Can Presidents Exempt People from US Law?

After the Supreme Court struck down his first order restricting birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, President Trump signed a new order on August 6. At first blush, the new order seems like only a blatant attempt to ignore the Supreme Court. That might be true, but there’s an alternative reading that is more bizarre and potentially frightening: The president might believe he can unilaterally decide whether US law applies to any particular person or groups of people.

The entire order rests on the assertion that presidents can decide who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and, therefore, US law. In a way, this is a far more dangerous claim. For instance, diplomats receive immunity not only from federal but also from state and local prosecution. If the president can suspend the laws—not just the enforcement of them but the laws themselves—the order would not only strip citizenship from many Americans, it would also create a massive new power for presidents to abuse.

The strange new order is already being challenged in court, but we still don’t know how the government will defend it.

Read the rest here.

Trump wants to admit more refugees to the US. But only White South Africans

The Trump administration is proposing increasing the refugee admissions ceiling for fiscal year 2026 to 17,500 for White South Africans, according to an emergency determination sent to Congress and obtained by CNN.

Last year, the administration restricted the number of refugees allowed to enter the country annually to 7,500, with a focus on White South Africans, slashing the previous year’s ceiling of 125,000 and excluding some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

Read the rest here.

Since October of 2025 the US has admitted 4,499 refugees. Of those, exactly three were not White South Africans. 

You would have to go back to Woodrow Wilson to find a president and administration that was as nakedly racist as the current one. 

Illegal Immigration and Crime

What the stats actually say.

Anarchists, Political Violence, and Legal Isonomia

The anarchist as a figure in crime is distinct. His goals are not financial, and the terrorist acts committed under the heading of anarchism have ranged from assassinations of public figures to bombings of random civilians. He has also slid far enough into history to seem quaint, or vaguely romantic, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. 

The anarchist “movement” (if we could apply such a concept to a decentralized group) was the beginning of modern global terrorism. The idea that killing, bombing, were a tactic to bring adversaries to the negotiating table, in the age of mass media, was a novel concept, in the late nineteenth century. It would be a model followed by various political sects to come. But anarchists did not want negotiations. 

Their nihilism marks them out against groups like the Fenians (roughly contemporary, and operating mostly in Britain, with some activities in North America), who had a clear political goal. The Fenians wanted Ireland to be independent from Britain. Whether one agreed with their tactics, the motive was coherent (if alarming to the British authorities). 

Meanwhile, the anarchists (unlike socialists) tended to offer vague ideals as their results. They did not participate in elections or seek to gain support through normal political means. “Burn it all down” was their message. One that was resonant for disaffected young men - as it always has been. There’s a reason terrorist groups and street gangs alike all recruit from this particular demographic.

Read the rest here.

The UK is a Warning to the Rest of the World

HT Blog reader Kurt.

I had never heard of this guy before but found the arguments presented to be cogent and well backed by sources and statistics. 

How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration

In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.

Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.

But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.

“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.

They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Mr. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations.

The warnings came true, and then some. After Mr. Biden became president, migrant encounters at the southern border quickly doubled, then kept rising. New arrivals overwhelmed border stations, then border towns, and eventually major cities like New York and Denver.

Anger over illegal migration helped return Mr. Trump to the presidency, and he has enacted even more aggressive policies than those Mr. Biden first campaigned against. Mr. Trump has drawn outrage from Democrats by sending masked agents to target immigrants, often aided by National Guard soldiers.

But a New York Times examination of Mr. Biden’s record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.

Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants — including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn — made two crucial errors.

First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration — believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters, and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters. Those calculations would later prove to be mistaken, with many voters, including Latinos, citing immigration as a reason for supporting Mr. Trump in 2024.

Read the rest here.

UK: Mass migration is only part of the problem.

The other part of the problem is all the skilled workers and the well off who are leaving.

And now for something a little lighter

W's Crystal Ball

George W. Bush called out the MAGA agenda years before Trump rode down that escalator. pic.twitter.com/17U0d1DkBy

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) June 7, 2025

I've had my differences with George Bush, but he nailed this one.

The Wall

HT: TDT

This is bonkers

New York Says they have an immigration problem

New York's Mayor calls for Federal aid to deal with migrant crisis.

Both New York City and the state have declared themselves "sanctuary" jurisdictions for illegal immigrants. Both have thumbed their nose at Federal efforts to enforce immigration law. Both basically shrugged and said "not our problem" while border states like Texas and Arizona got buried with migrants (both legal and not). 

Dear New Yorkers; embrace the suck.

Russia's Brain Drain

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Russia’s tech workers are looking for safer and more secure professional pastures.

