The Purging

It begins.

First, criminalize and oust foreigners. Then silence dissenters. Dear gods, I'm scared.

ETA: I decided to copy & paste the full article text below.

Federal agents conduct immigration enforcement raids in at least six states

By Lisa Rein, Abigail Hauslohner and Sandhya Somashekhar By Lisa Rein, Abigail Hauslohner and Sandhya Somashekhar

U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least a half-dozen states this week in a series of raids that marked the first large-scale enforcement of President Trump’s Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.

Officials said the raids targeted known criminals, but they also netted some immigrants without criminal records, an apparent departure from similar enforcement waves during the Obama administration. Last month, Trump substantially broadened the scope of who the Department of Homeland Security can target to include those with minor offenses or no convictions at all.

Trump has pledged to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records.

Immigration officials confirmed that agents this week raided homes and workplaces in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles area, North Carolina and South Carolina, netting hundreds of people. But Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said they were part of “routine” immigration enforcement actions. ICE dislikes the term “raids,” and prefers to say authorities are conducting “targeted enforcement actions,” she said.

Christensen said the raids, which began Monday and ended Friday at noon, found undocumented immigrants from a dozen Latin American countries. “We’re talking about people who are threats to public safety or a threat to the integrity of the immigration system,” she said, noting that the majority of those detained were serious criminals, including some who were convicted of murder and domestic violence.

Immigration activists said the crackdown went beyond the six states DHS identified, and said they had also documented ICE raids of unusual intensity during the past two days in Florida, Kansas, Texas and Northern Virginia.

That undocumented immigrants with no criminal records were arrested and could potentially be deported sent a shock wave through immigrant communities nationwide amid concerns that the U.S. government could start going after law-abiding people.

“This is clearly the first wave of attacks under the Trump administration, and we know this isn’t going to be the only one,” Cristina Jimenez, executive director of United We Dream, an immigrant youth organization, said Friday during a conference call with immigration advocates.

ICE agents in the Los Angeles area Thursday took a number of individuals into custody over the course of an hour, seizing them from their homes and on their way to work, activists said.

David Marin, ICE’s field director in the Los Angeles area, said in a conference call with reporters Friday that 75 percent of the approximately 160 people detained in the operation this week had felony convictions; the rest had misdemeanors or were in the United States illegally. Officials said Friday night that 37 of those detained in Los Angeles had been deported to Mexico.

“Dangerous criminals who should be deported are being released into our communities,” Marin said.

Spanish language radio stations and the local NPR affiliate in Los Angeles have been running public service announcements regarding the hourly “Know Your Rights” seminars the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles scheduled for Friday and Saturday. By the time the 4 p.m. group began Friday, more than 100 others had gathered at the group’s office in the Westlake neighborhood just outside downtown.

A video that circulated on social media Friday appeared to show ICE agents in Texas detaining people in an Austin shopping center parking lot. Immigration advocates also reported roadway checkpoints, where ICE appeared to be targeting immigrants for random ID checks, in North Carolina and in Austin. ICE officials denied that authorities used checkpoints during the operations.

“I’m getting lots of reports from my constituents about seeing ICE on the streets. Teachers in my district have contacted me — certain students didn’t come to school today because they’re afraid,” said Greg Casar, an Austin City Council member. “I talked to a constituent, a single mother, who had her door knocked on this morning by ICE.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.) said he confirmed with ICE’s San Antonio office that the agency “has launched a targeted operation in South and Central Texas as part of Operation Cross Check.”

“I am asking ICE to clarify whether these individuals are in fact dangerous, violent threats to our communities, and not people who are here peacefully raising families and contributing to our state,” Castro said in a statement Friday night.

Hiba Ghalib, an immigration lawyer in Atlanta, said the ICE detentions were causing “mass confusion” in the immigrant community. She said she had heard reports of ICE agents going door-to-door in one largely Hispanic neighborhood, asking people to present their papers.
“People are panicking,” Ghalib said. “People are really, really scared.”

