In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

2025/09/02 Leave a comment

Not that surprising:

When President Trump started dismantling federal agencies and dismissing rank-and-file civil servants, Peggy Carr, the chief statistician at the Education Department, immediately started to make a calculation.

She was the first Black person and the first woman to hold the prestigious post of commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. As a political appointee, she knew there was a risk of becoming a target.

But her 35-career at the department spanned a half dozen administrations, including Mr. Trump’s first term, and she had earned the respect of officials from both parties. Surely, she thought, the office tasked with tracking the achievement of the nation’s students could not fall under the president’s definition of “divisive and harmful” or “woke.”

But for the first time in her career, Dr. Carr’s data points didn’t add up.

On a February afternoon, a security guard showed up to her office just as she was preparing to hold a staff meeting. Fifteen minutes later, the staff watched in tears and disbelief as she was escorted out of the building.

“It was like being prosecuted in front of my family — my work family,” Dr. Carr said in an interview. “It was like I was being taken out like the trash, the only difference is I was being taken out the front door rather than the back door.”

While tens of thousands of employees have lost their jobs in Mr. Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to shrinking the federal work force, experts say the cuts disproportionately affect Black employees — and Black women in particular. Black women make up 12 percent of the federal work force, nearly double their share of the labor force overall.

For generations, the federal government has served as a ladder to the middle class for Black Americans who were shut out of jobsbecause of discrimination. The federal government has historically offered the population more job stability, pay equity and career advancement than the private sector. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal government aggressively enforced affirmative action in hiring and anti-discrimination rules that Mr. Trump has sought to roll back.

The White House has defended Mr. Trump’s overhaul of the federal government as an effort to right-size the work force and to restore a merit-based approach to advancement In July, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could continue with mass firings across the federal government.

In a statement, Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said that Mr. Trump was “ushering in an economy that will empower all Americans, just as it did during his first term.” He added that “the obsession with divisive D.E.I. initiatives reverses years of strides toward genuine equality.”…

Source: In Trump’s Federal Work Force Cuts, Black Women Are Among the Hardest Hit

Filed under DEI, Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Marco Rubio Once Filed a Brief Embracing Birthright Citizenship

2025/08/19 Leave a comment

While people can legitimately change their minds and positions, the nature of many of the policy reversals by Rubio and others appear more driven by pleasing Trump and being in power than by principle:

In a 2016 court filing, Marco Rubio, then a senator running for president, made the case that the Constitution conferred citizenship on essentially all children born in the United States. His argument was a crisp rendition of what was until recently the consensus understanding.

But the views he expressed are now in tension with an executive order issued by President Trump in January that seeks to restrict birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court seems likely to hear a direct challenge to the order’s constitutionality in the term that starts in October.

The little-noticed court filing helps show how quickly the Republican Party and parts of the mainstream of conservative legal thought have shifted on the issue. It is also a reminder that the question of who is born a citizen may affect eligibility to be president.

Tommy Pigott, a State Department spokesman, said in a statement that “it’s absurd the NYT is even wasting time digging around for decade-old made-up stories,” adding that Mr. Rubio was “100 percent aligned with President Trump’s agenda.”

Source: Marco Rubio Once Filed a Brief Embracing Birthright Citizenship

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with ,

Trump Administration Scraps Research Into Health Disparities

2025/08/15 Leave a comment

Another example of wilful ignorance:

The federal government has for decades invested vigorously in research aimed at narrowing the health gaps between racial and socioeconomic groups, pouring billions of dollars into understanding why minority and low-income Americans have shorter lives and suffer higher rates of illnesses like cancer and heart disease.

Spending on so-called health disparities rose even during the Trump administration’s first term. But in its second, much of the funding has come to a sudden halt.

Following a series of executive orders prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion policies at every level of the federal government, the National Institutes of Health this year began terminating initiatives that officials said smacked of identity politics and offered dubious benefits.

“Spending billions on divisive, politically driven D.E.I. initiatives that don’t deliver results is not just bad health policy — it’s bad government,” said a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The N.I.H will invest in projects that support “all vulnerable populations,” and expand participation “based on clinical need — not identity,” she added. She declined to be identified.

