Trump Pardons Democrat, Showing He Loves All Grifters

The Trump administration is halting immigration applications for people from 19 countries that were already subject to travel bans or restrictions.

Applications linked to those countries, including for green cards and citizenship, will be paused, according to a memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS. The countries in question are the same ones subject to travel bans and restrictions thanks to an executive order from President Trump in June.

The order banned citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from traveling to the U.S. It also placed restrictions on travel for citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

At the time, people from all of those countries who were already legally in the U.S. didn’t face any restrictions. The new measure, however, pauses all immigration and citizenship applications, including green cards, and can only be lifted at the discretion of USCIS’s Director Joseph Edlow, according to the memo. A similar plan was already in the works last month, but it seems last week’s alleged shooting of National Guard troops by an Afghan national spurred it into action.

“In light of identified concerns and the threat to the American people, USCIS has determined that a comprehensive re-review, potential interview, and re-interview of all aliens from high-risk countries of concern who entered the United States on or after January 20, 2021 is necessary,” the USCIS memo said, referencing immigration decisions made during the Biden administration.

The new order is discriminatory and punishes those who have successfully gone through the correct legal process. It amounts to not only punishing every new Afghan immigrant for the alleged actions of one, but also targets people from 18 other countries for seemingly arbitrary reasons. It seems very much like a racist attempt to overhaul U.S. immigration policy.

Senator Lindsey Graham is making an enemy out of the pope.

Pope Leo XIV called out Donald Trump on Tuesday for his aggressive attempts to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. And Graham was having none of it.

The South Carolina lawmaker pushed the pope to stay on the “right side of history” in a lengthy post on social media Tuesday, claiming that a “credible threat” of “military force” is the only way to enact change in Venezuela.

“Without a credible threat of the use of military force, nothing changes in Venezuela. When it comes to Maduro, the time for talking is closing. The time for action to end this reign of terror in Venezuela is upon us,” Graham wrote.

“I would urge the Holy Father to be on the right side of history when it comes to ending Maduro’s reign of terror on the Venezuelan people, the United States and others throughout the region.

“The use of military force to evict Maduro will only be required if Maduro insists on remaining as the illegitimate leader of a narcoterrorist state,” the Baptist continued. “He has stolen elections, collaborates with terrorist groups like Hezbollah, sits atop a notorious drug cartel and has flooded our country with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.

“As President Trump said, when it comes to Maduro, we can do it the easy way or the hard way. I would urge the Holy Father to spend his time and energy persuading Maduro to take the easy way out—for all,” Graham wrote.

Since early September, the United States has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean Sea that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.”

While chalking the seemingly needless violence up to counter-narco-terrorism efforts, Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019.

Pope Leo recommended less violent options that the U.S. could take in the boiling feud. The first American leader of the Catholic Church told reporters Tuesday that it would be “better” to “find another way” to apply pressure, such as hosting a dialogue with Maduro or imposing economic sanctions on the South American nation, “if that is what they want to do in the United States.”

Even MAGA media outlet Newsmax is calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s September 2 boat bombings a war crime.

“It gives me no pleasure to say what I’m about to say, because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News,” Judge Andrew Napolitano said on air Tuesday. “This is an act of a war crime. Ordering survivors—who the law requires be rescued—instead to be murdered.”

Napolitano continued.

“There’s absolutely no legal basis for it. Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger, should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”

Newsmax is tailor-made for a far-right audience, is the preferred network of President Trump, and has been virtually unwavering in its support for him. This kind of critique, especially coming from Hegseth’s former co-worker, speaks to just how poorly planned the explanation for this potential war crime was, and how widely panned the decisions have been from both the left and the right.

Republican Senator Rand Paul offered some scathing criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s efforts to push responsibility for the September 2 boat bombings away from himself and President Trump and onto Admiral Frank Bradley.

“In this sense, it looks to me like they’re trying to pin the blame on somebody else and not them,” Paul told reporters Tuesday evening. “There’s a very distinct statement [that] was said on Sunday—Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this and it did not happen. It was fake news, it didn’t happen. And then the next day from the podium at the White House, they’re saying it did happen.

“So either he was lying to us on Sunday, or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened,” he continued. “Do we think there’s any chance that on Sunday the secretary of the defense did not know there’d been a second strike?”

The growing Republican criticism comes as Hegseth and the Trump administration zero in on their version of events for whether the boat bombing actually happened (it did), and who in particular gave the order for a second strike to kill the two survivors seen clinging to the wreckage after the first bombing. At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that he didn’t know there were survivors after the first strike, adding that the “fog of war” would have made it difficult to determine if anyone had survived. He passed responsibility for the decision entirely on to Bradley.

The administration’s explanation for committing what very well may be a war crime has been so botched and sloppy that it made Paul remember he’s a libertarian. And on his question of Hegseth’s incompetence or stupidity, the answer seems to be both.