Category: Policies

Trump Calls Deportation Push a ‘Military Operation’

President Trump on Thursday called his effort to ramp up deportations a “military operation” aimed at ridding the U.S. of “really bad dudes.”

“We’re getting really bad dudes out of this country,” he said at a meeting with manufacturing CEOs. “And at a rate nobody has ever seen before. And they’re the bad ones. And it’s a military operation.”

Trump is touting his administration’s new immigration enforcement policies, which could result in millions of deportations.

The Department of Homeland Security guidelines vastly increase the number of immigrants who are considered priorities for deportation. They also direct law enforcement agencies to hire thousands of new agents to apprehend people living in the country illegally, with local police and sheriffs’ offices enlisted in the effort.

The military, however, is not involved. The guidelines did not adopt a draft plan to enlist National Guard troops to help apprehend undocumented immigrants in nearly a dozen states.

Trump officials have said the effort is aimed at deporting criminal undocumented immigrants.

“You see what’s happening at the border,” the president said. “All of the sudden, for the first time, we’re getting gang members out. We’re getting drug lords out.”

“When you see gang violence and you’ve read about it like never before, all of the things, much of that is people who are here illegally. And they’re tough and they’re tough, but they’re not tough like our people,” he continued.

Under the administration’s guidelines, any immigrant who is convicted, charged or suspected of a crime is considered a priority for removal.

That is a break from Obama administration policy, which focused on serious criminals, recent border crossers and suspected terrorists.

The changes angered immigrant-rights groups, who said they could result in families being split apart and violations of due-process rights.

(h/t The Hill)

Stephen Miller Admits the New Executive Order on Immigration Ban is Same as the Old

During a town hall hosted by Fox News Tuesday night, White House adviser Stephen Miller confirmed that President Donal Trump’s new executive order — which will replace the immigration ban on seven majority-Muslim countries — will effectively have the same policy outcome.

As one of the architects of the first executive order, Miller insisted that “nothing was wrong with the first executive order” — although the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the ban earlier this month. Miller admitted that a new order was necessary to avoid the judicial rulings from the appellate courts.

Although there will be changes in the language of the upcoming executive order, Miller said the policy outcome will remain the same.

“One of the big differences that you are going to see in the executive order is that it is going to be responsive to the judicial ruling which didn’t exist previously,” Miller said. “And so these are mostly minor, technical differences. Fundamentally, you are still going to have the same, basic policy outcome for the country.”

Critics were quick to point out that Miller had involuntarily provided civil rights organizations the material needed to challenge the order once it’s signed by the president.

Lawyers that challenged the first executive order cited former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s remarks on Fox News, when he said that Trump sought advice for a legal way to carry out a “Muslim ban.” Civil rights activists argued that Giuliani’s statement was evidence that the Trump administration wanted to discriminate against people of a certain religion.

Miller still believes the appellate courts’ rulings were wrong.

“The rulings from those courts were flawed, erroneous and false,” he said. “The president’s actions were clearly legal and constitutional and consistent with the longstanding tradition of presidents of the past.”

(h/t Salon)

Media

 

 

 

Senior Trump Appointee Fired After Critical Comments

A senior Trump administration official was fired following criticism in a private speech of President Donald Trump’s policies and his inner circle of advisers.

Craig Deare, whom Trump appointed a month ago to head the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere division, was on Friday escorted out of the Executive Office Building, where he worked in Washington.

A senior White House official confirmed that Deare is no longer working at the NSC and has returned to the position he previously held at the National Defense University. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an incident not otherwise made public, and provided no further details.

But current and former administration officials say Deare’s termination was linked to remarks he made Thursday at a private talk at the Wilson Center, a Washington think tank. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

According to one person who attended the discussion, Deare slammed the Trump administration for its policies on Latin America, specifically its rocky start to relations with Mexico. That person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a private event.

Trump signed an order in the first week of his presidency to build a border wall with Mexico, jumpstarting a campaign promise. The move prompted Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto to cancel his trip to Washington in late January.

