Confirming Friday that his administration is considering sending undocumented immigrants en masse to sanctuary cities, President Donald Trump framed the proposal as a threat—but several politicians and rights advocates replied that immigrants would be welcome in those communities.
The president announced that the White House is weighing the proposal hours after the Washington Post reported that it had been considered and then rejected last year.
“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only,” Trump tweeted.
At least one sanctuary city mayor, Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, responded that he would happily welcome any number of immigrants sent to his city.
“The city would be prepared to welcome these immigrants just as we have embraced our immigrant communities for decades,” Kenney said in a statement. “This White House plan demonstrates the utter contempt that the Trump administration has for basic human dignity.”
Mayor Libby Schaaf of Oakland expressed pride in her city’s status as one that bars all city employees from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and condemned the president for focusing his immigration agenda on keeping immigrants out of the United States.
“I am proud to be the mayor of a sanctuary city,” Schaaf told CNN. “We believe sanctuary cities are safer cities. We embrace the diversity in Oakland and we do not think it’s appropriate for us to use local resources to do the government’s failed immigration work.”
Much of the response to the Post‘s earlier reporting centered around what an aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the White House’s “despicable” attempt to use human beings as pawns to demonize immigrants.
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As Libby Watson noted at Splinter, much of the corporate media’s reporting on the plan followed the narrative laid out by the Trump administration—that sending undocumented immigrants to sanctuary cities would be an “attack” on those cities and their Democratic leaders.
“A premise like ‘busing migrants to San Francisco will punish Nancy Pelosi’ is not self-explanatory,” Watson wrote. “I do not immediately understand the mechanism by which releasing a tired, huddled mass of immigrants in cities with massive populations—and cities where asylum approval rates are much higher—would punish their representatives.”
“The framing is left as ‘the presence of migrants in cities will be bad for those cities.’ And in the end, that just does Stephen Miller’s work for him,” she added, referring to Trump’s policy adviser who has pushed for hard-line, xenophobic immigration policies.
Julia Carrie Wong, a technology reporter for the Guardian, echoed Watson’s concerns.
“Let’s not concede that having refugees in our cities is something to be threatened by,” Wong tweeted.
After Trump announced the plan was again under consideration Friday, critics noted that sending immigrants to sanctuary cities would simply be using the cities and their laws as they were intended.
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Nikki Cross is getting the next shot at Bayley’s SmackDown Women’s Championship.
It was confirmed tonight that Bayley will defend her SmackDown Women’s Championship against Cross at Clash of Champions. Cross won a fatal four-way number one contender’s match on SmackDown tonight to get the title shot.
Cross overcame a pre-match attack by Bayley to get the win. The match also included Alexa Bliss, Lacey Evans, and Tamina, but Bliss walked out of the match like she was in a trance after giving Cross a Sister Abigail on the floor. The storyline is that Bliss has been acting strange and has been changed by her encounters with The Fiend.
Cross got the win in tonight’s match by reversing a Samoan drop by Tamina, blocking a superkick, and then stacking up Tamina and pinning her.
After attacking Sasha Banks last week, Bayley appeared on SmackDown tonight and explained her actions. Bayley said she loved every single second of attacking Banks. She claimed that Banks was just waiting for the right time to strike against her. Bayley said Banks was using her — and she knows that because Bayley was using Banks too. Bayley said she never cared about Banks or their friendship. She said Banks is useless to her now.
Cross made her entrance as Bayley was walking up the ramp after her promo. Bayley then attacked Cross with the same steel chair she used to beat down Banks.
Bayley retained her title against Cross at Extreme Rules this July and then defeated her again in a rematch later that month.
Clash of Champions is taking place on Sunday, September 27. Here’s the updated card for the show:
WWE Champion Drew McIntyre defends against Randy Orton
Universal Champion Roman Reigns defends against Jey Uso
SmackDown Women’s Champion Bayley defends against Nikki Cross
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Pointing to “the map of the U.S. military bases” around the world as evidence of American imperialism, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Wednesday his country has no plans to remove the small number of troops it has stationed in Venezuela despite- Trump administration demands to withdraw.
On March 24, a Russian military plane landed in Venezuela, depositing around 100 Russian soldiers in the country, as Common Dreams reported at the time. The move was “akin to tripwire” against U.S. intervention in Venezuela, said Washington Institute fellow Soner Cagaptay.
The move angered U.S. officials and, on March 29, President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton issued a statement criticizing Russia for its presence in the Latin American country.
“We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of establishing or expanding military operations,” said Bolton.
The rhetoric didn’t stop there: Bolton also called the Russian presence in Venezuela “a direct threat to international peace and security in the region.”
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Bolton’s comments didn’t sit well with Lavrov. In an interview with Russian newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets, Lavrov called U.S. demands Russian military personnel leave Venezuela “insolent” and asserted that America does not, in fact, have the right to tell Russia what to do—even in America’s so-called “sphere of influence.”
“What do they mean by insolent remarks that the countries external to the Western Hemisphere are not allowed to have any interests there?” Lavrov said.
Further, said Lavrov, a country like the U.S. isn’t in the best position to throw stones about stationing troops in foreign countries.
“Take a look at the map of the U.S. military bases—the whole world is dotted with red spots and each of them poses rather serious risks,” said Lavrov.
The U.S. operates around an estimated 800 bases worldwide, though that number moves even higher depending on how the term “bases” is defined.
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Tech giant Facebook must remove videos of right wing militias kidnapping migrants, a civil rights group demanded this week.
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law sent a letter to the company on Wednesday calling for it to remove content –from– posted by members of the New Mexico-based extremist group the United Constitutional Patriots (UCP) that is in “flagrant” violations of the platform’s terms of service.
UCP members have uploaded material to the social media site that shows the far-right militant group holding migrants at the border hostage.
The videos frequently show groups of defenseless migrants surrounded by heavily armed members of the militia.
“Because these videos include content showing possible assault, kidnapping and false imprisonment, among other illegal acts,” the lawyers’ committee said in a statement announcing the letter, “UCP is in violation of Facebook’s Community Standards, which prohibits ‘content depicting … criminal acts’ including ‘acts of physical harm committed against people.'”
The videos also show a disturbing crossover with federal officials, as the Daily Beast‘s Audrey McNamara reported last week.
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Facebook, in response to reporting on the videos by Slate‘s Future Tense blog, said on April 23 that it would not allow the militias to fundraise off of the videos and that it would remove content that violated its standards.
“People cannot use our fundraising tools for activities involving weapons,” said Facebook. “We will remove fundraisers this group may try to start on our service and any content that violates our Community Standards.”
As of this writing, at least one video showing the kidnappings remains publicly accessible.
And, as Mother Jones reported on Wednesday:
“We believe Facebook has a duty to act and remove content posted by UCP that violates the company’s community standards,” said Kristen Clarke, President and Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The United Constitutional Patriots have engaged in illegal activities, including rounding up and restraining hundreds of people—including babies and young children—at gunpoint.”
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“UCP should not be allowed to use Facebook’s platform to gain support for their illegal actions,” Clarke added.
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Amid growing fears that Democratic political leaders are not taking seriously the possibility that President Donald Trump could refuse to yield power if he loses in the 2020 election, progressive critics are voicing concern over Trump’s retweet over the weekend of a post calling for two years to be added to his first term as “pay back for time stolen” by the Mueller investigation.
Written by right-wing Liberty University head Jerry Falwell, Jr. and boosted by the president Sunday evening, the tweet stated Trump “should have 2 yrs added to his 1st term” as “reparations” for the recently completed Mueller probe.
“It may seem nuts,” Adolph Reed, Jr., professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said of Falwell’s tweet in an email to Common Dreams, “but I do think this is worth paying attention to.”
