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Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump administration uses Colorado suspect's status to push deportation agenda
The immigration status of the man who allegedly attacked people with a makeshift flamethrower and other incendiary devices at an event for Israeli hostages in Boulder, Colorado, has become further fodder for the Trump administration's deportation agenda. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, a 45-year-old who came to the US in 2022 from Egypt and overstayed his initial tourist visa, according to the US government, allegedly planned his attack on the event specifically to target Zionists, federal authorities said. He shouted 'Free Palestine' while carrying out the attack, which the FBI has called an 'act of terrorism', and he was charged on Monday with a federal hate crime. Related: Suspect charged with federal hate crime in attack on Colorado rally for Israeli hostages The attack combines two frequent enemies of the right – anti-Israel speech and actions, and illegal immigration – and is already being used on the right to garner support for more deportations. The response stands in contrast to how the right has reacted to attacks against Palestinians and Muslims in the US and to the conservative response to the war in Gaza. The Trump administration has also used support for Palestinians as an underpinning for deportations among college students. The Gateway Pundit, a rightwing outlet, is referring to Soliman as 'Biden's Illegal Alien from Egypt'. Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff, said the 'terror attack' was committed by an 'illegal alien'. 'He was granted a tourist visa by the Biden Administration and then he illegally overstayed that visa. In response, the Biden Administration gave him a work permit,' Miller wrote on X. 'Suicidal migration must be fully reversed.' In a post on Truth Social, Trump blamed the attack on Biden's 'ridiculous Open Border Policy'. 'He must go out under 'TRUMP' Policy,' Trump wrote. 'Acts of Terrorism will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law. This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.' The attack occurred in Colorado soon after the Trump administration listed the state and many of its cities and counties, including Boulder, as 'sanctuary' jurisdictions that won't aid law enforcement in deportation activities, though that list was subsequently removed after pushback from places it included. These policies have come up in rightwing coverage of the attack. For some rightwing commentators, the attack underscored the need for restrictions similar to what Trump attempted in his first term: a Muslim travel ban. (Soliman's religious affiliation is not clear.) 'Notice how the GOP narrative around Mohamed Soliman is that he is an 'illegal alien,'' the rightwing commentator Laura Loomer wrote on X in one of several posts calling for a crackdown on 'Islamic terrorism'. 'We are being gaslit by the GOP to only care about Soliman's immigration status as opposed to his Islamic ideology which is more of a problem than his immigration status as it relates to the MOTIVE of the terrorist attack.' It was the second recent attack in which the perpetrator called for a free Palestine, though the first shooting in DC was carried out by a US citizen and did not generate calls to increase deportations. These attacks come amid a rise in support for using violence to achieve political goals, including around the Gaza war. Studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US-born citizens. The National Institute of Justice has recently taken down a webpage on about how undocumented people are less likely to commit crimes – a note indicates that it is one of many websites and materials being reviewed for compliance with Trump executive orders. Some studies don't differentiate between documented and undocumented immigrants when assessing crime rates because the data can be difficult to parse, an NIJ study said. But, this study said, it analyzed Texas criminal records from 2012 to 2018 and found undocumented immigrants 'had the lowest offending rates' compared with documented immigrants and US-born citizens, who had the highest rates.
