Donald Trump’s attorney general said Tuesday the Justice Department will limit its use of a tactic employed aggressively under President Obama — suing police departments for violating the civil rights of minorities.
“We need, so far as we can, to help police departments get better, not diminish their effectiveness. And I’m afraid we’ve done some of that,” said Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“So we’re going to try to pull back on this,” he told a meeting of the nation’s state attorneys general in Washington.
Sessions said such a move would not be “wrong or insensitive to civil rights or human rights.” Instead, he said people in poor and minority communities must feel free from the threat of violent crime, which will require more effective policing with help from the federal government.
While crime rates are half of what they were a few decades ago, recent increases in violent crimes do not appear to be “an aberration, a one-time blip. I’m afraid it represents the beginning of a trend.”
Sessions said he will encourage federal prosecutors to bring charges when crimes are committed using guns. Referring local drug violations that involve the use of a firearm, for example, to federal court can result is often a stiffer sentence than would be imposed by state courts.
“We need to return to the ideas that got us here, the ideas that reduce crime and stay on it. Maybe we got a bit overconfident when we’ve seen the crime rate decline so steadily for so long,” he said.
Under the Obama Administration, the Justice Department opened 25 investigations into police departments and sheriff’s offices and was enforcing 19 agreements at the end of 2016, resolving civil rights lawsuits filed against police departments in Ferguson, Missouri; Baltimore, New Orleans, Cleveland and 15 other cities.
On Monday, Sessions said he is reviewing the Justice Department’s current policy toward enforcing federal law that prohibits possession of marijuana, but has made no decision about whether to get tougher.
His opposition to legalization is well known, and he emphasized it during an informal gathering of reporters . “I don’t think America will be a better place when more people, especially young people, smoke pot.”
States, he said, can pass their own laws on possession as they choose, “but it remains a violation of federal law.”
The current policy, spelled out in a 2013 memo from former deputy attorney general James Cole, said federal prosecutions would focus on distribution to minors, involvement of gangs or organized crime, sales beyond a state border, and growing marijuana plants on federal land.
President Trump’s Justice Department is ending the government’s opposition to a controversial voter ID law in Texas, according to a group involved in the case.
Danielle Lang, the Campaign Legal Center’s deputy director of voting rights, told The Associated Press and Talking Points Memo on Monday that the Justice Department informed her group and others suing the state of the government’s change in position.
After six years of legal wrangling, the Justice Department will no longer argue that Texas intentionally sought to discriminate against minorities when it passed the law that mandates voters show certain forms of identification before casting a ballot.
“This signals to voters that they will not be protected under this administration,” Lang told Talking Points Memo.
“We have already had a nine-day trial and presented thousands of pages of documents demonstrating that the picking and choosing of what IDs count was entirely discriminatory and would fall more harshly on minority voters. So for the [Justice Department] to come in and drop those claims just because of a change of administration is outrageous.”
Lang said that despite the federal government’s change of heart, organizations challenging the Texas law will press on.
While a federal appeals court struck down the voter ID law a few months before the 2016 elections on the grounds that it had a discriminatory effect, it sent the question about intent back to the lower courts. The Supreme Court rejected Texas’s appeal earlier this year on the first question.
The Justice Department is expected to lay out its new position during a hearing on Tuesday. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is a supporter of voter identification laws as long as they are “properly drafted” and has voiced skepticism about the Voting Rights Act.
Republicans argue that the limits are unnecessary burdens on a state’s right to make its own laws to protect the ballot box.
During a town hall hosted by Fox News Tuesday night, White House adviser Stephen Miller confirmed that President Donal Trump’s new executive order — which will replace the immigration ban on seven majority-Muslim countries — will effectively have the same policy outcome.
As one of the architects of the first executive order, Miller insisted that “nothing was wrong with the first executive order” — although the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to reinstate the ban earlier this month. Miller admitted that a new order was necessary to avoid the judicial rulings from the appellate courts.
Although there will be changes in the language of the upcoming executive order, Miller said the policy outcome will remain the same.
“One of the big differences that you are going to see in the executive order is that it is going to be responsive to the judicial ruling which didn’t exist previously,” Miller said. “And so these are mostly minor, technical differences. Fundamentally, you are still going to have the same, basic policy outcome for the country.”
Critics were quick to point out that Miller had involuntarily provided civil rights organizations the material needed to challenge the order once it’s signed by the president.
