By Leah Litman/Take Care

In two cases this term, the Court heard evidence that government officials based their decisions on hostility toward particular religions. In one of the cases, the Court blinked. In Trump v. Hawaii, the Court refused to hold the administration accountable for the president’s entry ban, instead saying that it is up to us, the people, to do so. Time will tell whether we have the backbone for it.
As Justice Sotomayor highlighted in her Trump v. Hawaii dissent, the contrast between the Court’s decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and Trump v. Hawaii illustrates how the Court treated the entry ban case as unique. In Masterpiece Cakeshop, the Court concluded that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission violated the First Amendment by sanctioning a baker’s refusal to sell a cake to a same-sex couple. To support that conclusion, the Court pointed to a commissioner’s statement that it is “despicable” to invoke religion to harm others.
In Trump v. Hawaii, however, the Court avoided saying that the entry ban was tainted by religious animus, even though the president who enacted the ban had promised a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States and declared “Islam hates us.” The first iteration of the entry ban had also warned of “violent ideologies” and contained an explicit preference for religious minorities in a Muslim majority country (i.e., a preference for non-Muslims). In her dissent, Sotomayor remarked on the contrast between these decisions, explaining that in Masterpiece, the “Court . . . found less pervasive official expressions of hostility and the failure to disavow them to be constitutionally significant.”

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Posted on June 27, 2018

Unsurpassed Power Trip By An Insuperable Control Freak

Jeff Bezos, CEO
Amazon.com, Inc.
410 Terry Ave N
Seattle, WA 98109
Dear Mr. Bezos:
You’ve come a long way from being a restless electrical engineering and computer science dual major at our alma mater, Princeton University. By heeding your own advice, your own hunches and visions, you’ve become the world’s richest person – at $141 billion and counting. You must feel you are on top of the world.
You are crushing your competition – those little stores on Main Street, USA, and other large companies that are still in business.
Your early clever minimizing of sales taxes gave you a big unfair advantage over brick-and-mortar stores that have had to pay 6, 7, 8 percent in sales taxes. Your tax lawyers and accountants are using the anarchic global tax avoidance jurisdictions to drive your company’s tax burden to zero on a $5.6 billion profit in 2017, plus receiving about $789 million from Trump’s tax giveaway law, according to The American Conservative magazine (see Daniel Kishi’s article, “Crony Capitalism Writ Large,” in the May/June 2018 edition).

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Posted on June 26, 2018

By Vanessa Swales/Reveal

A government-funded migrant youth shelter in Texas visited by first lady Melania Trump on Thursday has been cited with serious deficiencies by state inspectors this year, including delaying medical care for a child in pain, records show.
The 12 deficiencies reported at the New Hope shelter in McAllen are among 37 that state inspectors found at its parent company’s two shelters in the past three years, records show.

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Posted on June 25, 2018

By Aura Bogado, Patrick Michels and Vanessa Swales/Reveal with Edgar Walters/The Texas Tribune

Taxpayers have paid more than $1.5 billion in the past four years to private companies operating immigrant youth shelters accused of serious lapses in care, including neglect and sexual and physical abuse, an investigation by Reveal and The Texas Tribune has found.
In nearly all cases, the federal government has continued to place migrant children with the companies even after serious allegations were raised and after state inspectors cited shelters with deficiencies, government and other records show.
Since 2003, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department has awarded nearly $5 billion in grants through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, mostly to religious and nonprofit organizations in 18 states, to house children who arrive in the country unaccompanied.
The program grew quickly in 2014, when around 70,000 children crossed the southern border alone.
Now this web of private facilities, cobbled together to support children with nowhere else to go, is beginning to hold a new population: the more than 2,000 6,000 children who arrived with their parents but were separated from them because of a Trump administration policy.

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Posted on June 20, 2018

By Alex Samuels/The Texas Tribune

It’s been nearly two months since the Trump administration announced its new “zero tolerance” policy regarding illegal immigration, which federal officials say has led to about 2,000 undocumented immigrant children in government custody being separated from their parents.
The first tent city that’ll house immigrant children opened in El Paso on Friday. Some families have been separated for months; some parents have been deported without their children.
We’ve compiled a list of organizations that are mobilizing to try and help children that have been separated from their parents at the Texas-Mexico border:

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Posted on June 19, 2018

By Andre Perry/The Hechinger Report

“In middle school, I had a dress code and they always dress coded people,” a Washington, D.C, student identified as Beatrice told researchers as part of a recent study published by the National Women’s Law Center. “Dress coded” is what happens when a school administrator or teacher issues someone a dress code violation. “Sometimes, they made you miss class because you didn’t have the right shoes or right sweater,” Beatrice said.
Dress codes, which are supposed to build community cohesion by removing signifiers of class and race, are singling out children and removing them from classrooms across the country.
Restrictions on some designs, shorts, dyed hair and other asinine rules governing what students can wear give educators permission to harass, discriminate and pull students out of class when they slip up. Paired with harsh discipline, these rules set students up to miss valuable instruction time.
In our nation’s capital, 81 percent of the public schools require a uniform; 65 percent regulate the length of skirts; 58 percent forbid tank tops; 42 percent ban tights and/or leggings; and 45 percent require students to wear belts, according to the findings of the report, which was published by the National Women’s Law Center.
You might notice that almost all of the restrictions listed above are aimed toward female or female-identifying students. Girls are often forced to think about what they can and can’t wear, and perhaps even buy additional clothing, to abide by the rules. Gender norms are policed. Boys’ masculinity is protected while girls’ sexuality is targeted, putting an additional mental, emotional and financial burden on them.

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Posted on June 18, 2018

‘Genuine, Bona Fide, Teslafied’

Well, sir, there’s nothing on Earth
Like a genuine, bona fide
Teslafied, airport Elonorail
What’d I say?
Elonorail
What’s it called?
Elonorail
That’s right! Elonorail
Elonorail
Elonorail
Elonorail

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Posted on June 18, 2018

By Jessica Corbett/Common Dreams

A “jaw-dropping” wage theft report out this week reveals that many top U.S. corporations – from Walmart to Bank of America to AT&T – “have fattened their profits by forcing employees to work off the clock or depriving them of required overtime pay,” based on a review of labor lawsuits and enforcement actions.
Grand Theft Paycheck: The Large Corporations Shortchanging Their Workers’ Wages, produced by Good Jobs First and the Jobs With Justice Education Fund, found that hundreds of firms have collectively paid billions of dollars in wage theft penalties since 2000.

How do corporations commit #wagetheft? Through off the clock work, misclassification, unreimbursed purchase requirements, and violations of minimum wage, overtime, rest break and tipping rules. #GrandTheftPaycheck https://t.co/EvkZ4iazFM pic.twitter.com/fz4paV9B66

— Good Jobs First (@GoodJobsFirst) June 6, 2018

The report identifies several wage theft practices such as off-the-clock work, job title misclassifications that unfairly exempt workers from overtime pay, and uncompensated clothing purchase requirements, as well as overtime, minimum wage, meal break, and tip violations.

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Posted on June 14, 2018

By Leah Litman/Take Care

This post is the fourth of a series on the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.
In a prior post, I drew a connection between the administration’s refusal to release undocumented minors from its custody so that the minors can obtain the abortions they are entitled to under state law and the recent news that the administration has been unable to follow up on the whereabouts of over 1,000 children who it has released into the custody of private sponsors.

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Posted on June 10, 2018

By Leah Litman/Take Care

This post is the third in a series on the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border. Part 1. Part 2.
In this post, I want to highlight some connections between the administration’s policy of separating children from families and another policy this administration (and the previous one) defended – indefinite detention, without individualized bond hearings, of persons detained for immigration purposes.
In Jennings v. Rodriguez, the U.S. Supreme Court held that immigration statutes did not provide for individualized bond hearings for persons who are detained for immigration reasons for longer than six months. The Court did not, however, address whether the statutes, by allowing indefinite detentions with no individualized bond hearings, are consistent with the due process clause. Although the Supreme Court requested briefing on that question and set the case for re-argument, it ultimately opted not to address it.

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Posted on June 8, 2018