Biden Rushes to Block Some of Trump’s Mass Deportations

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it will extend the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of South American immigrants living in the United States.

It’s a final Hail Mary by the Biden administration for undocumented immigrants, with little more than a week left on the clock before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House.

The department noted that roughly 600,000 Venezuelans and more than 200,000 Salvadorans living in the U.S. would be permitted to stay for another 18 months, while the program maintaining their status faces an uncertain future under Trump.

Homeland Security cited “environmental conditions” in El Salvador, such as heavy storms, “that prevent individuals from returning,” as well as a “severe humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela under the “Maduro regime.” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on Friday for a third six-year term, despite a six-month-long election dispute and international condemnation.

The extension of temporary protected status stands in stark contrast to the proposed policies of Trump, who has made aggressive immigration reform a cornerstone of his second-term agenda. The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttled immigration crackdown, including attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids against undocumented immigrants, which he plans to initiate as soon as his first day in office.

On Wednesday, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser Stephen Miller previewed some of Trump’s forthcoming policies in a meeting with Senate Republicans, revealing the administration’s intention to leverage Title 42—a pandemic-era public health policy—to expel immigrants from the country before they can request asylum, continue construction on Trump’s border wall, and heavily wield the Immigration and Nationality Act in order to allow more state and local law enforcement to assist ICE.

Years of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric should be taken as a sign of his beliefs. During his recent presidential campaign, the MAGA leader leaned on appalling language that recalled Adolf Hitler’s fascistic verbiage designed to dehumanize his enemies. Trump referred to his political rivals—the GOP-anointed “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs”—as “vermin” and claimed that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”

Donald Trump is looking to reclaim one of his most useful tools of corruption: the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that the president-elect’s real estate company is in negotiations to take back the hotel, which is owned by the federal government but currently leased to the Hilton hotel chain. Eric Trump met with the bank in control of the hotel’s lease at Mar-a-Lago this week, according to sources who spoke with the Journal, although the discussions were inconclusive.

The Trump International Hotel was a hotbed for corruption and foreign conflicts of interest during Trump’s first term. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, for example, spent at least $259,724 at the hotel in 2017 while he was under investigation for money laundering. He used the presidential suite, which at the time was $10,000 per night.

Saudi officials spent at least $164,929 from late 2017 through 2018, and Trump approved a $1.3 billion weapons sale to the country shortly afterward. In all, at least six governments spent more than $750,000 at the hotel during Trump’s first administration.

“Anyone looking to curry favor with his administration could simply walk over to his namesake hotel a couple of blocks from the White House and flash cash,” executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington Noah Bookbinder said in 2021.

The hotel is now a Waldorf Astoria. The Trumps could reacquire it for at least $300 million.

Immediately after Donald Trump was finally sentenced in his hush-money case, the president-elect decided to try and make some money off it.

On Friday morning, after Judge Juan Merchan sentenced Trump to unconditional discharge, a sentence without imprisonment, fines, or probation, the president-elect fired off a fundraising email to supporters asking them to “stand with him.”

“They’re trying to sabotage the Presidential Transition process. They’re trying to END the presidency as we know it—just before I take office,” Trump wrote. “But together, we will put a stop to the LAWFARE and make our country GREAT once again.”

The email linked to a website with the message “After my RIGGED SENTENCING, do you still Stand with Trump? RESPOND TO TRUMP,” with suggested donations ranging from $10 to $3,300 listed below it.

It’s hard to see how a sentence that carries no real penalties would “end the presidency,” but Trump has repeatedly claimed that the case, which resulted in 34 felony convictions, was rigged against him. The president-elect has not hesitated to use news about him, even negative developments, to solicit money from his supporters, and is not above inciting rage for money.

After he was found guilty in the hush-money case in May, Trump also sent out a fundraising email right away. The president-elect used the July assassination attempt against him to sell grotesque themed merchandise, including gaudy sneakers. He invoked guillotines in a July fundraising email, and even used a Valentine’s Day message to his wife, Melania, to raise money last February.

Trump has never missed an opportunity to grift, and his second term will likely be no different. And now that he has escaped consequences in all of the criminal cases against him, there won’t be any limits on how low he will stoop to make a dollar.

Republicans aren’t interested in providing disaster aid to Californians suffering from the devastating wildfires, unless those Californians are ready to do exactly what they say. 

During an interview on Fox Business Friday, Representative Warren Davidson, a Republican from Ohio, said GOP lawmakers would be reluctant to help Californians who had been affected by the wildfires because they don’t agree with California’s policies. 

“People are losing their home insurance coverage for fire because of policies that the state government’s doing, and if they want the money, then there should be consequences where they have to change their policies,” said Davidson.

Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo noted that Warren’s Californian colleagues would continue to push for aid to “states prone to disasters” to have money allocated to dealing with those disasters.  

“Yeah, but California wants the money without changing the policies that are making the problem bad or worse, and I don’t see how Republicans could possibly support that,” Davidson said. “I mean, we support the people that are plagued by disaster, but we have to put pressure on the California government to change course here.”

It’s important to note that there are no “states prone to disasters” anymore, there are only states. Every corner of the United States, even those that are not historically affected by severe weather, will only continue to experience escalating natural disasters as climate change worsens. Earlier this year, Asheville, North Carolina, which was previously considered a potential climate safe haven, was devastated by catastrophic flooding after it was struck by Hurricane Helene.

It seems that Republicans such as Davidson, ready to play politics with disaster aid, are taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book. While he was president, Trump was reportedly hesitant to send aid to areas where people voted against him, such as wildfire-stricken California. Trump had to be shown a map of Trump voters in Orange County before he agreed to send help. 

Bartiromo asked Davidson whether there had been any Republican “pushback” against sending aid to California. 

“Yeah I think so, and I think, how do you do that?” Davidson replied. “Because you don’t want to send the message to families, ‘Oh, we’re not going to take care of you!’ They certainly didn’t have a problem saying that to the people in western North Carolina, uh, in the Biden administration.

“Instead, the Biden administration said, ‘Oh, we’re gonna take care of everything! And so, different response when it’s out there where the Hollywood elites live. So that’s disappointing from the Biden administration. Help is on the way from President Trump and a new administration,” he continued.

“But when it comes to congressional funding, the idea that we’re going to have an open checkbook, no matter how bad your policies are, is crazy,” Davidson added.

It’s unclear what Davidson is referring to here. The Biden administration approved more than $300 million for emergency assistance across North Carolina, which included $118 million in individual assistance to more than 87,600 households. The only people convinced that they weren’t providing aid were the GOP politicians hoping to use Hurricane Helene as political fodder for the forthcoming election. 

Also, for what it’s worth, the only one threatening not to take care of people suffering from disaster is Davidson. If Davidson doesn’t want to give the impression that that’s his “message,” one possible way to get around that is to say something else.

The Supreme Court signaled on Friday that it is considering upholding Congress’s ban on TikTok until the platform separates itself from its parent company, Chinese-owned ByteDance.

The court declined to pause the law while deliberating the case, implying that a decision could arrive before the ban is slated to take effect on January 19.

TikTok’s lawyer Noel Francisco explained the impact of the law in blunt terms before the court on Friday: “At least as I understand it, we go dark,” Francisco said, according to Forbes. “It’s essentially gonna stop operating, I think that’s the consequence of this law.”

TikTok has argued that the law banning its presence in the United States is a violation of its First Amendment rights, while the government has claimed the app’s erasure from the American market is a matter of national security.

Justices on both sides of the ideological spectrum appeared skeptical of TikTok’s arguments, pointing out that the law did not target free expression on the app itself but rather ByteDance’s foreign ownership and the residual implications of a powerful foreign algorithm in the U.S.

President-elect Donald Trump filed a brief with the court last month, urging the bench to pass on ruling on the ban until he takes office, when his lawyers argue he could “pursue a political resolution that could obviate the Court’s need to decide these constitutionally significant questions.”

But Trump has not always been on TikTok’s side. Before he left office in 2020, Trump attempted to eradicate TikTok via an executive order. He claimed that the video-sharing platform threatened “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

ByteDance announced shortly after President Joe Biden signed the ban—which gave TikTok an ultimatum to either sell its I.P. to an American owner or stop operating within the U.S.—that the company didn’t “have any plans to sell.” But that may have changed since the law passed at the start of the year. Last month, James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told NPR that China could be willing to trade off TikTok and its proprietary algorithm to American investors in exchange for a better deal from Trump on his massive tariff proposal.

Some of Trump’s allies could be waiting in the wings for that to happen. Major Republican donor Jeff Yass reportedly owns a 15 percent stake in TikTok. Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort has business ties to the Chinese media industry, and former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin revealed his own plans to acquire the social media company via an investor group just a day after the ban passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the House.