Gestapo USA

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7083727

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/14447

Policy experts were skeptical Wednesday that the Trump administration could legally or practically carry out its threat to strip more naturalized Americans of their citizenship. Still, they warned that new guidance issued by the White House to immigration officials would ramp up "fear and terror" in immigrant communities and could portend the targeting of naturalized citizens who President Donald Trump views as adversaries.

The guidance was issued Tuesday to US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) field offices, with officers directed to supply the Department of Justice (DOJ) with "100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year.

The denaturalization process is "deliberately hard" for the federal government, noted American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, and stripping people of the citizenship is a rare step only taken in cases of fraud when they applied to be a citizen or in other narrow circumstances.

As such, between 2017-25, there have been just over 120 denaturalization cases filed with the Office of Immigration Litigation at the DOJ.

Under the first Trump administration, denaturalization cases peaked at 90 in one year in 2018, and the directive issued Tuesday signaled the White House is aiming for a far bigger escalation as it also continues its mass deportation operation and blocks people from seeking asylum as they are permitted to under international law.

Reichlin-Melnick called the directive for a denaturalization quota "vicious and cruel," and pointed out that the president is asking USCIS and the DOJ to take on an onerous task.

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"These cases are hard to file and win, and require a lot of DOJ resources, and the DOJ is stretched thin already. So we’ll see; I have serious doubts about their ability to do this," said Reichlin-Melnick.

USCIS refers cases to the DOJ, which must prove in a federal court that it has "unequivocal evidence" that someone obtained their citizenship illegally or fraudulently.

"The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that citizenship and naturalization are too precious and fundamental to our democracy for the government to take it away on their whim. Instead of wasting resources digging through Americans’ files, USCIS should do its job of processing applications, as Congress mandated,” Amanda Baran, a former senior USCIS official who served during the Biden administration, told the New York Times.

Naturalized Americans account for 26 million people in the US, with 800,000 people sworn in last year. In most cases, a person who loses their citizenship status is classified as a legal permanent resident.

Trump has repeatedly called to denaturalize Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and to deport her over her criticism of his policies, and has made the same threat against New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist.

In those threatened cases, wrote Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, earlier this month, "it appears that crime isn’t so much a motivation as disloyalty."

"Stripping citizens of their citizenship in the name of making the electorate more 'American' is arguably one of the most un-American acts imaginable," wrote Waldman. "We are a nation of immigrants and also a nation of laws. The courts must continue to ensure that those laws protect naturalized citizens from being punished for speaking out."

Three other Brennan Center experts also recently wrote about the history of denaturalization efforts in the US, including during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s:

Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin led witch hunts, with denaturalization often used as a tool against accused communists or sympathizers. Among those targets was Harry Bridges, an Australian-born, nationally known labor leader accused of being a communist, who faced an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to revoke his citizenship. The Supreme Court ruled in his favor, not once, but twice.

"This is straight-up Nazi stuff and I’m calling on my fellow Jewish Americans who know where this can lead to be in the vanguard against it," said Dylan Willams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, also noting that the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee has endorsed Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), who has called for the denaturalization and expulsion of Muslim Americans and immigrants.

Sarah Pierce, a former USCIS official, told the Times that Trump's quota for denaturalization cases "risks politicizing citizenship revocation" as it has been in the past.

“And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years," she said, "turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.today/post/44032506

The political crisis in the United States today is the consequence of economic processes that have been underway for generations. The rise of fascism is not a fluke brought about by the demagoguery of a single individual, but the logical outcome of profit-driven capitalism.

The neoliberal order paved the way for this by deepening the gulf between the rich and poor, militarizing policing in order to preserve those disparities, and creating a downwardly mobile population desperate for scapegoats. In a globalized economy, politicians cannot mitigate the impact of capitalism on their constituents without investors taking their business elsewhere.

Consequently, “left” parties have consistently failed to deliver on their promises, while reactionary parties have pulled public policy and permissible discourse steadily to the right—with centrists serving as a sort of ratchet preventing policy and discourse from shifting back.

The Trump administration has virtually stopped releasing undocumented children in federal custody to their parents and other relatives. That’s according to data obtained by the California Newsroom, immigration attorneys around the country and officials inside the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the agency tasked with caring for those children.

