Rachel Morris

Trump, Border Patrol Retreat in Failure from Chicago Five important lessons of the first six months of Trump’s immigration raids — and why CBP’s Greg Bovino is the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump era.

Greg Bovino is leading a rebel cavalry terrorizing America—and it's important to recognize that it's in retreat. While the trauma and terror Bovino’s raiders instill is real and damaging, it’s remarkable to note how ineffective the force has turned out to be. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/trump-bord...

Good piece by @rachelmorris.bsky.social about the liberal faculty lounge chin-stroking origins of what became a politically potent nativist argument about the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship. (Aside: I am sorry to hear that Peter Schuck, whose torts class I took 23 years ago, is ailing.)

The Liberal Scholars Who Influenced Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship The President’s executive order took inspiration from an esoteric legal argument from 1985, by two Yale professors. They have some regrets.

Rogers Smith was my thesis advisor in college. A kind and decent man without a xenophobic bone in his body. But the story of how his work became fodder for White supremacists is an object lesson in how galaxy brain thinking has consequences.

www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

The Liberal Scholars Who Influenced Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship The President’s executive order took inspiration from an esoteric legal argument from 1985, by two Yale professors. They have some regrets.

Fascinating piece by @rachelmorris.bsky.social on the long, strange path of a clause in the 14th amendment and the contested nature of citizenship www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

The Liberal Scholars Who Influenced Trump’s Attack on Birthright Citizenship The President’s executive order took inspiration from an esoteric legal argument from 1985, by two Yale professors. They have some regrets.

Forty years ago, two liberal professors published a "provocative" book about immigration that sold poorly and got terrible reviews. It also inadvertently handed Trump the legal argument he's using to attack birthright citizenship. www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

What Zohran Mamdani Knows About Power The thirty-three-year-old socialist is rewriting the rules of New York politics. Can he transform the city as mayor?

"A real-estate lobbyist told me that he does not know anyone who is leaving the city because of Mamdani, though he does know 'several who may pied-à-terre.'" www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Investigation by Sen. Jon Ossoff alleges abuse of children, pregnant women in ICE custody An investigation by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff alleges more than 500 counts of human rights abuses in immigration detention, including the abuse of pregnant women and children.

U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff says his office has documented more than 500 cases of abuse in immigrant detention centers, including the abuse of pregnant women and children.

Hundreds of Alligator Alcatraz detainees drop off the grid after leaving site As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald.

More than 1800 detainees are missing after the closure of Alligator Alcatraz. Their families and lawyers can’t find them and they’ve vanished from the ICE database. Feels like this should be a much bigger story www.miamiherald.com/news/local/i...

🚨NEW: A horror story emerges from hacked flight logs of the March 15 flight to El Salvador: mass disappearances.

It's possible there are DOZENS of additional people the Trump admin sent to be imprisoned in El Salvador without trial who are imprisoned there whose names have never been disclosed.

Every American should read this ACLU lawsuit about what is happening in Los Angeles and California. It is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. This is not immigration enforcement. It is positively stuffed with videos and articles documenting racial profiling on a scale unseen since Jim Crow.

New data show that ICE is pulling record numbers of people off the streets who have no criminal convictions of any kind. This is not just a change from the Biden admin. This is a radical tactical shift compared to Trump 1.0. These arrests are up over 1,000% from 2017.
www.cato.org/blog/ice-arr...

Thanks Eva!

Why Did New Zealand Turn on Jacinda Ardern? A new memoir by the former Prime Minister revisits her time in office but doesn’t explain the confounding transformation the country underwent during COVID.

I wrote about Jacinda Ardern’s new memoir and New Zealand’s strange transformation during the pandemic for the New Yorker. www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

This sentence could have used some work.

“The AI jobs crisis is not the sudden displacement of millions of workers in one fell swoop—instead, it’s evident in the attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.”

We’re only 100 days in.

One mother was allowed less than 2 minutes on the phone w/her husband to figure out what would become of her 2-year-old US citizen son. Another wasn’t allowed to speak w/attorneys or family members before she was deported, accompanied by her US-born kids, even though ICE knew one had Stage 4 cancer.

