Here’s What The HBCU Presidents In That Oval Office Photo Say Happened At The White House

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WASHINGTON — The moment may have been stolen by a controversy stirring photo featuring presidential aide Kellyanne Conway seated with her feet up on a couch in the Oval Office, but the presidents of dozens of HBCUs left a meeting with the vice president hopeful that their schools will make progress under the current administration.

“Today’s meeting was an important first step toward building a working relationship between the administration, UNCF, and America’s HBCUs,” United Negro College Fund president and CEO Dr. Michael Lomax said in a statement, adding that the schools were looking forward to “meaningful actions” and “additional resources and investments.”

But questions swirled late Monday into Tuesday regarding the execution of a photo-op with the president inside the Oval Office, and a statement by education secretary about school choice. Members of the UNCF attended a meeting with the education secretary and vice president, expecting to give remarks, Dillard president Walter M. Kimbrough wrote in a post on Medium. The agenda “blew up” when a photo op was proposed, Kimbrough said, adding, “needless to say that threw the day off and there was very little listening to HBCU presidents today.”

Shortly after the photograph surfaced, DeVos caused an uproar on social media with a statement that called HBCUs “real pioneers on school choice.” She was criticized for not acknowledging the necessity of HBCUs during segregation, when black students were systematically denied access to higher education.

South Carolina State University President James Clark said he was “very hopeful” that HBCUs would flourish under the Trump administration, saying the presidents spoke “as a unified group” at the listening session about the need for infrastructure investment, financial aid and host of other priorities.

A UNCF spokesperson said four presidents from its member schools spoke during the listening session with Vice President Pence, discussing a wide range of topics Monday. Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis, Florida Memorial University president, emphasized a need to do produce more STEM graduates. Dr. Henry N. Tisdale of Claflin University president said Title III programs need to be fully funded. Dr. Mary Schmidt Campbell of Spelman spoke about HBCUs’ role in revitalizing communities.

Talladega College recently came under fire for performing at Trump’s Inaugural parade, but its president, Dr. Billy C. Hawkins, spoke Monday of leveraging HBCUs ability to create professional development opportunities.

“Our agenda is about educating the youth of America and especially the ones that attend HBCUs,” Clark told BuzzFeed News.

President Trump, who will sign an executive order on HBCUs this afternoon, has said he'll help the schools in his New Deal for Black America. The action is set to move the White House Initiative on HBCUs from the Department of Education into the White House.

LINK: Betsy DeVos Is Under Fire After Saying Historically Black Colleges Are "Pioneers" Of School Choice

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Keith Ellison’s Loss Leaves A Sour Taste For Progressives

Chris Berry / Reuters

ATLANTA — One of the protesters in the Atlanta Convention Center, angry and upset over the vote, directed his chants at the atrium full of Democrats.

“Party for the people!” Curtis Ries yelled. “Party for the people!”

Tom Perez’s narrow victory over Keith Ellison in election to chair the Democratic National Committee — a race progressives considered an urgent existential choice between the “establishment” and “grassroots” — did not spur the massive backlash DNC officials feared in the end. But Ellison's defeat did leave some young, liberal activists with new disdain, as 28-year-old Ries put it, for “institutional leadership" — for the party, for elected officials, the 447 DNC members with a say in the chair.

Liberal support for Ellison, a Minnesota congressman beloved by Bernie Sanders voters, “was a very clear message, given to the party by its progressive base, by young people,” Ries said. "The DNC instead decided that they knew better.”

The same frustration cycled through social media into this week: #DemExit hashtags, Facebook statuses on quitting the party, a Medium post for "disappointed progressives" advising activists to leave behind an organization of “paying, craved, cynical lip-service” and leaders who live to “serve the establishment.”

A party chair race rarely decides the direction of a political movement, and this one didn't. Perez, the 55-year-old former labor secretary, is taking the helm of a party still contending with ideological differences and unresolved questions about how Democrats will handle pressure from the left to resist President Trump at every turn.

Since the vote, Perez and Ellison have put forth a united front, making stops in Washington on Tuesday for the first time as chair and deputy chair of the DNC.

But in the wake of a the long-fought chair's race, where Perez was cast as an insider, he is also facing a group of young and progressive grassroots activists and voters who view Democratic Party politics with distrust, unease, or from a remove.

Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ former campaign manager, a Perez critic, and supporter of Ellison’s, said that Saturday's vote had likely reinforced that distance.

“I think there are a number of people now who have increased skepticism about the party,” Weaver said after the DNC vote. “It is incumbent on Tom Perez and the rest of the DNC to reach out to people who feel separated from the party, bring those people in, and let them know that the party is a place that welcomes them.”

Sanders himself told CNN on Sunday that Perez would "have to change is to figure out how we elect national Democratic leaders," adding that he was "not quite impressed with the process that exists."

“If we do not bring this new generation into institutional politics now, they may never get there,” said former DNC chair Howard Dean, a backer of another candidate, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who bowed out before voting. “And that would be the end of the Democratic Party as a functional institution.”

Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, one of several liberal groups that backed Ellison, said the congressman's experience as an organizer made him an ideal figure to close the gaps on the left. "To actively build bridges between the Democratic Party and the grassroots base," he said.

Of Perez, Green said, “This was not an ideological battle."

Perez, he noted, would have been PCCC's first choice for U.S. attorney general had Clinton won.

The left’s objection to Perez has to do in part with his entry into the race, and is centered not on policy but proximity to the Democratic Party establishment.

The week after the presidential election, Ellison launched his chair’s bid and quickly secured top endorsements from Sanders and House and Senate Democrats, positioning his campaign as the link between grassroots activists and Washington.

One month later, Perez got in the race, followed by news reports declaring him the preferred candidate of Barack Obama. When Joe Biden endorsed weeks later, Sanders released a statement “Do we stay with a failed status-quo approach?"

Together with his role as a prominent surrogate for Hillary Clinton in last year’s campaign, the “establishment” label stuck. (Perez's resume is less commonplace: He is the first Latino chair of the DNC, a civil rights lawyer, and has only held public office once, on the Montgomery County Council in his home state of Maryland.)

In the three final days before this weekend's vote, as the candidates made their final appeals to the DNC's 447 voting members in the meeting rooms and lobby bar of Atlanta’s Westin Peachtree Plaza hotel, there were warnings among progressives that a Perez victory would incite a revolt among the already alienated left wing.

Weaver, the former Sanders manager, made a splash in a MSNBC hit where he called Perez’s candidacy “divisive” and referred to him as a “candidate of the inside” whose election would “send a horrible message to millions and millions of people.” A Glenn Greenwald column in the Intercept called him a party “functionary.”

When voting ended, the only brief protest inside the Atlanta Convention Center came from Ries and the other Ellison supporters.

The DNC race, the first contested chair’s vote since the 1980s, spanned 15 weeks and drew a total of 11 candidates. Perez and Ellison, the frontrunners from the start, went through two long and tense rounds of votes on Saturday before the former labor secretary clinched the majority of votes from DNC members.

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The Court Fight Over A Detained DREAMer Could Have A Major Effect On All DACA Holders' Rights

Jason Redmond / AFP / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Daniel Ramirez Medina has been in a detention center since Feb. 10, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement came to arrest someone else at his house and, finding Ramirez there, arrested him as well — despite the fact that he had been granted relief under the Obama administration as a DREAMer.

On Friday, however, Ramirez’s lawyers asked a federal court to hold a hearing as soon as Tuesday on a request to release him while the legal questions in his case can be resolved.

“Mr. Ramirez is a DACA holder—and thus considered lawfully present in the United States,” the lawyers wrote in Friday’s filing, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. “He has not been convicted of, or charged with, any crime, but has already been in detention for over two weeks.”

The lawyers allege that the federal government's actions in Ramirez's case have violated his Fourth Amendment, due process, and equal protection rights.

While the case only directly involves the facts of Ramirez’s detention, it quickly could become a case over the contours of the rights of all DACA holders in the country — an issue that President Trump and senior White House officials have acknowledged is a difficult one even for the president's hardline immigration position.

That's because the lawyers behind the Ramirez challenge have a bigger aim: a federal court order that would guarantee due process rights to all DREAMers who have been approved for the DACA program.

To understand how this could happen (or not happen), it's important to understand the the specifics of the Ramirez case and the legal actions at play, and what will happen next this week.

Federal officials have defended Ramirez’s detention, alleging that he is affiliated with a gang — a contention strongly disputed by Ramirez’s lawyers. (Neither side says that Ramirez was involved in any gang-related activity at the time of his arrest.) Nonetheless, he was arrested and has been detained since then at the Northwest Detention Center pending deportation proceedings.

The lawyers filed a federal lawsuit against the detention on Feb. 13, seeking a writ of habeas corpus — a move that would result in his release, if successful. The federal court denied an initial request on Feb. 17 to release Ramirez immediately, instead directing that he have a bond hearing before an immigration judge.

Earlier this week, Ramirez’s legal team — a high-profile set of 17 lawyers that includes nonprofit advocates, big law firm partners, and constitutional law scholars — went back to the federal court (rather than an immigration judge) and asked the court to release Ramirez while his case is proceeding. Notably, they write that they have made the request, in part, because they allege that the gang-related claims by the government have put Ramirez at risk in detention.

