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But why would Republicans get behind such a plan? Some astute political observers advise that when politicians appear to be promoting agendas against their own interest, follow the money.

Republicans (and red state Democrats) used to tell voters amazing things about their opposition to amnesty. Then they got elected and supported legislation that actually weakens border security and puts people on a path not just to legalization, but to citizenship, before ever securing our borders.

As U.S. President Donald Trump ramps up his attack on immigration, his executive order to cut federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities” protecting immigrants could face a number of legal and logistical loopholes.

The executive order signed on Wednesday orders federal agencies to withhold grant money from around 300 cities and counties that block local law enforcement from targeting undocumented immigrants, or as White House Press Secretary Sean Spice put it, “harbor illegal immigrants.” Spicer said that Trump will look at means to strip funding to cities and counties that “willfully refuse to comply” with his new plan to crack down on immigration, which also included ordering the construction of the infamous border wall between Mexico and the U.S. and increasing immigration authorities' power to deport people from the U.S., often without due process. These measures have sparked outrage among many immigrant rights organizations and caused city mayors to speak out against them. Opponents likely have the law on their side. Politico reported that the White House failed to consult the proper federal agencies and lawmakers before signing the executive orders. This means the orders are likely fraught with contradictions to current laws that can be easily exploited by opponents to dismantle them. The legal fight has already begun. Mayors of targeted cities are teaming up with immigration advocacy groups and attorneys to gear up for a legal battle against the presidential orders. Opponents of Trump’s order say that federal money allocated to cities can only be cut if the funding is directly linked to behavior that opposes the federal government’s plan for immigration.

Trump's plan to make police and other key services exempt from any funding cuts has also sparked legal debate. Trump had previously stated that even if a city was stripped of funding for non-compliance, police departments' funding would not be cut. Opponents also say that making police exempt would make it possible for a judge to deem parts of the order unconstitutional. Richard Doyle, city attorney in San Jose, California, argues that Trump cannot cut a city's funding for healthcare and education while protecting the police force from cuts because its function relates more closely to immigration enforcement, adding that it was uncertain whether only future or existing federal funding would be targeted under the order. Others have argued that there would be significant barriers and a long process for the federal government to cut off funding to sanctuary cities that would first have to go through states and local government where targeted jurisdictions have rights to appeal. Edward Waters from Feldesman Tucker Leifer Fidell in Washington told Reuters that for the Trump administration, “It’s fair to say that they don't understand the scope and reach of federal grants law.”

After President Trump signed two sweeping executive orders on immigration on Wednesday, most of the attention was on his plans to build a wall along the border with Mexico and to hold back money from “sanctuary cities.” But the most immediate effect may come from language about deportation priorities that is tucked into the border wall order. It offers an expansive definition of who is considered a criminal — a category of people Mr. Trump has said he would target for deportation. Immigration agents will now have wider latitude to enforce federal laws and are being encouraged to deport broad swaths of unauthorized immigrants.

Each presidential administration must decide who it considers a priority for deportation. Mr. Trump’s order focuses on anyone who has been charged with a criminal offense, even if it has not led to a conviction. He also includes, according to language in the order, anyone who has “committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense,” meaning anyone the authorities believe has broken any type of law — regardless of whether that person has been charged with a crime.Mr. Trump’s order also includes anyone who has engaged in “fraud or willful misrepresentation in connection with any official matter or application before a governmental agency,” a category that includes anyone who has used a false Social Security number to obtain a job, as many unauthorized immigrants do. Anyone who has received a final order to leave the country, but has not left, is also considered a priority.Finally, he allows the targeting of anyone who “in the judgment of an immigration officer” poses a risk to either public safety or national security. That gives immigration officers the broad authority they have been pressing for, and no longer requires them to receive a review from a supervisor before targeting individuals.

The order defines criminal loosely, and includes anyone who has crossed the border illegally — which is a criminal misdemeanor. Anyone who has abused any public benefits program is also considered a criminal under the order.The Obama administration, which deported nearly 400,000 people per year during its first five years, initially included those convicted of minor offenses such as shoplifting. But it later changed its policy to target primarily those who had been convicted of serious crimes, were considered national security threats or were recent arrivals. By the end of President Barack Obama’s time in office, around 90 percent of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants were not considered a priority for deportation. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, roughly 820,000 undocumented immigrants currently have a criminal record.

