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Feds block League of Women Voters from registering new citizens after R.I. naturalization ceremonies

Part of Trump regime effort to make it harder to vote

By Christopher Shea, Rhode Island Current

You would think that newly naturalized citizens
would pass the Trump "proof of citizenship" test

For the past two years, Rhode Island League of Women Voters volunteers have helped over 1,700 new American citizens register to vote at weekly naturalization ceremonies at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Johnston.

“It’s a routine,” Christine Stenning, president of the Newport League of Women Voters, said in an interview Monday. “And it seems to work.”

But when volunteers arrived at the Johnston office the morning after Labor Day, they were told the Trump administration had ended their routine. 

A new policy quietly enacted the Friday before the holiday weekend prohibits all nongovernmental groups from registering voters at naturalization ceremonies.

The new rule, issued Aug. 29 by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), leaves voter registration duties at naturalization ceremonies solely with state and local election officials.

This Trump post is insane. Is this part of Trump's campaign to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

You pass the test

Confront or Cave? Federal Pressure Splits the Building Trades

Often conservative construction unions will have to decide what they will do

Natascha Elena Uhlmann, Keith Brower Brown for Labor Notes

Will prevailing wage be paid on ICE
concentration camp construction?

One of the last nationwide bastions of union jobs is getting jackhammered by the Trump administration. Members are languishing in ICE prisons without trial. Programs that protect members from racism and sexism are getting the axe.

In response, building trades officers are split: some are pleading, some are protesting, and others are surrendering without a fight.

Out of nine million construction workers in the U.S., one million had a union last year. Since the 1970s, when about forty percent of U.S. hardhats wore union stickers, anti-union developers have kicked unions out from most residential and private building sites.

The building trades took refuge in publicly funded construction projects and specialized industrial jobs. An old federal law that favors union hires for interstates and military outposts helps small locals of pile drivers and insulators straggle on even in rural Alabama or Wyoming, where unions are otherwise scarce.

Reason enough, he reckons

Around and around

The costs of sabotaging science

Turbulent research landscape imperils US brain gain − and ultimately American prosperity

Marc Zimmer, Connecticut College

Despite representing only 4% of the world’s population, the United States accounts for over half of science Nobel Prizes awarded since 2000, hosts seven of The Times Higher Education Top 10 science universities, and incubates firms such as Alphabet (Google), Meta and Pfizer that turn federally funded discoveries into billion-dollar markets.

The domestic STEM talent pool alone cannot sustain this research output. The U.S. is reliant on a steady and strong influx of foreign scientists – a brain gain. In 2021, foreign-born people constituted 43% of doctorate-level scientists and engineers in the U.S. They make up a significant share of America’s elite researchers: Since 2000, 37 of the 104 U.S. Nobel laureates in the hard sciences, more than a third, were born outside the country.

China, the U.S.’s largest competitor in science, technology, engineering and math endeavors, has a population that is 4.1 times larger than that of the U.S. and so has a larger pool of homegrown talent. Each year, three times as many Chinese citizens (77,000) are awarded STEM Ph.D.s as American citizens (23,000).

To remain preeminent, the U.S. will need to keep attracting exceptional foreign graduate students, budding entrepreneurs and established scientific leaders.

The IRS Is Building a Vast System to Share Millions of Taxpayers’ Data With ICE

ICE gets to see your tax records to see if you should be deported

By William Turton, Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro for ProPublica

The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data.

ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport.

Last month, in a previously undisclosed dispute, the acting general counsel at the IRS, Andrew De Mello, refused to turn over the addresses of 7.3 million taxpayers sought by ICE. In an email obtained by ProPublica, De Mello said he had identified multiple legal “deficiencies” in the agency’s request.

Two days later, on June 27, De Mello was forced out of his job, people familiar with the dispute said. The addresses have not yet been released to ICE. De Mello did not respond to requests for comment, and the administration did not address questions sent by ProPublica about his departure.

