We're All Invaders Under This Regime, Plus

Apple steps up for ICE, plus music

Local Heroes and Big In Japan, Kalapana Celebrate Their 50th Anniversary (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review

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Why I Feel As Though I Have To Go, Plus

I went to a show this weekend to get some photos. I think it was only the second time this year and afterward I felt like I’d been tenderized but the experience was rewarding, not least for seeing and catching up with some old music scene friends, including another photographer whom I greatly admire and who has been struggling with getting out herself but pushes through.

We’re All Invaders Under This Regime

One among the many enduring shames of Democrats is how they allowed Republicans to turn immigration into such an electoral and administrative sledgehammer. It is but a short hop from demonizing immigrants to demonizing citizens who are something other than who we ought to be, and the current regime has made that transition with enthusiasm and ease.

Immigrants, documented and otherwise, are valuable. They contribute to the economy, they pay taxes, they grow our food and, if they’re undocumented, they consume few of the social welfare resources reactionary bigots are always bitching about. Investing in immigrants pays off in dollars as well as in humanity, as Nick Tabor in The Baffler writes in a story about Denver, which along with suburb of Aurora played host to some of the regime’s early massive anti-immigrant raids.

Denver had begun closing shelters and moving families into apartments. It recruited lawyers on a volunteer basis and collaborated with the Colorado Asylum Project to help the migrants apply for asylum and work permits. It brought in federal immigration officials to speed up processing. For the next six months, while these families awaited work permits, their rent and food would be paid for. Meanwhile, at least one adult from each household was required to spend twenty hours a week in WorkReady Denver, a program designed by a local nonprofit. Jon Ewing, the spokesperson for the Denver mayor’s office, described it to me as “a one-stop shop on how to live and work in the United States of America.”

Nationwide, this program was unmatched. Other cities provided services such as legal help and job training, but Jacob Hamburger, a law professor at Marquette University whose work focuses on the role of state and local governments in immigration, called Denver’s model the most comprehensive by far. “All the different portions of this seem to come together in the Denver program in a way they don’t anywhere else,” he said.

The program cost roughly $1,700 per person, but Denver saw this as an investment—and not without reason. A report by the state in 2018 found that 2,700 refugees had generated $611 million in new economic activity in the previous decade. It concluded that for every $1 spent in refugee services, state and local governments received $1.23 in tax revenue.

A return on investment of 23% or better is outstanding in the corporate world but bog standard for social welfare spending on both children (which can over time return close to two dollars for every social welfare dollar spent, from food stamps to early childhood education to child tax credits) and adults. Immigrants, and especially immigrant children, are no exception to the rule.

But Democrats have been really, really bad both at telling that story and at following through on the kinds of programs that bring those kinds of benefits. Obama ended his term labeled the Deporter in Chief, having accelerated an immigration process that prioritized increasing deportations over due process and—with the notable exception of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals process (DACA, the Dreamers program)—programs designed to integrate immigrants and benefit from their presence here.

Despite the insistence in some quarters that immigration has always been a doom-for-Democrats issue at the polls, Americans were feeling generous toward immigrants when the Biden administration rolled in. Rather than take advantage of the sentiments to craft a humane and effective immigration policy, though, the administration sort of gestured weakly in the direction of positive reforms and then retreated into meanness.

The year Biden was elected, a record 77 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll said immigration was a good thing, and more than a third thought the current levels should be increased. Moreover, during those early days of Biden’s presidency, the labor market was tighter than it had been in decades, with business owners grousing that “no one wants to work.” A federal initiative to help asylum seekers join the workforce—with full legal status, so they wouldn’t undercut other workers’ wages—could have benefited everyone. Biden’s administration had also demonstrated that it was capable of running such an operation. Under the Uniting for Ukraine program, launched in 2022, the government welcomed at least 240,000 Ukrainians who had been displaced by their country’s war with Russia. It worked with nonprofits to place them in specific communities and provide them with housing and job training. The program was almost universally considered a success.
…
By the late days of Biden’s presidency, the public had shifted hard on immigration. In a Gallup poll that February( of 2024), a record share of respondents—55 percent—said illegal border crossings posed a “critical threat” to the country. And that summer, for the first time in decades, a majority said they wanted to see less immigration, period. Three-quarters were in favor of hiring more border guards. (Even so, a strong majority, 70 percent, still favored a path to citizenship for people who entered the country illegally.)

The Democrats could have rejected these narratives and made a case in favor of immigration. The United States has a clear moral imperative to help people fleeing from Venezuela (and other places like it), if only because the sanctions we’ve imposed there have played a huge part in the country’s economic ruin. Granted, it’s hard to imagine the party of the Clintons and Joe Biden framing the matter in such moral terms.

But Democrats also could have championed immigration as part of a plan to stave off further price increases and boost tax revenue in a year when economic inflation was at the top of voters’ minds. Instead, they fully embraced the idea that immigration was a threat and that a border crackdown was needed. In the Senate, they pushed a bill that advanced several of the GOP’s top priorities on immigration, including a $7 billion increase in ICE funding. Chuck Schumer knew Republicans would block it, but he hoped this would show voters they were hypocrites. Instead, when the legislation failed, it simply made the Democrats look like a paler shade of the GOP.

So you have this long-term, concerted effort by reactionaries dating back decades (more than a century, really) to paint immigrants as dangerous, disease-ridden subhuman criminals, against less and less resistance from the centrist party policy-setters, and nobody should be surprised that the current regime is directly tying support for immigration to support for terrorism.

Linking the characterization of immigrants as an invading force intent on destroying the fabric of the country with the characterization of regime opponents as the perpetrators of an inside job with the same goals was an easy and premeditated jump for the regime. The connection generated an under-reported executive order that, along with the declaration of people expressing anti-fascist sentiments as a terrorists-in-waiting, potentially criminalizes opposition to almost every aspect of the regime’s most un-American (in theory, anyway) projects.

In (executive order) NSPM-7, “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” President Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to fight his version of political violence in America, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. This vast counterterrorism army, made up of federal, state, and local agents would, as Trump aide Stephen Miller said, form “the central hub of that effort.”

NSPM-7 directs a new national strategy to “disrupt” any individual or groups “that foment political violence,” including “before they result in violent political acts.”

In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report.

The Trump administration isn’t only targeting organizations or groups but even individuals and “entities” whom NSPM-7 says can be identified by any of the following “indicia” (indicators) of violence:

• anti-Americanism,

• anti-capitalism,

• anti-Christianity,

• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,

• extremism on migration,

• extremism on race,

• extremism on gender

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

The directive had gone unreported in any corporate news outlet at the time independent journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote about it, although stories have been slowly percolating up since then.

You won’t find much daylight at all between terrorizing immigrants and terrorizing transgender people, or socialists, or atheists, or any other “other.” Once a regime identifies one group of people who can safely be marginalized and terrorized and excluded from society not just by the state but by everybody who supports the state, all the others of us become ripe for the same.

So far as I’m aware, CBS is not among those who have reported on this most commodious of security directives. The long arc of the network news division, from Fred Friendly and Ed Murrow and Harvest of Shame to Bari Fucking Weiss, who for instance recently tried to link Charlie Kirk’s murder to the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, is bad news for us all.

You gotta stand up for everybody who needs it, even if doing so makes you queasy or uneasy. I mean, how many sententious deliveries of Martin Niemöller’s anti-serenity prayer do we need? We’re already at the point where Leni Riefenstahl would consider making a Stephen Miller documentary.

Apple steps up for ICE

Apple, like any giant corporation, wants to pursue their piratical enterprises with minimal disruption from governments. (Full disclosure: I got a MacBook during the holidays last year and am currently using it as a desktop substitute.) Sometimes they’ll go to court to protect their right to jolly-roger the competition; sometimes they’ll seek government approval to swallow up a competitor under the auspices of delivering better service to consumers; and sometimes they’ll immediately comply with demands from a fascist regime which has already demonstrated the willingness to fuck with corporations at levels both micro and macro.

The latter is how Apple reacted when the regime’s lead oppression attorney, Pam Bondi, ordered them to remove ICEblock, a crowd-sourcing application designed to help the public track and respond to ICE activities, from the Apple App Store.

Apple said it yanked an app called ICEBlock from its app store after the “safety risks” of the app were made known to the company. The anonymous, crowd-sourced app describes itself as “Waze but for ICE sightings,” and claims to serve as an early warning system informing people when ICE agents are nearby.

The app was launched in April and garnered hundreds of thousands of downloads, but it was only after Attorney General Pam Bondi put Apple on notice, demanding the app be pulled from the App Store, that the company made it unavailable.

“We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store — and Apple did so,” said Bondi in a statement to Fox News.

The Justice Department did not respond to NPR’s questions about its request.

Since the app never had an Android version, it was not on Google’s Play Store. Still, a company spokesperson told NPR that it, too, “removed similar apps for violations of our policies,” falling in line with Apple’s actions.

Google, you may remember, was once famous for its “Don’t be evil” self-admonishment, something some employees took so much to heart that they sued the company when they saw it as having abandoned the principle in connection with, not so ironically, its work for Vaterland Security. And Apple is of course famously self-satisfied about allegedly prioritizing user safety above the convenience of inimical state actors (although that was always a flag flown subject to corporate convenience). User safety, it seems, doesn’t include American users who may be immigrants or people who want to protect immigrants from a fascist paramilitary.

The NPR story mentions that one time when Tim Apple went to the White House and gave Trump a one-of-a-kind glass plaque on a gold base for no other reason than that he knows Trump likes shiny stuff.

I don’t know that the regime came into power fully expecting corporate genuflections, but they certainly had the intention to try for them and they have to be enthused by their success at this early stage of the project.

Use of the ICEBlock app, which the makers say remains unavailable on all platforms, or similar anti-fascist helpmeets, is exactly the kind of thing that the regime’s sweeping anti-terrorism directives could target in order to rid themselves of all you turbulent priests.

So hey! Tim Apple is just looking out for your welfare.

They’re getting in line to get in line and to get you in line along the way.

Music!

Lisa O’Neill, Heard A Long Gone Song, “Rock the Machine”

English Teacher, This Could Be Texas, “Nearly Daffodils”

Yura Yura Teikoku, “Into The Next Night”

Mary In The Junkyard, “Tuesday”

Hinds featuring Grian Chatten, “Stranger”

Fontaines D.C., “Starburster”

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That, comrades in thug-blocking, is all I got. Take care; be well.