Tag: Donald Trump

Grid of images of No Kings protests on June 14, 2025

No Kings protests were extraordinary. How exactly?

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

Americans, citizens and immigrants alike, protested on Saturday, June 14, in exceptional numbers as a wave of No Kings protests became the most widespread public repudiation of the second Donald Trump administration. These protests, which were undoubtedly energized by the standoff between Los Angeles-area communities and Federal troops, could mark a turning point from isolated protests to mass resistance.

Protests are called demonstrations for a reason. And these were displays of political strength for a movement that has a lot to prove: that it better represents the country than a president elected with a slim plurality in November 2020, that it is better able to capture public enthusiasm than an incipient fascist movement, and that it is undeterred by the state violence shown through military deployments, arrests of opposition leaders, and near-disappearances of a growing number of immigrants.

So what does success look like for a mass display of public will?

One simple metric is comparative: did a the anti-Trump movement out-organize and out-turnout their opponent. And here, the juxtaposition with Trump’s military parade — a celebration of the US Army’s 250th birthday on Trump’s 79th — will be unforgettable.

The King’s Parade vs No Kings Protest

— News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) 2025-06-14T22:36:16.034Z

But in a larger sense, protesters make a political statement through crowds (and yes, through many other kinds of actions, but June 14 was largely a day for crowds). When they succeed, that message is “indisputable in its overwhelmingness,” as Argentina’s Colectivo Situaciones described the protests that brought down three presidents on December 19 and 20, 2001. Through some alchemy of place, time, presence, voice, and action, crowds constitute themselves into the “The Voice of the People.” And assert that they, and not their government, will decide the future.

I want to use this occasion to share how those of us who study mass protest try to conceptualize just how protests achieve that kind of political impact.

Charles Tilly, who with various colleagues has probably done the most to examine the protest demonstration as political form, has a four-word summary of what protesters are actually demonstrating. And Tilly’s model is interesting in part because it situates demonstrations as just one form of collective political action (or “contentious politics”), alongside riots, strikes, revolutions, and among many other attempts at disruption or representation. Demonstrations are a social transaction where movements accept that a government system will persist, but where governments are moved to recalibrate their actions based on shifts in popular support and public mode. In that frame, Tilly et al. argue that protesters are engaged in displays of WUNC: worth, unity, numbers, and commitment.

  • Worth: Protesters present themselves as worthy of political participation, rather than exclusion from decisions about their own fate. This might be especially relevant for groups, from working-class laborers in the 19th century to women in the suffrage movements to minorities of various enfranchisement movements, who are formally excluded from participating in official politics. This is self-presentation as an argument that one deserves a place at the table.
  • Unity: Protesters come together and present a common voice. This may be the most basic element of what a common protest is, and everything from a speaker’s dais to roars of approval to marching side-by-side demonstrates this unity of purpose, both to participants themselves and to their audience.
  • Numbers: The size of a protest illustrates the larger capacity of a movement to catalyze political action, to show up again, and to influence democratic outcomes. When the 2006 immigrant protests promised, “Hoy marchamos, mañana votamos / Today we march, tomorrow we vote,” they were offering their quantitative weight to political actors that would accept their agenda.
  • Commitment: To a greater or lesser degree, protests demonstrate the willingness of participants to do hard things, to devote a share of their time to political action, and to make sacrifices for a cause. This is why long marches, gatherings in spite of rain or cold, and endurance of repressive violence—fire hoses, dogs, tear gas, projectile weapons—are so impactful. And why activists can create their own endurance tests—sit-ins, extended vigils, hunger strikes—to show others what they are willing to do.

What‘s great about this framework is that it doesn‘t just make sense of how movements have an impact, but also gives some sense of what goals organizers might have in choosing different protest forms.

But when I tried to understand the movements I have worked with, I came to feel that other dimensions were important as well. As I’ve written: “But what if grassroots movements see themselves not just as claimants before the state, but as a rival power to it? What if they claim a bit of sovereignty for themselves? The mobilized communities described here do use their unity and numbers to illustrate their claim to represent the public as a whole. To create the shared impression that “everyone” is part of a mobilization, however, they also highlight diversity among themselves and carry out geographically expansive protests. And they demonstrate effective practical sovereignty over urban spaces and persistence in the face of state violence.”

These are, I think, four new dimensions. A mobilization that claims sovereignty has worth, unity, numbers, and commitment, but is also diverse, widespread, irrepressible, and in control. What do these four adjectives mean?

  • Diverse: This includes and goes beyond the intersectional identities notion of diversity. Yes, it’s about including those oppressed, marginalized and excluded. It is those who were scorned claiming political voice. But also yes, it’s about joint action across lines of difference, showing people working together despite privilege and division. It is uniting to fight together. And yes again, it‘s about those sectors of society that have been pitted against each other finding common cause. It’s realized though unexpected juxtapositions: Teamsters and Turtles together at last, the office worker in a suit throwing back a tear-gas canister.
  • Widespread: Movements demonstrate their political significance by being ubiquitous: We are everywhere. At the height of their water privatization protests, Cochabambans moved to erect road blockades on every street they could find. And in the United States, we’ve seen a move since at least Occupy in 2011 to maximizing the number of protest locations. This was definitely a feature of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, possibly the most widespread protest mobilization in American history. Here in 2025, No Kings seems to have doubled down on this strategy, meaning that many metropolises could boast multiple urban and suburban protests on the same day: as many as fifty separate locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Much of the celebratory sharing that happened yesterday was geographical, with images from places like Boise, Salt Lake City, or Hattiesburg (Mississippi) treated as mic drop moments.

Do you know how badly you have to screw up as a Republican to get this kind of turnout in IDAHO? #NOKINGS

— Heather M. Collins🗽 (@heathersdesk.bsky.social) 2025-06-14T19:44:59.284Z

The last two elements of my list may just be at the horizon for the current protest wave in the USA, but they mark out where things could go as the protester–government standoff evolves.

  • Irrepressible: When a movement surges back in to the streets after repression, it showcases the limits of state power. This feeling is definitely significant right now, with these protests surging both in places where police and military violence was displayed over the past ten days, and showing up in new places in outraged reaction. Anyone who has been on the streets when police have backed down, or gave up their hold on even a block of the city to allow protesters to surge in, knows the electricity that goes through a crowd that has lost its fear and disempowerment. Finding ways to protest through, or in spite of, physical attempts to prevent you from doing so is a powerful political statement.
  • In control: Beyond that, lies the experience of protesters actually choosing what happens in the streets. Of public collective decisions on what happens next. This is why certain kinds of rallies and assemblies are uniquely empowering, because people choose on the spot what do, where to go, how to escalate, and whether to persist until their demands are one. The collective experience of direct action is its own unique form of self-empowerment.

The United States is a massive country with many cities, countless communities, and many, many places of gathering. It’s an exceptional challenge to walk forward through the different kinds of collective power sketched out here all at once. When face-to-face in one place we can get a sense of our potential, but we’ll need to find ways of keeping track of that across many settings.

Synthetic journalistic, movement media, and academic accounts can give us perspective, and I hope this outline of elements of power can help orient those accounts. Counting the number of locations, as being done by the Crowd Counting Consortium, is vital information. Yet summaries of crowd size and dispersion are useful, but also not enough. We need to thicken these accountings of where and how many with considerations of which alliances are emerging, which sectors of society are participating, and how daring and how contagious actions are. As well as what is working despite the kinds of force directed against it.

In the past, with thinner forms of communication and a greater reliance on centralized mass media, singular national protest gatherings may have been more important in building this shared sense of working together and achieving power. So did roving concentrated mobilizations, whether that was the trail from Birmingham to Freedom Rides to Selma to Chicago, or from Seattle to DC to Cancun to Miami. Now, in part because the adversary is more directly the national government, an Everything Everywhere strategy seems to be taking shape.

Front cover image from l'Humanité, a Paris newspaper. Shows a confrontation on a highway between black-clad soldiers and American civilians, one of them holding an American flag.

Resistance to Trump reaches its first turning point

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

“The Whole World Is Watching.” It’s been decades since American protesters chanted this sentence at American police in an effort to deter violence and brutality. But it has perhaps never been more true than right now. The political drama of the USA in 2025 has the world riveted, and I as I walked through the modern train station in Potsdammer Platz, built where the Berlin Wall once stood, the face offs, a pillar at the bottom of stairway brought the confrontation between Federal troops and Los Angeles protesters to life in the middle of Germans daily commute.

And without a doubt, Los Angeles marks a dramatic new turn in the authoritarian rollout of the second Trump Administration. After months of high-consequence policy changes and comparatively isolated forms of protest, the situation is shifting towards an open confrontation and nationwide resistance. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on everyday Angelenos have prompted a public reaction by a community that doesn’t have the luxury of waiting until November 2026. And the president’s long-advertised desire to confront protesters with the United States military is finally being realized.

Both the roundup of ordinary civilians and the militarization of American cities push beyond existing expectations. They embody the threat of a different country, one where freedom is utterly denied to a millions and dramatically curtailed for the rest of us.

Everything I’ve said so far is, I think, obvious whether one is within range of the tear gas, across town, across the state, or across the ocean. But that’s not why I write this post. Instead I want to share a bit of perspective as someone who spent a decade puzzling through the sometimes deadly and sometimes transformative dance between protest and repression, including how Bolivians flipped the most heavy-handed domestic military deployment into the forced end of a presidency.

First and foremost, state crackdowns like Trump’s deployment of the National Guard and the Marines are exceptionally risky moves for rulers. The repressor imagines that such a show of force will rapidly bring about a scene of submission: arrested or injured opponents, a fearful majority of the population, and a quieter country. But the truth is, there’s no single outcome when an unarmed populace faces down an armed military. And nothing demonstrates a government’s weakness more powerfully than when even its deliberately trained soldiers can not obtain compliance with its orders.

Second, a crackdown in one place can kick up either mass demonstrations of repudiation or many sparks of daring rebellion across the country. Or both, which is what the invasion of Los Angeles has appeared to do this week. Spreading out protests when repression is concentrated is a winning tactical approach.

Sometime in the coming days or weeks, American protesters will make the turn from a solidarity movement with Los Angeles to a national mobilization in defense of freedom and democracy.

Third — and these may be the two ideas I most want to share widely because they is not common sense to many Americans — widespread confrontational protest and massive shows of popular opinion are both essential, and need not be in competition with one another. In Bolivia, in Argentina, in Thailand, in Ukraine, in Egypt, and in Chile, people who succeeded in national political turns did both of these things. As seen this week, acts of confrontational action can deter or delay the mass detention and deportation of our neighbors; they also can hold space in times of protest. On the other hand, acts of mass participation literally demonstrate that the public rejects a government and its policies. They create moments of collective purpose that strengthen their participants and remind allies elsewhere that they are not alone, and that we can win. (See below the line for how I described them working together in Cochabamba, Bolivia.)

This month, and especially this weekend, people primarily oriented around one or the other of these goals will likely be side-by-side in the street. Those who define themselves around what I’ve called “The Tactical Argument of our time” (whether nonviolent action can/is better at/is necessary for/could never/is counterproductive to bringing about revolutionary change), may be primarily worried about whether their preferred tactical approach is being permitted or blocked. My suggestion instead is to consider how much more powerful this movement could be if both flourished. And then to do the work of both helping people stay safe(r) as they speak, act, and resist.

Solidarity from Berlin.

p.s. Here’s how I described these two sides of successful uprisings in my research on Bolivia:

To win, the Coordinadora had to wield mass pressure, establish its legitimacy, gain a seat at the bargaining table, and convince the government to completely reverse the privatization. The moment of mass pressure involved blockades and other disruptive actions to win the annulling of the contract. The moment of legitimacy consisted in convening assemblies, cabildos, and an unofficial referendum or consulta popular to register public opposition to water policies. … While pressure and legitimacy represent two distinct moments of the mobilization, they worked in tandem, like two legs walking: Road blockades organized across the city and the surrounding region built up into an overwhelming civic strike, while marches flowed together into large-scale meetings called cabildos, often held in the central plaza. The civic strike was the cabildo’s operative arm, its means of exerting pressure; and the cabildo was the strike’s brains and voice, the only place from which it could claim sovereignty. Without either, the Coordinadora and the Water War it fought, would have amounted to nothing.

People's March, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025, in Washington.(Mike Stewart | AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Trump’s authoritarian turn is everyone’s problem

Carwil Bjork-James1 Comment

It’s May 2025, and it feels like every new conversation (in my circles? in the United States? far beyond that?) needs to start with an acknowledgement of the bleak bigger picture on the national and global stage. Like every How are you? could be personal, but could also be a How are you coping with these unfathomable times?

In my circles, a short phrase circulated in 2020–22: “Pandemic fine.” It was a way of addressing this uncertainty, this complication, this brokenness in brief, humane terms. With an unspoken subtext something like this: “My loved ones and I had a reasonably good day, though before bed I will be checking the charts that reveal that 2,592 of my countrymen have died yesterday of a disease that didn’t exist three years ago. And that reasonably good day was made as we navigate all the ways we know to live differently to make that number a bit smaller than it otherwise would be.”

Also in my circles, this attentiveness and yet also disconnect around the COVID pandemic was eventually displaced by the mounting horror of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Which is something we didn’t have to plan our everyday behavior around. But which was present in our consciousness in a new and visceral way. The first live-streamed genocide brought us inches away from a tide of human suffering and calculated cruelty that was unimaginable. And while it felt like awareness of this new horror was uneven in the United States, the half or more of us who were aware could not look away. Our day-to-day lives coincided with both this atrocity, and with the broken promise of post–World War II life: “Never again.”

Less publicly, and I imagine among a smaller set of Americans than these last two, a dawning realization of the reality of massively disruptive climate change came up again and again in 2024. The city-shaking and sometimes city-shattering disasters that accompany the global rise in temperature knocked on more places I know in 2024, most memorably Asheville and Los Angeles. Those of us for whom climate is an area of expertise know the worst is still yet to come, and in the absence of rapid emissions reductions, the tempo and scale of these disasters will only rise. Among ourselves, we talk about the opposing demands for hope and clarity. and we mourn those places and lifeforms that can no longer be saved.

And for the United States, a further damaging shift came in with the Trump administration, and its dramatic efforts to take off the limits on repressive power; stigmatize and reverse efforts towards racial and gender inclusion; and dismantle a swath of institutions. We’ve see a former president who dreamed of being a dictator hire a phalanx of officials who are actually working to make him one. Moves from an authoritarian playbook are underway in the American state, even as crown jewels of that state — the Centers for Disease Control, PEPFAR, the National Endowment for the Arts , the list goes on — are cast aside. The White House directs a crackdown on the most vulnerable while also starting fights with pillars of its own power: the Ivy League, elite law firms, the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Here there has been no silence. The details are too incredible, the variance with routine channels of action too extreme, the impacts too widespread for us to not bring these things up, just when we check in with each other. Public protests have popped up at a much faster pace this year than in 2017, with sustained regular demonstrating turning into a feature of the political landscape.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem receives a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center CECOT with the Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 26, 2025. (DHS photo by Tia Dufour)

But also, the warning signs of a more repressive turn are real and obvious: snatch squads targeting outspoken student activists; the use of immigration enforcement as political police; unaccountable detentions of lawfully arriving visitors; and the out-of-country imprisonments in El Salvador’s no-way-out prison CECOT. Again, those of us who have made our lives work studying such systems of power, as well as those who grew up living through authoritarian turns, are unified in seeing the dangers here.

Okay, so now what?

We’re up against a wildly ambitious White House intent on turning the US government into an authoritarian state, but also a White House that is doing so with self-weakening abandon. Starting from a bare plurality of voters, and the smallest possible majority in Congress, it is pursuing a maximalist agenda by largely ignoring the legislative process altogether. Its attacks on diversity, on queer rights, on opposition figures personally push otherwise moderate people into opposition. Its crudeness inspires more revulsion than it does participation. Trump’s absolutely Nixonian inability to treat powerful opponents differently than he does powerless ones continues to generate shock and outrage.

