Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s War on Americans

Posted: July 5, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Donald Trump, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration | Tags: Camp Mystic, climate modeling, concentration camps, fascist takeover, FEMA, ICE, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, NOAA, NWS, police state, slave labor, Texas floods, weather emergencies | 12 Comments

Good Morning!!

Patrice Preveirault, Le Pastel

It’s just the beginning of the storm season, and we are beginning to see the damage from Trump/DOGE cuts to the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). There’s a terrible tragedy playing out in the Texas hill country right now.

The Texas Tribune: Death toll from Hill Country flash floods rises to 24 as rescue efforts continue.

State officials said Friday night that at least 24 people have died in the catastrophic flood that swept through Kerr County early Friday morning, and 23 girls from Camp Mystic, a private Christian girls’ camp, are still unaccounted for.

In a news conference in Kerrville, Gov. Greg Abbott signed an emergency disaster declaration, which allows numerous counties affected by the floods to get the state resources needed to help with ongoing search-and-rescue efforts.

Kerr County Sheriff Larry Leitha said one other person was found dead in nearby Kendall County but it’s unclear if that person was a flood victim.

Nim Kidd, the chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, said local officials were caught off guard by the volume of rain, adding that the National Weather Service advisory issued Thursday “did not predict the amount of rain that we saw.”

Gen. Thomas Suelzer, the head of the Texas Military Department, said 237 people have been rescued and evacuated so far. Officials said they couldn’t provide the number of people who are unaccounted for, but they include the 23 girls from Camp Mystic.

In an earlier press conference Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the dead include adults and children, and some were found in cars “that were washed out upstream.” He said officials aren’t sure whether any of the bodies were children from Camp Mystic, and stressed that the campers are only considered missing at this point….

As much as 10 inches of heavy rain fell in just a few hours overnight in central Kerr County, causing flash flooding of the Guadalupe River. Patrick said the river, which winds through Kerr County in Central Texas, rose 26 feet in 45 minutes during torrential rains overnight.

Were there warnings this was coming?

A flood watch issued Thursday afternoon estimated isolated amounts up to 7 inches of rising water. That shifted to a flood warning for at least 30,000 people overnight.

According to the National Weather Service website, the flash flood watch, which included Kerr County, was issued at 1:18 p.m. Thursday. Nearly 12 hours later, a “life threatening” flash flood warning was issued at 1:14 a.m., according to the website.

When asked about the suddenness of the flash flooding overnight, Kelly said “we do not have a warning system” and that “we didn’t know this flood was coming,” even as local reporters pointed to the warnings and pushed him for answers about why more precautions weren’t taken.

“Rest assured, no one knew this kind of flood was coming,” he said. “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.”

There’s much more at the link.

The New York Times has live updates on the tragedy: Death Toll in Texas Flood Rises to at Least 24, With as Many as 25 Missing.

Here’s the latest:

Search and rescue teams were working throughout the night in Central Texas after flooding that began early Friday swept through a summer camp and homes, killing at least 24 people and leaving as many as 25 girls missing from the camp.

The girls were at Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, in Kerr County, according to the county sheriff. Desperate parents posted photos of their children online, seeking any information, and others went to reunification centers to try to find missing loved ones. An unknown number of other people were also missing, Kerr County said in an update on Friday night, citing the sheriff, Larry Leitha.

By Katya Vigovskaya

The deadly flooding surprised many, including Texas officials, who said that some National Weather Service alerts had underestimated the risks. The most urgent alerts came in overnight, in the early hours of Friday.

Hundreds of emergency personnel were searching for stranded people. The Texas National Guard made 237 rescues and evacuations using helicopters and rescue swimmers, Maj. Gen. Thomas M. Suelzer, the guard’s commander, said at a news conference Friday evening.

Gov. Greg Abbott signed an emergency disaster declaration encompassing 15 counties in Central Texas. The declaration will expedite state funding for the areas that experienced significant damage.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said earlier in the day that Camp Mystic was contacting the parents of campers who remained unaccounted for. He said that parents with children who had not heard from camp officials should assume their children were safe. The camp has some 750 campers, he said.

