budget Model. Since 2015 the gross national debt has doubled, from $18 trillion to over $36 trillion. Debt held by the public, which most economists consider the more significant measure, sits at more than $28 trillion, or 99 percent of GDP. Deficits of nearly $2 trillion are expected for the foreseeable future.”
“According to a new investigation from The Marshall Project, hospitals are giving women drugs during labor and then reporting them to child welfare services when they later test positive for those same drugs. These cases are one of the more maddening side effects of an out-of-control drug war combined with strict mandatory reporting laws.”
“Since June 27, 2022 (three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade), Mississippi has prohibited nearly all abortions. According to the 2007 bill that resulted in that ban, “every human being, including those in utero, possesses a natural intrinsic right to live.” It is therefore hard to understand why Brandy Moore, a mother of four who lives in Leake County, Mississippi, was recently arrested for a felony because she decided not to have an abortion back in 2019, when the procedure was still legal in her state.
The explanation for that puzzling situation lies at the confluence between the war on drugs and a child protection system that often breaks up families without solid evidence of neglect or abuse. In this case, that dangerous combination was compounded by a local prosecutor, District Attorney Steven Kilgore, who for years deployed patently frivolous criminal charges in an attempt to get drug-using mothers the help he thought they needed, whether they wanted it or not.
Moore’s legal ordeal, which stemmed from surreptitious drug tests at the hospital where she gave birth to her daughter Remi in 2019, is detailed in a Mississippi Today story, produced in collaboration with The Marshall Project, that shows her situation is far from unique. Across Mississippi and across the country, postnatal drug tests can trigger grueling investigations by state-appointed social workers, separation of mothers from their newborn children, and even criminal charges. These interventions are all based on the faulty presumption that women who use illegal drugs during pregnancy—or are mistakenly suspected of doing so based on erroneous test results—are manifestly unfit parents.
Moore’s experience is nevertheless striking in several ways. She stopped using methamphetamine around the middle of her pregnancy after a religious epiphany inspired her to reject abortion and turn her life around. For reasons that remain unclear, she was secretly indicted in 2020 but was not arrested until last May, at which point Remi was 4. And most remarkable of all, Kilgore, who seems to have previously overlooked the human consequences of treating mothers as criminals based on hospital drug tests, had an awakening of his own as a result of Mississippi Today’s investigation.
“I’ve reevaluated our stance on the topic and have decided not to handle these cases anymore,” Kilgore told Mississippi Today reporter Anna Wolfe after learning how his decisions had harmed Moore and other women, several of whom received stiff prison sentences because they failed to fully comply with the 8th Judicial District’s drug court program. “It was eye-opening to learn of the fate of these women. I believe we can all do better.”
As Kilgore tells it, he never thought these women belonged in prison. He just wanted to scare them straight. Toward that end, he charged them with “aggravated domestic violence,” a felony punishable by up to 20 years behind bars.
Under Mississippi law, “a person is guilty of aggravated domestic violence” when he “attempts to cause serious bodily injury to another, or causes such an injury purposely, knowingly or recklessly under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Contrary to the way Kilgore read that statute, simply using an illegal drug during pregnancy does not meet the elements of that offense.
Moore, for example, says she used meth early in her pregnancy to help her deal with stress at a difficult time. “The father wanted no involvement and encouraged her to get an abortion,” Wolfe writes. “As Moore plotted where and when to get the procedure, which was still legal in Mississippi at the time, she was using crystal meth to cope.” Once she decided to keep the baby, “it wasn’t hard to stop getting high.””
…
“Mississippi Today and The Marshall Project “found 44 women across Mississippi who were arrested between 2015 and 2023 for felony child abuse or child endangerment after their newborns tested positive for drugs.” Such cases lead to family separation, intrusive surveillance, and criminal punishment—outcomes that reflect the arbitrary distinctions drawn by U.S. drug laws. Although alcohol consumption during pregnancy can harm a fetus, caseworkers and prosecutors do not target new mothers simply because they are drinkers. Yet any detectable use of an illegal drug is enough to trigger life-disrupting and liberty-threatening interventions.
Beyond the individual injustices, these policies may deter drug-using women from seeking medical care, which surely is not in the interest of the children whom officials claim to be protecting or the mothers they claim to be helping. The threat of criminal penalties might even tip the scale in favor of abortion, the option that Moore rejected years before she discovered that decision could send her to prison.
Gilliam thinks the demise of Roe v. Wade has encouraged prosecutors to pursue such cases. “Some local prosecutors across the nation have been charging women in these scenarios for years,” Wolfe notes. “But no year saw more of these criminal charges than the year following the U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe.”
After Kilgore saw the error of his ways, he dropped the case against Moore, who has mixed feelings about that result. “When she learned of the dismissal, Moore broke down in tears of relief,” Wolfe writes. “But she said she was also almost sad about the conclusion—that she would have no public trial to challenge how the [district attorney] is criminalizing pregnant women in her community. Maybe a trial would have helped others, possibly changed some laws, she thought. That’s what she hopes telling her story might do, especially for the mothers currently incarcerated.””
“In August 2022, Biden announced a blanket forgiveness of up to $20,000 in federal student loans for single borrowers earning less than $125,000 or couples earning less than $250,000. This plan—estimated to cost over $500 billion—was swiftly blocked in federal court, and the Supreme Court later struck it down as an unconstitutional exercise of the spending power.
While Biden couldn’t quite bring home the grand prize, he managed to cancel billions in student loans through now-blocked changes to the federal student loan program. Unsurprisingly, these changes also led to a big increase in the estimated 2024 federal deficit—a $145 billion hike.
The seminal achievement of Biden’s student loan overhaul was the introduction of the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, an income-driven repayment plan that dramatically reduces most borrowers’ monthly payments. Under the previous version of the program, borrowers were directed to pay 10 percent of their discretionary income (calculated as earnings above 150 percent of the federal poverty rate) for 20 years before receiving forgiveness. Borrowers will now pay just 5 percent of their discretionary income (now estimated as earnings more than 225 percent of the federal poverty level), with some receiving forgiveness after only 10 years. While the program was estimated to cost taxpayers nearly $500 billion over the next decade, federal courts fully blocked the program by July 2024.
If somehow allowed to go forward, the SAVE plan would be likely to incentivize students to take on much larger student loan balances, because the program requires borrowers to pay so little back before forgiveness. Ultimately, it’s difficult to see how this extra spending doesn’t encourage colleges to hike tuition.”