Immigration officials acknowledged that as a result of Trump’s executive order, authorities had cast a wider net than they would have last year.

The Trump administration is facing several legal challenges to his executive orders on immigration. On Thursday, the administration lost a court battle over a separate executive order to temporarily ban entry into the United States by citizens of seven majority-Muslim countries, as well as by refugees. The administration said Friday that it is considering raising the case to the Supreme Court.

Some activists in Austin and Los Angeles suggested that the raids might be retaliation for those cities’ “sanctuary city” policies. A government aide familiar with the raids said it is possible that the predominantly daytime operations — a departure from the Obama administration’s night raids — meant to “send a message to the community that the Trump deportation force is in effect.”

Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy group, said that the wave of detentions harks back to the George W. Bush administration, when workplace raids to sweep up all undocumented workers were common.

The Obama administration conducted a spate of raids and also pursued a more aggressive deportation policy than any previous president, sending more than 400,000 people back to their birth countries at the height of his deportations in 2012. The public outcry over the lengthy detentions and deportations of women, children and people with minor offenses led President Obama in his second term to prioritize convicted criminals for deportation.

Janell Ross in Los Angeles and Camille Pendley in Atlanta contributed to this report.

Link: Associated Press Fact Check: Trump claims on travel ban misleading, wrong

The whole article is good at teasing apart the half-truths of which career politicians are so fond. But here is a highlight. If anyone tries to tell you, "This isn't a Muslim ban there are other Muslim countries that aren't on the list!!!" drop this excerpt on them:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently told Fox News that Trump had asked him to create a plan for a Muslim ban that would meet legal tests. Giuliani said he ultimately made recommendations that focused on security and what countries posed security threats.

You can't get much more obvious than that. Whatever else I may think of him, I deeply appreciate Giuliani's bluntness in that moment.

Executive Orders (and Memoranda)

I heard on the local talk radio show today that Barack Obama made five executive orders during the first two weeks of his presidency; Donald Trump has made six seven. I decided to look up what they were. I am thankful every day that the internet makes such research easy.

Obama's First Executive Orders:

1. January 20th, 2009: 120-day halt on "legal proceedings" for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
2. January 22nd, 2009: Orders Guantánamo Bay facility to close within a year.
3. January 22nd, 2009: Requires interrogators to follow the methods in the Army Field Manual (same article as #2). In other words, to not torture people. The two psychologists who cooked up the questionable methods used at Guantánamo Bay are still on trial. [link]
4. Before January 26th, 2009: Ends ban on federal funding for international organizations that encourage or perform abortions (pro-choice opinion article; could not find original source in search function). It was reversed by President Trump in 2017 -- in other words, any organization that so much as mentions abortion gets their funding revoked.
5. Soon after January 24th, 2009: Lifts ban on federal funding for stem-cell research. Obama was "expected to" do this when the article was written.

Trump's First Executive Orders:

1. January 20th, 2017: Announcing plans to dismantle (and rebuild?) Obamacare.
2. January 24th, 2017: "Expediting Environmental Reviews and Approvals For High Priority Infrastructure Projects." I understand that this is aimed at expediting the Dakota Access Pipeline and similar projects.
3. January 25th, 2017: Promises to enforce strict immigration laws, especially on self-declared "sanctuary cities." Couches it as a security measure.
4. January 25th, 2017: "Immigration Enforcement Improvements." With the U.S.-Mexico border.
5. January 27th, 2017: "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES." This was the thinly-disguised anti-Muslim travel ban. Also, the title was entirely in caps.
6. January 28th, 2017: Lobbying restrictions. Not sure who this is aimed at. I do not have time today to seek out that information.
7. January 30th, 2017: Budget restrictions. He appears to want the agencies to not spend more than in previous years. If one program costs more, cut another to balance it out. This would probably throttle sections of government he and his cabinet members disapprove of.

