Trump May Take Away Millions of Americans' Bank Accounts

Reuters fires employee who defended immigrants from ICE surveillance, Republican tells Americans to stop complaining about gas prices, Trump's Diet Coke addiction gets worse

Good evening, and welcome to Raw America. I’m John Byrne, in for British Chris.

The Trump administration is quietly moving to lock millions of Americans out of the banking system. A major media company just fired a worker who tried to protect immigrants from surveillance. A Republican senator is telling you to stop complaining about higher gas price. And one of Trump’s top health officials spoke at length about the president’s Diet Coke habit. Let’s get into it.

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Trump May Remove Millions of Americans’ Access to Their Bank Accounts

The Trump administration is moving forward on an executive order that would require banks to collect citizenship documentation from their customers. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed it’s already in process.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton is cheering this on, writing to the Treasury Department to push for a review of rules that let undocumented people access the banking system. But here’s the part that doesn’t get said enough: this wouldn’t just affect undocumented immigrants.

Banking experts are warning that this order could strip millions of ordinary Americans of their bank accounts. Think about who doesn’t have a passport. According to American Banker, only about half of the U.S. population does. In West Virginia, it’s about two in ten. And the ten states with the lowest passport rates, all below 37 percent, voted for Trump in the last three elections.

Additionally, one in ten Americans don’t have their birth certificate readily available. Nearly four million people report theirs as lost, stolen, or destroyed. Elderly Americans born before standardized record-keeping could be caught in this net. So could low-income people, students, and anyone living in a state where replacing documents is slow or expensive.

The details of the order still aren’t clear, including exactly what documents will be required, how exceptions would work, and what happens to people with incomplete records. But the direction is clear enough: a lot of Americans, including a lot of Trump voters, could find themselves suddenly without a bank account.

Media Giant Fires Employee for Speaking Out Against ICE

Thomson Reuters isn’t just a news company. It also operates something called the CLEAR database, a massive data broker product that contains names, addresses, Social Security numbers, car registration data, and even ethnicity information on millions of people.

That database has been sold to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And when one employee tried to raise the alarm about it, she got fired.

Billie Little was a senior attorney editor at Thomson Reuters for nearly two decades. She helped lead hundreds of coworkers in signing a letter to company leadership expressing serious concerns that CLEAR was being used to compile and share sensitive personal and location data with federal immigration authorities in ways that may violate the law and the Constitution.

Thomson Reuters launched an internal investigation after that letter went public. Nine days later, Little was fired for an unspecified “code of conduct violation.”

She’s now suing. The lawsuit claims she’s the only employee who was fired out of the more than 200 who signed that letter, and that she was singled out because she was the most visible leader of that effort.

The case is being filed under Oregon’s whistleblower law, which exists precisely to protect employees who report in good faith that their employer may be breaking the law.

This story matters beyond just one person’s job. It’s about a major corporation selling surveillance tools to the government that can be used to track and locate people, and then punishing the employee who had the courage to say something about it.

Unlike other media companies, Raw America isn’t afraid to publicly stand against unlawful behavior. We aren’t owned by a billionaire or controlled by a corporation — we have you. Become a paying supporter of Raw America right now.

GOP Senator Shrugs Off Americans’ Concerns About Gas Prices

Gas prices are averaging around four dollars a gallon nationally right now. In California and Oregon, they’re topping five dollars. And Republican Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas has a message for Americans struggling with those costs: too bad.

Appearing on Newsmax Tuesday morning, Marshall was asked about the economic impact of the Iran war and said, “national security … is even more important than your pocketbook.”

He then compared the situation to World War II, suggesting that Americans who ask how long they’ll be paying higher prices are like people who wanted to give FDR a deadline to defeat Hitler.

Here’s what Marshall left out.

This war wasn’t forced on the United States by an imminent threat. It’s a war of choice, launched by Trump’s decision to attack Iran. The national security threat Marshall is describing was created by this administration’s own actions.

But Marshall’s defending it anyway, and he’s doing it by invoking the Greatest Generation to shame working Americans for noticing that filling up their gas tank has gotten dramatically more expensive.

Dr. Oz Reveals Extent of Trump’s Diet Coke Addiction

And finally, here’s a story that says a lot about the kind of personality we have running the world’s largest economy and military.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who now runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, went on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast and talked about President Trump’s eating habits in some detail.

According to Oz, the president’s Oval Office routine involves a candy drawer, a red button that summons Diet Coke, and a personal theory that diet soda is good for you because, and this is a direct quote, “it kills grass, it’s poured on grass, so therefore must kill cancer cells in the body.”

He also shared that Trump was caught drinking a Fanta on Air Force One, justified on the grounds that it’s “fresh-squeezed” and therefore healthy.

Trump Jr. defended his father, noting that the president doesn’t drink alcohol or use drugs, so the Diet Coke is basically his version of a cocktail.

Look, what a person eats and drinks is their own business. But when the man running Medicare and Medicaid is cheerfully describing a medical theory that Diet Coke fights cancer and declining to push back on it, that’s more than a little concerning.

Help Raw America Compete with the Billionaires

Today, Raw America sat down for an exclusive interview with Liz Oyer, the former Biden DOJ pardon attorney who’s been speaking out about what she’s witnessed in the justice system. Tomorrow, we’re having a conversation with Christopher Hale, a former Obama administration official, at 2pm ET.

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