About 60,000 visas were revoked under U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily halting immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, the State Department said on Friday, in one of several government communications clarifying how the order is being rolled out.The revocation means the government voided travel visas for people trying to enter the United States but the visas could be restored later without a new application, said William Cocks, a spokesman for consular affairs at the State Department."We will communicate updates to affected travelers following the 90-day review," he said.Earlier news reports, citing a government attorney at a federal court hearing, put the figure at more than 100,000 visas.The government issued over 11 million immigrant and non-immigrant visas in fiscal year 2015, the State Department said.The immigration executive order signed by Trump a week ago temporarily halted the U.S. refugee program and imposed a 90-day suspension on people traveling from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Trump said the measures would help protect Americans from terrorist attacks.

If you’re reading this, you probably follow the news. So you’ve probably heard of the latest iteration of the “crisis at the border”: tens of thousands of children, many of them unaccompanied by an adult, crossing the desert from Mexico into the United States, where they surrender to the Border Patrol in hope of being allowed to remain here permanently. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention and hearing system has been overwhelmed by the surge of children and, in some cases, their parents. The Obama Administration has asked Congress to approve new funding to speed up processing and deportations of these illegal immigrants. Even if you’ve followed this story closely, you probably haven’t heard the depressing backstory — the reason so many Central Americans are sending their children on a dangerous thousand-mile journey up the spine of Mexico, where they ride atop freight trains, endure shakedowns by corrupt police and face rapists, bandits and other predators. (For a sense of what it’s like, check out the excellent 2009 film “Sin Nombre.”) NPR and other mainstream news outlets are parroting the White House, which blames unscrupulous “coyotes” (human smugglers) for “lying to parents, telling them that if they put their kids in the hands of traffickers and get to the United States that they will be able to stay.” True: the coyotes are saying that in order to gin up business. Also true: U.S. law has changed, and many of these kids have a strong legal case for asylum. Unfortunately, U.S. officials are ignoring the law.

The sad truth is that this “crisis at the border” is yet another example of “blowback.” Blowback is an unintended negative consequence of U.S. political, military and/or economic intervention overseas — when something we did in the past comes back to bite us in the ass. 9/11 is the classic example; arming and funding radical Islamists in the Middle East and South Asia who were less grateful for our help than angry at the U.S.’ simultaneous backing for oppressive governments (The House of Saud, Saddam, Assad, etc.) in the region. More recent cases include U.S. support for Islamist insurgents in Libya and Syria, which destabilized both countries and led to the murders of U.S. consular officials in Benghazi, and the rise of ISIS, the guerilla army that imperils the U.S.-backed Maliki regime in Baghdad, respectively. Confusing the issue for casual American news consumers is that the current border crisis doesn’t involve the usual Mexicans traveling north in search of work. Instead, we’re talking about people from Central American nations devastated by a century of American colonialism and imperialism, much of that intervention surprisingly recent. Central American refugees are merely transiting through Mexico.

“The unaccompanied children crossing the border into the United States are leaving behind mainly three Central American countries, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. The first two are among the world’s most violent and all three have deep poverty, according to a Pew Research report based on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) information,” reports NBC News. “El Salvador ranked second in terms of homicides in Latin America in 2011, and it is still high on the list. Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador are among the poorest nations in Latin America. Thirty percent of Hondurans, 17 percent of Salvadorans and 26 percent of Guatemalans live on less than $2 a day.” The fact that Honduras is the biggest source of the exodus jumped out at me. That’s because, in 2009, the United States government — under President Obama — tacitly supported a military coup that overthrew the democratically elected president of Honduras. “Washington has a very close relationship with the Honduran military, which goes back decades,” The Guardian noted at the time. “During the 1980s, the US used bases in Honduras to train and arm the Contras, Nicaraguan paramilitaries who became known for their atrocities in their war against the Sandinista government in neighbouring Nicaragua.”

Despite an international uproar and condemnation by President Obama and nearly all of those running for the presidency, Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims coming to the United States has the support of a sizable majority of Republicans – and a plurality of all voters. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 66% of Likely Republican Voters favor a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the United States until the federal government improves its ability to screen out potential terrorists from coming here. Just 24% oppose the plan, with 10% undecided. Among all voters, 46% favor a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, while 40% are opposed. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, proposed the ban following last week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California. Sixty-five percent (65%) of voters believe the two shooters in the incident were radical Islamic terrorists. Those individuals had entered the United States without problem and escaped detection despite several actions here suggesting that they had violent intentions. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters believe it is too easy for foreigners to legally enter the Untied States. Only 10% believe it is too hard, while 23% say the level of difficulty is about right. Still, when thinking about immigration policy in general, 59% also feel that the United States should treat all potential immigrants equally, down only slightly from June. Thirty percent (30%) think the United States should allow more immigrants from some countries than others, a finding that’s changed very from past surveying.  Eleven percent (11%) are not sure. Late last month – and prior to the mass murders in San Bernardino, Trump said he would support government tracking of Muslims living in the United States through a federal database, a plan his fellow GOP rivals said was going too far. But at that time, one-in-three voters - and a slight plurality of Republicans – supported government monitoring of Muslims.

