A Baptist chaplain at a privately-run ICE lockup in Pennsylvania is facing accusations of sexually abusing a detainee over the course of more than a year, beginning shortly after he gained her trust by gifting her a Bible.
Pastor Mark Melhorn, 67, engaged in “extraordinary misconduct” at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center “under the guise of providing pastoral services,” according to a federal lawsuit obtained by The Independent.
His “repeated and pervasive” misconduct started with sexualized comments and gestures, with Melhorn telling the plaintiff in the case, who is identified as Jane Doe in court filings, that she was “hermosa,” “bonita,” and “preciosa,” according to the complaint.
“Melhorn would ask Ms. Doe if she liked how he looked, stare at her breasts, and lick his lips while staring at her,” the complaint alleges. “While Melhorn and detained women sang hymns together, he would position himself so that he could stare at Ms. Doe from behind. When she tried to change her position so that he could not stare at her from behind, he would change his position and continue staring at her.”
On numerous occasions, Melhorn approached Doe and placed his hands on her head as if he was praying for her, but instead ran them down her body suggestively, according to the complaint. From there, it says things got worse until Melhorn one day entered Doe’s cell and allegedly sexually assaulted her. He then warned Doe not to tell anybody about what had happened, because “even if she did, nothing would happen.”
Doe in fact reported Melhorn – twice – to higher-ups at Moshannon, the complaint says. And, according to the complaint, nothing happened.
“The system absolutely failed our client,” Doe’s attorney Trina Realmuto told The Independent. “It takes a lot of courage to speak up, [especially] when you’re fighting an immigration case in a detention facility.”
Realmuto, the executive director of the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, said Doe, an undocumented Dominican citizen living in New Jersey, remains deeply traumatized by the experience, and continues to suffer from anxiety, nightmares and a diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Melhorn did not respond to The Independent’s requests for comment.
On August 21, 2023, Doe arrived at Moshannon in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, where she was assigned a two-person cell in the women’s housing unit, according to her complaint. It was filed two years later, almost to the day, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
The 1,800-bed facility has been at the center of significant controversy, once again making headlines last month when a 32-year-old detainee from China died by suicide as he awaited a hearing with the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Melhorn visited the women’s housing unit every weekday afternoon, and conducted a church service for female detainees at least one evening a month, the complaint continues. Doe, a devout Christian, met Melhorn a few days after getting to Moshannon and was “comforted to know that a chaplain was available to provide religious guidance.”
She trusted Melhorn, and when he asked him to bring her a Bible, he did so, the complaint states.
Shortly after Doe first met Melhorn, things started getting creepy, the complaint alleges. Beyond showering her with inappropriate comments, Melhorn “began to go out of his way to touch Ms. Doe,” according to the complaint. Oftentimes, it says, Melhorn would enter Doe’s cell to give her printouts of Bible passages, but instead of simply handing them to her, he would set them down on her lap and rub her inner thigh.
In October 2023, Doe’s complaint claims she caught Melhorn peering into her cell while she was partially nude.
“At first, she believed it was her roommate and was not concerned, so she showered,” the complaint states. “When she got out of the shower, however, she saw that her roommate was asleep and that Melhorn was standing on his toes so that he could see Ms. Doe over the [privacy] screen.”
During the next several months, Melhorn’s overtures gradually got “forceful and more invasive,” until eventually becoming “even more extreme,” according to the complaint.
On March 29, 2024, Melhorn entered Doe’s cell while she was sleeping, woke her up and groped her under the sheets, the complaint maintains.
“Ms. Doe was terrified and got up abruptly,” it says. “Melhorn immediately warned Ms. Doe not to report him. He told her no one would believe her. Ms. Doe thought this was true and decided not to report Melhorn’s actions to anyone. Because Ms. Doe did not report Melhorn, his conduct continued and worsened.”
The following month, Melhorn walked into Doe’s call under the pretext of bringing her religious pamphlets, according to the complaint. It says he stood in front of her bed, and began to make “sexually explicit comments,” then grabbed at her breasts, inner thighs, buttocks and crotch, after which he forced Doe to touch his erect penis, the complaint alleges. Melhorn only stopped when Doe’s cellmate returned, according to the complaint.
At that point, it says Doe walked out of the cell and went to the unit’s common area. But, Melhorn followed her and continued to force himself upon her, the complaint contends. Melhorn again told Doe not to tell on him, and said other women had tried to report him, but that no one had believed them, according to the complaint.
As before, Doe believed Melhorn and kept quiet.
