3 d. ago Why is Trump so fixated on toys for little girls? | Moira Donegan

Asked about his tariffs’ impact, the president has repeatedly pointed to dolls – because they’re seen as feminine, childlike and frivolousDonald Trump has found a new target for his trademark mockery and dismissal: little girls.In comments at a 30 April cabinet meeting, the president seemed to dismiss the economic impact of his chaotic tariff regime on American consumers by citing girls as the primary complainants. “Somebody said, oh, the shelves are going to be open,” Trump said. “Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Politics

5 d. ago Top Trump GOP allies speak out against plan to send citizens to overseas prisons: ‘I doubt that would hold up’

Multiple Trump allies in the Senate expressed doubt over the constitutionality of Trump sending US citizens to foreign prisons

Events

1 week ago If leaders stay silent, the US won’t survive Trump’s next 100 days | Robert Reich

We are tottering on the edge of dictatorship. Powerful voices across institutions, from politics to academia and religion, must speak outWe have witnessed the first 100 days of the odious Trump regime.The US constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray.If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ would lose its meaning.Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Guardian US colu...

Politics

1 week ago We are witnessing slow constitutional collapse in the US | Moira Donegan

The vestiges of the US’s democracy are crumpling to the ground. We don’t yet know what will be erected in its placeIt’s possible that later, when we know more about how the Trump regime reshapes the US and about how it ultimately comes to an end, we will look back at this moment in 2025 and conclude that we were already living under an autocracy. Checks on executive power seem to have all but vanished; the Trump administration is not acting like either the courts, the judiciary or the people have any prerogatives that they must respect.Science is suffering: massive cuts to federal funding of research into medicine, climate change or anything that might include a word on a long list of banned ones – like “transition” – has decimated research, made the US a global laughingstock, and set the cause of human thriving back by years. The economy is in chaos, and the bribery is all but out in the open; it no longer seems to occur to many Americans that their politicians should not be on the...

Politics

1 week ago Most Americans believe Trump’s threats over Canada, deporting citizens and a third term but don’t approve, poll finds

Even many Republicans oppose some of the president’s signature policies

Politics

1 week ago Women deported with US citizen kids denied chance to transfer custody, says lawyer

Mothers and kids held in ‘complete isolation’ and unable to coordinate childcare before being put on flight to HondurasTwo women who were deported to Honduras alongside their US citizen children were held in “complete isolation” and denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on a flight, according to one of the lawyers representing them.The mothers were unable to contact attorneys or loved ones, and were not allowed the option to transfer the custody of their citizen children to another parent or caregiver, said Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project who is representing one of the families and coordinating with the team representing the other family. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Mothers deported by Trump ‘denied’ chance to transfer custody of children, lawyer says

Two women and their children, who are US citizens, held in ‘complete isolation’ before being put on flight to HondurasTwo women who were deported to Honduras alongside their US citizen children were held in “complete isolation” and denied any opportunity to coordinate the care and custody of their children before being put on a flight, according to one of the lawyers representing them.The mothers were unable to contact attorneys or loved ones, and were not allowed the option to transfer the custody of their citizen children to another parent or caregiver, said Gracie Willis, an attorney with the National Immigration Project who is representing one of the families and coordinating with the team representing the other family. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Trump admits it’s possible US citizens could be deported by mistake: ‘Nothing will ever be perfect in this world’

The administration has already come under fire for lack of due process when deporting immigrants

Politics

1 week ago The FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan is a bid to silence dissent | Moira Donegan

The Trump administration is making an example of the Milwaukee judge to intimidate critics and opponentsOn Friday, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its assault on the courts when the FBI arrested Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge handling misdemeanors in Milwaukee – allegedly for helping an undocumented man avoid abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside her courtroom. The arrest, a highly publicized and dramatic move from the Trump administration, seemed designed to elicit fear among judges, government bureaucrats and ordinary Americans that any effort to slow, impede or merely not facilitate the administration’s mass kidnapping and deportation efforts will lead to swift, forceful and disproportionate punishment by Donald Trump allies. Her arrest may be the opening salvo of a broader Trump assault on judges.Even if you believe the FBI’s allegations, their account of Dugan’s alleged misconduct is trivial and flimsy, wholly undeserv...

Events

1 week ago Immigrant mothers are to blame for their US citizen children being deported, says Trump’s border czar: ‘Parenting 101’

At least three US citizen children were deported with their mothers, who did not have legal status

Events

2 w. ago Marco Rubio denies Trump is deporting citizen kids. They’re deporting mothers instead

Rubio slams media for making it ‘sound like ICE agents kicked down door and grabbed two-year-old and threw him on an airplane’

Politics

2 w. ago Trump hits thousands with surprise deportation notice email – including US citizens

The Trump administration is quietly revoking a temporary legal status that applies to around 900,000 people

Politics

3 w. ago Senior Republican flounders when asked about Trump plan to deport US citizens to foreign jails

House majority whip Tom Emmers quickly changes the subject three times after being asked about controversial idea

Politics

3 w. ago Kilmar Ábrego García ‘traumatized’ by threats in prison, Maryland senator says

Chris Van Hollen describes meeting with constituent held in Salvadoran prison against supreme court orderUS politics live – latest updatesWrongly deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Ábrego García has been held incommunicado and faced threats in prison that left him “traumatized”, a Democratic senator said Friday after returning from meeting him in El Salvador.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the state Ábrego García had been living in with his US citizen wife and son until he was deported last month in what the Trump administration conceded was an “administrative error”, traveled to the central American country this week to see his constituent. After initially rejecting his request to meet Ábrego García and preventing him from traveling to the prison where he was being held, president Nayib Bukele’s government on Thursday facilitated a meeting at Van Hollen’s hotel. Continue reading...

Events

3 w. ago Woman born in the US gets email from DHS telling her it’s time to leave the country

Connecticut doctor Lisa Anderson receives disturbing message from Department of Homeland Security ordering her to self-deport, despite being an American citizen born in Pennsylvania

Politics

3 w. ago Trump live updates: President exploring legality of deporting U.S. citizens to Central American prisons

White House says, ‘It’s a legal question that the president is looking into’

Politics

3 w. ago The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism | Moira Donegan

The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish sillinessThere are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scie...

Politics

3 w. ago Attorney general dodges question on Trump proposal to jail US citizens in El Salvador

Trump proposed that ‘homegrown criminals’ should be deported, an idea that experts say is clearly illegalThe US attorney general declined on Tuesday to say whether Donald Trump’s suggestion of removing US citizens to El Salvador was legal, in alarming remarks about what experts think is an obviously illegal idea.Trump proposed the idea on Monday in the Oval Office during a visit with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who has been accepting people deported from the US and imprisoning them in a gigantic facility notorious for human rights abuses. Continue reading...

Politics

4 w. ago Trump’s already skirting due process. Now he’s musing about deporting citizens | Moira Donegan

Amid a series of sadistic expulsions, the White House says Trump has reflected kicking Americans out of the countryThey’re rounding people up, and you could be next. The Trump administration has largely dispensed with due process rights in deporting immigrants, who are now being targeted for their protected speech, having their visas or green cards summarily cancelled without process and sometimes without notice, and getting kidnapped off the streets and hustled into vans so that they can be shipped to “detention centers” too far away for their loved ones, or their lawyers, to visit them.Some immigrants are being targeted for disappearance because they oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, an opinion that it is now physically dangerous, instead of merely unpopular, to hold. But others the government seems to be seizing almost at random. More than 200 Venezuelan nationals have been seized and deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador, rendered outside of US jurisdiction in...

Politics