GREG KELLY (HOST): What do you want to say about what we just saw?
WAYNE ALLYN ROOT (GUEST): Well, look, I think Tucker is getting paid by somebody to divide our movement, to divide MAGA, the GOP, and most importantly, to divide America. Because one thing I know about America, Greg, is America has always been wonderful to the Jewish people, wonderful to Israel. We’re a Judeo-Christian nation. There are more important issues to worry about than hammering on Israel and asking for DNA tests to find out if you’re a descendant from 3000 years ago. It’s the most ridiculous, ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard. It’s the most insulting thing I think I’ve ever heard in my life. I happen to be Jewish. I’ve never heard anything so insulting. Do we ask the Irish, the Italians, the Polish? My great friend, my director Petar is Serbian — does he need to prove that he really is Serbian from Serbia? Where have we gotten off track here? Tucker is in another world, a twilight zone, and he’s dividing our party, causing dissension and hatred. And if only he grilled white nationalists and Holocaust deniers the same way he grilled my great friend Mike Huckabee, who just sent me a beautiful email last night, hearing a couple of things that I said online about Tucker, and the United States ambassador to Israel sent me a beautiful email thanking me for everything I’m doing to support him and Israel and the United States of America. I’m sickened and flabbergasted by what’s coming out of the mouth of Tucker Carlson, who I used to like, by the way, very much. I think him and I were on the same track on almost every issue. But suddenly Israel has become the dividing line. No, Trump was elected over the economy, inflation, and the border, and the war on women. Women being robbed, raped, and murdered by illegals. Send them home, build the wall, deport them all. That’s what this election was about. That’s what this presidency is about. It isn’t about Israel. Ridiculous. It’s a weapon of mass distraction.
KELLY: I didn’t see the whole interview. That did seem a little bit, whoa, what’s going on there? I — you know, look, there are so many podcasts. There’s so much content. I cannot keep up. But Josh Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, please. Your thoughts.
JOSH HAMMER (GUEST): So I do listen to the entire interview. Almost three hours of it. I will pay for my sins for doing so at some future time, actually. Tucker Carlson at this point is not just the most dangerous antisemite in the history of the United States of America, he’s the single most dangerous man in America today. Period. Full stop. End of story. He is literally more dangerous than George Soros. He is more dangerous than anyone on the left because he is fundamentally out here, not just to kick American Jews, Christian Zionists, all who take a biblical worldview. He’s not just out to kick all of us out of the movement there. I genuinely think that this man is actually out to destroy the United States from within. If you look at all that Tucker Carlson has been doing over the past two years, whether it’s his propagandistic videos in the Moscow supermarket and the grocery store, whether it is his fawning interviews with the emir of Qatar, whether it’s his puff interview with the president of Iran, his saying that Nicolas Maduro, Nicolas Maduro was his great sage of social conservatism — he repeatedly stands up for America’s enemies, repeatedly throws not just America, but our close allies like Israel under the bus. There’s a reason that Tucker Carlson’s show was being played with dubbed English language and then Persian language subtitles on air in Iran, while the regime was slaughtering tens and tens of thousands of their own people. We’ve seen this play out in China, Russia, there. He is a walking useful idiot for the enemies Western civilization. It’s nothing less than disgusting there. I am wondering when he will pay the price for it. When will he be booted out from the White House? When will the president, vice president, everyone just say you are no longer welcome in the corridors of power, there. He needs to be stopped speaking at Turning Point USA, all these conferences there. He is cancer. He is pure, unmitigated cancer.
Great Job Media Matters for America & the Team @ Media Matters for America Source link for sharing this story.
Doors, sinks, windows, floors, and cabinets often end up in a landfill when a building is torn down. A Minnesota-based company is trying to change that.
AUSTIN, Texas – The Austin Police Department is asking the public for help identifying a suspect in connection to a criminal mischief incident.
What we know:
APD says the incident happened on Dec. 17, 2025 at 513 W. Odell Street at around 1:12 p.m.
The suspect entered a construction site by squeezing through a gate and entered a house that was under construction.