On April 16, 2024, Doe met with a social worker at Moshannon Valley. She said she was having trouble sleeping, and asked for a prescription that might help her relax, the complaint states. When the social worker asked Doe why she was so anxious, the complaint says she finally opened up about Melhorn.
The social worker told Doe that she was obligated to report the allegations, under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act, or, PREA, and that she was glad she spoke up “because Melhorn had done things like this before,” according to the complaint. This, the complaint asserts, was corroborated by a nurse at Moshannon Valley, who told Doe that Melhorn had earned a reputation at the facility as “a pervert.”
Further, a female guard told Doe that she and another employee had complained about Melhorn after he entered the women’s locker room while staffers were changing or using the bathroom, according to the complaint.
Roughly three weeks later, the jail’s PREA investigator closed Doe’s case, deeming her allegations unsubstantiated due to insufficient evidence, the complaint states. (According to Doe, most of the incidents with Melhorn occurred in areas not covered by surveillance cameras; a lack of video evidence is what led to the “unsubstantiated” determination, the PREA investigator told Doe, according to the complaint.)
Because of this, the complaint says Melhorn – who had been removed from the women’s housing unit while the PREA investigation was underway – would be permitted to return. But when the other women in the unit turned on Doe and threatened her for “snitching” on Melhorn, she was moved into protective custody, the complaint says.
On July 5, 2024, Melhorn located Doe in protective custody and stood outside her cell, staring at her while she used the toilet, according to the complaint.
“Melhorn sang Ms. Doe’s name and asked her what she had done to end up in protective custody,” it continues. “Ms. Doe, frightened, immediately yelled out for an officer.”
Melhorn left the area, and Doe asked to speak with a supervisor. A new PREA investigation was opened, and Doe was transferred to a different segregation unit, the complaint explains. But, once again, without the necessary video evidence, Doe’s allegations were subsequently closed as “unsubstantiated,” according to the complaint.
Doe’s anxiety and nightmares worsened, and on August 29, 2024, Doe’s immigration lawyer submitted a request to ICE that her client be released, “based on, among other things, Melhorn’s sexual abuse,” the complaint states. The next day, Doe was sent home, where she remains, fighting deportation.
Doe’s complaint suggests that she was far from alone, citing an August 2022 report issued by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in response to “a concerning number of reports of sexual assault and harassment” at Moshannon Valley. Federal authorities, along with the GEO Group, which operates the Moshannon Valley facility under a contract with ICE, are legally obligated to prevent such abuse.
“Despite this knowledge, they failed to act,” the complaint says.
In an email, Lauren DesRosiers, who heads the Immigration Law Clinic at Albany Law School, told The Independent, “I wish that the abuse alleged in the complaint was an isolated incident. There’s good documentation that abuse is a widespread problem – for example, Senator Jon Ossoff’s office recently released this report on abuse of pregnant women and children in detention.”
Kristina M. Fullerton Rico, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Racial Justice at the University of Michigan’s Ford School of Public Policy, emphasized the point, saying that Doe’s allegations are “part of a larger pattern of sexual violence perpetrated by staff and volunteers on people who are under their supposed care. This has been documented for decades.”
Realmuto, the attorney representing Doe in her suit against Melhorn – which also names the U.S. government, the GEO Group, and Moshannon Valley’s PREA investigator – hopes to hear from others who have gone through similar experiences to the one Doe says she endured.
“There are an untold number of women who have passed through this facility who have been subjected to the same or worse types of sexual abuse,” Realmuto told The Independent. “… It’s particularly disturbing when it’s coming from the clergy, which, for many people who are detained, is supposed to be a source of comfort.”
Doe’s lawsuit alleges 11 individual causes of action, including negligence, intrusion upon seclusion, and violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. She is seeking compensatory damages and punitive damages to be determined in court, plus attorneys’ fees.
ICE and the GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment. The Moshannon Valley PREA investigator, whose full name is not listed in court records, was unable to be reached.
The Art of The Deal has come to government. President Trump wants a piece of the action on transactions needing government approval or funding. He wants equity stakes in an ever-increasing number of America’s major corporations, giving him a say in what those corporations invest in, from whom they buy, to whom they sell, whom they fire and much more. The free-market capitalism that saw this nation prosper like no other is no more. The confessedly corrupt early 20th-century politician George Washington Plunkitt famously said, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.” Trump “seen” his.
The first opportunity was presented by a global trading system that seriously disadvantaged the US. Trump replaced it with a system of tariffs that transfers enormous powers to him. Nvidia, a world leader in AI development, was granted an export licence to sell some of its chips to China in return for directing 15 per cent of the proceeds to the Treasury over which Trump, in effect, presides.
