"What would Germany look like without Jews?"
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 3:33 PM
===
BREAKING: A farmworker at a Southern California cannabis farm has died, the United Farm Workers says, a day after being injured during an immigration raid by federal officers.
— NBC News (@nbcnews.com) July 11, 2025 at 5:36 PM
Per the NYTimes:
… The farmworker, Jaime Alanís, fell several stories to the ground from a greenhouse on Thursday, when federal agents raided a state-licensed cannabis farm in the agricultural region of Ventura County, Calif.
Mr. Alanis‘s condition had been the subject of confusion among officials, relatives and the media. On Friday, leaders with the United Farm Workers union said that Mr. Alanís had died on that day, and The New York Times and other media outlets reported that…
On Saturday evening, a lawyer retained by the family through the Mexican consulate said in a text message that Mr. Alanis had died on Saturday afternoon. The lawyer, Jesus Arias, added that the family decided to “disconnect” after tests for brain function yielded “no good results.” Mr. Arias said arrangements were being made to transfer Mr. Alanis’s body to his family in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
Elizabeth Strater, vice president for the United Farm Workers union, said in an interview on Friday that during the chaos of the raid, Mr. Alanís “fell 30 feet or more, and experienced devastating spinal and skull injuries.”
An official who was briefed on the situation said Mr. Alanís was from Michoacán, had been working at the farm for more than a decade and had been trying to flee from agents when he fell. He is in his late 50s.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said on Friday that Mr. Alanís had not been in federal custody and denied that the agents involved in the raid were the reason he climbed the greenhouse. “Although he was not being pursued by law enforcement, this individual climbed up to the roof of a greenhouse and fell 30 feet,” she said in a statement. Agents called for help, she added, “to get him care as quickly as possible.”
In a statement, Teresa Romero, president of the U.F.W., said that several farmworkers had been critically injured in the enforcement actions, and that others, including U.S. citizens, remained unaccounted for. She said those citizens who were detained “were forced to delete photos and videos of the raid from their phones” before being released…
Sounds like ICE killed a guy and then held american citizens hostage at gunpoint until they agreed to destroy the evidence
— Hemry, Local Bartender (@bartenderhemry.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 6:03 PM
===
The UFW can confirm farm workers were critically injured yesterday during chaotic raids in Ventura County, CA. Other workers, including US citizens, remain unaccounted for.
UFW staff is on the ground supporting impacted families.
Our full statement below. ⬇️
1/— United Farm Workers (@ufw.bsky.social) July 11, 2025 at 2:41 PM
The UFW can confirm farm workers were critically injured yesterday during chaotic raids in Ventura County, California. Others, including US citizens remain totally unaccounted for. 3/
Our staff is on the ground supporting families. Many workers-including US citizens, were held by federal authorities at the farm for 8 hours or more. US citizen workers report only being released after they were forced to delete photos and videos of the raid from their phones. 4/
The UFW is also aware of reports of child labor on site. The UFW demands the immediate facilitation of independent legal representation for the minor workers, to protect them from further harm. Farm workers are excluded from basic child labor laws. 5/
It is unfortunately not uncommon for teenagers to work in the fields. To be clear: detaining and deporting children is not a solution for child labor. 6/
These violent and cruel federal actions terrorize American communities, disrupt the American food supply chain, threaten lives and separate families. 7/
There is no city, state or federal district where it is legal to terrorize and detain people for being brown and working in agriculture. These raids must stop immediately. 8/
I sat in the courtroom for this hearing on Thursday and listened to the federal government bend over backwards to try and justify their roving patrols as not at all racist and unconstitutional
They failed spectacularly. Miller’s rhetoric is predictable &dangerous, but also the gov is full of idiots— Mel Buer (@melbuer.bsky.social) July 12, 2025 at 2:52 PM
I don’t know what gods, if any, Stephen Miller follows. But it has been my lived experience, since I was a tiny child, that Sekhmet, Goddess of Consequences, will not be outrun.