The Department of Government Efficiency began pushing the IRS to provide taxpayer data to immigration agents soon after Donald Trump took office. The tax agency’s acting general counsel refused and was replaced by De Mello, who Trump administration officials viewed as more willing to carry out the president’s agenda. Soon after, the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, and the IRS negotiated a “memorandum of understanding” that included specific legal guardrails to safeguard taxpayers’ private information.

In his email, De Mello said ICE’s request for millions of records did not meet those requirements, which include having a written assurance that each taxpayer whose address is being sought was under active criminal investigation.

“There’s just no way ICE has 7 million real criminal investigations, that’s a fantasy,” said a former senior IRS official who had been advising the agency on this issue. The demands from the DHS were “unprecedented,” the official added, saying the agency was pressing the IRS to do what amounted to “a big data dump.”

If you're going to lose your Medicaid coverage, the Trump regime has an solution

The Violence Trump responds to is actually the violence in His mind

Darkness Visible

Dr. Bandy X. Lee

Trump at his big, beautiful June 14 birthday
military parade in DC

The nation is now watching it unfold.

We mental health experts have long warned that internal states determine external manifestations, and that the dangerousness evident to us in Donald Trump would result in dire consequences if we did not intervene. His deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC, and seizing control of its police force is just the kind of manifestation we warned against.

His claim that the nation’s capital is “lawless” and is “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world” of course has no validity in reality. 

Many had hoped that reality would curb him, be it the Covid-19 pandemic or the January 6 insurrection—but when an overwhelming internal reality blinds one to external reality, he will not see what the rest of us see.

It does not matter that violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low, just as there has been no rhyme or reason to his sending out more than 4000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Southern California to quell imaginary “lawlessness” in June.

Here is the real reason: he said Los Angeles would be “the first, perhaps, of many,” as immigration raids erupt all over the country under his authorization. “You know, we didn’t attack this one very strongly. You’ll have them all over the country.” Now, he is fulfilling his promise, and it will only grow worse over time.

Indeed, his psychopathology almost guarantees that violence will be unleashed, primarily against those who represent what he never had—which is why caregiver-child bonds were among the first he targeted at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Attorney General Neronha co-leads lawsuit against Trump Administration’s imposition of illegal conditions on Victims of Crime Act grants

To get funding to help victims of crime, states must buy into Trump's anti-immigrant agenda

Steve Ahlquist

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha is co-leading a coalition of 21 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit against the Trump Administration over the imposition of illegal conditions on more than $1 billion in Congressionally-authorized funds for Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) grant recipients. The lawsuit is filed in Rhode Island. 

According to the lawsuit, the Trump Administration, disregarding the law and the intent of Congress, has declared that states will be unable to access these funds – used to support victims and survivors of crimes – unless they agree to support the Trump Administration’s extreme immigration enforcement efforts.

“When the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is actively preventing Americans from receiving justice, we have a problem,” said Attorney General Neronha. 

Heil

If Democrats got off their asses, here’s what they’d be doing now

Nine critical steps NOW

Robert Reich

We have endured more than six months of the most despotic regime in American history.

Republican members of Congress have disgraced themselves and the nation by enabling it. They are traitors to the Constitution, the rule of law, and American democracy.

What of the Democrats? Individually, some have shown real heroism. But as a party they are disunited, ineffective, seemingly afraid of their shadows. “Epsteingate” offers a chance for Dems to derail Trump for a time, but it is not a strategy.

What would that strategy look like if the Democrats were bold and united? Here are nine critical steps (adding to those from someone named Pru Lee):

1. Don’t let Trump get away with his lies.

Have a truth squad that responds immediately with the facts and cites sources.

When Trump claims that Washington, D.C., is rife with crime, for example, get the truth out: that its crime rate is actually the lowest it’s been in 30 years. That Republicans have literally defunded the police in D.C. by stealing more than a billion dollars from the city. That Trump is dismantling the FBI and putting corrupt, unqualified jerks at the top of our federal law enforcement.

