#Immigrant Defenders Law Center

[minnesotafollower]

Biden Administration’s New Restrictions on U.S. Asylum Law Being Challenged in Federal Courts 

This year has seen many developments regarding the Biden Administration’s attempts to cope with the large numbers of migrants illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Here is a review of some of those developments. Biden’s New Asylum Regulation[1] On February 21, the Biden Administration announced a proposed rule that would  require rapid deportation of an immigrant at the U.S. border who had…

[animentality]

I don't particularly like the Purge movies, but it does annoy me when people say they hate the Purge movies because they "support the idea that humans without laws would immediately kill each other."

You know. A somewhat conservative, pro-state message.

But I say this simply, and carefully:

The Purge movies are the opposite of that. Completely.

From the beginning, they have always been a scathing criticism of the middle class and the wealthy for their blatant disregard for the lives of everyone else and their love for state sanctioned violence.

They aren't even fucking subtle.

Every villain in those movies dress like fucking Republicans. They worship guns. The Purge in universe only exists to fund the NRA.

The first movie was about a black man being hunted by Ivy League looking ass white people in suits and shit.

Said black man was the only decent person too, and he saved the people in the house he took refuge in, despite the fact that they beat his ass up and were going to give him to the crazies that were chasing him.

Purge 2 was about how state sanctioned violence always affects the underclasses more than the wealthy, since the wealthy can buy fancy defenses and nice weapons, while the poor are forced to defend themselves by any means necessary.

Purge 4 actually showed the FIRST PURGE in a majority black community, and guess what they were doing?

Having sex in public.

Doing drugs and partying outside.

It was stated that white people in charge literally had to unleash a serial killer on the community to force them to commit acts of violence.

And the latest purge, Purge 5 I think, was centered entirely on the struggles of immigrants, trying to cross the border and not get murdered during Purge night.

So no.

The Purge movies do NOT say, "Oh people would immediately kill each other if given the chance."

They actually say, rich white people would kill minorities if given the opportunity.

And are they wrong?

Seriously.

Lord of the Flies moment, guys.

Neither Lord of the Flies, nor the Purge movies suggest that people would kill and cannibalize one another as soon as they can without the rules of society.

They both say actually, privileged spoiled brats who are used to having everything would support violence for the sake of violence.

[freeworldallahexecutivembaclass]

This is my rule as the ruler

Getting them all with this champion sound

Getting them all with this champion sound

Getting them all with this champion sound

Getting them all with this champion sound

Getting them all with this champion sound

Hot song see you soon with it presenting my song Champion 🏆 sound

And

Now to present you with some of my accomplishments already

My New York City accomplishments

Trump is the whole package but he had boundaries he set boundaries and was strong against people especially the criminal element me I defend the proletariat the common man and woman with real issues and get them the laws passed that they need boost the economy with more money legalize weed get free college education for the city citibikes more money for people on Human resources administration and permanent employment from temporary seasonal jobs from decades long however much months work program they learn and then get kicked out and you can't support yourself and your family I made it where that after you finish that probation period you get the job the job security meaning your secure because you got a steady paycheck and now could build a future from there I got union contract for Starbucks workers and Amazon workers and more money on the city feps and seps voucher for their housing the city pay more rent for you so you and your family could rent in the neighborhoods you want with better schools and employment opportunities for the parents to provide a good future for their kids

I got hotels for the homeless in New York City 2021 it is now happens where everything that happens in New York City is under my name and my control of the city which is good because I do good for the people my name is Allen Henry notice the Henry Hall building with the Henry lives here sign on it next to 42nd Street Port Authority yes I live in New York City and thanks for the big announcement on your building symbolizing radio city music hall at Rockefeller center in New York City is shouted out about from a building with the Henry lives here sign on it let radio city music hall know I'm coming soon and thank you my super hero Batman and Superman my superhero days are just starting that's on 38th Street on llth Avenue in New York City Manhattan next to port authority on 42nd Street you could actually drive pass it and see it now it is actually a tourist site wow thanks that's amazing I love it thanks I'm honored I appreciate it again like the sign says I live in New York City and thanks for the big announcement on your buildings and don't forget the Henry apartment buildings in Brooklyn New York thank you I'm honored

I got Amazon workers their union contract

I got Starbucks workers their union contract

I got the minimum wage increased from $ 11 dollars an hour to $ 15 dollars to $ 17 dollars an hour put 100 million $ dollar boost in New York State economy proven math governor Kathy Hochul is signing that into law from where I already got it she is going to give it boost we need oh yeah very great and lovely governor we got now she is pretty good at doing her job I like her a lot and wish that the government of America go through with wage increase for all states and have the new federal minimum wage for a better rate of pay for all workers from the dishwasher , to the bike messenger to the Mexican American and union for job security is created for them to help immigrants and Kathy Hochul signs off on a new money adjustment plan to balance out against inflation and new tax cuts that help the common man and woman the employees that provide services in the places me and you have to visit

I got more money put on the housing vouchers the city feps and seps voucher so that homeless individuals and women with their kids and husband and wife can have better housing and a better life for themselves and their family And it's only going to get better more housing more safer housing where the housing crew does it's job and provide safe clean housing cleaning the apartment from Asbestos and using the wrong products that could harm the people in the apartment and their should be more NYCHA the projects job openings to the people in those surrounding neighborhoods the hood and any hood in the world to help clean their neighborhoods 20 men and women crews clean up crews drivers and even regular normal everyday people of those neighborhoods newly hired people that take pride in doing a very good service for the people of their community they have to educate the tenants on lead paint and checking their apartments carbon monoxide levels how to use a stove fire safety plans and evacuations plans in those apartments safety with electrical sockets for their children and toxic free apartments air conditioners and heating free cable so they can watch some good TV shows and movies and enjoy their summer and winter and they get WI Fi now hooked up with their house packages and hopefully more money on the voucher to help rehabilitating families to get their lives together better housing and better schools for their kids equal a better future don't forget to give New people moving into their apartment fire safety 🦺 training courses on unplugging their wires from the outlets and child safety outlets not leaving the oven on or stove on or leaving the stove and ovens on unattended child safety windows no water near electronics and electrical devices carbon dioxide early detectors and smoke detectors no smoking 🚭🚬 around fire hazardous materials and we should reduce the number of accidents and tragedies in NYCHA called the housing projects in our neighborhoods and enjoy your cable wifi air conditioning heat in the winter and your Citibikes .

I got the fair chance to compete for a job act of 2019 in New York City and California hopefully other cities and countries are going to follow suit

I legalized marijuana in New York City on March 31 , 2021 no violence in the hallways of the projects that we are from fellas respect people space and their kids in those hallways don't bring an violent atmosphere and environment around those kids when hanging out with our friends in the lobby that means no violence and violent talk around the kids while walking through projects NYCHA hallways go outside and enjoy the sun or the nice breeze that passes us and chill and enjoy outside that is so no laws will be passed restricting our laws .

I cleaned up fox square in Brooklyn , NY

Free college education in New York City

Free gym membership for people on Medicare

Citi bikes for New Yorkers

I got the second stage theatre in Manhattan , New York City meaning I got my second chance to perform music 🎼🎶 on a stage record and performing music, I rap .

Pictures of me as Christopher Wallace Biggie Smalls the Notorious BIG in Brooklyn New York City that is a big big accomplishment shout out to his moms how are you doing Ms . Violetta Wallace I'm very honored thank you Governor Cuomo legalized weed Marijuana the gaunja off of those pictures and across the street from the picture I got apartment buildings in my name the Henry apartments in Brooklyn on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn New York City

I brought Yo MTV raps to the Brooklyn Museum 🎨 an Art museum since I'm of the sophisticated crowd and Talented tenth from W . E . B . Dubois book and I'm a rapper from Harlem and Brooklyn New York City via Saint Croix U.S. Virgin Islands

I got my own subway street named after me called Respect Avenue in New York City New York and Brooklyn New York

Governor Andrew Cuomo gave me and opened an hospital named after me in Brooklyn , New York back in 2015 Brooklyn's 760 Parkside Avenue where my family is originally from when they landed in Brooklyn , New York City my uncle and his family 760 Parkside Avenue downstate biotechnology incubator hospital 🏥 thank you I'm honored and actually do put my sponsorship behind it not being funny it's just that it's an hospital and hospitals heal people and take care of them and I love that caring nurturing loving and nourishing environment of hospitals and the hospitality of the nurses doctors and specialists we never tell them we love them and thank you and I love you enough tell your doctor if he is doing a great job correctly say hey doctor I love you I love you all of my hospital staffs for providing a great service in my name I love you for taking care of God's people all of God's people I mean people from all communities we are all good people and deserve the best in treatment and the care that is given to patients when you visit my hospital and counselors should know the nutritionist and give out good advice even while your A casac counselor therapist and clinician do your job with passion , love and the intention of betterment for your patients and even those that come to work under and learn from you teach them how to doctor truly heal human beings through laughter , love a d being strong for them and doctor the soul through a warm smile and hug for all patients and pediatrics should know you have a great responsibility to love provide and care for all patients you have a very very important job and I love you we never know when you might need somebody to take care of our every needs, I love hospitals they should actually play Joyce Meyer and Joel Osteen in the care units to help heal the people in special care units play their TV shows and audio all through all units of the hospital

I won the Super bowl with Patrick Mahomes I got Clinton Dannemora back and I came home and took over the streets of NYC in politics Errol Louis of Channel 1 news would be proud of me

President Joe Biden presented me with a medal 🏅 of honor in the year 2023 for my heroism

Watch out Donald Trump my movement is doing very good now

I'm on 5th Avenue in the heart of New York City now

My gift 🎁 from Nicki Minaj the female rapper from her Young Money Crew thank you Nicki I got my own library in New York City thanks to her in the heart of New York City it is pleasing to me to be able to have a library that host after school programs for the kids and storytelling fun with their teachers and parents with Barney the dinosaur type characters to make the kids laugh and enjoy their selves that is a blessing for me coming from where I come from I had a rough life I grew up in Harlem New York City running the streets but I kept my nose in a book and part of that reason is because my mom was in college she would have tons of books on her bed and I fell love in books because of her she went to Monroe College in the Bronx and got her degree and even worked for the Board of Education for awhile and I got my love of books from her and to see that they give me a library is beautiful to me I know she is proud of me I made something of myself reading books I learned my way in anyway the library have costume animals Barney the dinosaur type costume animals for the kids to make them laugh and enjoy life is a blessing for me and it is in my building thank you I'm honored New York City and yes it is in the same building that I got my GED from in 2003 so I had already been going their for awhile they gave to me in 2022 thank you New York City and it's on 40th street and 5th Avenue right next to Grand Central and Times Square New York City and the same block wow as the Joel Osteen store so go get some Coffee ☕ and bagels and enjoy your day , their programs to help people returning to work , Cafe on the seventh floor outside rooftop so you could watch New York 5th Avenue like the empire state building and their are regular programs special instructors from any career is their to teach and instruct you on how to get where you would want to be in life it is so so clean the water fountains are the new ones where you place your bottle under some kid of water dispenser and it fills your bottles you could stand there and get as much refills as you want self service sanitized napkins to wipe your area where you are going to be reading I own the building so I eat at my seat the security guards is very professional that is their brand professionalism and high quality service with a smile they greet you warmly and treat you like you are at home it's mines so it is your home of course I'm like yeah yeah whatever but you would love it there make it a tourist attraction when you come to New York City I left school early I wish I didn't but the library is to give me a new start to learn all the on the job skills I need to excel in my career and it is there for you to hang out have fun meet some good people all New Yorkers are really good people and watch movies listen to music and to learn anything you want to make it there and enjoy yourselves

I won the Nobel Peace Prize 🏆 once for my caring Martin Luther King jr would be proud of me and love of humanity and with the helping of this page and Nobel memorial prize for economic sciences twice so that makes three Nobel prizes I won three Nobel prizes

Benefit monetary assistance increase for snap and cash assistance recipients

I'm John Wick in the movies John Wick series and I'm Neo in the Matrix and Matrix series congratulations to me I'm very Honored thank you Keeanu Reeves I'm very Honored thank you so much with tears in my eyes 💞 I love it everything I am now is bigger than what I been through in life and it is all because of people like you thanks and to my very close friend Laurence Fishburne true story real friend I mean we go back while he was studying to do the Matrix and I turned out to be a fine gentleman thank you and I found out I'm the one but the ones are the ones that study hard and work hard and making themselves into great people efficient and effective in constructive productivity their good at school , music or their career whatever they are good at is because they worked hard at it and that how we all can be an anomaly in society the good people .

Rikers Island tablet program podcasts and video games for inmates in jail to help stop crime violent crime in prison and to help rehabilitate the guy or woman and stop the back and forth of them going to jail . The tablet have podcasts and programs for Job Search legal research and books to read to help them become better citizens in the free society .

I was named The 16th Captain of New York City that is New York Yankees history and current captain of New York city New York Yankees hat history and time magazine 2022 man of the year the 16th and current captain of New York City , thank you .

I got meteors in front of the courtroom in New York City right in front of City Hall , 80 and 100 Centre street symbolizing I'm superman and I'm not the people of New York enemy I'm a friend and employers are there to help me if I just meet them halfway with some job skills they will employ me get me a job and for all that I say thank you for letting me work my way back into America's good people list thank you so much I mean I'm working and learning to give myself a job start my own business I'm learning how to do that but it is good to know that I got y'all white people the decent ones on my side not the ones that side with my enemies and haters but the ones that rock with me to be there to give me my life back with the meteors real live meteors thank you so much now in front of City Hall the famous New York City at 80 and 100 Centre where I first caught my first case at 16 years old🥇Joe Montana number thank you goodness for Bill Walsh is now in front of the courtrooms thank you for the chance again in my life to work and not stay idle in dangerous neighborhoods and environments which I'm teaching my way out of but thank you so much and I honor that thank you so much I'm proud to be an American 🏈

Laws I'm proposing

Job Safety and secure act - 2022

Fair banking act - 2022

Retirement investment plan for employees IRA act - 2022

Ready , willing and able Expansive territory act - 2023

Riverside drive Expansion project act - 2023

The new ferry from New Jersey to New York City - 2023

School sports culture expansion Act Copperas Cove , Texas

Rikers Island schooling expansion act Added on Basic education classes on Rikers Island on the tablet , college programs on the program , online school on the Tablet . -2023

NYCHA ( New York City Housing projects ) plans and ideas for improvement

The New Trench town rock - 2021 , 2022 , 2023

And many other pitches and proposals rebuilding the workforce , wages and structure of New York city and cities like New York .

Next order of business : My Plans for infrastructure in a utopian society hotels jobs pay raise on citizens paycheck from 15 $ - 17 $ dollars minimum wage pay to 19$ dollars to 20$ dollars an hour to better provide for all costs emergencies uncovered insurance payments due to partial health care coverage and full union membership granted to employees of any company free education grants and school loans payment plans

Pay raise for school teachers in every city at junior high school , high school and elementary school level since they are stewards of our children's future .

Pay raise for civil service workers and Civil service exams made and updated daily to the public , school crossing guards , correction officers , supervisors , probation officers , construction site supervisors .

Pay raise for day care workers

Free day care services for temporarily unemployed mothers and fathers

Pay raise for city fire fighters and police officers .

Job contractors fulfilling contracts with back to work public assistance programs that train and employ job candidates without their high school diploma or GED and granting them full employment with full medical and medicare coverage union membership and back to school Acces Vocational rehabilitation counseling and restoration of financial aid assistance for non violent crimes like drug sellers and abusers to stop recidivism to prison and to cure an addiction to a habit of committing perpetual crimes thus creating repeat offenders .

Jobs moving back to inner cities through the effort of study and research groups from urban planning courses from their neighboring colleges .

Tax abatement and financial incentives and business incentives and tax breaks .

