Blog
June 14, 2025
Things in the US have taken a serious turn during the past week. On June 6, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ramped up its raids in Los Angeles, taking people off the streets without, in many cases, even knowing their names, ignoring the right of all people to be served a warrant if they are seized by the authorities, paying no heed to their right to legal representation.
Donald Trump’s campaign promise to deport immigrants was a promise to crackdown on, and deport, immigrants with criminal records. But after his inauguration, that policy quickly shifted to something much more aggressive. In response, over the past three months, the strategy of pushback that involved helping immigrants know their rights and assert them has disintegrated, because it is clear that ICE is not a respecter of rights.
One third of the population of LA was born in another country. In some sections of the city, the immigrant population is over 60%. If immigrant deportation was to become a national flashpoint, Los Angeles was a likely candidate as the place where this would happen.
A week ago, ICE raids in LA elicited enlarged citizen protests that were mostly nonviolent, though a few violent incidents occurred. President Trump used this to take the highly unusual step of calling in the California National Guard. The National Guard operates under the jurisdiction of state government, and by law the president steps in to use it only when the country is invaded, there's a rebellion or threat of rebellion against the government, or when the president’s extra clout is needed to enforce the laws of the United States. In a move that has even less legal basis, Trump also brought in 700 Marines to guard Federal buildings in LA’s downtown area.
An additional matter for concern is that Trump’s order to bring in the National Gurad can be implemented anywhere in the country – it is not limited to Los Angeles. And it does not require civil unrest for its implementation. Immigration Secretary Tom Homan acknowledged on Thursday that the administration plans to use the National Guard more broadly to respond to protests.
By early June, 51,000 undocumented immigrants were in detention following Trump’s inauguration. About 44% of these have not committed any crime. Their situation speaks to the complexity of the immigration issue in the US. The country relies on a large number of undocumented immigrants who pay taxes, abide by laws, and provide essential service in the hospitality industry, nursing homes, hospitals, construction, and agriculture. The US has, over many decades, lived with the reality that we rely on our undocumented, and they can have meaningful and useful lives in the US if they do not come up against the law.
The LA situation of this past week by no means required the extreme response President Trump imposed. Local law enforcement authorities were capable of handling it. Trump’s actions created an impression things were worse than they were and in turn raised the level of protest.
On Tuesday, June 10, the Mayor of Los Angeles imposed an 8 pm to 6 am curfew in an area of one square mile where most of the incidents of looting had occurred. People living in the area, and homeless people, are not subject to the curfew – only those coming into the area to protest. The last several nights have been quieter.
Governor Gavin Newsom
In the context of these events, California Governor Gavin Newsom took his place on the front line of public opposition to Donald Trump. He sued the Trump administration for illegally using in the National Guard. A San Francisco court quickly found in Newsom’s favor, but the administration immediately appealed. Now the appeals court has stayed the ruling, pending a hearing on June 17.
Last Tuesday, Newsom made a televised speech, calling out Donald Trump’s decision to send the military into LA as a response to protests, asserting that these actions have taken the nation a step further in the direction of authoritarianism, saying that this is a “perilous moment” for democracy and for the long-held norms of participatory governance.
“California may be first, but it clearly won’t end here,” Mr. Newsom said. “Other states are next. Democracy is next…. Democracy is under assault right before our eyes — the moment we’ve feared has arrived.”
Ramping up concerns about the administration’s nonconcern for normal rights of free speech, on Thursday, California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla, asked a question at a news conference on immigration in Los Angeles held by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. "I am Senator Alex Padilla I have questions for the secretary," Padilla said. Immediately several men dressed in plainclothes seized him, handcuffed him, and dragged him out of the room. He was on his knees in the hallway when someone working for Noem arrived and ordered that he be released.
Trump’s parade and citizen protests
And so, the nation awaits the coming events of June 14 with additional attention and concern. President Trump has organized a military parade in the nation’s capital, ostensibly marking 250 years since the formation of the US Army at the opening of the American Revolution in 1775, but staged on the day of Trump’s 79thbirthday. The event thus implies an authoritarian victory parade.
The citizenry will be staging the largest demonstration in opposition to the regime that we have seen since January 20. A coalition of national movements – Indivisble, the American Civil Liberties Union, Black Voters Matter, Center for Common Ground, Community Change, and over 200 other democracy-focused organizations – is leading 1,800 protest rallies in the US and seventeen other countries. Churches and other community groups that are not official sponsors are also mobilizing people to attend.
