Latest news with #KristiNoem
Chicago Tribune
3 hours ago
- Politics
- Chicago Tribune
ICE imposes new rules on congressional visits
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has imposed new limits on visits by members of Congress and their staff to immigration enforcement facilities, intensifying a conflict between federal immigration officials and Democratic lawmakers. Under federal law, members of Congress can make unannounced oversight visits to immigration facilities that 'detain or otherwise house aliens.' Lawmakers are not required to provide 'prior notice of the intent to enter a facility' to conduct oversight, though members of their staff must request a visit at least 24 hours in advance. 'What are they hiding?': Illinois Democrats denied entry into ICE processing center in visit WednesdayBut in guidance released this month, Immigration and Customs Enforcement asks members of Congress to give at least 72 hours' notice for a visit to its facilities. Asked about the policy, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, went even further, suggesting that federal officials would not be allowed entry unless they provided a week's notice. 'A week is sufficient to ensure no intrusion on the president's constitutional authority,' the spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said in a statement. She added that 'any request to shorten that time must be approved' by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. In its new guidance, ICE asserts that it has broad power to 'deny a request or otherwise cancel, reschedule or terminate a tour or visit' by lawmakers or their staff under a number of circumstances that include 'operational concerns' or if 'facility management or other ICE officials deem it appropriate to do so.' The new policy, updated since February, also denies that ICE field offices are subject to the provision in federal law about congressional oversight visits. Democratic lawmakers in California, Illinois and New York have been turned away from ICE facilities recently, sometimes after trying in vain for hours to gain access to buildings that they say they are authorized to visit. Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, criticized the new ICE policy as an attempt to skirt congressional oversight. In a statement, he said the new guidance was 'an affront to the Constitution and federal law.'
Time of India
4 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
'I'm dead serious...': Kristi Noem erupts in anger over illegal migrants at US Senate hearing
At a fiery Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on May 20, US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem slammed Democratic senators over the surge in illegal migration. She accused them of failing to protect American borders and putting politics over national security, demanding urgent federal action to stop the influx. Show more Show less
Fast Company
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Fast Company
With ICE crackdowns on the rise, private prisons are booming businesses
Within apartment complexes, workplaces, and courtrooms, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers have forcibly detained more than 50,000 people in the first six months of 2025. These people, some of whom were reportedly detained for matters as trivial as a single missing form, find their lives abruptly uprooted as they are transported—sometimes thousands of miles across the country—to large-scale ICE detainment facilities, which are primarily located in the South and on the East Coast. ICE currently holds more than 48,000 detainees, though the agency only has funding to support housing for 41,500. Despite that overflow, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller now want ICE to ramp up arrests to 3,000 per day —and private prisons stand to benefit. Taxpayers are expected to shoulder the cost of this potential expansion, but the money won't just go to the government: The majority of ICE's 113 detention facilities are not government-run. More than 90% of immigrants arrested by the agency are held in private detention centers, most of which are operated by just two companies: GEO Group and CoreCivic. Private prisons occupy a controversial place in the criminal justice system, said Bob Libal, a senior campaign strategist at the Sentencing Project. Beyond general discomfort with the idea of profiting off of incarceration, reports have also questioned safety and security, citing higher incidences of assaults, theft, and contraband in private facilities than those operated by the Bureau of Prisons. advertisement The final deadline for Fast Company's Next Big Things in Tech Awards is Friday, June 20, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply today.
New York Times
9 hours ago
- Politics
- New York Times
What's Inside a 10th Floor ICE Office? New York Democrats Want to Know.
