“A few scenarios are possible. One is that the U.S. really is striking narcotraffickers, and that either their families don’t know their dead relatives are narcotraffickers or are obfuscating. Another possibility is that the U.S. is striking innocent fisherman and calling them narcotraffickers. There could, of course, be a mix of smugglers and fishermen.
But the U.S. government is almost definitely acting illegally here. These people are not combatants. We don’t know if they’re affiliated with groups designated terrorist organizations. Congress has not approved these strikes, and Trump doesn’t even appear to be seeking retroactive approval. When some senators did try to check Trump via the War Powers Act, it didn’t go all that well. And rest assured that Petro, Maduro, and all other who stand to profit are going to keep milking this for all it’s worth, using Trump’s inevitable screw-ups as a means of distracting from their own misbehavior.”
“on one hand, the president believes he’s helping American cattle farmers by imposing tariffs on imported beef—particularly beef from Brazil, which is now subject to a 50 percent tariff. (Amusingly, that tariff is officially for “national emergency” reasons, but in reality, it exists simply because Trump got mad at the current government of Brazil for prosecuting his buddy, former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.)
Leave aside the question of whether American cattle farmers are actually happy about this. Let’s just think about the mechanics of what Trump is describing. He says the cattle farmers are “doing so well” because of the tariffs. Presumably, that’s because they can now raise prices. That’s what tariffs do: by making foreign goods more expensive, they benefit domestic producers, largely by allowing them to raise prices in an environment with less competition.
Trump wants cattle farmers to be able to charge higher prices. Well, OK, what he really wants is the cattle farmers to appreciate him for creating the conditions in which they can charge higher prices—but same difference.
But, wait. Trump says he also wants those same cattle farmers to “get their prices down,” because consumers are unhappy about beef prices hitting record highs.
My dude. How is this supposed to work?
I understand that Trump sees tariffs as effectively a magic wand that he can wave around to accomplish literally any policy. But even by that standard, this is a wild set of claims to make in consecutive sentences. The cattle ranchers are supposed to applaud Trump for letting them charge higher prices, and then also save him from the direct consequences of his own policies, I guess?”
“A Washington, D.C., resident who was handcuffed and detained in September for mocking National Guard soldiers by playing “The Imperial March” from Star Wars on his cellphone is suing the soldiers and police officers for their stormtrooper-like behavior.
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Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote in 1987, in a ruling striking down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to oppose or interrupt a police officer, that “the freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state.”
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According to his lawsuit, O’Hara was released after 15 to 20 minutes without charges.”
“Colombian President Gustavo Petro says one of the “narcoterrorists” recently killed by U.S. military strikes on boats in the Caribbean was a “fisherman” who had “no ties to the drug trade.” That man’s death, one of at least 32 ordered by President Donald Trump, therefore qualified as “murder,” Petro declared on Saturday.
That much would be true even if the dead man, whom Petro identified as a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, really was smuggling drugs. Trump’s new policy of summarily executing drug suspects simultaneously corrupts the mission of the armed forces, erasing the traditional distinction between civilians and combatants, and violates long-standing principles of criminal justice, imposing the death penalty without statutory authorization or any semblance of due process.
On September 15, U.S. forces blew up a boat that Trump said was “in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics,” killing three men he described as “confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela.” But according to Petro, the attack that killed Carranza happened in Colombian waters, and the target was a “Colombian boat” that “was adrift and had its distress signal up due to an engine failure.”
Trump reacted angrily to that charge on Sunday, calling Petro “an illegal drug leader” who is “strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs…all over Colombia.” He said the U.S. government would punish Petro by ending all “payments and subsidies” to his country.
Notably, Trump did not actually contradict Petro’s claim that Carranza had been erroneously identified as a Venezuelan “narcoterrorist.” And Trump has repeatedly acknowledged that his bloodthirsty anti-drug strategy could threaten innocent fishermen.
After the first strike on an alleged drug boat in early September, Trump joked about the potential for lethal mistakes: “I think anybody that saw that is going to say, ‘I’ll take a pass.’ I don’t even know about fishermen. They may say, ‘I’m not getting on the boat. I’m not going to take a chance.'”
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Trump claims drug traffickers are “murdering” Americans because some of their customers—about 82,000 last year—die after consuming their products. By the same logic, alcohol producers and distributors, who supply a product implicated in an estimated 178,000 deaths a year in the United States, likewise are guilty of murder.
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The Trump administration also argues that the U.S. government is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which makes the boat strikes consistent with the law of war. That claim, Cardozo Law School professor Gabor Rona says, is “utterly without precedent in international law.”
Geoffrey Corn, formerly the U.S. Army’s senior adviser on the law of war, agrees. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he told The New York Times. “This is shredding it.”
Trump, in short, is killing people without a legal justification. There is a word for that.”
The civil rights movement wasn’t just about getting blacks rights for the first time, but regaining rights that they had torn from them during segregation. We should remember that America has taken rights away before based on race, and it could do it again if we aren’t careful.
“Kentucky GOP Rep. Thomas Massie has officially drawn a Donald Trump-backed challenger.