The lawyers also filed a brief with the court at the same time detailing why, in their view, the district court has jurisdiction to hear Ramirez’s case. The Justice Department maintains that the matter should be confined to proceedings before an immigration court, which actually is an administrative arm of the Justice Department itself.

The day after the filings from Ramirez’s lawyers, the magistrate judge overseeing the case in the federal court, James Donohue, ordered the government to respond to the request by 5 p.m. Pacific Time on Monday — when the Justice Department’s brief asking the court to dismiss the case due to lack of jurisdiction also is due.

Once that brief is in, Ramirez’s lawyers want the court to resolve, at the least, the preliminary question of whether Ramirez can and should be released conditionally while his case is resolved.

“The continued detention with dangerous criminals, of a lawfully present individual, who has no criminal record and has not been charged with any crime, is particularly unsafe and alarming and should be remedied immediately,” the lawyers argue.

But the lawyers, in the underlying request for Ramirez's release, also bring the larger implications for all DREAMers who applied for DACA into focus.

“Leaving Mr. Ramirez in detention signals that arresting and detaining a Dreamer without probable cause or reasonable suspicion is permissible, potentially putting all DACA holders at risk,” the lawyers note.

In the amended petition filed in the case this past week, the lawyers ask for a declaratory judgment that DREAMers "have constitutionally-protected interests in their status conferred under DACA," that "arbitrary arrest and detention violates" DREAMers' due process rights, and that the federal government does not have the authority to arrest DREAMers "on the basis of their immigration status."

It is in this context that the Justice Department is fighting to keep Ramirez’s case out of federal court and in its own administrative courts.

In Friday’s filing, Ramirez’s lawyers were rather direct in their legal reasons for aiming to keep the case out of immigration court, rather than the federal court. They wrote that they “could find no way to ensure that this Court’s review of any determination by the Immigration Court would be ‘de novo,’ rather than for ‘clear error.’” "Clear error” is a deferential review, whereas “de novo” review would mean the federal court would not need to defer to the immigration court. In other words, which standard of review ultimately happens could lead to a significantly different review of the case.

As the lawyers for Ramirez put it, “Given the critical factual and legal issues to be determined—and their importance both to Mr. Ramirez’s liberty and the status and well-being of hundreds of thousands of other DACA holders and their families — this Court should determine these matters in the first instance.”

The larger issue, though, that the lawyers note is the fact that the underlying constitutional allegations cannot be resolved by the immigration courts. Those questions — sure to be heavily disputed by both sides — eventually would have to be resolved in federal court, and the lawyers for Ramirez note that they "could find no way to ensure that—once the case started down [the immigration court] path—it would be returned to this Court (where the important constitutional questions presented must be determined) in a timely manner." (The backlog in immigration courts is an ongoing concern that has raised questions for Trump's immigration enforcement plans.)

On Monday, the Justice Department will present its argument that Ramirez’s case should be dismissed from federal court and, in the alternative, that he should not be released while the habeas petition is being considered.

The magistrate judge, Donohue, has not yet responded to the request for a hearing. As of now, however, the next hearing in the case — on the government's motion to dismiss the petition — is not set to take place until March 8.

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The Federal Government Just Took The First Step In Building Trump's Wall

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WASHINGTON — The federal government is moving ahead quickly on the construction process for President Donald Trump's controversial wall along the US-Mexico border.

US Customs and Border Protection posted a notice Friday saying it will "on or about March 6, 2017" issue a solicitation for "the design and build of several prototype wall structures in the vicinity of the United States border with Mexico."

A CBP spokesperson, speaking on background, confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the notice "is directly related to" Trump's Jan. 25 executive order on the construction of the border wall — a major campaign promise.

According to a pre-solicitation notice posted Friday, interested bidders will have to "submit a concept paper of their prototype(s) by March 10." The government will then review and narrow the offers over the following 10 days, the notice says.

"The primary purpose of this effort is to develop design standards for a border wall that may be constructed along the southwest border with Mexico in support of USBP operational requirements," the CBP spokesperson said in an email. "Any and all prototypes will be designed to deter illegal entry into the United States."

CBP will then issue a full request for proposals, the notice says. The narrowed group of bidders will have to submit proposals — including the price of the wall — by March 24.

"Multiple awards are contemplated by mid-April for this effort," the notice says. "An option for additional miles may be included in each contract award."

Friday's notice represents the first step in the procurement process for construction of the wall, which has been applauded by some Republicans who want a crackdown on illegal immigration.

Trump has said the wall will cost $12 billion, but Reuters reported earlier this month that the actual cost could be up to $21 billion. The president has repeatedly claimed Mexico will fund construction of the wall, which Mexican officials have roundly rejected.

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AP Claims LifeZette Owes Nearly $50,000 In Unpaid Fees And Penalties

Laura Ingraham

Alex Wong / Getty Images

The Associated Press is suing LifeZette for more than $49,000, claiming that the Laura Ingraham-helmed website failed to pay months of licensing fees.

The complaint, filed on Friday in District of Columbia Superior Court, alleges that LifeZette entered into a year-long licensing agreement to use AP content in July 2015, agreeing to pay $4,200 per month. The AP says it suspended LifeZette's account in February 2016 due to nonpayment.

LifeZette did submit a check for $42,611, according to the lawsuit, but it was returned due to insufficient funds. A copy of the check, dated Jan. 16, 2017, from the account of Ingraham Media Group Inc., was included in the court filings. Ingraham launched LifeZette in 2015 and is listed on the website as its editor-in-chief.

A representative for LifeZette did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday afternoon.

Ingraham, a conservative radio talk show host who supported Trump during the campaign and since, was reported to be a contender for the press secretary job in the new administration, a position that ultimately went to Sean Spicer. LifeZette, however, was one of the first news outlets that Spicer called on at his press briefings after Trump took office.

AP is seeking $49,267 — $24,937.21 for the allegedly unpaid licensing fees, $17,674.50 for revenue that AP says it lost after it suspended LifeZette's account before the end of the contract, $2,915.10 in interest, and $3,740.58 in attorney fees. The amount of the returned check is the sum of the unpaid fees and lost revenue that would have been covered by the contract.

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Poll: Voters Say Conduct Of Trump — And Anti-Trump Protesters — Hasn't Been Appropriate

Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Voters are critical of both President Donald Trump and the people protesting him, according to a new poll.

A majority of 1,200 respondents survey said Donald Trump's conduct in office has been inappropriate, but a majority said anti-Trump protesters have also acted inappropriately.

The PredictWise and Pollfish survey received responses from 1,200 people on Feb. 22 through online and in-app polling methods. Economist David Rothschild, from` PredictWise, said he does not report margins of error because he does “not believe it can be accurately estimated.”

BuzzFeed News worked with PredictWise on designing the exclusive poll as part of a regular partnership.

A slim majority of 52% disagreed with the appropriateness of Trump's behavior in office while only 36% approved of it. Women were more likely to be critical, with only 28% agreeing that Trump had acted appropriately compared to 45% among men.

Younger people were less likely to say that Trump has acted appropriately, as were non-white people. Of white respondents, 43% said Trump had acted appropriately compared to 21% of Latino respondents and 13% of Black respondents.

But despite these numbers, people were still critical of anti-Trump protesters, with only 31% agreeing their conduct was appropriate and 57% disagreeing.

These results break down predictably among party lines. Republicans are far more likely to approve of Trump's conduct and to disapprove of protester conduct (83% disapproval) than Democrats (37%).

Trump was trusted by 86% of Republicans surveyed but just 20% of Democrats.

The poll also uncovered a large age divide where younger people are much less trusting of politicians in general. Whereas Trump is trusted by 52% of people aged 55 or older, that number drops to 32% among the 18-24 age range.

While both Republicans and Democrat respondents largely agreed that all Americans should be freely able to criticize the president, a majority of Republicans opposed criticism of the president by legal immigrants.

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Trump Administration Keeps Major News Orgs Out Of Closed Press Briefing

Ron Sachs / Ron Sachs/MediaPunch/IPx

WASHINGTON - The Trump administration held an unprecedented closed briefing with press secretary Sean Spicer Friday, allowing in an extended press pool as well as select news organizations they approved of, while excluding major news organizations, including ones the administration has been critical of.

In a recording of the closed press briefing provided by ABC News, press secretary Sean Spicer defended not doing a larger press briefing, arguing that the president gave a big speech to CPAC Friday. While Spicer said he wants to get information out to the press, "We don’t need to do everything on camera everyday."

The confusing actions came on a day when the White House again fought with CNN and the media over a report that they asked the FBI to publicly knock down reports that the agency was investigating communications between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The White House said it only communicated that to the FBI once the agency itself cast doubt on the stories as inaccurate.

Of the administration's dispute with CNN, in particular, Spicer said they reported "pretty serious accusations, making it appear as if we did something wrong and nefarious when we want to make sure we set the record straight."

