President Trump said he would “show great heart” when considering whether to deport recipients of DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. So why is Daniel Ramirez Medina sitting in jail? We look at the case of a 23-year-old father who was detained by ICE one week ago in Des Moines, Washington, even though he has permission to live and work in the United States under DACA. His supporters have maintained a vigil at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, where he is being held. It’s a private detention center owned by the for-profit prison company GEO Group. We go to Seattle, Washington, to speak with Councilmember Lorena González, a civil rights attorney who is the city’s first Latino councilmember.
Democracy Now
4: ‘Raid Alerts’ Wants to Warn Undocumented Immigrants With an App
A project that started under Obama gained new life under President Trump.
Like many of the over 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, 27-year-old developer Celso Mireles spent much of his life haunted by the specter of surprise deportations of the kind that we saw across the country this week. Although he’s recently documented, Mireles came to the country as a child with two undocumented parents and then spent over 25 years undocumented while seeing friends and community members deported.
Vice News
3: WHY DO SO MANY AMERICANS FEAR MUSLIMS? DECADES OF DENIAL ABOUT AMERICA’S ROLE IN THE WORLD.
THERE’S BEEN LOTS of attention-grabbing opposition to Trump’s “Muslim ban” executive order, from demonstrations to court orders. But polls make it clear public opinion is much more mixed. Standard phone polls show small majorities opposed, while web and automated polls find small majorities continue to support it.
What surprises me about the poll results isn’t that lots of Americans like the ban — but that so many Americans don’t. Regular people have lives to lead and can’t investigate complicated issues in detail. Instead they usually take their cues from leaders they trust. And given what politicians across the U.S. political spectrum say about terrorism, Trump’s executive order makes perfect sense. There are literally no national-level American politicians telling a story that would help ordinary people understand why Trump’s goals are both horrendously counterproductive and morally vile.
Think of it this way:
On February 13, 1991 during the first Gulf War, the U.S. dropped two laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah public air raid shelter in Baghdad. More than 400 Iraqi civilians were incinerated or boiled alive. For years afterward visitors to a memorial there would meet a woman with eight children who had died during the bombing; she was living in the ruined shelter because she could not bear to be anywhere else.
Now, imagine that immediately after the bombing Saddam Hussein had delivered a speech on Iraqi TV in which he plaintively asked “Why do they hate us?” — without ever mentioning the fact that Iraq was occupying Kuwait. And even Saddam’s political opponents would only mumble that “this is a complicated issue.” And most Iraqis had no idea that their country had invaded Kuwait, and that there were extensive United Nation resolutions and speeches by George H.W. Bush explaining the U.S.-led coalition’s rationale for attacking Iraq in response. And that the few Iraqis who suggested there might be some kind of relationship between Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the Amiriyah bombing were shouted down by politicians saying these Iraq-hating radicals obviously believed that America’s slaughter of 400 people was justified.
If that had happened, we’d immediately recognize that Iraqi political culture was completely insane, and that it would cause them to behave in dangerously nutty ways. But that’s exactly what U.S. political culture is like.
The Intercept
2: Sergey Lavrov: I hope world chooses post-West order
Russia’s foreign minister has called for an end to an outdated world order dominated by the West, even as US Vice President Mike Pence has pledged his country’s “unwavering” commitment to its transatlantic allies in NATO.
Sergey Lavrov’s comments at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday came just hours after Pence promised to stand with Europe to rein in a resurgent Russia and “hold Russia accountable”.
Lavrov, offering pragmatic ties with the US, said: “I hope that [the world] will choose a democratic world order – a post-West one – in which each country is defined by its sovereignty.”
The time when the West called the shots was over while NATO was a relic of the Cold War, he said.
In its place, Russia wanted a relationship with the US that is “pragmatic with mutual respect and acknowledgement of our common responsibility for global stability”.
The two countries had never been in direct conflict, he said, and were close neighbours across the Baring Straits.
Aljazeera
1: Mike Pence widens US rift with Europe over Nato defence spending
The US vice-president has delivered the most uncompromising message yet from the Trump administration to Nato allies that they have to step up financial contributions towards defence spending.
On his first visit to Europe since taking office, Mike Pence said “some of our largest allies do not have a credible path” towards paying their share of Nato’s financial burden. Although he did not name individual countries, his targets included Germany, France and Italy. “The time has come to do more,” he said.
This section of his speech to the Munich security conference, which is being attended by 500 delegates including government leaders and defence and foreign ministers from around the world, was greeted with lukewarm applause.
He was speaking immediately after the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, made it clear she would not be bullied by the US over defence spending. She said Germany had made a promise to increase defence over the next decade and would fulfil that commitment rather than be forced into the faster rises that Trump is looking for.
The Guardian
