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Jesse Duquette Walk this way. The post Transport appeared first on The Nation.

When President Joe Biden tried to enact student loan forgiveness programs, it was treated as an unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach of power. But now that Donald Trump is president, mucking around in student loan programs is perfectly fine and dandy—though this time the goal is to hurt people rather than help them.  Trump is preparing to turn the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program into yet another tool of retribution. Under PSLF, students who enter public service—including government and nonprofit jobs—have any remaining balance on student loans forgiven after 10 years of payments.  Public service jobs are often lower paying than their private-sector equivalents, especially for those requiring advanced degrees. Before PSLF was created in 2007, student loan debt would often act as a barrier preventing graduates from taking public-sector jobs.  But now, the Department of Education is gearing up to remove eligibility from any employer that it deems to be involved in “illegal activities.” The Trump administration’s warped sense of what constitutes an illegal activity is exactly what you’d expect. Trump’s March executive order requires Education Secretary Linda McMahon to redefine public service to exclude organizations that work on immigration issues or transgender rights, along with any employers that she determines are “aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” or violate state laws like trespassing, disorderly conduct, or blocking highways.  People rally outside of the Supreme Court in 2023, protesting against a lawsuit seeking to block President Joe Biden’s student loan relief efforts. In other words, organizations that focus on anything that Trump and McMahon don’t like will get yeeted from eligibility for the PSLF program.  Of course, it’s not illegal to work with immigrants, to help trans kids, or to engage in peaceful protests, but the Trump administration doesn’t care. The entire point is to make loan forgiveness unobtainable for filthy liberals. There’s no way that this won’t be used as a weapon, where the Trump administration can remove any organization it doesn’t like, for any reason, wiping out loan forgiveness for employees—regardless of the law. Contrast this with Biden’s detailed rulemaking efforts explaining his authority to enact student loan forgiveness and lengthy outlines of each proposed rule change. But honestly, it probably didn’t matter what Biden proposed: The Supreme Court was always going to rush to rule against him. Even when the Biden administration significantly narrowed the scope of relief after the ruling, red states kept suing to ensure that students would stay saddled with debt.  Watching Trump pretend that this is about “restoring” PSLF is ridiculous given his behavior during his first term, when only 7,000 people received loan forgiveness and the other 99% of applications were denied. While Biden fixed that deliberately broken process, Trump is wiping it out again.  When Biden exerted any presidential authority, no matter how well-grounded in law, it was deemed a historic crisis and a trampling of Congress. But when Trump throws up a lawless, bigoted executive order, it’s totally fine.  Who needs law when you’ve got Congress and the Supreme Court willing to let you do whatever you want?

In a sign Republicans are out of touch with regular Americans, Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Wednesday bragged that the Senate had “the longest continuous work period in 15 years.” “We’ve taken more roll-call votes so far this year than at the same point in any year since at least 1989,” Thune added in a speech on the Senate floor, as he tried to build support for Senate Republicans’ actions to strip health care and food aid from the poorest Americans in order to cut taxes for the rich and fund President Donald Trump’s masked deportation force. YouTube Video How long was this “continuous work period,” you might ask? The Senate was in session on weekdays from Jan. 3 through March 14, the chamber’s first scheduled weeklong break, according to the Senate’s official calendar. Of course, that time in session includes days off for federal holidays and days where they gaveled out early.  As of Wednesday, the Senate has had 111 days in session since Jan. 3, according to the secretary of the Senate. During that time, they’ve had 11 Fridays where they didn’t meet, in addition to various scheduled breaks. What’s more, Thune bragging about the number of votes taken is an odd choice. The GOP and its unified control of Washington have so far enacted just 49 pieces of legislation, according to GovTrack, which monitors actions in Congress. That’s far off track from the 117th Congress, when Democrats had unified control of the nation’s capitol. The Democratic-controlled 117th Congress had 1,234 pieces of legislation enacted over the course of two years. Republicans would have to seriously pick up the pace over the next year and a half to get to that level. And if Republicans want to talk about quality over quantity, Democrats have them beat there, too. In the 117th Congress, Democrats passed a sweeping COVID-19 relief bill, which gave Americans stimulus checks. They also expanded subsidies for Americans to obtain health care, passed $1 trillion in infrastructure funding, and allowed Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower prescription costs. What have Republicans done this Congress?  They passed a budget that will strip away health care and food stamps from millions of Americans. They made it harder for Americans to afford the cost of college, and beefed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement to make Trump’s deportation gestapo the largest police force in the United States. Republicans are also set to let the expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire, which will cause millions to become unable to afford their health insurance.  But congrats on working a few full weeks in a row, Republicans. What a sacrifice.

According to President Donald Trump’s labor secretary, Americans are jumping at the chance to work long, low-paid hours in the fields.  Lori Chavez-DeRemer appeared Wednesday on Fox News, where both she and the hosts challenged the silly leftist notion that U.S. citizens aren’t keen to take certain difficult jobs.  “What happened to the threat from the left that American citizens won’t do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do?” asked Todd Piro, co=host of “Fox & Friends First.” “Because when I look at these numbers, I think, ‘Nope, the American citizen is willing to do those jobs.’” “Americans are willing to do the job,” Chavez-DeRemer replied. “What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.” YouTube Video While there’s nothing wrong with putting more money back into the pockets of American workers, some of the positions Chavez-DeRemer and the Trump administration are hounding about have a long history of low pay and abusive work conditions.  Forty-two percent of crop farmworkers are foreign born and not authorized to work in the U.S., according to the Department of Agriculture. Undocumented immigrants have been known to live in bug-infested shacks as they work long hours on farms for little pay.  This push to put Americans in the fields comes amid the Trump administration’s brutal push to expel undocumented—and even some documented—immigrants from the U.S. And with the administration telling Americans to turn to the fields if they want to keep their Medicaid coverage, it seems as if Trump and his crew are aware of their dire need to fill the labor shortage they’re fomenting.

