Chris Hedges's Blog, page 543

Moms Outraged by Family Separations Become Protest Leaders

PORTLAND, Ore. — Immigrants who have spent years fighting to change the country’s immigration system are getting newfound support from liberal activists, moms and first-time protesters motivated by a visceral narrative: President Donald Trump’s administration separating children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Groups that pulled off massive women’s marches the past two years and other left-leaning rallies are throwing their weight behind migrant families Saturday. More than 600 marches could draw hundreds of thousands of people nationwide, from immigrant-friendly cities like Los Angeles and New York City to conservative Appalachia and Wyoming.

Though many are seasoned anti-Trump demonstrators, others are new to immigration activism, including parents who say they feel compelled to show up after heart-wrenching accounts of children forcibly taken from their families as they crossed the border illegally. In Portland, Oregon, for example, several stay-at-home moms are organizing their first rally while caring for young kids.

“I’m not a radical, and I’m not an activist,” said Kate Sharaf, a Portland co-organizer. “I just reached a point where I felt I had to do more.”

She and others are undaunted after nearly 600 women wearing white and railing against the now-abandoned separation policy were arrested Thursday in Washington, D.C. With demonstrations emerging nationwide, immigrant advocacy groups say they’re thrilled — and surprised — to see the issue gaining traction among those not tied to immigration.

“Honestly, I am blown away. I have literally never seen Americans show up for immigrants like this,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, political director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents nannies, housekeepers and caregivers, many of whom are immigrants. “We just kept hearing over and over again, if it was my child, I would want someone to do something.”

Saturday’s rallies are getting funding and support from the American Civil Liberties Union, MoveOn.org, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and The Leadership Conference. But local organizers are shouldering on-the-ground planning, many of them women relying on informal networks established during worldwide women’s marches on Trump’s inauguration and its anniversary.

Tyler Houlton, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, welcomed interest in the immigration system and said only Congress has the power to change the law.

“We appreciate that these individuals have expressed an interest in and concern with the critical issue of securing our nation’s borders and enforcing our immigration laws,” Houlton said. “As we have indicated before, the department is disappointed and frustrated by our nation’s disastrous immigration laws and supports action.”

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley didn’t respond to a request for comment.

In Portland, Sharaf and other mothers are working to organize a march expected to attract 5,000 people — all while they change diapers, nurse babies and prepare snacks. They have marched for women’s rights but have never spearheaded a political rally, which isn’t related to an 11-day vigil at an U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Portland that led to arrests this week.

Sharaf and three other women recently fired up their laptops and cellphones at her dining room table — one mother breastfeeding her son as she worked. A toddler wolfed down pasta in a high chair and two 5-year-olds and a 4-year-old careened around the house.

“I’m a mom, and I think everyone I know that I’ve talked to about this issue has had a very visceral reaction,” Sharaf said. “Because as moms, we know how important it is to be with your child and how critical attachment is to a child. It’s just heartbreaking for me to see.”

Sharaf and co-organizer Erin Conroy are coordinating their efforts with immigrant advocacy groups.

“This is not my wheelhouse,” Conroy said. “As far as I’m concerned, this is a national emergency that we all need to be focused on right now.”

That passion is heartening for the broader anti-Trump coalition, which hopes the weekend marches will attract people who have otherwise been on the sidelines, said David S. Meyer, a political science professor at the University of California, Irvine, who has authored books on U.S. political protest.

“There are people who have all kinds of other grievances or gripes with the Trump administration and they’re quite happy to use this one as the most productive and salient for the moment,” he said.

The groups planning the so-called Families Belong Together rallies have carefully framed them as peaceful and family-friendly — another draw for those looking to jump into their first protest, Meyer said.

That’s in contrast to the sit-in in the nation’s capital Thursday, where participants knew they might be arrested.

In El Paso, Texas, immigrant advocacy groups are partnering with religious leaders and women’s march organizers Saturday to try to shut down the bridge connecting El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.

Immigration attorney Linda Rivas said groups have met with U.S. authorities, congressional representatives and other leaders to discuss an escalating immigration crackdown that they say began decades ago. But the family separation policy has been a watershed for attracting a broader spectrum of demonstrators, she said.

“To finally have people on board wanting to take action, marching, taking to the streets, it’s been motivating for us as advocates because we have to keep going,” Rivas said.

In Los Angeles, Angelica Salas said she has been marching to fix the immigration system for nearly two decades. The executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights said she would often tell people about how immigration enforcement was splitting up families and non-immigrants couldn’t believe it.

Now, she said, they do.

___

Taxin reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press reporter Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.

The Resistance Before the #Resistance

It was a watershed year in American history. In 1968, protests and marches erupted almost daily; riots broke out across the United States; the Fair Housing Act was signed into law; Richard Nixon was elected president; and the back-to-back assassinations of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy threatened to tear the country apart. The Vietnam War, which had been simmering for more than a decade, suffered its highest body count on record.

Today, the U.S. military relies on a volunteer army to fight its forever wars. But in the 1960s, you could get a draft deferral only if you were married, had children, were a registered college student or had a medical condition that precluded you from service. The Resistance was a local organization based in Los Angeles whose mission was to stop the war though dedicated, nonviolent noncooperation with the federal Selective Service System. Members turned in their draft cards in protest, but their dissent came at a heavy price; some were fined up to $10,000 or sentenced up to five years in prison.

“We Won’t Go: the Los Angeles Resistance, Vietnam and the Draft,” an exhibit of The Resistance archives on display from June 22 to Aug. 19 at the Los Angeles Public Library’s Getty Gallery, explores these young men’s commitment to social justice. The collection features posters, leaflets and legal documents created by the Peace Press, along with newspaper clippings, draft cards, videos, and images by photographer Charles Brittin.

“Having the Resistance archives here [is] significant as they document their activities during an important time in our political history,” said Ani Boyadjian, research and special collections manager at the Central Library. “They were answering Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for a Vietnam summer by creating a movement of nonviolent draft resistance with the aim of ending the war.”

Bob Zaugh, one of the original members of the Resistance, graduated from Gardena High School in 1962 and promptly registered with the Selective Service. “The war in Vietnam wasn’t heating up yet, but I didn’t want to be drafted. So I took a 2S,” he said.

Zaugh enrolled at El Camino College, and like so many other students his age, enjoyed the security of a college deferment.

