Gaetz's tenure as congressman was widely criticized and controversial, with The New York Times noting accusations of:[111]
sexual misconduct and illicit drug use; sharing inappropriate images or videos on the House floor; misusing state identification records; converting campaign funds to personal use; and accepting impermissible gifts under House rules.[111]
Gaetz routinely conflicted with members of Republican leadership. In October 2023, Gaetz filed a motion to vacate which led to the removal of Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.[71]
Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson wrote in her memoir that, during a trip to Camp David in 2020, Gaetz made "repeated passes" at her and asked her to "escort" him to his room. Gaetz has denied these actions.[275]
Federal investigations into child sex trafficking and statutory rape
In January 2020, the U.S. Secret Service reportedly received a tip that, in April 2018, Gaetz had accompanied Seminole County tax collector Joel Greenberg to a government office where Greenberg was producing fake IDs.[276] Greenberg was indicted in August 2020 on an array of charges, including sex trafficking a 17-year-old girl in 2017 and creating fake IDs to facilitate sex trafficking.[277][278] The investigation of Greenberg led federal officials to look into some of Gaetz's related activities.[276] In late 2020, the Justice Department opened its investigation of Gaetz for allegedly sex trafficking the same 17-year-old girl in 2017 and whether he had violated federal sex trafficking laws by paying her to travel with him across state lines.[277][279][280] As part of his plea bargain, Greenberg cooperated with the investigation of Gaetz and others.[281][282]
Axios reported that Gaetz was "seriously considering not seeking re-election and possibly leaving Congress early for a job at Newsmax" on March 30, 2021.[283] The same day, The New York Times reported the Justice Department's investigation of Gaetz.[277] According to CNN, a person briefed on the matter said investigators also examined whether Gaetz used campaign money in his relationships with young women for travel and expenses and whether cash and drugs were involved.[284] By April 2, the Justice Department was examining whether Gaetz asked women to recruit others for sex.[285][286]
According to the 2021 reports, federal investigators were looking into Gaetz's September 2018 trip to the Bahamas.[278] Gaetz was reportedly joined by marijuana entrepreneur and hand surgeon Jason Pirozzolo, who allegedly paid trip accommodations, traveling expenses, and escort services. Investigators were reportedly exploring whether the escorts were sexually trafficked for Gaetz and whether Gaetz accepted paid escorts in exchange for political access or legislative favors for Pirozzolo, who at the time chaired the board of the Medical Marijuana Physicians Association. Gaetz made two speeches for the organization while in Congress, and Pirozzolo gave two separate donations of $1,000 to Gaetz's campaign arm, "Friends of Matt Gaetz", in March 2016 and May 2017.[287] A spokeswoman for Gaetz denied the new allegations.[288] A woman on the Bahamas trip—a Capitol Hill intern who did not work in Gaetz's office but who was dating him—reportedly agreed in May 2021 to cooperate with investigators, who believe she has information about Gaetz's financial transactions on the trip.[289][290]
Investigators believe that Greenberg met women through a website for sex and introduced them to Gaetz, who also had sex with them.[277] Evidence including mobile payment receipts reportedly suggesting Gaetz had illegally exchanged money for sex, such as May 2018 Venmo transaction records showing Gaetz sending $900 (with a memo referring to a woman) to Greenberg, who then relayed the money (with the memos "tuition" and "school") to three women, one of whom was 18.[291] Joseph Ellicott, an associate of both Gaetz and Greenberg, pleaded guilty in January 2022 to two charges related to this investigation and is also cooperating with authorities.[292]
Gaetz had argued in a November 2020 Fox News appearance that Trump "should pardon Michael Flynn [and] everyone from himself to his administration officials to Joe Exotic".[293][294] In late 2020, Greenberg apparently attempted to secure a pardon from the Trump administration via a confession letter (first reported by The Daily Beast in April 2021), writing that he and Gaetz had had sex with a 17-year-old girl they believed was 19, which Greenberg learned of on September 4, 2017, and that payments had been made on behalf of Gaetz to her and other women in exchange for sex.[295] Greenberg attempted to bribe Roger Stone with a $250,000 Bitcoin payment to secure a presidential pardon, texting Stone, "They know [Gaetz] paid me to pay the girls and that he and I both had sex with the girl who was underage."[295] By the end of the Trump administration, Greenberg was under indictment, investigators had been questioning some Gaetz associates, and federal agents had seized the phone of one of Gaetz's former girlfriends.[296] Gaetz's phone was also seized, and he changed his phone number in late December.[278]
Defense and counter-claim of extortion
Denying any sexual relationships with minors, Gaetz said on March 30, 2021, that he did not plan to resign from the House.[277] That same day, he tweeted that he and his family were "victims of an organized criminal extortion involving a former DOJ official seeking $25 million".[277][297] This allegedly began on March 16, with a text message to his father demanding money in exchange for making sex trafficking allegations "go away".[298] Gaetz and his father purportedly received communications saying that the FBI had photographs of Gaetz engaged in a "sexual orgy with underage prostitutes". The sender demanded millions of dollars to help secure the release of U.S. federal agent Robert Levinson (who had disappeared in Iran in 2007 and had already been presumed and declared dead),[299][300] proposing that President Joe Biden would pardon Gaetz as a reward for freeing Levinson.[301][302] The sender was later identified as Florida developer Stephen Alford, who was arrested on August 31.[303][304]
Gaetz said his attorneys contacted the FBI, whom he said had informed them that Gaetz was a subject, not a target, of an investigation. He also said his father agreed to wear a "wire" to help the FBI record the alleged extortionists.[305] Gaetz sent Axios screenshots of text messages, emails and documents outlining the alleged extortion scheme, which he asserted was being run by David McGee,[306] a former federal prosecutor who has been a private attorney since 2005[307] and has represented the Levinson family.[308] McGee's law firm called Gaetz's allegation "completely, totally false" and defamatory,[298] telling The Daily Beast that Gaetz was attempting to distract from the sex trafficking investigation.[309] Alford, who has previously been federally convicted of fraud and is represented by McGee, was federally indicted in August 2021 for allegedly conducting the scheme. Prosecutors alleged that Alford said he had contacts in the Justice Department who could arrange for a presidential pardon for Gaetz and directed Don Gaetz to wire the money to a trust account managed by McGee. McGee reportedly met with Don Gaetz before Alford did,[308][310] but apparently did not discuss a presidential pardon, which Alford later admitted to the FBI that he had lied about his ability to arrange.[300]
Also on March 30, Tucker Carlson interviewed Gaetz on Fox News. In addition to denying the allegations about his relationship with a 17-year-old girl, Gaetz denied a previously unreported claim that he had been photographed "with child prostitutes", and said that the FBI had urged a friend of his (whom Carlson had supposedly met) to claim Gaetz was "involved in some pay-for-play scheme". He also argued that "Providing for flights and hotel rooms for people that you're dating who are of legal age is not a crime."[311][312][313]
Response and other developments
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he had no plans to remove Gaetz from his seats on the Judiciary and Armed Services Committees on March 31, 2021, but that he might change his mind if Gaetz "gets indicted"[314] or "if it comes out to be true".[315]
CNN reported on April 1 that Gaetz had shown pictures of naked women to colleagues on the House floor. Gaetz had allegedly claimed to have slept with the women in the photos.[316] The next day, his communications director, Luke Ball, and his legislative director, Devin Murphy, resigned. Both had begun working for Gaetz when he joined Congress in 2017.[317][318][319]
On April 6, The New York Times reported that in the last weeks of the Trump administration, Gaetz privately requested a blanket presidential pardon for himself and others, which was reportedly denied because it would set a bad precedent.[294] The next day, Trump publicly denied that Gaetz had asked him for a pardon.[320] On April 7, journalist Maggie Haberman revealed on CNN that Trump had reportedly wanted to defend Gaetz but was told to stand down due to the seriousness of the allegations.[156][157]
Gaetz's congressional office released a statement purportedly from his female employees vouching for his character, stating they "uniformly reject these allegations as false" on April 8. Gaetz's new communications director, Joel Valdez, told Forbes that "all of the office's eight female staffers signed it", but the version of the statement that was released did not have anyone's signature or identify any specific employee.[321] That evening, Representative Adam Kinzinger tweeted that Gaetz should resign, becoming the first congressional Republican to make such a call.[322][323]
The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation on April 9 into allegations that Gaetz "may have engaged in sexual misconduct and/or illicit drug use, shared inappropriate images or videos on the House floor, misused state identification records, converted campaign funds to personal use, and/or accepted a bribe, improper gratuity, or impermissible gift".[324] The committee deferred its investigation at the request of the Justice Department, but resumed it in June 2023.[325][326]
In late April, Gaetz fundraised to run his own political ads, claiming that he was under attack by powerful interests such as "big government, big tech, big business, big media" that perceived him as a political threat.[327] A public relations firm hired by Gaetz issued a denial statement regarding The Daily Beast's reporting on Greenberg's correspondence implicating him and Gaetz.[295]
Greenberg pleaded guilty to multiple crimes on May 17 in a plea bargain in which he would have to cooperate with prosecutors.[282]
By June, the federal investigation had reportedly broadened to include obstruction of justice, relating to Gaetz's phone conversation with a witness.[328][329] Later in June, ABC News reported that the investigation had engulfed many in the Central Florida political scene and that prosecutors could decide whether to bring charges against Gaetz as early as July.[330] In August, ABC News reported that Greenberg had "provided investigators with years of Venmo and Cash App transactions and thousands of photos and videos, as well as access to personal social media accounts". These include September 2018 text messages between Greenberg and a woman engaging in prostitution, which indicate that a prostitute was arranged for Gaetz and that MDMA may have been proffered. A spokesperson for Gaetz said, "not one woman has come forward to accuse Rep. Gaetz of wrongdoing" and that Gaetz had "addressed the debunked allegations against him" on his new podcast, Firebrand.[331][332] According to Greenberg, he made the arrangements for Gaetz.[331]
Two top Washington prosecutors—a public corruption investigator with expertise in child exploitation crimes and a leader of the public corruption unit—have worked on Gaetz's case since at least mid-2021.[333] Greenberg's sentencing hearing was originally scheduled for August 2021,[334] but due to his cooperation in related investigations, had been repeatedly delayed.[335][336] In January 2022, an ex-girlfriend of Gaetz's testified before a grand jury after being granted immunity;[337] she reportedly had information relevant to two of three criminal charges being considered for Gaetz: sex trafficking a minor and obstruction of justice.[337] (A year later, her attorney said that Justice Department prosecutors made the right decision not to charge Gaetz because "they didn't have evidence to prove a crime".)[338] Gaetz was also accused of violating the Mann Act, which prohibits sex trafficking across state lines.[339] Later in January 2022, Joseph Ellicott confessed that on September 4, 2017, he witnessed Greenberg telling Gaetz over the phone that the woman they had both had sex with was underage.[340][341][342]
Thanks to his assistance with the prosecutors in a series of investigations, including those involving Gaetz, Greenberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison, plus 10 years of supervised release, on December 1, 2022.[343] The sentencing judge, Gregory A. Presnell, said, "He has provided substantial cooperation to the government...more than I've seen in 22 years."[343]
Court documents filed in September 2024 stated that, according to multiple eyewitnesses, Gaetz had attended a party in 2017 alongside a 17-year-old girl, at the home of lobbyist Chris Dorworth where people engaged in sexual activities and did drugs, including cocaine, ecstasy, and cannabis.[344][345]
Conclusion of DOJ investigation
A September 2022 Washington Post article reported that prosecutors had recommended not to charge Gaetz in the sex trafficking investigation, telling Justice Department superiors that a conviction is unlikely in part because of credibility questions about the two central witnesses.[346] In February 2023, the DOJ communicated to the attorneys for Gaetz that they had concluded their investigation and would not be laying charges against him, effectively ending a multiyear probe including allegations of misconduct.[347]
Re-opening of investigation by House Ethics Committee
The House Ethics Committee began its probe in April 2021 into Gaetz's alleged misconduct but soon paused it while the DOJ investigated. Shortly after the February 2023 conclusion of the DOJ investigation, the House Ethics Committee reopened its probe.[348][349] Two women, both represented by attorney Joel Leppard, testified that Gaetz paid them for sex. One of those women said that in July 2017, she saw Gaetz having sex with her 17-year-old friend and that once Gaetz became aware of the girl's age, he paused the relationship until she turned 18.[350] The woman who was 17 at the time of the incident told the House Ethics Committee that she had two sexual encounters with Gaetz at the same party.[351] The DOJ had charted payments showing that, between July 2017 and January 2019, Gaetz paid both women a total of over $10,000 across 27 Venmo transactions and a check. The committee received this chart from the DOJ, but the DOJ did not turn over other information the committee requested.[352][353] The committee also contacted Gaetz's ex-girlfriend who in 2022 had received immunity and testified in the criminal investigation, though reportedly it did not expect her to cooperate in the ethics investigation voluntarily.[354]
In mid-November 2024, days before the committee was scheduled to vote whether to release its report, which was nearly complete and which insiders said was "highly critical" of Gaetz,[355][356][357] Gaetz resigned from the House, in part due to an announcement of his nomination as United States Attorney General for Donald Trump's second term.[358] This caused the committee to lose jurisdiction to continue its probe[359] and, under the House's own rules, it cannot release the report either. (Despite this internal rule, the House has released reports on former members before.)[360] House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would "strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report".[361] Given the Senate's role in approving Gaetz's nomination for Attorney General, several senators including Joni Ernst, John Curtis, John Cornyn, and Markwayne Mullin called on the House to allow them to review the Ethics Committee report.[362][363] Attorneys for the two women called for the report to be released publicly: John Clune (representing the woman who had been 17 at the time of the incident) and Joel Leppard (representing the witness).[360][364]
The sworn testimony of the woman who said she had sex with Gaetz in 2017 when she was 17, along with corroborating eyewitness testimony to that sexual encounter, was obtained by a hacker on November 18. A lawyer on the case noticed the suspicious download. The hacker did not immediately leak the material.[365]
The House Ethics Committee decided that by December 5, it would finish its report and vote on whether to release it.[366][367]
Gaetz withdrew his nomination for attorney general on November 21,[368] and indicated the following day that he would not return to the House.[369]
The House Ethics Committee voted to release its report in December 2024.[370] It was made public on December 23. The Ethics Committee report concluded that Gaetz had violated Florida state laws, including those prohibiting statutory rape, procurement of prostitution, and illicit drug use, but that Gaetz did not engage in sex trafficking across state lines. The committee identified at least 20 occasions on which he had paid women for sex or drugs. It found a total of over $90,000 in payments to the 17-year-old girl and 11 other women.[371][2][372][373]
"The Snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Wednesday, July 16, 2025. Inflation increases under Chump, the effects of the tariffs begin to be felt, ICE agents need to hide behind masks while ICE attorneys hide their names from the courthouse records, Mark Cuban wants Democrats to co-sign on Chump's gestapo immigration war, and much more.
Inflation was addressed at the top of THE 11TH HOUR WITH STEPHANIE RUHLE last night on MSNBC.
Chump campaigned on ending inflation on day one. As Stephanie noted, Tuesday was day 177 of the Chump administration. No, that's not day one.
Inflation continues to increase.
Question: Do you think he might have done a better job if he and his administration had focused on the economy instead of trying to micro manage college universities -- not really a presidential duty -- or a hundred and one of his other pet causes?
If he'd focused on the actual job, would the economy be as bad as it is? Because it is bad and its going to get worse. Each month it already has. Walmart, for example? Keesha e-mailed to note that the plain label canned chick noodle soup? Great Value is the brand. It's not at 70 cents a can and, under Joe, it was 50 cents a can. Last month, Keesha notes, she paid 70 cents an avocado and this week the price jumped to 90 cents.
And as if inflation isn't bad enough for the average American, Chump's 'big' 'beatiful' bill is about to really steal from the middle class, the working class and the poor to give huge tax breaks to te extremely wealthy.
Stephanie noted and quoted the banking institution's reaction to the inflation increase:
Bank of America: Today's report provides ample evidence that tariffs are being passed onto consumers.
Wells Fargo: One of the top questions we get these days involves when will we see the impact of tariffs on consumer spending and in the retail sector. The time is now.
Ben covers the economy this morning on MEIDASTOUCH NEWS.
Ben notes, "But the only prices that are going down? Airfare, hotel and motel prices. These are recession indicators, folks."
Chump's tariffs are destroying the economy and so is his war on immigration. Martín Macías, Jr. (LOS ANGELES PUBLIC PRESS) reports:
Over the last month, Jorge, an Inglewood resident and a cook at a restaurant, has scanned social media each morning to check for ICE activity near his home or along the route to work. If federal immigration agents are around, he stays inside, which he said means risking the loss of a job that sustains his family of four.
“I leave home not knowing whether [ICE agents] will arrest me or not,” said Jorge, whose last name LA Public Press has agreed to withhold to protect his identity as an undocumented person. “I don’t go to work when I hear that [ICE is] near my home.”
Jorge, who said he’s lived in the United States for 24 years and is married to a U.S. citizen, said he’s missed at least eight days of work in recent weeks due to the fear of arrest by ICE.
“I can’t miss many more days of work,” Jorge said. “Money isn’t going as far as it once did.”
Though ICE hasn’t targeted his workplace, Jorge said he’s distributed red cards explaining the legal rights of immigrants to his coworkers so they’re more prepared in case agents show up.
Jorge’s story reflects a broader crisis across Los Angeles County’s restaurant industry, where some establishments have seen revenue drop by as much as 25% since immigration raids began in June, according to industry leaders, forcing owners to cut staff and reduce hours.
Since June 6, undocumented restaurant workers like Jorge have been targeted for arrest by federal immigration agents across Los Angeles County, where one in three residents is an immigrant. About 1.8 million California residents work in restaurants and food service, making it the largest private employer in the state, according to the National Restaurant Association. Nationwide in 2025, at least 20% of restaurant workers are immigrants.
Across Southern California over the last month, at least 1,600 immigrants have been arrested by ICE in raids at sites including factories, car washes and Home Depot parking lots. The operations have made immigrants fearful of leaving home for daily errands and forced businesses such as auto shops to close, costing thousands of dollars in lost wages and revenue.
An ICE spokesperson didn’t respond by time of publication to a request for comment on the impact that federal immigration operations are having on restaurants.
The restaurants where immigrants work and eat have also reported that they’re struggling to remain open as ICE operations continue to sweep across the region.
Tricia La Belle, president of the Greater LA Hospitality Association and a restaurant owner for more than 30 years, told the LA Public Press that her five establishments have seen a 25% drop in revenue since ICE launched raids in June.
The loss of business has forced her to cut staff, she said.
“We’ve cut down to the bare bones,” La Belle said about her establishments, which include Boardner’s nightclub in Hollywood and the Bon Vivant restaurant in Atwater Village. “You can’t provide the same quality of service when you don’t have a bus boy, barbacks and floor maintenance crews. You just don’t have those bells and whistles anymore.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will now be the biggest federal law enforcement agency, by far. Its budget will exceed that of the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, and U.S. Marshals Service combined. (It even has a bigger budget than the militaries of Brazil, Italy, and Israel.)
It will require a crash hiring spree for new ICE agents, with little training and oversight. Federal and local law enforcement officials will be pulled off their core duties in massive numbers to play the unfamiliar role of immigration enforcer. All this for an agency whose agents wear masks to avoid identification while grabbing people off the street, arresting political leaders, and choosing to sow terror.
And for all the claims that only the “worst of the worst” will be targeted, enforcement seems increasingly to be focused more on construction workers and landscapers with no criminal history than on drug traffickers or sex offenders.
Then there is the troublesome role for private prisons. Many of the new facilities will be built and run by private firms. Eisen is the author of the definitive book, Inside Private Prisons. She reports, “In May, the CEO of private prison company CoreCivic told investors, ‘Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now.’ This budget bill will solidify that vision for CoreCivic, GEO Group, and other firms that manage and own immigrant detention centers and transportation subsidiaries.”
The administration has rebuffed oversight by Congress. Federal law says that members of Congress and their staffs must be permitted to “enter[], for the purpose of conducting oversight, any facility operated by or for the Department of Homeland Security used to detain or otherwise house aliens.” ICE is throwing up barriers and in some cases denying access outright.
And of course, the Brennan Center has documented the ways this current crackdown is being pursued in violation of the law. The misuse of the Alien Enemies Act, a discredited wartime statute the administration has used to deport migrants, is a vivid example.
Let's stay with legal issues for a moment. ICE agents? As weve noted, if they don't quit their jobs their future is one of two paths: Suicide or drug addiction to self-medicate. You can't do what they're doing and not tear apart your soul. The same is true of the the attorneys working for ICE.
Debbie Nathan (INTERCEPT) reports:
Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.
“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.
As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning.
“I’ve never heard of someone in open court not being identified,” said Elissa Steglich, a law professor and co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin. “Part of the court’s ethical obligation is transparency, including clear identification of the parties. Not identifying an attorney for the government means if there are unethical or professional concerns regarding [the Department of Homeland Security], the individual cannot be held accountable. And it makes the judge appear partial to the government.”
Why not identify themselves? Because they're rightly ashamed of themselves. And they can hide all they want from the public -- or try to -- but they can't escape the voice inside them that knows what they're doing is wrong, the voice that will nag them until the day that they die. Too late, they'll grasp that there's not enough money in the world to justify selling your soul.
And as G. Elliott Morris points out, the detailed polling suggests overwhelming disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies. Notably, voters are twice as likely to support giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship than they are to support deporting them. By the way, in 2023 Congress seemed likely to enact bipartisan legislation that would have opened such a path. But Trump killed it.
What’s going on? Why were cynical, seemingly savvy takes on the politics of immigration so wrong?
Part of the answer is that there is almost always a “thermostatic backlash” against the policies pursued by a party that has recently gained power. Pundits who imagined that Trump’s war on immigrants would become more, not less popular once it began were assuming that he could defy all historical precedent.
But, like Morris, I think there’s more going on here than just the thermostat.
First, it’s important to understand that the call for mass deportations and/or imprisonment was based on a lie — the claim that America is facing a huge immigrant crime wave. “They’re not a city of immigrants, they’re a city of criminals,” declared Kristi Noem about Los Angeles last month. Last week city officials reported that LA is on track to have the fewest homicides in 60 years.
It's true that many Americans have remained willing to believe that big cities like LA and NYC are scary urban hellscapes, even though they’re quite safe these days.
An aside: There was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when New York, in particular, actually was the kind of scary place people like Trump and Noem claim it still is. As it happens, that sort-of hellscape period coincided with an era when New York had fewer immigrants than at any time before or since:
In any case, however, it seems to me that the lie is beginning to unravel as it becomes clear that ICE is having a really hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest.
According to the Miami Herald, only around a third of the people being held in “Alligator Alcatraz” — a cute name, but it’s a concentration camp, pure and simple — have any kind of criminal conviction.
Why aren’t they rounding up more undocumented criminals? Because that would be hard work, and anyway there aren’t that many of them. Morris did a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that there may in total be only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and 14,000 convicted of violent crimes. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is demanding that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day. Do the math, and you see why they’re grabbing farm workers and chasing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.
So Americans may be turning on Trump’s immigration policies in part because they’re starting to realize that they’ve been lied to. But an even more important factor may be that more native-born Americans are beginning to see what our immigrants are really like, rather than thinking of them as scary figures lurking in the shadows.
It’s a familiar point that views of immigration tend to be most negative in places with very few immigrants and most positive in places where there are already many foreign-born residents. You can get fancy about why that’s true, but I would simply say that if you live in a place like New York, where you’re constantly interacting with immigrants, they start to seem like … people.
And the Trumpies — for whom, as Adam Serwer famously observed, the cruelty is the point — are inadvertently humanizing immigrants for Americans who don’t have that kind of daily experience. The nightmarish ordeal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has probably done more to highlight the humanity of immigrants, documented or not, than any number of charts and tables. And while some Americans are instinctively cruel, most are, I believe, instinctively decent.
Mark Cuban wants us to 'meet in the middle' on this hideous program. He wants Democrats to co-sign off on it, thereby giving Republicans cover and the ability to claim both parties supported this evil plan. No. This needs to be fought and people across America grasp and see what Mark Cuban can't or won't.
Let's wind down with this from Senator Patty Murray's office:
ICYMI from June: Senator Murray Statement on Protests in Response to Immigration Arrests in Spokane
Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, released the following statement on the news, reported by the Spokesman-Review, that federal agents arrested and searched the homes of Spokane residents who took part in a protests in Spokane on June 11th. The protests in June were sparked by the sudden detention of two asylum-seekers whose work visas were abruptly revoked days before.
“The Trump administration is abusing the force of the law to intimidate Americans exercising their First Amendment rights—whether you are a Democrat or Republican, this is wrong and we all need to speak out against this disturbing perversion of justice.
“If you are as angry as I am about Trump’s unconstitutional and cruel assault on immigrants, we need to speak out peacefully against inhumane policies. We lose our democracy when our voices fall silent.
“Let’s be perfectly clear about Trump’s unconstitutional immigration crackdown: he is diverting limited federal resources away from pursuing violent criminals to instead round up individuals with no criminal record—and now, apparently, he’s going after peaceful protestors as well. We cannot be silent and I will be contacting DOJ directly regarding this gross abuse of federal resources.”
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Isaiah's THE WORLD TODAY JUST NUTS "Pam Tries Another Lie" went up yesterday. The following sites updated:
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Hawks, Doves and Lapdogs1 hour ago
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Never ending GOP lies8 hours ago
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The client list or THE CLIENT LIST8 hours ago
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