November 20, 1816 The term “scab” was first used in print by the Albany (N.Y.) Typographical Society. A scab is someone who crosses a union’s picket line and takes the job of a striking worker. Read The Scab by Jack London
November 20, 1945 The International War Crimes Tribunal began in Nuremberg, Germany, and continued until October 1, 1946, establishing that military and political subordinates are responsible for their own actions even if ordered by their superiors.Twenty-four high-ranking Nazis were on trial for atrocities committed during World War II, ranging from crimes against peace to crimes of war, to crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg Trials were conducted by judges from the United States, the Soviet Union, France, and Great Britain.The Nuremberg defendants Read more
November 20, 1959 The United Nations proclaimed “The Declaration of the Rights of the Child,” because “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth.” Read the text of the Declaration
November 20, 1962 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order forbidding racial discrimination in public housing.
November 20, 1969 Eighty-nine American Indians seized Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, offering to buy the island from the federal government for $24 worth of beads (the alleged price paid to the Canarsee Delaware Indians for Manhattan Island; it was actually 60 Dutch guilders). Their numbers swelled into the hundreds at times; the General Services Administration, which had responsibility for the site of the former federal prison, and Coast Guard gave them the opportunity to leave the island peacefully.They were reclaiming it as Indian land by right of discovery, and demanding fairness and respect for native peoples. The occupation lasted for more than a year. Said Richard Oakes, a Mohawk from New York, “We hold The Rock.” Indian people and their supporters wait for the ferry. Photo/Ilka Hartmann a new entrance to Alcatraz; Photo/Michelle Vignes Read more about the occupation LaNada Boyer (formerly Means) inside one of the Alcatraz guard barracks where occupiers lived from 1969-71. Much of the graffiti from 30 years ago remains throughout the island today. Photo by Linda Sue Scott.
November 20, 1977 Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat addressed the Israeli Knesset (parliament). “I come to you today on solid ground to shape a new life and to establish peace. “But to be absolutely frank with you, I took this decision after long thought, knowing that it constitutes a great risk….” Text of Sadat’s speech to the Israeli Knesset Listen to the speech
November 20, 1987 SANE (The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and FREEZE (the campaign to freeze all testing of nuclear weapons) merged at their first combined convention in Cleveland, Ohio, becoming the largest U.S. peace organization. Peace Action today
November 20, 1993 The U.S. Senate approved the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), creating the world’s largest trade area covering Canada, the U.S. and Mexico.
On Friday, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo locked in a $6.6 billion deal with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company for it to invest $65 billion in three state-of-the-art fabrication plants in Arizona. This will bring thousands of jobs to the state. The money comes from the CHIPS and Science Act, about which Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan on October 25: “That CHIPS deal is so bad.” House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said he would work to repeal the law, although he backed off that statement when Republicans noted the jobs the law has brought to their states.
Also on Friday, a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a Biden administration rule that would have made 4 million workers eligible for overtime pay. The rule raised the salary level below which an employer has to pay overtime from $35,568 to $43,888 this year and up to $58,656 in 2025. The decision by Texas judge Sean D. Jordan kills the measure nationally.
On Sunday, speaking from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, President Joe Biden said that it would not be possible to reverse America’s “clean energy revolution,” which has now provided jobs across the country, primarily in Republican-dominated states. Biden noted that the U.S. would spend $11 billion on financing international responses to climate change in 2024, an increase of six times from when he began his term.
But President-elect Trump has called climate change a hoax and has vowed to claw back money from the Inflation Reduction Act appropriated to mitigate it, and to turn the U.S. back to fossil fuels. What Trump will have a harder time disrupting, according to Nicolás Rivero of the Washington Post, is the new efficiency standards the Biden administration put in place for appliances. He can, though, refuse to advance those standards.
Meanwhile Trump and his team are announcing a complete reworking of the American government. They claim a mandate, although as final vote tallies are coming in, it turns out that Trump did not win 50% of the vote, and CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that his margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He also had very short coattails—four Democrats won in states Trump carried—and the Republicans have the smallest House majority since there have been 50 states, despite the help their numbers have had from the extreme gerrymandering in states like North Carolina.
More Americans voted for someone other than Trump than voted for him. (Emphases mine- A.)
Although Trump ran on lowering the cost of consumer goods, Trump and his sidekick Elon Musk, along with pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, have vowed to slash the U.S. government, apparently taking their cue from Argentina’s self-described anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei, who was the first foreign leader to visit Trump after the election. Milei’s “shock therapy” to his country threw the nation into a deep recession, just as Musk says his plans will create “hardship” for Americans before enabling the country to rebuild with security.
Ramaswamy today posted on social media, “A reasonable formula to fix the U.S. government: Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” He has suggested that cuts are easier than people think. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump noted that on a podcast in September, Ramaswamy said as an example: “If your Social Security number ends in an odd number, you’re out. If it ends in an even number, you’re in. There’s a 50 percent cut right there. Of those who remain, if your Social Security number starts in an even number, you’re in, and if it starts with an odd number, you’re out. Boom. That’s a 75 percent reduction done.”
But, as Bump notes, this reveals Ramaswamy’s lack of understanding of how the government actually works. Social Security numbers aren’t random; the first digit refers to where the number was obtained. So this seemingly random system would target certain areas of the country.
Today, both Jacob Bogage, Jeff Stein, and Dan Diamond of the Washington Post and Robert Tait of The Guardian reported that Trump’s economic advisors are talking with Republicans in Congress about cuts to Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) formerly known as food stamps, and other welfare programs, in order to cover the enormous costs of extending tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Medicaid is the nation’s health insurance for low-income Americans and long-term care. It covers more than 90 million Americans, one in five of us. Rural populations, which tend to vote Republican, use supplemental nutrition programs more than urban dwellers do.
The Washington Post reporters note that Republicans deny that they are trying to reduce benefits for the poor. They are, they say, trying to reduce wasteful and unnecessary spending. “We know there’s tremendous waste,” said House Budget Committee chairman Jodey Arrington (R-TX). “What we don’t seem to have in the hour of action, like when we have the trifecta and unified Republican leadership, is the political courage to do it for the love of country. [Trump] does.”
Those cuts will likely not sit well with the Republicans whose constituents think Trump promised there would be no cuts to the programs on which they depend.
Trump’s planned nominations of unqualified extremists have also run into trouble. Senate Republicans are so far refusing to abandon their constitutional powers in order to act as a rubber stamp to enable Trump’s worst instincts. Former representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a Trump bomb thrower, was unqualified to be the nation’s attorney general in any case, but as more information comes out about his alleged participation in drug fueled orgies, including the news that a woman allegedly told the House Ethics Committee that she saw him engage in sex with a minor, those problems have gotten worse.
Legal analyst Marcy Wheeler notes that the lawyers representing the witnesses for the committee are pushing for the release of the ethics committee’s report at least in part out of concern that if he becomes attorney general, Gaetz will retaliate against them.
According to Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, fear of the MAGA Republican colleagues who are already trying to bully them into becoming Trump loyalists is infecting congress members, too. When asked if Gaetz was qualified for the attorney general post, Representative Mike Simpson (R-ID) answered: “Are you sh*tting me, that you just asked that question? No. But hell, you’ll print that and now I’m going to be investigated.”
The many fringe medical ideas of Trump’s pick for secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., earned him the right-wing New York Post editorial board’s denigration as “nuts on a lot of fronts.” The board called his views “a head-scratching spaghetti of what we can only call warped conspiracy theories, and not just on vaccines.” Kennedy is a well-known opponent of vaccines—he called Covid-19 vaccines a “crime against humanity”—and has called for the National Institutes of Health to “take a break” of about eight years from studying infectious diseases, insisting that they should focus on chronic diseases instead.
Writing in the New York Times yesterday, Peter Baker noted that Trump “has rolled a giant grenade into the middle of the nation’s capital and watched with mischievous glee to see who runs away and who throws themselves on it.” Mischievous glee is one way to put it; another is that he is trying to destroy the foundations of the American government.
Baker notes that none of Trump’s selections would have been anything but laughable in the pre-Trump era when, for example, Democratic cabinet nominations were sunk for a failure to pay employment taxes for a nanny, or for a donor-provided car. Nor would a president-elect in the past have presumed to tap three of his own defense lawyers for top positions in the Department of Justice, effectively guaranteeing that he will be protected from scrutiny.
A former deputy White House press secretary during Trump’s first term, Sarah Matthews, said Trump is “drunk on power right now because he feels like he was given a mandate by winning the popular vote.”
Today Trump confirmed that he intends to bypass normal legal constraints on his actions by declaring a national emergency on his first day in office in order to launch his mass deportation of undocumented migrants. While the Congressional Budget Office estimates this mass deportation will cost at least $88 billion a year, another cost that is rarely mentioned is that according to Bloomberg, undocumented immigrants currently pay about $100 billion a year in taxes. Losing that income, too, will likely have to be made up with cuts from elsewhere.
Finally, today, CNBC’s economic analyst Carl Quintanilla noted today that average gasoline prices are expected to fall below $3.00 a gallon before the Thanksgiving holiday.
Pete Hegseth, the Army National Guard veteran and Fox News host nominated by Donald Trump to lead the Department of Defense, was flagged as a possible “Insider Threat” by a fellow service member due to a tattoo on his bicep that’s associated with white supremacist groups.
Hegseth, who has downplayed the role of military members and veterans in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack and railed against the Pentagon’s subsequent efforts to address extremism in the ranks, has said he was pulled by his District of Columbia National Guard unit from guarding Joe Biden’s January 2021 inauguration. He’s said he was unfairly identified as an extremist due to a cross tattoo on his chest.
This week, however, a fellow Guard member who was the unit’s security manager and on an anti-terrorism team at the time, shared with The Associated Press an email he sent to the unit’s leadership flagging a different tattoo reading “Deus Vult” that’s been used by white supremacists, concerned it was an indication of an “Insider Threat.”
Read the full article. Last month Hegseth sat for an interview with anti-LGBTQ Christian nationalist Kirk Cameron.
"This falls along the line of Insider Threat and this is what we as members of the U.S. Army, District of Columbia National Guard and the Anti-Terrorism/Force Protection Team strive to prevent," Gaither warned of Hegseth's assignment at @JoeBiden inauguration. AP obtained the… pic.twitter.com/8rJRN8N2dg
BREAKING: Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, was flagged as a possible "Insider Threat" by a fellow service member due to a tattoo he has that’s associated with white supremacists. -AP pic.twitter.com/m5AWjKYbQt
November 18, 1910 Hundreds of suffragists marched on the House of Commons in London, England, with reinforcements arriving to replace the “fallen” and arrested. Protesting government inaction on the Conciliation Bill, which would have enfranchised about a million women, they were brutally forced back by London police, leading to a public outcry. Read more
November 18, 1964 FBI director J. Edgar Hoover publicly characterized Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the most notorious liar in the country.” King replied that Hoover “has apparently faltered under the awesome burden, complexities, and responsibilities of his office.” The FBI vs. Martin Luther King Democracy Now
November 18, 1970 President Richard Nixon asked Congress for supplemental appropriations for the Cambodian government of Premier Lon Nol. Nixon requested $155 million in new funds for Cambodia — $85 million of which would be for military assistance, mainly in the form of ammunition.
November 18, 1989 More than 50,000 people took to the streets of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, demanding political reform. In the biggest demonstration in the country’s post-war history, protesters held up banners and chanted: “We want democracy now.” Read more
November 18, 1993 South Africa’s ruling National Party, and leaders of 20 other parties representing both blacks and whites, approved a new national constitution that provided fundamental rights to blacks and other non-whites, ending the apartheid system. South Africa held its first democratic multi-racial election on April 26, 1994.From the preamble: “WHEREAS there is a need to create a new order in which all South Africans will be entitled to a common South African citizenship in a sovereign and democratic constitutional state in which there is equality between men and women and people of all races so that all citizens shall be able to enjoy and exercise their fundamental rights and freedoms….” South African citizens in line to vote. Constitutional history of South Africa (2 separate pages)
November 18, 2001 In London, 100,000 marched against the U.S. and British attacks against Afghanistan.
November 16, 1928 An obscenity trial began for Radclyffe Hall’s novel, “The Well of Loneliness.” Great Britain banned it for its treatment of lesbianism, though it contained no explicit sexual references. A U.S. court in 1929 ruled similarly, for its sympathetic portrait of homosexuality, and because it “pleads for tolerance on the part of society.” Radclyffe Hall Read more
November 16, 1989 Six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were brutally murdered by U.S.-trained and -supported death squads in El Salvador.In 1995 the United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador linked the slayings to 19 members of the armed forces who were graduates of the School of the Americas (SOA, now known as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), a facility run by the U.S. Army at Fort Benning, Georgia. Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000 Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence and interrogation tactics. The graduates have consistently used their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor. The Truth Commission’s report More on the School of the Americas
November 16, 1990 President George H. W. Bush issued Executive Order 12735 which found the spread of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) to constitute an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” He declared a state of national emergency to deal with this threat. The order reiterated U.S. policy to lead and seek multilaterally coordinated efforts to control the spread of CW and BW and directed the secretaries of State and Commerce to adopt a variety of export controls.
November 16, 1994 After receiving assurances from the United States, Britain, and France, the Ukrainian Parliament approved Ukraine’s agreement to follow the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapons state.
November 17, 1973 President Nixon told an Associated Press managing editors meeting at Disney World in Orlando, Florida, that “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.” Read more
November 17, 1980 Hundreds were arrested at the Women’s Pentagon Action protest of patriarchy and its war-making. Read more
November 17, 1989 Riot police in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, arrested hundreds of people demanding the resignation of the leader of the Communist-led government. More than 15,000 people, mostly students, took part in the demonstration demanding democratic rights. [see November 18, 1989 below]
November 17, 2000 The Florida Supreme Court froze the tallying of the state’s presidential election returns, forbidding Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify results of the vote count in the presidential race between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore.
November 15, 1917 About 20 women peacefully picketing for universal suffrage (right to vote), who had been arrested in front of the White House a few days earlier, were subjected to beatings and torture at Occoquan workhouse in Virginia. The National Women’s Party and other organizations had been picketing the White House and President WoodrowWilson as he traveled around the country eversince the inauguration of his second term.
Mary Winsor The incident became known as the “night of terror.” Wilson had led the country into the European war (later called World War I), by characterizing the U.S. mission as “making the world safe for democracy.” The women demonstrating outside in Lafayette Square called attention to the need for complete democracy at home, where half of its citizens lacked complete voting rights.Many women, including Lucy Burns and Alice Paul, had been arrested several times, usually for obstructing the sidewalk, and imprisoned before. When a judge learned of the abuse he freed the women. Public outrage over their treatment increased sympathy for the suffrage movement. left: Lucy Burns in Occoquan Workhouse, Washington, DC. right: Alice Paul, New Jersey, National Chairman, Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage; Member, Ex-Officio, National Executive Committee, Woman’s Party, ca 1915.
November 15, 1940 75,000 men were called to Armed Forces duty under the first peacetime conscription. Draft inductees leaving Wilmington, Delaware in November, 1941
November 15, 1943 Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Hitler’s head of the SS (Schutzstaffel or protective rank), Gestapo, the Waffen SS and the Death’s Head units that ran the concentration camps, made public an order that Gypsies (more properly the Roma) and those of mixed Roma blood were to be put on “the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps.” Gypsy prisoners arriving at a Concentration Camp
Himmler was determined to prosecute Nazi racial policies, which dictated the elimination from Germany and German-controlled territories of all races deemed “inferior,” as well as “asocial” types, such as hardcore criminals. Gypsies fell into both categories according to the thinking of Nazi ideologues and had been executed in droves both in Poland and the Soviet Union. The order of November 15 was merely a more comprehensive program, as it included the deportation to the Auschwitz death camp of Gypsies already in labor camps. The Gypsies in Germany Gypsies: Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust
November 15, 1957 U.S. Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) was founded. Thirty years later on November 20, SANE merged with the Nuclear Freeze organization (dedicated to freezing all nuclear weapons testing worldwide) at a joint convention in Cleveland to form SANE/FREEZE. Its successor is known as Peace Action, the largest U.S. peace organization. Sane Nuclear Policy poster, 1960 SANE history Peace Action
November 15, 1969 Following a symbolic three-day “March Against Death,” the second national “moratorium” against the Vietnam War opened with massive and peaceful demonstrations in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. Organized by the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“New Mobe”), an estimated 500,000 demonstrators participated as part of the largest such gathering to date. It began with a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House (while Pres. Nixon watched the Purdue-Ohio State football game on TV) to the Washington Monument, where a mass rally with speeches was held.
Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Peter, Paul and Mary, and four different touring casts of the musical “Hair” entertained the demonstrators. The rally concluded with nearly 40 hours of continuous reading of known U.S. deaths (to that date) in the Vietnam War.
November 15, 1986 A government tribunal in Nicaragua convicted American Eugene Hasenfus, a CIA operative, of delivering arms to Contra rebels and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. He had been arrested when his plane was shot down by Sandanista troops. He was pardoned a month after his conviction (his last name means “rabbit’s foot” in German). Hasenfus under arrest
November 14, 1910 Eugene Ely performed the first airplane takeoff from a ship. His Curtiss pusher flew from the deck of the U.S.S. Birmingham in Hampton Roads, Virginia.By January he would execute the first (takeoff and) landing on a warship, the U.S.S. Pennsylvania. Captain Washington I. Chambers of the Navy Department had been interested in the military uses for the seven-year-old invention. Naval flight training started shortly thereafter. More of the whole story
November 14, 1954 “Ten Million Americans Mobilized for Justice” began a campaign to collect 10 million signatures on a petition urging the Senate not to censure Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin). The motion of censure against Senator McCarthy was for obstructing a Senate committee and for acting inexcusably and reprehensibly toward a U.S. soldier appearing before his own committee. McCarthy had used his Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee to publicly denounce thousands as subversive, especially within the federal government, many without any justification. The political views of most were painted as treasonable and conspiratorial, rather than differing political views. The petition effort fell about nine million signatures short. More on Joe McCarthy
November 14, 2000 Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, simultaneously co-chair of George W. Bush’s Florida presidential campaign organization and the public official responsible for the conduct of the election itself, certified Governor Bush’s fragile 300-vote lead over Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election. Katherine Harris Florida Judge Terry Lewis gave Harris the authority to accept or reject a follow-up manual recount from some counties where the count was open to question. Harris rejected the manual recounts.
November 13, 1933 The first recorded “sit-down” strike in the U.S. was staged by workers at the Hormel Packing Company in Austin, Minnesota. When the Independent Union of All Workers (IUAW) went on strike, the company tried to bring in scab (strike-breaking) workers.
“ Four hundred men, many of them armed with clubs, sticks and rocks, crashed through the plant entrance, shattering the glass doors and sweeping the guards before them. The strikers quickly ran throughout the plant to chase out non-union workers. One . . . group crashed through the doors of a conference room where Jay Hormel and five company executives were meeting and declared “We’re taking possession. So move out!” (Larry Engelmann, “We Were the Poor — The Hormel Strike of 1933,” Labor History, Fall, 1974.) The tactic worked: within four days Hormel agreed to submit wage demands to binding arbitration. The success of this strike reinvigorated the labor movement, which had been in decline throughout the 1920s.
November 13, 1956 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregation unconstitutional in public transportation. The case, Browder v. Gayle, was brought by four women, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, who had refused to surrender their bus seats to whites in Montgomery (months before Rosa Parks had done so), and had been arrested for violating Alabama law which required segregation on public buses.They challenged the law and the Court agreed, finding the law under which they were arrested in violation of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Aurelia Browder A roadside monument was dedicated in 2004 to the four plantiffs in the Browder v. Gayle case. Colvin, a 15-year-old student at Booker T. Washington High School, boarded a bus in 1955 and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She was handcuffed, arrested and forcibly removed from the bus, as she screamed that her constitutional rights were being violated. More on Browder v. Gayle
November 13, 1960 Over 1000 Quakers (members of the Society of Friends) surrounded the Pentagon for a silent vigil to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the first Quaker Peace Testimony issued to King Charles II in 1660. From the original Peace Testimony: “We utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world….” The complete text of the 1660 Declaration
November 13, 1974 Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist (Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers’ Union) at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium fuels production plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, was killed in a one-car crash. Read more about her story
November 13, 1982 Maya Ying Lin The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C. Carved into black granite are the 58,260 names of those Americans who died in Vietnam. The designer, Maya Ying Lin of Athens, Ohio, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University, was the winner of the competition that drew 1,421 design entries: “. . . this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.” Eventually, the Memorial included three elements, the Wall of names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial. The Wall of Names, the Three Servicemen Statue and Flagpole, and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial
I am so tired of this stupid lie. The right / republicans keep using it because the children they stole from parents at the border back during tRump’s term have never been found and returned to their parents. That is what this asshole false claim is about. Here are the facts. And also notice that the time frame includes tRump’s first term! Want to know why this pisses me off so much !!! Because as an abused kid I could have been saved if people had cared enough to do it. Instead the republicans do this shit that helps no child, helps no kid. Hugs
Kamala Harris is expected to visit the U.S.-Mexico border during a trip to Arizona this week as the Vice President attempts to win over voters on immigration policy ahead of the November election
Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted Harris over the number of border crossings during the Biden administration, highlighting the role handed to her by the president to investigate the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America.
