George Packer's Blog, page 97

A Case That Could Determine the Future for Dreamers

On the morning of February 10th, Daniel Ramirez was sleeping on a couch in his father’s apartment in Des Moines, Washington, when three agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) walked through the front door. The agents had just arrested his father, who is undocumented, in the parking lot outside, and when they learned that Daniel and his older brother, Josue, were in the apartment they decided to investigate. An agent asked Daniel for his name, date of birth, and birthplace. He is twenty-four and was born in Mexico, but he grew up in California. Since 2014, he has been registered with the federal government under a policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era measure that establishes “lawful presence” for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. The program allows beneficiaries—some eight hundred thousand people nationwide, often referred to as Dreamers—to work legally, while also freeing them from the immediate threat of deportation. “I have a work permit. You cannot take me,” Daniel told the agent before he was handcuffed. Daniel has been in federal detention since his arrest, and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has refused to release him.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Being Indian in Trump’s America
Why Protesters Gathered Outside Peter Thiel’s Mansion This Weekend
Latinos Feel the Sting of Trump’s Presidency

How Not to Freak Out About Cyber War

In 2007, Admiral Mike McConnell, the wonky former head of the National Security Agency, became the director of National Intelligence, and soon discovered that many senior American officials were not remotely prepared for the advent of digital warfare. (Less than a year earlier, Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, who chaired the main Senate committee that regulates the Internet, had described the Web as a “series of tubes.”) To grab his peers’ attention, McConnell adopted the intelligence community’s version of a party trick: when visiting a Cabinet officer, he would pull out a copy of a memo that had been written by his host and then stolen. The Chinese, he might explain, hacked this from you—and we hacked them to get it back.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 15th
Who Leaked Part of Donald Trump’s 2005 Federal Tax Return?
C.B.O. Report Leaves Trump in a Political Jam on Health Care

Who Leaked Part of Donald Trump’s 2005 Federal Tax Return?

During last year’s election campaign, some tax experts and financial reporters suggested that Donald Trump may not have paid any federal income taxes since the nineteen-nineties. Trump’s dogged refusal to release any of his returns contributed to this speculation. So did his state tax returns from 1995, portions of which were sent to the Times. These showed that he had used aggressive accounting tactics, taking a loss that year of more than nine hundred million dollars. Experts suggested that Trump might have exploited this huge write-off in subsequent years, too, greatly reducing or eliminating his tax liabilities.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
My Long, Unfinished Path to Becoming an American Citizen
Daily Cartoon: Wednesday, March 15th
How Not to Freak Out About Cyber War

Being Indian in Trump’s America

On a September evening in 1987, Navroze Mody, a thirty-year-old Indian man living in Jersey City, went for drinks at the Gold Coast Café, in Hoboken. Later that night, after he left the bar, he was accosted on the street by a group of about a dozen youths and severely beaten. Mody died from his injuries four days later. There had been other attacks on Indians in the area at that time, several of them brutal, many of them carried out by a group that called itself the Dotbusters—the name a reference to the bindi worn by Hindu women on their foreheads. Earlier that year, a local newspaper had published a handwritten letter from the Dotbusters: “We will go to any extreme to get Indians to move out of Jersey City. If I’m walking down the street and I see a Hindu and the setting is right, I will hit him or her.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
My Long, Unfinished Path to Becoming an American Citizen
A Case That Could Determine the Future for Dreamers
Who Leaked Part of Donald Trump’s 2005 Federal Tax Return?

C.B.O. Report Leaves Trump in a Political Jam on Health Care

When it comes to spotting an opportune moment to hold a press conference, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, has few equals. There he was on Tuesday morning, surrounded by nurses, patients, and health-care advocates. The subject at hand was the Congressional Budget Office’s new estimate that House Republicans’ proposed replacement for the Affordable Care Act, which President Trump has endorsed, would swell the number of uninsured Americans by twenty-four million over ten years, while also raising insurance premiums for older people, gutting Medicaid, and providing a hefty tax cut to many of the richest people in the country.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Taking Stock of Hate Under Trump
The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 14th

