On April 14,  Mohsen Mahdawi arrived at a government immigration office in Vermont for a citizenship interview. After 10 years as a “legal” US resident with a “green card,” he wanted to officially become an “American.” Instead, he found himself handcuffed, hooded, and whisked away to a cage pending deportation. He was finally released on bail two weeks later.

On April 15, Kasper Eriksen arrived at a government immigration office in Tennessee. Eriksen, also a “green card” holder, with a family and pregnant wife in Mississippi, also thought he was attending a citizenship interview. He was also arrested and caged pending deportation. As of this writing, he has yet to receive bail.

On April 30, Ming Li Hui, better known to her friends and neighbors in Kennett, Missouri as “Carol,” found herself summarily ordered to report to an immigration office in St. Louis. Carol arrived in the US as a refugee from Hong Kong in 2004. Twenty years later, she’s gainfully employed, a convert to Catholicism, and has a family including three children. The US government locked her up pending deportation back to Communist China.

One of her local friends, Vanessa Cowart, interviewed by the New York Times, puts it bluntly: “I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here. But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves. This is Carol.”

Why are ordinary people, living ordinary lives, some even seeking to become American citizens, finding themselves in cages and facing deportation?

Let’s not kid ourselves: It was going to come to this eventually. Authoritarian police states never stop looking for victims and scapegoats. They eventually collapse, thankfully, but until they do it’s open season on enemies, real and imagined.

But why so soon? Because Donald Trump’s promise to deport millions of immigrants has, so far, proven itself an epic fail. At the moment, the US government is deporting people at half the pace of the Obama regime.

In late May, Axios reports, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem called the Trump regime’s top immigration thugs in for a dressing down. They’re unhappy with the slow rate of immigrant abductions and want it tripled to 3,000 per day.

And there’s your answer: It’s easier to reach an artificial “quota” by kidnapping immigrants who show up to appointments on demand than it is to track down a handful of real criminals in their lairs, or nab foreign-born workers quietly making their livings (and making our lives better) while avoiding contact with “law enforcement.”

In the opening salvos of his first administration’s nativist push, Donald Trump groused about immigrants from “sh*thole countries.”

Now he’s discovering that the only way to stop immigration to the US is to turn it into one of those sh*thole countries that no one wants to live in.

He’s doing his best to accomplish that, and even his supporters are starting to notice.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In early May, Reuters reports, the US government revoked “virtually all” of Harvard University’s federal research grants — nearly $3 billion worth — because they “no longer effectuate agency priorities.”

Now, president Donald Trump says (in a post to his “Truth Social” platform) he’s “considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land.”

Mainstream media coverage of the whole matter seems focused mainly on the reality TV style melodrama — Trump’s specialty — and on the question of whether he can legally take money appropriated by Congress for Party A to do Thing B and re-appropriate it for Party B to do Thing C.

The melodrama sees to itself, and the legal horse seemingly escaped the barn years ago when Trump unconstitutionally misappropriated Defense Department funds to build his silly “border wall” — after Congress refused him the money multiple times — and got away with it instead of facing impeachment and removal for his lawless mishandling of government funds.

What I’m not seeing much discussion of is whether it’s a good idea for the federal government to stop writing checks to a well-heeled private university (Harvard has more than $50 billion in the bank) for various things, and instead spend that money on teaching young Americans to weld, build houses, repair cars, etc.

At first blush, the concept does look like sound. America is full of college graduates working behind the counters of convenience stores, in the kitchens of fast food restaurants, wrangling carts at Walmart, etc., all while trying to pay off the crippling debt they incurred studying social work, creative writing, and so forth. Why not equip the NEXT generation with the skills they need to earn better livings, and hopefully make that training affordable?

Here’s why:

The government does not and cannot know how many welders, carpenters, and auto mechanics the economy “needs,” let alone how many it will “need” a year from now or in 2035 … just as it has no way of knowing whether Little Bobby should rack up tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt while hoping to become an elementary school math teacher or university physics researcher.

That’s what markets are for. Markets aren’t perfect, but they’re much better at figuring out what people need, and delivering it less expensively, than governments.

Ending all federal funding of “higher education” institutions would negatively impact my household’s finances, at least temporarily (a close family member works in university research), but it would be the right thing to do. It would result in better, cheaper, and more relevant education all around.

Let Harvard be Harvard, and let trade schools be trade schools. Give tax funding to neither.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Man carrying child’s body in Gaza. Fars Media Corporation.  Attribution 4.0 International license.

On May 20, Israeli forces bombed two homes in Gaza, where, Reuters reports, “children were among the 18 dead.” The attack was justified, the Israeli regime claims, because — who knows? — there might have been a Hamas member hiding in one of the closets or something. To criticize those killings, we’re told, is “anti-semitic” even though the dead were almost certainly all semites (Palestinian Arabs). And there are a LOT of such attacks.

On May 21, a gunman killed two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC. Cue outrage — THAT attack, the Israeli regime tells us, was both unjustified and “anti-semitic.”

It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the victims being actual, voluntary employees of the regime that’s conducting those daily attacks in Gaza, even though the perpetrator (allegedly one Elias Rodriguez of Chicago) was shouting “free free Palestine” as he was taken into custody outside a pro-Israel “Young Diplomats” event. He obviously just hates Jews, see?

And maybe he DOES just hate Jews. There’s certainly a lot of ethnic hatred out there, and it’s sick regardless of who’s infected with it or who it’s aimed at.

A lot of that ethnic hatred is aimed at Palestinian Arabs (who are, again, semites), by the Israeli regime,  used by that regime and its supporters to justify the murders of, at a minimum, tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians over the last year-and-a-half. Multiple Israeli officials have openly called for the “ethnic cleansing” of Gaza and even genocide of the Palestinian Arab population.

But we’re supposed to ignore all that — the pro-Israel media “charm offensive” is already in full swing. The victims (Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky), the New York Times laments, were young. They were in love. They were just minding their own business and looking forward to a trip to Israeli-occupied Jerusalem next week, where Lischinsky intended to propose.

Yes, it’s very sad. I mean that. When it comes to murder, my sympathies are always with the victims, not the perpetrators.

But  similarly sad things could be, and haven’t been, widely reported concerning the victims of the Israeli strike. Mainstream media haven’t mentioned the victims’ marriage or travel plans, their occupations, or even their names. They’re just not important, I guess.

As in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “all animals are equal — but some animals are more equal than others.”

What can we do about that? I’m not going to try to solve the conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians here. That’s a thorny matter with a long, ugly history.

But there’s one obvious first step, and that’s for people to stop murdering and excusing murder over it.

Unfortunately, both sides suffer from an over-abundance of people who aren’t willing to take that first step.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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