Michigan Democratic Rep. Rashida Tlaib, left, speaks at a press conference hosted by immigrant youth, allies and advocates outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — In the crucial last month before President Joe Biden leaves office, immigrants and allies on Tuesday urged the president to offer protections for immigrant communities before Donald Trump is inaugurated.
The president-elect has promised the largest deportation in U.S. history, stoking fear and uncertainty among undocumented immigrants and immigration advocates over a sweeping platform that marked the core of Trump’s GOP presidential campaign.
Speaking near the U.S. Capitol, the “Home is Here” campaign featured immigrant youth, allies and advocates demanding Biden take executive action.
The national coalition, which fights to protect immigrant communities, also urged Congress not to boost funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection during the lame-duck session in a way that would aid Trump in carrying out mass deportations. Members of Congress are expected to vote this week on a stopgap spending bill that would fund the government through mid-March.
Immigrant youth, allies and advocates traveled to Washington, D.C., from across the country, including states such as Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, New York and Utah, to rally and meet with members of Congress about their demands.
Claudia Quiñonez, organizing director of United We Dream, the nation’s largest immigrant youth-led network, said “before the keys to the White House are handed over to Trump, before a new Congress takes office, this lame-duck period is (a) critical window for our members in Congress and President Biden to leave it all on the field.”
Quiñonez, who is also a co-chair of the Home is Here campaign, said there is “no underestimating the length Trump is willing to go to fulfill his pledges for mass deportation in raiding our schools, our workplaces, our hospitals and our churches.”
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib also voiced her concerns Tuesday over the president-elect’s immigration plans.
“We cannot underestimate, as you all know, what will unfold the moment Trump takes office in January, and we need as many people as possible working to resist this hateful agenda,” the Michigan Democrat said.
Tlaib noted that Biden “still has power to take immediate executive action to protect our immigrant communities.”
She also said “we must continue to work incredibly hard, not only to outwork the hate, but to really promote love and justice within our communities.”
Among its priorities, the Home is Here campaign aims to protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program recipients. A federal court will determine the program’s legal fate.
The Obama-era program was created in 2012 and designed to protect children who were brought into the country illegally from deportation.
Trump tried ending DACA during his first term.
During an NBC News interview earlier this month, Trump did not give specifics on what he intends to do about the program but said that he “will work with the Democrats on a plan.”
Immigration groups on Tuesday also expressed worry over the uncertainty of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which allows migrants in countries with unsafe conditions to legally reside and work in the United States.
Trump sought to end TPS for multiple countries throughout his first administration.
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building is seen on Jan. 28, 2019 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The decade-long endeavor to move the Federal Bureau of Investigation out of its crumbling headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C., and into a new facility outside the city could face roadblocks next year.
President-elect Donald Trump and some of his top allies in Congress have rebuked the federal agency that undertook the search for a new suburban location, ultimately deciding on Greenbelt, Maryland, over two other options.
Once Trump is back in the Oval Office and the GOP controls both chambers of Congress, the funding stream for the General Services Administration to build the new facility could end.
Republican lawmakers could also require the GSA to restart the search process, change the criteria the federal agency used to select the Greenbelt location, or simply tell the agency it must construct the new headquarters in a different location. Other options floated by GOP lawmakers include Alabama and somewhere inside the District of Columbia. Or they could require GSA to build the new FBI headquarters in either Springfield, Virginia, or Landover, Maryland — the other two locations considered for the new building.
Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the spending panel that controls GSA’s budget, told States Newsroom he believes the issue is settled, in part, because some funding has already been allocated for the project.
“We’re going to work very hard to make sure we keep the program on track,” Van Hollen said. “I think there’s a consensus that the FBI’s current headquarters does not meet the security requirements, does not meet the other requirements. So, you know, from our perspective, a decision has been made and we will work hard to make sure it’s executed, implemented.”
Construction funding
Congress approved $200 million for the headquarters project this spring as part of a much larger government spending package.
Beyond that, funding is less certain.
The Senate Appropriations Committee, controlled by Democrats, has proposed $375 million for construction in this year’s GSA spending bill. That measure, which includes numerous other funding proposals, received bipartisan support during a committee vote. In January, control of the Senate will flip to the GOP.
The House version of the bill, drafted by Republicans, doesn’t include any funding for a new FBI headquarters and would require the GSA to send Congress “a detailed plan and timeline to support the District of Columbia based personnel by keeping the current FBI headquarters operational or identifying another Federally owned location in the District of Columbia that can serve as the FBI headquarters building.”
The two chambers will likely negotiate a final, bicameral version of the bill during the first few months of next year, once the GOP holds unified control of Congress and the White House.
Trump hotel
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said during an interview he hadn’t really thought about whether his state could become the new site for the FBI headquarters.
“If you just go by history, Trump didn’t want to put any money into a new FBI headquarters,” Kaine said. “He didn’t want that block that the FBI is on to be cleared and opened for a hotel that might compete with his own hotel. So four years of the Trump administration was him basically doing everything he could to stop a move and to stop funds being used for the move.
“Now he may not have the same financial interest that he had back then so I bet it’s hard to say.”
Trump owned a hotel in the old Post Office building along Pennsylvania Avenue during his first term in office, but it was later sold and is now a Waldorf Astoria. The building is about one block away from the current FBI headquarters.
Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer, the top Democrat on the House panel that funds the GSA, told States Newsroom there’s “no doubt” the Greenbelt location “is the best site, both in terms of security and in terms of finances.”
