Forget it Jake, It's Texas

In response to Texas' refusal to extradite an indicted ICE agent, Minnesota has sued Texas Governor Greg Abbott. 

While I know that this won't result in Abbot being wheeled into a prison cell, the image makes me smile.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, alleging the governor is refusing to extradite a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent charged with shooting an immigrant during Operation Metro Surge.

Christian Castro, 52, is facing four counts of assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime related to a Jan. 14 incident in which prosecutors allege he fired through the front door of a Minneapolis home he knew was occupied.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and Ellison have sent letters to Abbott urging him to sign off on the officer’s extradition after Castro was charged in May. Last week, Ellison warned Abbott he would sue if he did not authorize Castro’s extradition by the end of the day Monday.

“This is not some accidental thing,” Ellison said in a Tuesday news conference announcing the lawsuit. “This is a choice.”

At a news conference Tuesday, Abbott said he would not respond to Minnesota prosecutors until they “acknowledge their fault in the fraud that took place” and repay the government for it. He was referring to the Trump administration’s accusations of fraud in Minnesota.

Governor Abbot?  You do not get to ignore a lawful request for extradition because you want Minnesota to do racism.

………

In addition to the extradition demand, Ellison’s lawsuit also requests a temporary restraining order to bar the Cameron County Sheriff’s Office, where Castro is in jail, from releasing him. According to the lawsuit, which was filed in the Southern District Court of Texas, Castro could be released under Texas law as soon as Aug. 26 if he is not extradited. 

If Castro is released, he will most likely flee to Mexico.  

Irony, neh? 

Engineer, Meet Petard

'I never thought leopards would eat MY face,' sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

— Adrian Bott (@Cavalorn) October 16, 2015

A MAGAt restauranteur is facing the lost of his business as a result of Trump's revocation of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians.

Trump said that he would do this.  He accused Haitians of eating dogs.

Now you are surprised that he has done this.

As they say in Japan,  "バカにつける薬はない." (There is no medicine for stupidity)

Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who owns Miami Chef Creole, says customers and others in the community are scared, and he might have to shut down two of his restaurants.

The effects of the Trump Administration's ending of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian immigrants are already starting to affect Miami's Little Haiti neighborhood.

At eateries such as Chef Creole, a well-established restaurant that famously serves comfort food inspired by traditional Haitian and Bahamian dishes, the end of TPS has led to confusion, with rumors spreading about potential raids and arrests. Wilkinson "Ken" Sejour, who told CBS Evening News that he voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 election, says the end of TPS for more than 350,000 Haitians might effectively end his career in the hospitality space.

………

"The end of TPS means for me that my future in the hospitality business is almost gonna be non-existent," he added. When asked why he voted for Trump, Sejour admitted that Trump "sold to me that he was a businessman and that he would make business decisions."

You mess with the bull, you get the horns.

"The Very Best People"

Rather unsurprisingly, it has been discovered that ICE Agent David Brouillette, who murdered Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine has a long history of domestic violence and mental illness.

This guy should never been allowed anywhere near any sort of law enforcement of security position. 

He shouldn't be a security guard, nor a meter maid, nor a bouncer at a bar.

The fatal shooting of an immigrant in Maine has renewed concerns about the Trump administration’s push to quickly hire officers for mass deportations, after a woman said her abusive ex-husband told her he was the officer who fired his gun.

Ashley Brouillette said her former spouse, David Brouillette, told her in a phone call that he is the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer who shot and killed Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, on Monday.

She identified him in video footage from the scene of the incident, which does not show the shooting itself, but does show two officers in the moments after.

David Brouillette also called his other ex-wife and told her the same thing, according to a person with knowledge of the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy.

………

DHS conducted a massive drive to recruit 10,000 enforcement officers last year. In recent weeks, the agency has ramped up street arrests of alleged undocumented immigrants, aiming for as many as 2,000 a day. Ashley Brouillette said her ex-husband told her in November that he’d accepted a job with ICE.

Newly hired officers received a shortened training course. Those with prior law enforcement experience were often given an even more accelerated timeline.

………

A review of court files, employment records and interviews with people who have known Brouillette for many years indicate he had worked off and on in law enforcement. He has also had volatile personal relationships, with him and his two ex-wives accusing each other of abuse and neglect.