Ed Gallrein, who preemptively earned the president’s endorsement last week, launched his campaign Tuesday to oust the seven-term lawmaker Trump began targeting earlier this year over Massie’s opposition to Republicans’ megalaw.”
““In Portland, protests have endured for months, and the [Portland police have] been either unwilling or unable to respond to the disturbances,” the appeals judges wrote.
Nelson and Bade said Immergut relied too heavily on Trump’s social media commentary — calling Portland “war ravaged” — to conclude that his deployment was “untethered” from reality, noting that the unrest had required a surge of law enforcement from the Federal Protective Service to contain.
The 9th Circuit panel majority repeatedly cited a similar decision issued by three colleagues permitting Trump’s deployment of Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year. In the ruling, the judges said Trump is owed great deference in determining whether civil unrest reaches a point in which the military may be called in for support.
The majority said Immergut used a faulty definition of rebellion in her decision, but the appeals judges did not address whether Trump had a valid claim that such unrest was underway when he sent in the Guard. (They did say they were not endorsing Trump’s description of Portland as a “war zone.”)
The appeals panel’s dissenting judge, Clinton appointee Susan Graber, called the majority’s decision ”absurd,” pleaded with her 9th Circuit colleagues to quickly reverse it and urged the public to “retain faith in our judicial system for just a little longer.”
“We have come to expect a dose of political theater in the political branches, drama designed to rally the base or to rile or intimidate political opponents. We also may expect there a measure of bending—sometimes breaking—the truth,” Graber wrote. “By design of the Founders, the judicial branch stands apart. We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda.”
Graber emphasized that even though there had been unruly protests in Portland in June, they had largely subsided and by September routinely featured 30 or fewer demonstrators and virtually no violence or requests for local police assistance.”
““All of this is unprecedented,” John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director, tells POLITICO Magazine. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen a nationwide immigration enforcement effort like this.”
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he noted the Trump administration has revved up the agency’s raid strategy, leading to broad and indiscriminate sweeps to maximize arrests — regardless of people’s criminal record.
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What we have seen is that immigration enforcement has become probably the central priority for all U.S. law enforcement, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense. This executive order has elevated this to the highest priority. I’ve never seen a whole government effort focused like this, even in the State Department. As a result of that, we’ve never seen an immigration enforcement effort like this. And that manifests itself in a lot of different ways, really quickly.
When you’re at ICE, of course you can run down to a Home Depot parking lot. Any administration could have done this: round the Home Depot parking lot, stop a bunch of day laborers and ID them. In car washes, in places where low-wage workers work, places like that. The reason that historically hasn’t been done, is you just don’t find criminals there. Once in a blue moon you find someone, and we see that the administration highlights when they get someone who has some criminal history. But by and large, your really serious criminal threats don’t do shifts at the local car wash for minimum wage. They’re out making their money, making a living as a criminal.
And so ICE has always focused our operations on getting those individuals — that takes more time, though. You’re taking lists of people who are criminally convicted and you’re identifying them, and then once you identify them, you’re doing research on addresses, and then you’re building a dossier and sending a team out to get them. The Obama administration deported a large number of people, but generally, a very high percentage of them were people who either just crossed the border or people with a serious criminal history.
This administration, though, is taking a different tack. This administration has repurposed the way they’ve operationalized ICE — to go out and get as many people as possible, and that’s why we’re seeing these raids on the car washes and on the Home Depot parking lots. They know they can make a large number of arrests there, and they don’t seem to care whether or not those people pose a threat to public safety. They just say, “If you’re undocumented, you’re a fair target.”
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This administration is going to want to get as many of these new agents out in the field as quickly as possible. Normally, to hire this many people, it would take the agency three, four years.
The problem is that the agency only has the capacity to do so many background checks at once, to interview so many people at once. The training academy can only train so many people at once. It would take years to fully deploy these agents. This administration clearly doesn’t want to wait.
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I spent five years at DHS working on ICE issues. It just wasn’t an issue. None of the officers felt the need to wear masks. I think it’s an unfortunate byproduct of the administration’s policies. This is a very contentious area of law, this idea that we’re not going to discern the difference between migrants who might be committing serious crimes and those who might have real long-term presence in the United States, young children and family members and things of that nature.
I hate that the agents are wearing the masks. I think it is hurting the reputation of the agency, and feeding a lot of these narratives about the agency. But I’m also sympathetic to the agents themselves, who need to protect themselves and their families. Like we just talked about, there are these upticks, these massive upticks in assaults on the agents. These threats against the agents are real, and there’s, unfortunately, a lot of people out there who can’t discern the difference between the administration and the policymakers and the agents themselves. And as a result of that, these agents feel compelled to take steps to protect themselves and their family, and I’m sympathetic to it.
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What’s different is who they’re targeting. Under Obama, under Biden and even to a certain extent, under the first Trump administration, there were priorities. The agents were told, “Focus first on the worst. Worst first. Get the worst bad guys off the street first, we’ll deal with everything else later.” Those rules are gone.”