In letters from the N.I.H., scientists were told that their projects were canceled because they “harm the health of Americans,” “provide a low return on investment,” or “do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”

“The communication is very clear: We do not value health equity, we do not value a focus on underserved and under-treated populations, we do not consider these to be a priority,” said Dr. Kemi Doll, a cancer specialist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, who coaches younger researchers from minority backgrounds.

In interviews, many scientists whose work depends on N.I.H. grants described the terminations as harrowing and bewildering. Many felt their research was not evaluated on its merits, but nixed because words like “race” or “gender” were in the project’s title or description.

According to an analysis of federal data by The New York Times, as of mid-June the N.I.H. had terminated at least 616 projects focused on closing the health divide between Black and white, and rich and poor, Americans….

Source: Trump Administration Scraps Research Into Health Disparities

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Marche: ‘Acute, Sustained, Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada Finds Its Voice

2025/08/11 Leave a comment

Good op-ed. But more needed in right and Trump-leaning media…:

The mind-set of Canada is changing, and the shift is cultural as much as economic or political. Since the 1960s, Canadian elites have been rewarded by integration with the United States. The snipers who fought with American forces. The scientists who worked at American labs. The writers who wrote for New York publications. The actors who made it in Hollywood. Mr. Carney himself was an icon of this integration as chair of the board of Bloomberg L.P., the financial news and data giant, as recently as 2023.

As America dismantles its elite institutions one by one, that aspirational connection is dissolving. The question is no longer how to stop comparing ourselves with the United States, but how to escape its grasp and its fate. Justin Trudeau, the former prime minister, used to speak of Canada as a “post-national state,” in which Canadian identity took second place to overcoming historical evils and various vague forms of virtue signaling. That nonsense is over. In several surveys, the overwhelming first choice for what makes the country unique is multiculturalism. This, in a world collapsing into stupid, impoverishing hatreds, is the distinctly Canadian national project.

Even after Covid and the failure to create adequate infrastructure for new Canadians, which lead to a pullback on immigration, Canada still has one of the highest rates of naturalization in the world. This country has always been plural. It has always contained many languages, ethnicities and tribes. The triumph of compromise among difference is the triumph of Canadian history. That seems to be an ideal worth fighting for.

Canada is now stuck in a double reality. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 59 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s top threat, and 55 percent of Canadians identified the United States as the country’s most important ally. That is both an unsustainable contradiction and also a reality that will probably define the country for the foreseeable future. Canada is divided from America, and America is divided from itself. The relationship between Canada and America rides on that fissure.

Margaret Atwood was, and remains, the ultimate icon of 1960s Canadian nationalism and also one of the great prophets of American dystopia. “No. 1, hating all Americans is stupid,” she told me on “Gloves Off,” a podcast about how Canada can defend itself from America’s new threats. “That’s just silly because half of them would agree with you,” and “even a bunch of them are now having buyers’ regret.”

Large groups of people in Canada, and one assumes in America, too, hope this new animosity will pass with the passing of the Trump administration. “I can’t account for the rhetoric on behalf of our president,” Gov. Janet Mills of Maine said recently on a trip to Nova Scotia. “He doesn’t speak for us when he says those things.” Except he does. The current American ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, is the kind of man you send to a country to alienate it. During the first Trump administration, the State Department had to apologize for offensive remarks he made, which he had at one point denied. He has also said the administration finds Canadians “mean and nasty.” Such insults from such people are a badge of honor.

But it’s the American system — not just its presidency — that is in breakdown. From the Canadian side of the border, it is evident that the American left is in the middle of a grand abdication. No American institution, no matter how wealthy or privileged, seems willing to make any sacrifice for democratic values. If the president is Tony Soprano, the Democratic governors who plead with Canadian tourists to return are the Carmelas. They cluck their disapproval, but they can’t believe anyone would question their decency as they try to get along.

Canada is far from powerless in this new world; we are educated and resourceful. But we are alone in a way we never have been. Our current moment of national self-definition is different from previous nationalisms. It will involve connecting Canada more broadly rather than narrowing its focus. We can show that multiculturalism works, that it remains possible to have an open society that does not consume itself, in which divisions between liberals and conservatives are real and deep-seated but do not fester into violence and loathing. Canada will also have to serve as a connector between the world’s democracies, in a line that stretches from Taiwan and South Korea, across North America, to Poland and Ukraine.

