#Posse Comitatus Act

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Josh Kovensky at TPM:

Many MAGA influencers have an apocalyptic story to tell about the country, the political divide, and where we’re all headed, and they’re already using it to lay the groundwork for crossing what has long been a red line: deploying the military for domestic law enforcement purposes. In this MAGA fever dream, everyone has their part to play. They believe that they’ll be caught up in it; you might be, too. It goes something like this: If Donald Trump wins in November, people will protest. Riots will break out. The left, they theorize, will go all-out to stoke organized violence around the country, clearing the way for a newly inaugurated Trump administration to step in and make unprecedented, widespread use of the U.S. military to restore law and order.

This dark vision of the future draws on deeply pessimistic theorizing, on lectures about Marxist anti-government ideology seemingly ripped from the Cold War, on memories of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, and on claims that Democrats and the left will be unable to accept a Trump victory. It all comes against the backdrop of senior officials around Trump and Trump himself reportedly having been eager to invoke the Insurrection Act while he was in office, and mulling its actual use if he’s re-elected. In this situation, a second Trump administration would invoke the law to deploy the military to enforce immigration laws as part of a broader mission at the southern border — a proposal Trump has often spoken about publicly. But it would also make that invocation to do something far more extreme and at odds with American history: use the military against protestors.

[...] In the minds of Trump’s supporters, this planning is justified — in line with Trump’s promise of “retribution.” In their telling, he’s already borne those same slings and arrows that he envisions for his opponents: years of attempts by the “deep state” to thwart his administration, followed by supposedly unjust political prosecutions. He is punching back. It sets the stage, for Trump and those around him, to claim they are simply engaged in a tit for tat: using the machinery of the state to suppress his political opponents. And, in a stunning coincidence, those same opponents will happen to be violently rioting just as Trump takes office — at least in the fantasies of these hardcore supporters. Peter Feaver, a scholar of civil-military relations at Duke University, told TPM that the powers of the executive had “evolved” over the years, and that their responsible use had it come to “depend on electing a principled President.” Feaver served on the National Security Council in the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations. He added that the judiciary has long given the executive branch the power to use the Insurrection Act to override state law enforcement, in part out of deference to national security decision-making. Federal troops have been deployed domestically in dozens of situations; to quell the 1992 Los Angeles riots, to ensure desegregation efforts, to break up railroad strikes.

[...]

Higher stakes

For many right-wingers, the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter protests serve as a benchmark, often invoked when forecasting the kind of developments that they see as inevitable over the coming months, and requiring a tough response following a potential Trump victory. On the right, those protests are regarded as the high-water mark of recent left-wing violence.

As MAGA influencers tell it, the media and local, Democratic-controlled city governments ignored wanton lawlessness and violence, leaving shop owners and police squads to fend for themselves among violent mobs. The sense of grievance that’s emerged ignores the reality that many of the 2020 marches against police brutality were peaceful and managed to avoid burning down any police stations or looting stores. But the memory of that moment of activist mobilization remains powerful, among this set, and continues to inspire fear. Howell and others said that in their view, the November election would lead to a far greater level of chaos across the country than what was seen in summer 2020.

“Much more is at stake,” Douglas Wilson, a Moscow, Idaho pastor who has become influential in conservative circles, told TPM. “With the killing of George Floyd, it was simply an opportunity to vent, but no actual power was at stake. And with the presidential election, it would be actual power.”

Setting aside the crimped definition of “power” here, Wilson envisions left-wing self-preservation as further inflaming the imagined post-election violence. “If Trump wins, a lot of high powered, highly placed people are going to go to jail,” Wilson added. “They don’t want to go to jail.” Wilson has become increasingly influential among self-described Christian Nationalists, who see Trump as a vehicle to punch through an agenda that would try to reshape American society, bringing it closer to their hardline interpretation of Christianity. Wilson appeared last September at an event held on Capitol Hill called “Theology of American Statecraft.” He spoke immediately after a talk given by Russ Vought, a former Trump Office of Management and Budget director who has taken a leading role in developing policies for a second administration, including through Project 2025.

[...] A review of the paper that Vought referenced, authored by former DHS acting secretary Ken Cuccinelli and another staffer, shows that it answers an undisputed question: Does the Posse Comitatus Act, which blocks executive branch officials from deploying troops domestically, allow the president to use the military to defend the border? That part of the paper answers a question that’s long been settled: The Pentagon regularly deploys troops in support of protecting the U.S.-Mexico border, though not in a law enforcement capacity. But as the New York Times first reported, the document makes extensive legal arguments for using troops to arrest people as part of a domestic deployment.

[...] “This is actually the longest the United States has ever gone without an invocation of the Insurrection Act since the first version of the law was enacted in 1792,” Nunn, a fellow at the Brennan Center, told TPM. (The last time the Act was invoked was during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when state and local law enforcement briefly lost control of sections of the city.) He noted that the Act is intended for situations in which civilian law enforcement cannot cope; thanks to heavy investment in state and federal law enforcement, Nunn said, those kinds of emergencies have become exceedingly rare.

Using the military against peaceful demonstrators would cut against a foundational element of American public life: the right to freely and peacefully make your views about the government known, absent government retribution. “To the extent that any candidate or person in the orbit of a candidate is suggesting a preemptive plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, that’s inappropriate,” Nunn said. “The purpose of this law is to respond to sudden emergencies. If you are planning it months in advance, that’s by definition anticipating an abuse of the law.” Neither of the two missions that the Trump team is envisioning — immigration enforcement or putting down protests — falls remotely within the ambit of why people join the military, Nunn added. “People who join the military don’t do so because they look to be deployed against their fellow Americans,” he said. Domestic law enforcement, among other things, is not seen within the military as its job. “It’s not what they want to be doing. They want to be focused outward, on defense.”

MAGA influencers are seeking to justify use of military force on domestic soil for law enforcement purposes if Trump wins to be used against anti-Trump protests.

[ausetkmt]

Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans

Former President Donald Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up people living in the United States without legal permission on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.

Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslim-majority nations and reimposing a COVID-19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — although this time, he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

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He plans to scour the country for immigrants living here without legal permission and deport people by the millions per year.

To help speed mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due-process hearings. To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

In a public reference to his plans, Trump told a crowd in Iowa in September, “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” The reference was to a 1954 campaign to round up and expel Mexican immigrants that was named for an ethnic slur — “Operation Wetback.”

The constellation of Trump’s 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history. Millions of immigrants living in the country without legal permission would be banned from the U.S. or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court. But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States. Afghans holding special visas granted to people who helped U.S. forces would be revetted to see if they really did.

And Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents living in the country without legal permission — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

In interviews with The New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description yet of Trump’s immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error. Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Todd Schulte, the president of FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy group that repeatedly fought the Trump administration, said the Trump team’s plans relied on “xenophobic demagoguery” that appeals to his hardest-core political base.

“Americans should understand these policy proposals are an authoritarian, often illegal, agenda that would rip apart nearly every aspect of American life — tanking the economy, violating the basic civil rights of millions of immigrants and native-born Americans alike,” Schulte said.

The Tools to Exploit

Since Trump left office, the political environment on immigration has moved in his direction. He is also more capable now of exploiting that environment if he is reelected than he was when he first won election as an outsider.

The ebbing of the COVID-19 pandemic and resumption of travel flows have helped stir a global migrant crisis, with millions of Venezuelans and Central Americans fleeing turmoil and Africans arriving in Latin American countries before continuing their journey north. Amid the record numbers of migrants at the southern border and beyond it in cities like New York and Chicago, voters are frustrated, and even some Democrats are calling for tougher action against immigrants and pressuring the White House to better manage the crisis.

Trump and his advisers see the opening and now know better how to seize it. The aides Trump relied upon in the chaotic early days of his first term were sometimes at odds and lacked experience in how to manipulate the levers of federal power. By the end of his first term, Cabinet officials and lawyers who sought to restrain some of his actions — like his Homeland Security secretary and chief of staff, John Kelly — had been fired, and those who stuck with him had learned much.

In a second term, Trump plans to install a team that will not restrain him.

Since much of Trump’s first-term immigration crackdown was tied up in the courts, the legal environment has tilted in his favor: His four years of judicial appointments left behind federal appellate courts and a Supreme Court that are far more conservative than the courts that heard challenges to his first-term policies.

The fight over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals provides an illustration.

DACA is an Obama-era program that shields from deportation and grants work permits to people who were brought unlawfully to the United States as children. Trump tried to end it, but the Supreme Court blocked him on procedural grounds in June 2020.

Miller said Trump would try again to end DACA. And the 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court that blocked the last attempt no longer exists: A few months after the DACA ruling, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, and Trump replaced her with a sixth conservative, Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Trump’s rhetoric has more than kept up with his increasingly extreme agenda on immigration.

His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.

As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

Trump had similarly vowed to carry out mass deportations when running for office in 2016, but the government only managed several hundred thousand removals per year under his presidency, on par with other recent administrations. If they get another opportunity, Trump and his team are determined to achieve annual numbers in the millions.

Keeping People Out

Trump’s immigration plan is to pick up where he left off and then go much further. He would not only revive some of the policies that were criticized as draconian during his presidency, many of which the Biden White House ended, but also expand and toughen them.

One example centers on expanding first-term policies aimed at keeping people out of the country. Trump plans to suspend the nation’s refugee program and once again categorically ban visitors from troubled countries, reinstating a version of his ban on travel from several mostly Muslim-majority countries, which President Joe Biden called discriminatory and ended on his first day in office.

Trump would also use coercive diplomacy to induce other nations to help, including by making cooperation a condition of any other bilateral engagement, Miller said. For example, a second Trump administration would seek to reestablish an agreement with Mexico that asylum-seekers remain there while their claims are processed. (It is not clear that Mexico would agree; a Mexican court has said that deal violated human rights.)

Trump would also push to revive “safe third country” agreements with several nations in Central America and try to expand them to Africa, Asia and South America. Under such deals, countries agree to take would-be asylum-seekers from specific other nations and let them apply for asylum there instead.

While such arrangements have traditionally only covered migrants who had previously passed through a third country, federal law does not require that limit, and a second Trump administration would seek to make those deals without it, in part as a deterrent to migrants making what the Trump team views as illegitimate asylum claims.

At the same time, Miller said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would invoke the public health emergency powers law known as Title 42 to again refuse to hear any asylum claims by people arriving at the southern border. The Trump administration had internally discussed that idea early in Trump’s term, but some Cabinet secretaries pushed back, arguing that there was no public health emergency that would legally justify it. The administration ultimately implemented it during the coronavirus pandemic.

Saying the idea has since gained acceptance in practice — Biden initially kept the policy — Miller said Trump would invoke Title 42, citing “severe strains of the flu, tuberculosis, scabies, other respiratory illnesses like RSV and so on, or just a general issue of mass migration being a public health threat and conveying a variety of communicable diseases.”

Trump and his aides have not yet said whether they would reenact one of the most contentious deterrents to unauthorized immigration that he pursued as president: separating children from their parents, which led to trauma among migrants and difficulties in reuniting families. When pressed, Trump has repeatedly declined to rule out reviving the policy. After an outcry over the practice, Trump ended it in 2018, and a judge later blocked the government from putting it back into effect.

Mass Deportations

Soon after Trump announced his 2024 campaign for president last November, he met with Tom Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants.

In an interview, Homan recalled that in that meeting, he “agreed to come back” in a second term and would “help to organize and run the largest deportation operation this country’s ever seen.”

Trump advisers’ vision of abrupt mass deportations would be a recipe for social and economic turmoil, disrupting the housing market and major industries including agriculture and the service sector.

Miller cast such disruption in a favorable light.

“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs,” he said. “Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.”

One planned step to overcome the legal and logistical hurdles would be to significantly expand a form of fast-track deportations known as “expedited removal.” It denies immigrants living in the country without legal permission the usual hearings and opportunity to file appeals, which can take months or years — especially when people are not in custody — and has led to a large backlog. A 1996 law says people can be subject to expedited removal for up to two years after arriving, but to date, the executive branch has used it more cautiously, swiftly expelling people picked up near the border soon after crossing.

The Trump administration tried to expand the use of expedited removal, but a court blocked it, and then the Biden team canceled the expansion. It remains unclear whether the Supreme Court will rule that it is constitutional to use the law against people who have been living for a significant period in the United States and express fear of persecution if sent home.

Trump has also said he would invoke an archaic law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to expel suspected members of drug cartels and criminal gangs without due process. That law allows for summary deportation of people from countries with which the United States is at war, that have invaded the United States or that have engaged in “predatory incursions.”

The Supreme Court has upheld past uses of that law in wartime. But its text seems to require a link to the actions of a foreign government, so it is not clear whether the justices will allow a president to stretch it to encompass drug cartel activity.

More broadly, Miller said a new Trump administration would shift from the ICE practice of arresting specific people to carrying out workplace raids and other sweeps in public places aimed at arresting scores of immigrants living in the country without legal permission all at once.

To make the process of finding and deporting immigrants already living inside the country without legal permission “radically more quick and efficient,” he said, the Trump team would bring in “the right kinds of attorneys and the right kinds of policy thinkers” willing to carry out such ideas.

And because of the magnitude of arrests and deportations being contemplated, they plan to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progress and they wait to be flown to other countries.

Miller said the new camps would likely be built “on open land in Texas near the border.” He said the military would construct them under the authority and control of the Department of Homeland Security. While he cautioned that there were no specific blueprints yet, he said the camps would look professional and similar to other facilities for migrants that have been built near the border.

Such camps could also enable the government to speed up the pace and volume of deportations of people who have lived in the United States without legal permission for years and so are not subject to fast-track removal. If pursuing a long-shot effort to win permission to remain in the country would mean staying locked up in the interim, some may give up and voluntarily accept removal without going through the full process.

The use of these camps, he said, would likely be focused more on single adults because the government cannot indefinitely hold children under a long-standing court order known as the Flores settlement. So any families brought to the facilities would have to be moved in and out more quickly, Miller said.

The Trump administration tried to overturn the Flores settlement, but the Supreme Court did not resolve the matter before Trump’s term ended. Miller said the Trump team would try again.

