Simon Chaisson, left, flips a sandbag into the back of a pickup truck as members of the DSHS Softball team form a fire brigade passing sandbags down the line. Denham Springs has gone through a huge number, estimated 15,000, sandbags as of Thursday morning, July 11, 2019, in Denham Springs, La. Community groups are there shoveling the bags for the elderly and infirm. It’s so busy that police officers and firefighters have been directing traffic around sandbag locations.
Capri Cafaro and Terry Holt weigh in on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent comments insinuating that Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t respect her as a ‘woman of color.’
“It is so inappropriate. So uncalled for. It does not do anything to help with unity. It was unfair to Speaker Pelosi.”
Clay continued his broadside, saying the comment exposed how much Ocasio-Cortez and Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., have to learn when it comes to being “effective legislators”.
“It’s going to take a process of maturing for those freshman members. They will have to learn to be effective legislators,” he said.
“It shows their lack of sensitivity to racism. To fall back on that (trope) is a weak argument. It has no place in a civil discussion.”
The lawmaker closed his remarks by suggesting the four freshmen could hurt Democratic chances in upcoming elections.
“It shows they have no sensibility to different members from our caucus. Some come from red districts and those are the ones who gave us the majority. We need them all,” he said.
His comments followed a feud between Pelosi and freshman congresswomen, like Ocasio-Cortez, that involved racially-charged criticism.
Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, previously compared moderate Democrats to racists — prompting Pelosi, at the request of some of her members, warn House Democrats not to attack each other on Twitter.
“You got a complaint? You come and talk to me about it. But do not tweet about our members and expect us to think that that is just ok,” she reportedly said. On the same day of that caucus meeting, Ocasio-Cortez called out Pelosi for what she sees as the speaker continually targeting her and other freshmen lawmakers of color.
“Their ignorance is beyond belief,” Clay also said while in the Speaker’s Lobby, according to The Hill.
Clay wasn’t the only one to attack Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday. “The View” hosts Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg criticized her’s and others’ decision to attack Democrats like Pelosi. “I think this is more BS,” Goldberg said of Ocasio-Cortez’s comments on race.
“Because they know what the facts are and what we are responding to. We respect the value of every member of our caucus. The diversity of it all is a wonderful thing. Diversity is our strength. Unity is our power.”
The NYPD said Thursday it wasn’t required to monitor Jeffrey Epstein’s 2010 sex-offender registration, despite a judge’s orders that he check in every 90 days. The wealthy financier was arrested on new federal sex trafficking charges last week, alleging he abused dozens of girls as young as 14 as part of a sex trafficking ring.
The new indictment renewed scrutiny of a controversial secret plea deal he struck in 2008: Epstein pleaded guilty to state sex crimes in Florida but dodged federal charges. He served 13 months in jail and was required to register as a sex offender.
A judge ordered Epstein to register in New York because he maintained a residence in the state in 2011. In the 2011 New York court hearing, his lawyer called the residence a vacation home and said his primary residence was in the Virgin Islands, arguing for the least stringent sex offender classification. But a judge ordered Epstein to register as a Level 3 sex offender, the most stringent classification, rejecting the lawyer’s argument that the required 90-day check-ins would “require him to come to New York more than he does normally.”
“I am sorry he may have to come here every 90 days,” New York County Supreme Court judge Ruth Pickholz said, according to a transcript of the January 2011 hearing. “He can give up the New York home if he does not want to come every 90 days.”
NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said in a tweet Thursday Epstein registered in New York in 2010 before he changed his residence to the Virgin Islands, which Shea said required monitoring to take place there and not in New York.
Jeffrey Epstein
Florida Department of Law Enforcement via Reuters
In the tweet, Shea said Epstein changed his address before his first mandated check-in. Epstein lists a Manhattan home as a secondary residence with the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services, which maintains the sex offender registry but relies on local jurisdictions for compliance enforcement. NYPD spokesman Sgt. Brendan Ryan said in a statement the NYPD Sex Offender Monitoring Unit monitored Epstein while his reporting address was in New York City.
“Jeffrey Epstein is in jail because of the hard work of NYPD detectives and our law enforcement partners who built a strong case and arrested him for his vile crimes,” Shea wrote in the tweet.
At the same 2011 hearing, Pickholz expressed shock when a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office also argued for the lowest sex offender classification for Epstein, despite a state board’s recommendation that he register as Level 3 sex offender. The classification, reserved for those who pose a “high risk” of offending again and who pose a potential threat to public safety, requires the offender’s photo and address to be published online in a searchable database, along with other requirements. But Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Gaffney instead argued Epstein should be classified as Level 1, which would not require that information to be published.
“I have to tell you, I am a little overwhelmed because I have never seen the prosecutor’s office do anything like this,” Pickholz said.”…I could cite many, I have done many SORAs [Sex Offender Registration Act] much less troubling than this one where the People would never make a downward argument like this.”
Gaffney acknowledged it was an “incredibly unusual” request. She argued that the state board made its recommendation for Level 3 based on the accounts of victims outlined in a Florida probable cause affidavit, but said those allegations were ultimately never prosecuted.
“I don’t know that we can rely on it as clear and convincing evidence if the prosecutor’s office never went forward on it,” Gaffney said.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office later said Gaffney had mis-interpreted the law. Danny Frost, a spokesman for Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance, Jr., said the office “promptly filed briefs with the appellate court which acknowledged the error by the Assistant District Attorney and strenuously argued that Epstein should receive the highest sex offender status.”
“D.A. Vance was not made aware that the Manhattan D.A.’s Office even had this SORA matter, or any matter involving Jeffrey Epstein, until well after the hearing occurred and only when the office corrected its legal error on appeal,” Frost said.