Ron Filipkowski at Meidas: Texas Officials Blame Agency Gutted by Trump for Results of Deadly Storm.

As the best and the brightest were being fired at the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by senseless and draconian ‘DOGE’ cuts earlier this year under Trump, with no reason given except for the need to cut a paltry amount of the government’s budget, experts warned repeatedly that the cuts would have deadly consequences during the storm season. And they have.

Dozens and dozens of stories have been written in the media citing hundreds of experts which said that weather forecasting was never going to be the same, and that inaccurate forecasts were going to lead to fewer evacuations, impaired preparedness of first responders, and deadly consequences. I quoted many of them in my daily Bulletins and wrote about this issue nearly 20 different times.

And the chickens have come home to roost. Hundreds of people have already been killed across the US in a variety of storms including deadly tornadoes – many of which were inaccurately forecasted. And we are just entering peak hurricane season. Meteorologist Chris Vagasky posted earlier this spring on social media: “The world’s example for weather services is being destroyed.”

Now, after severe flooding in non-evacuated areas in Texas has left at least 24 dead with dozens more missing, including several young girls at a summer camp, Texas officials are blaming their failure to act on a faulty forecast by Donald Trump’s new National Weather Service gutted by cuts to their operating budget and most experienced personnel.

Forewarnings:

Reuters published a story just a few days ago, one of many warning about this problem: “In May, every living former director of the NWS signed on to an open letter with a warning that, if continued, Trump’s cuts to federal weather forecasting would create ‘needless loss of life’. Despite bipartisan congressional pushback for a restoration in staffing and funding to the NWS, sharp budget cuts remain on pace in projections for the 2026 budget for the NOAA, the parent organization of the NWS.”

But Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose agency oversees NOAA, testified before Congress on June 5 that the cuts wouldn’t be a problem because “we are transforming how we track storms and forecast weather with cutting-edge technology. Under no circumstances am I going to let public safety or public forecasting be touched.” Apparently the “cutting edge technology” hasn’t arrived yet.

And now presumably FEMA will be called upon to help pick up the pieces of shattered lives in Texas – an agency that Trump said repeatedly that he wants to abolish. In fact, Trump’s first FEMA director Cameron Hamilton was fired one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be abolished.

Filipkowski notes that so far the “president” has had nothing to say about the tragedy in Texas.

In April, Abraham Lutgarten of ProPublica warned about the danger of gutting U.S. weather services: White House Proposal Could Gut Climate Modeling the World Depends On.

Over the past two months, the Trump administration has taken steps to eliminate regulations addressing climate change, pull back funding for climate programs and cancel methods used to evaluate how climate change is affecting American society and its economy. Now it is directly undermining the science and research of climate change itself, in ways that some of the nation’s most distinguished scientists say will have dangerous consequences.

Proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the agency whose weather and climate research touches almost every facet of American life, are targeting a 57-year-old partnership between Princeton University and the U.S. government that produces what many consider the world’s most advanced climate modeling and forecasting systems. NOAA’s work extends deep into the heart of the American economy — businesses use it to navigate risk and find opportunity — and it undergirds both American defense and geopolitical planning. The possible elimination of the lab, called the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, in concert with potential cuts to other NOAA operations, threatens irreparable harm not only to global understanding of climate change and long-range scenarios for the planet but to the country’s safety, competitiveness and national security.

The gutting of NOAA was outlined earlier this month in a leaked memo from the Office of Management and Budget that detailed steep reductions at the Department of Commerce, which houses the science agency. The memo, which was viewed by ProPublica, has been previously reported. But the full implications of those cuts for the nation’s ability to accurately interpret dynamic changes in the planet’s weather and to predict long-term warming scenarios through its modeling arm in Princeton have not.

According to the document, NOAA’s overall funding would be slashed by 27%, eliminating “functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people” including almost all of those related to the study of climate change. The proposal would break up and significantly defund the agency across programs, curtailing everything from ocean research to coastal management while shifting one of NOAA’s robust satellite programs out of the agency and putting another up for commercial bidding. But its most significant target is the office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research ⎯ a nerve center of global climate science, data collection and modeling, including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory ⎯ which would be cut by 74%. “At this funding level, OAR is eliminated as a line office,” the memo stated.

A bit more:

The total loss of OAR and its crown jewel in Princeton represents a setback for climate preparedness that experts warn the nation may never recover from.

“If we don’t understand what’s happening and why it’s happening, you can’t be adapting, you can’t be resilient. You’re just going to suffer,” Don Wuebbles, an atmospheric scientist who sits on NOAA’s scientific advisory board, told ProPublica. “We’re going to see huge impacts on infrastructure and lives lost in the U.S.”

By Jo Potocki

There are other national climate models, but they also appear to be in jeopardy of losing funding. The National Science Foundation supports the National Center for Atmospheric Research, but the foundation announced it was freezing all research grants on April 18. NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a model, but the institute could see cuts of up to 47%. And the Department of Energy, home to a fourth climate modeling system, is also under budget pressure.

Without the models, and all the sensor networks and supporting NOAA research programs that feed them, “We’ll go back to the technical and proficiency levels we had in the 1950s,” said Craig McLean, a 40-year veteran of NOAA who, until 2022, was the agency’s top administrator for research and its acting chief scientist. “We won’t have the tools we have today because we can’t populate them by people or by data.” [….]

Princeton and NOAA together built America’s global supremacy in weather and climate science over generations. After World War II, the United States refocused its scientific superiority ⎯ and its early computing capabilities ⎯ on understanding how the weather and the planet works. The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory was established in 1955 and moved to Princeton in 1968. Under NOAA, which was established by President Richard Nixon in 1970, the lab advanced early forecasting, using sensors in the oceans and the sky. It developed theories for how fluids and gases interact and came to understand that the oceans and the atmosphere drive weather ⎯ what today has become known as climate science.

The GFDL’s models, including the first hurricane model, became the basis for both short-term weather outlooks and longer-range forecasts, or climate prediction, which soon became one and the same. Those models now form the underlying modeling architecture of many of NOAA’s other departments, including the forecasts from the National Weather Service. The GFDL has trained many of the world’s best climate scientists, who are leading the most prestigious research in Japan, the U.K. and Germany, and in 2021 an alumnus of its staff won the Nobel Prize in physics. The U.S. agencies periodically run their models in competition, and last time they did, the GFDL’s models came out ahead. The lab is “the best that there is,” McLean said. “It’s really a stunningly impressive and accomplished place. It is a gem. It is the gem.”

But to Trump, tax cuts for billionaires who don’t need them are more important than predicting weather disasters.

With the passage and signing of Trump’s big ugly bill, we are soon going to be dealing with even worse horrors than bad weather. With the funds allocated to ICE in the bill, Trump plans to create a U.S. police state and a concentration camp system. I wonder, did the Republicans include funds for boxcars in the bill?

Trump’s coming police state and his war on citizens:

Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo: Congress Throws More Money at Removing Immigrants than Most Countries Spend on Their Armies.

It’s hard to convey just how big the new budget makes the country’s immigration enforcement infrastructure.

The Bureau of Prisons? Bigger than that. The FBI? Bigger. The Marine Corps? Bigger even than that, by some estimates.

All in all, the bill directs around $170 billion through 2029 to various forms of immigration enforcement, according to an analysis by the American Immigration Council and TPM’s own read of the legislation. ICE, responsible for enforcement, detentions, and removals, will oversee much of the spending.

The picture is not so much of an expanded immigration enforcement system, but of an entirely new one.

“It’s going to get really scary,” Adriel Orozco, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Council, told TPM. “I do think that we are in a place where the Trump administration is centering a lot of the law enforcement authority of the federal government into the Department of Homeland Security.”

The bill gives ICE $29.8 billion to hire new staff and conduct deportations. That will lead to a hiring spurt of deportation officers; an additional $4.1 billion bump goes to Customs and Border Protection for new personnel….

We’re Listening, by Elisheva Nesis

For immigration detention, also overseen by ICE, the bill allocates a whopping $45 billion.

