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Stephen Miller runs DHS and the DOJ and now has a rapidly expanding army under his command

Stephen Miller runs DHS and the DOJ and now has a rapidly expanding army under his command

Jason Zengerle writes: Stephen Miller was livid. It was a couple of months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, and Mr. Miller, a senior White House adviser, believed that the federal government was not doing nearly enough to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States. In a relentless round of meetings, phone calls and emails, he reached deep into the federal bureaucracy and, according to a former Department of Homeland Security official, berated mid- and low-level bureaucrats inside the…

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ICE is now the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history

ICE is now the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history

Garrett Graff writes: No healthy law enforcement agency can grow quickly. And ICE is far from a healthy law enforcement agency. ICE’s annual budget is about $10 billion a year, and the new legislation is about to hand it about nearly untold billions more — including $30 billion for hiring staff and conducting deportations and $45 billion for detention operations, as well as about $46 billion for border security construction, which could include the border wall and more detention facilities….

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Trump regime’s assault on free speech faces judicial scrutiny through a First Amendment lawsuit

Trump regime’s assault on free speech faces judicial scrutiny through a First Amendment lawsuit

Politico reports: A trial on a First Amendment lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s drive to deport pro-Palestinian academics quickly confronted a thorny legal issue Monday: whether foreigners in the U.S. enjoy the same free speech rights as American citizens. The administration’s stance on that critical question proved murky. Under questioning by U.S. District Judge William Young in his Boston courtroom, Justice Department attorney Victoria Santora initially said non-citizens have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. “People in the United…

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The economic consequences of Trump’s big ugly bill

The economic consequences of Trump’s big ugly bill

John Cassidy writes: Ever since Trump came down the escalator at Trump Tower ten years ago, he has portrayed himself as a gilded avenger of the toiling masses. At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last July, Vance famously remarked, “We’re done, ladies and gentlemen, catering to Wall Street—we’ll commit to the working man.” The results of November’s election showed that the G.O.P. was, indeed, making progress in working-class areas. But, after Friday’s signing ceremony, what is left of Trump’s…

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New York Times faces scrutiny over Mamdani hit piece

New York Times faces scrutiny over Mamdani hit piece

Dan Froomkin writes: The sad fact is that there is nothing terribly out of character about the New York Times’s decision to publish a deceptive hit piece about New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, based on hacked data supplied by a noted eugenicist to whom they granted anonymity. The newsroom will go to extreme lengths to achieve its primary missions — and one of them, most assuredly, is to take cheap shots at the left. You can see it almost…

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Melting glaciers might trigger volcanic eruptions around the globe, study finds

Melting glaciers might trigger volcanic eruptions around the globe, study finds

Live Science reports: Melting glaciers could make volcanic eruptions more explosive and frequent, worsening climate change in the process, scientists have warned. Hundreds of volcanoes in Antarctica, Russia, New Zealand, and North America rest beneath glaciers. But as the planet warms and these ice sheets melt and retreat, these volcanoes are likely to become more active, according to the authors of a new study analyzing the activity of six volcanoes in southern Chile during the last ice age. The researchers…

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The Democratic establishment needs to catch up with voters on Israel

The Democratic establishment needs to catch up with voters on Israel

Peter Beinart writes: To grasp the significance of Zohran Mamdani’s shocking victory in last month’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York, it’s worth recalling another upset, which took place 11 years ago and some 300 miles to the south, in a Republican congressional primary near Richmond, Va. In 2014 Dave Brat, a little-known economics professor at Randolph-Macon College, challenged Eric Cantor, who was then the House majority leader. Mr. Brat was outspent by a margin of more than 10…

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Trump’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian activists goes to trial in Boston

Trump’s effort to deport pro-Palestinian activists goes to trial in Boston

Politico reports: At least five times in recent weeks, federal judges have forcefully rejected President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport pro-Palestinian student activists, issuing one stinging ruling after another to declare the efforts unconstitutional — with one judge comparing the deportation drive to the Red Scare. The five foreign-born academics, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Yunseo Chung, Rumeysa Ozturk and Badar Khan Suri, were all targeted by the Trump administration after Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared their presence in the…

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‘Blood for food’: The American soldier-spies sidelining UN aid work in Gaza

‘Blood for food’: The American soldier-spies sidelining UN aid work in Gaza

Anas Baba reports: What does it take to get food today in Gaza? It involves a perilous journey that I took myself. I faced Israeli military fire, private U.S. contractors pointing laser beams at my forehead, crowds with knives fighting for rations, and masked thieves — to get food from a group supported by the U.S. and Israel called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or GHF. Every day since the group began offering food on May 26, thousands of hungry Palestinians…

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From Bush’s war on terror to Trump’s war on immigrants

From Bush’s war on terror to Trump’s war on immigrants

Axios reports: Mass surveillance. Pre-emptive military strikes in the Middle East. Shipping people to domestic and foreign prisons. Citing national security to hide information from the courts. Labeling people as “terrorists” as a political and legal strategy. Why it matters: Donald Trump became president in part by running against the legacy of George W. Bush, the last Republican in the White House before him. But now Trump is supercharging many of the post-9/11 legal, tactical and political strategies Bush used. Driving the news: Trump’s push to…

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Meteorologists say the National Weather Service did its job accurately predicting flood risk in Texas

Meteorologists say the National Weather Service did its job accurately predicting flood risk in Texas

Wired reports: Some local and state officials have said that insufficient forecasts from the National Weather Service caught the region off guard. That claim has been amplified by pundits across social media, who say that cuts to the NWS and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, its parent organization, inevitably led to the failure in Texas. But meteorologists who spoke to WIRED say that the NWS accurately predicted the risk of flooding in Texas and could not have foreseen the…

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Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR

Why evangelicals turned their back on PEPFAR

Peter Wehner writes: In 2006, Ambassador Mark Dybul, then the United States global AIDS coordinator, visited an orphanage run by the Daughters of Charity in Ethiopia. It was a sanctuary for more than 400 HIV-positive babies and young children found in garbage heaps, abandoned on the roadside, or left at the orphanage door. As Dybul and Michael Gerson, then a senior policy adviser to President George W. Bush, walked through the massive campus, they came to the dining hall, where…

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American academics being offered ‘scientific asylum’ in France

American academics being offered ‘scientific asylum’ in France

The Guardian reports: It was on a US-bound flight in March, as Brian Sandberg stressed about whether he would be stopped at security, that the American historian knew the time had come for him to leave his home country. For months, he had watched Donald Trump’s administration unleash a multipronged attack on academia – slashing funding, targeting international students and deeming certain fields and even keywords off limits. As his plane approached the US, it felt as though the battle…

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Trump’s war against immigrants threatens the freedom of all Americans

Trump’s war against immigrants threatens the freedom of all Americans

Chandran Kukathas writes: The tactics of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda have shifted from time to time, but the broader objective has remained consistent: to deport as many people as possible and, more broadly, to transform the restrictions and reach of America’s immigration system. President Trump and members of his administration believe they have a democratic mandate to do this. Their ultimate fear is that outsiders pose a danger to American values — the threat of not just taking our…

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