Epstein remains registered in New York state under Level 3. In a memo arguing for bail on the new federal charges Thursday, a lawyer for Epstein described his “perfect compliance with onerous sex offender registration requirements – pinpointing his exact nightly whereabouts – across multiple jurisdictions over a 10-year period.”
Epstein has pleaded not guilty to the new charges.
Two and a half years into the Donald Trump presidency, Americans are used to Trump posting off-the-rails tweets. But Thursday morning still stood out.
Trump body-shamed Sen. Elizabeth Warren while using a slur to demean her, mistakenly tagged a random retired teacher who is not of fan of his while insulting her fellow 2020 contender Pete Buttigieg, expressed confusion about when his presidential campaign began, joked about illegally staying in power beyond a second term, brazenly gaslighted about his indebtedness to banks, and said he thinks he’ll win in Minnesota in 2020 simply because a city council there decided to stop saying the Pledge of Allegiance before meetings.
All of this happened before 8 am.
Each of these tweets, by themselves, would’ve been highly abnormal public statements coming from any other president. For Trump, they are not. Still, the volume with which he posted them on Thursday morning was remarkable.
Here’s a breakdown of Trump’s odd tweets on Thursday, in the order in which he posted them.
Trump is confused about when his campaign began
While hyping the sham social media summit that’s set to take place at the White House on Thursday, Trump tried to take shots at “The Fake News,” which he claimed has “lost tremendous credibility since that day in November, 2016, that I came down the escalator with the person who was to become your future First Lady.”
(Trump deleted and reposted a number of tweets, including this one, in a thread that contained errors, but not before I captured screengrabs of the originals.)
There’s just one problem: The escalator incident Trump referred to actually happened happened in Trump Tower 17 months before November 2016, in June 2015, just before the speech in which he launched his presidential campaign. While Trump’s election night victory speech also took place in Trump Tower, there was no footage of him coming down an escalator on that night. He appears to have mixed it up.
Remembering when your presidential campaign began seems like a pretty odd thing to get confused about. But Trump was just getting started.
Trump “jokes” about staying in office for for 14 more years
Trump segued from a tweet expressing confusion about when his campaign began to one in which he joked about staying in office for as many as 14 more years.
Trump mistakenly tags a retired teacher who isn’t a fan of his
In the same tweet in which he joked about illegally extending his term in office, Trump, while trying to demean South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg for purportedly resembling cartoon character Alfred E. Neuman, mistakenly tagged an account belonging to a retired teacher who, based on his recent retweets, is clearly is not a fan of the president.
This isn’t the first time Trump has mistakenly tagged the wrong account on Twitter — he did so as recently as two weeks ago. But that he continues to make easily avoidable mistakes like this is a sign of how little vetting his tweets get before they’re posted for the world to see, as well as a broader recklessness.
Trump body-shames Elizabeth Warren while using a racial slur
After insulting Buttigieg, Trump demeaned Elizabeth Warren by describing her as “a very nervous and skinny version of Pocahontas.”
“Pocahontas” has become Trump’s go-to slur while mocking Warren and her ill-fated attempt to claim Native American ancestry. But attacking Warren’s demeanor and looks is a new twist, and comes while first lady Melania Trump is purportedly busying herself with anti-cyberbullying work as part of her broader “Be Best” campaign.
Trump went on to compare Warren unfavorably with himself, describing himself as “so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” But note that in that very same tweet, Trump revealed a confusion about fractions. According to an analysis of the results of the DNA test Warren released, her fractional Native American ancestry is somewhere between 1/64 and 1/1024. But in writing “1000/24th,” Trump got it backward.
“Stable Genius,” indeed.
Trump thinks he’ll win Minnesota over a silly Pledge of Allegiance controversy
Trump then turned his attention to Minnesota, where the city council in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park recently voted to stop saying the Pledge of Allegiance before meetings. The story has been a major topic this week on Trump’s favorite television show, Fox & Friends.
The latest polling indicates that Trump’s approval rating is 16 points underwater in Minnesota, but Trump seems to think that the St. Louis Park City Council’s move will be enough for him to overcome that deficit and win a state that hasn’t gone for a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972.
The Pledge of Allegiance to our great Country, in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, is under siege. That is why I am going to win the Great State of Minnesota in the 2020 Election. People are sick and tired of this stupidity and disloyalty to our wonderful USA!
Trump’s tweet suggests that instead of using his power to do things that make people’s lives better, he thinks a winning strategy heading into 2020 is identity grievance issues. The polling in Minnesota begs to differ, but then again, Trump doesn’t buy polls that aren’t favorable to him.
Trump gaslights about his indebtedness to banks
Hours after the New York Times published a report about the business relationship between Deutsche Bank and Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender with ties to Bill Clinton and Trump, the president proclaimed that he doesn’t need to do business with banks because “I didn’t (don’t) need their money (old fashioned, isn’t it?).” He went on to acknowledge but downplay his dealings with Deutsche Bank.
….And remember, a bank that I did use years ago, the now badly written about and maligned Deutsche Bank, was then one of the largest and most prestigious banks in the world! They wanted my business, and so did many others!
This is brazen gaslighting. In March, the New York Times reported that Trump took out an astounding $2 billion in loans from Deutsche Bank and was cut off on two separate occasions by the bank because executives realized he was a risky client. That reporting came a little less than a year after news that Trump still owed as much as $480 million to a number of banks and financial services firms, including but not limited to Deutsche Bank.
And, of course, while Trump tries to brag about his business acumen, it’s worth remembering the Times’s bombshell reporting from last October about how he was gifted at least $413 million by his father, then participated in “dubious tax schemes during the 1990s, including instances of outright fraud” to increase that fortune.
