Airports in Washington DC, New York, Chicago, Denver, Columbus, Seattle-Tacoma, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Dallas saw protests against Trump's recent executive order on the immigration status of Muslims from seven countries. The protests ranged in size from a reported 700 in Los Angeles to over 5000 at New York's JFK. The actions enforcing Trumps ban by the Department of Homeland Security affected not only those people in Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran applying for work, travel or tourist visa, but those already holding those Visa and legal permanent residents of the United States holding Green Cards, including those married to American Citizens. Those returning from overseas were detained without access to counsel. The American Civil Liberties Union intervened on behalf of the detainees in the Federal Courts in New York and Virginia. Both courts ordered detainees released and a halt to enforcement action. At least two detainees, who were named plaintiffs, have been released. Others have not and are not being given access to lawyers despite court order and despite Federal Marshals being ordered by the courts to enforce their orders directly. Agents of the Border Patrol and Customs Agency have not complied.
This pits the judicial branch directly against the executive branch for the first showdown since 1832 when President Andrew Jackson refused to enforce the Worcester v. Georgia Supreme Court decisions saying "...the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate" Jackson's willful disobedience of the highest court in the land lead directly to repeated acts of genocide. That bloodstain on the American history books can be found on the page labeled “Trail of Tears,” until Trump's education secretary, Betsy DuVos takes office. DuVos's brother, billionaire founder of the the mercenary company Blackwater Eric Prince, is advising the president on personal security matters instead of the secret service.
The forced relocation over the next six years resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 native Americans by exposure, starvation and outright murder. Last week Donald Trump hung a portrait of Jackson in the Oval office and has availed himself of multiple photo opportunities proudly by displaying it to visitors. It was a clear signal to the populace and world that he was willing to defy the Constitution, rule by decree, and enact policies of racist murder.
It is not coincidental that six of the seven countries listed in the ban are subject to American airstrikes at the current time. All six have weak or non-existent governments and all are being fled by people who are loosing loved ones to murder and starvation every day. This move is designed to trap their populations in the killing fields and further destabilize and destroy their societies and those of the nations around them. America has found Aleppo on the map and wants those that have fled to return there and die so that Turkey and Russia can pay to bury them.
The Trump administration was willing to paralyze parts of the federal government to enact this decree. The so-called “resignations” of the entire senior staff of the State Department was were not voluntary, nor were they entirely a quiet purge of Clinton and Kerry loyalists. The midnight decapitation of the State Department was designed to sow chaos and interfere with the process of granting visas and carrying out the so-called vetting of immigrants should any part of the “temporary” ban or executive order be overturned by the courts and the decision of the courts be enforced.
The move came near simultaneously with sacking of the head of the Border Patrol, Mark Moran, after only seven months on the job. Moran was brought in to fight rampant corruption in the largest federal police agency and had clashed repeatedly with the union representing rank and file guards. The union for the border guards, which has seen 112 convictions for murder, drug smuggling, human trafficking, rape and rampant abuse of detainees in recent years, endorsed Trump prior to his becoming president despite loosing the popular vote.
Agents of the Customs and Border Patrol are so far both refusing attorney's access to clients and referring all inquiries to the President of the United States directly. Some of the these action are clearly willful disobedience of the law, and some are loyalty to the man in the Orange House. Some actions however may be part of the confusion brought on by the timely decapitation of the agency and a chain of command that effectively leads nowhere.
Meanwhile protesters have vowed to continue to attempt airport demonstrations which are slated to expand to include Newark, Atlanta, and Detroit this week.