Long-standing American principle of birthright citizenship under attack from Trump allies

  As President-elect Donald J. Trump prepares to implement sweeping policy changes affecting American immigration and immigrants, one of the issues under scrutiny by his allies appears to be birthright citizenship – the declaration in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that anyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ nationalities or immigration status.

  Some prospective members of Trump’s team, including anti-immigration advisers Stephen Miller and Thomas Homan, have said they intend to stop issuing federal identification documents such as Social Security cards and passports to infants born in the U.S. to undocumented migrant parents, according to The New York Times.

Trump’s politicization of the justice system

  Since the vast majority of Republican senators failed in their constitutional duty to be a check on serious government corruption, President Donald Trump has repeatedly exhibited his willingness to abuse the power of his office. But involving himself in the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) recommended sentencing of Roger Stone, a convicted federal criminal—and Trump’s close political ally—was perhaps the most flagrant display of how little respect Trump’s administration has for American democracy.

A brief history of television interviews – and why live TV helps those who lie and want to hide

  First, it happened on Fox News. Chris Wallace asked White House adviser Stephen Miller about the president’s decision to use private lawyers “to get information from the Ukrainian government rather than go through … agencies of his government.”

  Miller’s response began, “two different points –” when Wallace cut him off.

  “How about answering my question?” Wallace asked. Miller, changing the subject, ignored Wallace.

  Wallace’s question was never answered.

From cable to the White House, the mainstreaming of white nationalism

  It doesn’t take the infiltration of a hate group meeting or a deep dive into extremist chat rooms to be exposed to white nationalist ideas.

  Take Dylann Roof, who murdered nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, after a chain of events that started with a simple Google search.

  As Roof wrote in an online manifesto, when he typed the words “black on White crime” into Google, he came across the website of a crudely racist group called the Council of Conservative Citizens. There, he found what he described as “pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders.”

The ugly truth about President Trump's extreme anti-immigrant campaign

  President Trump may have backed down from his monstrous policy of separating children from parents who bring them across the border, but the executive order he signed this week was just another exercise in deception – a fig leaf that won’t conceal the ugly truth about the extreme anti-immigrant campaign he’s leading.

  As we all know, Trump didn’t need an executive order to change the policy, one that his homeland security chief initially denied even existed.

  And contrary to Trump’s scapegoating of Democrats – “that’s their law,” he earlier claimed – there was never any law that required him to rip terrified children away from their parents and cram them into kennel-like pens.

The state of hate in the Union

  In his State of the Union address last week, President Trump congratulated his administration for having “taken historic actions to protect religious liberty.”

  It certainly was historic in October when Trump became the first sitting president to give the keynote address at an annual summit hosted by an anti-LGBT hate group, the Family Research Council.

  And it was historic when his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued religious freedom guidance eroding protections for LGBT people after he consulted with another anti-LGBT hate group, the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Trump's anti-immigrant crusader

  Stephen Bannon may have left the White House, but anti-immigrant nativism didn't go anywhere.

  President Trump made that abundantly clear when he trumpeted an “America first” philosophy at the U.N. General Assembly last week, touting the importance of national sovereignty and warning that “major portions of the world are … going to hell.”

  Behind the speech was none other than Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigrant chief policy adviser.