Joe Biden and vice president Kamala Harris should include this law into all of their plan for cleaning up America I'm glad to see it go beyond New York City and other counties in New York I want to share this honor with author Michelle Alexander who I did my research from her book about mass incarceration of the black and Latino community and the political office and my friends that help put this law in place I reached out to hopefully stop the recidivism to prison and hopefully to help some of my friends and people that go back and forth to jail because they couldn't get a job due to the felonies on their record I recommend a certificate of relief of disabilities to all people returning to society if they haven't given you one go get it from your county's or borough courthouse it works wonders .

Next order of business : Tax cuts to help the everyday person keep more of their check in their pockets cut the tax rates in New York City by 4 percent I see it as New York State taxes % 8.82 to % 4 percent and business tax cuts to create more jobs Proposal For a Wage increase of $ 22 dollars an hour Including : Fire safety directors Security guards Librarians Fed Ex workers UPS workers Ready Willing and able with free vocational grants from access vr programs they should hire vocational rehabilitation counselors and job developers finding permanent housing and permanent job placement after the clients training Stock Clerks and cashier's at major stores like Gristedes , C Town , met foods , Burlington coat factory wage increase for all warehousing and factory workers jack pallet and forklift training for people with no experience and a starting salary at $ 17 - 19 $ dollars an hour and it increase with more time on the job how about the first year at that base salary of $ 17 - 19 $ dollars and on the even of that year the employee gets an raise of $ 2 dollars more on their check and other financial incentives as cash allocation from their check for newly place employee mutual fund packages besides with other benefits that said company is offering this helps to place that company on the stock market and grant their employees preferred stock options from their company that they work for at that current moment and because of the huge huge employee buy in it is like the employers are investing in their employees and their stores and company .

Educational requirements for jobs posted is less than a high school diploma but the job candidate has to be in a vocational program or GED preparation course half or full time hours .

Civil service jobs and exams posted weekly .

Sales professional salary plus commission on sales and stock options for mutual funds packages as bonuses with an wage increase to $ 19 dollars to $ 21 dollars an hour .

Newly added benefits to a job description benefits an employer on jobs posted give to their employees an employer get to hold back cash or take money out of an employees check to put towards a mutual funds stock fund option to help that client make more money as a second job the municipals funds and stock and funds and stock and then you gotta get hedge funds option packaged in to help the employees money make more money for them talk about overtime whew and at the same time that local market and store owner can put his company on the stock market and give out public shares thus in the end making it a good investment a regular place of shopping in a family like environment it is like getting to know your deli clerk , butcher , bakery attendant again only this time you are making money with the people you are spending money with Think about it that in turns build better communities better stores customer relationships safer neighborhoods and the beautifying of economically depressed environments more money for your kids college tuition school supplies newer roads being built leading to and from better neighborhoods and businesses and this is a future that we all as fellow New Yorkers can build together .

[transfloridaresources]

Today (05/06/24), 4:30pm, Orlando

[Photo ID: Pink to white gradient image with various logos and info boxes. Text reads: 'Save the date: May 6th 4:30pm. Press Conference. 5205 South Orange Avenue - Orlando, FL 32809. Not one step back! Identification for all! Not one step back. Every Floridian. Every Identity. Every ID.' Logos for Orlando for Gender Equality, Free Mom Hugs, Inc., Dream Defenders, Zebra Youth, Come Out with Pride Orlando, HRC Orlando / Central Florida, Spektrum Health, The Center Orlando, GLSEN Central Florida, HOPE CC. /End ID]

[Photo ID: White box with rainbow border. Text reads: 'Statement on DMV Policy Change. LGBTQ+ advocates from around the state organized and mobilized in great numbers this past legislative session. Through actions like protests, letter-writings, die-ins, and more, we defeated 21 out of 22 anti-LGBTQ+ bills attempting to move through the Florida legislature. One of these bills, HB 1639, sponsored by local representative Doug Bankson, was particularly egregious. It sought to redefine "sex" in a way that excludes transgender, non-binary, and intersex people, and to prohibit a person's state identification documents from reflecting their gender identity. As the bill was heading towards its downfall in the legislature, the Deputy Executive Director, Robert Kynoch, of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) released a memo to county tax collectors in late January rescinding previous department policy (IR08 - Gender Requirements), which allowed for Florida residents to change the gender marker on their ID to accurately reflect their gender identity. The memo wrongly excludes gender identity from "sex" in an effort to subvert the democratic process to redefine sex - and prohibit gender marker amendments - absent legislative authority. In a similar way, the legislature continued its attacks on the rights of immigrants and people experiencing homelessness in the form of HB 1451. This bill, which passed and was signed into law by DeSantis, restricts the acceptance of community IDs issued by community organizations to immigrants and individuals experiencing homelessness. Community IDs are essential for demonstrating that a person is a resident and member of a given community. It is already tremendously difficult for these groups to acquire valid identification, and this law imposes yet another barrier to identification.' /End ID]

[Photo ID: White box with rainbow border. Text reads: 'Statement on DMV Policy Change. Accurate identification is a human right; we must demand access to legal authenticity for all. Advocates for transgender individuals, immigrants, and people experiencing homelessness must stand together in the fight for equitable access to accurate identification. We demand that the FLHSMV restore their previous IR08-Gender Requirements policy to ensure that transgender people can obtain accurate IDs. Furthermore, we demand that legislatures take action to protect trans people's ability to obtain accurate identification as well as protect the acceptance of community IDs. Join us for a rally and press conference at SPEKTRUM Health (5205 South Orange Avenue) on May 6th at 4:30pm! WE CANNOT LET THEM TAKE US ONE STEP BACK! Signed, Orlando for Gender Equality, GLSEN Central Florida, HRC Orlando/Central Florida, SPEKTRUM Health, HOPE CC, PRISM, Zebra Youth, Youth Action Fund, Central Floridians for Social Equality, Justice Advocacy Network, Voices of Florida Fund/Women's Voices of Southwest Florida, UCF Students for a Democratic Society, Central Florida Queers for Palestine, LGBT+ Center Orlando, Inc., Come Out with Pride, Free Mom Hugs, Inc., Dream Defenders, Corey Hill, Vance Ahrens, candidate State Senate District 19, Amy Phillips, Beverly Washington, Orlando Drag Queen.' /End ID]

[mariacallous]

BRUSSELS (AP) — Far-right parties made major gains in European Union parliamentary elections Sunday, dealing stunning defeats to two of the bloc’s most important leaders: French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

In France, the National Rally party of Marine Le Pen dominated the polls to such an extent that Macron immediately dissolved the national parliament and called for new elections. It was a massive political risk since his party could suffer more losses, hobbling the rest of his presidential term that ends in 2027.

Le Pen was delighted to accept the challenge. “We’re ready to turn the country around, ready to defend the interests of the French, ready to put an end to mass immigration,” she said, echoing the rallying cry of so many far-right leaders in other countries who were celebrating substantial wins.

Macron acknowledged the thud of defeat. “I’ve heard your message, your concerns, and I won’t leave them unanswered,” he said, adding that calling a snap election only underscored his democratic credentials.

In Germany, the most populous nation in the 27-member bloc, projections indicated that the AfD overcame a string of scandals involving its top candidate to rise to 16.5%, up from 11% in 2019. In comparison, the combined result for the three parties in the German governing coalition barely topped 30%.

Scholz suffered such an ignominious fate that his long-established Social Democratic party fell behind the extreme-right Alternative for Germany, which surged into second place. “After all the prophecies of doom, after the barrage of the last few weeks, we are the second strongest force,” a jubilant AfD leader Alice Weidel said.

The four-day polls in the 27 EU countries were the world’s second-biggest exercise in democracy, behind India’s recent election. At the end, the rise of the far right was even more stunning than many analysts predicted.

The French National Rally crystalized it as it stood at over 30% or about twice as much as Macron’s pro-European centrist Renew party that is projected to reach around 15%.

Overall across the EU, two mainstream and pro-European groups, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, remained the dominant forces. The gains of the far right came at the expense of the Greens, who were expected to lose about 20 seats and fall back to sixth position in the legislature. Macron’s pro-business Renew group also lost big.

For decades, the European Union, which has its roots in the defeat of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, confined the hard right to the political fringes. With its strong showing in these elections, the far right could now become a major player in policies ranging from migration to security and climate.

Bucking the trend was former EU leader and current Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who overcame Law and Justice, the national conservative party that governed Poland from 2015-23 and drove it ever further to the right. A poll showed Tusk’s party won with 38%, compared to 34% for his bitter nemesis.

“Of these large, ambitious countries, of the EU leaders, Poland has shown that democracy, honesty and Europe triumph here,” Tusk told his supporters. “I am so moved.”

He declared, “We showed that we are a light of hope for Europe.”

Germany, traditionally a stronghold for environmentalists, exemplified the humbling of the Greens, who were predicted to fall from 20% to 12%. With further losses expected in France and elsewhere, the defeat of the Greens could well have an impact on the EU’s overall climate change policies, still the most progressive across the globe.

The center-right Christian Democratic bloc of EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, which already weakened its green credentials ahead of the polls, dominated in Germany with almost 30%, easily beating Scholz’s Social Democrats, who fell to 14%, even behind the AfD.

“What you have already set as a trend is all the better – strongest force, stable, in difficult times and by a distance,” von der Leyen told her German supporters by video link from Brussels.

As well as France, the hard right, which focused its campaign on migration and crime, was expected to make significant gains in Italy, where Premier Giorgia Meloni was tipped to consolidate her power.

Voting continued in Italy until late in the evening and many of the 27 member states have not yet released any projections. Nonetheless, data already published confirmed earlier predictions: the elections will shift the bloc to the right and redirect its future. That could make it harder for the EU to pass legislation, and decision-making could at times be paralyzed in the world’s biggest trading bloc.

EU lawmakers, who serve a five-year term in the 720-seat Parliament, have a say in issues from financial rules to climate and agriculture policy. They approve the EU budget, which bankrolls priorities including infrastructure projects, farm subsidies and aid delivered to Ukraine. And they hold a veto over appointments to the powerful EU commission.

These elections come at a testing time for voter confidence in a bloc of some 450 million people. Over the last five years, the EU has been shaken by the coronavirus pandemic, an economic slump and an energy crisis fueled by the biggest land conflict in Europe since the Second World War. But political campaigning often focuses on issues of concern in individual countries rather than on broader European interests.

Since the last EU election in 2019, populist or far-right parties now lead governments in three nations — Hungary, Slovakia and Italy — and are part of ruling coalitions in others including Sweden, Finland and, soon, the Netherlands. Polls give the populists an advantage in France, Belgium, Austria and Italy.

“Right is good,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who leads a stridently nationalist and anti-migrant government, told reporters after casting his ballot. “To go right is always good. Go right!”

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A federal judge in Austin on Thursday halted a new state law that would allow Texas police to arrest people suspected of crossing the Texas-Mexico border illegally.

The law, Senate Bill 4, was scheduled to take effect Tuesday. U.S. District Judge David Ezra issued a preliminary injunction that will keep it from being enforced while a court battle continues playing out. Texas is being sued by the federal government and several immigration advocacy organizations. Texas appealed the ruling to the conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Ezra said in his order Thursday that the federal government “will suffer grave irreparable harm” if the law took effect because it could inspire other states to pass their own immigration laws, creating an inconsistent patchwork of rules about immigration, which has historically been upheld as being solely within the jurisdiction of the federal government.

“SB 4 threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice,” Ezra wrote.

Ezra also wrote that if the state arrested and deported migrants who may be eligible for political asylum, that would violate the Constitution and also be "in violation of U.S. treaty obligations."

"Finally, the Court does not doubt the risk that cartels and drug trafficking pose to many people in Texas," Ezra wrote in his ruling. "But as explained, Texas can and does already criminalize those activities. Nothing in this Order stops those enforcement efforts. No matter how emphatic Texas’s criticism of the Federal Governments handling of immigration on the border may be to some, disagreement with the federal government’s immigration policy does not justify a violation of the Supremacy Clause."

Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 4 in December, marking Texas’ latest attempt to try to deter people from crossing the Rio Grande after several years of historic numbers of migrants arriving at the Texas-Mexico border.

In a statement, Abbott said the state "will not back down in our fight" and that he expects this case would eventually be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. On social media, he wrote that he is "not worried" because "this was fully expected."

"Texas has solid legal grounds to defend against an invasion," he added.

State Attorney General Ken Paxton, whose office is defending SB 4 in court, said in a statement that he "will do everything possible to defend Texas’s right to defend herself."

The law seeks to make illegally crossing the border a Class B misdemeanor, carrying a punishment of up to six months in jail. Repeat offenders could face a second-degree felony with a punishment of two to 20 years in prison.

The law also seeks to require state judges to order migrants returned to Mexico if they are convicted; local law enforcement would be responsible for transporting migrants to the border. A judge could drop the charges if a migrant agrees to return to Mexico voluntarily.

In December, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Texas and the Texas Civil Rights Project sued Texas on behalf of El Paso County and two immigrant rights organizations — El Paso-based Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and Austin-based American Gateways — over the new state law. The following month, the U.S. Department of Justice filed its lawsuit against Texas. The lawsuits have since been combined.

During a court hearing on Feb. 15 in Austin, the Department of Justice argued that SB 4 is unconstitutional because courts have ruled that immigration solely falls under the federal government’s authority.

The lawyer representing Texas, Ryan Walters, argued that the high number of migrants arriving at the border — some of them smuggled by drug cartels — constitutes an invasion and Texas has a right to defend itself under Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits states from engaging in war on their own “unless actually invaded.”

Ezra said that he “is not unsympathetic to the concerns raised by Abbott,” but appeared unconvinced by Walters’ argument.

"I haven't seen, and the state of Texas can't point me to any type of military invasion in Texas," Ezra said. "I don't see evidence that Texas is at war."

Immigrant rights advocates around the state celebrated the ruling because they worried that SB 4 would lead to border residents' rights being violated.

"We celebrate today’s win, blocking this extreme law from going into effect before it has the opportunity to harm Texas communities," said Aron Thorn, senior attorney for the Beyond Border Program at Texas Civil Rights Project. "This is a major step in showing the State of Texas and Governor Abbott that they do not have the power to enforce unconstitutional, state-run immigration policies."

Edna Yang, co-executive director at American Gateways, said that SB 4 does not fix “our broken immigration system” and it will divide communities.

“This decision is a victory for all our communities as it stops a harmful, unconstitutional, and discriminatory state policy from taking effect and impacting the lives of millions of Texans," she said. "Local officials should not be federal immigration agents, and our state should not be creating its own laws that deny people their right to seek protection here in the U.S."

David Donatti, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Texas, said the ruling is an "important win for Texas values, human rights, and the U.S. Constitution."

"Our current immigration system needs repair because it forces millions of Americans into the shadows and shuts the door on people in need of safety. S.B. 4 would only make things worse," he said. "Cruelty to migrants is not a policy solution.”

[yongyuan-st]

Doria Ragland (The Duchess of Sussex's mother) attended the 5th anniversary of the charity This is About Humanity this Saturday night.

This same charity has a link with The Duke and Duchess of Sussex's charity Archewell Foundation. Last December, the Archewell Foundation participated in This Is About Humanity’s annual Holiday Party for Reunified Families represented by Immigrant Defenders Law Center. (X)

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hafiz Rashid at TNR:

A Project 2025 adviser was exposed Thursday in a congressional hearing for defending slavery in Haiti.  Mark Krikorian, an adviser for the right-w ing manifesto, is the director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-wing organization described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group with a history of promoting eugenics. Representative Greg Casar, a progressive Democrat, pointed out that in 2010, Kirkorian wrote an article for the conservative National Review magazine defending French colonization in the country.  “I’ll ask you, Mr. Krikorian, and I know you’re a Project 2025 board member, your recent quote from a few years ago, where you said, quote, ‘Haiti is so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.’ Is that correct, did you say that?” Casar said to Krikorian.  

