Trump's Vicious Immigration Policies' Willing Accomplices

While the Trump/Pence regime's Stephen Miller physically resembles Hitler's Joseph Goebbels, the cruel immigration policies he is pushing - and which Der Trumpenführer is gleefully embracing - are more akin to the policies of Heinrich Himmler's - the man who oversaw the "Final Solution" and the murder of millions of Jews across Europe. Like Hitler and Himmler, Miller and Trump see no common humanity in the immigrants their policies abuse, including small children in some cases wrenched from their parents. There are other parallels to the horrible Nazi past alive and well in America in 2019: the portion of the population that supports such horrors and, even more so, the personnel implementing the policies and abusing immigrant families.  No doubt the latter justify their conduct in the same manner Nazi death camp workers did: we were just following orders.  As if that excuse washed away any responsibility for the harm they did to others.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump and Miller's accomplices - individuals who deserve to be damned by history.  Here are excerpts:

As President Trump continues his mad purge of the Department of Homeland Security, a sinister figure is emerging as the driving force behind all the chaos: Stephen Miller, the president’s top immigration adviser. . . . Mr. Miller seems to have rarely met an immigrant he didn’t want to deport. He is among the hardest of hard-liners, known for spurring his boss to pursue ever more draconian measures.

Not that Mr. Trump needs much encouragement. He did, after all, ascend to the White House on an immigrant-bashing, ethnonationalist platform as dishonest as it was divisive. Many of the administration’s uglier policy ideas have been a result of Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on his signature campaign promise of a “big, beautiful” border wall. Small wonder Mr. Miller has emerged as his favorite consigliere on such matters.

He [Miller] was a chief architect of the travel ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries. He favors the building of tent cities at the border for warehousing asylum seekers. He’s agitating to end the 20-day limit on detaining migrant children. And he wants to reinstate the practice of snatching migrant children from their families — though this time he’d like to give parents a “binary choice” of having their kids taken from them or held with them in detention indefinitely.

Mr. Miller is being credited with the blood bath at the Department of Homeland Security. Since Friday, a handful of top leaders have been, or are soon to be, shown the door, including the head of the Secret Service, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was never quite ruthless enough for the president’s or Mr. Miller’s taste. More firings are expected as Mr. Miller moves to remake the department in his image.

Bottom line, Stephen Miller is a man whose anti-immigration zeal remains unfettered by concern for the law, international norms or basic humanity. . . . And yet. The portrait of the 33-year-old policy adviser as a figure of singular evil is both overly simplistic and counterproductive.

But no matter how much of the administration’s immigration agenda Mr. Miller has been responsible for, it’s taken a village to make that vision a reality. Giving too much credit to any one person builds up Mr. Miller, undeservedly, as a Machiavellian genius and lets many other folks off the hook.

A society does not fall because of a small coterie of bad actors. Widespread rot requires legions of enablers, many of whom are driven by varying blends of personal ambition, ideological expedience and the self-aggrandizing delusion that, through their invaluable counsel, they can save the state from total destruction.

Expect increasingly to hear this last rationalization from former administration officials starting redemption tours as they resume life outside the Trump bubble.

Advisers like Kellyanne Conway, lawmakers like Senator Lindsey Graham and the former House Speaker Paul Ryan, party apparatchiks like the Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel and a whole host of Trump-friendly media personalities may not  personally share the president’s views or policy aims. But their willingness to swallow some of the administration’s cruelest acts renders them complicit. Neither their reputations nor their consciences should be wiped clean.

Take Ms. Nielsen. . . . . Throughout her tenure, stories bubbled up about how she incurred Mr. Trump’s wrath by dragging her feet on policies that would have run afoul of the law or thrown the nation into chaos. But she still carried out and aggressively enforced her share of atrocities.

Now, defenders are portraying the woman who was in charge of caging migrant children as a hapless victim of the administration’s more unhinged forces.

It’s tempting to see Stephen Miller as the archvillain of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But there is much guilt to go around, and even reluctant collaborators cannot be allowed to absolve themselves of responsibility for the administration’s continuing outrages.

Those who quietly allowing the Trump regime's abuses to continue are little better than the "good Germans" who did nothing as millions were murdered. These people deserve no respect and deserve to be treated as pariahs. They are morally bankrupt no matter how frequently they park their asses in church pews.