Still from Storm Warning, 1951.

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

– Geothe

As a parable from the past to help us come to grips with our perilous present, you could do worse than screen Storm Warning, the 1951 noir that may be the most unlikely Klan movie ever made. It features Doris Day as the pregnant young wife who works in a bowling alley that just happens to serve as the local Klavern, but is clueless about everything going on around her; Ginger Rogers as her fashion model sibling who drops in for an unnaounced visit to check on little sister and exposes DD’s husband as a member of the KKK; and Ronald Reagan as the smalltown prosecutor who ends up pursuing the Klan for lynching a…reporter! Reagan and Rogers were two of Hollywood’s most prominent right-wingers. In fact, the film was shot during the time when Reagan (FBI Confidential Informant T-10), as president of SAG, was secretly snitching out members of the actors’ union he led to the Feds as suspected Reds. The theme of the Storm Warning isn’t that the KKK is racist or hates Jews (those details are taken as a given), but that it is…corrupt. A great film if you’re in the right state of mind. I watched it under the influence of a bottle of Côte du Rhone and Oregon’s most profitable agricultural product…You can find it on TCM and Criterion.

ICE is relentlessly targeting sanctuary communities, like Greater Boston, with some of its most egregious and violent arrests.

Most police in Massachusetts are prohibited from assisting ICE. But last Thursday, local cops in Worcester, Mass. pushed a 16-year-old girl to the ground and pinned her face to the sidewalk, as ICE agents handcuffed her mother and took her away to a detention center.

In a Mother’s Day raid, ICE agents were videotaped breaking an SUV’s window, throwing a man inside to the ground, handcuffing him, and driving him away. The man and his family had just left church in Chelsea, Massachusetts.

The man who recorded the footage, Kennet Santizo, told Telemundo Nueva that he heard the mother of the man ICE was targeting scream: “He has his papers! He has his license!” Santizo said the ICE officer pulled out his gun and pointed it at his face: “Then he broke the window.”

Child abuse as government policy: Another video of an ICE raid in Worcester, Mass., shows ICE agents arresting a man and leaving behind a 12-year-old boy standing on the sidewalk.

Masked ICE agents smashed the car window in Waltham, Mass, zip-tied a man inside, showed no warrant, and refused repeated demands to identify themselves as they dragged the man away. “No reaction,” said the man who filmed the raid. “They just broke the window… You know how they don’t care. Just taking this guy, and they don’t know if he is a legal resident or not.”

Officials in Dalton, Georgia, dismissed the traffic violations that led ICE to arrest 19-year-old Ximena Arias Cristobal, who came to the US when she was 4. (I reported on Ximena’s case in my last Roaming Charges.) Officials discovered the officer stopped the wrong vehicle. Ximena remains in ICE detention, facing deportation to Mexico, where she has never lived as an adult. Kasey Carpenter, Republican lawmaker in Georgia, said: “There’s been an uprising of heartbreak for our community [after Ximena’s arrest.] A lot of people felt like we were going after the hard criminals, and unfortunately, good people are getting caught on the wash on this issue.”

A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia ordered the release of Badar Khan Suri, the Georgetown postdoc fellow targeted for deportation because of his pro-Palestine speech. The judge, who said his release is in the public interest in order to “disrupt the chilling of free speech.” After the government failed to present any evidence of Khan Suri’s alleged support for Hamas, the judge imposed no conditions on his release and required no bond. So far, the Trump administration has lost every habeas case brought before a federal court, which is why they want to eliminate habeas corpus. Of the habeas cases that have been filed, only Mahmoud Khalil remains in detention because the case is moving at a more sluggish pace than the others.

According to Reuters, the Trump administration has ordered the FBI to devote at least a third of its work to immigration enforcement (ie, rounding up poor migrant workers)— and must deprioritize all white collar crime (by rich people) as a result–to the extent white collar crime was ever a priority in the first place.

Figures provided to Congress by the Pentagon’s US Transportation Command show that the Trump administration spent at least $21 million on 46 military flights carrying migrants to Guantanamo between January 20th and April 8th.

GOP Rep. Randy Weber on Trump’s plan to give noncitizens $1000 to self-deport: “I’m a Texan. I’m old school. I think that they ought to really be punished in some fashion. Maybe they can have a plane ride and fly them over their country, open the door, and they can either have $1,000 or a parachute.” Funny guy, that Weber.

Tulsi Gabbard fired the top two officials at the National Intelligence Council, Michael Collins and Maria Langard-Riefhok, after the council authored an assessment that contradicted Trump’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. It’s no surprise that Tulsi Gabbard, one of the biggest political frauds of our time, landed her dream job in the most fraudulent administration since the Teapot Dome Era.

What a weird world Trump invents inside his head…

REPORTER: Why are you creating an expedited path into the country for Afrikaners but not others?

TRUMP: Because they’re being killed. And we don’t want to see people be killed … it’s a genocide that’s taking place. Farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.

Julie K. Brown on the Afrikaner refugees “fleeing persecution” to the US: “I’ve never seen refugees with so much luggage.”

While the Trump administration continues to strip away visas and deport hundreds of students over pro-Palestinian social media posts, it has welcomed into the US an Afrikaner refugee who said Jews are “untrustworthy and dangerous,” demonstrating once again these repressive policies have nothig to do with protecting American Jews from people who hate Jews and everything to do with protecting Israel from people who object to its wholesale slaughter of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

The Episcopal Church announced this week it will end its decades-old partnership with the US government to resettle refugees, citing moral opposition to resettling white Afrikaners from South Africa who have been classified as refugees by the Trump administration.

On Monday, Customs and Border Patrol forcibly yanked Yamal Said, drummer for Lord Buffalo, the Austin, Texas-based rock band, off a plane as the band........

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