On Friday, the administration for the first time included in its guidance a planned press gaggle that was supposed to be on camera. That was changed to off camera, with the White House not informing reporters that they would have to be put on a list. News organizations were put on a list of "interested parties" but then not allowed in. The New York Times, CNN, BuzzFeed News, Politico and the LA Times were not allowed in. Instead, a group that included handpicked reporters from conservative outlets were invited to chat with Spicer, including Breitbart, One America News Network and The Washington Times. Some national news outlets, like ABC, were also allowed to attend the briefing.

The Associated Press and Time Magazine boycotted the closed briefing.

A reporter could be heard on the phone saying that the Trump administration "excluded a number of news organizations that have been targeted by the president."

In a statement, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith said: "While we strongly object to the White House's apparent attempt to punish news outlets whose coverage it does not like, we won't let these latest antics distract us from the work of continuing to cover this administration fairly and aggressively."

President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the mainstream media, which he says traffics in fake news, which he often charges about stories he doesn't like. Of late he has ratcheted up those attacks, saying the media is the "enemy of the people" and "we're going to do something about it," during his CPAC speech Friday.

In a statement, the White House Correspondent's Association board said it "is protesting strongly against how today's gaggle is being handled by the White House. We encourage the organizations that were allowed in to share the material with others in the press corps who were not. The board will be discussing this further with White House staff."

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At Least 746 People Were Held Over The Weekend After Trump's Travel Ban Was Issued

Scott Olson / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration, under a court's order to do so, turned over information Thursday night suggesting that a far greater number of people had been held by government officials as a result of the refugee and travel ban than previously acknowledged by the White House.

The federal government held 746 people in between Saturday night, Jan. 28 — more than 24 hours after President Trump signed the executive order — and the end of the day on Sunday, Jan. 29, according to information provided to BuzzFeed News by the lawyers who challenged the ban in the Eastern District of New York.

On Monday morning, Jan. 30, Trump tweeted otherwise, saying only 109 people were detained and questioned due to the order.

"This evening, as ordered by a federal court, the Trump Administration disclosed to counsel in Darweesh v. Trump a list of 746 individuals that were held pursuant to the January 27, 2017 Executive Order," the statement from the Darweesh plaintiffs' lawyers noted. "The disclosure effectuates a court order first entered on Saturday, January 28, 2017, during an emergency hearing."

The initial order in Darweesh was issued at 9:37 p.m. Jan. 28, so the list provided to the lawyers only begins with those being held at that time and goes through the next day, until 11:59 p.m. Jan. 29, according to the Darweesh lawyers. As such, the number of those detained on the first day of the order and released — or already removed from the country — by 9:37 p.m. Jan. 28 would not be included in the list turned over to counsel.

In the Justice Department's cover letter accompanying the list, which was provided to BuzzFeed News by the plaintiffs' lawyers, Justice Department lawyer Samuel Go referred to the list as consisting of all people "encountered or undergoing processing ... pursuant to the Executive Order" during the relevant time period. The letter also notes that "this list includes legal permanent residents."

The statement from the plaintiffs' lawyers also noted, "The identities of the 746 individuals were disclosed to Darweesh counsel under a protective order that prevents their release to the general public."

The Justice Department provided no on-the-record comment beyond the filings in court.

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Immigration Court Backlog Could Pose Problems For Trump's Enforcement Plans

Charles Reed/U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement / AP

ARLINGTON, Va. — In a small, windowless courtroom on the second floor of an office building, Judge Rodger Harris heard a string of bond requests on Tuesday morning from immigrants held in jail as they faced deportation.

The detainees appeared by video from detention facilities elsewhere in the state. Harris, an immigration judge since 2007, used a remote control to move the camera around in his courtroom so the detainees could see their lawyers appearing in-person before the judge, if they had one. The lawyers spoke about their clients’ family ties, job history, and forthcoming asylum petitions, and downplayed any previous criminal record.

In cases where Harris agreed to set bond — the amounts ranged from $8,000 to $20,000 — he had the same message for the detainees: if they paid bond and were set free until their next court date, it would mean a delay in their case. Hearings set for March or April would be pushed back until at least the summer, he said.

But a couple of months is nothing compared to timelines that some immigration cases are on now. Judges and lawyers interviewed by BuzzFeed News described hearings scheduled four, five, or even six years out. Already facing a crushing caseload, immigration judges are bracing for more strain as the Trump administration pushes ahead with an aggressive ramp-up of immigration enforcement with no public commitment so far to aid backlogged courts.

Immigration courts, despite their name, are actually an arm of the US Department of Justice. The DOJ seal — with the Latin motto “qui pro domina justitia sequitur,” which roughly translates to, “who prosecutes on behalf of justice” — hung on the wall behind Harris in his courtroom in Virginia. Lawyers from the US Department of Homeland Security prosecute cases. Rulings can be appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which is also part of the Justice Department, and then to a federal appeals court.

As of the end of January, there were more than 540,000 cases pending in immigration courts. President Trump signed executive orders in late January that expanded immigration enforcement priorities and called for thousands of additional enforcement officers and border patrol officers. But the orders are largely silent on immigration courts, where there are dozens of vacant judgeships. And beyond filling the vacancies, the union of immigration judges says more judges are needed to handle the caseload, as well as more space, technological upgrades, and other resources.

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly acknowledged the immigration court backlog in a memorandum released this week that provided new details about how the department would carry out Trump’s orders. Kelly lamented the “unacceptable delay” in immigration court cases that allowed individuals who illegally entered the United States to remain here for years.

The administration hasn’t announced plans to increase the number of immigration judges or to provide more funding and resources. It also isn’t clear yet if immigration judges and court staff are exempt from a government-wide hiring freeze that Trump signed shortly after he took office. There are 73 vacancies in immigration courts, out of 374 judgeships authorized by Congress.

“Everybody’s pretty stressed,” said Paul Schmidt, who retired as an immigration judge in June. “How are you going to throw more cases into a court with 530,000 pending cases? It isn’t going to work.”

Judge Dana Leigh Marks

Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

Judge Dana Leigh Marks, an immigration judge in San Francisco and president of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said judges have not been formally advised about whether the hiring freeze applies to immigration courts. Kathryn Mattingly, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review — the Justice Department office that runs immigration courts — said in an email that the office is working with DOJ officials to come up with “guidance that may address specific positions.” According to Mattingly, there are more than 50 immigration judge candidates at various stages of the hiring process.

In setting immigration enforcement priorities, the Obama administration focused on individuals involved in gang activity and convicted of felony and “significant” misdemeanor crimes. The Trump administration is casting a wider net, prioritizing deportation for any immigrant unlawfully in the United States who is charged with or convicted of a crime. Trump’s executive orders call for the construction of more detention facilities near the southern border and the hiring of 10,000 more immigration officers and 5,000 more border patrol agents.

The only explicit reference to immigration courts in these orders directs the US attorney general to assign judges to detention facilities. That could mean flying judges to border states with large numbers of detainees, if there’s space to accommodate them, or holding hearings by video, which lawyers say can put individuals facing deportation at a disadvantage, especially if they don’t have a lawyer.

"We actually hear it from both immigrants and people who want strong enforcement policies that the length of time these cases are pending is way too long and should be addressed."

“All of those logistical considerations are daunting,” Marks said. Without more judges to augment what Marks described as an “anemic judge corps,” especially as Homeland Security hires thousands of more immigration enforcement officers, more cases means more delays, she said.

According to Mattingly, the immigration review office is “evaluating” the executive orders and “having discussions with the Department of Justice regarding implementation.” Requests to interview office director Juan Osuna or Chief Immigration Judge MaryBeth Keller were declined.

The immigration review office "recognizes that to reduce the pending caseload and wait times for those in proceedings, the agency must continue its hiring initiative to increase the size of its immigration judge corps and must increase support staff, in the field and at headquarters, accordingly," Mattingly said.

Plagued by delays

There are immigration courts in 27 states, plus Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. The National Association of Immigration Judges has long advocated for immigration courts to become independent from the Justice Department, under a structure similar to the US Tax Court. The president can remove Tax Court judges, but otherwise it operates as an independent entity within the executive branch.

The union says this type of structure would give courts more control over dockets and staffing, and bolster public trust. The US Government Accountability Office is studying proposed options to restructure immigration courts in response to a 2015 request from Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy and Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren; the office expects to finish the study by the summer, according to a GAO spokesman.

For now, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is in control. The attorney general signs off on all immigration judge appointments. Sessions also has the authority to overrule decisions by the Board of Immigration Appeals.

Greg Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the group is watching to see if Sessions — a proponent of hardline immigration policies — moves to bring in judges who align with his views.

Political screening is a sensitive issue for the immigration courts. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded in a 2008 report that department officials improperly adopted a political test for immigration judges during the second Bush administration.

“We would hope that kind of ideology doesn’t infect the process,” Chen said.

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Even if Sessions does move now to fill the current vacancies, it could be years before the courts are at full strength. It can take as long as three years to hire a new immigration judge, according to judges and lawyers familiar with the process. The most recent class of immigration judges was hired in early January.

And even if Sessions does fill all the existing judgeships, Schmidt said it still wouldn’t be enough to tackle the backlog. At most, an experienced judge could handle about 750 cases annually without rushing through proceedings and “stomping over everybody's due process rights,” he said. With 374 judges, that comes out to about 280,000 cases per year — far short of the current number of pending cases.