If that’s not enough, there’s more: Remember the wall? It was Trump’s big immigration-related promise during the 2016 campaign. It didn’t get built during his first term (and Mexico never paid for it, as Trump promised). Congress allocated $46.5 billion for its construction in this legislation. (A Senate source tells TPM that this, too, was drafted in such a way as to be fungible, so it could be used for building detention facilities as well.)

It’s a headspinning increase from ICE’s 2024 funding, that, per a recent CRS report, stood at $9.9 billion.

At the same time, the bill adds only a modest number of immigration judges, capping the number at 800 starting in November 2028 — an increase from the current approximately 700.

Read the rest at TPM.

A guest essay at The New York Times by Greg Grandin, Professor History at Yale (gift link): Trump Is Waging War on His Own Citizens.

No president in the history of the Republic has used the word “America” as effectively as Donald Trump — not as a symbol to invoke unity but as kerosene to keep the home fires of our culture wars burning.

America, America: Make it great. It already is great. Keep it great. America must. America will. America First. “America,” said Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff and the driver of much of his nativist domestic policy, “is for Americans and Americans only.”

But what does it mean to be an American if armed, masked men can sweep anybody, citizen or not, off the street, forcing people into unmarked S.U.V.s — to be, if Mr. Trump has his way, disappeared to remote Louisiana or taken to a prison camp in El Salvador?

Mr. Trump and operatives like Mr. Miller are waging a war not only on migrants but also on the concept of citizenship. According to one report, Immigration and Customs Enforcement expelled as many as 66 citizens during Mr. Trump’s first term, and now he has issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship. His government is exiling children who were born in the United States, including a 4-year-old boy with late-stage cancer. The Justice Department says it is “prioritizing denaturalization,” establishing a framework to revoke citizenship from naturalized citizens the White House deems undesirable.

Vice President JD Vance admits the expansion of ICE is the mainspring of the White House’s agenda. In a series of social media posts, he pushed back against worries about the president’s signature reconciliation bill. Nothing else in the bill mattered, he said — not debt, not Medicaid cuts — compared to securing “ICE money.” Now, the agency — which already acts like a secret police — will have an additional $75 billion to build detention centers, hire new agents and supercharge its operations.

Mr. Trump’s war on citizenship goes hand in hand with his politicization of the name of America, and though the first is unprecedented in its intensity, the second taps into a long, well, American tradition, one as old as the nation itself.

Use the gift link to read learn about the history of the use of “America” to refer to the United States, as well as the notion of internationalism in the U.S.

Alligator Alkatraz and Trump’s dream of a concentration camp system:

The Washington Post: Heat, storms, mosquitos the big threats at Alligator Alcatraz, experts say.

The hastily constructed detention camp in the Everglades that began processing immigrant detainees late this week has already flooded once, may not meet hurricane codes and is not officially approved or funded by the federal government.

Experts say detainees and staff will face far more common hazards than the swampland terrors gleefully envisioned by state and national Republicans to discourage escapes. Mosquitoes and hurricanes are more likely to harm the expected 3,000-plus detainees and 100-member staff than are alligators and Burmese pythons.

With a cat by Galya Didur (2024)

“The risk of mosquito-borne disease at this site is significant,” said Durland Fish, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale University School of Public Health. And the viruses detected during a mosquitos study he conducted in the Everglades — including at Big Cypress Swamp, where the detention center is located — can cause neurological damage, including encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain.

“There’s no treatment for these,” Fish said….

The facility, which includes large tents over cells erected with chain-link fencing, portable showers and portable toilets, was put together in eight days. State lawmakers who have spoken about it say that work was done secretly, after they had ended their annual legislative session.

The camp is located on an infrequently used airfield in the heart of the protected Everglades. Before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) commandeered it, the site consisted of a long runway built in the late 1960s as an initial stage in a project intended to create a mega-airport. But environmentalists and Indigenous tribes successfully fought back, and the area, surrounded by the Big Cypress National Preserve and next door to Everglades National Park, is now part of an ongoing $25 billion Everglades restoration project.

