A January 2, 2026 PBS NewsHour interview with Richard Grenell, President Trump’s choice to lead the now renamed Trump-Kennedy Center was a classic lesson in evasiveness.
According to The New Yorker, Kennedy Center staff and others often liken Grenell to Grendel, the “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” in Beowulf. In his PBS interview, he showed he has another talent.
Richard Grenell
Co-Anchor Amna Nawaz led off with a direct question, asking him to respond to a report that a number of artists had chosen to cancel or pull out of performances at the Center because of the president’s takeover of the Center’s board and the renaming of the Kennedy Center.
“Chocolate milk,” Grenell replied.
Well, not exactly.
That’s how I characterize non-answers.
Grenell might as well have said “chocolate milk” because his response completely ignored the question and immediately veered off into an allegation that NewsHour had consistently failed to cover the Center’s finances.
“At the Trump-Kennedy Center, we have 19 unions. It’s incredibly expensive to go and put on performances,” he whined. “We cannot have unpopular programming that doesn’t pay the bills.”
“How about ticket sales at the Center.,” Nawas asked. ‘Are ticket sales down? Is that confirmed or not?”
Grenell’s response. “I find it to be outrageous that PBS is not reporting on the phenomenon that arts institutions have been having for decades. Since President Trump has arrived at the now Trump-Kennedy Center, we have raised more than $130 million, blowing away all other fund-raising, and that’s corporate donors who are coming back because they trust the programming.”
In other words, “Chocolate milk”.
And so it went, on and on.
Nawas said, “Viewership for the Kennedy Center Honors were down dramatically. Does that — as a steward of this institution, does all of this, the backlash, the headlines about artists pulling out, the fact that so few people paid attention to the Honors, does that worry you?”
Grenell: “If you go to CBS, they will tell you that the CBS Trump-Kennedy Center Honors this year tied for number one in its demographic.” In other words, it did well with a specific segment of the tv audience in that time period, not total viewers.
In other words, “Chocolate milk”.
Politicians have long evaded media questions, but Trump and his minions have raised it to an art form, figuring there’s little or no downside these days to giving a word salad answer or sequeing to a completely unrelated topic.
Donald Trump himself is the role model for his administration in this behavior.
His stream-of-consciousness speaking style, involving long seemingly unscripted statements that veer from topic to topic, is a practiced deceit allowing him to avoid directly answering questions. He has referred to his meandering speaking style as the purposeful “weave”. In his case, however, it could just as well be a rambling sign of muddled thinking and cognitive decline.
Piece by piece, President Donald Trump is dismantling America’s representation and reputation around the world.
With about 80 U.S. ambassador posts worldwide already vacant, the Trump administration has abruptly recalled nearly 30 career ambassadors at U.S. embassies around the world. They’ve been directed to vacate their posts by Jan. 15 or 16, 2026. Most of the affected ambassadors are at diplomatic posts in Africa, but the removals are also impacting posts in Europe,
Africa was hit the hardest, with about a dozen ambassadors or chiefs of mission recalled from Niger, Uganda, Senegal, Somalia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritius, Nigeria, Gabon, Congo, Burundi, Cameroon, and Rwanda. In the Middle East, heads of mission were recalled from Egypt and Algeria. European chiefs of mission were also recalled from Slovakia, Montenegro, Armenia and North Macedonia.
A senior department official told the Journal the recall was part of a standard process to reassess ambassadors in any administration and that it’s the president’s right to ensure he has envoys in place who advance his foreign-policy agenda.
The damage done by the vacancies is compounded by the questionable quality of some of Trump’s ambassadors who are already confirmed .
For example, Herschel Walker, a former professional football player who ran unsuccessfully as the Republican party’s nominee in the 2022 U.S. Senate election in Georgia, is Trump’s s ambassador to the Bahamas. Then there’s Charles Kushner, a disbarred attorney who in 2005 was convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering, and who happens to be the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Charles Kushner is Trump’s Ambassador to France and Monaco. And there’s Kimberly Guilfoyle, Trump’s Ambassador to Greece. She’s a former Fox News personality and Donald Trump Jr.s ex- fiancée.
The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) , which represents the U.S. foreign service and career diplomats, said the recall represents “a steady erosion of norms, transparency, and professional independence in the Foreign Service.”
“Abrupt, unexplained recalls reflect the same pattern of institutional sabotage and politicization our survey data shows is already harming morale, effectiveness, and U.S. credibility abroad,” AFSA said.
The United States is going to pay a steep price for President Trump’s reckless moves undermining our country’s diplomatic authority.
Five years ago, Reed Hastings, the co-founder and CEO of Netflix, and his wife, Patty Quillin, donated $120 million to two historically Black colleges, Spelman College and Morehouse College, and the United Negro College Fund. “HBCUs have a tremendous record,” Hastings and Quillin said in a news release announcing their gifts.
I wrote about the optimism at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s) at that time, when they seemed to be on a roll with large grants from philanthropists and a commitment to improvement.
Five years later, however, graduation rates remain dreadful, leaving many Black students, particularly Black men, with abandoned dreams, college debt and no degree. And without that degree, the default rate of borrowers is three times as high as it is among those who graduated.
There are 104 HBCUs in the United States, of which 78 are “ranked”, been placed on a specific list by a third-party organization, such as U.S. News & World Report. The average four-year graduation rate for first-time, first-year students at the ranked HBCUs in 2025 was an abysmal 23.2%. The average six-year graduation rate for students at ranked HBCUs in 2025, 32%, was better, but still dreadful.
In contrast, the average four-year graduation rate for US colleges in 2025 was 50.8% and the average six-year rate was 60.1%, almost double the rate at ranked HBCUs.
