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As the Trump administration expands its immigration crackdown nationwide, President Trump is simultaneously creating new pathways for wealthy noncitizens to obtain U.S. visas. Earlier this week, Trump officially launched a program allowing affluent visitors to fast-track permission to live and work in the United States. For a $1 million payment, applicants can receive a so-called Trump Gold Card, which promises to speed up U.S. residency applications "in record time." The administration says it will also soon offer a $5 million "Trump Platinum Card" that would allow participants to avoid paying some U.S. taxes. The announcement comes as new rules published this week would require visitors from 42 countries in the visa waiver program to submit up to five years of social media history, along with phone numbers, email addresses and biometric data.
Shev Dalal-Dheini, director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, says the changes show that "if you're wealthy, if you can pay to play, then you're welcome to come to the United States. But if you're not — if you're coming as a tourist, or you're coming to seek humanitarian protection — then we're going to make it much tougher for you to come here and really put a lot of hurdles along the way in the guise of security and vetting."
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After almost four years of Russia's full-scale war, Kyiv is running out of cash, and needs an estimated €135.7bn over the next two years.
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Award-winning Palestinian reporter Mohammed Mhawish, who left Gaza last year, joins us to discuss his new piece for New York magazine about Israel's surveillance practices. It describes how Palestinians throughout the genocide in Gaza have been watched, tracked and often killed by Israeli forces who have access to their most intimate details, including phone and text records, social relations, drone footage, biometric data and artificial intelligence tools.
This all-encompassing surveillance system is "reshaping how people speak, how they're moving, how they're even thinking," says Mhawish. "It manufactured behavior for people, so they shrink their lives to reduce risk, they rehearse what version of themselves feels safest to present, and that creates an enormous psychological burden."
Mhawish also describes the terror of when his family's house was bombed, killing two of his cousins and two neighbors in an attack he says was linked to Israeli surveillance of his reporting activities. "I was being watched and tracked," he says.
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