“If you were to ask me whether I believe David Brouillette is capable of this level of extreme violence, my answer is unequivocally yes,” Lucinda Brouillette, David’s second ex-wife, said in a statement Saturday. “That belief is not based on speculation, but on my own lived experiences over many years.”

Ashley Brouillette said that on the same day her ex-husband told her he’d joined ICE, he left her a voicemail calling her a “disgusting, fat” expletive and saying that her throat should be slit. She shared the voicemail with The Washington Post.

……… 

Ashley Brouillette said her ex-husband was diagnosed with several mental health disorders as a young adult, and that his temperament and mental health issues worsened after joining the Army. The Post could not independently verify those claims. When he left the military, records show, he went on to work short stints in various law enforcement jobs, including as an officer at the Maine Department of Corrections from November 2015 to August 2016. 

So not surprised.  This sort of enshittification is a feature of the, "Very best people," that Trump hires.

Now Indict Them

Federal law enforcement is finally sharing data from the Good and Pretti murders with Minnesota law enforcement.

Good.  No go forth and indict the bastards. 

Months of effort between Minnesota’s state and federal law enforcement agencies led the Justice Department to turn over a substantial amount of evidence from the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said Monday.

The evidence, which was exchanged with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) over the last two weeks without public acknowledgment by the federal government or Minnesota law enforcement officials, includes the SUV that Good was driving when she was shot and killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross. It also includes hard drives of federal evidence like body camera footage and statements from immigration enforcement agents about the killings.

At a news conference, Moriarty said the new information will allow state investigators to be more thorough in determining whether or not to charge federal agents with crimes in connection with the killings.

 

6 — 3 (More like 5½ — 3½)

The Supreme Court just came frighteningly close to invalidating a Constitutional amendment because Donald Trump wanted them to.

I am, of course referring to their ruling on the birthright citizenship case, where 5 justices said that the black letter text of the US Constitution said what it said, 1 justice said that federal law would have to be changed, and 3 justices wanted to give Trump a blank check. (How I get to 5½ — 3½)

The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed the principle that almost everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, a major decision that rejects a push by President Donald Trump to fundamentally redefine who is American in ways not seen for more than 150 years.

The justices struck down an executive order by the president that said citizenship would not be granted to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or those on temporary visas for work, travel, school or humanitarian reasons.

Trump’s order would have had sweeping political, economic and social ramifications, changing the definition of citizenship in the most significant way since the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to formerly enslaved people was ratified shortly after the Civil War. 

The ruling reaffirms the long-settled understanding that the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship on any child born in the United States, with limited exceptions for children of diplomats and other rare cases. The principle was established in a landmark 1898 high court decision that found that Wong Kim Ark, a man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, was a citizen. ………

Conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented from the 5-4 majority in ruling the executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but he joined the 6-3 majority in finding the order violated federal law.

………

The opinion came over the objections of conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Alito wrote a dissent, while Thomas wrote another that Gorsuch joined.

Alito said birthright citizenship acts as a magnet drawing migrants to the United States to give birth so their children could be citizens, echoing an argument the Trump administration has made.

………

Thomas said the court “adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

So, Alito just let his bigot flag fly, and Thomas just showed himself to be a worse historian than he is a jurist, which is a pretty heavy lift.

Today in Fascism

Ice attempted to raid the offices of lawyers representing migrant children.

Of course they did this without any warrants.

Cops don't get to seize lawyers records, but they don't care, because they are little more than a heavily armed gang. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents attempted to raid the offices of attorneys for unaccompanied migrant children this week, lawyers tell The Lever, the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s attempt to collect sensitive data on children in the U.S. immigration system.

As The Lever first reported last week, the legal services providers for unaccompanied migrant children — who represent the youth in deportation proceedings — have been locked in a standoff with the Trump administration over requests for sensitive case data on their clients.

Now, ICE agents are arriving at their doors.

Dozens of nonprofits and law firms around the country provide critical legal representation to migrant children under the Unaccompanied Children Program, which is funded by the Department of Health and Human Services. The program has become a central focus in the Trump administration’s ongoing targeting of immigrants.

………

Providing sensitive client data to the federal government could represent a serious violation of attorney-client privilege and put vulnerable children at risk, attorneys say. Already, the immigration courts are expediting children’s cases in an apparent attempt to deport children as fast as possible.