“I’m happy to talk about that all you want,” Krikorian replied. Casar responded by noting Haiti’s history as a French slave plantation until the slaves revolted in 1791, ultimately winning independence in 1804. “The French colonized Haiti so that slaves would work on plantations. The end of colonization in Haiti was so that the people there would no longer be slaves. So what you’re saying, and I read your quote, and anybody watching this online should go read it—what you’re saying is it would have been good if they’d stayed colonized, which means it would’ve been good if they had stayed enslaved by the French,” Casar said. Krikorian stumbled in his response, trying to explain that Haiti wasn’t better off for having gained independence earlier.   “They had every right to throw the French out,” Krikorian said. “My point is, they would have been free 30 years later, they would have been in the same situation as—” “You’re saying you wanted 30 more years of slavery in Haiti,” Casar said. 

Anti-immigrant hate group Center For Immigration Studies Executive Director and Project 2025 adviser Mark Krikorian made excuses for slavery in Haiti.

[lilithism1848]

Atrocities US committed against PRISONERS

The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies.

Ramping up since the 1980s, the term prison–industrial complex is used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activist groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have argued that the prison-industrial complex is perpetuating a flawed belief that imprisonment is an effective solution to social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy. 

The War On Drugs, a policy of arrest and imprisonment targeting minorities, first initiated by Nixon, has over the years created a monstrous system of mass incarceration, resulting in the imprisonment of 1.5 million people each year, with the US having the most prisoners per capita of any nation. One in five black Americans will spend time behind bars due to drug laws. The war has created a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have few educational or job opportunities as a result of being punished for drug offenses, in a vicious cycle of oppression. 

In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed “aliens”, 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren’t considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion.

Over 90% of criminal trials in the US are settled not by a judge or jury, but with plea bargaining, a system where the defendant agrees to plead guilty in return for a concession from the prosecutor. It has been statistically shown to benefit prosecutors, who “throw the book” at defendants by presenting a slew of charges, manipulating their fear, who in turn accept a lesser charge, regardless of their innocence, in order to avoid a worst outcome. The number of potentially innocent prisoners coerced into accepting a guilty plea is impossible to calculate. Plea bargaining can present a dilemma to defense attorneys, in that they must choose between vigorously seeking a good deal for their present client, or maintaining a good relationship with the prosecutor for the sake of helping future clients.

European countries. John Langbein has equated plea bargaining to medieval torture: “There is, of course, a difference between having your limbs crushed if you refuse to confess, or suffering some extra years of imprisonment if you refuse to confess, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Plea bargaining, like torture, is coercive. Like the medieval Europeans, the Americans are now operating a procedural system that engages in condemnation without adjudication.”

A grand jury is a special legal proceeding in which a prosecutor may hold a trial before the real one, where ~20 jurors listen to evidence and decide whether criminal charges should be brought. Grand juries are rarely made up of a jury of the defendant’s peers, and defendants do not have the right to an attorney, making them essentially show-trials for the prosecution, who often find ways of using grand jury testimony to intimidate the accused, such as leaking stories about grand jury testimony to the media to defame the accused. In the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, all of whom were unarmed and killed by police in 2014, grand juries decided in all 3 cases not to pursue criminal trials against the officers. The US and Liberia are the only countries where grand juries are still legal.

The US system of bail (the practice of releasing suspects before their hearing for money paid to the court) has been criticized as monetizing justice, favoring rich, white collar suspects, over poorer people unable to pay for their release. 

On Jan 26th, In Mississippi state penitentiary, an inmate was found hanging in his cell, in a string of deaths in the prison. This is the 12th death within a single month. 

A photo surfaced of a November 2019 training class for prison guards in west virginia, showing 34 trainees doing a nazi salute. Only 3 people have been fired. A large number of prison workers, and populations in prison towns, are white supremacists. 

A black-site interrogation warehouse in Chicago called Homan Square is notorious for the sexual abuse, torture, and disappearances of its prisoners. The main interrogator, Richard Zuley, applied torture techniques he learned at Guantanamo Bay at Homan Square. 

On Oct 25, 2014, a mentally ill inmate, Michael Anthony Kerr, at the Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, NC, died of thirst after being denied water during a 35-day solitary confinement. Prison officials have said since Kerr’s death six months ago that they would investigate the events that led to his death, but no report has been issued and officials have not said when one would be. 

On May 23rd, 2014, a mentally ill inmate at a Dade County correctional facility near Miami FL was tortured to death by prison guards. Darren Rainey was serving a two-year sentence for cocaine possession when he was forced into a locked shower by prison guards as punishment for defecating in his cell, says one inmate. Once Rainey was inside the shower, guards blasted him with scalding hot water as he begged for his life. Investigators determined that there was not enough evidence to charge the guards. 

The Crime Bill of 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, increased the size of the US prison industry and dealt with the problem of crime by emphasizing punishment, not prevention. It extended the death penalty to a whole range of criminal offenses, and provided $30 billion for the building of new prisons, to crack down on “super predators”, a term used by Hillary Clinton to refer to remorseless juvenile criminals. 

In the 1978 case, Houchins v. KQED, Inc. the Supreme Court ruled that the news media do not have guaranteed rights of access to jails and prisons. It ruled also that prison authorities could forbid inmates to speak to one another, assemble, or spread literature about the formation of a prisoners’ union. 

In September 1971, prison guards killed George Jackson, a black Marxist and member of the Black Panthers in San Quentin prison (who had served 10 years of an indeterminate prison sentence for a $70 robbery), after he attempted to free himself and other inmates. Outrage over this, terrible prison conditions, and mistreatment by white prison guards, caused the Attica Prison Riot, in which 33 inmates and 10 prison guards were killed, and sparked dozens of prison riots across the country. In Attica, 100 percent of the guards were white, prisoners spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families were conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, 75% were there as a result of plea bargaining, and their parole system inequitable. 

Many companies in the 1800s were guilty of using prison laborers, such as the Tennesee Coal Iron and Railroad Company. In 1891, the prison workers struck and overpowered the guards, and other neighboring unions came to their aid.

[fandomtrumpshate]

2024 Supported Org: Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center (CREEC)

Nearly all of America's systems -- from education to healthcare to public transit -- are more difficult to navigate for persons with disabilities. Although the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990 established a new standard of protection and support for disabled people in many spheres of public and civic life, the harsh reality is that most of these systems fall far short of what the law requires of them in terms of accommodating and supporting disabled people. The existing problems have been compounded by the United States' widespread return to pre-COVID protocols and practices, leaving anyone who is unusually vulnerable to COVID or its aftereffects with fewer pathways through public life.

The Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center (CREEC) is a nonprofit legal organization that fights for liberation and equity through the lens of intersectional disability justice. Their work is informed by grassroots movements for systemic change and centers the concerns and goals of people with disabilities who are confronting barriers to accessing programs and services and resisting oppressive legal systems in the United States. 

CREEC's legal expertise in the disability-rights frameworks of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act allows them to move the dial for intersectional disability justice across a variety of systems that deny the humanity, dignity, and agency of disabled people. They further their aims through a combination of public education, coalition and policy work, systemic-change litigation, direct legal services, and technical assistance to movement leaders and community-based partners, strengthening social movements and upholding human rights. 

CREEC focuses on supporting and defending disabled people who are experiencing discrimination and exclusion at the intersection of other systems of harm. Their work encompasses improving access to public services and spaces, disaster and environmental justice, immigration, and incarceration and policing.

You can support CREEC as a creator in the 2024 FTH auction (or as a bidder, when the time comes to donate for the auctions you’ve won.)

