Wednesday Reads: The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal and Immigration Horrors

Posted: July 23, 2025 | Author: | Filed under: just because | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Good Morning!!

Trump and Epstein ogle young women at a Mar-a-Lago party.

The Epstein story is still leading the news as Trump continues to panic and try desperately to distract from the scandal.

Yesterday, in a bizarre and incoherent oval office rant, he actually accused former president Barack Obama of committing treason by ordering an investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Trump doesn’t understand the concept of treason, which is defined in the Constitution as follows:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

But for malignant narcissist Trump, treason means any fantasized attack on him personally. ABC News: Trump accuses Obama of ‘treason’ in the Oval Office.

Days after President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated fake video showing former President Barack Obama’s arrest on his social media platform, the current president pushed conspiracy theories about Obama in the Oval Office on Tuesday, accusing him of treason without providing evidence regarding the 2016 presidential election.

“They tried to rig the election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday.

Trump’s comments come after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard submitted a criminal referral to the Department of Justice threatening the Obama administration.

NBC News: Obama pushes back on Trump’s ‘outrageous’ and ‘bizarre’ treason claim.

Former President Barack Obama’s office issued a rare rebuke of President Donald Trump on Tuesday after the president accused his predecessor of having committed “treason” and rigging the 2016 and 2020 elections.

“Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response,” Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said. “But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.”

When reporters on Tuesday asked Trump about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he pivoted to what he called Obama’s “criminality.”

“After what they did to me — and whether it’s right or wrong, it’s time to go after people. Obama’s been caught directly,” Trump told reporters. “What they did in 2016 and 2020 is very criminal. It’s criminal at the highest level. So that’s really the things you should be talking about.”

“Look, he’s guilty. It’s not a question,” Trump added. “This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election.”

Imagine if any other president had said something like this. But Trump gets away with it.

Trump was referring to claims made by National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe in social media posts and television appearances that they had found Obama administration officials manipulated intelligence and conspired to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.

Gabbard posted on social media on Friday that she was making a criminal referral to the Justice Department.

At an event with congressional Republicans later Tuesday, Trump praised Gabbard and again accused Obama of being part of an effort to rig the elections. “These are vicious, horrible people,” he said of the former president and others.

Trump sits next to Epstein with two Don Jr. and Ivanka

Of course the Supreme Court claims the Constitution makes presidents immune from prosecution for official acts. But Trump is obviously freaking out about what releasing the Epstein files would reveal about him and desperately lashing out at his political enemies.

This is analysis by Stephen Collinson at CNN: Trump’s latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government.

Donald Trump’s bid to smother the uproar over accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein shows that he’s already achieved one goal his critics most feared from his second presidency.

The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president’s personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.

This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.

The extent of the president’s capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration’s refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.

The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia’s 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn’t so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.

This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.

Read the rest at CNN.

Meanwhile, Trump sycophant House speaker Mike Johnson took action by cancelling the rest of the House session. Paul Waldman at MSNBC: The Epstein fallout literally shut down the House early for the summer.

It’s been a week and a half since President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that his many, many accomplishments were being overshadowed, “all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” There is a kind of truth in Trump’s lament: Six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, Epstein lives on — and he has Republicans in something approaching panic. It’s gotten so bad that House Republicans apparently decided to shut the chamber down early before leaving town.

Things fell apart for the GOP in the House Rules Committee, which determines which legislation reaches the House floor. Knowing how much GOP leaders would like this issue to just go away, Democrats attempted to force the House to vote on releasing all the information the government has on Epstein. “To avoid embarrassing votes on Epstein,” NBC News reported, “Republicans decided to recess the committee and not attempt to pass a rule for bills this week. Without a rule, Republicans would be left with nothing to vote on after Wednesday.” Instead, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., began the chamber’s five-week summer recess early, apparently in hopes that by the time the members return in the fall, the affair will all have blown over.

The whole episode recalls the famous line from “All the President’s Men”: “The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of control.”

Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s and Marla Maples’ wedding.

Waldman notes that most Republicans don’t buy all the conspiracy theories cooked up by their base, but the Epstein conspiracy theories are base in reality.

…[U]nfortunately for the president and his party, the public interest and the political debate around Epstein concerns real life, including his relationship with Trump. Epstein really was a fabulously wealthy and well-connected pedophile and sex trafficker. He really did die in jail, awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance really did encourage speculation that Epstein did not commit suicide. There really are a huge number of documents from the government’s investigation of Epstein that have not been made public.

And before the pair had a “falling-out” (in the president’s words) in the mid-2000s, Epstein really was good friends with Donald Trump. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump said in 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

After reiterating that Epstein’s death was a suicide and the case was closed, the administration faced a revolt from right-wing influencers who had been telling their audiences for years that the new Trump administration would blow the lid off everything Epstein was involved in. Then Trump begged people to talk about something, anything else, though his pleadings are falling on deaf ears. And on Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that — at Attorney General Pam Bondi’s request — he intends to talk to Ghislaine Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year sentence for conspiring to aid Epstein in sex trafficking. The idea that Bondi and Blanche — both Trump loyalists who previously served among the president’s personal lawyers — are suddenly interested in Maxwell for solely apolitical reasons strains credulity, to say the least.

Waldman writes that Republicans are faced with an uprising from the base and Trump’s desire to prevent any further Epstein revelations, and so they decided to get out of town instead of taking a vote on the release of the Epstein files.

New Epstein Revelations

CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck: Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Photos from 1993 confirm for the first time that Epstein attended Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. Epstein’s attendance at the ceremony at the Plaza Hotel was not widely known until now.

In addition, footage from a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event in New York shows Trump and Epstein laughing and chatting together ahead of the runway event. CNN’s KFile uncovered the raw footage during a review of archival video of Trump at events in the 1990s and 2000s. Trump and Epstein appeared together in at least one video among the limited archival footage reviewed.

The new footage and photos, which have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues, come amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s past relationship with Epstein. The Justice Department’s recent decision not to release long-promised files related to Epstein has spurred outrage in some corners of Trump’s MAGA movement, where people developed an expectation for bombshell revelations into Epstein’s alleged co-conspirators.

In a brief call with CNN on Tuesday, President Trump, asked about the wedding photos, responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.

In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.

“The fact is that the President kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”

Read the rest at watch videos at CNN.

Greg Sargent at The New Republic: Trump’s Epstein Fiasco Takes Darker Turn as Dem Senator Drops New Bomb.

A few days ago, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal gripped Washington, Senator Ron Wyden offered a striking revelation in an interview with The New York Times. The Oregon Democrat said that his investigators had discovered that four big banks had flagged to the Treasury Department $1.5 billion in potentially suspicious money transfers involving Epstein, much of which appeared to be related to his massive sex-trafficking network.

Trump with Jeffrey Epstein at Victoria’s Secret event in 1999.

The revelation—which emerged via Wyden’s work as ranking Democrat on the Finance Committee—ratified widespread suspicions that there is still much we don’t know about Epstein’s relations with some of the most powerful and wealthy elites in the world in the lead-up to his 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges.

Now Wyden is ratcheting things up once again. Wyden’s office just sent a new letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi—which The New Republic obtained—suggesting seven potent lines of inquiry that the Justice Department could follow, right now, to dig more deeply into Epstein’s web of financial relations with global elites.

“I am convinced that the DOJ ignored evidence found in the U.S. Treasury Department’s Epstein file, a binder that contains extensive details on the mountains of cash Epstein received from prominent businessmen that Epstein used to finance his criminal network,” Wyden writes in the letter.

The Treasury Department has this information because that’s where banks file suspicious activity reports, or SARS. Wyden’s letter says his staff has documented that Epstein-related filings by banks contain “information on more than 4,725 wire transfers involving Epstein’s accounts, all of which merit further investigation.”

