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Former U.S. President Donald Trump leaves Trump Tower to meet with New York Attorney General Letitia James for a civil investigation on August 10, 2022 in New York City.
On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”
Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.
Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration.
Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.
The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.
In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as The New York Times reported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.
Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the Global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.
Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps”—think: prisons—that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told The New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do.
And rest assured about one thing: The next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons.
Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House—a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges—success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.
While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.
Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between 3 and 8 million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto.
While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents.
In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist—that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe—and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading antisemite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.
Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: Some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.
The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.
America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:
When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call—perhaps a bridge too far even for them—but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)
Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at—yes!—Mar-a-Lago.
The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak Republican is more dangerous than a Democrat.” Ward is under investigation in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there.
Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.
The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As The Wall Street Journal noted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.
The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: Should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
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On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”
Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.
Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration.
Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.
The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.
In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as The New York Times reported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.
Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the Global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.
Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps”—think: prisons—that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told The New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do.
And rest assured about one thing: The next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons.
Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House—a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges—success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.
While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.
Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between 3 and 8 million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto.
While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents.
In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist—that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe—and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading antisemite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.
Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: Some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.
The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.
America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:
When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call—perhaps a bridge too far even for them—but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)
Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at—yes!—Mar-a-Lago.
The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak Republican is more dangerous than a Democrat.” Ward is under investigation in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there.
Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.
The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As The Wall Street Journal noted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.
The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: Should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. It initiated a Department of Defense program that resulted in the rounding up and incarceration of about 122,000 individuals of Japanese descent. They were to be placed in federal “relocation centers” that would popularly become known as “internment camps.” As it happened, they were neither. They were prisons set up to house and so violate the civil and human rights of a despised and racially different group defined as “the enemy.”
Although that executive order did not, in fact, mention a specific ethnic or racial group, it was clearly understood that the prisons were not being established for citizens or residents of German or Italian descent, the other two nations then at war with the United States. While not a single person of Japanese ancestry was found to have spied on this country or to have committed acts of sabotage against it, pro-Mussolini and pro-Hitler demonstrations, rallies, and propaganda had been commonplace. Before the war, fascist groups had been allowed to organize and spread propaganda from coast to coast. Some even had influence over and alliances with members of Congress, mainstream journalists, and well-known scholars.
Such a travesty of justice was not just being pushed by Roosevelt, one of the most liberal presidents in American history, but by notables like California judge Earl Warren (later to become a liberal Supreme Court justice) and renowned journalist Edward R. Murrow.
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration.
Although lawsuits challenging the prison camps were filed, the Supreme Court allowed them to continue to operate. More than half of those incarcerated were U.S. citizens. None had been charged with any crimes. Often under the banner (made popular again in our time) of “America First,” far-right, racist policies had been put in place and millions suffered from them.
The openly discussed basis for unity in those years was, at least in part, opposition to non-Aryans and non-Protestants, whether they were Japanese, Jewish, or African American.
In 1981, 36 years after World War II ended with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, a Presidential Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians issued a report making clear that the imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent in such striking numbers “was not justified by military necessity, and the decisions which followed from it… were not driven by analysis of military conditions. The broad historical causes which shaped these decisions were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
It’s important to keep this history in mind since Donald Trump and his MAGA associates are planning to emulate it on a grand scale in a second (and what they hope will be a never-ending) administration. Promises of new “camps,” should The Donald be elected a second time in 2024, are already pouring out of Trumpworld. These would be “huge camps” for migrants near the border with Mexico, as The New York Times reported recently, “to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights.” To ensure that Congress has no direct role in funding them, they will be built and operated with money taken directly from the military budget.
Just to be clear, Trump isn’t against all immigrants. Anything but. After all, he married two, one from the Czech Republic and the other from Slovenia, countries that most Americans would have to google to find on a map of Europe. Instead, the targets of the pending Trumpian anti-immigrant tsunami will, of course, be individuals and families from the Global South. The racism embedded in such a future effort isn’t beside the point, it is the point.
Trump’s former adviser and fellow xenophobe, Stephen Miller, stated that such a new administration would build “camps”—think: prisons—that could house up to a million undocumented immigrants while preparing them for mass deportations. As he told The New York Times, “Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown. The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do.
