Investigative reporting about thousands of dead Russian soilders fighting in Ukraine

Russia’s military made its largest territorial gains in more than two years in October, as it pressed farther into Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region — but at a heavy cost. Echo report published in The New York Times by Anatoly Kurmanaev. 

Part of a military tag found with the body of a Russian soldier near Koroviy Yar, Ukraine, last year.Credit...Nicole Tung for The New York Times.

British and Ukrainian military officials, as well as BBC researchers, claim that Russia suffered its highest rate of dead and injured soldiers during that month. The arrival of thousands of North Korean troops in Russia is also raising questions about whether the Kremlin has enough soldiers to make up for its losses.

What do we really know about Russia’s casualties and its ability to replace them?

The losses that matter:  It is difficult to obtain concrete information about Russian casualties, which comprise deaths and injuries. Moscow has an incentive to minimize its losses and rarely discloses any information; Ukraine and its allies have an incentive to overstate them.

Even if they are accurate, the Western casualty estimates usually lump together deaths with all injuries. Military experts say that category is too broad to fully explain the state of the war. Lightly wounded soldiers can quickly recover, for example.

What determines a military’s true ability to fight are its irreplaceable, irrecoverable or permanent losses — soldiers who are dead or so seriously injured that they will never see battle again.

Russia and Ukraine treat such mortality and morbidity statistics as state secrets.

Ukraine guards its casualty figures especially closely, restricting journalists’ ability to report on the topic, withholding information from allies and halting the publication of demographic data.

Some independent Russian journalists and researchers have found innovative ways to count Russia’s dead and wounded, digging up information from diverse sources like obituaries, cemeteries, disability payments and notary databases.

Their calculations begin to show a more accurate toll of the war, shedding light on Russia’s ability to continue the fight. They also suggest that Russia has lost more soldiers in this war than any industrialized nation has in a conflict since World War II.

Counting obituaries and burials:  Journalists from the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona and the BBC Russian Service have been counting Russian soldiers who have died in Ukraine since the early months of the invasion. Their methods are based on collecting and cross-checking public information such as obituaries and cemetery burials.

A cemetery for fallen Russian soldiers in Ulan-Ude, Russia, last year.Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times

This work has produced the most comprehensive database of confirmed Russian combat deaths: 78,000 soldiers by November, not including the Ukrainian separatists and foreigners fighting for Russia. (A similar, but less transparent, account of Ukraine’s losses found 65,000 dead soldiers by mid-November.)

Mediazona’s tally is incomplete: Some soldiers leave no trace when they die. The journalists estimate that they have recorded about half of all Russian military deaths.

Counting inheritances:  Another independent Russian news outlet, Meduza, collaborated with Mediazona and the BBC for a statistical analysis of war casualties. Their main tool is Russia’s public notary database, which contains all inheritance cases opened by the relatives of killed soldiers. 

To collect the data, Meduza and Mediazona journalists must outsmart government programmers who try to block them from locating and downloading inheritance entries.

Once the data is collected, the journalists use statistical tools developed during the pandemic to calculate how many military-age Russian men became subjects of inheritance proceedings since the invasion. This analysis of excess mortality led the journalists to estimate Russia’s total military deaths at nearly 150,000 by the end of October. 😔😯😭

Counting the wounded

After estimating the number of dead Russian soldiers, journalists from the BBC, Mediazona and Meduza collaborated on the next task: quantifying Russia’s severe battlefield injuries.

They consulted military experts, analyzed leaked personnel lists and looked at statistics on veterans’ compensation payments. They concluded that for every dead Russian soldier, about two more were seriously injured.

That ratio is a rough approximation, they cautioned. It will fluctuate throughout the same war, as weapons, medical equipment, weather and tactics change.

Adding up the estimated number of dead and the seriously injured, Meduza estimated that Russia’s military had suffered a total of 405,000 irreplaceable losses by late October. Using a similar method, Olga Ivshina of the BBC estimated 484,000 irreplaceable Russian losses in the same period.

Assessing military intelligence:  The military intelligence agencies of Ukraine and many NATO nations produce their own estimates of Russian casualties. They all claim that Russia has lost 600,000 to 700,000 in dead and wounded soldiers as of October.

These agencies do not disclose their methods. The numbers they make public usually represent the top range of their internal estimates and include light injuries, according to officials and military analysts familiar with the calculations.

That ratio is a rough approximation, they cautioned. It will fluctuate throughout the same war, as weapons, medical equipment, weather and tactics change.

Adding up the estimated number of dead and the seriously injured, Meduza estimated that Russia’s military had suffered a total of 405,000 irreplaceable losses by late October. Using a similar method, Olga Ivshina of the BBC estimated 484,000 irreplaceable Russian losses in the same period.

Assessing military intelligence:  The military intelligence agencies of Ukraine and many NATO nations produce their own estimates of Russian casualties. They all claim that Russia has lost 600,000 to 700,000 in dead and wounded soldiers as of October.

These agencies do not disclose their methods. The numbers they make public usually represent the top range of their internal estimates and include light injuries, according to officials and military analysts familiar with the calculations.

Military analysts and statisticians said the lack of transparency, and the catchall nature of Western estimates of Russian casualties, made them, at best, an unreliable snapshot of the war.

What it all means:  To be sure, losses are just one side of the coin. In a war of attrition as in Ukraine, the supply of new troops is another crucial variable.

In June, Russia’s Defense Ministry counted 33 million men eligible for military service, according to a government database obtained by Meduza. This compares with six million potential soldiers who lived in Ukraine before Russia’s invasion in 2022. Just over half of those have since been registered in the country’s military service database.

About 900 men joined the Russian forces every day in the first half of this year, according to an analysis of Russian budget data by Janis Kluge, a Russia expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, a research organization.

They are drawn by ever-rising sign-up bonuses, (HELLO❓ In useless devalued Rubles❓ ₽ Valued at about $0.01 per 💲US; IOW < one cent) Oh well❗) salaries and compensation payments that will change the financial fortunes of a recruit’s family, regardless of whether he lives or dies. 

In fact, the Kremlin has also looked beyond its borders for new fighters, attracting volunteers from dozens of developing nations and troops from its ally North Korea.

This rate of recruitment has allowed the Russian military not only to replenish losses, but also to create new units. 

This month (November 2024), the Pentagon said Kremlin had amassed a combined force of 50,000 Russian and North Korean troops to expel Ukrainian forces from the Kursk region of Russia.

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine, and Julian E. Barnes and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Oleg Matsnev contributed research from Berlin.

Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Russia and its transformation following the invasion of Ukraine. 

Russia going bankrupt while Ruble ₽ tanks, colossal losses in Ukraine, their economy is in big trouble

Russia's economic path looks unsustainable 

Echo report published in Business Insider by Theron Mohamed

Putin tells Russians there's no reason to panic 😳😮💥as the ruble sinks, but analysts say its economy is in trouble ❓❗😕

• Russian President Vladimir Putin said the ruble's plunge to two-year lows was no cause for panic.
  
• The Russian currency ₽, hit its lowest level against the dollar since March 2022, this week. (0.094 to US💲 IOW< $0.01)
• Analysts say Russia is under pressure from inflation, military spending, and falling oil prices.

Russians shouldn't stress about the ruble tumbling to two-year lows, Vladimir Putin said Thursday. But, (guess what❓)analysts told Business Insider there is plenty of cause for concern.

Putin attributed the ruble's fluctuations "not only to inflation but also to budget payments and oil prices," along with many seasonal factors.

The Russian currency traded at its weakest level since March 2022, shortly after the Ukraine invasion began. In fact, the ₽ currency has depreciated by 36%, in under four months. A greenback was worth about 108 rubles on Friday (November 22, 2024).

Russia's central bank stepped in to shore up the floundering ruble on Wednesday. It suspended purchases of foreign currency on the domestic market for the rest of this year to reduce volatility.
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The Russian leader told reporters that the "situation is under control" and that "there are absolutely no grounds for panic," according to a Google translation of a report from the RIA Novosti news agency.

A Wednesday headline in the state newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta read, "Panic attack for Russia's currency market." The Kommersant newspaper warned readers to "buckle up your rubles."

The ruble's latest plunge follows the US sanctioning Gazprombank, one of Russia's largest lenders. The restrictions limit the bank's ability to access global financial markets and handle energy payments.

A weakening ruble benefits Russian exporters by making their goods more competitive in global markets. But it threatens to accelerate inflation by raising the cost of imports, leaving sellers little choice but to increase their prices. Stubborn inflation has already spurred Russia's central bank to raise the main interest rate to 21%, the highest level since 2003.

The Russian economy has suffered from Western sanctions imposed since Putin's invasion of Ukraine, with energy revenue tanking by almost a quarter last year. Other countries, such as India, have snapped up Russian oil instead, tempering the impact of price caps and other penalties.

Mounting pressure on Russia: Russia also fired a hypersonic missile into Ukraine last week after its opponent launched missiles at targets inside Russia for the first time. The escalation has raised concerns of further economic disruption.

Robin Brooks, a senior fellow focused on the global economy and development at the Brookings Institution, posted on X, that the ruble's collapse shows how vulnerable Russia is to sanctions.

He also said the European Union's reluctance to impose certain penalties might have staved off economic disaster in Russia.

George Pavel at the trading platform Naga.com told BI the ruble's dive had been driven by rising inflation and a widening budget deficit fueled by heavy military spending.

"Russia's economic path looks unsustainable barring major changes," he said, ticking off concerns such as slowing growth, stubborn inflation, a tight labor market, and the massive cost of the Ukraine war.

Brent crude is trading at just over $70 a barrel, and sliding oil prices pose an existential threat to Russia, said Kathleen Brooks, research director at XTB.

"Russian income is shrinking at the same time as defense spending is surging as the war with Ukraine enters a more intense phase," Brooks said. "While President Trump may go some way to ending the Russia-Ukraine war, his policy on energy and plans to get the US pumping even more oil could weigh on the oil price further in 2025, which is bad news for Russia."

Mexico Strong: Thank you President Sheinbaumgive- Immigrants are welcome here!

"Trump, and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaumgive differing reviews of - their opinion about a  'wonderful conversation'  😕😮on border, illegal immigration," Politico

Letter from President Sheinbaurmgive link to source here.

“Dear President-elect Donald Trump (Translation in English),

I am writing to you regarding your statement on Monday, November 25, concerning migration, fentanyl trafficking, and tariffs. 

You may not be aware that Mexico has developed a comprehensive policy to assist migrants from different parts of the world who cross our territory en route to the southern border of the United States. As a result, and according to data from your country’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP), encounters at the Mexico–United States border have decreased by 75% between December 2023 and November 2024. Moreover, half of those who arrive do so through a legally scheduled appointment under the United States’ CBP One program. For these reasons, migrant caravans no longer arrive at the border. Even so, it is clear that we must work together to create a new labor mobility model that is necessary for your country, as well as address the root causes that compel families to leave their homes out of necessity. If even a small percentage of what the United States allocates to war were instead dedicated to building peace and fostering development, it would address the underlying causes of human mobility. On another note, and for humanitarian reasons, Mexico has consistently expressed its willingness to help prevent the fentanyl epidemic in the United States from continuing. This is, after all, a public health and consumption problem within your society. So far this year, Mexican armed forces and prosecutors have seized tons of various types of drugs, 10,340 firearms, and have detained 15,640 individuals for violence related to drug trafficking. Furthermore, the Mexican Congress is in the process of approving a constitutional reform to classify the production, distribution, and commercialization of fentanyl and other synthetic drugs as a serious crime without bail. However, it is publicly known that the chemical precursors used to produce this and other synthetic drugs are illegally entering Canada, the United States, and Mexico from Asian countries. This underscores the urgent need for international collaboration. You must also be aware of the illegal trafficking of firearms into my country from the United States. Seventy percent of the illegal weapons seized from criminals in Mexico come from your country. We do not produce these weapons, nor do we consume synthetic drugs. Tragically, it is in our country that lives are lost to the violence resulting from meeting the drug demand in yours. President Trump, migration and drug consumption in the United States cannot be addressed through threats or tariffs. What is needed is cooperation and mutual understanding to tackle these significant challenges. For every tariff, there will be a response in kind, until we put at risk our shared enterprises. Yes, shared. For instance, among Mexico’s main exporters to the United States are General Motors, Stellantis, and Ford Motor Company, which arrived in Mexico 80 years ago. Why impose a tariff that would jeopardize them❓ Such a measure would be unacceptable and would lead to inflation and job losses in both the United States and Mexico. I am convinced that North America’s economic strength lies in maintaining our trade partnership. This allows us to remain competitive against other economic blocs. For this reason, I believe that dialogue is the best path to understanding, peace, and prosperity for our nations. I hope our teams can meet soon to continue building joint solutions.”

Letter to Donald Trump from the President of Mexico
Mexico Strong

Trump administration unable to create trust in the administration's ability to care for all Americans

Echo opinion letter published in the CapTimes of Madison Wisconsin

Get Ready for a Catastrophic Four Years for Public Health

"The concern is not just about what the Trump 2.0 Administration will do, but also about what it will say," TIME.

Dear Editor: The nomination of (the incompetent❗) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of Health and Human Services is a potential catastrophe for health policy in the U.S.

A person who continues to believe that vaccines cause autism — in the face of scientific consensus that they do not — and that "there are no safe and effective vaccines," represents a danger to all of us.

Literally, children and others will die, like the excess deaths that occurred in "red" states where vaccination and sound public health protective behaviors were rejected during the pandemic. And he’s a worldwide danger. Read about the Samoans who died unnecessarily because of anti-vaccine policy Kennedy espoused. Pathogens don't respect international boundaries.

The author in this conservative publication notes, "(T)he Senate has a job to do. ... The question before the Senate is whether he should run the Department of Health and Human Services, and the answer — even after accounting for some due deference to the president’s preferences — is that he very obviously should not." This view spans political perspectives.

I'd urge any and all who care about public health in our country to call or write your senator now and tell them the danger this particular nomination has, and to reject it. Especially senators who are likely to vote to support nominees, which I’d estimate to be about 50% of Wisconsin’s senators.

From: Gordon Herz  in Madison, Wisconsin

RFKjr! OMG "why would a former herion addict be put in position of power over Heatlh and Human services" ?