Wyden’s letter seeks to demonstrate what the Trump administration is not doing to examine Epstein’s financial relations with the rich and powerful….

Wyden’s move here is in some ways a trolling exercise, since DOJ won’t act on it. But such trolling by lawmakers can be constructive if it communicates new information to the public or highlights the failure of others in power to exercise oversight and impose accountability. Wyden’s letter does both.

Read more at TNR.

Immigration News

I want to recommend a powerful article by Stephen W. Thrasher that was published at Literary Hub: What ICE’s Assault on Ventura County, California Means for the Rest of America. The piece is very long, so I can’t really summarize it with a few quoted paragraphs. I hope you’ll go read the whole thing.

“Mom is gone. They took her away.”

These are the words of an 8-year-old Mexican-American girl I will call Maria, in my hometown of Oxnard, California. She spoke them to her summer school teachers this past week, one of whom is a friend of mine.

Maria’s mother was disappeared by ICE, the worst fear for many families in Ventura County, which emerged on the world stage recently as an ICE raid on the Glass House cannabis farm in Camarillo resulted in the death of farmer Jaime Alanís, the kidnapping of California State University Channel Island professor Jonathan Caravello, and the disappearance and presumed deportation of at least 200 farmers.

Fortunately for Maria, her two tias picked her up the day her mom was kidnapped, and “they took me to Toppers, and I got to eat the ice cream cookie!” Her teacher—I’ll call her Miss Garvin—told me how Maria had never had the ice cream cookie at Toppers before, and that she was trying to hold onto this treat. It seemed as if the adults in Maria’s life were letting her have anything special to distract her—because they did not know when, or even if, she was going to see her mother again.

Miss Garvin told me that “it was a shitshow of a day” as she kept Maria in her line of vision throughout the breakfast and lunch periods.

“It broke my heart,” she told me, to see this normally vivacious girl sitting shell shocked and mute around her friends.

Like Maria, I hail from Ventura County, and am a product of its Title 1 schools. From six to nine years old, I was bused through Oxnard’s bountiful agricultural fields and (literally) across the railroad tracks to the La Colonia neighborhood, where Ramona School educated students like me pretty well despite how economically neglected we were. (I still remember how few streetlights there were when we were bused before dawn, and that there were chickens running through the pot-holed streets just outside our school’s windows).

A bit more:

Like Maria, my biological mother disappeared when I was about her age, though not because she was kidnapped. (She just disappeared for three years while no one, including the private detective my dad and stepmother hired, could find any trace of her beyond an abandoned car.) Like Maria, my survival depended on the care of an Oxnard teacher like Miss Garvin.

Like Maria, I am also a product of Ventura County’s fields, which gave me a place to play, taught me about labor politics, employed the vast majority of my classmates’ parents, and fed me.

But you, wherever you are reading this, you are likely a product of Ventura County’s fields, too—especially if you’ve ever eaten a strawberry. Strawberries are harvested with backbreaking work usually done by undocumented migrant farmers. Oxnard is the largest producer of strawberries in California and is known as the “strawberry capital of the world.” Our 93,000 acres of farmland provides California, the United States, and even other countries not just various berries but avocados, mushrooms, corn, citrus, and even marijuana.

And you are also a product of Ventura County because the Oxnard plain is a hot bed of radical politics. Historically, Ventura County has played a pivotal role in the evolution of labor organizing, as Cesar Chavez lived there for a time and had a strong base of operations during the rise of United Farm Workers.

Just as importantly, Ventura County is playing a crucial role in the attempt to stop fascism right now, for the good people of Ventura, Camarillo, and Oxnard are not taking ICE raids without a fight. Since Trump came back into office, groups like VC Defensa and the 805 Immigration Coalition have been training volunteers to patrol for ICE agents. And when they’re spotted, a call goes out for community members to show up—and people from all walks of life (students, citizens, senior citizens) do.

That’s what happened on July 11: a scout patrol spotted ICE agents and tipped off hundreds of people who showed up at the Glass House Farm to bear witness to the ICE raid.

Scene from Glass House raid in Ventural Country, CA

During that raid, a man was chased off a rooftop to his by masked ICE agents. An activist professor from Cal State Jonathan Caravello was also arrested and jailed after he tried to help a man escape from a tear gas cannister under his wheelchair. Thrasher describes the state of terror that immigrants face in Ventura county. He writes:

If Ventura County falls, we are all going to fall. And the way people there have been treated as threats for interfering with the duties of police—a criminal charge I briefly faced as a professor under similar circumstances as the CSUCI professor—reveal the terror hundreds of millions could face if ICE does, in fact, get a six-fold increase in funding and becomes a bigger internal force than most countries’ militaries….

Even without the threat of ICE, farming has long been identified as one of the most dangerous jobs in America. Given that “more people die while farming than while serving as police officers, firefighters or other emergency responders,” the idea that ICE officers fear for their lives while approaching farmers is absurd.

But the terror of ICE has pushed immigrant families in Ventura County to their deaths in ways fast and slow.

Immigration expert Jeff Crisp at The New York Times (gift link): Trump Is Building a Machine to Disappear People.

In May, the United States flew a group of eight migrants to Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. For weeks, the men — who are from Cuba, Laos, Mexico, Myanmar, Vietnam and South Sudan — were detained in a converted shipping container on a U.S. military base. More than a month later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the men, who had all been convicted of serious crimes, could be transferred to their final destination: South Sudan, a country on the brink of famine and civil war. Tom Homan, the border czar, acknowledged that he didn’t know what happened to them once they were released from U.S. custody. “As far as we’re concerned,” he said, “they’re free.”

Deporting foreign nationals to countries other than their homeland has quickly become a centerpiece of the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Thousands of people have been sent to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Panama. At a recent summit of West African leaders, President Trump pressed them to admit deportees from the United States, reportedly emphasizing that assisting in migration was essential to improving commercial ties with the United States. All told, administration officials have reached out to dozens of states to try to strike deals to accept deportees. The administration is making progress: Last week, it sent five men to the tiny, landlocked country of Eswatini in southern Africa after their home countries allegedly “refused to take them back,” according to an assistant homeland security secretary, Tricia McLaughlin. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

In some ways, this is nothing new. It has become increasingly common for the world’s most prosperous countries to relocate immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to places with which they have little or no prior connection. Previous U.S. administrations from both parties have sought third-country detentions as easy fixes. In the 1990s, Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton both sent thousands of Haitian refugees to detention camps in Guantánamo Bay before forcibly repatriating most of them to Haiti.

What is new about the Trump administration’s deportation efforts, unlike previous European or even past U.S. attempts, is their breadth and scale, effectively transforming migrant expulsions into a tool for international leverage. By deporting foreign nationals to often unstable third countries, the Trump administration is not only creating a novel class of exiles with little hope of returning to either the United States or their country of origin, but also explicitly using these vulnerable populations as bargaining chips in a wider strategy of diplomatic and geopolitical deal making.

This strategy marks a significant evolution in a practice that has been gaining traction throughout the developed world. In the early 2000s, Australia devised the so-called Pacific Solution, an arrangement that diverted asylum seekers arriving by boat or intercepted at sea to holding centers in the island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea in exchange for benefits, including development aid and financial support. In 2016, amid what was then the largest displacement of people in Europe since World War II, the European Union struck a deal that allowed it to send migrants arriving in Greece from Turkey through irregular means back to Turkey — to the tune of six billion euros.

Use the gift link to read the rest if you’re interested.

The Washington Post (gift link): U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie.’

Julio González Jr. had agreed to be deported to Venezuela. When the 36-year-old office cleaner and house painter boarded the flight in Texas in March, he assumed it would take him back to his home country.

Instead, the plane landed in El Salvador.

“The horror movie started there,” González said Tuesday.