To increase the number of agents available for ICE sweeps, Miller said, officials from other federal law enforcement agencies would be temporarily reassigned, and state National Guard troops and local police officers, at least from willing Republican-led states, would be deputized for immigration control efforts.

While a law known as the Posse Comitatus Act generally forbids the use of the armed forces for law enforcement purposes, another law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception. Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act at the border, enabling the use of federal troops to apprehend migrants, Miller said.

“Bottom line,” he said, “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”

[hybridmindthoughtsreloaded]

Trump is the Deep State

The "Deep State" want to destroy America. Well what is America? America is the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Destroy that and the Country ceases to exist. Agenda 47 shreds apart the Constitution, here are a few examples.

1: Make homelessness and Urban Camping illegal. Violators would be rounded up by Government agents, charged with a crime, and put into FEMA camps away from society. Effectively killing the 8th amendment of the United States Constitution.

2: Death penalty for Human traffickers and drug dealers. This would operate the same way China operates for these crimes. Anyone accused and arrested for these crimes would have a swift trial and if convicted be swiftly executed, no appeals. Effectively adopting the justice system of a Communist Dictatorship.

3: Using Executive Orders on day one to end natural born citizenship in America. Effectively killing the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution.

4: Implement an unconstitutional Nationwide "Stop and Frisk" policy and deployment of federal assets, including the National Guard, if local law enforcement refuses to comply with this order. Effectively violating the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and killing the 4th amendment of the United States Constitution.

5: Strictly enforcing existing gun laws and implement nation wide "Red Flag" gun laws that violate the 2nd amendment of the United States Constitution.

Still think the "Deep State" is against Trump? Trump is the "Deep State"! Wake up and take back what's left of your mind.

[advanced-imbecile-ocs]

Since I'm slowly making some Special Forces OCs, I realized making one is probably kind of daunting for most people due to all the Military stuff so here's a very loose collection of thoughts on the structure of the Special Forces.

Cause after all, what's a Black Dragon without an Special Forces Agent to hunt them down?

So to start, if you know anything about the military, the Special Forces is weird. A US Military task force started to fight international crime gangs? That's more the wheelhouse of other agencies like the CIA and INTERPOL I feel, but I digress because I'm here to make some sense of the Earthrealm Special Forces (ESF) since I think that's the era most people would be interesting in making an OC for the organization and I hope what I write here will give some of you enough insight to feel confident developing one or two.

First we'll cover some boring shit that won't really affect the day to day of your average ESF troop. Normally, federal troops are incredibly restricted on what the can and can't do to enforce domestic policies on US soil per The Posse Comitatus Act. However, given it's focus is responding to otherworldly threats to the US and the world at large, there is likely legislation that has been passed and carve outs made for Special Forces to operate in this capacity and still be part of the Department of Defense. There is likely a congressional panel that provides civilian oversight to ESF, hence all of Sonya Blade's references to a particular congressman during MKX. He's likely in charge of that oversight committee which can do things like hold hearings about what ESF has been up to to ensure they are operating within the bounds of their assigned responsibilities and not wasting taxpayer money.

Now onto the stuff you'll really want to know for your potential troop. Starting with some general military structure knowledge. The most important thing you need to know is there are two main groups in the military. Your Officers and your Enlisted. Officers are your captains, Lts, Colonels. They're the managers of the forces. Every group and subgroup within the military will generally have an Officer in charge of it to manage it. Sometimes they're assigned to do actual tasks, but generally they're in charge of the far more numerous Enlisted doing the tasks. Enlisted are the real work force of the military. These are the guys getting called Private, Arimen, Seamen, Sergeant, Petty Officer, ect. They're going to be the guys making up those mobs we seen getting thrown at Outworld's threats. The ones guarding the portal at the refugee site in MKX. For a more in depth break down of that, just search the US Military Rank Structure and you'll get plenty of images breaking down the E and O ranks across the forces.

ESF is most certainly a Special Joint Operation with the US Army making up a good amount of the group given how many grunts we see get mowed down in MK11's opening. This likely means, outside of special cases I'll ponder later, that you do not directly join the ESF. Instead you would join one of the basic military branches (Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and now our new Space Force) or even other agencies like the FBI and CIA and later be selected or be given the opportunity to volunteer for this special mission. Because of this, there are likely very very few junior ranking enlisted in the ESF. Most everyone is likely a Sergeant or Petty Officer for the Enlisted side, and at least a Captain on the Officer side.

The ESF is also certainly an international effort. It's not unusual for certain units and missions to have troops from our allied forces assigned to them. So there's probably a good handful of members from other countries, likely mainly from the Five Eyes partnership of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, and the US. That said, this is a fantasy land with alternate history so your agent could be from anywhere! Germany, India, whatever you like.

Finally, onto some funky exceptions I imagine exist for the ESF. At this point, I bet you're asking where someone like Johnny Cage falls in all this. On one hand, he could be a Civilian General Schedule. Which is just the term used for Civilians employed by a federal agency like the Department of Defense. Usually referred to as GS on a grade scale similar to how Enlisted and Officers are. He could also be specially contracted to work on behalf of the ESF, but not be directly employed by the Department of Defense. There's a lot of nitty gritty differences here, but what I imagine is most important to you theoretical OC maker, is that a Civilian employee will answer to someone on the Military side. A Contractor would view the ESF more as a customer they are providing a service for.

Finally, I know I said earlier you likely aren't able to directly join the ESF? Well given that they're a suped up kind of X-Files agency, I would bet good money there is a department dedicated to identifying special individuals like meta humans and recruiting them into the ESF. Possibly into small highly specialized units. There's bound to be all sorts of people scattered on Earthrealm with other worldly powers like Johnny Cage and Kenshi have, or perhaps just have a particular skill set or knowledge the ESF may need. Keeping a keen eye on anyone who might already be recruited into the military, but also identifying anyone who could be either useful to the ESF or a threat to Earthrealm if left unchecked. Think like how the X-Men are recruited into Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters.

That's all I've got for now. Sorry if anything in here doesn't make much sense, but like I said. Late night and loosely organized. I'm more than happy to talk about any of this in more detail if someone has questions.

[odinsblog]

What is the Posse Comitatus Act?

I’ve said it before and I will keep on saying it: If it was wrong when Trump did it, then it’s still wrong when Biden does it.

Title 42 was wrong when Trump enacted it, and Title 42 was wrong when Biden sued to continue using it to target Haitian and Mexican refugees and asylum seekers. And now Biden is sending U.S. troops to the border to “assist” the Border Patrol.

Stop sending troops to the border, and start sending lawyers, asylum judges and pop-up courts. Refugees and asylum seekers have a right to seek legal asylum.

Wrong is wrong. Preferential, race-based asylum and refugee policies that favor European immigrants above all others doesn’t magically stop being racist just because “our team” is doing it. Seeking asylum is legal. For everyone.

“Stop sending troops, start sending lawyers, asylum judges and pop-up courts. Refugees and asylum seekers have a right to seek legal asylum.”

Joe Biden is fundamentally altering how, when, where and who can legally, and more easily, seek refuge on American soil. This is wrong.