Echo opinion What's Next for Public Health, by Dr. Ashish K. Jha* 

The hurricane of nominations by President-elect Donald Trump has the country reeling and trying to understand just how 🌪️ big a storm is coming and what it will bring.  🌪️🌀💥

There are big winds  blowing around the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of health and human services, with related health care appointments feeding the storm. At this time of uncertainty for public health, it’s important to understand what these nominations mean for the health of the American people.

There are challenges to be sure. More people have health insurance, but health care costs are still too high. COVID-19 has left empty seats at too many tables this Thanksgiving. But there’s been much progress in public health, and the data prove it. Fewer people are dying from heart disease. Cancer deaths are down. Even our latest public health scourges — opioids and respiratory disease like COVID — are on track to cause fewer deaths. In the past 50 years alone, life expectancy in the United States has increased by nearly a decade.

Understanding what is — and has been — driving progress also brings an understanding of what’s at risk in these nominations and what they will mean to health care and the health of the American people. Over generations, progress has been driven by data and science, rigorously collected, analyzed, and translated into action and policy. It is a dynamic process, with our understanding of what works and what doesn’t continually improving over time and experience. Scientific exploration is constantly expanding, fueled by new technologies and a continuous supply of new insights and information.

The Department of Health and Human Services, with a budget of nearly $2 trillion, has been responsible for much of this progress in health. It includes the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. 

For decades of Republican and Democratic administrations, leaders, informed by experts and evidence, have created the rules governing hospitals, doctors, and others providing health care, as well as evaluating medical devices, vaccines, and the regulation of food and medicine to keep Americans safe.

Although there is a need and room for improvement and reform across HHS. But the incoming administration is signaling more: a disturbing change of direction, away from science and data, beyond reform and improvement, to instead take a wrecking ball to the whole place. Its justification is rooted in bumper sticker slogans, pseudoscience, and personal grievances.

Some of those nominated to lead agencies responsible for protecting and improving the health of Americans have long records of pushing bad information — unsupported (and often refuted) by facts, data, or evidence. Consider that Kennedy has argued for an approach to health and medicine antithetical to how we have made progress. 

He espouses ideas that have been widely debunked with data, such as the notion that vaccines cause autism (they don’t) and that HIV does not cause AIDS (it does). He says that on his first day in office, he’ll stop funding research into new medicines and infectious diseases for eight years.

This would stop and reverse the engine of science, data, and discovery that has driven progress improving the health of the American people. There is no apparent plan for a better approach.

Hoping for a cure for a rare cancer that has hospitalized your child? The US government won’t help you find it.

Concerned your elderly parents will skip their flu shots or COVID boosters as vaccines are discouraged❓ Some of the folks being discussed to lead our key public health agencies won’t recognize the link between missed vaccines and deadly illness — though that connection is clear. 

Consider the recent experience in Samoa, where a Kennedy campaign to end childhood vaccinations led to a measles outbreak and 83 deaths, mostly of unvaccinated children.

And Kennedy has promised to hollow out large parts of the FDA. How do we then bring data and science to approve new treatments and improve America’s health? Imagine you depend on insulin every day. Will it be safe? Can we be sure essential food and medicines are safe?

I get it. The pandemic shook people’s trust in key institutions — like the FDA, the CDC, and HHS — and for good reasons. But our work should be to reform these institutions, not erase them, leaving nothing in their place to protect and advance our health.

The bumper sticker slogans are appealing. No one is arguing against protecting Americans from dangerous chemicals or poisons. 

We are all committed to helping Americans eat healthy and stay healthy. But we’ve got to be honest about how we’ve done that and how we can continue to make progress.

Here’s to a confirmation process through the US Senate that provides the critical opportunity for questions to be honestly asked and answered, not just for the senators but also for the millions of Americans they represent. It’s our health that’s on the line.

*Dr. Ashish K. Jha is dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a contributing Boston Globe Opinion writer.

Comment on this opinion:  I consider such (incompetent) nominations to be criminal acts aimed at the health of Americans. 

Musk and Putin are likely telling Trump to nominate people who will weaken and terrify us. I consider Trump to be a criminal who should never have been allowed to run. The danger posed by a man like Kennedy pushes us into an America we have never experienced before--not even in Trump 

Biden should take whatever action he can right now--but failure to get Trump where he belongs in jail long before this has led us to this nightmare.

Incompetence in charge of our nation's health❓😠 "I can't understand why a former herion addict woul be put in position of power like this one will."

Donald Trump nominates an incompetent cabinet without reqirement for background check? But many nominees are unqualified.

Echo editorial published in the Boston Globe:

RFK Jr.? Seriously?
Some of Donald Trump’s nominees are real (loooosssy❗) doozies. The Senate must publicly vet them via thorough background checks, committee hearings, and floor votes.

Senate Republicans must be thanking their lucky stars that former representative Matt Gaetz withdrew last week as President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to be attorney general. 

In doing so, Gaetz rescued the Republicans, who will take control of the Senate early in January, from having to oppose his nomination and thereby incur Trump’s assured wrath.

That rejecting Gaetz might have seemed a profile in courage says much about the state of Republican politics today: He was among the least qualified nominees to run the Justice Department in memory and had been one of the most scandal-scarred and disliked men in Congress before he resigned earlier this month. One of his staunchest defenders was former representative George Santos, who was expelled from the House last year as an ethical embarrassment.

Now comes the truly hard part. More than two dozen Trump Cabinet secretaries and other top administration officials will require Senate confirmation early next year, and some of them are (looooossy❗) oozies. For the integrity of their own institution and the good of the nation, the Senate must not simply rubber stamp them all, as Trump and his most vocal supports will demand.

This process must begin by not acceding to Trump’s suggestion that he should be allowed to choose his Cabinet through so-called recess appointments, which would circumvent the gauntlet of Senate approval. The Senate must instead move with dispatch to publicly vet all of Trump’s nominees via thorough background checks, committee hearings, and floor votes.

Though he would be the last to admit it, Trump himself would benefit if his most dubious nominees were forced to answer hard questions about possible ethical issues and policy positions. They should show competence beyond the ability to please a Fox News audience. If nothing else, the process might save him from his own worst impulses.

So where to begin? Start with former representative Tulsi Gabbard, a onetime Democrat turned Bernie Sanders independent turned MAGA enthusiast, who is Trump’s choice to be director of national intelligence. The job entails overseeing the 18 agencies that collect and analyze information from human spies, satellites, and other foreign and domestic surveillance sources. The DNI is the chief intelligence adviser to the president and his national security leadership, the keeper of the nation’s most classified secrets.

Gabbard is justifiably criticized for her lack of experience (and incompetence❗)  in intelligence policy, beyond her service in the Army National Guard. 

But, far more troubling is her bizarre coziness with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard blamed the United States for provoking the aggression, an absurd apology for Putin’s unsubtle expansionist ambitions. And during the Syrian civil war, she accused the United States of supporting terrorists there, even as Assad — an avowed ally of not just Russia but also Iran — was massacring his own citizens. It should come as no surprise that Rossiya-1, a Russian state television channel, called her a Russian “comrade.”

Next up is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense. Though he has little experience managing a large organization, he did serve with the Army National Guard,  in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of greater concern: He is accused by an unnamed woman of rape during a Republican event in 2017; he asserts he had consensual sex with her. Democrats can be counted on to question Hegseth about this accusation.

