Tag: immigrants
Tom Homan

'They're Building Our Houses': Contractors Warn Against Trump's Mass Deportation

One key plank of former President Donald Trump's second-term agenda is mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. That policy proposal is now getting heavy criticism from construction industry leaders.

According to NBC News, homebuilders in particular are coming out against the ex-president's call to deport millions of immigrants. this includes builders in Republican-dominated states like Florida and Texas. Construction business leaders are worried that an already shallow labor pool could dry up even further if Trump followed through on his signature campaign initiative.

"They don’t think it’s going to happen,” Stan Marek, CEO of the Texas-based Marek Family of Companies, said of his colleagues in the construction industry. “You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house.”

“We need them. They’re building our houses — have been for 30 years,” Marek added. “Losing the workers would devastate our companies, our industry and our economy.”

Tampa, Florida homebuilder Brent Taylor, who runs a five-person construction business, said building is already a "very, very difficult industry," and is only "getting worse." He told NBC that Trump's proposed deportations would have a particularly adverse impact on both his company and his clients.

Taylor said that he often subcontracts labor, and that those who provide him with workers typically don't check workers' immigration status before sending them out to construction sites. He added that Trump's deportations would mean that he hypothetically "can only do 10 jobs a year instead of 20." He then noted: “Either I make half as much money or I up my prices. And who ultimately pays for that? The homeowner.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are roughly 370,000 open construction jobs, and that figure would likely climb even higher if migrants are rounded up and deported en masse. And according to the National Immigration Forum, roughly 30 percent of construction workers in the United States are immigrants. That share of non-native born Americans working in construction climbs up to 40 percent in larger states like California and Texas.

Trump has said he would deport as many as 20 million immigrants if he were elected to a second term. That figure is noticeably higher than the number of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S., which is currently estimated to be around 11 million. The former president has suggested he would revoke the Temporary Protected Status granted to migrants from unstable nations reeling from political violence and war like Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others.

The logistics of rounding up, detaining and deporting that many people would be a massive endeavor. During the National Conservatism conference in July, Tom Homan — the former director of the Trump administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — hinted that ICE would kick its operations into high gear if Trump wins the November election.

"Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Elon Musk

Why Migrant Musk Wants To Control The U.S. Presidency

Elon Musk is a migrant.

There is a difference between a migrant and an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who moves to another country with the intention of living there permanently. The great majority of immigrants to America come for work or personal safety or affection for the way of life. Their goal is to assimilate.

A migrant is someone who moves from one place to another, often across country borders, for various reasons with money high on the list. The United States is Musk's third nationality. He started off as a South African. He then became a Canadian. Now he's an American.

Musk is an entrepreneurial genius. Of that there's no doubt. But his pursuit of wealth and power has shown him soulless regarding the communities he lords over. And his support of the man who tried to overthrow this country's elected government does not speak of any strong attachment to American tradition, namely, the U.S. Constitution.

Though already wealthy, Donald Trump's slobbering before Vladimir Putin strongly suggests he wants to become oligarch wealthy. It's unclear whether Musk or Putin is the richest man alive. Either might assume Trump could be acquired.

For all his bashing of California, Musk got his start soaking in the advantages of being a tech entrepreneur there. In 2002, he launched SpaceX in the Los Angeles area. In 2004, he joined Tesla, based in Palo Alto, and made it the electric vehicle giant it is today. And along the way, he helped himself to more than $3.2 billion in direct and indirect California subsidies since 2009.

Musk had every right to move SpaceX and social media company X, formerly Twitter, to Texas or anywhere else. But he should spare us the baloney of his stated reason, California's law aimed at protecting transgender children. I share his aversion to a lot of the wokeness, but Musk's tweet that the bill was "attacking both families and companies" was laughably histrionic.

Look, Musk wanted less regulation, lower taxes, and official hostility to organized labor. Why didn't he just say that?

He did stop the United Auto Workers from unionizing the giant Tesla plant in Fremont, California, threatening those who joined with loss of their stock options. That would have been illegal.

In a recent conversation on X, Trump praised Musk for firing workers who went on strike. "You're the greatest cutter," Trump gushed. "I look at what you do. You walk in and say, 'You want to quit?' I won't mention the name of the company, but they go on strike and you say, 'That's OK. You're all gone.'" They laughed in unison.

The worst part of this exchange wasn't the firings. It was the evident pleasure Trump took in visiting pain on workers.

California does have ways to get even. Tesla sales there have fallen 17 percent in the first half of this year, whereas sales by other EV makers soared — from 26 percent for Ford to 77 percent for Rivian. And a state commission just voted against more SpaceX launches from the Vandenberg Space Force Base outside Los Angeles.

Musk recently played the yahoo arguing that the budget deficit under Biden was "insane." It happens that Trump ran up the national debt by twice as much as Biden. His plans for tax cuts and spending would add $7.5 trillion to budget deficits over the next decade, according to The Wall Street Journal. Kamala Harris' proposals would add half as much.

But, you know, this isn't really about government spending. Trump says he'd invent a position for Musk in a future administration. If so, what a convenient stop the United States would have been for Elon Musk.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Trump's Debate Debacle Is Shock Therapy For Distracted Voters

Trump's Debate Debacle Is Shock Therapy For Distracted Voters

As we tuned into the big debate, the Trump camp was peddling the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people's dogs and cats. When the debate turned to the subject of immigration, Donald Trump jumped on that hallucination without prompt.

"In Springfield, they're eating the dogs!" he howled. "The people who came, they're eating the cats!"

The split screen showed Harris initially laughing at the lunacy. Then her face screwed up with the concern of a psychiatric nurse.

There are no credible claims of dogs, cats or other pets being eaten by immigrants in Ohio. A debate moderator inserted that modest fact check. His source was Springfield's city manager, who would know.

Nurse Ratched is a character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the Ken Kesey novel made into a movie then a Netflix series. The head nurse in a mental institution, Nurse Ratched exerted authoritarian control over the patients, enforcing rules. Harris could have channeled that disciplinarian at the debate, herding Trump's outlandish statements into a padded cell with a strong hand.

Harris further tormented Trump by noting his references at rallies to Hannibal Lecter, the fictional psychiatrist and serial killer. Lecter was a cannibal who ate his human victims, never mind dogs.

She baited him into meltdown over the crowd size at his rallies. Of course, she was going to do that. And he responded with what shrinks might call "a dissociative episode," a means to cope with the overwhelming stress of hearing that some of his rallygoers left early.

Trump went on about the 75 million people who voted for him. Harris pointed out that 75 million is less than 81 million, the number who voted for Joe Biden.

"Donald Trump was fired by 81 million people," she said. "Clearly he is having a very difficult time processing that."

Harris used the words "tired" and "old," leaving out the word senile. Trump had repeatedly referred to Barack Obama as his 2024 opponent at a time that Biden was the presumed candidate. And he has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi. We call these episodes memory lapses.

At a certain point, Harris had to say, "It's important to remind the former president, you're not running against Joe Biden. You're running against me."

Immediately after the debate, Harris called for another one. Serious commentators opined that if Trump went for round two with her, he'd have to prepare. This is something he's known not to do and for which he may lack the mental capacity. Staffers working for Trump at the White House say that when they tried to hand him simple one-page summaries, he wouldn't read them. Or couldn't.

In the reality-based world, a new report has inflation slowed to 2.5 percent in August — another reason the Federal Reserve is expected to soon lower interest rates. Violent crime is way down. The Southern border is now calm.

And dogs trot the streets of Springfield, Ohio, unthreatened by hungry migrants.

You can't "sane wash" this guy, as much as some Trump supporters, real or paid, may try. This debate treated Americans to an informal forensic psych eval of Donald Trump. Such assessments are used to determine an individual's competency to stand trial.

As for how therapists might manage Trump in the future, one might borrow from Ratched's "comforting" quote to an unruly patient: "The best thing we can do is go on with our daily routine."

Donald Trump has administered a kind of political shock therapy to the part of the voting public that hasn't been watching closely. Lest he regain possession of the nuclear codes, intervention is called for, preferably at the polls.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Trump's Former ICE Chief Says He'll Begin Mass Deportations In 2025

Trump's Former ICE Chief Says He'll Begin Mass Deportations In 2025

One senior-level official from former President Donald Trump's administration just made an ominous threat to the immigrant community during a recent gathering of far-right political activists.

On Tuesday, Semafor reporter Dave Weigel reported that during the National Conservatism conference (also known as "NatCon") in Washington, D.C., several of the speakers eagerly expressed how they would help the former president accomplish his goal of pursuing vengeance against his political opponents if elected to a second term. During one panel, Tom Homan – who was director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Trump's Department of Homeland Security – suggested he was already working behind the scenes to make Trump's promise to deport millions of immigrants as draconian as possible.

"Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”


As the New York Times reported last year, one key plank of Trump's second-term policy agenda is the rounding up and detainment of undocumented immigrants on an unprecedented scale. Trump immigration advisor Stephen Miller — an outed white nationalist — previously suggested Trump would deport approximately 10 million immigrants during a second term. Earlier this year, Ronald Brownstein — a senior editor for the Atlantic — tweeted excerpts from a speech Miller gave to National Rifle Association activists about how Trump would create “standing facilities” to detain immigrants by the thousands “where planes are moving off the runway constantly.”

Deporting millions of immigrants in a short number of years would likely be a major blow to the economy and result in significant price hikes for Americans. New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan reported last month that it's likely "production falls and labor costs go up" in the event of mass deportations.

"For example, if farmers could not find enough workers to pick all their crops, there would be a smaller supply of produce and it would get more expensive," they wrote. "And businesses would be forced to offer higher wages to attract or retain workers — passing on some of their higher costs to consumers."

According to Weigel, the NatCon audience that met at the Capital Hilton in D.C. consisted of "Trump administration veterans mingled with conservative writers and think tankers who had conquered the old 'Bush-Romney' Republican Party." Attendees reportedly viewed Trump as "a conquering hero who’d have a confident, well-trained movement behind him next year," and NatCon speakers often echoed Trump's promises to use the force of the federal government to punish Trump's enemies.

In a segment featuring former Trump attorney John Eastman (author of the so-called "Eastman Memo" that outlined the plot to disrupt Congress' certification of the 2020 Electoral College count), the now-disbarred lawyer proposed punishing federal judges who ruled against Trump in his unsuccessful election litigation.

"We’ve got to start impeaching these judges for acting in such an unbelievably partisan way from the bench," Eastman said, just a week after the six conservatives on the Supreme Court ruled that presidents are free to break the law as long as it's deemed an official act.

John Yoo, who was a top DOJ official in former George W. Bush's administration, also encouraged political reprisal under a second Trump administration. He specifically called on Republican prosecutors to be Trump's political foot soldiers should he win in November.

"People who have used this tool against people like John [Eastman] or President Trump have to be prosecuted by Republican or conservative DAs in exactly the same way, for exactly the same kinds of things, until they stop," Yoo said.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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