The president now has life-and-death power over Apple, which has won exemption from tariffs on its iPhones and other devices by pouring the odd billion into Trump’s headline-generating announcements of new investments in America. Such relief is in the gift of the president, creating a giant pay-to-play casino where market forces, flawed though they were, once prevailed. Congress can read all about it on Truth Social.
The second opportunity was presented to Trump by Nippon Steel’s request for approval of its acquisition of US Steel. Permission granted, in return for which the government received a golden share in the combined company. That, added to its need for tariff protection, gave Trump considerable power not only over the new US Steel but over the auto, appliance and other industries that use the metal, both domestic and imported.
The third opportunity for power enhancement was created for Trump when President Biden ladled out billions in subsidies to chipmaker Intel. In return, in the inimitable words of commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, “We got nothing, nothing.” A Republican president of the old school might have cancelled the Biden subsidies and left Intel at the mercy of market forces.
Trump has been accused of many things, but never of being a traditional Republican. He demanded that Intel issue and turn over to the government some $8.9 billion of new shares, in effect giving him control of 10 per cent of Intel’s outstanding shares. Socialist senator Bernie Sanders professed delight. Intel’s competitors not so much. Existing rivals and those the Silicon Valley crowd expects to conjure will be at a significant disadvantage competing with businesses in which the government has a financial interest, and with which Trump’s political future is now linked.
The president promises “many more” such deals, or “shakedowns” as his critics call them — the substitution of state capitalism for market capitalism, as an economist would put it. MP Materials, a potential major producer of rare earth magnets, is to receive government financial aid that it says will position the Department of Defense “to become the company’s largest shareholder”.
Lockheed Martin, which gets 90 per cent of its revenues from the US government, might be the next of many defence contractors Trump is planning to add to the congeries of enterprises under his management. The issuance of new shares to the government, of course, will dilute the value of existing shares, and is therefore a de facto seizure of private property. And, say critics, will surely slow the pace of risk-taking innovation.
In short, the extent of presidential control of the economy has not been seen since the end of the Second World War. Trump has added to his influence over macroeconomic policy by levying tariffs, another name for taxes. He is in the process of gaining control of monetary policy by packing the Fed board and firing an existing board member for alleged mortgage fraud, no trial necessary.
Fed independence, done and dusted, control of the macroeconomy complete, he is turning his attention to the independent players that make up the microeconomic economy. With sycophants in seats once occupied by powerful advisers and the opposition Democrats in disarray, effective resistance to Trump’s power push is negligible.
Economists have long linked free markets with individual freedom, state control of the economy with the power of government to decide which companies prosper and which industries provide jobs in which states. Trump has displaced those market forces with, well, himself. Add control of the criminal justice system and the firing or demotion of two dozen January 6 prosecutors; replacement of professional number-crunchers with Maga loyalists at no-longer independent agencies; raids on the home and office of former National Security Advisor John Bolton; and plans to replace local law enforcement with what the Founding Fathers feared, a federal “standing army” under the control of the president, America’s new CEO-in-chief.
“You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet” has long been a common boast among America’s entertainment celebrities, of which the star of The Apprentice is one. Now, as president, he is favouring visitors with baseball caps emblazoned “Trump in 2028”.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is showing no signs of relenting when it comes to attacking President Donald Trump—this time taking aim at his health.
Newsom posted a video Saturday evening of clips of the president set to the song “I’m A Survivor” by country music singer Reba. The song is popular on TikTok, where it has been used in over 200,000 videos, many of which are satirical and focus on the lyric about a “single mom who works two jobs”.
Newsom’s video features clips of Trump golfing, almost being attacked by an eagle, falling up the stairs to Air Force One, being hit in the face with a microphone, as well as photos of the bruises on his hands that have caused considerable speculation in recent weeks. The clips play as Reba sings ”A single mom who works two jobs / Who loves her kids and never stops / With gentle hands and the heart of a fighter / I’m a survivor.” The caption reads, “He’s trying.”
The president has been seen with bruises on both hands in recent weeks, fueling speculation that his health is declining after being diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed that the bruises were “consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin,” stressing that Trump “meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history.”
On Tuesday, Trump’s former physician and now-GOP congressman Ronny Jackson swore that the president was “the healthiest president this nation has ever seen.”
The bruises and his four-day absence from the public view this week, sent the rumor mill into overdrive on Friday. with some speculating that he died.
An eventual public appearance in Virginia on Saturday morning put the rumurs to bed, but questions remain about what caused the president’s bruises and his brief disappearance from the public eye.
Newsom hasn’t limited his attacks to Trump. In recent weeks, Newsom has also mocked First Lady Melania Trump’s rumored Vanity Fair cover, made fun of Vice President JD Vance’s “very tiny brain” and told top Trump aide Stephen Miller to stop being so shrill.
On Wednesday, the governor revealed in an interview with Politico’s Christopher Cadelago that Trump’s team had responded to his trolling by sending him endless “Trump 2028″ hats.
“I have two dozen Trump 2028 hats his folks keep sending me‚” Newsom said.
Newsom is now selling his own, including “Newsom 2026″ mugs, red hats that mimic Trump’s own that read ”Newsom was right about everything!” and made-in-USA Bibles in a jab at Trump’s own branded Bibles, which were made in China.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/newsom-trolls-trump-over-bruised-hands-and-golfing-skills
The 22-year-old philosophy student from China did not expect any problems after his 29-hour flight arrived at a Texas airport this month as he was on his way to study at the University of Houston.
His paperwork was in order. He was going to study humanities — not a tech field that might raise suspicions. He had a full scholarship from the U.S. school and had previously spent a semester at Cornell University for an exchange program with no issues.
But the student, who asked to be identified only by his family name, Gu, because of the political sensitivities of the matter, was stopped, interrogated and 36 hours later, put on a plane back to China.
He also was banned from coming back for five years, abruptly halting his dream for an academic career in the United States.
“There is no opportunity for the life I had expected,” Gu said.
He is one of an unknown number of Chinese students with permission to enter the United States who have been sent back to China or faced intense questioning after their arrival, drawing strong protests from Beijing and showing the uncertainty from President Donald Trump’s shifting policies.
His administration has quickly pivoted from a plan to revoke visas for Chinese students to Trump himself saying he would welcome hundreds of thousands of them, partly to help keep some American schools afloat.
The US has put restrictions on Chinese students
Even so, some officials and lawmakers have expressed suspicions about Chinese students, especially those who study advanced technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and their possible links to the Chinese government and military. Some lawmakers want to ban Chinese students altogether.
There’s no immediate data available on how many Chinese students with valid visas have been interrogated and repatriated from U.S. airports in recent weeks. U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for that data or for comment on Chinese students being questioned or sent back.
In recent days, Trump said he told Chinese President Xi Jinping that “we’re honored to have their students here.” But he also added, “Now, with that, we check and we’re careful, we see who is there.”
The Chinese Embassy said it has received reports involving more than 10 Chinese students and scholars being interrogated, harassed and repatriated when entering the U.S.
“The U.S. side has frequently carried out discriminatory, politically driven and selective law enforcement against Chinese students and scholars, inflicting physical and mental harm, financial losses, and disruptions to their careers,” the Chinese Embassy said in a statement.
They were repatriated under the pretext of “so-called ‘visa issues’ or ‘might endanger U.S. national security,’” the embassy said.
The students and scholars were taken into small rooms for extended interrogation, repeatedly questioned on issues unrelated to their academic work, and forced to wait long hours in cold rooms without blankets or quilts, the embassy said. Some relied on aluminum foil to keep warm, and some were detained for more than 80 hours, it said.
Such acts by the U.S. side “run counter to the statements” made by Trump, the embassy said, accusing some U.S. departments and law enforcement personnel of not “faithfully acting on the president’s commitment.” The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a Friday interview with the conservative news site Daily Caller, Trump said “it’s very insulting to a country when you say you’re not going to take your students.” The interview was published on Sunday.
“I think what we’re doing is the right thing to do. It’s good to get along with countries, not bad, especially, you know, nuclear-powered countries,” Trump said.
One Chinese student had no concerns as he headed to the US
Gu told AP that he liked his Cornell experience so much that he applied for a master’s program to study philosophy in the U.S.
Despite reports of stricter policies by the Trump administration, Gu said he wasn’t too worried, not even when he was first stopped and taken to a room for questioning by a customs officer after landing at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. His belongings were searched, and his electronics were taken away, he said.
After the officer went through the devices, he started interrogating Gu, focusing on his ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Gu said.
He said his parents are party members, but he has never joined, though he — like nearly all Chinese teens and young people — is a member of the party’s youth arm, the Communist Youth League.
The customs officer also grilled him on his connections to the governmental China Scholarship Council, which popped up in his chat history. Gu said it came up in his chats with his schoolmates, but he did not receive money from the Chinese government.
Three rounds of interrogation lasted 10 hours, before Gu was told he was to be deported. No specific reason was given, he said, and the removal paperwork he provided to AP indicated inadequate documentation.
By then, he had hardly slept for 40 hours. The waiting room where he was kept was lit around the clock, its room temperature set low.