Canada has experienced the second Trump administration like a teenager being kicked out of the house by an abusive father. We have to grow up fast and we can’t go back. And the choices we make now will matter forever. They will reveal our national character. Anger is a useful emotion, but only as a point of departure. We have to reckon with the fact that from now on, our power will come from only ourselves.

Source: ‘Acute, Sustained, Profound and Abiding Rage’: Canada Finds Its Voice

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with , ,

Trump Administration Releases New Plans to Enforce Birthright Citizenship Order

2025/08/02 Leave a comment

Good overview:

Current Birthright Citizenship Rules vs. Proposed Changes

While the executive order is not yet in effect, recent documents from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the State Department, and the Social Security Administration (SSA) outline the administration’s intended approach. The proposed strategy involves implementing stricter requirements for parents to obtain U.S. passports, Social Security numbers (SSNs), and federal benefits for their U.S.-born children.

How It Currently Works

  • A child’s U.S. birth certificate is considered sufficient proof of U.S. citizenship, and parents can present it to the government to get a passport, SSN, and federal benefits for their child.
  • Parents don’t need to prove their own citizenship or immigration status when applying for these documents or benefits on their U.S.-born child’s behalf (except in cases involving foreign diplomats, who aren’t considered under U.S. jurisdiction).

How It Would Work Under the Proposed Plan

  • For any child born in the U.S. after the executive order’s effective date, their U.S. birth certificate alone is not considered sufficient proof of U.S. citizenship, and parents will need to provide additional documentation to obtain a passport, SSN, or federal benefits for their child.
  • At least one parent would need to prove their own citizenship or eligible immigration status when applying for these documents or benefits on their U.S.-born child’s behalf.
  • Federal agencies would verify parental status during or after birth registration.
  • Federal documents recognizing U.S. citizenship are not issued to children whose parents lack qualifying status.

“Ending birthright citizenship by fiat in contravention of several existing court challenges is an effort destined for failure. In the meantime, it will only create chaos and confusion in many households already struggling to navigate our broken immigration system.” — Erik Finch | Director of Global Operations, Boundless Immigration | Former USCIS Officer

Implications for Individuals and Families

Restricted birthright citizenship would have profound consequences on individuals and families:

  • Family Planning and Uncertainty: Legal ambiguities would likely deter many immigrant and mixed-status families from having children in the U.S., leading some to delay or reconsider building their families there.
  • Risk of Statelessness: Children denied citizenship at birth — especially if their parents’ home countries cannot confer nationality — could become stateless, facing lifelong barriers to education, healthcare, travel, and legal protection.
  • Reduced Access to Services: Even the threat of this policy’s implementation is likely to discourage families from seeking healthcare or essential public services, worsening health and welfare outcomes.
  • Bureaucratic and Legal Challenges: Stricter documentation rules could cause errors, delays, or denials, increasing stress and potential legal limbo for families.

Implications for Employers

Employers that depend on global talent could face serious challenges:

  • Recruitment and Retention: Uncertainty around children’s citizenship may deter skilled foreign professionals from working in or staying in the U.S.
  • HR Complexity and Compliance: Varied state laws could complicate HR, payroll, and benefits administration, requiring greater investment in immigration support for employees and their families.
  • Risk of Discrimination: Increased scrutiny of family and citizenship status raises the risk of accidental anti-discrimination violations and workplace unfairness.
  • Employee Wellbeing and Productivity: Ongoing anxiety about family status can lower morale, productivity, and long-term workforce stability, ultimately impacting company competitiveness.

Broader Social and Economic Implications

Fewer foreign-born residents and their U.S.-citizen children would reduce population diversity, shrink the workforce, and limit innovation. Communities of color — especially Latino families — would be disproportionately affected, deepening existing inequalities and creating long-term disparities. Over time, this could lead to a rise in U.S.-born individuals without legal status or statehood, increasing poverty, exclusion, and instability.

In addition, the proposed policy could expand the undocumented immigrant population, strain the U.S. immigration system, and fuel long-term political tension. Denying birthright citizenship risks alienating immigrant communities, weakening social cohesion, and creating a stateless underclass with limited access to education, jobs, and stability.

Even as a proposal, the policy has already sparked confusion and anxiety, leading some families to avoid essential services and underscoring the urgent need for clear guidance and community support.

Multiple court rulings have blocked the executive order, and it’s unclear if or when the administration’s plans will take effect. However, the government’s ongoing preparations suggests the issue will remain a priority for the Trump administration.


The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and state attorneys general have called the order unconstitutional and vowed to continue fighting it in court. Immigration advocates have reassured families that, for now, children born in the U.S. remain U.S. citizens regardless of their parents’ status, and no immediate action is required.

Source: Trump Administration Releases New Plans to Enforce Birthright Citizenship Order

Filed under Birthright Citizenship, Citizenship Tagged with , , ,

‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has

2025/07/29 Leave a comment

All too true, even if there have been previous chilling periods:

…Banning books doesn’t stop at the local level.This year, after Mr. Trump signed three executive orders aimed at combating “wokeness,” the Department of Defense’s education agency removed and reviewed more than 500 titles from its school system, including, according to one report, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” which the C.I.A. had sent to the Eastern Bloc. Federal funding agencies have compiled a list of more than 350 banned words and phrases, including “women,” “diversity” and “ethnicity.”

In the Cold War, the United States chose “freedom” — democratic freedom, freedom of speech, intellectual freedom and freedom of choice — as its key point of difference with the Soviet enemy. Since the end of World War II, U.S. presidents from both parties have wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of the “free world” that they led. When Ronald Reagan — who spearheaded the Cold War “freedom” agenda and oversaw an upswing in C.I.A. literary programs — spoke to the British Parliament in 1982, he invoked “the march of freedom and democracy,” which would “leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” It was no coincidence that George Minden, the leader of the C.I.A. book program, once described his operation as “an offensive of free, honest thinking.”

Mr. Trump, JD Vance, Ron DeSantis and their fellow travelers expound the virtues of the First Amendment while dismantling guardrails against disinformation and working to suppress political ideas they oppose. Book bans aren’t their only tool. They also block access for independent journalists, intimidate news organizations and defund outlets they perceive as hostile to the MAGA agenda, including NPR, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Voice of America.

There are two lessons from the history of the C.I.A. book program that the book banners would do well to heed. One is that censorship — whether by Communists, fascists or democratic governments — tends to create demand for the works it targets. (That, and Mr. Trump’s Orwellian tactics, may explain why “1984” has been surging up the book charts in recent years.)

The other is that the totalitarians lost the Cold War, and freedom of thought won the day. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, whose own works were promoted by the C.I.A., presumably without his knowledge, said: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books.”

Charlie English is the author of, among other books, “The CIA Book Club: The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature.”

Source: ‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has

Filed under Politics Tagged with , , ,

Key takeaways from trial over Trump administration’s ‘ideological deportation’ policy

2025/07/29 Leave a comment

Chilling:

A trial over the extraordinary measures taken by the Trump administrationto detain foreign scholars over their pro-Palestinian speech revealed previously unknown details about the extent to which immigration officials broke with precedent in their campaign against university activists.

The case, which was brought by the national American Association of University Professors (AAUP); its Harvard, Rutgers and New York University chapters; and the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa) after the arrest of several noncitizen students and scholars who had been outspoken about Palestinian rights, marked the first time the administration was asked to defend its position that it has the authority to deport noncitizens over constitutionally protected speech.

The plaintiffs argued the government’s actions amounted to an illegal “ideological deportation” policy.

“The Trump administration is imprisoning and expelling people because of their political viewpoints,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, which represented the plaintiffs along with the law firm Sher Tremonte. “It would be difficult to conceive of a policy more offensive to the first amendment, or to the values the first amendment was meant to serve.”

While the four arrested scholars – including the Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk – have all been released from detention while their legal cases proceed, others have left the country to avoid arrest and one is in hiding.

The trial ended in Boston on Monday. The judge in the case, Reagan appointee William G Young, is not expected to rule on the case for at least a few weeks. Any decision he makes will almost certainly be appealed, possibly up to the US supreme court.

These are some of the revelations that came out of the trial.