It should be noted, however, the graduation rate at HBCUs varies widely. According to U.S. News & World Report, the top five HBCUs for graduation rates, based on 2025 data, were:
Rank
Institution Name
State
Four-Year Graduation Rate
1
Spelman College
GA
68%
2
Howard University
DC
60%
3
Xavier University of Louisiana
LA
48%
4
Fort Valley State University
GA
44%
5
Virginia Union University
VA
41%
In contrast, the 4-year graduation rate at LeMoyne-Owen College, a private, historically black Christian college in Memphis, Tennessee is 7% and the 6-year graduation rate is 18%, while the 4-year graduation rate at Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama is 14% and the 6-year rate is 28%. Additionally, the retention rate stands at 60%, which is also below average, ranking in the bottom 15%.
That raises questions about why philanthropist MacKenzie Scott recently pledged $38 million to Alabama State and made pledges to some other HBCUs with abysmal graduation rates, such as the University of Maryland Eastern Shore (4-year graduation rate – 19%; 6-year rate – 37%) and Morgan State University ( 4-year graduation rate – 13%; 6-year rate – 37%).
A report from the Center for Minority Serving Institutions at Rutgers University included the observation that “philanthropists should consult data to make better informed decisions around giving, considering the donations to both high performing institutions to reward growth and lower performing institutions to stimulate growth.” The problem with that approach, however, is it can endorse propping up failing institutions that are failing their students.
They are not doing their students any favors if they end up leaving so many with debt and no degree.
One issue for Black HBCU’s is that some have an almost blanket acceptance rate. That leads to unready students, which inevitably leads to the low graduation rates. For example, LeMoyne-Owen College has a 97% acceptance rate and Alabama State University has a 98% acceptance rate.
Too often, high acceptance rates are accompanied by low scores in college readiness tests.
A key standardized college admissions test that assesses high school students’ academic readiness for college is the ACT test. A student’s Composite score, ranging from 1-36, is the average of a student’s English, math, and reading test scores.
Some American universities look for students with scores in the 30s, others may consider scores in the mid-20s as competitive. According to ACT, the average score is 34 for admitted students at Harvard University and 23 for admitted students at University of Massachusetts Boston.
The average ACT composite score of students admitted to Spelman College is 26; for Howard University, 24. In contrast, the average ACT composite score of students admitted to LeMoyne-Owen College is 16, to Alabama State University, 18. The ACT college readiness benchmarks range from 18 for English to 23 for Science.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., former president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, a Washington D.C.-based, nonprofit organization that represents 47 public HBCUs, has attributed much of the high non-completion rate to the HBCUs accepting a lot of students with low standardized test scores and GPAs, students encountering time-management and behavioral issues, and a lack of financial literacy.
Many Black HBCU students also have to deal with being first generation college attendees, who tend to graduate at much lower rates across the board than continuing-generation students.
The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) has also found that students at HBCUs borrow more than students from non-HBCUs because African American families generally have lower assets and incomes that limit their ability to contribute toward college expenses.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the median income of Black households in the United States in 2024 was $56,020, significantly lower than the $92,530 median income figure for non-Hispanic White households. ”With only minor fluctuations, the racial gap in median income has remained virtually unchanged for more than a half-century,” the Bureau noted.
High HBCU drop-out rates compound the problem of paying off college debt as drop-outs earn less.
Too many Black students at HBCUs also come from failing high schools with a below-average teaching environment involving inexperienced and less qualified educators and benefit from easy college admission standards at some of the less-competitive HBCUs.
A recent UNCF report pointed out that poor high school preparation often means Black students are more likely to need remedial college courses than other student groups, and the lack of preparedness hampers their success. “Increasing the number of African Americans receiving college degrees depends in large measure on whether students receive a quality K-12 education that prepares them for college coursework and college success,” the report said.
In the midst of all this, there are some hopeful positives. Some HBCUs have been seeing record enrollment growth and overall HBCU enrollment for the 2024-2025 school year rose by 5.9% compared to Fall 2023, the third year of increases. It’s worth noting, however, that enrollment growth at some HBCUs is occurring as the Associated Press has just reported that new enrollment figures from 20 selective colleges provide mounting evidence of a backslide in Black enrollment. On almost all of the campuses, Black students account for a smaller share of new students this fall than in 2023. At Princeton and some others, the number of new Black students has fallen by nearly half in that span.
In the fall of 2025, North Carolina A&T State University held down the #1 spot as the largest HBCU for the twelfth straight year with 15,275 students, up 6.7% from the previous school year. In the same vein, Spelman College increased its 2024 enrollment by 24% in 2025, Winston-Salem State University had a 4.7% enrollment increase and Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, founded in 1865, saw a 45% increase in new students in the fall of 2025,
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, however, that HBCU enrollment growth is not shared equally across all the nation’s HBCUs. For example, enrollment fell at eight of the 10 HBCUs in North Carolina over the last decade, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, and overall enrollment at HBCUs has yet to rebound to its 2010 peak of 327,000. In addition, enrollment growth will need to be accompanied by increases in graduation rates in some cases. For example, the 4-year graduation rate at Shaw University is only 9% and the 6-year graduation rate is just 16%.
As was the case five years ago, if philanthropists and HBCUs really want to help Black college students, they will put money and effort into ensuring they get a K-12 education that prepares them for college and that HBCU students graduate with a good education. HBCUs that fail this test are still doing their students no favors, undercutting the very people they claim to champion.
The plane was flying 3500 ft. above the vast Atlantic Ocean.
