On February 16, “A Day Without Immigrants,” thousands of people across the country refused to work and spend money in an effort to protest the Trump administration’s stance on immigration. Many businesses closed for the day because of a shortage in staff, and the strike received national media attention.

The following day, however, over 100 strikers found themselves in a quandary, as their employers informed them that they would no longer be employed.

Take, for example, Bradley Coatings, a commercial painting company in Nolensville, Tenn. All employees were warned the day before the strike that those who failed to work the following day would be terminated, but 18 employees — some of whom reportedly held mid-level positions — joined the nationwide strike anyway.

“Regretfully, and consistent with its prior communication to all its employees,” the company’s attorney Robert Peal said in a statement, Bradley Coatings “had no choice but to terminate these individuals.”

Over in Lexington, S.C., 21 strikers were fired from Encore Boat Builders, a pontoon manufacturer, and in Catoosa, Okla., a dozen employees were fired from a local restaurant, I Don’t Care Bar and Grill. “Restaurant owner Bill McNally said that he has no tolerance for employees who don’t show up for work without notifying their employer,” NBC12 News reported.

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Heading into President’s Day weekend, New York’s John F. Kennedy international airport Twitter account alerted travelers that with the anticipated increase in passenger volume, they should “allow extra time for on-airport travel, check-in & security screening.” One would think that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would have implemented additional security precautions heading into the holiday weekend, but that does not seem to have been the case.

Eleven people were able to board planes without undergoing TSA security screenings after TSA officials mistakenly left a security lane open and unattended. As the eleven people walked through the unattended security checkpoint, three of them set off the metal detector, which would normally lead to further screening.

Port Authority police spokesman Joe Pentangelo told NBC News that police officers had canvassed the terminal looking for the eleven passengers, but failed to find any of them. TSA officials didn’t alert the police until two hours after the breach in security had occurred.

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In 2002, Margarita Del Pilar Fitzpatrick uprooted her life as a Peruvian citizen and moved to the U.S. to study English. Subsequently, she became a green-card holder, earning employment in Illinois as a medical translator and then as a nurse.

Like thousands of green-card holders, Fitzpatrick applied for a driver’s license three years after living in the U.S. Presenting her green card and Peruvian passport at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the desk clerk proceeded to ask, in accordance with Illinois’s motor-voter laws, whether she was registering to vote. When Fitzpatrick questioned the clerk about voting with her Peruvian passport in hand, the clerk refused to give advice and retorted, “It’s up to you.”

Mistaking the clerk’s refusal to offer advice with his approval to register to vote, Fitzpatrick checked the box confirming that she is a U.S. citizen, a prerequisite to register to vote, and completed the paperwork.

Fitzpatrick voted twice in the 2006 federal elections, and in 2007 the Department of Homeland Security filed a deportation order as a result. (DHS discovered Fitzgerald’s voting history after she truthfully described it in her application for U.S. citizenship.) Since then, Fitzgerald has fought in court — and appealed — the DHS’s deportation order.

On February 13, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Fitzpatrick in her plea to remain in the U.S. Fitzpatrick’s attorney Richard Hanus argued that there was “no fraud” and contended that the mistake had “[arisen] out of confusion,” but the three-judge panel disagreed: “Fitzpatrick is well educated and understands English,” the Seventh Circuit concluded. “It is not too much to ask that she find out before voting whether an alien can cast a ballot in a federal election.”

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January 20, 2017, was the day the press rediscovered its profound interest in the deportation of illegal immigrants. Since Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, media have rushed to craft a deceptive narrative of innocent “immigrants” being deported en masse by the Trump administration, all while failing to draw the crucial distinction between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants.

Take last week’s revelation that the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has begun targeting an increased number of illegal immigrants with criminal backgrounds. In Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, and San Antonio, ICE officers arrested more than 680 individuals. “Of those arrested,” DHS secretary John Kelly said in a statement, “approximately 75 percent were criminal aliens, convicted of crimes including, but not limited to, homicide, aggravated sexual abuse, sexual assault of a minor, lewd and lascivious acts with a child, indecent liberties with a minor, drug trafficking, battery, assault, DUI and weapons charges.”