The Administration for Children and Families, which oversees ORR, said via email that earlier this year, it put in place “enhanced vetting policies” for adults who will care for the children after their release. The goal, it said, was to better protect children from harm. But it said the office “has not issued a moratorium” on releases to those adults.

However, sources with knowledge of the office’s directives contradict that claim, saying ORR leadership began issuing verbal orders to staff in early November to stop releasing kids to their relatives until further notice...

capitalism <---> fascism

Jesse Rabinowitz, the communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center joins Sam and Emma to discuss Utah’s plan to build an involuntary “treatment center” on the outskirts of Salt Lake City.

The Department of Homeland Security’s attorneys inside New York’s immigration courts are moving to close asylum claims en masse, arguing that people in deportation proceedings have no right to seek asylum in the United States because they’re eligible to do so in three other countries with which the U.S. has recent agreements: Honduras, Ecuador and Uganda.

Word spread of the new Trump administration tactic among the city’s immigration attorneys in recent weeks, as it’s been rolled out inside immigration courts in San Francisco, according to local media there. In New York City’s immigration courthouses, the novel strategy kicked off in full steam over the last two weeks inside, observers told THE CITY. Hellgate earlier reported on the new Trump administration tactic, which sets the stage for potential third-country removals on a large scale in the coming months.

THE CITY watched a Department of Homeland lawyer make a motion to “pretermit” asylum claims inside the courtroom of Immigration Judge Tiesha Peal in case after case on Thursday morning. The request to “pretermit” the asylum claim is an effort to toss a person’s asylum claim, leaving them defenseless against deportation to a country they are not from and may have never even entered before...

Anti-loitering speakers have been installed in the parking lot of Home Depot in Cypress Park, following a recent Border Patrol raid. “It’s like a sonic ice pick–just stabbing you,” says audio expert Dustyn Hyatt.

Last year, the pro-Israel regents of University of Michigan (U-M) ignited controversy by recruiting State Attorney General Dana Nessel to crackdown on campus Gaza protesters. Now, members of U-M’s Board of Regents are making large donations to Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald, a candidate who may replace Nessel.

McDonald is the prosecutor in a wealthy suburban county north of Detroit. McDonald also received the highest level of corporate donations from the state’s largest businesses and executives, and is viewed as the establishment choice to replace Nessel.

McDonald is also receiving significant backing from donors that include prolific GOP contributors and those connected to pro-Israel organizations in metro Detroit, as well as from national organizations like Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces and AIPAC. The regents and pro-Israel donors have contributed at least $200,000 to McDonald’s campaign, according to state and federal campaign donation records reviewed by Drop Site.

Only one in ten American voters want a bigger military budget. Congress keeps approving massive spending increases anyway, as it did when it voted for a nearly $1 trillion military budget last week.

...

The charges originated from a protest at the Prairieland Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, where a police officer was shot.

In a superseding indictment filed in the U.S. District Court of Northern Texas on Nov. 13, prosecutors charged eight defendants with providing material support to terrorists, an increase from the two who had such charges levied against them in the initial indictment filed on Oct. 15.

“For the first time, Antifa-aligned anarchist extremists have been hit with federal terrorism charges after a July 4th attack on an ICE facility in Texas,” FBI Director Kash Patel posted on X on Oct. 17 following the initial indictment.

None of the arrested suspects have any connections to an organization named Antifa and only one was affiliated with a group that described itself as anti-fascist.

Since the beginning of the year, the federal government has been accelerating its war on the American left, targeting dissent with loose terminology and reaching for legislative and executive tools created at the turn of the century with the War on Terror. Whether this political strategy amounts to anything more than rhetoric could revolve around the outcome of the Prairieland case, which could set a precedent for bringing cases against individuals and organizations that the government labels as terrorists.

Much of the strategy was spelled out in National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7), a memorandum on countering domestic terrorism and organized political violence that was released on Sept. 25. The memorandum outlined “common threads” that animate a supposed rise in political violence: anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity; “extremism” on migration, race and gender; and hostility towards individuals who “hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

The threat from such vague classifications is broad, especially as terrorism designations include financial connections.