Detainees get priority in immigration courts. As of the end of January, there were 20,856 pending detained cases, according to the latest statistics available from the Justice Department, out of more than 540,000 pending cases. Trump’s executive orders and Kelly’s guidance memos stress that priority will be placed on holding people facing deportation rather than releasing them, so those cases would go the top of the docket.

Kelly criticized the immigration court delays because they meant that immigrants who were illegally in the United States could stay longer. Immigrants with work authorization before they enter into removal proceedings in court — green card holders, for instance — keep that status while their case is pending, and asylum seekers can be eligible for work authorization under limited circumstances. Generally, undocumented immigrants face the same job prospects that they did before they were picked up by immigration officers — working off the books, or self-employment.

During the long stretches in between hearings, Marks said additional problems can arise: evidence can go stale and witnesses can move away or die.

“We actually hear it from both immigrants and people who want strong enforcement policies that the length of time these cases are pending is way too long and should be addressed,” he said.

Easing the backlog

Chief Immigration Judge MaryBeth Keller took steps in January to try to ease some of the strain. She issued a memorandum that revised the types of cases considered priorities. The top priority is individuals held by the Department of Homeland Security. She rescinded earlier memos that prioritized classes of unaccompanied children who were not in the care of federal agencies and families who were not detained.

"If you’re going to move these many cases in, you’re going to have to do something with the cases that are there now."

It wasn’t clear from the memo, dated Jan. 31, if it was drafted in response to the Trump administration's new enforcement priorities — Trump signed the two executive orders on immigration enforcement on Jan. 25 — or if it was already in the works when Trump took office. A spokeswoman for the Executive Office for Immigration Review said the priorities outlined in the Jan. 31 memo “reflect the present state of the immigration system and EOIR’s efforts to adapt as the immigration landscape changes.”

Eliza Klein, an immigration lawyer who retired as an immigration judge in 2015, said that Keller’s memo provided some relief to judges. But given the expanded enforcement expected under the Trump administration, she said, “the sense is that might be temporary.”

Kelly addressed the immigration court backlog in his guidance memo this week, writing that the “surge of illegal immigration at the southern border has overwhelmed federal agencies and resources.” He said the department would expand the class of immigrants who can be immediately removed from the United States without first going before an immigration judge.

President Trump with Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

In the past, this “expedited removal” process was applied to immigrants illegally in the United States caught within 100 miles of the border and two weeks of entry. It now will apply nationwide to immigrants who can’t prove that they have been in the US for at least two years.

Those cases could still end up in court, though, if an immigrant seeks asylum or expresses a fear of persecution if they’re sent back to their home country. There are also carve-outs for children crossing the border alone and individuals who claim they have a legal right to be in the United States.

Schmidt said that expanding expedited removal won’t be enough to address the backlog.

“If you’re going to move these many cases in, you’re going to have to do something with the cases that are there now,” he said. “Grant them some kind of temporary status, and make room for new cases. But you can’t throw new cases on top of what you had.”

Given the Trump administration’s hardline approach to immigration so far, any new proposal that goes beyond existing programs to grant immigrants facing deportation temporary legal status to remain in the United States seems unlikely to go far. With the exception of two existing deferred deportation programs, Kelly wrote in one of his guidance memos this week that “the Department no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

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White House Strongly Defends Move To Withdraw Guidance Protecting Transgender Students

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

WASHINGTON — The White House strongly defended the Trump administration's decision to withdraw Obama-era guidance aimed at protecting transgender students on Thursday as a states' rights issue that had already suffered a court loss this past summer.

"It's a states' rights issue," White House press secretary Sean Spicer repeatedly said at the press briefing on Thursday, where he faced several questions about the decision. "That's entirely what he believes, that if a state wants to pass a law or rule or an organization wants to do something in compliance with the state law, that's their right. It shouldn't be the federal government getting in the way of this."

Spicer refused to engage when asked if transgender students' rights is a civil rights issue, reiterating the states' right point and saying, "It's a question of where it's appropriately addressed."

Detailing a five-point list to back up the decision to withdraw the guidance, Spicer repeatedly raised a 2016 trial court ruling by US District Judge Reed O'Connor in Texas that enjoined the enforcement of the guidance nationwide.

"We have to remember, this guidance was enjoined last August by a court," he said. "It hasn't been enforced."

Spicer did not, however, mention a conflicting ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. (That case is on appeal, scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court next month.) The Fourth Circuit sided with the Obama administration earlier in 2016 — holding that the administration's position, that regulations implementing Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 could be interpreted to provide protections for transgender students under the law's sex discrimination ban, was permissible.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration withdrew that guidance, Spicer said, for five reasons.

"[T]he law that was passed in 1972 did not contemplate or consider this issue," he said. Later, reiterating a point he made earlier in the week, he said, "The idea this was even contemplated is preposterous on its face."

"Number two, the procedure for this guidance letter that was done through the Obama administration was not properly followed. There was no comment period," Spicer said, referring to an argument that the guidance should have gone through additional review under the Administrative Procedure Act. "There was no input from parents, teachers, students or administrators. None."

"Number three, there's a reason that the Texas court had this matter enjoined. Because it didn't follow the law and it had procedural problems," he said, not providing any specific rationale for how that is a different reason, as opposed to just being a reiteration of the first two points.

"Four, as I mentioned, it's a state rights issue," he said.

"Number five, we have to recognize that children do enjoy rights from anti-bullying statues that are in almost every state. There's a difference between being compassionate for individuals and children who are struggling with something, wanting to make sure they're protected, and how it's being done," he said.

Asked later in the briefing about President Trump's personal belief on the matter, Spicer deflected.

"The president believes it's a state's rights issue," Spicer said. "He's not — I understand what you're asking. As [another reporter] pointed out, when the issue came to one of his own properties, he was very clear" — a reference to Trump's comments that Caitlyn Jenner would be free to use the restroom in accordance with her gender identity in Trump Tower.

"Again, what he doesn't want to do is to force his issues or beliefs down — he believes it's a state's rights issue."

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This Guantanamo Detainee Argued He Should Go Free Because The War Is Over — A Judge Disagreed

A guards at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

John Moore / Getty Images

President Obama's pronouncements in 2014 and 2015 that the US combat mission in Afghanistan was over didn't end the government's right to hold prisoners at the US military facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge ruled this week.

Moath al-Alwi has been held by the US government since late 2001, when Pakistani authorities turned him over on suspicion that he had ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In his latest bid for freedom, his lawyers argued that the end of the US combat mission meant he could no longer be lawfully detained as an enemy combatant.

US District Judge Richard Leon ruled late Wednesday that regardless of Obama's statements, he would defer to the determination of the executive branch that the US was still engaged in "active hostilities" against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their affiliates.

"Although the President announced a change in the military's focus going forward, he made clear that the United states would continue to engage in active counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan," Leon wrote.

Leon, who heard arguments in December, is now the fourth federal judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to reject arguments similar to those raised by Al-Alwi's lawyers. The US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, which sets precedent for the district court, has yet to consider the issue because the detainees who brought earlier cases were transferred out before they could pursue an appeal.

Al-Alwi is one of 41 detainees still held at Guantánamo Bay. The Defense Department last transferred out a group of detainees on Jan. 19. President Trump has expressed opposition to releasing detainees, tweeting on Jan. 3:

Al-Alwi had also argued that even if there were still hostilities, his 15-year detention ran afoul of the principles of war, pointing to an earlier US Supreme Court decision — Hamdi v. Rumsfled, in 2004 — that warned against indefinite detention. Leon wrote that given the current military operations in Afghanistan, Al-Alwi's detention was permissible.

"After all, 8,400 United States service members are currently stationed in Afghanistan and engage in the use of force, against al Qaeda, Taliban, and associated forces, consistent with the laws of war and in a context similar to that presented to the Supreme Court in Hamdi," Leon wrote. "To say the least, the duration of a conflict does not somehow excuse it from longstanding law of war principles."

Al-Alwi's lawyer, City University of New York School of Law professor Ramzi Kassem, was not immediately reached for comment.

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Bernie Sanders Keeps Quiet On His Supporters’ Plans To Primary Democrats

Alex Wong / Getty Images

The latest project from the staffers and activists who worked on Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign, #WeWillReplaceYou, presents Democratic lawmakers with a stark choice: oppose Donald Trump at every turn, or face a primary challenger who will.

One progressive who has yet to back the group’s aims is Sanders himself.

Through a spokesman, the Vermont senator declined to say whether he supports the strategy behind #WeWillReplaceYou, founded last week by campaign alums and activists. Sanders' political organization, Our Revolution, also declined to comment when asked whether officials there agree with the idea of unseating incumbents.

One month into Trump's presidency, Sanders and other party leaders are navigating new and difficult terrain as activists push a view of "resistance" defined in absolute terms, threaten lawmakers with primaries, and embrace tactics they readily compare to the Tea Party movement that upturned the Republican Party eight years ago.

