Federal Immigration Contractor Rallies Against Trump’s Deportations, Campus Hamasniks Get Bad News, and Journos Finally Admit Harris’s Defeat

30.01.2025 15:00

The Acacia Center for Justice is a D.C.-based nonprofit that oversees a $769 million federal immigration program. It also believes that "no immigrant should be detained."

The center, our Chuck Ross reports, "is one of the largest federal contractors providing legal services for illegal aliens apprehended at the border." It says its aim is to provide those aliens "due process." But it’s also working for a radical overhaul of the immigration system that isn’t aligned with that of the current administration.

The Acacia Center, for example, says the immigration system is "intentionally designed" to exploit "Black and brown people." It opposes the use of police officers for "immigration purposes." It says electronic surveillance to track illegal aliens "must be abolished" and that the "the use of local law enforcement for immigration purposes … must be dismantled." And it plans to keep working for the federal government under Trump, unless he and his aides do something about it.

"The administration has threatened to pull federal funds from sanctuary cities and states that prohibit local law enforcement from cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Trump has ordered federal agencies to shut down the kinds of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies pushed by the Acacia Center," Ross writes. There may be another funding fight coming soon.

The president’s latest executive order is bad news for campus Hamasniks.

The order, titled, "Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism," gives every federal agency 60 days to submit a report detailing its efforts to combat anti-Semitism. It also orders the deportation of any foreign national who committed an anti-Semitic crime: If you deface a campus building with threats of a "student intifada" and you’re here on a student visa, pack your bags.

Pro-Hamas campus groups have long warned their international members to tread more carefully than their domestic counterparts when planning protests. Under Biden, those warnings turned out to be moot. But the times are a-changing, and we’ll soon see if campus radicalism is, too. Read more on the order here.

When Kamala Harris was the Democratic presidential nominee, her media allies raved about her performance in a Fox News interview with Bret Baier. Now that she’s a failed candidate, they’re free to admit the truth.

"A recently published excerpt from a forthcoming book about the election," our Andrew Stiles writes, "offers an assessment of Harris's candidacy that is dramatically different from the media coverage at the time." The book, Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House, by journalists Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen, notes that Harris "bombed" the Baier interview (duh) and couldn’t have gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast because her campaign "had kept its candidate hermetically sealed in the manufacturer’s box, like she would retain more value without exposure to air and sunlight" (again, duh).

"While accurate," writes Stiles, "the analysis is completely at odds with what many mainstream journalists were saying about Harris during the campaign."

The suggestion that she "bombed" the Fox News interview, for example, does not reflect how the media covered Harris's performance at the time. "She more than held her own," Chris Suellentrop, politics editor for opinions at the Washington Post, said after the debate. "Baier was the one who seemed flustered. ... It was fun to watch: We learned, I guess, that she is tough under fire and that she got genuinely angry about Trump."

Post columnist Eugene Robinson declared it a triumph for Harris. "Practically since the day Harris became the Democratic nominee, Fox News hosts and guests have blasted her for not doing more unscripted interviews. Wednesday’s half-hour encounter was a reminder that we should all be careful what we wish for," he wrote. "She stood her ground, refuting the Trump campaign’s claim that she is weak and easily pushed around. She spoke fluently and cogently, putting to rest GOP claims that all she offers is word salad."

USA Today columnist Rex Huppke agreed. "Trump fans and his many minions at Fox News will undoubtedly say Harris failed miserably, but the truth, for people operating outside the bubble of insanity, is she more than held her own in a wildly adversarial situation," he wrote. CNN's Brian Stelter praised Harris for showing "toughness and strength." Former Rep. Max Rose (D., N.Y.) called the interview a "home run" because Harris had shown "courage." MSNBC's Joe Scarborough complained that Baier was "shockingly rude." The New York Times suggested Baier's aggressive questioning could endear Harris to female viewers.