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OPINIONOPINION

Mountain View News Saturday, March 22, 2025

HOWARD Hays As I See It


“The largest, most significant modern and balanced trade agreement in history . . 
. All of our countries will benefit greatly.” 

– President Trump signing the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, 2018

“Who would ever sign a thing like this? . . .We were led by, in some cases, fools” – 
President Trump, 2025

“I don’t care what the judges think.” – Trump “border czar” Tom Homan

President Trump knows he has to pick up his numbers on deportations – and he’s not about 
to let any judge get in his way. “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of 
criminals in the history of America.”, he said during his campaign. In February, ICE deportations 
(11,000) lagged behind what they were February 2024 (12,000) under President Biden 
– who did, in fact, target criminals while affording due process under our laws. 

 

Mahmoud Khalil is a permanent legal resident married to an American citizen (their first 
child due next month), a recent Columbia University grad student arrested by ICE for having 
led pro-tests against the Israeli bombing of Gaza. He’s being held under the Immigration and 
Naturaliza-tion Act that provides for deportation if their “presence or activities . . . the Secretary 
of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign 
policy conse-quences for the United States”.

 

When asked on CBS whether Khalil had committed any crime, supported Hamas or done 
any-thing other than exercise his First Amendment right to protest, all Secretary of State Rubio 
could offer was that maybe he shouldn’t have been allowed here in the first place. Khalil 
is under indefinite detention as the government seeks to deport him.

 

There’s Rhode Island organ transplant specialist Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 2015 med school graduate, 
fellowships and residencies at three U.S. universities, H1-B visa holder (valid until 2027) 
and professor at Brown University. She was detained at Boston’s Logan airport upon returning 
from visiting her family in Lebanon and told she was being deported. An Assistant U.S. 
Attorney said, “her true intentions in the United States could not be determined”. A judge 
ordered a halt to the deportation, but she was put on a plane and sent out of the country, 
anyway. 

 

Now we have those planes taking alleged gang members to a prison in El Salvador – offshoring 
incarceration to a third country. They supposedly belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua 
– though in some cases it appears to have been simply a matter of having a suspicious tat-too. 

 

This comes six months after candidate Trump kept repeating how Tren de Aragua had taken 
over apartment buildings in Colorado - long after that story had been debunked by local police 
and the apartments’ residents. And then his campaigning on Venezuela releasing “millions” 
from its prisons and asylums to pour into our country – a charge then (as now) called 
“laughable”.

 

Trump is carrying out these particular deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. 
It’s only been invoked three times in our history; during the War of 1812, WWI and WWII 
– against nations with whom we were actually at war as declared by Congress. The court 
seemed unwilling to let that fly in this case – regardless of how much Trump talks of a migrant 
“invasion”- and ordered the flights halted pending further review.

 

The administration then chose to play games with the court and our laws. Trump attorneys 
maintained that since the planes took off after the judge made his verbal order but before a 
written one was filed, everything was cool. They asserted that once the planes were over 

international waters, they were outside the court’s jurisdiction. But the Judge made clear that 
as long as the detainees were in U.S. custody, until they’re handed over to Salvadoran authorities, 
the court had jurisdiction.

 

There’s an appellate process available for rulings they don’t like, but instead they choose to 
simply ignore rulings and go after the Judge. For House Republicans, having abandoned any 
pretense of being a check on the president themselves, they want to make sure the judiciary 
doesn’t exercise its constitutional role, either – and have begun impeachment proceedings 
against this Judge. He's been called “Crooked” and a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge” by the 
President of the United States, Donald Trump.

 

A family was stopped on their 
drive from Rio Grande, Texas to 
Houston. The parents are undocumented 
with kids who are 
U.S. citizens. Their 10-year-old 
daughter (right), was diagnosed 
with brain cancer last year, had a 
tumor removed, and they’ve since 
been making regular trips for follow-
up treatment with specialists 
in Houston. 

 

They’d had no problems on these 
trips – showing letters from their 
lawyer and doctors at the checkpoint. 
But this time, the parents 
were stopped and given a choice: 
either the entire family be deported 
or just the parents - with kids 
turned over to foster care. Faced 
with the choice of either their 
daughter no longer having access 
to this specialized care or perhaps 
forever losing custody of her, they 
chose to keep the family together 
and hope for the best in Mexico.