“The Trump administration,” said Reed, “obviously is contemptuous of procedural democracy, as are Republicans in Congress and elsewhere.”
From Reed’s perspective, “the Republicans’ decades-long campaign to demonize and undermine popular and democratic institutions, suppress voting, forge a political alliance based on the most dangerously reactionary and irrationalist elements of the society and committed to eliminating all restraint to capitalist class power is particularly chilling.”
“The confrontation between the House Democrats and the Trump administration over access to his tax returns and the executive branch’s requirement to honor congressional subpoenas,” said Reed, could prove far more consequential in the long run than “the daily theater of palace politics.”
In a column on Monday, Esquire‘s Jack Holmes echoed Reed’s alarm at the president’s apparent endorsement of a two-year term extension:
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Trump’s retweet came as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) warned that Trump would refuse to give up power if Democrats don’t win resoundingly in 2020. In order to to achieve such a victory, Pelosi said, the party should not run too far to the left.
“We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that,” Pelosi told the New York Times. “Own the center left, own the mainstream.”
Progressives were quick to reject and denounce Pelosi’s suggestion that running on bold left-wing policies would be electorally harmful for Democrats.
And as historian Kevin Kruse pointed out, Trump could contest unfavorable election results regardless of the Democratic Party’s approach or policy platform.
In a column published by Common Dreams on Tuesday, Jeffrey Isaac, political science professor at Indiana University, expressed concern that Pelosi herself is not sufficiently worried about the possibility that Trump could refuse to leave office.
Responding to Pelosi’s remark that Trump may not “respect the election,” Isaac wrote: “I don’t believe that commentators have treated this comment with the seriousness that it deserves. And yet, alas, I fear that neither has Pelosi herself taken the full measure of the comment.”
“What cannot be right is to claim that Trump is a danger to the republic, and to orchestrate House investigations in a politically serious way that focuses attention on this, and at the same time to meet with Trump in the White House and even feign to do deals with him,” Isaac wrote, citing Pelosi’s negotiations with Trump on infrastructure. “This president must be opposed, consistently and unambiguously. Period.”
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Tens of thousands of social media users joined a call for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s resignation on Tuesday, after the South Carolina Republican publicly offered advice to Donald Trump Jr. about his recent congressional subpoena.
The president’s eldest son was subpoenaed in April to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee about his contacts with Russia during the 2016 election, after twice backing out of planned testimony before the committee.
The subpoena prompted Graham—one of President Donald Trump’s closest allies—to tell Trump Jr. on Monday to refuse to answer the panel’s questions.
“You just show up and plead the Fifth and it’s over with,” Graham told reporters, according to The Washington Post.
Graham also appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to declare Congress’s attempts to continue probing questions about Trump’s 2016 campaign, its communications with Russia, and potential obstruction of justice by the president “worthless,” and said Trump, Jr. should not respond to the subpoena.
“If I were Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer I would tell him, ‘You don’t need to go back into this environment anymore, you’ve been there for hours and hours and hours,'” Graham said. “I would call it a day.”
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Trump Jr. declined to be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation team and has not testified publicly about his involvement with the Trump campaign.
The Democratic Coalition, which started the call for Graham’s resignation, accused the senator of tampering with a witness and obstructing justice.
Mueller’s report did not conclude that the Trump campaign worked with Russia to swing the 2016 election in Trump’s favor, but also did not exonerate the president of intentionally trying to impede the special counsel’s investigation. The report suggested that Congress should further investigate the Trump administration and campaign to determine any wrongdoing by the president and other officials.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) was among the critics who condemned Graham’s statements, saying the comments suggested “that Donald Trump Jr. is above the law.”
By Tuesday afternoon, according to the Democratic Coalition, more than 100,000 people had tweeted the hashtag #LindseyGrahamResign—pointing to a number of reasons that the senator is not fit to serve in the Senate.
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