When asked about what specifically he was accusing the mayor of doing, the congressman told reporters, ‘Well that’s why we’re going to have an investigation,’ but failed to name any crimes.
The Democrat has denied any wrong doing while pushing support for the Belonging Fund.
‘The Belonging Fund supports families known to be impacted as a result of activities related to immigration, but the entire point is family supports, cost of living, those kinds of things,’ O’Connell told the local outlet.
‘It’s not even intended to be about legal services, so it is about people who have identified food insecurity as a result of possibly losing somebody who was an earner in the household, it is about childcare, it is about basic family needs.’
Tag Archives: immigrants
Talking Points Memo: The ‘Invasion’ Invention: The Far Right’s Long Legal Battle to Make Immigrants the Enemy
The Trump administration is using the claim that immigrants have “invaded” the country to justify possibly suspending habeas corpus, part of the constitutional right to due process. A faction of the far right has been building this case for years.
When top Trump adviser Stephen Miller threatened on May 9 that the administration is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus in response to an “invasion” from undocumented immigrants, he was operating on a fringe legal theory that a right-wing faction has been working to legitimize for more than a decade.
…
Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.
Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.
The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.
The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.
So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion….
And therein lies the problem: The Trump regime is off pursuing an unconstitutional tangent to solve a problem that is improperly framed as an “invasion”.
It’s a long well-researched article. Please click on the link below and read the entire article.
Snopes: Clarifying claim that DOGE, RFK Jr. found 8M people fraudulently on Medicaid
The numbers appeared tied to estimates on the number of people who may be cut from Medicaid under U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Snopes has a lengthy discussion of claims by F’Elon Musk (DOGE) and Robert “Brainworm” Kennedy Jr. that they found 8M people fraudently on Medicaid. Their conclusion:
These numbers don’t add up to 8 million …
Like almost everything else involving DOGE, the math doesn’t work out.
You can click the link below to read the article:
CBS News: Hundreds of border agents to help ICE with arrests in U.S. interior
The Trump administration is planning to dispatch hundreds of border agents to different parts of the country so they can help Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest unauthorized immigrants in the U.S interior, three sources familiar with the plan told CBS News.
The plan would be the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to muster the vast resources and personnel of agencies across the federal government to support ICE in its bid to carry out what the president has vowed will be the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.
The effort is expected to involve around 500 personnel from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including green-uniformed Border Patrol agents in charge of interdicting the illicit entry of migrants and drugs, the sources said, requesting anonymity to discuss internal governments plans that have not been announced.
Wonderful, the Gestapo just got larger. 🙄

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-ice-arrests-border-agents
Washington Post: Immigrant-detention officer charged with choking handcuffed migrant

A private security officer at an immigrant detention center in Texas was criminally charged last week with choking a handcuffed detainee, who was later transported to the facility’s medical unit.
Charles Siringi is accused of putting his hands around the detainee’s neck and throat and slamming him against walls March 31 in Conroe, Texas, according to a criminal complaint.
Siringi, 66, was charged in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas with deprivation of rights while acting under the government’s authority, resulting in bodily injury. He posted a $10,000 bail Tuesday.
Newsweek: Harvard graduate self-deports to Mexico
A Harvard graduate has self-deported to Mexico alongside his husband amid fears about President Donald Trump‘s immigration crackdown.
Francisco Hernandez-Corona, 34, and his United States citizen husband, Irving Hernandez-Corona, decided to leave the country because the federal government ramped up immigration enforcement, NBC10 Boston reported.
The couple traveled to Mexico’s west coast, arriving in Puerto Vallarta three weeks ago.
“We started seeing ICE everywhere and people sent to El Salvador,” said Francisco.
“There would be knocks at the door and [Francisco] would be scared and be terrified,” said Irving. “It was never our intention to leave under these circumstances. We left, basically fleeing.”
Francisco came to the U.S. when he was 10, sent by his father to cross the border with the help of a coyote. He described the journey through the desert as “the worst three days of my life,” adding, “Nobody asked me if this is what I want to do. I didn’t have a choice.”