After a winter of cowardice, capitulation, and collaboration — with CBS, Columbia University, and the tech oligarchy as its most visible symbols — there’s a new balance of initiative. There will be battles in the courts, defiance from campuses, insubordination in federal offices and occasional bravery in state houses, and many, many reasons to get out in the streets.

Much of US activist practice is centered on raising awareness and visibility. But nothing could be more visible than the situation we confront. (We can retire the bumper stickers that say, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.” Everyone is paying attention.) We’ll have to learn the forms of praxis that transform numbers into disruption, and disruption into power.

But I like our emerging coalition. And I like our chances.

Lead Photo: People’s March, Saturday, Jan. 18, 2025, in Washington.(Mike Stewart | AP Photo/Mike Stewart)

Inset Photo: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem receives a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center CECOT with the Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro in Tecoluca, El Salvador, March 26, 2025. (DHS photo by Tia Dufour)

(L-R) Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, businessman Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and businessman Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend Donald Trump's inauguration as the next President of the United States in the rotunda of the United States Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, 20 January 2025.

Prom for the US tech oligarchy

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

It was an inescapable image of the 2025 presidential inauguration: the joint appearance of Mark Zuckerberg (CEO, Meta), Priscilla Chan (co-CEO and operating leader of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Zuckerberg’s spouse), Jeff Bezos (founder, Amazon) Lauren Sanchez (Bezos’ fiancée and co-chair of the Bezos Earth Fund), Sundar Pichai (CEO, Alphabet/Google), Elon Musk (CEO, Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter), Tim Cook (CEO, Apple), and Sam Altman (CEO, OpenAI). Upstaging governors and the incoming president’s cabinet, this roster of the giga-rich offered the blessing of the Silicon Valley to President Donald Trump and offered themselves as an on-stage symbol of what has been variously named the tech–industrial complex (by outgoing President Joe Biden), the Broligarchy (by Carole Cadwalladr among others), the attention economy (by Chris Hayes), and less recently surveillance capitalism (by Shoshana Zuboff).

If the inauguration served as something of a prom for tech oligarchs, it’s also a critical moment to think about how their power operates. It’s both quantitatively more extreme than prior rounds of monopoly capitalism, and tied to extraordinary ideas about future sources of wealth. As individuals, the founders and CEOs atop these corporate entities have way more power than even US corporate tradition usually provides.

The extraordinary personal concentration of dollars and power

First off, there’s a LOT of wealth in that one row: $653 billion among Chan, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk

Google’s Pichai holds $1.3 billion, but he stands in the shadow of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who have $266 billion together. The gap between Google founders Page and Brin, and current CEO Pichai highlight an staggering first-mover/founder advantage in many Silicon Valley firms, entrenching enormous wealth in early owners of these corporations. And these gaps are enabled by a corporate structure that provides founders with enormous voting power and disproportionate ownership of what eventually become large corporations.

Within the companies, they hold an extra level of voting power that exceeds even their share of the wealth.

One way that Google’s founders institutionalized their freedom was through an unusual structure of corporate governance that gave them absolute control over their company. Page and Brin were the first to introduce a dual-class share structure to the tech sector with Google’s 2004 public offering. The two would control the super-class “B” voting stock, shares that each carried ten votes, as compared to the “A” class of shares, which each carried only one vote. …
This arrangement inoculated Page and Brin from market and investor pressures, as Page wrote in the “Founder’s Letter” issued with the IPO: “In the transition to public ownership, we have set up a corporate structure that will make it harder for outside parties to take over or influence Google.… The main effect of this structure is likely to leave our team, especially Sergey and me, with increasingly significant control over the company’s decisions and fate, as Google shares change hands.” (Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism)

This makes actually-existing Google and Meta a lot closer in internal power dynamics to Elon Musk-owned Twitter than to Microsoft. Hence, this month’s turn-on-a-dime rejection of DEI and fact-checking by Mark Zuckerberg at Meta may reflect a kind of economic power unique to this sector, where founder-owners can exercise personal rule.

Outsized market values based on imagined future control

Despite the unusual internal structure, these are still publicly traded companies whose value is tied up in market expectations, and still massive employers whose functions depend on keeping their employees vaguely satisfied. In fact, tech firms with ties to the attention economy make up the majority the very largest companies by market capitalization—what shareholders estimate they are worth.