Police say the suspect caused more than $4,000 in dmages to the home’s electrical wires by cutting and ripping out multiple lines.
What we don’t know:
The identity of the suspect is not known, but the suspect is described as follows:
Hispanic male
5’6″ tall
200 lbs
Black hair and trimmed beard
He was last seen wearing a black shirt, black pants, and gray/black Vans sneakers
What you can do:
Anyone with any information may submit a tip anonymously through the Capital Area Crime Stoppers Program by visiting austincrimestoppers.org or by calling 512-472-8477.
A reward of up to $1,000 may be available for any information that leads to an arrest.
The Source: Information from Austin Police Department.
Beth Biggee, MD, is owner and practitioner of Lifestyle and Integrative Rheumatology, a holistic direct specialty care practice in North Andover, Massachusetts. She offers whole-person autoimmune care, lifestyle medicine, and holistic integrative consults.
She has over 20 years of experience in rheumatology and holds board certifications in rheumatology and integrative and lifestyle medicine. Dr. Biggee brings a human-centered approach to wellness rather than focusing solely on diseases.
Biggee graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree from Canisius College, and graduated magna cum laude and as valedictorian from SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse Medical School. She completed her internship and residency in internal medicine at Yale New Haven Hospital, her fellowship in rheumatology at Tufts–New England Medical Center, and her training in integrative rheumatology at the University of Arizona Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine.
Following her training, she attained board certification in rheumatology and internal medicine through the American Board of Internal Medicine, board certification in integrative medicine through the American Board of Physician Specialties, and accreditation as a certified lifestyle medicine physician through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. She is certified in Helms auricular acupuncture and is currently completing coursework in the Aloha Ayurveda integrative medicine course for physicians.
In prior roles, Biggee was medical director and integrative rheumatologist at Rheumission, a virtual integrative rheumatology practice, and she also provided healthcare wellness consulting for Synergy Wellness Center in Hudson, Massachusetts. Biggee taught as an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital (an affiliate of Columbia University). She was also clinical associate of medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine and taught Introduction to Clinical Medicine for medical students at Tufts. She was preceptor for the Lawrence General Hospital Family Medicine Residency.
Biggee has published work in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases, Arthritis & Rheumatology, Current Opinion in Rheumatology, Medicine and Health Rhode Island, and the Field Guide to Internal Medicine.
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Meta plans to purchase potentially up to $100 billion worth of AMD chips, enough to drive roughly six gigawatts of data center power demand, the companies announced Tuesday.
As part of the multiyear agreement, AMD has issued Meta a performance-based warrant for up to 160 million shares of AMD common stock — or about 10% of the company — for $0.01 each, structured to vest alongside certain milestones. The full stock award is conditional on AMD’s share price, which would need to hit $600 for Meta to receive its final tranche, per The Wall Street Journal. AMD’s stock closed at $196.60 on Monday.
Under the agreement, Meta will purchase AMD’s MI540 series of GPUs and its latest generation of CPUs. CPUs are increasingly becoming a core pillar of the AI inference compute stack because they’re efficient, easier to scale, and don’t tie companies solely to Nvidia.
AMD has been slowly gaining ground as AI firms look to reduce their reliance on Nvidia, which has been the longstanding leader in AI chips and has charged a premium for the title. Last October, AMD and OpenAI struck a similar deal trading equity for an agreement to buy chips.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the firm’s partnership with AMD is “an important step” as it diversifies its compute and works towards “personal superintelligence.” Zuckerberg has defined personal superintelligence as AI systems designed to deeply understand and empower individuals in their everyday lives.
The AMD partnership comes a couple of weeks after Meta struck a multiyear deal to expand its data centers with millions of Nvidia’s latest CPUs and GPUs. The Facebook-maker is also working on its own in-house chips but has reportedly hit delays.
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Boston, MA | June 9, 2026
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French and Italian agricultural ministers pressed Brussels for the amendment over concerns that CBAM could drive up the price of fertilizer, squeezing farmers’ margins. Such a price shift could risk widespread protests like the so-called nitrogen wars that started in 2019, when the Dutch government’s crackdown on agricultural emissions triggered a revolt among farmers.
But even if the amendment is passed into law, the European Commission cannot halt tariffs at its pleasure. Before suspending the tariff for any products, it must run assessments to determine whether CBAM’s impact on prices of relevant goods, like fertilizer, is significant enough to justify doing so.
“It isn’t clear to me that fertilizer prices would go up by enough to warrant activating 27a over, say, the coming year — even if punitive default values were used,” Vagneur-Jones said. “My sense is that we won’t be seeing the provision’s activation anytime soon.”
Still, the proposed pullback highlights “a growing conviction among Europeans that the EU is more or less fighting climate change alone,” said Adam Błażowski, the supervisory board chairman of the climate group WePlanet, which advocates for what it sees as pragmatic solutions, such as nuclear power and genetically modified crops.
“This may not be entirely accurate, but this trend only increased after the United States’ second departure from the Paris Agreement,” he said. “Mechanisms like CBAM function to preserve a certain level of equality between different economies, but rapidly progressing climate change is a global problem that needs global solutions. Unfortunately in an age of kinetic and trade wars all around Europe, this seems to be an increasingly difficult task.”
Equipping CBAM with an emergency brake may also have practical benefits that go beyond placating political constituencies. It could reduce regulatory complexity, for example — something of increasing importance to EU leaders who want to rejuvenate domestic industries, protecting the continent against geopolitical aggression from Russia, China, and, of late, the U.S.
“Looking to the future of a low-carbon economy, we may not be able to move as fast as we might like, but we have to move as fast as we can,” said Joseph Hezir, the former finance chief of the Department of Energy and current president of the EFI Foundation, a nonpartisan energy-policy think tank. “The 27a discussion right now is really about, how fast can we move in that direction?”
Europe’s carbon tariff may soon have company. Several other countries are considering what Hezir called “CBAM-like programs,” including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Taiwan. In a Friday post on X in response to the Supreme Court’s decisions to strike down President Donald Trump’s tariffs, U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican, called on the White House to champion his “Foreign Pollution Fee” bill, which “levels the playing field.”
CBAM’s impact is already being felt outside the 27-nation EU. In December, analyst Jian Wu cited the European tariffs as a major force behind China’s “thriving” hydrogen-fired metallurgy this year. With CBAM entering into force, he wrote in his newsletter China Hydrogen Bulletin, “Chinese steel exporters are facing real pressure to decarbonize their businesses.”
With 60% of its steel exports already headed for Europe before the signing of last month’s free-trade deal, India is also feeling the spur of CBAM on its notoriously coal-choked industrial and utility sectors.
Still, the policy is colliding with a harsh political climate. Anything that raises prices on European consumers is becoming radioactive, said Josh Freed, the chair of Catalyse Europe, a climate policy group.
“Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices way up, Europeans’ tolerance for any policies that they perceive as increasing prices is nonexistent,” he said. As a result, “slowing down and adjusting” both CBAM and the Emissions Trading System schemes “is just policy meeting reality.”
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It’s been 90 years since a British royal was removed from the line of succession. That might happen again now that Britain’s government says it will consider introducing legal changes to formally remove Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor from the list of royals in line to the throne.
Despite being stripped of his status as prince in October over his close links with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the former Prince Andrew, King Charles III’s younger brother, remains eighth in line to become monarch.
Experts say the process of removing him from the line of succession could be lengthy because it requires the involvement of about a dozen countries that also call the British monarch their head of state.
Nonetheless, momentum for change is building after police last week arrested Mountbatten-Windsor on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Following the release of millions of pages of files last month related to Epstein by the U.S. Justice Department, the former prince was accused of sharing confidential trade information with the disgraced financier when he served as U.K. trade envoy from 2001 to 2011.
Mountbatten-Windsor, 66, was released without charge on Thursday after spending about 11 hours in custody, but he remains under investigation.
“The government is clear that we are not ruling out action in respect of the line of succession at this stage, and we will consider whether any further steps are required in due course,” Darren Jones, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s chief secretary, told lawmakers on Monday.
Any such measure will only take place once the police investigation is finished, he added.