https://www.newsweek.com/harvard-graduate-self-deport-mexico-2075881
MSNBC: I confronted Sec. Noem [Bimbo #2] because our democracy is threatened like never before
President Trump has demonstrated he’s willing to tell any lie to justify jailing anyone.
Last month, President Donald Trump shared an edited image of the knuckles of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with protected status wrongfully sent to a Salvadoran detention facility. The photo showed “MS13” apparently added above his knuckle tattoos, even though other photos of his hand did not have that text. Last week, I had a chance to ask Homeland Security Security Kristi [Bimbo #2] Noem if she had investigated how an edited image came into the president’s hands. Not only did she refuse to answer, she barely acknowledged that the image was edited.
Politics is hyperbole. I know that voters have become inured to politicians saying, “The opposing party is the end of the country as we know it!” But what we are witnessing today is like nothing we have seen since the founding of this country, almost 250 years ago. Every warning light on democracy’s dashboard now flashes red.
Since taking the Oval Office, Trump has never been coy about his ambitions to rule as a dictator rather than serve as a president, accountable to the people who put him there. In just the past few months, he’s laid out the groundwork to jail innocent people and silence his political enemies, all under the guise of “law and order.” Perhaps in just a few months, Trump’s authoritarian ambitions will be realized. And it will be like how Hemingway described how one grows broke: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”Just last week, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of his longest-serving enablers, said the White House was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus for immigrants.
Let’s be clear: Suspending the constitutional right to challenge unlawful detention is not some academic exercise or abstract policy debate, as many on the right may claim. Miller is deadly serious. There is no ambiguity. Equally explicit is the United States Constitution: Only Congress can suspend habeas corpus, and only in cases of actual rebellion or invasion.
Suspending habeas corpus is the move of dictators and despots.
Click the link below to read the whole article:
CNN: Vance says Roberts is ‘profoundly wrong’ about judiciary’s role to check executive branch
Vice President JD Vance called Chief Justice John Roberts’ comments earlier this month that the judiciary’s role is to check the executive branch a “profoundly wrong sentiment” and said the courts should be “deferential” to the president, particularly when it comes to immigration.
“I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment. That’s one half of his job, the other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch. And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for,” Vance told New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat on the “Interesting Times” podcast, which was taped on Monday.
This idiot J.D. Dunce has a law degree?
Did he even pass civics in high school?

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/21/politics/jd-vance-john-roberts-judiciary-role
Rolling Stone: Trump Allegedly Violates Court Order, Sends Asian Immigrants to South Sudan
The administration reportedly deported two men from Myanmar and Vietnam to war-torn South Sudan
After an appeals court declined to remove an injunction aimed at barring Donald Trump’s administration from deporting noncitizens to “third-party countries” – a country that is not their country of origin – without due process, and without giving them chance to raise concerns of persecution, torture, and death, the government allegedly violated that court order days later.
Two men, who are originally from Myanmar and Vietnam and were being held in U.S. immigration custody, were deported to war-torn South Sudan, according their lawyers, Politico reported. Their lawyers said they received the a notice of the deportation plan on Monday evening and that by Tuesday morning, they were on a plane with 10 other deportees.
Earlier this month, as Rolling Stone reported, the Trump administration was preparing to use a military plane to fly immigrants to Libya before Judge Brian Murphy clarified that doing so would violate his court order. Lawyers with the National Immigration Litigation Alliance, the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, and Human Rights warned that “Laotian, Vietnamese, and Philippine” immigrants, who are being detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Texas, were “being prepared for removal to Libya, a county notorious for its human rights violations, especially with respect to migrant residents.”
Lawyers for the Burmese man, per Politico, said he was originally scheduled to be on a flight to Libya, before the plan was abandoned amid media and legal scrutiny. The attorneys also said that the man, identified as N.M. in court papers, received notification about the deportation to South Sudan only in English, violating Judge Murphy’s previous order due to N.M.’s limited English proficiency.
Sudan and South Sudan are on the U.S. Department of States “do not travel” advisory list, yet King Donald and his cronies are using it for third-country deportations.
Washington Examiner: Judge rules Trump administration violated court order with migrant flight to Africa
A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated an order he issued last month barring officials from deporting people to countries they are not from without first giving them an adequate chance to object to their removal.
The decision from Judge Brian E. Murphy came after a hearing in Boston to consider an emergency motion filed by lawyers on behalf of a group of men who they said were being deported and sent to South Sudan.
When the hearing began, officials from the Department of Homeland Security said eight immigrants were deported Tuesday on a flight. The officials did not say which country the men were being sent to.
Murphy said the government gave the deported men just over 24 hours’ notice that they were being removed from the country. He called the time frame “plainly insufficient.”
“The department’s actions in this case are unquestionably violative of this court’s order,” he said.
And King Donald gets bent all out of shape:
The Trump administration slammed Murphy as an “activist judge” after the hearing, accusing him of trying to protect “criminal illegal immigrant monsters.”
“A local judge in Massachusetts is trying to force the United States to bring back these uniquely barbaric monsters …
No, King Donald, they are human beings just like you and I, and they are entitled to their day in court.