“Then, just as he was looking at the needle of the air-speed indicator, it froze in front of his eyes. He could smell smoke. Its sensor, mounted above his head, had become packed with sleet and jammed. The indicator was now useless. The turbulent wind made the aircraft sway and judder…To try to get his equilibrium back, he drew back the control column, hoping to pull the nose up. The aeroplane hung motionless for a second. Then it fell into a steep spiral dive.”
Charles A. Lindbergh in a single-engine plane, the Spirit of St. Louis, in May 1927, trying to complete the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight?
Negative.
It was eight years earlier in May 1919. The courageous pilot was Jack Alcock, a British aviator flying a modified Vickers Vimy bomber powered by two Rolls-Royce Eagle engines. Alcock was trying to complete a nonstop flight from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Ireland. Accompanying him as navigator was Arthur Whitten Brown. Brown, nicknamed “Teddy,” was born in Glasgow, Scotland, though his parents were Americans.
Alcock and Brown’s modified Vickers Vimy bomber
I’ve admired Lindbergh since I was a child, thrilled at his derring-do, self-reliance and a triumph of will against the odds. (Yes, I know he also had some less than admirable qualities) On a trip to Hawaii as an adult, I even made a special trip to visit his grave at the end of the road to Hana under the shade of a Java plum tree at Palapala Ho‘omau Church on Maui. I’ve read multiple books about Lindbergh, who became a sensational and lasting celebrity, and I always thought, as most Americans likely do, that he was the first to complete a nonstop transatlantic flight.
Then I came across a fascinating, dramatic, fast-paced book published in 2024, The Big Hop, by David Rooney.
At a time when there seems to be few real heroes, Rooney’s compelling account reveals that Alcock and Brown, both veterans of WW I, were among a hardy group of men who took on the challenge of a contest sponsored by Lord Northcliffe, owner of The Daily Mail newspaper. Northcliffe offered a £10,000 prize to the first aviators to fly non-stop across the Atlantic.
Alcock and Brown were no strangers to peril. Alcock had fought in multiple terrifying dogfights during WWI, earning a Distinguished Service Cross. Brown, captured by the Germans in 1915 after crashing his Flying Corps B.E.2c biplane in northeastern France during WWI, endured atrocious conditions in German prisoner-of-war camps. The camps, often run by sadistic commanders, offered scandalously meagre food rations, were often freezing, swarming with rats and mice, and were inattentive to the multiple injuries and health issues suffered by POWs.
To be eligible for Northcliffe’s prize, competitors had to comply with three basic conditions: the flight had to be between any point in Great Britain and any point in Canada, Newfoundland or the United States; the flight had to be non-stop; the flight had to be completed within 72 hours.
Three teams joined Alcock and Brown in Newfoundland to make the attempt at a continuous Atlantic crossing:
Harry Hawker and Kenneth Mackenzie-Grieve in a single engine Sopwith Atlantic
Frederick Raynham and C. W. F. Morgan in a single-engined Martinsyde Raymor
A team led by Mark Kerr in a four-engined Handley Page V/1500 bomber Atlantic
Hawker’s Sopwith Atlantic
Hawker had a successful takeoff and managed to fly about 1000 miles, but the Sopwith’s engine failed and the plane went down in the ocean about 750 miles from Ireland. Hawker and Mackenzie-Grieve were rescued by a Danish steamer, the SS Mary.
Raynham and Morgan’s plane crashed on takeoff on Newfoundland, likely due to a heavy fuel load and rough terrain.
Raynham and Morgan’s Martinsyde Raymor
Mark Kerr’s team abandoned their attempt at a transatlantic crossing after Alcock and Brown successfully crossed the Atlantic.
Mark Kerr’s Handley Page V/1500 bomber Atlantic
Alcock later said that when his modified Vickers Vimy bomber fell into a steep spiral dive during the transatlantic flight, the plane “began to perform circus tricks”—plunging toward the ocean while he fought desperately to remain aloft. One moment the altimeter read 1,000 feet, the next only 100. When they were just 65 feet above the waves, he succeeded in regaining control.
On 15 June 1919 a telegram from Alcock and Brown arrived at the Royal Aero Club with the message: ‘Landed Clifden, Ireland, at 8.40 am Greenwich mean time, June 15, Vickers Vimy Atlantic machine leaving Newfoundland coast 4.28 pm GMT, June 14, Total time 16 hours 12 minutes. Instructions awaited.’
As David Rooney wrote in The Big Hop, “Today, a transatlantic flight is an unremarkable part of everyday life. It is almost a chore. But somebody had to go first.”
Memorials at Clifden and London’s Heathrow International Airport also commemorate their achievement.
A statue ofAlcock & Brown. Originally on display at Heathrow Airport, it was relocated at the Heathrow Academy but was moved to Clifden in Ireland on 7 May for an eight-week stay to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the flight on 15 June.
It was 1943. By all appearances, Rudolph Höss, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children – Klaus, Heidetraud, Brigitte, Hans-Jürgen and Annegret – had an idyllic life in the Polish countryside. They lived in an exquisite villa with a tranquil garden, a greenhouse and a small swimming pool.
The children played in the yard, Rudolph and Hedwig went about their daily lives and Hedwig adorned herself with lipstick and jewelry.
The Höss family’s backyard (Scene from The Zone of Interest)
But something was amiss.
Hedwig’s clothing and jewels were taken from a Jewish woman on her way to the gas chambers. Beyond the concrete wall at the property’s edge, topped with barbed wire, was a sprawling complex of gas chambers and crematoria known as the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, the largest extermination camp run by the Nazis in Poland during WWII. Rudolph Höss, a German SS officer, was the camp commandant. An estimated 960,000 Jews were killed there.