Trump views the location as a plus for his crackdown with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland, and the only way out is really deportation,” he said.

And state officials are defending their rapid construction of the facility and its “soft-sided” cells — some of which started to flood during Trump’s visit, as seen in videos shot by local media. According to the state’s emergency management director, Kevin Guthrie, the 158,000 square feet of housing is “a fully aluminum frame structure rated for winds of 110 miles an hour,” the top-end equivalent of a Category 2 hurricane. He said Wednesday that the department has an evacuation plan in case a major storm threatens but released no details.

Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, at MSNBC: Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a concentration camp.

For many Americans, the word “concentration camp” evokes another country, a time long ago and a facility operating in the dark of night, away from the prying eyes of an outraged public. But a new concentration camp opened in Florida’s Everglades this week, and it’s the opposite of a secret.

President Donald Trump toured the facility with reporters in tow. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials posed with him, laughing in front of cages meant for human beings. The Florida Republican Party launched merchandise and gave the camp a nickname, “Alligator Alc

atraz,” that the state made official.

But it’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed. And its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.

This camp stands apart from other immigration detention facilities for a few reasons. First, its projected capacity of 5,000 beds is several times the average detention center (though Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking at even larger facilities). Its improvised tents and chain-link cages put detainees on display reminiscent of El Salvador’s CECOT prison. And it is billed as a “temporary” camp, with the theory being that the administration can seamlessly process massive numbers of detainees with rapid-fire judicial hearings by National Guard members-turned-immigration judges. In practice, this is unlikely to go smoothly.

By Marie Laurencin

While concentration camps have historical roots in earlier forms of mass detention, they themselves are modern. The patenting and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons over a century ago made it possible to detain large groups with a small guard force for the first time.

At the turn of the twentieth century, imperial powers such as Spain and Britain set up concentration camps in colonial regions. The camps had staggering death tolls that made early systems unpopular. But World War I led to a revival of the concept, with nearly a million people detained globally. The wartime camps paved the way for similar systems after the conflict ended, such asthe Soviet Gulag and the detention of homeless people in multiple countries.

Those were all in place before the Nazis came to power, so Hitler’s camps aren’t the lone precedent for the Everglades project. But even the extreme case of Germany offers disturbing parallels — and not just because the Nazis also allowed reporters to tour their camps.

Please click the MSNBC link and read the rest.

One more from Timothy Snyder at his Substack: Concentration Camp Labor Cannot Become Normal.

With the passage of Trump’s death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.

Concentration camps are sites of tempting slave labor. Among many other aims, the Soviets used concentration camp labor to build canals and work mines. The Nazi German concentration camp system followed a capitalist version of the same logic: it drew in businesses with the prospect of inexpensive labor.

We know this and have no excuse not to act.

What happens next in the U.S.? Workers who are presented as “undocumented” will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful. Trump has already said that this is the idea, calling it “owner responsibility.”

We should remember what drew I.G Farben into Auschwitz: profit. But there are of course precedents for extreme exploitation in American history, including but not limited to the history of chattel slavery. And slavery is not entirely illegal in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment allows slavery if only as punishment for a crime. The people described as “undocumented” or “denaturalized” (and other categories sure to be invented soon) are portrayed as criminals.

If the Trump regime tries to enslave such people on a large scale, there will be a court case. But waiting for the Supreme Court to do the right thing is, to put it gently, no substitute for action. It would be good if there were explicit legislation banning slave labor in all circumstances. But such a law is unlikely without a movement behind it.

The government is putting before us the temptation to cooperate in fascist dehumanization on a grand scale. But that does not mean we must do so. This is an area where actions by individuals, by civil society, by the professions, and by companies can be decisive.

Again, please follow the link and read the rest.

That’s it for me today. I know this is scary stuff, but it’s becoming real now. We are in the midst of fascist takeover. I was shocked to hear Rachel Maddow say those words last night on MSNBC, but that made it more read for. This is really happening, and we have to fight it in every way we can.

Take care everyone. I love you all.

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