Lawyers that challenged the first executive order cited former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s remarks on Fox News, when he said that Trump sought advice for a legal way to carry out a “Muslim ban.” Civil rights activists argued that Giuliani’s statement was evidence that the Trump administration wanted to discriminate against people of a certain religion.
Miller still believes the appellate courts’ rulings were wrong.
“The rulings from those courts were flawed, erroneous and false,” he said. “The president’s actions were clearly legal and constitutional and consistent with the longstanding tradition of presidents of the past.”
In a treatment describing a documentary on a purported Muslim plan to take over America, Stephen Bannon, now President Donald Trump’s top strategic adviser, described the “American Jewish community” as among unwitting “enablers” of jihad.
Bannon, a former banker who transitioned into a career as an ultranationalist propagandist, culminating in his becoming a top adviser to the Trump campaign, made several right-wing documentaries in the 2000s.
The Washington Post reported Friday on a 2007 proposal for a documentary that was never made called “The Islamic States of America.” It would be comprised of interviews of people who, like Bannon, believe that the threat posed to the West is broader than Islamist extremist terrorists, embracing an array of Muslim advocacy groups.
It describes as “enablers among us” – albeit with the “best intentions” — major media outlets, the CIA and FBI, civil liberties groups, “universities and the left” and the “American Jewish Community.”
It also describes “front groups and disingenuous Muslim Americans who preach reconciliation and dialogue in the open but, behind the scenes, advocate hatred and contempt for the West.”
Among these named by Bannon as “cultural jihadists” are the Islamic Society of North America, a group that had associations with the Muslim Brotherhood at its founding in the 1960s, but in recent years has worked closely with Jewish groups, including in combating anti-Semitism and raising Holocaust awareness among Muslims.
Before joining Trump’s campaign last summer, Bannon helmed Breitbart News, a site that is stridently pro-Israel, but which also has featured white nationalists and which Bannon once described as a platform for the “alt-right,” a loose-knit alliance that includes within it anti-Semites as well as right-wing Jews.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is citing the Sunday attack on Muslims in Quebec City as an example of why his own policies are needed.
“We condemn this attack in the strongest possible terms. It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant, and why the president is taking steps to be proactive, rather than reactive, when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” press secretary Sean Spicer said at his daily briefing on Monday.
Spicer did not specifically identify the policies he was referring to.
Spicer used similar words when asked directly about the travel ban later in the briefing, saying Trump was not going to “wait and react.”
“There is nothing nice about searching for terrorists before they can enter our country. This was a big part of my campaign. Study the world!” Trump himself wrote on Twitter earlier Monday.
The Quebec City massacre killed six Muslims who were attending a mosque for evening prayers. Trump’s policies have been condemned by Muslim groups and many others around the world as discrimination against Muslims.
Trump spoke to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau earlier on Monday.
Spicer said Trump offers “his condolences as well as his thoughts and prayers to the victims and their family and to all Canadians.”
He noted that Trudeau was “cautious to draw conclusions of the motives at this stage of the investigation.” He said “the president shared those thoughts.”
President Trump signed an executive order Friday instituting “extreme vetting” of refugees, aimed at keeping out “radical Islamic terrorists.”
“I’m establishing a new vetting measure to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” Trump said during his signing of the order. “We don’t want them here. We want to make sure we are not admitting into our country the very threats our soldiers are fighting overseas.”
According to drafts of the executive action, the order bars people from the Muslim-majority countries of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia or Yemen from entering the United States for 30 days and suspends the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days. The program will be reinstated “only for nationals of countries for whom” members are vetted by Trump’s administration.
In an interview Friday with the Christian Broadcast Network, Trump said he plans to help persecuted Christians.
“Do you know if you were a Christian in Syria it was impossible, at least very tough, to get into the United States?” Trump said. “If you were a Muslim you could come in, but if you were a Christian, it was almost impossible and the reason that was so unfair, everybody was persecuted in all fairness, but they were chopping off the heads of everybody but more so the Christians. And I thought it was very, very unfair.”
In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union declared Trump’s action “just a euphemism for discrimination against Muslims.”
From both legal and historical perspectives, the plan to ban refugees from specific countries is within the powers granted to the president under current law and historical precedent, according to Charles Haynes, vice president of the Newseum Institute’s Religious Freedom Center. However, whether the president can limit the ban to one religious group is another question.
Many Muslims, especially Shiites, are among the religious minorities under attack, Haynes said. This “raises moral and humanitarian concerns about excluding them from entrance to the U.S. while permitting people of other faiths,” he said. “Whether this policy rises to the level of a constitutional violation is uncertain and will be debated by constitutional scholars in the coming weeks.”