The five companies behind the presidential dais—Meta, Amazon, Alphabet/Google, Apple, and Tesla—weigh in at $11.16 trillion in market value. Adding in Microsoft (same sector, same inaugural donations, not on the dais) and NVIDIA and Broadcom (physical suppliers to this boom), we get a combined market capitalization of $19.21 trillion.

These corporations get a disproportionate amount of investor dollars, representing something approaching a quarter of the global stock equity market (estimated at $78 trillion in mid-2024). Needless to say they are a far smaller share of the global economy, whether measured in dollars of revenue or number of workers.

Collectively, stock markets imagine that these companies have not just their present revenue streams, but future control over larger and critical part of the global economy. Part of their monetary value is stories of future value, stories that may in part be fantastical. And their leaders’ personal wealth is heavily tied to just those stock market values: fundamentally they are fully invested in selling a narrative in which their products—advertising and marketing, behavioral prediction, digital infrastructure, and increasingly artificial intelligence will one day claim nearly all the value of the economy.

Tesla’s value in the stock market exceeds that of all other automakers put together, and is 114 times its earnings, while other carmakers (except Ferrari) run from 3x to 30x. Analysts estimate that over three-quarters of Tesla’s perceived value comes down to robotaxis and self-driving cars, technologies it has yet to deliver. Most of Musk’s wealth is from others’ bet that he has the secret key to the future.

So aside from the usual asks around taxes, subsidies, and freedom from regulation, these oligarchs will be seeking a way for the US government to sustain the illusions and collective future fantasies that amplify their wealth.

Why Trump’s Executive Order doesn’t solve the family separation crisis

Carwil Bjork-James2 Comments

Yesterday afternoon, June 20, President Trump publicly retreated from the family separation policy (Wikipedia article) that has torn at least 2,342 children from their families. A close reading of the Executive Order he signed, however, reveals that instead of retreating, Trump codified Jeff Sessions’ zero-tolerance policy and proposed an expanding system of indefinite family detention. Further reporting revealed that the Administration is not yet prepared to re-unite divide families. Practical and legal constraints may render the promises of the Executive Order worthless, or (and this is the only speculative part of this post) prompt renewed family separations within days or weeks.

A close read of the Executive Order

This is a slightly amplified version of a post that went viral on Facebook yesterday. While I am not an immigration lawyer, I am a trained policy analyst (M.P.P., University of Chicago, 1998) familiar with Executive Orders and recent immigration policy. My read here is a direct analysis of what the White House proposed, rather than an assessment of what it can legally or practically implement.

I’ve just read the Trump Executive Order. It’s not a solution, and it makes some things worse.

Here’s what the Executive Order actually does (numbered by section) …

1. Codifies Jeff Sessions’ “zero tolerance” directive until new immigration legislation is passed. Prior to the Trump/Sessions crackdown, the US government only criminally prosecuted about 21% of unlawful entrants, concentrating on return offenders and smugglers and exempting families with children. “This Administration will initiate proceedings to enforce this and other criminal provisions of the INA until and unless Congress directs otherwise.”

2. Limits the definition of family to parent-child pairs. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. are excluded. “Alien family” means…

3a. Puts families under Homeland Security custody during criminal, immigration cases. Previously, children and detained families had to be held in facilities contracted by the Department of Health and Human Services. [Correction 6/27: Detained families are held by DHS in three facilities: the privately operated Karnes County Residential Center and South Texas Family Residential Center in Texas, and the Berks County Residential Center in Pennsylvania. These facilities must be state-licensed as child-care facilities under rulings pursuant to the Reno v. Flores litigation.] The Secretary of Homeland Security (Secretary), shall, to the extent permitted by law and subject to the availability of appropriations, maintain custody of alien families 

3b.Authorizes immigration authorities to separate parents from children if joint detention “would pose a risk to the child’s welfare.” This phrase seems intended to separate abusers from their kids, but no procedure is elaborated.

3c. Authorizes the military to build new prisons for migrant families. The wording actually gives the Homeland Security Secretary, currently Kirstjen Nielsen, to choose any military facility she wishes.  The Secretary of Defense shall take all legally available measures to provide to the Secretary [of Homeland Security], upon request, any existing facilities available for the housing and care of alien families, and shall construct such facilities if necessary and consistent with law. 

3d. Allows all Federal departments to offer their buildings as prisons. Heads of executive departments and agencies shall, to the extent consistent with law, make available to the Secretary, for the housing and care of alien families pending court proceedings for improper entry, any facilities that are appropriate for such purposes. 

3e. Authorizes the DOJ to try to wriggle out of the Flores Agreement. This phrasing is the most foreboding since it would seek legal authorization for DHS (not Health and Human Services) to detain families throughout their often-lengthy criminal, deportation, and asylum proceedings. The Attorney General shall promptly file a request with the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California to modify the Settlement Agreement in Flores v. Sessions… to detain alien families together throughout the pendency of criminal proceedings for improper entry or any removal or other immigration proceedings.

4. Orders parents to be prosecuted first in immigration courts, presumably to deport them fastest. This phrase, intended to expedite prosecution and removal, puts families to the head of a line that also includes people being deported for dangerous criminal offenses, the exact opposite of the policy pursued by the Obama administration.

Early signs the crisis isn’t over

  • Wednesday afternoon, Kenneth Wolfe, a spokeman for  the Administration for Children and Families told the press, “There will not be a grandfathering of existing cases.” And also “For the minors currently in the unaccompanied alien children program, the sponsorship process will proceed as usual.”
  • Seemingly embarrassed by these admissions, the Department of Health and Human Services walked them back later on Wednesday, saying instead: “It is still very early and we are awaiting further guidance on the matter. … Reunification is always the ultimate goal of those entrusted with the care of UACs, and the administration is working towards that for those UACs currently in HHS custody.”
  • Once guidance comes, there is the problem of a system not built to keep families connected at all. Politico reports that “The biggest problem, as far as I can tell, is where the kids’ records don’t have information on the parents,” said one Homeland Security Department official. “I don’t know how they’re going to go about fixing that.”
  • Should families be reunited, they might not have a place to go. The Executive Order instructs the Department of Homeland Security (ICE and CBP) to incarcerate families together. At the moment, ICE has very limited detention space for families. As the Washington Post reports, “ICE operates two large family detention centers in Texas and a smaller facility in Pennsylvania, with a combined capacity for about 3,000 beds. As of June 9, the three facilities had nearly 2,600 of those beds occupied.” Reuniting families immediately would require some five thousand separated family members into 400 beds.

Looming obstacles mean family separation will likely resume, and soon

Again, this is the only speculative part of this post.

  • Reports indicate that ICE has been separating 65 children per day. As noted above, ICE family detention capacity is low (perhaps as few as 400 empty beds), even if already separated families remain separate. Incarcerating families will require putting around 130 people into these facilities every day, or rapidly building more. Either the government will rapidly stop detaining families together, or they will start putting them into makeshift facilities recently built for immigrant children, like the tent camp in Tornillo.
  • Legal constraints, primarily the Flores Settlement, limit DHS custody of children to 72 hours and HHS custody to 20 days. If enforced, these would require either separating or releasing families at the end of these windows.
  • There will be lawsuits over the new family detention policy, and some of it seems manifestly against existing law or legal orders. Politico reports: “The president doesn’t get any brownie points for moving from a policy of locking up families and kids separately to locking them up together,” said Karen Tumlin of the National Immigrant Law Center. “I will not hesitate to use every legal tool available to challenge these policies in court….May a thousand litigation flowers bloom.”

On the other hand…

We did get some genuinely good news today (Thursday) with this announcement from Customs and Border Patrol, reported by the Washington Post:

The U.S. Border Patrol will no longer refer migrant parents who cross into the United States illegally with children to federal courthouses to face criminal charges, a senior U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told The Washington Post on Thursday.

…

A Justice Department spokesperson denied changes to the zero tolerance policy and said prosecutions would continue.

…

Because ICE lacks the detention capacity to increase the number of families it holds in detention, the official acknowledged that many migrant parents and children will likely be released from custody while they await court hearings.