  1. The Trump administration relied on lists from shadowy pro-Israel groups Among the trial’s most explosive revelations was the fact that the government relied on dossiers compiled by the rightwing Canary Mission, a secretive, pro-Israel group dedicated to doxing thousands of pro-Palestinian students, scholars and activists, as well as information by the far-right Zionist group Betar USA, which even the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League lists as an extremist organisation. Both Canary Mission and Betar had been involved in compiling “deportation lists”, sending “thousands of names” to government officials. While that had been previously reported, the testimony of senior US immigration officials revealed for the first time the extent to which the government relied on such lists. Peter Hatch, a senior official within Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) division, testified that the agency assembled a group of officials – known internally as the “Tiger Team” – dedicated to investigating student protesters. The team rapidly compiled more than 100 reports based on a list of 5,000 individuals identified on the Canary Mission website. The dossiers the agency compiled on Öztürk, Khalil and others highlighted their pro-Palestinian speech, Hatch testified, included their Canary Mission pages, as well as, in Öztürk’s case, an op-ed she wrote in a student paper. “The direction was to look at the website,” Hatch said in court. “That we should look at the individuals named in the Canary Mission website.”
  2. Immigration officials admitted to the unprecedented nature of the arrests Four of the officers involved in Öztürk and Khalil’s arrests, as well as in the arrests of Columbia graduate Mohsen Mahdawi and Georgetown postdoctoral fellow Badar Khan Suri, said that orders to prioritize the scholars had come from high up within the Trump administration.  They also admitted they had never taken part in such arrests before.  A New England Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agent involved in Mahdawi’s arrest, William Crogan, said that he had never seen a noncitizen removed from the US based on similar factual allegations and that his superiors had ordered him to prioritize the case. Patrick Cunningham, an Ice agent in Boston, said the same of Öztürk’s case, while Darren McCormack, an agent in New York, said that the request to arrest Khalil was unusual and that he was told the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the White House were specifically interested in Khalil’s case.  Andre Watson, a senior HSI official, testified that early in the Trump administration, Ice and the state department coordinated on a new process to implement the president’s executive orders targeting student protesters. 
  3. The government tried to block the release of documentsDuring the trial, the government’s attorneys sought to block the release of documents detailing its processes and reasons for revoking student visas and issuing determinations of removability for green card holders such as Khalil and Mahdawi.  The records for only five of the targeted students were released in the end; many others were not. The government also succeeded in blocking the release of a state department report detailing the administration’s policies on the matter. The government has claimed the authority to deport noncitizens who have committed no crimes but whose presence it deems poses a threat to US foreign policy and national security, and it has said that the students’ presence in the US interfered with its stated efforts to combat antisemitism. The US Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment but in court filings it called claims of an ideological deportation policy the product of plaintiffs’ “imagination”. But John Armstrong, the most senior official at the state department’s bureau of consular affairs, admitted under questioning that statements critical of Israel or US foreign policy could qualify noncitizens for deportation. He also admitted that officials who were instructed to compile allegations about the individuals targeted received no guidance about what constitutes antisemitism even as they sometimes invoked “antisemitic conduct” in their memos. The administration’s lawyers have also equivocated on whether noncitizens have the same constitutional rights as US citizens, at one point saying they do, but later adding that there are “nuances” related to national security, immigration and foreign policy matters. 
  4. A huge chilling effect Both citizen and noncitizen scholars testified about the climate of fear created by the arrests. Megan Hyska, a Canadian philosophy professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, said in court that she decided not to publish an op-ed she had written about organising resistance to the Trump administration’s policies out of fear of being targeted for arrest. Nadje Al-Ali, a German anthropologist and former director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University, said she canceled plans to travel abroad and stopped pursuing research related to Palestine because of similar concerns. Veena Dubal, the AAUP’s general counsel, testified that the government’s fearmongering campaign has fundamentally altered the group’s activities. She said that members who had previously been very active within the group stopped attending meetings.Aslı Bâli, Mesa’s president, warned in a statement to the Guardian that the impact of the government’s policies risked only growing worse. “The government is abducting individuals, and thereby separating families and squandering public resources, purely on the basis of protected political speech that they disagree with,” she said. “They need to be held to account, and our rights need to be defended, because otherwise we will find these protections gone – and the chilling effect will be pervasive.”