“I was so nervous I was shaking, due to both being freezing cold and also the nerves,” Gu said. “So many things were going through my head now that I was being deported. What should I do in the future?”
It would be another day before he was put on a flight. Now, Gu is considering appealing the decision, but that might take years and cost thousands of dollars.
One down, 599,999 to go! But they’ll probably admit thousands of Chinese science and engineering students, who will be much more adept at stealing defense and proprietary information than this unfortunate philosophy student.
President Donald Trump is once again defending his plan to have 600,000 Chinese students attend American universities, saying it is the “right thing to do” and that it would be “insulting” to think he is doing it improve trade negotiations with Xi Jinping, the head of China’s communist government.
The president tripled down on the move during an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese that was published on Sunday.
“I think what we’re doing is the right thing to do,” the president said. “It’s good to get along with countries, not bad, especially, you know, nuclear-powered countries. I think it’s good to get along with countries. The [Ukraine-Russia war] would have never started if I were president, all those kids would have been alive right now.”
A moment earlier, Trump said “I don’t want anything in return” for allowing the 600,00 students to come to the U.S. The president told TDC those students would be spread out over a two-year period.
President Donald Trump‘s deployment of warships off the coast of Venezuela and authorization for the use of force against drug trafficking organizations is fueling speculation of potential military action looming in South America.
However, the White House’s moves also speak to a broader shift in policy focus under Trump’s “America First” movement that envisions the Americas as a whole as part of the U.S. zone of interest, an outlook reminiscent of the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine that served as the basis for U.S. intervention against European colonialism and communist expansion across the region.
With Venezuela and its leftist leader, President Nicolás Maduro, now in the crosshairs, experts and former officials see the dawn of a new era of U.S. power projection across the Western Hemisphere.
“This massive show of force is consistent with the administration’s efforts to assert dominance in the Western Hemisphere, reviving the Monroe Doctrine that declared the region to be uniquely a U.S. sphere of influence,” Cynthia Arnson, a leading Latin America expert serving as adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced and International Studies, told Newsweek.
‘Gunboat Diplomacy’
Arnson warned of the potential regional consequences of such an approach, noting how just because “many Latin American democracies would welcome the end of the Maduro regime, that doesn’t mean that they are lining up to applaud a 21st century version of gunboat diplomacy.”
Observers have debated whether or not the recent naval build-up in the waters of South and Central America would serve as a prelude to real action or constituted mere posturing, meant to deliver a message to Maduro who the U.S. has accused of being complicit in drug trafficking.
Arnson argued that “the utility of such a huge deployment in fighting drug trafficking is questionable, although there undoubtedly will be some seizures that the administration will tout to justify the exercise of military force.”
She added: “The number of troops deployed, although large, is not sufficient to invade Venezuela with the aim of toppling the government.”
José Cárdenas, a former National Security Council and U.S. State Department official who has dealt extensively with Latin America policy, said the latest moves would prove far more than showmanship.
“It would be a mistake to consider the U.S. naval deployment off the Venezuelan coast ‘business as usual’ or mere political theater,” Cárdenas, who today is a principal at the Cormac Group consulting firm, told Newsweek. “It is too big, powerful, and costly for that.”
“Rather,” he added, “it is a signal by the Trump administration that the status quo—Venezuela as a hub for transnational organized crime and a regional destabilizer through mass migration—is no longer tenable.”
Believe What He Says, or Else’
Cárdenas spoke of a “wide range of options” available to the Trump administration, short of a “full-scale invasion” that could effect change in Venezuela.
For one, he felt “it is likely the U.S. is in contact with Venezuelan military personnel not involved in narco-trafficking and others in charge of guns to state that if they don’t remove Maduro from power the U.S. is prepared to unleash an asymmetric offensive that could consume them as well.”
“The Trump administration has carefully constructed a policy rationale that this is not ‘regime change’ for the sake of exporting democracy to the world’s benighted peoples,” Cárdenas said. “It is a national security initiative meant to eliminate a source of tons of cocaine from entering the United States. Main Street, USA, can identify with that.”
He also said that plans were likely already set in place, and any upcoming action would serve to send a message to great power competitors such as China and Russia, which U.S. officials have long warned were gaining influence in the Western Hemisphere.
“Credibility, moreover, is the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s foreign policy. Believe what he says, or else. There is no climb-down from the current deployment,” Cárdenas said. “No doubt anti-American despots in Moscow, Beijing, and elsewhere are watching the unfolding action in the Southern Caribbean carefully.”
When reached for comment, the White House referred Newsweek to remarks made by press secretary Karoline Leavitt during a press conference last week.