Some of Trump’s most bizarre mornings of tweeting have come amid bad news cycles for him or when bad news is on the horizon; for instance, as I detailed at the time, Trump posted a string of increasingly bizarre tweets shortly after the Mueller report was released publicly in April. But these Thursday tweets come as his approval rating hits historic highs — he’s still 9 points underwater but, according to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, at the highest point of his presidency — and with no obvious reason for him to be melting down. Perhaps there is less method to the mayhem than there sometimes seems.
UPDATED with cause:Twitter is experiencing a broad outage of its services, the social media site said Thursday, saying on its official status page that the problem is due to an internal configuration change that now is being fixed.
“Some people may be able to access Twitter again and we’re working to make sure Twitter is available to everyone as quickly as possible,” it wrote in its update.
The side DownDetector reported that te issues began just before 3 PM ET, impacting Twitter’s website and Android and iPad apps. Most queries on the social media platform were resulting in an error page for users all over the world.
It’s the second notable outage for Twitter this month. The platform experienced temporary outages relating to DM delivery and notifications on July 3, the same day Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp users saw those services down for most of the day.
Todaay’s outage comes the same day President Donald Trump is hosting a Social Media Summit at the White House that does not include the biggest social media networks — including Twitter. The gathering is mostly of conservative influencers Trump follows who have complained that they consistently are marginalized on the major platforms.
Twitter recently announced that disclaimers would be attached to tweets from world leaders who violate the site’s community standards rules. More recently, a New York appellate court upheld an earlier decision that Trump violated the First Amendment by blocking Twitter users.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday dropped efforts to get a citizenship question on the 2020 census, saying he will use other means to seek information about the number of U.S. citizens in the country.
Trump said he will order federal agencies to provide all citizenship records, in order to get a “full and complete” account of the nation’s “non-citizen” population.
“We are not backing down” from efforts to count citizens and non-citizens, Trump told reporters in a Rose Garden question, but a Supreme Court decision two weeks ago has blocked him from attaching a citizenship question to next year’s census.
Earlier, he told a meeting of social media users that “I think we have a solution that will be very good for a lot of people,” Trump said while hosting a social media summit at the White House.
Hours earlier, administration officials told reporters Trump was planning to announce an executive order that would authorize a citizenship question on the census.
“We will all go to the beautiful Rose Garden for a News Conference on the Census and Citizenship,” Trump said in a morning tweet promoting the social media summit.
But by Thursday afternoon, officials said he might not go that far after all, citing a “fluid” discussion among the president and his aides.
CLOSE
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says President Donald Trump wants to add a citizenship question to next year’s Census because he wants to “make America white again.” AP, AP
Trump did not tip his hand during the social media summit, but did criticize the recent Supreme Court decision blocking the citizenship question. He said census takers can ask about all sorts of information in households, but not ask if the people living there are U.S. citizens.
“It’s the craziest thing,” Trump said. “Pretty amazing.”
ABC News reported that Trump is expected to announce “he is backing down from his effort to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census,” and will instead take executive action to instruct the government “to obtain an estimate of U.S. citizenship through other means.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who has described Trump’s citizenship question as effort to “make America white again,” said the government is already printing census forms.
In its June 27 ruling, the Supreme Court said the administration had not justified its support for a citizenship question, and it sent the matter back to the Commerce Department. The administration could come up with a new justification and re-litigate the issue, but that could take months.
Adding a citizenship question to the census would affect some 22 million noncitizens. Even if only a small percentage of them refused to return the questionnaire, it would alter the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives and about $650 billion in federal funds.
Trump and aides have said the U.S. is entitled to know how many citizens are in the country.
“The president wants to know who is in the country legally and lawfully,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. “The American people have a right to know.”
In a case decided by a 5-4 vote, Chief Justice John Roberts said he did not find the administration’s justification for the question to be credible. The administration had said it needed citizenship data to help prepare for voting rights cases, even though Trump’s team has yet to engage in that kind of litigation.
Chief Justice John Roberts has sided with the four liberal justices to rule against allowing the Trump administration to add citizenship to census. USA TODAY
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli said that raids on illegals are “absolutely” going to take place, that President Donald Trump is on board with the idea and that the far-left, for all its crying and whining, could go take a long leap off a short pier.
Well, he didn’t exactly say that last. But it was implied.
And count on it: The left is going to react very badly to such a bold pronouncement. Make way for the accusations of racism, for one.
“They’re absolutely going to happen,” Cuccinelli said, The Hill reported in a tweet. “There’re approximately a million people in this country with removal orders and, of course, that isn’t what ICE will go after in this, but that’s the pool of people who have been all the way through the due process chain.”
Sound the media gongs.
“U.S. Prepares to Arrest Thousands of Immigrant Family Members,” The New York Times put it.
Immigrant Family Members — that’s rich.
The Trump administration had initially announced a June operation to target up to 2,000 families in 10 cities and remove “the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the U.S.,” as he wrote on Twitter.
But Trump then gave Congress a couple of weeks to deal with the border issue and put the operation on hold.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Some are watching old video of his previous testimony. Others are closely re-reading his 448-page report. And almost all are worrying about how they’ll make the most of the short time they’ll have for questioning.
Robert Mueller, the Democrats know, will be tough to crack.
The stern, reticent former FBI director has said he won’t answer questions beyond what is in the report on Russia’s election meddling and the Trump campaign and possible obstruction of justice when he comes to Congress on July 17.
Mueller is expected to testify in front of the Judiciary and intelligence committees for two hours each, with time split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, though that timing is still a subject of negotiations. That means Democrats will have to be efficient and targeted in their attempts to extract information from the former special counsel and spotlight what they say are his most damaging findings against President Donald Trump.
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“It will not be easy,” said Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee. He added: “We just have to be very smart about how we use the time and really give the special counsel the time to tell the story.”
Cicilline says he’s reading the report a second time, thoroughly, with an eye toward what he wants to ask.
Separately, a Democratic aide said staff members have been watching old videos of Mueller testifying as FBI director during the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. They’re looking to see how he’ll act, the aide said, and they have noticed he gives minimal commentary when answering questions. The aide was not authorized to discuss internal preparations for the hearing and requested anonymity.
Wary of their challenging witness, Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee huddled Wednesday evening to discuss strategy for questioning Mueller, along with other topics. Exactly how the hearing will be structured is still being negotiated, members said as they emerged, but Democrats are expected to divvy up the questions in a methodical way.
Among the topics up for discussion as the hearing approaches: Should they work through the report step by step, or paint a general picture? Will every member be able to speak in the short time they have? And what can they do to best crystalize the findings of a report that they believe Americans haven’t read or absorbed?
New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a member of the panel, said before the meeting that he expects to discuss “what the team strategy is going to be as we begin an intensive phase of preparation.”
Republicans seem to have given it less thought. Ohio Rep. Steve Chabot, a senior GOP member of Judiciary, said he hasn’t started preparing and expects little news from the event. He said Democrats are just “chasing their tails” and are aiming to placate base voters who want to see the Democratic House majority take on the president.
“It’s possible a few people could change their opinion, but overall I think it’s not likely,” Chabot said.
The Judiciary Committee is expected to focus on the second half of Mueller’s report, which details multiple episodes in which Trump attempted to influence the investigation. Mueller said he couldn’t exonerate the president on obstruction of justice.
The House’s intelligence panel, which will go second, will focus on the first half of the report, which details Russian interference in the presidential election. Mueller said there wasn’t enough evidence to establish a conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign but detailed several contacts between the two as well as the Trump campaign’s willingness to accept Russian help.
Under a deal struck with the committees, two of Mueller’s deputies — James Quarles and Aaron Zebley — are expected to meet with the panels in separate closed sessions after Mueller’s public hearing. But that might be in jeopardy as the Justice Department has pushed back on the arrangement, according to two people familiar with the negotiations. They requested anonymity to discuss the private talks.
The chairman of the intelligence panel, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said Tuesday said he wouldn’t discuss the details of those negotiations, but that the deputies have agreed to appear and “I have no reason to believe that will be unsuccessful.”
One issue that Judiciary members are expected to focus on is whether Mueller will state whether Trump would have been charged with a crime were he not president. Jeffries said that answer could “strike to the heart of why a prosecution or recommendation to prosecute wasn’t included in the report.”
Mueller said at a May news conference that charging a president with a crime was “not an option” because of longstanding Justice Department policy. But Democrats want to know more about how he made that decision and when.
It’s unclear if Mueller will go beyond his previous comments. Mueller, who was reluctant to testify, has been firm that he will stick to what’s already in the report.
Some lawmakers say that’s OK and just want to reach a broader audience of Americans who they fear have tuned out.
“This isn’t a question of creating a narrative,” said Florida Rep. Ted Deutch, another Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. “The narrative is already out there. It’s simply highlighting what is already there.”
___
Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
The Trump administration is now trying to add the question by taking executive action after the Supreme Court ruled to keep a citizenship question off forms for the upcoming national head count.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
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Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
The Trump administration is now trying to add the question by taking executive action after the Supreme Court ruled to keep a citizenship question off forms for the upcoming national head count.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Updated 12:53 p.m. ET
President Trump is expected to take executive action to try and add a question about U.S. citizenship status to forms for the upcoming 2020 census, a source familiar with the matter tells NPR.
It’s the administration’s latest effort in a more than yearlong legal fight to include the question, which has been blocked by the Supreme Court for now.
The question asks, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?”
Trump is expected to announce the executive action Thursday afternoon at a White House event that will include Attorney General William Barr.
The move is expected to spark additional litigation from the dozens of states, cities and advocacy groups that challenged the administration’s first attempt to include the question.
Ahead of the announcement, Dale Ho of the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the question, said: “If President Trump takes executive action, we will take legal action.”
Last month, the Supreme Court blocked the citizenship question from the census for now. A majority of the justices rejected the administration’s original stated justification — to better protect the voting rights of racial minorities — for appearing “contrived.” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the Census Bureau, formally approved adding the question last year after pressuring Commerce officials for months to find a way to include the question.
The court’s decision does leave open the possibility for the administration to make another case for the question. But it’s not clear if an executive order could clear a path that would allow the administration to overcome lower court orders that continue to block the question from census forms.
Census Bureau research suggests including the question is highly likely to discourage an estimated 9 million people from taking part in the constitutionally mandated head count of every person living in the U.S. Critics of the question worry that could lead to undercounts of immigrant groups and communities of color, especially among Latinx people.
That could have long-term impacts on how political representation and federal funding are shared in the U.S. through 2030. Census results determine each state’s share of congressional seats and Electoral College votes for the next decade. They also guide how an estimated $880 billion a year in federal tax dollars are distributed for schools, roads and other public services in local communities.
The Census Bureau has continued to recommend against adding the question, which researchers say would produce self-reported responses that are less accurate and more costly to gather compared to existing government records on citizenship. Ross has authorized the bureau to compile those records, and bureau officials have said they are waiting for “guidance” on whether to release that information, which would be anonymized to not identify individuals.
“I have no intention of allowing this flagrant waste of money,” Rep. José Serrano of New York, who chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee that funds the Census Bureau, said in a written statement released Tuesday. “I once again urge the Trump Administration to give up this fight and allow for a depoliticized and accurate census, as we always have.”
