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Javier E

Who Is a 'Criminal'? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • While President Barack Obama set deportation priorities by making a distinction between undocumented immigrants with serious criminal convictions and everyone else, Trump’s executive orders vastly expand the criminal category — so much so that it essentially criminalizes anyone in the country who is without status and makes the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States a top priority for deportation
  • Between January and March of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21,362 immigrants, a 32.6 percent increase from the same period last year. Of those arrested, 5,441 of them had no history of violating a law.
  • To test the severity of that position, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., confessed to a crime — driving 60 miles an hour in a 55-mile-an-hour zone many years ago without being caught. He then asked if a person who had not disclosed such an incident in his citizenship application could have his citizenship revoked. The lawyer answered, yes.
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  • There was “indignation and incredulity” expressed by the members of the Court. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy told the lawyer, “Your argument is demeaning the priceless value of citizenship.” Roberts put it simply. If the administration has its way, he said, “the government will have the opportunity to denaturalize anyone they want.”
  • EXILE FROM ONE’S HOME is historically considered one of the worst punishments the state could employ; it was, after all, one of the traditional Greek and Roman punishments for murder, their alternative to the death penalty
  • To drag someone out of the life they have painstakingly created over many years, for something as petty as traffic violations or shoplifting, is a gross violation of the proportionality principle — that the punishment should fit the crime.
  • Human rights by their nature apply to both citizens and noncitizens alike. It is difficult to see why deportation for such violations is not also a human rights violation. How, then, have so many of us accepted these policies so at odds with our American values?
  • The word “criminal” has a literal meaning, of course, but it also has a resonant meaning — people who by their nature are insensitive to society’s norms, drawn to violate the law by self-interest or malice. We do not generally use the term to describe those who may have inadvertently broken a law
  • Someone who runs to catch a bus is not necessarily a runner; someone who commits a crime is not necessarily a criminal.
  • Politicians who describe people as “criminals” are imputing to them permanent character traits that are frightening to most people, while simultaneously positioning themselves as our protectors
  • Deliberately obscuring the crucial distinction between someone who violates a law and someone whose character leads them to repeatedly commit serious crimes is an effective strategy for masking gross injustice.
  • Our current administration is vigorously employing that strategy, and history suggests that it is rarely constrained to just one group. If we look away when the state brands someone a criminal, who among us then remains safe?
Javier E

Opinion | How Germany Became Mean - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Germany occupies a special place in the international imagination. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the difficulties of reunification, the country acquired a reputation as a leader of the free world. Economically prosperous, politically stable and more welcoming to immigrants than most other countries, the Germans — many thought — had really learned their lesson.
  • The past few months have been a bit of a rude awakening. The economy is stuttering and a constitutional court ruling has upended the government’s spending plans
  • The far-right Alternative for Germany party, fresh from success in two regional elections, is cementing itself as the country’s second-most-popular party.
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  • Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.
  • And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.
  • The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.
  • The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.
  • The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect
  • Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.
  • the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position
  • The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.
  • politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda
  • When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”
  • More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.
  • everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”
  • In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.
  • Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks
  • it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.
  • Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.
  • Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.
  • The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.
  • Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.
  • German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.
  • Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.
  • The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.
  • Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”
  • It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction
  • Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.
abbykleman

Americans adopted this South Korean man when he was 3. Now 41, he's being deported. - 0 views

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    Adam Crapser was born in South Korea, but, when he was three years old, an American couple adopted him. Until recently, he lived in Vancouver, Wash., with his daughters and his pregnant wife. He has a son by an ex-girlfriend.
alexdeltufo

Donald Trump's Economic Ideas Would Destroy the American Economy - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • "I've borrowed knowing that you can pay back with discounts," he told CNBC. "I would borrow knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.”
  • Trump has promised to make America great again. But a closer look his policy proposals, such as they are, suggests that within his first few years as president, he would more likely make American recessionary again.
  • Meanwhile, he has no plans to cut spending on Medicare, Medicaid, benefits for veterans, defense, or Social Security, which, along with mandatory payments on the debt,
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  • AAF’s analysis found, with the worst of the slump occurring in industries like construction and hospitality.
  • Here is Trumponomics, in a sentence: Create an unnecessary economic downturn by deporting 7 million workers while cutting taxes for the rich and requiring the United States to borrow trillions of dollars from creditors,
  • When interest rates were historically low and infrastructure spending was attractive, Republicans called for deficit reductions.
  • Like so much of his candidacy, those ideas are a joke—one that the country is civically obligated to take seriously.
Javier E

