“Guan Heng is a former resident of China who did something amazing: He defied the country’s authoritarian government and documented the abuses of Uyghur Muslims.
…
A few months ago, in August, ICE detained him after he admitted he had initially entered the country illegally. Immigration authorities would now like to deport him, either to Uganda—where he would likely be taken back to China—or to China directly.”
“The Trump administration is using a law against impeding federal law enforcement to threaten and arrest people who are recording and protesting immigration officers. However, an unprecedented number of those cases are falling apart once they go to court, according to media investigations, think tank reports, and voluminous court records and video evidence.
…
“On their own, yelling, protesting, honking a horn, blowing a whistle, following, and recording are all clearly First Amendment–protected activities, even if done during law enforcement operations,” Bier wrote. “Of course, it is possible to follow an officer in a dangerous manner or physically interfere while recording an operation or protesting, but following and recording by themselves without physical interference are clearly protected.”
…
It would be tempting to call these cases failures, and they are in a legal sense, but the administration’s real goal isn’t to win cases. It’s to intimidate American citizens into giving up their First Amendment right to peacefully oppose and monitor the police.”
“Southern Baptists, the biggest white evangelical grouping, remain the largest force in religious life in the Deep South, Tidewater and Greater Appalachia, which are also the stronghold of nondenominational Christian churches, the vast majority of which are independent Baptist fundamentalist congregations. The distribution of the Great Wave immigrants is the primary force behind today’s religious geography.
One consequence of all this is political. These are the only regions where white Christian Nationalism — the belief that the United States is a country founded by and for white Christian evangelical Protestants — is sufficiently widespread to influence politics and policy. In all the other regions, white Protestants, whether evangelical or not, haven’t been a plurality of the population for decades or even centuries, but in the southern nations, evangelicals have been in the driver’s seat since the early 19th century. A majority of white evangelical Christians hold Christian Nationalist views compared to a third of white mainline Protestants and just 30 percent of white Catholics, according to a 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute. Among white Christian Nationalist adherents, 81 percent believe “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background” and 87 percent believe that God intended the U.S. to be a promised land for “European Christians.” (By comparison, Americans overall rejected the latter assertion by more than two to one, the former by more than three to one.)
…
the three “southern” regions have seen a substantial increase in the foreign-born population: roughly tenfold in the case of Tidewater and the Deep South, and a more than doubling in Appalachia. Now these regions have a higher proportion of foreign-born people than either Yankeedom or the Midlands, and Greater Appalachia isn’t far behind.
To be clear, it’s not that those regions have a higher share of immigrants than some other parts of the country. Rather, it’s that the share of the foreign-born population has grown dramatically in places where, historically, there were few immigrants to begin with and very little experience with living with them. Almost all of the immigrant growth in these regions has happened since the late 1990s, the result of the collapse of Yankee-Midland manufacturing and the transfer of factory jobs to the south’s low-wage, low-regulation, low-tax jurisdictions.
…
Much of the scholarly research suggests that people in regions that have always been prominent immigrant destinations and continue to be so now tend to have positive feelings about immigrants, but people in regions that have recently become destinations after having few if any foreign-born residents are more likely to see them as invaders.
…
Yankeedom’s Puritan founders had strict religious and moral requirements for citizenship…Newcomers were meant to “melt” into the existing culture.
…
the Deep South and Tidewater were ruled by slaveholding oligarchs and aristocrats who saw no need for immigrants and created an economic and social environment that offered few reasons for any to come… These regions were tightly bound to narrow ethnoracial and religious criteria for belonging and remained so right into living memory, though the Tidewater has rapidly transformed in recent decades because of the massive federal presence around the District of Columbia and Hampton Roads, site of the world’s largest naval base.
…
the Midlands and New Netherland each embraced different strains of pluralism and multiculturalism from their 17th century foundations onward. In both regions, immigrants were not only welcomed but encouraged to retain their cultural practices, identities, and languages…. “The process of Americanization…is not one of assimilation or conformation to any particularly ethnic type,” argued Marion Dexter Learned, a Delaware-born Midlander who headed the Germanic department at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 20th century. He said Americans should be a “composite people” composed of overlapping but still distinct ethnic cultures. America, in this tradition, is a mosaic not a melting pot.
…
Greater Appalachia’s mythic narrative was developed in response to the Great Wave whose decidedly un-Protestant character panicked many “old stock” Anglo Protestants. In the midst of this “invasion,” the intellectual elite of Appalachia — many of them transplants from Yankeedom or natives who’d been educated there — asserted their region was a repository of unadulterated Anglo-Saxon Protestant settlers, a time capsule where millions of people were living, speaking and worshiping just as their pioneering 18th century ancestors had, uncorrupted by unsavory aliens and degenerate cosmopolitans… Thus was born the notion that there were “real Americans” who were members of an American ethnicity that was British, Evangelical Protestant, English-speaking and white and to whom the country was supposed to belong.”
“The federal surge, which took place after Trump signed an executive order declaring a crime emergency in the nation’s capital, brought with it a spike in immigration-related arrests. But despite the pretense of curbing and targeting violent crime, more than 80 percent of the 1,100 people arrested for immigration offenses had no prior criminal record. And according to United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Beryl A. Howell, many of these warrantless immigration arrests may have been unlawful.
…
her determination that the DHS has, in fact, adopted an unlawful policy and practice of conducting warrantless immigration arrests without probable cause that runs counter to federal law and “well-settled constitutional principles,” and reveals an “abandonment of the probable cause standard.””
Initially, and for some time, the Biden administration didn’t know what to do with the flood of people coming across the border. There was not clear leadership on the issue, and some hoped it would die down on its own. Then the administration wanted Congress to pass something to help them solve the issue without using executive force on its own. Trump convinced Republican Congressmen to not vote for that bill even though it moved policy closer to what they agreed with. Then, Biden used executive authority and successfully stopped the flow. Politically, this was too late for him to get credit.
Trump sent illegal immigrants to El Salvador where they were held in a prison and treated inhumanely. The U.S. government knew things like this happened in this prison before they sent the migrants there.
The administration says they are targeting the worst of the worst in their illegal immigration crackdown, but the facts are, they are sweeping up lots of people whose only crime was illegally immigrating.
“Less than two days after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to restrict immigration agents from using riot control weapons, including chemical irritants, a Chicago-area couple and their 1-year-old daughter were pepper-sprayed during their Saturday morning grocery run.
On Saturday morning, the Veraza family was on its way to Sam’s Club in Cicero, a Chicago suburb near the epicenter of the federal government’s immigration enforcement campaign known as “Operation Midway Blitz.” Upon hearing a helicopter and car horns, which are often used by community members to signal immigration enforcement activity in progress, they decided to leave. That’s when a black pickup truck, captured on video by the car’s passenger, drove past their vehicle while a masked agent sprayed a chemical irritant through the car’s open driver’s side window. A cloud of spray hit the driver, Rafael Veraza, in the face, affecting him, his wife, and his 1-year-old daughter, Ariana, in the back seat. The video then cuts to Rafael and his wife trying to wash out Ariana’s eyes as she cries.
…
In response to questions regarding the incident, Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin sent a statement to the A.P. claiming “there was no crowd control or pepper spray deployed in a Sam’s Club parking lot.””