In the summer of 1967, the war intensified and riots broke out in Los Angeles. Concerned about the deadly conflict and an impending draft, the political science major from Torrance attended a speech on the UCLA campus. The speaker was David Harris, the student body president at Stanford University.

“Everything changed after hearing his electrifying speech,” said Zaugh. “That’s when I got in involved with The Resistance. I was given a deferment while poor people and people of color didn’t have that privilege.”

Zaugh dropped out of school and turned in his draft card. From 1967 to 1968, the Los Angeles Resistance held peaceful protests outside the Selective Service offices in Westwood, where busloads of young men were inducted into the military. Vietnam was not their father’s war.

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In 1967, Zaugh began working for the Peace Press, a political collective backed by founder and UCLA graduate student Jerry Palmer. “The sentiment in the country at the time was overwhelmingly pro-war, which made us very unpopular,” said Zaugh. “We had to teach ourselves how to print because nobody else would print our literature.”

Booted by landlords unsympathetic to their cause, and hounded by the FBI and CIA, the Peace Press relocated several times over the course of its 20-year existence from 1967 to 1987.

The ultimate objective of the Resistance was not only to end the war but the draft itself. Draft card turn-ins were held twice in 1967 and 1968. “We also refused inductions and physicals,” said Zaugh. These acts ranged from felonies to federal offenses; resisters eventually had to appear in court, many without attorneys. One of Zaugh’s friends was given three years in prison at the Federal Correctional Institution in Lompoc, while another was subjected to solitary confinement.

Even Harris was indicted. Convicted of draft evasion, he served 15 months in federal prison in 1969. When Zaugh had his day in court, he decided to represent himself despite his hatred for public speaking. Luckily, he found an ally in federal Justice Harry Pregerson, a liberal former Marine and veteran of the battle of Okinawa in World War II. Said Zaugh, “He thought my argument was terrible, told me I was going to lose and had me acquitted.”

Zaugh said he and his fellow members of the Resistance felt it was their responsibility to let the public know what their government was doing in Vietnam. “We wanted people to pay attention to our foreign policy and what we could do about it,” he said.

Eventually, the powers that be realized the war was unwinnable.

“The Resistance was a very potent organization,” noted Zaugh. “The government did its best to keep us out of the public eye and keep stats on the number of men who were breaking the Selective Service laws under wraps.”

As many as 206,000 people were reported delinquent during the entire war period, according to the Antiwar and Radical History Project. Fewer than 9,000 out of 209,517 accused draft offenders were convicted.

In 1977, realizing the draft resisters were too numerous to imprison, President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to those who fled abroad, allowing them to return to the United States.

Since the war’s conclusion, Zaugh has continued his involvement in social activism, peacefully protesting the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in Avila Beach and Gary Tyler’s four-decade incarceration in Angola, La. Zaugh also spent 13 years working for “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, a loyal Peace Press customer, at his Bongo Comics Group.

PHOTO ESSAY | 6 photosThe Resistance Before the #Resistance

Before Family Separations, the Trump Administration Quietly Removed Protections for Migrant Kids

Thousands of children separated from their parents after crossing the U.S. border eventually may be reunited, but children’s chances for asylum are slimmer than ever, thanks to a series of recent policy changes under the Trump administration.

Many of the changes happened quietly over the last 18 months, short-circuiting opportunities for children to get help and prove whether they are entitled to refugee status or asylum. Most give more power for final decisions about child deportation to officials at the border.

“The message is … if you come to the border, you are going to be detained and quickly removed,” said Charles Wheeler, a veteran immigration attorney who oversees training and advocacy in Oakland, California, for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.

The recent shifts preceded the new policy to separate children from the adults they traveled with to get to the Mexico-U.S. border, and even if the executive order to reverse course holds, they will outlive that effort.

Laura Barrera, an immigration lawyer in Las Vegas, is representing a 10-year-old boy whom the federal government is considering deporting. After crossing the border from Mexico alone, the child was picked up by immigration authorities and eventually placed with a step parent—a legal U.S. resident.

But Barrera says the future of that child, like many others, is far from certain because of the steps the Trump administration has taken in recent months, including:

Collecting and sharing more information, including fingerprints and resident status of adult sponsors and other adults in the household of children awaiting decisions. This data collection can discourage relatives or family friends already in the U.S. from coming forward to help the child, possibly leaving the child waiting in federal detention for months. However, administration officials counter that the data collection will enable officials to do a better job of keeping track of unaccompanied children while they await deportation decisions.
Allowing immigration judges to revoke the designation of “ unaccompanied ” to  exclude children  from that category once they are placed in the custody of a responsible adult. This means children lose certain rights that give them extra time to make their claims, including at least two opportunities to collect documents and make a case to fight deportation.
Requiring lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security to oppose any delays in deportation proceedings. Previously, state courts and federal agencies were given time to find safe housing for children while they determined the risk of returning them to their home country. “Now the Department of Homeland Security is fighting everything,” said Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge in Los Angeles and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
Making it easier for a federal immigration judge to discount the validity of children’s testimony about the dangers they face. In recently issued guidelines, the Justice Department cautioned immigration judges that vague, speculative or generalized testimony may not meet the burden of proof required for asylum or refugee status. Critics say that contradicts immigration courts’ own requirements that judges take into account a child’s age, the fact that the child arrived in the U.S. unaccompanied and that he or she may be acting without a lawyer.
Failing to renew a federal program that provided legal help to unaccompanied children. The AmeriCorps program had provided $4.4 million to nonprofit organizations that trained and recruited lawyers. It was not renewed nearly a year ago, even though the Vera Institute of Justice, a nonpartisan contractor and think tank with a long history of working with the Department of Justice, had found in a 2016 report that the program helped immigration courts run more smoothly.  In early June, another program that would have provided legal aid to some unaccompanied children through funding from the Department of Health and Human Services was put on hold.

One Child’s Experience

The experience of Fatima Aleman Rodas, 14, was typical of how things worked before the Trump administration began changing procedures and challenging claims that children face greater risk in their home countries than in the U.S.

Fatima, who recently finished eighth grade in Bakersfield, California, fled El Salvador to join her mother and two brothers, who arrived several years ago and work in the fields. Fatima and her older sister, Brenda, had stayed behind in El Salvador, enduring a five-year separation from family members who had slipped into the U.S.

A few months before the 2016 presidential election, Fatima and Brenda walked for more than five weeks, eager to escape gang violence that included threats from Brenda’s father.

“We slept in the countryside,” Fatima said in Spanish. “People gave us food.”