An act of Parliament is required
Under the current line of royal succession, Charles’ son Prince William is heir to the throne and his three children — Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis — are next. Prince Harry is fifth, while his two children, Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet, are sixth and seventh in line.
Mountbatten-Windsor — who was second in line to the throne at his birth — currently follows them in eighth position. His daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, are at ninth and 12th places respectively.
Removing him from the line of succession would require an act of Parliament, which needs lawmakers’ approval.
One party, the Liberal Democrats, has been vocal about supporting such a move.
“I think it would be intolerable for Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor to succeed to the crown,” party leader Ed Davey said last week. “It’s not as remote as some people think.”
Beyond Britain
Any change to the line of succession would also require backing from 14 Commonwealth countries where Charles is head of state.
Of those, Australia and New Zealand have said they would support any U.K. government plan to exclude Mountbatten-Windsor.
“These are grave allegations and Australians take them seriously,” Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wrote in a letter to Starmer. “I agree with His Majesty that the law must now take its full course and there must be a full, fair and proper investigation.”
Starmer’s government is not believed to have received similar letters from other countries that also have Charles as head of state, including Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Tuvalu.
Robert Hazell, a politics professor who founded the Constitution Unit at University College London, said in some countries the change will require a formal constitutional amendment, while in others it can be done by legislation.
He expressed doubt that the U.K. or the other governments would want to spend time removing Mountbatten-Windsor from the succession line given he is only eighth in line.
“The last time this happened was for the Succession to the Crown Act 2013, which made the law of royal succession gender neutral,” he said. “It took two years of protracted negotiations for all the different countries to amend their own laws or constitutions.”
President Donald Trump commented on the arrest of Prince Andrew.
The status of Andrew’s daughters
One question is whether excluding Mountbatten-Windsor would affect his daughters, who are not working royals, and their children.
“Not necessarily — it depends how the legislation is framed,” Hazell said.
The last time a royal was removed from the line of succession was after King Edward VIII abdicated in December 1936 to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson. At the time, the law was changed to strike him and any descendants from the list.
For his part, Charles has not publicly indicated whether he would support or oppose removing his brother from the line of succession. The monarch stressed that the law must take its course in the investigation, adding: “My family and I will continue in our duty and service to you all.’’
Reports in the British media, however, suggest the palace is not against the legal change. Citing an unnamed palace source, the Times of London reported on Saturday that the royal family said it would “never get in the way” of what Parliament decides.
King Charles is speaking out after new allegations surrounding the former Prince Andrew have made headlines.
Great Job Sylvia Hui | The Associated Press & the Team @ NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth for sharing this story.
Last Thursday, the White House tried to get President Trump to focus on the economic concerns driving the midterm elections. Instead, he issued a 10-to-15-day ultimatum to Iran, claimed that his wife’s documentary was so good that some women had seen it four times, and accused his predecessor Barack Obama of releasing classified information about space aliens.
Few actually watched his 68-minute speech on the economy later that afternoon at the Coosa Steel Corporation in Georgia. But even if they had tuned in, they would have found Trump’s recitation of his economic talking points overshadowed by his banter about wanting to award himself the Congressional Medal of Honor, claims that the FBI found “plenty of stuff” when it raided Fulton County’s election office, or the suggestion, denied by his own advisers, that inflation was no longer an issue: “I’ve won affordability.”
So it fell to aides at the White House to email reporters with the message top political advisers have tested and refined as the best way to move voters in 2026. Their strategy is to highlight the accomplishments of the administration—tax cuts, lower gas prices, foreign investment—while promising that more is to come. “Republican leadership is building a brighter, more prosperous future for all Georgians—and today’s visit underscores President Trump’s unrelenting commitment to finishing the job,” the press release said.
Trump will have another chance to sell his economic agenda tonight, when he delivers his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress, in what is likely to be his most-watched speech of the year. But top White House advisers and Republican strategists have so little faith that he will stick to the script in the months ahead that they are reverting to a 2024 playbook: They will let Trump be Trump, while demanding discipline from the rest of the GOP ecosystem.
