Fridays with Nicole Sandler

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  1. wa_rickf says:

    The Trump administration has ordered some Afghan refugees who legally entered the U.S. after the 2021 Taliban takeover to leave the country within a week or face deportation and legal action, according to several reported emails.

    Many of those who fled Afghanistan applied for U.S. entry through Special Immigrant Visas (SIVs), asylum or Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a designation that shielded them from deportation. Other Afghans have sought refuge in the U.S. from religious and ethnic persecution in their home country.

    The Trump administration is now moving to end TPS protections for thousands of Afghan nationals, which could result in their deportation back to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.

    Fox News reports: “Christian leaders say President Donald Trump has a chance to fix a Biden-era mistake by halting deportations of believers facing torture or death.

    As thousands of Christians rallied during Holy Week, faith leaders across the U.S. urged Trump to intervene and stop the deportation of Afghan Christians who face near-certain persecution under the Taliban.
    …
    Among them, according to documents obtained exclusively by Fox News Digital, are hundreds of Christians, many of whom converted after the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and now face life-threatening danger under Taliban rule.

    On April 10, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced it would terminate humanitarian parole for Afghan nationals, effectively ordering thousands to leave the U.S. within days.
    …
    Faith leaders argue this is a chance for the Trump administration to fix one of the most painful consequences of that Biden-era decision — abandoning persecuted Christians. ”

    https://www.foxnews.com/politics/exclusive-afghan-christians-face-deportation-faith-leaders-urge-trump-administration-reconsider
    ===========
    Biden-era mistake? Its verbiage like this is what turns Rwing Americans against other Americans. Afghans that converted to Christianity while in the U.S. are being pleaded for, while Latin American Christians get sent back to their tormentors.

    Isn’t a Christian a Christian? Why are some Christians elevated over other Christians? Who does a group of Latin American Christians need to appeal to in order to receive special Trump Admin protection status?

    • Gacyclist says:

      Same reason in magaworld white males are elevated over females and brown and black skinned people, it’s what they do.

  2. P J Evans says:

    We promised them a safe home, if they helped us. They did, and we are failing on our end of the deal. The Felon Guy knew, or should have known, about that before he promised the Taliban we’d leave.

    • wa_rickf says:

      I agree with you from a humanitarian perspective that the U.S. DID promise Afghans a safe home, if they helped us. My quibble is that many Afghans converted to Christianity WHILE IN THE U.S. and those folks are now being pleaded for – simply because they are now Christians who will face persecution if sent back home , while many non-Christians being sent back to Afghanistan will face the same persecution for helping the U.S. and no one is advocating on their behalf.

      All the while, other Christians, namely Latin American Christians are being sent home and it doesn’t matter to the Trump Admin that these Christians will face persecution because they left an undesirable living situation for the U.S.

      THAT is my quibble: Why is one group of Christians being elevated over another? Regarding Afghanistans: It’s ok by U.S. religious leaders to send Afghans back to face the Taliban simply because they are not Christians? How Christian is THAT ?!?

      • P J Evans says:

        I agree with you there – religion should not be involved. But I think part of it is that the people pleading for the Afghan refugees think that the people from Latin America are all Catholics (they aren’t) and thus Not Real True Xtians. It’s bigotry. (They may also see Afghans as being whiter than “those others.”)

        • wa_rickf says:

          There are Christians who do not believe that Catholics are Christian? The entire SCOTUS is nearly Catholic and religionists go running to them all-of-the-time for favorable Christian rulings.

          My dad’s side of the family is Catholic. Oy vey! The standing, the kneeling, the chants, lining up the receive the sacrament. These people are the epitome of Christianity! Protestants just sit on their lazy asses and stay in one place during the entire sermon.

        • P J Evans says:

          wa_rickf says: April 18, 2025 at 9:58 pm

          I got raised Methodist. Lots of standing and singing.
          The fundies are very narrow in their ideas of who’s a real Christian. (I know of groups who think the Southern Baptists are too liberal. Won’t even go to secular events on a Baptist school campus.)

      • ShyDeer_19APR2025_1007h says:

        Probably comes down to something as simply as a Muslim convert to Christianity is far more useful to the narrative the right wants to push than any ‘ordinary’ Christian from Central or South America (& fact rw fundies aren’t standing against all Afghans being deported shows persecution by Taliban upon return isn’t what’s important to the wingers).

        [Welcome to emptywheel. Please choose and use a unique username with a minimum of 8 letters. We adopted this minimum standard to support community security. Because your username is too short and common, your username will be temporarily changed to match the date/time of your first known comment until you have a new compliant username. /~Rayne]

      • ExRacerX says:

        Every world religion has variations on and interpretations of their fairytale, but in the end, that’s all they are—fairytales. The real-world implications have been made quite clear by religious extremists of all stripes.

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        Why is one group of Christians favored over another? The question has spawned wars since the Roman Empire. That history is a major reason the Constitution prohibits a state religion or favoring one religion over another.

  3. thequickbrownfox says:

    Meanwhile, the administration is queuing up more Venezuelans to be deported to El Salvador tomorrow (Saturday). There is a court order to prevent this in the district that has the Harlingen holding facility, so ICE moved the detainees to Bluebonnet holding facility, which has no such order.
    The ACLU filed for restraint before Boasberg, but he cannot do anything because the SC ruled that all legal action must be filed in Texas. U.S. law is not equipped to handle this kind of behavior (blatant circumvention).
    And guess which attorney is in the forefront of the DOJ’s case. If you said “Ensign” you win the kewpie doll. And, as in the previous case, he “knows nothing about any deportations”.

