Big Take Asia: Trump Tariffs Rattle China to Vietnam
US President Donald Trump shocked the world — and global markets — with tariffs that exceeded expectations last week. But there was one region that was hit harder than most: Asia. Exporting powerhouses like China and Vietnam were slapped with some of the highest levies of any country, with China now facing an additional 50% tariff, bringing the total rate of its levies to more than 100%. On today's Big Take Asia Podcast, host K. Oanh Ha sits down with Bloomberg's John Liu in Beijing and John Boudreau in Ho Chi Minh City to discuss the reactions from Asian economies and how the tariff onslaught may upend the trading world order.
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Associated Press
10 minutes ago
- Associated Press
After tear gas and street fires, an Los Angeles community cleans up as National Guard troops arrive
COMPTON, Calif. (AP) — Ernest Melendrez woke up early Sunday to shovel tear gas pellets and other charred and broken detritus from his neighborhood's streets, the remnants of a battle between protesters demonstrating against immigration raids and federal and local authorities the night before. Melendrez wore a mask covering his nose and mouth, but he coughed often – it wasn't enough to protect him from remaining tear gas still in the air. Across the street, storefronts were covered in anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement graffiti. 'I think people have the right idea, just the wrong approach,' Melendrez said as cars whisked by him, some honking in appreciation or stopping to ask questions about the night before. 'Everybody has their own way of coping with stuff, and if nobody is there to help manage their feelings this is what can tend to happen. You need some community support.' Melendrez, his wife and daughter cleaned the streets that were obscured just hours earlier by huge clouds of tear gas fired by federal authorities. The protests prompted President Donald Trump to order National Guard troops deployed to downtown Los Angeles President Donald Trump says he's deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to Los Angeles to respond to immigration protests, over the objections of California Gov. Gavin the clashes. More protests were planned Sunday, and troops dressed in tactical gear were seen stationed outside Metropolitan Detention Center downtown, where hundreds of demonstrators clashed with federal authorities previously. Newsom has called Trump's order a 'complete overreaction.' A Home Depot about a block away from where Melendrez was cleaning was the epicenter of the previous night's struggle. On Sunday it was empty and calm; a lone worker cleaned graffiti off the store's sign as customers drove in. As federal officers in tactical gear fired tear gas and other nonlethal weapons in Compton and Paramount on Saturday, some protesters started a series of small fires that left black char on the streets. Graffiti was scrawled on a doughnut shop, a taqueria, a gas station and other locally owned businesses. On Sunday the damage was still raw and uncleaned in Compton, save for Melendrez's efforts, with spray-painted slogans such as 'What is America without Immigrants' all around. Launie Melendrez, who is married to Ernest, said she supported peaceful protest, and empathized with the families 'being destroyed, that are getting wrangled up. It's sad.' She looked around at the local businesses that had been damaged, and shook her head. 'The destruction of people's hard work. This is how these people, their families, take care of themselves. And the destruction of that is not going to help your case.' Given the breadth of the damage, neighbors said they were angry they were being left to clean up the mess. Melendrez's daughter, Elaina Angel, grew up in Compton and said she wasn't surprised. But it still left her feeling frustrated to see the Home Depot already reopened while her streets and local businesses were still marred by trash and graffiti. 'They don't care about Compton,' she said through her mask, stopping to cough from the irritation. She meant political leaders, law enforcement authorities and others who were nowhere to be seen Sunday morning. 'But I don't think they were counting on us to come out and clean it up.'