Occasionally, they took a bus, and a relative had arranged some assistance from “coyotes”– men paid to help smuggle people across the borders.

When the sisters reached the U.S. border near Reynosa, Mexico, they were able to walk across, Fatima said, but quickly were spotted by U.S. immigration officials, picked up and separated.

Fatima was sent to a center for children in Texas, then to New York. Because of her age and because authorities were able to determine that they could release her to her mother – with help from the legal aid program that was not renewed – Fatima was released from detention after about a month. Until recently, that was pretty standard for many unaccompanied children. Brenda, who was 24 at the time, was detained a few weeks longer.

Now the family is applying for asylum.

Fighting state courts

Until recently, the federal government turned to state courts – which routinely deal with child welfare and custody issues – and the Office of Refugee Resettlement in the Department of Health and Human Services to determine where children would be safest.

Those decisions sometimes take months or years, as children or appointed representatives gather documents and other information about their families back home and in the U.S.

The administration’s lawyers now routinely oppose efforts by lawyers for unaccompanied children to delay deportation. When a state court does rule that staying with a guardian or parent in the U.S. is in the child’s best interest, Trump administration attorneys frequently challenge those findings.

Department of Homeland Security spokesman Tyler Houlton cited concerns about the trafficking of children to explain some of the policy changes.

“There have been numerous intelligence reports and cases where kids have been used and trafficked by unrelated adults in an effort to avoid detention,” he said in a March statement.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions amplified that, saying at a criminal justice conference in Scottsdale, Arizona: “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you as required by law.”

Sessions also appeared to equate smuggling with any illegal entry with or without a parent, not just human trafficking.

“If you cross this border unlawfully, then we will prosecute you,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

Critics say targeting children is one route to achieve the broader administration goal of halting illegal border crossings and deterring family reunification even when some family members already are legal U.S. residents.

“This is the demonization of all immigrants and in particular the demonization of children,” said Jeanne Atkinson, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network.

Seeking legal aid

Hector, 20, also was represented by a nonprofit that had benefited from the AmeriCorps funding. Hector, who asked that his last name not be used, left Guatemala when he was 17 and now lives in Maryland with relatives who have received asylum.

Several family members were killed in what Hector said were revenge killings after another relative had been involved in a murder.

“They killed my family,” he said in a recent interview with Reveal, which his attorney, Jennifer Bibby-Gerth, observed. Hector met Bibby-Gerth through Catholic Charities, one of the most active nonprofits seeking to help immigrants. “First, they shot my uncle, then they killed my grandfather and shot my mother, then another uncle,” he said.

Hector talked of boarding a bus and traveling alone for 15 days, rarely with enough to eat. He crossed the U.S. border at night near Reynosa, Mexico, he said, swimming across the Rio Grande.

Hector walked alone for about a day, he said, searching for food and water. Then he was picked up by immigration officials and taken to a youth detention center in Texas.

While there, he turned 18 and was transferred to an adult detention center. He eventually connected with Catholic Charities in Houston, made his way to his relatives in Maryland and awaited word from the government about his petition for asylum.

His first petition was turned down two years ago by a hearing officer, but Bibby-Gerth filed an appeal, which is pending.

“The asylum officer was wrong,” Bibby-Gerth said. “It was one of the strongest cases for asylum I had ever seen.”

Hector was lucky. Michael Kagan, director of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Immigration Clinic, said the demand for lawyers to represent children far outstripped the supply even before the recent cuts.

“The idea that anyone should go into deportation proceedings without any attorney really raises serious questions about whether immigration court is fair to people,” he said.

Children are especially vulnerable, he said. Not only are they young – some as young as 4 have been left to represent themselves – but some cannot read in any language.

The Las Vegas law clinic began with funding through the AmeriCorps program. When Kagan learned in spring 2017 that the Trump administration would not be renewing the program (it formally ended in the fall), the clinic was able to get a sizeable grant from a local law firm to continue its work.

But similar clinics around the country had to shut down their legal aid to unaccompanied kids, even while they were able to provide other immigration services.

Sarah Lackritz, a spokeswoman for Equal Justice Works – the nonprofit that administered the program for the Justice Department – said the organization is seeking new ways to assist legal clinics that had provided aid to unaccompanied children. Among them: trying to place legal fellows, including newly minted attorneys, in the clinics.

“We care about this work and are committed to finding new sources of funding to ensure that we have as many fellows working in the public interest field as possible,” she said in an email.

A lengthy process

The legal process from U.S. entry to a decision can take years – partly due to a caseload that grew as border crossings increased without commensurate growth in the ranks of federal immigration judges.

In a Dec. 5 memorandum, Sessions said the Justice Department was moving to hire more immigration judges. By May, the court backlog had grown to 714,000 cases – over 2,000 per judge.

Bills introduced this year in Congress would further increase the number of immigration judges, and that effort has been moving ahead.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on border security and immigration, said he would support hiring more judges and wants to ease the backlog. In his home state, he said the wait for a final determination of legal status is nearly 900 days – about two and a half years.

Cornyn called that unacceptable.

“We know that these long delays can be frustrating and affect the lives of aliens with legitimate claims for relief,” he said at an April subcommittee hearing. While pushing for more immigration judges, he also has been trying to toughen penalties for those who enter the U.S. illegally.

Like President Donald Trump, Cornyn complained that the immigration system, including its courts, is failing to ensure that those who are granted a reprieve from deportation actually deserve to be in the U.S. Trump has been highly critical of the Department of Homeland Security and has blamed procedural delays for enabling gang members and criminals to slip across the border under the guise of seeking refugee or asylum status – some as unaccompanied children.

“We need to fix the loopholes in current laws that hamper the government’s ability to bar criminals, gang members and sex offenders from entering the United States or from being removed,” Cornyn said at the hearing.

As part of its effort to speed up deportation, the Trump administration has announced plans to impose a quota system on cases for already overworked immigration judges. Ashley Tabaddor, the Los Angeles immigration judge, said that may force them to close cases sooner than when the system has meted out due process to those applying, making it more likely that immigration court decisions could be overturned on appeal.

State courts and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, part of the Department of Homeland Security, also are experiencing substantial backlogs in their assessments of unaccompanied children.

But they are widely considered by immigration lawyers to be well-suited to handle cases in which the “best interest of the child” standard is applied.

Turning instead to border hearing officers for those assessments could lead to more reversals, Tabaddor said. Hearing officers at the border and immigration judges in courtrooms across the country are being urged to make speedy decisions. They may lack pertinent information simply because the child – or his or her attorney – hasn’t had time to gather it.

19 ICE Officials Call for Dissolution of Agency

As the demand to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spreads across the country—and with community members building protest encampments outside ICE facilities in several cities this week—some officers with the 15-year-old agency have now added their voices to the growing call to dissolve it.

Want to know how rapidly #AbolishICE has gone mainstream?

19 ICE agents are now calling for it. https://t.co/H0N6Rg6Ug3

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) June 29, 2018

The agency’s targeting of undocumented immigrants has weakened its employees’ ability to carry out other work, argued 19 officers who signed the letter, which was obtained by the Texas Observer.

The agents work in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) unit, which focuses on crimes including drug trafficking, human smuggling, and child pornography.

“The perception of investigative independence is unnecessarily impacted by the political nature of civil immigration enforcement,” wrote the agents to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. “Many jurisdictions continue to refuse to work with HSI because of a perceived linkage to the politics of civil immigration.”

The officers suggested that ICE be dissolved and its work divided among two new separate agencies, one focused on HSI and one focused on Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)—the unit which has enforced President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy.

As the Texas Observer reported, the Department of Homeland Security “shifted HSI funds to other parts of ICE to cover the costs of civil immigration enforcement, including $34.5 million in 2016.”

Lawmakers and the public alike have grown increasingly alarmed over the agency’s operations as ICE officers under the Trump administration, including forcibly separating children from their parents; conducting aggressive raids in private homes; detaining a man whose green card application was underway; and pressuring a spokesperson to lie about their work.

The call from ICE agents drew attention from Trump critics on social media, who said it put on clear display the fact that the president’s immigration policies have centered on persecuting immigrants, contrary to his claims that ICE is focused on protecting U.S. national security.

This is a stunning & unsurprising indictment of Trump’s claimed purpose behind the crackdown on “illegal immigration.” It was never about crime. Never about MS-13. Always just about hurting less privileged people of color. All at the expense of *actually protecting America.

— Scott Hechinger (@ScottHech) June 29, 2018

6 Things We Must Do, Now, to Fight the Trump Agenda

My friends, this is a dark hour. Intolerance, cruelty, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and environmental destruction have been let loose across the land.

Trump controls the Republican Party, the Republican Party controls the House and Senate, and the Senate and Trump will soon control the Supreme Court.

Republicans also control both chambers in 32 states (33 if you count Nebraska) and 33 governorships. And in many of these states they are entrenching their power by gerrymandering and arranging to suppress votes.

Yet only 27 percent of Americans are Republican, and the vast majority of Americans disapprove of Trump. The GOP itself is now little more than Trump, Fox News, a handful of billionaire funders, and evangelicals who oppose a woman’s right to choose, gay marriage, and the Constitution’s separation of church and state.

So what are we – the majority – to do?

First and most importantly, do not give up. That’s what they want us to do. Then they’d have no opposition at all.

Second, in the short term, if you are represented by a Republican senator, do whatever you can to get him or her to reject Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, or, at the least, postpone consideration until after the midterm elections. Urge others to join with you. Senate switchboard: 202-224-3121

Third, make a ruckus. Demonstrate. Engage in non-violent civil disobedience. Fight lies with truth. Join the resistance. @IndivisibleTeam @swingleft @UpRiseDotOrg@MoveOn @Sister_District @flippable_org.

Fourth, don’t succumb to divisive incrimination over “who lost” the 2016 election (Hillary loyalists, Bernie supporters, Jill Stein voters, etc.). This will get us nowhere. We must be united.

Fifth, vote this November 6 for people who will stand up to the Trump Republican outrage. Mobilize and organize others to do so. Contact friends and relations in “red” states, and urge them to do the same.

Sixth, help lay the groundwork for the 2020 presidential election, so that even if Trump survives Mueller and impeachment he will not be reelected.

Finally, know that this fight will be long and hard. It will require our patience, our courage, and our resolve. The stakes could not be higher.

House Republicans Grill Rosenstein on Russia Probe

WASHINGTON—Republicans accused top federal law enforcement officials Thursday of withholding documents from them and demanded details about surveillance tactics during the Russia investigation in a contentious congressional hearing that capped days of mounting partisan complaints.

Underscoring their frustration, Republicans briefly put the hearing on hold so they could approve a resolution on the House floor demanding that the Justice Department turn over thousands of documents by next week.

The House Judiciary Committee hearing marked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s first appearance before Congress since an internal DOJ report criticizing the FBI’s handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation revealed new disparaging text messages among FBI officials about Donald Trump during the 2016 election. FBI Director Christopher Wray also appeared at Thursday’s hearing.

Republicans on the panel seized on the watchdog report to allege bias by the FBI and to discredit an investigation into potential ties between Russia and the Trump campaign that is now led by special counsel Robert Mueller. They suggested the Justice Department had conspired against Trump by refusing to produce documents they believe would show improper FBI conduct.

“This country is being hurt by it. We are being divided,” Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, said of Mueller’s investigation. Gowdy led a separate two-year investigation into the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, and Clinton’s role in those attacks as secretary of state.

“Whatever you got,” Gowdy added, “finish it the hell up because this country is being torn apart.”

Rosenstein, at times raising his voice and pointing his finger, strongly defended himself and the department, saying he was doing his best to balance congressional oversight with the need to preserve the integrity of ongoing investigations. He said despite Republican allegations, he was “not trying to hide anything.”

“We are not in contempt of this Congress, and we are not going to be in contempt of this Congress,” he said.

The hearing came amid Republican attacks on the Justice Department and allegations of FBI bias against Trump. On Wednesday, lawmakers spent 11 hours behind closed doors grilling Peter Strzok, the FBI agent who worked on both the Clinton and Russia investigations and traded anti-Trump text messages with an FBI lawyer. The inspector general criticized the officials for creating an appearance of impropriety but did not find evidence that bias had tainted prosecutors’ decisions in the Clinton investigation.

His lawyer called Thursday night for the committee to release the entire transcript of the interview instead of “leaking selective excerpts designed to further a partisan agenda.”

The resolution that passed along party lines Thursday demanded that the department turn over by July 6 documents on FBI investigations into Clinton’s private email use and Trump campaign ties to Russia. Both investigations unfolded during the presidential election, causing the FBI — which prides itself on independence — to become entangled in presidential politics in ways that are continuing to shake out.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., one of the resolution’s sponsors, did not deny Democratic assertions that the document requests were related to efforts to undercut Mueller’s probe.

“Yes, when we get these documents, we believe that it will do away with this whole fiasco of what they call the Russian Trump collusion because there wasn’t any,” he said on the House floor.

The House judiciary and intelligence panels, which have subpoenaed the documents, want to use the records for congressional investigations into the FBI’s decision to clear Clinton in the email probe and its opening of an investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia.

The Justice Department has already turned over more than 800,000 documents to congressional committees, but the subpoenas seek additional materials, including records about any surveillance of Trump campaign associates. Lawmakers have threatened to hold top DOJ officials in contempt or vote to impeach them if the documents aren’t turned over.

On the floor, lawmakers hurled insults as Republicans said Congress is entitled to whatever it wants.

“We have a petulant Department of Justice defended by a petulant Democratic Party,” said Rep. Tom Garrett, R-Va.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., shot back: “We’re caught up in this nonsense because they can’t get over Hillary Clinton’s emails. Get over it!”

Wray and Rosenstein said law enforcement officials have been working diligently to provide the records, though Republicans made clear their dissatisfaction at the pace.

“We have caught you hiding information from Congress,” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan said at the hearing, an accusation Rosenstein strongly denied.

“I am the deputy attorney general of the United States, OK?” he said. “I’m not the person doing the redacting. I am responsible for responding to your concerns, as I have.

“Whenever you have brought issues to my attention, I have taken appropriate steps to remedy them,” he added.

He also dismissed media reports that he had threatened to subpoena staff members of the House Intelligence Committee, saying to laughter, “There’s no way to subpoena phone calls.”

Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, R-Va., signaled the hearing’s tone in his opening remarks when he complained about the Justice Department’s failure to produce all the requested documents.

“The Department of Justice and the FBI are not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The president and Congress are,” Goodlatte said.

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., demanded to know why Rosenstein had not recused himself from overseeing Mueller’s investigation into whether Trump had obstructed justice given Rosenstein’s role in laying the groundwork for the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Rosenstein’s memo criticizing Comey’s handling of the Clinton investigation was initially cited by the White House as justification for his firing.

“I can assure you that if it were appropriate for me to recuse,” Rosenstein said with a smile, “I’d be more than happy to do so and let somebody else handle this.”

Picture on Steele Dossier Comes Into Focus

An Associated Press review finds that investigations and criminal cases are revealing some truth in a set of controversial memos accusing the Trump campaign of working with the Russian government. But libel complaints argue otherwise, and whether there was collusion remains an open question.

No one has painted a more vivid or lurid portrait of a purported alliance between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia than a quiet, nondescript former British spy named Christopher Steele.

Steele’s once-confidential campaign memos were published just before Trump’s inauguration, unleashing tales of cavorting prostitutes and conniving campaign aides on secret sorties with agents of the Kremlin.

Ever since, the credibility of these Democratic-funded memos — the so-called Steele dossier — has remained the subject of both official investigation and political sniping.

In the 18 months since the dossier’s release, government investigations and reports, criminal cases and authoritative news articles have begun to resolve at least some of the questions surrounding the memos.

As a whole, the Steele dossier now appears to be a murky mixture of authentic revelations and repurposed history, likely interspersed with snippets of fiction or disinformation, an Associated Press review finds.

Mixing Fact and Fiction?

At the vortex of all the arguments is Steele, often described as a buttoned-down, earnest defender of Western interests, who spied on Russia for the British government and later founded a business intelligence firm built on his network of confidential informants.

Steele’s 17 memos laid out an extraordinarily detailed narrative of how the Russian government supposedly collaborated with the Trump campaign in an elaborate operation to tilt the 2016 presidential race in his favor.

Some of the dossier’s broad threads have now been independently corroborated. U.S. intelligence agencies and the special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference did eventually find that Kremlin-linked operatives ran an elaborate operation to promote Trump and hurt Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, as the dossier says in its main narrative.

The dossier first told of a clandestine partnership between the Trump campaign and Russian officials in a memo dated June 2016, the month before the FBI began investigating that very possibility.

Steele laid out details of a secret Moscow meeting between the Russians and Trump adviser Carter Page months before FBI suspicions about Page and news reports about just such a meeting forced him to leave the campaign.

The dossier’s portrait of a cooperative campaign also has been bolstered by developments it did not specifically foretell: Legal cases and authoritative reporting have exposed Trump’s son Donald Jr. and another aide as receptive to Russian overtures to supply dirt on Clinton.

However, the dossier makes other sensational, unverified claims. It reports that Trump provided intelligence to the Kremlin on wealthy Russians in the U.S. The Russian government, in return, was said to supply Trump with secrets about his political rivals while collecting compromising information on him, including recording him with prostitutes who supposedly urinated on a bed in a Moscow hotel.

It remains unclear if the Trump campaign, in the end, secretly acquired Russian information, and if so, whether Trump himself was aware and involved.

For his part, Trump has dismissed the memos as “fake news” and turned “no collusion” into the Twitter tagline of his presidency.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied his government meddled in the election.

Defamation Claims

Four wealthy Russians take more specific exception to the dossier: They say they were libeled.

In four separate lawsuits filed as recently as April, the Russians sued Steele and BuzzFeed, the online news outlet that published the memos in January 2017. Three of the Russians — all owners of a Moscow-based financial-industrial conglomerate called Alfa Group — also have sued Fusion GPS, the research company that enlisted Steele under a contract with a law firm connected to the Democrats.

Russian tech entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa Group’s owners — Mikhail Fridman, Petr Aven and German Khan — all say they had nothing to do with the events described in the dossier. In cases playing out in state, federal and British courts, they say they took unfair hits to their reputations.

The four men are named in two separate Steele memos, both of which are seemingly out of alignment with the rest of the dossier, as their legal teams have stressed in court filings.

Their questionable relevance raises the possibility that they were motivated by someone with a different agenda who perhaps fed false information to the former spy. Indeed, Gubarev’s lawyer has repeatedly suggested his client might have been framed by a competitor or someone looking for a scapegoat in the computer business.

In the Alfa Group memo, the billionaire owners were said to perform unspecified political favors for Putin. Fridman and Aven allegedly sent “large amounts of illicit cash” to Putin in the 1990s when he was still a city official in St. Petersburg.