Many of Trump’s top advisers gathered with the Cabinet last Tuesday at the Capitol Hill Club, not far from the House chamber, for a briefing on the new strategy. James Blair, the White House deputy chief of staff in charge of midterm efforts, explained to the group that the message had to be nuanced, recognizing both Trump’s accomplishments and the continued economic struggles of many voters, one of the Republicans in the room told me, requesting anonymity to discuss the private meeting. Even Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the 1934 midterms, did not go around saying that everything was great, Blair told the crowd. Instead, Roosevelt’s team argued that things were getting better, and that if Democrats stayed in power, much more improvement awaited.
The challenge, of course, is similar to the one Trump’s team faced during the previous presidential election, when they rolled out an advertising strategy largely focused on economic concerns that felt disconnected from everything Trump was saying. That difficulty is amplified because Trump is now in the White House, and this is his economy. The president fills his speeches with superlatives—the best, the greatest, the biggest—not nuance. He has for months been focused elsewhere, on foreign policy, building projects, getting revenge on those who he feels have done him wrong—all areas where he has more control. Inside the White House, aides have tried to keep Trump from becoming fatalistic about losing the House, after he told a reporter, “When you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” in January. He has committed to traveling the country about once every two weeks until the start of spring, when his travel is expected to increase to weekly or more.
At the Capitol Hill briefing, Blair and the pollster Tony Fabrizio asked Trump’s top deputies to drive the economic storyline that Trump sometimes discards. “The president will have his message. And that works for him. But you are not the president, and here are the messages that the data show work,” the person who attended the meeting told me, summarizing the strategy. “Going on Fox News and reiterating what the president says every day—that is a problem.”
Asked to comment for this story, the White House spokesperson Kush Desai sent me a statement that argued the economic benefits of Trump’s efforts are just beginning: “President Trump pledged to turn the page on Joe Biden’s inflation and affordability crisis, and the Trump administration is embarking on an ambitious agenda of reform across every sector of our economy to deliver.”
Strategists at the National Republican Congressional Committee have been making the case that tax refunds are up and more benefits will be felt late in the year. They have also pointed to low approval ratings for the Democratic Party, following the 2024 wipeout. “After inheriting Joe Biden’s economically disastrous spending spree, President Trump and Republicans are delivering real relief for the American people,” Mike Marinella, a NRCC spokesperson, told me. “The contrast is clear: Republicans are delivering relief where it counts while Democrats want to get back to their status quo of failures.”
Democrats, for their part, are counting on Trump to continue to bungle the economic messaging. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has for months summed up his party’s argument as a focused antidote to Trump’s more scattered priorities. “America is too expensive, and Donald Trump is doing nothing about it,” Jeffries said in a January interview with Jim Acosta. “He’s focused on Venezuela or Greenland or Iran or Syria.”
It’s a story that Democrats say resonates with voters. Just after Trump took office last year, Democratic polling by Navigator found that 59 percent of voters thought inflation, along with the cost of living, was the most important political issue. Only 29 percent thought this was the issue that Trump and Republicans in Congress were most focused on. Now, one year later, that 30-point gap has grown to 38 points, and voters report that Trump and his colleagues are far more focused on issues such as foreign conflicts and immigration than they are.
“His obsession is on everything other than what matters to people’s lives,” Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic strategist, told me. “If Bill Clinton is ‘I feel your pain,’ Donald Trump is ‘I want you to feel my pain.’ He is all about what makes a ballroom and getting FIFA World Cup peace prizes.”
Republican strategists tell me they have seen similar warning signs. When a national GOP organization recently assembled a focus group of independent swing voters, those involved were alarmed by the number of people who described Trump as distracted or not caring about the right issues, including one voter who questioned why the president was so focused on gaining control of Greenland. Several Republicans told me they are worried about Trump’s continued obsession with unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud in the 2020 election, which they said is not only too far afield of voter concerns but could also backfire if it depresses turnout among Republican voters who don’t trust elections, increases turnout among Democrats, or alienates independents.