Demands for oppositional purity have emerged as a new rallying cry on the left, driving a wedge between grassroots activists and Democrats who remain open to pieces of Trump's agenda, vote for his cabinet nominees, or argue broadly that elected officials have a responsibility to find common ground with any president.

#WeWillReplaceYou, the Sanders outcrop, is the first group to seize directly on those demands, asking progressives to "pledge to support primary election challengers against Democrats who won't do everything in their power to resist Trump."

In interviews after their launch, #WeWillReplaceYou leaders outlined plans to pressure Democratic members of the House and Senate on every vote and policy item — and eventually, said co-founder Claire Sandberg, on an impeachment push.

“We think that it’s time for Democrats to start seriously considering impeachment,” said Sandberg, who served as digital organizing director on the Sanders campaign. “If that takes shape, we’ll want to see Democrats across the board support it.”

“There’s no middle ground anymore. This is a moment of black or white,” said another co-founder, Jessica Pierce, an organizer based in North Carolina.

But under the terms set by #WeWillReplaceYou, not even Sanders clears the test.

The self-described Democratic socialist, now a member of Sen. Chuck Schumer's leadership team, voted for three of Trump’s cabinet picks, including Secretary of Homeland Security Gen. John F. Kelly and Secretary of Defense Gen. James Mattis. Sanders also voiced an early willingness to working with Trump on infrastructure, trade policy, and drug costs, arguing in January that it didn't make "sense to say, ‘No, we’re not gonna work in any way in any form with the Trump administration."

Trump’s first four weeks in office, of course, have since hardened opposition. Democrats have fiercely condemned his move to place a ban on refugees and travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, and they have led the charge for a comprehensive investigation into revelations about his associates' contacts with Russian officials.

Still, organizers behind #WeWillReplaceYou said they haven't seen enough, describing any Democratic collaboration as unacceptable, whether a vote for a cabinet pick or an offer to speak with Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.

Sandberg, the co-founder, acknowledged that no Democrat in Congress — not even Sanders — currently meets their demands for wholesale “non-compliance." The point of the project, she said, is to start pushing Democrats toward the grassroots' vision of opposition well in advance of primary season. (“The most effective threat is one you don’t have to follow through on,” the group’s website explains.)

“It was very strange to see so many people who are in the Democratic Party establishment react with just horror,” Sandberg said, citing criticism that the strategy could cost valuable seats in red states like Missouri and West Virginia, where Democratic Sens. Claire McCaskill and Joe Manchin are up for reelection.

“I’m honestly surprised that they’re surprised. Whenever thousands of people [are telling Democrats to] do more to fight Trump — there’s an implicit ‘or else.’ We’re just making that ‘or else’ explicit.”

It’s a threat activists had already started to embrace.

Last week, a forum for candidates vying to chair the Democratic National Committee came to a sudden halt when a group of six activists — not aligned with #WeWillReplaceYou, they said later — rose from their seats and unfurled a large white banner: “DEMS: #RESIST TRUMP,” it warned, “OR BE REPLACED.”

One of the protesters, 24-year-old Natalie Green, called out questions to Tom Perez, a DNC frontrunner, asking the former labor secretary if he would supporting primary challengers to run against incumbent Democrats “who refuse to fight” Trump.

Perez did not answer the question directly, telling Green instead that he valued the party’s “big tent” and the tradition of locking arms after “spirited debate.” (It’s currently DNC practice to remain neutral in House and Senate primaries, though Perez did not mention that policy.)

Activists confront DNC chair candidate Tom Perez at a forum on Wednesday.

Via Twitter: @laurenegambino

Green, a regular at marches and protests near her home in Washington, D.C., said Perez's response had been disappointing. “It's a question that's going to be so critical in the next couple years,” she said afterward. “But I think we made it clear that we will not be silenced. We will make sure that we do everything we can to hold Democrats accountable — and that will include running primary challengers.”

The exchange between Green and Perez is one poised to replay itself again and again between activists and party leaders. Some Democrats describe the split as the party's next central internal strife, replacing the ideological fights that defined 2016 with a new struggle “between those who resist and oppose, and those who accommodate and appease," as operative David Brock put it early this year.

The battle lines are not unfamiliar to either party.

Under Barack Obama, the Affordable Care Act spawned a movement to pressure lawmakers on the right, with the conservative Heritage Foundation's political action committee threatening Republicans who wouldn't commit to a full repeal.

Relative to Tea Party upsets, however, liberals have seen less success unseating Democratic incumbents. Two high-profile attempts to replace a sitting senator — Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman in 2000 and Arkansas’ Blanche Lincoln in 2010 — did not end with progressive victories. (After losing his primary, Lieberman ran as an independent and kept his seat. And though she scraped through her primary, Lincoln went on to lose badly to the Republican in the general election.)

Whether #WeWillReplaceYou can successfully recruit and run winning primary challengers is a question the group's leaders describe as still a ways off. (The group has no full-time staff, just a team of volunteer activists that Pierce, one of the co-founders, described as "a coalition of the willing" and "a hybrid of love.")

In recent years, liberal activist groups have concentrated on open-seat primaries, not incumbents. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee, an aggressive outfit based in Washington, hews to the belief that even if progressive candidates don't win their primaries, they've succeeded in pushing the field to the left.

Last week, PCCC co-founder, Adam Green, welcomed the news of #WeWillReplaceYou with a statement of firm support for the project and for a party that fights Trump “boldly, consistently, and effectively.”

“Ideally,” he added, “there would be no need for primaries against incumbents.”

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Two Justices Warn Loophole Could Allow States To Conduct Otherwise Unconstitutional Executions

Alabama Department of Corrections via AP

The US Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to hear a case brought by an Alabama death row inmate challenging the conditions under which he will be executed — a move that two justices say allows states to avoid similar challenges "no matter how cruel or how unusual" their method of execution might be.

The high court had halted Tommy Arthur's execution in November, with Chief Justice John Roberts issuing a so-called courtesy fifth vote. It only takes four justices to decide to hear a case, but requires five justices to issue a stay of execution.

In order to challenge a method of execution, however, death row inmates have to prove the method risks severe pain — but also propose a “known and available” alternative way to be executed.

The lower court held that Arthur's alternative method — the firing squad — cannot be a "known and available" alternative because it is not "expressly permitted" under Alabama law. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court declined to review that decision.

In an 18-page dissent from the court's decision not to hear the case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote Arthur had met his “macabre challenge.”

Alabama uses a three-drug execution protocol: A controversial sedative used in several botched executions, followed by a paralytic and then concluded with a drug that stops the heart. The final drug feels like fire coursing through your veins, and both states and inmates agree that, if an inmate were not properly sedated, the final drug would be incredibly painful.

"Execution absent an adequate sedative thus produces a nightmarish death," Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justice Stephen Breyer. "The condemned prisoner is conscious but entirely paralyzed, unable to move or scream his agony, as he suffers 'what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake.'"

Arthur alleged that midazolam was not suitable as a sedative, as it has a "ceiling effect," which, when reached, means more of the drug won't increase sedation. It was here that Arthur instead asked that he be executed by firing squad and lower courts dismissed his claim because the firing squad is not currently allowed as a method of execution under Alabama law.

"Under this view, even if a prisoner can prove that the State plans to kill him in an intolerably cruel manner, and even if he can prove that there is a feasible alternative, all a State has to do to execute him through an unconstitutional method is to pass a statute declining to authorize any alternative method," Sotomayor wrote "This cannot be right."

The sedative midazolam has been used in several high-profile botched executions. Sotomayor pointed to problematic executions using the drug in Ohio, Oklahoma, Arizona and even Alabama.

"Science and experience are now revealing that, at least with respect to midazolam-centered protocols, prisoners executed by lethal injection are suffering horrifying deaths beneath a medically sterile aura of peace," she wrote.

"Twice in recent years, this Court has observed that it 'has never invalidated a State’s chosen procedure for carrying out a sentence of death as the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment,'" Sotomayor wrote. "We should not be proud of this history."

Arthur was sentenced to death for a 1982 murder for hire scheme. In delaying his November execution, Roberts wrote that he did not think the court should grant the stay because the case “does not merit the Court’s review."

Roberts stated that he was voting to stay the execution because "[f]our Justices have, however, voted to grant a stay. To afford them the opportunity to more fully consider the suitability of this case for review, including these circumstances, I vote to grant the stay as a courtesy.”

A month later, Roberts did not vote for a stay in a different case and Alabama was allowed to carry out an execution using its three-drug protocol. The execution lasted more than 30 minutes, where the inmate “clenched his fists and raised his head during the early part of the procedure" and “heaved and coughed through about 13 minutes.”

Read the dissent:

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The President Says He Hates The Press — And His Supporters Go Right With It

Joe Raedle / Getty Images

MELBOURNE, FL — Within minutes of taking the stage at his first campaign-style rally since he became president, Donald Trump told his supporters he wanted to speak to them "without the filter of the fake news."

"They've become a big part of the problem," Trump told his cheering audience. "They are part of the corrupt system."

The crowd in attendance was happy to go along with Trump's anti-press rhetoric, which has become significantly more hostile since his press conference on Thursday and tweet on Friday calling many outlets "the enemy of the American People!" Many of his supporters told BuzzFeed News they see Trump as the truth teller.