Top CBP officials did not know what the executive order would ask them to do until its release Wednesday, the official said. The decision to cease prosecutions of parents with children was made by the Department of Homeland Security for logistical purposes because the official said it would not be “feasible” to bring children to federal courtrooms while their parents go before a judge.

This is a logistical decision; there really is nowhere to put families with children. So, it may be reversed. But it is the first sign that CBP might not implement the mass detention of families, for now.

Mass prosecutions of adults without children continue. So the zero tolerance policy has not be reversed.

Further reading

I’m not just a voice in the wilderness saying these things. You can read reporting and commentary here…

Numerous detentions go beyond letter of Muslim Travel Ban Executive Order

Carwil Bjork-JamesLeave a comment

We’re seeing a lot of legally ungrounded detentions and expulsions of international travelers in and around Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13769 imposing a travel ban on residents of seven Muslim countries. Here’s a brief list:

  • Prior to the January 27 Executive Order, multiple valid visas were abruptly canceled by the Department of Homeland Security, The Intercept reports: “Valid visa holders were suddenly being prevented from re-entering the country after taking trips abroad … The impacted individuals whose files the official reviewed included a young mother of a U.S. citizen child and students at some of the nation’s top universities who had been publicly recognized for their outstanding achievement. These students had already undergone rigorous U.S. government vetting before being admitted to the country, and had only traveled abroad briefly over their winter break.”
    These cancellations were imposed suddenly and the surprised visa holders were punished, the official is quoted as saying, “More disturbing, in some cases the individuals were allowed to board flights for the United States not knowing their visas had been terminated. They were only informed when they attempted to use their visas to seek admission and were denied. Even though they were ignorant of the termination, they were still charged with violating U.S. immigration law and given a five-year ban to future admission.”
  • The pattern of border officials threatening visa holders with punishment for violating immigration law continued on Saturday, January 28, as the Order began to be implemented upon people who had begun their journeys before it even existed. Cleveland Clinic medical intern Suha Abushamma, an MD from Sudan, was told she faced deportation and five-year ban from the United States unless she signed a document relinquishing her H-1B visa, according multiple press reports. UAE national and doctor Amer Al Homssi likewise had his visa cancelled upon arrival to O’Hare; the United Arab Emirates is not on the travel ban list. Al Homssi’s exclusion was reversed on February 1 as his lawyers appeared in court to press his case. Coerced departures were common at JFK as of Sunday, according to Becca Heller of the International Refugee Assistance Project, “Rogue customs and Border Patrol agents continue to try to get people on to planes. A lot of people have been handcuffed, a lot of people who don’t speak English are being coerced into taking involuntary departures.”
  • Court orders enjoining enforcement of the travel ban have been ignored by the government.
    • Abushamma’s removal came after Judge Ann Donnelly’s stay and the judge’s insistence that “nobody is to be removed in this class [i.e., those covered by the class action suit], okay?”
    • Four Democratic members of Congress were unable to compel authorities at Dulles Airport to comply with the court order on January 28.
  • Extended questioning of arrivals continued on Monday, January 30 at O’Hare airport despite court orders, with the Chicago Tribune reporting that 40 to 50 people were detained for hours.
  • Mohammad Abu Khadra, a sixteen-year-old Jordanian visa holder who sometimes lives with his family in Katy, Texas, has been detained since his January 28 arrival at Houston Intercontinental airport. (Jordan isn’t on the travel ban list.) On January 30, he was transferred to an Office of Refugee Resettlement facility in Chicago. He was first able to speak with his lawyers on February 1, and they now expect him to be detained for up to a month. He “is allowed to talk to his family twice a week for 10 minutes on the phone now that he’s been processed” according to his immigration attorney. There have been intimations in the press that he may be detained now because of a mismatch between his tourist visa and his taking English classes at a Texas high school. Khadra was released to his family on Febuary 13; his future visa status is unresolved. Representative Shirley Jackson Lee held a press conference advocating him upon his release. [Updated February 13]

In short, the Department of Homeland Security is coloring outside of the lines of the Executive Order, in the direction of a general process of arbitrary detention of foreign Muslims. Unfortunately, I fear I may be updating this list for some time to come.