On the 10th floor of a federal building in Lower Manhattan, there is a holding area where immigration authorities have typically held a few dozen immigrants at a time for a few hours before transferring them to detention centers. But as the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown, the space has become overcrowded and people sleep sprawled on the floor, sometimes for days, according to those who have spent time there. Descriptions of the conditions at the center, the New York City field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, have prompted several congressional Democrats to demand that they be allowed inside for oversight purposes. Those demands have been denied. On Friday, seven New York City Democrats plan to escalate their efforts to get onto the 10th floor by sending a letter to Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which includes the immigration agency, known as ICE. In the letter, they accuse the immigration authorities of violating federal laws that allow members of Congress to tour facilities where migrants are being held. From New Jersey to California, ICE premises have turned into political battlegrounds over President Trump's immigration agenda, leading to the arrests of several Democratic officials. 'Congressional oversight is essential to bring transparency to the conduct of the Department of Homeland Security,' the lawmakers say in the letter. 'Given the overaggressive and excessive force used to handcuff and detain elected officials in public, DHS's refusal to allow members of Congress to observe the conditions for immigrants behind closed doors begs the obvious question: what are you hiding?' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Guardian
9 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
From LA to Paris, the populist right hates cities – and it's fuelled by a sense of bitter defeat
From Los Angeles to London, Istanbul to Warsaw, cities are making rightwing populists angry. Their liberal elites, immigrants, net zero policies, leftwing activists, globalised businesses, expensive transport infrastructure and outspoken municipal leaders – all are provocations to populist politicians whose support often comes from more conservative, less privileged places. Three years ago the founders of national conservatism, the transatlantic ideology on which much of modern rightwing populism is based, published a statement of principles. One of these, surprisingly little noticed at the time, declared with some menace: 'In those [places] in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.' This month, Donald Trump's administration identified the first American city – and almost certainly not the last – to meet these ominously broad criteria. 'Los Angeles has been invaded and occupied by Illegal Aliens,' he said. It was 'a city of criminals' and 'socialists', said his homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. 'Mob violence' was so disrupting the work of the federal government there, claimed his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, that an 'insurrection' was under way. Trump promised: 'We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean and safe again.' That this 'liberation' involved an ongoing, expanding and legally contentious military occupation – almost unprecedented in American history – is one indicator of how deep the populist animosity towards liberal cities and their leaders runs. Another is the recent imprisonment of the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, a challenger to the authoritarian Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the Turkish presidency. Another is the level of security required for London's Labour mayor, Sadiq Khan, which is similar to that for Keir Starmer and King Charles. The death threats, public abuse and state aggression endured by such municipal figures in supposedly free democracies – along with slightly more subtle anti-urban interventions, such as Nigel Farage's complaint in 2014 that he could not 'hear English' on an inner London train – reveal much about rightwing populism, its anxieties and fundamental values. Cities are where the future often starts, and populism is often about holding on to the past. While conservative populism reveres, or says it reveres, the nation state, the countryside, community, social continuity and the traditional family, cities are often places of more fluid loyalties. While populism presents politics as a simple battle between 'the people' and their enemies, cities, by gathering so many interest groups in one place, show that politics is in fact a more complex process: involving competition but also cooperation, contests over space and resources, and many social forces, including class, gender, sexuality, local pride and race. More enraging and disorienting still for conservative populists, over the past 30 years many big cities have changed. Trump acknowledges this by describing Los Angeles as 'once great'. As Mike Davis laid out in his pioneering histories of the city, for most of the 20th century Los Angeles was, behind its laid-back image, a highly conservative place: racially segregated, repressively policed, ruled by Republican mayors as much as Democrats. Immigration, radical activism, more progressive administrations and liberal gentrification gradually altered the city so that now, while still often shaped by inequalities, it is a stronghold of the centre left. A similar shift has happened since the 1990s in Paris, London and many other European and North American cities. For the right, the loss of these prestigious places has been a bitter defeat – hence their insistence that they have been ruined by liberals and the left. Khan's centrist mayoralty in London has used its very limited powers to provide free meals for primary schoolchildren and give the capital cleaner air, yet is routinely described by the rightwing press as a dogmatic and disastrous experiment. Such caricatures of cities and their government are all the more unconvincing because they ignore the political complexity of these places. Forty percent of Londoners voted for Brexit, and many of the city's immigrants are social conservatives. Some of its supposedly most rigid leftwing areas have, or have had, well-known rightwingers as residents: Boris Johnson and Paul Dacre, the ferociously illiberal former Daily Mail editor, used to live in Islington, north London. Dominic Cummings still does. At a Turkish greengrocer in the borough, I sometimes see the Tory MP Nick Timothy – who recently told the House of Commons: 'Diversity is not our strength: it is a very serious and difficult challenge' – queueing seemingly quite happily as the shop hums with different languages, before returning to his home in the even more diverse borough of Hackney. For all the aspects of city life that infuriate those on the right, there are others you might expect to please them: the emphasis on work, the entrepreneurialism, huge importance of property and endless hierarchies. These priorities and divides could push cities back to the right. In the 1980s, much of London elected Tory MPs. Paris had a conservative mayor, Jacques Chirac, from 1977 to 1995. Yet a return to urban conservatism feels less likely with the right in populist mode. As the Economist magazine – not usually an ally of the municipal left – recently pointed out, city government needs 'pragmatic politicos who keep … the roads free of potholes … [and] buses running on time'. The broad-brush, administratively chaotic politics of Trump, Farage and Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives don't seem well suited to such tasks. Perhaps that doesn't matter to the populists. They can go on attacking cities, in order to stir up their voters elsewhere, without actually having to run them. Meanwhile, liberal and leftwing municipal politicians keep key economic and tourism hubs functional, leaving populist national politicians such as Trump free to promote less practical policies. He may hate contemporary Los Angeles and California, but the state's economy recently overtook Japan's to become the world's fourth largest – helpful for a president whose own economic plan is misfiring. Yet the urban resistance to rightwing populism shouldn't be written off as just playing into the enemy's hands, as some political pessimists have done during the protests in Los Angeles. Whether on the street or from a grand mayoral office, defying today's intolerant, reactionary populists has a value – as an act in itself and as an encouragement to others. City life can be grim and disappointing. But one of its virtues is that while trends come and go fast, rebellions are rarely forgotten. Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist
