Border wall contractors face growing boycotts from Dem-led cities

As President Trump pushes forward with his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall, companies competing for the chance to work on the multi-billion-dollar project are facing mounting boycotts from local Democratic lawmakers moving to blacklist the border builders.

Coordinated efforts have been launched in California, Arizona, Illinois, New York and Rhode Island that would prohibit cities and towns from doing any official business with the companies as part of a larger resistance strategy to delay construction of the controversial wall.

Most recently, Berkeley’s City Council in California approved an ordinance that would ban it from contracting with companies involved in the construction.
The proposal, drafted by Mayor Jesse Arreguin and Councilmembers Ben Bartless, Sophie Hahn and Cheryl Davila, argues that the wall would harm California’s prosperity.
Arreguin called the border wall a “highly impractical response to America’s broken immigration system, and a symbol of hatred that will only further demonize the people of Mexican and Latin American descent.”
This follows a March measure approved by the council that would vet contracts to avoid business with border wall-affiliated companies. Earlier this month, the council expanded the policy to prohibit investment with companies involved in the “designing, building or financing” of the wall. The latest ordinance formalizes those rules.

'This is the worst kind of populism.'

“Our divestment policy is a message that we don’t want to do business with companies that seek to profit off of separating families, degrading the environment and heightening tensions with long-time partners such as Mexico,” Arreguin told Fox News.
Berkeley’s new mandate comes on the heels of a similar economic boycott that passed in Oakland last month.
In that case, the Oakland City Council barred the city from entering into new or amended contracts with companies that work with the federal government to build the border wall.
Construction, engineering, planning and information technology businesses are all subject to the ban. So are subcontractors and financial institutions.
Councilmember Abel Guillen said it is important to put “our dollars where our values are.”

Companies involved in a planned U.S.-Mexico border wall are facing boycotts in several cities.  (AP)

A December committee proposal in Los Angeles -- still under consideration -- requires anyone wanting to do business with the city to disclose any bids they have made. However, it does not prohibit the city from entering into contracts with border builders.
It so happens that some of the cities boycotting these contractors have the kind of 'sanctuary' policies that the Trump administration is aggressively fighting.
"It's just amazing to me why any city would not want to rid itself of criminals who are also in the country illegally," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said earlier this month.
The Associated General Contractors of America told Fox News it has gone to the White House and Sessions, asking that they apply pressure and sue states and localities trying to deny contractors work based on their involvement building the border wall.
“This is the worst kind of populism,” Brian Turmail, spokesman for the AGCA, said. “Given the fact that this administration has been aggressively pursuing sanctuary cities, this seems like an easy slam dunk.”
He also accuses ambitious state and local lawmakers of trying to score political points off of contractors and says it sets a dangerous precedent.
“Today, it’s you don’t like the border wall while tomorrow you could have an anti-war mayor who refuses to work with defense contractors,” Turmail said.
At the center of the sanctuary city debate is California, which has also considered going after border wall companies at the state level.
Earlier this year, three Democratic state senators introduced a bill that would require California’s pension funds to divest from any company involved in building the wall. It would also require the California Public Employee Retirement System and the California State Teachers Retirement System to liquidate any investments in companies that aid in construction.
“This is a wall of shame and we don’t want any part of it,” Assemblyman Phil Ting said in a written statement. “Californians build bridges not walls.”
Nearly 100 of the roughly 600 companies interested in bidding on the border project are based in California.
On the East Coast, Rhode Island state Rep. Aaron Regunberg introduced legislation in May requiring the state divest any funds from companies involved in Trump’s border wall.
“We’re saying he shouldn’t be creating this symbol of xenophobia and hate using Rhode Island state dollars,” Regunberg said.
During a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Trump said he might soon head to San Diego where six construction companies have built eight border wall prototypes for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
“I may be going there very shortly to look at them in their final form,” Trump told members of his Cabinet.
It remains unclear when the wall might actually go up. Trump campaigned on building it and set an ambitious timetable for construction. But aside from potential funding and political complications, there have been court challenges from geologists.
Critics also say the barrier would be ineffective and costly. On the campaign trail, Trump said Mexico would pay for the bill. That’s not happening. He also said the cost to build the wall would be $4 billion. Estimates have ranged wildly, but have since soared as high as $70 billion, though the actual cost is not clear.

Trump administration considering to separate families who illegally cross U.S.-Mexico border

Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen speaks during a news conference, after a US-Mexico bilateral meeting on disrupting transnational criminal organizations at State Department in Washington, Thursday, Dec. 14, 2017. ( AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Trump administration is weighing a policy that would separate families who are caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally as a way to discourage more arrivals, the Washington Post reported Thursday.

The policy, developed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Officials and other Department of Homeland Security agencies, would place children in protective custody or with an approved sponsor while their parents would be placed in a detention facility to await deportation, officials told the Post.  

“People aren’t going to stop coming unless there are consequences to illegal entry,” a DHS official told the paper.
Under current policy, families caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally are held together at detention centers or released with a court date while awaiting a decision on their deportation.
The idea to separate families had been circulating earlier this year in the DHS, but was canned after the proposal received backlash and illegal migration levels dropped. 
According to Customs and Border Protection, when Trump took office in January, the number of people illegally crossing the border dwindled to the lowest number in 17 years.
But the controversial measure is being considered once again after the number of illegal border crossings has climbed back up. In November, immigration authorities apprehended 7,000 family units and 4,000 unaccompanied minors – a 45 percent increase from the previous month according to DHS statistics.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has final approval power, however. DHS officials told the Post that Nielsen has not yet signed off on the plan. 

Jill Stein says Americans need to 'see the evidence of Russian culpability' in election meddling

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein told Fox News Thursday night that Americans "have yet to see the proof" that Moscow meddled in last year's election.
Stein confirmed earlier this week that the Senate Intelligence Committee had contacted her campaign to request documents, including emails, as part of its investigation into Russian activities and alleged collusion between campaigns and foreign interests.
"I think there are legitimate aims here in the investigation," Stein told Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight." "Interference in our election is much bigger than the Russians and ... I would like to see the evidence of Russian culpability here."
Stein compared the Russia investigation to the run-up to the Iraq War, saying, "We didn’t get to really see the evidence [then] ... We are still paying that price -- $5.5 trillion and counting. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me a gazillion times, shame on all of us."
Stein also addressed her attendance at a now-infamous dinner in Moscow marking the 10th anniversary of RT, a Russian state-run news and propaganda channel. She was photographed sitting at a table with Russian President Vladimir Putin and future national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is now cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation.
"The dinner ... was really a non-event," Stein said. "At one point, Putin came in with a couple of guys that I assumed were his bodyguards. Turns out they were actually his inner circle, but you would have never known it. Nobody was introduced to anybody ... At one point, Putin made a very rapid turn around the table and shook everybody’s hand, but without any exchange of names, so that’s about as significant as this was."

Chain Migration Cartoons 2017

Hell freezes over: Media start admitting that Trump's first year isn't a flop

I have sensed for weeks now that some in the media were on the verge of rolling out a contrary take on President Trump’s first year in office.

And in the wake of yesterday’s final passage of massive tax cuts, that moment has arrived.

The dominant media narrative, of course, is that Trump hasn’t gotten much done, that he’s in over his head, that he doesn’t understand government, that he keeps picking petty fights rather than winning big battles.
But the thing about the pundits is that they get tired of pushing the same line, week after week, month after month. Some inevitably want to seize credit for a new insight, for getting ahead of the pack with a burst of contrarian wisdom.
And that hot take is, hey, maybe Trump has gotten some important things done after all.
It’s true that the president had not gotten much from the Republican Congress this year. But a new law that cuts taxes for businesses and individuals—even though the measure polls poorly and is not mainly aimed at the middle class—puts an end to the verdict that Trump doesn’t know how to work the Hill. Like it or not, this is a sprawling piece of legislation that was quickly pushed through the House and Senate in a show of party-line muscle.
Trump hasn’t gotten much credit for the record-breaking stock market, but there is now some recognition that Dow-Almost-25,000 can’t be completely divorced from his policies. And there’s starting to be a greater appreciation for the president’s progress on slashing regulations and appointing judges (even though three nominees recently had to withdraw, one because he couldn’t answer a Senate panel’s questions about basic court procedures).
On Axios, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen stake out the new ground:
"The media often appraises presidencies and politics through liberal-tinted glasses. But the vast majority of the Republican Party like, even love, these policies ...
"We have been saying all year: Watch what he does, not what he says. Until recently, he hasn't done much. But these wins are substantial, with consequences for millions of people and many years to come."

They note that Trump has won approval not just for Neil Gorsuch but for a dozen Circuit Court judges.
And while Trump failed in repeated attempts to scrap ObamaCare, he boasted yesterday abolishing the individual mandate—a provision added to the tax bill—amounts to repealing the health care program. That’s an overstatement, but letting people wait until they get sick to buy insurance could well undermine the exchanges created by Barack Obama.
On foreign policy, there is a telling New York Times piece by conservative columnist Ross Douthat, a harsh critic of Trump. He says the decimation of ISIS has drawn scant media attention:
"There is nothing more characteristic of the Trump era, with its fire hose of misinformation, scandal and hyperbole, than that America and its allies recently managed to win a war that just two years ago consumed headlines and dominated political debate and helped Donald Trump himself get elected president — and somehow nobody seemed to notice."

It’s true there was no surrender ceremony and ISIS still exists, but it has lost physical stronghold in Iraq.
Says Douthat: “This is also a press failure, a case where the media is not adequately reporting an important success because it does not fit into the narrative of Trumpian disaster in which our journalistic entities are all invested.”
But the narrative is changing a bit. While Trump remains quite unpopular, at least according to the polls, the media are reluctantly starting to acknowledge that his presidency is having a significant impact.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz. 

From Omarosa and Huckabee to Joe and Mika, politics of feuding takes center stage

Media Buzz

6 days ago

In Washington, politics is personal. And lately it’s been getting intensely personal.

Kind of like when you were in high school.

Omarosa's departure from the White House was always going to attract an unusual degree of attention—since she was not exactly a major policymaker—because Donald Trump had fired her on "The Apprentice." But yesterday it became about a feud.
While Omarosa Manigault insists she resigned, White House correspondent April Ryan reported that she was fired in a nasty confrontation—and was escorted off White House grounds.
Omarosa denied that on "Good Morning America," blaming the report on "one individual who has a personal vendetta against me"—meaning Ryan.
Ryan, a CNN contributor who also works for American Urban Radio Networks, pushed back on the air, saying she was a beat reporter doing her job. "That’s what a White House correspondent does: listens to sources inside the White House and outside of the White House," she said on CNN.
The Secret Service took the unusual step of denying any role in removing Omarosa from the White House. But several news outlets, including The New York Times, said she was hustled off the premises and was leaving after a clash with John Kelly, the chief of staff, who limited her access to Trump.
Omarosa did seem to hint at a coming book, or something, in telling Michael Strahan on "GMA" that as "the only African American woman in this White House senior staff, I have seen things that have made me uncomfortable, that have upset me and affected me deeply and emotionally and affected my people and my community."
Over the summer, Ryan said she and Omarosa had been friends but she was "screaming at the top of her lungs" about a false rumor involving the reporter, and "I embarrassed her in front of reporters and people in that office ... I made mincemeat of her."
See? Politics is personal.
And that also applies to the case of the Scarboroughs vs. the Huckabees.
To recap: Kirsten Gillibrand called on Trump to resign. The president ripped her in a tweet, saying she had been begging him for campaign contributions "and would do anything for them."
That set off a wave of media criticism, and Mika Brzezinski led the chorus. She’d had her own very personal clash with Trump, a onetime friend, when he claimed in a tweet that she was bleeding from a face lift. (Got it so far?)
So Brzezinski denounced the president on "Morning Joe" for what she described as a "reprehensible" attack on a woman. And then she turned to his press secretary, saying Sarah Huckabee Sanders should not defend her boss’s tweet (though that is sort of her job).
"Don’t lie," Brzezinski said. "And do not defend the president of the United States for what he did. If you do ... you should resign."
That didn’t sit well with the former governor of Arkansas, who of course is Sanders' dad.
Mike Huckabee said on Fox that "I was stunned that of all the people who are going to give a lecture on morality and family, and marriage, it’s going to be Mika?"
Huckabee defended the presidential tweet, said his daughter "deserves better from other women" and added, "Mika can go pound sand somewhere as far as I’m concerned."
Now that brought a blast from Mika’s partner and fiancé, Joe Scarborough, who was understandably upset at the reference to their romance, which became public only when they announced their engagement.
"What a sleazy thing to do," Morning Joe said, adding: "Mika never talked about marriage. She never lectured on the morality of any of that…What a judgmental, predictably stupid thing to do."
There are serious issues here—about the president and women, his battle with a leading senator, the responsibility of his press secretary. But with fathers and fiances getting involved, it became, like so much inside the Beltway, brutally personal.

Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m.). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz. 

Trump administration can retain DACA documents, Supreme Court rules

The Supreme Court on Wednesday lifted an order requiring the Trump administration and federal agencies to release internal documents related to the withdrawal of an Obama-era program that offered a deportation reprieve to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.

In a unanimous ruling, the high court ordered lower courts to hold off any demands of documents from federal agencies until a ruling is reached on the Trump administration's attempts to dismiss five lawsuits in California that challenge the legality of the order to rescind DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), Politico reported.

The lawsuits argue that the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) determination to completely rescind the limited amnesty program by March 2018 was unlawful because “It violates the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.”
After the government provided only 250 pages of documents related to the program’s termination, the challengers accused the administration of concealing records, claiming the termination of such program would have created a large volume of documents.

Protesters demonstrating against the decision to rescind an Obama-era program that offered a deportation reprieve to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.  (Associated Press)

U.S. District Judge William Alsup sided with the plaintiffs and ordered DHS and the Justice Department to turn over more documents related to the DACA reversal. This order, according to the Supreme Court’s opinion, was wrong and should have not been made.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions praised the high court’s ruling, saying it was “a crucially important ruling” and vowed to “continue to defend the Trump Administration’s lawful actions.”
“The discovery order in the DACA cases was dramatically intrusive and premature, and I am pleased with tonight’s decision that the district court’s order was ‘overly broad,’” Sessions said.
He added: “Make no mistake, this was a crucially important ruling, and the fact it was granted by a unanimous Supreme Court cannot be overstated. We will continue to defend the Trump administration’s lawful actions.”
But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who brought one of the five lawsuits challenging the White House over the DACA decision, told Politico that the ruling was not a win for the administration as it left the possibility that the challengers were eligible to more information.
"Today the Supreme Court has essentially told us that no one — not even the president — can hide the facts," he said.
Both the White House and leaders in Congress were working on legislation to address the issue and replace the legally contentious DACA program with a legal status for those who are or were covered by the program, Fox News reported.
It is likely that a bipartisan deal will emerge in January and include border security measures at the request of the White House in exchange for a deal on DACA.

McCabe draws blank on Democrats’ funding of Trump dossier, new subpoenas planned

EXCLUSIVE: Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Tuesday’s seven-hour interrogation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas next week on Justice Department and FBI personnel.

While HPSCI staff would not confirm who will be summoned for testimony, all indications point to demoted DOJ official Bruce G. Ohr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker, who accompanied McCabe, along with other lawyers, to Tuesday’s HPSCI session.

The issuance of a subpoena against the Justice Department’s top lawyer could provoke a new constitutional clash between the two branches, even worse than the months-long tug of war over documents and witnesses that has already led House Speaker Paul Ryan to accuse DOJ and FBI of “stonewalling” and HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to threaten contempt-of-Congress citations against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.
“It’s hard to know who’s telling us the truth,” said one House investigator after McCabe’s questioning.
Fox News is told that several lawmakers participated in the questioning of McCabe, led chiefly by Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C.

Bruce G. Ohr was demoted at the DOJ for concealing his meetings with the men behind the anti-Trump 'dossier.'  (AP)

Sources close to the investigation say that McCabe was a “friendly witness” to the Democrats in the room, who are said to have pressed the deputy director, without success, to help them build a case against President Trump for obstruction of justice in the Russia-collusion probe. “If he could have, he would have,” said one participant in the questioning.
Investigators say McCabe recounted to the panel how hard the FBI had worked to verify the contents of the anti-Trump “dossier” and stood by its credibility. But when pressed to identify what in the salacious document the bureau had actually corroborated, the sources said, McCabe cited only the fact that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had traveled to Moscow. Beyond that, investigators said, McCabe could not even say that the bureau had verified the dossier’s allegations about the specific meetings Page supposedly held in Moscow.
The sources said that when asked when he learned that the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall – despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe’s own signature on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier’s financing and provenance.
The decision by HPSCI staff to subpoena Ohr comes as he is set to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is conducting its own probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Until earlier this month, when Fox News began investigating him, Ohr held two titles at DOJ: associate deputy attorney general, a post that placed him four doors down from his boss, Rosenstein; and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF), a program described by the department as “the centerpiece of the attorney general’s drug strategy.”
Ohr will retain his OCDETF title but was stripped of his higher post and ousted from his office on the fourth floor of “Main Justice.” Department officials confirmed that Ohr had withheld from superiors his secret meetings in 2016 with Christopher Steele, the former British spy who authored the dossier with input from Russian sources; and with Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that hired Steele with funds supplied by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Subsequently, Fox News disclosed that Ohr’s wife Nellie, an academic expert on Russia, had worked for Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

Glenn Simpson, shown here, met with DOJ official Bruce Ohr in 2016.

Former FBI Director James Comey, testifying before the House in March, described the dossier as a compendium of “salacious and unverified” allegations against then-candidate Donald Trump and his associates. The Nunes panel has spent much of this year investigating whether DOJ, under then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch, used the dossier to justify a foreign surveillance warrant against Page, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign.
DOJ and FBI say they have cooperated extensively with Nunes and his team, including the provision of several hundred pages of classified documents relating to the dossier. The DOJ has also made McCabe available to the House Judiciary Committee for a closed-door interview on Thursday.
The Justice Department and FBI declined to comment for this report.
James Rosen joined FOX News Channel (FNC) in 1999 and is the network’s chief Washington correspondent.
Jake Gibson is a producer working at the Fox News Washington bureau who covers politics, law enforcement and intelligence issues.