    • drhester says:

      SCOTUS has issued an order about this… in the middle of the night.
      Alito and Thomas dissented
      From NYTimes

      In an emergency filing, lawyers had asked the justices to stop the deportations.

      The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration early Saturday from deporting another group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under the expansive powers of a rarely invoked wartime law.

      “The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the court said in a brief, unsigned order that gave no reasoning, as is typical in emergency cases.

  4. wa_rickf says:

    US Supreme Court temporarily halts deportations of Venezuelan migrants under wartime law

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/19/supreme-court-halts-deportations-venezuelan-migrans/83171290007/

    =======

    Over at Fox “News”, the commenters are livid.

    To which I comment:
    wa_rickf
    46 minutes ago

    If you MAGAts don’t understand why non-citizens have due process, AND you disagree with it, perhaps living in Russia is a better fit for you because you don’t appreciate the America that the founding fathers built.

    • Gacyclist says:

      The 14th amendment and the Constitution means no more to magas than it does to trump. It’s a stage prop used as an avatar on their Facebook and Twitter pages.

      • gruntfuttock says:

        More from Vladek:

        ‘Third, and perhaps most significantly, the Court seemed to not be content with relying upon representations by the government’s lawyers.’

        ‘But this case arose only because of the Trump administration’s attempt to play Calvinball with detainees it’s seeking to remove under the Alien Enemy Act. The Court appears to be finally getting the message—and, in turn, handing down rulings with none of the wiggle room we saw in the J.G.G. and Abrego Garcia decisions last week. That’s a massively significant development unto itself—especially if it turns out to be more than a one-off.’

    • Matt Foley says:

      If it looks like a Trump insurrectionist, if it talks like a Trump insurrectionist, if it storms the Capitol like a Trump insurrectionist…

      …then it must be Antifa.

      I could do this all day, there’s so much material.

  7. wa_rickf says:

    Many comments I read on Fox News seem to follow what Trump’s WH narrative is pushing – pretty much verbatim. It’s almost as if the commenters and Trump’s WH have a meeting or something and then the narrative get disseminated far and wide.

    A commenter on Sunday said that the J6 terrorists never had due process insinuating it was ok for Trump to dispel migrants from the U.S. because J6’ers didn’t have their day in court. I had not seen that before. No one has ever said that before in the Fox News comments section – that I have seen while there. I pushed back and cited appellate court decisions in some of the cases as evidence of due process had in fact taken place.

    THEN, yesterday, Stephen Miller began saying the J6’ers didn’t have due processes. That is what I began to wonder…what’s going on? Is there really a coordinated effort between Rwingers to disseminate this stuff, or was Stephen Miller posting in Fox News comments?

    I find this J6 situation odd and thought I’d share this observation.

    https://x.com/StephenM/status/1914347254942494849

  9. wa_rickf says:

    DAVID MARCUS: What America owes Elon Musk after DOGE

    “As Elon Musk prepares to step back from his service in the Trump administration, the nation owes him a debt of gratitude for breaking through decades of empty promises about exposing and ending waste, fraud and abuse in Washington.”
    https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/david-marcus-what-america-owes-elon-musk-after-doge
    ========
    Elon Musk attempted to run our government like one of his companies, and he hurt a lot Americans. Musk influenced decisions that hurt everyday Americans, from attempts to cut off aid to save on his tax bill to pressuring federal employees into resigning. Musk pushed to control public spending, dismantle the safety net for tens of thousands, and reshape the lower and middle class way of life to suit his interests.

    Elon Musk uses his platform to spread white supremacist rhetoric, including a now-infamous gesture during a Trump rally that white nationalist groups have celebrated. Reports also suggest that Musk played a significant role in decisions to pardon violent January 6th insurrectionists, attempting to rewrite the history of that dark day.

    The end of Musk’s influence has not come soon enough.

    • P J Evans says:

      Elon Musk is a businessman like The Felon Guy: he likes to be seen as smart, but he’s not good at anything but running his mouth – a sales guy, not anyone who can run a business.

      He’s trying to do to government what he did when he bought Twitter: strip it to the bone, and take whatever money he can get out of it.

  10. dopefish says:

    Off-topic: CNN reports that in Maryland, Judge Xinis is not happy with the govts’ conduct in the case over Abrego Garcia.

    She issued a real smackdown of an order. (link to pdf, and a courtlistener page for that case).
    Here’s a sample:

    Given that this Court expressly warned Defendants and their
    counsel to adhere strictly to their discovery obligations, see Hr’g Tr. 11:24–12:2, Apr. 16, 2025
    (“Because in fairness, Mr. Ensign, [if] you’re not going to answer the questions that the plaintiffs
    put within the scope of my order, then you’ll justify why. You’ll cite privilege, you’ll follow the
    rules, I’ll make a determination.”), their boilerplate, non-particularized objections are
    presumptively invalid and reflect a willful refusal to comply with this Court’s Discovery Order
    and governing rules. ECF No. 79. Although Defendants state now that they are willing to “meet
    and confer” with counsel about the production of such a log, ECF No. 98-1 at 23, their repeated
    refusals to meet and confer about much of anything else undermine the reliability of this
    assertion. ECF No. 98 at 2. The Court thus finds this offer was not made in good faith.

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