December, 09 2016, 01:00pm EDT
Sierra Club: McMorris Rodgers Wrong Choice for America's Public Lands, Wildlife
WASHINGTON
President-elect Donald Trump is expected today to announce his plans to appoint Chair of the House Republican Conference, Cathy McMorris Rodgers as Secretary of the Interior. McMorris Rodgers currently represents the state of Washington.
In response, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune issued the following statement.
"The Department of the Interior exists to protect and manage the nation's natural resources and cultural heritage. Yet President-elect Trump seems to have missed the 'protect' part of that statement when nominating Rep. McMorris Rodgers to head the agency.
"Selling off our public lands to the highest bidder and opening them to drilling, mining and logging is not in the best interest of our country, but that is exactly what Rep. McMorris Rodgers has voted to do over and over again. From expanding offshore drilling to undermining attempts to protect our wild places, it's clear that McMorris Rodgers would jeopardize the future of our public lands if appointed as Secretary of the Interior.
"America's public lands are vital to our shared history, our national identity, our economy, and perhaps most importantly our future. We urge Senators, who are elected to represent and protect the American people, to stand up for everyone who enjoys the outdoors and oppose this nomination."
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
(415) 977-5500LATEST NEWS
'Horrible Racist' Stephen Miller Slammed for Using Classic TV Christmas Special to Bash Immigrants
"Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics," said one critic in response to Miller.
Dec 26, 2025
Top Trump White House aide Stephen Miller on Friday elicited disgust after he said that a beloved Christmas television special reminded him of his own personal animus toward immigrants.
Miller, often seen as the architect of President Donald Trump's mass deportation policy, revealed in a post on X that he and his children had just watched "Christmas with The Martins and The Sinatras," a one-off 1967 TV holiday special that featured singers Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra.
Miller then quickly pivoted from that to once again bash immigrants who come to the US.
"Imagine watching that," Miller wrote, "and thinking America needed infinity migrants from the third world."
As Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki McCann Ramírez pointed out in response, both Martin and Sinatra both had parents who were first-generation Italian immigrants.
"Dean Martin was born Dino Paul Crocetti and gave himself a stage name because of braindead xenophobes like Stephen," McCann Ramírez observed. "Sinatra was also a child of Italian immigrants. Imagine watching them and thinking immigrants didn’t build the culture you fetishize today."
A similar point was made by civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill in a post on Bluesky.
"Imagine watching Sinatra, son of Dolly and Antonini born in Genoa and Sicily, respectively," she wrote, "and Martin, son of Gaetano and Angela, born in Montesilvano, Italy and Ohio respectively... and crusading against the value of children of immigrants to the US."
Journalist and author Jeff Yang added some historical context to Miller's remarks by noting that Italian immigrants in the early and middle decades of the 20th century faced many of the same stereotypes that Miller and his political allies ascribe to immigrants from Latin America.
"A reminder," Yang wrote, while also posting old cartoons that featured racist depictions of Italians, "that Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra’s parents emigrated here during a period when Italians were considered to be a genetically inferior and criminal-minded underclass that Stephen Miller’s racist predecessors said should be excluded from America."
Yang added that Frank Sinatra's mother "ran an underground free abortion clinic, chained herself to a fence to fight for women’s suffrage, and was an extremely influential organizer for the Democratic Party."
Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse promoted Yang's thread that demonstrated Miller's apparent ignorance of Dean and Sinatra's family histories, and said it showed the Trump adviser is "a horrible racist in the sense that he is actually not that good at being racist."
Tim Wise, a senior fellow at the African American Policy Forum, managed to find an upside to Miller's holiday-themed anti-immigrant rant.
"The one silver lining in all this sickness is that one day your children will despise you as much as most of America already does," he commented.
Film producer Franklin Leonard was even more succinct in his response to Miller.
"Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra would hate Stephen Miller and his politics," he wrote.
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Trump's 'Bomb Magnet' Fleet Could 'Never Sail' and Waste Billions of Dollars: Experts
"A future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water," said one critic.
Dec 26, 2025
President Donald Trump on Monday announced that the US Navy is building a new class of warship that will be named after him—but naval warfare experts are warning the project looks like a wasteful boondoggle.
Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote an analysis of the Trump-branded ships the day after their announcement in which he bluntly predicted that they "will never sail."
Among other things, Cancian argued that the ship being commissioned by the president "will take years to design, cost $9 billion each to build, and contravene the Navy’s new concept of operations, which envisions distributed firepower."
As if that weren't enough, Cancian projected that "a future administration will cancel the program before the first ship hits the water."
Dan Grazier, a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center, also predicted doom for Trump's prized ships, which he said would be too overloaded with the latest cutting-edge technology to be effective at naval combat.
"Every gadget you add to one of these systems is one more thing that can break," Grazier wrote in an analysis published by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. "When designers lack discipline, as they obviously did while sketching out this latest future boondoggle, a simple mathematical truth asserts itself."
In fact, Grazier felt so confident in his gloomy prognostication for Trump's warships that he told readers they could "take it to the bank."
"The Navy will spend tens of billions of dollars over the course of the next decade on the Trump-class program," he wrote. "At best, the Navy will receive three troublesome ships that will cost more than $10 billion each before then entire scheme is abandoned."
William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, flagged a particularly troubling detail of Trump's warship plan in a lengthy analysis published by Forbes on Thursday.
"The most troubling aspect of the proposed Trump-class ships is that they are supposed to carry sea-launched nuclear armed cruise missiles," Hartung explained. "The last thing the US military needs is yet another way to deliver nuclear weapons. And because nuclear-armed cruise missiles are difficult to tell from cruise missiles armed with nonnuclear bombs, there is a danger that and adversary could mistake an attack with a nonnuclear armed missile with a nuclear attack, with devastating consequences."
Hartung also pointed out that the ships, which are projected to cost billions each, are not the only pricey weapons system that Trump is planning to build, as earlier this year he vowed to build a "Golden Dome" missile defense system that is projected to cost anywhere from $292 billion and $3.6 trillion.
"It’s time for Congress to do its oversight job and slow down these 'golden' programs until the administration can make a plausible case that they can be both affordable and effective," Hartung concluded. "The odds are against them."
Bernard Loo, senior fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said in an interview with CNBC that Trump's proposed ships appear to be "a prestige project more than anything else."
Loo argued that the proposed ships' massive size, with each projected to displace more than 35,000 tons while measuring more than 840 feet, would make each vessel a "bomb magnet" for adversaries.
"The size and the prestige value of it all make it an even more tempting target," Loo added.
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Federal Judge Halts Trump's 'Arbitrary and Capricious' Immigration Court Arrests
"This decision means I can finally focus on my asylum case, not on the ICE officers who might be waiting for me outside the courtroom door,” said the plaintiff in the class action suit.
Dec 26, 2025
A US judge on Wednesday temporarily blocked two federal agencies from arresting noncitizens at immigration courthouses in the San Francisco area, a ruling hailed by migrant justice advocates amid ongoing legal challenges to the Trump administration's policy.
US District Judge for the Northern District of California Casey Pitts granted a stay in Sequen v. Albarran blocking Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) from carrying out courthouse arrests within ICE’s San Francisco Area of Responsibility, pending the outcome of a broader legal challenge.
"Plaintiffs have established a likelihood that members of the courthouse-arrest class will suffer irreparable harm in the absence of a stay," Pitts, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, wrote in his 38-page ruling. "ICE has arrested large numbers of noncitizens at immigration courthouses in northern California pursuant to the challenged courthouse arrest policies, and it avows that it will continue doing so."
“This ruling is a critical step in ensuring that immigrants can safely pursue their immigration cases without fear of arrest."
For decades, federal immigration authorities eschewed arrests at "sensitive locations," including places of worship, hospitals, schools, and—during the Obama and Biden administrations—immigration courts. Trump began targeting courthouses during his first term.
"This circumstance presents noncitizens in removal proceedings with a Hobson’s choice between two irreparable harms," Pitts wrote in his decision. "First, they may appear in immigration court and face likely arrest and detention... And for many class members whom ICE arrests under the challenged policies... such an arrest would likely violate their rights under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment."
"Alternatively, noncitizens may choose not to appear and instead to forego their opportunity to pursue their claims for asylum or other relief from removal," Pitts wrote. "As the declarations of immigration attorneys and former immigration judges establish, dozens of noncitizens are already taking this path and receiving in absentia removal orders as a result."
"Accordingly, if noncitizens wish to avoid the irreparable harm of arrest and detention, they must instead irrevocably give up their pursuit of potentially valid immigration claims and be ordered removed," he noted. "There can be little question that this permanent loss of noncitizen’s opportunity to have their claims heard, and their resulting removal, is an irreparable injury."
Pitts found that the class plaintiffs "are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims" that the Trump administration's ICE and EOIR courthouse arrest policy is "arbitrary and capricious."
Wednesday's decision follows a November 25 preliminary injunction in the same case requiring ICE to remedy unconstitutionally unsafe conditions in temporary holding cells at the agency's San Francisco field office.
Responding to Wednesday's ruling, class plaintiff Carmen Pablo Sequen said: "I fled persecution to seek safety, only to find myself arrested in the courthouse, the one place I was told to trust. The terror of that day has haunted me. This decision means I can finally focus on my asylum case, not on the ICE officers who might be waiting for me outside the courtroom door."
Plaintiffs' lawyer Jordan Wells, a senior staff attorney at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area, said in a statement that "the administration’s reckless policy is an affront to justice, designed to sabotage the immigration court system and force people to abandon their lawful claims."
“This ruling is a critical step in ensuring that immigrants can safely pursue their immigration cases without fear of arrest," Wells added.
Laura Sanchez, legal director at the Central American Resource Center of Northern California, said, "For our clients, who are asylum seekers, survivors of violence, parents fighting to stay with their children, this ruling begins to lift a cloud of terror."
"They can now walk into court, not as targets, but as people lawfully pursuing their cases," Sanchez added. "This stay is a profound affirmation of their humanity and their right to be heard."
"This ruling begins to lift a cloud of terror."
In a separate case, Pitts earlier this week issued a 67-page order in Garro Pinchi v. Noem blocking the Trump administration’s rearrest and redetention policy targeting noncitizens who had previously been released and later taken into custody after attending immigration court hearings or check-ins.
Other courts have ruled against the arrest of noncitizens at immigration courthouses, including in a 2019 preliminary injunction granted by District Court Judge Indira Talwani—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—blocking ICE “from civilly arresting parties, witnesses, and others attending Massachusetts courthouses on official business while they are going to, attending, or leaving the courthouse.”
A federal appellate court reversed Talwani's preliminary injunction in the case, which did not result in any final judgment for or against ICE's courthouse arrest policy, as plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed their lawsuit as moot after the Biden administration ended such apprehensions.
Earlier this month, US District Judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell—an Obama appointee—issued a ruling in Escobar Molina v. US Department of Homeland Security that preliminarily blocked warrantless civil immigration arrests by DHS officers in Washington, DC absent probable cause.
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