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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • Flash forward eight years, to this past May, when Mr. Miller, still livid and now the White House deputy chief of staff, paid a visit to the Washington headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he berated officials for not deporting nearly enough immigrants. He told the officials that rather than develop target lists of gang members and violent criminals, they should just go to Home Depots, where day laborers gather to be hired, or to 7-Eleven convenience stores and arrest the undocumented immigrants they find there.

    This time, the officials did what Mr. Miller said. ICE greatly stepped up its enforcement operations, raiding restaurants, farms and work sites across the country, with arrests sometimes climbing to more than 2,000 a day. In early June, after an ICE raid in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles triggered protests, Mr. Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines to the city, over the objection of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

    The crisis, from the immigration raids that sparked the protests to the militarized response that tried to put the protests down, was almost entirely of Mr. Miller’s making. And it served as a testament to the remarkable position he now occupies in Mr. Trump’s Washington. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, who reportedly accompanied Mr. Miller on his visit to ICE headquarters, seems to defer to him. “It’s really Stephen running D.H.S.,” a Trump adviser said. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, is so focused on preparing for and appearing on Fox News that she has essentially ceded control of the Department of Justice to Mr. Miller, making him, according to the conservative legal scholar Edward Whelan, “the de facto attorney general.” And in a White House where the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is not well versed or terribly interested in policy — “She’s producing a reality TV show every day,” another Trump adviser said, “and it’s pretty amazing, right?” — Mr. Miller is typically the final word.

    That last paragraph… Ooof.

    I knew Miller was a nihilistic misanthrope who would take as much power as he could, but I expected Bondi, Noem and Wiles to be nearly as craven to demonstrate their value to Trump and carve out their own fiefdoms. I didn’t expect them to cede it without so much as a shrug.






  • The DHS views the situation differently. In a statement to NBC, a department spokesperson said that “Garcia assaulted and verbally harassed a federal agent and that he was subdued and arrested for the alleged assault”.

    They say this every time, whether or not there is footage obviously proving otherwise.

    Apart from being so insulting and pathetic that this is the government’s generic response to unconstitutional arrests (though he is suing under a tort law due presumptively due to qualified immunity), it’s also outright defamatory to falsely claim that someone has committed a crime and assaulted ICE.

    The story doesn’t provide evidence either way, but if this just is their typical Baghdad Bob propaganda, I hope the victims of ICE start to sue for defamation as well - drain the new bill’s obscene funding with a wave of court-ordered compensation to ICE’s victims.




  • I think a general strike would be effective, but dangerous when people are kept so close to poverty.

    Remember the pandemic, we “all” stopped going into work? Except the grocery store workers, and the food processor workers, and those that distribute the food, and water treatment plant staff, and the power plant, and hospital staff, and taxis, and drug store workers, and so on and on. Do those people stop working? How many people can’t obtain the things they need beyond their next paycheck? What if in addition, the store shelves are empty?

    I agree, it’s the most feasible way to fight back, so don’t get me wrong. But just like union dues and preparation enable a local strike, accounting for food, water, amenities…a general strike would need to do that or else we would be fighting a war of attrition not just against billionaires with multi-year bunkers but also against ourselves.








  • It’s going to be awhile before folks recognize just how damaging this is, if it plays out as I expect.

    Trump’s entire life policy is to ignore norms, contracts, laws, and opposition until he’s stopped. It’s still dumbfounding he’s gotten this far, because he’s not some strange unknown entity - he’s a typical sociopath, pushing boundaries as far as they’ll go in his favor until he’s actually prevented from doing so.

    His “litigate to delay” strategy is right in line with this. And now the norm is that his administration doesn’t just get to act unlawfully until a court enjoins him from it (if even that, and if even he follows the order). It’s now that his administration gets to act unlawfully to any individual who hasn’t, on their own, challenged it and won in court.

    That’s basically game over for the rule of law.