A national Republican election strategist noted that the GOP lost the Senate in 2020 after Democrats flipped seats in Georgia and Arizona—the epicenter of the fraud claims—and then lost numerous House and Senate races in 2022 after candidates embraced the false theories. “President Trump was in large part elected again because he was disciplined enough to focus on issues that voters cared about—inflation, jobs, border security, and the economy,” the strategist told me, “but any efforts to relitigate the ‘stolen election’ would be a disaster for Republicans this fall.”
Democratic candidates are proceeding on the same assumptions. On the western edge of North Carolina, the farmer Jamie Ager hopes to push out Republican Representative Chuck Edwards from a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024. The region is still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Helene, which blasted through the area that year, and waiting for federal compensation to rebuild.
“I met a woman still living in a camper, and she is not able to get her home rebuilt. I have an employee whose family house floated away in the river,” Ager told me, before making an argument that will be repeated hundreds of times by Democrats this year. “To hear that we want to give money to Argentina, to spend money on Greenland, and to build a ballroom all feels like, Wait a second. We were all promised a lot of money down here, and that is not coming.”
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Ana is a Mexican American woman who, as a child, did not live in fear of immigration raids. She’s a U.S.-born citizen who grew up in Mexicantown, Detroit, a Southwest neighborhood that serves as a cultural hub for the city’s Latinx population.
Her grandparents immigrated to the United States with legal status from a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Admittedly, Ana, 38, did not have much awareness about the experiences of undocumented immigrants until she started dating her now-husband in 2012. At 18, he entered the country without documentation, arriving from the same area of Mexico as Ana’s family.
“We started dating in the early fall, and I remember that he couldn’t take me out, and I was so distraught. Like, ‘Do you not want to take me out?’ But he couldn’t get a job because he didn’t have a Social Security Number,” said Ana, whose name has been changed by The 19th to protect her family.
When she imagined getting married and raising a family, her list of motherhood expectations definitely did not include one day preparing her elementary school-age children, all of them U.S. citizens, for an encounter with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE): Memorize our home address. Take daddy’s phone and hit record. Call mom.
This is Ana’s reality during the second Trump administration. Her husband still does not have legal status. Together, they have three children who are 9, 7 and 5 years old, and the family speaks openly at home about the risks they face.
“I’m parenting in a political climate that could separate my whole family. It could break us apart,” Ana said. “It’s just one more thing; this emotional labor that we carry on as mothers — but this one’s with more stress.”
Ana says parenting during the second Trump administration carries a new level of stress. “I’m parenting in a political climate that could separate my whole family,” she said.
(Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)
Across the country, immigrant mothers and mothers who are partnered with immigrants are forced to teach their children a lesson of survival as President Donald Trump continues his historic expansion of immigration enforcement. Over the last year, $75 billion — an unprecedented increase — has been approved for building new detention centers, hiring thousands of immigration officers and surging ICE operations.
The administration initially claimed it would focus on detaining and deporting people with criminal convictions, but independent analyses of ICE data show that about one-third of those arrested in 2025 had a criminal conviction. The rest included people without convictions — child care workers, high school honor roll students, parents heading to work and kids on their way home from school. Some are undocumented. Others have legal status or, in some cases, are U.S. citizens.
For generations of Black American mothers, preparing their children for interactions with police, including arrests or violence, is an unwelcome rite of passage known as “The Talk.” Historically, it has served as an act of love, vigilance and desperation by mothers seeking to protect their kids in a world that often views them as suspects first and children second.
In the Trump era, a different version of “The Talk” is emerging among immigrant parents who are living with the dread that their children could become targets as well.
As an Afro-Dominican woman living in North Carolina, Dania Santana is balancing multiple dynamics. Her youngest son, who is 11 years old, looks more like the stereotypical image people associate with Latinx children. Her middle son, who is 14, is a Black boy with afro-textured hair. Her 16-year-old daughter has a skin tone that is more of a mix between the two.
“I always get different reactions among different groups of people with my kids, of who is acceptable or cute and who is the opposite. It’s interesting because it’s different reactions from Black people, from Latino people and then from White people,” Santana said. “So I have different conversations with my children about how things can play out for them in this moment.”
Coming to the United States from the Dominican Republic at 25, Santana, now 48, had limited knowledge of U.S. racial dynamics until she began to witness the bias and discrimination firsthand. That understanding shaped the way she began to guide her children. When her older son, who has darker skin, was in middle school, Santana recalls hearing from his teacher that he and his friends were pulling small pranks in class.
Santana said that she took the incident as an opportunity to not only discourage her son from being disruptive in class, but also to share with him that he may not always receive the same level of grace as his White friends. “You need to learn this now before you’re out there,” she said.
With both ICE and local police on Santana’s mind, she feels on high alert all the time, questioning every aspect of where her children will be and who they will be with. This includes monitoring cell phone locations and sitting inside the nearby Starbucks while her kids hang at the mall. She has even considered moving her family to New York City, where she lived before North Carolina. At least in New York, her kids wouldn’t have to drive, she said. Or maybe they might flee the United States entirely if circumstances get worse.
“I have been very clear with them that the moment I see that things are turning, we will be looking into leaving the country,” she said. “So when my youngest son heard that the National Guard was coming, he thought it was that moment. He got really sad. He was like, ‘So we’re gonna have to leave everything behind?’”
Ana has taught her children specific instructions in case of an encounter with ICE: memorize their address, record on their father’s phone and call their mother. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)
For many households in the United States, “The Talk” is a common method of racial socialization, a way for parents and caregivers to teach children about race and identity to both foster a sense of pride and to prepare them for societal inequities and police brutality.
Often, what prompts a parent to begin these conversations is a specific incident: a racist comment muttered under someone’s breath at the grocery store, a White mother on the playground instructing her child not to play with a Black child, said Dr. Leslie A. Anderson, an assistant professor of family and consumer sciences at Morgan State University.
As part of her research, Anderson analyzed how Black families with young school-age children navigated “The Talk.” She and her team found that many parents gave their children specific directives on how to act when in the presence of law enforcement. This includes keeping their hands visible at all times, remaining calm and respectful to the officers, answering officers’ questions and directing the officers to their parents. In other cases, parents instruct their children to leave the situation and find them or another trusted adult, which could unintentionally escalate the interaction.
Research indicates that when done thoughtfully, with specific, practical directives, “The Talk” can be beneficial for children, Anderson said. “But it’s also extremely stressful for the parent, primarily the mom, to have to navigate these conversations in the first place,” she said. “And what I found is that a lot of folks feel inept, like ‘I know I need to have this conversation. I don’t know how to do it.’”
Black and Brown people regardless of citizenship or immigration status face disproportionate risk of racial profiling and violence by law enforcement. Recent studies have also captured how the day-to-day lives of immigrants can be heavily shaped by the threat of immigration enforcement. One survey conducted among a representative sample of Latinx and Asian immigrants in California between 2018 and 2020 found that about 43 percent of Latinx immigrants and 13 percent of Asian immigrants knew someone who had been deported, said Dr. Maria-Elena De Trinidad Young, an immigrant health scholar and professor at the University of California, Merced.
About 16 percent of Latinx immigrants and 10 percent of Asian immigrants reported experiencing racial profiling. When it comes to speaking with children about ICE, conversations may start when children ask their parents specific questions based on what they’re observing. But many times, the conversations are not explicit, Young said.
Families walk past restaurants and shops in Mexicantown, a Southwest neighborhood that serves as a cultural hub for Detroit’s Latinx population. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)
Immigrant parents experience varying levels of comfort speaking directly about their status. They may instruct kids to avoid staring out from windows or going outdoors on certain occasions, which can be confusing, at least initially. Over time, the children may begin to pick up on their parents’ fears and any ICE presence in their communities — and they will connect the dots for themselves.
Many immigrant mothers feel that the country’s approach to immigration has intensified over the course of their lives. Some did not have to confront conversations about immigration enforcement until having to do so with their own children during the Trump administration.
Maya was born in India, spent her childhood in Australia and moved to the Seattle area when she was 12. The schools she attended in the United States were not diverse, so she often felt different from other kids. Immigration-specific conversations were never really on her radar until after she received a green card in high school and later began to face more explicit experiences with xenophobia as an adult, she said.