By one estimate, up to 70,000 computer specialists, spooked by a sudden frost in the business and political climate, have bolted the country since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago. Many more are expected to follow.

For some countries, Russia’s loss is being seen as their potential gain and an opportunity to bring fresh expertise to their own high-tech industries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has noticed the brain drain even in the throes of a war that, according to the U.N. refugee agency, has caused more than 4 million people to flee Ukraine and displaced millions more within the country.

This week, Putin reacted to the exodus of tech professionals by approving legislation to eliminate income taxes between now and 2024 for individuals who work for information technology companies.

Some people in the vast new pool of high-tech exiles say they are in no rush to return home. An elite crowd furnished with European Union visas has relocated to Poland or the Baltic nations of Latvia and Lithuania.

A larger contingent has fallen back on countries where Russians do not need visas: Armenia, Georgia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. In normal times, millions of less-skilled laborers emigrate from those economically shaky countries to comparatively more prosperous Russia.

Anastasia, a 24-year-old freelance computer systems analyst from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, chose Kyrgyzstan, where her husband has family.

“When we heard about the war on (Feb. 24), we thought it was probably time to leave, but that we might wait and see. On February 25, we bought our tickets and left,” Anastasia said. “There wasn’t much thinking to do.”

Like all the Russian workers contacted for this story, Anastasia asked to remain anonymous. Moscow was cracking down on dissent even before the invasion of Ukraine, and people living outside Russia still fear reprisals.

“As long as I can remember, there has always been fear around expressing one’s own views in Russia,” Anastasia said, adding that the war and “the background noise of patriotism” made the environment even more forbidding. “I left one day before they began searching and interrogating people at the border.”

The scale of the apparent brain drain was laid bare last week by Sergei Plugotarenko, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an industry lobbying group.

“The first wave – 50,000-70,000 people – has already left,” Plugotarenko told a parliamentary committee.

Only the high cost of flights out of the country prevented an even larger mass exit. Another 100,000 tech workers nevertheless might leave Russia in April, Plugotarenko predicted.

Read the rest here.

Thousands of young Russian men flee to US

Thousands of Russians are trying to reach the United States to claim political asylum and avoid being drafted to the army, the Telegraph can reveal.

Immigration lawyers in America have been inundated with inquiries from Russian men and their families asking if the US will grant them political protection amid fears of conscription, following Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.

In recent months, record numbers of Russian citizens have been apprehended on the US border with Mexico, as an easy path to the US offers opponents of Vladimir Putin’s government an escape.

The Telegraph has spoken to bank managers, engineers and fashion designers who have all left their homes in search of a new life in the US after being targeted by police in Russia.

But now, immigration lawyers say the numbers will “skyrocket” amid fears that military-age men will be called up to fight in the war with Ukraine - which has already called up conscripts and reservists aged between 18 and 60.

In 2020, just 467 Russians were detained at America's southern border. Last year, that number soared to 9,376 - a result of the Russian crackdown on dissent following widespread protests spearheaded by opposition leader Alexei Navalny, experts say.

But the numbers are still increasing. Last month, 1,028 Russians and 248 Ukrainians made their way across the border, mostly crossing from Tijuana to San Diego.

“We have never been so busy,” said Ekaterina Mouratova, a Russian-American immigration lawyer based in Miami. “But the number is going to skyrocket. I have got tons of emails in the last few days - hundreds. They are mostly men between 20 and 55 who are asking if they can get protection from the US if Russia does a mandatory military draft. These people do not want to go to war.

Read the rest here. (paywalled)

Oh Canada? Your guy just lost. Should you be looking north?

Unanimous Supreme Court rebukes 9th Circuit on immigration law

The Supreme Court is often divided on ideological lines on hot-button issues, and tends to write unanimously when dealing with procedural questions where a lower court just went off the rails. So, when the Court takes a unanimous stand in a case involving a controversial political issue and goes out of its way to dress down the lower-court judges, you know they really went overboard. That’s what happened this morning in an immigration case, United States v. Sineneng-Smith. Justice Ginsburg herself delivered the lecture to the Ninth Circuit to knock off the antics and stick to the cases before it.

The Sineneng-Smith case involved an immigration consultant who made $3.3 million from clients (mostly Philippine immigrants) by filing applications for lawful permanent residence when she knew they were not legally entitled to that status. There were two potential victims here: the immigrants, if they paid for something they were never going to receive, or the government, if it approved illegal applications. Sieneneng-Smith tried to make herself more sympathetic by arguing that she was only scamming the immigration system: She “argued that labor-certification applications were often approved despite expiration of the statutory dispensation, and that an approved application, when submitted as part of a petition for adjustment of status, would place her clients in line should Congress reactivate the dispensation.” Neither of these was an argument that her clients had any legal leg to stand on, just hope that they might get away with it.