And rest assured about one thing: The next Trump administration won’t just go after undocumented immigrants trying to enter the country. It will build an unprecedented gulag system to round up and deport millions of people of color, one that would be unimaginable if those undocumented immigrants came from Canada or Denmark. The Trump gang has stated that they will end TPS (temporary protected status), reinstate the former president’s Muslim ban, reimpose and expand health restrictions on asylum seekers, revoke visas for foreign students who participated in protests against recent Israeli actions, shut down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and deport immigrants who had been allowed into the United States for humanitarian reasons.
Mind you, Trump proposed or tried to institute much of this while still in office, only to be thwarted by his administration’s ineptitude, Democratic resistance, grassroots organizing, and the courts. If, in the wake of the 2024 election, the GOP were to gain control over both chambers of Congress as well as the White House—a formula that would ensure the appointment of ever more Trump-friendly federal judges—success (as he defines it) will be a given for many of these efforts.
When Trump tells his followers that “Our cruel and vindictive political class is not just coming after me—they are coming after YOU,” he means that he hates the very same people they do and will provide the retribution for all the harm supposedly done to them by immigrants (of color), Muslims, Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Native peoples, feminists, and other enemies.
While Trump is the likely GOP nominee in 2024, the election is still a year away and any number of unforeseen developments could lead to someone else being nominated. At this moment, the other potential Republican candidates are Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, business executive Vivek Ramaswamy, and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie excepted, there isn’t a sliver of policy difference between any of them and Trump. And notably, Christie supported Trump for nearly all of his administration. In addition, each of them would need the former president’s far-right MAGA base to win the nomination.
Trump’s people have cloaked themselves in an “America First” aura without in any way owning that as a meme. In fact, it harks back both to the second rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s and the American fascist movement of the 1930s. By the mid-1920s, the KKK had ballooned to between 3 and 8 million members and, as scholar Sarah Churchwell notes in her remarkable book Behold, America: A History of America First and the American Dream, it had already adopted “America First” as a motto.
While both Democratic President Woodrow Wilson and Republican Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge had used the term earlier to promote American isolationism, nativism, and “exceptionalism,” it was the KKK that truly embraced its white supremacist core ethos. As one example, 1,400 Klansmen chanted “America First” as they marched in a Memorial Day parade in Queens, New York, in 1927. And consider it more than ironic that, as Churchwell documents, their presence evolved into a riot that led to the arrests of five Klansmen, one bystander (by mistake), and under circumstances that remain less than clear, Fred Trump, the father of the future 45th president of the United States.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents.
In 1940, the America First Committee (AFC) was founded. At its height, it would have more than 800,000 members. Initially, it was seen as isolationist—that is, against American entry into the war already being waged in Europe—and even anti-imperialist. As a result, its ranks initially included liberals, progressives, and socialists, as well as conservatives, libertarians, and avowed fascists. The latter, however, would eventually come to dominate, especially after the nation’s leading antisemite and pro-Hitler celebrity, pilot Charles Lindbergh, became its most popular spokesperson. The fascist-loving AFC then joined other U.S.-based far-right groups in celebrating German nazism and Italian fascism, while making America First their rallying cry.
Of course, the historically challenged Donald Trump undoubtedly doesn’t know much, if anything, about this history. But give him full credit. From the beginning, with the instincts of both a fascist and a white nationalist, he intuitively grasped the mobilizing value of seemingly patriotic but xenophobic slogans. Count on one thing, though: Some of his allies know all about the noxious roots of “America First” and still embrace it. Such jingoistic patriotism has, in fact, become a thinly veiled cover for a revised and expansive contemporary version of white nationalism.
The proliferation of America First groups run by former Trump staffers and supporters is daunting. The dizzying array of them includes America First Legal, America First Action, America First Policies, America First Policy Institute, America First P.A.C.T. (Protecting America’s Constitution and Traditions), America First Foundation/America First Political Action Conference, and America First 2.0, the latter a contribution from Republican presidential aspirant Vivek Ramaswamy.