But,  Republicans must also look hard at Hegseth’s policy statements, including his vigorous defense of troops accused or convicted of war crimes; his opposition to women serving in combat, though they have been for years; and his being a hyper-partisan Trump loyalist who seems eager to politicize the armed services. The latter would be a dire subversion of t  US military’s long tradition of nonpartisanship.

And then there is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s  (incompetent) pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services. The sprawling agency is nearly as large as the Pentagon and oversees the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Institutes of Health, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

For all his support for quack theories, Kennedy has called for improving the nation’s diet. But his obsessive and scientifically refuted skepticism about vaccines is deeply alarming, given the clear benefits of inoculations against not just COVID-19, measles, and the flu, but also once-deadly diseases that have been nearly eradicated, like polio. (HELLO❓ But, wait, wait❗ What about the hypocritical picture taken with RFKjr eating a MacDonald's hamburger with his new master the 😡cult leader DJT❓)

The department not only delivers crucial health care funding to individuals and institutions, it also helps direct the nation’s medical research. At the very least, the Senate must closely interrogate his views on the research and development of potentially life-saving vaccines and other curative treatments.

No one should be surprised if Senate Republicans assist Trump in pursuing his (incompetent) policy agenda, whether sharply reducing immigration, shrinking the regulatory state, reducing US military commitments, opposing Chinese expansionism, reinvigorating domestic manufacturing, or cutting taxes  (for the rich).

If ever there were a magistrate in need of restraint, it is Donald Trump. Who among the Senate Republicans will stand for the good of the nation and integrity of the Senate itself against blind loyalty to the (tryant) president?

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by the newspaper's Editorial Board. 

What the Senate should vigorously oppose are Trump’s worst inclinations toward retribution and overreach😥😞. Never mind that the nation’s security will be threatened by corrupt, hyper-politicized, or incompetent oversight of the military and intelligence agencies. Trump’s own MAGA base will be among the first to be hurt if the nation’s health care system is shipwrecked by bumbling leadership.

In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton argued that the great benefit of requiring Senate approval of top administration jobs was to prevent “the appointment of unfit characters.” He added: “The necessity of its co-operation, in the business of appointments, will be a considerable and salutary restraint upon the conduct of that magistrate.”

If ever there were a magistrate in need of restraint, it is Donald Trump. Who among the Senate Republicans will stand for the good of the nation and integrity of the Senate itself against blind loyalty to the president?

Support immigrants against mass deportations in sanctuary cities - A San Francisco model

Echo report published in the San Francisco Examiner (California) newspaper by Adam Shanks:

San Francisco immigrants, advocates prepare for Trump’s return

In the weeks leading up to the presidential election, speculation and analysis about the immigrant and minority votes — particularly in key swing states — ran rampant, with many suggesting they could decide the winner between the former guy Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Then, overnight, immigrants and their advocates quickly pivoted to control the fallout from Trump’s election victory, given that he has pledged to carry out mass deportations and threatened sanctuary cities such as San Francisco.

A spectrum of opinions and outlooks exists among leaders in The City (San Francisco) about how to react, and how afraid to be, 😱😰after a second Trump election victory.

While a playbook of sorts was drafted and put to use during his first administration, there is concern whether San Francisco has the resources at hand to fend off Trump’s plans, which had already escalated at the tail end of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Several immigrant-defense organizations told The San Francisco Standard this month that they are under-resourced for the task they anticipate under Trump, who has indicated on social media that he will (unlawfully❗) deploy the U.S. military to help carry out mass deportations. (Meanwhile, California's farmers are justifiably worried about the agricultural labor pool being depleted.)

At a Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, Mayor London Breed — who leaves office in January — trumpeted her administration’s work to improve resources for immigrants. It has expanded the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs and increased immigrant legal defense funding for programs such as CARECEN SF by 40%, Breed said.

The City is also working to prepare for threats under Trump’s administration, she said.

“My hope is that so much of this rhetoric and the worst does not come to pass,” Breed said. “But either way, I believe in this city as one that will always stand for immigrants and their families, and not give in to fear.”

But even if much of Trump’s plans does not come to pass, some advocates say they’re already struggling.

“The truth is, our capacity to do removal defense cases has been very, very limited, and I think if you talk to any provider in SF they would say the same thing,” said Adrian Tirtanadi, executive director of Open Door Legal, a nonprofit that aims to offer universal access to legal assistance to those who need it.

Open Door Legal estimates it would need more than an additional $2 million in annual funding just to meet the current demand from people currently under deportation proceedings. In San Francisco Immigration Court, people with representation are more than five times more likely to successfully avoid deportation, Tirtanadi said.

“If we just let immigrants enforce their rights under current immigration law, you would dramatically slow the number of people being deported,” Tirtanadi said.

Economic calculus will come into play. The City will be pushed to expand funding for immigrant-support programs at the same time it attempts to close a massive budget deficit. But immigrant advocates stress that the risk of doing nothing is great, and that the economic consequences of mass deportations would be severe in a city where about one third of the population is foreign-born.

There were about 40,000 undocumented immigrants living in San Francisco as of 2021, according to the California Immigrant Data Portal, a project of the University of Southern California’s Equity Research Institute.

But that number only represents a fraction of the people who could be affected by mass deportations and other policies proposed by Trump. An additional 26,000 U.S. citizens in San Francisco were living with people who are undocumented, according to the same data set.

There are political factors for San Francisco leaders to consider, as well, and some might suggest The City proceed with caution. San Francisco — by virtue of being home to House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and a longtime progressive bastion — already has a target on its back and need not be thrust further into the path of Trump’s agenda.

Francisco Ugarte, managing attorney of the Immigration Defense Unit in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office, said he remains optimistic about San Francisco’s ability to resist Trump.

“We have been through a similar period in history where there were promises of sweeping human-rights abuses and mass deportation,” Ugarte said. “This is going to be different, clearly, but what we learned is that San Francisco stood up, a lot of these local political disputes kind of sifted away, and we unified as a city around attacks on people who were not born in the United States.”

He pointed to the unmet goals of the first Trump administration such as the construction of a massive border wall and end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

“It’s going to be bad, no doubt there’s going to be a lot of fear,” Ugarte said. “We don’t know what’s coming, so it’s hard to prepare — but we will be there.”

Under the first Trump administration, San Francisco took quick legal action that successfully blocked him from implementing an executive order that would’ve pulled funding from sanctuary cities.

Trump has proposed a different path this time, hoping Congress will adopt legislation that would effectively accomplish the same goal as his original executive order. He’s likely to have a more receptive ear to that proposal on Capitol Hill, as Republicans will control both the Senate and the House of Representatives.

Already, community-based organizations in San Francisco and the Office of Civic Engagement and Immigrant Affairs are preparing by highlighting resources — many of which were launched under the first Trump administration — for immigrants and their families.

That includes a rapid-response hotline through which ICE activity in San Francisco can be reported. The network of nonprofits that handle the call line work to vet reports, and can offer legal assistance to anyone detained by immigration officials.

Proof about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s incompetence - Measles 2019 in American Samoa

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Brian Deer:

In November 2019, when an epidemic of measles (5,700 cases of measles and 83 deaths) was killing children and babies in Samoa, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who in recent days became Donald Trump’s pick to lead the department of Health and Human Services — sent the prime minister of Samoa at the time a four-page letter. In it, he suggested the measles vaccine itself may have caused the outbreak.❗ 😱

He claimed that the vaccine might have “failed to produce antibodies” in vaccinated mothers sufficient to provide infants with immunity, that it perhaps provoked “the evolution of more virulent measles strains” and that children who received the vaccine may have inadvertently spread the virus to other children. “Please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be of any assistance,” he added, writing in his role as the chairman of Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group.

At the time of his letter, 16 people, many of them younger than 2, were already reported dead. Measles, which is among the most contagious diseases, can sometimes lead to brain swelling, pneumonia and death. For months, families grieved over heartbreaking little coffins, until a door-to-door vaccination campaign brought the calamity to a close. The final number of fatalities topped 80.

I was in Samoa during that outbreak as part of my more than 16 years of reporting on the anti-vaccine movement. The cause of the outbreak was not the vaccine, but most likely an infected traveler who brought the virus from New Zealand, which that year had seen the biggest measles outbreaks in decades, especially among that country’s Indigenous and Pacific Islander communities. 

Migration and poverty were likely factors in a sudden spread of measles in Samoa and New Zealand. But, as an editorial in the New Zealand Medical Journal reported, so too was a factor that Kennedy specializes in: “Increasing circulation of misinformation leading to distrust and reduced vaccination uptake.” Samoa’s vaccination rates had fallen to less than a third of eligible 1-year-olds.

Vaccine skepticism has ballooned worldwide, and Kennedy and others who back him have encouraged it. Americans may be well aware that their possible future health leader holds dangerous beliefs about vaccines. The consequences of his views — and those of his orbit — are not merely absurd but tragic.

In my reporting, parents have mentioned fearing vaccines after watching “Vaxxed,” a 90-minute documentary, which had also toured countries such as New Zealand. The film, focused on unproven allegations, was released more than three years before the Samoa measles outbreak. Among much else, it claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had committed fraud.

Two of the filmmakers — Del Bigtree and Andrew Wakefield — are buddies of Kennedy. The director, Mr. Wakefield, is a former doctor whose medical license was revoked in his native Britain in2010 amid charges of ethical violations. One of the producers, Mr. Bigtree, became Kennedy’s presidential campaign communications chief.

In the years before the documentary was released, I revealed, in a series of articles, evidence that Mr. Wakefield’s research in the 1990s had been rigged at a London hospital to make it look as if the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine was linked to autism. 

This research was retracted in 2010. Kennedy certainly didn’t seem fazed by Mr. Wakefield’s professional downfall. “In any just society, we would be building statues to Andy Wakefield,” he yelled, for instance, from a platform he and Mr. Wakefield shared at an event in Washington, D.C., a few days before he sent his letter to Samoa.

Reports say Kennedy is reviewing résumés for his possible Health and Human Services empire. He’s reportedly eyeing Joseph Ladapo, a Florida health official who has questioned the safety of COVID vaccines. I’d say Mr. Bigtree may get a role; Mr. Wakefield is trickier, given how discredited he is, even in the United States. 

But, sadly, there are plenty of others in Kennedy’s (crazy 😠😒) circle whose claims ought to concern everyone.

Consider Sherri Tenpenny, a doctor who has been declared by Mr. Kennedy as “one of the great leaders” of the anti-vaccine movement. She has falsely claimed that a “metal” attached to a protein in the Covid shots was making their recipients magnetic. “They can put a key on their forehead and it sticks,” she told Ohio state lawmakers in June 2021. “They can put spoons and forks all over them and they can stick.” I could pluck plenty more outrageous characters from  Kennedy’s circle over the years, including veteran AIDS denialists.

In recent days, Kennedy appears to have tried to change the conversation around his vaccine views to focus on America’s junk food diets (But wait❗  Then he was photographed with Trumpti-Dumpti, while on a Trumpzi flight, earting a MacDonald's hamburger🍔👀💥 ). But, his views on vaccines shouldn’t be forgotten. In January 2021, speaking to a gathering of loyalists in Ohio, he outlined a three-point checklist that had to be met for him to consider a COVID vaccine. First, he said, “you take one shot, you get lifetime immunity.” Second, side effects are only “one in a million.” 

Third, “herd immunity” is achieved at 70 percent public uptake — after which, he stipulated, “nobody in this society” ever gets the disease again.

“If they came up with that product,” he said, “I’d be happy to look at it.”

His audience laughed. But it’s not funny.

Brian Deer is the author of “The Doctor Who Fooled the World,” detailing the origins of today’s anti-vaccine movement.

American journalists teaching voters about Civics- How the government is supposed to work in our democracy

Americans seem to be in a "learn as we go along" about basic American civics 101. Journalists like David French are educating us about a subject we should have learned in primary school.

These are the times that try a constitutional conservative’s soul.
Echo opinion essay published in The New York Times by David French:

Donald Trump and his allies have proposed two legal maneuvers that could have profound consequences for the function of the federal government. He has proposed confirming presidential appointments through an abuse of his power to make recess appointments, and his allies have proposed reviving a mostly banned practice called impoundment, under which the president can refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.

These proposals together would gut core constitutional functions of Congress and could make Trump our nation’s most imperial peacetime president.

You can’t fully comprehend how pernicious these proposals are without knowing Congress’s intended role in our republic. If you read the Constitution carefully, you see that the United States was not intended to have coequal branches of government. Instead, it is clear that the branch of government closest to the people, Congress, was given more power than any other.

While other branches can check Congress’s power — the president can veto bills and the Supreme Court can use the power of judicial review to invalidate statutes passed by Congress, to give the most obvious examples — Congress’s enumerated powers surpass those of both the president and the court.

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution says, “All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives.” This constitutional provision is particularly important, given that in the original Constitution the House was the only part of the federal government chosen directly by the people. The power of the purse is inseparable from democratic rule.

Congress has the sole constitutional power to declare war, even if presidents frequently usurp that authority. It can fire the president, executive officers and judges through impeachment and conviction. It can override presidential vetoes, and the Senate can reject presidential appointees.

But if Trump gets his way, he will have the power to nullify congressional enactments, even if they’re passed with veto-proof majorities. He’ll destroy the Senate’s advice and consent authority. He’ll make the executive the most powerful branch of government by far, creating a version of monarchical government that the founders despised.

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton warned that “of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious (aka "excessive attention") court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.” A similar pattern is playing out here — claiming a popular mandate, Trump is threatening to further diminish American democracy.

In one version of a Trump recess plan, Trump could pressure the Republican majority in the Senate to agree with the House to adjourn, granting Trump the ability to make immediate recess appointments. This is the clear message of Trump’s post on the subject on Truth Social. He wants the Republican leader to agree to an adjournment, thus forfeiting the Senate’s constitutional role.

But if the Senate holds firm, Trump theoretically has another option. He could conspire with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, to request that Congress enter into a recess. If the Senate refuses a recess, then he’ll rely on Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution — which provides that the president can adjourn Congress “to such time as he shall think proper” if the two chambers disagree about the timing of a recess — and then use his constitutional power to make recess appointments without the Senate‘s advice or consent.

The recess appointments wouldn’t be permanent. They’d lapse at the beginning of the next congressional term, but he could have his handpicked team for up to two years, and there is nothing the Senate could do about it, at least according to Trump’s theory.

The founders never intended for Article II, Section 3 to permit the president to shut down Congress and name his cabinet without Senate approval. Recess appointments were created to permit presidents to fill vacancies when Congress was out of session in a large nation, when travel was often slow and difficult.

When legislators were traveling by horseback to Washington, permitting recess appointments made a degree of sense. It could be weeks before Congress could assemble. But now it takes hours, less when they assemble online.

There is no meaningful question about whether Trump’s scheme violates the spirit of the Constitution. Advice and consent exists precisely because the founders believed that a president should not possess unchecked power to name his team.

In Federalist No. 76, Hamilton wrote that the advice and consent power is “an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the president, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from state prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”

In fact, a key purpose of the power is to prevent the confirmation of exactly the kind of obsequious yes men with whom Trump surrounds himself. Hamilton warned against the selection of nominees who have “no other merit” than “being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

Trump’s potential scheme violates the letter of the Constitution as well. In a 2014 case called National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected President Barack Obama’s recess appointment of three members of the National Labor Relations Board. A majority of the court held that even when the Senate was in a mere “pro forma” session — when no formal business was conducted — it was not technically “in recess,” and thus the recess appointment power wasn’t available to the president.

Four members of the court, however, went further. In a persuasive concurrence, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the recess appointments clause covered only the space between congressional sessions, not breaks within the session. Chief Justice John Roberts, Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas all joined with Scalia.

According to this reasoning, even if Trump engineered a disagreement between the House and the Senate and forced a recess, his recess appointment power wouldn’t attach because the recess occurred after the congressional term started.



Yes, that’s a concurrence — and concurrences aren’t binding law — but the current court’s jurisprudence is far more aligned with Scalia’s than it is with that of Justice Stephen Breyer, the author of the Canning majority. It is highly unlikely that a Roberts-led court would abandon Scalia’s logic and rubber-stamp an obvious end-run around one of the Senate’s core constitutional powers.

Now let’s talk about impoundment. During earlier periods of American history, presidents would sometimes refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress. This process, which came to be called impoundment, could give presidents the ability to nullify acts of Congress, even if the act passed with a veto-proof majority.

Imagine that Congress passed a statute mandating the construction of a new bridge across the Potomac, at a cost of $200 million. If impoundment were a real option, the president could simply choose not to spend the money, block construction of the bridge and frustrate the will of Congress.

American presidents periodically used impoundment to block the use of appropriated funds until 1974, when Congress largely banned the practice through the Impoundment Control Act. The act was passed after Richard Nixon frustrated Congress by impounding funds more than his predecessors, blocking spending for multiple programs across several federal agencies.

The constitutional justification is obvious. It prevents the president from exercising an unconstitutional version of a veto. Nonetheless, in a Wall Street Journal essay last week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy — the two men Trump named to lead his new Department of Government Efficiency — raised the prospect of reviving impoundment. They suggested it was the Impoundment Control Act itself that was unconstitutional.




Russ Vought, Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget (and the man Trump has chosen to choose to lead the O.M.B. again), is an enthusiastic supporter of impoundment. The Center for Renewing America, which Vought founded in 2021, has published a raft of materials attacking the constitutionality of the Impoundment Control Act.

I very much want to limit the growth of government spending, but not at the expense of our constitutional structure. There is no authority for impoundment in the text of the Constitution. The president’s principal check on Congress is the veto, and the process for vetoes (and for overriding them) is plainly detailed in the text.

One of the reasons American democracy is under duress is that Congress has spent decades abdicating its power to the president. Congressional inaction has created a power vacuum that presidents and courts have been only too eager to fill.

Unilateral executive action elevates the power of the presidency, increases the stakes of each presidential election and sidelines our nation’s most democratic branch of government. According to Trump and his team, however, Congress has not abdicated enough power. They want the president to get the yes men (and women) he wants in government, no matter how corrupt or unqualified. They want the president to block government spending, no matter if Congress has mandated the expenditure.

Trump isn’t in office yet. We don’t know whether he’ll follow through on his threats and try to engineer a recess or impound funds. But his threats are still destructive. He’s trying to cow Congress into becoming an extension of his own will and desires. And if the Republican-led Congress capitulates, the party that long prided itself on constitutional fidelity will become an instrument of its decline.

American immigration system has been broken and it cannot get up-!

An excellent review about the botched history of American immigration, araticle written by Cuco Fusco published in New York Review of books.: 

Two recent books about our immigration system reveal its long history of exploiting vulnerable individuals for financial gain.

Welcome the Wretched: In Defense of the “Criminal Alien”
by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández

In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States
by Ana Raquel Minian

The man who fixed my roof stopped by the other day to see if he could charm me into giving him more work. He’s a jovial fellow in his sixties, with a bustling family business, who, judging by his name and fair complexion, is probably of Scottish origin. I was trying to figure out whether what he was telling me about my cornices was true when he suddenly started ranting about migrants. He was convinced that they were being lured by tales on social media of a carefree life in America. “They get free gift cards!” he exclaimed. “They get free phones and free health care—free everything!” I could have pointed out that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has given some recent arrivals limited-use phones in order to monitor asylum seekers without having to bear the costs of jailing them. I knew that the rumor about the gift cards had been spread by a Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, but I had little hope of changing the roofer’s mind. Conservative media spouts an endless stream of anti-immigrant vitriol that, sadly, many find appealing. Even liberal yuppies in my Brooklyn neighborhood lined up at a community board meeting in May, to complain that there were just too many migrants at local shelters.

It’s hardly news that Republicans use immigration to make Democrats look soft, and it can’t be ignored that the number of migrants who crossed the US–Mexico border reached record highs in 2023. What the inflammatory claims about a “migrant crisis” overlook is that, because of a decline in the American population growth rate, the US actually needs immigrants to fill essential jobs for at least the next thirty years. That reality doesn’t stop us from whipping up anti-immigrant sentiment, and that rhetoric is nothing new. Casting recent arrivals as invaders, degenerates, threats to social and economic stability, or unwanted charges on local budgets was commonplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when millions of Irish, Chinese, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants were coming to America. At that time, laws were implemented to restrict their admission and preserve the political power of a white Protestant elite, and many a county jail made good money imprisoning noncitizens. What has changed in the past forty years is the scale of the effort to criminalize and detain migrants.

The US now invests more money and effort in immigration enforcement than it ever has in its history. Last year the Biden administration requested $25 billion for US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE. In 2022, 28.4 percent of criminal cases in federal courts were immigration related, a figure that excludes the sizable number of immigration cases handled by magistrate courts. President Biden recently issued an executive order that closes the southern border if the weekly average for daily crossings reaches 2,500 people per day, which is less than a third of the average number of daily crossings last fall—and the border would only reopen after the average number of entries drops below 1,500 daily for an entire month. This effectively blocks asylum seekers who, in accordance with international law, should be entitled to enter and plead their case.

While stringent anti-immigration measures may be attractive to lawmakers, it is not entirely clear that detaining migrants deters migration. Two new books by the scholars César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández and Ana Raquel Minian criticize our current policies and examine their history, questioning their efficacy on moral and procedural grounds. García Hernández looks at the laws that have shaped migrant detention. Minian elaborates four case studies to show how racism and political currents have led to long detentions of those who have not done anything wrong.