Issues related to the Constitution and religion are usually associated with matters of sex, such as contraceptives and LGBT discrimination, but some observers said they expect Trump’s actions on immigration to raise new challenges for religious freedom, according to Chelsea Langston Bombino of the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance at the Center for Public Justice. Several organizations, she noted, are speaking out against orders that “will hurt the very people that their organizations were established, out of a religious calling, to serve,” she said.
Trump’s actions have been decried by several religious groups this week. “The expected cutbacks to U.S. refugee programs and funding will compromise our ability to do this work and the infrastructure needed to serve refugees in the years to come,” evangelical ministry World Relief said in a statement.
And in a strongly worded statement, Rabbi Jack Moline, the Interfaith Alliance president, noted that this decision was announced on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“For decades, the United States has prided itself as a safe bastion for refugees around the globe escaping war and persecution,” he said. “President Trump is poised to trample upon that great legacy with a de facto Muslim ban.”
In addition to seemingly implying the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims may not be “civilized,” in his first Tweet after being confirmed as President, Donald Trump demand for the West to “change thinking.”
A spokesman for the pro-Trump Great America PAC cited World War II Japanese internment camps as “precedent” for President-elect Donald Trump’s discussed plan for a Muslim registry system.
Carl Higbie, a former Navy SEAL, appeared on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” to argue in favor of the plan, which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach said in a Reuters interview is being modeled after the highly controversial National Security Entry-Exit Registration System implemented after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Confronted with questions about the constitutionality of such a plan, Higbie cited history, in particular the forced relocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.
“We’ve done it based on race, we’ve done it based on religion, we’ve done it based on region,” he said. “We’ve done it with Iran back — back a while ago. We did it during World War II with [the] Japanese.”
Pressed by host Megyn Kelly on whether he was suggesting re-implementing the internment camps, Higbie said no, before adding: “I’m just saying there is precedent for it.”
Kelly then swiftly rebuked his suggestion.
“You can’t be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is gonna do,” she said.
The conversation around a proposed registry comes less than one year after Trump first proposed a “complete shutdown” on Muslims entering the United States. Since announcing it, Trump has reiterated his support for a ban, but also rebranded it as “extreme vetting” and proposed narrowing its scope to persons from “territories” with a history of terror.
Trump has himself said that he may have supported internment during WWII. “I certainly hate the concept of it. But I would have had to be there at the time to give you a proper answer,” Trump told TIME in December 2015. Then-candidate Trump also said during an appearance on MSNBC that he viewed internment and a ban on Muslims as “a whole different thing.”
During the much anticipated presidential debate Sunday evening, Republican nominee Donald Trump was finally asked by a Muslim American how he, as president, would respond to the rise of Islamophobia. It was a unique and powerful opportunity for the businessman to address the shockingly anti-Islam tenor of his campaign, which many hate-group experts say has precipitated an unprecedented spike in Islamophobic violence across the United States.
Instead, Trump responded with an answer that was not only blatantly Islamophobic, but also outright fallacious. In fact, his reply was so filled with anti-Islam sentiment that it’s worth breaking down into individual parts.
The exchange was initiated when Gorbah Hamed, an uncommitted Missouri voter and a Muslim American, asked how Trump would “help people like me deal with the consequences of being labeled as a threat to the country after the election is over.”
“Well, you’re right about Islamophobia—it’s a shame,” he began, seemingly unaware that his own candidacy is often specifically credited by hate-group experts as a driving force behind the recent uptick in anti-Islam sentiment. In fact, at least one such incident involved a report of a woman verbally and physically assaulting a Muslim woman in Washington, D.C. before justifying the attack by citing her support for Donald Trump.
But Trump wasn’t done.
“But…whether we like it or not there is a problem,” he continued. “We have to be sure that Muslims come in and report when they see something going on. When they see hatred going on, they have to report it.”
Trump has made this claim before. In the aftermath of the tragic Orlando massacre earlier this year, Trump said, “For some reason, the Muslim community does not report people like this.”
This accusation, both then and now, is patently false. Muslims in the Untied States do report when they see evidence of extremism, so much so that law enforcement often relies on them for tips. FBI director James Comey even said as much back in June while discussing the Orlando shootings.
