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Our columnists and staff writers recommend their top reads for the end of the year.
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Since President Trump's rise, Democrats have served as defenders of a political system many Americans believe is broken. Now the party is trying a new approach.
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Democracy Now! speaks with longtime immigrant rights activist Jeanette Vizguerra, who was just released Monday from ICE jail after nearly 10 months in a Colorado detention center. Vizguerra was ambushed by ICE agents during her work break in March. A judge ordered her detention was unconstitutional, and she was released on bond Monday. Vizguerra describes her time in detention and says she is "very emotional" and glad to be reunited with her children, and plans to keep fighting for her rights and for others. "Her detention was intentional to try and silence people across the country, not only immigrant leaders, but also citizens," says Jennifer Piper, a supporter and program director for American Friends Service Committee Colorado.
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Former immigration judge Tania Nemer, who was fired in February, is now suing the Trump administration, alleging that she was discriminated against despite strong performance reviews. Nemer is one of about 100 immigration judges who have been fired or reassigned since Trump took office. The system is notoriously backlogged, with more than 3 million cases pending. "I was pulled away in the middle of the hearing," she says.
Nemer filed a discrimination complaint with the Department of Justice, which officials dismissed, citing Article II of the Constitution on presidential powers. "I've been practicing employment law and representing federal employees for almost 30 years, and I have never seen a federal agency dismiss a complaint for this reason," says Nemer's attorney, James Eisenmann.
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WASHINGTON - Today, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro N. Mayorkas released the following statement and video on International Holocaust Remembrance Day:
"When you walked into the home where I grew up, our living room shelves were filled with books of Jewish history and, regrettably and all too often tragically, histories and stories of antisemitism and violence that accompanied it.
"My mother had lived this history. As a girl, she and her parents fled from Romania to France, and on to Cuba, because they could not make it safely to Israel or the United States. Her father lost his parents, brothers, and other family members in the Holocaust. Through the years in the United States, my mother stayed in touch with her two cousins who survived the camps and had made it to Israel alone.
"Our home was deeply rooted in my mother's experience of the Holocaust and the fragility of our safety, wherever we might live in the world. As you might expect, my mother's childhood profoundly shaped her approach to a young child away from home through the night. When our fellow elementary school students went to sleepaway camps and had sleepovers with friends, my siblings and I did not. My mother taught us the meaning and experience of independence in different ways.
"She also taught us three foundational principles that defined for her the scourge of antisemitism and other ideologies of hate. First, their existence manifests in ways that we readily can see, but also lies more widely beneath the surface, often undetected in the day-to-day goings-on of life but sometimes appearing in the most subtle of ways. Second, their prevalence continues to present an existential threat, and one can never assume that a holocaust could not happen again and could not happen where we, her children, might live. And third, that an attack borne of hate against one minority is an attack against all of society.
"I am proud to work in the Department of Homeland Sec
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