Taking Stock of Hate Under Trump

Last week, the zoning board in Bayonne, New Jersey—just across New York Harbor from Sunset Park, Brooklyn—voted to deny a variance to Muslim residents who wanted to convert a warehouse into a mosque. The hearing had been moved to Bayonne High School, to accommodate a large crowd, and wound up lasting six hours. When a group of Muslims stood to pray as the meeting convened, a group of Christians stood “in response” and recited the Lord’s Prayer, according to the Times. At the microphone, one opponent of the proposed mosque asked the board to press its organizers on what they believed. Another read violent passages out of the Koran. One woman asked, “How many people have died because of this so-called religion?” There was testimony from Coptic Christians whose relatives had been murdered by Muslims in Egypt, and who wanted that violence kept away from Bayonne. The mosque’s supporters needed five votes, but they got only four. “The Muslim Brotherhood was brought up in this meeting, for chrissakes,” someone said early on. The great New Jersey political reporter Matt Katz, now of WNYC, pointed out that this countering of the grandiose with the profane was “the Jersey-est thing said so far.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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C.B.O. Report Leaves Trump in a Political Jam on Health Care
The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump
Daily Cartoon: Tuesday, March 14th

Why Protesters Gathered Outside Peter Thiel’s Mansion This Weekend

On Saturday afternoon, a group of about fifty tech workers, attorneys, anti-surveillance activists, and other Bay Area denizens stood outside a three-story, nine-bedroom, twenty-five-million-dollar mansion. It is the home of the investor, entrepreneur, and Trump adviser Peter Thiel, who co-founded Palantir Technologies, in 2004. Thiel’s house is located on what is known as Billionaires’ Row, in San Francisco’s tony Pacific Heights, close to the Lyon Street Steps. Old-money heirs such as the Getty and Traina families, and software-industry giants, including Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, have homes nearby. Thiel’s address is not publicly listed, but Sonja Trauss, a Bay Area housing activist who, together with her colleague Laura Foote Clark, had organized the protest, was fairly certain that she had it right. “He lived there as of September 26th,” she said. Last fall, Thiel invited Trauss for breakfast to discuss local housing policy. Trauss recalled that she ate oatmeal, that Thiel had “some little quiches with a salad,” and that she had been struck by the house’s interior décor; the walls were gray with white molding, and pictures—“cityscapes, countryscapes, inoffensive stuff”—were hung in odd locations. “Places where you don’t put a picture, like too close to a ceiling or poking onto the window,” she said. “I just imagined the interior decorator being, like, ‘Peter, I have a vision.’ ”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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Latinos Feel the Sting of Trump’s Presidency
Trump’s Divisive New Travel Ban
The End of the Idea of North America

The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump

On Monday, March 20th, the House intelligence committee will hold its first open hearing on Russia’s meddling in the 2016 Presidential campaign. Because Republican leaders in the House and Senate have blocked any attempt at forming an independent committee modelled on the bipartisan 9/11 Commission to dig into the Russian cyber attack, the intelligence committee’s investigation may be the only chance Americans have at receiving a comprehensive report on the breadth of the Russian hacking.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
C.B.O. Report Leaves Trump in a Political Jam on Health Care
Taking Stock of Hate Under Trump
Twenty-Four Million Reasons the G.O.P. Health-Care Bill Is No Good

Twenty-Four Million Reasons the G.O.P. Health-Care Bill Is No Good

For days, the political world had been waiting nervously for the Congressional Budget Office’s assessment of the House Republicans’ Trump-endorsed proposal to replace Obamacare. On Monday afternoon, when the numbers-heavy report finally appeared, one figure it contained dominated all the others: twenty-four million.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
C.B.O. Report Leaves Trump in a Political Jam on Health Care
Taking Stock of Hate Under Trump
The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump

Trump Can’t Stop Himself

A few days after President John F. Kennedy made a calamitous early misstep—a carelessly planned attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro, in April, 1961—he invited Dwight D. Eisenhower, his predecessor as President, for lunch. They met at Camp David, in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains, close to Eisenhower’s Gettysburg farm. Outside the complex’s Aspen Cottage, Kennedy said, “No one knows how tough this job is until after he has been in it for a few months.” Eisenhower replied, “Mr. President, if you will forgive me, I think I mentioned that to you three months ago,” to which Kennedy said, “I certainly have learned a lot since then.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
C.B.O. Report Leaves Trump in a Political Jam on Health Care
Taking Stock of Hate Under Trump
The Unlikely Liberal Hero Adam Schiff Is Ready to Investigate Trump