Still, President Trump has been vocal in not wanting to back down. His tweets after Justice and Commerce officials announced that printing had started without a citizenship question signaled a marked pivot towards a prolonged legal battle.
This week, Trump’s reelection campaign sent emails to ask supporters to complete an online survey that asked if they believed the 2020 census should ask people is they are “American citizens.”
“We can’t Keep America Great for all Americans if we don’t know who’s in this country,” said the email, signed by “Team Trump 2020.”
Attorneys defending the administration, however, will be coming from a new team of Justice Department lawyers. This week, in an unusual move, the administration tried to get judges to approve a complete turnover of every single career DOJ attorney who has been working on the ongoing lawsuits for months. The Justice Department has not provided an explanation for why it wants the change. So far, two federal judges have rejected those requests while allowing the administration to try again to swap out the attorneys.
The House is also scheduling a vote on July 16 to hold Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas related to the oversight committee’s investigation on the citizenship question.
“For months, Attorney General Barr and Secretary Ross have withheld key documents subpoenaed by the Committee on a bipartisan basis without asserting any valid legal justification for their refusal. These documents could shed light on the real reason that the Trump Administration tried to add the citizenship question,” oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings said in a statement on Thursday.
He urged Barr and Ross to comply with the subpoenas so Congress can avoid a contempt vote.
President Trump’s threatened deportation raids are “absolutely going to happen,” says senior Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
“There are approximately 1 million people in this with deportation orders,” the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told reporters on the White House driveway. “Of course, that isn’t what ICE will go after in this, but that’s the pool of people that have been all the way through the process.”
The former Virginia attorney general, whose agency handles asylum cases, declined to discuss the timing of raids or additional details.
On June 22, Trump wrote on Twitter he would postpone threatened raids “for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!”
As the clock ran out, Trump told reporters Friday that large-scale deportation sweeps would be “starting fairly soon.”
“I don’t call them ‘raids.’ I say they came in illegally, and we’re bringing them out legally,” Trump said. “We’re removing people that have come in — all of these people over the years that have come in illegally — we are removing them and bringing them back to their country.”
Federal agents who searched the East Side Manhattan mansion of wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein turned up a “vast trove of lewd photographs” of young-looking girls, including hundreds of meticulously labeled nude pictures locked in a safe, according to federal court documents.
The description, laid out ina memo by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was aimed at convincing a federal judge that Epstein, who was arrested July 6 upon return from Paris on his private jet, should not be freed pending trial on charges of sex trafficking.
Agents used crowbars to force open the front door of the seven-story Upper East Side mansion.
The memo said the search turned up not only evidence supporting its sex trafficking allegations against Esptein but also “hundreds – and perhaps thousands – of sexually suggestive photographs of fully – or partially – nude females.”
While investigators were still reviewing the material, the memo said one of the girls, according to her attorney, “was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken.”
This photo shows the Manhattan residence of Jeffrey Epstein, Monday July 8, 2019, in New York. Prosecutors said Monday, federal agents investigating wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein found “nude photographs of what appeared to be underage girls” while searching his Manhattan mansion.
It noted that other photographs were found in a locked safe that included CDs with handwritten labels including the descriptions ““Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.”
In calling for Epstein to remain in jail, the memo noted that he is a registered sex offender after a 2008 conviction in Florida and “is not reformed, he is not chastened, he is not repentant, rather he is a continuing danger to the community and an individual who faces devastating evidence supporting deeply serious charges.”
Epstein, 66, has pleaded not guilty to one federal count of sex trafficking and one count of sex trafficking conspiracy for allegedly sexually exploiting minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, Florida, and other locations, according to the federal indictment.
In a report on the mansion, valued at more than $55 million, The New York Times noted that its artwork includes, on the second floor, a commissioned mural of a “photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.”
The Times quotes R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist who recently met with Epstein at his home, as saying, “(Epstein) said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’”
The home also includes such oddities as a hallway covered with artificial eyeballs originally made for wounded soldiers, a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and a chess board with custom figures, many dressed suggestively and modeled after one of Epstein’s staffers, The Times reported.
Federal prosecutors said in the indictment that they were moving to seize the mansion as part of the proceedings against Epstein.
President Trump’s threatened deportation raids are “absolutely going to happen,” says senior Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
“There are approximately 1 million people in this with deportation orders,” the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told reporters on the White House driveway. “Of course, that isn’t what ICE will go after in this, but that’s the pool of people that have been all the way through the process.”
The former Virginia attorney general, whose agency handles asylum cases, declined to discuss the timing of raids or additional details.
On June 22, Trump wrote on Twitter he would postpone threatened raids “for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!”
As the clock ran out, Trump told reporters Friday that large-scale deportation sweeps would be “starting fairly soon.”
“I don’t call them ‘raids.’ I say they came in illegally, and we’re bringing them out legally,” Trump said. “We’re removing people that have come in — all of these people over the years that have come in illegally — we are removing them and bringing them back to their country.”
The immigration raids that President Donald Trump threatened, then put off, are now set to start in the United States this weekend, according to a new report.
On Thursday, Caitlin Dickerson and Zolan Kanno-Youngs at the New York Times reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will commence the arrests of potentially thousands of undocumented immigrants on Sunday. Similar to the initial reported plan, ICE agents are targeting at least 2,000 immigrants for deportation across 10 major cities and could also sweep up immigrants who aren’t the initial targets.
The Trump administration for weeks has been building up potential mass immigration raids, but thus far it has held off. President Donald Trump on June 17 tweeted that the following week ICE would begin removing “millions” of undocumented immigrants from the United States. But on June 22, he said he would hold off for two weeks, at Democrats’ request, to see if they could “get together to work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border.”
At the request of Democrats, I have delayed the Illegal Immigration Removal Process (Deportation) for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!
House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) had called Trump to ask him to call off the raids, and she publicly welcomed the delay on Twitter. “Families belong together,” she wrote. But as Vox’s Ella Nilsen and Li Zhou noted at the time, Trump’s accompanying demand on asylum law “came out of the blue” and was one that Congress was never going to be able to tackle in the time frame he prescribed.
The idea of immigration raids has been a fraught one, even within the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE. According to the Times, immigration agents have “expressed apprehensions” about the prospect of potentially arresting children and babies, and within DHS, there’s been disagreement as to what to do:
For weeks last month, the ICE director at the time, Mark Morgan, signaled that agents would escalate efforts to round up families. Days before the operation was to begin, Mr. Trump forecast the plan on Twitter, blindsiding ICE agents whose safety officials feared would be compromised as a result.
In early June, the Department of Homeland Security’s acting secretary, Kevin K. McAleenan, told Mr. Morgan to call off the operation. Mr. McAleenan did not support the raids, officials said at the time, in part out of concern that undocumented parents could be separated from any of their children who are American citizens.
Just because immigrants are targeted for deportation doesn’t mean they’ve committed a major crime
As Vox noted last month, while the families targeted for deportation have likely received final orders that they are to leave the country, they may not have been accused of any crimes besides disobeying that order:
Last year, the Trump administration developed an expedited legal process for migrant families, which, according to the [Washington] Post, fast-tracked “the cases of thousands of families in major cities, obtaining ‘in absentia’ deportation orders for thousands of families that did not show up for their court hearings.”
But just because one or more members of a family have deportation orders doesn’t mean they are the hardened criminals that Trump often portrays them as being. (In a departure from Obama administration policy, Trump hasn’t made distinctions between undocumented immigrants who have criminal records and those that don’t.)
According to the Times, if family members are arrested together, they’ll be held in family detention centers — or, if there’s not enough room, hotels — until they can be deported.
Pro-immigrant groups last month put out advisories for potential targets as to what they are and aren’t allowed to do in the event an ICE agent comes knocking.
The ICE warrant on the left does NOT authorize agents to enter a home without permission.
La orden de ICE a la izquierda NO autoriza a los agentes a entrar al domicilio sin permiso. https://t.co/hl7Q1rv7sK
Also last month, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) used his presidential campaign email list to warn about raids. The cities where the raids at the time were supposed to take place were Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, and San Francisco. It’s likely the same cities will be targeted now.
To be sure, this could be yet another threat from the Trump administration and the raids will again be postponed. But per the Times report, this weekend the enforcement campaign could happen. On Wednesday, Ken Cucinnelli, acting director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, told reporters that raids are “absolutely going to happen,” though he declined to comment on the timing.
Federal agents who searched the East Side Manhattan mansion of wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein turned up a “vast trove of lewd photographs” of young-looking girls, including hundreds of meticulously labeled nude pictures locked in a safe, according to federal court documents.
The description, laid out ina memo by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was aimed at convincing a federal judge that Epstein, who was arrested July 6 upon return from Paris on his private jet, should not be freed pending trial on charges of sex trafficking.
Agents used crowbars to force open the front door of the seven-story Upper East Side mansion.
The memo said the search turned up not only evidence supporting its sex trafficking allegations against Esptein but also “hundreds – and perhaps thousands – of sexually suggestive photographs of fully – or partially – nude females.”
While investigators were still reviewing the material, the memo said one of the girls, according to her attorney, “was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken.”
This photo shows the Manhattan residence of Jeffrey Epstein, Monday July 8, 2019, in New York. Prosecutors said Monday, federal agents investigating wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein found “nude photographs of what appeared to be underage girls” while searching his Manhattan mansion.
It noted that other photographs were found in a locked safe that included CDs with handwritten labels including the descriptions ““Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.”
In calling for Epstein to remain in jail, the memo noted that he is a registered sex offender after a 2008 conviction in Florida and “is not reformed, he is not chastened, he is not repentant, rather he is a continuing danger to the community and an individual who faces devastating evidence supporting deeply serious charges.”
Epstein, 66, has pleaded not guilty to one federal count of sex trafficking and one count of sex trafficking conspiracy for allegedly sexually exploiting minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, Florida, and other locations, according to the federal indictment.
In a report on the mansion, valued at more than $55 million, The New York Times noted that its artwork includes, on the second floor, a commissioned mural of a “photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.”
The Times quotes R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist who recently met with Epstein at his home, as saying, “(Epstein) said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’”
The home also includes such oddities as a hallway covered with artificial eyeballs originally made for wounded soldiers, a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and a chess board with custom figures, many dressed suggestively and modeled after one of Epstein’s staffers, The Times reported.
Federal prosecutors said in the indictment that they were moving to seize the mansion as part of the proceedings against Epstein.
President Trump’s threatened deportation raids are “absolutely going to happen,” says senior Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
“There are approximately 1 million people in this with deportation orders,” the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told reporters on the White House driveway. “Of course, that isn’t what ICE will go after in this, but that’s the pool of people that have been all the way through the process.”
The former Virginia attorney general, whose agency handles asylum cases, declined to discuss the timing of raids or additional details.
On June 22, Trump wrote on Twitter he would postpone threatened raids “for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!”
As the clock ran out, Trump told reporters Friday that large-scale deportation sweeps would be “starting fairly soon.”