Source: Key takeaways from trial over Trump administration’s ‘ideological deportation’ policy

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

ICYMI: ICE’s Shocking Midday Kidnappings Remind Me of Something I’ve Seen Before

2025/07/29 Leave a comment

Frightening times:

Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has kicked into high gear, employing a set of extreme methods in an attempt to reach Stephen Miller’s unrealistic deportation quotas. Many Americans have watched in horror as masked ICE agents, sometimes accompanied by other federal agents and even local police, have appeared on their television screens, looking for and detaining immigrants in their homes, in their workplaces, and on the street. Sometimes, small gangs of law enforcement appear in military gear and masks, resembling military police. Sometimes, a mix of federal agents and local police deploy in large groups to conduct workplace raids, in a strange hodgepodge of uniforms. In other instances, officers have confronted immigrants as they leave court or show up to renew their work permits, then take them away.

But the law enforcement strategy that may have garnered the most shock among members of the public is the jump-out squad: small tactical teams of armed officers not in uniform who jump out of unmarked cars and grab immigrants off the street with no warning, or pull immigrants over and surround their cars, suddenly, before taking them away. Described by advocates for detainees as “brazen, midday kidnappings,” jump-out squads use a combination of surprise, terror, and overwhelming force. When they stop individuals with no reasonable suspicion, they act in violation of federal law, and a court in California has enjoined this practice.

But if this particular technique—jumping out on potential suspects, searching them, and taking them away—seems entirely foreign, it should not. Nor should the overt racial profiling that always accompanies these sorts of methods. Many urban police departments—including those in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Louisville, and Washington—have used jump-out tactics as a means of crime prevention. And those are just the ones we know about.

Police jump-out squads drive around in unmarked cars, looking for people who they believe are breaking the law. Although they rarely mask, they are still difficult to identify because they don’t wear uniforms or show their badges. Like the ICE squads, they deploy overwhelming force and the element of surprise to intercept criminal activity and find people carrying illegal guns. Jump-out squads have become more taboo in the past several years because the confrontations they instigate have proved so dangerous for the people they stop: These tactical teams can spiral out of control, leading to deadly consequences. They have been responsible for countless acts of excessive force, some of which have resulted in tragedy. The SCORPION squadthat killed Tyre Nichols in Memphis was a jump-out squad, as was the task force that killed 12-year-old TJ Siderio in Philadelphia.

These squads often cultivate a kind of vigilante ethos among their officers. Their members frequently work outside the typical chain of police command, reporting directly to the brass. Often, the units intentionally recruit aggressive officers and fail to properly train them on the Fourth Amendment. A group of police officers in L.A., calling themselves the Jump Out Boys, described their work this way: “Jump out boys are alpha dogs, who think and act like the wolf. … They understand when the line needs to be crossed and crossed back. They need to work hard, they need to get guns, they need to take people to jail, and sometimes they need to do things they don’t want to do.”

Over the past 30 years, jump-out squads were used first as a tool to break up the drug trade (in Seasons 1 and 3 of The Wire, Baltimore police deploy a ragtag such squad), then, more recently, during a spike in violence caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, when urban police departments attempted to bring down the rate of gun violence by seizing illegal firearms. In the summer of 2020, 18 years after the tragic death of Amadou Diallo, New York City finally disbanded its infamous anti-crime unit, which frequently used aggressive jump-out tactics, but Mayor Eric Adams brought back a “modified plainclothes anti-gun unit” just a few weeks after taking office in 2022….

Source: ICE’s Shocking Midday Kidnappings Remind Me of Something I’ve Seen Before

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

McWhorter: A Term So Outdated, Even President Trump Wouldn’t Use It

2025/07/28 Leave a comment

Good take:

On Sunday, President Trump, still on the ropes because of the controversy over the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files, ventured a distraction. With all the usual exclamation points and eccentric capitalization, he sounded the alarm on an issue a reader might have mistaken for a national crisis: the names of professional sports franchises. In particular those franchises that had cast off names that no longer felt culturally appropriate: the Washington Commanders, formerly the Redskins, and the Cleveland Guardians, formerly the Indians.

“The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams,” — by the way, it wasn’t — “with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them.”

With typical subtlety, Trump concluded, “OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”

The controversy dates back more than a half-century. It was formalized in 1968, when the National Congress of American Indians embarked on a campaign to fight negative stereotypes of native people in American culture.