On Thursday, two agents with Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, arrived at the Washington, D.C., offices of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, which represents unaccompanied minors.

According to the organization’s executive director, Michael Lukens, security guards turned the agents away when they did not present a valid warrant.

 Calling these people, "Good Germans," gives them too much credit.

Well, Trash Belongs in Trash Bags

As the backlash against Flock AI driven license plate readers grow, more and more municipalities are canceling their contracts.

They find two problems, canceling the contract is difficult because of their Byzantine nature, and even when canceled, Flock does not remove them, so the cameras remain on their poles, where anyone with a Flock contract (think ICE) can continue to use them.

Some towns have an interesting way of dealing with this, they are sending out government workers to cover the cameras with trash bags. (alternate link)

The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used. 

Joe Parlette, the deputy city manager of Dayton, said at a city commission meeting last week that the “Dayton Police Department agreed to work with Public Works to put bags over the cameras” as a stop-gap measure until Flock cameras could be removed entirely. I spoke to multiple people in Dayton who said they had seen bagged cameras in the last few days. The Dayton Daily News first reported on the baggings.

Dayton is not the first city to cover its Flock cameras with trash bags because they can’t figure out how to immediately terminate the use of the cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois also covered its cameras with trash bags while it was waiting for the company to remove them from the city. Cities around the country have been reconsidering their relationship with the surveillance company after reporting from 404 Media and local news outlets that showed data from the cameras was making its way to Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Flock’s national camera network.

Flock cameras are usually solar powered, so once installed, it costs more to take them down than it does to leave them there, particularly if the data can be sold to someone else.

Garbage bags are a decent solution to this dynamic. 

Support Your Local Police

It appears that an officer at ICE protests used the injury of a journalist to steal her bag full of photographic equipment.

At least time, he was charged.

A law enforcement officer in New Jersey was charged on Thursday with stealing the camera equipment of a photojournalist who was covering a protest outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.

The photojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to a statement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.

The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.

………

A law enforcement officer in New Jersey was charged on Thursday with stealing the camera equipment of a photojournalist who was covering a protest outside the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark.

The photojournalist, Angelina Katsanis, 25, dropped her camera bag after she was injured at the protest on Saturday, she said in an interview. The bag contained roughly $10,000 worth of equipment, according to a statement from the state attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.

The bag was later tracked using an Apple AirTag to the home of Darryl Brown, 43, a sergeant with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office, the statement said. Sergeant Brown, of Sparta Township, N.J., had been deployed to Delaney Hall during the protest, prosecutors said.

………

Later that night, Ms. Katsanis and another photographer, who was on assignment for The Times, made their way to a nearby hospital using a wheelchair given to her by a medic at the scene.

From a hospital bed, she watched on her phone as the AirTag in her camera bag traveled across northern New Jersey — on the highway, then to a private residence, and then to a bar close to that home, she said.

Ms. Katsanis said her boyfriend and the other photographer went out to track the AirTag and found that it had been removed from her bag and was on the side of the road. She said that her name and contact information were still clearly written on the AirTag.

“That was a pretty clear sign to me that this was a theft and not just a law enforcement officer holding onto this bag for safekeeping,” said Ms. Katsanis, who reported the missing bag to the attorney general’s office.

This is likely far more common than is reported in the  press. 

Headline of the Day

Looks Like A Police State To Me, Says Federal Judge Handling Migrant Detention Cases

—Techdirt, quoting Judge Sanket Bulsara of the Eastern District of New York.

Money quote:

And that leads to the judge comparing ICE’s actions to those of a police state: 

This practice of after-the-fact arrest warrants can be called many things—illegal, improper, and unconstitutional, among them. But whatever label one wishes to apply, the practice is fundamentally at odds with and offensive to lawful, constitutional behavior in this country. “An arrest is not justified by what the subsequent search discloses[.]” A contrary rule—the one that the USAO here defends by backing detention and opposing release—“would obliterate one of the most fundamental distinctions between our form of government, where officers are under the law, and the police-state where they are the law.” 

Police and law enforcement cannot operate as roving bands, detaining individuals, figuring out the reasons later, and papering over their failures afterwards. This sadly is the practice in many other parts of the world. But in the United States, the law prohibits such conduct.

