Jump to content
Just visiting?

U.S. Politics

maqroll

By maqroll
in Off Topic

 Share

Recommended Posts

limpid Grand Master

limpid

Posted
  • Administrator
Posted

I hope we see a lot more of this. Aron Ra is standing for the senate in Texas.

Quote

Aron Ra, the charismatic science educator and atheist activist, has announced his intention to run for Texas State Senate in 2018. On a recent episode of Dogma Debate, Aron Ra explained why he felt the time was right to announce his intention to run. Inspired by Bernie Sanders and California State Senate candidate Steve Hill, Ra remarked that “in 2018, when I run for Texas State Senate, I’m going to do an advertising campaign along those lines, and I think people are going to be completely outraged at what they’ve had to put up with for the two years leading up to that point before I do.”

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Replies 24.4k
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

  • villakram

    1470

  • maqroll

    1469

  • StefanAVFC

    1195

  • HanoiVillan

    1174

Popular Days

Top Posters In This Topic

Popular Days

Popular Posts

choffer
choffer
Davkaus
Davkaus

Well, Firstly, the goal of senior republicans is to ban it nationwide, so there's an eye on the long game here. Secondly, there have already been rumblings of red states not looking kindly

sne
sne

I know every club has them but it still makes me sad that Villa does.

snowychap Community Regular

snowychap

Posted
Posted

Arrested while applying for a green card: US immigration experts fear policy shift

Quote

Leandro Arriaga arrived at the immigration office with his US citizen wife and three-month-old daughter on Wednesday.

Their lawyer knew the meeting was a risk. Arriago, 43, who had come to the US from the Dominican Republic in 2000, did have an order of deportation out against him. But she had never had a client detained at a US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) meeting before.

The arrest of Arriago and at least three other people in Massachusetts this week while they were applying for their green cards marks a dramatic shift in immigration policy, say attorneys and experts.

A total of five individuals were arrested in total according to a statement from Immigration Customs Enforcement (Ice), which was responding to “an investigative tip”.

Susan Church, the head of the New England chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says that at least three of those people were in the process of applying for green cards and did not have criminal records.

“This is what we all feared,” said Church.

She said Wednesday’s detentions, first reported by WBUR, signify that the goal of Donald Trump’s administration is not to target criminals or in the president’s words, “bad hombres”, for deportation.

“These people universally are trying to follow the laws, they are trying to follow the rules,” said Church. “[These] people are not placed in hotel rooms when they are arrested, they are placed in detention with other individuals with significant records, and they are held there without any significant opportunity to get bond, without any opportunity to see a judge, it’s utterly inhumane.”

Arriaga owns five properties, two in Lawrence and three Springfield, which he maintains and rents. He pays taxes, say his attorneys. Along with his four American born children, ranging in ages from three months, to thirteen years, he also supports his mother-in-law and his wife’s grandmother.

The Arriagas were meeting at USCIS to get an I-130 approval, or permission to apply for a green card on the basis of his wife’s citizenship. The purpose of the meeting was to determine the legitimacy of the couple’s relationship.

Catherine was interviewed first and then Leandro. Then the USCIS officer told the Arriagas and Palumbo to take a seat in the waiting area.

“She told us that she needed to review his previous file,” said Palumbo.

Then the officer called Leandro and Palumbo back. Palumbo said the USCIS officer sat them both down, asked if he was aware of a final order of removal, and called in two officers from Ice to detain him.

“They ask, ‘Do you want to see your wife and children? and he says, ‘No, no, I don’t want her to see me like this,’” said Catherine Arriaga.

Leandro Arriaga is now being held in the Bristol County jail.

“It’s too hard,” says Catherine of being left to care for her infant daughter on her own. “All his life here,” she says. “He has no criminal record, he has four children here, he is a hard worker and I don’t what happened.”

Church, who tracks detentions in New England, says that under the later years of the Obama administration, people who did not have criminal records were not priorities for deportation. Under George Bush’s administration, she only once had a client detained at the USCIS office, but she was released the same day.

The recent arrests mark a stark change in tactics, said Church. “This administration is processing them, detaining them, and my understanding is not letting them go,” she said.

Brian Doyle says he has a client who was detained under similar circumstances on the same day, 29 March. His client, a Brazilian woman in her late 30s, is also married to a US citizen and has a US born teenage child. She is a small business owner who employs between 8-12 people, and asked that her name not be released.

She came to the United States in 2001 and overstayed her visa. She does not have a criminal record, he says.

She was detained immediately after she and her husband were interviewed for I-130 approval, which would have paved the way to her obtaining a green card.

She is now being held in the Suffolk County house of corrections.

Doyle, who called her arrest “shocking”, says the detention is the first in his career under these circumstances.

Ice said in a statement that all five individuals arrested have deportation orders against them, and all will be “held in custody pending removal from the United States”.

Palumbo says she is working to get Arriaga released, but his arrest will dramatically change how she advises clients in the future. In a recent consultation, she met with a client who had an order of deportation but had been married to her American husband for five years. “I have to say to her, listen I have a client be arrested so I don’t feel comfortable doing a process if your husband is going to be arrested.”

She added: “This is a whole new class of people who now has to live underground.”

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
snowychap Community Regular

snowychap

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, KHV said:

5 people with outstanding deportation orders get arrested and are set for deportation. 

Well, yeah. That's what happens with a deportation order. 

You understand that the point of the article was to report a believed shift in policy from the point of view of (a couple of) the lawyer(s) involved and someone from the American Lawyers Immigration Association as the third sentence of the article says?

Quote

The arrest of Arriago and at least three other people in Massachusetts this week while they were applying for their green cards marks a dramatic shift in immigration policy...

To argue 'that's what happens' is to argue the case that these people are wrong - which may well be the case (never trust lawyers unless you're their client) - but you'd have to counter that with some facts, even anecdotal ones as reported in this story, to support that.

I note in the piece that it says under the later years of the Obama administration, does that mean that in the earlier years of the Obama administration this also occurred? Perhaps there's a hint that it may have done.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites
il_serpente Veteran

il_serpente

Posted
  • VT Supporter
Posted

Note also the reference to Trump's emphasis on the need to remove the "bad hombres" and how this exposes that as empty campaign rhetoric to stir up support for something totally different.  This is a guy who's working hard and paying taxes, with no criminal record, who's not taking a job from a "real" American.  He's at an interview to determine whether his relationship with his wife is real so that he can potentially get a green card.  They had to have known about the deportation order before inviting him for the interview, but they led him to believe he might be able to become legal and then grabbed him and left his wife with 4 kids and a collection of rental properties to maintain.  That's just plain f*cked up and a colossal misdirection of USCIS energy and waste of resources that doesn't do a thing to address the real problem and benefits no one.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • Popular Post
Brumerican Veteran

Brumerican

Posted
  • Popular Post
Posted
On 01/04/2017 at 12:44, limpid said:

I hope we see a lot more of this. Aron Ra is standing for the senate in Texas.

 

Aron Ra, the charismatic science educator and atheist activist, has announced his intention to run for Texas State Senate in 2018.

 

I wish him all the luck in the world !:D

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites
limpid Grand Master

limpid

Posted
  • Administrator
Posted
7 minutes ago, Brumerican said:

Aron Ra, the charismatic science educator and atheist activist, has announced his intention to run for Texas State Senate in 2018.

 

I wish him all the luck in the world !:D

The cities are pretty liberal - it depends which district he gets.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
villakram Rising Star

villakram

Posted
Posted (edited)

Susan Rice outed as having accessed intercepts and unmasked US citizen Trump and his US citizen associates for all and sundry to see (confirmed) AND a supposed journalist for the biased rag that is the NYT had this story over 2 days ago and decided to sit on it (tbc).