Well you may throw your rock and hide your hand
Workin’ in the dark against your fellow man
But as sure as God made black and white
What’s done in the dark will be brought to the light
Nukular Biskits
Hell isn’t hot enough for these people …
ETA: And I say that just as a pop-up shower has ended and the sun is back out in full force here. Weather.com says it’s 89, humidity at 66% for a heat index of 100. I think they’re on the low end.
pluky
Sure, I’ll delete stuff from my phone. You don’t need to know about the real time stream to my cloud account.
Chief Oshkosh
In the previous thread, Jeffro showed us a NYTimes op-ed telling us not to shun MAGAts.
I predict that that article will not age well.
Sister Golden Bear
During the raid ICE also disappeared a well-loved professor from the local state university who was gang tackled as he was attempting to help someone in a wheelchair escape the tear gas fired at protesters. ICE refuses to say where he is.
Bill Arnold
@pluky:
Oops, I triggered a manual backup to iCloud. Encrypted. Then locked my phone, long passphrase only, and powered it down.
Kent
Oh for God’s sake.
California without immigrants would look like West Virginia or eastern Kentucky.
JoyceH
It sounds like ICE is just rampaging in and rounding up all the Hispanics and then not bothering to sort them out later. When the Dem congressmen toured the Florida concentration camp, they weren’t allowed to enter the cells or talk with the prisoners, but one said someone in the back called out “I’m a US citizen”. There are six times more citizen Hispanics than undocumented Hispanics in this country. How many of them are going to wind up behind bars or dumping onto foreign battlefields?
frosty
Off-topic. Great song you linked, AL!
ETA: looked up the lyrics and chords and found out it’s a cover of a Johnny Cash song. Native Howl calls their music ThrashGrass. I’ll have to check them out.
On-topic: Stephen Miller and ICE are vile. And evil. Sooner or later …
Mike in Pasadena
@Chief Oshkosh: who is jeffro?
Mike in Pasadena
You can tell S. Miller does not know what he’s talking about about because in California if half the students are not in class, the school gets only half the money.
Steve LaBonne
@Kent: That’s what these abominable Nazis think the whole country SHOULD look like.
Steve LaBonne
@Mike in Pasadena: He may not even believe it himself, but he knows the red state MAGAs will eat it up.
frosty
@pluky: That’s one piece of Adam’s advice for protests: GoPro or phone set to save to the cloud. Burner phone, ideally.
Chief Oshkosh
@Mike in Pasadena: A person here at Balloon Juice, like you and me.
Anne Laurie
“God’s Gonna Cut You Down” was a traditional American folk song long before Johnny Cash resurrected it. First version I heard was by Odetta (couldn’t find a decent version on YouTube), and I remember being told it was a favorite of Black churches going back to before the Civil War.
oldgold
I fear we are building towards a Kent State like incident.
Mai Naem mobile
One of reasons Sheriff Joe lost his job in Maricopa County here is because of the lawsuits won by prisoners. I’ve forgotten the amount but IIRC it was around $150M. I have a feeling we are going to see the same thing with the feds, ICE and detention. I’d love to see an undercover reporter get a low level job at Alligator Auschwitz and report on the inner workings.
Trivia Man
@Chief Oshkosh: Welk, if even the liberal new york times says so, maybe i should reconsider my opposition to Magats.
nope
still think they are trash and i should oppose them with every fiber of my being
dc
@frosty:
These people were at their jobs having a normal day before ICE Nazis showed up. Regular people aren’t going to go around with burner phones. Maybe there might be some conversations about uploading and or sending immediately to others who can then keep passing the evidence on.
Nukular Biskits
@Mai Naem mobile:
And the problem is that those who come up with, enact and promote these hardline unconstitutional “conservative” policies that eventually result in multi-million dollar awards will never be held personally financially liable.
Another Scott
Relatedly, Popehat points us to a job posting for a manager at the Florida swamp camp.
12 hour shifts, 7 days a week. (84 hour work week.)
2-3 weeks on, 1 week off.
Duration of up to 12 months.
No benefits.
$80/hr.
I assume that decent, qualified, people will say “eh, no thanks”. But who knows.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Splitting Image
@Chief Oshkosh:
I note that none of the atrocities being committed by Trump and his goons are close to stopping, and if anything they are accelerating, so I fail to see why anyone ought to change their behaviour towards the maggots who voted for it.
The news organizations that made bank off of Biden’s alleged mental decline are continuing to do so, while at the same time they are covering up Trump’s actual mental decline. So I fail to see why anyone ought to change their behaviour towards them either.
Trivia Man
@Mai Naem mobile: paging Nellie Bly, paging Nellie Bly. Her courage and daring absolutely changed America.
frosty
@Anne Laurie: Even better. Thanks for the Wikipedia link.
Trivia Man
@oldgold: intentionally so. A shocking % of americans TODAY think kent state either “wasnt so bad” or “those dirty hippies had it coming.”
Martin
⅓ of Californias workforce are immigrants. I play little games to distract me when I’m worried about my family – one is to go around our health care providers offices and look at the list of languages they speak there. There’s always the big ones, but then there’s this whole pile of obscure ones from Southeast Asia, Africa, tribal languages, you name it. And you find that in EVERY office. If they have 20 employees, I guarantee one will speak a language you go ‘huh’ when you read. How’d they find their way here – that’s a story I’d like to hear.
When my wife had cancer I needed to ramp the game up a bit to keep from falling apart, so I tried to guess where all of her care providers were originally from. Almost nobody is from here – the city is too new. My wife is from CA (near Pasadena) but I’m originally from NY and sometimes you can tell. One of her 4 doctors was American (Massachusetts, he offered without my asking) the others were Persian, Chinese, and Polish. Nurses were Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, a bunch from Spanish-speaking countries, former Yugoslavia – and one other American, former USN. One technician was either Russian or Ukrainian (I’m not good at distinguishing those accents), one was Australian, a bunch more were repeats of countries above, including a second Pole (Poland turns out a lot of medical professionals in my experience). All told of the 30-40 or so doctors, nurses, techs, my guess is no more than 10% were born in the US. If not for immigrants, my wife would probably be counting days or dead.
I don’t think you’ll find a lot of people in California who aren’t acutely aware of how beneficial overall immigrants have been to our state. Our economy would be half its current size without them. Same holds for NY and probably a lot of cities around the US.
Sister Golden Bear
Great thread, and includes a couple citations from BJ posters/commenters, including Cole’s “anthrax and tire rims.”
ETA: Somehow the threading is a bit broken, so you’ll need to click on the poster’s page to see all of it.
Anne Laurie
@Another Scott: Old Chinese saying, I’m told: You do not use good iron to make nails, or good men to make soldiers.
Trump’s ICE doesn’t want qualified law enforcement workers; they want disposable peons who won’t have the knowledge or the backing to defend themselves, much less their charges, when situations inevitably go bad. ‘One bad apple’ kills a prisoner, or allows a few hundred prisoners to die due to neglect? Whocoodanode! Pontius Pilate’s hands will be clean!
TONYG
@Chief Oshkosh: “It depends”. None of my friends would have ever considered supporting Donald Trump. They’re not that kind of people. I have a cousin who (along with her husband and adult kids) are Trump supporters. I will not cut them off because they are family. I have a couple of acquaintances (former co-workers) who are Trump supporters. I will probably never talk to them again. In any event, I am under no illusion that Trump supporters will ever change for the better. Stupid, hate-filled people almost never become intelligent, decent people.
rikyrah
This is crazy. NURSES BEING ASKED TO PICK BLUEBERRIES?? DA PHUQ?😡😡 https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8hm3cMp/
Martin
@oldgold: Pretty sure we are. The pushback is getting more aggressive. Sooner or later someone will panic or see an opportunity. My understanding is the National Guard has invested a lot of time and energy in training to prevent another Kent State, but the same sure can’t be said about ICE (cue video from the other day of an ICE vehicle driving off dragging protesters).
TONYG
@Trivia Man: Nothing about the stupidity and hatefulness of the American people shocks me any more. To the degree that people even remember the Vietnam War (which ended a half-century ago) I’d bet that a lot of people view that war through the lens of that asinine “Rambo” movie. The roots that led to Trump are very deep.
New Deal democrat
A Canadian who has lived in the US as a legal resident since age 3
Is married to a U.S. citizen
Has 5 children
Has lived here for 43 years.
In 2004 and 2007 was charged with marijuana possession and driving with a suspended license only had to pay fines.
Went to a family vacation in Canada last Sunday.
Was denied re-entry into the US.