Numerous trainings have been held online during the past week to ensure that these rallies will be peaceful and that participants understand how to handle themselves if they are confronted by the authorities.
Events in Los Angeles have raised the level of commitment of these groups. In many cases, they include people who have already been active in helping immigrants to know their rights, to prepare their families in case someone gets deported, to get legal representation if they are detained, to track what happens to them when they get enmeshed in the deportation system.
All know that the plight of particular, high profile individuals helps to heighten commitment of citizen protest. The population is well aware of the cases of Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Öztürk, Jeanette Vizguerra, Mohsen Mahdawi, and many others. A glaring reality is that these personalities come from the university and economic elite, and that ordinary folks in a similar or worse plight remain part of anonymous statistics.
But one case in this latter category has received notable attention, namely the 250 deported in March to an El Salvador mega-prison, who the government claims are members of the gang Tren de Aragua. Their family members dispute these gang ties: some of the detainees were arrested because of innocent tattoos. They were deported under a 1798 act that allows deportation of citizens of an “enemy” nation. The most well-known of these is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old from El Salvador who is a Maryland resident and who was deported from the US in March. Several courts, including the US Supreme Court, ruled that Mr. Abrego Garcia was deported in error and that the government should "facilitate" his return to the US and his family. On 6 June he was returned to the US, but remains in custody. He now faces federal criminal charges in relation to an earlier dismissed indictment alleging he illegally transported undocumented migrants while still in the US.
Of course the ruthless deportation of immigrants is only one of a large number of actions of the Trump administration that arouse public concern and are the target of tomorrow’s No Kings! rallies. The elimination of US overseas aid, radical diminishing of funds for scientific endeavors, the removal of all watchdog entities within the federal government, the attack on universities and free media, abandonment of obligations with regard to the Atlantic alliance, and tariffs imposed on some of our closest traditional allies, suggest a radical departure from policies that have in the past identified our country as a humanitarian bastion.
We Are Living in a New Reality: Donald Trump 2.0
This column was posted today on the website
In the name of eradicating waste and fraud and “making America great again,” President Trump has found common cause with a highly organized 40 year project to create a “unitary presidency” and to unravel many features of the US’s regime of fairness and dignity. This project is most clearly laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a document written in part by Russell Vought, who has recently been confirmed as head of the Office of Management and Budget. President Trump has also found common cause with the wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, to whom Trump has given carte blanche under the auspices of a government department created with no congressional approval - the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE - to fire federal employees and cut agencies without any discriminatory protocols. By this means, in the past four weeks, President Trump has been presiding over the dismantling of the world’s oldest and most influential democracy.
No one questions the importance of addressing the US’s trillion-dollar debt. And it would be naïve to suppose there are no areas of the federal government where waste could be cut. Nor would anyone dispute that the US system for handling matters relating to immigration is seriously broken. Over and above these premises, it is no secret that the situation of blue-collar workers in the US has been undermined by forty years of diverting industry overseas, leaving possibilities for livelihood, pride, and meaning-making in the dust. And beyond that, angst is understandably growing everywhere in the face of the world’s breakneck speed of change, leading all of us to believe deeply in the need for new approaches to governance.
The rapidity with which Donald Trump’s government has acted would be admirable if we could see that its initiatives were leading to a thoughtful reinvention of American institutions. And we can’t entirely dismiss that possibility in a few cases. But we are now seeing individuals with little knowledge and no experience of what our government does being let loose to apply a wrecking hammer. Elon Musk’s free rein allows him to eliminate all barriers to his own business interests, to be Donald Trump’s representative in challenging guardrails and checks that protect government, to blur the division between governance and politics. Some are arguing that it is now Elon Musk, not Donald Trump, who runs the US government. All these actions suggest the imposition of an authoritarian regime that takes no notice of Congress’s role in governance.
This is not conservatism, because conservatism means slow evolution, protecting existing institutions from rapid change. It is not populism, because populism operates in the interests of the non-elite, whereas many of the programs that protect the vulnerable have been placed on the chopping block in the first four weeks of this administration. These actions amount to an authoritarian takeover, where guardrails have been destroyed, and arbitrary orders delivered that require tests of allegiance or firing. A number of these actions are clearly contrary to the wellbeing of citizens of the US, and contrary to President Trump’s campaign promises to reduce inflation and increase the welfare of Americans.
