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Even as so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ around the country ramp up their efforts to thwart the Trump administration on enforcing immigration laws, despite the risk of losing their federal subsidies, arrests of illegal immigrants spiked 33% YoY in the first 52 days of Trump’s presidency. 

Of course, for the Washington Post, such a spike in the enforcement of federal laws is highly disturbing and perhaps even a direct attack on the rights of sexual assault victims.  

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 21,362 immigrants, mostly convicted criminals, from January through mid-March, compared to 16,104 during the same period last year, according to statistics requested by The Washington Post.

 

Arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled to 5,441, the clearest sign yet that President Trump has ditched his predecessor’s protective stance toward most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States.

 

Advocates for immigrants say the unbridled enforcement has led to a sharp drop in reports from Latinos of sexual assaults and other crimes in Houston and Los Angeles, and terrified immigrant communities across the United States. A prosecutor said the presence of immigration agents in state and local courthouses, which advocates say has increased under the Trump administration, makes it harder to prosecute crime.

 

“My sense is that ICE is emboldened in a way that I have never seen,” Dan Satterberg, the top prosecutor in Washington state’s King County, which includes Seattle, said Thursday. “The federal government, in really just a couple of months, has undone decades of work that we have done to build this trust.”

That said, we doubt very seriously that WaPo made the same arguments in 2014 when, under the Obama administration, immigration arrests were 37% higher than Trump’s first 50 days…wonder why that would be?

 

ICE “focuses its enforcement resources on individuals who pose a threat to national security, public safety and border security,” spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said in a statement. “However, as [Homeland Security] Secretary [John F.] Kelly has made clear, ICE will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

Meanwhile, arrests of people caught trying to sneak into the United States across the Mexican border plummeted in March to the lowest monthly figure in more than 17 years, a decline that Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said was “no accident” and directly attributable to the Trump administration’s firm stance on enforcing immigration laws.

By region, ICE’s offices in Dallas, Atlanta and Houston have recorded the largest number of arrests since Trump took office.

ICE’s Atlanta office arrested the most immigrants who had never committed any crimes, with nearly 700 arrests, up from 137 the prior year. Philadelphia had the biggest percentage increase, with 356 noncriminal arrests, more than six times as many as the year before.

 

The ICE field offices with the largest total number of arrests — more than 2,000 each — were in Dallas, which covers north Texas and Oklahoma; Atlanta, which includes Georgia and the Carolinas; and Houston, which spans Southeast Texas.

 

Immigration detainers — voluntary requests from ICE to law enforcement agencies to hold those arrested beyond their normal release so that agents can take them into custody and deport them — also rose, to 22,161. That was a 75 percent jump from the year before. But many were issued in areas that do not necessarily comply with ICE requests.

Of course, as enforcement actions surge so do claims of political persecution…

But Anabel Barron, an immigrant activist in Ohio, said she is facing deportation even though she is a domestic-violence victim who applied for a visa. She said ICE officials have affixed an electronic-tracking device to her ankle.

 

“I’m scared to go back to Mexico,” she said. “I’m losing hope.”

 

Others fear ICE is arresting immigrants in retaliation for asserting their rights, such as two dairy worker advocates in Vermont, who have since been released on bond, and a community activist in New York, who is detained.

 

“I honestly believe that ICE wants to send a message that this is what happens when you speak out,” said Boston immigration lawyer Matt Cameron, who represents the Vermont activists.

But perhaps ICE’s message isn’t “this is what happens when you speak out” as much as it is “this is what happens when you break the law”…just a thought.

via http://ift.tt/2prpr2f Tyler Durden

Authored by Kevin Muir via The Macro Tourist blog,

Today’s post will have no answers. I am not sure anyone truly understands the strange day to day squiggles of the increasingly intertwined global financial system, but I wanted to highlight a relationship that cannot simply be monkeys typing Shakespeare.

Let’s start with the market developments over the past couple of days. Last week ended on a trading holiday, with markets closed for Good Friday. Weirdly, the U.S. Federal Government does not take the day off. With Wall Street deserted, there were a bunch of economic releases that shit the bed. Yup, they were not good.

I took the liberty of lifting a couple of charts from ZeroHedge that sum up the extent of the economic miss:

 

 

 

As traders huddled around their screens Easter Sunday evening, it was no surprise that U.S. Treasury futures were indicated to gap higher. When the opening bell rang for the GLOBEX session, the Five Year T-Note future opened up almost half a dollar (a big move for a five year note) on massive volume of more than a billion dollars in the first two minutes.

 

Nothing really surprising about that move. After all, there is a monster speculative short position at the front end of the yield curve.

But after the big emotional gap open, the price of all U.S. fixed income drifted lower.

Maybe this could be the result of thin holiday conditions. For most of the night, prices meandered around, so it makes sense to not read too much into the moves.

But once U.S. traders returned to their turrets this morning, prices continued moving down. Strange. Maybe this was an ‘all-baked-in’ situation where the weak CPI and Retail sales data were anticipated?

Yet today’s economic data once again disappointed expectations. The Empire Manufacturing Survey came in at 5.2 versus a forecasted 15.0.

Despite more bad news on the economic front, bonds continued to sag.

What’s going on?

Eventually markets go where the fundamentals dictate. But “eventually” can often be a long time.

Far be it for me to suggest that U.S. Treasury yields are not set by fundamental factors, but take a gander at this chart of the U.S. 5 year treasury yield versus the Japanese Yen.

 

The Japanese Yen and the U.S. 5 year yield have been trading almost on top of one another.

And just in case you think this might be a “U.S. dollar thing,” here’s the same time frame with 5 year yields versus the US Dollar DXY index:

 

Yeah, there might be a loose relationship between the U.S. Dollar index and 5 year yields, but don’t forget the Yen is one of the DXY members. Given that fact, the DXY does not exhibit the same sort of pattern.

It is obvious the Yen price action is tied to U.S. yields.

And it’s not limited to fixed income. Here is the Japanese Yen versus the S&P 500 future:

 

It’s nowhere as clean as JPY / US 5 year yield relationship, but it is still way more correlated than should be the case.

There is no fundamental economic reason for the Japanese exchange rate to be so closely correlated to US yields and equities. The two economies are simply not that closely tied. It would make more sense for the Mexican Peso or the Canadian Dollar to track US capital markets.

The Japanese exchange rate is being influenced by massive distortions with their unprecedented quantitative easing programs. And that’s the rub. The Yen is not ‘tracking’ but instead ‘creating’ these moves in the U.S. capital markets.

The Bank of Japan’s quantitative easing program is without precedent in the developed economic world. It is easy to forget the magnitude of their purchases. To remind you, here is a chart of the Fed, ECB and BoJ’s balance sheet as a percent of GDP:

 

At almost 90% of GDP, the Bank of Japan’s balance sheet is just bat shit crazy! No other way to describe it.

With Kyle Bass and all the other “cool kids” focusing on China or some other trendy trade, the “Japanese QE blow up” forecast has drifted off the radar screen. But it really shouldn’t.

We might kid ourselves that U.S. financial markets are reacting to fundamental news, but all too often, they are simply moving to the price on the Bank of Japan’s last blue ticket.

I warned you that I wouldn’t have any answers in today’s post, but I implore you to stick the Yen up your screen and watch it like a hawk – it’s likely that any serious market dislocation will first show up in the movement of the Yen.

via http://ift.tt/2oEVcC0 Tyler Durden

With the world’s attention focused on Syria and North Korea in recent weeks for obvious reason, another geopolitical hotspot is on the verge of eruption. According to AFP, after weeks of increasingly more violent protests, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has ordered the army into the streets as the insolvent nation braces for what the opposition has vowed will be the “mother of all protests” on Wednesday.

Maduro, who recently backed down from a bid to usurp supreme power after a Supreme Court decision left the local Congress powerless, only to reverse itself following furious blowback even from his own party, has faced violent protests over recent moves to tighten his grip on power, and ordered the military to defend the leftist “Bolivarian revolution” launched by his late mentor Hugo Chavez in 1999.

“From the first reveille (on Monday morning), from the first rooster crow, the Bolivarian National Armed Forces will be in the streets… saying, ‘Long live the Bolivarian revolution,'” Maduro said Sunday night in a televised address. State TV showed images of army units marching in the streets of Caracas as Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino watched although there was no sign of soldiers on patrol Monday morning in the capital.

As noted previously, Venezuela has been rocked by two weeks of unrest since Maduro’s camp moved to consolidate its control with a Supreme Court decision quashing the power of the opposition-majority legislature. The court partly backtracked after an international outcry, but tensions only rose further when authorities slapped a political ban on opposition leader Henrique Capriles.

In the ensuing protests, at least five people have been killed and hundreds wounded as riot police clashed with demonstrators. All this took place as the country was scrambling to collect $2 billion to make a bond principal repayment for domestic energy giant PDVSA (which it did last week), even if it meant briefly running out of gasoline for domestic consumption.

 

Maduro’s recent attempt to concentrate power  – which unlike those of Erdogan proved unsuccessful for now – led to a powerful backlash, with near daily protests around the country and capital; these are expected to climax on Wednesday when Maduro’s opponents have called for a massive protest, a national holiday that marks the start of Venezuela’s independence struggle in 1810.

Meanwhile, the president’s supporters have called a counter-demonstration the same day. As AFP puts it, April 19 is a touchy date in Venezuela “where Chavez and Maduro have built a politics of populist, left-wing nationalism around the struggle for independence from colonial Spain and its hero, Simon Bolivar.”

Maduro is fighting off the center-right opposition’s efforts to force him from power amid an economic crisis that has sparked severe food shortages, riots and looting.

Maduro denounced his opponents as “traitors” and called the new deployment a sign of the military’s “honor, unity and revolutionary committment.”

Despite pervasive public anger at the Maduro regime driven by an economic collapse that has resulted in the Bolivar losing all value in recent years, so far the key arbiter of Venezuela’s fate – the army – remains on his side.

