Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of October 6

U.S. states have the power to prosecute ICE agents conducting warrantless entry and arrests.. This is an opinion piece, not news, but worth mentioning as a potentially effective strategy.

Donald Trump’s Maxwell Pardon Remark Sparks MAGA Fury

President Donald Trump's refusal to rule out pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell for her sex trafficking conviction has sparked fury within the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement

This is a typical Trump moment that we’ve seen many many times.

• He wants do do something
• He pretends he doesn’t know anything about it
• He makes an offhand comment as a trial balloon
• He’ll scream about fake news when he’s directly quoted
• He’ll end up doing it anyway but blame someone else
• MAGA will forgive him and act like he’s doing what they always wanted

BTW, you can tell if Trump knows a lot about something. He’ll pretend he doesn’t know anything about it, usually because it’s something unethical. For anything that he claims to be an expert, you can assume he doesn’t know anything at all.

In this case, he clearly was a friend of Maxwell, and he’s certainly deeply involved with Epstein’s crimes. He’s already corruptly intervened in her case in a way that obviously she has dirt on him. He wants to pardon her now and hide behind the DOJ as if he isn’t micromanaging them.

US Supreme Court seems skeptical toward Colorado LGBT 'conversion therapy' ban

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared receptive to a challenge on free speech grounds to a Colorado law banning psychotherapists from conducting "conversion therapy" that aims to change a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity.

Questions posed by the court's conservative justices during arguments in the case seemed to reflect sympathy toward Christian licensed counselor Kaley Chiles, who challenged the law under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment protections against government abridgment of free speech. The court has a 6-3 conservative majority.

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Chiles has said she "believes that people flourish when they live consistently with God's design, including their biological sex." Colorado's true aim with this law, Chiles has argued, is "to silence and marginalize views it dislikes."

Colorado's law prohibits licensed mental healthcare providers from seeking to change a minor's sexual orientation or gender identity according to a predetermined outcome, with each violation punishable by a fine of up to $5,000. This includes attempts to reduce or eliminate same-sex attraction or change "behaviors or gender expressions."

Rutgers University professor Mark Bray, author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook in 2017, is attempting to flee the U.S. to Spain with his family due to death threats following targeting by right-wing sources.

US is sending about 200 troops to Israel to help support and monitor the Gaza ceasefire deal

The United States is sending about 200 troops to Israel to help support and monitor the ceasefire deal in Gaza as part of a team that includes partner nations, nongovernmental organizations and private-sector players, U.S. officials said Thursday.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details that were not authorized for release, said U.S. Central Command is going to establish a “civil-military coordination center” in Israel that will help facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid as well as logistical and security assistance into the territory wracked by two years of war.

Another DHS immigration related video from the department’s official instagram page.

“Bag it. Tag it. Take it down.”

Marc Benioff Says Trump Should Send Guard Troops to San Francisco - NY Times

https://archive.is/wk2RT

While other tech titans built private rocket ships and scooped up super yachts, the Salesforce founder and chief executive Marc Benioff was known for spreading large sums of money around San Francisco, his hometown. He tended toward the liberal side of Silicon Valley politics. He lectured other business leaders about the importance of helping homeless people instead of complaining about them.

But 2025 seems to have ushered in Benioff 2.0.

The benevolence remains, but the liberal leanings do not. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Benioff said this week that he avidly supported President Trump and thought National Guard troops should be deployed to San Francisco — an action that city leaders would consider beyond the pale.

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Speaking by telephone from his private plane en route to San Francisco, he lamented that he has to pay for hundreds of off-duty law enforcement officers to help patrol the convention area and said that San Francisco needed to “re-fund” the police.

The city never actually “defunded” its police force, and San Francisco’s violent crime rates are below those in many other U.S. cities.

But San Francisco has struggled to recruit and keep officers, and it still has problems with lower-level crimes and open-air drug use, especially in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin near City Hall. It has about 1,500 police officers, and Mr. Benioff says it needs another thousand.

“You’ll see. When you walk through San Francisco next week, there will be cops on every corner,” he continued. “That’s how it used to be.”

Mr. Benioff’s team wanted him to highlight his latest round of philanthropy, which includes another personal donation of $100 million to the University of California, San Francisco children’s hospitals named after him, as well as a $39 million company gift to schools and children’s causes. His family and company have given more than $1 billion to Bay Area causes over the past 26 years.

Inside the online battles streaming from a single block in Portland (Washington Post)

Floodlit by DHS spotlights, the square outside the ICE facility where Sortor was arrested is more stage than battleground, which in recent months has become a real-life, live-action set for an increasingly fevered standoff over the nation’s future. Sortor’s experience — and the White House’s use of it — shows how those events can be shaped and polished in a fractured media ecosystem that selectively spins 10-second video clips into furor, and ultimately policy, in an administration that has harnessed the power of social media to inspire and enrage.

Much of the footage from Portland doesn’t originate from traditional TV networks but from a phalanx of activist-journalists, on both the right and the left, filming on their phones. Despite the protests largely being confined to one city block, it has resulted in a cascade of videos that has bolstered the conservative depiction of Portland as a city under siege by left-wing terrorists — video the White House has cited to justify and build support for deploying the National Guard to cities across the country.

In the weeks since Trump said he would send the National Guard to the city, two distinctly different scenes have developed. During the day, a crowd of mostly homegrown activists stage deliberately absurd protests designed to provoke or embarrass government officials, wearing pajamas, inflatable animal costumes, or, if all goes right at the planned Naked Bike Ride on Sunday, nothing at all.

But at night, the scene often turns violent, with leftist demonstrators exchanging blows with counterprotesters, at times shoving or spitting on federal law enforcement officers, lobbing fireworks and attacking conservative influencers and journalists. Portland police have largely held back, stepping in sporadically to make targeted arrests rather than clearing the block, to the frustration of federal authorities.

Almost every moment is captured to push a political message online, as leftists aim their phones at law enforcement officers and conservatives turn their cameras at those leftists, documenting their crimes, reveling in their frustration and celebrating the at-times violent arrests that result from their faceoffs with federal officers.

It sounds like nothing much is happening in Portland apart from that one block, but that block is pretty bad. Here’s an article from August about a school that had to move:

K-8 school next door to Portland ICE facility plans immediate move

With Cottonwood School of Civics and Science teachers expected back in the classroom Aug. 18, and students by Sept. 2, school officials say federal agents’ frequent use of tear gas on Portlanders protesting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, facility endangers students.

The school’s board of directors voted 4-2 to approve a move to the Southwest Portland building in a contentious three-hour board meeting Aug. 4. The approval allows Cottonwood to temporarily sublease the building from Bridges and start its school year on time amid a challenging budget cycle.

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Cottonwood announced plans to begin searching for a new property May 9, expecting a yearslong process to decide on a location. But with federal agents frequently deploying tear gas and other munitions against protestors this summer because of President Donald Trump’s expansive deportation efforts, school leaders and parents say the quiet neighborhood south of downtown is no longer safe.

This isn’t the first time Cottonwood school has had problems. Here is an article from 2021:

School next to Portland ICE facility sounds alarm over children’s exposure to chemical munitions

After more than a year of distanced learning, students of Cottonwood School of Civics and Science in South Portland returned to campus for the first time Monday.

One thing, besides their face masks, was different: The school’s play yard was closed, too contaminated with toxic chemical munitions to be used.

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For months, Cottonwood staff, parents, neighborhood residents and public officials have been pleading with federal agents to stop using chemical weapons to disperse protesters outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility next door. In addition to tear gas seeping into nearby apartment buildings, empty gas canisters and impact munitions have been collected from the streets and sidewalks around the building.

Remnants of chemical munitions such as pepper balls are also routinely found littering the outdoor play area at Cottonwood. The potential risks of a child ingesting, inhaling or being exposed to one of these munitions led to the play area’s closure.