George Packer's Blog, page 113

In Boston, a Late-Night Victory Against Trump’s Immigration Ban

Less than two days after President Trump signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries, lawyers in four states have, as promised, taken him to court and won. The first ruling came on Saturday night from the Eastern District of New York, headquartered in Brooklyn, where Judge Ann M. Donnelly issued an emergency injunction on Trump’s ban. Her judgment, which explicitly mentioned refugees and visa holders but not green-card holders, extends nationally and will remain in effect until a follow-up hearing on February 21st. Soon after Donnelly’s ruling, a federal judge in Virginia barred the government from deporting permanent residents detained at Dulles International Airport. Then, in Seattle, another judge temporarily blocked two specific deportations. After the hearing in Brooklyn, outside the courthouse, hundreds of demonstrators, some of whom had come directly from protests at John F. Kennedy International Airport, shouted, “Let them stay!”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Khizr Khan, Gold Star Father, on the New Refugee Ban
The Promise of J.F.K.: The Place Where America Meets the World
A Dangerously Isolated President

Khizr Khan, Gold Star Father, on the New Refugee Ban

Since his six-minute speech at last summer’s Democratic Convention, Khizr Khan has become a kind of celebrity, an honorable everyman who stood up for America’s Muslim community. The story he told of his son Humayun, a captain in the U.S. Army who gave his life to stop a suicide bomber approaching his troops in Iraq, in 2004, was emotional, and it made for gripping television. The Washington Post called the image of Khan waving his pocket-size Constitution in the air—and asking if Donald Trump had ever read it—one of the most memorable of the campaign. “I will lend you my copy,” Khan said, addressing Trump. “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.” His speech made the Constitution a best-seller on Amazon. Google searches on it soared tenfold.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
In Boston, a Late-Night Victory Against Trump’s Immigration Ban
The Promise of J.F.K.: The Place Where America Meets the World
A Dangerously Isolated President

The Promise of J.F.K.: The Place Where America Meets the World

The approach to Terminal 4, at the John F. Kennedy International Airport, is traditionally a clogged and stumbling route. By car, most mornings, drop-off traffic has a way of backing up before the curb starts, leaving travellers to lurch from S.U.V.s and town cars and drag their bags across a life-sized Frogger game. A subway arrival means a toe-crushing rush on escalators packed with suitcases, jerky trains that do not have enough handrails, and slippery floors where foot traffic collides in all directions. The goal is to get just beyond the X-ray machines, where the world—or so we hope—moves fast and freely once again.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
In Boston, a Late-Night Victory Against Trump’s Immigration Ban
Khizr Khan, Gold Star Father, on the New Refugee Ban
A Dangerously Isolated President

A Dangerously Isolated President

The Presidential order that Donald Trump signed on Friday barring all refugees and citizens from seven Muslim countries from travel to the United States was reviewed by virtually no one. The State Department did not help craft it, nor the Defense Department, nor Justice. Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, John Kelly, “saw the final details shortly before the order was finalized,” CNN reported. Early Saturday morning, there were reports that two Iraqi refugees had been detained upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport. When a lawyer for the men asked an official to whom he needed to speak to fix the situation, the official said, “Ask Mr. Trump.” This sounded like a sign of straight goonery and incipient authoritarianism; maybe it was. But it also may have been the only reasonable answer. Few people understood what was going on.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
In Boston, a Late-Night Victory Against Trump’s Immigration Ban
Khizr Khan, Gold Star Father, on the New Refugee Ban
The Promise of J.F.K.: The Place Where America Meets the World