"He tells the truth and all the rest of them are liars," one supporter told BuzzFeed News about Trump, who gained prominence as a creature of the New York City tabloid media and as a reality show star.

"He tells the truth and all the rest of them are liars."

The rally, held in an airport hangar in Melbourne, FL, took an unfriendly tone toward the press before Trump even took the stage. Notably, Diamond and Silk, sisters who stumped for Trump via YouTube, had the crowd chanting "CNN sucks" before it was even 5 p.m. (the rally's scheduled start time).

By the end of the evening, supporters approached the media pen, chanting "CNN sucks" and "tell the truth!"

"What you hear about chaos, I think that's really overblown," said Philip Wahlbom, 48, of Atlanta, GA when asked what he thought about the beginning of the administration. "You have these reporters that want to highlight the things that maybe aren't going quite as [smoothly] as you would like them to, but by and large I think it's going just fine... he's shaking things up, he's stirring the pot, he's kicking the hornet's nest, I think he's doing a great job."

Some of Trump's supporters told BuzzFeed News that their media consumption habits changed during the campaign. And when asked what they thought of Trump's remarks on the media tonight, many said they thought Trump was spot on.

"I was an avid CNN person. But even during the campaign... you could see which way they were swaying, OK? I mean, it didn't take a rocket scientist to see they were against him," said Darlene Morris, 61, of Palm Bay, FL. "And if I'm just a normal person and I could tell that, I'm sure [Trump] knows it."

"Now I don't watch but our Channel 13 news."

The president has established a direct line of communication to his supporters, at times circumventing the press by using Twitter to connect directly to them.

Some said they became more engaged with news and politics when Trump began running for office. Jeinne Eubanks, 56, of Summerfield, FL told BuzzFeed News she did not follow politics at all until she heard Trump was running.

"When my mom told me he was running, I'd never even watched news because I was always just so fed up with everything," Eubanks said. "I started paying attention, and I have just loved that man, would take a bullet for him, since day one."

When asked where she gets her news, Eubanks said she TiVo's Fox News.

"If I told you you did a sorry job ...every day, every day, every minute of the day, how long would it be before you would get disheartened?" Asked Richard Rowell, 74, of Waycross, GA. Rowell said that while he still watches a little bit of MSNBC, he stopped watching it regularly because he felt its reports were "negative."

When asked about what political issues supporters wanted the president to address at the rally, many listed the "liberal media."

One supporter told BuzzFeed News that she was turned off by a changed media landscape. "Our local paper fell apart," she said, and too many outlets rush to be first. Now, she said, she watches Right Side Broadcasting — a mostly YouTube channel that gained prominence by streaming every Trump campaign rally — and "watched MSNBC [on election night] because I wanted to see them whine."

Another supporter told BuzzFeed News he either gets his news from C-SPAN — which mostly airs the workings of government without commentary — and the Kremlin-backed Russia Today, now known as RT.

Other supporters said they got their news from Facebook — recently embroiled in a controversy over promoting fake news — the National Enquirer, and Dennis Michael Lynch, who openly promotes news favorable to Trump.

Many others had complaints about "fake news." The phrase was a big topic of conversation among supporters as they waited for the president.

When asked what news he trusts to stay informed, one supporter answered that the president was the answer.

"We can trust Donald."

With reporting from Andrew Kimmel and Salvador Hernandez.

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As Many Republicans Avoid Testy Town Halls, Mark Sanford Hosts A Marathon Event With Protesters

Rep. Mark Sanford

Sean Rayford / Getty Images

MT. PLEASANT, S.C. — “What do y’all want to do?” South Carolina GOP Rep. Mark Sanford asked the crowd of 235 or so supporters and protesters packing a small auditorium shortly after 9 a.m. on Saturday.

This was Sanford’s mantra for the morning, when the hour-long town hall he had scheduled with South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott ballooned into a three hour and 38 minute exercise in playing, as Sanford put it the night before, “a human piñata.”

Heading into the recess week, many Republican members of Congress and staff met questions about in-person town halls with a point blank “no,” and the occasional question about the sanity of any member who did one. Since the election of President Donald Trump, members’ offices have been flooded with phone calls and protesters have flocked to their offices in Washington and back home, eager to press members on Trump’s policies and the GOP plan to repeal Obamacare.

Before this week’s recess — the longest break members have had at home since Trump’s inauguration — Republican House members discussed security precautions to prevent town halls from becoming violent, and talked about strategies to keep events under control in the face of heightened activism around the country in opposition to Trump.

Then there’s Sanford, who organized the town hall mid-week in conjunction with protesters, in this case the Charleston chapter of Indivisible, a loosely organized national network dedicated to resisting Trump’s agenda and holding members of Congress’ feet to the fire.

“They said they wanted to do one, and we said, ‘OK, let's do one,’” Sanford told BuzzFeed News Friday evening.

Joe Preston, the legislative coordinator for Indivisible Charleston, corroborated that version of events, remarking on just how amenable Sanford’s office had been to working with them.

“It blows my mind, actually,” he told BuzzFeed News.

Though Saturday’s town hall was scheduled for 9 a.m., the room had hit already capacity by 8:09, and an equal number of people were stuck outside. Sanford was trying to find a way to accommodate everyone. He offered to relocate to the nearby building, or to move the whole thing outside to the waiting crowd, but those people who had arrived before 8 a.m. to secure seats were not inclined to give them up. They wanted another town hall next weekend, in a bigger venue.

The crowd outside was not pleased, jeering Scott and Sanford when they went out to talk to them.

“The group outside didn’t like the plan,” Sanford deadpanned when he came back in.

Finally, Sanford settled on a solution. “We'll do 45 minutes in here, then we'll come outside,” he told the crowd. Scott, would stay only for the first hour; he had to leave to get to a funeral.

So, Sanford began, “Do y’all want to do questions?”

Sanford knew what he was getting into. The former governor, who earned notoriety when he was caught lying about an extra-marital affair, then rekindled his political career by winning back his old congressional seat, is no stranger to political fireworks.

“They're down to watch me blow up tomorrow morning,” Sanford, can of Miller Lite in hand, told acquaintances and friends Friday evening, as he introducing them to the two reporters he was teaching to shuck oysters at a fundraiser for Ducks Unlimited in Charleston.

“What's gonna happen tomorrow is gonna be a little bit weird,” he acknowledged later that evening, perched on a table as an auctioneer took bids for duck-related items.

The room he and Scott — who asked to join the event at the last minute on Friday — walked into the next morning was charged, but polite. Wearing matching blue and white checked shirts (“His has buttons [on the collar], mine does not,” Scott protested), the two faced a crowd armed with signs that read “agree” on one side and “disagree” on another.

The “agree” side got very little use.

“Are you personally proud to have this person representing our country?” a man asked, kicking it off with an immediate reference to Trump.

“Given the two choices I had, I am thankful that Trump is our president,” Scott said.

Sanford, who has been openly critical of Trump at times, was more circumspect. “I think we’re all struggling a little,” he said.

It was the reason that many of the people in the crowd were there; the reason Indivisible was founded. “Trump brought us here,” said Brandy Southerland, who was seated in the front row.

But Sanford tried to move the conversation away from the president. “Let’s not make this a referendum on [Trump],” he urged. “It’s the Irish prayer: we can control certain things, certain things we can’t control.”

The subjects ranged the gamut, but healthcare was the dominant topic of discussion, with attendees voicing concerns about the quality of care and range of options they would have if Republicans follow through on their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

True to his word, Sanford stopped the discussion 45 minutes later to move the proceedings outside. Flanked by attendees asking more questions and one urging him to stop Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz from continuing to investigate Hillary Clinton, Sanford and the crowd slowly processed to the football field where a crowd was waiting. He stood on the field, facing a crowd arrayed along the track and in the bleachers.

The crowd ping ponged between applause for Sanford, in appreciation of the fact that he was sticking around or when he gave an answer they appreciated (like suggesting Trump ought to release his tax returns, calling it unrealistic that Mexico would really pay for the border wall, or suggesting that perhaps a House committee ought to look into the circumstances surrounding Gen. Mike Flynn’s resignation as National Security Advisor), and jeers and boos when he said things with which they disagreed. At one point, he was serenaded with a version of “Big Yellow Taxi,” by an environmental activist who asked him, in song, to “save paradise.”

“We’ll agree on some things; we’ll disagree on other things,” Sanford told the crowd. But he asked that people not yell over each other so that he could hear them.

By 11:30, two and a half hours in, the crowd had started to dwindle. “I totally get it,” he said. “Two and a half hours into any town hall gets boring.” But, he promised, “as long as y’all want to talk, I’ll talk.”

Finally, he agreed to stop at noon, if only to let the police officers who were working security leave. But he made the most of his time. When an aide attempted to cut him off at 11:57, he stopped her. “We’re” going right ‘til 12,” he said. “We have three more minutes.”

When his time ran out, Sanford meandered over to a car and leaned against it, taking questions from the small group of people remaining. “Would you call the boys and see if any of them want to have a late lunch?” he asks his aide at one point, referring to his four sons.