Downsizing government at what cost?
Plenty of statistics are available, and the only difficulty with providing them is that they change every day. A comprehensive list of federal government layoffs as of February 19 can be found here. Some highlights: the federal government has offered early retirement to all federal employees who wish to take this offer, and so far 75,000 have signed on, though the program has been temporarily halted by a judge who is looking into the repercussions. DOGE’s layoffs will prioritize all probationary federal workers, which means anyone who has worked for the government for less than a year. Numbers involved are not entirely clear but there were 200,000 such workers as of March 2024, whose jobs are therefore immediately on the line. 1,300 of these are at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making up one-tenth of the workforce in that body. The jobs of more seasoned civil servants are also on the line: 5,000 from the Department of Health and Human Services, 1,000 from the Department of Veterans Affairs. The Department of Education is having $900 million cut from its institute that tracks student performance, and it is unclear whether the institute will continue to exist.
Many who voted for Trump applaud all of the above as a good and necessary reduction in government spending. The crucial question is at what cost does all this occur to the American people and the country’s future as a democratic government?
Some provisional answers:
Firing seventeen Inspectors General without giving Congress the required 30 day notice removes government employees who are already doing precisely what President Trump claims he wants to do: eliminating fraud and abuse in government at the federal, state and local level. The logicality of this move can only be understood as a power play, testing the willingness of the system to push back, and showing that Trump-Musk will call the shots on how things are done even if they are being done very well already.
The directive to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs, will make it difficult for anyone to speak honestly in public about racism or exclusion because they will be open to accusations of using DEI language. This could end up being one place where the issue of free speech will be put to the test.
Trump’s announcement that the Gulf of Mexico will now be called the Gulf of America seems laughable, but when Associated Press continued to use the term Gulf of Mexico because it serves an international clientele, it was shut out of the White House press briefings. This is even more serious than it sounds, because Associated Press holds a unique position in the journalism pool for its highly trusted and longstanding role in global journalism. It is the US’s largest, and until recently the world’s largest, press agency, servicing thousands of other journalistic outlets. Trump’s action is a highly thought-out tactic to assert power and create precedents for limiting free speech.
In bulldozing Federal agencies through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has brought in a group of young people with no experience or understanding of the role played by government workers who now have to access government records and private information. The highly prized “right to privacy” is thus also being threatened. This situation plays out in its most acute form with regard to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), where Musk and his people initially attempted a level of access to information – through the Integrated Data Retrieval System - that even the head of the IRS does not have, because the need to protect this elaborate system is so prized. Fortunately, yesterday the Treasury Department cut across the White House’s acceptance of this and forbad DOGE from accessing individuals’ personal tax information, though DOGE is persisting in its bid to get access to medical files of the Social Security Administration.
With regard to the US’s stance on the global stage, the decision to cut over 800 existing programs from the US’s foreign assistance agency , USAID, and to lay off approximately 10,000 people employed by USAID, removes one of the most important means by which the US reinforces good relations with the rest of the world, quite apart from the substance of the work it does. This action is a brutal removal of humanitarian aid in numerous areas.
Abandoning Ukraine’s fight for freedom
Blaming Ukraine for the war it is fighting is a blatant untruth and a declaration that the US is no longer the world’s ultimate defender of freedom. US actions in the past week in relation to Ukraine have raised questions for Europeans about whether the longstanding Atlantic Alliance still stands. And the Trump administration’s criticism of the EU because “it has too many rules” and thus interferes with the goals of American tech companies has reinforced concern about the demise of trans-Atlantic ties. Comments one columnist, “The era of international gangsterism has arrived.”
In addition, Trump’s government has placed our justice system under assault. A series of examples of this are available, but consider, as one case, the offer made to New York Mayor Eric Adams to have his corruption indictment removed if he cooperates with the Federal Government’s immigration agenda as it relates to New York City. The prosecutor who was ordered to drop the case, a Republican who had, in her early career, clerked for two of our most far-right Supreme Court Justices, resigned immediately, and seven other prosecutors have followed suit. Now four deputy mayors of New York City are threatening to resign as a vote of no-confidence in their Mayor. People are taking a costly stand against Trump’s Justice Department, because they see a blatant attempt to introduce political manipulation into the legal system.
In sum, these actions and others threaten to endanger us all if they alienate us from our allies, undermine our dedication to truth, freedom and global humanitarian solidarity, and produce an apathetic population that is amenable to a power grab.
