Trump Accepts Some Mexican Immigrants. Only the best, I might add:
Mexico’s security chief confirmed Tuesday that 17 family members of cartel leaders crossed into the U.S. last week as part of a deal between a son of the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Trump administration.
Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch confirmed a report by independent journalist Luis Chaparro that family members of Ovidio Guzman Lopez, who was extradited to the United States in 2023, had entered the U.S.
Guzmán Lopez is one of the brothers left running a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel after notorious capo Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was imprisoned in the U.S. Video showed the family members walking across the border from Tijuana with their suitcases to waiting U.S. agents.
Even The Cato Institute Objects To Storm Troopers:
I had missed the story from two weeks ago about what happened after (apparent) agents of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one wearing a balaclava to hide his face, seized two men at the Charlottesville, VA, courthouse. The sequel, as reported by the local paper, the Daily Progress, was that an *unnamed* (!) ICE spokesperson threatened to prosecute two persons at the scene who challenged the action and asked the agents to identify themselves or show a warrant. The headline read: “ICE promises bystanders who challenged Charlottesville raid will be prosecuted.”
Leave aside the question of when, if at all, it is proper to prosecute bystanders under these circumstances. Why is it considered acceptable for ICE enforcers to wear masks to hide their identity in the first place? They did so last week, a video shows, when they arrested Newark, NJ Mayor Ras Baraka as he protested at a detention facility. A casual search reveals that ICE agents have worn face coverings, ski masks, and the like in raids and stops reported from around the country (Westminster, MD; Douglas County, CO; Great Barrington, MA; Bellingham, WA). Federal agents wore masks when they abducted Turkish grad student Rümeysa Öztürk off a street near her Boston-area home. (She was freed by a judge last week.) The Trump Department of Homeland Security appears to have made it standard practice.
At what point will we as a nation find ourselves with a secret police? (Now.)
People who mask themselves before street confrontations ordinarily do so to avoid legal and public accountability, especially when they are up to no good.
Trump/Musk Browbeat Africa To Submit To Musk:
In early February, Sharon Cromer, U.S. ambassador to Gambia, went to visit one of the country’s Cabinet ministers at his agency’s headquarters, above a partially abandoned strip mall off a dirt road. It had been two weeks since President Donald Trump took office, and Cromer had pressing business to discuss. She needed the minister to fall in line to help Elon Musk.
Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet company, had spent months trying to secure regulatory approval to sell internet access in the impoverished West African country. As head of Gambia’s communications ministry, Lamin Jabbi oversees the government’s review of Starlink’s license application. Jabbi had been slow to sign off and the company had grown impatient. Now the top U.S. government official in Gambia was in Jabbi’s office to intervene.
Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency loomed over the conversation. The administration had already begun freezing foreign aid projects, and early in the meeting, Cromer, a Biden appointee, said something that rattled Gambian officials in the room. She listed the ways that the U.S. was supporting the country, according to two people present and contemporaneous notes, noting that key initiatives — like one that funds a $25 million project to improve the electrical system — were currently under review.
Jabbi’s top deputy, Hassan Jallow, told ProPublica he saw Cromer’s message as a veiled threat: If Starlink doesn’t get its license, the U.S. could cut off the desperately needed funds. “The implication was that they were connected,” Jallow said.
In recent months, senior State Department officials in both Washington and Gambia have coordinated with Starlink executives to coax, lobby and browbeat at least seven Gambian government ministers to help Musk, records and interviews show. One of those Cabinet officials told ProPublica his government is under “maximum pressure” to yield.
“If this was done by another country, we absolutely would call this corruption,” said Kristofer Harrison, who served as a high-level State Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “Because it is corruption.”
Words can hardly describe just how far Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the administration have gone to serve the interests of their fellow billionaires, undermine our economy and kill hundreds of thousands of jobs while dragging our basic civil liberties and constitution through the buzzsaw to illegally disappear countless immigrants and send them to privately funded domestic prisons and torture camps abroad.
It’s why the absence of true oppositional leadership has been deafening. After spending an entire campaign cycle naming Trump as an existential threat to our democracy and rule of law – which he is – the party’s leadership has folded at the first chance to wield the power they have, revealing hypocrisy and cowardice.
Chuck Schumer surrendered the entire federal budget and Marco Rubio, who is now championing the administration’s campaign of disappearing immigrants, was confirmed unanimously to Trump’s cabinet by the US Senate.
Every choice Democratic leadership has made to sacrifice its base and become more like the bad guys we were supposed to be fighting has led us here. And now, people are losing faith in Democrats’ ability to solve our country’s biggest problems – the party is polling at a historic low.
Americans have long been ready for the political revolution Bernie Sanders has talked about, but the party and the DC elite haven’t been. Aside from the many polls that highlight the national popularity of Sanders and the policies he supports over the last eight years, voters have made it abundantly clear that it’s time to usher in a new generation of leaders who won’t act like doormats for Trump and Elon Musk. They see this party – just like our government and our economy – as captured by the wealthy few.
She must be readin’ my mail.
It’s The Lease We Can(‘t) Do. Featuring the AG, Carney and Meyer, The Joint Finance Committee and, wait for it, Buccini/Pollin. Can’t we just agree that not another penny of state money should go the operators of BucciniPollinville? Read the story. Marvel at the dysfunction and the dissembling.
What do you want to talk about?