Tag: ice

Three lawsuits filed against USPS over ICE-trucks

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Three separate lawsuits were filed today against the U.S. Postal Service over the quasi-independent agency’s billion-dollar move to replace its aging delivery fleet with a majority of gasoline-powered vehicles (ICE = Infernal Combustion Engines).

The lawsuits say USPS failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act, including by using inaccurate or outdated information about the emissions of gas-powered trucks and the cost of electric vehicles.

The Natural Resources Defense Council and the United Auto Workers filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Earthjustice, CleanAirNow, the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity filed their lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) led 14 other states and the District of Columbia in filing a separate lawsuit in the Northern District of California.

Bonta and James were joined by the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, as well as the city of New York and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has said scaling up the agency’s purchase of electric vehicles would be too expensive in both the short and long term.

DeJoy is a liar. I don’t know or care which suits he’s sharing the money with. After he loses the lawsuit he should be forced to get an honest job. For once.

ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 who got student visas

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” It has been 10 months since unsealed federal court documents revealed that U.S. immigration officials created a fake university to lure foreign-born college students who were trying to stay in the country on student visas that might not have been legal.

The University of Farmington, a fictitious school that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement marketed as a hub for STEM students who wanted to enroll and not “interrupt their careers,” had a fake name, a fake website and a fake motto on its fake seal. “Scientia et Labor,” the seal said, which means “Knowledge and Work.”

Then, ICE rolled out deportation for the students, busted the “recruiters” they hired for the fictitious university – for fraud.

Truly a unique chapter added to the Book of Creepy US Government Hustles.

Trump’s raid to “deport millions” turned up 18 family members

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Remember our fake president’s imminent deportation of millions?

❝ The real list had about 2,100 families on it.


L.A.Times

❝ The final tally from the operation, according to federal officials: 18 family members were arrested, not enough to fill a school bus. Immigration officials arrested another 17 undocumented immigrants they encountered in their searches, what are known as collateral arrests.

❝ Acting ICE Director Matthew T. Albence called the criminal operation successful and said the family operation, Operation Border Resolve, will continue, although the number of arrests were lower than in the past…Officials would not say where the arrests were made during the recent operation or when the operation took place, and immigration arrests are not public record.

Same old, same old. Trump’s ignorance is matched by his impulse to lie and inflate anything he’s blathering about to galactic size. Trump voters are getting what they deserve. A global laughingstock.

America’s new concentration camps

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Paul J. Richards/AFP

❝ [In June], New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to US border detention facilities as “concentration camps,” spurring a backlash in which critics accused her of demeaning the memory of those who died in the Holocaust. Debates raged over a label for what is happening along the southern border and grew louder as the week rolled on. But even this back-and-forth over naming the camps has been a recurrent feature in the mass detention of civilians ever since its inception, a history that long predates the Holocaust.

❝ At the heart of such policy is a question: What does a country owe desperate people whom it does not consider to be its citizens?…From the Fourth Geneva Convention protecting civilians in 1949 to the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, the international community established humanitarian obligations toward the most vulnerable that apply, at least in theory, to all nations…

In addition to the total of detainees held by Border Patrol, an even higher number is detained at centers around the country by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency: on a typical day at the beginning of this month, ICE was detaining more than 52,500 migrants. The family separation policy outraged the public in the 2018, but despite legal challenges, it never fully ended. Less publicized have been the deaths of twenty-four adults in ICE custody since the beginning of the Trump administration; in addition, six children between the ages of two and sixteen have died in federal custody over the last several months. It’s not clear whether there have been other deaths that have gone unreported.

RTFA. Please. It is a thorough and current essay on what has been done in our name, time and again.

Our state capital, Santa Fe, was the site of one of those so-called internment camps during WW2. It’s a lovely neighborhood, nowadays, with few remembering the political aberration of 80 years ago. What our politicians are doing along the southern border will not be easy for anyone with a conscience to forget.

Huge number of migrant kids held in Trump Jails

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Mike Blake/Reuters

❝ Even though hundreds of children separated from their families after crossing the border have been released under court order, the overall number of detained migrant children has exploded to the highest ever recorded — a significant counternarrative to the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the number of undocumented families coming to the United States.

Population levels at federally contracted shelters for migrant children have quietly shot up more than fivefold since last summer, according to data obtained by The New York Times, reaching a total of 12,800 this month. There were 2,400 such children in custody in May 2017.

❝ The huge increases, which have placed the federal shelter system near capacity, are due not to an influx of children entering the country, but a reduction in the number being released to live with families and other sponsors…

Or – perish the thought – returned to their own families.

In the Melting Arctic, an Account from a Stranded Ship

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Aground on a shoal — DONGLAI GONG

❝ On the second day of a U.S. National Science Foundation-sponsored expedition to the Arctic, we were sitting in the presentation room of the 364-foot Russian cruise ship, Akademik Ioffe, about 45 miles north of the Inuit village of Kugaaruk…

As the briefing transitioned into ways of avoiding a dangerous polar bear encounter, the Akademik Ioffe suddenly grounded to a violent halt. I knew that we were in a very remote area of the Gulf of Boothia in Canada’s central Arctic, and I knew the danger we were in if the hull of the ship had been breached in a serious way.

❝ Rumors – spread quickly, as the hours on the shoal passed. The captain wasn’t communicating with us directly. What little information was offered came from Dave Sinclair, expedition leader, who did wonders calming everyone’s nerves even though he had almost no idea what was going to happen.

RTFA. A good read. Firsthand experience sometimes rocks.

Plus I had to do a quick search through the article for an old bud of mine often on journeys to the poles. All clear.