thehill.com
Democrats face flak for accepting contributions from donors funding Trump ballroom
Senate Democrats are gearing up to make President Trump’s lavish new White House ballroom a prominent issue in the midterm elections, but several prominent Senate Democratic contenders have also ac…
![From the MPR story: [Minneapolis Federal Reserve Governor] Kashkari echoed a statement he made at a St. Paul Area Chamber of Commerce event last month. The ongoing data center boom, which has been financed by companies borrowing heavily, raises the demand for capital. That raises interest rates and pulls capital away from less
profitable projects, like, for instance, building housing. That's why, Kashkari said, bringing down mortgage rates isn't as simple as the Fed cutting its benchmark interest rate. There are other factors
at play, such as data centers. "There's a higher return for the economy for that capital to build data centers than to build an apartment building," he said. "So data centers (are) a big deal. It's having a near-term inflationary impact. It's probably pushing
up interest rates across the economy now and for the next several years"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2yhglxsi2owchryafic2gmr3/bafkreifputwjolwbynmcuz5zrtwaxvf3jd4a3uclywdnlfzr6xbcyh2mje)
![And this is an ongoing problem: Just last month here in my hometown, we had a former Border Patrol agent sentenced for having more than 350 images of child sexual abuse material on his phone while serving as an agent.
ICE has all of its own problems — just three weeks ago, a detention officer at an ICE facility in Louisiana pleaded guilty to raping a Nicaraguan detainee for months. And an off-duty ICE officer who shot and killed a man in L.A. on New Year’s Eve had been accused of “allegedly whipp[ing] his sons with a belt and ma[king] racist and homophobic remarks in the past.”)
Overall, CBP’s arrest and misconduct rate is FIVE TIMES higher than other federal law enforcement agencies — and, in fact, if you look over the last decade, the arrest rate of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents (.5%) has been HIGHER than the arrest rate of undocumented immigrants in the United States (.4%).
To frame that a different way: In rough terms, the workforce of CBP officers and Border Patrol agents commit crimes at an equal or even greater rate PER CAPITA than the population of undocumented immigrants do in the United States. And, we are now in the process of repeating all of the same mistakes we made with the CBP hiring surge with ICE’s new hiring surge, which is going disastrously so far.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:7vyyy23h3scgc3vrtzm5kbrx/bafkreihb3u3xd3aeyeevdewvufrlxy3ddbo7ilzjinnc7adx2i6wwdvcom)