For a while, however, the evidence on the word “redskin” seemed equivocal. Polls by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, in 2004, and again by The Washington Post, in 2016, reported that a vast majority of actual Native Americans had no problem with the term. Was the whole thing just a politically correct tempest in a teapot, an effort to fix something that wasn’t actually a problem?

In 2020, a new poll was conducted. This one asked respondents for more finely grained responses and gave them more opportunity to consider their answers. The outcome was very different: Almost half of 1,000 Native Americans surveyed indeed found the term “redskin” to be offensive. Organized college athletics had long since forsworn team mascots that were based on caricatures of Indians. Amid the national climate of racial reckoning that George Floyd’s death and the Black Lives Matter movement brought on, the Washington football franchise announced it would change its name.

When Trump claims that “our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” there is no reason to wonder if he commissioned his own secret polling. But you don’t need a poll to understand why he’s wrong.

I doubt even Trump himself would be comfortable using that contested term to address a human being. Imagine him inviting a tribal leader to join him at some White House ceremony and introducing him as “my honored guest, a respected redskin.” At best, the term sounds like an artifact from some century-old stage play. To most ears, it simply sounds like a slur.

My grandmother was a laundress for a very wealthy white family, who would grant their staff a lovely week at their Maine island getaway every summer. Grandmom took us there with her for two summers in the mid-1970s. The white staff members there, while at least outwardly kind to my Black family, were acridly unfond of the local Native Americans. I had occasion to hear them late at night hissing about “those redskins.” That’s what we want as the name of a football team?

But even those who agree with me on that point might still quite reasonably ask what was wrong with “Cleveland Indians.” The term “Native American” may sound more respectful, but a vast majority of people who trace their ancestry to America’s tribal nations prefer being called Indians.

That might seem odd, given that “Indian” was a term imposed on them by Christopher Columbus when he mistakenly thought he had reached India. But it’s not that unusual.

As I wrote recently, quite a few Black Americans prefer “Black” over “African American,” despite the fact that “Black” was a term imposed on people with dark skin by people with light skin, and it sure wasn’t meant as a compliment. At the turn of the previous century, even educated Black people such as Sylvester Russell, an editorialist at the Indianapolis newspaper The Freeman, reportedly approved of the usage of “darkey.” In 1908 the doughty Black opera diva Sissieretta Jones asked, “Is there a soul so insensible that it cannot be stirred to the very depths by the heartbroken cry of the poor old homesick darkey?”

The problem with the Cleveland Indians isn’t “Indian.” The Cleveland Native Americans would be just as wrong. The problem isn’t the word choice; it’s the choice to use a human group as a mascot at all. Even if the members of that group are celebrated as brave warriors. No one today would be debating the merits of a team called the Boston Blacks or the New Jersey Negroes. How about the New York Jews or the Pittsburgh Polacks? Shifting to a more seemly Pittsburgh Poles would do nothing to solve the glaringly obvious problem. People are not pets.

Trump is right that the heritage and prestige of American Indians have been “systematically taken away from them,” but that is the work of the United States government, which pursued an explicit policy of dehumanization and dispossession and achieved it with horrifying success. Going back to antique stereotypes only continues the process.

Source: A Term So Outdated, Even President Trump Wouldn’t Use It

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US citizenship test too easy? Trump bringing back 2020 naturalisation format

2025/07/28 Leave a comment

Stay tuned. Arguably, many Trump administration figures could start with a better understanding of the US constitution and history:

The new director of the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) stirred a debate after he said that the present US citizenship test is easy and can be memorised. The US citizenship test, officially known as the Naturalisation test, is an examination that an applicant has to take to become an American citizen.

The test is not for green card holders unless they are applying for citizenship. Joseph Edlow, the new director of USCIS, said that since the tests are too easy, the Trump administration is planning to bring back the 2020 version of the test.

For the test, applicants have to submit a former N-400 seeking naturalisation. They would be required to pass a background check and meet residency tenure, along with other requirements. After this, they will have to attend an interview where they take two tests: One is an English test, and the other is a civic test.

Source: US citizenship test too easy? Trump bringing back 2020 naturalisation format

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