I am desperately waiting for all of the, “Oh, don’t worry we’ll pull him left after the election” liberals to start speaking up. Suddenly they’re all on mute.

[stephensmithuk]

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Baskerville Hall

CW injury discussion, discussion of violent crime including torture, whaling and capital punishment:

There were three classes of travel on British railways at this point, althought second-class travel was on its way out:

Paddington station, designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and today and a Grade I listed building, still has a big platform where it is possible to see someone directly onto a train without going through a ticket barrier. This is Platform 1 with access to the taxi rank and Elizabeth line station. It is also home to the GWR warm memorial and Paddington Bear statue, with a shop dedicated to the ursine Peruvian immigrant in the retail area at the south-eastern side.

The Museum of the College of Surgeons is now called the Hunterian Museum and is located near Holborn tube station. Admission is free, but they recommend advanced booking. It is closed on Sundays and Mondays.

It would be rather harder on a modern train to conduct a conversation as the vehicle was pulling out due to the elimination of most rolling stock with "droplights" i.e. manually lowerable windows, usually so you could open the door. The High Speed Trains which had at their end doors, them were withdrawn in 2019, the surviving "Castle Class" examples had their doors replaced with sliding ones and the Mark 3 carriages used on the Night Rivieria sleeper service now have them set to automatic locking during train movement. This was due to an enthusiast who stuck his head out of a window on a train with similar provision, resulting in a fatal encounter with a signal gantry.

The route taken is today electrified as far as Bristol (to Cardiff in fact) and is operated by the Class 802 Intercity Express train, although these mostly divert off that route at Reading. These are bi-mode units, capable of running both off 25kV overhead wire and on their underfloor diesel engines, both at 125mph like their High Speed Train predecessors, although much of SW England does not allow them to go near that speed. The main difference between the similar Class 800 is that they have larger diesel tanks for extended operations away from the wires; Devon does not have electrified railways.

The IETs come in five-car (802/0) and nine-car (802/1) on GWR. Not sure of these are 800s or 802s, but you can see why they are dubbed "Cucumbers" by enthusiasts when they are not complaining about the seats, which are a bit hard.

Spaniels were originally bred to be "gun dogs" to flush out animals and retrieve the corpses for the hunter. There are a wide variety of breeds, including the smaller ones like the King Charles Spaniel, which mainly serve as companion or lap dogs.

Dartmoor is home to the Dartmoor Intrusion, a large section of granite bedrock formed around 300 million years ago. London is on a clay bedrock, which is much younger:

Granite quarrying was widely done on Dartmoor, including by prisoners doing hard labour sentences. Today, it is no longer done as the area is now a national park, but you can get reclaimed granite from the area.

Nearly every station bar the smallest one would have a resident stationmaster and porters; these days, staffing is a lot less common in many areas and the station building may see other uses.

A wagonette is a four-wheeled carriage with longitudinal seats i.e the passengers sit on the sides facing each other. They are common on the Channel Island of Sark, where cars are banned.

Cobs are large ponies used mainly for driving carts or recreational riding:

The UK does not have an equivalent of the Posse Comitatus Act that the United States does to restrict the use of the military for law enforcement. While the use of them to deal with riots largely ended with the creation of civilian police forces, they can be still called on for "Military Aid to the Civil Authorities".

Not counting their use in Northern Ireland as part of Operation Banner from 1969 to 2007. This typically involves things like:

Civil engineering after disasters, like repairing flood defences;

Search and rescue;

Bomb disposal, such as when someone finds a German bomb during construction work;

Counter-terrorism, which mainly consists of standing around possible targets with their rifles or in 2012, sticking short-range SAMs on tower block roofs to protect the Olympics and Paralympics from aerial attack. The SAS would famously be used to end a siege at the Iranian Embassy in 1980, but this sort of thing would now be done by armed police officers today.

Selden's commutation of his death sentence due to questions over his sanity wouldn't have been uncommon, 534 of the 988 death sentences handed down were commuted between 1868 and 1899. 1889 saw 15 executions, all for murder:

****

HMP Dartmoor, on land leased from the Duchy from Cornwall, is located in a pretty remote location. It is six miles over open countryside before you reach the next town at Tavistock (which had two railway stations, both closed in the 1960s) and around ten before you'd reach Plymouth, with a further 4 1/2 before you could get to the coast. Also, you'd be doing this in a distinctive uniform with black arrows on, not exactly suited for the conditions.

This is not to say that people didn't try to escape and indeed succeed - 24 American POWs would do so during the prison's first incarnation.

It would be easier to do so when outside the prison on a work party rather than it, like Frank Mitchell, a gangster who in 1966 asked a guard if he could feed some ponies. He in fact walked to a nearby road, got into a waiting car driven by associates of the Kray twins and was driven to London. The escape (which involved soldiers in the manhunt) was a major political embarrassment, especially when Mitchell managed to get letters published in two newspapers asking for a parole date:

However, Mitchell becaming an increasing liability for the Krays; he then disappeared, generally believed to have killed and dumped at sea. They and an associate called Freddie Foreman, known as "Brown Bread [dead] Fred" for his ability to dispose of bodies, were tried for this murder and others at the Old Bailey; they were acquitted of this particular charge. Foreman admitted to the crime in 1996 and again in 2000; the CPS decided "double jeopardy" meant they could not bring new charges.

Because of its remoteness, Dartmoor ended up becoming a place for the worst of the worst in the British prison system. Mitchell, known as the "Mad Axeman". had a string of violent offences to his name, including an escape from Broadmoor that had seen him hold a married couple hostage with an an axe. He would not be the only London gangster of the period to spend time there:

It also held more "political prisoners", like Éamon de Valera. During the First World War, with other prisoners moved elsewhere, it became a Home Office Work Centre for conscientious objectors who agreed to do non-combatant work; the locks were removed, they could wear their own clothes and could even move around freely locally, although they were not very popular there.

The place was bleak too; no flushing toilets (so you had to spend each morning "slopping out", being cold and damp. Tampered-with porridge led to a riot in 1932:

A further riot in 1990 was part of a string of copycat riots in prisons following one at Strangeways in Manchester; D Wing was wrecked by fire and a prisoner was found dead in a burnt-out cell; this may have been an accident or murder.

In the aftermath, an inquiry was held by Lord Justic Woolf. A summary of the findings of the 600-page report can be found here:

Notably he recommended major improvements to Dartmoor if it was to continue operating.

In 2001, Dartmoor became a Category C prison for non-violent offenders, although concerns remained about its condition. Discussions about closure began in the 2010s with consideration being given to ending the lease and closing it down in 2023.

This did not happen, but other events are now looking like closing it anyway. Concerns over radon gas levels have now seen all the prisoners relocated as of time of writing; it may not reopen.

****

Electric lighting was of course becoming more common. Candlepower was a measurement for the intensity of a light, 1 candlepower being defined as the light from a spermaceti candle. Spermaceti is a wax found in the heads of sperm whales; it was mistakenly thought that spermaceti was whale semen because it looked like that when fresh. This was a major reason they were hunted, like in Moby Dick - today they remain at "Vulnerable" status.

The SI (metric, basically) unit is called the candela - one candlepower is 0.981 candela. The lumen is another measure, used for lightbulbs.