Highlighting the courageous actions of individuals who have found ways to push back is one valuable service we writers can provide. Another is to help our readers keep perspective on the larger significance of this turn of events.
Can we grow to meet our global challenges?
The emergence of so many democratically elected far-right governments that are questioning long-held assumptions about fair, just and inclusive politics, underlines that humanity is at a turning point. “Turning point” language has been used many times before but has never been more true. This moment of truth is prompted by the coalescence of a number of mounting challenges: pressures of immigration, climate change, shifts in understanding of the nature of morality and values, disrupted economic patterns caused by the pandemic, failures over the past forty years to address the economic realities of the hardest working people in a number of countries, not least the world’s wealthiest country, an overly intellectualized university-educated elite that lacks attunement to core economic needs of people not like them, accumulating power of a small number of the very wealthy, and a shifting international security picture that allows older assumptions to be called into question.
A large body of people exists globally who believe very significant changes are needed for us to be able to function on the planet both within our countries and in our relationships to others. Tensions between realism about a range of economic considerations, and concerns about justice, dignity and fairness, underlie the debate for even the most sincere and least self-serving people.
We, the residents of this planet, don’t have fully developed answers to these large conundrums. But we have many of the raw materials to create answers, if we will choose to use them. This is a moment of deciding who we are. It is not an academic matter, it is an existential matter. It is a time for those who believe we can grow to meet our challenges to find common cause by embracing essential honesty about our situation and truth in our discussions.
For Americans the future has arrived
The events of the past week force Americans to pull out of hibernation and get to grips with what is to come. Please see my post on the website of We Are One Humanity.
https://www.weareonehumanity.org/contributing-writers/kti0y21isenomhtk97iylsiu50brdo
American Bounty
This week Americans travel home for Thanksgiving. In spite of inclement weather forecasts, a record eighty million people will be on the move. Families will reconnect, turkey will be eaten, football will be watched. Traditionally we thank God for the extraordinary bounty of this country.
But many of us are right now feeling the ache of an election that divided us existentially. Nearly half of those who voted believe that the country is in danger: the stated determination of Donald Trump, the great disrupter, to throw into disarray institutions that have safeguarded this two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment in democracy is a heartache. We are grieving. Those who voted for him did not necessarily like him – though some did. But a common thread among his supporters was a sense of desperation with things as they are.
We hope this Thanksgiving time will help us affirm all that we love and to deepen our connections with things and people that matter to us.
Why did the Democrats lose? Kamala Harris has largely been credited for running an excellent campaign, and her debate performance against Donald Trump on September 10 was remarkably good. Her weaknesses were that she did not address the immigration crisis and the economy adequately. She ran on democracy and abortion, and those proved not to be enough.
She was hampered by the process by which she became the nominee. By announcing before he chose her as his vice-presidential candidate in 2020 that he intended to choose a woman, Joe Biden made it hard for her to shake off an aura of his “diversity” choice. This tainted her in the eyes of the right, who have made what they call “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) the butt of their disparagement. Mr. Biden’s failure to bow out of the race a year earlier denied us Democratic primaries where candidates would have been tested. Then there is the fact that it has been extremely rare for a vice-president to follow their sitting president into office. George H.W. Bush did it in the 1988 election. The president who did it before Bush was Martin Van Buren in 1836. This is because it is so difficult to defend the record of your predecessor while trying to assert your distinctive potential. All this in addition to Harris having to overcome standard prejudices about a black female candidate.
Harris was also seriously hampered by the Democratic Party’s more longstanding confusion over its essence and role. The Democratic Party has come to represent the meritocracy of the elite, and in the process, the party has lost its attunement with working people and its traditional primary focus on the disadvantaged. Instead, its emphasis on cultural identity as an approach to empowerment has taken that to extremes, as seen with transgender issues that do not resonate with large numbers and make the party seem out of touch. In a country that has shifted to the right since 1980, Democrats have seen their passion for economic equality trashed as “Marxism” by the other party. The trick is to find a left-of-center position that resonates with a country whose composite national outlook falls to the right-of-center.
Of course, a party that feels no inhibitions about lying or about indulging in crowd-pleasing denigration is, unfortunately, going to have an advantage. Trump created and played on fear. He trumped up beliefs that the illegal immigrants of this country are taking jobs away from others who want them and making people unsafe, even though crime rates of immigrants are generally low. His reported intention to deport large numbers of illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes will draw down on numbers working in agriculture and contribute to rising food prices.