Women and children deemed “unfit for work” being unknowingly led to gas chamber #3 at Auschwitz, where two thousand people at a time could be murdered. Source: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center
“Human beings did this to other human beings and it’s very convenient for us to try and distance ourselves from them because we think we can never behave this way, but I think we should be less certain than that,” said Jonathan Glazer, the director of a 2024 movie, “The Zone of Interest” that depicted the mundane daily activities of the family at their home during the war.
In the movie, when her husband is transferred to a new post in Germany, Hedwig is enraged. She demands that the family stay at Auschwitz, claiming, “This is the life we’ve always dreamed of.”
It all brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s talk about “the banality of evil”, which she cited when writing about one of Höss’ compatriots, Adolf Eichmann, in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
“Never again,” proclaimed the weary idealists, the peace-seekers, the hopeful.
So much for that.
Moises Sotelo, 54, of Newberg, OR was on his way to work at about 5:30 a.m. on June 12 when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers swooped in and took him into custody. According to an ICE detention database, Sotelo was transferred to ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington.
Moises Sotelo
“ICE Seattle arrested Moises Sotelo-Casas, 54, who is a citizen of Mexico, as a part of routine federal law enforcement activity that identifies, detains and removes criminal aliens to their country of origin,” ICE Public Affairs Officer David Yost said in a statement. “Sotelo has a criminal conviction for DUI in Newberg, OR, and he will remain in custody pending removal.”
Sotelo’s family sought community support through a GoFundMe account with a $175,000 goal to “Help the Sotelo Family with Expenses After ICE Detainment”. The account had raised $142,751 from 2,100 donations as of June 30.
There was a time when Moises Sotel0’s plight would have generated little public concern and certainly fewer helping hands. .
In 2022, the public perception of an invasion of migrants across the southern border of the United States bore some relation to reality.
U.S. immigration authorities carried out 2.38 million migrant encounters (a term encompassing apprehensions and expulsions) at the southwest border during Joseph Biden’s presidency in FY 2022, according to the Migration Policy Institute. For the first time, not only were there more Venezuelans, Cubans, and Nicaraguans encountered than migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but there were significant attempted crossings by Brazilians, Ecuadorians, Haitians, Ukrainians, Indians and Turks. Monthly encounters peaked at over 370,000 people in December 2023, nearly 12,000 a day. This isn’t count migrants who crossed the border and escaped detection. (For a better understanding of the brutal migration process, see Footnote 2)
The crescendo of arrivals overwhelmed processing capacities, federal infrastructure, and border communities. As the chaos at the border increased, the public became more hostile to the migrants. Donald Trump exploited that hostility in winning re-election to the presidency in November 2024.
His administration has since initiated vigorous, combative mass deportation efforts that resemble military-style attacks at homes, businesses and public spaces. Masked and heavily armed ICE agents wearing tactical gear and carrying high-powered rifles have been descending on areas in unmarked black SUVs and armored vehicles. Immigrants showing up at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices for routine check-ins are being arrested. “What should be routine appointments are becoming detention traps,” Katrina Kilgren, an immigration attorney and pro tem instructor at the Knight Law Center in Eugene, OR told the Register-Guard newspaper.
Increasingly, ICE has been targeting work sites, such as farms, meat production plants and restaurants, and migrant worker gathering places, such as Home Depot, in immigration sweeps.
In April, Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons told attendees of the 2025 Border Security Expo in Arizona he wanted the agency to become as efficient at deporting immigrants as e-commerce giant Amazon is at delivering packages. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” Lyons said, describing his ideal deportation process as “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
In one deportation case reported by the Portland Mercury, Jorge (a pseudonym being used to protect his identity) received a text message on his cell phone in Spanish from ICE in early June.Jorge had immigrated to the US from Nicaragua in late 2021 as an asylum seeker. He has an active asylum case, a work permit, a job, and a young family. The message told him to report to the nearest ICE facility within 12 hours to check in and sign paperwork, or face deportation. After consulting a lawyer, he followed the instructions, only to be detained by ICE agents and sent to a federal detention center in Tacoma, Washington.
ICE was holding about 56,397 people in detention facilities across the country as of June 15, 2025 likely setting a record high, according to TRAC Immigration. Despite the government’s stated goal of pursuing criminals, 40,433 out of 56,397—or 71.7%—held in ICE detention had no criminal record, TRAC Immigration claims. Adams County Detention Center in Natchez, Mississippi held the largest number of ICE detainees so far in FY 2025, averaging 2,166 per day as of June 2025.
The vast majority of ICE detention centers are privately operated and for profit, with companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic dominant in the space. Tom Homan, Trump’s border adviser, has called for boosting ICE’s detention capacity to at least 100,000 people. In furtherance of that goal, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted a request in April asking contractors to submit bids for new detention facilities, transportation, security personnel, medical services and administrative support.
Florida is now turning a remote abandoned mosquito-infested 39-square-mile airport next to Everglades National Park in Florida into the newest migrant prison featuring mostly tents and trailers in sweltering heat and nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has said the facility will be temporary and have “zero environmental impacts.”
“It’s like a theatricalization of cruelty,” Maria Asuncion Bilbao, Florida campaign coordinator at the immigration advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, told The Associated Press.
President Trump visited the Everglades detention center on July 1, 2025.
The Trump administration has also sent immigrants to detention facilities outside the United States, including to Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo ( CECOT) in El Salvador, where brutal conditions predominate.
The Trump administration is also trying to deport a group of migrants convicted of violent crimes from countries including Cuba, Mexico and Vietnam to South Sudan, a country embroiled in fighting between various political and ethnic groups. In a Travel Advisory, the U.S. Department of State advises: “Violent crime, such as carjackings, shootings, ambushes, assaults, robberies, and kidnappings are common throughout South Sudan, including Juba. Foreign nationals have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, armed robberies, and other violent crimes.”