A billiard-room is where one plays billiards. It was also acceptable to smoke there. Women played billiards too; Queen Victoria was a fan, but I am not sure of the etiquette on mixed games. Especially if evening dress was involved, it would be seen as saucy by today's standards and positively scandalous in 1889!

[vote-democrat-president-congress]

Deploying on U.S. Soil: How Trump Would Use Soldiers Against Riots, Crime and Migrants

NYTimes Aug 17, 2024:

The former president’s vision of using the military to enforce the law domestically would carry profound implications for civil liberties.

During the turbulent summer of 2020, President Donald J. Trump raged at his military and legal advisers, calling them “losers” for objecting to his idea of using federal troops to suppress outbreaks of violence during the nationwide protests over the police murder of George Floyd.

It wasn’t the only time Mr. Trump was talked out of using the military for domestic law enforcement — a practice that would carry profound implications for civil liberties and for the traditional constraints on federal power. He repeatedly raised the idea of using troops to secure border states, and even proposed shooting both violent protesters and undocumented migrants in the legs, former aides have said.

In his first term in office, Mr. Trump never realized his expansive vision of using troops to enforce the law on U.S. soil. But as he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats.

“In places where there is a true breakdown of the rule of law, such as the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago, the next president should use every power at his disposal to restore order — and, if necessary, that includes sending in the National Guard or the troops,” Mr. Trump said at a conservative conference in Dallas in August 2022, shortly before announcing that he was running to be that next president.

During his time out of power, allies of Mr. Trump have worked on policy papers to provide legal justifications for the former president’s intent to use the military to enforce the law domestically. In public, they have talked about this in the context of border states and undocumented immigrants. But an internal email from a group closely aligned with Mr. Trump, obtained by The Times, shows that, privately, the group was also exploring using troops to “stop riots” by protesters.

While governors have latitude to use their states’ National Guards to respond to civil disorder or major disasters, a post-Civil War law called the Posse Comitatus Act generally makes it a crime to use regular federal troops for domestic policing purposes.

However, an 1807 law called the Insurrection Act creates an exception to that ban. It grants presidents the emergency power to use federal troops on domestic soil to restore law and order when they believe a situation warrants it. Those federal troops could either be regular active-duty military or state National Guard soldiers the federal government has assumed control over.

The Insurrection Act was last invoked in 1992, when President George H.W. Bush sent troops to help suppress riots in Los Angeles following the acquittal of white police officers who had been videotaped beating a Black motorist, Rodney King. In that case, however, the governor of California, Pete Wilson, and the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, had asked for federal assistance to restore order.

But parts of the Insurrection Act also allow presidents to send in troops without requiring the consent of a governor. Presidents last invoked the act to deploy troops without the consent of state authorities in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the civil rights movement, when some governors in the South resisted court-ordered school desegregation.

Mr. Trump has boasted that, if he returns to the White House, he will dispatch forces without any request for intervention by local authorities. At a campaign rally in Iowa last year, for example, he vowed to unilaterally use federal forces to “get crime out of our cities,” specifically naming New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco as “crime dens” he pointedly noted were run by Democrats.

“You look at what is happening to our country — we cannot let it happen any longer,” Mr. Trump said. “And one of the other things I’ll do — because you are not supposed to be involved in that, you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in — the next time, I am not waiting.”

Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that, as part of his group’s contingency planning for how to resist what it sees as potential risks from any second Trump administration, it is drafting lawsuits to challenge invocations of the Insurrection Act against protesters. He said the group sees it as likely that Mr. Trump would be drawn to the authoritarian “theatrics” of sending troops into Democratic cities.

“It’s very likely that you will have the Trump administration trying to shut down mass protests — which I think are inevitable if they were to win — and to specifically pick fights in jurisdictions with blue-state governors and blue-state mayors,” he said. “There’s talk that he would try to rely on the Insurrection Act as a way to shut down lawful protests that get a little messy. But isolated instances of violence or lawlessness are not enough to use federal troops.”

In a statement, a Trump spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said, “As President Trump has always said, you can’t have a country without law and order and without borders. In the event where an American community is being ravaged by violence, President Trump will use all federal law enforcement assets and work with local governments to protect law-abiding Americans.” She added that he was committed to “using every available resource to seal the border and stop the invasion of millions of illegal aliens into our country.”

Mr. Trump has long been attracted to the strongman move of using military force to impose and maintain domestic political control. In a 1990 interview with Playboy, he spoke admiringly about the Chinese Communist Party for displaying the “power of strength” a year earlier when it used troops and tanks to crush the pro-democracy protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

Many years later, at a 2016 Republican primary debate, he claimed that his comments in that old interview did not mean he actually endorsed the crackdown. But then, as he continued talking, he described the Tiananmen Square demonstration as a riot: “I said that was a strong, powerful government. They kept down the riot. It was a horrible thing.”

Seeking a Show of Strength

In 2020, the videotaped killing of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Derek Chauvin, sparked racial justice protests. Peaceful demonstrations sometimes descended into rioting — especially when anarchists hijacked some of the protests as an opportunity to set fires, smash store windows and take other destructive actions. This was especially visible in Portland, Ore., where the Department of Homeland Security flooded the streets with hundreds of federal officers, many not wearing any identifying insignia.

During a stormy protest in Washington, D.C., centered in Lafayette Square outside the White House, protesters knocked over barricades. The Secret Service whisked Mr. Trump away to take shelter in a bunker underneath the White House. Attorney General William P. Barr later wrote in his memoir that Mr. Trump was enraged — in part by the violence but “especially the news reports that he was taken to the bunker.” He wanted to make a show of strength as the world watched.

Because D.C. is a federal enclave, not a state, it has no governor, and its National Guard always reports to the Pentagon. The secretary of defense, Mark Esper, sent National Guard forces to support the Park Police and other civilian agencies protecting federal buildings — and, to particular controversy, National Guard helicopters swooped frighteningly low over crowds of people.

But civilians remained in control of the response in the nation’s capital. Mr. Trump wanted to instead put the military directly in charge of suppressing violent protesters — and to use regular, active-duty troops to do it. Members of his legal team drew up an order invoking the Insurrection Act in case it became necessary, according to a person with direct knowledge of what took place. But senior aides opposed such a move, and he never signed it.

Mr. Barr later wrote that he and the acting Homeland Security secretary had thought using regular troops was unnecessary, and that Mr. Esper and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had “recoiled at the idea, expressing the view that regular military forces should not be used except as a last resort, and that, absent a real insurrection, the military should not be in charge but should provide support to civilian agencies.”

As Mr. Trump nevertheless publicly threatened to put the regular military in the streets across the country, General Milley issued a memo on June 2, 2020, to top military leaders saying that every member of the military swears an oath to uphold the Constitution and its values, including the freedoms of speech and peaceful assembly.

The next day, on June 3, Mr. Esper contradicted Mr. Trump from the Pentagon podium, saying: “The option to use active duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Mr. Trump was outraged, seeing this as an act of defiance. He fired Mr. Esper that November.

In a comment for this article before President Biden dropped out of the 2024 campaign, Mr. Esper pointed to his earlier remarks, adding, “I think the same standard applies going forward, whether it is a second term for Biden, Trump or for any other future president.”