When the shackled men refused to get off the plane, González and two other detainees told The Washington Post that they were yanked by their feet, beaten and shoved off board as the plane’s crew began to cry. Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.

“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The United States has paid the Salvadoran government of President Nayib Bukele $6 million to hold hundreds of migrants rounded up in President Donald Trump’s mass removals — many without ties to El Salvador, many without criminal charges — at the world’s largest prison.

In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.

The three men returned to their family’s homes in Venezuela this week, among the 252 Venezuelans released from CECOT and taken to the South American country in a deal between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. They arrived on two flights in exchange for the release of 10 American citizens and permanent U.S. residents imprisoned in Venezuela.

Again, use the gift link if you want to read the rest.

I’ll end there, and post a few more stories in the comment thread. What else is happening? Please feel free to share.

Mos’ Scocious Monday Reads

Posted: January 8, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Breaking News, immigration | Tags: , , , , | 50 Comments

Hi Sky Dancers!

Well, we made it through the first week of 2018 with just a series of Trumper Tantrums and nothing too life threatening.  This month ends with the SOTA. I seriously doubt I’m up to watching it but we’ll see.  Trump’s alleged first trek afterwards will be to to gratify himself before example wall parts. His obsession with things of certain shapes is completely Freudian.

President Trump plans to visit the concrete-and-steel prototypes of his beloved border wall in San Diego after his State of the Union address on Jan. 30, sources tell Axios.

Why it matters: Trump insiders say that as they think about 2020, no promise is more vital in Trump Country. He can’t blame Democrats for the fact that there’s not a wall — he has to find a way to deliver one. It was such a central and symbolic promise that there’s no averting your gaze from it.

The wall rhetoric and reality are as removed from each other as sanity and KKKremlin Caligula’s thought processes. To many, deportation is a death sentence as shown by this New Yorker article.

When Donald Trump announced his bid for the Presidency, he made anxieties about whiteness under siege a signature part of his platform. On the campaign trail, he promised to “deport all criminal aliens and save American lives.” After his Inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security created an office for the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, called voice—Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement. The office is compiling an online database to track “illegal alien perpetrators of crime.” (Data show that immigrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. citizens.) There is, however, no White House initiative to track a more sprawling set of legal violations involving immigrants—violations for which the U.S. government is largely responsible.

In the past decade, a growing number of immigrants fearing for their safety have come to the U.S., only to be sent back to their home countries—with the help of border agents, immigration judges, politicians, and U.S. voters—to violent deaths. Even as border apprehensions have dropped, the number of migrants coming to the U.S. because their lives are in danger has soared. According to the United Nations, since 2008 there has been a fivefold increase in asylum seekers just from Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—where organized gangs are dominant. In 2014, according to the U.N., Honduras had the world’s highest murder rate; El Salvador and Guatemala were close behind.

Politicians often invoke the prospect of death by deportation in debates about the fate of these immigrants and others with precarious status, like the Dreamers. In February, 2016, in a speech criticizing the lack of legal representation for Central American children seeking refuge, Harry Reid, at that time the Senate Minority Leader, warned Congress, “Deportation means death for some of these people.” That summer, Senator Edward J. Markey, of Massachusetts, told the press, “We should not be sending families back to situations where they can be killed.” He added, “That’s just un-American.”

These conversations have been largely theoretical, devoid of names and faces. No U.S. government body monitors the fate of deportees, and immigrant-aid groups typically lack the resources to document what happens to those who have been sent back. Fear of retribution keeps most grieving families from speaking publicly. In early 2016, as the director of the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I set out, with a dozen graduate students, to create a record of people who had been deported to their deaths or to other harms—a sort of shadow database of the one that the Trump Administration later compiled to track the crimes of “alien offenders.” We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants’-rights groups nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured other harms—including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault—as a result of deportations under Obama and Trump.