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s request to allow it to deport migrants to places other than their country of origin, often to countries plagued by violence. The Trump administration wanted the power to do so as part of its effort to discourage illegal migration by threatening to deport migrants a third country with no recourse.
Legal analyst Steve Vladeck told CNN, “…today’s ruling allows the government to remove those individuals and others to any country that will take them—without providing any additional process beyond an initial removal hearing, and without regard to the treatment they may face in those countries.”
To add insult to injury, Semafor reported on July 1 that the Trump administration is thinking about trying to void naturalized immigrants citizenship— potentially starting with New York City mayoral primary winner Zohran Mamdani. Asked about Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles’ proposal to strip Mamdani, who was born in Uganda but became a citizen in 2018, of his legal status, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it’s “something to be investigated.” Semafor reported that GOP leaders are increasingly comfortable with revoking foreign nationals’ visas over their political beliefs or actions, and that may soon extend to citizens.
An American naturalization ceremony
NPR reported on June 30 that the Justice Department is aggressively prioritizing efforts to strip some Americans of their U.S. citizenship, a practice heavily used during there McCarthy era of the late 1940s and early 1950s. “Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online,” NPR said. Approximately 25 million immigrants are naturalized citizens.
Hans von Spakovsky, with the conservative Heritage Foundation, told NPR he supports the DOJ’s denaturalization efforts. “I do not understand how anyone could possibly be opposed to the Justice Department taking such action to protect the nation from obvious predators, criminals, and terrorists,” he said.
But Trump’s draconian efforts to halt border crossings and deport already settled migrants are now driving a new sympathy for migrants and resistance to ICE’s aggressive deportation efforts.
Even popular podcaster Joe Rogan is raising doubts about Trump’s deportation chaos. “Bro, these ICE raids are fucking nuts, man,” Rogan said in June. ” I don’t think if they, the Trump administration, if they’re running and they said, we’re gonna go to Home Depot and we’re gonna arrest all the people at Home Depot, we’re gonna go to construction sites, and we’re gonna just, like, tackle people at construction sites. I don’t think anybody would have signed up for that. They said, we’re gonna get rid of the criminals and the gang members first, right? And now we’re, we’re seeing, like, Home Depots get raided. Like, that’s crazy.”
Local government officials are raising concerns, too. A group of elected officials in one of Oregon’s most racially diverse counties pushed back Monday against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (See footnote 3)
“ICE has no place in our neighborhoods,” Cornelius City Councilor Angeles Godinez told OPB in June. “When fear enters our community, trust leaves,” she said. “Without trust, our schools, our cities and even our local economies suffer.”
“To the immigrant community across Oregon, I am one of you, I see you. I know what you’re going through and I stand with you in unwavering solidarity,” said Tigard City Councilor Yi-Kang Hu.
And then there’s the massive cost of Trump’s immigration program, a veritable cornucopia of cash.[1] “If the bill passes, it could make ICE the nation’s largest jailer, Wirth more funding for detention than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons,” according to immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
With the federal deficit already high, and projected to increase to destructive levels under the Republicans’ “big, beautiful bill”, America is going to pay a heavy price for Trump’s deportation fiasco. With the immigration blowout, the Senate-passed a reconciliation bill that would add over $4 trillion to the national debt through Fiscal Year (FY) 2034, $1 trillion more than the House-passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).
Protests against immigration arrests are multiplying as people rail against government overreach and a majority of Americans now say actions by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have “gone too far,” according to a new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll..
But it’s not enough.
As The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said earlier this year, the Trump administration’s widespread and persistent cruelty, indiscriminate immigration enforcement tactics, wrongful questioning and detention of American citizens, unjust profiling, and abuse of common decency “signals a troubling shift toward a more punitive and dehumanizing approach to immigration enforcement.”
” History has shown us time and time again,” the Leadership Conference said, ” that when communities come together, our collective resistance has the power to rewrite the narrative and create change. While it may feel like we are in the midst of a dark chapter, together, we can write the next one — a chapter where compassion and justice prevail over cruelty and inhumanity. In the end, that’s what defines us — not just as a nation, but as human beings.”
We cannot be the Höss family. We cannot be innocent bystanders. Evil must not triumph. We must resist.
Immigration detention capacity: Expand capacity to detain immigrants taken into custody
$45 bil.
Border wall: Fund border barrier system construction and related activities
$45 bil.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement: Funding for hiring, training, transportation, facilities and legal resources to carry out immigration enforcement and removals
$31 bil.
State and local grants: Funding for border security, immigration enforcement and major event security. The Senate parliamentarian determined that this provision does not comply with the chamber’s rules, and it may be removed or modified.
$13 bil.
Homeland Security Department funding: For border security and immigration enforcement
$12 bil.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection: Funding to expand workforce and purchase new vehicles and technology
$12 bil.
Border surveillance technology
$6.2 bil.
Department of Justice grants: For state and local immigration and law enforcement
$3.5 bil.
Department of Justice funding: For immigration and other law enforcement
$3.3 bil.
Fund vetting for sponsors of unaccompanied alien children: Through the Office of Refugee Resettlement
$0.3 bil.
2. For a better understanding of what is driving migrants to the United States and who is guiding them through Mexico to the US border, read Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León. In 2015, he began a long-term ethnographic project focused on understanding the daily lives of Honduran smugglers who profit from transporting migrants across the length of Mexico. This 2024 National Book Award-winning story examines the complicated relationship among transnational gangs, the human smuggling industry, and migrant desires for safety and well-being.