"Susan Rice, who served as the National Security Adviser under President Obama, has been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming Trump officials, Cernovich Media can exclusively report."

https://medium.com/@Cernovich/susan-rice-requested-unmasking-of-incoming-trump-administration-officials-30085b5cff16

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-03/top-obama-adviser-sought-names-of-trump-associates-in-intel

Edited by villakram
Link to comment
Share on other sites
StefanAVFC Grand Master

StefanAVFC

Posted
Posted (edited)

Trump being 'incidentally monitored' doesn't vindicate him. In fact, I'd argue it makes the suspicion of collusion stronger.

Foreign agents were monitored. Some, were talking to his campaign officials. Those officials were unmasked to properly understand the context of the discussion. That's how this works, and can only be done with warrants, warrants that require a judge and probable cause to issue...

It's obvious Trump/certain quarters of the media don't understand the law here, or the context around WHY his team was picked up in monitored communications. Or WHY they were unmasked. It's because what they were discussing had national security implications.

Then, him/his officials are giving info to Fox who are reporting that Trump was surveilled, which then Trump tweets at the FBI with that story.

And after all that, none of this has anything to do with Trump's ridiculous claim that Obama wiretapped him, that he made without proof and is yet to apologise for. 

 

Edited by StefanAVFC
Link to comment
Share on other sites
StefanAVFC Grand Master

StefanAVFC

Posted
Posted (edited)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/blackwater-founder-held-secret-seychelles-meeting-to-establish-trump-putin-back-channel/2017/04/03/95908a08-1648-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3_story.html?tid=a_breakingnews?tid=a_breakingnews

Quote

The United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Blackwater founder Erik Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump, according to U.S., European and Arab officials.

The meeting took place around Jan. 11 — nine days before Trump’s inauguration — in the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean, officials said. Though the full agenda remains unclear, the UAE agreed to broker the meeting in part to explore whether Russia could be persuaded to curtail its relationship with Iran, including in Syria, a Trump administration objective that would likely require major concessions to Moscow on U.S. sanctions.

Though Prince had no formal role with the Trump campaign or transition team, he presented himself as an unofficial envoy for Trump to high-ranking Emiratis involved in setting up his meeting with the Putin confidant, according to the officials, who did not identify the Russian.

Prince was an avid supporter of Trump. After the Republican convention, he contributed $250,000 to Trump’s campaign, the national party and a pro-Trump super PAC led by GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, records show. He has ties to people in Trump’s circle, including Stephen K. Bannon, now serving as the president’s chief strategist and senior counselor. Prince’s sister Betsy DeVos serves as education secretary in the Trump administration. And Prince was seen in the Trump transition offices in New York in December.

U.S. officials said the FBI has been scrutinizing the Seychelles meeting as part of a broader probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged contacts between associates of Putin and Trump. The FBI declined to comment.

The Seychelles encounter, which one official said spanned two days, adds to an expanding web of connections between Russia and Americans with ties to Trump — contacts that the White House has been reluctant to acknowledge or explain until they have been exposed by news organizations.

“We are not aware of any meetings and Erik Prince had no role in the transition,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.

A Prince spokesman said in a statement: “Erik had no role on the transition team. This is a complete fabrication. The meeting had nothing to do with President Trump. Why is the so-called under-resourced intelligence community messing around with surveillance of American citizens when they should be hunting terrorists?”

Prince is best known as the founder of Blackwater, a security firm that became a symbol of U.S. abuses in Iraq after a series of incidents including one in 2007 in which the company’s guards were accused — and later criminally convicted — of killing civilians in a crowded Iraqi square. Prince sold the firm, which was subsequently re-branded, but has continued building a private paramilitary empire with contracts across the Middle East and Asia.

well okay.

Edited by StefanAVFC
Link to comment
Share on other sites
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...
Â