 

“Border czar” Tom Homan has 
a message for such parents: “you 
put your family in that position”.

 

The administration has laid off 
dozens of immigration judges and 
slashed funding for immigration 
courts and non-profits set up to 
guide migrants and asylum-seekers 
through the process – with a current backlog of nearly four million cases. It’s easier just 
to summarily deport them. 

 

Even if judges thought they had a solution for that family in Texas, one where they could keep 
their family together while also continuing treatment for their daughter, Homan wouldn’t 
“care what the judges think”, anyway. He needs to help Trump get those deportation numbers 
up. 


DICK POLMAN


JACKIE ROBINSON INFO YOU WON’T GET 
FROM THE MAGA PENTAGON

Wow, a chance to write about a baseball player! Thanks, MAGA!

You may have heard what happened the other day. Trump’s apparatchiks, 
in their quest to scrub all vestiges of racial diversity from federal websites 
(they call diversity “a form of Woke cultural Marxism”), somehow saw fit 
to erase Jackie Robinson from the Pentagon’s online roll call of athletes 
who’d served their country.

Yes, that Jackie Robinson.

His military service during World War II was flushed down the Orwellian memory hole some 
time on Tuesday. We think it was Tuesday. An ESPN reporter noticed that Jackie’s page was 
gone on Tuesday night, so it’s not clear how long the erasure was actually in effect, because 
the enemies of “cultural Marxism” haven’t provided a timeline. Even if they were to do so, I’m 
disinclined to believe anything they’d say.

What we do know is that some time on Wednesday afternoon, they restored Robinson’s 
page to the Pentagon website via what they called a “digital content refresh.” I’ll quote their 
gobbledygook:

“We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing 
DEI content from all platforms. In the rare cases that content is removed – either deliberately 
or by mistake – that is out of the clearly outlined scope of the directive, we instruct the components 
and they correct the content…”

I don’t speak MAGA, but I can translate: “Oops.”

Naturally, they failed to specify whether Robinson’s erasure was done “either deliberately or 
by mistake,” indeed whether the scrubbers’ zeal was wrongfully “out of the clearly outlined 
scope of the directive,” but now that the “components” are back in place (as are others), I do 
have a modest suggestion for the Pentagon, a suggestion about Robinson that of course carries 
no weight.

As punishment for that erasure, it would behoove the scrubbers to beef up one particular 
“component” of Robinson’s military stint. The page devotes a total of three lines – one terse 
paragraph – to the fact that he was court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of an 
Army bus. There’s so much more to that story, and the scrubbers should be compelled to tell 
it. As an act of penance.

They could just copy/paste what I’ve got here – and these are just highlights:

On an Army base in Texas, on July 6, 1944, 2nd Lieutenant Robinson visited what was called 
“the colored officer 
club,” then boarded 
a shuttle bus and 
sat in a middle row 
next to Virginia 
Jones, the wife of a 
fellow Black officer. 
The white bus driver 
mistakenly thought 
Jones was white, so 
he yelled: “Hey, you, 
sittin’ beside that 
woman – get to the 
back of the bus!”

Robinson refused. 
He told the driver 
– accurately – that 
military buses had 
been desegregated. But the driver called his dispatcher to say that a “n–” on the bus was making 
trouble. Robinson (according to his own subsequent testimony) told the driver, “Stop 
f– with me” and “Look here, you son of a b–, don’t you call me no n–.”

Soon after, the military police handcuffed Robinson, shackled his legs, and drove him to MP 
headquarters. At the HQ, a white enlisted man called Robinson a “n–,” and, as Robinson later 
testified, “I told him that if he ever called me a n– again, I would break him in two.”

On August 2, a nine-member court-martial panel was convened to hear The United States 
v. 2nd Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson. Six votes were required to convict. Only five did so. But 
Robinson was scarred by the experience, and later lamented his acquittal “was a small victory, 
for I had learned that I was in two wars, one against the foreign enemy, the other against 
prejudice at home.”

Actually, that victory was pivotal. Had Robinson been convicted and dishonorably discharged, 
it’s highly doubtful Dodgers owner Branch Rickey would’ve chosen a Black guy tossed from 
the Army to break baseball’s color line.

The Pentagon’s scrubbers are welcome to paste that material on Robinson’s page – although 
those “components” would probably strike them as anti-white or culturally Marxist.

But wouldn’t they like another time at bat? Nah, you all know the answer.

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