3 .An immigration scholar, Austin Kocher, has written a Journalist Resource guide analyzing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest data, based on datasets published by the Data Deportation Project. His observations are revealing as to the Trump administration’s motives:
“The Trump administration is now demanding that ICE make 3,000 arrests per day. That is to say, ICE did not come close to meeting the quota set in January until June—and even then; only for a few days at a time. To be clear: this is a lot of arrests. I’m not downplaying that. But it’s also clear that the Trump administration’s daily arrest quotas are detached from the reality of what ICE can do—and even more so now that the new quota is 3,000 per day.
This prompts a further question: if these quotas are demonstrably unattainable, why have them? In my view, the answer is simple: the unattainability of the quotas is the point.
An essential component of Donald Trump’s longstanding approach to politics is to invent crises, or exploit existing crises, in ways that ensure they are unsolvable. No amount of funding for immigration enforcement will ever be enough to achieve his mass deportation goals. No amount of power concentrated in the office of the President will ever be sufficient to exercise totalizing control over immigration. The goal is not to solve a real problem, but to manufacture an ever-expanding crisis that justifies ever-expanding unregulated power.”
Oregon is justly proud, for example, that in 1971 it was the first state to pass a bottle bill to address the growing problem of litter from beverage containers and to encourage recycling.
Other times being first is an abomination.
That will be the case if Oregon Gov. Kotek signs SB 916, which would award up to ten weeks of unemployment insurance benefits to workers who go on strike.
The Oregon Employment Department (OED) anticipates that the bill would result in an additional $2.1 million of benefit payments in the 2025-27 biennium. Critics of the bill say this doesn’t take into account the likelihood of longer and more frequent strikes if workers can count on some income while striking.
The whole concept of strikes is an assumption that the loss of income for workers and the loss of production by employers will motivate an eventual settlement. SB 916 would change that whole dynamic, putting employers at a disadvantage. Equally egregious, because the Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund is funded through a payroll tax that is paid by employers, Oregon employers would be paying workers not to work.
What makes their strong support for this bill particularly egregious is that it is aimed at benefiting an extremely small portion of the labor force, but a sector that overwhelmingly favors the Democrats in campaign contributions.
In 2024, just 15.9% of wage and salary workers in Oregon were union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Dig deeper and you find that the union membership rate for public sector workers in Oregon, about 51%, is considerably higher. That is consistent across the country, where unionization is about five times higher nationwide in the public sector compared with the private sector.
Supporters of SB 916 often try to bolster their cause by alluding to the fact that New York and New Jersey already allow unemployment benefits to be paid to strikers, but they neglect to mention that both states bar public employees, such as teachers, from striking.
No wonder the bill has drawn across-the-board opposition from businesses and public entities, including already stretched local governments and school districts.
Earlier in the process, two Senate Democrats, Jeff Golden, D-Ashland and Janeen Sollman, D-Hillsboro, showed praiseworthy wisdom in voting against the bill. “Counties, cities and schools are scrambling to just maintain current services,” Sollman said. “Now is not the time to be adding more uncertainty and more expenses.”
Both senators subsequently changed their minds and voted for a scaled back bill, but Sollman’s statement is still valid. As Senate Minority Leader Daniel Bonham, R-The Dalles, said, “This is bad policy. It’s going to be harmful to our students. It’s going to be harmful to the state.”
Despite the financial strains facing Oregon, and even the likely diversion of kicker money to address forest fires, Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat with strong ties to labor, has said she plans to sign the bill.
“I know the argument has been that this will be highly detrimental to our school districts,” Kotek said in a June 9 media availability. “I don’t particularly believe that is an accurate assessment of that bill and at the end of the day I support the right of folks to strike and I believe the way the bill is drafted we will actually see shorter strikes.”
Kseniia Petrova (Polina Pugacheva, via Associated Press)
UPDATE
On May 28, the New York Times reported that a federal judge said she would grant bail to Ksenia Petrova in an immigration case stemming from Ms. Petrova’s failure to declare scientific samples she was carrying into the country. “There does not seem to be either a factual or legal basis for the immigration officer’s actions” in stripping Ms. Petrova of her visa on Feb. 16, Christina Reiss, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Vermont, said in a court hearing. She added that “Ms. Petrova’s life and well-being are in peril if she is deported to Russia,” as the government has said it intends to do.
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To what levels of uncaring depravity have we sunk?
U.S. Government lawyers told a federal judge today that the Trump administration intends to deport a Harvard scientist back to Russia, a country she fled in 2022, despite her fear that she will be arrested there over her protest of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The New York Times reported the action today.
Christina Reiss, chief judge of the United States District Court in Vermont, asked the government to clarify whether or not it planned to deport Ms. Kseniia Petrova to Russia.
“You are asking for her removal to Russia?” she asked.
“Yes, your honor,” Jeffrey M. Hartman, an attorney representing the Department of Justice, replied, according to the Times.
That this is taking place in Donald Trump’s America is a travesty.
Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Returning to Boston’s Logan International Airport from a trip to France, she brought back frog embryo samples for her lab. The PBS News Hour reported on April 24 that ICE said she knowingly broke the law in failing to properly declare the embryos. According to the News Hour, A typical customs violation results in a fine, but Petrova had her visa revoked, was detained and flagged for deportation.
In moves more common in a police state, where people are swiftly moved from place to place to avoid detection, ICE first sent Petrova to a cell at the airport. The next day they transferred her to a jail in Vermont. She spent the next week there. Then ICE flew Petrova to detention in Louisiana. She has now been imprisoned at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana for two months in a one-room facility with 89 other women, wall-to-wall beds and almost no personal privacy. Yes, for two months now.
The News Hour reported that Petrova has been a vocal critic of the Russian government and its actions in Ukraine and fears persecution if deported there. “I am afraid that, if I come to Russia, I will be arrested, because we have in Russia special law,” she said. “If you say something against current war, you will be imprisoned, and you can be imprisoned for 15 years.”
“ICE is required to detain individuals … only if they are a flight risk or a danger to the community. Ms. Petrova is neither,” said her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky. “Her continued detention serves no purpose and wastes limited government resources.”
The Trump administration, banking on the support of its most dedicated backers, is running roughshod over human rights right here in America.
Remember when the eight-time WNBA All-Star, Britney Griner, was arrested in 2022 at a Moscow airport on drug-related charges? She was detained for nearly 10 months, spending much of that time in prison. American public and political outrage was severe and her supporters pressed the White House hard to bring her home.
“I’m terrified I might be here forever,” Griner said in a handwritten letter to President Biden appealing for her freedom.
Apparently, America learned a lesson from Griner’s imprisonment. But it was the wrong one.
Kseniia Petrova, a 30-year-old Russian-born scientist at Harvard Medical School, has been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since February. Her detention occurred when she was returning to Boston from a trip to France. Her story was reported by Geoff Bennett, who serves as co-anchor and co-managing editor of PBS News Hour.
Returning to Boston’s Logan International Airport from a trip to France, she brought back frog embryo samples for her lab. The PBS News Hour reported on April 24 that ICE said she knowingly broke the law in failing to properly declare the embryos. According to the News Hour, A typical customs violation results in a fine, but Petrova had her visa revoked, was detained and flagged for deportation.
In moves more common in a police state, where people are swiftly moved from place to place to avoid detection, ICE first sent Petrova to a cell at the airport. The next day they transferred her to a jail in Vermont. She spent the next week there. Then ICE flew Petrova to detention in Louisiana. She has now been imprisoned at the Richwood Detention Facility in Louisiana for two months in a one-room facility with 89 other women, wall-to-wall beds and almost no personal privacy. Yes, for two months now.
She has an immigration court hearing scheduled for May 7 in Jena, Louisiana, related to her asylum case.
The News Hour reported that Petrova has been a vocal critic of the Russian government and its actions in Ukraine and fears persecution if deported there. “I am afraid that, if I come to Russia, I will be arrested, because we have in Russia special law,” she said. “If you say something against current war, you will be imprisoned, and you can be imprisoned for 15 years.”
“ICE is required to detain individuals … only if they are a flight risk or a danger to the community. Ms. Petrova is neither,” said her attorney, Gregory Romanovsky. “Her continued detention serves no purpose and wastes limited government resources.”
He has filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Vermont, arguing that a declaration issue doesn’t justify detention and the government failed to follow standard protocol.
NPR reported that earlier this week, during a preliminary hearing, a Louisiana immigration judge found the government’s case to be legally insufficient and ruled that the Notice to Appear, the document that initiates deportation proceedings, did not meet legal standards. The judge gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement one week to submit stronger evidence.
The Trump administration, banking on the support of its most dedicated backers, is running roughshod over human rights right here in America.
President Donald Trump has pressured nine of the nation’s largest and most prestigious law firms to capitulate to demands that they provide nearly $1 billion in free, or pro bono, legal work to causes Trump supports.[1]
In a post on Truth Social, Trump said one of the firms, the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP law firm (“Paul, Weiss”) agreed that:
Paul, Weiss will take on a wide range of pro bono matters that represent the full spectrum of political viewpoints of our society, whether “conservative” or “liberal.”
Paul, Weiss will dedicate the equivalent of $40 million in pro bono legal services over the course of President Trump’s term to support the Administration’s initiatives, including: assisting our Nation’s veterans, fairness in the Justice System, the President’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and other mutually agreed projects.
Paul, Weiss affirms its unwavering commitment to these core ideals and principles, and will not deny representation to clients, including in pro bono matters and in support of non-profits, because of the personal political views of individual lawyers.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that Paul, Weiss also “… acknowledged the wrongdoing of former Paul, Weiss partner, Mark Pomerantz”, who had worked as a prosecutor in Manhattan and had pushed for Mr. Trump to be charged criminally. A copy of the agreement provided to the media by Brad S. Karp, the chairman of Paul, Weiss, did not, however, include any mention of Pomerantz. The New York Times also reported that five people briefed on the matter said Mr. Karp said he did not criticize Mr. Pomerantz with the president, in spite of Mr. Trump’s assertion to the contrary.
In a particularly hypocritical move, Trump added to his Truth Social post, “Our Justice System is betrayed when it is misused to achieve political ends,” despite the fact that Paul, Weiss only agreed to Trump’s terms after he threatened the firm,
Initially, the compliant law firms are said to have agreed to the free legal work assuming it would be for such uncontroversial causes as helping veterans. But Trump, who has a habit of wandering into unexpected territory in his remarks, now appears to have a broader view of what the law firms may be pressured to work on.
“Over the last week, he has suggested that the firms will be drafted into helping him negotiate trade deals,” the New York Times reported on April 16. “He has mused about having them help with his goal of reviving the coal industry. And he has hinted that he sees the promises of nearly $1 billion in pro bono legal services that he has extracted from the elite law firms…as a legal war chest to be used as he wishes. White House officials believe that some of the pro bono legal work could even be used toward representing Mr. Trump or his allies if they became ensnared in investigations.”
Whatever issues Trump chooses to rope the law firms into working on, what will the public know?
On one side, even though the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applies to records created by federal agencies within the executive branch, the White House Office itself is exempt from FOIA. This means the public cannot directly request information from the White House Office[2] under FOIA.
