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Washington Post Columnist Quits—and Rips Jeff Bezos on His Way Out

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Former Washington Post writer Joe Davidson made sure to make his disdain for Post owner Jeff Bezos known in a scathing resignation letter.

In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Davidson stated that he was stepping down from his position as the “Federal Insider” columnist, a position he held since 2008, because the paper had pulled one of his columns for being too critical of Donald Trump.

“For me, the cost became too great when a Federal Insider column I wrote was killed because it was deemed too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy, which I had not heard of previously,” Davidson wrote.

“Blocking my column because it was too opinionated was a shock. I’ve authored many pieces over my 17 years writing the Federal Diary (renamed the Federal Insider in 2016), that were at least if not more opinionated as the now dead one. In that piece, I argued that ‘one hallmark of President Donald Trump’s first three, turbulent months in office is his widespread, ominous attack on thought, belief and speech.’ The piece contained specific examples, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s alarming memo supporting deportation of Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil. Rubio said Khalil could be expelled for ‘expected beliefs … that are otherwise lawful.’ What immigrants might believe in the future now can make them federal law enforcement targets.”

Davidson went on to mention that his article covered the DHS kidnapping of Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing a pro-Palestinian op-ed, a “terrifying sight” reminiscent of “George Orwell’s dystopian and cautionary tale against totalitarianism and thought police in [his] novel ‘1984.’”

“Killing that column was a death blow to my life as a Washington Post columnist. But I wrote two more articles to see if I could cope with the restrictions. That’s when I learned just how severe the policy is. In my next piece, I was not allowed to describe a potential pay raise for federal employees as ‘well-deserved’ because of Post policy,” Davidson continued.

“As a columnist, I can’t live with that level of constraint. A column without commentary made me a columnist without a column. I also was troubled by significant inconsistencies in the implementation of the policy. During this period, The Post allowed stronger, opinionated language by other staffers, including the words ‘viciousness,’ ‘cruelty’ and ‘meanness’ to describe Trump’s actions.”

There has been an alarming amount of capitulation to Trump from the media in this first year of his second term. Earlier this month, CBS settled with Trump for $16 million in a defamation lawsuit.

“I’m gone from The Post, but only as a journalist. Many people understandably have canceled subscriptions to protest Bezos’s actions that have damaged the news organization’s integrity,” Davidson wrote. “I still subscribe, and read and support the enduring fine work of Post journalists in the newspaper and digitally.”

A new report from The Atlantic’s Nick Miroff finds morale at Immigration and Customs Enforcement is suffering as the agency, under the direction of President Trump and Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, targets undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes.

While the Trump administration may claim its deportation campaign prioritizes violent criminals and gang members, in reality, it has focused on arresting noncriminals, evidently to hit quotas passed down by Trump and Miller.

And while the administration may claim ICE agents are happier than ever, Miroff’s report—based on conversations with 12 current and former ICE personnel—shows that the change is frustrating many agents and officers.

One ICE veteran finds the job so “infuriating” that the agent is considering quitting. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” said the agent, who complained about having to focus instead on “arresting gardeners.”

A former agent told Miroff that “morale is in the crapper,” and “even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”

Another former ICE official suggested that this shift is vindicating criticisms the agency has faced in the past, observing, “What we’re seeing now is what, for many years, we were accused of being, and could always safely say, ‘We don’t do that.’”

One of Miroff’s interviewees was Adam Boyd, a young attorney who resigned from the agency’s legal department because it’s no longer focused on “protecting the homeland from threats.” Instead, he said, “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.”

Boyd told Miroff: “We still need good attorneys at ICE. There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

One former ICE official said that there are now “national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed,” as the agency moves staff from its Homeland Security Investigations division, focused largely on transnational crime, to its Enforcement and Removal Operations division—a move that many perceive as retaliation for HSI in recent years distancing itself from the agency’s deportation arm.

When Miller issued his demand for 3,000 arrests per day, he reportedly

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