#amee vanderpool

Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:

Before World War II, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified German, Italian, and Japanese aliens and claimed they were “suspected” of being potential enemy agents. These people, some of them American citizens, were legally kept under surveillance, and following the attack at Pearl Harbor, people from “enemy nations” and all people of Japanese descent were immediately considered suspect and referred to the US Army. In 1942, Executive Order 9066 was enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Under this order the entire west coast was deemed a military area, and was divided into military zones. Curfews were established that included only Japanese-Americans. Voluntary evacuation of Japanese-Americans from a limited number of areas, totaling about seven percent of the entire Japanese-American population, was begun. The issue of human rights had been briefly brought up at Congressional Hearings prior to the issuance of these new laws, but in 1942, no one felt these rights were important enough when compared to securing the United States. On March 29, 1942, Japanese-Americans on the west coast were given a 48-hour evacuation notice, and most of their land and private property was abandoned and never recovered.

From the end of March to August of that year, approximately 112,000 persons were sent to racetracks or fairgrounds, which had been re-labeled as “assembly centers.” People were tagged like cattle and sorted for removal to a more permanent "relocation center" where they would be imprisoned for the remainder of the war. In these "relocation centers,” also called "internment camps,” four or five families shared tar-papered army-style barracks for nearly three years or more until the end of the war. The people in these camps shared eating facilities and restrooms and had limited opportunity for work or school. Nearly 70,000 of these evacuees were American citizens, who were denied their due process rights as the federal government froze their ability to appeal their circumstances under the guise of “American security.” This was just 80 years ago. On Tuesday, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott, through the the Texas General Land Office, offered Donald Trump the 1,400-acre Starr County site to build new detention centers to fulfill his promise of mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said in the Tuesday letter that her office is “fully prepared” to enter an agreement with any federal agencies involved in deporting individuals from the country “to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.”

We are again on the brink of repeating some of the most shameful and abhorrent lessons that America should have learned long ago. While Donald Trump and his Project 2025 implementation team move to enact the fascist promises made during the election, many of Trump’s cronies are already aligning themselves to profit from the impending migrant prison system that will be nothing short of a concentration camp. Due Process Rights will again be frozen, as amnesty and human rights will cease to exist within these militarized zones. Dismissing any warnings about where we are headed by calling these claims hyperbole will cease to matter after Donald Trump assumes his office on January 20, 2025.

Amee Vanderpool at SHERO:

The issue of abortion protections will be on Missouri’s statewide ballot in November, thanks to a successful initiative petition, put forth by the Missourians for Constitutional Freedom coalition, that was finalized on Tuesday, just before the 5pm deadline. In order to be successful, the amendment proposal must receive more than 50% of votes in approval, which would then protect abortion procedures up until the point of fetal viability, generally around 24 weeks. A successful amendment like this would return the State of Missouri back to the standard used after the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, but before the Dobbs Decision, which overruled the guaranteed rights from Roe. The language of this new amendment also includes exceptions after viability “to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.” The new law would also protect the patients receiving medical care as well as anyone performing or assisting in the abortion procedure.

The current law in Missouri currently holds that doctors who perform abortions can be charged with a class B felony and face up to 15 years in prison. As a consequence of providing medical care, a doctor’s medical license can now also be suspended or revoked for performing abortions in the state. This latest win of providing a ballot initiative for abortion comes after a grueling battle with Republicans in the Missouri House of Representatives, that sought to keep any type of abortion protection measure off the ballot. Missouri is currently among 18 states with an abortion ban, and one of more than a half-dozen states which will allow the voters to decide on the issue of abortion protections on the 2024 ballot. This week, officials in Arizona also announced that local abortion-rights supporters had amassed enough signatures to put a proposed amendment on the November ballot that would formalize abortion rights in the Arizona State Constitution as well.

Amee Vanderpool writes in her SHERO Substack that Missouri’s abortion rights referendum is a very big deal for the state of abortion access post-Roe. Missouri currently has a near-total abortion ban as a result of the Dobbs ruling.

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“While many would consider Navarro a bad choice on the basis of his felony conviction and subsequent four months spent in prison, this is not the biggest alarm that should be sounding at the mention of bringing Navarro back in on tariffs. Trump can easily "fix" the mark on Navarro's criminal record with a pardon on his first day back in office.

The real issue should be Navarro's disastrous trade dealings under Trump that lost Americans millions of dollars, and his unwavering loyalty to a man that landed him in jail.”

“Navarro was a major player in Donald Trump's fiasco response to Coronavirus and the world-wide ventilator shortage.

When the Trump Administration thought they could overcome the optics of failing on every front to protect Americans from the virus by simply stockpiling ventilators, there were several problems that occurred. Acting as a Trump trade advisor, Peter Navarro bought 43,000 ventilators from a Dutch company for half a billion dollars more than a reasonable market price, in order to give the US the appearance of having a surplus of machines by the end of April 2020.

“Sellers who profited off of the Trump administration's exuberance and arrogance were able to inflate their prices for machines which had already fallen out of favor in many cases due to the success rate for COVID patients who were given supplemental oxygen instead. It was fairly easy to secure too many machines at this point as long as Peter Navarro was there and willing to throw a lot of US dollars at the problem.