The person who attended the Wilson Center discussion also said that Deare openly expressed frustration over being cut out of most of the policy discussions about Mexico, saying that members of Trump’s inner circle, including chief strategist Steve Bannon and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, have not consulted with NSC directorates as the White House formulates policy.

Officials at the State Department have expressed similar sentiments regarding the president and his administration’s take on diplomacy. Last week, when the president met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, no one from the State Department had been involved in those talks. Instead, Kushner, who had little diplomatic experience, had a greater role in the meeting than Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Several staffers in the State Department have also been laid off.

Deare has been on the faculty of National Defense University in Washington since 2001. He joined the university’s College of International Security Affairs in 2010 and most recently served as dean of administration.

The person who attended the Wilson Center talk also noted that Deare made several remarks about how attractive Mr. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, appeared, remarks that person described as “awkward.” Mr. Trump has also made several remarks in the past about how attractive his eldest daughter is, once commenting on a television talk show, that “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I would be dating her.”

Deare did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Officials with the Wilson Center also declined a request for information, saying the discussion was off the record.

Deare is the second senior NSC official to leave in under a week. On Monday, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, retired Gen. Michael Flynn, resigned after revelations that he discussed sanctions with a Russian diplomat before Trump was sworn in, then misled Vice President Mike Pence about the nature of those conversations.

(h/t CBS News)

Update

Since being fired from the National Security Counsel, Deare has been reassigned back to his old position at National Defense University.

Trump Cited a Nonexistent Incident in Sweden

President Donald Trump cited a nonexistent incident in Sweden while talking about the relationship between terror attacks and refugees around the world during a rally in Melbourne, Florida, on Saturday.

“You look at what’s happening in Germany. You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden … Sweden … who would believe this? Sweden, they took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible. You look at what’s happening Brussels, you look at what’s happening all over the world,” Trump said.

No incident occurred in Sweden on Friday night.

However, Fox News host Tucker Carlson ran an interview on Friday night’s broadcast of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with documentarian and media personality Ami Horowitz, who presented a clip from a new film documenting alleged violence committed by refugees in Sweden. The segment went on extensively about a supposed crime surge in Sweden and its links to immigrant populations.

Crime rates in Sweden have stayed relatively stable, with some fluctuations, over the last decade, according to the 2016 Swedish Crime Survey.

This isn’t the first time that there has been a correlation between Trump’s statements and programming on cable news, of which he is a noted fan.

In late January, Trump tweeted about gun violence in Chicago shortly after after an “O’Reilly Factor” segment on the same topic, which cited the same statistics and even used the word “carnage,” a recent favorite noun of Trump’s.

In February, Trump declared in a tweet that he was calling “my own shots” in his administration shortly after MSNBC “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough asked on air whether Trump’s chief White House strategist, Steve Bannon, was “calling the shots” in the White House.

(h/t Business Insider)

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0tSLV3GGQc

Trump Tweets: The Media is the ‘Enemy of the American People’

President Trump blasted the media as “the enemy of the American people” in a tweet Friday, calling out several outlets specifically.

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” he wrote.

He had posted and then quickly deleted a slightly different version of the tweet just a few minutes earlier, which omitted ABC and CBS. He also included the word “SICK!” at the end of the original post.

The tweet came one day after Trump held an adversarial and lengthy news conference, in which he berated the media as “very fake news” and dismissed news reports about his and his associates’ ties to Russia as a “ruse.”

About an hour later, he posted a second tweet criticizing the media’s coverage of the press conference.

“‘One of the most effective press conferences I’ve ever seen!’ says Rush Limbaugh. Many agree.Yet FAKE MEDIA calls it differently! Dishonest,” Trump wrote.

Trump has long had an antagonistic relationship with the press, and often labels news stories he sees as unfavorable as “fake news.” Trump’s campaign issued a survey to supporters on Friday, asking them to gauge the trustworthiness of the media.

The news outlets singled out in Trump’s Friday afternoon tweet are not new targets for the president. He has often lambasted CNN and The New York Times, referring to them as “failing” and out of touch with voters.