“I don’t call them ‘raids.’ I say they came in illegally, and we’re bringing them out legally,” Trump said. “We’re removing people that have come in — all of these people over the years that have come in illegally — we are removing them and bringing them back to their country.”
After 9/11, the U.S. enforced stricter control on immigration. This enforcement led to the birth of Homeland Security and ICE, but what is ICE exactly? We explain. Just the FAQs, USA TODAY
Immigrant advocates were bracing Thursday for a massive sweep of arrests and detentions amid reports that a roundup in at least 10 major cities could begin this weekend.
ICE officials would neither confirm nor deny a report Thursday in The New York Times, citing multiple administration officials the newspaper did not name, that the sweep would begin Sunday. President Donald Trump said last week that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement would begin a major sweep “soon.”
“No one arrested in the immigration raids should be deported without a fair day in court,” the American Immigration Council tweeted. “We are recruiting and training immigration attorneys from around the country to ensure this happens.”
UnidosUS tweeted a list of don’ts and dos for immigrants – don’t open doors, say anything to ICE agents, or sign anything, they said; do take pictures and get a lawyer.
“As the threat of ICE raids brings fear to our communities, it is important that you know your rights,” the tweet said.
Speaking outside the White House on Wednesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acting director Ken Cuccinelli declined to say when any raids would begin, but vowed that they were coming.
“They’re absolutely going to happen,” Cuccinelli said, adding that there are “approximately a million people in this country with removal orders. Of course that isn’t what ICE would go after in this. But that’s the pool of people who’ve been all the way through the due process chain.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday decried the upcoming raids as immoral actions taken to “terrorize children and tear families apart.”
During a press conference at the Capitol, she stressed that a deportation order is not the same as a search warrant, and urged immigrants to learn their rights before allowing ICE to enter their homes.
“If ICE agents do not have a warrant signed by a judge, a person may refuse to open the door and let them in,” she said.
The Times said the sweep would target more than 2,000 immigrants facing deportation orders who remain in the country illegally. The sources told the Times that ICE planned to keep family members together at family detention facilities whenever possible.
Trump said two weeks ago that he would delay nationwide raids for two weeks to give Congress time to develop an immigration plan. Trump’s hard line on immigration has been a recurring theme in his presidency and is expected to take center stage in his 2020 reelection bid.
ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke, in a statement emailed Thursday to USA TODAY, said ICE cannot provide details on coming raids for security reasons. ICE has consistently maintained that its focus is on people with criminal records but that anyone found to be in the U.S. illegally would face detainment.
“Ninety percent of aliens arrested by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations component in FY2018 had either a criminal conviction, pending criminal charge, were an ICE fugitive or illegally reentered the country after previously being removed,” Bourke said.
That is true, but in 2018 about 66% of people arrested by ICE had been convicted of a crime in the U.S. — a sharp drop from the final years of the Obama administration, which targeted undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
ICE officials previously have said they plan to target new arrivals in an effort to stem a surge of Central American families arriving through Mexico. That surge showed some decline in June, when total border arrests fell 29% according to numbers released by Customs and Border Protection. But the decline came after May totals — more than 140,000 arrests — that were the highest since 2006.
“This is not a ‘rule of law’ operation,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, tweeted Thursday. “The goal is to terrorize immigrant communities so immigrants do not seek protection in the US.”
A government report released last week found that migrants were being held in overcrowded conditions described as “a ticking time bomb.” In one room at Customs and Border Protection’s Fort Brown station near the U.S-Mexico border in Texas, 51 women were in a cell with a capacity for 40 juveniles, according to the report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office. In another cell, 71 men were in a cell designated for 41, the report said.
Trump was dismissive of the report, saying the facilities he visited were clean and well run.
“I think they do a great job with those facilities,” Trump said.
President Trump’s threatened deportation raids are “absolutely going to happen,” says senior Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
“There are approximately 1 million people in this with deportation orders,” the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told reporters on the White House driveway. “Of course, that isn’t what ICE will go after in this, but that’s the pool of people that have been all the way through the process.”
The former Virginia attorney general, whose agency handles asylum cases, declined to discuss the timing of raids or additional details.
On June 22, Trump wrote on Twitter he would postpone threatened raids “for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!”
As the clock ran out, Trump told reporters Friday that large-scale deportation sweeps would be “starting fairly soon.”
“I don’t call them ‘raids.’ I say they came in illegally, and we’re bringing them out legally,” Trump said. “We’re removing people that have come in — all of these people over the years that have come in illegally — we are removing them and bringing them back to their country.”
Federal agents who searched the East Side Manhattan mansion of wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein turned up a “vast trove of lewd photographs” of young-looking girls, including hundreds of meticulously labeled nude pictures locked in a safe, according to federal court documents.
The description, laid out ina memo by prosecutors from the Southern District of New York, was aimed at convincing a federal judge that Epstein, who was arrested July 6 upon return from Paris on his private jet, should not be freed pending trial on charges of sex trafficking.
Agents used crowbars to force open the front door of the seven-story Upper East Side mansion.
The memo said the search turned up not only evidence supporting its sex trafficking allegations against Esptein but also “hundreds – and perhaps thousands – of sexually suggestive photographs of fully – or partially – nude females.”
While investigators were still reviewing the material, the memo said one of the girls, according to her attorney, “was underage at the time the relevant photographs were taken.”
This photo shows the Manhattan residence of Jeffrey Epstein, Monday July 8, 2019, in New York. Prosecutors said Monday, federal agents investigating wealthy sex offender Jeffrey Epstein found “nude photographs of what appeared to be underage girls” while searching his Manhattan mansion.
It noted that other photographs were found in a locked safe that included CDs with handwritten labels including the descriptions ““Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.”