USA Today
17 minutes ago
- USA Today
Illegal border crossings at record lows as Trump crackdown spreads
SUNLAND PARK, New Mexico ‒ The U.S.-Mexico border used to buzz with illegal migration at a scale President Donald Trump called an "invasion." Now soldiers surveil the desert from military vehicles, Border Patrol radios are silent and illegal crossings have fallen to record lows. Reaching far beyond the border, deep into the country's heartland, Trump insists America is under "invasion" and has continued to invoke wartime powers to stop it. He has transformed the borderland into a military base, made arrests by masked agents a common sight in America and packed detention centers with immigrants, the vast majority without criminal records. He's now trying to take control of the California National Guard to crack down on immigrants and the protesters trying to defend them. Trump's aggressive actions – and protestors' increasingly violent opposition – have touched off a furious national debate about civil rights, the rule of law and what the word "invasion" really means. Trump is known for his verbal flourishes, but declaring an "invasion" in numerous executive actions is one way to unlock extraordinary federal authorities, often reserved for wartime, said Jessica Vaughan, of the right-leaning Center for Immigration Studies. "It was not just meant to rile people up, or to just be used as a melodramatic description, but it was meant to trigger a certain response under certain authorities," she said. The word "invasion" appears in at least 12 of Trump's executive orders, proclamations and memoranda since he took office Jan. 20, according to a USA TODAY review. He has ramped up military rhetoric in official orders, even as his administration touts its success in stopping border crossings. In a May 9 proclamation, after months of increased border security, Trump declared that he wants to "end this invasion, remove the illegal-alien invaders from the United States, and protect the American people." The mass arrival of migrants under President Joe Biden pushed the United States to its highest percentage of foreign-born people in a century. Trump's moves to reverse it by deporting millions is transforming the country again, redefining what it means for the United States to be a nation of immigrants. From immigration raids at construction sites in Florida, dairy farms in Vermont and restaurants in California; to the detentions of college students in Massachusetts and targeting of alleged gang members in Colorado apartment complexes, the Trump administration is sending a firm message to millions of immigrants: You aren't welcome here. Which America is it? The president's most vocal supporters see a chief executive delivering rapid results. Craig Johnson, 67, rallied for Trump at a campaign stop in Las Vegas last year. The Navy vet supports the ramp-up in deportations – especially after the VA recently cut back his benefits, he said. He is appealing the cutback, but he also believes immigrants have drained resources. "There are so many people that were here illegally that were getting food stamps or medical," he said. "The impact it's had on citizens is just horrendous." But other Americans are growing increasingly concerned as the president's agents adopt aggressive, fear-inducing arrest tactics and widen their net to target otherwise law-abiding immigrants alongside murderers, rapists, and drug dealers. "They've created a war zone in our community for a war that's imagined," said Laura Lunn, director of advocacy and litigation for the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network. "It's making us all feel less safe. People are losing trust in law enforcement." Some migrant advocates are becoming militant in their opposition to Trump's agenda, in some cases adopting tactics commonly associated with resistance fighters, mapping the movement of ICE agents and increasingly engaging in physical confrontations. On June 6 and 7, hundreds of protestors clashed violently with federal agents in Los Angeles, after dozens of immigrant arrests were carried out by masked agents riding in armored vehicles. The Trump administration dispatched U.S. Border Patrol tactical agents to the city in response and deployed 2,000 members of the National Guard. L.A. Mayor Karen Bass condemned how agents carried out the detentions. "These tactics sow terror in our communities and disrupt basic principles of public safety in our city," she said in a statement. "We will not stand for this." Some former immigration agents and military personnel also have concerns about the new enforcement tactics. In California, retired Homeland Security Investigations special agent Patrick Comey dedicated three decades of his life to enforcing U.S. immigration laws. But the Trump administration's tactics – splashy arrests by agents in heavy tactical gear – are "becoming more and more distressing every day." "This is not the America that I was trained to serve," he told USA TODAY. Army veteran Jose Diaz was outside the Buona Forchetta Italian restaurant in San Diego on May 30, when immigration agents tried to drive their vehicles through an angry crowd and deployed two flash-bang grenades, one of which went off by his foot. Diaz said he had never seen soldiers overseas use such tactics on a crowd of unarmed civilians. 'We had much stricter rules of engagement than these agents had,' he said. Shifting the focus away from the border On a morning in mid-May, near the rusted steel U.S.