America First Legal is run by Stephen Miller and promotes itself as an alternative to the American Civil Liberties Union, but its deepest focus is on defending whiteness and amplifying Miller’s white nationalist proclivities. During the 2022 midterm election cycle, it typically produced radio and television ads like this fact-free one:
When did racism against white people become OK? Joe Biden put white people last in line for Covid relief funds. Kamala Harris said disaster aid should go to non-white citizens first. Liberal politicians block access to medicine based on skin color. Progressive corporations, airlines, universities all openly discriminate against white Americans. Racism is always wrong. The left’s anti-white bigotry must stop. We are all entitled to equal treatment under the law.
Decrying (fake) racism against whites fits well with Trump’s hysterical, desperate accusations that Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg are all “racists” out to prosecute him because he’s white, not because he broke the law in their jurisdictions. (So far, none of Trump’s Black supporters have echoed that call—perhaps a bridge too far even for them—but Miller and others on the far right certainly have.)
Linda McMahon, former head of the Small Business Administration under Trump, is now the president of the America First Policy Institute, which claims that its guiding principles are “liberty, free enterprise, national greatness, American military superiority, foreign-policy engagement in the American interest, and the primacy of American workers, families, and communities in all we do.” That well-funded group takes on policy and culture war issues. You undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn that it recently held a gala at—yes!—Mar-a-Lago.
The America First P.A.C.T., led by former Arizona Republican Party chair Kelli Ward, focuses on running state candidates on a far-right MAGA agenda and prioritizes raising funds for GOP candidates. Blasted across its website is the phrase “A weak Republican is more dangerous than a Democrat.” Ward is under investigation in Arizona for her alleged involvement in a 2022 fake-elector plot there.
Perhaps this country’s best-known white nationalist (and former Trump dinner guest) Nick Fuentes is the founder and president of the America First Foundation. It sponsors the annual America First Political Action Conference, an unabashed gathering of white supremacists and other far-right and extremist elements. Fuentes founded AFPAC because he thought the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was too moderate. However, the political distance between the more traditional CPAC and AFPAC has narrowed. Noted Islamophobe Michelle Malkin, for example, spoke at both in 2019, as did conservative journalist Jon Miller in 2020. Neither Malkin, who is Asian, nor Miller, who is African American, called out Fuentes and other bigots at the conferences on their racism.
The 2022 AFPAC conference featured a who’s who of contemporary American extremists, including disgraced former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, defeated Arizona election-denier Kari Lake, longtime founder and publisher of the white supremacist American Renaissance Jared Taylor, Florida-based Islamophobe and anti-immigrant warrior Laura Loomer, extremist activist Milo Yiannopoulos, and former too-toxic-for-even-the-House-Republicans Representative Steve King. Current Republican congress members who have spoken at AFPAC include (you undoubtedly won’t be surprised to learn) Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.
Like fascists and racists of old, Donald Trump and the America First crowd are demonizing and dehumanizing their opponents. In October 1923, Klan leader and Imperial Wizard Hiram Evans gave a fiery anti-immigrant speech in Texas railing against the “polluting streams of pollution from abroad” that immigrants were bringing to the United States. This October, exactly 100 years later, Trump gave an interview to the far-right National Pulse in which he declared that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
In his 2024 campaign, he’s not only planning to go after immigrants, but a broader group of liberal and progressive citizens and even Republicans who stand in the way of his fevered lust for heading a genuinely authoritarian government. If he returns to the Oval Office, he’s already declared that he’ll “root out” what he’s called “communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
“Vermin” (a classic Hitlerian word choice) and those who would “poison” the nation must be wiped out, annihilated. Responding to criticism of such language, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the very notion “ridiculous,” even as he reinforced the point by insisting that the former president’s critics suffered from “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and “their entire existence will be crushed when President Trump returns to the White House.”
None of what Trump and his allies plan to do is likely to be passively accepted. In fact, they’re already anticipating a massive popular revolt and preparing for it. As The Wall Street Journal noted, in 2020 Trump first contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act, which allows a president to employ the military to enforce federal laws under special circumstances, to break up protests related to the murder of George Floyd and other African Americans by the police and racists. He was talked down. Its use was then suggested by Trump ally Roger Stone and evidently considered by the president as a way to “put down” any “leftwing protests” related to the 2020 election. Again, the idea went nowhere.