In calling for Epstein to remain in jail, the memo noted that he is a registered sex offender after a 2008 conviction in Florida and “is not reformed, he is not chastened, he is not repentant, rather he is a continuing danger to the community and an individual who faces devastating evidence supporting deeply serious charges.”
Epstein, 66, has pleaded not guilty to one federal count of sex trafficking and one count of sex trafficking conspiracy for allegedly sexually exploiting minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach, Florida, and other locations, according to the federal indictment.
In a report on the mansion, valued at more than $55 million, The New York Times noted that its artwork includes, on the second floor, a commissioned mural of a “photorealistic prison scene that included barbed wire, corrections officers and a guard station, with Mr. Epstein portrayed in the middle.”
The Times quotes R. Couri Hay, a public relations specialist who recently met with Epstein at his home, as saying, “(Epstein) said, ‘That’s me, and I had this painted because there is always the possibility that could be me again.’”
The home also includes such oddities as a hallway covered with artificial eyeballs originally made for wounded soldiers, a life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier, and a chess board with custom figures, many dressed suggestively and modeled after one of Epstein’s staffers, The Times reported.
Federal prosecutors said in the indictment that they were moving to seize the mansion as part of the proceedings against Epstein.
After 9/11, the U.S. enforced stricter control on immigration. This enforcement led to the birth of Homeland Security and ICE, but what is ICE exactly? We explain. Just the FAQs, USA TODAY
Immigrant advocates were bracing Thursday for a massive sweep of arrests and detentions amid reports that a roundup in at least 10 major cities could begin this weekend.
ICE officials would neither confirm nor deny a report Thursday in The New York Times, citing multiple administration officials the newspaper did not name, that the sweep would begin Sunday. President Donald Trump said last week that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement would begin a major sweep “soon.”
“No one arrested in the immigration raids should be deported without a fair day in court,” the American Immigration Council tweeted. “We are recruiting and training immigration attorneys from around the country to ensure this happens.”
UnidosUS tweeted a list of don’ts and dos for immigrants – don’t open doors, say anything to ICE agents, or sign anything, they said; do take pictures and get a lawyer.
“As the threat of ICE raids brings fear to our communities, it is important that you know your rights,” the tweet said.
Speaking outside the White House on Wednesday, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services acting director Ken Cuccinelli declined to say when any raids would begin, but vowed that they were coming.
“They’re absolutely going to happen,” Cuccinelli said, adding that there are “approximately a million people in this country with removal orders. Of course that isn’t what ICE would go after in this. But that’s the pool of people who’ve been all the way through the due process chain.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday decried the upcoming raids as immoral actions taken to “terrorize children and tear families apart.”
During a press conference at the Capitol, she stressed that a deportation order is not the same as a search warrant, and urged immigrants to learn their rights before allowing ICE to enter their homes.
“If ICE agents do not have a warrant signed by a judge, a person may refuse to open the door and let them in,” she said.
The Times said the sweep would target more than 2,000 immigrants facing deportation orders who remain in the country illegally. The sources told the Times that ICE planned to keep family members together at family detention facilities whenever possible.
Trump said two weeks ago that he would delay nationwide raids for two weeks to give Congress time to develop an immigration plan. Trump’s hard line on immigration has been a recurring theme in his presidency and is expected to take center stage in his 2020 reelection bid.
ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke, in a statement emailed Thursday to USA TODAY, said ICE cannot provide details on coming raids for security reasons. ICE has consistently maintained that its focus is on people with criminal records but that anyone found to be in the U.S. illegally would face detainment.
“Ninety percent of aliens arrested by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations component in FY2018 had either a criminal conviction, pending criminal charge, were an ICE fugitive or illegally reentered the country after previously being removed,” Bourke said.
That is true, but in 2018 about 66% of people arrested by ICE had been convicted of a crime in the U.S. — a sharp drop from the final years of the Obama administration, which targeted undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
ICE officials previously have said they plan to target new arrivals in an effort to stem a surge of Central American families arriving through Mexico. That surge showed some decline in June, when total border arrests fell 29% according to numbers released by Customs and Border Protection. But the decline came after May totals — more than 140,000 arrests — that were the highest since 2006.
“This is not a ‘rule of law’ operation,” Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, tweeted Thursday. “The goal is to terrorize immigrant communities so immigrants do not seek protection in the US.”
A government report released last week found that migrants were being held in overcrowded conditions described as “a ticking time bomb.” In one room at Customs and Border Protection’s Fort Brown station near the U.S-Mexico border in Texas, 51 women were in a cell with a capacity for 40 juveniles, according to the report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general’s office. In another cell, 71 men were in a cell designated for 41, the report said.
Trump was dismissive of the report, saying the facilities he visited were clean and well run.
“I think they do a great job with those facilities,” Trump said.
President Trump’s threatened deportation raids are “absolutely going to happen,” says senior Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
“There are approximately 1 million people in this with deportation orders,” the acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told reporters on the White House driveway. “Of course, that isn’t what ICE will go after in this, but that’s the pool of people that have been all the way through the process.”
The former Virginia attorney general, whose agency handles asylum cases, declined to discuss the timing of raids or additional details.
On June 22, Trump wrote on Twitter he would postpone threatened raids “for two weeks to see if the Democrats and Republicans can get together and work out a solution to the Asylum and Loophole problems at the Southern Border. If not, Deportations start!”
As the clock ran out, Trump told reporters Friday that large-scale deportation sweeps would be “starting fairly soon.”
“I don’t call them ‘raids.’ I say they came in illegally, and we’re bringing them out legally,” Trump said. “We’re removing people that have come in — all of these people over the years that have come in illegally — we are removing them and bringing them back to their country.”
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