The Gubarev memo said his business “had been using botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data” in an operation against Democratic Party leaders. He was purported to have been recruited under duress by Russian security agents.

Any actions ascribed to the four Russians have never been independently confirmed by official investigations or authoritative news reports.

The Alfa Group owners do have ties to the Kremlin. Aven is a former Russian foreign trade minister, and Fridman has been said to be close to Putin. Like Fridman, Khan is Ukrainian-born and one of the original founders of the Alfa Group. However, their financial and industrial empire has also waged bare-fisted battles with other powerful Russian interests, leaving adversaries who might want to take them down.

Gubarev, who lives in Cyprus, also is a possible target for scapegoating as the owner of a Luxembourg-based digital services business with thousands of customers, subsidiaries around the world, and business relationships in Russia, the U.S. and elsewhere.

Unlike the other memos, Steele’s Alfa Group write-up concentrates on internal Russian affairs, with no direct connection to the U.S. election. The only tie is an unsupported inference in the memo’s heading that it somehow involves the topic of “Russia/US Presidential Election.”

“Mr. Fridman, Mr. Aven and Mr. Khan have absolutely nothing to do, in any way, with the issue that is the theme of the dossier — alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign,” the trio’s lawyer, Alan Lewis, said in an interview.

Oddly, the memo about Gubarev is dated five weeks after the election.

“Why the heck did he even bother to continue writing this stuff?” Gubarev’s lawyer, Valentin Gurvits, asked in an interview.

Steele has said the Gubarev memo came from unsolicited details that continued to trickle in after Trump’s election, and his lawyers have acknowledged that the memo “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified.”

BuzzFeed has issued an apology for publishing Gubarev’s name and redacted it in response to his complaints.

Representatives for both Steele and Fusion GPS chief executive Glenn Simpson declined to comment for this story.

Possible Mistakes

In a filing in the Alfa Group owners’ lawsuit, Steele’s lawyers say that memo “came from a network of vetted sources known to Mr. Steele … and resources developed over a lifetime of Russian intelligence work in public and private service.”

However, testifying to Congress, Simpson quoted Steele as saying that any intelligence, especially from Russia, is bound to carry intentional disinformation, but that Steele believes his dossier is “largely not disinformation.”

Both men deny giving the documents to BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed’s legal arguments don’t rely primarily on the truth of the memos. Instead, they cast the dossier as something that was under review by multiple layers of government and thus subject to news coverage as an official document, whether true or not. Judges have decided to allow that argument.

BuzzFeed News spokesman Matt Mittenthal said “the fact that these allegations were being taken seriously at the highest levels of government was in itself a real story here.”

BuzzFeed’s lawyers have acknowledged that Gubarev’s involvement could have been tangential, simply “turning a blind eye” to wrongdoing by websites he hosted.

Gubarev’s World

Even before the Steele dossier, a 2014 lawsuit filed against Gubarev’s company in Florida opened a window on how readily associates can become adversaries in the post-Soviet business world.

The suit, dismissed last year, was filed by Depicto Commercial Ltd., a little-known company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The company contended that it lent $627,000 to Gubarev’s business and that he failed to repay as agreed; Gubarev’s side contended it repaid what was owed.

The lawsuit identifies Depicto Commercial’s principal figure as Victor Lukashenko, a Belarusian digital services businessman.

Lukashenko spent time in prison in 2010-2012 in that former Soviet republic, according to his lawyer, Rolandas Tilindis. He said Lukashenko, who is now in hiding, was accused of improperly exchanging cryptocurrency for real money as a service to customers, not realizing the currency was the product of fraud.

Gurvitz, Gubarev’s lawyer, said his client “had absolutely no relationship” with Lukashenko beyond the loan.

The Depicto Commercial lawsuit gives little detail about that company. However, a company with that name has been identified in previously leaked corporate documents from the Bahamas, with a director named Emilios Hadjivangeli. Hadjivangeli runs a corporate services business in Cyprus, Gubarev’s home and a haven for well-to-do Russians and their money.

Hadjivangeli has been listed as an official for hundreds of companies. Many appear to be so-called shell companies, where wealthy Russians and others often list intermediary strawmen as executives to hide the actual ownership.

Hadjivangeli did not respond to messages seeking comment.

Gurvitz said that his client has never heard of Hadjivangeli and that there is no reason to believe that he or Lukashenko was involved in any way with the Steele dossier.

___

Dossier timeline: https://interactives.ap.org/steele-do...

___

Contributing to this report were researchers Rhonda Shafner and Randy Herschaft in New York and reporter Nataliya Vasilyeva in Moscow.

Searching for the True Trumpistas

“The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics”
Purchase in the Truthdig Bazaar

“ The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics”

A book by Salena Zito and Brad Todd

It’s hard to know whether to take “The Great Revolt” seriously or literally.

Journalist Salena Zito and conservative political advertising executive Brad Todd have co-authored a new book that provides a taxonomy of 2016 Trump supporters, one that claims to upend the stereotypical narratives of the mainstream press. “We spent time in diners, watering holes, bed-and-breakfasts, and coffee shops, finding Trump voters where they live and work,” they write. Where others saw an irate, dispossessed, racist, uneducated mass eager to burn it all down, Zito and Todd travel through Iowa, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, deploying “smart empirical research with on-the-scene, shoe-leather reporting” in search of the true Trumpistas, those “hidden in plain sight.”

Zito became pundit-famous in 2016 for her pithy formulation about Donald Trump’s faithful and the news media: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” On such insights are reputations forged and book deals struck. So it’s ironic that “The Great Revolt” commits an offense similar to the one Zito attributes to the press.

The authors do take Trump supporters literally, recording their every utterance and grievance with great fidelity. But I’m not sure how seriously they truly regard them. Zito and Todd lump voters into pat categories and miss chances to engage with them on the origins and depth of their views. And when the book concludes with the authors’ attack against the “multiculturalist militancy pushed by the Far Left” and their sanitizing of Trump’s positions on race and borders as merely the “broadening” or “shifting” of policy debates, the move from analysis to ideology proves jarring. I can’t tell if the authors’ views flow from their insights on Trump voters or if their insights on Trump voters are curated according to the authors’ views.

To their credit, Zito and Todd didn’t just crash campaign rallies or scan the landscape for MAGA caps; they spent time in communities that flipped from Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 to Trump in 2016. But the classification scheme they develop can at times feel more clever than useful.

Click here to read long excerpts from “The Great Revolt” at Google Books.  

The “Red Blooded and Blue Collared” are voters animated by Trump’s pledge to restore America’s manufacturing prowess. The “Perot-istas” feel drawn into the electoral process by mavericky outsiders. The “Rough Rebounders” have experienced professional or health setbacks and admire Trump’s resilience. “Girl Gun Power” describes women under age 45 who view Second Amendment rights as a feminist imperative. “Rotary Reliables” include well-educated, high-income community leaders who embrace the politics of their less-educated, lower-income neighbors. The “King Cyrus Christians” look past Trump’s moral failings and find solace in his judicial appointments. And the “Silent Suburban Moms” may not like to admit that they went for Trump, but they remain skeptical of strictly gender-based appeals for their vote.

These are the groupings that Zito and Todd identify in their travels and dissect through a survey conducted for the book. Rather than the angry hordes of the popular imagination, these individuals are invariably depicted as well-mannered, kind, thoughtful and, above all, “infectious”—their smiles, their laughs, their love of life always seem to be infecting everyone else.

These voters emphasize Trump’s style more than any ideology. “He shows every day that he is sticking up for the country,” explains one Pennsylvania voter. “He was his own man,” declares another. “I just love his moves with North Korea,” remarks a Trump supporter who moonlights as a Kenny Rogers impersonator. “When to hold ’em, when to fold ’em.” (Yes, that’s really the quote.)

Trump often speaks of his election as a movement, and the individuals in “The Great Revolt” certainly see themselves as part of something bigger than one man, larger than themselves. “I don’t know how to explain it except I felt compelled not for me but for my country,” muses a Pennsylvania man. A Trump supporter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, tells the authors that “the vote was larger than him, it was about us, our families and our community and the preservation of our rights.” And a Trump voter in Macomb County, Michigan, declares that “what I feel isn’t an anomaly; this movement unequivocally goes on long past Trump.”

Zito and Todd argue that the condescension of liberal elites energizes Trump supporters. “For a key slice of his coalition, it was attacks on their values on the national stage by a culture careening leftward that drew voters to his bombast,” they write. Or as one Iowa voter told them: “We just felt for the last eight years we were spoon-fed this liberal cultural crap.”

Indeed, these voters’ decisions to support Trump are as much about his opponents and predecessors as about the man. Ed Harry, a former Democrat in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, promised himself he would never vote for a Clinton or a Bush again—“I thought they were both corrupt”—and found that everyone he had grown to distrust (Democrats, the GOP establishment, Mexico, lobbyists) disliked Trump. “I figured I must have a candidate,” he concluded. And Sally Tedrow, a Silent Suburban Mom in Lee County, Iowa, wishes that Trump “had a softer manner about him,” but that doesn’t really matter, because Tedrow also voted less for Trump than against Hillary Clinton: “I felt like she was not honest.” Zito and Todd do not ask Tedrow what she makes of Trump’s truthfulness, or if they do, we don’t learn about it.

Trump is different, says Renee Dibble of Ashtabula, Ohio, in a particularly memorable passage. “Not because I am blind to his faults, but because the other politicians’ faults are so worse. Because their failures were our lives, and that is unforgivable.”

The authors say America has endured a “cultural change” in recent years, and the voters they feature blame Obama for it. He “ran our country into the ground,” argues a Trump supporter in Lake County, Michigan. A voter in Howard County, Iowa, says Obama spread a “moral decay,” making it so that “everyone has to think his way or it is unacceptable.” Obama is even to blame for any resurgence of racial prejudice. “We’re here in a small town where you could see lots of racism … but I think there was a lot more stuff that would come up because Obama failed to use more common sense when talking about problems the country faces,” explains a voter in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. “Just say what it is instead of trying to not offend people.”

The interviewees constantly worry about a worsening “attitude of entitlement” throughout the country, saying that “nobody wants to be accountable … nobody wants to be responsible.” As a 70-year-old Pennsylvania woman explains, “I see this culture changing around us in that no one values hard work.” Zito and Todd don’t inquire who these entitled, lazy and irresponsible people might be; their identity is only implied, as when one Rotary Reliable frets that, under Obama, “only some people’s traditions and cultures matter.” Yes, those rhetorically useful some people. And it should surprise no one that, after Trump built his political brand on the lie of Obama’s noncitizenship, survey data cited in “The Great Revolt” shows that the Trump voters in the Rust Belt consider their guy “a more patriotic American” than the guy before. Maybe birtherism is infectious, too.

Not every book must cover everything, of course. Zito and Todd are not required to add Alt-Right Reliables, Birther ‘Burbs or Middle-Class Misogynists to their mix. When the authors wonder about the durability of Trump’s support, they ask, “Was his coalition the product of a candidacy or did he, as a candidate, benefit from a cause that succeeded in spite of him?”

Their book does not settle the question, nor does it persuasively define the cause animating this coalition. They call it “the new populism,” but in many ways their vision of the Trump base seems as partial and euphemized as the conventional journalistic notions they purport to debunk.

In their view, Trump’s racist statements bind his supporters more closely to him only because the mainstream news media overreacts and therefore draws ire from the base. Trump voters support a border wall and a ban on travelers from some Muslim-majority countries as part of their “mistrust of multinational bigness,” nothing more. When he attacks NFL players who kneel during the national anthem to protest police violence, Trump is “shifting the debate away from the protesters’ stated purpose to a debate on patriotism itself,” eliciting “roars of approval” from his base. The Democrats are the race-baiters; Trump supporters merely desire a “restoration of cultural respect.”

All of which may be accurate. In a literal sense.

Carlos Lozada is the nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post.

©2018 Washington Post Book World

To Hell With Civility

A restaurant owner in Virginia engaged in a very thoughtful, considered act of protest against the Trump administration in refusing to serve dinner to Sarah Huckabee Sanders last Friday. The actions of Red Hen owner Stephanie Wilkinson were instantly construed as uncivil even as Sanders has proved herself to be one of President Donald Trump’s most unwavering defenders in her role as White House press secretary.

Wilkinson did not base her decision to boot Sanders on the press secretary’s gender, race, sexual orientation or any other protected characteristic. Unlike the Colorado baker who became a cause célèbre among right-wing Trump supporters for discriminating against gay couples, Wilkinson and her staff concluded they could not serve Sanders in good conscience because of her immoral actions, not her identity.

Amid the horrific news reports emerging each day of thousands of immigrant children remaining in government custody separated from their parents, the Supreme Court’s appalling decision to preserve Trump’s Muslim ban, the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico, etc., it might seem a trivial matter to focus on the ability of Sanders to eat dinner where she chooses. But it is in fact a critical test of how we as a nation set basic standards for what we will tolerate.

Protesters have righteously dogged the ardent defenders of Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policies in recent days, including White House adviser Stephen Miller, Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

By its very definition, “protest” is an act of disapproval. It cannot be made with kind words, fake smiles, handshakes or quiet dinners. Protest is often an act of rage against a perceived injustice, and at this moment Americans are outraged and have every right to nonviolently confront Trump’s defenders in the streets, in restaurants and outside their homes.

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., gets it. The intrepid progressive urged her supporters to act, saying that if they “see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

A careful reading of her words makes it imminently clear that Waters believes in raucous and peaceful protest. Contrast that with Trump, who has literally called for violence against individuals and whole communities repeatedly. Worse than Trump threatening Waters for her statement has been the response of Waters’ fellow Democrats. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer issued a statement showing immense cowardice, saying, “If you disagree with a politician, organize your fellow citizens to action and vote them out of office. But no one should call for the harassment of political opponents. That’s not right. That’s not American.”

Actually it is very American to engage in protest, whether or not Schumer interprets that as “harassment.” What is “not right” are Trump’s policies and Schumer’s unwillingness to confront them more harshly. Other Democrats echoed Schumer in denouncing Waters. Waters rightly refused to capitulate to the weak-willed establishment wing of her party and demanded a refocusing of efforts on what matters, saying, “I decided I’m just talking about the children. I want the children released, I want a plan. I want a plan for what this administration is going to do to connect these children.”

House Speaker Paul Ryan had the audacity to call on Waters to apologize, saying, “There is no place for this,” even though the Republican leader has, for well over a year, silently acquiesced to the ugliest and most violent of discourses from the president he continues to back. Perhaps Ryan is truly worried he too may no longer be able to eat out in peace or enter and exit his home without facing protesters in the streets outside. If so, Waters and the activists she spoke to in her statements are the real winners in the war for the nation’s moral conscience.

There is nothing civil about a president and Supreme Court deciding to ban people from whole nations vis-à-vis the Muslim ban ruling by the Supreme Court this week. There is nothing civil about more than 2,000 children being held hostage by the Trump administration. There is nothing civil about the massive numbers of undercounted deaths in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria for which Trump has yet to be held accountable. There is nothing civil about Trump’s undoing of the Iran nuclear deal. There is nothing civil about the GOP’s offensive on Obamacare, its tax giveaway to the rich, its attacks on voting rights or the undermining of unions. In the face of such relentless daily assaults on our Constitution, our social safety net, our human rights and dignity, Schumer and his ilk want us to remain civil?

It is quite likely that proponents of slavery, Jim Crow racism, Japanese-American internment, etc., called for calm over fury. Nothing helps the status quo quite like civil discourse in the face of daily destruction.

The right is hardly worried about civility, and it is winning every single day. Take the horrific mocking sounds that former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski made on Fox News in response to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome being separated from her family. Lewandowski expressed no regret despite the rightful outcry, defiantly retorting, “An apology? I owe an apology to the children whose parents are putting them in a position that is forcing them to be separated.”

The right is taking its cues from Trump, who campaigned and won on incivility. Examples abound, like the recent incident in Los Angeles in which a racist white woman confronted a Mexican neighbor and her Mexican-American son, invoking Trump’s dehumanizing words against undocumented immigrants such as “rapist,” “animals” and “drug dealers.”

This is nothing new. Our nation’s past is filled with violent, hate-filled rhetoric and actions from conservative and racist forces, and militant rage from the defenders of equality and freedom. The architects and defenders of racist, inhumane policies that are ripping apart lives and shredding dreams do not deserve to dine in peace. They forsake that right when they choose to upend basic moral and ethical standards of governing to a degree most of us have not seen in our lifetimes. It is imperative for Americans to not quietly accept the destruction Trump and his supporters have wrought. Civility in the face of such madness wrongly normalizes the slide toward fascism. There is nothing normal about the times we live in.

Local Governments Cut Contracts With ICE Over Immigrant Policies

Cities around the country are responding to President Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy by canceling what The New York Times reports can be lucrative contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide housing facilities and services for detainees.

In one major victory for immigrant rights activists, commissioners in conservative Williamson County, Texas, voted earlier this week to cut ties with a 500-bed facility owned by CoreCivic, which housed mothers who had been separated from their children. Sofia Casini, an organizer with the group Grassroots Leadership, told the Times that while the group had been fighting against the facility for months, children torn from their families “really touched a different kind of community nerve.”

According to the Austin-American Statesman, “The county was paid approximately $8,000 per month to provide deputies from the Williamson County sheriff’s office to do random checks at the facility and investigate reports of abuse.”

Sacramento County, Calif., had substantially more to lose, but as reported by the city’s Capital Public Radio, the county still voted to end its multimillion-dollar contract with ICE. As the station explained: “For five years, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security paid the county $6.6 million annually to keep unauthorized immigrants who are awaiting hearings at its correctional facility in Elk Grove.”

Capital Public Radio continued, “Three supervisors went against county staff and Sheriff Scott Jones’ recommendations and voted against renewing the agreement.”

Similar situations played out in Alexandria Va., and Springfield, Ore., with city officials backing away from agreements with ICE to house immigrant detainees in their adult jails and juvenile detention centers.

“The cancellations,” the Times observes, “suggest an attempt to disengage from federal policies seen as harmful to immigrant families—even when those policies could be pouring millions of dollars into local government budgets.”

They may be partly inspired by protests that have cropped up outside ICE field offices across the country.

In New York City, members of the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council helped a coalition of immigrant rights groups stage an occupation that blocked the loading dock of a local ICE office. This led to hearings being canceled or carried out via video conference Monday. Although the protest broke up Tuesday, on Wednesday the facility was still not holding in-person hearings, according to The Appeal, a publication focused on criminal justice.

In Portland, Ore., federal agents on Thursday dispersed a group of protesters that had been camping outside the city’s ICE offices, shut for eight days. According to CBS station KOIN, eight people were arrested. Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler refused to help federal agents clear the area.

That children are at the center of the immigration crisis seems to be the breaking point for many city officials. As Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told the Times, “There comes a time when we must draw the line, and for me the line is with our children.”