Summary
The Trump administration plans to revoke temporary legal status for 240,000 Ukrainians who fled Russia’s war, fast-tracking them for deportation.
The move is part of a broader effort to strip protections from 1.8 million migrants admitted under Biden’s humanitarian parole programs.
Trump’s policies also target 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
Legal challenges are mounting, as affected individuals face uncertain futures. Advocates warn that even U.S. allies, such as Afghans who assisted the military, are now at risk of detention and deportation.
Sometimes I feel like I was the only one who remembered that this is what it was like the last time he was in office. Just every day some fresh hell, like a treadmill of anger and grief until the only real reason to protest is so that they don’t drive you permanently numb.
The scope of this new order is hard to contemplate. 0.77 million people who are being shown the door today. Our colossus is in need of a new credo.
Edit to add: I know that it is currently only a plan. I do not need to bicker with anyone about this.
I feel like it’s worse this time. Darker. We didn’t have the Ukraine or Israeli war. We didn’t have perverse AI videos like the Gaza video with a giant golden Trump statue.
2016 was the rise of Trump. Right now we are in the age of Trump. Trump is steadily increasing his power and I believe fairly soon he will be able to more or less unilaterally control the federal government as he continues his purges.
That is a large amount of people being sent back to a country where there is a good possibility that they will be killed. The country that is throwing them out (the US) has a lot of sympathetic people to their cause…and a lot of easily accessible guns.
Im not American so I probably didn’t see a lot of this but my lasting impression was a lot of blustering and shit slinging but no real action or substance. Like everything he tried or promised either didn’t get done or was half arsed. Basically i saw it as incompetence and damage through inaction rather than the malicious active damage he is doing now.
You are partially right. For US Presidents, implementing policy is much harder than declaring it, something IIRC Bush and Obama echoed.
But on top of that, Trump had a lot of guardrails in the first term, a lot of old school Republicans and “regular” cabinet that watered down whatever ideas he had.
That is no longer the case. It’s only loyalists egging each other on now. And there’s already a lot more bite, it’s just so much that it’s hard to process.
He did a huge amount of harm to our government. Not quite like this time, where most of what he is doing is outright illegal and is essentially a soft coup, but really bad nonetheless - just mostly aimed at making him money and getting/keeping political power instead of destryoying the country. Much of that was outright illegal, but a lot of it was just breaches of “norms” and “decorum”.
I literally can’t fit it all into one comment, its so much and such a convoluted web of schemes and lies and crimes and support from other politicians/lawyers/the media. And every day was something new. I followed all the legal cases relating to his admin back in the first term - it was hard to keep up with even while it was all happening. Much of the reason he was never charged or indicted for so much of what he did is that you can’t criminally indict a sitting president.
The Mueller investigation into the Trump administration’s conduct with Russian political operatives found that he more than likely illegally colluded with Russia to the detriment of the US and to defraud and disenfranchise voters, but literally couldn’t charge Trump since he was a sitting president - hoping instead that someone would pick up the investigation when he could be charged. It is notable that that investigation produced 37 indictments and 7 convictions/guilty pleas, referred 14 more cases to DoJ for prosecution, and recovered like $48M in misappropriated government funds (the investigation cost $32M, so it was actually profitable). So, this investigation couldn’t prosecute Trump, but 34 people in his administration were indicted and the findings of the report suggested they would have prosecuted Trump if they were legally allowed to. That says all you need to know, IMO.
It drove me crazy how much people acted like the Mueller investigation exonerated Trump completely. It absolutely did not and everyone just dropped the topic after it came out. Even Rachel Maddow who seemed to be desperately chasing her Woodward and Bernstein moment with her coverage of the investigation seemed to stop talking about the investigation as soon as the report came out as if there wasn’t anything to talk about, even though a bunch of Trump allies were charged and convicted for engaging in secret dealings with agents related to Russia.
MSNBC at the end of the day is a for-profit business.
Not being able to indict a sitting president is the biggest bullshit policy of all time. Nobody should be above the law, especially the people in power.
It was also only based upon a DOJ memo of some sorts for a long time. The “Supreme Court”'s recent decision though makes it seem like the only legal remedy for an active criminal president is to impeach and then convict and remove them first.
This becomes what russian hegemonic law looks like in the US. The DOJ does whatever the Kremlin wants or needs on this, a sharp departure from other administrations or even other jurisdictions such as blue states. We become a patchwork of neomedieval geoplitical clashes constantly caught in between the jurisprudential spheres of entirely conflicting global and financial agendas. Individual politicians and public servants serving throughout the government become agents of different global factions and different hegemonies and the people are continually subjected not just to unstable and unreliable patterns of legal text and texts indicating some kind of public policy but to endlessly shifting pretext of every type to the jurisprudence and statecraft themselves. The federal government has been collapsing for a while but this just makes it faster than it has been.
Yeah, his first time around there were people who kept his worst ideas from being realized and drove away the worst of his associates. This time around those people are gone and he is surrounded by those associates and even worse people like Musk.
I remember stories from Trump’s first term about how his handlers had to babysit him and do things like hide his rough drafts of orders planning to go to war (he’d calm down and forget about them by the next day). It reminds me of the (hopefully apocryphal) story of how Nixon had to be lead to bed when he got roaring drunk and started threatening to nuke North Korea.
The staffers also preserved the documents he (illegally) shredded as a matter of habit, so scholars will hopefully be able to piece together what was going on in that hot mess someday.
None of those handlers are there this term. Trump spent the four years since his first term campaigning and gathering a crew of sycophantic parasites to do his bidding, and we have no view into what’s going on behind closed doors. The “checks and balances” every American was taught about as a child seem to be doing nothing, with him flagrantly ignoring them without reprisal.
I hope the US gets out of this as an intact democracy and without alienating every single ally in existence. People here don’t seem to realize how bad an antagonistic America would be - they have the military and logistics to take on half the world without nukes, and Trump has been very open (almost giddy) about his willingness to use those.
And a civil war would be worse since the government is wholly controlled by what most
wouldshould consider the bad guys and the military is trained to follow the chain of command, and Trump is openly purging top officials and replacing them with loyalists.Ugh, sorry for the rant. The last decade has been exhausting.
That’s because the first term was to prepare
Golden Arches works, but now we can use Golden Dome too.
Yeah his first term was mind-melting, nonstop nonsense. Same again now but even worse. I can’t believe people are so easily capable of forgetting.