Tag Archives: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

News You Should View, That’s What College Papers Are For Edition

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Over the summer, I kinda got out of the habit of checking in with the three campus newspapers in our catchment because they don’t regularly publish anything when the students are away. But hey, it’s fall, and one college paper has stepped up to the plate to give full coverage to a big story that’s landed on its doorstep. Also in this space: Another potential deportation that makes no sense, another town facing a water shortage, a telling indicator of the soft market for office space, and one story that deserve dishonorable mention. If you’re here for the snark, skip down near the end.

Trump administration trying to bribe Dartmouth. Our authoritarian-minded chief executive has taken a new tack in his war on academia. He’s offering financial incentives to select institutions that adopt his ideological agenda. Which would be the death knell of academic freedom, but hey, if you want an omelet you gotta break some eggheads.

One of the nine bribery targets is Dartmouth College, which has already flown its Trump-friendly colors in a few unsettling ways. And there’s The Dartmouth, its student newspaper, with broad coverage of how the Ivy League’s party school might respond.

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Are You Unfulfilled Because Your Career Isn’t Evil Enough?

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Don’t you know the devil wears a suit and tie

I saw him driving down the 61 in early July

White as a cotton field and sharp as a knife

I heard him howling as he passed me by

Rarely do I begin one of these posts with a song lyric, but this one speaks to me right now It’s a song by Colter Wall, a retelling of an oft-told yarn about bluesman Robert Johnson meeting the devil and learning his secrets… at a price.

In the case now before us, the devil isn’t howling down a country road in a Cadillac. He’s a bureaucrat with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, trying to recruit willing desk workers for the unconstitutional, illegal, and yes, evil work of ferreting out the undocumented for prosecution and deportation. VTDigger:

ICE plans to hire at least a dozen contracted workers for the effort at its National Criminal Analysis and Targeting Center, which is located in an unassuming business park in Williston. … [The contractors would] use sites such as Facebook, Instagram and X… to generate leads about “individuals who pose a danger to national security, risk public safety or otherwise meet ICE enforcement priorities.”

Yeah, because of course people who pose a clear and present danger to national security are out there openly sharing their nefarious plans on social media platforms.

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News You Should View, Emergency Dispatch

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Hats off to The Hardwick Gazette, not because of my association with it, but because they pulled off the scoop of the goddamn week. In the process, the doughty weekly showcased the importance of strong, active local news operations, especially as our daily papers have focused on their core communities and our statewide outlets just can’t cover all the gaps.

Last Friday, federal agents conducted “a coordinated Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) action that involved five vehicles” in the town of Hardwick, population less than 3,000, not exactly an epicenter of crime, not the place where Trump’s immigration crackdown could actually do anything to make our country safer. As The Gazette put the pieces together, what emerged was the apparent detention of nine individuals who all “worked for the same construction company,” which could not be immediately identified.

Rumors about this action reverberated around social media over the weekend. The Gazette’s editor, publisher, chief cook and bottle washer Paul Fixx put the pieces together in time for this week’s edition. And as far as I can tell, no other media outlet has reported on this coordinated action targeting people who may or may not have their papers in order, but who apparently held jobs in an industry desperately short of personnel.

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News You Should View: Manchester Journal FTW

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This week’s crop was looking a little thin until I visited The Manchester Journal’s website and found not one, not two, but three stories worthy of note. One of them was actually published on September 4, and I managed to miss it last time. But it remains relevant, and The Journal has since published a meaningful follow-up.

The Journal is one of three southern Vermont newspapers owned by Paul Belogour, an international financier type who originally hails from Belarus, one of the most corrupt and press-unfriendly dictatorships this side of Kim Jong Un. His 2021 acquisition of The Journal, The Bennington Banner and The Brattleboro Reformer raised many an eyebrow at the time, including mine. So far his stewardship seems to be fairly benign, at least by contemporary oligarchical standards. (Although I doubt that The Reformer will be doing any more overviews of Belogour’s wide-ranging acquisitions like it did before he bought the papers.) And this week, at least, one of his outlets occupies the top spot in Vermont’s incredible shrinking news pantheon.

ICE detainee whisked out of state. The Journal’s Cherise Forbes and Michael Albans were first to report that Davona Williams, the Manchester resident seized by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month, had been secretly moved to the North Lake Processing Center in rural Michigan. This story ought to reverberate in Montpelier’s corridors of power; last spring, when leading lawmakers were looking to limit Vermont’s cooperation slash complicity in the ICE crackdown, the Scott administration successfully argued that people detained in Vermont were better off in Vermont prisons than elsewhere. Huh, turns out that ICE can move people around willy-nilly no matter where they live or where they were first detained. Which puts us back on the “complicity” side of the ledger.

There’s also a fascinating little Vermont connection with the North Lake facility itself, but that’s beyond the remit of this post.

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It’s Such a Fine Line Between Prudence and Appeasement

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Gov. Phil Scott continues to tiptoe the line when it comes to the rank berserkitude of the Trump administration. He got a lot of press coverage for his refusal to approve Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s request for Vermont National Guard personnel for administrative assistance. Since then, it’s been pretty much prudence slash appeasement.

Frankly, I don’t give him much credit for the ICE decision. They only wanted 12 people to basically do secretarial work. (I guess someone’s got to fetch the coffee.) It was such a small-stakes request that I wondered why ICE even bothered. Were they trying to get a foot in the door for bigger asks down the line? Or were they doing Scott a favor by making a request he could safely refuse?

Whatever, Scott’s subsequent actions make it clear that we shouldn’t be giving him a membership card in The Resistance anytime soon. In context, the ICE decision looks more like a brief tactical pivot than a sign that he takes Trump seriously as an existential threat to democracy.

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The DMV needs an overhaul

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Ah, the Department of Motor Vehicles: everybody’s stereotype of a complacent, hidebound bureaucracy, where the lines are long and the staff’s hostility is held in check by its somnolence.

The image is unfair to the reality. The DMV has made strides to enter, if not the 21st Century, at least the late 20th. But now it faces new challenges not of its own making, and there needs to be a shakeup in its future.

Among those challenges: responsibility for voter registration which it seems to be fumbling, and an attitude toward the new driver’s privilege cards that seems to have awakened the inner Barney Fife in some DMV employees.

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