Relgious leaders sue to prevent ICE raids on churches giving immigrants sanctuary, does Trump care? By Hal M. Brown

Here is comment I wrote to the HUFFPOST article about 27 religious groups suing to protect immigrants from ICE raids at churches.

As a Jew, this me think of history and my first thought was that today in the United States we are all German Jews circa. Nazi Germany. Then I glance down at some of the comments and am appalled by the ignroacne and hate. As far as the Nazis were concerned Jews were criminals.

I was groggy since I'd just gotten up so I made the typo spelling ignorance "ignroacne "and "glance," needed a comma, and left a word out. It should have read:

As a Jew, this made me think of history and my first thought was that today in the United States we are all German Jews circa. Nazi Germany. Then I glanced down at some of the comments and am appalled by the ignorance and hate. As far as the Nazis were concerned, Jews were criminals.

I considered writing about the HUFFPOST article this morning, but then didn't really have much to say beyond the comment I made. Then I got the email shown below. I decided not to encourage the person who wrote this by responding. Even so, I clicked where it said "Reply to Cecil Patrick" and saw that there were replies to him. I decided that I would share them and add a few thoughts.

Click images to enlarge.

The commenter who prompted these replies had almost 58 thousand "likes" to his other HUFFPOST comments. I couldn't see them because he has this feature blocked.

These replies challenged Cecil Patrick:

Here are a few of the pro-MAGA replies to my comment:

Mark S. obviously doesn’t understad what an analogy is.

This is the excerpt from HUFFPOST from the rabbinical association that is. part of the lawsuit:

“As Jewish leaders, we are mindful of our history as an immigrant people,” Central Conference of American Rabbis executive Hara Person said in a statement about the lawsuit.

“Jews in the United States came as immigrants and so we have always supported and welcomed immigrants,” Person wrote. “The most often repeated command in the Torah is to care for the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt — in this way our scripture and history compels us to work with and help immigrants and refugees.”

There is no mention of Jews taking sanctuary in synagogues or churches in Nazi Germany. While this didn't happen, I assume this in because the issue here involves immigrants and the German Jews weren't immigrants. If they were being given sanctuary in relgious buildings, the Gestapo would have have had a easier job rounding them up.

I am certainly not the first to point out that, except for Native Americans, we are all either descended from immigrants or immirgants ourselves who came here legally. Many of our ancestors were fleeing oppression in their country. All of them came here for a better life. Those Central American immigrants today are the same as them.

So far there has been no reporting I know of that churches are currently housing immigrants. They may be doing this without publicizing it. There is a likelihood that it will be a short matter of time before they do this and the word will get out. The question then is whether or not Trump, realizing that this will make it far easier for him to signficantly increase the number of immigrant arrests, will order ICE agents to raid churches which have offered immigrants sanctuary.

The lawsuit is an attempt to stop this before it happens. It "alleges the Department of Homeland Security’s authorization to make detainments at places of worship violates the First Amendment, as well as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which curtails the federal government’s ability to restrict religious practices." I'm not a lawyer, but since ICE hasn't conducted any raids on churches, at least not yet, the case isn't as strong as it would be if they'd already done this.

Trump likes putting on a good show with the ICE raids. It's like Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Dr. Phil are his on the ground theatrical producers and directors.

I can't think of a better show for them that a raid on a church would be, especially one in a liberal city.

If the religious leaders win the lawsuit order the raids would be a typical Trump in your face defiance of a court order. If the immigants had already been hustled out of the country there would be nothing anybody could do to help them.

It would remain to be seen what the reaction would be from the American relgious community if ICE agents were seen on TV breaking down the doors of churches, arresting ministers, and herding immigrants out the door in chains. I doubt Trump would care since he thrives on being attacked. He could order this in part to provoke blowback. This is the nature of the psychopathic beast that he is.

Thanks to Lawrence O'Donnell... well really thanks to Donald Trump... I am wide awake at midnight writing this. By Hal M. Brown

Last night, after watching a couple of epsodes of Vienna Blood ( where a young neurologist and psychoanalyst helps a detective solve murders in 1900s Vienna) we decided to check and see what Lawrence O'Donnell was talking about. Watch the video of the segment that we foound partiuclarly disturbing below :

With lie about cop-assaulting Jan. 6 rioters, Trump is saying what you saw didn't happen

About five minutes into this segment O’Donnell showed what Trump insanely said. Lawrence said we should think about the depth of pathology that allows someone to say this and then showed the clip of the Capitol police officer sceaming as he was being crushed in a door. He went on to say that the only word for this is madness, not just audaciy, to say you didn’t see what you saw live on January 6th.

This is the article about this on HUFFPOST:

Trump Claims The Jan. 6 Cop-Assaulters He Pardoned Were The Ones Assaulted

Excerpt:

“I pardoned people who were assaulted themselves. They were assaulted by our government,” he said in a half-hour news conference with the reporters traveling with him on his flight to the Super Bowl on Sunday.

