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To the Editor:

Bernie Sanders denounced the culture of greed that is plaguing our nation President Barack Obama said, I do think at a certain point youve made enough money. Hillary Clinton has always railed against the fat cats.

But Bernie made $1 million last year. Apparently there is no greed when he makes it. Barack and Michelle signed a book deal for $60 million. Hillary and Bill, how many hundreds of millions have they raked into their foundation?

Where is the outrage at such hypocrisy? Republicans and Democrats fattening themselves at the public trough.

Should a person be entitled to make as much as he can? Bernie, Barack and Hillary say no. Until they are on the receiving end, that is.

If I invent a widget and make millions, I am rewarded for my personal effort, not for someone elses efforts. I am working for myself.

But Bernie, Barack and Hillary didnt start their own business; they were employed by the people of this country. No one would have paid Bernie for his memoirs if he hadnt been elected to government office. Same for Barack. Hillary, too.

The taxpayers already paid those people. And it was only because we elected them that they have anything to sell. But now they capitalize on what we the people made possible, selling their experience and keeping the money for themselves. Isnt that what Bernie, Barack and Hillary have vilified people for?

Bernie, Barack and Hillary should do the right thing and return all that money to the people.

Scott A. Nolan

Crystal Lake

See original here:
Letter: Sanders, Obama, Clintons profit off taxpayers - Northwest Herald

The nations battle lines over immigration enforcement deepened Friday after Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly rescinded an Obama-era memo that sought to shield millions of parents of U.S. citizens and others from deportation.

Kelly was fulfilling part of a campaign promise that President Trump had made to overturn on his first day in office two of former president Barack Obamas controversial memos on illegal immigration.

The rescinded memo was never implemented, and it is the subject of an ongoing federal lawsuit over whether Obama had the authority in 2014 to even issue the order.

But the Trump administrations action late Thursday spurred fears that the president would also revoke the second memo, which protects undocumented immigrants brought here as children, and that the administration would target families indiscriminately for deportation.

This action by President Trump demonstrates to us that they have no compassion, they have no common sense, they have no humanity, said Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.

Kelly rescinded the memo at the deadline for the parties to decide how the lawsuit should proceed. In his statement, Kelly said there was no credible path forward for the program Obama had proposed.

I applaud President Trump, said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who filed the lawsuit that halted the 2014 memo. I am proud to have led a 26-state coalition that went all the way to the Supreme Court to block this unlawful edict.

Kelly said the second program, the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals initiative, would remain intact. The program has transformed the lives of nearly 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, allowing them to avoid deportation and work and drive legally.

That reassurance from the administration drew mild criticism from Trump supporters who favor increased immigration enforcement.

Many protested last week when data released by the Department of Homeland Security showed the agency has issued thousands of new permits under the 2012 program, despite Trumps campaign-trail promise to eliminate it.

As a candidate, the president called both programs illegal executive amnesties.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose backers are ascendant in the Trump administration, praised Kellys rescission of the 2014 initiative but said it calls into question the legitimacy of DACA, as well.

Advocates for immigrants said Kellys action was a stark reminder of the landscape facing the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States and, especially, in Texas, which also recently passed a law to crack down on sanctuary cities. It takes effect Sept. 1.

Lawyers and activists say they are battling Immigration and Customs Enforcements attempts to deport immigrants, including a college student in Georgia who won a federal court battle this week to avoid deportation and a janitor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a clean criminal record and who is the parent of two U.S. citizens.

On Tuesday, the nations top immigration enforcement official warned that undocumented immigrants should look over their shoulder.

But in Boston, the MIT janitor said he didnt want to live that way. Francisco Rodriguez, the 43-year-old father of two U.S. citizen children, said he has no criminal record and would have applied for Obamas 2014 program if it had been allowed to proceed.

Instead, he watched as Texas filed a lawsuit that temporarily halted the program. Then the Obama administration appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, finally losing last June.

Rodriguez said ICE had granted him several stays of deportation after he lost his asylum case but told him Tuesday that he has to prepare to go home. He has until July 13 to show up with a plane ticket to his native El Salvador.

He said he fled that country in 2006 after gangs tried to extort money from his construction company. In his country, he was a mechanical engineer. Now he cleans laboratories and offices for one of the best universities in the world.

This is very sad, he said of his pending deportation. But I know thats the new politics that we have with the new government. They say they could protect families. But theyre against the families.

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Immigration battle lines deepen as Trump administration rescinds Obama proposal - Washington Post

After nearly three years of warming relations between the United States and Cuba, President Donald Trump has announced that his administration will unravel many of his predecessors policies on the communist state.