Atlantic
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Kristi Noem Is Dangerously Ignorant
Several top members of the Trump administration have been evading constraints on their lawless actions by playing a clever game of feigned ignorance as to the plain requirements of the Constitution and a series of adverse court rulings. Then there's Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose ignorance appears to be utterly genuine. Appearing before a Senate hearing this morning, Noem was asked by Senator Maggie Hassan, 'What is habeas corpus?' Noem, whose hearing prep clearly did not anticipate any questions with Latin terms in them, replied, 'Habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to—' At this point, Hassan interjected to explain that habeas corpus is, in fact, 'the legal principle that requires that the government provide a public reason for detaining and imprisoning people.' In other words, it's the opposite of what Noem said. It's not a right the president possesses, but a right the people possess against the president. Habeas is an extremely basic right, for the obvious reason that, if the government can simply throw anybody in jail without justifying their imprisonment in court, its power is absolute. It dates back to the Magna Carta, and is one of the few rights the Founders included in the original Constitution, without waiting for the addition of the Bill of Rights. Noem—the head of a department with a budget exceeding $100 billion a year, more than a quarter million employees, and vast domestic enforcement powers that critics warned upon its creation had dystopian police-state potential—would ideally be familiar with the concept. The second Trump era has produced two broad castes of post-liberal spokespeople. The first category is the lawyers and other theorists who, in the wake of Trump's flailing first term, set out to reimagine a second Trump presidency that would ruthlessly deploy the power of the state to terrorize the opposition. This category is represented by figures like Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. McKay Coppins: The visionary of Trump 2.0 Earlier this month, Miller appeared outside the White House and replied to a question about habeas corpus, offered up by a reporter for the far-right site Gateway Pundit, with a confident-sounding explanation: 'Well, the Constitution is clear, and that of course is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion.' The administration has sought to leverage its wartime powers into the kind of limitless authority that the Founders directly closed off. Miller's logic is that the presence of foreign-born gang members amounts to an 'invasion,' thus permitting the president to employ emergency wartime authority, which in Miller's account entails suspending habeas corpus. Miller's reasoning contains obvious factual and legal flaws. The presence of foreign gang members is hardly tantamount to an invasion, and the Constitution does not actually give presidents the unilateral power to suspend habeas. Abraham Lincoln famously suspended the right during the Civil War, but this is widely held to have been a constitutional violation, not proof of concept. ('Scholars and courts have overwhelmingly endorsed the position that, Lincoln's unilateral suspensions of the writ notwithstanding, the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide when the predicates specified by the Suspension Clause are satisfied,' wrote Amy Coney Barrett in 2014). If the president could suspend habeas corpus simply on account of foreign-born people engaging in criminal activity, a condition that has obtained continuously throughout American history, then the people would functionally have no rights at all. Noem did not display a strong enough grasp of Miller's quasi-legal rationale to repeat it in her testimony. She appears to belong to the smaller, second category of Trumpian post-liberals: those who believe that Trump axiomatically possesses unlimited rights. That category includes Trump himself. The president has frequently likened his own power to that of a king. He has tweeted, 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,' and when asked if he needs to follow the Constitution, replied, 'I don't know.' While Trump has clearly been exposed to legal justifications for expanding his power, he has never been able to repeat them coherently. His best effort was perhaps the moment during his first term when he said, 'I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.' This was close in the sense that Article II indeed enumerates the president's powers. It was off base in the sense that those powers are, well, enumerated. Noem appears to subscribe to Trump's reading of the Constitution. A lack of familiarity with the Miller-style pseudo-legal reasoning has not prevented her from executing the administration's agenda. She has swept up immigrants, shipped them off to an El Savadoran mega-prison, and posed menacingly for photos in front of their cell. That dozens of them never even violated U.S. immigration law, according to the Cato Institute, is a mere detail. Conor Friedersdorf: Donald Trump's cruel and unusual innovations Upon having habeas defined for her by Hassan, Noem recovered enough to declare, 'I support habeas corpus,' as if it were a bill before Congress or an aspirational slogan. Then she immediately contradicted herself by adding, 'I also recognize that the President of the United States has the authority under the Constitution to decide if it should be suspended or not.' If the president had the authority to suspend the right of habeas corpus, then it wouldn't be a right. That's how rights work. Generations of Americans feared that liberty might perish under the thumb of ruthless leaders who ignored or undermined constitutional rights. There turns out to be an equal threat from leaders who simply don't understand them.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Are We Sleepwalking Toward a Constitutional Crisis?