A federal judge in Los Angeles has ordered the U.S. government to allow people holding immigrant visas from seven majority-Muslim nations into the United States despite President Trump's executive order banning them.In a temporary restraining order issued late Tuesday, Judge Andre Birotte Jr. ordered the government not to cancel any validly obtained immigrant visas or bar anyone from the seven nations holding them from entering the U.S.But it was unclear whether the order will have any effect. The State Department ordered all visas from the seven countries revoked on Friday, and the government has maintained that orders similar to Birotte's do not apply because the visas are no longer valid.The State Department declined comment Wednesday on Birotte's order, saying it does not comment on pending litigation.

Gartland said two major airlines have turned them down but they are trying to work with smaller airlines that will follow Birotte's order."These are all children, parents and the spouses of U.S. citizens," Goldberg told The Associated Press from the Horn of Africa nation, emphasizing that those stranded are not refugees, though Yemen is engulfed in civil war. They received visas last week, she said.

Geert Wilders, who is often called “the Dutch Donald Trump,” will not necessarily head the government even if he wins the most seats in parliament. But he has taught the current Prime Minister Mark Rutte to pit Dutch voters against immigrants and their children.The American right’s favorite Islamophobe and a columnist for Breitbart news, Wilders is campaigning with the slogan, “The Netherlands Ours Again.” He promises to close all mosques and ban the Qur’an. He also calls for “Nexit” — the Netherlands leaving the European Union.In the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union (Brexit) and Trump’s election as US president, the world is obsessing over Dutch polls to see if “Trumpism” will score a victory in The Netherlands, one of the world’s most democratic countries.Wilders’s anti-Islamic, anti-EU and anti-immigration Party for Freedom (PVV) is in a tight race for the lead with Rutte’s center-right People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). At a minimum, Wilders will likely add to his seats in parliament after the March 15 polls. About 40% of voters are undecided, giving hope to Dutch progressives that a left-wing coalition is still possible.

It is Rutte, in office since 2010, who has the best chance of forming a new government. Veering right, he is now competing with Wilders to articulate the feelings of a so-called “silent majority,” saying immigrant youth should fit in or pleur op (“fuck off”).The Dutch elections are the first in 2017’s super election year in Europe, with far-right parties in many countries campaigning on an anti-immigrant and anti-EU platform. The next test for populism, only a month away, will be in France, where the far-right leader Marine Le Pen seeks to become president. Germany’s Chancellor, Angela Merkel, faces elections in September and could lose to a challenger from the left.

If Wilders gains power, he says the first thing he will do is hold a Brexit-style referendum. Leaving the European Union, the world’s biggest economic trading bloc, would hardly seem to make sense for the Netherlands, a small country that has grown wealthy off trade.Still, a new opinion poll confirms that the Dutch are falling out of love with the EU. It shows a slight majority actually favor Nexit if EU membership could be replaced with “bilateral trade relations.”It should not be forgotten that the Dutch voted down the 2005 EU constitution, which later became the Lisbon Treaty. They also rejected, by a wide margin, an EU treaty with Ukraine in a referendum last spring.

I sat in the first class section of the Acela Express once from New York to Washington. I was on a book tour and the publisher was whisking me from New York to DC for events. Thomas Freidman sat diagonally from me. His single seat backed up to where the First Class Stewards worked. As the train pulled into DC, the overworked steward hadn’t taken Friedman’s tray. Friedman yelled angrily about this being why the nation was collapsing. I kid you not. I was the tipster. First Class of the Acela Express has more to do with what is wrong with America than the Steward who works there. The New York-Washington bubble remains largely disconnected from the rest of the country. When last I made that point, Dylan Byers of the Politico tweeted along the lines of this being as preposterous as the French claiming Paris truly wasn’t France. Of course, de Gaulle popularized the notion of La France profounde — that Paris really wasn’t indicative of the rest of the country.