Why Trump Was Inevitable by Ronald B. Rapoport | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

  • Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants and Muslims have been at the center of his campaign
  • how did his positions and comments play with Republican primary voters?
  • overwhelming majorities of likely Republican voters supported his positions: almost three quarters (73 percent) favored banning Muslims from entering the US, 90 percent favored identifying and deporting illegal immigrants as quickly as possible, and 85 percent favored building a wall on the Mexican border.
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  • large majorities of likely Republican voters who did not support Trump for the nomination did support Trump’s positions on his three central issues. Almost two thirds favored his proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US and four fifths favored building the wall and identifying and deporting illegal immigrants. In fact 60 percent of non-Trump supporters took his position on all three of his distinctive issues.
  • regardless of how successful he is in unifying the Republican Party behind his candidacy in the future, Donald Trump was already very close to being the inevitable nominee in January 2016.
marleymorton

Deported mom's kids prepare to face Trump - 0 views

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    In a matter of hours, the teenagers plan to be inside, in the same room as the president they blame for their mother's deportation. Two Arizona lawmakers invited them to be their guests when President Trump addresses a joint session of Congress. The teenagers took their first-ever flight to be here.
Javier E

In central California, it's neighbour versus neighbour on Trump | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Maddox’s confidence in Trump is rooted in a sense that finally someone is paying attention. She takes his bucking of protocol and decorum as evidence that he doesn’t play by the rules, and she likes that because so far as she concerned the rules have been fixed against people like her.
  • So do I think Trump’s going to do it? Probably not to accommodate everybody. Something he does to stimulate the lower class and the middle class obviously it’s going to somehow affect the upper class.”
  • At a different time, the Democrats might have represented the best hope of making this possible. But a good number of Porterville’s low-income voters saw a choice between two multimillionaires and decided Trump had the virtue of a plan. Maddox is not fazed by the fact that the new president has stuffed his administration with billionaires and some of those same types of big businessmen – led by a raft of former Goldman Sachs executives – responsible for some of the practices that have driven the country’s wealth in to the hands of the few.
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  • She said Trump would set the agenda and needed people with inside knowledge to reform the system. Maddox sees other criticisms as part of the same howl of anger at Trump’s victory from what she regards as a privileged and entitled liberal establishment.
  • “They’re saying all those who supported him are stupid white men. Do they understand the lives of underprivileged people? They’re living in these $10m penthouses in New York. Come live down with the people here that are struggling and lucky if they can pay for a house that’s a $100,000. Knock yourself off your pedestal and bring yourself down here. You’re going to think people here live in poverty, but people down here make the best of what they have,” she said. “Just because you don’t have the boo-coo dollars they have over there does not make you an ignorant person. Does not make you incapable of making rational decisions.”
  • Every man on this planet at some point has said something vulgar or inappropriate about a woman. And if they say they haven’t, they’re liars. Honestly, what he says to his buddies doesn’t affect me in the least,” she said. “I could care less what he did personally. That has nothing to do with me. That doesn’t affect me. What I care about is what he’s going to do professionally.”
  • Like many of the estimated 3 million undocumented immigrants in California, they live near the poverty line without the social protections available to American citizens. The Galvans rely on a local clinic offering affordable care to low-income families. Luis Galvan faced navigating life without documents which, at best, meant stunted expectations and the constant fear of arrest.
  • Then in 2012, Obama issued an executive order lifting the threat of deportation for undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US before they were 16 and granting them work permits. More than 750,000 “Dreamers” have applied for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, popularly known as Daca, liberating them from life in the shadows and offering hope of a future beyond labouring in the fields. Galvan’s Daca authorisation opened the door to a place in college to train as a teacher.
  • Although he is not likely to be an immediate target for deportation, Galvan also worries that the immigration service now knows where to find his family from the Daca application. He says his father fears the worst and is saving money to buy land in Mexico ready to return.
  • “I have an uncle that’s packing already. He’s like: ‘I’m going. I’m sorry but I don’t want to deal with this stuff. It’s going to get worse.’ I was trying to calm down but he said no. He has a lot of kids, all US citizens. They’re all going back to Mexico,” said Galvan. “A lot of people are making an escape plan.”
Javier E

