We still don’t know the full extent of the damage done to thousands of undocumented families by the Trump administration’s separation policy, but we are getting a clearer picture of the absolute menace and sheer incompetence driving the White House’s immigration policy. The latest twist, revealed in a court filing Monday, is that the U.S. government believes that potentially hundreds of parents that were forcibly separated from their children have already been deported without their children.
“The Trump administration said [-] that 463 parents of migrant children are no longer present in the United States, indicating that the number of mothers and fathers potentially deported without their children during the ‘zero tolerance’ border crackdown could be far larger […]
Credit: Sean Rayford/Getty
States are kicking a growing number of voters off their rolls in the wake of a 2013 Supreme Court decision that invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act.
The rate of voter purges — a sometimes faulty process that states use to clean their voter rolls — is significantly higher than it was a decade ago, according to a new report from NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice.
This increase coincides with a 2013 Supreme Court decision, which struck down a part of the Voting Rights Act that required nine states with a history of racial discrimination to obtain federal approval when altering their election laws.
The spike is notable. Between 2006 and 2008, 12 million voters were purged from voter rolls. Between 2014 and 2016, that number rose to 16 million — a roughly 33 percent increase.
Brennan Center researchers also found a major surge in voter purges in the places that had previously been subject to federal preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. Several states […]
But what about YOUR pay raise?
Credit: Cherise May/NurPhoto
A few months ago, I cautioned that Americans should be patient before deciding what effect President Donald Trump’s tax cuts have had on the economy. It takes a while for companies to make investment decisions, more time for those decisions to be implemented and even more time for the resulting changes in labor demand to bid up workers’ wages. It therefore takes months or even years before the full impact of the tax bill will be known.
But it’s also important to evaluate policies like Trump’s tax reform as quickly as possible. Not only is this critical for deciding whether to change course, but as more time goes on, the effects of a policy can become harder to assess. Two years from now, plenty of other things will have had time to affect the economy, including Trump’s trade war and natural economic forces. And now that the tax cut has been in effect for a half-year, the results are starting to trickle […]