Last Friday, top White House adviser Stephen Miller suggested that President Donald Trump is actively considering triggering a full-blown constitutional crisis. But you wouldn't know it by listening to some congressional Republicans this week. 'Well, the Constitution is clear,' Miller said, responding to a Gateway Pundit blogger whether the president is considering suspending the writ of habeas corpus to 'take care of the illegal immigration problem.' The Constitution, Miller said, 'is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So that's an option we're actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.' The Constitution is indeed clear: It says that the writ of habeas corpus—that is, the right to challenge one's detention in court—shall not be suspended except in 'Cases of Rebellion or Invasion.' Those terms have been universally understood to mean military conflict or war. 'It wouldn't apply to a case of immigration at all. There's zero chance that that would fly in the courts,' John Yoo, a former clerk to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and a Bush Justice Department lawyer, told The Dispatch in an interview. Yoo, who has an expansive view of the power of the president in times of war, noted that the Constitution is less clear about who has the authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. The clause is located in Article I, which covers the powers of Congress, and therefore most legal scholars and the Supreme Court have held that only Congress has limited powers to suspend it. Throughout U.S. history, the writ of habeas corpus has been suspended only four times, and the only time the president unilaterally suspended the writ was in 1861 during the Civil War. (Congress ratified Abraham Lincoln's suspension in 1863.) 'This is nowhere near the time of the Civil War where you had actually, obviously, a civil rebellion,' Yoo said of the present state of the country. It's entirely possible Miller's comments are simply meant to intimidate and cajole the courts into ruling in favor of the Trump administration's actions on immigration, such as stripping 'Temporary Protected Status' from immigrants. Miller explicitly mentioned cases regarding 'Temporary Protected Status' and said last Friday that those court decisions 'will inform the choices that the president ultimately makes.' But Miller's comments are also an extraordinarily grave threat—striking at a fundamental matter of civil liberty during peacetime—and Trump's willingness to follow through on more extreme ideas has been underestimated before (see January 6, 2021, and his 'Liberation Day' tariffs). If Trump unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus to address illegal immigration, and the Supreme Court quickly rules against him, what would happen next? Either Trump would comply, or he would defy the court and plunge the country into a constitutional crisis. 'Here you would have plausible grounds for impeachment,' Yoo said. 'You would have a president who arguably arrogated the powers of another branch at a time when the provision doesn't even apply—so much stronger ground for impeachment than Trump's first two rides on that rodeo.' But congressional Republicans' response to a top White House official toying with a blatantly unconstitutional act has been muted, at best. In the Capitol this week, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul was the only Republican senator who forcefully spoke out against Miller's comments. 'It's a terrible idea, and anyone discussing suspending habeas corpus is running afoul of history and not really considering that it's the ancient right of habeas corpus. It's been around since Magna Carta or before,' Paul told The Dispatch. Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware who sits on the Judiciary Committee, said it was essential for more Republicans to speak out. 'My colleagues should all be outraged. This is an exceptional threat to our liberty, unprecedented in modern times,' Coons told The Dispatch. 'Habeas corpus is a foundational basis of our liberty. It goes back to hundreds of years ago when English kings would put in jail their critics and their opponents without charge, without reason and just keep them there. So the framers of our Constitution knew you have to have the right to appear in front of a judge, to say: 'On what basis am I being held? Show the charges, show the evidence, or set me free.'' 'Republican senators have to speak up in opposition,' he added. 'That is the only way to slow down some of the more outrageous actions by this president.' While no one spoke out as forcefully against Miller as Rand Paul, some other GOP senators expressed opposition in a more mild manner. 'Habeas corpus is something I think we fundamentally look to and rely on for due process protections,' Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told The Dispatch. 'We want to make sure we don't jeopardize anything that we would consider to be fundamental. So I'm not quite sure exactly what [Stephen Miller] intended with that. We'd have to find out more.' Asked if the president had the constitutional authority to suspend the writ of habeas corpus over illegal immigration, South Dakota GOP Sen. Mike Rounds said: 'I don't think so. … I think they can look at it, but I think that's about as far as it goes.' Even some of Trump's staunchest allies stopped short of defending the notion that the president could suspend the writ of habeas corpus over immigration. 'The president can suspend it, right?' Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said. When The Dispatch noted the provision is limited to cases of invasion or rebellion, Hawley replied: 'I think that this problem would be solved if these judges would actually adjudicate the law and not try to set policy for the nation.' Asked about Miller's comments, Florida GOP Sen. Rick Scott simply said: 'I'm sure they'll follow the law.' A lack of enthusiastic support from congressional Republicans is, of course, far from the kind of threat that might actually deter Trump from an unprecedented assault on civil liberties. If Trump doesn't fear the courts or Congress, might anything else constrain him? 'It also depends on whether other officers of the government choose to obey the president's order,' Yoo told The Dispatch. 'If you suspend habeas corpus, and you put these aliens … into the hands of the military, does the president really want to raise doubts about the military's willingness to follow the commander in chief? You could see officers refusing to hold people in violation of habeas corpus.' 'I can't think it would come to this,' Yoo said. 'It would really be a mistake to cause those dominos to start falling.'
