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.

Hillary Clinton Takes the Lead on Immigration

As noted in a prior post, Hillary Clinton has thrown down the immigration reform gauntlet to the Republican clown car occupants in a move that will likely help even more Hispanics get the message that today's Republican Party is anti-immigrant and for all intent and purposes, the party of white supremacy.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at this bold move that should trigger all kinds of disingenuous tap dancing from Hillary's opponents.  Here are excerpts:

With her speech on immigration in Las Vegas on Tuesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton took a large step forward, up front and to the left of President Obama. That is a good place to be for a presidential candidate who proposes to get the stalled debate moving again, and to bring hope to the millions living here outside the law.

Mrs. Clinton defended a path to citizenship for those 11 million, and promised as president to take executive action — more broadly than Mr. Obama has — to defer the deportations of those who have strong bonds to the community through family and work. She also promised to make conditions “more humane” for immigrant detainees.

Mrs. Clinton noted that her call for a citizenship path sets her apart from any and all Republicans who are in, or likely to enter, the 2016 race. The same is true of her support for executive action.

Like Mr. Bush, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky speaks compassionately of immigrants at times, but his agenda seems limited to sealing the border and ending the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship by birth. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin just wants every unauthorized immigrant to leave the country — and he wants to limit legal immigration, too.

Creating a citizenship path requires Congress to pass a bill, and there’s no sign when that will happen. “If Congress refuses to act,” Mrs. Clinton vowed, “as president I will do everything possible under the law to go even further. There are more people — like many parents of Dreamers and others with deep ties and contributions to our communities — who deserve a chance to stay. I’ll fight for them, too.”

There is a pressing need to lift the burden of fear and separation from families, to unshackle workers who are chained to exploitive jobs by fear of deportation. Mrs. Clinton has shown that she understands this. But meanwhile, the Republicans are stuck in the early 2000s, still talking of border security and illegal invaders. They forget that the 11 million are on this side of the border, and have children, and roots, and jobs, and dreams, and their plight needs to be confronted.

Here is a tip: When you hear candidates talking about securing the border — a border that is as secure as it’s ever going to get — that is the sign that they are not interested in a serious conversation.

Republicans Push Congress Closer to Cliff

At times I think to be a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives you either (i) need to be insane, (ii) have had a lobotomy, (iii) be a Christofascist extremist, (iv) be a card carrying member of the KKK, or (v0 some or all of the preceding.  How else to explain the House Republicans' insistence on pushing Congress toward an impasse that will lead to a funding shut down? And right at a time when Islamic extremist groups are claiming that they are going to target the USA, Britain and Canada for domestic terror attacks.  But then I forgot something: being virulently anti-immigrant/anti-Hispanic is now a prerequisite to being a true Republican as opposed to a RINO.  At least when one isn't busy thumping on one's Bible and prostituting them self to the religious fanatics in the GOP base.  A piece in Politico looks at the GOP's continued push for a crisis of its own making.  Here are excerpts:

Republican leaders, racing against the clock to find a tough response to President Barack Obama’s immigration policies, are now left with two messy options: punt or risk getting blamed for shutting down an agency that fights terrorism.  A punt is looking more likely by the hour.

On Monday evening, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved the Senate toward a standalone bill narrowly targeting the president’s 2014 executive action and sparing the 2012 action aimed only at certain young immigrants. It’s the GOP leader’s first step in trying to disentangle the immigration fight from a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security.

Senior Republicans said privately earlier in the day that the party may have no choice now but to fund the agency on a short-term basis. The length of a so-called continuing resolution isn’t clear, but McConnell plans to discuss the matter with GOP senators in a closed-door lunch on Tuesday.

The dual efforts — to potentially move a short-term funding bill and attack the immigration bill separately — are meant to signal to [racists] conservatives the GOP will continue to battle the president on immigration without jeopardizing DHS funding. While passing a short-term continuing resolution without restricting Obama on immigration would likely clear the Senate, it faces an uphill climb in the House, where it is unclear if conservatives will view the GOP’s evolving tactics as a run toward political cover.

Both McConnell and Boehner have vowed to avoid any shutdowns — raising the stakes for the leaders in only the second month of a Congress now fully under GOP control.

[W]ith worries growing over national security preparedness in the event of a shutdown, an increasing number of Republicans said the party may have no option other than to extend the department’s funding for several weeks under a Continuing Resolution.

A number of outspoken conservatives — such as Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — are trying to stiffen GOP leaders’ spines, arguing that Democrats will shoulder the blame if the department shuts down. And as McConnell began to search for a way out of the jam and his colleagues expressed openness to punting on the immigration fight, Cruz did little to hide his disregard for party leaders’ tactics.

As the congressional standoff barrels to a climax, the Obama administration revved up its messaging machine. Flanked by nearly 30 employees from across the department and the chiefs of FEMA and Customs and Border Patrol, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Monday up to 80 percent of the department would work without pay in the event of a shutdown, while 30,000 employees would be furloughed, including 80 percent of FEMA. 

Poll: Americans Will Blame GOP for DHS Shutdown

As the GOP controlled House of Representatives remains dead set on pandering to the racist, anti-Hispanic elements of the GOP base, Congressional Republicans are on the verge of proving to the nation that the party is unable to govern responsibly and about to shut down the Department of Homeland Security rather than provide funding that could assist Hispanic immigrants covered by Barack Obama's executive order.  The good news is that a new CNN/ORC International poll indicates that voters will rightly blame the GOP (and in particular John Boehner) for the debacle that may endanger America's safety.  Here are highlights from Politico:

If the Department of Homeland Security shuts down later this month, most Americans would point the finger at congressional Republicans, a new CNN/ORC International poll finds.

The survey’s results find that if DHS shuts down on Feb. 27 — the date when the department is set to run out of funds — 53 percent of Americans would blame the Republicans in Congress. Thirty percent of respondents said they would blame President Barack Obama, while 13 percent said they would blame both.

House Republicans have passed a bill to fund the department that would also unravel Obama’s executive action granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants. Senate Democrats have indicated that the bill is dead on arrival in the upper chamber.

Multiple Senate Republicans, including Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have asked the House to pass a bill that would pass muster with Democrats.

McCain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that cutting off DHS’ funding would be “terrible.”

Speaker of the House John Boehner has repeatedly insisted that blame should fall on Senate Democrats for blocking the House’s version of the bill.

New York’s Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer responded in a statement, “When Speaker Boehner tied immigration to DHS funding he knew exactly what he was doing: saying, ‘Unless I get my way, I’m going to shut down a large part of the government.’ To now blame Democrats when members of his own party, conservative leaders and others have all asked him to back off this game of chicken is disingenuous at best.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has stated publicly that the House’s bill is a nonstarter in the Senate.