Point out that red states have higher murder rates than blue ones.

Make sure the truth gets out by repeating it over and over. If it’s not reported in the media, find out why.

2. Plan and announce ways to catch up with what we’ve lost on the environment, human rights, voting rights, labor rights, and safety nets.

Even when the orange Caligula on the Potomac is history and his lackeys are out of power, America will have a huge amount to repair, rebuild, and catch up on.

Tell the nation how you’d make up for the time and momentum we’ve lost. What sacrifices will be entailed. Explain what we must do to get back on track toward a just society, a strong democracy, and an environment that isn’t collapsing around us.

Tell us how you’ll rebuild the government that Trump and his Republican sycophants have decimated. How we’ll get back the talent we’ve lost — in science, health, the environment, worker safety, the foreign service. How we’ll build back morale.

3. Lay out a vision for the future.

Don’t stop there. Give us a vision of the future. Tell us where we could and should be, and how we can get there.

Medicare for all. Affordable child care and elder care. Affordable homes. Universal Basic Income. Paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy (including wealth tax), a tax on polluters, and a smaller military.

Also: All fossil fuels replaced by wind, solar, nuclear, conservation. Profit-sharing with employees. Living wage. Strict regulation of Wall Street including crypto, so we never again have to suffer a financial crisis and bail out the Street.

Challenge us. Tell us the truth. Demand much from us.

4. Tell us what you’d do to prevent this catastrophe from ever happening again.

Publicly lay out the laws and amendments you’ll pass to ensure this never happens again, the systems you’ll tear down, the safeguards you’ll enshrine, the plan to hold perpetrators of human atrocities accountable, the urgent commitment to immediately bring home those “disappeared” into prisons in El Salvador and other countries.

Set out the electoral reforms you’ll fight for to prevent a dictatorship from ever again forming under our very noses. Voting rights. Civil rights. Tell us how you’ll get big money out of our politics, even if it takes a constitutional amendment.

5. Mount an independent investigation.

Hold public hearings based on an independent, civilian-powered investigative coalition. Build a real-time archive of corruption, overreach, and executive abuse. Use experts, veterans, whistleblowers, journalists, watchdog organizations.

When the people now hurling us into fascist hell are held accountable, we’ll need every name, every signature, every illegal order, every act of silence — documented.

You’re not just preserving truth. You’re preparing evidence for prosecution. The more they disappear people and weaponize data, the more we need truth in the sunlight.

Investigate every author of Project 2025, every aide who defies court orders, every communications director repeating lies, every policy writer enabling cruelty.

6. Join the International Criminal Court.

You cannot control what the other side does, but you can control your own integrity. So call their bluff. Prove that the Democratic Party is still grounded in law, human rights, and ethical leadership. Join the International Criminal Court. If you’ve got nothing to hide — join.

Show the world who’s hiding bodies, bribes, and buried bank accounts. Force the GOP to explain why they’d rather protect a war criminal than sign a treaty, why they’re setting up detention facilities in an alligator-infested swamp.

And while you’re at it, publicly invite ICC observers into the United States. Make this administration explain — on camera — why they’re terrified of international law and oversight.

7. Create a digital safe haven for whistleblowers and defectors.

Not everyone inside this regime is a traitor to America. Some are scared. Some want out. Build channels for them to defect — encrypted, anonymous, and protected. Make it easy for the cracks in the system to become gaping holes.

Stop ostracizing MAGA defectors. Don’t push them back into the crowd. We don’t need purity. We need numbers. We need people willing to burn their red hats and testify against the machine they helped build.

8. Aim at the real culprits.

Don’t let Trump Republicans blame stagnant incomes and insecure jobs on immigrants, the “deep state,” transgender people, socialists, or communists.

Tell Americans the real reason why they’re working harder and getting nowhere: because big corporations are monopolizing the economy and they, and the super-rich, have amassed enough political power to rig the game for their own benefit.