(Emphasis original) 

Everyone involved at any level in these actions should be barred from law enforcement and the legal profession for the rest of their life.

 

A Small Win

The DHS funding bill finally passed both houses without funding ICE or the Border Patrol.

Johnson said no funding bill without funding those two agencies, but he blinked. 

The House on Thursday passed stalled legislation reopening the Department of Homeland Security, ending a record 76-day shutdown at the agency and resolving uncertainty over whether thousands of federal security workers would be paid in May.

The voice vote after a brief debate brought to a close a bitter partisan fight spurred by President Trump’s immigration crackdown and the tactics of federal immigration officers who fatally shot two U.S. citizens during immigration roundups in Minneapolis earlier this year. Negotiations between the White House and Democrats who were demanding new restrictions on the officers went nowhere, leading to an impasse that cut off funding on Feb. 14. 

………

Senate Republicans and Democrats had struck a deal on April 1 to fund everything except for the immigration enforcement agencies, vowing to approve that money separately in a bill that Democrats could not block. But the House G.O.P. declined for weeks to act on the measure, with conservatives refusing to vote for a bill that did not fund ICE and border patrol.

House leaders finally took it up on Thursday ahead of a 12-day break, and after the White House requested that the bill be passed immediately.

The bullies blinked. 

 

So Much for Judicial Independence

The Trump administration just fired a number of immigration judges after they followed the law when making their decisions.

That seems just a little bit ……… Fascist.

It's certainly an explicit attempt to intimidate judges into breaking the law. 

The Trump administration has fired two immigration judges who dismissed high-profile deportation cases against international students who had advocated for Palestinians.

The firings of the judges, Roopal Patel and Nina Froes, marked the latest efforts by the Trump administration to reshape the country’s immigration courts.

The administration has dismissed dozens of immigration judges and, according to those on the bench, has put judges under pressure to deny asylum claims and order deportations. Unlike federal judges in the independent judicial branch, immigration judges work for the Justice Department and are hired and fired by the attorney general.

The two judges, who were terminated alongside four colleagues on Friday, oversaw two high-profile cases filed by the government against the students, Rumeysa Ozturk and Mohsen Mahdawi.

 If there is an election in 2028, and if the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) doesn't shoot itself in the foot again, every one of these bastards, from Trump, to Miller, to Bondi, to Blanche, to Rubio need to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

From the Department of, "About F%$#ing Time"

This picture should refresh your memoryThe Ramsey County Minnesota District Attorney and Sheriff are investigating the detention of ChongLy “Scott” Thao by ICE as a possible kidnapping.

Thao, a US citizen, was dragged out of his house wearing a pair of shorts and Crocs by ICE agents after they broke down his door.

It was all without a warrant.

Ramsey County is investigating the January arrest of a St. Paul Hmong American man by federal immigration officers as a potential case of kidnapping, burglary and false imprisonment, officials announced Monday. 

Ramsey County Attorney John Choi and Sheriff Bob Fletcher said at a news conference they will pursue information from the Department of Homeland Security that they need for their investigation into the arrest of ChongLy “Scott” Thao on Jan. 18, calling it a violation of the U.S. Constitution to forcibly remove Thao without probable cause.

………

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers bashed open the front door of Thao’s East Side home at gunpoint without a warrant, then led him outside half-dressed in freezing conditions.

………

Thao later told the Associated Press that his daughter-in-law alerted him that ICE agents were banging at the door. He told her not to open it. Masked agents then forced their way in and pointed guns at the family, yelling at them, Thao recalled.

“I was shaking,” he said. “They didn’t show any warrant; they just broke down the door.”

Thao, a naturalized U.S. citizen and Hmong elder, was quickly handcuffed and was seen on video being led outside bare-chested in freezing temperatures, wearing nothing but Crocs, boxer shorts and a children’s blanket. A photo of the incident drew immediate attention on social media.

 Throw the book at them.

Now Start Kicking Down Doors and Hauling Them Off to Prison

You may not have heard the story of Nurul Amin Shah Alam.

He was a refugee from from Myanmar, a Rohinga.  He is also blind and spoke very little English.

He was arrested in what was clearly a case of over aggressive policing, and spent much of the next year in jail.