The Freedom That Refugees Once Found Here

We called it, half-jokingly, our Iran-Iraq friendship dinner. It was a party we threw in 2007 for friends my husband and I had made through our reporting—his in Iraq, mine in Iran. They were doctors, translators, journalists. We’d written letters on their behalf to American consulates, Fulbright committees, courts; we’d helped some of them find English lessons, housing, lawyers, friends. They came to this country fleeing war and repression. Some had suffered unimaginably. They believed—we believed—that they would find safety and freedom on these shores, and that the United States would be that much richer for extending them its welcome. We had no greater gift to give them, and no aspect of our country in which we believed more wholeheartedly.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
In Boston, a Late-Night Victory Against Trump’s Immigration Ban
Khizr Khan, Gold Star Father, on the New Refugee Ban
The Promise of J.F.K.: The Place Where America Meets the World

The Fate of a Leg of a Statue of Saddam Hussein

Last June, Kai Kobold, a German antiques dealer whose wares date back to the Neolithic era, bought a fourteen-year-old object with more history, he believed, than any other piece in his collection. He said it was the left leg of a statue of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The statue had stood in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and was famously toppled during the American invasion, in 2003. Thirteen years later, Kobold enlisted five friends to help him carry what appeared to be the statue’s gam into his home, near the city of Hamburg. “You see this and it’s boring,” he told me a few months ago, as we ogled the leg together. It looked like someone had bronzed a giant’s hip wader as though it were a baby shoe. “But when you know what it is—it’s something like the experience when you come into a church.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Beacon in Berlin
The Road from Saddam Hussein to Donald Trump
The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming

What the Anti-Abortion Movement Has Won

The anti-abortion-rights March for Life rally has occurred every January since 1974—the year after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Roe v. Wade established the right to abortion. The first march, according to organizers, ended on the western steps of the U.S. Capitol, and attracted a crowd of roughly twenty thousand. This year, the group had reportedly hoped that their rally on Friday would draw numbers to compete with last weekend’s Women’s March on Washington, which attracted at least half a million protesters. Instead, attendance at the March for Life was estimated in the thousands—a fairly typical turnout, as some attendees told the Washington Post. The Washington, D.C., Metro recorded normal ridership for a Friday. The rally did not ripple the daily rhythms of the city—and, just as Donald Trump has painted a picture of liberal journalists hell-bent on minimizing the size of his Inauguration Day crowd, some conservatives are blaming the media.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Yazidi Refugee, Stranded at the Airport by Trump
Steve Bannon’s War on the Press
The Kind of Comedy That Can Hurt Trump

A Yazidi Refugee, Stranded at the Airport by Trump

At 10:05 on Friday morning, a young Iraqi couple named Khalas and Nada were trading panicked texts. Would Nada escape Iraq before President Trump’s executive order barring refugees took effect, or would Trump’s pen-stroke bring all their plans to ruin?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What the Anti-Abortion Movement Has Won
Steve Bannon’s War on the Press
Europe’s Migrant Trail, Through the Instagrams of Refugees

Steve Bannon’s War on the Press

Somewhere in the West Wing of the White House, I’m guessing, Stephen Bannon, Donald Trump’s chief political strategist, is chuckling to himself. A quick call with a Times reporter, and, a day later, there was his mug on the paper’s front page, next to a story in which he was quoted as saying, “The paper of record for our beloved Republic, the New York Times, should be absolutely ashamed and humiliated. They got it 100 per cent wrong.” Talk about hitting the enemy where it lives.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Kind of Comedy That Can Hurt Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, January 27th
Trump Tweets the Classics

Donald Trump Blows Up the U.S.-Mexico Relationship

Since Ronald Reagan was first elected, in 1980, every new American President has met with his Mexican counterpart shortly after winning the White House. Reagan travelled to Mexico before his swearing in and welcomed Mexican President José López Portillo to Washington later that year. George H. W. Bush met with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in Houston, in November, 1988, before either man was sworn in as President. Bill Clinton met with President Salinas, in Austin, before Clinton’s Inauguration. George W. Bush, who already had a relationship with President Vicente Fox, made Mexico his first foreign destination as President. Obama met with President Felipe Calderón, in Washington, shortly before his swearing in.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Steve Bannon’s War on the Press
The Kind of Comedy That Can Hurt Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, January 27th