Good morning. I’m Corrine Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The president wants to rebrand his deportation force because a conservative influencer thought it would be funny. Two North Carolina Democrats lost their primaries, then quit their party before their replacements could take their seats. A Trump-appointed immigration judge with no immigration experience went viral after a resurfaced video showed her making disgusting comments about women. And the federal government just paid nearly a billion dollars to make sure two million homes don’t get clean power.
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Now, let’s go.
Trump Saw a Meme and Decided to Rename ICE
A rose by any other name would still detain you.
Trump has endorsed renaming U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Instead of ICE, we’d have NICE.
The idea was promoted by a conservative influencer who wanted the media to have to say “NICE agents all day everyday.” Trump saw the post more than a month after it was written and responded, in full: “GREAT IDEA!!! DO IT.”
The proposal was floated as a way to force left-leaning media to call immigration agents NICE, after several months of coverage involving deaths in custody, masked arrests, and the deportation of American citizens. The thinking, apparently, is that none of that will matter once reporters are forced to say the word NICE on television.
A federal agency name change typically requires an act of Congress. Congress has other things on its plate, including not funding ICE at all.
The agency remains unfunded amid a standoff in Congress, where Democrats have demanded various reforms to immigration enforcement following the deaths of two U.S. citizens at the hands of federal authorities earlier this year. The word changes. The raids don’t.
Trump’s Immigration Judge: No Experience, Disgusting Views on Women
Trump’s newest immigration judge got caught on video saying something deeply degrading about women. She is now deciding the fates of women fleeing abuse.
The Trump administration appointed 140 new immigration judges in April to help clear a backlog of deportation cases. One of them is Melissa Isaak, an Alabama-based attorney who has spent her career since 2009 running a private practice she described as a “divorce attorney for men.” She has no immigration court experience.
Isaak was a defense attorney for three of the January 6 Capitol rioters, and she also helped Roy Moore attempt to dismiss a defamation suit brought by a woman who said he molested her when she was 14.
In a 2021 interview with a pickup artist, she outlined her view that there are two types of women. The first type, she said, are good, solid women who are assets to men. The second type, she explained, are “a warm, wet hole.”
Many of the women whose cases land on Isaak’s desk will be fleeing domestic abuse. She has also gone on record claiming that domestic abuse accusations are “one of the most abused allegations in family court” and that more men suffer from domestic abuse than women, which is not what the data shows. She is now deciding their cases.
Many of the 140 new judges have no experience practicing immigration law. They’re also receiving less training than previously offered, even as the administration pursues a target of one million deportations a year.
Think of it this way: one hundred experienced judges lost their jobs so Melissa Isaak could get one.
Two North Carolina Lawmakers Left the Democratic Party
Two North Carolina state legislators have decided that the best response to being fired by their own voters is to also quit their party.
Representatives Carla Cunningham and Nasif Majeed, both of Mecklenburg County, announced within days of each other that they were leaving the Democratic Party to become unaffiliated. Both lost primary elections last month by overwhelming margins, and had faced scrutiny for not sufficiently supporting the party’s agenda.
Their losses can be traced back to votes that helped push Republican bills through, including the “Power Bill Reduction Act,” which eliminates a key climate target for Duke Energy. Research from Duke University estimates it could cost ratepayers $23 billion more due to fluctuating fuel prices.
Cunningham also voted to override the governor’s veto of a bill requiring sheriffs to cooperate with ICE. Majeed voted to override a veto on legislation declaring there were only two sexes and genders in the state.
“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me,” Majeed said. Cunningham said she wanted to serve people, not a party. House Speaker Destin Hall, a Republican, praised both of them for putting their constituents first. He did not explain which constituents specifically, though he seemed very pleased about it.
Both lawmakers will continue to hold office until their terms expire at the end of 2026. The voters who fired them by 40 points have marked the calendar.
The Government Paid Nearly a Billion Dollars to Not Build Clean Energy
The Trump administration is very concerned about taxpayer subsidies. So concerned, in fact, that it just paid nearly $900 million to make sure two wind energy companies stop building wind energy.
Bluepoint Wind and Golden State Wind will receive a total of $885 million to voluntarily end their offshore wind leases, with both committing to instead invest in oil, gas, and liquefied natural gas projects. The $885 million is, for the record, taxpayer money.
The two projects were capable of powering more than one million homes each when complete, and were designed to help New Jersey, New York, and California meet their clean energy goals. They will not be doing that now.
The deals came after the administration’s efforts to simply block offshore wind were thwarted by federal courts, which declared Trump’s executive order blocking wind energy unlawful. When you can’t legally stop something, you can apparently just pay people to stop it instead.
This follows a similar $1 billion deal the administration struck in March with French firm TotalEnergies, which agreed to walk away from offshore wind leases off North Carolina and New York. The administration has now paid nearly $2 billion to not build clean energy. This is the fiscal responsibility part.
The Billionaires Have Their Outlets. This One’s Yours.
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POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Federal judge blocks ICE from converting Maryland warehouse into detention center. Maryland’s attorney general sued after the federal government purchased an 825,000-square-foot warehouse for $102 million and conducted its own environmental review. A federal judge sided with the state and blocked the conversion. ICE acknowledged in court that more environmental analysis was needed, which is something they perhaps could have determined before spending $102 million.
Supreme Court upholds bribery convictions of corrupt Ohio Republican and his lobbyist. Justices declined to overturn the racketeering convictions of former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder and former lobbyist Matt Borges in the state’s sweeping $60 million bribery scandal, leaving their prison sentences intact. Householder, who was sentenced to 20 years, will now pursue a presidential pardon. His lawyer called it a sad day for free speech and the rule of law. The courts called it a felony.
Wyoming’s six-week abortion ban was blocked by a state judge. Judge Dan Forgey ruled that the state cannot enforce its ban on abortions after the detection of a “fetal heartbeat” while its constitutionality is decided at trial. It is Wyoming’s second loss this year, following a Wyoming Supreme Court ruling in January that found residents have a constitutional right to make their own healthcare decisions — a right Wyoming voters enshrined in their own state constitution in 2012. The legislature responded by passing a new ban anyway.
One in ten Trump voters backed New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. NBC News exit polling from last November found that roughly one in ten Trump voters who showed up at the polls backed Mamdani. A recent Marist poll found that 48% of New York City residents approve of the job Mamdani is doing, and a majority believe New York City is now moving in the right direction, a marked shift from last fall. The Democratic socialist mayor from Queens is apparently doing something right, and no one on either side is entirely comfortable saying so out loud.