-Mexico border fence in southern New Mexico, soldiers surveilled the desert from inside an eight-wheeled Stryker vehicle. Hours went by without a single illegal crossing. Trump's aggressive new policies helped drive down illegal migration at the Mexican border, accelerating a sharp decline that began in the last year of the Biden administration. Citing the "invasion," Trump deployed troops to Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California and declared a strip of land along the border a "National Defense Area." Migrants who enter that territory can be charged with illegal entry and trespassing on a military installation. The administration is already shifting its focus from the border to the country's interior. "The prior administration allowed unchecked millions of aliens to illegally enter the United States," Trump said in an April 28 executive order. "This invasion at the southern border requires the federal government to take measures to fulfill its obligation to the states." Stephen Miller, Trump's top immigration advisor, has long argued that vast government powers and the military should be deployed to combat the migrant "invasion." Miller, who as White House deputy chief of staff has helped shape Trump's muscular new approach to immigration enforcement, argues liberal Americans are more interested in sob stories about law-breaking immigrants than they are about protecting their country. On social media, he called the protests in Los Angeles"an insurrection against the laws and sovereignty of the United States," adding in a comment directed to Bass, the mayor: "You have no say in this at all. Federal law is supreme and federal law will be enforced." But Trump's reliance on the military to combat the "invasion" has some critics worried that a president who grows accustomed to using the military in one arena may be increasingly willing to deploy soldiers elsewhere inside the country. The border military build-up "is part of an effort to take on internal missions," said Adam Isacson, director of defense oversight for the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America. "The authoritarian needs an enemy to start, to galvanize the population," he said. "You use the word invasion; it's immigrants for now." Federal judges challenge Trump Courts around the country have put the brakes on some of Trump's efforts to reverse or combat the "invasion." Federal judges have been quick to thwart his more controversial efforts, from his invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport certain immigrants without due process; to his targeting of pro-Palestinian protesters because the White House didn't like what they said. Prof. Michael Kagan, who runs the Immigration Clinic at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas law school, said Trump's use of wartime language reflects the administration's deliberate effort to sway both the courts and public opinion by invoking national security. During war, he said, the courts and the general public have given the president broad deference to exercise powers that could never be justified during peacetime. Kagan cited the preemptive incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II as an example of a presidential action that was at the time endorsed by the courts but later widely deemed both unconstitutional and morally wrong. "They're hoping to tap into a broader norm in America, where the courts allow the executive to get away with a lot more during a war," he said. Kagan said current efforts targeting immigrants are akin to to the military testing new weapons systems: a small number of agents trying different tactics against a relatively small number of people to find the most effective path forward to meeting Trump's 1-million-per-year deportation goal. "They're seeing what can we get away with," said Kagan, adding the courts should block any effort to curb due process before the practice becomes widespread. Congress appears poised to pour $150 billion in new funding to back Trump's efforts, according to an analysis of a reconciliation budget bill by the American Immigration Council. That's more than double the current Department of Homeland Security budget and would represent a dramatic expansion of the department's reach. "If you think bad things are happening now, wait till they get tons more money," said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization. The organization has argued against deporting people who benefitted from Biden-era immigration programs and followed the rules at the time. Soerens says what happened wasn't an "invasion." "We want DHS to have enough money to deport violent criminals and ensure secure borders," Soerens said. "We don't want them to have enough money to deport people who came here under the rules we gave them." Contributed: Eduardo Cuevas
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Meta reportedly in talks to invest billions of dollars in Scale AI
Meta is discussing a multi-billion dollar investment in Scale AI, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the deal value could reportedly exceed $10 billion, making it the largest external AI investment for the Facebook parent company and one of the largest funding events ever for a private company. Scale AI (whose CEO Alexandr Wang is pictured above) provides data labeling services to companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI to help them train their AI models. Much of that labeling work is done by contractors — in fact, the Department of Labor recently dropped its investigation into whether the company was misclassifying and underpaying employees. According to Bloomberg, the company saw $870 million in revenue last year and expects to bring in $2 billion this year. Meta was already an investor in Scale AI's $1 billion Series F, which valued the company at $13.8 billion. Scale AI also built Defense Llama, a large language model designed for military use, on top of Meta's Llama 3.