The third time, however, could be the deadly charm. The Washington Post has reported that Trump is now considering invoking the Insurrection Act on his first day back in office. One thing is certain: Should he somehow, despite four criminal indictments and multiple trials, return to the White House on January 20, 2025, we can’t say we weren’t warned.
Italian labor unions led a massive 24-hour general strike on Monday to protest Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of demonstrators rallying in dozens of cities across Italy.
Protesters took to squares, streets, transport hubs, ports, university campuses, and other spaces in more than 75 cities and towns, rallying under the call to "Block Everything." Places including schools, train stations, and retail stores were shut for the day.
"The strike is called in response to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip, the blockade of humanitarian aid by the Israeli army, and the threats directed against the... Global Sumud Flotilla, which has on board Italian workers and trade unionists committed to bringing food and basic necessities to the Palestinian population," explained Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), a grassroots union confederation known for its militant stance on labor and political issues.
In Rome, tens of thousands of Palestine defenders rallied at the Termini rail station, Italy's largest, with many of the demonstrators occupying the building.
While protest activities snarled traffic in some parts of the Italian capital, many Roman motorists showed solidarity with the demonstrators by honking their horns and raising their fists into the air.
Watch: Pro-Gaza protesters who blocked a highway near Rome were met with visible solidarity from drivers. Regional news coverage of the paralyzed Central Station showed only people expressing support for the protest.Source: Paolo Mossetti on X (@paolomossetti)
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— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) September 22, 2025 at 11:35 AM
Milan saw an estimated 50,000 people turn out to locations including the central rail station, where some protesters damaged property and clashed with police, who said 10 people were arrested and 60 officers were injured.
“If we don’t block what Israel is doing, if we don’t block trade, the distribution of weapons and everything else with Israel, we will not ever achieve anything,” protester Walter Montagnoli, who is the Base Unitary Confederation's (CUB) national secretary, told The Associated Press at a march in Milan.
In Bologna—home to the world's oldest continuously operating university—students occupied lecture halls and thousands of demonstrators took to the streets, including the Tangenziale, the ring highway around the city, where police attacked them with water cannons and tear gas.
Dockworkers and other demonstrators marched and blocked ports in cities including Genoa, Trieste, and Livorno.
Thousands of protesters also blocked the main train station in Naples.
Source: Potere al Popolo via X (@potere_alpopolo)
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— Drop Site (@dropsitenews.com) September 22, 2025 at 11:06 AM
In the Adriatic seaside resort of Termoli, hundreds of student-led Palestine defenders rallied in St. Anthony's Square and, with Mayor Nicola Balice's permission, draped a Palestinian flag from the façade of City Hall.
"Faced with such an important subject, the genocide in Palestine, we students... said this would be a nonpartisan demonstration because in the face of what is happening in the Gaza Strip—hospitals bombed, children killed every day—there can be no political ideology," said one Termoli protester. "We must all be united.”
Some participants in Monday's general strike pointed the finger at their own government.
"In the face of what is happening in Gaza you have to decide where you are," Italian General Confederation of Labor leader Maurizio Landini told La Stampa. "If you don’t tell the Israeli government that you have to stop and don't send them more weapons, but instead you keep sending them... you actually become complicit in what’s happening.”
While European nations including Ireland, Norway, Spain, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Luxembourg, and Denmark have formally recognized Palestine or announced their intent to do so since October 2023, Italy has given no indication that it will follow suit. More than 150 of 193 United Nations member states have recognized Palestine.
Although increasingly critical of Israel's 718-day genocidal assault—which has left at least 241,000 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing in Gaza—right-wing Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been accused of complicity in genocide for actions including presiding over arms sales to the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Meloni has rejected the ICC warrants and said Netanyahu would not be arrested if he enters Italy.
"Meloni should listen to the voice of those who are peacefully protesting and asking her to act, rather than curling up to Washington to protect her friend, the war criminal Netanyahu," Giuseppe Conte, who leads the independent progressive Five Star Movement, said Monday on social media. "Meloni should take a stand with the facts against those who have slaughtered 20,000 children, rather than limiting herself to saying, 'I do not agree.' And she should stop running away from the debate in Parliament."
