Three More Executive Orders

Who knows why some of the egregious actions of our current government move me to write about them here while others — just as bad — don't. You have to pick and choose from the flood.

Maybe it's because I hadn't heard much about these particular pieces of bad news on social media before seeing them in the newspaper today, via a New York Times story.

Yesterday, Trump signed three more executive orders.*

• The first will try to bring the force of the federal government against cities, like Saint Paul, that refuse to cooperate with ICE or other federal immigration authorities. ("Sanctuary cities," one of those terms the right has managed to make into a dirty word)
• The second is a bunch of bad police policy: helping cops who are accused of illegal acts and loosening the minimal rules we have to restrain police departments, giving even more military equipment to local police, and a vague promise to punish people who "prohibit law enforcement officers from carrying out duties," as if that isn't already a law.
• The third one would up enforcement of an existing rule that requires spoken and written English proficiency among truck drivers. Can't have immigrants driving trucks! (I wonder when that existing rule was passed.)

The execrable Karoline Leavitt said the second EO would "unleash America's law enforcement to pursue criminals." I have really come to hate the word "unleash."

The attack on sanctuary cities is, of course, part of the greater anti-immigrant purge. As was predicted, there aren't anywhere near enough actually dangerous people among the undocumented population to meet the kinds of quotas Trump promised to deport.

The Times story ended with two paragraphs that were almost funny, except for the danger they represent to real people:

At a morning news conference, Tom Homan, the Trump administrations border czar, said the administration had carried out 139,000 deportations. That figure lags behind the pace of the final year of the Biden administration, which seemed to annoy Homan.

He said the number would be higher but, because border crossings had fallen so significantly, there were fewer people to turn back.

That decrease in crossings should, from the right's point of view, be a good thing, but somehow they manage to see it as bad since their purpose is to inflict harm on vulnerable people and make everyone live in fear.

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Yes, I know that executive orders are not laws and the fact that he signed these pieces of paper doesn't necessarily mean they will have any effect. I sure hope not.