Seeking President, No Experience Necessary - The New York Times - 0 views

  • According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, Republicans prefer an outsider to a candidate with experience in the political system by a 24-point margin (60 to 36). People who would never board an airplane piloted by a person who has never flown before, or even used a flight simulator, apparently want to elect as president someone who has never served in public office.
  • More than at any point in recent times, then, the Republican Party — large parts of it, at least — is moving in the direction of insularity, defensiveness and discomfort with people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Many on the right now see things as a pitched battle between “us” and “the other.”
  • All of this presents a serious threat to the Republican Party. A party that is already at a disadvantage in presidential elections is on course to alienate huge numbers of nonwhite voters, including some of the fastest-rising demographic groups in America. Four years ago, Republican presidential candidates were talking about self-deportation and electrified fences; today the front-runner is talking about forced deportation, ending birthright citizenship and calling for a “pause” on green cards issued to foreign workers.
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  • The struggle within the Republican Party right now centers on those who, figuratively speaking, want to rebuild the village and those who want to burn it down, those who want to fight irresistible demographic changes and those who want to responsibly embrace them, those who think they can win over new Americans and those who want to turn them away
Javier E

The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin | Hoover Institution - 0 views

  • All told, some fourteen million people are estimated to have died as a result of these atrocities; to put this number into context, it is two million more than the total number of German and Soviet soldiers killed in battle and over thirteen million more than American losses in all of its foreign wars combined.
  • The Holocaust was a unique historical event, the causes of which were distinctive. But it’s precisely because it occurred alongside other wide-scale horrors that Snyder is right to “test the proposition that deliberate and direct mass murder by these two regimes in the bloodlands is a distinct phenomenon worthy of separate treatment.”
  • Both ideologically and practically, Stalinism gave rise to Hitler. This was thanks to Soviet communism’s absolutist and totalitarian nature, which gave Hitler all the evidence he needed that nothing less than the full militarization of society was required to confront the eastern menace. Similarly, Stalin’s paranoid worldview directly contributed to policies which only emboldened Hitler. Stalin instructed German communists to treat their Social Democratic countrymen as “social fascists,” leading to fractures on the German left that ultimately gave way for Hitler’s ascent. This hothouse geopolitical environment created, as Hobsbawm would later put it, an “Age of Extremes.”
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  • Despite the images of walking skeletons that greeted American liberators at Buchenwald, the full enormity of the Holocaust was not fully appreciated, even in the Western world, until relatively recently, for the simple reason that “the Americans and the British liberated no part of Europe that had a very significant Jewish population before the war, and saw none of the German death facilities.” Those facilities, and the fields in which the Germans exterminated the vast majority of their Jewish victims, lay in the bloodlands, which were conquered by the Soviets.
  • But it was in Belarus where the conflagration between Nazis and Soviets, and between collaborationists and partisans, was greatest. By the end of the war, Snyder writes, a full half of the country’s population had either been killed or deported.
  • To this day, the populations of the former Soviet Bloc, and some elements of their intelligentsia, have yet to come to terms with their historical complicity in the Holocaust, painting their ancestors as victims, which indeed many of them no doubt were, while ignoring the fact that many were erstwhile collaborators.
  • The Nazi plan to eliminate the Jewish race — a plan which it executed often with the gleeful participation of local collaborators who needed no prompting in rounding up and murdering their Jewish neighbors — is today being downplayed so that Soviet crimes loom larger.
  • “the vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.” Their murders were personal affairs in that they involved soldiers firing bullets into their bodies; death did not take place within a closed chamber and the murderers saw the faces of their victims. Most of the killing took place in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.
  • The perverse irony of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s desire to conquer the bloodlands was that by expanding their empires they diversified them. Suddenly, they had a whole lot of foreigners living under their domain, who would need to be pacified. And so the solution to this problem would have to be the liquidation of massive numbers of people.
  • What has allowed the Soviet Union to escape the same sort of historical reproach as Nazi Germany is that its killing was carried out in the furtherance of various causes — absolute economic equality, the preservation of a dictatorship, the collectivization of agriculture — that are not commonly considered to exist on the same moral plane as a theory of racial superiority. “In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself,” Snyder explains.
  • Academics, journalists and political leaders in this region, particularly in the Baltic states, have put forward a “double genocide” approach to understanding this period of European history, which, unlike the more nuanced take of Snyder (who, while placing the Stalinist and Nazi regimes alongside each other as subjects of historical inquiry, does not equate them in terms of moral depravity), is explicitly political.
  • Snyder reports that the Nazis deliberately killed upwards of eleven million; for the Soviets during the Stalin period the figure was between six and nine million. On the Soviet side, these numbers are far less than what had originally been believed, due to the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives in the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
  • This historical airbrushing amounts to “Holocaust obfuscation,” in the words of the academic Dovid Katz, which, he writes, “tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.” Last year, for instance, the Lithuanian government passed a law making it illegal to deny that the actions of the Soviet Union in Lithuania constitute “genocide,” as it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
  • But his acknowledgement that the period of 1933 to 1945 was marked by several genocides, rather than a single one, does not lead him to promote the “double genocide” theory. Snyder has written elsewhere that “The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated.” It is morally specious to compare the Jewish Holocaust to the Soviet “genocide” of Balts or Poles or Ukrainians, awful as the experiences of these peoples were, because of the inherently different nature of the methods the Soviet and Nazi regimes used against their subject populations. The Soviet Union had many local collaborators throughout its occupied and satellite territories. And while the Nazis also had collaborators during their occupation of the Baltic States, there was never any room for a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi project.
  • Though Stalin’s murder campaigns were, in many cases, predicated on ethnic antagonism, the difference is that the Soviets did not exterminate for extermination’s own sake. Once Stalin’s discrete policies had been achieved (the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, for instance), the mass murder stopped, and the Soviet Union eventually wound down its widescale deportations and mass killings in the mid- 1950s. Had Hitler’s  regime, with its animalistic understanding of human nature, lasted beyond 1945, its mass murder and terror would not have decreased. For these tactics were not just means but ends; they were the very lifeblood, the weltanschauung, of nazism itself.
  • The crucial factor one must consider in evaluating these two strains of totalitarianism is their competing long-term visions, and the policies that were required to execute them. Classifying Stalin’s various murder campaigns (alongside Nazi policies towards Roma, gays, educated Poles and Soviet citizens in Belarus and Ukraine) as “genocides,” which Snyder does, while also singling out the Holocaust as the worst of them all, is not mutually exclusive.
  • Bloodlands is an incredibly original work. It seeks to redirect our understanding of the Holocaust as primarily an eastern phenomenon, and one which took place among a spate of mass killing policies. When popular interest in the Holocaust and an “international collective memory” of it began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, it focused almost exclusively on the experience of German and West European Jews, the wealthiest and most assimilated on the continent, who died in far smaller numbers than did the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States, who were nearly eradicated. “Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history,”
sgardner35

Marco Rubio's Policies Might Shut the Door to People Like His Grandfather - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Marco Rubio’s Policies Might Shut the Door to People Like His Grandfather
  • Pedro Victor Garcia had left behind a home and a job with the government in communist Cuba, intent on never returning.
  • immigration officials stopped him.
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  • “I always thought of being here in the United States as a resident, living permanently here,” the slight 62-year-old grandfather, speaking through an interpreter, said at a hearing five weeks later.
  • The immigration officer was unmoved. He did not see an exiled family man — just someone who had no visa, worked for the Castro government and could pose a security risk.
  • “It is ordered that the applicant be excluded and deported from the United States,”
  • As he campaigns for president, Mr. Rubio, a Florida senator, says that the United States cannot accept refugees from Syria and Iraq because of the potential security risk
  • has called for a tightening of immigration law so that if the United States cannot identify with 100 percent certainty who immigrants are and why they want to enter, he says, “We’re not going to let you in.”
  • But under the stricter screening he now supports, his grandfather would most likely have been deported, depriving him of knowing the man he has called his mentor and closest boyhood friend.
  • Despite Mr. Garcia’s insistence that he was fleeing oppression, immigration officials raised suspicions that he might harbor communist sympathies, the records reveal.
  • In an interview, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that some would see a conflict between the stricter immigration and refugee policies he supports and his grandfather’s experience.
  • But Mr. Rubio said the difference between then and now is how much more sophisticated foreign infiltrators like the Islamic State have become, and how dangerous they are.
  • “I recognize that’s a valid point,” the senator said, “But what you didn’t have was a widespread effort on behalf of Fidel Castro to infiltrate into the United States killers who were going to detonate weapons and kill people.”
  • He says at the hearing that what made him decide he wanted to leave for the United States to join his wife and seven daughters, one of whom was Oria, Mr. Rubio’s now 85-year-old mother, was when Castro confirmed suspicions that he was a Marxist.
jongardner04