Speaking in Miami, Florida, Trump announced changes to President Barack Obamas historic rapprochement with Cuba -- fulfilling a promise to the anti-Castro voting bloc he believes helped his campaign clinch the state, but stirring fear among others he could set back business interests and Cubas potential for a more prosperous private sector.

The Cuban government said in a statement published in the state-run newspaper Granma, "Again, the United States Government resorted to coercive methods of the past, adopting measures to intensify the blockade, in force since February 1962, which not only causes damage and deprivation to the Cuban people and constitutes an undeniable obstacle to the development of our economy, but also affects the sovereignty and interests of other countries, inciting international rejection."

The statement continues, "The Cuban Government denounces the new measures to tighten the blockade, which are destined to fail as has been shown repeatedly in the past, and which will not achieve its purpose to weaken the revolution or to defeat the Cuban people, whose resistance to the aggressions of any type and origin has been proven over almost six decades."

In one form or another, the embargo on Cuba has been in place since the Eisenhower administration. But beginning in late 2014, Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro began a process that gradually thawed diplomatic tensions and eased commercial and travel restrictions between the two countries.

This process culminated in significant economic opportunities for both the U.S. and Cuba. American businesses, including airlines, cruise lines, and telecommunications companies, earned 26 agreements with the Cuban government from 2015 to 2017.

Hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars flowed into privately owned businesses in Cuba, The Associated Press reported , spurring the growth of a nascent middle-class that could thrive independent from the government.

For Cuba, there have been tangible benefits in tourism and telecommunications. According to the Cuban Ministry, 74 percent more American citizens visited the island in 2016 than in 2015 and, following through on a pledge to Obama, Castro opened nearly 400 new public Wi-Fi access points around Cuba.

However, the U.S. International Trade Administration told ABC News it hasn't yet released its 2016 statistics on outbound travel and therefore could not confirm those numbers from the Cuban Ministry on U.S. tourism.

While Obama did not end the embargo on Cuba, since only Congress has that power, the U.S. and Cuba reopened embassies in each others capitals for the first time since 1961. The U.S. and Cuba have also signed multiple bilateral agreements to work together on everything from human and drug trafficking to maritime security and migration.

Finally, Obama ended the "wet foot, dry foot" immigration policy that applied only to Cubans. Previously, Cubans who reached U.S. shores earned automatic visas. Now, Cubans have to follow the same process as other refugees and immigrants.

Trump is not reversing all of Obamas changes, but he is redefining what it means to be part of the Cuban military, which could prevent U.S. companies from doing business in Cuba. The White House explained in a fact sheet released earlier today that the policy aims to keep the Grupo de Administracin Empresarial (GAESA), a conglomerate managed by the Cuban military, from benefiting from the opening in U.S.-Cuba relations.

The profits from investment and tourism flow directly to the military. The regime takes the money and owns the industry, Trump said. The outcome of last administration's executive action has been only more repression and a move to crush the peaceful democratic movement. Therefore, effective immediately, I am canceling the last administration's completely one-sided deal with Cuba.

This comes amid concerns that the Cuban military could be the beneficiary of increased American private investment, at a time when Castro has failed to take action on human rights. In 2016, there were 9,940 short-term detentions of protesters, up from 8,899 in 2014, the AP reports.

According to senior White House officials, Trump is also revisiting trade and travel policies toward Cuba, clamping down on individual people-to-people travel. There will still be certain exceptions under which Americans can travel to Cuba and family travel will continue to be authorized. Importantly, no changes will go into effect until the Treasury and Commerce Departments issue new regulations that conform with the administration's policy.

Trump continued, We will not lift sanctions on the Cuban regime until all political prisoners are free, freedoms of assembly and expression are respected, all political parties are legalized and free and internationally supervised elections are scheduled.

The changes will certainly harm relations between Cuba and the U.S. In a hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson explained, "The general approach, if I can say that, is to allow as much of this continued commercial and engagement activity to go on as possible because we do see the sunny side, as I described it. We do see the benefits of that to the Cuban people."

But then Tillerson qualified his statement. "On the other hand, we think we've achieved very little in terms of changing the behavior of the regime in Cuba and its treatment of people," he said, "and it has little incentive to change that."

Senior White House officials say that Trump will not close the newly re-opened U.S. Embassy in Havana. He will also not reinstate the "wet foot, dry foot" policy.

To avoid alienating the Cuban-American community, which largely votes Republican, Trump will not re-implement limits on remittances -- U.S. based money transfers -- that Cuban-Americans can give their families back on the island. But if the administration follows through on redefining what it means to be part of the Cuban military, that could affect policies on remittances down the line.

Sen. Marco Rubio and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, both Republican, Cuban-American hardliners, lobbied Trump hard toward reversal. Importantly, the Trump administration wants to build good rapport with both. Rubio sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is currently looking into the Trump campaigns supposed contacts with Russian officials. He spoke in Miami briefly before Trump took the stage.