[Muslim Americans] do not want people committing violence, either in their community or in the name of their faith, and so some of our most productive relationships are with people who see things and tell us things who happen to be Muslim,” he said. “It’s at the heart of the FBI’s effectiveness to have good relationships with these folks.”
Trump’s inaccurate assertion struck a chord with the Muslim American community, many of whom immediately took to Twitter to mock his statement using the hashtag #MuslimsReportStuff.
Yet Trump had more to say. To drive home his point about Muslims reporting violence, he claimed that “many people” saw weapons in the home of the San Bernardino shooters, implying that Muslims who knew the ISIS-linked terrorists simply did not tell police about their dark plans.
But as Richard Winton, a Pulitzer-prize winning Los Angeles Times journalist who covered the shootings, pointed out, that claim is also completely unsubstantiated.
And just in case you missed his point, Trump closed with an anti-Muslim argument that members of his own party have been using for years now: that president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “have to” use the term “radical Islamic terrorism” to ever fully combat terrorism perpetrated by those who claim to be followers of Islam.
“To solve a problem, you have to be able to be able to state what the problem is or at least say the name,” he said. “[Hillary Clinton] won’t say the name, and president Obama won’t say the name. But the name is there: it’s radical Islamic terror, and before you solve it, you have to say the name.”
This argument has been dismissed by security experts for some time, many of whom say that such terms only make fighting terrorism harder. Or, as Michael German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a former undercover FBI agent, said when asked about the term during a congressional hearing in June, that kind of language “puts us on a path to perpetual war.”
“[Such language] only serves to stoke public fear, xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry,” he said.
Ultimately, Trump didn’t have to spout explicitly anti-Muslim bigotry to be Islamophobic. Rather, his responses were in and of themselves Islamophobic because they were based on falsehoods that perpetuate a very specific, and unabashed inaccurate, narrative: that Muslims are generally dangerous, and those that aren’t are failing to help their fellow Americans.
Hamed herself was deeply unimpressed with Trump’s response.
“[Trump’s response] wasn’t an answer, actually, it was kind of like an accusation,” she told The Huffington Post.
Trump’s remarks were, in effect, a very honest “answer” to her question: if elected president, Trump, assuming he continues to voice the kinds of arguments he repeated last night, will “deal” with the rise of Islamophobia the same way he has throughout his campaign—by making it worse.
Donald Trump on Monday said police officers across U.S. can’t effectively carry out their counter-terrorism duties unless they’re allowed to engage in racial profiling.
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox and Friends” after he was asked for his idea on how cops should investigate and respond to terror plots, like the explosion that rocked Chelsea Saturday evening. “They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”
“We don’t want to do any profiling — if somebody looks like he has a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person and say I’m sorry because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world we’re not allowed to profile,” he added. “Give me a break.”
Trump, throughout his campaign, has pushed for the use of racial profiling — particularly in Muslim communities — as a policing tactic departments should use to combat terrorism, consistently disregarding the fact that such practices have not only been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but have been deemed ineffective by multiple studies.
Trump, on Monday, went on to claim that Israeli officials practice profiling and that the U.S. should look to its Middle Eastern ally, which is constantly under attack, as a model.
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in … They will take that person in. They will check it out.”
At a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Fla., later Monday Trump didn’t mention his fondness for profiling, but delved into his proposal to institute “extreme vetting” measures for anyone immigrating to the U.S.
“Immigration security is national security,” Trump said. “And we can’t have vetting if we don’t look at ideology.”
All of his claims were quickly rejected by several civil rights groups and lawmakers, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Let us (be) vigilant but not afraid,” she said. “We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion.”
Gov. Cuomo later warned against the very same idea.
Donald Trump on Monday said police officers across U.S. can’t effectively carry out their counter-terrorism duties unless they’re allowed to engage in racial profiling.
“Our local police, they know who a lot of these people are,” Trump said during an interview with “Fox and Friends” after he was asked for his idea on how cops should investigate and respond to terror plots, like the explosion that rocked Chelsea Saturday evening. “They are afraid to do anything about it because they don’t want to be accused of profiling. And they don’t want to be accused of all sorts of things.”
“We don’t want to do any profiling — if somebody looks like he has a massive bomb on his back, we won’t go up to that person and say I’m sorry because if he looks like he comes from that part of the world we’re not allowed to profile,” he added. “Give me a break.”
Donald Trump brags about breaking Chelsea bombing news
Trump, throughout his campaign, has pushed for the use of racial profiling — particularly in Muslim communities — as a policing tactic departments should use to combat terrorism, consistently disregarding the fact that such practices have not only been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court but have been deemed ineffective by multiple studies.