Opposition leaders have urged the military, the only remaining pillar of Maduro’s power, to turn on the socialist president. So far, they have been unsuccessful, and if Wednesday’s preview is any indication, this won’t change any time soon: the defense minister vowed the army would show its “fighting spirit ahead of April 19,” but said the deployment was “a call to peace.” “We don’t want confrontation.”  For the ordinary people, millions of whom have little if anything left to lose, a confrontation may be the only option.

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Following news earlier this morning from South Korea’s primary news outlet, Yonhap, that the Pentagon has directed a total of three US aircraft carriers toward the Korean Peninsula, Sean Spicer is scheduled to take the stage momentarily to brief the press on the latest developments regarding North Korea.

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April looks set to be the worst month since August 2015 (when China devalued and turmoil spread across the world) for global financial stress.

As Bloomberg reports, rising geopolitical concerns are pushing a gauge of anxiety for global asset classes to this year’s high.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Financial Stress Index climbed to 0.24 last week, meeting the peak reached in February and rebounding from a low at the end of March. A positive reading indicates more financial-market stress than normal.

This signal suggests more possible downside to US equities…

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Authored by Zaki Laidi via Project Syndicate,

In a few weeks, France will elect its next president. Given the French executive’s considerable powers, including the authority to dissolve the National Assembly, the presidential election, held every five years, is France’s most important. But the stakes are higher than ever this time.

The two frontrunners are the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron, who served as economy minister under Socialist President François Hollande, but is running as an independent. If, as expected, Le Pen and Macron face off in the election’s second round on May 7, it will be a political watershed for France: the first time in 60 years that the main parties of the left and the right are not represented in the second round.

France has not endured such political turmoil since 1958, when, in the midst of the Algerian War, General Charles de Gaulle came to power and crafted the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. That shift, like any great political rupture, was driven by a combination of deep underlying dynamics and the particular circumstances of the moment.

Today is no different. First, the underlying dynamic: the rise, as in most developed countries nowadays, of popular mistrust of elites, feelings of disempowerment, fear of economic globalization and immigration, and anxiety over downward social mobility and growing inequality.

These sentiments – together with the French state’s historical role in fostering national identity and economic growth – have contributed to a surge in support for the National Front. Le Pen’s nationalist, xenophobic message and populist economic policies resemble those of the far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

Although support for the National Front has been growing for more than a decade, the party has so far been kept out of power by France’s two-round electoral system, which enables voters to unite against it in the second round. And, given the National Front’s inability to make alliances, power has remained in the hands of the main parties of the left and the right, even as France has moved toward a tripartite political system.

Now, Macron is taking advantage of current circumstances to blow up the tripartite system. Macron’s great insight, which few initially recognized, was that the right-left divide was blocking progress, and that the presidential election amounted to a golden opportunity to move beyond it, without the help of an organized political movement. At a time when the French people are increasingly rejecting the traditional party system, Macron’s initial weakness quickly became his strength.

It helped that, as Macron himself recognized, both the right and the left have fragmented in recent years. This is particularly true on the left, where a clear division has emerged between a reformist current, led by former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, and traditionalists, represented by the Socialist Party candidate, Benoît Hamon. The Socialists’ problems are compounded by the existence of a radical left working actively to eliminate them, much as Spain’s left-wing Podemos party has sought to replace the Socialist Workers’ Party there.

The source of the mainstream right’s travails is less clear. Its forces remain generally united on economic and social issues. In fact, until a few months ago, its presidential candidate, the Republicans’ François Fillon, was expected to lead the pack in the first round by a wide margin. But a scandal over his personal conduct (he allegedly paid his wife and children for non-existent jobs while he was a member of parliament) damaged his candidacy – probably fatally.

Whatever the reason for the right’s decline, Macron has benefited substantially from it, as well as from the rifts afflicting the left. Now, there is a real chance the young independent could be elected president on May 7, upending the Fifth Republic’s political system.

But an electoral victory is just a first step. To govern in France’s hybrid presidential-parliamentary system, Macron would need to secure a majority in the National Assembly. This opens the possibility of two scenarios.

In the first scenario, Macron quickly gains a parliamentary majority, as French voters seek to reinforce his mandate in June’s National Assembly election. This is conceivable, but not certain: it is here where the lack of an organized political movement on the ground remains a weakness for Macron.

That is why the June election could give rise to the second scenario: cohabitation with a parliamentary coalition comprising a small right-wing faction, a large centrist faction, and a hopelessly divided left-wing faction. Such a development would be familiar in many European countries. But in France, where republicanism gave rise to the left-right ideological spectrum that shapes politics throughout the West today, it would be a genuine revolution – one that could spell the end of the Socialist Party.

Given the symbolic power of the left-right divide, France’s voters and political leaders alike have long tended to frame virtually all of the country’s problems in ideological terms. The public and its politicians have little experience with government based on broad coalition agreements. This partly explains why the political system becomes gridlocked, sometimes making reforms difficult to implement, and why Macron’s message, which includes clear reform plans, is so unusual for France.

If Le Pen somehow comes out on top, French politics – not to mention the European Union – will be turned upside. But even the ostensibly moderate Macron represents, in his own way, a truly radical stance. With both candidates likely to make it to the second round, France is on the verge of a political revolution, regardless of who wins.

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