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A growing number of U.S. citizens—many of them Latino—say they’ve been detained by immigration agents in what critics are calling blatant racial profiling and overzealous policing. Of course, citizens aren’t supposed to be arrested or detained unless agents believe they’ve broken the law. But across the country, reports are piling up of Latino citizens being stopped, questioned, and even jailed—just for looking “foreign.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement hasn’t released statistics on these incidents in months, but the Department of Homeland Security is already doing damage control. Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Axios that claims of citizens being wrongfully detained are not true, and accused the media of “shamefully peddling a false narrative” to smear ICE agents. Protesters gather to denounce ICE operations in Los Angeles on June 10. “Any claims that individuals have been ‘targeted’ by law enforcement because of their skin color are disgusting and categorically FALSE,” McLaughlin said. But anecdotal evidence paints a murkier picture. Axios reviewed news reports, social media clips, and complaints from advocacy groups and found several cases where citizens were taken by ICE, sometimes for days. In May, ICE detained Florida native Leonardo Garcia Venegas while he was on the job at a construction site in Foley, Alabama. They accused him of carrying a fake Real ID, ordered him to his knees, and handcuffed him, according to Noticias Telemundo. Then there’s Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who spent 10 days in ICE custody after agents arrested him in Arizona and refused to believe his citizenship. Last month, ICE briefly held Elzon Lemus, an electrician from Brentwood, New York, during a routine traffic stop, saying he matched the description of someone they were looking for. Related | Trump goons arrest another politician, laws be damned In California, plainclothes ICE agents briefly detained Jason Brian Gavidia, born in East Los Angeles, outside of a Montebello body shop and demanded to know where he was born. “I’m an American, bro!” he shouted, as captured on video. In Southern California alone, at least five more incidents have been reported, according to Guadalupe Gonzalez of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. And they don’t appear isolated.  ICE raids have continued aggressively across Latino-heavy regions like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Diego, and states like Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and New York—raising fears that the agency is targeting communities by ethnicity, not evidence. Civil rights groups are pushing back. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund plans to file a $1 million federal lawsuit on behalf of Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen and photographer who was allegedly detained while filming an ICE raid outside of a Hollywood Home Depot. Garcia had no criminal record and confirmed his citizenship, but he was still held for a day. Sen Alex Padilla is pushed out of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s news conference on June 12. “We do our due diligence,” McLaughlin insisted. “DHS enforcement operations are highly targeted and are not resulting in the arrest of U.S. citizens.” But advocates aren’t buying it. “Let’s just call it what it is: This is racial discrimination,” said councilmember Mario Trujillo of Downey, California.  Even Sen. Alex Padilla of California, who was physically removed from a Homeland Security briefing in June, weighed in on the matter. “Reports of American citizens detained by ICE purely based on their race are wholly unacceptable and run afoul of our Fourth Amendment rights,” he told Axios. “No one should feel unsafe because of the color of their skin, but in [President] Donald Trump’s America—where indiscriminate immigration raids are commonplace—this is the stark reality.” For now, ICE denies any wrongdoing. But to many Latino citizens, the message is clear: In Trump’s America, having the right papers isn’t enough.

The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals just did scuzzy businesses a solid by throwing out the click-to-cancel rule. Finalized during the Biden administration, back when the Federal Trade Commission was actually doing its job, the rule would have required companies to make canceling their services as easy as signing up.  This rule was a slam dunk, because literally no consumer is clamoring for the right to drive to the gym to cancel your free trial or to sit on the phone with a newspaper hell-bent on keeping you trapped in a subscription. But companies desperately want that, so they ran to a friendly court to whine about how unfair it was to rob them of the ability to drain consumer pocketbooks.  Going to the 8th Circuit was a pretty safe bet, as the court has only one Democratic appointee. Otherwise, it’s wall-to-wall Republicans eager to lend a helping hand to businesses. Five days before the rule was supposed to go into effect, the 8th Circuit obligingly blocked the rule, providing American consumers with the god-given freedom to have unwanted subscription charges hammer their bank accounts.  “On the Court” by Clay Bennett One of the bases for the ruling was that the FTC failed to do a preliminary regulatory analysis, required when a rule’s impact on the economy would exceed $100 million. Of course, the only way companies can complain that making it easier to cancel things would cost at least nine figures is to acknowledge that trapping people into paying for services they can’t cancel is a significant moneymaker. The Trump administration could always choose to restart the rulemaking process and do the necessary regulatory analysis, but these days, the FTC is not really all that jazzed about consumer protection. Instead, the agency is currently busy investigating Elon Musk’s enemies and making merger approvals contingent on companies agreeing to let the administration dictate what advertisers they choose to work with and what platforms they will advertise on. What company doesn’t love the idea of being forced to buy ads on Trump’s social media network or to have their ads appear alongside Grok’s open praise for Adolf Hitler over on X? Though the FTC did go to court to defend the rule, the Trump administration had already tipped its hand in mid-May when it delayed the implementation of the click-to-cancel rule for two months, which just happened to be long enough for the appeals court to issue its ruling. The word salad justification for the delay was “Having conducted a fresh assessment of the burdens that forcing compliance by this date would impose, the Commission has determined that the original deferral period insufficiently accounted for the complexity of compliance”—which sounds like giving businesses a pass because they said it’s just too darn hard for them to obey.  Since Trump illegally fired the Democratic FTC appointees months ago, there’s no real worry that any commissioners would come forward to say that maybe it is good to protect consumers from sleazy corporate tactics. So now, you can continue racking up unwanted fees with dirtbag companies whose business plan relies on keeping you trapped. Freedom!

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