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In the sordid, chaotic, belligerent and openly racist “war on migrants” that Donald Trump declared when he took office on January 20, two particular truths about the administration’s intentions have become increasingly evident, and both of them are profoundly disturbing.

The first is that no immigrant to the US from anywhere in the world — but mostly, to date, from countries in Central or South America — is safe from arbitrary detention and deportation, and, in particular, the threat of being deported, not to their home countries, but to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where prisoners are held indefinitely without charge or trial, dehumanized, half-starved and subjected to relentless violence. The CECOT prison, established under El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele, is nothing less than a futuristic, turbo-charged version of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The second cause for deep alarm is the Trump administration’s absolute contempt for any legal challenges to what it aggressively claims is its right to detain and deport anyone it feels like detaining and deporting. Primarily, to date, Venezuelans, these men are routinely described as dangerous “high-threat aliens”, gang members and terrorists at war with the US, although the administration has failed to back up its hysterical claims with anything resembling evidence.

Disturbingly, the administration insists that all of its claimed deliberations about who to detain and deport are shielded from any kind of scrutiny or review because of national security concerns, claims that are nothing less than the thinnest of covers for what is actually the the unacceptable and unconstitutional exercise of unfettered executive power.

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Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning over the first two months of the Trump administration.

A week after Donald Trump issued his disgraceful executive order banning visitors from seven mainly Muslim countries (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen), District Judge James Robart, a senior judge in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, appointed by George W. Bush, “granted a temporary restraining order … after hearing arguments from Washington State and Minnesota that the president’s order had unlawfully discriminated against Muslims and caused unreasonable harm,” as the Guardian described it.

In a second article, the Guardian explained that Judge Robart had “declared the entire travel ban unconstitutional,” noting that, although other states are also suing the government, Washington State’s Attorney General Bob Ferguson had “argued the widest case: that the Trump order violated the guarantee of equal protection and the first amendment’s establishment clause, infringed the constitutional right to due process and contravened the federal Immigration and Nationality Act.”

Outside the courtroom, Ferguson said, “We are a nation of laws. Not even the president can violate the constitution. No one is above the law, not even the president. This decision shuts down the executive order immediately — shuts it down. That relief is immediate, happens right now. That’s the bottom line.” Read the rest of this entry »

Please support my work! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my work over the first two months of the Trump administration.

Heroes abound in opposition to Donald Trump’s America — the lawyers filing habeas corpus petitions in airports, the citizens filling the streets with their voices and their indignation in huge numbers of cities across the land, and a handful of individuals whose objections have directly challenged the worst of his policies in his first turbulent ten days in office.

One is Judge Ann Donnelly, the federal court judge in Brooklyn who, on Saturday morning, issued a stay on the forced deportation of those on flights or in US airports who had been targeted by Trump’s outrageous immigration ban, barring entry to the US for anyone from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen for three months, and banning all Syrian refugees permanently (in defiance of the US’s refugee treaty obligations), and also, with utter contempt for their rights, banning re-entry to any permanent US resident from any of these countries who happened to have been abroad when the ban came into effect, as well as anyone with dual nationality (where one nationality includes any of the proscribed countries), including US citizens.

The ban has drawn widespread criticism and has sparked huge protests, and it is clear that it is absolutely unacceptable, as its claimed basis — to protect the US from terrorists — has no basis in reality, as just two US citizens a year from these seven countries are killed by immigrants who could be described as terrorists, compared to 21 a year killed by toddlers with guns, and 11,737 a year shot and killed by other Americans. Read the rest of this entry »