The Trump administration is prioritizing the prosecution of those who are affiliated with MS-13, an international criminal gang formally known as Mara Salvatrucha. “We are targeting you. We are coming for you,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last month. If the Trump administration is committed to eradicating MS-13 in the U.S., it ought to look no further than the way in which the U.S. immigration system unintentionally allows for the recruitment of unaccompanied minors into gangs.

Upon catching unaccompanied minors at the border, U.S. Border Patrol agents have 72 hours to bring the minor to the Justice Department’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). From there, he or she is placed with a sponsor. According to the Washington Times, “That usually leaves the children with no federal supervisions once they are released to sponsors — where they are often prime recruiting targets.”

In a Senate judiciary committee hearing on Wednesday, Republican senator Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the committee, grilled officials from U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and the Justice Department’s ORR.

“No one takes responsibility for these children after they are placed with a sponsor,” Grassley said. “Your agencies repeatedly pass the buck to each other. As a result, children are allowed to disappear. When these children disappear without any supervision, they are vulnerable to join dangerous gangs like MS-13.”

MS-13 is increasingly recruiting unaccompanied minors who are heading to the U.S. According to ORR, 39 of the 138 unaccompanied minors who are being held by the U.S. at secure facilities — nearly 30 percent — are affiliated with MS-13 and other gangs. And just last week, 41 alleged MS-13 gang members were arrested in Nassau County, N.Y. Nineteen of the 41 arrested came to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors.

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Honors student J.P. Krause won the election for senior class president at Vero Beach High School in Vero Beach, Fla. And then, all of a sudden, his victory was stripped from him.

Summarily, the high school’s administrators stripped him of his new position, and, to add insult to injury, gave him detention. Why? Because Krause delivered a satirical campaign speech that channeled Donald Trump’s presidential campaign rhetoric and, in jest, claimed his opponent was a Communist. It was “harassment,” the principal concluded.

After Krause’s classmates chanted “speech, speech,” he gave an impromptu speech that kept his fellow classmates laughing for well over a minute. “I am for freedom, equality, and liberty,” he said. His opponent? Well, she wants to “advance Communist ideals,” he smirked. “She will raise taxes to 80 percent!”

Krause also suggested in jest that his opponent supports their rivals at the nearby high school, whereas he would “build a wall” between the two schools — and make their rival pay for it.

No one thought Krause was serious. The room, full of honors students in U.S. History, seemed to be well aware of the parallels Krause was making between his campaign speech and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign speeches. The teacher allowed the off-the-cuff speech to continue, and there wasn’t any reaction by students inside the classroom but laughter.

Nevertheless, the speech not only disqualified Krause from taking up the reins as class president, it also added “harassment” to his school record. “The administration took my speech out of context and said I was harassing a student,” Krause tells National Review.

“It was a joke the whole way through.”

Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, is representing Krause in an attempt to remove the harassment claims from his school record. It also seeks to reinstate Krause as class president. “It was pure political speech and obviously humorous,” explains Mark Miller, Krause’s attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, to National Review. “It’s clearly protected in First Amendment speech.”

In a letter sent to Mark Rendell, the superintendent of the school district, Miller argued that “if a student gives a speech that is lewd, vulgar, or profane, then the school can sanction him.”

“But that is not remotely the case here,” Miller retorted. Satirically claiming that an opponent in a class election wants to raise taxes, advance Communism, and implement a dress code is certainly not “lewd, vulgar, or profane” — it’s a joke.

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Reality Leigh Winner, the 25-year-old intelligence contractor who is being charged with leaking to the press classified information on Russian efforts to hack U.S. voting machines, allegedly sympathized with terrorist leaders, wanted to burn down the White House, and mishandled classified information during her time in the military.

After searching Winner’s home, government officials found Winner’s hand-written notes: “I want to burn the White House down . . . find somewhere in Kurdistan to live,” she wrote in one note. In other notes, Winner sympathized with Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour.

As Jim Geraghty wrote in this morning’s Morning Jolt: “Dear National Security Agency, if somebody like Reality Winner got through your interview process, who the heck are you not hiring?”

The prosecution also found evidence leading them to believe that Winner had leaked classified information in the past. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Solari, “This was not the first time” that Winner mishandled classified information. Solari alleged that there is reason to believe that, while on active duty in the Air Force, Winner stole classified information through a USB drive; the USB drive in question has yet to be recovered.

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On Thursday, the California state Senate passed Senate Bill 562, which seeks to establish a statewide single-payer healthcare system.

Democratic senator Ricardo Lara, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, co-authored the bill and advocated its passage, but failed to explain how the proposal’s $400-billion price tag will be financed.

The bill represents a key progressive goal, and yet, it will almost certainly never be signed into law — even though Californians have elected Democratic majorities to both legislative chambers and a Democratic governor. Why not? Because it’s absurdly expensive. This year’s entire state budget is $180 billion. The single-payer system called for in 562 costs more than double that.

“We don’t have the money to pay for it,” Republican state senator Tom Berryhill said. “If we cut every single program and expense from the state budget and redirected that money to this bill, SB 562, we wouldn’t even cover half of the $400-billion price tag.”

Proponents of Lara’s bill claim that half of the $400 billion in question would be covered by the existing healthcare funds doled out at all levels of government, and the other $200 billion would be raised through increased tax revenues.

But for even this plan to be feasible, the Trump administration would have to approve a waiver allowing California to redirect all funds from Medicare and Medi-Cal to the proposed healthcare system. This is especially unlikely, as California Democrats seek to grant illegal immigrants who reside in California the right to use the state-funded healthcare system, and the Trump administration opposes that. Moreover, California’s legislators haven’t exactly built up a rapport with the new administration. In January, Democratic legislators hired former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to represent them in lawsuits resisting the Trump administration’s political agenda.

Read More at National Review

At 8:30 a.m. this morning, in the diplomatic quarter of Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, a suicide bomber killed at least 90 and wounded 400. The bomb was detonated in a large truck that had been designed to empty septic tanks. It is unclear whether the intended target was the German Embassy, which was approximately 400 yards away and was damaged from the blast, or the Afghan presidential palace:

“The blast was so huge that it dug a big crater as deep as four meters,” said General Hassan Shah Frogh, Kabul’s police chief.

The Texas state House’s legislative session ended in disarray yesterday. Republican representative Matt Rinaldi announced that he had called Immigration and Customs Enforcement on protesters who held signs that read “I am illegal and here to stay,” and verbal and physical altercations erupted on the House floor.

The protests were a last-ditch effort to convince legislators to halt SB 4, a bill that bans sanctuary cities in Texas, from going into effect on September 1. Hundreds of people flooded the House gallery with identical red shirts that said, “Fight Back, No SB 4.” “Undocumented and afraid,” they chanted.

After Rinaldi told his colleagues that he had called ICE on the protesters, whom he believed to be in the country illegally, he alleges that Democratic representative Poncho Nevarez threatened to “get [him] on the way to [his] car.” Here is the video in which Poncho allegedly threatened Rinaldi.

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While speaking at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s graduation ceremony last week, President Donald Trump said, “No politician in history — and I say this with great surety — has been treated worse or more unfairly” by the media.

Surely, Trump’s assertion is questionable. According to a report released last week from Harvard Kennedy School, however, “Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days was negative even by the standards of today’s hyper-critical press.”

Eighty percent of the news coverage in Trump’s first 100 days was negative. “In no week did the coverage drop below 70 percent negative and it reached 90 percent negative at its peak,” wrote Thomas E. Patterson, the author of the report.

Patterson examined news coverage from seven U.S. media outlets: CNN, NBC, CBS, Fox News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. He also assessed the tone in which European media outlets covered Trump by including in his research the Financial Times, BBC (Britain’s public-service broadcaster), and ARD (Germany’s public-service broadcaster).