“I was definitely all for MAGA. But now I feel a little differently.”
bsky.app/profile/thetnholler.bsky.social/post/3ltsrcfvfc22x
Ooops!
Martin
@Sister Golden Bear: Sparrows and curtain rods should be in that thread.
Sister Golden Bear
@JoyceH:
Not just ICE, but Border Patrol as well, whose section chief essentially told LA to bend the knee. This thread captures only some of what’s going on.
Catholic bishops have offered dispensation from attending Mass to a million parishioners and telling them to stay home. The mayor of one city mayor just told residents to stay inside, don’t answer the door, and brace for ICE sweeps. ICE has blown doors off of houses and rammed chain link fence with armored vehicles.
If not Gestapo, why Gestapo-shaped?
WTFGhost
And all we have to do, is help his lord Thanos Scrote-chin, gather the 5 infinity stones in an infinity gauntlet, so he can erase half of humanity (and all of our individual humanity) with a snap of his fingers.
Steve LaBonne
@TONYG: Everything since the 2016 election has been an education in what country I’m actually living in. I really could have done without finding out this way.
Sister Golden Bear
@Martin:
It is.
New Deal democrat
@Splitting Image:
Every time the Supreme Court enables him, he takes a maximalist position and pushes further.
Per Stalin: “Probe with bayonets. If you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.”
kindness
I am really growing on the idea of re-purposing ‘Aligator Alcatraz’ for the defendents of the Nuremberg trials we are going to need after Trump’s crash & burn.
Martin
@rikyrah: No, no, they aren’t just being asked to pick blueberries. They’re being told that they should pick blueberries because it’ll help advance their career. The suggestion it’ll help their career is a fucking lie and that’s the real outrage.
How long do we think it’ll take before the farmworkers that ICE rounds up and puts in Alligator Alcatraz are put on work crews to pick crops in Florida for free? My money is on 6 weeks.
Martin
@Sister Golden Bear: Some universities are returning to offering classes remotely so students don’t need to come to campus. I know a number of the community colleges in the Central Valley have student populations that are half undocumented or more. And most of the ones who aren’t undocumented would get picked up for looking undocumented.
Martin
@Sister Golden Bear: Ah, missed it. One of our better contributions to this world.
Martin
@kindness: Gitmo. Don’t leave them someplace for the right to martyr themselves trying to break them out.
bjacques
@kindness: the NKVD did exactly that with Buchenwald, until 1950
Matt McIrvin
How does Stephen Miller imagine these people live? Does he not see them *doing work*? It’s absurd. Even ignoring that many of the people ICE is rounding up were not “illegal immigrants” until they were magically declared so.
Hoodie
@Matt McIrvin: These people live in fantasyland. We were in the VA mountains visiting some friends over the July 4 weekend. We went to a fireworks show at the Homestead near Hot Springs. A bunch of the staff were there, and they mostly sounded eastern European. There are no young locals to work in these places and they ain’t going to change beds or bus tables. They’ll move to Richmond or Raleigh for better paying jobs and more action. We stopped for lunch in Roanoke on the way back and were struck at the number of immigrant-run businesses. They’re not taking jobs, they’re creating them. I recall a few years back the mayor of Danville VA said the town would be dead without immigrants. And there is no way in hell these places will ever return to their manufacturing glory days.
Dman
Any chance of getting that Goddess here anytime soon?
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Martin: The last decade of her life my mother (who lived on the Peninsula), had caretakers from the large Tonganese community in the Bay Area. I hadn’t known there were a lot of immigrants from Tonga in N CA
ETA The excellent doctor who did my cataract operations this January had family of (I forget exactly) Iranian or Palestinian origin. She herself was originally from MN, IIRC. I’m a native of N CA, but a lot of people I know are from somewhere else. I keep reading that CA isn’t attractive to migrants (from abroad or other parts of the US) any longer, but I have seen no evidence of that.
Martin
He doesn’t care. He’s the one who planted the ‘remigration’ into Trumps head, which is just a polite way to say ‘ethnic cleansing’. Rubio must be on board with it to some degree since the proposed office is in the State Department. At least they seem to recognize that they’ll have to convince other counties to agree to accept the US citizens that are not, say, Mexican citizens back into Mexico so they can be denaturalized and deported.
