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Jennifer [ [link removed] ]: Last week, PBS NewsHour ran a powerful and deeply upsetting piece on the Haitians who have made their homes in Springfield, Ohio under TPS and who are now being subjected to ankle monitors and other shameful methods of control by ICE and this presidential administration. (Thanks to SCOTUS, as is increasingly the case with many bad things of late.) Perhaps some of your readers have seen the story of Pierre Damas Bel, the young man with a promising future who took his own life after being shackled with an ankle monitor.
My question is, what can be done to support and protect these people, or otherwise help mitigate their criminalization? Does the state of Ohio have any jurisdiction here to prevent their deportation? Is there even any political will to do so? Or are these people doomed to suffer the racist whims of Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, et al? This shameful situation seems to be getting lost among the many other emergencies going on. It also seems destined to become another disgraceful chapter in our nation’s history.
Let me acknowledge up top that my practical knowledge here is very limited. I asked around and the feedback I got was that these local organizations are doing heavy lifting:
FOR LEGAL AID:
Advocates for Basic Legal Equality [ [link removed] ] (ABLE)
Legal Aid of Southeast and Central Ohio [ [link removed] ] (LASCO)
The Immigration Clinic [ [link removed] ] at the Moritz College of Law
The Haitian Support Center [ [link removed] ]
FOR MUTUAL AID/SUPPORT:
The Society of St. Vincent De Paul [ [link removed] ]
Second Harvest Food Bank [ [link removed] ]
United Way [ [link removed] ] of Central Ohio
Community Refugee & Immigration Services [ [link removed] ] (CRIS)
But this comes to me second hand. It isn’t a comprehensive list, and I can’t say which of these organizations needs the most support, in what form, etc.
At this point, the best those of us who want to help can do is provide people basic necessities, and the legal resources required to make asylum claims, because the Republican Supreme Court declared the executive branch has unreviewable discretion over grants and rescissions of temporary protected status. For the courts to have any role, according to Sam Alito et al, plaintiffs would have to show that a revocation was plainly unconstitutional. In the case of Ohio, the Republican justices rejected the most obvious constitutional claims, holding in essence that the only way to prove racial animus on the part of the federal government would be for the government to declare racial animus overtly, rather than disguise it behind expressions like “they’re eating the dogs” and “shithole country.”
Perhaps some clever advocate or advocates will devise a new argument that gets the whole community back in court. But absent an intervention like that, our recourse is mostly political, and mostly forward looking.
Mike DeWine is, sadly, about the best we can expect in the category of “Republican governors in the Trump era.” But he could do quite a bit more than rue the policy and ask Trump to reconsider.
He appointed the state’s current attorney general, and could ask him to make devising a new challenge to DHS a top priority.
He could order state authorities to cease all cooperation with federal officials. He could ban federal officials from state property. He could direct more state support to these immigrants. At the extreme, generous use of the pardon power might remove Haitians accused or convicted of non-violent crimes from the state lists that the feds are using to target people for deportation (though now I’m really just spitballing).
The point is, that kind of relief is likely to require political change. So making sure DeWine is replaced by Amy Acton instead of Vivek Ramaswamy is critical. Making sure Ohioans have more Democratic reps, and Sherrod Brown representing them in the Senate instead of Jon Husted, is also important.
I wish I had better news. Ultimately, the decks are stacked against humanity in this instance. Donald Trump would have to have a change of heart, which would require having a heart to begin with. But if more Ohio Republicans are forced to plead for him to back off, the outlook might improve at least a bit.
Matt Colbert [ [link removed] ]: I recently read something from Jay Rosen about how the press decides to cover certain political stories but not others. His thesis boils down to how there has to be some form of conflict that acts as a news hook. For example, they covered the Hasan Piker embroglio from multiple angles based on multiple conflicts: Will Dems condemn? Dems are divided. Dems are worried about Senate chances in Michigan. Schumer says Dems can take Senate without Michigan, etc. But they aren’t covering Elon Musk rabid racism and antisemitism because it’s just expected at this point.
I believe a high-profile Democrat should rampage on the Sunday shows or other legacy media interviews and basically spell this out to the hosts directly. “You have so far failed to cover Elon Musk’s racism and antisemitism, and the Republican party’s ties to him because you think it’s a boring dog bites man story. Well here’s your news hook, which I am providing you right now so that you have a permission structure to finally cover this story. I am calling out Republicans for not denouncing Elon Musk. Questions linger about whether Elon Musk will be a liability for Republicans. There. Now can you cover this story?”
Thoughts?
This is what I mean when I say [ [link removed] ] the press corps needs to do better, but until that day comes, Democrats need to work with the press corps we have. To be more specific about it: there’s what journalism should be in the abstract—a vocation that blends reporting, expertise, and critical thinking to inform the public of newsworthy developments in a manner that fosters a broadly accurate depiction of reality—and then there’s how journalism functions. If Democrats assume that reality will assert itself, because journalists are nominally committed to informing the citizenry, and thus take little interest in how reporters and outlets actually do their jobs, they’ll get outmaneuvered by their opponents, who are happy to work the refs.
Jay’s right about this. Reporters use proxies in the political world as assignment editors. They don’t deem things to be controversial based on a shared understanding of what’s right and wrong, in bounds and out of bounds. They look for indications that some political figure or partisan entity is outraged, and cite the outrage as evidence of controversy.
Republicans have figured this out! It’s why they shout bias when reporters scrutinize them in unhelpful ways. It’s why they pretend to be mad about everything, hypocrisy be damned. Republicans have political journalists so well trained at this point that they sometimes kick into scandal-mode anticipatorily, on the belief that Republicans will feign or affect outrage as soon as they get wind of the news.
We actually discussed this on Politix this week, but here are the two main takeaways.
First: Democrats and prominent liberals should engage in media criticism of their own. Not the right-wing vintage, which Republicans have used (with some success) to discredit journalism as a vocation. I’m imagining a distinctly liberal critique [ [link removed] ] designed to shame journalists into applying neutral standards. Republicans bullied them into embracing false balance; think of this as bullying them out of it.
Second, relatedly: ...

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