But the key point about the Trump victory is that Trump was able to appeal to a very large and disaffected group who believe they have been left out when it comes to sharing in the purpose, culture and bounty of this country.
People were incensed about inflation, but the problem was greater than that. In the years since 1981, the gap between the rich and poor in America has brutally widened. Wages have remained stagnant, while tax deductions for the wealthy have increased exponentially. In 2021, America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 139 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Trade unions have all but disappeared. Ronald Reagan’s administration removed regulation of guardrails on companies and limitations on stock buybacks. NAFTA (passed in the Clinton administration) encouraged sending basic industries overseas, leaving whole towns in the midwest with no livelihood. It was also on Bill Clinton’s watch that welfare ceased to be an open-ended entitlement from the federal government. Instead, money is now given as block grants to states, which distribute it according to their own formulas, often including a requirement that a person be working in order to get welfare. The new system introduced caps on length of time aid could be given and fines for those who did not comply with aspects of the regulations.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, brought to America’s attention a few days ago that General Motors just last week laid off 1,000 workers, having laid off 1,500 workers last summer. The company mumbled that their bottom line could not meet the costs of paying these workers, but Reich reports that GM’s profits for this year will surpass its 2022 record profit of $14.5 billion. GM CEO Mary Barra’s compensation for 2024 is slated to be $27.8 million, making the ratio of her compensation to that of the average worker 303:1.
Historians tell us that revolutions happen not when things reach their worst but when things start getting better. At that point expectations rise, and then when things don’t continue to improve, people protest. The pandemic, interestingly, has ended up helping many in the workforce who benefitted from the hiatus during which they had federal assistance and were freed up to look for better paying jobs. Large numbers have moved from the service industry (restaurants, hotels, et cetera) into tech, which grew enormously during the pandemic. This raised expectations and gave people more sense of power, enhancing their hopes for more.
But the lives of those at the very bottom of the economic ladder may well have been permanently disrupted by the pandemic. COVID-19 mortality rates affected the economically disadvantaged disproportionately. Millions of Americans in the lower socio-economic tier are still suffering that psychological shock, as well as experiencing a disruption of the fragile economic balance of their lives. Government handouts during the pandemic reduced the poverty rate on the short term. Trump instituted those handouts, but it was left to Biden to end them once COVID-19 had receded. He had to do it, but he did it just as inflation was hotting up.
All of the above provides some background to the anger and the welcoming of disruptive populist politics we saw during the presidential election on November 5.
Will Donald Trump be able to meet the expectations of those who elected him? Right now, we don’t yet know which of his policy promises will come to fruition in his administration. Cabinet nominations indicate that in most cases loyalty to himself is a more important criterion than experience with the substance of the position. Six of his nominees had a role in preparing the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Project, a policy blueprint for the new administration that reorganizes the federal bureaucracy to further a conservative agenda, greatly enhancing the powers of the presidency. It encourages Mr. Trump in his plan to fire as many as 50,000 civil servants in the federal government and designate their jobs as political appointments, thus allowing him to fill the bureaucracy with more loyal followers. Mr. Trump promises to place tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China on day one – an action that will result in further inflation. He also promises to lower corporate taxes from 21 percent to 15 percent, further enriching the wealthy.
Mr. Trump’s promise to improve the economic lives of working people seems unlikely to be achieved with such policies.
Privileged Americans have always been able to be complacent about the bounty and possibilities of this country. But in a country whose ethos of self-help seems bottomless, the disinclination to use government to redistribute resources has been a no-no written into the culture. This is a country founded, in the minds of many people, on an idea that freedom consists of minimal government action. Inroads into this mindset were made during the period bookended by Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Subsequently the pushback has been enormous, making Barack Obama’s success in passing a broader health insurance system that still left over twenty million uninsured a near miracle. What this election has made clear is that working people see through intellectualized notions of empowerment. They respond to words that resonate with their experience.
As we approach this Thanksgiving Day, we are thankful that our recent election occurred without violence. We recognize anew that our precious democracy requires participation and vigilance from all of us and we prepare ourselves to discover new ways to do that. And we ask ourselves, at a time when the frustrations of our workforce have been brought before us afresh, can we imagine a country that can redefine itself from being a self-help, me-first collective that denies its obligations to those left behind, to a country determined to allow everyone to thrive?