While I was searching for info, my partner directed me to this article from MSN / The Washington Post about how, technically, not all of Trump's recent declarations are executive orders (commands to a whole department to do things a certain way), but executive memoranda (presidential suggestions). The orders are numbered and published in the Federal Registrar. I guess the memoranda are tracked in press releases?

Now that I've found the Trump Administration's website, I'm going to be visiting it a lot. I...would rather not, but it is the best source for official announcements.

My First Protest

Events are happening faster than I can write about them.

On Friday, January 27th, Trump signed an executive order than placed a 90-day travel ban to the U.S. for people from six mostly Muslim countries: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. The order also suspends the refugee program for 120 days. Syrians, for some reason, are barred indefinitely -- even refugees. This command went into effect on Saturday the 28th. I read that a federal judge challenged it, and managed to eliminate the part about sending these people home...but implementation was uneven. Also it did not address the core problem.

So, what happened to people who were unlucky enough to be in transit yesterday? They were "detained" at the airports. They were effectively arrested because of their country of origin. Scientists, students, permanent residents with green cards, refugees who had been waiting in a bureaucratic queue for years...All criminalized. This is deeply wrong. So wrong, that after about twenty minutes of struggling with my own cowardice, I decided to travel to my local airport and join the protest forming there.

In the past I have viewed protests as largely futile. Stand around, wave signs, yell simple slogans. Make a scene. Make people uncomfortable. I had missed an important component: disruption. If you have enough people, you can physically block employees and customers from doing what they need or want to. That forces the higher-ups to listen, to placate you, if only to get you out of their hair.
I felt sorry for the everyday travelers and workers who could not (directly) make the changes we were demanding, but were still inconvenienced. Yet, that's the whole point.

Before I even left I read through people posting on Facebook that the light rail that ran to the airport was not letting off passengers at that station. So, my girlfriend and I had to get out at the previous stop and walk at least 1.5 miles to our destination. Thankfully, we were physically up to the task. Bus service was restricted, too. One blew past us as we were jogging to catch it....and the driver also ignored a very confused woman with a suitcase waiting at the bus stop proper. I hope she got a ride eventually.

When we arrived, we met up with my partner's sister and her boyfriend. A crowd was sitting or standing, blocking a security checkpoint. Other groups blocked the rest, but ours was the largest. A handful of people seemed to have taken charge of the event, leading chants and such. I quickly learned that communication across a large, loosely organization group of people was nearly impossible; this distressed me. But a brilliant person came up with a solution: yelling, "Mic check!" and waiting for a response. They did this a few times until the answer was strong and the murmur of conversation had quieted. They then dispersed the information in small clusters of words, pausing so that the crowd could repeat it and thus ensure more people understood. Runners spread news between the pockets of protesters. Mostly, they informed us that police had started intimidating the smallest knot of people at the farthest gate, and asked for reinforcements. They made it clear that those who moved risked being arrested. I was not that brave. I know that several were arrested while I was there. Police used pepper spray at one point -- so said a runner. The Seattle Stranger's blog reported that tensions rose throughout the night, with the last resistors forced out at around 2:30 in the morning. I left some time after 11:00. Thankfully, we had secured a car ride home.

It seems that large-scale civil protests, no matter how peaceful they begin, always go sour. The pattern goes like this:

1. Protestors make a scene and/or block access to a place.
2. Police arrive to "keep the peace."
3. Only there can be no peace with the protestors there, so the police eventually start intimidating them.
4. Police push for the protestors to leave, so the protestors resist; police push more, sometimes using things like pepper spray, until eventually...
5. The protestors display "disorderly conduct" and are arrested and/or are forced to flee.

Antagonizing someone until they snap and then claiming self-defense is despicable behavior. I anticipate I will see much more of it in the coming months, directly or not. My involvement in physical protests will probably continue to be small -- I have to make sure to not burn out, after all -- but I will continue to try to keep pace with current events online.