“That’s who were assaulted and they were treated unfairly. There’s never been a group of people in this country outside of maybe one instance I can think of, but I won’t get into it, that were treated more horribly than the people of J6,” he continued. “So no, I didn’t assault. They didn’t assault. They were assaulted, and what I did was a great thing for humanity.”

I woke up at 11:30 and couldn't get this out of my mind. I was wide awake at midnight so I thought I'd get up and write my Substack. Being able to do this is a benefit of being an old man who is retired and dosen't have to go to work in the morning. I can catch up on sleep taking a nap later in the day.

I have MSNBC on as I write this. Jen Psaki, in a repeat of her earlier show. is talking about how Trump administration’s job candidates are being asked whether January 6th was an inside job and whether the 2020 election was stolen. This was reported in The Washington Post.

Of course, no matter what these candidates believe, they know what answers are required in order to be hired.

They weren't asked whether they thought Trump should have complete control of the entire government as a dictator, be able to ignore court orders, and be able to have those he considered to be his enemies prosecuted and thrown in prison, or worse. Six months or a year from now the interviewers may be asking these questions too.

Jen Psaki went on to talk about how the just pardoned Rob Blagojevich would be appointed to be the ambassador to Serbia, how my old US representative who lost the election, former mayor of a city down the road from where we live, Lori Chavez-DeRemer has been nominated to be Secretary of Labor, and how many other Republican election losers have been appointed to Executive Branch jobs. 

These people had proved themselves to be Trumpers. There was no need for them to be interogated to ascertain their loyalty. 

Assuming Kash Patel becomes FBI director, I expect there will be hundreds, if not thousands, of vacancies at the FBI. He doesn’t have to worry about taking time to conduct the usual extensive background checks required for applicants. He has some 1,600 J6 MAGA warriors he can hire. All he has to do is swear them in with a wink and a nod to actually following the oath, and then send them to the FBI academy for firearms training. Currently FBI Academy training takes 16 weeks. Learning to shoot a firearm without hitting too many people you aren’t aiming at would take about a week, maybe less. (When I became a reserve police office it took me an hour to be able to hit the target the first time I fired a handgun.) 

Patel could dispatch his new J6 FBI agents across the country to arrest people in a short time. Many of them would be easy to find since lots of them live in and around Washington, DC. The FBI has about two dozen planes, so sending agents further away would be easy.

It bears knowing the history of the Gestapo. It was founded three months after the Nazis came into power. When the Gestapo was first established in 1933, it had a small staff of about 300 agents. It was originally created to combat political opposition to the Nazi regime and before long was commiting atrocities.It grew to over 30,000 by the end of the war.

The FBI will provide well paid job opportunities for members of the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Boogaloo Boys.

I rather doubt you feel safer reading this. I certainly don’t. Now it’s 2:00 AM. I’m not sure that getting this out of my system will enable me to fall asleep.

Three weeks in and we have Fort Sumter. By Hal M. Brown

If you know the most basic bit of American history, and I assume since no MAGAs read my Substack, that you do, when someone asks you why Fort Sumter is significant you can tell them that this is where the first shots of the Civl War were fired by Confedrate forces attacking a Union fort.

Here's how Wikipedia describes this battle:

The attack on Fort Sumter is generally taken as the beginning of the American Civil War—the first shots fired. Certainly it was so taken at the time—citizens of Charleston were celebrating. The First Battle of Fort Sumter began on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina Militia artillery fired from shore on the Union garrison. These were (both sides agreed) the first shots of the war. The bombardment continued all day, watched by many happy civilians. The fort had been cut off from its supply line and surrendered the next day. Major Robert Anderson took the flag with him as they evacuated.

What has just happened mere few weeks into the Trump presidency is that we have had our Fort Sumpter in the form of Trump attacking federal agencies and, as I wrote yesterday, locking Democratic members of Congress out of federal buildings. 

The war is about to escalate as Trump threatens to defy court orders and Vance, Musk, and some Republican members of Congress say he has every right to do this.

It is worse than that. There are also thinly veiled threats to try to take control of the media.

Two Substacks describe this today:

Ben Meiselas writes in The Meidas Touch “Trump is threatebning to prosecute us.”

We knew this would happen. As Trump gets more desperate, we always thought he would try to use his Department of Justice and FBI to attack Meidas and try to shut us down. Since MeidasTouch is not on terrestrial TV or cable TV, the FCC does not have regulatory authority over us. Since we don’t have investors, the SEC and DOJ do not have regulatory authority over us to approve mergers. So what is an authoritarian regime to do?

This weekend, Elon Musk published a letter from the top Trump federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C., stating he would be investigating “networks” that covered and exposed Elon Musk’s team for seizing control of government agencies and people’s private data. Then, Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary stated she would be going after networks that exposed ICE raids and protected migrants. Trump is apparently livid at the coverage by us and others who have alerted migrants about ICE raids.

Robert Reich wrote “The end of law?:”

He is the most lawless president in American history.

He’s allowed Musk’s rats unfettered access to the Treasury’s payments system. Banned birthright citizenship. Refused to spend money appropriated by Congress. Closed independent agencies without Congress’s approval. Substituted political loyalists for civil servants. Unleashed the military on civilians. And on it goes.

Republican lawmakers won’t restrain him. In one of the most shameful apologia for dictatorship I’ve ever heard coming from a public official, Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina admits that much of what Trump is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, Tillis adds, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

We shouldn’t bellyache about Trump’s torching the Constitution?

As Trump’s marauding continues, America's last defense is the federal courts. But the big story here (which hasn’t received nearly the attention it deserves) is that the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is ignoring the courts.

Here’s some of what George Conway said on Morning Joe: 'Mark my words': George Conway predicts alarming showdown that could 'end' U.S. democracy.

"They are violating the text of statutes by having DOGE run around and do all the things that they've been doing, the executive orders, there's no reason that this government that has decided not to obey the laws and the Constitution of the United States is going to obey a court order and, as you know, having practiced law there's really only one way that courts can enforce their orders when somebody is being contumacious and refusing to obey an order, and that's to send the U.S. Marshals out to take somebody in and to hold them in contempt or to otherwise enforce court orders."

"Well, who does the U.S. Marshals Service work for?" Conway added. "The U.S. Marshals Service is part of the United States Department of Justice. It reports to Donald J. Trump, and what's going to happen here, mark my words, is that at some point, they are going to basically tell the United States Marshals Service, do not enforce any of these orders, we will not obey them, and you are not to enforce them and, once that happens, I mean, I hope it doesn't happen, but I know in my heart that it will, our 236-year experiment in the federal rule of law, in democratic self-governance for the United States of America, in American constitutionalism, is essentially over."

Conway didn't see any institutional bulwark against Trump's abuse of the rule of law.

The difference between what is happening now, and what happened at Fort Sumter, is that we now have the equivalent of the Union firing on a Confederate fort. The Confederate soldiers were the rebels. They were waging war against the elected goverment of the United States. Now we are the rebels. We are engaged in a battle against an elected government. There is an equivalency. The country is equally divided. Unfortunately, this is only by population rather than by hard power. We have the ability to wield soft power which, unfortunately, is akin to bringing a knife to a gunfight.

We are the rebels. We are like guerrillas. Guerrillas can win a war when a majority of the population supports them, but we only have half. We have to fight smart though being on the side of righteousness isn’t enough.

Robert Hubbell writes” We are not sheep. Get louder. Take action. Create a shadow cabinet.”

Over the weekend, Musk and JD Vance each posted statements asserting that the president should or could defy court orders. A Harvard law professor joined the conversation by endorsing the notion that judicial restraints on the president violate the separation of powers doctrine.

They mean business, folks. They want Trump to be unbounded by the Constitution, Congress, or the courts. In other words, they want a dictator. They think we are sheep who will huddle together for safety and look the other way. They are wrong, and it is time for us to let them know by raising the volume.

Let’s skip through thousands of words of analysis and get to the point: Trump believes that he is immune from all laws, can ignore Congress, and spend money (or not) based on his whims (or those of teenage hackers and rogue AI), and that we will dutifully send our tax dollars to Washington without so much as a whimper.

Hubbell recommends the actions we can take against this:.

• Street protests must continue to grow daily.
• Telephone lines into the offices of every US Representative and Senator should melt from the volume and anger of the messages.
• Everyone in America should belong to a grassroots organization that is actively involved in planning protests (even if you are unable to show up at the protests).
• Engage in daily acts of resistance: Jessica Craven Chop Wood Carry Water, Third Act, and 5Calls.org, and others.
• Support Democrats while demanding that they act in a manner consistent with the constitutional emergency we face.
• Support the legal advocacy organizations leading the fight in court: Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, Democracy Docket, ACLU, and other legal advocacy groups

We should do as much of this as we can but not kid ourselves into false optimism but we should not wallow in pessimism. We must be realistic. This is a battle against an enemy that is better armed than we are which in addtion to controlling Congres is supported by of half the population. 

The Civil War lasted four years. It is a grim coincidence that this is how long Trump’s presidency is supposed to last. If he wins the war it may last longer than that, but our power will be be greatly diminshed. Since mass peaceful protests will have been outlawed we may end up being solitary rebels hiding in basements trying to find a way to use the internet to have our voices heard. This may be difficult since Substack and Google Blogger which is owned by Google where it’s CEO is a Trumper and where I post a mirror of my Substack, may be shut down.

You may not be ale to read what I and others post on Bluesky. Not that more than a few people are interested in what I have to say, but if they take RawStory down they won’t be able to follow my comments to their articles.

Addendum

We all may have to figure out how to use TOR to post and read websites on the dark web. Make a hard copy of this: What Is the Dark Web? Here's How to Access It Safely (and What You'll Find)

Related Substack about our resistance using peaceful unconventional warfare.

Update: If you think I am going overboard in raising the alarm about what Trump would like to do, and how Kash Pattel wants to turn the FBI into Trump and his Gestapo, read this.