Asked before the town hall why he would want to put himself through this, Sanford deflected, calling his “human piñata” comment the night before just a joke and then turning the floor over to Scott. But he is fiercely proud of the character of his district, where the people, he says, are uniquely suited to have these types of disagreements without ever becoming disagreeable.

Sanford, too, may be uniquely suited to voluntarily wade into such an, at times, unfriendly situation. He often finds himself in political “no man’s land,” he tells the crowd — that is to say, vocal when he’s not on the same page as his own party. And he very evidently relishes being the one who stays and takes questions and criticism — despite the fact, as he noted several times, there are plenty of other things he could be doing with his Saturday.

Three hours and 38 minutes later, Sanford had taken his last question, and shaken his last hand. He dashed across the road, narrowly avoiding oncoming vehicles, and hopped into a waiting car.

LINK: After Promising For Years To Repeal Obamacare, Republicans Have To Explain Why They Haven’t Yet

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President Trump Declares The News Media "The Enemy Of The American People"

President Trump arriving in West Palm Beach, Florida, Friday.

Susan Walsh / AP

President Trump's war against the media escalated to a new level Friday, posting on Twitter that news organizations are "the enemy of the American people."

In the tweet, Trump said the New York Times, CNN, NBC News "and many more" are not his enemy — but rather that of the general public.

"SICK!" the tweet concluded.

Twitter

Trump deleted the tweet moments after sending it out, then reposted it a few minutes later — this time adding CBS and ABC to the list of "enemy" media organizations, and removing the all caps "SICK!"

The White House did not immediately respond to a BuzzFeed News request for clarification Friday.

However, the tweet comes just a day after Trump held a combative and lengthy news conference in which he repeatedly accused various US news organizations of reporting "fake news." He also emailed a survey to supporters designed to record his supporters' anger at news organizations.

Trump has long been a critic of the media, but his escalating attacks on "fake news" and "enemy" organizations comes amid a rocky start to his administration that has seen his national security adviser resign, his nominee for labor secretary withdraw, and a barrage of leaks suggesting the White House is in chaos.

LINK: President Trump Wants You To Take This Bizarre Survey On Media Bias

LINK: Trump Attacked The Media For Running "Fake News" During A Combative Press Conference

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Two DNC Candidates Question If Tom Perez Really Has 180 Votes

Pete Marovich / Getty Images

Two candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee cast scrutiny and doubt Thursday on the claim from one leading rival, Tom Perez, that he has secured 180 votes in the race.

It's a rare flash of discord in a race where criticism and debate have been sparse, despite the opportunity to use the DNC platform to potentially alter the direction of the Democratic Party in the Trump era.

Perez, the former labor secretary and civil rights lawyer, announced the pledges on Tuesday in a letter to DNC members, the rank-and-file Democrats and state leaders who will vote next weekend on a new chair. To clinch the race, candidates need a 224-vote majority. Perez did not name the 180 members, but the decision to reveal the whip count in the final days of the race came as a striking assertion of confidence in a crowded 10-candidate field.

On Thursday, two of those candidates, Rep. Keith Ellison and Mayor Pete Buttigieg, each pushed back on Perez, describing the 180-commitment figure as questionable.

Ellison, the Minnesota congressman also vying for the lead in the race, went so far as to suggest that Perez had released his whip count to deliberately mislead.

Referring to Perez only as “one of the other great candidates,” Ellison told DNC members in a letter that the whip count was “unverifiable” and meant to “exert pressure on you” — “tactics,” he said, to “make the race sound like it is over” and put a “finger on the scale.”

On Thursday night, in an interview, Buttigieg said he found Perez’s 180-pledge count “a little unlikely,” asking why the campaign hadn't release names with the number. “If hard counts or hard numbers were used there — if it's actually hard, you can put out the names. But by definition it's not a hard count,” Buttigieg said, speaking by phone in Indiana, where he is a two-term mayor of South Bend.

Buttigieg conceded that Perez likely has “a substantial number” of backers. “But you don't generally do that [publicize a whip count] if you're at or near the majority,” he said.

“I'd be surprised if they were at 180.”

Perez’s team has spent eight weeks aggressively courting, and tracking, the 447-person voting pool. (David Huynh and Matt Berg, two strategists who built the massive and intricately organized whip operation at the Democratic convention last summer, are now running Perez's whip count.)

The pledges would put Perez just 44 members south of victory. If no candidate immediately receives a majority of the 447 votes — a scenario most in the race consider likely on the first ballot — DNC members will vote again on a new ballot, and then another, until someone reaches 224 votes.

Buttigieg said his success depends on multiple rounds of voting, where members may abandon their first choice: “It’s a very specific lane for us, but the lane is there.”

Neither Ellison nor Buttigieg has released his own whip count.

Ellison told DNC members he is “very confident in our whip count” — “in an excellent position to win,” he said, dismissing Perez’s claim to a definitive lead.

The responses from Ellison and Buttigieg on Thursday, mild as they are compared to any exchange from 2016, amount in this particular race to a pointed moment.

The DNC chair candidates agree on many of the issues. The forums where they face off are cordial and subdued, less like debates than lengthy Q&As where all 10 candidates, from Perez to 29-year-old Sam Ronan of Ohio, are given fair time.

After one recent forum in Washington, the night before Ellison wrote to DNC members about Perez, the two rivals sat down to a private dinner together.

“We’re friends. It's ok,” Ellison tweeted.

Perez added: “What Keith said.”

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Florida Law Barring Doctors From Asking Patients If They Own Guns Is Struck Down

Dominick Reuter / AFP / Getty Images

Florida lawmakers violated the First Amendment when they passed a law prohibiting doctors generally from asking patients if they owned guns, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday.

The law said that doctors couldn't ask patients if they owned guns unless they believed in "good faith" that the information was relevant to a patient's medical care or safety, or the safety of others. A doctor who violated the law faced disciplinary action, including having their medical license revoked.

The American Medical Association encourages doctors to ask patients about gun ownership as part of a broader inquiry into possible health and safety risks, particularly if children live in the home. In response to complaints from patients who said they felt harassed and discriminated against by these types of questions from doctors, the Florida Legislature passed the Firearms Owners’ Privacy Act in 2011.

A majority of all the active judges of the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected Florida's argument that the law wasn't a free speech restriction but was rather a permissible regulation of doctors' professional conduct. The court also found that state lawmakers relied on a weak record of evidence in adopting the law.

"Saying that restrictions on writing and speaking are merely incidental to
speech is like saying that limitations on walking and running are merely incidental
to ambulation," Judge Adalberto Jordan wrote in a majority opinion.

The court did uphold a separate section of the law that said doctors couldn't discriminate against gun-owning patients.

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The Best Known DREAMer Wants Progressives To Show Up For Her Mom, Too

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WASHINGTON — The former Bernie Sanders staffer turned on a sepia-toned Facebook live video outside the Phoenix ICE office where family friend Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos was being held before being deported last week and pleaded with progressives to join the fight.

"This is the time to show up for the undocumented community. This is the time to show up for Lupita," said an emotional Erika Andiola, a popular and well-respected DREAMer who benefitted from Obama's deferred action program. "All of you who were at the Women's March, all of you that were at every single protest against Trump."

Andiola was talking about the mother of US-born children who went to a check-in with immigration officials and was deported after 22 years living in the states over a years-old removal order, but she could have been talking about her own mom, and very soon, she will be.

Immigration activists tied together by the arms participate in a sit-in protest against ICE raids and deportations near the downtown Los Angeles Federal Building.

Nick Ut / AP

In May, her mother Maria “Guadalupe” Arreola has her own check-in with Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (ICE), as well as a pending removal order. Andiola, who has already stopped her mother's deportation once, said she will fight, even in the face of the daunting challenge of doing so against a Trump administration that has already expanded immigration enforcement priorities.

"With my mom, it's really bad," Andiola said, letting out a heavy breath in a phone conversation just days after her friend's deportation. "Trust me, I’m putting up a fight. I'm not just going to sit here and let them take her from me or me self-deporting, that’s not how I've done things before and that’s not how I am."

The problem for even the most hardened activists is that the playbook they've used for years is severely limited by a Trump administration that doesn't have the same pressure points as President Obama's did. They used to reach out to former Sen. Harry Reid or Sen. Dick Durbin, who would make the call to ICE themselves or contact the administration. But last week, efforts to recruit Republican Sen. John McCain to help Garcia de Rayos were unsuccessful.

That's why Andiola says the new anti-Trump protest energy that has been seen at the Women's March in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, to airports in New York City and around the US to demonstrate against the travel ban on Muslim-majority countries, must also be mobilized to help immigrants.

Andiola, who was a featured speaker at the Women's March and saw the ferocious pushback against the travel ban, notes with frustration that those outside ICE in Phoenix, Arizona, were the same faces she always sees fighting on immigration. The coalescing of a unified progressive coalition is happening in fits and starts, she argues, but needs to muscle up quickly.

