Few things shock in today’s increasingly alienated and unshockable world, but I think I might manage it this morning with a few things that I noted on social media yesterday coming out of America, or at least the America as it is under Donald Trump. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), one of the investigative arms of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seems to have gone rogue and has started to arrest and detain people almost at random. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, 48 people have been 'forcibly disappeared' in the state, having been detained by ICE. Apparently, nobody knows where they are.
This is what used to happen in Argentina under General Galtieri but I never thought it could happen in the USA, but here we are.
As part of Trump's drive to get rid of any Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) policies, a memo issued by the General Services Administration (GSA), the body that deals with communications, accommodation and supplies for federal agencies, contractors will no longer be prohibited from having segregated restaurants, waiting rooms and drinking fountains. Individual states may have their own laws against segregation but why do this at the national level? Who asked for it?
Melissa Murray, a constitutional law professor at New York University said: "It's symbolic, but it's incredibly meaningful in its symbolism." She added: "These provisions that required federal contractors to adhere to and comply with federal civil rights laws and to maintain integrated rather than segregated workplaces were all part of the federal government's efforts to facilitate the settlement that led to integration in the 1950s and 1960s." Will we soon need a latter day Rosa Parks?
In Illinois, governor Jay Pritzker told an audience that in 2020 during the pandemic, he had a conversation with Donald Trump about federal help for his state's health services which were in danger of being overwhelmed. Trump promised to send badly needed equipment only if Pritzker "praised him" in the next Sunday's political shows.
Pritzker apparently did it but didn't get the kit anyway. Who would have imagined that of any other president in history?
Lawyers acting on behalf of the Venezuelans shipped off to a prison in El Salvador, a country with an extremely dubious civil rights record, have submitted a brief to a court in Washington summing up their case. The US government has claimed that national security will be 'compromised by allowing the district court to decide these issues' but lawyers argue that nothing prevents people being arrested and detained but they should be allowed due process.
At the bottom of page 2, you can see this:
"The implications of the government’s position are staggering. If the President can designate any group as enemy aliens under the Act, and that designation is unreviewable, then there is no limit on who can be sent to a Salvadoran prison, or any limit on how long they will remain there."
Imagine that. Trump orders your arrest and removal to a hell-hole in El Salvador and no court can review the decision or block it. Incredible in any normal functioning democracy with separated powers.
Last Friday in a speech in the Department of Justice, Trump said it “should be illegal” for people to criticize judges, adding that it “probably is illegal in some form.”!
Nobody has criticised judge more and more frequently than him but in an act of staggering hypocrisy, this is what appeared on his social media platform yesterday, just three days later:
