Immigration assault in Trump’s ’25 plans Sweeping raids, giant camps, mass deportations are seen in a second term. ​ By CHARLIE SAVAGE, MAGGIE HABERMAN and JONATHAN SWAN • ​New York Times So what if you were brought here as a baby and grew up in the United States. Plan to go to college next year? Tough, you will have to do that in Mexico! In the meantime, were taking you to an internment camp to wait for flights out!

Former President Donald Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up people living in the United States without legal permission on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

The plans would sharply restrict both legal and illegal immigration in a multitude of ways.

Trump wants to revive his first-term border policies, including banning entry by people from certain Muslimmajority nations and reimposing a COVID-19-era policy of refusing asylum claims — although this time, he would base that refusal on assertions that migrants carry other infectious diseases like tuberculosis.

He plans to scour the country for immigrants living here without legal permission and deport people by the millions per year.

To help speed mass deportations, Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due-process hearings.

To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.

To ease the strain on ICE detention facilities, Trump wants to build huge camps to detain people while their cases are processed and they await deportation flights. And to get around any refusal by Congress to appropriate the necessary funds, Trump would redirect money in the military budget, as he did in his first term to spend more on a border wall than Congress had authorized.

In interviews with the New York Times, several Trump advisers gave the most expansive and detailed description yet of Trump's immigration agenda in a potential second term. In particular, Trump's campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump's first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Miller contended, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new legislation.

And while acknowledging lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team's daunting array of tactics as a "blitz" designed to overwhelm immigrant rights lawyers.

The totality of Trump's 2025 plans amounts to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history.

Millions of immigrants living in the country without legal permission would be banned from the U.S. or uprooted from it years or even decades after settling here.

Such a scale of planned removals would raise logistical, financial and diplomatic challenges and would be vigorously challenged in court.

But there is no mistaking the breadth and ambition of the shift Trump is eyeing.

In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled.

U.S. consular officials abroad would be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes.

People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.

Similarly, numerous people who have been allowed to live in the country temporarily for humanitarian reasons would also lose that status and be kicked out, including tens of thousands of the Afghans who were evacuated amid the 2021 Taliban takeover and allowed to enter the United States.

And Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents living in the country without legal permission — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy's legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Trump's plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.

Trump agenda if elected: Revenge By ISAAC ARNSDORF, JOSH DAWSEY and DEVLIN BARRETT Washington Post ​​Second-term plans seek to weaponize DOJ, prosecute critics, political enemies.

Donald Trump and his allies have begun mapping out specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents should he win a second term, with the former president naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute and his associates drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations.

In private, Trump has told advisers and friends in recent months that he wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and former Attorney General William Barr, as well as his exattorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark M illey, according to people who have talked to him, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.

Trump has also talked of prosecuting officials at the FBI and Justice Department, a person familiar with the matter said.

In public, Trump has vowed to appoint a special prosecutor to "go after" President Biden and his family. The former president has frequently made corruption accusations against them that are not supported by available evidence.

In an interview that aired Thursday night on the Spanish-language TV network journalist Enrique Acevedo asked Trump if he would weaponize the FBI and Justice Department on his opponents in the same way he claims federal law enforcement agencies have been weaponized against him.

"Yeah. If they do this, and they've already done it, but if they follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse," Trump told Acevedo, according to excerpts of the interview.

"What they've done is they've released the genie out of the box," the former president continued, adding, "You know, when you're president and you've done a good job and you're popular, you don't go after them so you can win an election."

"They have done something that allows the next party ... if I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say, 'Go down and indict them.' They'd be out of business. They'd be out of the election," Trump continued.

To facilitate Trump's ability to direct Justice Department actions, his associates have been drafting plans to dispense with 50 years of policy and practice intended to shield criminal prosecutions from political considerations. Critics have called such ideas dangerous and unconstitutional.

"It would resemble a banana republic if people came into office and started going after their opponents willy-nilly," said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional law professor at the University of Virginia who studies executive power. "It's hardly something we should aspire to."

Much of the planning for a second term has been unofficially outsourced to a partnership of right-wing think tanks in Washington. Dubbed "Project 2025," the group is developing a plan, to include draft executive orders, that would deploy the military domestically under the Insurrection Act, according to a person involved in those conversations and internal communications reviewed by the Washington Post. The law, last updated in 1871, authorizes the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

The proposal was identified in internal discussions as an immediate priority, the communications showed. In the final year of his presidency, some of Trump's supporters urged him to invoke the Insurrection Act to put down unrest after the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, but he never did it. Trump has publicly expressed regret about not deploying more federal force and said he would not hesitate to do so in the future.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung did not answer questions about specific actions under discussion.

"President Trump is focused on crushing his opponents in the primary election and then going on to beat Crooked Joe Biden," Cheung said. "President Trump has always stood for law and order, and protecting the Constitution."

The discussions underway reflect Trump's determination to harness the power of the presidency to exact revenge on those who have challenged or criticized him if he returns to the White House. The former president has frequently threatened to take punitive steps against his perceived enemies, arguing that doing so would be justified by the current prosecutions against him. Trump has claimed without evidence that the criminal charges he is facing — a total of 91 across four state and federal indictments — were made up to damage him politically.

"This is third-world-country stuff, 'arrest your opponent,' " Trump said at a campaign stop in New Hampshire in October. "And that means I can do that, too."

Special counsel Jack Smith, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Biden have all said that Smith's prosecution decisions were made independently of the White House, in accordance with department rules on special counsels.

Trump, the polling leader in the GOP race, has made "retribution" a central theme of his campaign, seeking to intertwine his own legal defense with a call for payback against perceived slights and offenses to right-wing Americans. He repeatedly tells supporters he is being persecuted on their behalf and holds out a 2024 victory as a shared redemption at their enemies' expense.

'He is going to go after people that have turned on him'

Other modern presidents since the Watergate scandal — when Richard Nixon tried to suppress the FBI's investigation into his campaign's spying and sabotage against Democrats — have sought to separate politics from law enforcement. Presidents of both parties have imposed a White House policy restricting communications with prosecutors. An effort under the George W. Bush administration to remove U.S. attorneys for political reasons led to high-level resignations and a criminal investigation.

Rod Rosenstein, the Trumpappointed deputy attorney general who oversaw the investigation by special counsel Robert M ueller i nto Russian interference in the 2016 election, said a politically ordered prosecution would violate the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under law and could cause judges to dismiss the charges.
That constitutional defense has rarely been raised in U.S. history, Rosenstein said.

"Making prosecutorial decisions in a nonpartisan manner is essential to democracy," Rosenstein said. "The White House should not be meddling in individual cases for political reasons."

But Trump allies such as Russ Vought, his former budget director who now leads the Center for Renewing America, are actively repudiating the modern tradition of a measure of independence for the Department of Justice, arguing that such independence is not based in law or the Constitution.

Vought is in regular contact with Trump and would be expected to hold a major position in a second term.

"You don't need a statutory change at all, you need a mindset change," Vought said . "You need an attorney general and a White House Counsel's Office that don't view themselves as trying to protect the department from the president."

A fixation on the DOJ and prosecuting enemies

As president, Kelly said, Trump would often suggest prosecuting his political enemies, or at least having the FBI investigate them. Kelly said he would not pass along the requests to the Justice Department but would alert the White House Counsel's Office. Usually, they would ignore the orders, he said, and wait for Trump to move on. In a second term, Trump's aides could respond to such requests differently, he said.

"The lesson the former president learned from his first term is don't put guys like me ... in those jobs," Kelly said.

"The lesson he learned was to find sycophants."

Although aides have worked on plans for o ther agencies, Trump has taken a particular interest in the Justice Department.

In conversations about a potential second term, Trump has made picking an attorney general his number one priority, according a Trump adviser.

Jeffrey Clark, a fellow at Vought's think tank, is leading the work on the Insurrection Act under Project 2025. The Post has reported that Clark is one of six unnamed co-conspirators whose actions are described in Trump's indictment in the federal election interference case.

Clark was also charged in Fulton County, Georgia, with violating the state anti-racketeering law and attempting to create a false statement, as part of the district attorney's case accusing Trump and coconspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark has pleaded not guilty. As a Justice Department official after the 2020 election, Clark pressured superiors to investigate nonexistent election crimes and to encourage state officials to submit phony certificates to the electoral college, according to the indictment.

