Bolts.com has done another interesting Q&A with state and local leaders about how they’re dealing with ICE and CBP. It’s quite interesting and somewhat inspiring. The Resistance is deep:
The violence of Trump’s immigration crackdown in cities across the country and the killing of protesters by federal agents have put pressure on local leaders to change their approach to federal immigration enforcement.
Already, a growing list of states has moved to restrict local collaboration with ICE, and in many local criminal justice elections this year, assisting federal immigration authorities has become a defining issue.
We asked our readers to send us their questions about state and local responses to the federal immigration crackdown as part of our ongoing series “Ask Bolts.” With the help of our entire staff, we respond to nine of those questions below.
Jump to the topic that interests you most, or keep scrolling to explore all nine questions.
What’s the point of having a Congress if it won’t exercise the real powers vested in it? Are they lawmakers or simply a student council?
Twice this week, the U.S. Congress, both the Senate and House chambers, voted down a demand that the president come to Congress for authorization for its war-making in Iran. The House voted 219 to 212 on Thursday, nearly along party lines, “to block consideration of a bipartisan resolution that would end offensive military operations in Iran that had not been approved by Congress.” Four Democrats opposed the resolution. Two Republicans supported it. Collectively, they surrendered their constitutional powers without a shot.
But, of course, it’s not a war. Another name will be found for it.
RAJU: You'll concede this is war?
MARKWAYNE MULLIN: We haven't declared war. They declared war on us
RAJU: The president called it war and Secretary Hegseth called it war
REPORTER: When you walked up just now, you called it war
“The Constitution is clear: Our Constitution provides Congress initiatory powers of war,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and the lead sponsor of the resolution, said during debate on the House floor, directly challenging members of his own party.
Mr. Massie, who cosponsored the measure with Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, noted that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows the president to go around Congress and exercise unilateral authority to use force only if there has been a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization or a national emergency created by an attack on the United States.
“None of those conditions exist today,” Mr. Massie said.
After a series of classified briefings led by senior Trump administration officials, Democrats said the case had not been made that the president had needed to act unilaterally.
Donald Trump did anyway.
You knew he would. So did Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic:
During the run-up to the 2016 election, I wrote that “if you’re a voter who believes that Donald Trump is against foreign wars and regime change, unlike the globalist elites in Washington, D.C., you have been misled.” At the time, I noted that Trump released a video in 2011 that sought to pressure President Obama to invade Libya. Trump also argued that George H. W. Bush should have ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons.” He added, “Am I being contradictory here, by presenting myself as a deal-maker and then recommending preemptive strikes? I don’t think so.” In 2011, he urged the Navy to wage war on Somali pirates.
Now Trump has proved his proclivity for interventionism, without congressional approval or the support of the public. And there’s no evidence to suggest that he will stop here. If Congress continues allowing him to deploy force unilaterally, he may pursue land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, a prospect that he raised early this year in an interview with Fox News; regime change in Cuba, a longtime dream of Rubio’s; and God knows what else. He is an impulsive man who gambles, especially when the most significant risks are borne by others. There is no way to know how exactly he will surprise Americans next.
“The United States is now enmeshed in so many conflicts that its foreign policy is closer to ‘world police’ than ‘America First’, ” chides Friedersdorf. As candidate, Trump promoted himself as the “peace president” while lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel,” Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal judge, told Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump in a secretly recorded interview.
“He has no principles. None. None.”
Trump is engaged in another criminal enterprise, this time involving spilling blood. The question is whether Congress has the balls to parent a career criminal with possession of the nuclear launch codes and in control of the world’s most powerful military. It is because Trump is the most insecure, emotionally damaged president of our time that he surrounds himself with total nincompoops. And because he helps elect them to Congress expressly to do his bidding, over half of that body is populated with ass-kissing Otis wannabes.
Noem testified before Congress this week that Trump approved her $200 million ad campaign that featured her and Trump was supposedly very angry and it led to her firing. They’ve been playing for over a year in every media market. But I recalled that this story has been around since the early days of the administration and Noem has always told the same story — and Trump never denied it. The details are even more juicy that what they’re reporting today:
The Department of Homeland Securityhas budgeted up to $200 million to run anti-immigrant ads in the United States and overseas that repeatedly thank President Donald Trump for leading an immigration crackdown. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Friday night that these ads were Trump’s idea, and during the administration’s transition to power, the president asked her to star in ads thanking him “for closing the border.”
Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Ronald Reagan dinner on Friday night — at a tux and gown affair that served striploin, mashed potatoes, and raspberry cake — Noem recalled Trump telling her after she was nominated: “I want you to do [ads] for the border, and I want you to do those everywhere, not just in the United States, but I want them around the world. I want you to tell people not to come to this country if they’re going to come here illegally.”
She said the president continued: “We’re not going to let the media tell this story, because the media will never tell the truth. We’re going to run a marketing campaign to make sure the American people know the truth of what you’re doing.”
The ad campaign amounts to an extremely expensive taxpayer-funded propaganda blitz to scare off migrants and to flatter Trump on television. On Friday, Trump’s DHS secretary entertained the CPAC high-roller audience with her account of how Trump orchestrated the whole thing.
Noem said that Trump instructed that he didn’t want to be in the ads himself, telling her: “I want you in the ads, and I want your face in the ads … but I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.” She recalled: “I said, ‘Yes, sir, I will thank you for closing the border.’ So if you notice, in that ad, we thanked him for closing the border.”
Lol! I don’t know about you but Kristi’s story has the ring of truth if only because she so clearly doesn’t understand how much it makes him look like a narcissistic moron.
Of course that’s what he said. He’s always demanding that people thank him. It’s him.
Hegseth: "No stupid rules of engagement. No nation-building quagmire. No democracy-building exercise. No politically correct wars…An effort of this scope will include casualties. War is Hell and always will be." pic.twitter.com/yuvwJWTk0V
The Feb. 28 strike that hit an elementary school in the southern Iranian town of Minab is the deadliest known episode of civilian casualties since the United States and Israel attacked Iran — and no side has yet taken responsibility.
But a body of evidence assembled by The New York Times — including newly released satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos — indicates the school building was severely damaged by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
And official statements that U.S. forces were attacking naval targets near the Strait of Hormuz, where the I.R.G.C. base is located, suggest they were most likely to have carried out the strike. […]
The elementary school is in the small southern town of Minab, more than 600 miles from Tehran but near the critical waterway of the Strait of Hormuz. Since Saturday is the start of the Iranian workweek, children and teachers were in class at the time of the strike, health officials and Iranian state media said.
No biggie.
It reminds me of the comment by former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs who defended the targeted killing of American Anway Awlaki by saying, “he should have had a more responsible father.” If those little Iranian kids didn’t want to be killed they should have had the good sense to be born American and live in the United States. Of course, that’s no guarantee that Trump’s administration won’t kill them too but it may be slightly less likely.
President Trump told Axios in an interview Thursday that he needs to be personally involved in selecting Iran’s next leader — just as he was in Venezuela.
Trump revealed this exclusively in an eight-minute phone call — his second conversation with us to explain his war planning.
Trump acknowledged that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of assassinated supreme leader Ali Khamenei, is the most likely successor — while making clear he finds that outcome unacceptable.
For several days, the Iranian regime has postponed the announcement of the new supreme leader. But statements by Iranian politicians on Thursday suggested an announcement could be imminent.
“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodriguez] in Venezuela,” Trump said.
He added that he refuses to accept a new Iranian leader who would continue Khamenei’s policies, which he said would force the U.S. back to war “in five years.”
“Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me. We want someone that will bring harmony and peace to Iran,” Trump said.
Trump’s comments represent an extraordinary claim of American power over Iran’s political future, further muddying the objectives of the massive U.S. military campaign he launched on Saturday.
No shit. So I guess we’re going in with boots on the ground and plan to occupy the country? Because that’s the only way he’s going to get a vote on this.
They aren’t giving their country to him the way Trump’s puppet Delcy did. They are fighting. And I guess we’re fighting too — because Trump is so braindead that he doesn’t understand how any of this works
Ice Barbie told the Congress that Trump had approved her spending hundreds of millions on ads promoting herself and he got mad so he’s replaced her with the stupidest man in the U.S. Senate, Markwayne Mullin. It gets more and more surreal every single day.
A congressman embarks on a secret mission to rescue five American citizens, demanding a huge sum of cash from an ambassador – immediately! – to make it all work.
Truth, as people who follow politics closely, is always stranger than fiction.
Which brings us to the curious case of Oklahoma Republican Rep. Markwayne Mullin and his suspended attempt to enter Afghanistan with a big sack of money that he hoped would be arranged for him by the US ambassador to Tajikistan.
“Mullin told the embassy that he planned to fly from Tblisi, Georgia, into Tajikistan’s capital, Dushanbe, in the next few hours and needed the top diplomat’s help, according to the two U.S. officials familiar with the incident, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose private conversations about a sensitive matter.
“The answer was no. Embassy officials told Mullin they could not assist him in skirting Tajikistan’s laws on cash limits on his way to visiting one of the most dangerous places on earth.
“Mullin was outraged by the response, the officials said — threatening U.S. ambassador John Mark Pommersheim and embassy staff and demanding to know the name of staff members he was speaking with.”
Even more remarkable? That this wasn’t, according to the Post, the first time that Mullin had attempted to pull this stunt. “Last week, Mullin traveled to Greece and asked the Department of Defense for permission to visit Kabul,” the Post wrote. “The Pentagon denied Mullin’s request, an administration official said.”
And this detail! “As of late Tuesday, U.S. officials said they were unsure of Mullin’s location. Mullin’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment before this story published.”
More highlights:
PAMELA BROWN (ANCHOR): Look, early voting is kicking off. The race is super tight, as you know. Some of Trump’s confidantes are starting to scare GOP veterans, based on our reporting just coming in. I have to ask you, should right-wing firebrands like Laura Loomer, who once said 9/11 was an inside job, be in Trump’s ear?
SEN. MARKWAYNE MULLIN (R-OK): Yeah, President Trump is real good about surrounding himself around people that gives him the positive advice and information that is useful to him winning the election. To say who should be around his ear or who shouldn’t — this is a guy that’s been very successful in business. He’s built a wonderful brand, very successful business along the way. He’s not been in politics, but he knows how to put the right people in place to get the job done.
That was during the last campaign. After Trump had already been president for 4 years.
Markwayne Mullin: "War is ugly. It smells bad. If anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that's happening around you and taste it, and feel it in your nostrils, it's something you'll never forget. And fortunately you have President Hegseth — or Secretary… pic.twitter.com/kFTyKxS3Z8
Markwayne Mullin has never been in the armed service.
Markwayne Mullin was shook by the end of this CNN interview with Kasie Hunt. He's increasingly serving as a Trump spokesperson on TV and it's not going well. pic.twitter.com/TDfBpNQpXL
Sen. Markwayne Mullin: "Think about this, they were literally out there protesting carrying a foreign flag. That is absolutely insane. I mean, they're not just peaceful protesters."
In 2018, on the eve of the massive blue wave in the midterms that gave the Democrats a congressional majority, Donald Trump seemed to acknowledge for the first time that Republicans might actually lose. At a rally in Huntington, West Virginia, airport hangar, he told the ecstatic crowd, “It could happen. And you know what you do? My whole life, you know what I say? ‘Don’t worry about it, I’ll just figure it out.’”
That is how the president strategizes. And let’s face it, it’s worked pretty well for him so far.
Trump recovered his fortune by being rescued by a game show producer. Aside from being found civilly liable by a jury for sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll and being convicted of 34 felony counts in a hush-money case, he has managed to evade accountability for all of his crimes and abuses of power. Tens of millions of Americans even put him back in the White House after he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election and inspired an insurrection. He seems to think all this came about as a result of his strategic brilliance, or maybe his genetic superiority. But the fact is that it’s just plain old luck. Some people have more of it than they deserve, and he is definitely one of them. Over the course of his life, Trump has made decisions that would have destroyed the fortunes and reputations of anyone else. His greatest superpower is the ability to survive his own monumentally terrible judgement.
Now, as he wages war against Iran in a widening conflict that is quickly engulfing the entire Middle East, Trump is putting that preternatural resilience to what may be its greatest test. The Islamic Republic is proving an able military enemy, and with only one ally — Israel — at his side and tepid public support, the president has no plan for how win or for what comes next. Apparently, he’s just going to “figure it out.”
Part of that, the nation discovered on Tuesday, is an old method: using the CIA to arm and train unorganized opposition. The Wall Street Journal reported that the administration is in talks about arming Kurdish forces to lead an effort to “dislodge the regime.” According to CNN, the CIA is already engaged on the ground and Trump has been speaking with Kurdish leaders.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the rumors of a Kurdish insurgency “completely false.” But the New York Times reported that the CIA had already “given small arms” to pro-American Kurdish forces in Iran before the current war started in hopes of destabilizing the Islamic Republic.
The CIA and U.S. military’s use of foreign militias has a long — and checkered — history spanning at least 65 years. The record shows that they have rarely had any positive effect, and most often, they have made situations worse.
Throughout the Cold War and beyond, America attempted to overthrow governments or fight proxy wars that often led to wider conflicts or the imposition of regimes that were worse than those they replaced. Far too often, it was done for the same reason Trump is citing now with Iran — to install, or at least create the conditions for, a new regime that “we can work with.” And sometimes, that has meant having little concern for the country’s people or democracy.
Consider the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 or the Reagan administration’s support for the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinista government. The former saw the CIA, in a plan that began under Dwight D. Eisenhower and was approved by his successor John F. Kennedy, training a group of Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro to make a secret landing in Cuba and fight their way to Havana, leading a popular uprising to topple the president. The group were captured immediately, leading to international embarrassment for the U.S. and for the young president, who took responsibility in public and, behind closed doors, vowed to never trust the CIA again.
In 1963, the agency supported a military coup by South Vietnamese forces against Ngo Dinh Diem, the country’s president. The act, which was intended to stabilize the country in its fight against North Vietnamese communists, did the opposite, helping to transform America’s role in the conflict from advisory to an all-out war that left over 58,000 U.S. service members — and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian military and civilians dead.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, under successive Republican and Democratic administrations, the CIA supported Operation Condor, a network of right-wing dictatorships throughout Latin America including Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
Then there are the more recent covert adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 1980s, the U.S. supported the Mujahadeen militants in their war against the Russians. Unfortunately, the Mujahadeen became disillusioned with their helpful allies and became the Taliban. That didn’t work out too well either. The CIA had been in Iraq in various capacities for decades before the first and second war, and they even went in prior to the 2003 invasion to — wait for it — establish contact with the Kurdish forces to secure their help.
But perhaps the most relevant precedent in Iran is the original CIA-backed overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, the country’s democratically-elected prime minister, in 1953, which restored power to Reza Pahlavi, the last shah. This was done primarily to restore control of Iranian oil fields, which Mossadegh’s government had nationalized, to British energy companies. As with Afghanistan, this act sowed seeds of resentments and helped lead to the revolution in 1979, which got us to where we are today.
The first days of the war have been chaotic, as Trump, members of his administration and his congressional allies have given competing rationales to justify the war. Secretary of State Marco Rubio seems to have landed on the doltish explanation that because Israel was planning to attack Iran, the U.S. had no choice but to join the campaign to preempt Iranian retaliation against American assets in the region. The implication of this slip was stunning: That America was a passive, secondary partner to Israel and could wield little influence over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. For his part, Trump said on Tuesday he just “had a feeling” they were going to attack.
It’s impossible to be sure just why they chose to attack the regime when they did, other than the fact that Trump has almost certainly been persuaded by the likes of Rubio and long-time Iran hawk Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., that it will mean another path to glory. The problem is that they apparently forgot to plan what comes next.
