Rania Khalek and Zoe Alexandra are joined by special guests to discuss the surge of ICE & Police terror; U.S. intervention threats against Mali; Trump's far-right puppets in South America; and MORE!
The House Ethics Committee is investigating Texas Republican Representative Lance Gooden. The scope of the probe is unclear at this time. The committee said it received a referral from the Office of Congressional Conduct last month.“The Committee notes that the mere fact of a referral or an extension, and the mandatory disclosure of such an extension and the name of the subject of the matter, does not itself indicate that any violation has occurred, or reflect any judgment on behalf of the Committee,” the committee’s statement read.Gooden has held office in Texas’s 5th district for seven years, and has been an ally to President Trump for all of them. In 2020, he joined 146 other Republicans in voting to overturn the presidential election results, and he voted against Trump’s impeachment after the January 6 insurrection. “These are bogus spending allegations perpetrated by dishonest unelected OCC bureaucrats, and as the fifth Texas GOP ally of the President to endure one of these attacks,” Gooden told Fox News’s Liz Elkind. “I am confident the House Ethics Committee will confirm their baseless nature.”A complaint against Gooden was filed to the Office of Congressional Ethics in 2021, alleging that he “purchased 12 assets with a total value ranging from approximately $60,019 and $376,000 without disclosing the transactions” in 2020. While notable, it may or may not be related to the current probe.Gooden is the second Texas Republican to go under House Ethics investigation this year, following former Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, who was accused of having an affair with ex-staffer who set herself on fire after he ended it and hurt her career. Gonzales resigned in April.This story has been updated.
Cash bail, mandatory minimums, incarcerating children as adults—the Trump-led GOP is destroying decades of criminal justice reforms for “tough on crime” policies that are not only cruel but objectively don’t work.
President Donald Trump’s administration has found a new way to gut due process and fast-track deportation for asylum applicants. U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, or USCIS, the agency that manages visas, green cards, naturalizations, and other aspects of the legal immigration process, published a new regulation Monday allowing officers to refer hundreds of thousands of asylum applicants directly to deportation proceedings without interviewing them.The rule would scrap USCIS’s long-standing practice of offering interviews to asylum applicants already in the United States. The agency claimed that it had previously offered interviews despite there being “no statutory right to an interview or requirement to conduct one.” The rule would also remove references in Department of Homeland Security materials to a “right” to an interview and language asserting that asylum officers would review cases “in an interview.” “This means many people will never get a chance to argue their case,” Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X Monday. In order to receive asylum, applicants must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their home country.The filing states that the new rule will “more quickly place certain aliens into removal proceedings” with immigration judges at the Executive Office of Immigration Review, or EOIR. Once asylum applicants are passed to the EOIR, the cases that are deemed “legally deficient” may be pretermitted, meaning those applicants can be deported without a hearing. No interview and no hearing? That sounds like a clear violation of due process—which the Trump administration has been angling to obliterate for more than a year.In addition, the new rule would allow asylum officers to “determine that the alien does not merit a grant [of asylum] as a matter of discretion without first making an eligibility determination,” and would also stop requiring a letter communicating that the basis for referral of asylum should include an assessment of the applicant’s credibility. The rule was published Monday, to be implemented Tuesday without prior warning or public comment period—and will likely invite a slew of legal challenges under the Administrative Procedures Act.
In January, President Trump told the media that his deadly extrajudicial strikes on alleged “drug boats” in the Caribbean had maritime drug flow “down 97 percent.” New reporting from The Washington Post shows that was a lie. After over 60 strikes, more than 200 people are dead with no trial, and the Drug Enforcement Administration has confirmed that the flow of cocaine into the U.S. has not been impeded at all.Instead of stopping shipments, traffickers have just changed their strategies, taking larger vessels or even planes to circumvent international waters, the DEA found.“The business is so extraordinarily profitable that the cartels do not mind paying freight costs that are five or even 10 times higher,” one naval intelligence official from Ecuador said. “They know that while the United States may destroy one speedboat, they will successfully get 10 semisubmersibles—or other speedboats that evade detection—through.”“When you squeeze the balloon on one side, it always expands on the other side,” an anonymous DEA official told the Post. “They always find the weak spots and exploit them.” While DEA officials noted that prices rose after the first two months of strikes, smugglers “adapted to the intensified pressure,” and neither supply nor price had “been noticeably affected.”In April, just over seven months into the strikes, Trump wrote that “98.2% of Drugs coming into the U.S. by Ocean or Sea have STOPPED!” It’s unclear where he got that number from.Perhaps most troubling of all is the 221 people killed by the U.S. government without any kind of trial or legal process. There’s no way we even know for sure that they were “narcoterrorists”—these could have very well been innocent people, their deaths simply serving as fodder for Trump to drum up fear and resentment toward Latin America.
For the first time in my life, I found myself completely helpless. My car was engulfed in flames, but all that mattered to me was my family's survival.
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