On Sunday, MoveOn.org, the earliest incarnation of what we now know as the online left, held a call for members that grew from 30,000 the previous week to 40,000. And presenting on the call was Cristina Jimenez of the advocacy group United We Dream, comprised and working in defense of undocumented youth and families. The progressives on the call, she said, should pressure their mayors and local elected officials to stand up to Trump’s raids and deportations "and ensure that immigrants in our localities are safe, protected from deportation, and that local police are not deputized to be immigration agents."

Charles Reed / AP

ACLU, MoveOn.org, and Star Trek actor George Takei's popular social media presence also shared United We Dream online information cards on what to do if immigration officials show up at your door.

Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org Civic Action, said she sees momentum growing to protect immigrants, and that progressives should show up on the issue.

“People who aren't themselves members of front-line communities really need to show up in the wake of reports of recent raids," she said. "This is truly a moment for solidarity across lines of immigration status, religion, and national origin."

But along with grassroots energy, immigration advocates say they also need organized pushback and the support of progressive Democrats, which has at times been difficult to focus during the early days of the Trump administration because there always seems to be a new outrage or major issue to react to.

Andiola is hoping to see her former boss Sanders and the group that sprouted from his candidacy, Our Revolution — for which she now works — on the front lines fighting for her mother and immigrants across the country.

But the issue doesn't yet seem to be the top priority for progressives. Sanders did not respond to repeated requests for comment over multiple days for this story. Jeff Weaver, his former campaign manager and president of Our Revolution, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Symone Sanders, who worked on black outreach for Sanders, in addition to her role as national press secretary, and is now a strategist for Priorities USA, said it is not enough for progressives to come out forcefully for something like the Women's March, but not for a Black Lives Matter or immigration rally.

"The progressive movement is really going to have to step up on all fronts — today it's immigration raids, tomorrow it could be infringing on the rights of indigenous communities," she said.

And advocates hoping to catalyze immigration as the next great progressive fight with protests like Thursday's "Day Without Immigrants," which features business owners closing shop for the day, may find that other issues continue to step on the urgency of the immigration battle. A coalition of progressive groups, including Our Revolution, hopes to create a sequel to the Women's March with the April 15 Tax March, to pressure Trump to release his taxes.

Foreign nationals are arrested an ICE operation.

Bryan Cox / U.S. Immigration and Customs Enf

Former Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, who is running to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told BuzzFeed News that raids near schools and deporting families and DREAMers are not who we are as a country.

"We can't and won't stand for this," he said. "This is why we must continue to organize, we must continue to march, and we must make our voices heard the way we've done over the first month of his disastrous administration. We can't be silent now and we must hold him accountable."

The fear, activists say, is that the new administration will mobilize against already vulnerable immigrants.

"With Erika, one of the fears we have is there are greater risks for us as individual activists, she's a very public figure, her mother was out there during SB1070," said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC). "Trump is a very vindictive personality, so you wonder not just about him, but the team he has around him, will they take any action? But we’re committed to protecting our leaders."

Members of the family of Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, left, stand with supporters at a news conference in front of the ICE office in Phoenix.

Steve Fluty / AP

For these activists, the current situation is serious. Just 24 hours after Garcia de Rayos was deported from Phoenix after appearing for her immigration check-in, DREAMer Daniel Ramirez, one of the estimated 750,000 young immigrants shielded from deportation under President Obama’s 2012 executive actions, was detained in Seattle after officials maintained that he admitted to being a gang member. On Wednesday, Jeanette Vizguerra, who has lived in the country for 20 years did not go to her checkin, instead taking sanctuary in a church in Denver, Colorado.

Then there are those with upcoming court dates like Juan Miguel, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, who is scheduled to appear for his asylum case in April.

“I’m scared that when I show up they’ll put me in detention right then and there or deport me,” Juan Miguel told BuzzFeed News.

The 40-year-old was deported three times. The last time he was deported to Mexico was in 2015. At that time, he worked in Nogales, Sonora in Mexico and sent money to his wife and kids on the US side of the border.

One night, Juan Miguel said he was kidnapped by a cartel and, along with a group of other people, was forced to dig tunnels underneath the border fence. After nine days of grueling work, people started screaming that the Mexican government was coming. Seeing his armed captors run, Juan Miguel also ran until he felt safe enough to catch his breath.

At the suggestion of an immigrant rights group, Juan Miguel asked for asylum at the border and was placed in detention for eight months without a bond hearing. That changed when a federal court ruling, Rodriguez v. Robbins, required that detainees locked up for six months or more be given a bond hearing.

He’s settled back into life with his family in Tempe, Arizona, and is heavily involved the immigrant rights movement there. He visits detainees at Eloy Detention Center and recently met with a delegation from Mexico that was concerned about the treatment of Mexicans under the Trump administration.

Despite his activism, the thought of now going to court weighs on him.

“We have to wait and see what happens in the immigration courts,” Juan Miguel said. “If they do end up locking people up or deporting them, I just don’t know. I don’t want to be in a detention center again, that was hell.”

"They have a thirst to do their job and are just going to town with it."

Karla Navarrete, staff attorney for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, doubts people will be detained in courtrooms because they are supposed to be neutral spaces.

“But for check-ins, you should be wary. You should go, but you should go with an attorney,” Navarrete told BuzzFeed News. “I know it’s scary, but it’s better than having someone come knock on your door and putting people around you at risk. At the same time, I do believe it’s hard to tell people it’s going to be OK.”

When she tried to help an undocumented man who was caught in an ICE sweep last week get out, an agent told her things were changing, Navarrete said.

“I feel like a lot of ICE officers feel like they’ve been suppressed in doing their jobs for the last eight years, even though that’s ridiculous because Obama deported more people than in the past,” she said. “They feel like people have gotten too many passes…They have a thirst to do their job and are just going to town with it.”

Besides emboldened immigration agents on the ground, conversations with Trump administration officials reveal the scope of the challenges facing activists and immigrants. Appearing on Meet The Press Sunday, senior policy advisor Stephen Miller said the emphasis is on removing immigrants that commit crimes that threaten or endanger public safety, but that he "cannot order a federal law enforcement officer in ICE" to ignore the laws of the United States.

Further, he said it would "be highly unethical for me in the White House or anybody else to pick up the phone and call an ICE officer and say, 'Well, when you encounter this particular felon, we'd like you to pretend the law doesn't exist.'"

Asked about Andiola and her mother, a Trump official told BuzzFeed News they didn't know who she is. But in discussing whether the administration might employ some sort of prosecutorial discretion on individual cases in the future for someone like Arreola — who has a removal order because she reentered the United States in 1998 after an initial deportation order was given to her at the border — the official went down the same road as Miller, questioning whether activists want criminals out on the street.

Pressed on Meet The Press, Miller said "an immigration judge makes those decisions. An ICE officer makes those decisions."

But David Leopold, a lawyer who represented clients in many high-profile immigration cases in the Obama years, said Trump gave judges and immigration agents all the leeway they needed to argue that everyone is a removal priority by how broadly the administration wrote the executive order on interior enforcement.

"When I read these priorities two weeks ago, I jumped out of my seat because they really do encompass almost every undocumented person in this country," Leopold said.

He pointed to Section 5 of the executive order, which sets as a priority any immigrant who has been convicted of any criminal offense; someone who has only been charged; someone who has committed a "chargeable offense" but has not been charged; someone who engaged in fraud, such as working with a false social security number; has received public benefits; is subject to a final order of removal, but who have not complied with their legal obligation to depart the country; or someone who poses a public safety or national security risk in the judgment of an immigration officer.

About 40% of undocumented immigrants crossed the border without inspection, Leopold said, so that's already 5 million people subject to deportation. Someone who did not receive due process may nonetheless have a final order of removal against them and an immigration agent would have incredible leeway to decide if an individual is a risk under these guidelines.

Everyone from a person with a parking ticket to a murderer could be included in the same enforcement priorities boat.

"So [Press Secretary Sean Spicer] or Trump can say we’re going after bad people, but mothers and grandmothers and fathers are living in fear," Leopold said.

Activists worry that the administration will do just that, labeling everyone a hardened criminal who deserves to be expelled from the country. That's why they say Facebook Live, as Andiola used last week, will be an important tool to show Americans who is actually being targeted.

"This is about the soul of the nation and who we are as Americans," NILC's Hincapié said.

But to Jeffrey Lord, a former official in the Reagan administration who went to bat for Trump on CNN during the campaign, the president has always been clear on what he plans to do. He cited Americans who have been killed by undocumented immigrants, which Trump elevated to national prominence during the election.

Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

"I am of the belief that what he’s going to do here is set an example, he’s going to rigorously enforce the law, and say we can’t just do this," Lord said, adding that Trump's promised border wall will have a big, beautiful door for legal entry. "There's no question this is going to be a flashpoint, this is just the beginning."

And Andiola says she will need the force of the progressive movement for the coming clash.

"It's interesting how the rest of the progressive movement is now paying attention to injustice and suffering because there’s a boogeyman talking about it," Andiola said. "Our house has already been raided, my mom's been detained before, we’ve grown a lot stronger, but we're picking ourselves up and having a plan, we’re not leaving this country without a fight."

LINK: A DREAMer Was Arrested During A Raid And Now Immigration Officials Have Been Ordered To Explain Why

LINK: More Than 680 Arrested In Raids Targeting Undocumented Immigrants

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