“The reason we’re here is because the government of the United States wants you to leave the United States,” Judge Ubaid ul-Haq, presiding from a courtroom on Varick Street, told a group of about a dozen children on a recent morning on Webex. “It’s my job to figure out if you have to leave,” ul-Haq continued. “It’s also my job to figure out if you should stay.” The parties included a 7-year-old boy, wearing a shirt emblazoned with a pizza cartoon, who spun a toy windmill while the judge spoke. There was an 8-year-old girl and her 4-year-old sister, in a tie-dye shirt, who squeezed a pink plushy toy and stuffed it into her sleeve. None of the children were accompanied by parents or attorneys, only shelter workers who helped them log on to the hearing.

Children as young as *four* are being put in the position of representing themselves without lawyers/parents present in front of immigration judges in cases that will determine whether they are deported.

gothamist.com/news/4-year-...

Hours ago, @politico.com revealed that DOGE is working with DHS on automating mass deportation efforts — likely explaining why many US citizens, green card holders, and even a Canadian (in Canada) got threatening emails last night terminating “your parole” and telling them to leave the US in 7 days.

An ‘Administrative Error’ Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison The Trump administration says it mistakenly deported an immigrant with protected status but that courts are powerless to order his return.

BREAKING: Trump admin says it mistakenly deported a Maryland father who had *withholding of removal* back to El Salvador on March 15. Govt told court Monday it won't bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back. "What.The.Fuck..." one govt attorney told me. www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc... @theatlantic.com

SCOOP: ICE Revoking Students’ Immigration Statuses Without Their or the University’s Knowledge “Never seen something like this,” say university officials about the secret targeting of Middle Eastern students.

SCOOP: The Trump admin appears to be going into a visa database to quietly change students' immigration status. It's coming entirely by surprise — setting students up to be detained without warning.

It's Mahmoud Khalil & Rumeysa Ozturk — on a wider scale.

a bunch of government goons from ICE/HSI showed up to an elementary school in DC this morning and tried to detain a staff member in the parking lot but the person's colleagues intervened and stopped it and let that be a reminder to all of us that we can do that

Tariff War Risks Sinking World Into New Great Depression, International Chamber of Commerce Warns The world economy could face a downturn similar to the Great Depression of the 1930s unless the U.S. rows back on its plans to impose steep tariffs on imports, a senior official at the International C...

Has anyone checked in with John Key to see how’s he’s feeling about his prediction that Trump would be “better on the economy”? www.wsj.com/economy/trad...

Some DOGE Staffers Are Drawing Six-Figure Government Salaries Engineers and executives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency are drawing healthy taxpayer-funded salaries—sometimes from the very agencies they are cutting.

Some DOGE staffers are getting paid six-figure salaries from the very agencies they're slashing and burning

killer scoop from @knibbs.bsky.social !!!!
www.wired.com/story/doge-g...

Seriously, stop microwaving your food in plastic 'We’re exposed to a chemical soup.'

www.popsci.com/science/plas...

Children eat burned plastic in ‘appalling’ school lunch “Disgusting and dangerous”: Children who reached the bottom of their lunch discovered the plastic container had melted into their food.

Heating food in this kind of plastic packaging (even if you don’t burn it till the plastic melts into the food, ffs) is a public health disaster waiting to happen—toxic chemicals from the plastic leach into the food when heated. www.thepress.co.nz/nz-news/3605...

If Trump really believed that Zelensky is a dictator, he would get along with him far better than he does now.

I’ve spent the last 8 years working on a book about forever chemicals, or #PFAS, and the chemical industry’s decades-long campaign to cover up their dangers. What I discovered along the way is deeply disturbing, and yet the journey has left me hopeful.

www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554198...

Some Migrants Sent by Trump to Guantánamo Are Being Held by Military Guards The Times has obtained a list of 53 Venezuelan men the Trump administration has put in a wartime prison built to hold Al Qaeda suspects.

The Trump admin says ICE has custody of migrants sent to Guantanamo, but it's DOD guards in Camp 6, a war-on-terror prison. It won't say who is being held incommunicado there, but we are publishing a list of 53 men in Camp 6.
w/ @carolrosenbergnyt.bsky.social
www.nytimes.com/2025/02/12/u...

The fact that AREN’T live shots from the press and Dem members of Congress lined up outside each of these agencies is its own indictment of their ineffectualness.