Sineneng-Smith argued that she had a First Amendment right to file bogus applications, under the Petition and Free Speech Clauses. When her appeal reached the Ninth Circuit, however, it landed before notorious liberal activist judge Stephen Reinhardt (who died after the case was argued, and has since been the subject of other controversies), on a three-judge panel with two Clinton appointees, judges Marsha Berzon and Wallace Tashima. Instead of hearing the arguments Sineneng-Smith made against her conviction, the judges thought up their own argument — that the federal statute against “encourag[ing] or induc[ing] an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence is or will be in violation of law” is itself overbroad and should be thrown out in its entirety.

Read the rest here.

Turkey opens its border to Europe for 3.6 million migrants

Mobs rush Greek border. Greeks repel them with tear gas and force.

Details.

Orthodox churches repeatedly vandalized by Muslim refugees on Lesvos

The tense situation on the islands of the northern and eastern Aegean, now home to tens of thousands of refugees, mainly from predominantly Muslim countries, is like a “time bomb ready to blow,” reports the Orthodoxia News Agency.

The locals have reached their limits and are in a constant state of anger and sorrow as the refugees repeatedly attack and desecrate their Orthodox holy sites.

In particular, residents of Moria, Lesvos complain that groups of illegal Muslim immigrants have repeatedly vandalized churches in the area and made direct threats against the Orthodox faith. The Church of St. Catherine is now locked, as residents try to block the entrance and protect it from being desecrated again.

The windows of the church have been broken, the holy cross has been thrown down, and the icons have been overturned. Refugees have also damaged the chapel of Taxiarchis (the Archangel Michael), the patron saint of Mytilini, the capital of Lesvos, breaking in to sleep there. 

With the help of the police, local residents managed to kick the refugees out of the Taxiarchis chapel, “but the picture inside the church was tragic.”

According to a recent report from the Guardian, there are more than 42,000 immigrants on Lesvos and a handful of other islands, who are “unable to leave because of a containment policy determined by the EU, they are forced to remain on the islands until their asylum requests are processed by a system both understaffed and overstretched.”

Police on Lesvos clashed with some 2,000 Afghani migrants and refugees who were participating in a protest rally from the Moria camp to Mytilini last Monday to demand better living conditions and a acceleration of asylum procedures. 

The conditions at the Moira camp are widely recognized to be extremely poor. 

Source

Jerry Kammer: I’m a Liberal Who Thinks Immigration Must Be Restricted

In 2001, when I was the new Washington correspondent for The Arizona Republic, I attended the annual awards dinner of the National Immigration Forum. The forum is a left-right coalition that lobbies for unauthorized immigrants and expansive immigration policies. Its board has included officials of the National Council of La Raza, the American Civil Liberties Union and the American Immigration Lawyers Association, as well as the United States Chamber of Commerce, the National Restaurant Association and the American Nursery and Landscape Association.

After dinner, the group’s executive director, Frank Sharry, made a pitch to business allies who wanted Congress to allow them unfettered access to foreign workers. “You guys in business get all the workers you want, whenever you want them,” he proposed. “No bureaucracy.”

“Sold!” yelled John Gay, a lobbyist for the American Hotel and Lodging Association. Mr. Sharry quickly added that the deal must include advocacy for “three little, tiny pieces of paper: a green card, a union card and a voter registration card” for unauthorized immigrants.

For me, a reporter who had long covered immigration in the Southwest and Mexico, the exchange was a revelation about the politics of immigration in Washington. Business lobbyists like Mr. Gay — conservatives who seek loose labor markets so employers can keep wages down — align themselves with liberal activists like Frank Sharry to pursue policies that serve their groups.

Who, I wondered, was lobbying for the American workers competing with the new arrivals? The answer, I learned, was no one. As the former labor secretary Robert Reich once put it, “There’s no National Association of Working Poor.”

This mismatch of political influence, combined with the social and fiscal consequences of a wave of low-skilled immigrants, led me to believe that immigration should be restricted so that its power to invigorate our country is not eclipsed by its potential to harm workers. I think immigration, like capitalism itself, should be regulated in the national interest, not shaped to serve the free-market libertarianism of the right or the post-national humanitarianism of the left.

That’s why I call myself a liberal restrictionist.

Read the rest here.

California Shows The Limits Of Progressivism

More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.
 
Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

The demand for socialism is on the rise from young Americans today. But is socialism even morally sound? 

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Read the rest here.