Wednesday, September 06, 2017

White Supremacists Got What they Wanted with DACA Rescission


Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions - a man who refused to prosecute KKK members for lynching a black man when he and I both lived in Mobile - made the announcement today for a cowardly Donald Trump indicating that the Obama administration executive order protecting undocumented individuals brought to America as children would be rescinded.  Given Sessions' unbridled racism, it a wonder he didn't have an organism while making the announcement. Placing 800,000 mostly non-white individuals at risk of deportation is a dream come true for Sessions, Trump's white supremacist supporters and a host of racist Republican officials. Yes, Sessions sought to dress the decision up with legal arguments, but the real hope is that Congress will fail to act and then these individuals can be deported.  Driving home I heard Kris Kobach, the Secretary of State of Kansas, a vociferous immigrant hater in my view, and a Trump supporter, claim that families would not be broken up as a result.  His solution was to have entire families  return to the parents countries of origin, including U.S. born children.  That's right, he's perfectly fine with the defacto deportation of U.S. citizens who would have to wait until age 18 to return to America.  Why? Because - although he won't say it directly and engages in legal mambo jumbo - most would be Hispanics and other non-whites.  That's the Reality of what today's Republican Party stands for.   I hope I'm proven wrong and Congress reverses this ruthless policy, but I will not be holding my breath.  As for the evangelical Christians who support this administration, this merely further confirms that they are truly horrid people who need to be shunned by decent and moral people.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the Democrats who see through Trump's charade as I do. Here are excerpts:
Democrats, dismayed but not surprised by President Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, were quick to issue statements of condemnation and offer up legislative fixes. They were also bolder than they’d been in the past to make a heavy accusation: The president, in the wake of deadly neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, was giving white supremacists what they wanted.
“It is clear that the president eliminated DACA to advance his xenophobic agenda,” Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) said in a statement. “This repeal aligns with the interests not of the 78 percent of Americans opposed to deporting these young people, but of un-American anti-DACA white supremacist leaders like Richard Spencer. Spencer has called himself a former ‘mentor’ to close Trump adviser, Stephen Miller, who urged the president to end the program.”
Conyers, who is in line to run the House Judiciary Committee if Democrats retake the House, was one of several Democrats who invoked racists, Charlottesville, or both, to describe the president’s decision as a sop to bigots.
 
“The president is breaking apart families and bruising our economy,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in his statement. “And on the heels of Charlottesville, he is signaling to champions of hate and bigotry that their voices matter most.”
Rep. Luis V. GutiĆ©rrez (D-Ill.), the House’s main advocate for DACA, singled out White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly, saying in a statement that he’d been lied to about the fate of the program. Then he went further, accusing Kelly of siding with white supremacists.
“General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear,” GutiĆ©rrez said. “He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House along with the white supremacists and those enabling the president’s actions by ‘just following orders.’ ”
The final hypocrisy is Sessions and  Kobach whining about "protecting the Constitution and the rule of law" when Trump utterly ignores the Emoluments Clause and other legal norms and Kobach and his Republican cohorts seek to disenfranchise minorities and are waging a homophobic war on the LGBT community, particularly those who are transgender. 

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