Hundreds of press releases about arrests, prosecutions, and convictions tied to the January 6, 2021, insurrection have disappeared. The removals are framed as an effort to erase history while the government creates a taxpayer-funded, multi-billion-dollar slush fund to reward people involved. The same period includes pressure on public officials to meet authoritarian targets across areas such as mass deportations and public loyalty. A deportation-related example involves Levi Mendez-Maldonado, a Honduran asylum seeker who arrived unaccompanied at age 17 in 2022, later lived in Charlotte, and was shot and killed a little over two years afterward. His attorney learned of the murder months later.
"Over the past few weeks, the Trump Department of Justice has been assiduously scrubbing press releases relating to the January 6, 2021, convictions. Hundreds of these documents announcing arrests, prosecutions, and convictions of people involved in the insurrection have simply vanished. It is an astoundingly Orwellian effort at erasing history, at the same time that the agency has created, with taxpayer money, a multi-billion dollar slush fund to reward these men and women who flirted with treason on that dark winter day."
"As Trump's popularity continues to plummet, his authoritarian instincts have kicked into an even higher gear. Sixteen months into his presidency, Trump and his administration are corroding not only basic norms about what the public purse can be used for, but they are also marshaling the entire apparatus of the federal government to retell the story of the past decade in a way designed to make the president and his henchmen-including his paramilitaries outside of government-look anything but the traitors to democracy and decency that they so manifestly are."
"At the same time, the Trump regime is also putting extraordinary pressure on public officials to meet self-imposed authoritarian targets on everything from mass deportations to cult homages to Trump himself. When it comes to the deportations, perhaps no case better illustrates the Kafkaesque depths that the bureaucracy is now plumbing than that of Levi Mendez-Maldonado, a young Honduran asylum seeker in Charlotte, North Carolina."
"Mendez-Maldonado arrived, unaccompanied, as a 17-year-old, in 2022, at the height of the most recent surge of asylum seekers at the southern border. He spent a few months in Texas and then relocated to Charlotte, where an older brother lived. A little over two years later, Mendez-Maldonado was shot and killed. The young man's immigration attorney, Becca O'Neill, co-director of the Carolina Migrant Network, only found out about his murder months later, when her office"
#january-6-2021 #department-of-justice #immigration-and-asylum #deportations #authoritarian-governance
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