"We are all domestic terrorists"
Trump attacks unions, citizens are being implicated in Trump's crackdown on immigrants, and the Trump Administration is expanding its counterterrorism focus in broad and politically biased ways.
This article is part of a digest series delivered every Thursday, highlighting what I find to be the most interesting stories covering politics, working class struggles, and international current events of the week, along with my own brief commentary.
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After a bit of a hiatus, I am back to publishing on a more frequent basis. This week’s digest focuses on Trump’s expanding crackdown against migrants and citizens alike.
The clip embedded above comes from the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference during a segment in which the speakers ironically embraced the label of “domestic terrorist” as a tongue-in-cheek jab against what they saw as the politically charged application of the term by Democrats. As you will read below, Trump’s counterterrorism efforts have been geared towards exactly those ends: the targeting of political enemies.
From Praxis
Trump retaliates against federal worker unions by destroying collective bargaining rights
Late Thursday night, Trump signed an executive order ending union bargaining for huge swaths of the federal workforce. The Administration is stretching the jurisdiction of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 (CRSA), which typically only applies to some national security-related agencies, in order to justify the move.
Trump wants to send American citizens to a concentration camp in El Salvador
As previously reported, under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (a provision intended for wartime), the Trump Administration has been deporting illegal migrants without due process to a punitive concentration camp in El Salvador known for human rights abuses. Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador…
From Around the Web
🕵🏻♂️ The government is expanding its scope and focus on domestic terrorism to target political enemies
The Trump Administration is seeking to expand the net it casts when it comes to identifying and suppressing terrorism. Officially, “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” have become the primary subject of this new Trump Administration’s counterterrorism efforts, a broad label which could include virtually anybody, since the label is not exclusive to any particular or coherent political ideology. Perhaps in a less official but still substantive capacity, there has been increased scrutiny on those sympathetic to Palestine, as well as those sympathetic to migrants implicated in Trump’s draconian abduction policies, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
🇺🇸 American citizens are being implicated, profiled, and detained by ICE
‘Treated like a criminal': US citizen says he was detained returning from Canada
(via NBC Boston)
U.S.-born man held for ICE under Florida’s new anti-immigration law
(via Florida Phoenix)
The Trump Administration is continuing to detain American citizens and permanent residents. In the first story linked above, a Lebanese man was returning by car from a vacation in Canada when he was detained and had his phone searched. In the second story, a U.S.-born hispanic man was pulled over for going 78 miles per hour in a 65 zone and was subsequently asked to remain in detention by ICE, even though his birth certificate was presented in court.
At this point, when traveling abroad from the U.S., it would be prescient to bring a burner phone that you don’t mind being confiscated and searched by Customs and Border Protection.