His family would not bail him out because they believed that he would be seized by immigration officers and deported.

He was released following a plea deal which included no deportable offenses, but CBP seized him in response to a no longer in force detainer, and then they promptly dumped him in the parking lot of a closed coffee sErie County Medical Examiner has now ruled his death a homicide.

On Wednesday, the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office announced that it ruled the death of Nurul Amin Shah Alam, a Blind Rohingya refugee who was left on the freezing streets of Buffalo by Border Patrol officers, a homicide. Neither Shah Alam’s family, who had waited to meet him outside the facility where he was being held, nor his lawyers, who had been attempting to contact him, were notified of his location. Shah Alam spoke very little English.

The Associated Press reported that the medical examiner’s office did not “reach any conclusions about responsibility” for the homicide and that Shah Alam’s death was “caused by complications of a perforated duodenal ulcer, precipitated by hypothermia and dehydration. “

“The designation of homicide does not imply intent to cause harm or death,” Erie County official Mark Poloncarz said at a press conference on Wednesday. “Manner-of-death determinations are neutral, non-legal, and exist for vital statistical purposes only. They do not indicate criminality, which is the purview of the justice system.”………

The Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that Shah Alam “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” despite being blind and experiencing other health issues. “DHS is lying,” New York Democrat and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer responded in a quote post.

Poloncarz said that he has spoken to Erie County District Attorney Michael Keane and New York Attorney General Letitia James about the case, and he encouraged questions about criminal investigations to be directed to them.

The CBP officers involved with this, including supervisors who knew, or should have known, about this should be in custody right now.

I want to see COPS style footage of them being frog marched out of their homes in their underwear. 

Bringing Jobs Back to America

Or not.

Because of concerns about threats to travelers to the United States by immigration authorities, the Ig Nobel Prize will be moving its awards ceremony to Europe.

Honestly, I understand the need to relocate to a safer place than the United States.

It could have been Europe, it could have been Japan, it could have been Karg Island, or it could have been Chernobyl. They would all be safer for people going through US customs.

The annual Ig Nobels, a satirical award for scientific achievement, are shifting for the first time from the US to Europe due to concerns about attendees getting visas, organizers announced on Monday.

Organized by the Annals of Improbable Research, a digital magazine that highlights research that makes people laugh and then think, the 36th annual ceremony will be held in Zurich. It’s usually held in the US in September, a few weeks before the actual Nobel prizes are announced.

“During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country,” Marc Abrahams, master of ceremonies and editor of the magazine, told the Associated Press in an email interview. “We cannot in good conscience ask the new winners, or the international journalists who cover the event, to travel to the USA this year.”

The move comes amid Donald Trump’s sweeping crackdown on immigration, in which he has focused on deporting migrants illegally in the US, as well as holders of student and visitor exchange visas.

………

But four of the 10 winners last year chose not to travel to Boston for the ceremony. In previous years, the ceremony has taken place at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University.

I think that someone should publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal about this.  You might even get an Ig Nobel Prize for that.

 

………Which Would Be Replaced by Something Even More Bizarrely Inexplicable

I am referring, of course, to the fact that Markwayne Mullin has been confirmed as the new Secretary of Homeland Security, replacing Kristi "Ice Barbi" Noem.

I did not think that it would possible to find someone worse than Noem.

I was misinformed.

The Senate confirmed Sen. Markwayne Mullin on Monday to serve as the next secretary of Homeland Security, putting the Oklahoma Republican in charge of immigration enforcement, one of President Trump's biggest priorities in his second term.

Mullin won the confirmation in a 54-45 vote. He will be the second secretary to lead the department during this Trump administration, replacing Kristi Noem. He comes to the helm in the midst of a shutdown that has left 100,000 of the department's more than a quarter-million employees working without pay.

Reality exceeds my capability for cynicism yet again. 

It Gets Worse

It turns out that staff at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas were running a betting pool on which detainees would commit suicide.

Yes, I think that we can call them concentration camps now. 

Staff at the nation’s largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility have placed bets on which detainee will be the next to die by suicide, according to new reporting from the Associated Press based on 911 calls and detainee accounts.

Owen Ramsingh, a legal permanent resident who spent several weeks at the Camp East Montana detention facility in Texas, told AP that he overheard a security guard talking about a betting pool for which detainee would next die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into the pot, which would all go to the winner with the most accurate predictions on detainees harming themselves.

Without providing details, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told AP that Ramsingh, who was brought to the US at age 5 from the Netherlands, was lying about the suicide bets.

In January, staff at Camp East Montana called 911 to request emergency help for Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old from Cuba. DHS described his death as an attempted suicide. A medical examiner later ruled it a homicide. That same month, staff at the detention facility called 911 to report that a 36-year-old Nicaraguan man died by suicide. The AP reports that “detainees attempted to harm themselves while expressing suicidal ideations on at least six other occasions that resulted in 911 calls.”

Once the site of an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, Camp East Montana is made up of six long tents at the Fort Bliss Army base outside of El Paso. On an average day, the facility holds around 3,000 detainees who are living in harsh conditions: They lack sufficient food and often go without proper medical care, according to AP’s review of 130 calls made to 911. Those calls took place in just about five months—from when the tents were quickly constructed in mid-August to January 20.

The cruelty is the point.

Replaced by Something Even More Bizarrely Inexplicable

So, amid cratering poll numbers, Donald Trump has fired Kristi Noem as head of DHS and replaced her with the stupidest man in the Senate Markwayne Mullin.

There are any number of reasons for this, such as her persistent self dealing and her lying to the Senate about this under oath, or her $¼ billion PR program which primarily consisted of glamor shots of herself, or it could be that she said that Trump had approved her advertising excesses.

Mostly, I think that it's because she got caught, so Trump took her to the gravel pit along with her (alleged) adulterous "Special Advisor" Corey Lewandowski.

Her erstwhile successor mind mindbogglingly stupid, even by the standards of MAGA, which is saying a lot.

Margaret Atwood Must Be Weeping

In a move that highlights the inhumanity of the Trump administration, immigration authorities are moving detained girls to Texas to force them to have their babies.

This includes many rape victims. 

These people need to be permanently removed from anything resembling a position of power.

All unaccompanied immigrant children who are pregnant, many by rape, are being moved to a single facility in Texas in order to avoid providing abortion services in a significant human rights violation, critics say.

As detainees are frequently moved across state lines quickly, often to red states like Texas, pregnant people are facing challenges accessing reproductive health care in detention centers.

Unaccompanied minors who lack immigration documentation are at high risk for trafficking and other forms of harm, so they fall under the care of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), which previously had facilities across the country capable of caring for children under the age of 18 who are pregnant.

Since July, more than a dozen pregnant children have been moved to a single facility in the small town of San Benito, along the south Texas border. The children kept in Texas are as young as 13, and about half are pregnant because of rape, according to a joint investigation by the Texas Newsroom and the California Newsroom. In Texas, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances, including rape and incest.

 When the worm turns, the need to be taken down.  To quote Robert Graves apocryphal quote of They cannot be reasoned with.  To quote Robert Graves apocryphal quote of Germanicus Caesar, "They must be struck into the dust, struck down again as they rise. Struck again while they lie groaning, while their wounds still pain them." 

 

We Live in the Worst Timeline Ever

Fascist Kink Roleplay Subreddit Draws the Line: No More ICE Porn

—404 Media (Alternative link at archive.is) On how reality became too awful for a Reddit kink forum.

This buggers the mind.

In the wake of the public killings of multiple US citizens, protestors, and legal observers in recent weeks by immigration agents in Minneapolis, January 26, 2025 marked a watershed moment for r/FuckingFascists: they will no longer allow content or roleplay featuring ICE. 

The Reddit community r/FuckingFascists is for people with a kink for roleplaying sex with fascists. The subreddit’s description explicitly states that the sub is “about making porn or making fun of authoritarians. REAL FASCISTS, SEXISTS, HOMOPHOBES, TRANSPHOBES AND OTHER BIGOTS ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!,” and “Rule 1: No Fascists”. 

On Monday morning, moderator LilyDHM announced a complete ban of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) content in the sub. “No ICE related content will be allowed in kink posts,” the post reads. “We believe that this is the best option to allow people to still post MAGA content without touching this particular aspect of it, as it directly involves current politics and multiple lost lives.”

 

 

I Went to the Farmers Market Today

 And I picked up a button.