ICE sparks fury for reportedly detaining pastors — then threatening to take their kids

Faith leaders are calling on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement to immediately free a pair of pastors who advocates say were wrongfully detained by ICE agents in Texas on Thursday while traveling to a religious retreat.Pastor Nepthalí Zozaya Saucedo and his wife, pastor Cinthia Saraí Cardona Otero, were detained by federal immigration enforcers after arriving at McAllen International Airport.According to the couple and their church leaders, the longtime pastors at the Comunidad Cristiana Emanuel Assemblies of God congregation in Edinburg, Texas were on their way to a marriage retreat in North Carolina organized by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association when they were detained and taken to a US Border Patrol processing center in McAllen.At a Friday press conference hosted by leaders from the Assemblies of God and the Latino Christian National Network, LCN board member Sandy Ovalle said that the couple has valid R-1 religious worker visas.“We are calling for their immediate release, the protection of their due process rights, and an urgent oversight into ICE’s conduct,” Ovalle said. “No one should be pressured to give up their rights under the threat of losing their children.”A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Religion News Service that the pastors are “illegal aliens” who overstayed their visas.Addressing the conference by phone from the detention center, Nepthalí said that the couple was threatened with separation from their US citizen children if they did not sign papers authorizing their “voluntary” deportation.“They spoke with us about separation—to be separated from our children and even as married people,” he said, according to Religion News Service. “They spoke about how much time that we could end up spending here.”Speaking during the press conference, Comunidad Cristiana Emanuel senior pastor Sarai Martinez Luna said, “I think it’s very cruel that somebody that had no status for deportation be pressured to sign a voluntary deportation based on the separation of their children.”Friday’s news conference followed a Wednesday press briefing by faith leaders at the Texas Capitol in Austin to condemn the killings of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine, Juan Jairo Coronilla Durán in Florida, and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.“This is not of God. This is no peace that we want a part of because let’s be honest, this isn’t a peacekeeping initiative. This is a terror campaign with the mission of traumatizing our neighbors until they self-deport,” said Dan De Leon, senior pastor at Friends Congregational Church in College Station. “We don’t need terror. We need peace.”Elyse Rosenberg of the National Council of Jewish Women and Temple Beth Shalom in Austin said during the press conference that “throughout our history, we have repeatedly seen first-hand the consequences of governments exercising unchecked power on vulnerable populations.”Friday’s event also preceded nationwide vigils in more than 300 communities across the nation on Saturday to demand justice for the dozens of people who have been killed by federal enforcers or died in ICE custody during President Donald Trump’s second term.“We refuse to grieve quietly. We refuse to accept this terror and violence as inevitable," Crystal Cron, executive director of Presente! Maine, said ahead of the vigils. “Johan Sebastián should still be here with his wife and daughter—and instead, his name joins a growing list of people killed by an institution that treats our communities as disposable.”“This is bigger than one shooting,” Cron added. “We will not stop fighting until there is justice for the Durán Guerrero family and a total dismantling of this lawless, criminal agency that took him from them.”

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Warriors fans will forever imagine what could have been had LeBron James chose to play in the Bay Area. Would Golden State have won a title? Probably not. LeBron James and Steph Curry teamed up for the first time in their careers at the 2024 Paris Olympics. But the next two seasons for the Warriors...

Trump's on course to crash and burn — and his actions show he knows it

Trump, his billionaire buddies, and his Republican lickspittles appear to be setting up a possible massive fraud with regard to this fall’s election. It could signal the end of American democracy.We democracy-loving Americans have fought oligarchy three times on these shores, roughly every 80 years. Each time, we defeated the morbidly rich and established or re-established popular democracy and a government that put working-class people ahead of the oligarchs.This time, the oligarchs are behaving like they believe they can win, and the measures our billionaire oligarch-in-chief is taking right now should put every American on alert, if not provoke immediate impeachment.First, some background.While the Founders like Jefferson and Washington had large plantations and exploited the labor of enslaved people, they weren’t the truly rich, the oligarchs, of their era. Both those men, in fact, died in bankruptcy or its near-equivalent. The richest man to sign the Declaration of Independence was John Hancock, whose “fortune” was only worth about a million dollars in today’s money; like every other Founder, he left no fortune or family dynasty.But there were real oligarchs in America in the 1770s, universally aligned with the British king, and they hated the idea of democracy and independence.In The Rise of American Civilization, historian Charles Beard’s most famous work, he notes that on the banks of the Hudson River:“From mansions that were castles, the Johnsons ruled in the Upper Mohawk Valley with a sway that was half feudal and half barbaric, relying on numerous kinsmen, armed Negro slaves, trained bands of Gaelic retainers, and savage allies from the dread Iroquois to maintain their sovereignty over forest and plain.”It was the wealthiest families of the colonies who most strongly opposed both the Revolutionary War and the Constitution, because both endangered the stability of their fortunes, which were grounded in trade or relationships with England. Thousands of these families fought for and with the British, and fled the colonies after the Revolutionary War, both to England and Canada.In the 1780s, we defeated oligarchy and established a fledgling, albeit imperfect, democracy, the world’s first at that scale.Eighty years later, the plantation oligarchs of the Old South had amassed such fortunes that only a few hundred families essentially controlled the economy and politics of that entire region.By the early 1850s, they’d outlawed democracy, rigging elections, imprisoning or killing pro-democracy newspaper writers and publishers, and turning their slave patrols against even white men who dared challenge their power.In 1861, after declaring their independence from the United States, they turned their guns on the rest of America in an effort to finally end democracy on this continent. Abraham Lincoln defeated them and reestablished (a still-imperfect) democracy in America.Eighty years after the end of the Civil War, oligarchs had once again seized control of the American economy and government during the part of the Gilded Age known as the Roaring 20s.President Grover Cleveland had pointed to its early stages, warning Americans:“As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”The oligarchs’ excesses, though, crashed the economy, leading to the Republican Great Depression and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933. He challenged his era’s oligarchs head-on, saying, “They hate me, and I welcome their hatred.”With his New Deal and his 90% top income tax rate, he broke them, and both reestablished our democracy as well as building the first middle class in world history that was more than half of a nation’s population.So here we are now, 81 years after the end of World War II, and the oligarchs have once again seized control of our economy and our government. As President Jimmy Carter told me 10 years ago on my radio program:“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery… So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.”And now we learn that the billionaire oligarch in the White House has gutted every one of the federal agencies designed to protect this fall’s election, as if embracing the mentality of the old Confederate oligarchs who’d essentially outlawed voting by anybody who may have opposed them.Since taking office, Trump has:— Frozen and defunded the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) election security division,— Cut off the threat-sharing network serving 1,300 state and local election officials,—...

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President Trump was given a second chance Friday evening to deliver a speech before the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner — his first time addressing the crowd as president. Three months after the first event was derailed by an assassination attempt, Trump took to the podium at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Washington, acknowledging…

GOP Rep Says Troy Jackson May Not Qualify for Maine Senate Nomination

Maine state Rep. James White (R-Guilford) said Friday that Troy Jackson may not be legally eligible to become the Democrat replacement nominee for U.S. Senate, arguing the former gubernatorial candidate cannot use a party vacancy process to reach the ballot after losing a different statewide race in June. The post GOP Rep Says Troy Jackson May Not Qualify for Maine Senate Nomination appeared first on Breitbart.