Rubio and Diaz-Balart won out, though theres no shortage of actors lobbying the White House the other way. Last week, a group of House Republicans sent a letter to Trump opposing "reversing course" on Cuba. A similar group of Senate Republicans wrote to Tillerson and national security adviser H.R. McMaster, citing the entrepreneurial and national security benefits of continued engagement. Airbnb, Google and other notable businesses have also spoken out recently in support of maintaining current policies.

Tillerson had privately expressed support for Obamas Cuba policy during the transition, according to sources. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, when governor of Georgia in 2010, led a delegation to Cuba and said at the time to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "I think business cures a lot of ills."

Leading human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have also urged the administration to keep Cuba open.

"More travel, more communications access, and more dialogue with Cuba are the way forward for human rights in Cuba," Amnesty International wrote in a blog post, adding that Obamas trip to Cuba last year opened the door to scrutiny and transparency of human rights on the island for the first time in nearly 10 years.

Reversing policy is bad for Cubans, Human Rights Watch said in a statement, "and insisting on human rights progress as a precondition to a new policy is unlikely to bring about change."

During the campaign, Candidate Trump slammed Obamas Cuba policy, telling a crowd in Miami: "All the concessions that Barack Obama has granted the Castro regime were done through executive order, which means the next president can reverse them. And that I will do unless the Castro regime meets our demands."

But at the same time, Trump often criticizes regulations on the business community as "burdensome" and "job-killing.

Delivering a speech at the historic Manuel Artime Theater in Miami's Little Havana neighborhood, Trump made his policy known in the center of the Cuban-American community. The president fed off of a boisterous, rowdy crowd, seeming to even attempt a Cuban accent, shouting Little Havana! when he took the stage. By rescinding certain Obama-era Cuba policies, he went against the advice of Democrats, Republicans and business interests. He did, however, fulfill a campaign promise.

ABC News' Katherine Faulders, Serena Marshall and Adam Kelsey contributed to this report.

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Trump 'canceling' Obama's Cuba policy but leaves much in ...

An Obama-era immigration program intended to protect parents of U.S. citizens and legal residents from deportation has been formally cancelled, fulfilling a key campaign promise from President Trump, the Homeland Security Department announced late Thursday.

Homeland Security John Kelly formally revoked a policy memo that created the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program. The revocation came on the fifth anniversary of another effort that has protected hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.

The program to protect parents was announced by President Obama in November 2014 but was never fully launched because it was blocked by a federal court, according to Reuters.

It was intended to keep the immigrant parents safe from deportation and provide them with a renewable work permit good for two years, but it was blocked by a federal judge in Texas after 26 states filed suit against the federal government and challenged the efforts legality.

Republicans decried the effort as backdoor amnesty and argued that Obama overstepped his authority by protecting a specific class of immigrants living in the United States illegally.

The protection program for parents, like the one for young immigrants, was created with a policy memo during the Obama administration. Both programs required that participants meet certain conditions, including not having a criminal history. As part of the expansion to protect immigrant parents living in the United States illegally, the Obama administration also sought to provide the young immigrants with work permits good for three years at a time. That provision was also blocked by the Texas judge.

Revoking the memo and ending the stalled program fulfill a key campaign promise by Trump, who pledged to immediately cancel both efforts. Trump has not said what he plans to do about the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but so far most immigrants protected by the effort have not been targeted by stepped-up efforts to find and deport immigrants living in the country illegally. As of March 31, about 787,000 young immigrants have been approved for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, according to government data.

Arrests of immigrants in the interior of the country have increased under the Trump administration, but deportations are slightly down as fewer people have been caught crossing the Mexican border into the United States illegally.

Trump has made immigration enforcement a top priority and has vowed to continue a crackdown on those living in U.S. illegally and those trying to sneak into the country.

Reuters reported that Trump previously said that his administration was considering different options.

They shouldnt be very worried, Trump told ABC News in January, referring to DACA recipients. I do have a big heart.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

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Trump scraps Obama policy that protected immigrant parents ...

WASHINGTON To the list of things former President Barack Obama did that President Donald Trump is undoing, go ahead and add Cuba.

Two and a half years ago, Obama, with great fanfare, announced an easing of the decades-long travel and trade restrictions on the island nations authoritarian regime, arguing that the policies had not worked and were only punishing ordinary Cubans.

At a speech Friday afternoon in Miamis Little Havana neighborhood, Trump is expected to reverse at least some of Obamas changes, despite public opinion nationally and even among Cuban-Americans that shows support for more ties with Cuba, not fewer.