As US President Donald Trump faces mounting accusations of authoritarian conduct, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority on Monday empowered him to proceed with firing a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission and agreed to review a 90-year-old precedent that restricts executive power over independent agencies such as the FTC.
Trump in March fired the FTC's two Democratic commissioners, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya, without cause. Slaughter fought back, and US District Judge Loren AliKhan allowed her to return to work while the case continued. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld that decision, but it was halted Monday by the nation's top court.
Monday's decision was unsigned, though the three liberals collectively dissented, led by Justice Elena Kagan. In addition to letting Trump move forward with ousting Slaughter, the majority agreed to reconsider the precedent established with Humphrey's Executor v. United States, a 1935 case that centered on whether the Federal Trade Commission Act unconstitutionally interfered with the executive power of the president.
In Humphrey's Executor, the high court found that Congress' removal protections for FTC members did not violate the separation of powers. Along with revisiting the precedent established by that landmark decision in December, the justices plan to weigh whether a federal court may prevent a person's removal from public office.
The court's stay allowing Trump to fire Slaughter was granted as part of the court's emergency process, or shadow docket. In a short but scathing dissent, Kagan noted that it is part of a recent trend: "Earlier this year, the same majority, by the same mechanism, permitted the president to fire without cause members of the National Labor Relations Board, the Merits Systems Protection Board, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission."
"I dissented from the majority's prior stay orders, and today do so again. Under existing law, what Congress said goes—as this court unanimously decided nearly a century ago," she wrote. In Humphrey's Executor, Kagan continued, "Congress, we held, may restrict the president's power to remove members of the FTC, as well as other agencies performing 'quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial' functions, without violating the Constitution."
"So the president cannot, as he concededly did here, fire an FTC commissioner without any reason. To reach a different result requires reversing the rule stated in Humphrey's: It entails overriding rather than accepting Congress' judgment about agency design," she argued. "The majority may be raring to take that action, as its grant of certiorari before judgment suggests. But until the deed is done, Humphrey's controls, and prevents the majority from giving the president the unlimited removal power Congress denied him."
More broadly, Kagan declared that "our emergency docket should never be used, as it has been this year, to permit what our own precedent bars. Still more, it should not be used, as it also has been, to transfer government authority from Congress to the president, and thus to reshape the nation's separation of powers."
Kagan, of course, is correct that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Humphrey's Executor and allow the president to fire leaders of any independent agency (other than the Fed—maybe?!). She's also right to bemoan the fact that SCOTUS effectively overruled Humphrey's on the shadow docket already.
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjsdc.bsky.social) September 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
Sandeep Vaheesan, legal director at the anti-monopoly think tank Open Markets Institute, slammed the court in a Monday statement.
"Today, in a one-paragraph order, the Supreme Court authorized President Trump's illegal firing of Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and his ongoing destruction of the independent, bipartisan Federal Trade Commission," Vaheesan said.
"As Justice Kagan wrote in her dissent, Commissioner Slaughter was fired without cause and is clearly entitled to her position under the FTC Act and controlling Supreme Court precedent," he added. "The court could override Congress' decision to create an independent FTC on specious constitutional grounds but until it takes that step Commissioner Slaughter has a right to her job.”
While the justices agreed to take Slaughter's case, they turned away petitions from two ousted Democratic appointees referenced by Kagan: Cathy Harris of the Merit Systems Protection Board and Gwynne Wilcox of the National Labor Relations Board. According to SCOTUSblog: "The court did not provide any explanation for its decision not to take up Harris' and Wilcox's cases at this time. They will continue to move forward in the lower courts."
The New York Times noted that "the justices are separately considering the Trump administration’s request to remove Lisa Cook as a Federal Reserve governor. The Supreme Court has yet to act, but has suggested that the central bank may be insulated from presidential meddling under the law."
However, as Law Dork's Chris Geidner highlighted on social media, the second question the justices will consider in the Slaughter case, regarding courts preventing removals from public office, "would have implications even for the 'Fed carveout' exception that the court suggested exists."
US Sen. Elizabeth Warren is calling for an investigation into the Department of Housing and Urban Development after several whistleblowers reported that Trump appointees have gutted enforcement of the decades-old law banning housing discrimination.
A New York Times report published Monday, quotes "half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s fair housing office" who "said that the Trump political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs" enforcing the 1968 Fair Housing Act "which involve investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, lenders and others who discriminate based on race, religion, gender, family status or disability."
In a video posted to social media, Warren (D-Mass.) explained that “if you’re a mom protecting her kids from living with an abusive father or if you’re getting denied a mortgage because of the color of your skin, you have civil rights protection under US law. But the Trump administration has been systematically destroying these federal protections for renters and homeowners.”
According to the Times, when President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency, formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk, launched its crusade to dismantle large parts of the federal government at the start of Trump's second term earlier this year, the Office of Fair Housing (OFH) had its staff cut by 65% through layoffs and reassignments, with the number of employees dropping from 31 to 11. Just six of the remaining staff now work on fair housing cases.
The number of discrimination charges pursued by the office has plummeted since Trump took office. In most years, it has 35. During Trump's second term, the office has pursued just four. Meanwhile, it's obtained just $200,000 total in legal settlements after previously obtaining anywhere from $4 million to $8 million per year.
Emails and memos obtained by the Times show a pattern of Trump appointees obstructing investigations:
In one email, a Trump appointee... described decades of housing discrimination cases as “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary.”
In another, a career supervisor in the department’s [OFH] objected to lawyers being reassigned to other offices; the supervisor was fired six days later for insubordination.
In a third, the office’s director of enforcement warned that Trump appointees were using gag orders and intimidation to block discrimination cases from moving forward. The urgent message was sent to a US senator, who is referring it to the department’s acting inspector general for investigation.
Several lawyers said they have been restricted from using past cases in enforcement and communicating with certain clients without approval from Trump's appointees.
A memo also reportedly went out to employees informing them that documents “contrary to administration policy” would be thrown out, and that “tenuous theories of discrimination” would no longer be pursued.
Among those supposedly "tenuous" cases have been ones involving appraisal bias—the practice of undervaluing homes owned by Black families—zoning restrictions blocking housing for Black and Latino families, and cases related to discrimination against people over gender or gender expression.
The administration has also abandoned cases related to the racist practice of "redlining"—the decades-old practice of denying mortgages to minorities and others in minority neighborhoods—with memos from Trump appointees calling the concept "legally unsound."
The changes follow a sweeping set of executive orders from Trump during his first week in office, targeting "diversity equity, and inclusion" (DEI) programs. Employees at the Office of Fair Housing told the Times that Trump appointees had begun to describe much of the department's work as "an offshoot of DEI."
A HUD spokesperson, Kasey Lovett, told the Times that it was "patently false" to suggest that the administration was trying to weaken the Fair Housing Act. She pointed out that HUD was still handling approximately 4,100 cases this year, on par with the previous year. As the Times notes, "Lovett did not address, however, how many of the cases had been investigated or had resulted in legal action."
According to the Times:
Hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and some settlements revoked, even when accusations of discrimination had been substantiated, according to the interviews and the internal communications.
In one instance, a large homeowner’s association in Texas was found to have banned the use of housing vouchers by Black residents. That case had been referred to the Justice Department, but the referral was abruptly withdrawn by the new Trump appointees.
Four current staff members have provided the trove of documents to Warren, who announced Monday that she'd sent a request to Brian Harrison, HUD’s acting inspector general, to open an investigation into its handling of discrimination cases.
Warren said that the documents "show the extent of the Trump administration's attack on civil rights and show how the administration appears to be ignoring the law."
In a press release from the Democrats on the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Warren, the ranking member, highlighted the particularly devastating impact staffing cuts have had on the enforcement of complaints under the Violence Against Women Act, which the Times says only two of the six lawyers remaining at HUD have experience with.
According to Warren, whistleblowers said the cuts were "placing survivors in greater danger of suffering additional trauma, physical violence, and even death."
Warren said that as a result of the hundreds of dropped cases, "Now people are asking, 'well, why would I file a case at all if nothing's going to happen?'"
Calling for an independent investigation, Warren said, "We wrote these laws to make this a fairer America, and now it's time to enforce those laws."