The Emperor's New Immigration Policy

Image from The New York Times of the US Navy Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The "Migrant Tent Camp" at lower left is an area that was used to house boat people on their way to Florida, in the days when America used to welcome refugees from godless socialism, and still did during the Biden administration, from around 37 at the beginning of the term to 4 last February; it's theoretically capable of holding 13,000, but for the current exercise they've just assembled a camp of 150 tents. However, the actual 10 Venezuelan migrants sent to Guantánamo this week from America, in one of the first big moves of the Trump administration's mass deportation program, are being held seven miles to the east in the prison complex, not with but not too far from the 15 9/11 terrorism suspects still languishing there since 2002 or 2003. 

This from The Guardian is hilarious on first look:

US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations

It seems in the first week of the Trump presidency when you Googled ICE operations or raids you got the impression of a great big wave of arrests across the country of unauthorized foreigners in the form of ICE press releases, but when you looked at the stories there was something wrong:

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008. 

They were old stories, some 13,000 of them, all timestamped "updated 1/24/2025", which shot them to the top of the Google and Bing rankings. Some Merry Pranksters (at the White House?) had spoofed us all into thinking Trump was keeping his violent Day One promises.

Where's the Victim?

 

You probably won't believe this but this guy heads one of America's 2 major political parties. pic.twitter.com/FtdRnkVrhm

— Ron Shillman (@shillman1) December 12, 2023

I'm feeling a nagging dissatisfaction with the conduct of the New York lawsuit against Trump, his older sons, and the family business over the flagrant fraudulence of their financial "disclosures", which report wildly exaggerated values for their assets as a way of getting banks and insurance companies to get them better rates than they could otherwise get.

It's not anything wrong with the case, or any likelihood that New York will lose the case, I'm feeling very cheerful about that, but the way Trump and his attorneys seem to be playing the publicity war: 

In defiant and rambling testimony on [November 7], Trump acknowledged that his asset valuations were sometimes inaccurate but said they were not relevant to banks and insurers.

Trump's lawyer Christopher Kise built on that argument on Thursday, saying banks that did business with the Trump Organization profited from the loans.

"There's no victim. There's no complainant. There's no injury. All of that is established now,” Kise said. (Reuters)

And all the New York lawyers can say is response is that they don't have to prove there was a victim. Or the statutes were the victims ("I would just basically point out," Judge Engoron said, "that the mere fact that the lenders were happy doesn't mean that the statute wasn't violated. It doesn't mean other statutes weren't violated.") "Help, I'm being violated!" cried § 175.10. Which is no doubt true from the legal standpoint, but it's just an awful look. No harm, no foul, right? If the banks are happy with it, where's the harm?

Can't we please come up with a better argument than that?

Literary Corner: Perfect

 

The Worthless Clause

by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States

I have a clause in there
that says, don't believe the statement,
go out and do your own work:
this statement is worthless.
It means nothing. Well,
they call it a "disclaimer"--
they call it "worthless clause" too,
because it makes the statement worthless.

I hate to be boring and tell you this.
When you have the worthless clause
on a piece of paper and the first--
literally the first page
you're reading about how
this is a worthless statement
from the standpoint of your using it
as a bank or whatever--
whoever may be using it, you tend
not to get overly excited about it.
I think it had very little impact,
if any impact on the banks.

Arranged from the text of Trump's sworn deposition in the case of People of New York State vs. Donald Trump et al., as quoted in Judge Arthur F. Engoron's response to motions on both sides for summary judgment, released, I guess, on Tuesday (granting it in part, as you probably know by now, to the people, and denying it to the Trump, who is now in the first phase of losing the right to do business in New York State, which will mean he and his children and his 500 LLCs and the Trump Organization also have to give up a lot of properties run from New York, including Mar-a-Lago, the Aberdeenshire golf club, and golf courses in Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and I don't know how many more, unless he manages to absorb them into a reconstituted Trump Organization in Delaware, which Attorney General James has been trying to stop him from doing), on Trump's poetic theory of the "worthless clause", actually a whole bunch of clauses, of boilerplate that the organization prefixes to its annual Statement of Financial Conditions, which is used by financial organizations to figure out how risky it is to work with them: