It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6th, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker. As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on... Read more
Tomgram
Six years ago, at the time of the first Trump administration’s Muslim ban and its initial round of vicious anti-immigrant policies, I visited a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos to see how Europe was handling its own immigrants and refugees. Within a day, I met two Syrians, Eyad Awwadawnan and Hasan Majnan, who had fled Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship only to end up in a filthy, overcrowded camp in a country that didn’t want them with a future they could not foresee. That was June 2018 and I’ve kept in touch with them both ever since. So, when Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, ending two generations of perhaps the most murderous dictatorship in the modern... Read more
Source: “The Lion Has Fallen!” appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
Let’s face it: Electing Donald Trump was nothing short of a suicidal act. And that’s something we humans seem to have a genuine knack for these days. If you don’t believe me, just consider those record-setting burned-out areas around Los Angeles. Admittedly, that was Nature (with a capital N), but given a grim helping hand by You Know Who. You can thank big oil, big coal, and big natural gas for that (and, in the future, add President Donald Trump to that list in a big-time way). Yes, things do turn out to burn far more fiercely on an overheating planet. And they get wetter faster, too (though not in Los Angeles when rain was truly needed). The phrase now is “climate whiplash,” and if... Read more
Source: Call Him Apocalyptic Don appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
On January 10th, one day before the 23rd anniversary of its opening, a much-anticipated hearing was set to take place at the Guantánamo Bay Detention Facility on the island of Cuba. After nearly 17 years of pretrial litigation, the prosecution of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the “mastermind” of the devastating attacks of September 11, 2001, seemed poised to achieve its ever-elusive goal of bringing his case to a conclusion. After three years of negotiations, the Pentagon had finally arranged a plea deal in the most significant case at Guantánamo. Along with two others accused of conspiring in the attacks of 9/11, KSM had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for the government replacing the death penalty with a life sentence. After... Read more
Source: The Forever Charade appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
It came upon a midnight clear, a vision both complete and quite specific — not from any of those “angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold,” as in the Christmas carol, but from a long line of trucks on the Indiana Toll Road. On that cold winter’s night about five years ago, the 18-wheelers were playing their usual game to stay awake, passing each other endlessly and slowing me down to 60 miles an hour when I wanted to do 70 or, I’ll admit it, 75. When I pulled into a rest stop to gas up, about 50 of those big rigs were parked there. Their drivers were taking the federal government’s mandatory 11- or 12-hour... Read more
Source: Detroit’s Death Spiral? appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, advocates for peace, social justice, racial and economic equality, fair immigration policies, climate renewal, trans rights, and other movements for change are bracing for hard times. The new administration will be doggedly opposed to so many of the values we hold dear, as well as programs that have helped keep millions of Americans above the poverty line. Only recently, newly reelected Speaker of the House Mike Johnson reaffirmed his commitment to an “America First” agenda, which distills the most harmful aspirations of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 into 10 priority areas, including slashing social welfare, healthcare programs, and public education; supporting increased military spending to promote “peace through strength”; unleashing... Read more
My name isn’t important, only what I have to say. I’m writing with a pencil because I need to conserve my batteries tonight. It’s Year 24 of Our Trump (though he himself, of course, is no longer with us, just his kids who are running things). I feel like I should try to explain our era to whoever opens this time capsule a century from now, though you may need scuba gear to get at it. A lot of records could be lost by then. The Chinese climate hoax was less of a hoax than we thought at the time. Forgive me, Donald, but despite what the New Evangelical Church says, you were anything but infallible — even if I... Read more
Source: A Time Capsule from 2048 appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
This country, once a haven for immigrants, is now on the verge of turning into a first-class nightmare for them. President Donald Trump often speaks of his plan to deport some 11.7 million undocumented immigrants from the United States as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Depending on how closely he follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, his administration may also begin deporting the family members of migrants and asylum seekers in vast numbers. Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: the troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people... Read more
Source: American Troops as Migrants appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” So declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ah, if only it had proved to be so. Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history’s actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing). Let’s consider a specific, very recent segment of the past. I’m thinking of the period stretching from my birth year of 1947 to this very... Read more
Source: Surprise! appeared first on TomDispatch.com.
A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe — a nuclear war. But you would be wrong. A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), Representative John Garamendi (D-CA), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and... Read more
Source: Angling Toward Armageddon appeared first on TomDispatch.com.