Esther Yu-Hsi Lee Archive

It’s been five years since the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative granted undocumented immigrants the ability to receive temporary deportation relief and work authorization. In this time, upwards of 800,000 immigrants have began their first jobs, opened their first bank account, bought cars and other major consumer products, and contributed millions of dollars in taxes to the country.

Year after year, the program has come under successive waves of attacks from Republican lawmakers who say the program was an executive overreach by then-President Barack Obama. With a Democrat president and a Democrat-controlled Senate, the threats to rescind DACA without the promise to carve out a pathway to citizenship for so-called DREAMers have always remained largely empty. But now, the program is at an inflection point where it could end immediately. There already is a looming legal challenge against the White House by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and nine other state lawmakers to stop DACA by September 5. On the other side however, the program enjoys broad defense from at least 20 state attorney generals and more than 100 law professors across the country.

The fate of the program is clearly unclear: President Donald Trump promised to rescind any executive actions from his predecessor, but he also has said he would treat these so-called DREAMers “with heart.” In June, a White House official told Reuters that “no final determination has been made” about the future of the program.  With less than one month until Paxton’s deadline, Trump has remained mum so far.

Seven states and a dozen health and labor groups separately challenged the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last week to ban the use of a controversial insecticide linked to human health issues. Earlier this spring, the EPA rejected calls to ban the use of chlorpyrifos, an insecticide widely used to control pests on crops like Brussels sprouts and almonds.

New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, along with six other attorneys general, submitted legal objections arguing that the use of chlorpyrifos at any amount could have adverse effects on farmworkers and children. In the legal filing, the attorneys general argued that the EPA “failed to make a key safety finding needed to continue to allow levels of chlorpyrifos.”

Attorneys General argued that allowing chlorpyrifos residue on human food violates federal law because the EPA has not been able to make “the finding of safety required.” The states call on the EPA to ban the use of chlorpyrifos on food within 60 days.

“The EPA’s first job is ensuring the health and safety of New Yorkers and all Americans — especially our children. Yet the Trump administration is jeopardizing our children’s health by allowing continued exposure to this toxic pesticide at levels it has not found to be safe,” Schneiderman said in a press release. “If the Trump Administration won’t follow the law — and put our children’s well-being first — we will fight back.”

The morning after a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempts to deny federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities,” President Trump threatened to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities-both ridiculous rulings,” Trump wrote as the first of a three-part Twitter rant Wednesday morning. “See you in the Supreme Court!”

Trump said that the Ninth Circuit — where he presumed the ruling was issued — has a “terrible record of being overturned.” But Judge William Orrick — a district court judge based in San Francisco who issued Tuesday’s injunction — does not sit on the Ninth Circuit, which is an appeals court. As Politico pointed out, the Ninth Circuit will be the next court that will hear the case if the Trump administration chooses to appeal the decision.

Muslim immigrants coming into the United States from “terror-prone” countries may soon have to register and check in regularly with the government, said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump.

Kobach — architect of anti-immigration legislation in Arizona and Alabama, as well as cities in Pennsylvania and Texas — recommended that the incoming administration could enact Trump’s call for “extreme vetting” of Muslim immigrants by reinstating a national registry that targets people from largely Arab- and Muslim- majority countries, Reuters reported.

Known as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), that program allowed the U.S. government to record the arrival, length of stay, and departure of certain individuals from 25 countries believed to possess “possible national security threats.” Those countries included Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Lybia, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. Only one country on the NSEERS list, North Korea, is not majority-Muslim.

An image is circulating around the internet depicting a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent arresting an alleged undocumented immigrant in the back of a voter line. In one scary tweet originating from a supporter of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the individual said that ICE agents are monitoring polling sites.

In reality, both the photo and the tweet itself are fake.

Intended to scare Latino voters from going to the voting booth, the image in the tweet is actually two separate photos stitched together to concoct a completely false story. One photo, used widely by other media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, is from a primary voting location in Arizona from March. The other photo can be found on Wikimedia Commons, according to ProPublica and Univision, which first reported the image composite.

