Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
My post about how badly visitors to the US are treated by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in the US, with them being sent to detention centers and kept in prison-like conditions without access to lawyers and other contacts, may have prompted questions in readers minds about exactly what rights they have when trying to enter the US. The answer is: not much. This article describes what can happen. There are a whole array of scenarios that can unfold depending on the type of visa you have and the mood of the ICE agents processing you.
The reason that you have almost no rights is because being on the ground in the US but before you are allowed by ICE to pass through immigration means that you are in a kind of no-man’s-land where the laws do not apply.
“If you’re a foreign national, first understand you haven’t affected an entry despite being physically on US soil until you’re admitted properly,” said immigration attorney Michael Wildes, managing partner of Wildes and Weinberg and a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.
“It’s a term of art when you’re admitted fully to the United States,” he said. When a person lands on US soil but is not technically admitted, “you might be considered to be what’s called an ‘arriving alien’.
“You have greater rights as a criminal than as a foreign national coming with a visa.”
Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former director of global public policy at Meta’s precursor, Facebook, has written a best-seller Careless People that describes her former employer as having a culture that is pretty much what you would expect from one run by tech bros.
The memoir is an “ugly, detailed portrait of one of the most powerful companies in the world”, wrote Jennifer Szalai in the New York Times. Wynn-Williams “had a front-row seat to some of Facebook’s most ignominious episodes”.
Jasmine Mooney is a Canadian who got caught in the nightmare that is run by ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) and held for nearly two weeks in appalling conditions because of a slight suspected irregularity in her visa documentation. Even though she offered to buy a ticket to return to Canada, they moved her around to various harsh detention detentions before finally releasing her. She has now written about her experience.
Many people from other parts of the world are treated like dirt by ICE agents. Why I have chosen to highlight her particular story is for three reasons. One is that if a young, white, fairly affluent, Canadian woman could be treated like this, one can only shudder at what poor people of color from other countries experience. The second is that she can write in the first person in English and that makes her story more compelling and accessible to English speakers than others. The third is that while she was shuttled around the various detention centers, she spoke with other women she was herded with and wrote about their stories. What emerges is that many of them were seized and imprisoned for minor visa irregularities but treated as if they were dangerous criminals.
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Since they cannot get to him since he lives in the cocoon that all rich people can put around themselves, they are going after Teslas.
The Las Vegas police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are investigating a blaze set at Tesla showroom as potential terrorism. The FBI is probing at least three other incidents of Molotov cocktails hurled at Tesla facilities since January, including one in Kansas City, Missouri, that took place on the same night as the alleged arson in Nevada.
In Las Vegas, in the middle of the night on Tuesday, a cluster of Tesla vehicles were set on fire as they sat in a lot at a Tesla collision center, according to the Las Vegas metropolitan police department. Security cameras caught a person dressed in all black tossing what appeared to be Molotov cocktails into the vehicles at approximately 2.45am.
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What do the following people have in common: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried, George Santos, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, Dr. Oz, Yuval Noah Harari, Barack Obama, Sam Harris, Elizabeth Holmes, Steven Pinker, and Jordan Peterson? According to Nathan J. Robinson writing in Current Affairs, they are all bullshitters.
So what constitutes a bullshitter?
The clearest philosophical exposition of a Theory of Bullshit was put forth by Harry Frankfurt in his short classic On Bullshit. Frankfurt argued that bullshit was different than lying, and in some ways worse. A liar knows what they are saying is false. A bullshitter doesn’t care whether it is true or false. The liar has not abandoned all understanding of truth, but they are deliberately trying to manipulate people into thinking things are otherwise than they actually are, whereas the bullshitter has simply stopped checking whether the statements they are making have any resemblance to reality:
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The US seems to be following the path of authoritarian countries around the world in steadily abrogating the rights of people. One of the ways that this was done in many countries was to do away with such niceties as requiring warrants for the search of homes or the arrest of people.
Now the Trump gang is actually defying court orders, deporting people even after a federal judge ordered them not to.
The US deported more than 250 mainly Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador despite a US judge’s ruling to halt the flights on Saturday after Donald Trump controversially invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law meant only to be used in wartime.
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, said 238 members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and 23 members of the Salvadoran gang MS-13 had arrived and were in custody as part of a deal under which the US will pay the Central American country to hold them in its 40,000-person capacity “terrorism confinement centre”.
The confirmation came hours after a US federal judge expanded his ruling temporarily blocking the Trump administration from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority that allows the president broad leeway on policy and executive action to speed up mass deportations.
The US district judge James Boasberg had attempted to halt the deportations for all individuals deemed eligible for removal under Trump’s proclamation, which was issued on Friday. Boasberg also ordered deportation flights already in the air to return to the US.
“Oopsie … Too late,” Bukele posted online, followed by a laughing emoji.
Soon after Bukele’s statement, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, thanked El Salvador’s leader.
The law is just a joke to these people, to be ignored if they do not like it.
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Texas Republican congressman Keith Self is chair of a a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee and during a hearing, he turned to Sarah McBride, a member of the panel and is transgender and referred to her as “Mr. McBride”, deliberately misgendering her because he is, of course, a transphobic bigoted jerk and this is what the Republican party now consists of.
I have got to hand it to McBride. Without missing a beat or showing any outward sign of anger, she replied “Thank you, madam chair’.
A fellow Democrat on the panel Bill Keating of Massachusetts then interjected and demanded that Self refer to McBride properly. Self tried to bat away the implication that he was a bigot by the usual evasion ‘that he was only following orders’ to argue that he was merely doing what the House of Representatives had decided but Keating was having none of it and kept insisting that Self refer to McBride properly. Self then adjourned the meeting.
Watch.
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I am sad to report that Kevin Drum’s wife Marian posted on his blog that he had died on Friday, March 7th. In 2014, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, the severity of which fluctuated with the various treatments that he underwent. He wrote openly about his travails with the disease but was never self-pitying or maudlin.
I was a regular reader of his blog starting from the days when he started out as a private blogger Calpundit in 2003 and then moving on to start the blog Political Animal at the Washington Monthly magazine, then to blogging at Mother Jones, before going back to a personal blog again, now called Jabberwocking, in 2021.
While I did not always agree with his politics (he was a little too mainstream liberal, centrist Democrat for my taste), I respected him for his data-driven approach to the news. He wrote well and would take news items and subject them to rigorous fact-checking and often present the results in the form of easy-to-understand charts. He was a big advocate of the idea that lead was a major cause of aggressive behavior in people and I found his arguments and the data he presented in support of it persuasive.
He was a sane, positive, stabilizing presence in the chaotic world of internet punditry and he will be missed.