[minnesotafollower]

Biden Administration Announces Proposed Restrictions on Asylum Applications

On February 21, the Biden Administration announced a proposed rule that would  require rapid deportation of an immigrant at the U.S. border who had failed to request protection from another country while en route to the U.S. or who had not previously notified the U.S. via a mobile app of their plan to seek asylum in the U.S. or who had applied for the new U.S. humanitarian parole programs for…

[zvaigzdelasas]

Andersson, from the opposition center-left Social Democrats, suggested Thursday to Swedish outlet Aftonbladet: “Surveillance performed by police officers could be carried out by the military. In addition, there is technical know-how with the military that they could assist with.”[...] Sweden could also ask Norway, Denmark or Finland for additional police support, Andersson added. Sweden’s Justice Minister Gunnar Strömmer, from the center-right Moderate Party, finds the idea of deploying the military an “interesting thought,” public broadcaster SVT reported.[...] Defense Minister Pål Jonson, also from the Moderates, said deploying the military was not currently on the agenda. “There are no such plans currently,” he said.

28 Sep 23

After an explosion was reported yesterday in Uppsala, a city 70 km (43 mi) north of Sweden, which killed a 25-year-old woman, the prime minister gave a speech responding to several murders in Sweden. The prime minister, Ulf Kristersson of the center-right Moderate Party, said that gangs are responsible for these continuous murders. He said that the government would change its legislation to address gang violence, via stricter migration and surveillance policy assisted by the Swedish military.[...] Kristersson said the government’s “naivety” and “cluelessness” are the causes, which he said they would correct by denying more migrants entry into the country. “While immigration increases to Europe, it decreases to Sweden,” Kristersson said.[...] Starting on October 1st, Kistersson said there will be a preventive wiretapping measure instituted in Sweden. By the prime minister’s words, it seems as if the police will be able to listen to domestic calls. We were not able to provide more details on this new policy at the time of writing.[...]

On July 1st, 2023, Sweden passed laws doubling the sentence for gang-related crimes and added a law against recruiting children. The prime minister said the government was going to create “search zones” as well, where people will be searched for weapons. He said he had summoned the commander-in-chief of the armed forces to assist the police in these programs. Assisting in internal conflicts is not necessarily a part of the Armed Forces’ duties, which are usually more focused on assisting in international conflict, “to defend Sweden and its territories against armed attacks,” and “safeguarding national sovereign rights and interests in areas outside the territory.”[...] Currently, Sweden is governed by a right-wing coalition majority formed by Kristersson’s Moderate Party and two other right-wing parties. The party with the largest number of votes in Parliament is the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist party that wants to “keep organized crime out” via a strict migration policy and is “not afraid to challenge the status quo,” according to their website. The government needs the Sweden Democrats to get a majority in the Riksdag.

29 Sep 23

[lboogie1906]

Attorney Zephaniah Alexander Looby (April 8, 1899 - March 24, 1972) was among the small cadre of African American lawyers who began practicing in the southern United States during the 1920s and 1930s. Often considered the “second generation of Black attorneys,” these lawyers followed the first cadre of African Americans who began practicing in the 1880s. They provided much of the legal work that led to the dismantling of segregation in the late 20th Century.

He was born in Antigua and immigrated to the US in 1914 after the death of his father. He earned a BA from Howard University and a JD from Columbia University. He came to Fisk University to work as an Assistant Professor of Economics. He was admitted to the Tennessee bar and practiced in Memphis for three years. He married Grafta Mosby (1934), a Memphis schoolteacher. He returned to Nashville and helped found the Kent College for Law for African Americans.

He entered politics in 1940 when he was narrowly defeated for a position on the Nashville City Council. In 1951, he was elected to the council along with fellow lawyer Robert E. Lillard. They were the first African Americans to serve on the council since 1911.

He was president of the James C. Napier Bar Association (1943-45) an organization of African American attorneys. He worked with Thurgood Marshall on the NAACP-sponsored defense of twenty-three African Americans who had been charged with murder following race riots in Columbia, Tennessee. All of the defendants were acquitted. He filed the first desegregation suit against the Nashville public schools. When the student sit-ins began in Nashville in 1960 he became their first attorney, an action that resulted in his home being dynamited later that year. He and his family were uninjured in the attack. In 1962 he lost a bid to become the first African American elected to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

He remained on the Nashville City Council for twenty years before retiring in 1971. He was a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. His life and works are commemorated by a Nashville library and community center named after him. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #omegapsiphi

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Leor Sapir, Joseph Figliolia

Published: Nov 8, 2023

Fenway Community Health Center in Boston, the largest provider of transgender medicine in New England and one of the leading institutions of its kind in the United States, was named a defendant in a lawsuit filed last month. The plaintiff, a gay man who goes by the alias Shape Shifter, argues that by approving him for hormones and surgeries, Fenway Health subjected him to “gay conversion” practices, in violation of his civil rights. Carlan v. Fenway Community Health Center is the first lawsuit in the United States to argue that “gender-affirming care” can be a form of anti-gay discrimination.

The case underscores an important clinical reality: gender dysphoria has multiple developmental pathways, and many who experience it will turn out to be gay. Even the Endocrine Society concedes that many of the youth who outgrow their dysphoria by adolescence later identify as gay or bisexual. Decades of research confirm as much. Gender clinicians in the U.K. used to have a “dark joke . . . that there would be no gay people left at the rate [the Gender Identity Development Service] was going,” former BBC journalist Hannah Barnes reported. Rather than help young gay people to accept their bodies and their sexuality, what if “gender-affirming” clinicians are putting them on a pathway to irreversible harm?

Due partly to Shape’s lifelong difficulty in accepting himself as gay, his lawyers are not taking the usual approach to detransition litigation. Rather than state a straightforward claim of medical malpractice or fraud, they allege that Fenway Health has violated Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which bans discrimination “on the basis of sex” in health care. In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County that “discrimination because of . . . sex” includes discrimination based on homosexuality. Citing this and other precedents, Shape’s lawyers argue that federal law affords distinct protections to gay men and lesbians—upon which clinics that operate with a transgender bias are trampling.

Shape grew up in a Muslim country in Eastern Europe that he describes in an interview as “very traditional” and “homophobic.” His parents disapproved of his effeminate demeanor and interests as a child. They wouldn’t let him play with dolls, and his mother, he says, made him do stretches so that he would grow taller and appear more masculine.

At 11, Shape had his first of several sexual encounters with older men. “I was definitely groomed,” he recounts. Shape proceeded to develop a pattern of risky sexual behavior, according to his legal complaint. He told his medical team at Fenway Health about his childhood sexual experiences, calling them “consensual.” The Fenway providers never challenged him on this interpretation, he alleges. They never suggested that he might have experienced sexual trauma or, say, explored how these events might have shaped his feelings of dissociation. (The irony is that Fenway Health describes its model of care as “trauma-informed.”)

As with the social environment they inhabited, Shape’s parents were “deeply homophobic,” he says. When Shape came out to his parents as gay at 15, they took him to a therapist, hoping that he would be “fixed.” But when he graduated high school at that same age, he moved to Bulgaria for college, and in 2007, at 17, he came to the United States for a summer program at the University of North Carolina. He later moved to Massachusetts to pursue an MBA at Clark University and immigrated to the U.S.

Though he had known about cross-dressers and transsexuals as a child (he had taken interest in Dana International, the famous Israeli transsexual who won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1998), it was only at Clark that he was introduced to the idea that some people are transgender. Other students began asking him about his pronouns and telling him about “gender identity.” After getting to know a “non-binary” person and a transgender woman, Shape started to make sense of his life retrospectively. As a boy going through puberty, he had developed larger-than-average breasts and was curvier than the other boys. It was hard for him to be accepted in the gay community, he told me, because gay men tend to value masculinity. His discomfort with social expectations about how men are supposed to look and behave, his sexual attraction to other men, his ongoing psychological and emotional distress: these were all signs, he learned from online forums, that he must have been “born in the wrong body.”

Shape quickly developed self-hatred and a strong desire to escape his body. When he started cross-dressing and presenting socially as a woman, things changed. It had been hard for him to win acceptance as an effeminate gay man, but he encountered far less hostility presenting as a woman. A subtle but important shift in his thinking took place.

“People wouldn’t take me seriously when I was a man who presented socially as a woman,” he says. “I had to actually be a woman.” Shape became immersed in online transgender culture, which told him that sex is a social construct, and that hormones and surgeries can actually turn him into a woman. As a result, Shape developed highly unrealistic expectations about what hormones and surgeries could do for him. An example noted in his legal filing: he stopped using condoms because he wanted to get pregnant.

Julie Thompson, a physician assistant and Medical Director of the Trans Health Program at Fenway Health, made no effort to perform differential diagnosis on Shape, his legal filing alleges. Shape told Thompson about his childhood sexual encounters, his troubled history of risky sexual activity, and his struggles with social and familial rejection on account of his homosexuality. Allegedly, she wrote these difficulties off as byproducts of society not accepting him as a “trans woman”—an approach known as “transgender minority stress.” Shape’s ongoing mental-health problems, it was determined, were due to “internalized transphobia.”

As Shape’s filing puts it, the Fenway clinic operated with a strong “transgender bias.” Every problem or counter-indication that came up was explained away as part of the stress that transgender people experience in an unwelcoming society. The clinicians at Fenway Health apparently assumed that sexual orientation and gender identity are two distinct and independent phenomena.

Shape was put on estrogen at age 23. According to his filing, he was not given “any explanation of the numerous potential adverse side effects of estrogen or its potentially unknown effects.” As Shape kept taking estrogen, he became even more emotional, depressed, and unstable. Notably, he did not dislike his male genitals—a fact that should have attracted more scrutiny from his clinicians—but seemed more distressed over his high sex drive and desire for intercourse with men. Though he says he frequently told his providers that he hoped “sex reassignment surgery” would reduce his sex drive, this statement did not cause them to reconsider whether estrogen was appropriate.

As the Fenway team allegedly saw it, Shape’s deterioration was evidence that he hadn’t gone far enough in his transition. They recommended that he attend First Event, a Boston-based conference held annually since 1980, where transgender people can meet one another, share ideas, interact with vendors, and find medical providers who will agree to perform procedures on them. Marci Bowers, the genital surgeon who is president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, has attended the conference in the past. According to Shape, the point of going to First Event was to find a surgeon who would operate on him.

He did just that, and in 2014, at 24, Shape underwent facial feminization surgery and breast implantation. Less than a year later, a surgeon surgically castrated him and conducted what’s euphemistically called “bottom surgery.” It didn’t work. As a result, Shape had to undergo several additional surgeries, the last one borrowing tissue from his colon. Still, the problems persisted.

It took Shape a few years to realize that he had made a terrible mistake. The problem he had been trying to solve all his life was not “internalized transphobia” but failure to accept himself as an effeminate gay man. His legal filing states that he had what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders called, at the time he made contact with the clinic, “ego-dystonic homosexuality.” Because they failed to detect this and other mental-health problems, the Fenway team, argue Shape’s lawyers, “outrageously, knowingly, recklessly, and callously” led him to believe that he was really a heterosexual woman whose problems could be solved by de-sexing himself as male.

Shape was promised “gender euphoria.” Instead, he told me that he now sees himself as “mutilated.” His treatments have left him with “osteoporosis and scoliosis” as well as “mental fog,” according to his legal filing. Shape is now “faced with the impossible choice of improving his cognitive state and suffering the psychological and physical effect of phantom penis, or taking estrogen and suffering mental fog and fatigue, but no phantom penis and low libido.” He has also endured fistulas as a complication of his genital surgery and “suffers from sexual dysfunction and is unable to enjoy sexual relations.” He experiences dangerous inflammation. And not getting the mental health therapy he needed very likely caused Shape’s mental health to deteriorate throughout the several years that he was a patient at Fenway Health.

Shape now wants to have his breast implants removed. But insurance does not cover the procedure because it is not technically “gender affirming.” And since he cannot afford the hefty price tag, Shape has no choice but to live with the implants.

Understandably, criticism of gender medicine has focused largely on its use in minors. Its use in adults, however, is not without controversy. In the past, when clinicians spoke of adult transgender medicine, they were referring mainly to adult men who sought to change their bodies in their forties. Many had already spent years in marriage and were fathers of children.

That is no longer the case. Though data are limited, the main patient demographic in adult transgender clinics today appear to be 18-24-year-olds. In Finland, for example, adult referrals rose approximately 750 percent between 2010 and 2018, with 70 percent of referrals being 18-22-year-olds.

Humans reach full cognitive maturity around age 25, which means that there is often little to distinguish a 20-year-old from a 17-year-old in terms of impulse control, emotional self-regulation, and the ability to set long-term goals and prioritize them over present desires. Citing “irrefutable evidence” that being under 25 means having “diminished capacity to comprehend the risk and consequences of [one’s] actions,” the progressive decarceration and racial-justice advocacy group The Sentencing Project argues that the idea that people are adults once they reach age 18 “is flawed.”

Shortly after its founding in 1971, Fenway Community Health Center was repurposed to support the unique needs of gay and lesbian residents of Boston. According to Katie Batza, a historian of the clinic, the hippies and antiwar activists who founded Fenway Health “quickly solidified its reputation as an important gay medical institution.” During the 1980s, the clinic helped tackle the AIDS epidemic. That it now maltreats gay men like Shape by converting them into trans women reflects a tectonic shift within the institution’s culture.

American medicine has always found itself balancing two competing tendencies: the paternalism of care by experts on one hand, and the relativism of nonjudgmental customer service on the other. What has happened over the course of Fenway Health’s five decades of existence is a gradual loss of that equilibrium. Fenway has long defined its mission in terms of responsiveness to the stated needs and desires of community members: the volunteers who ran the clinic and offered its services free of charge, Batza writes, “focused on providing care and building community among Fenway residents, caring less if a volunteer met outside standards of professional qualification, which were often set by the state or medical profession, that the clinic critiqued.”

In the 1990s, the clinic set up a dedicated transgender unit. At first, “things moved slowly,” recounts Marcy Gelman, a nurse practitioner who served as Fenway Health’s first dedicated provider for transgender patients, in a document published by the institute about the history of its program. She is now its associate director of clinical research. “Patients didn’t get hormones right away. We wanted to get to know them, and required them to see a therapist for several months . . . we wanted to be careful.” This process felt too restrictive for some patients, and “a few got really angry.” Fenway Health says its “commitment to ensure patient safety . . . led to some conflicts with patients and community members.”

In the 2000s, Fenway Health adopted a new model of care for its transgender-identified patients, which it called the “informed consent model.” This came in response to patients complaining about “needless gatekeeping” and concerns that the clinic’s “customer service training specific to transgender patients lagged behind the development of its clinical care.” Using funding from the Blue Cross/Blue Shield Foundation, Fenway Health made a number of new hires and expanded its program. It drew inspiration from another community health clinic, the Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia, which was smaller than Fenway but served four times as many patients. “One key to [the Mazzoni Center’s] success,” the Fenway document explains, “was the elimination of any requirement for counseling before hormones were provided.” Ruben Hopwood, a physician who joined the Fenway team in 2005, developed this model for Fenway; soon thereafter, the institution’s three-month counseling requirement gave way to “a single hormone readiness assessment visit.”

In 2012, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health published the seventh version of its Standards of Care. In the chapter on hormone therapy, WPATH recommended eligibility criteria for estrogen or testosterone, including “persistent, and well-documented gender dysphoria” and having ongoing “medical or mental health concerns . . . reasonably well-controlled.” However, WPATH also noted a newly emerging “informed consent model” and cited Fenway Health as one of three clinics that developed and practiced it.

The difference between the models, WPATH explained, was that SOC-7 put “greater emphasis on the important role that mental health professionals can play in alleviating gender dysphoria and facilitating changes in gender role and psychosocial adjustment. This may include a comprehensive mental health assessment and psychotherapy, when indicated.” By contrast, Fenway Health’s model emphasizes “obtaining informed consent as the threshold for the initiation of hormone therapy in a multidisciplinary, harm-reduction environment. Less emphasis is placed on the provision of mental-health care until the patient requests it, unless significant mental health concerns are identified that would need to be addressed before hormone prescription.” Despite the obvious differences, WPATH insisted the two models were “consistent” with each other.