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Gov. Tony Evers calls White House border czar's threat over ICE guidance ‘chilling'
Gov. Tony Evers had already said he wasn't directing state employees to break the law should immigration officials enter state buildings. Evers answers reporters questions in March. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner) Gov. Tony Evers issued a three-minute video Friday in which he addressed Wisconsinites, describing a statement from the White House border czar Tom Homan that has been interpreted by some as a threat to arrest Evers as 'chilling.' Homan made the vague threat after a reporter for the far-right website Gateway Pundit asked him 'why not just arrest' leaders interfering with deportation efforts. The reporter then specifically asked him about Evers' directive to state agencies instructing them to consult an attorney if federal immigration agents enter state buildings demanding files or computer system access. 'Wait to see what's coming,' Homan said. 'You can not support what we're doing and you can support sanctuary cities if that's what you want to do, but if you cross that line of impediment or knowingly harboring or concealing an illegal alien, that is a felony and we'll treat it as such.' Before the comment, Evers had already said he wasn't directing state employees to break the law should immigration officials enter state buildings. 'A Trump Administration official, in not so many words, apparently threatened to arrest me… The goal of this guidance was simple — to provide clear, consistent instructions to state employees and ensure they have a lawyer to help them comply with all federal and state laws. Nothing more, nothing less,' Evers said in the video. 'But Republicans and their right-wing allies, including Elon Musk, lied about this guidance, spread misinformation, accused me of doing things I didn't do or say, and fueled a fake controversy of their own creation.' The guidance sent by the Department of Administration to state employees told them to stay calm if an ICE agent entered their offices. It told them to ask agents for their names and badges to verify their identity, to ask why they were there, ask for documentation like a valid warrant then tell the agent to have a seat. It said state employees should call the Office of Legal Council to consult an attorney. It also told employees not to answer questions from an agent, give them access to paper files and computer systems without speaking to an attorney and not to give consent for an agent to enter a 'nonpublic' area, noting that they need a judicial warrant to enter such an area. 'Remember that every state employee has a duty to protect confidential data and information collected or maintained by the State of Wisconsin in state offices and electronic filing systems,' the guidance stated. 'I haven't broken the law. I haven't committed a crime, and I've never encouraged or directed anyone to break any laws or commit any crimes,' Evers said in the video. 'When President Trump's hand-picked appointee, Tom Homan, was asked about me and this guidance after he apparently threatened to arrest elected officials across the country, he said, 'Wait 'til you see what's coming.' Overnight, Republican lawmakers piled on, encouraging the Trump Administration to arrest me.' Evers' directive had received backlash from Wisconsin Republicans who called on Evers to rescind the guidance and support Trump's deportation agenda. One Republican state lawmaker Rep. Calvin Callahan (R-Tomahawk) suggested in multiple social media posts Thursday that Evers should be arrested — sharing an AI-generated photo of Evers in handcuffs and writing in another post that 'this is what Tony Evers sent out; stick him in the same cell as the Milwaukee judge!' Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested last week under accusations that she impeded the arrest of a man that ICE followed to her courtroom. Evers said the threats should concern everyone. 'In this country, the federal government doesn't get to abuse its power to threaten everyday Americans. In this country, the federal government doesn't get to arrest American citizens who have not committed a crime. In this country, we don't threaten to persecute people just because they belong to a different political party,' Evers said. 'These threats represent a concerning trajectory in this country. We now have a federal government that will threaten or arrest an elected official — or even everyday American citizens — who have broken no laws, committed no crimes, and done nothing wrong,' Evers said. 'As disgusted as I am about the continued actions of the Trump Administration, I am not afraid. I have never once been discouraged from doing the right thing, and I will not start today.' SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Laura Loomer wants you to snitch on your immigrant neighbors