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that purports to bar for at least 90 days almost all permanent immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria and Iraq, and asserts the power to extend the ban indefinitely.But the order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin.

resident Trump is expected to sign orders Friday to temporarily freeze immigration from seven Muslim nations and halt refugee resettlements from everywhere — a classic example of a solution in search of problem, and just the kind of symbolic act that gives weight to radical Islamists when they argue that the U.S. is an enemy of their faith. Trump’s campaign for president was built on a foundation of fear and resentment, and that dark cloud hangs over these putative attempts to bolster national security. Based on a draft version of the executive order, it seems that Trump will impose a 30-day suspension of visas for people from seven predominately Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — while the government reviews and presumably tightens its visa-vetting protocols. He also will direct security officials to determine within 30 days what information they need to evaluate potential visitors, and list the countries around the world that don’t provide it. Countries that don’t correct the error of their ways within 60 days of that report — including the seven affected by the ban — will have their citizens barred until they comply. Worse, Trump apparently plans to suspend U.S. acceptance of all refugees — people fleeing war or oppression for whom returning home is not an option — for 120 days as the government reviews and revises its screening procedures, and he is expected to slash the number of refugees the U.S. would accept through October 2017 from 110,000 (set by President Obama last September) to 50,000. Trump also will prioritize the resettlement of refugees seeking asylum on grounds of religious persecution, officially valuing people oppressed because of their religion over those targeted for political dissent, sexual orientation or other reasons. 

And Trump wants plans drawn for “safe areas” for Syrians within Syria or nearby nations, which could help the administration at a later point if it wants to institute a longer-term ban on Syrian refugees. But the draft order offers no details on how the safe zones would be secured, or the legal basis for the U.S. establishing control of territory in a sovereign (if war-torn) state.  Such efforts to restrict access to the U.S. by people fleeing war-torn parts of the world would be misguided and inhumane. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, reported in 2015 that in the 14 years after the 9/11 terror attacks, 784,000 refugees resettled in the U.S. Yet during that time only three resettled refugees were convicted on terror-related charges — two of them for plotting against an overseas target and the third for hatching “plans that were barely credible,” according to the report. The vast majority of refugees allowed into the U.S. are first vetted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose screeners then recommend placements in third countries. When the U.S. gets a referral, it conducts its own security screening before offering resettlement, a process that routinely takes one to two years.

What’s more, a study by the New America Foundation shows that 80% of the terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11 have been carried out by American citizens (although some of those perpetrators were naturalized citizens). It is not surprising that some Americans are worried by the hostility directed at them from a small, radicalized segment of the Islamic world. But such fears should not be channeled into a broad, discriminatory retrenchment that is at odds with the best of our humanitarian principles — especially if that retrenchment would likely do little to protect us. The U.S. became a wealthy world power in large part through immigration. And it’s openness has provided a lifeline to the oppressed of the world — the U.S. has formally resettled more refugees than any other country (though at the moment it is not bearing its fair share of the burden of resettling the tens of millions of migrants currently fleeing war zones). Trump’s actions are not only inhumane, they are a betrayal of what the United States stands for. 

The figures are staggering. In what looks like a vast population transfer from a disintegrating Greater Middle East, nearly 200,000 refugees passed through Austria in September alone. About half a million desperate refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere have arrived in Greece since 2015 began (those, that is, who don’t die at sea), and the numbers are only expected to rise. Seven hundred children a day have been claiming asylum somewhere in Europe (190,000 between January and September 2015). And at least three million refugees and migrants from the planet’s war and desperation zones are expected to head for Europe in 2016. Under the circumstances, I’m sure it won’t surprise you that, once the first upbeat stories about welcoming European crowds had died down, the truncheons and water cannons came out in some parts of the continent and the walls began to go up. Nor, I’m sure, will you be shocked to learn that an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim fervor is now gripping parts of Europe, while far-right parties are, not coincidentally, on the rise.  This is true in France, where Marine Le Pen’s virulently anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-European-Union National Front is expected to make significant gains in local elections this winter (and Le Pen herself is leading early opinion polls in the race for the presidency), while in “tolerant” Sweden a far-right party with neo-Nazi ties is garnering more than 25% of the prospective vote in opinion polls. In Poland, an extreme party wielding anti-refugee rhetoric just swept into power. And so it goes across much of Europe these days.

All of this (and more) represents a stunning development that could, sooner or later, reverse the increasingly integrated nature of Europe, raise walls and barriers across the continent, and irreversibly fracture the European Union, while increasing nationalistic fervor and god knows what else. In the United States, in a somewhat more muted way, you can see similar developments in what’s being talked about here as an “outsider” election, but is, in fact, significantly focused on keeping outsiders separated from insiders. (Just Google Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and immigrants, and you'll see what I mean.) Isn’t it strange how we always speak of the “tribal” when it comes to Africa or the backlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but never when it comes to our world? And yet, if these aren’t, broadly speaking, “tribal” responses, what are?