Trump, on Monday, went on to claim that Israeli officials practice profiling and that the U.S. should look to its Middle Eastern ally, which is constantly under attack, as a model.
“You know in Israel, they profile,” Trump said. “They’ve done an unbelievable job — as good as you can do. But Israel has done an unbelievable job. And they’ll profile. They profile. They see somebody that’s suspicious. They will profile. They will take that person in … They will take that person in. They will check it out.”
At a campaign rally in Fort Myers, Fla., later Monday Trump didn’t mention his fondness for profiling, but delved into his proposal to institute “extreme vetting” measures for anyone immigrating to the U.S.
Trump’s profile in ignorance
“Immigration security is national security,” Trump said. “And we can’t have vetting if we don’t look at ideology.”
All of his claims were quickly rejected by several civil rights groups and lawmakers, including Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Let us (be) vigilant but not afraid,” she said. “We’re going after the bad guys and we’re going to get them, but we’re not going to go after an entire religion.”
Gov. Cuomo later warned against the very same idea.
Jimmy Fallon defends questions to Donald Trump on ‘Tonight Show’
“We cannot lose who we are in effort to protect this country. We are a nation of immigrants,” he told MSNBC.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan), whose district includes the Chelsea neighborhood that was rocked by the Saturday night blast, compared Trump’s ideas to what the “Gestapo” secret police were tasked with doing in Nazi Germany.
“The idea that police are handcuffed because of PC is ridiculous. You can’t arrest somebody unless you have some reason to suspect them, you can’t bug someone’s home, unless you get a warrant,” he told the Daily News. “The idea of going to a situation like police states in Europe or China … I don’t think you want to go there. We want to be safe and keep our liberties.”
“We don’t want to become a police state, we don’t want our police to be like the Gestapo, and we’re doing a great job of keeping people safe while protecting our liberties,” he added.
“Israel isn’t a police state either, they have rules about warrants and bugging people without reason,” Nadler said.
The New York Civil Liberties Union said Trump was “talking out of both sides of his mouth” and suggested he didn’t even know how to correctly refer to various police tactics.
“Suspicion based policing is the opposite of racial profiling, which is unconstitutional. Based on the latest reports, it was suspicion based policing, not randomly rounding up thousands of innocent people who happen to be Muslim, that resulted in the arrest of the suspect in the Chelsea bombing,” NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman said.
In fact, since the NYPD disbanded a controversial unit that had been dedicated to surveilling the Muslim communities in April 2014, the department has thwarted at least 20 terrorist attacks.
The Demographics Unit, which was created in 2003 and later renamed the Zone Assessment Unit following uproar over disclosure of its activities, was closed in April of that year after it was revealed that the unit had overseen infiltrating Muslim communities, eavesdropping on conversations and had built detailed files on people’s eating, praying and shopping habits.
And on Sunday, shortly before being sworn in as the new NYPD commissioner, James O’Neill maintained that his department had nevertheless “over the last two years … foiled 20 plots in New York City.”
“That was done by a very professional highly trained law enforcement agencies,” he said.
Despite that fact, Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.), the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, suggested Trump’s calls should be heeded and repeated his own suggestion that U.S. law enforcement must target the Muslim community with extra surveillance.
“There should be much more surveillance of mosques,” King told The News. “It’s political correctness that we don’t do it.”
King declined to address Trump comments directly but called the actions of the disbanded NYPD Demographics unit “the way it should be done.”
“What the NYPD did for years for years was the right thing to do,” he said.
“President Obama and Hillary Clinton, when they say we need more outreach to the Muslim community, that’s a politically correct statement. There’s no harassment at all towards the Muslim community that’s all just propaganda,” King added. “As a general policy we should be surveilling the Muslim community, absolutely. That’s where the threat is coming from, and it’s totally constitutional.”
“The same thing was done in the Italian and Irish communities,” he said, referring to targeted policing of the Westies Gang and Italian mafia in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.
Donald Trump is putting forth a proposal that would be a clear violation the 1st, 4th, and 14th amendments to the United States Constitution, as well as existing laws.
Racial profiling is the practice of targeting individuals for police or security detention based on their race or ethnicity in the belief that certain minority groups are more likely to engage in unlawful behavior.
However, should America decide to go trough with a President Trump’s suggestion, we should be racially profiling white Christian males because you are more than 7 times as likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than by Muslim terrorists.