A FOIA memo from the U.S. Department of Justice on White House Records states:
“By its terms, the FOIA applies to “the Executive Office of the President,” 5 U.S.C. § 552(f), but this term does not include either “the President’s immediate personal staff” or any part of the Executive Office of the President “whose sole function is to advise and assist the President.” Meyer v. Bush, 981 F.2d 1288, 1291 n.1 (D.C. Cir. 1993) (quoting H.R. Rep. No. 1380, 93d Cong., 2d Sess. 14 (1974)); see also, e.g., Soucie v. David, 448 F.2d 1067, 1075 (D.C. Cir. 1971). This means, among other things, that the parts of the Executive Office of the President that are known as the “White House Office” are not subject to the FOIA.”
Records originating with the Office of the Vice President or any of its component offices, are likewise not subject to the FOIA.
Similarly, the records of communications between the law firms and the White House or of work done by the law firms at Trump’s request would not be subject to the FOIA.
So how will the public know what Trump’s White House and the law firms bending the knee to Trump are doing? It won’t. And how will Congress know what Trump’s White House and the law firms are doing? It won’t. And how with the media know what Trump’s White House and the law firms are doing? Unless they are particularly aggressive, they won’t either.
The nearly $1 billion of pro bono work the nine law firms, and potentially more, will be doing for Trump could have a major impact on American life. And it looks like it can all be done in secret.
Shameful.
[1] The nine firms are Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Willkie Farr & Gallagher; Latham & Watkins; Milbank; Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft; A & O Shearman; Kirkland & Ellis; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.
Oregon’s new Democratic Congresswoman is learning quickly how to play the game.
On March 24, 2025, Democratic Rep. Janelle Bynum and two other House members, Reps. Cleo Fields (D-LA) and Sam Liccardo (D-CA), introduced a bill, H.R. 2287. The bill would require the Federal Reserve to study the impact of certain U.S. tariffs on the cost of goods and services in the United States.
“Every day I hear from my constituents that they’re struggling to afford groceries, rent, healthcare, and other necessities,” Bynum said in a press release. “Lowering costs has always been priority number one for me.”
Liccardo assailed Trump’s controversial tariffs “misguided economic measures” and said the study would allow Congress to advance “common-sense legislation that would provide much-needed relief to hard-working Americans.”
Of course, Bynum’s full-throated plea for a study on an issue of concern to her constituents got media coverage in Oregon – and that was the point. In fact, that was likely the whole point.
When I was a reporter at The Oregonian years ago, after serving on the staff of a House of Representatives subcommittee, I argued against giving a lot of coverage to bills when they were initially proposed by Oregon members of Congress. Far too often, they were just messaging bills, attempts to get publicity on a topic of interest to Oregonians, not serious legislative proposals with a high potential for enactment.
After all, any member can go to legislative counsel and get a bill drafted. And a lot do. In the 118th Congress (2023-25), 10,564 bills were introduced in the House and 5,649 in the Senate. In contrast, the 118th Congress, which began on January 3, 2023, and ended on January 3, 2025, enacted just 274 public laws.
What really matters is whether a bill gets a committee or subcommittee hearing and moves through the legislative process or key elements of the bill are incorporated in other legislation that does the same and become law.
Truly effective lawmakers go beyond press releases.
The Center for Effective Lawmaking (CEL), a joint program of the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University, does deep dives into the work of every member of Congress and develops Legislative Effectiveness Scores based on a combination of fifteen metrics capturing the bills that each member of Congress sponsors, how far they move through the lawmaking process, and how substantial their policy proposals are.
The Center’s newest report on the Legislative Effectiveness of the 118th Congress (2023-25) was just released.
For example, a Legislative Effectiveness Score for each member of the U.S. House and Senate captures the proven ability of a legislator to advance his or her agenda items through the legislative process and into law.
In the House, for example, the Center begins by identifying the number of bills that each member of the House of Representatives sponsored and the number of those bills that received any action in committee or action beyond committee on the floor of the House. The Center than categorized all bills as being commemorative, substantive or substantive and significant. A commemorative bill, for example, satisfied any one of several criteria, such as providing for a renaming, commemoration, private relief of an individual, and the like.
For those bills that received any action beyond committee, the Center identified how many of those bills subsequently passed the House and how many became law. Members also get credit if a substantial portion of the language in their sponsored bills is incorporated into other legislators’ bills that become law.
None of Oregon’s Representatives made the Center’s top 10 list of lawmakers in the 118thCongress (2023-25).
Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, however, came in 5th in the Center’s top 10 list of Senate Democratic lawmakers in the118th Congress. Merkley chaired the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, as well as chairing the Chemical Safety, Waste Management, Environmental Justice, and Regulatory Oversight Subcommittee of the Environment and Public Works Committee. He successfully advanced two sponsored bills into law: the StopInstitutional Child Abuse Act, and the Promoting a Resolution to the Tibet-China Dispute Act.
The Center also highlighted 12 High-Performing Freshmen who scored in the “Exceeds Expectations” category in their first terms in office. Notably, two of them were from Oregon, Republican Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer (6th) and Democrat Rep. Val Hoyle (9th). Hoyle was re-elected in November to represent Oregon’s 4th District. Chavez-DeRemer was defeated in her race, but was subsequently appointed Secretary of Labor by President Trump.
Every member on this High Performing list had at least one of their sponsored bills become law or at least had the language from one of their sponsored bills substantially incorporated into another measure that ultimately became law.
“Given that…research suggests that performance in a legislator’s freshman term is highly correlated with subsequent lawmaking effectiveness, as well as with their overall career trajectory, we might expect to see these Representatives continuing to be effective lawmakers and setting the agendas of the Democratic and Republican parties in the future,” the Center’s report noted.
So don’t take a slew of bills introduced by a member of Congress as an assurance of their impact. For a real understanding of legislative effectiveness, you have to dig a lot deeper.
ThinkingOregon 