What worries me the most this week
Trump's new plan to steal elections; insanely irresponsible Maga actions re FEMA; new plan to send migrants to a frightening future in "alternative" countries
I’m sad to report that while a few good things are happening, Magas are working ever faster to destroy everything most of us love and respect in order to change our society, culture, and lives into their ideal: a pure wealthy white male Christian country.
Below are my 3 latest concerns.
(Note: I’ve corrected a typo that appeared earlier. The word “billions” appeared incorrectly in the phrase “Noem has spent $21 million to send some 400 migrants to Guantanimo Bay…” I’ve removed “billions.” Apologies.)
Elections: Harry Litman writes, for The New Republic, that Trump and the so-called Department of “Justice” now plan to hurl criminal charges at election workers who don’t “safeguard” their systems. Litman says “Trump will try to achieve in pseudo-legal fashion what he failed to accomplish through brute force after the 2020 election he lost to President Biden. He says that on top of all the other destruction of our democracy Trump has already caused, this could be “a fatal blow.”
Litman explains that hardly anyone seemed to notice a New York Times article noting that “unidentified senior administration officials have directed DOJ lawyers to explore the possibility of federal criminal charges against state or local election officials deemed to have failed to adequately safeguard computer systems.” He says there’s no evidence that such a move is necessary, and that elections in 2020 and 2024 were “remarkably secure.” He says "even Trump’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called it ‘the most secure in American history,’” and that this is part of Trump’s goal to sow chaos and fear into all our institutions and '“force them to lean in to his advantage.”
He writes that most poll workers are mild-mannered people many of us know, including many elderly—all giving of their time for little reward except that they’re doing it for democracy’s sake. He says Trump is trying to scare them into doing whatever he wants., adding, “What makes this latest maneuver so dangerous is that it aims not just to relitigate 2024 but to pre-rig 2028. If Trump can scare off honest poll workers and install loyalists, he won’t need to overturn the results. He can subvert the process from the inside.” He gives as examples the Georgia poll workers Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, who were so bullied by Trump that “Freeman had to flee her home. Moss had to leave her job. These are the people Trump wants you to think are criminals.” Litman warns, “The message is simple: Help run an election that Trump loses, and we will come for you.”
He’s very worried, he says, because Trump “has already browbeaten” so many institutions that have felt threatened enough that they fell in line.
Noem and FEMA: Heather Cox Richardson wrote Sunday that the New York Times’s Maxine Joselow reported that FEMA answered 99.7% of 3,027 calls from the Texas flood zone (so 3,018 were answered). Then, unbelievably, the next day, Kristi Noem didn’t renew the contacts for four call center companies that answered those calls. The staff were fired. That day only 35.8% of 2,363 calls were answered (846 answered). On Monday, of 16,419 calls, FEMA answered 15.9%—2,613 answered calls out of the 16, 419 calls.
The Dept. of Homeland Security (under Noem) issued a statement that sounded like a complete lie to me, and also as if the department thinks all Americans are idiots, about how natural disasters cause phone calls to surge and wait times can therefore increase (duh). It added, “FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.”
Richardson writes that EmptyWheel’s Marcy Wheeler says one reason Noem is cutting FEMA so deeply is she’s run through the money Congress allocated for her department. Richardson explains that Noem has spent $21 million to send some 400 migrants to Guantanamo Bay “only to have many of them transferred back out,” and also, unbelievably, $220 million on an ad campaign pushing Trump’s agenda (our taxes paid for THAT?)
Sending migrants to “alternative” countries: The Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti, Carol D. Leonnig, and Marianne LeVine report that ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce that a Supreme Court ruling last month enables ICE officers to deport immigrants “immediately” to “alternative” countries where they may know no one and may not know the language. This despite U.S. Judge District Judge Brian Murphy having barred the government from removing immigrants without giving them a “meaningful” opportunity to challenge it. “Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote a stinging dissent with Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, warned that the court’s decision would put people at risk. “In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution,” she wrote. “In this case, the Government took the opposite approach.”
Now, says Trina Realmuto, executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, “It puts thousands of lives at risk of persecution and torture.” The Alliance is challenging the third-country removals on behalf of immigrants in an ongoing federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts in March, arguing that the U.S. government was violating federal law and sending immigrants to places where they could be harmed or killed, without giving them a chance to argue against it.
I saw, two days ago—I’m sorry I don’t remember the site—a video of a man being forced out of what seemed to be a hospital room by what appeared to be ICE agents, terror in his eyes, gripping the door frame desperately, as a woman inside tried to pull him back into the room. The caption said he was having some kind of surgical procedure. Even so, I believe they did remove him. The fear he felt was obvious and heartbreaking.
I’ve lost sleep over his fate, and the fate of a man in Alligator Alcatraz, reported by one of the Democratic officials who visited the site, to have pleaded from inside his crowded cage, “Help me, Help me.”
Aaron Parnas reports that the $150 billion dollars Congress gave ICE for immigration enforcement and border security puts it on track “to become the largest law enforcement agency in the country…Private contractors are bidding on multibillion-dollar detention center projects. Stocks in prison companies are soaring. Immigration enforcement is being transformed into a profit-generating industry, and people—including U.S. citizens, are the raw material it consumes.”
I’ve not heard any concern from the government about the fates of the thousands of families left behind. Surely their ongoing despair will affect their mental and physical health for years to come.
Notes: