“In 2015, I asked President Obama to reverse course & close the for-profit baby jails (‘family detention centers’) he opened in Dilley & Karnes City, Texas. What he said shook me to my core.”
Read more: https://twitter.com/ImmCivilRights/status/1008902662828511232?s=19
“America got along just fine for 225 years before ICE, the monstrous child of the wars on drugs and terrorism, was spawned. It can do so again.”
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2018/06/11/abolish-ice
“Emergencies are when people are most likely to lose their freedom at the hands of their own government.”
Read more: https://www.fff.org/2018/06/04/the-emergency-destruction-of-american-liberty/
“As Woodrow Wilson and LBJ knew well, the rush of power felt when America engages in a foreign crusade is effortlessly converted to a domestic crusade.”
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/you-cant-blame-trump-for-the-welfare-warfare-state/
“The government has big plans and the most outrageous part about this entire scheme is you don’t have a choice – your data is entered.”
“The result, the report says, is a nationwide system in which ‘even a small-town sheriff in rural Georgia or Vermont could have access to a database of hundreds of millions of Americans’ images.’ Between that and E-Verify, that sheriff could easily tie a face to a Social Security account—a National I.D. measure that voters have vociferously opposed, and that was rejected when it was proposed in the 1970s. This de facto National I.D. becomes even more expansive when combined with a number of new technologies that states are starting to roll out. Harper discusses the possible combinations of REAL ID and E-Verify with the facial and license plate recognition technologies many states are already using, either in experimental or full-fledged forms.”
Read more: https://reason.com/blog/2018/01/30/national-id-by-any-other-name-still-stin
“The practice of using questionable legal logic to justify military operations is not unique to the Trump administration. In fact, our last president engaged in similar maneuvers. Barack Obama rationalized his use of military force in several countries with reference to the 2001 AUMF, as well as to a second AUMF issued in 2002. The 2002 AUMF was granted to Bush by Congress specifically to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq. That license ended once that purpose was accomplished.”
Read more: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/42469-mattis-tillerson-want-blank-check-to-make-illegal-war
“The change last year to a Department of Defense manual on procedures governing its intelligence activities was made possible by a decades-old presidential executive order, bypassing congressional and court review. The new manual, released in August 2016, now permits the collection of information about Americans for counterintelligence purposes ‘when no specific connection to foreign terrorist(s) has been established,’ according to training slides created last year by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).”
“Allowing government agents to simply search a U.S. citizen’s contacts, social media, videos and everything else in search of a crime doesn’t feel American because it isn’t.”
“For many of those attacking the ACLU here, it is a staple of their worldview that the U.S. is a racist and fascist country and that those who control the government are right-wing authoritarians. There is substantial validity to that view. Why, then, would people who believe that simultaneously want to vest in these same fascism-supporting authorities the power to ban and outlaw ideas they dislike?”