Chicago Public Schools officials claim U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were denied entry to a South Side elementary school Friday morning.

[Ital. added]

Meanwhile, the most inane and unbelievable shit dribbles out of Trump administration officials mouths and journalists will be all “an official familiar with the matter confirmed to ABC” without the hint of a doubt

e; This article has been updated with the feds’ new story, and the new headline is a great example of exactly what I was talking about

US Secret Service approached South Side school, not ICE agents: officials

You could say that’s what these “officials” claimed, but ABC sure won’t.

At any rate, a couple of questions,

Why were the local cops totally in the dark on this? If the secret service was investigating a death threat, what was the plan if their suspect wasn’t at home or at school? Just hang around Chicago until you spot them? And if you’re confronting a potentially dangerous person at a school, wouldn’t you really want to have a whole coordinated police action instead of just having one agent waltz in on their own?

Did this agent identify themselves as secret service and tell the school why they were there? Because they should have but I don’t understand how the school would have thought they were ICE if they did, and I don’t believe this school would throw a press conference to lie about this when they had to know the federal government would respond to their press conference.

Lastly, if ICE and the secret service were just lying through their teeth to ABC, how would we know? Alternatively, if they were telling the truth, how could we know? Because absent some kind of external proof statements from the Trump administration have zero informational value.

Like a Russian warship

A few excerpts and thoughts,

In a post on X Thursday night, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “[A bunch of unverifiable bullshit].” …

Leavitt gave no further details about the arrests.

Until we have any kind of information that could be cross referenced against independent systems (e.g. names of the deported, court case file number, flight registration numbers, etc.) it’s impossible to know what happened. They definitely want to hurt as many migrants as possible but they also have a strong incentive to exaggerate everything they’re actually able to do.

Meanwhile, a defense official said [continues below]

Why not use their name? Would be helpful for your readers to see things they’ve said and done in the past to know if they’re a trustworthy source. And also to avoid general confusion, like -

[continued from above] there were two flights overnight. Both went to Guatemala, according to two sources, and carried 81 deportees. [continues below]

Did the two sources confirm the flights went to Guatemala or that they had 81 migrants on it? Are those two sources the same people as “a defense official” from the prior sentence and “a Guatemalan official” in the next sentence?

[continued from above] However, a Guatemalan official said 79 Guatemalans had been returned, 31 women and 48 men.

So was that a simple administrative slip up or did somebody murder two migrants mid-flight and dump their bodies in the ocean? I wouldn’t put that past the Pinochet fans running things today.

Three officials say the plan to use military aircraft for the deportation flights was approved under the Trump administration, not the Biden administration.

Are these three different officials than the previously mentioned officials? Are we taking the word of someone who couldn’t get the details about how many people were on this plane right?

The flights are part of the actions the acting secretary of defense announced on Wednesday following Mr. Trump’s executive action ordering the U.S. military to step up its presence on the border.

FFS CBS, acting secretary of defense Robert Salesses. It’s almost like you don’t want these stories to come up when somebody searches the names of the people involved in a few years when they want to see what their commencement speaker or new board member or boss or whatever used to do.

One single example of an exceptional candidate does not sound like “all the time” to me, and even though she was able to overcome DNC fuckery when she knocked out Crowley, the fact that that fuckery exists at all is a problem

Yeah, the way the DNC’s leadership has been hijacked by wealthy interests that push them to steer all their campaign support away from progressive candidates who support non-Republican policies because they’re not “electable” is a huge problem

Important to note that prior to the first Trump administration (archived), the process to apply for asylum was to enter the United States, surrender yourself to CBP, go through their booking process, say you wanted asylum, and then a hearing on that claim would be scheduled. Critically, you would wait in the US for your hearing, which is far more secure from the drug cartels and corrupt cops and soldiers people are seeking asylum from.

Trump used COVID as an excuse to forbid anyone applying for asylum from first just entering the United States, instantly removing anyone who surrendered themselves after entering no matter what they were running from and forcing them instead to wait outside the US for appointments at designated ports of entry, which Border Patrol would spontaneously slow down (archived) or shut down (archived) for made up reasons. Biden kept that restriction on entry in place (archived) and added a requirement that all applications for asylum come through a glitchy app (archived).

The people who you read about suffering in this news story would not be suffering in this way if Biden had gone back to Obama-era asylum procedures. Trump would certainly try to harm them in some other way, but by entrenching the international law violating system Trump first came up with Biden’s administration made it a lot easier for him. The next Democratic party member who becomes President has to learn that echoing Republican rhetoric and Republican policies has no political upside and causes real human suffering.

e; tupos

Nah, Nazis hated Jews just because they needed to hate someone to justify their own existence but they’ll switch to any other easy scapegoats and work with whoever they need to hold on to power

Important to note that

The Biden administration enacted its own asylum restriction last June, also citing the 212(f) authorities. While that order disqualified most migrants crossing the southern border illegally from asylum, it still gave them the opportunity to plead their case before asylum officers if they expressed fear of being harmed once deported.

Asylum officers that have been caught being racist and abusing migrants so many times I don’t even know what to link to, so here’s a catchall page from the ACLU (archived), but go on.

Former President Joe Biden’s asylum restrictions also had a major exemption: they did not apply to migrants waiting in Mexico who used a government smartphone app, known as CBP One, to request a time to enter the U.S. at an official border entry point.

An app that never worked right (archived) that allowed you to apply for an appointment CBP might never give you (archived).

Trump is going to be awful for migrants in a ton of ways (for example, doing ICE raids on churches schools and hospitals is new and awful), but at least as far as people seeking asylum go it will be hard for him to be any worse than Biden was.