I've just got word that an illegal trying to vote has been arrested.

ICE is watching voting places closely! Thank you ICE!

More to come! pic.twitter.com/TeNiWsMTSR

— Neil Turner

Just one day after the third and final presidential debate, another woman has come forward to say that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump groped her 18 years ago after a U.S. Open tennis tournament in Queens, New York.

Karena Virginia — a self-described yoga instructor and life coach who lives in the New York City region — said at a press conference on Thursday morning that Trump approached her in 1998 while she was waiting for her car service in Flushing, New York.

“As I was waiting, Donald Trump approached me,” she said. “I knew who he was, but I had never met him. He was with a few other men. I was quite surprised when I overheard him talking with the other men about me. He said, ‘hey look at this one. We haven’t seen her before. Look at those legs’ as though I was an object rather than a person.”

Virginia became visibly emotional when she described Trump groping her.

“He then walked up to me and reached his right arm and grabbed my right arm,” she said. “Then his hand touched the right inside of my breast. I was in shock. I flinched. ‘Don’t you know who I am?’”

During a rally for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Ashburn, Virginia last week, a school-aged boy shouted “take the bitch down” in an apparent reference to Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton.

Responding to a group of reporters sitting nearby, the child’s mother, who identified herself as Pam Kohler, defended her child’s “right to speak what he wants to,” noting that “he’s a minor so he can’t be interviewed.” When asked about his behavior, Kohler blamed “Democratic schools” for her child’s lewd language, the Los Angeles Times reported.

It may appear shocking that a young boy and his mother are unapologetic about his potty mouth and indecorous behavior against Clinton, who is not just a presidential candidate, but a former senator, Secretary of State, and First Lady as well. But because children are influenced by their environment, it almost seems inevitable that he would use the same kind of inflammatory language Trump and his campaign advisers use. In fact, a Clinton campaign video from mid-July titled “Role Models” lobbed similar criticisms about Trump’s language, showing children watching television set to some of Trump’s more controversial statements.

A little kid is yelling "Take the bitch down!" when Trump mentions Hillary Clinton. A little kid. No more than 10, I would say.

— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) August 2, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly promised to penalize and deport “illegal immigrants” living in the United States — but he may very well be married to one.

That’s because Melania Trump, who was born in Slovenia, may have worked illegally in the United States during the beginning of her career as a model in New York City, Politico reported this week.

Melania has said that she came to New York in 1996 on a modeling contract and a work visa. But nude photographs that surfaced this week, accounts from Slovenian journalists, and a former roommate all pinpoint her arrival date in 1995, leading to speculation that she may have actually worked in the country on a tourist visa.

Trump’s wife has suggested several times that she worked as a model on a short-term visa. She says she followed the law by traveling back to Slovenia “every few months” to renew her visa before getting her green card in 2001.

“I follow a law the way it’s supposed to be,” Melania Trump told MSNBC in February. “I never thought to stay here without papers. I had visa. I travel every few months back to the country, to Slovenia, to stamp the visa. I came back. I applied for the green card. I applied for the citizenship later on after many years of green card. So I went by system. I went by the law, and you should do that.”

Looks like Melania may have worked in the States on a tourist visa, making her an illegal immigrant. https://t.co/8Vk17ZqyFo

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) August 4, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to bring jobs back to the country and force American companies to hire more domestic workers. Just don’t expect him to apply that to his own business: instead he is bringing 78 foreign workers to work two of his properties in Florida.

Earlier this month, Trump filed temporary visa applications for 78 positions for servers, housekeepers, and cooks to staff his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach and the Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, citing an inability to find Americans who can fill the positions. The positions pay $10.17 an hour for housekeepers, $11.13 an hour for servers, and $12.74 for cooks, according to Buzzfeed.

From the moment he launched his presidential campaign, Trump has denigrated Mexican immigrants as rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. And on multiple occasions, he has supported the mass deportation of the country’s undocumented population.

Despite his harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy proposals, Trump has vigorously defended his own use of foreign workers, saying that it was hard to get Americans to take on seasonal jobs during the five-month period that he called “Palm Beach Season.”

“You can’t get help,” Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last year. “Getting help in Palm Beach during the season is almost impossible.”

Americans don’t conflate concerns about terrorism with a fear of immigrants, according to a new survey conducted by the nonpartisan group Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) — challenging the harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from leading political figures in the aftermath of major terrorist events.

Terrorism concerns have increased about 18 percentage points over the past two years. In 2014, PRRI found that just 33 percent of Americans said they were worried about being affected by a terrorist attack. In the new survey, 51 percent of participants expressed concern that they or a family member could be a victim of terrorism.

At the same time, however, Americans haven’t embraced a harsher approach to immigrants. Roughly six in ten people told PRRI they support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — a rate that has remained about the same since 2013, when the Senate approved a comprehensive immigration reform bill that would have included this policy.

It’s notable that rising terrorism concerns “have no discernible effect” on the public attitudes about this aspect of immigration reform, according to Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI and the author of The End of White Christian America.

“What it suggests is that Americans are thinking about these two things somewhat separately. Their concerns about terrorism don’t translate 1:1 into attitudes about immigration policy,” Jones told ThinkProgress.

Stefan Jagsch, a German neo-Nazi leader, has Syrian refugees to thank for saving his life following a car crash into a tree last week.

Jagsch, a 29-year-old member of the anti-immigrant National Democratic Party (NPD) and the party’s top candidate for an election in the Hesse region, was seriously injured after he swerved off the road and hit a tree in the German town of Büdingen. Witnesses said that two Syrian refugees who passed the accident rushed to his help, pulling him from the wreckage and administering first aid. The refugees left the scene by the time local police officers arrived. Jagsch suffered two broken legs and a cut to the face.

Dos refugiats sirians socorren el polític neonazi de l'NPD Stefan Jagsch després d'un greu accident de trànsit pic.twitter.com/DGrR2FVEth

— Roger Suso (@eurosuso) March 22, 2016

Mexico City legislators passed a proposal this week to ban Donald Trump from entering their country, following the presidential candidate’s repeated xenophobic rhetoric surrounding immigrants, particularly those from Mexico.

The proposal, which passed unanimously, is largely a symbolic recommendation since the local legislature cannot enforce federal legislation, as the Huffington Post pointed out. But Deputy José Manuel Delgadillo of the conservative National Action Party noted that the proposal was a way to urge Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to more forcefully confront Trump.

From the Mexico City legislature, which asked the federal government to ban Donald Trump from the country today pic.twitter.com/VNdykeEQ9f

— Roque Planas (@RoqPlanas) March 3, 2016

“What we’re saying is that if he wants to build a wall so that Mexicans can’t enter his country, then he is not welcome in our country,” Delgadillo said, according to the publication. “What we need now is for President Peña Nieto to make a strong statement condemning Mr. Trump’s anti-Mexican comments.”

Trump has been running his presidential campaign on inflammatory rhetoric that denigrates Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals, as well as the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. He recently stated that Mexico was “killing” the United States by providing cheap labor. Meanwhile, former Mexican President Felipe Calderon said Trump reminded him of Adolph Hitler.

Donald Trump supporters are not just passionate about his anti-immigrant rhetoric; they’re also living out his outrage in real-time.

A man spat in an immigrant activist’s face during a campaign rally for the Republican presidential candidate in Richmond, Virginia on Wednesday night. The incident occurred soon after immigrant activists briefly interrupted the Republican presidential candidate as Trump launched into an anti-immigrant tirade about giving “free stuff” to “illegal immigrants.”

During his speech, Trump referenced this week’s Democratic presidential debate, when candidates like Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders discussed their positions on providing services to undocumented immigrants. “They just couldn’t give away things fast enough,” Trump said. “They want heath care for illegal immigrants. They want drivers licenses for illegal immigrants. They want, listen to this, Social Security for illegal immigrants.”

A pair of siblings in Boston, Massachusetts targeted and ambushed a 58-year-old homeless Latino man because one brother was “inspired in part” by 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, the Boston Globe reported.

Police arrived on the scene early Wednesday to a homeless man covered in urine, whose nose was broken and chest and arms were battered. The victim told police that “he was awakened by two men urinating on his face.” He said they ripped away his blankets and sleeping bag, hit him in the face and the head, and punched him several times. According to the Boston Globe, several witnesses saw the homeless man being attacked.

The victim is in fair condition, though he has a broken nose and multiple bruises on his head and torso.

Scott Leader, one of the two brothers, told police that the victim started the confrontation. He also reportedly said that “it was OK to assault the man because he was Hispanic and homeless,” adding, “Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported.”

The retail clothing giant Macy’s became the latest company to cut ties with 2016 Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, following his campaign launch speech in which he claimed that some Mexican immigrants are rapists and drug dealers.

In its announcement on Wednesday, Macy’s made a strong statement in support of immigrants — saying that “respect for the dignity of all people is a cornerstone of our culture” and that Trump’s remarks “are inconsistent with Macy’s values” and that his “disparaging characterizations” aren’t an accurate portrayal of Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and Latinos.

“Macy’s is a company that stands for diversity and inclusion,” a statement released to CNN reads. “We have no tolerance for discrimination in any form. We welcome customers, and respect for the dignity of all people is a cornerstone of our culture. We are disappointed and distressed by recent remarks about immigrants from Mexico. We do not believe the disparaging characterizations portray an accurate picture of the many Mexicans, Mexican Americans and Latinos who have made so many valuable contributions to the success of our nation.”

During a lengthy Tuesday morning announcement that he would seek the Republican presidential nomination, real estate mogul Donald Trump claimed that undocumented immigrants from Mexico are “rapists” who “are bringing drugs” to the U.S. He also indicated that he would build a “great wall” on the southern U.S. border and that he would dismantle President Barack Obama’s 2012 executive action that has shielded hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants from deportation.

Trump is the 12th Republican to enter the 2016 race thus far.

“When do we beat Mexico at the border?” Trump asked the crowd at his announcement at his namesake Trump Tower in New York City. “They are not our friend, believe me…The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…When Mexico sends its people, they are not sending their best. They are not sending you. They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs and they are bringing crime, and they’re rapists.”

“Some, I assume are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we are getting,” Trump continued. “They are not sending us the right people. It’s coming all over South and Latin America and it’s coming probably from the Middle East. But we don’t know because we have no protection and we have no competence. We don’t know what is happening and it has got to stop and it has to stop fast.”

Watch it:

Love was the strongest emotion felt at a downtown Washington, D.C. office Thursday night as President Obama announced that he would use his executive power to grant deportation relieffor millions of undocumented immigrants. At least 50 undocumented immigrants and advocates, many who have been in the immigration fight for years, were scattered at a watch party to view Obama’s speech from a projector. About five million undocumented immigrants are expected to be helped by the executive action. Just as advocates were quick to congratulate immigrants whose family could now come out of the shadows, others also expressed cautious happiness, and even sadness over the family members who were not given deportation cover.

Outlining a few points to address the broken immigration system, Obama welcomed millions of undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows, including the parents of U.S. citizen and lawful permanent resident (LPR) children, as well as undocumented immigrants who have been here for at least five years. Clouding that announcement, however, was the advocates’ knowledge that Obama did not provide deportation cover for the parents of those who came here as children but do not have legal status, known as DREAMers.

Citing the issue of child arrivals through the U.S.-Mexico border, about 100 members of the Ku Klux Klan held a protest in North Carolina over the weekend to drum up support against immigration. The event was part of the organization’s latest campaign strategy to recruit new members.

According to a local Fox affiliate, Klan members did not give a speech at the rally, opting instead to shout messages of white power and hate against “mixed breeds.” At the same time, the Fox reporter said that immigration advocate counter-protesters across the street sang the gospel song, “Hallelujah.” The event at the Troy County Courthouse devolved into a shouting match between Klan members and counter-protesters who were separated by law enforcement officials. For over a month, the KKK has advertised the Troy rally, calling on local residents to “save our land, join the Klan.” The rally drew between 400 and 500 immigration advocates counter-protesters.