Late last month, Laura Loomer — a prominent MAGA influencer who in 2017 called herself 'pro-white nationalism' — invited Jacob Engels, a Proud Boys associate and writer for the conspiracy theory-pushing blog Gateway Pundit, to her podcast to discuss a new app that would help people they see as true patriots deport their neighbors — and get paid for it. 'It's called Engels said, explaining how users could snap photos of 'illegal aliens.' The app apparently then sends the photos, including the metadata identifying where and when they were taken, to law enforcement. 'This is really really interesting because it's taking so much off the backs of law enforcement … and we're doing it as citizens, and you have the opportunity to earn crypto for reporting and deporting illegals.' Loomer — one of President Donald Trump's close confidants — was thrilled. 'If you're sick and tired of the illegal alien construction workers making a bunch of noise at the house next door to yours, you can actually call it in!' she said. 'Get that cryptocurrency for reporting these individuals. It's almost like a bounty.' It's unclear how functional — created by a relatively unknown cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Jason Meyers — really is, or to what degree it's actually coordinating with law enforcement. (Meyers and representatives from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for comment.) What is clear is that the app's launch earned coverage across far-right media — including former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz's OANN show — and spoke to a growing hunger among the MAGA faithful, cultivated by the Republican Party, to become vigilantes, informants and snitches to target immigrants. Chaya Raichik, the influential LibsOfTikTok creator — whose viral propaganda has falsely labeled queer people 'groomers' and 'pedophiles' and has been linked to a wave of anti-LGBTQ harassment and threats — recently turned her sights on immigrants. Earlier this month, she joined Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in an armored vehicle for a 'ride-along' with ICE officers as they conducted a raid in Phoenix, at one point posting a clip of Noem, wearing a tactical vest and carrying an assault rifle, taunting a detainee. 'We're gonna prosecute you,' Noem said. 'You don't commit crimes in our country.' The stunt was representative, as Melissa Gira Grant observed in The New Republic, of how the Trump administration is 'branding traumatic arrests and detentions as some depraved cross-over event between law enforcement and internet vigilantes.' It is also representative of the long history in America of white vigilantes partnering with law enforcement to terrorize marginalized groups. William Horne, a history professor at the University of Maryland, told me 'the most worrisome parallel, the closest thing to what we're seeing now historically, is the assaults on the Reconstruction state governments' after the Civil War, when the Ku Klux Klan, along other white vigilante groups and lynch mobs partnered with law enforcement to target black Southerners — and white southerners who supported their freedom — with horrifying violence and murder. This guerilla war helped end Reconstruction, the federal government abandoning its nascent experiment in multiracial democracy and ushering in decades of Jim Crow. 'Historically, failing to take aggressive action against white vigilantism all but guarantees escalating white vigilantism and the creation of some form of apartheid regime,' Horne wrote in 2022. Trump's ability to escape prosecution for his attempted insurrection, combined with his almost immediate pardon of more than 1,000 Jan. 6 rioters, signals to MAGA vigilantes that they can now act with impunity. Trump's FBI has also reportedly shifted its focus away from investigating far-right extremism to Black Lives Matter activists and antifa. Meanwhile, armed border militias, according to reporter Tess Owen, are ready and eager to help Trump fulfill his campaign promise to mass deport millions of human beings. Politico has reported that Erik Prince, the billionaire founder of the mercenary group Blackwater, is among a group of military contractors who have pitched the White House on a plan to deputize '10,000 private citizens' to assist in rounding up undocumented people. (Prince declined to comment to Politico.) There has also been an alarming rise in people impersonating ICE officers to harass, threaten and detain immigrants. In South Carolina, an armed man detained two Latino men on a highway, telling them to stop speaking 'that shitty Spanish' and to 'go back to Mexico.' According to a police report in North Carolina, another man 'displayed a business card with a badge on it' before threatening to deport a woman if 'she did not have sex with him.' (He was charged with sexual assault.) We are only a few months into the second Trump administration. Things can, and very likely will, get even worse. The administration's dehumanizing campaign of mass deportation seems poised to include vigilantes acting as the militant arm of Trump's MAGA movement, scaring immigrants to make them retreat and hide, or even 'self-deport,' the preferred right-wing nomenclature for fleeing America before they're made to leave. When Loomer and Engels were discussing the IceRaid app, Loomer took a moment to recount an extremely exciting encounter she had recently. 'I actually ended up catching up with Tom Homan, our border czar, in the airport here in Palm Beach, Florida and I congratulated him on his deportation orders and his success thus far as the border czar,' Loomer said, queuing up a video of the interaction. 'Can we expect to see some more jihadist students rounded up soon and deported?' the video shows Loomer asking Homan, referring to the terrifying incidents of masked ICE agents disappearing college students off the streets for their support of pro-Palestinian causes — including, in the case of Tufts University doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk, for the apparent transgression of writing an op-ed in the school newspaper that was critical of Israel. The video shows Homan smiling at the question before looking into the camera. 'Just sit back and watch,' he said. This article was originally published on