“The same laws they create, precedent and strategies–they’ll just export it elsewhere very quickly,” said Xavier de Janon, the Director of Mass Defense at the National Lawyers Guild. “There’s no limit for the government on what Antifa is, clearly.”

...

US President Donald Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House Tuesday, defended the prince’s bloodstained rule when questioned by reporters about the grisly murder of Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and then hosted a formal dinner in the prince’s honor, attended by billionaires, corporate executives and Republican politicians.

For four years, bin Salman was unable to visit Europe or North America due to outstanding legal issues stemming from the Khashoggi murder. A team of Saudi assassins, headed by Salman’s security chief, seized Khashoggi when he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain documents for his marriage to his Turkish fiancée. The journalist was tortured, killed and his body dismembered and disposed of secretly.

During the course of the visit, Trump had an extraordinary exchange with a reporter that exposed the gangsterism and criminality of both governments. When ABC News reporter Mary Bruce raised two pointed questions—asking Trump about possible “incriminating evidence” in the Epstein files, and bin Salman about the Khashoggi murder and the Saudi government’s ties to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—Trump erupted in defense of both himself and the prince.

“You have arrived in hell. Here you will spend the rest of your lives.” With this declaration, the director of El Salvador’s CECOT greeted the hundreds of men dragged into the country’s maximum security torture camp.

The report documents an extensive, coordinated and deliberate series of incidents of physical, psychological, sexual abuses, deprivation and torture carried out with the express intent to subjugate and humiliate detainees.

You might think that using imagery from one of its best known videogames in a call to "destroy" immigrants would prompt Microsoft to action, or at least to express some small modicum of disapproval. For now, at least, you would be wrong: Rather like Nintendo, which eagerly picks copyright fights it knows it can win but kept its mouth tightly zipped when Homeland Security used Pokémon to promote violent immigration raids, a representative told PC Gamer that "Microsoft does not have anything to share on this matter."

The gpt-oss models are being tested for use on sensitive military computers. But some defense insiders say that OpenAI is still behind the competition.

Google is hosting a CBP app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, while simultaneously removing apps that report the location of ICE officials because Google sees ICE as a vulnerable group. “It is time to choose sides; fascism or morality? Big tech has made their choice.”

“Watch your step sir, keep moving,” a police officer with a vest that reads ICE and a patch that reads “POICE” says to a Latino-appearing man wearing a Walmart employee vest. He leads him toward a bus that reads “IMMIGRATION AND CERS.” Next to him, one of his colleagues begins walking unnaturally sideways, one leg impossibly darting through another as he heads to the back of a line of other Latino Walmart employees who are apparently being detained by ICE. Two American flag emojis are superimposed on the video, as is the text “Deportation.”

The video has 4 million views, 16,600 likes, 1,900 comments, and 2,200 shares on Facebook. It was, obviously, generated by OpenAI's Sora.

Some of the comments seem to understand this: “Why is he walking like that?” one says. “AI the guys foot goes through his leg,” another says. Many of the comments clearly do not: “Oh, you’ll find lots of them at Walmart,” another top comment reads. “Walmart doesn’t do paperwork before they hire you?” another says. “They removing zombies from Walmart before Halloween?”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is allocating as much as $180 million to pay bounty hunters and private investigators who verify the address and location of undocumented people ICE wishes to detain, including with physical surveillance, according to procurement records reviewed by 404 Media.

The documents provide more details about ICE’s plan to enlist the private sector to find deportation targets. In October The Intercept reported on ICE’s intention to use bounty hunters or skip tracers—an industry that often works on insurance fraud or tries to find people who skipped bail. The new documents now put a clear dollar amount on the scheme to essentially use private investigators to find the locations of undocumented immigrants.

Ypsilanti, Michigan has officially decided to fight against the construction of a 'high-performance computing facility' that would service a nuclear weapons laboratory 1,500 miles away.

If you still think the immigration raids aren’t as bad, you’re not paying attention, because although even one raid is bad enough, at least 20 people were taken in more than 40 attempted raids from Saturday through Tuesday, Veterans Day.

John Oliver discusses felony murder, a way you can wind up in prison for murder without actually killing anyone.