Damn, Donald!

Back at it, again, with the black vans.

#kafkaesque

BestoftheLeft #1706: "Trump's Kafkaesque Deportation Nightmare is the Shame of the Nation"

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#podcast #progressive #progressives #progressivepolitics #politics #uspolitics #immigration #deportation #trump #dueprocess #kafkaesque #constitutionalcrisis #kilmarabregogarcia #elsalvador #scotus

Kafka traveling under Schroedinger's Visa:

(from a thread by Sasha Gusev):

Dr. Émile P. Torres:
Four students at Case Western Reserve University were told that their visas had been revoked and that they will need to leave the country, while the semester is still going. Now, turns out, they don't! What a complete sh*tshow.

Sasha Gusev: This has to be one of the craziest admissions from A JUDGE that I've ever seen in a court transcript. What the hell are we doing here?!

THE COURT: Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque? I've got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a client who is months away from graduation, who has done nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status, although that clearly is BS. And now, his two very experienced lawyers can't even tell him whether or not he's here legally, because the Court can't tell him whether or not he's here legally, because the government's counsel can't tell him if he's here legally.

And the broader context is somehow even more embarrassing:

MR. *redacted*: I'm not able to answer that question, Your Honor.

THE COURT: How are you not able to answer that question? What does that even mean? He's either here legally or he's not here legally. You're the government's lawyer. Is he here legally? I mean, how is Mr. *redacted* supposed to know if he's here legally if you don't even know if he is here legally?

MR. *redacted* : He was lawfully admitted to the United States.

THE COURT: No, no, Mr. *redacted* there's a -- no, no Mr. *redacted* there is a yes or no answer here. We are not, this is not Schrodinger's visa, either he's here legally or he's not here legally. If you cannot answer the question, you have to explain to me why you cannot answer that question.

MR. *redacted*: I cannot answer that question. I have talked to ICE as to whether or not they consider at this point in time the individual, whether or not they are maintaining lawful status.

THE COURT: And what does ICE say to that?

MR. *redacted*: I have not received a response, Your Honor.

#USpol #immigration #kafkaesque

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1914125716943159324.html

https://theintercept.com/2025/04/17/international-student-visas-deport-dhs-ice/

A moment to appreciate the Kafkaesque situation of faculty time sheets.

At two schools in different states I've been required* to submit an electronic time sheet every month, detailing days and even hours of sick, vacation, and/or other leave time I've "used". I've also been ordered or pressured to charge/pay sick days** for illness or bereavement. Faculty (at these schools) almost never charge sick days, for the simple reason that nobody will do our job when we're not there. I've tried to push back on this and only succeeded in getting even higher up on some administrators' shit lists.

The administrators want faculty to reduce their accumulated sick time if they miss class, though they are absolutely not going to pay someone else to cover the classes, research, service, and advising while the faculty member is out. They seem to think this concept is unthinkable.

Now I, like everyone else I know, don't inform administrators when I am out sick etc. If I can get a colleague to cover a class (we often trade favors), great, but no way am I losing earned sick days when I still have to do everything as if I hadn't missed class, anyway.

I've also asked about overtime: If we're required (in theory) to document every hour we miss of our job, shouldn't we also be at least documenting extra hours we put in? The response to this question has been vaguely threatening with a strong suggestion that anyone asking that question is not a team player. The verbal answer has been, in essence, "No, because you're not hourly; you're salaried."

... which doesn't explain why we have to track the hours we "miss".

We have no set number of hours to work. Admin sends lots of "expectation" messages about when we should be on campus, etc., but (a) decades-old union agreements specify that there is no set number of hours, and (b) if admin pushes that too hard I assume they are flirting with paying faculty for the actual hours we work, and no administrator wants that.

* "required" = get nagged until I do it every month

** In my current system, accumulated sick days at retirement determine pro-rated discounts to monthly premiums if staying on the state health insurance plan, so faculty are motivated to maximize sick days and administrators are motivated to minimize them.

#highered #faculty #teaching #professor #management #labor #kafkaesque

In "When the Cattle Gun Touches Her Forehead" by Ben Serna-Grey, trillionaires get the Nobel while a father slaves on a tower to reduce atmospheric CO2 and his wife submits to in utero genetic engineering to make the baby eat plastic. Satiric treatment of eco-fascism. Strongly recommended

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D1N6MGDV

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