Currently, Fenway Health offers hormones on the informed-consent model. “Criteria for accessing hormone therapy,” it states, “are informed by the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) guidelines.” In other words, Fenway Health defers to WPATH, which adopted its recommendations from Fenway Health.

Shape and his lawyers deny that Fenway’s informed consent process is “a safe and effective replacement for assessment, diagnosis, and treatment provided by an appropriately trained and licensed healthcare professional.” Fenway’s model, they argue, “relies heavily on patients’ self-diagnosis, which may be a result of confusion or a misunderstanding of medically defined terms.” It does not take into account a patient’s expectations from medical treatment, which, as in Shape’s case, can be highly unrealistic. It “does not inform patients about the risk of iatrogenic effects of affirmation.” Nor does it take into account a patient’s “medical decision-making capacity,” which may be impaired in the presence of “significant emotional distress” and “undue influence from persons in position of authority and trust.”

A key charge in Shape’s lawsuit is that Fenway Health is driven by “market expansion goals and political demands of transgender activists.” Approval for hormones and surgery, the clinic’s staff wrote in 2015, should be a “routine part of primary care service delivery, not a psychological or psychiatric condition in need of treatment.” A leading advocate for the no-gatekeeping model, which rests on the assumption that mismatch between one’s actual and perceived sex is a normal human variation and not a pathological condition, argues that adults and adolescents should be free to turn their bodies into “gendered art pieces.”

From Shape’s story, we can infer that Fenway Health, which could not be reached for comment, has yielded to a barely constrained medical consumerism. In 1997, the institute had eight transgender customers. By 2015, it had over 1,700. “The rapid and sustained growth of Fenway Health’s transgender health care, research, education, training, and advocacy,” the institute’s doctors proudly declare, “might be succinctly summarized by the mantra from the movie Field of Dreams: If you build it, they will come.”

==

If you haven't met Shape Shifter, see the following interviews:

Literally "trans the gay away."

[girlactionfigure]

Young Nuremberg Prosecutor: Benjamin Ferencz

His slogan was “law not war.”

Benjamin Ferencz was an investigator of Nazi war crimes who served as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials and later dedicated his life to fostering world peace.

Born in Hungary in 1920, Ben immigrated to the U.S. with his family as an infant to escape anti-Jewish persecution. They settled in the lower east side of New York. Ben attended City College of NY, where he studied criminal law. He was an exceptional student and had such a high score on the final exam that he won a full scholarship to Harvard Law School. He graduated in 1943 and joined the US Army, where he served in an anti-aircraft artillery unit.

After the war ended in 1945, Ben was transferred to General Patton’s headquarters and assigned to a team investigating war crimes. He visited concentration camps immediately after they were liberated, and wrote: “Indelibly seared into my memory are the scenes I witnessed while liberating these centers of death and destruction. Camps like Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau are vividly imprinted in my mind’s eye. Even today, when I close my eyes, I witness a deadly vision I can never forget – the crematoria aglow with the fire of burning flesh, the mounds of emaciated corpses stacked like cordwood waiting to be burned… I had peered into Hell.”

Later that year, he was honorably discharged with rank of sergeant. He went back to NY to start his law career, but was soon recruited to prosecute top Nazis for war crimes in the famous Nuremberg trials. Ben traveled to Germany and started interviewing Jewish survivors in Displaced Persons Camps. He told the Washington Post about the strange and disturbing post-war atmosphere, “Someone who was not there could never really grasp how unreal the situation was… I once saw DPs beat an SS man and then strap him to the steel gurney of a crematorium. They slid him in the oven, turned on the heat and took him back out. Beat him again, and put him back in until he was burnt alive. I did nothing to stop it. I suppose I could have brandished my weapon or shot in the air, but I was not inclined to do so. Does that make me an accomplice to murder?” He continued, “You know how I got witness statements? I’d go into a village where, say, an American pilot had parachuted and been beaten to death and line everyone up against the wall. Then I’d say, ‘Anyone who lies will be shot on the spot.’ It never occurred to me that statements taken under duress would be invalid.”

Ben had a lot to learn; the Nuremberg prosecution was his first criminal case! He went to Berlin with fifty researchers tasked with searching through every German office and archive. They uncovered a vast trove of evidence against the Nazis. Perhaps the most shocking was the revelation that many members of the German elite were integrally involved in Nazi atrocities. Doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, and business moguls were active participants in the genocide of the Jews.

At 27 years old, Ben Ferencz became Chief Prosecutor for the United States in the Einsatzgruppen Case, which the Associated Press called “the biggest murder trial in history.” Twenty-two men were on trial for murdering one million people.

All of the defendants were convicted and thirteen received the death penalty. Afterwards, Ben said, “Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task. And I also learned that if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.”

Ben devoted his life to the cause of world peace and wrote several books about how to achieve it. He was essential in the establishment of the International Criminal Court to prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ben’s slogan is “law not war.” After a long and full life, Ben died at age 103 in April 2023.

.

[just-a-music-and-poetry-lover]

I'm scared. So fucking terrified that I can't express it right.

I'm from Portugal. Our government was dissolved by the president recently because our Prime Minister of the last 8 years resigned after his name was brought up in a criminal affair regarding very high patent government members. You might have heard of it if you follow international news. If you do, you probably know more about it than me, but this is the issue in a nutshell.

In the last elections, the Prime Minister's party had the "absolute majority" in Parliament (I don't know the name in English, that's how it's called in Portuguese), which basically means that more than half of the government's members belonged to that particular party, meaning they could pass whatever laws they wanted if they all voted the same. This meant that, for the first time in forever, real change could have happened for the better here if they had done that, since they call themselves a "center-left" party.

The problem is that some major problems happened during this government's time in power, as well as some others that had little to change happening to them. People are frustrated. Everyone is. Everyone was already tired of that party being in power during the last elections, but because there was the threat of the rising far-right parties, people got scared and mainly voted for the same party, afraid that we'd have another far-right government, not even 50 years after we freed ourselves from a fascist dictatorship. So he and his party got the absolute majority in parliament. And things got worse.

Yes, it is time for another party to be in power, but the far-right is NOT the answer, and that's what many people, and alarmingly, many young, about-to-vote-for-the-first-time impressionable people, are failing to understand.

The far-right claims to be a people's party, they claim they defend the people's interests, but THEY DON'T. They're racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, queerphobic in general, they're pro-marginalizing already marginalized communities. Did I already mention they plan to end universal healthcare, public education and social services? Well, they do.

The problem is that many people who are advocating for that party right now, when the new elections are a month from tomorrow, will absolutely lose rights if they get to power.

But they don't listen. They just think that, because a leftist party messed up (and they did mess up pretty badly, don't get me wrong. I'm in the left but I can recognize that), that the far-right is the solution to everyone's problems, when they will only make them worse.

I think of myself, a transgender man, who will absolutely lose my rights to transition as I wish if the far-right gets to power.

I think of my little sister, who is about to celebrate one month dating her girlfriend and who will not be able to get married to her if she wishes to do so if the far-right gets to power.

I think of my grandmother, who was recently very sick and would not have survived if Portugal didn't have universal healthcare, who have died otherwise because the family would not have been able to pay for her treatments in the privatized healthcare the far-right idealizes.

I think of all the immigrant friends I've made over the years and how they would all be deported to their countries of origin if the far-right got to power.

I think of every child, myself included, who would not have gotten even the most basic of education if there weren't public schools in my country.

I think of the scholarship I got to study at university because my family is low-income, which I would definitely not have received if the far-right was in power.

If you're from Portugal and are old enough to vote, please do so with conscience. Lives will depend on your vote on March 10th. Lives will be sacrificed for an illusion of freedom that will immediately disappear or lives will be spared. Please, vote, but don't vote for a party that would take away the rights of more than half of the population. Even if it seems like those measures wouldn't affect you, they definitely would. We're all in the same boat. Some of us won't even get on the boat if my concerns turn out to be true. The majority of us will drown.