Trump has said that he hopes Iran will be another Venezuela, a simple decapitation mission in which the people who replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the regime’s supreme leader who was killed on Saturday in an air strike, would be eager to be bought off and do his bidding under threat of more bombing and carnage. But a problem emerged. Trump complained that the people he’d apparently been told were good candidates to become his puppets have all been killed. “I guess the worst case is we do this and then somebody takes over who is as bad as the previous person,” he said to reporters in the Oval Office. “That could happen.”
Indeed it could.
Trump exhorted the Iranian people to rise up against the government and threatened the authorities, telling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps via video they would get immunity if they laid down their arms. Who they are supposed to surrender to is unclear, to say the least, and how any of this could possibly come to pass without a U.S. presence on the ground is virtually impossible. While Trump has said that hasn’t ruled out sending in combat troops, it’s hard to imagine that he’s so far gone that what the Defense Department has dubbed Operation Epic Fury would be nothing compared to the fury unleashed by the American people if he launched some kind of ground invasion.
We had better hope Trump gets lucky once again. Otherwise, the results of his and Netanyahu’s war in Iran are likely to be as successful as previous U.S. efforts at regime change have been — which is to say not successful at all.
Photo: Street view of Dali City, Yunnan, People’s Republic of China with installed solar panels. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The White House scrambles to mitigate gasoline costs expected to rise with the Trump-branded Iran War. Meanwhile, China is already poised to profit. (“Like you’ve never seen”?)
A friend already regrets buying an electric vehicle now that Trump has defunded clean energy. Trump’s big bill slashed funding for building out the EV charging station network begun under Joe Biden. Trump eliminated EV tax credits last year, causing EV prices to soar, CNBC reported in August.
But China? E&E News by Politico reports that China is readying to become a clean energy powerhouse:
As Chinese officials meet in Beijing this week to identify the country’s top policies for the next five years, China watchers expect the country to continue prioritizing building a new energy system centered on renewables — and events in Iran aren’t expected to change that calculus.
“The country has definitely pulled all these triggers in the last few years to be prepared for a moment like this,” Ashish Sethia, managing director of BloombergNEF, an energy research firm, said in an email.
China has poured huge amounts of money into expanding manufacturing and critical minerals mining to fuel its explosive growth in clean technologies. In the first half of last year, China added more wind and solar facilities than the rest of the world combined, with more than a third of the country’s economic growth in 2025 coming from green technologies like electric vehicles.
So much winning … for the United States’ chief economic rival.
Europe and Pakistan largely rely on batteries and solar panels imported from China. In Europe, national security concerns have led to the Industrial Accelerator Act, which launched Wednesday with the goal of kickstarting clean tech domestic manufacturing to reduce dependence on Chinese goods.
Other countries that are friendly with China, though, have continued to buy its clean tech.
In Cuba, for example, energy shortages have long been a feature of life on the island, which has been under sanctions from the US for decades. Those have become more severe in the last year, prompting the government to turn to China for support building solar power and batteries.
Trump’s January “threat to impose tariffs on any country supplying Cuba with oil” will mean China’s renewables market in Cuba will expand (barring a U.S. invasion promoted by Trump Secretary of State Marco Rubio).
The Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University believes that the Iran War’s closing the Strait of Hormuz will impact China’s supply of liquified natural gas and accelerate “its orderly transition away from fossil fuels.” Erica Downs reports: “Half of China’s oil imports and nearly one-third of its LNG imports transit this waterway.” The impact is likely to further push China to expand its clean energy sector as the U.S. market suffers both from Trump’s oil fixation and his illegal war against Iran. The “conflict is likely to reaffirm Beijing’s commitment to transforming China into an ‘energy superpower‘ that derives strength from its leading role in deploying green energy technologies at home and abroad.”
It could have been us, meaning the U.S. But Trump’s ten-year jihad against green energy means turning the U.S. into an energy backwater (and perhaps an economic one) in the 21st century while China’s domination of the renewables market builds. Like American farmers losing their soybean markets, America’s retreat under Trump into the 20th century means we will lose the clean energy market as well.
