Excerpt: The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.

The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.

With one day’s notice, and threats of arrest if anyone trans drives. Serves no purpose beyond cruelty.

The very definition of cruel and unusual punishment.

Excerpt: “It sounds like this poor woman was basically railroaded out of the country in the dead of night with barely a whimper,” said Kevin Johnson, the former dean of UC Davis’ School of Law and a legal leader in immigration law.
Estrada Juarez is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that began under President Barack Obama’s administration that has shielded people from deportation if they arrived in the U.S. as children and have not been convicted of a crime. In 2014, the federal government also granted her permission to leave and re-enter the country to visit a sick family member in Mexico.

Last year, after her daughter turned 21 — the minimum age at which a U.S. citizen can sponsor a parent — Estrada Juarez applied for lawful permanent residency, or a green card. She has no criminal history and is a regional manager for Motel 6.

“We tried to do things the right way,” said her daughter Damaris Bello, who also attended Wednesday’s appointment.

During the appointment, Estrada Juarez and her daughter said immigration agents cited a prior expedited removal order issued in 1998 when she entered the country alone at 15. Estrada Juarez said she was unaware of the order and would have not applied for permanent residency or attended the appointment if she had known about it.

Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, in a written statement on Sunday, said “DACA does not confer any form of legal status in this country” and encouraged those with the status to self-deport. She added that Estrada Juarez received “full due process,” was previously issued “a final order of removal from a judge” in 1998 and “illegally re-entered” the U.S.

Estrada Juarez denied ever standing in front of a judge or receiving an order of removal.

DHS did not respond to follow up questions attempting to clarify the discrepancy, including a request for documentation of the removal order. A search of Estrada’s Juarez’s record in a federal immigration database did not garner any results. …

Me again: They’re lying. The feds are always lying.

Excerpt: When 37-year-old Jose Argueta reported his car stolen in Maryland in November, he did not realize he had set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to him spending Christmas at an immigrant detention center.

But, he recently alleged as part of an ongoing lawsuit, that’s what happened.

Argueta said that in early December, he received a call from someone claiming to be with D.C.’s police department, telling him they had found his stolen car and asking that he pick it up at a station in Northeast Washington. After he walked in to the police station, he said he was handcuffed and taken into custody by officers, one of whom had the word “ICE” on his shirt. They told him they had used information from the stolen vehicle report to determine Argueta was in the country illegally.

“They tricked me into coming to the station to arrest me,” he said. “I was just trying to get my car back, but it was all a lie.”

Excerpt: “He showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance,” the spokesperson said in the statement.

Me again: They’re lying. The feds are always lying.

Excerpt: Rahman told the Democracy Now broadcast on Wednesday that she had been standing silently before she was arrested.

“No buttons, no facial expressions, no gestures, no signs, not one sound,” Rahman said. “There are only two things you can do at the State of the Union, and they are, sit down and stand up. All kinds of people were standing up all night. Me too. I stood up at the moment that I heard this man say some of the most racist things I have heard come out of any leader’s mouth about the people of my city.”

When asked about Rahman’s claim that she was standing silently, a Capitol police spokesperson told the Guardian in an email: “It’s not allowed. She was told to sit. She refused. It’s simple.”

The only valid reason for anyone who’s not a fascist to attend the State of the Union is to disrupt the speech, or somehow challenge the spectacle. Anyone who attends without disruption or challenge is either a fascist or ‘fascist-friendly’.

Excerpt: It might look like something from the early days of the internet, with its aggressively grey color scheme and rectangles nested inside rectangles, but FPDS.gov is one of the most important resources for keeping tabs on what powerful spying tools U.S. government agencies are buying. It includes everything from phone hacking technology, to masses of location data, to more Palantir installations.

Or rather, it was an incredible tool and the basis for countless of my own investigations and others. Because on Wednesday, the government shut it down. Its replacement, another site called SAM.gov with Uncle Sam branding, frankly sucks, and makes it demonstrably harder to reliably find out what agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are spending tax payers dollars on.

“FPDS may have been a little clunky, but its simple, old-school interface made it extremely functional and robust. Every facet of government operations touches on contracting at one point, and this was the first tool that many investigative journalists and researchers would reach for to quickly find out what the government is buying and who is selling it, and how these contracts all fit together,” Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me.

I’ve used FPDS to reveal ICE paid Palantir tens of millions of dollars for work on “complete target analysis of known populations” (which then led to a leak from inside Palantir describing the company’s new work for ICE); figure out Customs and Border Protection (CBP) spent millions of dollars on software that uses AI to detect “sentiment and emotion” in online posts; and identify the multiple agencies that bought access to a massive, and warrantless, database of peoples’ travel histories.

Fresh from guzzling beer with the hockey bozos, Patel gets back to retaliation for Trump.

The New York Times‘ headline, “Justice Department sues University of California over antisemitism,” is another lie.

Excerpt: rich, white, male, Conservative owners has resulted in a lazy U.S. press that reflects the interests of ownership. As a result you get a lot of feckless “he said, she said” coverage that struggles to report the actual truth, peppered with infotainment and agitprop.

This consolidated media ownership broadly normalizes Trump and Trumpism because it represents the sort of things affluent media ownership likes (deregulation, corporate tax breaks, unaccountable subsidies, rubber stamped merger approvals). But when there’s a meaningful progressive challenge to establishment norms (as we saw with coverage NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani,) the fangs quickly come out.

You saw that recently during Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s trip to the Munich Security Conference, where the press went out of their way to criticize her for some relatively innocuous comments about Taiwan. Outlets like the New York Times, which will endlessly normalize Trump’s incoherent rambling, spent extra time making a news cycle out of AOC saying “um” a few times during a question response…

Such legislation will never pass, and would be overturned by the courts, but I respect the effort.

Excerpt: Communication platform Discord is under fire after its identity verification software, Persona Identities, was found to have front-end code accessible on the open internet and on government servers.

Sounds a little Bay of Pigsy.