In one conversation described in the federal indictment, a deputy White House counsel warned Clark that Trump's refusing to leave office would lead to "riots in every major city." Clark responded, according to the indictment, "That's why there's an Insurrection Act."

Clark had dinner with Trump during a visit to his Bedminster, N.J., golf club this summer. He also went to Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday for a screening of a new Dinesh D'Souza movie that uses falsehoods, misleading interviews and dramatizations to allege federal persecution of Jan. 6 rioters and Christians. Also attending were fringe allies such as Steve Bannon , Roger Stone, Laura Loomer and Michael Flynn.

"I think that the supposedly independent DOJ is an illusion," Clark said in an interview. Through a spokeswoman he did not respond to follow-up questions about his work on the Insurrection Act.

Project 2025 director Paul Dans stood by Clark in a statement.

"We are grateful for Jeff Clark's willingness to share his insights from having worked at high levels in government during trying times," he said.

How a second Trump term would differ from the first

There is a heated debate in conservative legal circles about how to interact with Trump as the likely nominee.

Many in Trump's circle have disparaged what they view as institutionalist Republican lawyers, particularly those associated with the Federalist Society. Some Trump advisers consider these individuals too soft and accommodating to make the kind of changes within agencies that they want to see happen in a second Trump administration.

Trump has told advisers that he is looking for lawyers who are loyal to him to serve in a second term — complaining about his White House Counsel's Office unwillingness to go along with some of his ideas in his first term or help him in his bid to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

He has mentioned to several lawyers who have defended him on TV or attacked Biden that they would be a good candidate for attorney general, according to people familiar with his comments.

The overall vision that Trump, his campaign and outside allies are now discussing for a second term would differ from his first in terms of how quickly and forcefully officials would move to execute his orders. Alumni involved in the current planning generally fault a slow start, bureaucratic resistance and litigation for hindering the president's agenda in his first term.

They are determined to avoid those hurdles, if given a second chance, by concentrating more power in West Wing and selecting appointees who will carry out Trump's demands.

Trump's core group of West Wing advisers for a second term is widely expected to include Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump's hard-line immigration policies including family separation, who has gone on to challenge Biden administration policies in court through a conservative organization called America First Legal. Miller did not respond to requests for comment.

For other appointments, Trump would be able to draw on lineups of personnel prepared by Project 2025.

"We don't want careerists, we don't want people here who are opportunists," said Dans, a former Office of Personnel Management chief of staff. "We want conservative warriors."

"If I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say, 'Go down and indict them.' They'd be out of business. They'd be out of the election."

​Hottest year in the past 125,000 By SCOTT DANCE Washington Post

The Earth just endured its hottest 12 months in the modern era, and probably the hottest in 125,000 years, according to an analysis published Thursday.

That means nearly 3 in 4 people experienced more than a month's worth of heat so extreme that it would have been unusual in the past, but it became at least three times more likely because of human caused climate change, scientists at Climate Central found.

And it means that the planet is closer than ever to a global warming benchmark that scientists have predicted could irreversibly damage, if not destroy, entire ecosystems — 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial norms.

Data shows a surge of warming this year has pushed average planetary temperatures 1.3 to 1.4 degrees Celsius above 19thcentury levels.

In sharing the analysis, scientists professed hopes it would spur action and underscore its urgency as global leaders prepare to convene an annual United Nations climate change conference, COP 28, later this month.

"If we don't phase out fossil fuels now and stop burning them imminently, this will be a very cool year soon," said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London.

The Climate Central analysis looked at the influence of climate change on weather over the 12-month period from November 2022 through October 2023. The nonprofit climate science and news organization's leaders acknowledged they chose that period in light of the schedule for COP 28, which begins Nov. 30.

That meant the analysis included relatively cooler months in late 2022 and early 2023 as well as the dramatic surge in planetary heat observed during the past several months. July, August, September and October each brought record-high average global temperatures, all but guaranteeing that 2023 will be Earth's warmest calendar year on record.