Back in 2020, the protests or riots eventually ebbed, without any use of regular troops or Mr. Trump’s federalizing a state’s National Guard. But on the 2024 campaign trail, Mr. Trump has rewritten that history, falsely bragging that he personally sent troops into the streets of Minneapolis, who quelled violence there.

In reality, it was Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota — now the presumptive Democratic nominee for vice president — who ordered his state’s National Guard to briefly deploy in Minneapolis. Mr. Trump did not direct and was not responsible for the operation.

In a 2021 interview, Mr. Walz recalled consulting with General Milley and Mr. Esper about his decision to use the state’s National Guard at a time when they were resisting Mr. Trump’s desire to send in federal troops — a step that Mr. Walz said would have made the situation worse by exacerbating the anger of people protesting a police murder.

“It was critically important that civilian leadership was seen as leading this, and that the face forward needed to look like your state, it needed to be the National Guard, it needed to be those local folk,” he told the authors Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.

However, Mr. Walz has faced criticism from some quarters for moving slowly to deploy the guard when some protests in Minneapolis became riots.

Troops at the Border

Mr. Trump has broken with his former subordinates who raised objections to his desire to use federal troops that summer. Those who have stuck with Mr. Trump are working to ensure that a second administration would not contain politically appointed officials or lawyers who would be inclined to see it as their duty to constrain his impulses and desires — one of several reasons a second Trump presidency is likely to shatter even more norms and precedents than the first.

Indeed, even by the standards of various norm-busting plans Mr. Trump and his advisers have developed, the idea of using American troops against Americans on domestic soil stands apart. It has engendered quiet discomfort even among some of his allies on other issues.

Most of the open discussion of it by people other than Mr. Trump has focused on the prospect of using troops in border states — not against American rioters or criminals, but to arrest suspected undocumented migrants and better secure the border against illegal crossings.

In recent years, administrations of both parties — including Mr. Biden’s — have sometimes used the military at the border when surges of migrants have threatened to overwhelm the civilian agents. But the troops have helped by taking over back-office administration and support functions, freeing up more ICE and Border Patrol agents to go into the field.

The idea Mr. Trump and his advisers are playing with is to go beyond that by using regular troops to patrol the border and arrest people.

In an interview with The New York Times last fall, Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top immigration adviser, said Mr. Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigration included invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops as immigration agents.

And, in its 900-page policy book, Project 2025 — a consortium of conservative think-tanks that is working together to develop policy proposals and personnel lists to offer Mr. Trump should he win the election — has a brief line saying regular troops “could” be used at the Southwest border for arrest operations in the context of tackling drug cartels.

But the book has no further analysis or discussion of the idea, and Project 2025 is not substantively engaging with the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act in any context, according to multiple people with knowledge of the effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

‘Insurrection — Stop Riots ** — Day 1, Easy’

Regular troops are generally trained to operate in combat situations, not as domestic law enforcement, which heightens the risk of serious and, at times, even fatal mistakes — as happened when a Marine on an antidrug surveillance team assisting the Border Patrol shot and killed an American teenager near the border in 1997.

For that reason, the idea of using regular troops to enforce the law on domestic soil — especially away from the border — crosses a line that gives even some in the conservative think-tank world pause. Policy development work on using the Insurrection Act has joined a small number of other policy ideas circulating in Mr. Trump’s orbit, like disengaging with NATO, that are too radioactive to gain a consensus among the conservatives involved in Project 2025.

Instead, legal and policy development work on ideas that are too radical even for Project 2025 are being handled elsewhere, including at a Trump-aligned think tank called the Center for Renewing America that is run by Russell Vought, who was Mr. Trump’s White House budget chief.

An early 2023 email from a member of the center’s staff listed 10 agenda topics for papers that the center planned to write on legal and policy frameworks. An introduction to the email said the goal was to “help us build the case and achieve consensus leading into 2025.” The email went on to circulate more broadly, and The Times reviewed a copy.

The email placed each topic into one of three categories. One set involved Congress. A second involved “broader legal” issues — including “Christian nationalism” and “nullification,” the pre-Civil War idea that states should be able to negate federal laws they don’t like. The third category was “day one” ideas, meaning those whose legal frameworks were already well established, and which could be put into effect by a president unilaterally.

No. 4 on the list: “Insurrection — stop riots ** — Day 1, easy.”

The Center for Renewing America has since published papers about several other agenda items on its list, including arguing that a 1974 law banning presidents from impounding funds — or refusing to spend money Congress has appropriated for things the White House dislikes — is unconstitutional (No. 1 on the list) and advocating for the elimination of the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department investigative independence from the White House (No. 5).

The center has not published any paper on invoking the Insurrection Act to use troops to suppress violent protests. But earlier this year, it published a paper on a closely related topic: invoking that law to use troops in Southwest border states to enforce immigration law. The paper was co-written by Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy Homeland Security secretary in the Trump administration.

While the paper focuses on border security, most of its legal analysis applies to any situation in which a president deems the use of troops necessary to suppress lawlessness. It laid out extensive arguments for why the Insurrection Act provides “enormous” leeway for the president to use regular troops directly to make arrests and enforce the law.

It also cited a sweeping Justice Department memorandum written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, by John Yoo, a Bush administration lawyer with an idiosyncratically broad view of presidential power. Mr. Yoo had argued that the Posse Comitatus Act could not stop a presidential decision to use the armed forces domestically to combat terrorist activities.

In a statement responding to The Times’s reporting, Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the Center for Renewing America, said, “Thank you for confirming that we have made it a priority to articulate that the president has the legal authority to use the military to secure the border.”

While the center’s statement — like its paper — framed the prospect of using troops on domestic soil in the context of securing the border, not suppressing anti-Trump protests, Mr. Vought was more expansive in a hidden-camera video released last week by a British journalism nonprofit, the Centre for Climate Reporting, which spoke with him while deceptively posing as relatives of a wealthy conservative donor.

“George Floyd obviously was not about race — it was about destabilizing the Trump administration,” he said. “We put out, for instance, a 50-page paper designed for lawyers to know that the president has, you know, the ability both along the border and elsewhere to maintain law and order with the military and that’s something that, you know, that’s going to be important for him to remember and his lawyers to affirm. But we’ve given them the case for that.”

Blurry Lines

Mr. Trump and his campaign have tried to distance themselves from Project 2025 and other outside conservative groups, saying that only policy proposals endorsed by the campaign count. Ms. Leavitt said, “As President Trump and our campaign has repeatedly stated, outside groups do NOT speak for him. The ONLY official second-term policies are those that come directly from President Trump himself.”

Still, as a matter of substance, the lines between Project 2025’s work, the materials being developed separately by the Center for Renewing America and the Trump campaign can be blurry.

For example, Mr. Vought has also been in charge of one of the most important components of Project 2025: drafting executive orders and other unilateral actions Mr. Trump could take over the first six months in office. Mr. Vought also remains personally close to Mr. Trump. And the Republican National Committee, which Mr. Trump controls through allies, including his senior campaign adviser, Chris LaCivita, and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, put Mr. Vought in charge of the committee that developed the party’s platform.

That platform calls for “moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas to our own southern border” to secure it against migrants.

At the Center for Renewing America, Mr. Vought has also hired Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration who was indicted in Georgia for working with Mr. Trump to help overturn the 2020 election.

Mr. Clark wrote the center’s paper laying out a legal framework for why the president can take direct control of Justice Department investigations and prosecutions, and was also appointed to co-lead Project 2025’s Justice Department policy efforts.

The federal indictment of Mr. Trump, which deems Mr. Clark an unindicted co-conspirator, recounts how a White House lawyer told Mr. Clark that there had not been outcome-changing election fraud — and warned that if Mr. Trump nonetheless remained in office, there would be riots in every major city in the United States.

“Well,” Mr. Clark responded, according to the indictment, “that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy. More about Charlie Savage

Jonathan Swan is a political reporter covering the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s campaign. More about Jonathan Swan

Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent reporting on the 2024 presidential campaign, down ballot races across the country and the investigations into former President Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 18, 2024 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Vision For the Border: Send In Troops. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

See more on: Donald Trump, American Civil Liberties Union

[buckmyluv]

goddamn for all its flaws, the west wing was perhaps one of the best-acted shows and (often) among the best-written

fucking POSSE COMITATUS

martin sheen’s president bartlet is some mix of:

- furious that he’s being forced into this choice with sharif

- aggrieved that it’s all being treated like a foregone conclusion

- devastated that this last (or maybe only) piece of humanity has to be ripped away from him

and he plays it with this casual demeanor as if he can deny reality. every response and question he brings to the sit room is like him playing the part, a figurative sidelong glance and a smirk like “look at these guys” to the audience

surely, this is the most absurd meeting i’ve ever sat in, he says

knowing this choice is one he was (probably) always going to have to make, given the state of the world

and perhaps it’s just that he couldn’t (didn’t have to) confront it until now

but every decision he’s made has been of this magnitude

[ok and then obviously CJ AND SIMON]

[DEBBIE FIDERER]

what a fucking episode

[reasoningdaily]

The Fugitive Slave Law was enacted by Congress in September, 1850, received the signature of Howell Cobb, of Georgia, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, of William R. King, of Alabama, as President of the Senate, and was “approved,” September 18th, of that year, by Millard Fillmore, Acting President of the United States.

The authorship of the Bill is generally ascribed to James M. Mason, Senator from Virginia. Before proceeding to the principal object of this tract, it is proper to give a synopsis of the Act itself, which was well called, by the New York Evening Post, “An Act for the Encouragement of Kidnapping.”

SYNOPSIS OF THE LAW

Section 1. United States Commissioners “authorized and required to exercise and discharge all the powers and duties conferred by this act.”

Section. 2. Commissioners for the Territories to be appointed by the Superior Court of the same.

Section. 3. United States Circuit Courts, and Superior Courts of Territories, required to enlarge the number of Commissioners, “with a view to afford reasonable facilities to reclaim fugitives from labor,”.

Section. 4. Commissioners put on the same footing with Judges of the United States Courts, with regard to enforcing the Law and its penalties.

Section. 5. United States Marshals and deputy marshals, who may refuse to act under the Law, to be fined One Thousand dollars, to the use of the claimant. If a fugitive escape from the custody of the Marshal, the Marshal to be liable for his full value. Commissioners authorized to appoint special officers, and to call out the posse comitatus.

Section. 6. The claimant of any fugitive slave, or his attorney, “may pursue and reclaim such fugitive person,” either by procuring a warrant from some judge or commissioner, “or by seizing and arresting such fugitive, where the same can be done without process;” to take such fugitive before such judge or commissioner, “whose duty it shall be to hear and determine the case of such claimant in a summary manner,” and, if satisfied of the identity of the prisoner, to grant a certificate to said claimant to “remove such fugitive person back to the State or Territory from whence he or she may have escaped,”—using “such reasonable force or restraint as may be necessary under the circumstances of the case.” “In no trial or hearing under this act shall the testimony of such alleged fugitive be admitted in evidence.” All molestation of the claimant, in the removal of his slave, “by any process issued by any court, judge, magistrate, or other person whomsoever,” to be prevented.

Section. 7. Any person obstructing the arrest of a fugitive, or attempting his or her rescue, or aiding him or her to escape, or harboring and concealing a fugitive, knowing him to be such, shall be subject to a fine of not exceeding one thousand dollars, and to be imprisoned not exceeding six months, and shall also “forfeit and pay the sum of one thousand dollars for each fugitive so lost.”

Section. 8. Marshals, deputies, clerks, and special officers to receive usual fees; Commissioners to receive ten dollars, if fugitive is given up to claimant; otherwise, five dollars; to be paid by claimant.

Section. 9. If claimant make affidavit that he fears a rescue of such fugitive from his possession, the officer making the arrest to retain him in custody, and “to remove him to the State whence he fled.” Said officer “to employ so many persons as he may deem necessary.” All, while so employed, be paid out of the Treasury of the United States.

Section. 10. [This Section provides an additional and wholly distinct method for the capture of a fugitive; and, it may be added, one of the loosest and most extraordinary that ever appeared on the pages of Statute book.] Any person, from whom one held to service or labor has escaped, upon making “satisfactory proof” of such escape before any court of record, or judge thereof in vacation—a record of matter so proved shall be made by such court, or judge, and also a description of the person escaping, “with such convenient certainty as may be;”—a copy of which record, duly attested, “being produced in any other State, Territory, or District,” and “being exhibited to any judge, commissioner, or other officer authorized,”. “shall be held and taken to be full and conclusive evidence of the fact of escape, and that the service or labor of the person escaping is due to the party in such record mentioned;” when, on satisfactory proof of identity, “he or she shall be delivered up to the claimant.” “Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed as requiring the production of a transcript of such record as evidence as aforesaid; but in its absence, the claim shall be heard and determined upon other satisfactory proofs competent in law.”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims at Popular Information:

Former President Donald Trump has promised that he will start mass deportations if he wins in November. The promise has become a central selling point of his 2024 campaign. At a campaign rally in Michigan this summer, Trump vowed, “As soon as I take the oath of office, we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”  In April, during an interview with TIME, Trump laid out his plan for mass deportations, stating that he will use “local law enforcement” and “the National Guard.” Trump also said he would “not rule out” building new migrant detention facilities and that he would use the military “if necessary.” When TIME told Trump that deploying the military against civilians is prohibited under the Posse Comitatus Act, Trump responded, “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”

Trump has promised that one of his first targets will be Springfield, Ohio, where Trump and his allies have, on numerous occasions, falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants are eating neighborhood pets. “[W]e will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio. Large deportations. We’re gonna get these people out,” Trump said last week at a press conference in California. (The Haitian immigrants that Trump and his allies are targeting are in the country legally.) Trump also promised to prioritize deportations from Aurora, Colorado, where Trump has falsely claimed that Venezuelan immigrants are “taking over the whole town.” [...]

The human capacity problem

The scale required to orchestrate Trump’s proposed policy is far beyond the capacity of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Trump’s solution is to use local law enforcement. In an interview on Fox News, Trump said that he would give local police “immunity” to do “the job they have to do,” and that “the officers understand who the migrants are.” Using local law enforcement would result in police officers having less time to perform their other duties. A March report by the Center for Migration Studies of New York cited research that found putting local police officers in charge of immigration responsibilities would make “local communities less safe” and immigrants, fearing deportation, “less likely to report crimes or cooperate with police.”

[...]

The enormous price tag

ICE acknowledges that each deportation is costly and difficult. In its 2023 annual report, the agency stated, “Removal management is a complex process that requires careful planning and coordination with a wide range of domestic and foreign partners and uses significant ERO resources.” According to that report, ICE deported 142,580 non-citizens from the U.S. in 2023. Its budget for removals and transportation last year was over $420 million, meaning that it cost nearly $3,000 to remove each person from the country. If Trump successfully deported the estimated 11 million non-citizens currently in the U.S., it would cost $33 billion just to transport people out of the U.S. — more than triple ICE’s total budget in 2023. But the cost of actually moving a person off U.S. soil is only one part of the equation. It also costs ICE money to track people down and keep them in custody before their deportation. NBC reported that ICE currently has about 40,000 beds in detention centers which each cost $57,378 a year to maintain. If Trump enacted his mass deportation plan of 11 million people, ICE would need to expand its detention capacity drastically.

[...]

The nationwide civil rights violation

Trump’s promise of mass deportations would cause major civil rights violations. The policy would effectively result in local law enforcement engaging in a mass racial profiling campaign, as there is no objective way to identify undocumented immigrants. According to a report by the Center for Migration Studies of New York, “[i]mmigration ‘sweeps’... often lead to profiling, usually on racial or ethnic grounds.” The report argues that this would lead to U.S. citizens and legal immigrants being “unjustly detained and even deported,” and give them “little opportunity to legally respond to their arrest and detention.” In a memo released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in response to Trump’s proposed immigration policies, the group warns that Trump’s plan could also lead to violations of “constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure, including arrests and detentions without a specific reason to detain a certain individual.”  

The massive detention camps

Once the Trump administration identifies undocumented immigrants, it would need to detain them somewhere before deporting them. Trump has suggested that massive detention centers would need to be built in order to keep up with the number of deportations being processed. Aside from the economic cost, detention centers have been the sites of numerous human rights abuses. Undocumented immigrants in detention centers have been denied urgent medical care, sexually abused, and kept in chain-link pens.

The damage to the economy

[...]

The U.S. is already facing a labor shortage, and removing 11 million undocumented workers (about 5% of the total workforce) would only make the problem worse, pushing up prices on goods and services. Mass deportation would also impact the housing market, putting many of the 1.3 million mortgages of mixed-status households in danger, and cut tax revenue to the government and Social Security. 

Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy is a quagmire if it ever gets implemented, because it is a grave insult to civil liberties, police resources, and the economy.

Vote Kamala Harris to protect civil liberties!

[tobiasdrake]

"The PATRIOT Act should cover the red tape. The U.S. Military is hereby seizing control of all Stark Industries assets."

*blinkblink* ...the counterterrorism bill permitting expanded surveillance of civilians and imposing harsher penalties for committing acts of terrorism? I'm not sure I understand how that applies. Sometimes people just write things, I swear.

What you're looking for is the Defense Production Act, a Cold War-era bill that allows the government to order private corporations to manufacture particular products in times of crisis. The bill entered public knowledge due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as both Trump and Biden have used the DPA to mass-produce PPE.

When Ross tells Pepper that the government's ordering Stark Industries to mass-produce Liberator drones for war with Wakanda, he's invoking the Defense Production Act. Not the PATRIOT Act.

Of course, Ross can't do that. Only the President can invoke the Defense Production Act. And also it doesn't technically involve seizing of assets. It's a stern order given to the company, with penalties imposed for violating it.

But Ross doesn't even understand posse comitatus so we can't really expect him to know how the Defense Production Act works, I suppose.

[hybridmindthoughtsreloaded]

Agenda 47

Agenda 47 would turn America into an unconstitutional authoritarian police state with the President as dictator. It would effectively shred the United States Constitution into pieces.

1: Make homelessness and Urban Camping illegal. Violators would be rounded up by Government agents, charged with a crime, and put into FEMA camps away from society. Effectively killing the 8th amendment of the United States Constitution.

2: Death penalty for Human traffickers and drug dealers. This would operate the same way China operates for these crimes. Anyone accused and arrested for these crimes would have a swift trial and if convicted be swiftly executed. Effectively adopting the justice system of a Communist Dictatorship.

3: Using Executive Orders on day one to end natural born citizenship in America. Effectively killing the 14th amendment of the United States Constitution.

4: Implement an unconstitutional Nationwide "Stop and Frisk" policy and deployment of federal assets, including the National Guard, if local law enforcement refuses to comply with this order. Effectively violating the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 and killing the 4th amendment of the United States Constitution.

5: Strictly enforcing existing gun laws and implement nation wide "Red Flag" gun laws that violate the 2nd amendment of the United States Constitution.

This is Trumps Agenda 47. This is the future the Right-Wing wants for America. This agenda is not hidden, its displayed proudly on Donald Trumps own website for everyone to see. This is the future your children will live in if you don't take a stand against this and fight for our rights, fight for the Constitution, fight for the freedom of future generations.

[lightdancer1]

In all the discussions over reparations, the omission of the Freedman's Bureau is a good look at how much the people who discuss what was and wasn't done actually know or prefer to neglect:

Before going to Rutherford B. Hayes and the Compromise of 1877, and with it the Posse Comitatus Act, a look at two other aspects of reality for Black people in the postwar South. The first is why one of those HBCUs has the name 'Howard,' after General Oliver O. Howard. The Northern Leonidas Polk without the treachery, he was a very devout Christian and a very moral man but a better person with prayers than he was battlefield leadership. His leadership of the Freedmen's Bureau was the first of many organizations in US history dedicated to reducing poverty and actually helping people in need. This is the closest the US government ever came to actually providing reparations and its omission from the writings of white supremacists is more to be expected than those of hoteps disappointed the US government doesn't give them the power to dismantle without a fight what they'd have to fight to get and which they refuse to do for the same reason the other 101st Chairborne do.

It had very real limitations, but it was also the thing that both actually existed and was one of the main faces of the military occupation the South hated so much.

[kineticpenguin]

I think the funniest bit of cognitive dissonance in The Jared Chronicles thus far is John, the Delta Unit Tier Whatever Operator, and how he doesn't like the idea of killing Americans (but that doesn't stop him when he has to).

The guy who was in the super duper military unit with a special exemption to get around the Posse Comitatus Act so the Army can perform "counterterrorist" missions within the US' borders and trains with the FBI's HRT has reservations about killing Americans.

Ooookay then!

[sutrala]

(NaturalNews) Independent journalist Jason Goodman of “Crowdsource The Truth” has been documenting the bizarre U.S. Army takeover of a New York City hotel...

[deblala]

Huge! US Army manning NYC illegal ‘migrant’ hotels in direct violation of Posse Comitatus Act – NaturalNews.com

https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-09-06-us-army-manning-nyc-illegal-migrant-hotels.html