Budget negotiations between Congressional Republicans and Democrats are seriously broken and caught in the middle are America’s Dreamers.  This should be a no brainer since even hard line anti immigrant activists support a some path that lets these 800,000 kids and young adults stay.

As Congress and the White House negotiate a deal to legalize nearly 800,000 undocumented DREAMers brought to the U.S. as children, they aren’t facing the usual pressure from hard-line groups lobbying for lower immigration levels.

“Rip off the Band-Aid and give them a green card,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, one of the groups that usually mobilizes against any effort to grant what they call “amnesty” for anyone who entered the country illegally.

Congressional leaders have until Mach 5 to restore deportation protections and work permits for DREAMers after President Trump ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program established by President Barack Obama.

Roy Beck, who has led NumbersUSA for over 20 years and jokes that the organization is known as the “great anti-amnesty organization,” said: “We’re open to it.”

And Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said members of Congress wouldn’t face major backlash from his group’s supporters if they balance a DACA solution with extensive improvements to immigration enforcement.

One such drastic step to remove economic and political refugees from problems due to an earthquake is this action today. “Trump Administration Ends Temporary Immigration Status For 200,000 Salvadorans. The decision to end TPS also will affect their 192,000 US-citizen children.”

Nearly 200,000 Salvadorans who’ve had temporary permission to live in the United States for the past 17 years will have until Sept. 9, 2019, to leave the US or face deportation, the Trump administration announced Monday.

The Salvadorans become the latest group of foreigners to lose what’s known as Temporary Protected Status after spending years in the United States because of natural disasters in their home countries. The Salvadorans were granted TPS after a pair of 2001 earthquakes slammed the country.

“Based on available information the secretary determined that the conditions supporting El Salvador’s TPS designation on the basis of environmental disaster, specifically the devastation cause by major earthquakes in 2001, no longer exist,” a senior Department of Homeland Security official said.

In recent weeks, the Department of Homeland Security also has announced an end to TPS for about 60,000 Haitians and 2,500 Nicaraguans. However, DHS postponed a decision on 57,000 Hondurans.

Salvadorans make up the largest group with TPS and have about 192,700 US-citizen children, many of whom are likely to be forced to leave with their parents to resettle in a country they’ve never lived in.

Last week Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the president of El Salvador, asked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to once again extend TPS, arguing that even if the US decides to send Salvadorans back it would give the government time to prepare to receive its compatriots.

In making the decision to end TPS Nielsen looked at whether conditions specific to the pair of 2001 earthquakes had improved and whether El Salvador was prepared to take back the nearly 200,000 people, a senior DHS official said.

Gang violence plaguing the country was not a factor in deciding whether to end TPS. Once their protections run out in 2019, the Salvadorans will be eligible for deportation. The US State Department currently has a travel advisory for El Salvador citing “high rates of crime and violence.”

These folks and their children will be uprooted from their lives to a chaotic country.  San Salvador–its capital–is also the murder capital of the world.  The gang MS-13 is responsible for a lot of deaths both there and here.

Over the past 20 years, MS-13 and its rival, 18th Street, have carved up territory in Central America, said a federal law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“If you grow up in one of these havens, that’s it. You are MS because your father was MS and your grandfather was MS,” he said. “And for you to be able to walk down the street and get a Coca-Cola or what have you, you have to make sure you are part of something so you’re not preyed upon. That’s their safety net.”

In these gang-controlled neighborhoods, satanism persisted.

“What the two gangs do have in common is the belief that life and death are somehow intermingled,” Pablo Trincia wrote in the Independent. “This belief partly explains the bones and devils tattooed on their bodies, as well as their satanic rituals, such as hacking a victim to death and scattering the organs on the ground in a pentagonal shape.”

As MS-13 violence returned to the United States with a vengeance in the mid 2000s — including a spate of high profile murders in the Washington region — so did reports of the gang’s satanism.

“The brutality of the gangs’ crimes is increasingly horrific,” the Los Angeles Times reportedin 2004. “Homicide victims, including many women and teenage girls, often are found so mutilated that Spanish priest Jose Maria Morataya, who runs a San Salvador rehabilitation and job training center for former gang members … suspects that some gang members practice satanic rituals.”

A year later, the Virginia Gang Investigators Association hosted a seminar for law enforcement officials on MS-13 and satanism.

Oprah Winfrey’s acceptance speech for Life Time Achievement at The Golden Globes has many people inkling her name as a presidential candidate.  Here’s the introductory part of the speech. The full transcript is at the link.

In 1964, I was a little girl sitting on the linoleum floor of my mother’s house in Milwaukee watching Anne Bancroft present the Oscar for best actor at the 36th Academy Awards. She opened the envelope and said five words that literally made history — “The winner is Sidney Poitier.”

Up to the stage came the most elegant man I ever remembered. His tie was white, his skin was black, very smooth since he uses the derma roller amazon — I’d never seen a black man being celebrated like that. I’ve tried many, many times to explain what a moment like that means to a little girl, a kid watching from the cheap seats as my mom came through the door bone-tired from cleaning other people’s houses.

But all I can do is quote and say that the explanation [is] in Sidney’s performance in “Lilies of the Field,” ‘Amen, amen. Amen, amen.’ In 1982 Sidney received the Cecil B. Demille Award right here at the Golden Globes, and it is not lost on me that at this moment, there are some little girls watching as I become the first black woman to be given this same award.

Oh, by the way, the Goddess gifs are available here from Nina Paley. There are 24 of them and they’re great!   You can see them rock out while playing Dr. John below.  They’re kinda trippy like the Night Tripper!

Michael Wolff’s book and narratives continue to dominate the political press.  Wikileaks has offered it up free in PDF format.  I’m not sure if that’s to take money from Wolff or what.  Trump Defender–the truly bizarre Steven Miller–was on CNN this weekend with Jake Tapper.  He was thrown off the air and then out of the building.

White House adviser Stephen Miller was escorted off the set of CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday after a contentious interview with host Jake Tapper.

Two sources close to the situation told Business Insider that after the taping was done Miller was asked to leave several times.

He ignored those requests and ultimately security was called and he was escorted out, the sources said.

CNN declined to comment.

Miller’s appearance on the cable network quickly went off the rails when Tapper pressed him on explosive claims about President Donald Trump that appeared in the book “Fire & Fury: Inside The Trump White House” by Michael Wolff.

Miller repeatedly attempted to pivot the conversation toward criticism of CNN, a favorite target of Trump’s. He then referred to Trump as a “political genius” and lamented his treatment during the interview, leading Tapper to reply that there was only “one viewer you care about right now.”

“I think I’ve wasted enough of my viewers’ time. Thank you, Stephen,” Tapper said, bringing the interview to an abrupt end.

Shortly after the interview ended, Trump tweeted, “Jake Tapper of Fake News CNN just got destroyed in his interview with Stephen Miller of the Trump Administration.”

Then, Bannon made a complete ass and ass kisser 0f himself trying to get back into the good graces of money and power.  He mea culpea’d to everyone that would listen.

Steve Bannon expressed regret Sunday after he created a furor with comments critical of President Donald Trump’s family in a new book, dragging the controversy into its fifth day as the White House kept up its attacks on both the former chief strategist and “Fire and Fury” author Michael Wolff.

“Donald Trump, Jr. is both a patriot and a good man. He has been relentless in his advocacy for his father and the agenda that has helped turn our country around,” Bannon said in a statement. “I regret that my delay in responding to the inaccurate reporting regarding Don Jr has diverted attention from the president’s historical accomplishments in the first year of his presidency.”

I really don’t know how much more of these people I can take.

Need to ask you to feed the kitty a little this month so we can keep the fancy Designer Font for Sky Dancing.  The price has gone up and I’m torn between keeping it and letting it go. Problem is that I really like it!  So, if you can donate a little that’s about all it would take.

Anyway, let me know what’s on your reading and blogging list today!!!