In a rare interview with The New York Times last month, Chief White House Strategist Steve Bannon, the former chair of the far-right Breitbart News, called reporters the “opposition party” and said “the media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.”

“They don’t understand this country,” Bannon said. “They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.”

Trump echoed Bannon’s comments shortly after, telling “The Brody File” that “the media is the opposition party in many ways.”

(h/t The Hill)

 

 

 

Trump Winery Seeks More Foreign Help

A Virginia winery owned by President Trump’s son Eric has requested permission to bring in nearly two dozen foreign workers, according to a new report.

The Trump Winery in Virginia is seeking 23 workers from overseas to plant and harvest grapes there this spring, BuzzFeed reported Thursday.

The Department of Labor published a request from the winery, which is also known as Trump Vineyard Estates LLC, earlier that day.

Thursday’s posting says potential workers will earn $11.27 hourly working at the 1,300-acre estate from April 3 to as late as Oct. 27.

The workers are being sought using the federal H-2A visa program, which permits U.S. employers to hire foreign agricultural laborers for temporary work as long as no qualified Americans want the jobs instead.

The H-2 visa program has brought more than 100,000 foreigners into the U.S. annually since 2003, BuzzFeed reported, and the initiative has benefited businesses relating to the Trumps.

BuzzFeed added that companies owned by President Trump or bearing his name have sought to hire at least 286 foreign workers since he launched his White House run in June 2015.

Many laborers now work as servers and housecleaners at Mar-a-Lago, the report said, Trump’s luxury resort in Palm Beach, Fla., that Trump has dubbed “the winter White House.”

Stores in the Washington, D.C., area have reportedly been selling out of bottles of wine that bear the president’s name since he entered office.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump Ally With Zero Experience to Review Intelligence Agencies

President Trump is planning to ask a member of his economic advisory council to lead a review of the U.S. intelligence community, The New York Times reported on Wednesday.

According to the newspaper, Stephen Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, has informed his company’s shareholders that he is currently considering a move to join the Trump administration.

Feinberg also maintains strong ties to top Trump officials, including chief strategist Stephen Bannon and senior adviser Jared Kushner, who is also President Trump’s son-in-law.

Both officials declined to comment on The New York Times report.

Top intelligence officials told the Times they fear that the businessman is being prepped for a position within the intelligence community.

According to the paper, Feinberg’s only national security experience stems from his company’s involvement with a private security company and two gun manufacturers.

The possible review of intelligence agencies comes in the wake of Trump’s renewed feud with the intelligence community over leaks that led to the ousting of national security adviser Michael Flynn.

“From intelligence, papers are being leaked, things are being leaked; it’s criminal action. It’s a criminal act, and it’s been going on for a long time before me, but now it’s really going on,” Trump said Wednesday.

“The real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!” the president also tweeted.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), on Wednesday formally asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to further investigate the leaks.

“We have serious concerns about the potential protection of classified information here. … The release of classified information can, by definition, have grave effects on national security. In light of this, we request that your office begin an immediate investigation into whether classified information was mishandled here,” the lawmakers wrote.

(h/t The Hill)

 

Trump Signs Repeal of Transparency Rule for Oil Companies

President Trump signed legislation Tuesday to repeal a controversial regulation that would have required energy companies to disclose their payments to foreign governments.

The legislation is the first time in 16 years that the Congressional Review Act (CRA) has been used to repeal a regulation, and only the second time in the two decades that act has been law. It is the third piece of legislation Trump has signed since taking office three weeks ago.

It is the start of one front in an aggressive deregulatory effort that the Trump administration and the GOP Congress are undertaking to roll back Obama-era rules on fossil fuel companies, financial institutions and other businesses that they say have suffered for the last eight years.

The resolution repeals a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rule written under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law.

It was meant to fight corruption in resource-rich countries by mandating that companies on United States stock exchanges disclose the royalties and other payments that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies make to governments.

At a signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Trump said the legislation is part of a larger regulatory rollback that he and congressional Republicans are undertaking with the goal of economic and job recovery.

“This is a big signing, very important signing,” Trump said, flanked at his desk by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas), Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and other lawmakers.

“We’re bringing back jobs big league. We’re bringing them back at the plant level, we’re bringing them back at the mine level. The energy jobs are coming back,” he continued. “A lot of people going back to work now.”

Trump then asked Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), the measure’s lead sponsor, to speak about it and regulatory reform in general.

“Over 20 years, there’s been 56,000 rules that have been put in place, with very little legislative input or oversight, and it’s time that changed,” he said.

The administration and congressional allies say the SEC rule imposes massive, unnecessary costs on United States oil, natural gas and mining companies, putting them at a significant competitive disadvantage to foreign companies that do not have to comply.

“Misguided federal regulations such as the SEC rule addressed by H.J.R. 41 inflict real cost on the American people and put our businesses, especially small businesses, at a significant disadvantage,” White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said earlier Tuesday.

“It’s a priority for the Trump administration to fix our broken regulatory system so that it enhances American productivity and well-being without imposing unnecessary costs and burdens,” he said.

“Signing this joint resolution is one more step toward achieving this goal.”

The House passed the repeal measure earlier this month, followed shortly by the Senate.

Democrats and supporters of the SEC rule see the rollback as a victory for corruption.

“The rule they’re trying to repeal protects U.S. citizens and investors from having millions of their dollars vanished into the pockets of corrupt foreign oligarchs,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said earlier this month. “This kind of transparency is essential to combating waste, fraud, corruption and mismanagement.”

Supports argued in part that if the United States takes a leading role on foreign payment transparency, other major nations would follow.

Exxon Mobil Corp., whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is now secretary of State, was one of the most vocal opponents of the rule, along with other major oil companies.

The SEC is still obligated under the Dodd-Frank law to write some form of a transparency rule for extractive industries.

But under the CRA, the agency can never publish any rule that is “substantially the same” as the one that has now been overturned.

Both chambers of Congress have also passed a CRA resolution to overturn the Interior Department’s stream protection rule for coal mining, and Trump supports the repeal.

The House has passed numerous other regulatory repeal measures under the CRA, including ones on methane pollution and gun ownership, and the Senate is likely to take up at least some of them.

(h/t The Hill)

Trump Told Weeks Ago That Michael Flynn Withheld Truth on Russia

President Trump was informed weeks ago that his national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, had not told the truth about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador and asked for Mr. Flynn’s resignation after concluding he could not be trusted, the White House said on Tuesday.

At his daily briefing, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, said the president’s team has been “reviewing and evaluating this issue on a daily basis trying to ascertain the truth,” and ultimately concluded that while there was no violation of law, Mr. Flynn could no longer serve in his position.

“The evolving and eroding level of trust as a result of this situation and a series of other questionable incidents is what led the president to ask General Flynn for his resignation,” Mr. Spicer said.

(h/t The New York Times)

Trump Staffers Using App That Deletes Their Messages

Trump administration staffers are reportedly communicating by using an encrypted messaging app that erases messages shortly after they have been received.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that officials were using the app, called Confide, to avoid being caught talking to the media, as President Trump moves to crack down on leaks.

The Post report followed a report from Axios last week that reported Confide had become a favorite app for Republican staffers.

Staffers may also be concerned about being hacked after high-profile cyber attacks on Democratic groups during the election.

“We do see a spike in across the board metrics when there is a major news cycle about the vulnerability of digital communications,” Jon Brod, Confide’s president, told Axios.

The reports raise questions though about the possible violation of federal records keeping laws that require certain government employees to use their official email address for communications.

“The whole f—ing campaign was about Hillary’s emails and now Trump’s team is violating the Presidential Records Act by using Confide,” tweeted former Obama staffer Tommy Vietor.

A White House spokeswoman did not immediately respond when asked to comment on the reports.

(h/t The Hill)

1 … 246 247 248 249 250 … 277