Immigration is only a small part of the plan now. They’re opening the door to denaturalizing and deporting Latinos and others, whose ancestry traces back to California or Texas when they were still part of Mexico, and sending them back to Mexico. That’s the plan.
I’ve said before that the right defends Israel not because they care about Jews but because Israel is a template they intend to apply to the US to make it a white Christian homeland where white Christians have protected status and everyone else at best is a secondary citizen, if not pushed out of the country entirely through other mechanisms. JD Vance is working on the first/second class status side of the project. Miller on the immigration/remigration side. Rubio is supposed to be the competent administrator who can put enough legal effort around the exercise that USSC will go along with the idea (as they already have allowing the US to pay to intern non-citizens in arbitrary countries). They’re already exploring denaturalizing citizens that they believe didn’t follow the immigration path to the letter (which would likely include Musk and Melania, but it will of course be very selectively applied).
Archon
@Another Scott: Do you think they are looking for decent, qualified people?
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: I don’t think they really care much about deporting anyone– the camps like Gator Gulag are the endpoint, unless they can get someone in a prison camp elsewhere. Look at the way ICE sometimes nabs people who are *leaving* the country and prevents them from getting out free.
Matt McIrvin
Also, where does Stephen Miller think *doctors* come from? The administration is shutting down legal immigration and making war on the universities. We won’t have any doctors.
Another Scott
@Archon: No, not really.
But one can point to evidence like that to try to point out the reality to the normies.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Emily68
@Mike in Pasadena: That’s what I thought, too.
Also, while I know nothing about hospital economics, I bet if the number of patients showing up at the ER dropped very much, the hospital would lay off staff, and so even if your grandmother had been a member of the DAR, you still could have a wait a while before you were treated.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: I think they’re endpoints until they can figure out how to deport. The courts have shut that aspect of their plan down to a fair degree so far, so they’re going to continue with the project and hope to solve that problem down the road, warehousing people as they go. That’s why I said that I expect they’ll put the detainees on work crew and rent them out to local farmers because they understand the cost of the project both immediately and to the overall economy.
As to the folks trying to leave getting nabbed, that doesn’t seem to be a structural project, and seems pretty random. I attribute that more to the normal authoritarian process of letting go of oversight and allowing the on-the-ground workers to do what they want. My guess is those people nabbed aren’t intended to be held, rather to serve as a deterrent to anyone who would come here on any kind of a visa. A lot of deterrence can be achieved by creating a lawless environment to people who value an orderly one. You don’t even need to be consistent about it, it just needs to happen often enough that you can’t dismiss the possibility you would be next. If you let them go right away, it’s less of a deterrent than if you hold them for weeks.
prostratedragon
@Sister Golden Bear:
The comments at that thread point to a good one about people like a certain federal official whose expressions of his “catholic” faith are like flatulence:
At least one Catholic writer has found the story a good basis for a sermonette that the faith need not be abstruse unless one is using it as an excuse.
Martin
@Mike in Pasadena: Miller knows what he’s talking about. He’s counting on voters not knowing.
JoyceH
@Emily68: Heck, most rural hospitals are hanging on by their fingernails already. Once the Medicaid cuts go into effect, most of them will shut down. Then you can be the richest white guy in the county but that won’t save you from being one hour (or two or three) away from the ER.
XeckyGilchrist
Damn, Miller is sounding more and more bugfuck these days, and doing it more out in the open than I remember him doing it. Hope this supports the trend in public opinion that this Nazi shit is not what we want and makes the atrocities stop.
Chief Oshkosh
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): I had a surgical procedure last year. The doc was multi-generation US American, and as it happened, so was everyone in that organization that I met. The doc fucked it up, but boy does he have a great golf handicap!
I’m now working with a different team at a different organization to fix the fuck up. The team consists of a multi-generation US American, an Egyptian, a second-gen Iranian, and a Serbian. All four are outstanding as individual docs and as a team they’re great.
Just random observations.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Decades of reducing funding for public education has basically led to all the stuff they complain about: their smartest kids leaving to go elsewhere to college, large numbers of international students and high-skill immigrants filling in the gaps where there aren’t enough Americans to fill those roles, shortages in all manner of skilled professions.