This policy should be uncontroversial, but apparently it’s not. As a result of the action, the Washington Post warned, “Immigrant community on high alert, fearing Trump’s ‘deportation force,’” while National Public Radio worried that “Immigration Raids Are Reported around the Country.” Most, if not all, of the press failed to use the more specific term “illegal immigrant” when describing the subjects of these ICE raids.

CNN published a feature piece last Friday titled “‘I did it for love,’ says mother deported in Arizona immigration case,” detailing the story of Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, an illegal immigrant who was recently deported to Mexico. After being convicted of a felony in 2008 for using a fake Social Security number, Garcia de Rayos was required to appear at immigration check-ins; it was at her eighth annual immigration check-in that she was deported. Her “immigration case underwent review at multiple levels of the immigration court system, including the Board of Immigration Appeals,” ICE said in a statement. “The judges held she did not have a legal basis to remain in the U.S.”

On Wednesday the New York Times published a similar feature to CNN’s, calling national attention to an illegal immigrant, Jeanette Vizguerra, who was also convicted of using fake documents. “Should she present herself to the immigration authorities Wednesday morning for a scheduled check-in, risking deportation?” the Times asked. “Or should she stay in the church, one of the few places federal agents do not go, almost surely resigning herself to months or years trapped inside?” Vizguerra chose the latter, and her lawyer soon informed her that her request for another “stay” was rejected. Now she and her three youngest children wait in a Denver, Colo., church, praying that ICE officers will abide by federal policy: that immigration officers won’t enter sensitive locations such as churches “unless they have advance approval from a supervisor or face ‘exigent circumstances’ that require immediate action,” the Times explained.

Reporting on such events, which have been a feature on the American landscape for decades, has just recently come back into fashion. On Fox News’s The O’Reilly Factor on Monday, syndicated columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr. expressed his frustration that journalists have only recently decided to prioritize reporting on the deportation of illegal immigrants. “I wrote about the 3 million deportations carried out by the Obama administration,” Navarrette said, “but I couldn’t get a lot of liberals in the media to join me on the front lines.”

In fact, according to ABC News, President Obama deported more illegal immigrants during his tenure than the sum of all deportations throughout the 20th century. (This statistic is based only on “removals,” or individuals deported from within the U.S., rather than “returns,” or individuals sent back to their native country at the U.S. border.)

In other words: Illegal immigrants in the United States have long dealt with the fear that ICE officers would be knocking at their door. In fiscal year 2012, for example, ICE removed over 400,000 illegal aliens, a number that was high enough to prompt frenzied anti-deportation rhetoric and, eventually, motivate the Obama administration to sign the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order that the president had previously insisted was illegal. Where, it must be asked, was the press outcry then, back when the Obama administration conducted ICE raids that were nearly indistinguishable from last week’s? Where were the Valentine’s Day Twitter hashtags such as #ToImmigrantsWithLove that we see today?

Over the last half-decade, the press has routinely acquiesced to the demands of illegal immigrants and their supporters by conflating all immigrants when covering deportations.

Media bias notwithstanding, it is difficult to overstate just how successful activists have been in corrupting the language around immigration law. In January 2015, the Santa Barbara News-Press ran what seemed to be a non-controversial headline distinguishing between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants when reporting on the large lines at the local Department of Motor Vehicles: “Illegals Line Up for Driver’s Licenses.” The headline prompted protests and a red spray-painted message on the paper’s building — “the border is illegal not the people who cross it.” In response, the News-Press refused to back down. “We will not give in to the thugs who are attempting to use political correctness as a tool of censorship and a weapon to shut down this newspaper,” co-publisher Arthur von Wiesenberger said at the time.

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On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president of the United States. Introducing what soon became his signature campaign promise, Trump vowed that, if elected, he would “build a great, great wall on our southern border,” and that he would do so “very inexpensively.”

On Thursday, however, Reuters obtained a U.S. Department of Homeland Security internal report revealing that the Trump administration’s plan to construct the 1,250-mile wall will come at over four times the cost that Trump had originally promised. According to the report, DHS anticipates that the wall will cost taxpayers — not the Mexican people as previously promised — $21.6 billion. Moreover, it will take three and a half years to complete.

The wall’s projected price tag and construction time have increased drastically over the past 20 months since Trump’s presidential campaign began. During his first eight months on the trail, Trump suggested Mexico would pay for the estimated $5 billion wall, relieving U.S. taxpayers of bearing the cost for such a major project. At the New Hampshire Republican primary in early February 2016, Trump altered his story; Mexico would still bear the cost of the wall, but it would now be an $8 billion project. One week after emerging as the winner of New Hampshire’s primary, Trump told MSNBC in a town hall that “the wall is going to cost a fraction of that, maybe 10 (billion dollars) or $12 billion.” Now, the estimate is double that.

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San Francisco mayor Ed Lee and San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Jane Kim reached a “historic” agreement on Monday that will supposedly offer free higher education for all of San Francisco’s residents. “Making City College free,” Kim said, “is going to provide opportunities for more San Franciscans to enter into the middle class and for more San Franciscans to stay in the middle class if they already are there.”

Effective this fall, the City College of San Francisco will receive $2.1 million per year over the next two years from the city’s government; after two years, the contract is renewable. In return, San Franciscans must receive 45,000 subsidized academic credits per year (students must have lived in the city for at least a year to receive funding). The City of San Francisco will also appropriate $3.3 million per year over the next two years for other contributions to higher education, such as providing a $500-per-year stipend for low-income, full-time students and $200 per year for low-income, part-time students to cover education expenses (for example: textbooks, school supplies, and transportation).

But, according to City College’s enrollment statistics, there are 23,410 full-time and part-time students enrolled for course credit in Spring 2017, approximately 9,000 of which are full-time students enrolled in at least twelve academic credits. Which means that the allocated funds will inevitably pay for only a small percentage of students. Indeed, if the subsidized credits went to full-time students enrolled in a mere twelve credits, only 3,750 students would receive subsidized tuition.

Interim chancellor Susan Lamb said there are “a lot of empty seats” in the lecture halls, but that as a result of the city’s reforms, students will “come back and give us a try.” (In 2012, City College faced an accreditation crisis because of administrative and fiscal-planning issues.) It’s unclear, however, how $2.1 million of the city’s funds will cover the expenses of the currently enrolled students, let alone more students.

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Last July, the Democratic party pledged to lead the fight for a federally mandated $15 minimum wage. “The current minimum wage is a starvation wage and must be increased to a living wage,” the party’s platform contended. “No one who works full time should have to raise a family in poverty.”

Other champions of the movement to increase the minimum wage — such as “Fight for $15” and the Service Employees International Union — have called attention to the same concern. And sometimes, their voices have been heard: This year, 14 states and Washington, D.C., elected to increase their minimum wages, some through bills in the legislature and others through referenda. (Eight other states raised their minimum wage, too, but solely to adjust for inflation.)

Unfortunately, proponents of minimum-wage hikes have neglected to consider the unintended consequences of such drastic changes to state labor laws.

According to a report published last week by American Action Forum, a center-right think tank in Washington, D.C., the minimum-wage hikes implemented in 2017 (some laws went into effect January 1 and others will go into effect in July) will result in a loss of 383,000 jobs by 2020.

Of the 14 states, four of them — Arizona, Maine, New York, and Washington — are expected to host at least a one-percent reduction in employment by 2020. In Arizona, for example, American Action Forum predicts a 1.7 percent reduction in employment, resulting in 52,000 lost jobs. Similarly, the think tank projects a 1.1 percent reduction in employment in New York (109,000 lost jobs); New York City alone will lose 72,000 jobs. “In 2020,” the report states, “employment in these 14 states and DC combined will be 0.7 percent lower than if the minimum wages did not change.”

Between 2020 and 2025, the American Action Forum expects the economy to lose nearly 1.8 million jobs because of the newly implemented laws to increase the minimum wage. While Vermont may not have immediate effects because it has gradually raised the minimum wage by 12.5 percent ($9.33 to $10.50 by 2018), other states have implemented more radical new laws. California, for example, has a five-year plan to raise its minimum wage from $10 to $15, a change of 50 percent. Sixty-five thousand Californians are expected to be jobless by 2020 because of these new laws. And in Maine, a 60 percent increase ($7.50 to $12 by 2020) will likely result in 9,000 jobs lost and a 1.4 percent reduction in its total employment.

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During last year’s presidential election, Donald Trump promised that one of his first acts as president would be to address the United States’ illegal-immigration problem. “We have some bad hombres here,” Trump said. “We’re going to get them out.”

On January 25, just five days after he took the oath of office, Trump stayed true to his word: He signed Executive Order 13768, “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” which prioritizes the removal of illegal immigrants with criminal records.

But Trump’s executive order does far more than remove illegal immigrants with criminal records; it threatens to cut federal funding from the nearly 300 “sanctuary jurisdictions” across the country — that is, those government entities within counties, cities, and states that refuse to enforce federal immigration laws and thus to shield illegal immigrants from deportation.

Trump’s threat will not likely coax every sanctuary jurisdiction into enforcing federal law, but according to a report published Thursday by Open the Books, a non-profit dedicated to disclosing government spending, many sanctuary jurisdictions do rely pretty heavily on federal funds, and if they were to lose those funds they would have to reconsider their current spending levels on a wide range of city services, including fire departments, housing, schools, and police. Trump’s threat must be taken seriously.

Open the Book’s report, titled “Federal Funding of America’s Sanctuary Cities,” examined all sanctuary cities (not states or counties). There are 106 in total, and together they are home to nearly six million of the United States’ eleven million illegal immigrants. In fiscal year 2016, the federal government doled out nearly $27 billion to them. “On average, the cost of lost federal funding for a family of four residing in one of the 106 sanctuary cities is $1,810 — or $454 per person,” the report stated.

President Donald Trump signed his travel-ban executive order on January 27, and subsequently, 348 people were denied boarding while attempting to travel to the U.S. from the seven banned Muslim-majority countries. Of the 348 people, the press headlined unrelentingly one devastating story: Iraqi-born Mike Hager and his sick mother, Naimma, were supposedly traveling from Iraq to their residences in Michigan when his mother, who has a green card and has lived in the U.S. since 1995, died after airport authorities refused to let her board the plane. “If they would have let us in, my mom — she would have made it and she would have been sitting right here next to me,” Hager told Fox 2 Detroit. “She’s gone because of [President Trump].”

But Fox 2 Detroit has now confirmed that Hager fabricated the entire incident. Airport security never denied his mother permission to travel back to the U.S.; in fact, she died five days before Trump had even signed the executive order.

Imam Husham Al-Hussainy, leader of the Karbalaa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn, Mich., told Fox 2 Detroit that Hager’s report was false. “The 22nd of January, his mom died,” he confirmed. Hager’s mother passed away from kidney disease.

Marquette University’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom will host conservative political pundit Ben Shapiro in just over a week, and while the club anticipates a sold-out 500-person lecture hall, club members made a startling discovery: Marquette University’s faculty is attempting to sabotage the event.

Young America’s Foundation, the parent organization to Young Americans for Freedom chapters, has obtained screenshots from club members that show a Marquette faculty member explaining her plan to block students from hearing Shapiro speak.  “I just got off the phone with one of the directors of diversity on campus,” wrote Chrissy Nelson, a program assistant at Marquette’s Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies. “The suggestion I received and will be promoting is to go to the mission week events that day, reserve a seat through Eventbrite as a student (to take a seat away from someone who actually would go) and not protest the day of.”

In another Facebook post, Nelson corresponded with Susannah Bartlow, a former Marquette professor and director of the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. (Bartlow was fired in 2015 for honoring Assata Shakur, a convicted cop killer, with a mural in the university’s resource center.) “Register as a student,” Nelson told Bartlow. “Take a seat away from a student that would be interested in going.”

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