Your corporate, Wall Street, and fat-cat donors won’t like you saying this, but you know something? You’ll do far better in elections by telling Americans the truth and stressing the importance of getting big money out of politics. You’ll get more small-donor support, too. And you’ll help stop Trump Republican fear-mongering and scapegoating.

9. Take back Congress in 2026.

Don’t just talk about it. Have a plan, a strategy. Mobilize us to focus our attention and resources on districts and states we have a chance of taking back. Set out measurable goals. Give us progress reports.

Stop Trump and his Republican stooge governors from super-gerrymandering their states to squeeze out even more Republican votes: have Democratic governors credibly counter-balance whatever they do — matching seat for seat, as California is attempting to do.

Recruit people to run who aren’t corporate Democrats or Wall Street Democrats but who know the economic stresses most Americans are facing, who respect working people, who speak their language, who know how to connect with voters. Tell us who you’re considering and why. Ask us for names.

Stop AIPAC and the crypto crowd from spending money on Democratic primaries. They have no business there. Put resources where they’re most needed.

Then win!

**

Unless Democrats begin to take steps like these now, the nation’s peril will only deepen.

Is Trump taking us back to "kids in cages?"

Immigrant Kids Detained in ‘Unsafe and Unsanitary’ Sites as Trump Team Seeks To End Protections

Sandy West

A child developed a rash after he was prevented from changing his underwear for four days. A little boy, bored and overcome with despair, began hitting himself in the head. A child with autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder was forced to go without his medication, despite his mother’s pleas.

“I heard one officer say about us ‘they smell like shit,’” one detained person recounted in a federal court filing. “And another officer responded, ‘They are shit.’”

Trump South Africa Refugee Program 'Intended for White People' Only

Explicitly racist policy is the new normal

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

A July 25 report from Reuters claims that a senior Trump administration official recently informed diplomats in South Africa that a refugee program set up by Donald Trump earlier this year was explicitly intended for white people.

According to Reuters, American diplomats in South Africa earlier this month asked the U.S. State Department whether it was allowed to process refugee claims from South African citizens who spoke the Afrikaans language but who were of mixed-race descent.

The Trump regime argues the white Afrikaners will
be easier to assimilate in American culture
than refugees of color. Here's an example of their proof.

The diplomats received a response from Spencer Chretien, the senior bureau official in the State Department's Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, who informed them that "the program is intended for white people," writes Reuters.

The State Department told Reuters that the scope of the program is actually broader than what was outlined in Chretien's message and that its policy is "to consider both Afrikaners and other racial minorities for resettlement," which lines up with guidance posted earlier this year stating that applicants for refugee status under the program "must be of Afrikaner ethnicity or be a member of a racial minority in South Africa."

ICE wants YOU!

Trump's ICE Is Now Recruiting Teenagers

'What Could Possibly Go Wrong?'

Brett Wilkins for Common Dreams

"We're taking father/son bonding to a whole new level."

That's how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told social media users that it is lifting age limits for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) applicants—evidence, critics said, of the Trump administration's desperation to fill the ranks of federal agencies tasked with carrying out its cruel and illegal anti-immigrant policies.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

In a move reminiscent of how the U.S. military attempted to stem flagging enlistment during the George W. Bush administration's so-called War on Terror by lowering recruitment standards to welcome felons, gang members, white supremacists, and high school dropouts, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that "we are ENDING the age cap for ICE law enforcement."

Approved applicants will be joining an agency rife with human rights and legal abuses as it scrambles to satisfy alleged ICE arrest quotas and Donald Trump's desire to carry out the biggest mass deportation campaign in the nation's history—a campaign of kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and expulsion of innocent people, family separation, concentration camps, terrorization of American communities, alleged torture and sexual crimes, and many other outrages.

Noem told Fox & Friends Wednesday that in addition to lifting the 40-year-old age cap, ICE applicants can now be as young as 18.

Strange New World

The children know