Trump went after Harris again earlier this week during a rally in Pennsylvania when he accused her of losing hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who had entered the country.
At a speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 2024, Donald Trump claimed that Kamala Harris had lost more than 325,000 migrant children.
“She [Kamala Harris] lost more than 325,000 migrant children,” Trump said.
“They’re gone, nobody knows where they are. Many of them are dead, many of them are in sex trade, many of them, but many of them are dead, they’ve been trafficked, they’ve been raped. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand children are missing.”
August 2024 audit by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that uncovered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) statistics on unaccompanied migrant children (UCs).
Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, ICE transferred over 448,000 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). After apprehension by the Department of Homeland Security, children are transferred by ICE to ORR.
ORR handles the care and custody of these children awaiting immigration hearings. Care and custody include placing children in shelters or with a sponsor. ICE is responsible for managing immigration cases, and the audit showed the agency struggled to monitor the whereabouts of many of these children after their release from ORR custody.
ICE reported that more than 32,000 children had failed to appear for scheduled immigration court hearings between 2019 and 2023. ICE also failed to serve Notices to Appear (NTAs) on 291,000 children, leaving them without scheduled court dates and outside the formal immigration process.
The “more than 325,000” figure appears to be a combination of the 291,000 children who had not been issued a court date and the 32,000 who did not appear for scheduled dates, off by a couple of thousand.
Crucially, the main figure to focus on is the 32,000 children who missed their court date, the audit noting that ICE “was not able to account for the location of all UCs who were released by HHS and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court.”
The audit also said that failure to send an NTA could limit the chances of maintaining contact when children are released from ORR custody, adding ICE did not always inform ORR about the failure to appear in court.
“Similarly, when ICE does not share information with HHS regarding UCs who did not appear for hearings, HHS personnel are unable to determine if UCs need wellness checks or post-release services for individuals at an increased risk of being trafficked,” the report stated.
“Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”
However, Trump combined the figures even though the audit did not say that the 291,000 who had not been issued an NTA were lost.
The report also does not say that ICE could not find all 32,000 children who had not appeared in court. ICE is not a child welfare authority either; as explained here and in previous Newsweek fact checks, unaccompanied minors are placed into the care of sponsors if available which ORR is meant to monitor. Although there have been concerns regarding the risk of exploitation in this system, the context of who carries responsibility here is important.
Furthermore, the OIG audit covered cases between fiscal years 2019 and 2023. Although more children were transferred into ORR custody between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, Trump’s administration oversaw transfers during the 2019 and 2020 periods and part of 2021.
Newsweek has contacted media representatives for ICE, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the White House via email for comment.
Trump also claimed during his speech that “many” of the children were “dead”, “in sex trade”, and “raped.” The report does not make that conclusion. While the OIG report mentions exploitation vulnerability, it does not support Trump’s claim.
The Ruling
False.
Trump’s claim is based on an audit that showed between fiscal years 2019-2023 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had reported that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not appeared in court for immigration proceedings. The audit found that ICE “was not able to account for the location” of all these children.
The audit also said ICE had not issued orders for 291,000 children to appear in court.
Trump appears to have combined these two figures to try to make 325,000. The audit did not state that the 291,000 without court orders were missing, nor did it say that all 32,000 children could not be located. ICE is not a child welfare authority and unaccompanied migrant children are placed in shelters or with a sponsor by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is meant to monitor placements.
The audit monitored reporting under the Trump and Biden administrations.
The Nuremberg defendants
Mary Winsor
Aurelia Browder
Maya Ying Lin
Scottie's Playtime 