Germany Now Paying For Migrants To Go Home - 0 views

  • Failed asylum seekers in Germany are voluntarily returning home, but only because the government is paying them.
  • The Federal Government has set aside some €2.14 million to pay for voluntary repatriations, which includes travel subsidies of €200 per person, although this does not include people who have entered Germany without a visa.
  • The figures come as Germany tightens its asylum laws, allowing for faster deportation and classifying the Balkan nations of Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro as “safe”, thus making it more difficult for people from those countries to claim asylum, and much easier to deport them.
katyshannon

Growing scale of Cologne attacks stokes German debate on migrants | Reuters - 0 views

  • Attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year's Eve have prompted more than 600 criminal complaints, with police suspicion resting on asylum seekers, putting pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open door migrant policy.
  • The attacks, mostly targeting women and ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have prompted a highly-charged debate in Germany about its welcoming stance for refugees and migrants, more than one million of whom arrived last year.
  • The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted Germany's justice minister Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated.
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  • Merkel's popularity has dwindled as she refused to place a limit on the influx of refugees.
  • In Cologne, police said on Sunday that 516 criminal complaints had been filed by individuals or groups in relation to assaults on New Year's Eve, while police in Hamburg said 133 similar charges had been lodged with the north German city.
  • Frankfurt also registered complaints, although far fewer.
  • The investigation in Cologne is focused largely on asylum seekers or illegal migrants from north Africa, police said. They arrested one 19-year-old Moroccan man on Saturday evening.
  • In Cologne, where a 100-strong force of officers continued their investigations, around 40 percent of the complaints included sexual offences, including two rapes.
  • The attacks, which prompted violent far-right protests on Saturday, threatens to further erode confidence in Merkel, and could stoke support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of three key state elections in March.
  • The debate on migration will be further fueled by the acknowledgement by the authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia that a man shot dead as he tried to enter a Paris police station last week was an asylum seeker with seven identities who lived in Germany.
  • A survey sponsored by state broadcaster ARD showed that while 75 percent of those asked were very happy with Merkel's work in April last year, only 58 percent were pleased now.
  • Almost three quarters of those polled said migration was the most important issue for the government to deal with in 2016.
  • The Cologne attacks also heated up the debate on immigration in neighboring Austria.
  • There had been a handful of similar incidents in the border city of Salzburg. "Such offenders should be deported," she said, backing a similar suggestion by Merkel.
  • Swiss media contained numerous stories about sexual assaults on women by foreigners, fuelling tensions ahead of a referendum next month that would trigger the automatic deportation of foreigners convicted of some crimes.
  • The anti-Islam PEGIDA, whose supporters threw bottles and fire crackers at a march in Cologne on Saturday before being dispersed by riot police, will later hold a rally in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
  • The far-right will likely seize on reports that the Paris attacker, who was shot last week as he wielded a meat cleaver and shouted "Allahu akbar" (God is Greatest), was known to police for drug dealing and harassing women.
  • He had an apartment in an accommodation center for asylum seekers in Recklinghausen, north of Cologne, where he had painted the symbol of Islamic state on the wall of two rooms.
malonema1

Someone please remind Trump that he ended DACA - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • (CNN)The world's most listless and impotent -- err, "greatest" -- deliberative body shelved further debate over the future of DACA more than three weeks ago, after senators voted down four proposals, one of which didn't address the question at all, over the course of about an hour. Even with a pair of court decisions delaying its expiration date, which was supposed to hit on Monday, the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is now rolling downhill to collapse. Nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants, brought into the country -- the only home many of them have ever known -- as minors, will over the coming months, or weeks, lose their shield against deportation. Some already have.
  • DACA is ending because Trump ended it.
  • What's more, Trump had every opportunity to both protect DACA recipients on the brink and deliver on his dearest campaign trail promise. Democratic lawmakers had been largely willing to exchange billions of dollars for border wall construction in exchange for some kind of legislation to save DACA and the "dreamers," a wider swath of the mostly young, DACA-eligible undocumented immigrants.
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  • The two sides retreated from their brief visit to the bargaining table and, as of now, seem happy enough to cede the decision to some combination of the courts and voters in November. On the strategic front, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense for Trump and Republicans, who are expected to see their grip on Congress loosen in 2019.
Javier E

Too Radical for France, a Muslim Clergyman Faces Deportation - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Macron has already used his huge majority in Parliament to inscribe into law some government tactics — searches and seizures, house arrests, shutting down mosques — that had been applied before only as part of the state of emergency put in place after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people in November 2015.
  • The case of Imam Doudi, 63, who was born in Algeria and is not a French citizen, is part of a high-profile effort by the Macron administration to intensify scrutiny of Muslim clerics and, in some cases, to deport them. Some analysts say that Mr. Macron is using it to display toughness, as European governments struggle for tools to battle radical Islam, and as he fends off political challenges from the far right.
  • “They want to make an example of him,” said Vincent Geisser, an Islam expert at the University of Aix-Marseille. “It’s got more to do with communicating firmness.”
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  • The expulsion of Imam Doudi was recommended by the Marseille authorities under a French law regarding “deliberate acts tending to provoke discrimination, hatred and violence toward an individual or a group.”
  • Here and elsewhere in France, Salafism is increasingly seen as the enemy, a menacing way-station to terrorism. Five members of Imam Doudi’s flock left to fight jihad in Syria, the police say, though the imam denies knowing them.
  • His sermons are “exactly contrary to the values of the Republic,” said Marseille’s prefect of police, Olivier de Mazières, a terrorism specialist who has led the case against the cleric, in an interview in his office. “We think he’s preaching hatred, discrimination, violence.”
  • Mr. Geisser, the Islam expert, is among those who say that, if anything, Imam Doudi was known as a government stooge.“He was best known for having good relations with the security services,” Mr. Geisser said.“He thought that to collaborate was to be protected,” Mr. Geisser added. “He’s someone who stuck out his hand, and it ended up getting burned.”
  • “Scholars will tell you that Salafism does not lead to jihadism, sociologically,” he said. “You can get to jihadism without having passed through a Salafist mosque.”Those distinctions are being lost in a renewed wave of public anxiety in France, however.“We must forbid the spread of Salafism, because it’s the enemy,” the former prime minister Manuel Valls said in a radio interview last week.The newspaper Le Figaro said in a front-page editorial that “our country must launch a vast operation to eradicate Salafism.
  • While Imam Doudi acknowledges having once been a follower of Osama bin Laden and the radical Algerian leader Ali Belhadj, the preacher denied that he, or Salafism, was extremist.“Salafism is merely the reasonable middle ground between extremism and negligence. There are sects that pretend to be Salafist — Al Qaeda, Daesh — but are not,” Imam Doudi said. “These are extremists, and in our preaching we are opposed to them.”
  • “In the Quran, you’ll find verses justifying lapidation” — death by stoning — “and jihad,” Imam Doudi said. “Sooner or later, I’ll read them.”His lawyer, Nabil Boudi, supported the assertion. “It’s a formula you’ll hear in every sermon,” Mr. Boudi said. None of the phrases cited by the government explicitly justify terrorist attacks. Imam Doudi said he is resolutely against such assaults.
  • Scholars see a more ambiguous relationship between Salafism and jihad than the police do. “The source of radicalization is not Salafism,” Olivier Roy writes in the book “Jihad and Death. “There is a common matrix, but not a causal relationship.
  • “It could be dangerous for France,” said Fayçal Mansari, a mason, who called Imam Doudi “ a barrier” against Islamic radicals.“Very few people truly know Islam,” Mr. Mansari said. “If they get rid of a truly learned professor, people will find themselves disarmed.”
malonema1

