Good morning. I’m Corrine Straight, and this is AlterNet America.
The Trump administration used the word “woke” 34 times in its new budget while cutting heat assistance for the poor. The government is now shipping migrants to the Democratic Republic of Congo. CBP just ordered $50 million worth of chemical weapons to use on American protesters. And ICE detained a soldier’s newlywed wife on his own military base days before his deployment.
Before we dive in: AlterNet America exists to take on the billionaire-controlled press. We can’t be fired. We can’t be shut down. We don’t kill stories to protect powerful interests. We don’t soften our language because advertisers demand it. We answer to readers, period. If just 5% of the people reading this upgrade to a paid subscription, we’ll be able to fund everything we need to defeat MAGA. Please consider upgrading your subscription today.
Now. Let’s get into it.
Trump’s 2027 Budget Says “Woke” 34 Times, Cuts Heat for Poor People
They had a Project 2025, but apparently not a Project 2026, 2027, or 2028.
The Trump administration released its fiscal year 2027 budget, and the document has a lot going on. The word “woke” appears 34 times across 92 pages.
While the thesaurus was getting a workout, the budget proposed slashing nondefense spending by $73 billion. Among the casualties: the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps poor families pay their heating bills, and the $775 million Community Services Block Grant, which funds poverty reduction programs.
Congress blocked these same cuts last year. The administration is trying again.
On the defense side, defense spending would spike 44% to $1.5 trillion — the highest in modern history. The National Science Foundation would be cut by 55% and the EPA by 52%.
Meanwhile, the proposal includes a $10 billion mandatory fund to build “targeted, priority construction and beautification projects in and around Washington, D.C.” The same budget that can’t find money for a grandmother’s heating bill found ten billion dollars to make the capital look nicer.
So if you’re cold this winter, just drive to the capital and look at the nice fountains.
The Trump Administration Is Deporting People to the Congo
The Trump administration has been running out of countries willing to accept migrants it can’t legally deport home, so it has been finding new ones.
The Democratic Republic of Congo announced this week that it will begin receiving migrants deported from the United States under a new third-country deal, becoming the latest African nation to participate in the program. The U.S. will cover all logistics costs.
The Congo, for reference, is a country with ongoing armed conflict, mass internal displacement, and well-documented human rights abuses.
The Trump administration has now struck third-country deportation deals with at least seven African nations, many of them among the countries hit hardest by Trump’s trade, aid, and migration restrictions.
The administration has spent at least $40 million to deport roughly 300 migrants to countries other than their own. Several of these individuals had court orders specifically protecting them from deportation.
The administration calls this innovation. The people being sent to active conflict zones might use a different word.
Border Patrol Is Stockpiling Chemical Weapons To Use on Protesters
Good news for protesters: the government has placed a $50 million order for weapons specifically designed not to kill you. Bad news: that’s not the same as designed not to blind you.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is preparing to spend up to $50 million on what it is calling “Less Lethal Specialty Munitions” — weapons designed to hurt or disable a person without killing them. The agency is asking for 123 different types of munitions across 10 categories.
Among the items on the shopping list: 13,000 “distraction devices” capable of emitting sounds louder than a gunshot or jet engine. CBP also requested over 12,000 “ferret rounds.” These projectiles are filled with chemicals that punch through barriers to spread tear gas on the other side.
Experts, and people with eyes, note that if a projectile can go through glass, particle board, and walls, it can go through a body.
This isn’t preparation for a border emergency. Federal agents have long used these weapons on protesters, journalists, and bystanders. An anti-ICE demonstrator lost sight in his left eye after a federal officer shot him in the face in January. An 84-year-old woman was hit in the head with a pepper ball while marching peacefully with her husband.
CBP rules, incidentally, specify that pepper spray should not be used on small children or visibly pregnant women. Protesters who are simply standing and existing are apparently fair game.
ICE Detained a Soldier’s Wife. On His Military Base.
The United States Army will ask Matthew Blank to deploy to a war zone at the end of the month. It has already deployed ICE to his living room.
Blank, an Army Staff Sergeant, and his wife, Annie Ramos, arrived at Fort Polk, Louisiana last week expecting to begin their life together as newlyweds. Within hours, ICE had entered the base and taken his wife away.
Ramos, 22, was brought to the United States from Honduras as a toddler. She has no criminal record. She was months away from completing a biochemistry degree at Arizona State University, teaches Sunday school, and played in her high school marching band. The deportation order being used against her was issued in 2005, when she was 22 months old.
Her family missed a court hearing. She was not yet two years old. She is being punished for it now.
Blank, meanwhile, has served in the Army for five years. He is scheduled to begin deployment training at the end of the month, presumably related to Trump’s ongoing war with Iran.
DHS’s official statement said Ramos had been arrested “after she attempted to enter a military base.” Her husband’s position is that he lives there.
A Note From AlterNet America
We are running out of ways to describe how much is happening and how fast. The government is detaining soldiers’ wives on military bases. It’s shipping people to war zones. It’s buying weapons to use on citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. It’s writing the word “woke” into the federal budget like a ransom note.
None of this makes the front page of papers that depend on administration access to operate. That’s what we’re here for. If just one in twenty people reading this email became a paying subscriber, we could fund everything we need to keep going through the end of the year. You don’t have to do everything. You just have to do this one thing. Please consider upgrading your subscription today.
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you tonight.
POSITIVE STORIES YOU MAY HAVE MISSED:
Trump’s Chances of Being Removed by 25th Amendment Climb. The odds that Trump’s own Cabinet removes him from office have climbed to 35%, up from 15% in January. This is either alarming or a perfectly rational response to a president who spent Easter Sunday posting profanity-laced threats to bomb Iranian power plants and signing off with “Praise be to Allah.”
Pam Bondi ‘could be disbarred’ as Trump sacking goes from bad to worse. Pam Bondi was fired by the man she spent years defending, replaced by her own deputy, and may now lose her law license over the cases she brought to please him. A cautionary tale about what happens when you swear an oath to the Constitution but spend all your time working for someone who hasn’t read it.
Thousands in Texas protest against border wall through national park. The Trump administration wants to run a steel bollard wall through Big Bend National Park. In response, Republicans, Democrats, sheriffs, bighorn sheep advocates, and a gun YouTuber all showed up at the capitol to say, with one voice, absolutely not.
WGA & Studios Officially Confirm Tentative Deal That Protects Writers’ Health Plan. Hollywood’s writers quietly negotiated a new four-year contract over Easter weekend, saving their health plan and avoiding a strike like the one in 2023, while proving that the people who write the dramatic cliffhangers are perfectly capable of resolving one when they have to.