Suzanne
@JoyceH: Not just emergency and trauma care. Like, as all these Boomers get to their peak years of cancer diagnoses…. where does anyone think they’re getting chemo and radiation? Those aren’t covered by EMTALA.
Sister Golden Bear
@Matt McIrvin: Miller, like RFK Jr., is a stone cold eugenicist, so a lack of doctors killing off “the weak” is part of the plan.
prostratedragon
@Sister Golden Bear:
Going house-to-house in Utah a couple of days ago.
prostratedragon
@rikyrah, @Martin:
Sounds like something out of that infernal tv show.
sab
Without immigrants no ER in the USA would have enough doctors or nurses. So no ERs.
raven
Shithead is at the World Cup Club Final at the Meadowlands and I bet he loved the halftime show. Ninety percent of it was in Spanish with the usual bump and grind, dick grabbing AND a small person who was also an amputee!!!
TONYG
@pluky: Forcing people to delete content from their phones is itself a crime. But of course the ICE thugs have impunity.
WTFGhost
@Bill Arnold: I also have a long passphrase memorized that is not my password. “I don’t know, officer, here, you try this password, I must have mistyped it.”
sab
My sister’s long time doctor is seriously considering returning to Europe because as a foreigner he no longer feels welcome. He is Irish and feels unwelcome in Boston.
sab
@oldgold: Everyone talks about Kent State, where students (not those four) did burn down the ROTC building. Nobody talks about Jackson State that same year where students were also shot.
WTFGhost
@XeckyGilchrist: Not to be a downer, but that’s been the hope since re-election. People like Trump draw out the hate. The hate brings the ugly; the ugly drives the revolution. It’s something to think about when hate seems ever-present… you’re not the only one noticing it’s bad.
Betty
@Martin: In Miami, it is probably the majority if you include children of immigrants.
Jackie
FFOTUS can’t keep his story straight. Are there or aren’t there Epstein files? I’m not linking on FFOTUS’s social media link to learn more lol
Are the so-called friends his MAGA faithful who are demanding the Files be released? So, is he also acknowledging his name is prominently displayed throughout the Files?
Betty
Stephen Miller is a madman. He isn’t joking about any of this.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Jackie:
“The files are sitting on my desk. Betcha can’t guess who’s in them!”
”The files don’t exist.”
”The files are an evil plot by my enemies. Don’t help them win!”
Martin
@Suzanne: Not sure reducing funding to education is really a factor on this. A primary bottleneck on making doctors in the US is that all residencies are paid for by CMS, so our ability to expand them is tied to the amount of Medicare/Medicaid funding. If there’s no residency to put a student into, there’s no point admitting them whether the program is funded or not. The university could have loads of money and they’ll still throttle their students to the size of the residency pool. The AMA and other groups are contributors to the problem by gatekeeping for the purpose of keeping wages high, but not using the university so much as by using government.
Most medical jobs also run to some degree counter to our cultural biases of profit, masculinity and things like that. Cultural biases play a HUGE role in what students choose to study. Male nurses in the US almost exclusively come out of either other countries where their culture doesn’t promote gender roles around caring/uncaring as strongly, or out of the military where being a front line medic wasn’t sissy and when they ended their service they had a marketable skill and ran with it. It’s REALLY hard to get native men into nursing programs because they just don’t apply – like at all. We had the highest demand nursing program in the US – one of the hardest academic programs to get into anywhere in the US, Harvard and MIT included, and it was 4% male applicants. The program wanted at least some men because male nurses are helpful – they tend to be stronger, and lifting and carrying patients is a thing and having people strong enough to do that around helps, some patients are more comfortable with a male nurse in some situations just like some women are more comfortable with a female doctor in some situations. And it’s a real problem in medical schools to keep the native white men from racing toward plastic surgery and other high status specialities to fill out other areas. We need GPs and if you look, more surgeons tend to be white males and more GPs tend to be women and POC. There has always been a cultural sorting in medical professions and its less formally sorted than it used to be (we’re less likely to assume the women can’t be the doctor) but it’s still pretty voluntarily sorted by the men, by native whites, etc.
Taken together we don’t create enough domestic opportunities for some kinds of medical professionals (cost is another gatekeeping function) and we culturally discourage people from filling out a lot of these other opportunities, much as we do with other kinds of labor. Americans are supposed to aspire to better careers than nursing home nurse. So they do. And then we complain there aren’t enough of them. Like there isn’t going to be a consequence to maintaining a cultural hierarchy?
The insidious thing about plans by people like Miller is not only do they know that white people aren’t going to pick strawberries, white people aren’t SUPPOSED to pick strawberries. That’s doing whiteness wrong, or maleness wrong by being a nurse, etc. The point of the strawberry picker is that everyone is in agreement that the ag worker is ‘lesser than’. So people need to ask themselves, if we wipe out that ‘lesser than’ class of people, who do the architects intend to put into that role? They know the answer, pretty sure a lot of people around here also know the answer.
Jackie
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: FFOTUS has no idea of how unhinged he sounds to his supporters. His strongest supporters are calling him out. Between the Epstein files and republican voters becoming repulsed by who’s being arrested by ICE, an anti FFOTUS groundswell is growing. It’s showing up in MAGA media and spreading from there.
Ruckus
@Hoodie:
Don’t know if anyone has said this but this is a nation of immigrants. How many old farts are less than 2 generations away from being immigrants. My grandparents were immigrants. Now I am old so it’s been a while but still, my parents were first generation born here. I also know that a lot of people that I went to school with were first or second generation. My last partner was first generation.
Harrison Wesley
@Ruckus: The anti-immigrant jihad is peak Trump: stupid, corrupt,and evil.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: These people are racists. That immigration was OK because, they imagine, those were white people.
Of course, they weren’t classified that way at the time. Not entirely. Whiteness is flexibly defined. Every single wave of immigration is feared by the descendants of the previous wave, who explain that this time it’s different. They don’t assimilate. Don’t speak the language. They keep to themselves. They have an inherent criminality and repulsive social customs. Etc., etc.
Then the descendants of the people in that wave say exactly the same thing about the next one. It’s different this time.
Ruckus
@Martin:
My primary doctor at the VA is a woman. Better than some of the male doctors I’ve had in the past, far better than one current pompous, arrogant specialist.
Ruckus
@Harrison Wesley:
At the very, very least.
Matt McIrvin
@Jackie: Ha, ha, wow. In 2016 it was almost 100% Trump’s supporters bringing up Epstein as a smear on Hillary Clinton.
Martin
@Ruckus: Well, we were always a nation of a certain kind of immigrant. The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn’t some aberration, nor was the internment of Japanese Americans but not German Americans. Offering asylum to white South Africans while denying it from everyone else was quite the tell.
Jay
bsky.app/profile/kathleenclark.bsky.social/post/3ltoapfbqas2d
Screenshots at link.
Martin
@Jackie: Yeah, I thought the files hadn’t come out because they’d implicate Bill Clinton, but now they were written by Bill Clinton?
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
I know/have known a number of first generation American born humans. May be because of the state I was born and live in, CA. I’d bet that somewhere around half the humans I went to school with, including college were first generation US born or not even that. Quite a few of them were/are Oriental – Japanese , Chinese and Taiwanese.
Ruckus
@Martin:
Yep.
Bill Arnold
@Sister Golden Bear:
Amusingly, F. Wilhoit work-shopped that law on this site before that post to crooked timber.
Jay
bsky.app/profile/cwebbonline.com/post/3ltucfd42ac2f
Jackie
@Martin: Well… IF you believe FFOTUS….
He’s literally having a very public breakdown in front of his Base!
Martin
@Jay: Yeah, they’re engineering a kafkaesque system that they know the courts won’t be able to navigate because the courts are too beholden to procedure and conventions regarding time to respond and so on, which gives the feds time to constantly hide the ball. And courts are wired to assume that legal counsel is operating in good faith, and the feds are doing an admirable job of finding lawyers willing to break that and then swapping them out before they can be held in contempt.
I’ve had similar concerns regarding corporations ability to break the law and extract profits faster than the courts/regulators can hold them accountable, or to a degree enough to discourage the behavior.