Ive never seen a coalition this broad and it have no influence, said Marguerite Rose Jimnez, who helped craft the Obama policy at his Department of Commerce and is now with the Washington Office on Latin America advocacy group. This is not a move thats supported by a majority of the Cuban-American community.

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

But it is supported by the veterans of the failed 1961 CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion to overthrow Fidel Castro. The group endorsed Trump last fall, becoming one of the few Latino organizations to support the Republican nominee.

The president was honored and humbled, said a senior administration official who, along with two other officials, explained the coming policy Thursday on the condition that their names would not be used. The official said that Trump promised the group he would restore tougher restrictions and that his actions fulfill that promise.

Specifically, the changes to be announced Friday would eliminate a provision that Americans have used to visit Cuba on their own. They would also make it illegal for Americans to do business with entities controlled by the Cuban military or intelligence services. This would prohibit individuals from staying at state-owned hotels and would ban U.S. businesses from trading with state-controlled enterprises.

That would be our guiding principle, said a second administration official, who added that the policy would be lifted if Cuban President Ral Castro institutes reforms including free elections and the release of political prisoners.

Trumps new policy will not prevent U.S.travelers from bringing back Cuban rum and cigars or stop airlines and cruise ships from offering routine service. It would also not restore the immigration advantage Cuban refugees have had for decades if they managed to reach dry land in the United States the wet foot, dry foot policy.

Nor will Trumps policy restrict visits by Cuban-Americans to their relatives or reverse the reopening of formal diplomatic ties, the second official said. You cant put the genie back in the bottle 100 percent, the official said.

The crackdown on travel will end what had become an easy way for Americans to visit Cuba: Declare an individual people-to-people educational exchange. A third administration official said group trips will still be permitted for cultural visits and charitable efforts but that the crackdown would make sure visitors are actually fostering closer ties with the Cuban people and not just drinking daiquiris on the beach.

Supporters of Obamas changes, while grateful Trump does not plan to reverse everything Obama did, nevertheless criticized the policy as a step in the wrong direction. Jimnez said that the way the Cuban economy is structured, with so many enterprises tied to the military, blocking trade with entities connected to the Cuban military would basically block trade, period.

Thats a backdoor way of effectively stifling all commerce, she said.

Toward the end of his campaign last year, Trump promised to help the people of Cuba stand up to their government and to make a good deal with Castro to replace the bad one he said Obama had made.

Little Havana is home to much of the one constituency that continues to favor a hard line toward Cuba: the older generation of refugees who left in the 1960s and 70s following Fidel Castros 1959 revolution overthrowing the U.S.-backed dictator.

That generations children and grandchildren are much more inclined to support Obamas moves to increase tourism and trade opportunities with the island as a way of building a society that will bring democratic and human rights reforms.

A nationalpollof Cuban-Americans at the time Obamas policies were announced in December 2014 showed 47 percent to 39 percent support for easing sanctions. Four months later, support had grown to 56 percent to 35 percent.

One prominent Cuban dissident, though, argued that, while he had initially supported Obamas new policy, he has concluded that it is not working.

Reality has proved otherwise, wrote Jos Daniel Ferrer Garca, general coordinator of the Cuban Patriotic Union, in an open letter to Trump. Castros tyranny has been benefiting from the good will of the US government without giving up a bit in their repressive attitude.

Arrayed against Ferrer and Little Havanas community of hard-line emigres are a host of human rights and pro-engagement groups. The U.S. business community has also long supported ending the sanctions because of the opportunities presented by a new commercial market so close to Miami.

All the business entities have made their views known to the administration, said Pedro Freyre, a Miami lawyer who has worked with a number of clients with interests in Cuba, including a handful of cruise lines.

Polling also shows overwhelming support in the general public for easing the restrictions. In a recent Morning Consult poll conducted for Engage Cuba, 65 percent of voters nationally support the Obama policy, while only 18 percent oppose it.

Engage Cubas Madeleine Russak acknowledged an enthusiasm gap in those numbers, however. Those who support the more relaxed rules dont feel that strongly about it, while the pro-embargo side is passionate, she said.

Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), who like many Republicans from rural states supports lifting restrictions that make it harder to export agricultural products to Cuba, said Trump has not been well-served by listening to a small group of pro-embargo lawmakers.

Were on the wrong side of history when it comes to this, Emmer said.

Trump, like many Republicans, promised his supporters to undo much of what Obama was able to accomplish over two terms. Trump is pushing legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Obamas signature achievement. He is working to scrap Obamas Clean Power Plan to restrict carbon emissions, trying to undo workplace rules, repeal banking regulations and is withdrawing the United States from a near-unanimous international agreement to combat climate change.

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Trump Will Add Cuba To List Of Obama Achievements Hes Taking ...