Trump to tout border wall - well, fence - in Yuma visit - POLITICO - 0 views

  • President Donald Trump will travel Tuesday afternoon to Yuma, Arizona, which he'll say demonstrates the benefits of a border wall — or, at least, border fencing. The visit could set the table for a legislative battle next month over whether to include border wall money in a spending bill that Congress must pass by Sept. 30 to keep the federal government funded
  • “What was once one of the least secure border areas in America is now one of the most secure areas because of those investments in border security,” said one Department of Homeland Security official speaking on background. The officials blurred the distinction between Trump’s campaign vision of a border wall — big, beautiful and concrete — and the sort of fencing and other technologies that DHS relies on currently.
  • Trump will visit a Marine base in Yuma, where he’ll get a tour of U.S. Customs and Border Protection equipment, including a Predator drone and a Border Patrol boat and surveillance truck. The president will then head into a closed-door briefing and later meet with Marines, according to an administration official. In the evening, Trump will hold a campaign-style rally in Phoenix, part of a broader effort to reinvigorate his base. The rally comes one week after Trump drew fire for blaming “both sides” for violence at a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that attracted white supremacists, Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, and where one counter-demonstrator was killed.
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  • While the rate of deportations has slowed significantly under the Trump administration — partly due to a drop in people crossing the border illegally — the number of deportations that stem from an arrest far from the border has increased. According to statistics from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, removal of people arrested in the interior by Immigration and Customs Enforcement rose 31 percent from Jan. 22 to Aug. 5 from the same period the year earlier.
jayhandwerk

US immigration to resume requests under Dreamers scheme | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • US immigration authorities will resume accepting requests under the so-called Dreamers scheme that shields young people brought to the country illegally from deportation
  • Former president Barack Obama enacted Daca to keep the undocumented immigrants, known as dreamers, from being deported. 
Javier E

Trump's 'Animals' Remark Is Threatening to Immigrants - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • “It took an animal to stab a man 100 times and decapitate him and rip his heart out,” Sanders said, referring to the case of an unidentified man killed in the Washington, D.C., suburbs in 2017. “Frankly I think the term ‘animal’ doesn’t go far enough, and I think that the president should continue to use his platform and everything he can do under the law to stop these types of horrible, horrible disgusting people.”
  • There’s a certain moral clarity to these kinds of comments that allows them to be wielded as incredibly effective weapons, both in mobilizing support and in kneecapping opponents.
  • People who oppose this straightforward moral assessment are cast as either misconstruing the speaker or choosing to defend monsters. In this brutally simplistic worldview, one must either side with the “animals” or the humans sent to contain them.
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  • there are policy and human-rights implications to what the president says and does. Dehumanizing rhetoric is a powerful real-world tool, especially when it’s coming from the president of the United States.
  • As with his remarks on Wednesday, it’s unclear whether Trump was referring specifically to gang members or to undocumented immigrants as a whole. This ambiguity could perhaps be chalked up to the president’s imprecise speech, but it’s connected to real policy. This unclarity is a key mechanism in the federal government’s targeting of immigrants across the country.
  • In 2017, ICE arrested and detained Daniel Ramirez Medina, a young undocumented immigrant who’d been shielded from deportation by enrolling in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. ICE tried to strip him of his protected status and deport him, all because they claimed a tattoo of his birthplace proved his affiliation with a gang. According to criminal-justice and immigration advocates, the number of MS-13 arrests is inflated by these flimsy cases. In the Ramirez case, a federal judge criticized ICE for lying even in the court of law about Ramirez’s affiliation, saying the “agency [offered] no evidence to this Court to support its assertions.”
  • According to The Marshall Project, immigrants only have to meet some very loose criteria in order to fall into the gang dragnet, including hanging out where gang members usually frequent or being labeled as a gang member by a “reliable source,” such as a teacher.
  • the treatment of individuals caught up in the dragnet—from frigid detention centers to the separation of mothers from children—certainly still resembles what might be reserved for animals.
  • the combination of draconian rhetoric and the elision of nuance between real and perceived criminal elements is a crux of how racism has worked for centuries in this country and around the world.
  • “superpredator” originates as a zoological term for apex predatory animals—to mobilize massive public support for new criminal-justice policies and provide a moral high ground to marginalize any opponents.
  • any reasonable assessment of mass incarceration in black America will show that the damage has long been done. In Illinois, for example, over 80 percent of juveniles sentenced to life without parole under the superpredator dragnet were minorities. Driven to bloodlust against an ill-defined population of black youths made to be less than human, America strained against the Constitution and the basic precepts of human rights to stamp out a threat—based on a theory that has since been discredited.
  • The true peril of Trump’s comments on Wednesday is this: that the state will be further empowered to suspend human rights.
  • Dehumanization is not just a buzzword, but a descriptor of a specific and well-known psychological and sociological process, by which people are conditioned to accept inflicting increasingly inhumane conditions and punishments on other people
  • dehumanization means both a broadening of what’s acceptable and just who is unacceptable.
  • The most likely outcome of Trump’s “animals” rhetoric isn’t a return to some mythological Pax Americana, as his supporters might suggest. Quite the opposite: It could fuel more informing on neighbors, more regular harassment for people of color, a deeper and wider dragnet, and an increased acceptance of brutality and extralegal practices. That’s what happens when people stop being people.
Javier E

Human Rights Watch El Salvador report: 138 deportees killed - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • At least 138 Salvadorans have been killed in the past seven years after being deported by U.S. authorities, a rights group said Wednesday in a report that highlighted the risk of returning migrants to the Central American nation.
  • “U.S. authorities knew or should have known they were going to return these people to harm,” Parker told The Washington Post. “Therefore they should not have done it.
  • Many of those killed after their return to El Salvador were targeted by gangs, which control huge swaths of the country.
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  • Human Rights Watch also identified 70 cases of deportees who disappeared after their return or suffered sexual violence, torture or other abuse, often by gangs.
  • The 138 cases included Salvadorans who had fled their homeland trying to escape the grip of gangs, as well as police who had been hounded by gangs and sought shelter in the United States. The majority were slain within a year of their return.
  • The number of Salvadorans seeking asylum in the United States skyrocketed as violence surged in their country — from about 5,600 in 2012 to more than 60,000 in 2017.
  • Homicides have declined sharply in El Salvador since 2015, plunging last year to 2,390 — or about 36 per 100,000 people.
  • But that’s still about seven times the U.S. rate, and thousands more people disappeared in 2019. Gangs and security forces both kill their victims secretly and hide the bodies to avoid prosecution.
anonymous

Nancy Pelosi confronted by immigration rights protesters about her DACA talks with Trump - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • PowerPost Follow Stories Nancy Pelosi confronted by immigration rights protesters about her DACA talks with Trump
  • Protesters angrily confronted House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Monday — and she tried in vain to quiet them — about her emerging agreement with President Trump to provide legal protections to young undocumented immigrants.
  • after Pelosi spoke, about 40 protesters walked up to the front of the room and started shouting, taking over an event where Lee, Huffman and other activists had yet to speak.
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  • The deal would allow the roughly 700,000 people enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program to stay in the country after the program ends in early March.
  • We have made it clear: We are not giving up our fight to protect America’s dreamers from the cruelty of deportation.”
  • The protesters demanded “a clean bill” — meaning that the Dream Act would get an up-or-down vote on its own without any language regarding border security attached. They “demanded” that Pelosi show a commitment to protecting “all 11 million” undocumented immigrants believed to be in the country.
  • “The Democrats are the ones who stopped their assault on sanctuary cities, stopped the wall, the increased deportations in our last bill that was at the end of April, and we are determined to get Republican votes to pass the clean DREAM Act,” she said. “Is it possible to pass a bill without some border security? Well, we’ll have to see. We didn’t agree to anything in that regard, except to listen and something that deals with technology or something like that – but nothing like a wall.”
millerco

Trump Contradicts Democrats, Says No Deal on 'Dreamers' Has Been Made - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Trump Contradicts Democrats, Says No Deal on ‘Dreamers’ Has Been Made
  • President Trump said in a Twitter post on Thursday morning that no deal had been struck with Democrats on protections for young undocumented immigrants, contradicting what Democratic leaders had said after a dinner with the president
  • “No deal was made last night on DACA,” Mr. Trump said.
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  • The president said that there would need to be a larger deal on securing the United States’ border in order for any agreement on protections for the immigrants, known as Dreamers, to be completed
  • Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, tweeted that there was no agreement out of the dinner about “excluding” the wall.
  • the communications director for Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, tweeted that the wall was not part of the agreement, but that Mr. Trump made clear he would continue to push for it.
  • Democrats framed the recent deal with the president as a win for their agenda, but Republicans in Congress control the pace and scope of any new legislation.
  • Mr. Trump questioned whether anyone actually wanted to deport these young immigrants, raising more questions about the president’s intentions for this program.
  • The program benefits about 800,000 immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children. It allows them to remain in the country and gives them the right to work legally without fear of immediate deportation.
  • He has said he would end it, then he gave Congress time to come up with a legislative solution after he was widely criticized in the media for his decision to end DACA.
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