Jay
bsky.app/profile/reichlinmelnick.bsky.social/post/3ltu7wm6xwk2h
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
Do you think they’re organized enough to keep farm workers distinct from construction workers and nursing home staff after they’ve rounded them up?
And harvesting different fruits and vegetables is different work. How well does picking avocados translate to doing a good job picking strawberries? There will be a big drop-off in productivity, and a correspondingly large increase in produce prices, if they try to use their captives as slave labor in the fields.
different-church-lady
What would America look like without Stephen Miller? Probably a lot less Nazi.
Jay
More at the link.
bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3ltumbebb5c2w
Jay
bsky.app/profile/lataco.bsky.social/post/3ltq5oxfk4s2g
bsky.app/profile/lataco.bsky.social/post/3ltq5oxfk4s2g
bsky.app/profile/lataco.bsky.social/post/3ltqlw73nkk2x
Jay
@lowtechcyclist:
bsky.app/profile/sarahtaber.bsky.social/post/3ltuo5xy7nk2d
Martin
@lowtechcyclist: Oh, the south is REALLY experienced at renting out prison labor. It’s one of the mistakes I keep making wondering why CA has the politics it does around ag/low wage mfg labor and immigration and the south don’t – and its because they have prison labor for that. They’ve solved that problem. They’re less efficient laborers, but they’re WAY cheaper.
Some of the inefficiencies they can make up in volume. But I wouldn’t put it past ICE to target CA tomato farms, ship those workers to Florida, and rent them out to FL tomato farmers.
Timill
@Martin: They won’t do it because it would open up a communication path between detainees and the outside world. Especially the US citizen detainees.
Martin
@Jay: Yeah, in the year when we had high inflation and food prices went up 10%, crop prices went down an average of 20%. Wholesale prices for a flat of strawberries would be about $16, retail about $35. Pickers get paid about $2.50 (they can pick 8-12 flats per hour, minimum wage is $16.50).
The issue isn’t the upward pressure on wholesale prices that would result from paying workers more but the gap from wholesale to retail. That’s where grocery prices went up under Biden. Farmers made less, large grocery chains and distributers made more. Kroger was buying back stock while raising prices. They had a choice who to pay the excess profits to – consumers or investors, and they chose investors.
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: Using convict labor is actually *legal* under the 13th Amendment, and using immigration detainees is not. But this administration seems really reluctant to try to convict anyone of a crime. Too slow and hard and you might not win. They just want people imprisoned on their say-so.
dnfree
@Trivia Man: A shocking % of Americans at the time thought the students at Kent State had it coming.
Bill Arnold
@Jay:
Here’s that Sarah Taber thread as a skywriter rollup ( “@unroll.skywriter.blue unroll please” )
(Thread is on fruit/veg picker pay, for those just looking at the end of this thread.)
(Thanks for the link. Good thread!)
tsquared2001
@Betty: That motherfucker is as serious as a heart attack. Miller is not pretending about his evil intentions – true believers are a plague.
Jim Appleton
@Kent:
Miller specified “illegal[s]”. In LA this would mean huge hits to
You get the picture.
For Miller, all of this is either very clear and the intended result of inflicting maximal hurt to the brown pawns, or he just thinks hurting the browns is its own reward.
Either way, this guy is up there with historically evil actors. Now with supercharged means.
Martin
@Matt McIrvin: The administration keeps playing jurisdictional 3-card monte here. If they get blocked on ICE they’ll arrest from some other agency under some other legal authority. That’s what they’re doing with Garcia – the judge expects she’ll order his release and they’ll just have some other agency arrest him. That’s what’s happening with folks in courthouses. Judge rules for the immigrant, and they’re picked up under some different jurisdiction. DeSantis used FL taxpayer money to move asylum populations around. Texas did as well. I don’t see why these states wouldn’t be willing to pull these individuals under their jurisdiction if they can. The facility is already being run by the state, not the feds.
I don’t see any particular reason why the administration, taking a maximalist approach to all of these issues wouldn’t do the same with renting them out as labor. How confident are we that USSC would stop them after allowing them to send random people to places like Sudan with no means of getting out?
Kayla Rudbek
@Jay: this is why one of the corporeal works of mercy is to visit prisoners in Catholic theology (and Ursula Vernon/T. Kingfisher shows this in her fiction too)