“What I’ll say with respect to Venezuela, President Trump has been very clear and consistent,” Leavitt said at the time. “He’s prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”
She continued: “The Maduro regime is not the legitimate government of Venezuela, it is a narco-terror cartel. And Maduro, it is the view of this administration, is not a legitimate president. He’s a fugitive head of this cartel who has been indicted in the United States for trafficking drugs into the country.”
The Pentagon, meanwhile, shared with Newsweek a statement attributed to chief spokesperson Sean Parnell.
“On day one of the Trump Administration, the President published an Executive Order designating drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, clearly identifying them as a direct threat to the national security of the United States,” Parnell said. “These cartels have engaged in historic violence and terror throughout our Hemisphere—and around the globe—that has destabilized economies and internal security of countries but also flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.”
He added: “This requires a whole-of-government effort and through coordination with regional partners, the Department of Defense will undoubtedly play an important role towards meeting the President’s objective to eliminate the ability of these cartels to threaten the territory, safety, and security of the United States and its people. As a matter of security and policy we do not speculate on future operations.”
‘Competing Factions’
The brewing crisis is not the first time Trump has sought to unseat Maduro from power, and instead marks the latest episode in a downturn in ties between Washington and Caracas that came about after the Venezuelan leader’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, rose to power through elections in 1999.
Chávez, who would accuse the U.S. of supporting a brief coup against him in 2002, kickstarted what he and his supporters refer to as a Bolivarian Revolution of social and economic reforms that sought to channel 19th-century anti-Spanish colonial leader Simón Bolívar. Somewhat ironically, Bolívar during his time welcomed U.S. President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration of a new doctrine against European imperialism in the Americas.
Yet Washington’s strategy grew increasingly interventionist over the ages, with the U.S. aiding governments and rebels against communist movements across Latin America during the Cold War.
Chávez’s socialist movement emerged from the ashes of this era, painting the U.S. as a new imperialist hegemon seeking to assert its influence across the region. At home, his policies—bolstered by soaring oil prices—initially led to a massive boom in Venezuela’s economic outlook, yet by the time of his 2013 death from cancer, a mix of runaway public spending, economic mismanagement and sanctions had substantially undercut stability, and a subsequent fall in oil prices from 2014 deepened the crisis.
The political situation also escalated in January 2019, as Maduro’s reelection was challenged by critics and rejected by a number of foreign leaders, including Trump, who began a “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela during his first term. An opposition coup led by U.S.-backed National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó was attempted that April only to end in failure.
Like Chávez, Maduro would emerge victorious and went on to easily repel a plot hatched the following year involving dozens of dissidents, as well as at least two former U.S. Green Berets operating as private military contractors.
Tom Shannon, a career diplomat who served as undersecretary for political affairs during the Trump administration, noted how past errors have likely informed the president’s thinking as he grapples with conflicting movements in his second administration.
“When he decides to begin his maximum pressure campaign in Venezuela and recognizes Juan Guaidó as the interim president of Venezuela and slaps on secondary sanctions on oil and gas and even attempts to generate a military coup against Maduro, all of which fail, he does this on the advice of people who were advising him on Venezuela, including the current Secretary of State,” Shannon told Newsweek.
“And they were wrong, and he knows they were wrong,” Shannon, now senior international policy adviser at Arnold & Porter law firm, added.
Upon taking office in January, Trump took a different approach. He sent special envoy Richard Grenell to strike a deal in Caracas, specifically to negotiate the release of imprisoned U.S. citizens and secure a license for oil giant Chevron to resume operations in the country.
Trump went on to revoke this license, a move Shannon pointed out took place as the president sought to secure votes for his “Big, Beautiful Bill,” only to reinstate it once again last month.
“I think part of the confusion is that there are competing factions around the president,” Shannon said. “You have [Secretary of State Marco] Rubio, who would love to do the strike, but then there’s people like [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent, whose attitude is, ‘You’re out of your mind.'”
Noting how “Venezuela is sitting on the largest reserves of oil and gas in the world, and OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control], through its licensing process, gets to control who works in the oil and gas sector,” Shannon argued that if U.S. or European companies were licensed to work in the country, foreign competitors, including some of the nations viewed as hostile to U.S. interests, would be expelled.
“The Chinese are out. The Iranians are out. The Russians are out,” Shannon said of such a scenario. “We control the oil and gas. And guess what? We get to repatriate some of our earnings.”
‘You Should Use Your Power’
Yet the fight for resources does not entirely encapsulate the stakes over Venezuela, nor the administration’s interest in the country.
Trump’s Western Hemisphere doctrine includes pressure campaigns against a host of nations, including otherwise friendly U.S. neighbors Canada and Mexico, as well as territorial ambitions to seize control of foreign-owned territory like Greenland and the Panama Canal.
Drug cartels, from Mexico to Venezuela, are the latest target of Trump’s rhetoric as he portrays a battle against an “invasion” of narcotics, including fentanyl produced with precursors exported by China.
“He has said he is going to use American power to protect American interests, and he is not tied by diplomatic niceties, or by practice, or even by what we could consider to be the norms of international law,” Shannon said. “He believes that if you are powerful, you should use your power.”
He continued: “He’s focused on drug trafficking, cartels, gangs, whatever you want to call them, because first of all, for him, they’re a political winner. He knows that there is broad support in the United States for the use of the American military and intelligence capabilities against these entities that, in his mind, present a very real threat to the United States, to Americans.”
But Shannon also alluded to the costs of a more assertive position in a region that, despite its complex relationship with Washington, has largely courted U.S. influence and investment. In the globalized 21st century, unlike two centuries ago, he argued that the Trump administration may be better suited to bring China-style infrastructure deals than warships and tariffs to win over South America.
“If there is a new Monroe Doctrine, it’s kind of emasculated in the sense that the president is not bringing what you need to the game in order to win,” he said.
The ‘Ultimate Arbiter’
The dissonance in Trump’s “peace through strength” approach is not lost on his support base. A number of influential voices in the president’s populist “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) movement voiced displeasure toward his decision in June to conduct limited yet unprecedented strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities and some continue to criticize his continued support for Israel’s ongoing wars in the region.
Francisco Rodríguez, senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said the Trump administration was looking only to mount a “credible threat of force” that “some hardline opposition figures and Washington hawks” believed “could be enough to push Venezuela’s military to abandon Maduro.”
Yet he said that a similar approach to Trump’s isolated strikes on Iran “cannot be ruled out,” citing former U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper‘s memoir in recounting how “targeted strikes on Venezuelan military installations were seriously discussed at the cabinet level” back in 2019.
Today, “some of the same hawkish voices who favored such strikes are again influential in Venezuela policy,” Rodríguez told Newsweek.
And Rodríguez saw neither contradiction nor incoherence in what he called the “broader Trumpian assertion of hemispheric dominance in line with a MAGA interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine,” despite “the coexistence of that vision with a pronounced aversion, in some MAGA circles, to costly military involvement abroad.”
“Rather, it reflects the dynamics of a personalistic regime in which competing factions with divergent preferences overlap, leaving the final decision to the chief executive,” Rodríguez said. “That enhances Trump’s authority as ultimate arbiter, but it also makes policy unpredictable and inconsistent.”
He added: “The Venezuela case illustrates this perfectly: announcing the deployment of warships while simultaneously authorizing Chevron to expand its oil dealings in the country. It is almost as if, after placing a bounty on bin Laden, Washington had turned around and licensed Halliburton to do infrastructure projects with his family business in Afghanistan.”
https://www.newsweek.com/will-venezuela-first-target-trumps-new-maga-monroe-doctrine-2121883
The de minimis exemption—a tariff loophole that for years made millions of direct-to-consumer imports duty free—is gone, and its end marks a structural shift for American shoppers and logistics providers.
Up until Friday, U.S. consumers could order up to $800 in goods per package from overseas without paying any tariffs or taxes. Now, this landscape is changing, adding to inflationary pressures that will squeeze everyday purchasing power, particularly for low- and middle-income Americans, experts tell Fortune.
“It’s a different shock to the system at a different level than what we’ve seen with the tariffs on large industrial goods,” Rob Haworth, senior investment strategy director at U.S. Bank, told Fortune. “It does start up another near-term challenge for consumers and for businesses and spending overall.”
The de minimis exemption ended in May for imports from China, where an estimated three-quarters of goods under the $800 threshold came from, with a large share coming from e-commerce companies Shein and Temu. The de minimis suspension for parcels from all other countries implemented Friday now means the American dollar won’t buy as much as it used to, when it comes to shoppers purchasing goods made overseas.
“Categories like footwear and apparel will see some of the highest impacts, estimated at 15%-25% increased end consumer pricing, given the manufacturing origin often being China,” Sean Henry, CEO of Stord, an e-commerce and fulfillment company, told Fortune.
A senior Trump administration official said that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency has collected more than $492 million in additional duties on packages shipped from China and Hong Kong since ending the exemption.
And tariffs on goods that previously fell under de minimis could raise as much as $10 billion a year, U.S. trade advisor Peter Navarro told reporters Thursday. Putting that into perspective, the 2024 trade deficit in goods was $1.2 trillion.