“I’m going to continue to push that position,” Hoyer said. “We need to get this done for the FBI, for the American people. The building is literally falling down. And the fact that we have delayed this … is testament that we’ve escalated cost, decreased security for the federal employees at FBI, and we ought to move on. And hopefully we will.”
The Maryland and Virginia governors’ offices declined to comment for this article. A GSA representative, speaking on background, said the agency has submitted a report to Congress that was required by the spending package lawmakers approved in March 2022.
GSA, the person said, is trying to secure “resolutions” from congressional committees before it obligates funds to buy the site or begin design and construction activities. They said this is consistent with other large-scale development projects that require congressional approval. It was not clear what those resolutions would say.
Evaluation of selection process continues
The GSA has been under review by its inspector general for how it undertook the site selection process for more than a year, one factor that could potentially complicate things during unified Republican control of Washington.
GSA acting Inspector General Robert Erickson launched an evaluation into the agency’s process in November 2023, a few weeks after GSA announced its decision to pick the Greenbelt, Maryland, location.
That evaluation is ongoing, and the inspector general continues “to work thoroughly and expeditiously on the project,” according to a spokesperson.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner told States Newsroom in a brief interview he’s waiting to see the inspector general’s evaluation before deciding on a path forward.
“I know people thought that it might come out in the spring. It didn’t,” Warner said. “The reports we’ve got is that they’re still doing the investigating, and let’s see what that says first.”
Hoyer said he doesn’t expect the results of that evaluation will affect moving the FBI headquarters to Greenbelt.
“I think everything was done absolutely as it should have been,” Hoyer said. “An argument was made by both sides in public on the merits of their sites.”
Debate over process
FBI Director Christopher Wray also questioned the decision last year, writing in a letter to employees that he and others held “concerns about the fairness and transparency in the process,” though he wrote those “concerns are not with the decision itself but with the process.”
Trump has announced he will name Kash Patel as head of the FBI, though Wray would have to be fired or quit first. Trump has not yet named someone to lead the GSA.
The Greenbelt decision brought about some bipartisanship in Congress, with House Oversight & Accountability Committee Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, and Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, urging GSA to conduct a full investigation into the site selection process.
The two said the most disturbing aspect to them was that then-GSA Commissioner of the Public Building Service Nina Albert “overturned the unanimous site decision of an expert panel of civil servants representing GSA and its agency client, the FBI.”
Albert left that role on Oct. 13, 2023, about a month before the final decision was announced. General Services Administrator Robin Carnahan had also said two years earlier Albert didn’t have a conflict of interest.
“Congress created GSA in 1949 to increase the efficiency and economy of federal government operations — not least the procurement and use of property,” Comer and Connolly wrote in their letter. “To fulfill that mission, GSA must be fair and transparent in its operations. Its real estate dealings should consider only what is best for taxpayers and the Nation. It must set aside political or parochial interests.”
Comer and Connolly added they were “deeply concerned that GSA’s choice of a new FBI headquarters site departed from those principles — and in doing so, failed to put taxpayers and the public interest first.”
Rep. Raúl Grijalva, D-Ariz., speaks during a news conference regarding the separation of immigrant children at the U.S. Capitol on July 10, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Alex Edelman/Getty Images)
Raúl Grijalva, the top Democrat on the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, will not seek to remain in that position in the next Congress, he said in a written statement Monday.
The announcement from Grijalva, an Arizona progressive who has led Democrats on the committee overseeing environmental, public lands and tribal issues for a decade, paves the way for California’s Jared Huffman to take the ranking member role.
Meanwhile, in another major development among Democrats in the House, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland said he would challenge Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York as ranking member on the powerful House Judiciary Committee.
“This is where we will wage our front-line defense of the freedoms and rights of the people, the integrity of the Department of Justice and the FBI, and the security of our most precious birthright possessions: the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the rule of law, and democracy itself,” Raskin said in a “Dear Colleague” letter to lawmakers on Monday. “I respectfully and humbly ask for your support for my candidacy.”
Grijalva to focus on recovery
Grijalva disclosed in April that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer. He returned to Congress last month. His Monday statement noted he would continue to focus on his recovery.
“After much thought, I have decided that it is the right moment to pass the torch as top Democrat” on the House Natural Resources Committee for the 119th Congress, he said. “I do not make this decision lightly, as being elected Ranking Member stands as the honor of my professional career. I will continue to focus on improving my health, strengthening my mobility, and serving my district in what is likely to be a time of unprecedented challenge for our community.”
Grijalva was reelected to the House in November. He plans to serve his full term as a rank-and-file member, a spokeswoman said.
In a statement, Huffman said if he is made ranking member, he would ask the House Democratic Caucus to give Grijalva the title of ranking member emeritus “in recognition of his distinguished career and the enduring importance of his leadership.”
Grijalva was first elected to the House in 2002. He became the Natural Resources Committee’s ranking Democrat in 2015.
Inflation Reduction Act
Grijalva chaired the committee while his party held the majority from 2019 to 2023.
The first half of his chairmanship was marked by investigations of the first Trump administration, including a criminal referral of former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt.
The second half, which occurred during the first two years of the Biden administration amid unified Democratic control of Washington, saw the passage of the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed along party lines.
With hundreds of millions available in tax breaks for renewable energy projects, the law represented the largest federal investment in addressing climate change to date.
“I am so deeply proud of the progress that my colleagues and I have achieved in protecting our nation’s rich natural and cultural heritage, advancing justice for communities overburdened by pollution, elevating Indigenous voices and honoring tribal sovereignty, fighting for the decolonization of the U.S. territories, and securing a cleaner, safer climate and energy future for all Americans,” Grijalva said Monday.
Avoids race among Dems
Grijalva, who is also a chair emeritus of the Congressional Progressive Caucus after he co-chaired that group from 2009 to 2019, thanked “colleagues, tribal nations, and environmental organizations” who had supported him in his brief bid to fend off the challenge from Huffman.
Huffman, 60, said last month he would seek to unseat Grijalva, 76, a rarity among House Democrats, who do not use term limits for committee positions and normally strictly adhere to seniority.
Huffman is the top Democrat on the panel’s Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee. He is also a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
A statement from Huffman Monday was full of praise for the outgoing leader and said he would seek to work closely with him in the period of transition.
“For the past twelve years, Rep. Raul Grijalva has been my friend and ally on the Natural Resources Committee,” Huffman wrote. “Working alongside him, I’ve seen his grit, determination, and passion for protecting our nation’s treasured natural resources, and his iron-clad commitment to lifting up frontline and indigenous communities. He has inspired me and countless others with his passion and the clarity of his values.”
“Future generations will benefit from all that he has fought for and accomplished during his remarkable career,” the statement continued. “Rep. Grijalva leaves big shoes to fill, and I will now dedicate myself to building on his legacy of principled and productive leadership as Ranking Member of the Natural Resources Committee.”
Grijalva’s statement did not name Huffman.
A spokesman for Chairman Bruce Westerman, an Arkansas Republican, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Raskin and Nadler
Raskin in his letter said he was announcing his challenge to Nadler, a longtime top member of the panel, with “respect and boundless admiration,” but also said the upcoming session of Congress would be crucial for the nation’s future and House Judiciary would play a major role.
“We face an administration that would essentially put the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 on steroids. They want to turn the Justice Department and FBI into weapons of not only mass immigrant roundup and deportation but political revenge and prosecution. They would collapse the system of separated powers into an all-powerful monarchical Executive, and convert America from being a defender of democracy and human rights to being an open collaborator with autocrats and authoritarian oppression,” wrote Raskin, a former professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law and a member of the Jan. 6 investigative committee in the 117th Congress.
“They want to align us with Putin’s Russia, Kim Jong Un’s North Korea, Xi’s China and Orban’s Hungary. In the 119th Congress, the Judiciary Committee will be the headquarters of Congressional opposition to authoritarianism and MAGA’s campaign to dismantle our Constitutional system and the rule of law as we know it. I hope to be at the center of this fight and—as someone who has battled cancer and chemotherapy—I can tell you that I will never, never surrender.”
Nadler told colleagues last month he would like to continue in his role as ranking member of the committee, Axios reported.
This isn’t the first time Musk, who styles himself as “the Dogefather,” has fueled interest in dogecoin.
In May 2021, its price shot up in anticipation of Musk’s guest appearance on “Saturday Night Live.” During one skit, Musk played a financial analyst in conversation with a Weekend Update host, who repeatedly asked him, “What is dogecoin?” After some obfuscation, Musk’s character finally admitted that it was a hustle. The price of the coin went into a freefall. Just over a year later, it had shed over 90% of its peak value.
The losses hit small investors hard. In 2022, one of them filed a class action lawsuit against Musk for market manipulation and insider trading, though the case was dismissed in August 2024.
Why has dogecoin – a meme coin that was never meant to be taken seriously as an investment – seen such extreme swings in value?
We’re all in this together
Dogecoin was launched in 2013 to spoof bitcoin and a slew of other cryptocurrencies that were claiming to disrupt the traditional world of finance. Two strangers from across the globe met online, copied the code of an existing coin, and branded it with the already popular Doge internet meme – a picture of a Shiba Inu dog surrounded by fragments of broken English: “wow much coin.”
Although their main goal was to make the coin pointless and undesirable, it became one of the most popular and enduring cryptocurrencies on the market.
Following dogecoin’s previous surge in 2021, I studied how its fervent network of influencers and everyday investors worked together to draw tremendous attention – and capital – to the joke currency.
Elon Musk’s 2021 appearance on ‘Saturday Night Live’ caused the price of dogecoin to tumble.
To understand the appeal of these absurd investments, you have to look at the time and energy that users invest into these networks and the rewards, both financial and social, they get in return.
Meme coins are collaborative enterprises. Members of these online communities have an economic incentive to become outspoken boosters: The more the value of dogecoin rises, the more their investments grow. But they also receive social validation from other meme coin investors when they pump up the coin.
In other words, behind every meme coin is a collective of strangers on a communal mission to make more money.
Dogecoin and its imitators have been described by their leadership as crypto movements, shared journeys and community-owned projects. Beyond branding the assets with culturally resonant images, whether it’s a Shiba Inu dog or Pepe the Frog, successful crypto ventures are characterized by complex webs of trust. Trust in the technology. Trust in its potential for future appreciation. And trust that those holding power in the networks won’t exploit the rest.
This loyalty is woven among a global network of users who collaborate around the clock to promote their coin and demonstrate their unwavering commitment to its success.
During price dips, community members mutually reinforce their comrades’ – and their own – beliefs that this is just a bump in the road and that their collective efforts will eventually lead to a handsome payoff. Even in the coldest of crypto winters, this ritualistic behavior helps these speculative communities endure. Community serves as a substitute for financial loss.
The investment strategies in these communities – and the conviction in their payoff – involve repeating and reposting what others have said, like any traditional internet meme.
Trolling traditional valuation
The real value of meme coins cannot be understood in the same way as traditional assets, such as stocks and physical commodities. These types of assets have fundamentals, such as a company’s financial statements, or public demand for basic goods, from coffee to oil.
Conversely, the fundamentals of meme coins are reflected in their network activity, such as daily active users, and less concrete metrics, such as social sentiment and mindshare – how much public awareness a coin has generated compared with its rivals.
Of course, the valuations of traditional assets are also affected by these social factors. The difference is that meme coins offer little by way of productive activity. They add nothing to the economy. Occasionally, their leadership will build financial services around them, but these are generally added as afterthoughts, especially as a way to drum up more speculative excitement.
Meme coins troll the traditional conventions of valuation and mock the edicts and dogmas of mainstream investors.
And that’s exactly the point.
Participation in meme coin communities – or any crypto community, for that matter – entails embracing an alternative economic experience. They are speculative sandboxes for playing outside of the conventional rules of investment.
Who let the Doge out?
Musk is the quintessential meme coin influencer.
As the richest man in the world, he’s viewed by many as a paragon of savvy investing. His massive following extends far beyond dogecoin’s social network. And his promotional efforts are playful – so playful that the judge in his class-action case dismissed his dogecoin tweets as mere “puffery” and that “no reasonable investor could rely upon them.”
Dogecoin previously reached the peak of its memetic momentum when Musk appeared on “Saturday Night Live.” Now, instead of sitting at the Weekend Update news desk cracking jokes, he’s sitting in Trump’s office advising the president-elect. In other words, dogecoin’s memetic resonance has ascended from pop culture to politics, helping it capture a bigger slice of the public’s mindshare.
While dogecoin has specifically benefited from Musk’s proximity to Trump, the broader crypto market is leaping with optimism for a crypto-friendly administration. Speaking at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in July, the GOP candidate ensured he’d make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet.” After pouring $131 million into this election cycle, the crypto industry can now claim 274 pro-crypto members of the U.S. House of Representatives and 20 pro-crypto U.S. senators.
Between Musk buddying up with Trump and a shifting regulatory environment, the dog can once again run free.
A ‘For Sale’ sign is seen on March 19 in Austin, Texas. Policymakers are watching for indications of what President-elect Donald Trump plans to do to ease housing costs next year after an election where voters were laser-focused on the economy.
Americans hand over a huge chunk of their paycheck for a roof over their heads. Policymakers are looking out for indications of what President-elect Donald Trump plans to do to ease housing costs next year after an election where voters were laser-focused on the economy.
Housing accounted for 32.9% of consumers’ spending in 2023, making it the largest share of consumer expenditures, according to the most recently available data Bureau of Labor Statistics. And that was an increase of 5.7% from 2022.
This year, many Americans still struggle to find affordable housing, whether they choose to rent or buy a home.
There’s a lot economists and housing advocates still don’t know about what to expect from a second Trump term. It’s unclear which campaign promises will find their way into administrative rules or legislation, even with a Republican trifecta – the GOP will control the White House and both chambers of Congress.
But policy experts, researchers and economic analysts are looking at Trump’s record, his recent remarks on housing, and Project 2025 – the conservative Heritage Foundation’s 900-page plan to overhaul the executive branch – for a glimpse of what may lie ahead.
Tariffs and the cost of building homes
Trump has spoken frequently of his proposed 60% tariff on goods from China, which he has said would create more manufacturing jobs in the U.S. Tariffs could be as high as 20% on goods from other countries.
But housing economists and other experts say that could be bad news for building more affordable housing.
Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic, a financial services company, said tariffs are one of her main concerns about the effects of a second Trump term.
“One of the biggest concerns is not just lumber [costs], but the overall cost of materials, which have been going up,” said Selma Hepp, chief economist for CoreLogic, a financial services company.
Construction material prices have risen 38.8% since February 2020, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors’ analysis of October Producer Price Index data.
Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning in the department of planning and landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said building costs are already high from tariffs on Canadian lumber that Trump first imposed and that the Biden administration kept and increased.
“It used to be in construction that you would get a bid from a contractor or a subcontractor or supplier and it would be good for 60 days. Now, the bids are good for like five days because you don’t know where prices are going to be,” he said.
Immigration policy and its effect on construction labor
Trump tweeted on Nov. 18 that he is planning to use the declaration of a national emergency as part of his mass deportation plan.
Besides disrupting lives, Trump’s plan could have effects on what it costs to build housing, Hepp said.
“There is the cost of labor as well, if we do indeed have all these deportations. That’s a big, big concern,” she said. “A large share of labor in the construction industry obviously comes from immigrants. That is a huge issue for new construction and particularly new construction as it relates to affordable housing.”
Foreign-born construction workers made up 3 million of the 11.9 million people who work in the construction industry in 2023, according to the latest American Community Survey data.
Trump’s ‘not in my backyard’ rhetoric
The former president hasn’t always been clear on where he stands with zoning regulations and making way for more affordable housing in a wide variety of neighborhoods.
In a July Bloomberg interview, Trump spoke critically of zoning regulations and said that they drive up housing costs. But Trump also has a record of tending toward a “not in my backyard,” or NIMBY, approach to housing that maintained some of these zoning regulations. The Trump administration moved to roll back an Obama-era regulation that tied HUD funding to assessing and reducing housing discrimination in neighborhoods.
“He’ll talk about reducing regulations on developers, but he’ll also use this NIMBYism talking about protecting suburbs from low-income housing and you really can’t have it both ways,” said Sarah Saadian, senior vice president of public policy and field organizing at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Paulsen said Project 2025 embraces a pushback against anti-NIMBY approaches to expand multi-family housing.
“What I read in the Project 2025 documents is a clear statement that says every local community and neighborhood should be able to choose the housing it wants to accept or not. The challenge of that is that if every community in every neighborhood can veto housing, then we just don’t get enough housing and prices go up and prices and rents go up,” he said.
A more punitive approach to homelessness
Last year, homelessness rose to its highest level recorded since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began collecting this information in 2007. The ending of pandemic safety nets that gave some households better financial stability and a lack of affordable housing supply contributed to the number of unhoused people, the report explained.
Trump has been outspoken on his view that homeless people should be “off our streets.” The president-elect has also proposed putting unhoused people with mental health issues into “mental institutions.”
“There’s a movement that I think is largely reflected in Project 2025 that says, actually, cities need more coercive policy tools to enforce public order and to require that someone who’s camping take a shelter placement even if they don’t want it,” Paulsen said.
Saadian said that given the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which makes it easier to criminalize unhoused populations for sleeping outside, she’s worried about a changing political environment where policies that prioritize stable housing over policing fall out of favor.
“I think all of that just shows a culture shift in the political dynamic here that we’re definitely worried about,” she said.
Hundreds of immigrant rights advocates and others participate in rally and demonstration at the Federal Building in lower Manhattan on June 1, 2018 in New York. In coordinated marches across the country people gathered outside U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices, U.S. attorney's offices, and the Department of Justice headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Spencer Platt | Getty Images).
The week before Thanksgiving, I spoke with an immigration attorney in Madison, Grant Sovern, who helped found the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) — part of a flurry of new services created in the wake of the 2018 ICE raids that terrorized Dane County during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration. No one knows what the immigration crackdown Trump has promised for his second term will look like. But advocates are once again meeting to try to prepare.
Sovern told me about desperate calls from friends of his college-age daughter — students who are worried about losing their protected status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). While he has been offering them hope that the new administration won’t start by targeting Dreamers, who grew up in this country and just want to continue to study and work here, he added that the easiest targets for mass deportation are other people who’ve followed the rules. Asylum-seekers and those with temporary protected status and work visas — like the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that Trump and incoming Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused of eating their neighbors’ pets — will be the easiest to find.
What an ominous holiday season. We need the warmth of gatherings with friends and family more than ever. But it’s a weird time to be celebrating the arrival of our nation’s first immigrants and the mythical meal where they bonded with Native Americans before swiping their land and wiping them out. Talking about colonialism, genocide and how our society is built on historic injustice is quickly dismissed as “woke” and out of fashion these days. But it’s unavoidable if you’re trying to understand the rise of right-wing authoritarianism here and around the globe.
The same week I spoke with Sovern about preparations in Dane County to counter Trump’s mass deportations, Israeli peace activist Rotem Levin came to Madison with his Palestinian peace movement colleague Osama Iliwat to speak out against the war in Gaza and to discuss their vision for “a path to shared safety, justice and liberation,” according to the promotional materials from Jewish Voice for Peace, Vets for Peace and a handful of local religious groups that brought them to the Presbyterian church near my house.
I met Levin at the home of a neighbor who hosted the pair (Iliwat was resting, feeling unwell after their trip). Levin said their goal was to get people to stop being “sleepy” about the occupation and the hopelessness of the seemingly endless war on Palestinians by his country, supported by the U.S.
“We’re not like you – you genocided all the Native Americans and now they have to accept you,” Levin said with startling Israeli frankness. “We’re in the Middle East. There are Muslims all around us. The only way to guarantee safety and security is by building trust.”
Of the recent U.S. election, he said, “I want to encourage you. We have been living with dictatorship for 20 years. You will be OK.”
People who have been living comfortably with the thought that they are part of a democracy, protected by the rule of law, are not the ones who need to be afraid, he added. In the U.S., “people without papers” are the most vulnerable, like the Palestinians in Israel, he said. His parents, among other Israelis, have been shocked by his country’s rapid slide into fascism under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu and his right-wing cabinet. For his mother, who suddenly doesn’t recognize her country, and for his father, who was beaten at a protest march, the shift to militarism and the crushing of free speech was unthinkable until recently. For his Palestinian friends, however, repression is a familiar fact of life. His message is that security depends on justice for everyone.
Levin was not keen to talk about the daunting project of finding a political solution to the conflict. He didn’t want to get bogged down in arguments about the details, he said. Focusing on the small things, building personal, humanizing connections between Israelis and Palestinians, is critically important, even if there is no big-picture solution on the horizon yet.
The same approach applies here, on the cusp on the next Trump administration.
Community leaders and immigration attorneys have been meeting in Madison to try to figure out what to do. Local funding has dried up since the first Trump term. CILC lacks adequate resources and doesn’t have enough volunteer lawyers to respond to the crisis advocates see coming. And they don’t even know what shape that crisis will take. The prospect that the Trump administration will likely do away with its own practice, in the first administration, of not conducting raids in churches and schools “sends shivers down everybody’s spine,” Sovern said.
Mass raids like the 2018 ICE operations that shut down local restaurants could be scaled up, and could cause huge economic harm, especially for Wisconsin dairy farms where an estimated 70% of the workforce is comprised of undocumented immigrants.
But raiding isolated farms in rural areas of the state wouldn’t make the kind of news splash Trump is probably seeking. To achieve that effect, Democratic cities like Madison could be in the crosshairs. Instead of dropping busloads of migrants off in liberal northern cities, the publicity stunt gleefully executed by Republican Govs. Greg Abbot of Texas and Ron Desantis of Florida, the Trump administration could send in buses to round people up, crashing local economies by emptying out restaurants and other businesses that depend on an immigrant workforce.
According to The Hill, Texas has offered the incoming Trump administration 1,400 acres to build a mass deportation detention camp.
In Madison, immigrant rights groups and local officials have begun trying to calm people down.
After the 2018 ICE raids, advocates hosted an information session to offer legal advice and “the only thing anyone wanted to ask was, ‘Who will pick up my kids from school if I’m deported?’” Sovern recalled.
There is a lot to worry about, including the bill that recently passed the U.S. House allowing the federal government to designate U.S. nonprofits “terrorist supporting” organizations and strip them of their tax-exempt status.
But it’s also important to remember that, under current law, “they can’t do all the bad things they want to do all at once,” Sovern said.
He pointed to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation. (CILC, in Madison, was the second such effort.) The project provided lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%.
And despite polls showing increasing public support for mass deportations, even in the current amped-up anti-immigrant climate, most Americans (about 64%)say undocumented immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country if they meet certain conditions including applying for citizenship, working, paying taxes and not committing crimes.
People are more sympathetic if they hear the stories of real people who are affected by deportation threats, not just the lies about violent criminals who are eating pets.
It’s also important to spread the word that there are good people trying to hold up a light in the darkness. As Sovern puts it, “What we can do are little bits of tons of hard work.”
Even if it’s impossible to solve the big problem all at once, brave people are doing their best to lead us to a better future.
President-elect Donald Trump attends the America First Policy Institute Gala held at Mar-a-Lago on Nov. 14, 2024 in Palm Beach, Florida. The annual event supports Grey Team, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing military suicide. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump continued his blitz of Cabinet and senior staff selections, closing the week Friday with the announcement that North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a former presidential rival turned Trump surrogate, is his candidate to lead the federal department responsible for vast swaths of federal lands and U.S. relations with Native American tribes.
Burgum also will head up a brand new “National Energy Council,” Trump said.
In just 10 days since his decisive win, Trump from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida rapidly disclosed his picks to lead major U.S. policy areas, including relationships around the globe and the health and well-being of Americans at home.
The president-elect, who trounced Democratic nominee Kamala Harris on Nov. 5, has named roughly half of his intended nominees for the 15 executive departments that traditionally comprise a president’s Cabinet. If Trump follows through on his nominations, he’ll need the U.S. Senate’s approval for each.
That feat could be an uphill battle for Trump’s more controversial nominees — namely a Fox News host to oversee the entire U.S. military, a vaccine skeptic to administer health and science funding, and a recent Florida congressman who was investigated by the Department of Justice to wield the power of attorney general.
Trump has also drawn from his 2024 campaign staff, personal attorneys and pool of first-administration loyalists to fill several senior White House staff picks that do not require Senate approval.
Here are some of the president-elect’s latest choices:
Burgum as secretary of the Interior. Trump announced Friday he will nominate Burgum, a former 2024 Republican presidential hopeful, to lead the U.S. Department of the Interior. The $18 billion, 70,000-employee department oversees 11 bureaus that have a vast reach over relations with Native American tribes; control of hundreds of wildlife refuges and fish hatcheries; and the management of 245 million acres of public land, a third of the country’s minerals, and leasing for energy extraction from U.S. ocean waters. Trump said in a statement Friday that he will create a National Energy Council, with Burgum at the helm, “to oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE,” he wrote. Burgum, a wealthy software executive turned governor, has filed a handful of lawsuits against the agency, including a challenge to open more oil and gas leasing in his state, according to the North Dakota Monitor. He dropped his 2024 presidential bid in January and endorsed Trump.
Former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia as secretary of Veterans Affairs. Trump announced Thursday his choice of the ex-congressman from Georgia to lead the agency that distributes health care to 9 million veterans at over 1,200 facilities annually. The department, which asked Congress for a $369.3 billion budget for next year, also oversees veterans disability benefits and manages national veterans cemeteries and memorials. Collins, a lawyer, pastor and member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve since 2002, served in the U.S. House from 2013 to 2021, according to his congressional biography.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of Health and Human Services. The president-elect tapped Kennedy Jr. Thursday as his choice to lead the massive 80,000-employee Department of Health and Human Services that projects mandatory spending — think Medicare and Medicaid — will reach $1.7 trillion in 2025, and discretionary spending at $130.7 billion. Also under the huge HHS umbrella are the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Kennedy Jr., a former 2024 presidential hopeful who dropped out and endorsed Trump, is well known for his spreading of vaccine misinformation. The former environmental lawyer and son of the late Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy also made headlines during the 2024 race for admitting he dumped a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park nearly a decade ago, among other unusualrevelations.
Trump attorney D. John Sauer as solicitor general of the United States. In his last staffing announcement Thursday, Trump said he intends to nominate his defense attorney in his federal election interference case to be the U.S. Justice Department’s litigator before the U.S. Supreme Court. Sauer successfully argued Trump’s presidential immunity case before the Supreme Court in April. Sauer made headlines at Trump’s federal January appeal hearing for appearing to argue that a president’s order for SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival would be covered under presidential immunity. Sauer, Missouri’s former solicitor general, was among those who filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of Texas’ lawsuit to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Former U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Trump dropped a bombshell Wednesday afternoon when he revealed he will nominate the now-ex-lawmaker Gaetz of Florida as attorney general. Gaetz resigned from the U.S. House hours after Trump’s announcement, getting ahead of an anticipated ethics report on his alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use that could have been released Friday, according to severalnews outlets. Politico reported Friday that U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., does not want the report released, despite pressure from some in his own party. Gaetz, who if confirmed by the Senate would be the nation’s top law enforcement officer, was investigated by the Justice Department for two years, beginning under Trump’s first administration, for possible sex trafficking. The probe was dropped last year, as has beenwidelyreported. Trump campaigned on meting out retribution from the Justice Department for his political foes following two federal investigations into his alleged stockpiling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate, and his alleged subversion of the 2020 presidential election. Gaetz is a staunch Trump ally and was among the nearly 140 House Republicans who objected to the 2020 election results. Trump has also tapped his personal criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche to serve as deputy attorney general.
Within the past seven days, Trump also announced his plans to nominate former chair of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Jay Clayton as a U.S. attorney, former Democratic Congresswoman-turned-Republican Tulsi Gabbard as the director of national intelligence, Sen. Marco Rubio as secretary of State, Fox News host Pete Hegseth as secretary of Defense, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem as Homeland Security chief, GOP Rep. Mike Waltz as national security adviser, former head of national intelligence John Ratcliffe as CIA director, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan as “border czar,” former Trump White House adviser and immigration policy architect Stephen Miller as deputy chief of staff for policy, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, former Congressman Lee Zeldin as Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and his 2024 campaign manager, Susie Wiles as his chief of staff.
The president-elect made waves as well when declaring this past week that billionaire campaign donor Elon Musk and former presidential hopeful, now a staunch Trump supporter, Vivek Ramaswamy will together run an ambiguous entity titled the Department of Government Efficiency. Shortened to DOGE, it is still unclear how the organization would operate and interact with the federal government.
This article has been updated to reflect the correct title for Jay Clayton.
Tesla owner Elon Musk, right, was hardly alone in the tech sector in supporting the reelection efforts by Donald Trump, left. Many Silicon Valley investors and innovators were hoping for a lighter regulatory hand than they have seen under President Joe Biden. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Some venture capital investors, who have funded the tech boom in Silicon Valley and beyond, say they are excited by the prospect of a lighter regulatory environment under a new Trump Administration than they saw under President Joe Biden.
But they warn that Trump policies that will benefit many technology companies may come at a cost to other pro-Trump voters.
The Bay Area bubble of Silicon Valley, which is home to institutional tech giants like Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe, had been previously seen as a left-leaning region, like many other California communities. But the 2024 election was a unique one, venture capitalists and founders say.
“There’s been a significant shift in the valley rightward since the last election,” said Joe Endoso, a Silicon Valley investor. “And you’ve seen that in the financial flows — in the level of dollars — that were directed towards supporting President Trump’s campaign from the technology sector.”
Endoso, president of financial tech platform Linqto, said some tech industry people who previously voted for progressive issues and candidates this time cast their ballot for Trump. He said he’s heard more concern about potential regulations in the tech industry and negative economic effects under continued Democratic leadership.
This turn toward Trump wasn’t universal in the Valley. The majority of donations from employees at companies like Google, Amazon and Microsoft went toward Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, Reuters reported in September. But tech billionaires like Elon Musk and venture capital investors, like Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, poured millions into his campaign.
While Trump didn’t receive unanimous support from the tech sector, many American tech giants and investors are excited about the light-handed approach to tech regulation that’s likely to come in the next four years. Congress has struggled to pass any federal laws around emerging technology like AI, though states have done so on their own on issues like data privacy, transparency, discrimination, and on how AI-generated images can be used.
The Biden administration, however, on its own issued a number of “best practice” guides for emerging technologies and aggressively pursued antitrust cases against some tech giants, including an ongoing case against Google that could force the company to spin off its popular Chrome web browser.
It appears unlikely that Trump will continue the Biden era regulatory and enforcement drives.
Those working in emerging technologies like AI are making advancements so quickly that regulators are unlikely to be able to keep up anyway, Endoso said. The tech industry mindset — move fast and break things, first coined by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — will likely continue under Trump’s administration.
“You’re running through walls and hoping that when the regulations come about, they’re not going to be so, you know, restrictive,” Endoso said. “But you’re not going to sit and wait for the regulators. You can’t afford to.”
Why care about the VC market?
Venture capitalists pour money into many promising startups in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, looking for the ones that will create lucrative new technologies or “disrupt” existing ones. Silicon Valley successes include Uber, which received its first round of venture capital investment for just about $1.3 million in 2010, and Airbnb, which started with just a $20,000 investment in 2008. Today, the companies are worth $146 billion and $84 billion, respectively.
The high-risk, high-reward nature of the industry makes for a rarified business, and there’s a high barrier to entry. To become an accredited venture capital investor, one must have an income of at least $200,000 a year, or be worth $1 million. The handful of firms pouring the most money into the United States technology market are usually worth billions.
Yet, the technology being developed and funded by wealthy investors today will shape the next decade of everyone’s lives. Some of the most influential technology in the global economy has been released under President Joe Biden’s administration in the last three and a half years.
Advancements in generative AI and machine learning technology, rapid development of augmented and virtual reality, further adoption of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, such as internet connected appliances and home devices, along with automation of many industries have already shifted much of American life. ChatGPT, one of the most recognizable examples of generative AI that the public can use, was only released two years ago, but the sector of generative AI is already threatening many American jobs.
Those with writing-focused careers like copywriters and social media marketers, are already feeling the disruption, and experts believe STEM professionals, educators and workforce trainers and others in creative and arts fields are going to see much of their job responsibilities automated by AI by 2030.
The venture capital market has been a volatile one over the last four years. Though many of Trump’s attacks on Democrats during his campaign cycle centered on the healthy economy under his first term, the COVID-19 pandemic was the single-biggest economic factor to disrupt the venture capital market and others.
The U.S. saw its biggest year for venture capital investments in 2021, but supply-chain issues and the continuing reliance on remote work changed the trajectory of many companies’ plans to go public on the stock market. High inflation and interest rates have kept many investors from deploying capital and many companies from completing mergers and acquisitions since then, although the second half of 2024 is looking up.
The economy quickly became the number one issue for Americans in the presidential election cycle. And though thriving venture capital markets usually benefit those that are already wealthy enough to invest, we’ll likely see a positive correlation in the general markets too, said Scott Nissenbaum, president and CEO of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, an innovation-centered fund in Pennsylvania.
“A thriving, efficient market is good for venture capital. And the flip side is also true,” he said. “We feed into and create the innovations and the efficiencies and the next generation … that create the robust and the boom.”
How investors and founders are preparing for Trump
Nissenbaum predicts that Trump may remove regulations for technology used by U.S. transportation and military systems, allowing for more tech integration than previously permitted without human safeguards in place. That might look like more flight optimization technology, or more drone usage by military branches. Nissenbaum also thinks Trump will attempt to open up space travel, especially with big backing by Musk, who runs SpaceX.
Health care also has been implementing technology rapidly, and Nissenbaum believes could see some major changes under Trump.
That is of note for healthtech founder Sipra Laddha, an Atlanta-based psychiatrist and cofounder of LunaJoy, which provides in-person and virtual wellness visits for women. The three-year-old company raised venture capital in 2022 and 2023, despite a more challenging fundraising market. Women’s health care companies saw a surge of VC investment in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022, an exception to the generally slower investment market at the time.
But she is uncertain about how Trump’s potential cabinet appointees, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was appointed to head the Department of Health and Human Services, will affect LunaJoy’s operation. Kennedy has made health a key issue in his public advocacy and political activity, but he has also espoused eccentric and even false views on issues such as vaccines and pharmaceuticals.
“When women don’t have choices, mental health is significantly worse, and that’s something that goes on, often, for the entire time of that family’s trajectory,” Laddha said. “So I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen, but you know, those are certainly things that, as a women’s mental health company, we are looking at and watching closely to see what sort of legislation, rules and laws come out.”
When it comes to fundraising early next year, Laddha is optimistic. She’s focused on how fragmented the healthcare industry is right now, and plans to showcase how companies like hers will aim to integrate with larger health systems.
“Our role is to be really as disruptive as possible, and to bring to the forefront the most innovative solutions that we can do while still working within the current framework of healthcare that exists today,” she said.
Some sectors worry about Trump economic policy
While software and cloud-based technologists seem excited by the effects of deregulation, startup founders that make physical products, especially using microchip technology, are wary of Trump’s plan to impose tariffs on imported goods.
Samyr Laine, a managing partner at Los Angeles-based Freedom Trail Capital, specializes in consumer tech and consumer packaged goods. Laine said he feels a sense of relief in ending the “uncertainty” around who will take the presidency the next four years, but he predicts many founders will feel the costly effects of Trump’s planned tariffs, and pass those additional costs to consumers.
Though the existing companies in his portfolio won’t be hit too hard, it’s a factor they’ll be forced to review when considering investments in companies in the future. Those that will incur the additional costs of imported goods will have to adjust their profit margins and might not be as attractive to investors.
“As a consumer and someone who isn’t in the space, not to be like a fear monger, but expect that some of the things you typically pay for, the price will go up,” Laine said.
The effect on work
Although Trump was successful in picking up a significant amount of tech industry elite support this election season, much of his voter base is working class people who will not feel the positive effects of tech industry deregulation.
Endoso, the Silicon Valley investor and founder, says the Trump coalition of tech entrepreneurs and working-class voters represents “a division between the haves and the have-nots.” The usual basis on which people pick their electoral preferences, like race, geography, income and proximity to city life, were “shattered” this time around.
“It was a revolt of the working class, at least in my view,” he said.
The advancements of AI and machine learning, which will enrich the investor class, will have large implications on employment for those working class voters. The vast majority of Americans who are not college educated, and work physical jobs, might struggle to thrive, he said. We’ll likely see overhauls of industries as robots replace and automate a majority of physical labor in warehouses, and self-driving vehicles take over jobs like long-haul trucking and ride services such as Uber and Lyft.
“I think those are important questions to be asking from a policy standpoint, and I think that the intelligent answers shouldn’t be ‘let’s shut the innovation down.’” Endoso said. “That didn’t work in 19th century England. It won’t work here today, right? But it does require our rethinking the definition of work, and the definition of how you … organize a society along lines where you don’t need to have the same level of maybe direct labor input as we had in the past.”
Nissenbaum agreed, saying that AI has already begun to leak into every field and industry, and will only continue to disrupt how we work. As revolutionary as the internet and internet companies were in the late 1990s, the web has become the infrastructure for artificial intelligence to become more efficient and effective at everything it does.
With lighter regulation under a new Trump administration, we’re likely to see AI develop at unpredictable rates, he said. And laborers will definitely be feeling the effects over the next four years.
“You’re not going to lose your job to AI,” Nissenbaum said. “You’re going to lose your job to someone who understands how to do your job with AI.”
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