Her son was just 1 year old when Trump returned to Washington for a second time. The 35-year-old and her husband live in a predominantly White New Jersey town. The week Trump got elected, she said, an older White man walked up to her and her son at the grocery store and told her to go back to her country.
In the 15 months since, Maya, whose name The 19th has changed, has watched online videos of ICE agents storming playgrounds and posting up outside of elementary schools. She’s read the stories of what’s happened in Minnesota, including the killings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents, as well as the detention of 5-year-old Liam Ramos.
Maya has her green card and should be legally shielded from an ICE arrest or detention. Yet she has seen news reports documenting the apprehension of people with legal work permits, green cards or pending asylum cases.
Maya’s green card expires next year.
Maya, who has a green card, is teaching her 3-year-old son what to do if he is ever separated from her during an immigration enforcement encounter, including to say, “I want my mommy” and “I want my daddy.” (Courtesy of Maya)
Her son is 3 years old now, and there’s only so much he can absorb, Maya said. She struggles with the balance between protecting his innocence and childhood and making sure he’s prepared should anything happen. His nanny is undocumented, which adds an extra layer of complication because ICE could come after her while she’s out with Maya’s son. Maya said there are days when her phone will ping with a text from the nanny saying she can’t make it to work because ICE agents are near her home.
For now, Maya tells her young son:
Do not go anywhere except with his nanny, mom and dad.
Do not walk away with any strangers.
If his nanny gets pulled over while he’s in the car, he needs to immediately say, “I want my mommy.” “I want my daddy.”
Maya also keeps a laminated card tucked into the backseat pocket of her car.It states, “If left unattended, please contact,” with her name and phone number, as well as her husband’s name and phone number.
Maya said she feels isolated in her town, which has few other women of color. She described encounters with other mothers in her area who appear confused by the fear she is experiencing. She also hasn’t been able to find any resources to help her navigate having age-appropriate conversations with her son about ICE and the political climate, which heightens the anxiety.
“I think that is the piece of motherhood that is changing so much, because when you are living a very different version of motherhood versus someone who is White, who has lived here for generations, who does not have this level of stress and anxiety on them at all times. It’s a very different experience,” she said.
In conversations with The 19th, immigrant mothers’ concerns in some ways mirrored those of the Black parents from Anderson’s research. Immigrant moms largely expressed feeling ill-equipped to handle conversations about ICE with their kids. They also struggled with the grief that their children will have to internalize adult problems at an early age.
As immigration enforcement operations intensify nationwide, families like Ana’s are building contingency plans for moments they hope never come. (Sylvia Jarrus for The 19th)
Some studies suggest that Black children who received “The Talk” report lower levels of stress related to the anticipation of police brutality. But general exposure to incidents with law enforcement has been shown to create psychological distress in Black and Brown children. For immigrants or children of immigrants, the more times a person comes into contact with immigration enforcement, the higher their risk for psychological distress and self-reported poor health outcomes over the course of their lives, Young said.
Black and Brown mothers are trying to balance all of these factors.
“No one should have to tell their children, first of all, that the streets might not be safe anymore. Like, as mothers, we don’t want to tell our children that they shouldn’t trust the police, that the police might get into their schools and try to detain kids like them,” said Linda López Stone, who came to the United States from Ecuador nearly two decades ago and has three children ages 12, 14 and 17.
She lives in Utah, and has made a point to teach her kids their basic rights and, most importantly, to know when to stay quiet. “No digas nada,” she has told them. Don’t say anything to law enforcement about themselves, their immigration status, their parents or their friends. If there’s any silver lining, Stone said, it’s that she’s raising children who are engaged and active in their communities, serving as a language bridge for their classmates who cannot speak English and passing on the safety lessons they have learned to other kids.
“I have let them know everyone is an immigrant, and everyone that you know who is a person of color is under threat, even myself,” Stone said. “So you have to make sure that the people around you, your friends and your peers, are aware of what’s happening, and it’s important to take care of each other.”
Great Job Candice Norwood & the Team @ The 19th Source link for sharing this story.