“The net number (of tariff revenue without de minimis) is not all that meaningful in terms of how big the deficit is,” Baird Investment Strategist Ross Mayfield told Fortune. “The bigger difference is going to be the extent to which the government is levying these bigger, kind of broader swaths of tariffs.”
Over the past decade, the number of shipments entering the U.S. de minimis surged by more than 600%, from approximately 139 million in 2015 to almost 1.4 billion, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. However, the amount of revenue generated by these new tariffs depends on whether consumers are willing to continue to purchase cheap products from abroad.
“Nearly 40% of online shoppers abandon their carts when faced with these extra tariff and duty surcharges at checkout,” Stord CEO Henry said.
Lee Klaskow, a senior analyst of transportation and logistics at Bloomberg Intelligence, told Fortune he expects spending on these largely “discretionary” purchases to decrease.
“That Shein shirt that you really want that’s $5—maybe you’ll think twice about getting it because it’s going to be more expensive,” Klaskow said.
Prior to the pandemic, consumers had a “huge appetite for cheap things,” but Klaskow expects consumer behavior to flip in response to the change.
U.S. Bank’s Haworth said he’s more focused on how the government will implement the change, as it will require new systems, investment, and infrastructure to collect on small purchases.
He added the whole purpose of de minimis was to streamline the process of bringing small imports into the country, since they are more complex to track. The government has previously said this allowed illicit substances like fentanyl to cross into the U.S. more easily. Still, the system will need to recalibrate to adhere to the new rules.
“Originally why you had a de minimis exemption is so that you weren’t spending a lot of time on small transactions that didn’t net anything,” Haworth said. “So that’s kind of an interesting or challenging cost that is going to come into the business system.”
California Governor Gavin Newsom took a swipe at President Donald Trump on Friday after an appeals court struck down his sweeping plan on global tariffs.
Why It Matters
The decision undercut a central element of President Trump’s unilateral trade strategy and could potentially raise the prospect of refunds if the tariffs are ultimately struck down.
The ruling set up an anticipated legal fight that could reach the Supreme Court.
What To Know
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit held that Trump had exceeded his authority by invoking the International Emergency Economic Powers Act IEEPA to declare national emergencies and impose broad import taxes on most trading partners, the Associated Press reports.
The legal challenge centered on two sets of actions: reciprocal tariffs announced on April 2—including up to 50 percent on some goods and a 10 percent baseline on most imports—and earlier tariffs announced February 1 targeting selected imports from Canada, China and Mexico tied to drug and migration concerns.
Newsom’s press office reacted to the ruling on X on Friday, saying, “If it’s a day ending in y, it’s a day Trump is found violating the law!”
The rebuke comes amid weeks of back-and-forths from the pair as Newsom has taken aim at Republicans‘ redistricting efforts and Trump’s implementation of national guard troops in U.S. cities.
Taking to his social media platform Truth Social, reacting to the ruling, the president vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, saying in part that: “ALL TARIFFS ARE STILL IN EFFECT! Today a Highly Partisan Appeals Court incorrectly said that our Tariffs should be removed, but they know the United States of America will win in the end. If these Tariffs ever went away, it would be a total disaster for the Country. It would make us financially weak, and we have to be strong. The U.S.A. will no longer tolerate enormous Trade Deficits and unfair Tariffs and Non Tariff Trade Barriers imposed by other Countries, friend or foe, that undermine our Manufacturers, Farmers, and everyone else.”
What People Are Saying
Republicans Against Trump reacting to the president’s vow to appeal to the Supreme Court on X: “Grandpa is mad”
Retired U.S. Air Force General Robert Spalding reacting to Trump’s post on X: “Thank god”
William and Mary Law School Professor Jonathan Adler on X reacting to the ruling: “Whoa”
Justin Wolfers, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, on X: “BOOM. The federal appeals court rules Trump’s tariffs illegal, because they are. There’s no national emergency, and so the power to tariff a country rests with Congress. Trump admin has lost at every stage of the process, but stay tuned for the Supremes to chime in.”
Wolfers in a follow-up post: “This won’t end all tariffs. This ruling applies to tariffs applied to entire countries (which is most of the tariff agenda). The industry-specific tariffs use a different legal authority, and will remain. The White House has other (more limited) tariff powers it’ll dust off.”
What Happens Next
The appeals court did not immediately block the tariffs, however, allotting the Trump Administration until October 14 to appeal the decision.
https://www.newsweek.com/gavin-newsom-mocks-donald-trump-tariff-plan-struck-down-2121980