García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University, grew up on the American side of the US–Mexico border. Welcome the Wretched combines his expertise in immigration law with extensive knowledge of the situations of relatives, friends, and professional associates who cross the border in search of work and family. He maintains that migration itself should not be considered a crime and argues that the imposition of laws restricting immigration does not stop people from crossing—but it does encourage smuggling enterprises that exploit migrants, and it produces profits for the local jails and private industries involved in their detention. He believes that immigrants’ extenuating personal circumstances such as family ties, long periods of residence in the US, and US military service should be reasons for leniency when officials make decisions about deportation. And he marshals facts about the racialist views that led to the criminalization of border crossing a century ago and currently result in the targeting of Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean people on the one hand and the lax treatment of Canadians and Europeans on the other.

García Hernández is adept at revealing inconsistencies in the application of immigration law, reminding us that American attitudes toward immigration have been nothing if not inconsistent. While we may be quick to reject migrants as criminals now, convict labor was used extensively during the colonial period (a practice that ceased in 1788, when the Continental Congress of the newly independent United States called on states to ban it). After the Civil War, when formerly enslaved Black people and Chinese immigrants joined the American working class in large numbers, the Chinese Exclusion Act and Jim Crow laws were enacted in an effort to entrench racial privileges and “mold the nation’s racial stock,” as García Hernández writes. Those efforts did not prevent 15 million immigrants from arriving in the US between 1900, and 1915, at a rate that was unsurpassed until the 1990s.

In 1924, influenced by eugenicist theories and the desire to limit the influence of anarchists and Communists arriving from Southern Europe, two Republicans introduced the Johnson–Reed Act, which imposed ethnic quotas that heavily favored Northern Europeans. Then in 1929, after years of effort, a white supremacist senator from South Carolina named Coleman Livingston Blease succeeded in turning unauthorized entry and reentry into a crime, a move directed largely at Mexicans. For decades afterward, border patrol agents at the southern border (who form the vast majority of US border agents) tended to send migrants back to Mexico. The push since the 1980s to prosecute and incarcerate has resulted in a dramatic rise in migrant detention and court proceedings. At present, hundreds of shackled migrants are herded before judges in large groups on a daily basis and are tried after getting only a few minutes to speak with a lawyer.

García Hernández explains that while several changes in law have contributed to the escalating rate of convictions, the legal concept of the “entry fiction” is what deprives many migrants in the US of the constitutional right to defend themselves in court. Traceable back to an 1886 Supreme Court decision, the entry fiction claims that when detained in border zones such as Ellis Island or on boats docked at US harbors—or at detention centers well within the borders of the country—immigrants are not due the rights and protections of US residents and can be treated as if they were not actually in the US. More recently the entry fiction has been applied to a variety of migrant detention facilities across the country and the US military base in Guantánamo. As Ana Raquel Minian explains,

When these “entrants” are detained in the United States while the government decides their fate, they are treated as if they are not here…. Since they are “not here,” detainees are not guaranteed basic constitutional protections—even when subjected to the laws and forces of the state.

This leaves detained migrants in a legal limbo that has catalyzed the growth of public and private institutions with a pecuniary interest in holding them for as long as possible.

The detention and criminalization of migrants intensified in response to the growing numbers of asylum seekers from the Caribbean and Central America in the 1980s, as García Hernández notes. Haitians and Central Americans fleeing brutal regimes that were considered US allies faced resistance to their asylum claims, while anti-Communist Cubans had up to that time received automatic asylum and permanent residency within a year, thanks to the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. The 1980 Mariel boatlift, in which 125,000 Cubans landed on American shores over a six-month period, overwhelmed Miami-Dade County. Among those arriving that year was a small number of Cubans who lacked sponsors or had criminal records. The sheer scale of the influx and the presence of such “undesirables” among them altered the perception and treatment of what had been a privileged class of immigrants. The “undesirables” were sent to several military bases and penitentiaries and interned in some cases for years, which led to violent protests and an explosion of media reports about migrant criminality.

A subsequent influx of Haitians fleeing violence after the 1991 coup produced a similarly negative reaction, with the added presumption that these arrivals all had AIDS. Xenophobic media reports and mounting political pressure prompted Congress to increase the penalties imposed on immigrants. In 1988 the concept of “aggravated felony” became part of immigration law, enabling the CBP and ICE to detain and deport any immigrants (even those who arrived “legally”) convicted of murder or drug or firearms trafficking after they had served their sentences in American prisons. In the 1990s forging a passport, skipping a court date, and shoplifting were added to the category of aggravated felonies, making these nonviolent offenses grounds for deportation.

By the 1990s, according to García Hernández, it had become almost impossible to disassociate migrants from criminality in political discourse. In 1994, President Clinton’s Crime Bill increased prison time for aggravated felonies, and in 1996, an antiterrorism law facilitated the deporting of migrants with criminal histories and limited the power of immigration officials to pardon them. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 ushered in an era of partnership between federal immigration officials and local police, ensuring that any noncitizen interacting with police, regardless of their guilt or innocence, could be sent to immigration prison and deported. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, García Hernández writes, migrants who came to a courthouse to pay fines or otherwise comply with the law were often arrested there.

The Trumpzi administration made an already punitive system harsher by sharply intensifying the practice of family separation—more than 5,500 children were taken from their parents between April and June of 2018, and some 1,400 remain separated—and adding the “Muslim Ban” and the “Remain in Mexico” initiative. Although these moves generated a widespread public outcry (and the Biden administration worked to reunite seven hundred children with their families starting in 2021), García Hernández emphasizes that there was a vast body of law already in place that, together with the financial benefits reaped both by county jails and by private industries associated with detention, has made the machinery of migrant criminalization extremely difficult to dismantle.
“Today, the idea that migrants present a threat to the United States isn’t just overblown rhetoric by over-the-top politicians like Donald Trump,” he writes. “It’s actual laws turned into concrete policies carried out every day in real neighborhoods and courtrooms where questions about life and death, of the ability to keep living in the place a migrant calls home, are put into action.”



Welcome the Wretched tells the stories of significant cases that underscore the discrepancies in the treatment of immigrants on the basis of race. In 1939 a white man from the Dutch West Indies living in New York euthanized his son, who was in a vegetative state, and was convicted of manslaughter. While this would certainly be cause for deportation now, his having committed a felony did not prevent him from becoming a US citizen in 1949, thanks to a merciful judge. The Canadian singer Justin Bieber, who is also white, has been arrested for assault, reckless driving, and vandalism, but he has not been deported. On the other hand, the British-born Black rapper known as 21 Savage overstayed his visa and was arrested by ICE. He narrowly escaped deportation because he was a celebrity and had the money to pay a good lawyer.

García Hernández finds similar disparities between our current treatment of refugees from Ukraine and those from Venezuela and Nicaragua. In 2022, the Biden administration created a special initiative to allow Ukrainians fleeing the war to come to the US and work here for up to two years, while many Venezuelans and Nicaraguans have been expelled from the US and others sent to shelters without work permits. It took pressure from activists to force the Biden administration to introduce a parole program that allows Cuban, Venezuelan, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants to stay temporarily in the US.

While García Hernández stresses the inefficiencies and inconsistencies of our immigration system, the Stanford historian Ana Raquel Minian’s In the Shadow of Liberty makes us feel the inhumanity of detention as exemplified by the ordeals of four immigrants from places as far-flung as China, Germany, Cuba, and Guatemala. Their stories were chosen to make the point that migrant detention is fundamentally unjust and arbitrary.

Minian’s detainees are exceptional in that they all attracted media attention and the support of activists. This extensive historical record allows Minian to provide a detailed background for each case but obscures the reality that most detainees never get a chance to tell their stories. Fu Chi Hao, a devout Chinese Christian who escaped to the US after risking his life to defend American missionaries during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, was detained upon arrival owing to a paperwork snafu. He and his travel companion, who later became an important Chinese statesman, were held for weeks in abysmal conditions, on a ship docked in San Francisco’s harbor and then in a filthy, overcrowded shed at the port. The Geary Act that was in effect at the time authorized the deportation of Chinese immigrants without residence certificates, unless a white person vouched for them—luckily, Fu and his companion were rescued by Luella Miner, a white missionary who lobbied on their behalf in Washington.

Although in the end Miner succeeded in preventing their deportation, the men ran into trouble again when the train they boarded to the Midwest crossed into Canada, causing them to violate the terms of their conditional release. Rather than giving up, as others might have, Fu gave a series of public talks in Canada about the xenophobic attitudes toward the Chinese, and he continued to do so upon his reentry to the United States. Together with Miner, Fu lectured and published articles about the conditions Chinese immigrants faced in detention. He also published an autobiography in the US in 1903 that so incensed merchants in China that they boycotted American imports.

Ellen Knauff also published a memoir, in 1952, about her detention and legal struggle. A Jew born in Germany, she gained Czech citizenship in 1934 when she married a salesman in Prague, but she soon divorced him. In 1948 she married an American GI—thereby losing her Czech citizenship. Falsely accused of being a Czech spy by her second husband’s ex-girlfriend, she was detained for three years at Ellis Island. In 1952 the Supreme Court ruled that neither Knauff nor any other immigrant trying to enter the US was entitled to any constitutional protections, but she was ultimately spared deportation by US Immigration’s Board of Special Inquiry, following a deluge of editorials and newspaper articles focusing on her plight. As a European woman and a war bride, she had attracted an enormous amount of favorable news coverage; Minian notes that two thousand articles about her were printed in the US between 1950 and 1954. Her situation turned public opinion against migrant detention, leading to the closing of Ellis Island in 1954. After that the government shifted away from the practice of interning new arrivals, at least for a time. There was concern, Minian writes, that the practice damaged America’s image abroad.

Like García Hernández, Minian notes that the detention of migrants increased when nonwhite people from the Caribbean and Central America began to arrive in large numbers in the 1980s. Their demand for protection challenged the understanding of asylum policies—like the Refugee Relief Act of 1953—that had originally been conceived to help those fleeing Communist countries in Europe, policies that had already been stretched to admit Vietnamese refugees after the fall of Saigon. The fate of Minian’s third subject, Gerardo Mansur, was determined by the political crisis of the Mariel boatlift. Detained briefly upon entry, Mansur married soon after his release, settled in Las Vegas, fathered two children, and thrived professionally, but his life was turned upside down when an ounce of marijuana was found during a questionably legal search of his apartment.

He and his wife were detained separately for four years, and their children were placed in foster care. By 1987 there were thousands of Mariel boatlift immigrants imprisoned in Atlanta and Louisiana, and many rioted after years of detention; the media coverage drew the attention of activists, including a church leader who helped to free Mansur. Although the upheaval caused irreparable harm to his family, Mansur managed to reunite with them and prosper again in Florida. But almost thirty years later, in 2016, the Obama administration succeeded in getting the Cuban government to accept deportees, after which Mansur suddenly found himself on a flight back to his homeland after twenty-six years in America, all because of a drug possession charge dating back to the 1980s.

Seven years ago Fernando Arredondo decided to leave Guatemala with his wife and three daughters after his teenage son was murdered by gang members in revenge for his having helped to organize a neighborhood watch committee. Forced into hiding, the family sold their house and all their possessions to pay for their journey and to bribe police officers in Mexico. They had no idea their departure coincided with the Trump administration’s notorious zero tolerance policy toward immigrants at the southern border, separating parents from their children. The family was nearing the border when Arredondo and his eldest daughter were pulled off a bus by police. The mother and other daughters continued without them. Although Arredondo and his daughter eventually made it to the US, they were separated upon entering Texas.

His interview to determine his eligibility for asylum—conducted in English months after his arrival—did not succeed, but his wife was permitted to stay in the US. The daughter who had crossed with Arredondo was eventually reunited with her mother and sisters in California, but he was jailed and deported in 2018. The two-year separation of Fernando Arredondo’s family occurred in the midst of widespread media coverage of families similarly torn apart, and this fostered public sympathy and helped in securing legal support for Arredondo. Two years after being deported, he was reunited with his family thanks to a court order issued after they were granted asylum in 2020.

The intertwined structure of Minian’s book emphasizes the similarities among the different immigrants’ experiences of internment and the actions of civic-minded Americans who came to their aid. Minian’s decision to lead readers through the vicissitudes of immigration detention using the stories of individuals is clearly intended to put human faces on public policies. The difficulties suffered by these subjects are indeed disturbing, even though three out of the four enjoy happy endings. But the portraits lack a sense of specific personalities and psychological complexity, the kind of details that embellish more engaging journalistic accounts of migrants past and present. And the choice not to include any migrants who have committed offenses (other than crossing the border itself) results in a limited view of those in detention.

García Hernández’s broader view of the migrant detainee population, his acknowledgment of the imperfect conduct of some, and his more comprehensive consideration of how racism and financial incentives fuel unequal justice make for a much stronger argument against migrant detention. He also stresses that deportation, in addition to disrupting migrants’ lives, constitutes a second form of punishment for those who have already served sentences for criminal offenses. As such it could be considered tantamount to being tried twice for the same crime, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. He quotes an early-twentieth-century decision by the judge Learned Hand:

Deportation is to him [the migrant] exile, a dreadful punishment…. Such, indeed, it would be to any one, but to one already proved to be incapable of honest living, a helpless waif in a strange land, it would be utter destruction.

Both Minian and García Hernández conclude that migrant detention should be eliminated because it is financially costly and doesn’t achieve the desired goal of deterrence and because the very concept of the entry fiction should be considered an affront to justice. The details they provide about the racist double standards that lead to much harsher treatment of nonwhite immigrants are not surprising, but they add to our understanding of the entrenched racism in law enforcement that affects all incarcerated people.

What emerges from both studies is a sad truth about our willingness as a country to exploit the most vulnerable among us for financial gain: not just by renting out jails, building prisons, and charging exorbitant fees for phone calls, but also by creating conditions that compel immigrants to accept long work hours and low wages, which keep consumer costs down for the rest of us. To make it worse, we mask those economic interests with hyperbolic rhetoric about migrants as threats, despite the fact that numerous studies show that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. These writers ask us to consider how much abuse of the disenfranchised we will ignore in order to promote a political agenda or make a middle-class lifestyle more accessible to those of us who enjoy the benefits of citizenship.