Read More at National Review

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers arrested over 41,000 illegal immigrants between January 22 and April 29, the 100 days following President Donald Trump’s executive order on stricter illegal-immigration enforcement. In comparison to the same period in 2016 under the Obama administration, there was a 37.6 percent increase in arrests.

According to the ICE report released last week, nearly 75 percent of those arrested under the Trump administration were convicted criminals; more than 2,700 of them were convicted of violent crimes such as rape, homicide, kidnapping, and assault.

“ICE agents and officers have been given clear direction to focus on threats to public safety and national security,” said ICE acting director Thomas Homan, “which has resulted in a substantial increase in the arrest of convicted criminal aliens.”

“However,” Homan added, “when we encounter others who are in the country unlawfully, we will execute our sworn duty and enforce the law.”

Indeed, ICE officers did not shy away from increasing the number of arrests involving illegal immigrants without criminal records. There were 10,845 illegal immigrants without criminal records arrested between January 22 and April 29 under the Trump administration, a stark contrast to the 4,242 arrested under the Obama administration. Which is to say that the number of illegal immigrants arrested who had no criminal record soared 156 percent in just one year.

Read More at National Review

President Donald Trump and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan met in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to discuss U.S.–Turkish trade relations, the fight against terrorism, and more. But one topic that seems to have been ignored was Turkey’s democratic-turned-autocratic regime, which is at odds with a core NATO principle: that member states will promote democratic values.

Erdogan is intolerant of any opposition, especially when it comes from those in the media. As of December 2016, 81 journalists, more than in any other country in the world, were in Turkish prisons.

The U.S. and its NATO allies must lead Turkey back on to the path toward democracy, not autocracy. Turkey officially joined NATO in 1952 after establishing a multiparty election system in 1950. Nearly 70 years later, Turkey’s NATO allies must continue to hold all members to high standards, ensuring that they maintain democratic norms.

If the U.S. and NATO remain silent on Erdogan’s violations of human rights, the number of Turkish citizens being persecuted will likely increase, especially now that Erdogan has the authority to control all three branches of government. The Turkish people in April passed a referendum granting him broad presidential power, but there is reason to believe that it was not a fair and free election.

On Tuesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center said that the U.S. should “call for a reputable and impartial international review of the referendum, and continue to treat the results as illegitimate until such a point as Turkey has a free press and independent judiciary capable of investigating all evidence of fraud.” The BPC document also called on the U.S. to demand that Turkish officials release the journalists who are imprisoned because of their opposition to the president. “The key for American policymakers,” it said, “is to remain critical of Erdogan’s intensified efforts to crack down on his opponents through increasingly draconian means.”

Read More at National Review

Last week, AFL-CIO, the largest trade union organization in the U.S., released the results from its annual Executive Paywatch report: CEOs at S&P 500 companies earned on average $13.1 million in 2016, and “this greed of corporate CEOs” has caused a “CEO-to-worker pay ratio of 347 to 1.”

“It’s shameful that CEOs can make tens of millions of dollars,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said, “and still destroy the livelihoods of the hard-working people who make their companies profitable.”

But the AFL-CIO report neglected to include the average salary for all CEOs in the U.S. in 2016, which, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, was $194,350. These same union leaders who criticize the salaries of CEOs earned on average $252,370 in 2016 — nearly $60,000 more than their private-sector counterparts.

The Center for Union Facts, the union watchdog that unveiled the average presidential salary from nearly 200 unions, found that some union leaders are earning lucrative salaries north of $700,000.

“Timothy Canoll, president of the Air Line Pilots Association, earned more than $775,000last year,” wrote Luka Ladan, the Center for Union Facts’s communications director, in a column for the East Bay Times. “International Brotherhood of Boilermakers President Newton Jones came close at $756,973, while Laborers’ International Union President Terence O’Sullivan made nearly $718,000 in total compensation.”

Read More at National Review