It didn’t take long for Republican presidential candidates to stake out strikingly anti-Muslim immigration positions following the terrorist attacks in Paris that left at least 129 people dead and over 300 injured. French flags were flown and moments of silence observed across the U.S. and around the world, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Sen. Marco (R-FL), Ben Carson, and Donald Trump decided it was an opportunity to stoke anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fears. The anti-immigrant and Islamophobic comments led President Obama, speaking from the G20 summit in Turkey, to denounce the statements as “shameful.” Cruz claimed that “there is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror” so the U.S. should focus on admitting displaced Christians, but it was “lunacy” to allow Muslim refugees into the country. Rubio outright rejected accepting any Syrian refugees into the U.S. because “there’s no way to background check” them. Ben Carson said that accepting Syrian refugees into the U.S. would require “a suspension of intellect.” Donald Trump, doubling down on his anti-immigrant campaign platform, warned that Syrian refugees could be “one of the great Trojan horses.” Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal called for sealing the U.S. border, and Sen. David Vitter (R-LA) started a petition to stop Syrian refugees from entering Louisiana.

The comments from Republicans led Obama, speaking to the press at the close of the G-20 Summit today in Antalya, Turkey, to hit back against the growing sentiment on the right to only allow Christian refugees into the country. Obama pointed to the hypocrisy of politicians who “themselves come from families who benefited from protection when they were fleeing political prosecution,” a jab at Rubio and Cruz, both of whom are the children of Cuban immigrants to the U.S. “We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” said Obama, adding that “while I had a lot of disagreements with President George W. Bush on policy, but I was very proud after 9/11 when he was adamant and clear about the fact that this is not a war on Islam.” Watch Obama’s comments here:

The Trump administration on Tuesday sued California over its sanctuary policies for undocumented immigrants, setting off a chorus of near-unanimous defiance from California lawmakers.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday evening in the U.S. Eastern District of California, marks a turning point in the ongoing battle between the Trump administration and state and local jurisdictions over how far cities and states can go to block their officers from enforcing federal immigration law. The suit targets three California laws – Senate Bill 54, Assembly bill 450 and Assembly bill 103 – that the federal government say violate the supremacy clause of the U.S. Constitution and interfere with the enforcement of federal immigration laws.

“The Trump administration is now going on the offense and is going to use any tools in its tool box to enforce immigration laws,” said a U.S. source who has spoken about the plans with senior administration officials. “They have no expectation in winning in District Court or the 9th Circuit. This is a case that is intended to be ultimately successful in the Supreme Court.”

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians. The source of the data is not named in the contract, but an ICE representative said the data came from Vigilant Solutions, the leading network for license plate recognition data. “Like most other law enforcement agencies, ICE uses information obtained from license plate readers as one tool in support of its investigations,” spokesperson Dani Bennett said in a statement. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database through this contract.”

While it collects few photos itself, Vigilant Solutions has amassed a database of more than 2 billion license plate photos by ingesting data from partners like vehicle repossession agencies and other private groups. Vigilant also partners with local law enforcement agencies, often collecting even more data from camera-equipped police cars. The result is a massive vehicle-tracking network generating as many as 100 million sightings per month, each tagged with a date, time, and GPS coordinates of the sighting.

ICE agents would be able to query that database in two ways. A historical search would turn up every place a given license plate has been spotted in the last five years, a detailed record of the target’s movements. That data could be used to find a given subject’s residence or even identify associates if a given car is regularly spotted in a specific parking lot. “Knowing the previous locations of a vehicle can help determine the whereabouts of subjects of criminal investigations or priority aliens to facilitate their interdiction and removal,” an official privacy assessment explains. “In some cases, when other leads have gone cold, the availability of commercial LPR data may be the only viable way to find a subject.” ICE agents can also receive instantaneous email alerts whenever a new record of a particular plate is found — a system known internally as a “hot list.” (The same alerts can also be funneled to the Vigilant’s iOS app.) According to the privacy assessment, as many as 2,500 license plates could be uploaded to the hot list in a single batch, although the assessment does not detail how often new batches can be added. With sightings flooding in from police dashcams and stationary readers on bridges and toll booths, it would be hard for anyone on the list to stay unnoticed for long. Those powers are particularly troubling given ICE’s recent move to expand deportations beyond criminal offenders, fueling concerns of politically motivated enforcement. In California, state officials have braced for rumored deportation sweeps targeted at sanctuary cities. In New York, community leaders say they’ve been specifically targeted for deportation as a result of their activism. With automated license plate recognition, that targeting would only grow more powerful. For civil liberties groups, the implications go far beyond immigration.