Using what is known as attribution science, the analysis found that billions of people around the world have recently experienced extreme heat waves that likely would not have been as intense or as long-lasting if fossil fuel emissions had not warmed the planet so dramatically over the past century and a half.

It focused on temperatures so extreme that they are at least three times more likely today than they were before the Industrial Revolution.

During the past year, 9 in 10 people experienced at least 10 days of such heat, the analysis found. Nearly 3 in 4 people endured it for 30 days or more.

Scientists linked the warming climate to calamitous disasters around the world: hospitals overwhelmed with heat-related illnesses, thousands dead and millions displaced from floods, and 23 million without secure food supplies in Africa alone because of drought.

"The past year was quite extraordinary," said Joyce Kimutai, principal meteorologist at the Kenya Meteorological Department.

The analysis found that average temperatures during the past year have met or exceeded the 1.5-degree- Celsius warming threshold in nearly a dozen countries in Europe and northern Africa: Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Moldova, Morocco, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Montenegro, Algeria and Ukraine.

That heat was most intense across Europe and Africa in recent months, with temperatures in both Switzerland and South Sudan averaging 2 degrees Celsius warmer than preindustrial levels from May through October.

As extreme as those hot spots may seem, the observations are in line with past global warming observations and projections, said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central.

"We should expect to set records because we live on a warming planet," he said.

"2023 is very consistent with that long-term trend."

Separate data that European scientists published Wednesday underscored how dramatically the warming trend has accelerated just in recent months.

The European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service said that October brought record global warmth for a fourth consecutive month. Temperatures across the planet averaged 1.7 degrees Celsius above the norm for October during preindustrial decades, from 1850 to 1900.

And through the first 10 months of 2023, global temperatures are averaging 1.43 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, according to the Copernicus data. That is a tenth of a degree Celsius warmer than observed during the first 10 months of 2016, which holds the record as Earth's hottest ever measured.

And scientists said they don't expect the surge of warming to slow down.

When the planet surged to record warmth in 2016, it was on the tail end of an episode of El Nino, the global climate pattern known to release vast stores of Pacific Ocean heat into the atmosphere. Now, a strong El Nino is still building toward an expected peak this winter, meaning its influence could make for an even hotter 2024.

"El Ninoi going to push these temperatures higher," Pershing said. "We're going to continue to set these records as we move on into next year."

"If we don't phase out fossil fuels now ... this will be a very cool year soon."

Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London
​
3 in 4 people experienced at least a month's worth of extreme heat in the past year.

Being confident is critical to success OUTSWIMMING THE SHARKS HARVEY MACKAY

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A king in a far-off land had an army of elephants. When his bravest, most substantial elephant grew too old to fight, the king let him go free in a forest where he had everything he could eat and drink.

One day, the elephant was drinking in a pond and got a leg stuck in the mud. As hard as he tried, he couldn't pull himself free. He finally just sat down, bellowing in pain.

The king asked a wise man for advice on how to help. The wise man thought momentarily and said, "Play the drums of war."

The king assembled his army and ordered them to play their war drums. Soon, the elephant perked up, rose, and freed his leg.

All the elephant needed was to be reminded of who he was. People are much the same. Sometimes, we forget who we are, what we are capable of, and what we have accomplished.

And while you will probably get stuck in the mud, obstacles can set you back if you let them. When you feel like you can't escape the quicksand, you question how you will get back on track.

You need your own drums of war. You need self-confidence.

Self-confidence starts with believing in yourself. It alone won't help you succeed, but getting started or pushing through the inevitable obstacles is hard without believing in yourself first.

Harvey Mackay is a Minneapolis businessman. Contact him at 612-378- 6202 or email [email protected].
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I first came across Earl Nightengale's "The Strangest Secret" in the early 60s. Although it seems to be about success in sales and becoming wealthy in its current presentation, its true reach is far more profound.

The central theme of the book, "you become what you think about most of the time," is undoubtedly true, but it is not practiced enough.

Just as continuously thinking about our inability to accomplish a task, regain our strength and mobility, or resolve life problems can inundate us with negativity, it is equally true that our positive thoughts can lead us to success.

It is easier to become negative than to remain positive, just as it is easier to go downhill than climb a mountain. However, changing our attitude can make all the difference, as shown in the story of the elephant in this release.