Kirstjen Nielsen Enforced Trump's Cruelty at the Border

Kirstjen Nielsen - handmaiden of evil.

Hopefully, history will be very cruel to Kirstjen Nielsen who as Secretary of Homeland Security enforced Donald Trump's horrific family separation policy which has left countless children separated from the parents.  It not's too much of a stretch to imagine Nielsen as a Nazi death camp commander or SS commander who saw her victims as less than human and, therefore deserving of any imaginable mistreatment. She's a symbol of the inhumane policies of Der  Trumpenführer, yet frighteningly, her replacement may be even more morally bankrupt give that Trump's main complaint was that she was not sufficiently brutal in pushing his racist policies.  An editorial in the New York Times looks at Nielsen's departure and the possibility of worse horrors ahead.  Here are excerpts: 

Time finally ran out for Kirstjen Nielsen, President Trump’s beleaguered secretary of homeland security.

The terms of Ms. Nielsen’s departure were unclear. She met with the president on Sunday evening to discuss continuing problems at the southern border. At the conclusion of the meeting, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that Ms. Nielsen “will be leaving her position” and thanked her for her service, implying he had asked her to step down. Ms. Nielsen issued a formal letter of resignation, saying it was the “right time for me to step aside.”

Considering the long-simmering tensions between the president and Ms. Nielsen, the most surprising thing about her departure may be that it didn’t happen months ago.

She was said to have become increasingly insecure in her job in recent weeks, as Mr. Trump repeatedly railed about the chaos at the border and vowed to move in a “tougher” direction. [Trump] The president grew impatient with Ms. Nielsen’s insistence that federal law and international obligations limited her actions.

It’s no secret that Mr. Trump had a problem with Ms. Nielsen, whom he considered “weak” on matters of border security. [Trump] The president and Stephen Miller, his hard-line immigration adviser, have long grumbled privately about the secretary’s insufficiently brutal approach to the surge in migrant families across the border.

In her resignation letter released on Sunday, Ms. Nielsen noted, “For more than two years of service beginning during the Presidential Transition, I have worked tirelessly to advance the goals and missions of the Department.”

This is hardly something to brag about. Whatever the secretary’s personal views, and no matter how impossible her job, she was the face of some of the administration’s most poorly conceived and gratuitously callous policies. At best, she was complicit and, yes, hopelessly weak.

Sadly, Ms. Nielsen’s response to her boss’s displeasure and abuse was both morally anemic and strategically incoherent. Last summer, as Republicans and Democrats — and many in the American public — protested the administration’s practice of tearing migrant children from their parents at the border, Ms. Nielsen rushed to publicly defend the policy. Scratch that. She insisted, repeatedly and bizarrely, that the administration had no such policy, even as her agency was enforcing and justifying it.

On the critical question of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 elections, she was even less lucid. At times, she seemed to support the intelligence community’s findings that the Kremlin had been up to no good. Other times, she supported the view that Russia had not favored Mr. Trump in the election. Her every utterance seemed designed to obfuscate rather than clarify.

For now, Ms. Nielsen’s acting replacement will be Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection. This leaves Homeland Security without a top official at either of its critical immigration agencies.

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, said of Ms. Nielsen’s departure, “It is deeply alarming that the Trump administration official who put children in cages is reportedly resigning because she is not extreme enough for the White House’s liking.”

If Ms. Nielsen wants to perform one last act of public service, she could come clean about the costs of the policies she enforced over the past year and half, not only to the desperate migrants seeking a better life in the United States, but also to the thousands of employees of her department charged with carrying out an inhumane and ineffective set of policies.

Build Central America, Not a Wall

The maternal side of my family is intertwined with Central America. My own mother was born in Honduras - which has become a hell hole on the mainland - and later lived in Panama.  I myself qualify for dual citizenship under Honduran law.  As a family, my siblings and I own investments in Honduras that were handed down through my mother's family which left Central America before I was born.  Sadly, Honduras' horrific state of affairs is  in no small part due to bad decisions made in Washington, DC, that focused on supposed strategic decisions that paid no concern for the welfare of that nation's population.  Now, Honduras is one of the main points of origin of the thousands seeking asylum in the USA to escape the fruits of the USA's bad actions and decisions.  An editorial in the New York Times argues that building the economies of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras would go much farther than building a fruitless wall is the real solution to the USA's illegal immigration issue.  Here are excerpts:

As thousands of families fleeing violence, poverty and oppression in Central America arrive at the American border, the Trump administration has responded by separating children and parents and cracking down on asylum claims.

A more humane, and effective, response would be to address the sources of the desperation that propelled these people north. President Trump chose on Monday to reaffirm his punitive bent, complaining about the exodus of migrants and saying he told the leaders of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, whose countries receive millions of dollars in annual aid, “We’re not sending it anymore.” But what if the United States truly prioritized helping these nations?

Plagued by corruption, violence and gang terror, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras need stronger and more honest judges and police officers, better schools and economic development. Elites control much of the land and avoid taxes, even at some of the lowest tax rates in Latin America. Bribery is rampant, and too often leaders lack the interest, competence or will to manage such problems.

Over the years, the United States has contributed to instability by supporting autocrats in civil wars and tolerating corruption that has bred criminality. In 2017, Washington recognized the results of the Honduran presidential election days after the Organization of American States called for new elections because of voting irregularities.

The United States has also invested in Latin America for decades to promote democracy and economic and social development. But the Trump administration has begun to place “more emphasis on preventing illegal immigration, combating transnational crime and generating export and investment opportunities for U.S. businesses,” . . .

While the administration has tried to scale back aid, Congress has resisted, appropriating $2.1 billion for the region from 2016 to 2018, roughly double what had previously been allocated.

Results are mixed: While murder rates in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras declined in 2018, they are still very high, fueled by the trafficking of 90 percent of the cocaine bound for the United States. Economic growth has been steady since 2014, but poverty rates are relatively unchanged. While officials have pursued criminal cases involving presidents and other leaders, opposition from political and economic interests threatens to upend their work.

Eradicating gangs, which drive much of the northward migration, is especially difficult. The International Crisis Group has warned that mass deportations from the United States risk fueling gang violence unless accompanied by serious economic investment in impoverished communities. Just subjecting gang members to harsh prisons and branding them terrorists has backfired, the group said.

In the end, it is Central American leaders who must carry out reforms. They are more apt to do that with international support. But America can slow the exodus of the desperate by investing in democracy, judicial reform and economic growth. So far, Mr. Trump has shown little interest.

Government Data Proves There Is No Border Crisis

One thing that one can count on is that just about anything that comes out of the Trump/Pence regime will be a lie.  That same thing holds for Fox News - today's equivalent of  Germany's Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, or Propagandaministerium for short - under the Nazi regime.  Fox News cares nothing about the truth and objective facts and like it's German model instead works to (i) enforce Trump/Pence ideology, and (ii) give the impression that the Trump/Pence regime has the support of a majority the population rather than merely 35-38% of the population.  Nowhere is the lying campaign more pronounced at the moment than in pushing the fiction that a crisis exists at the US southern border and that a mass invasion of brown people is rushing the border.  A piece in Forbes looks at the Trump/Pence regime's own Department of Homeland Security data that proves that Der Trumpenführer claims are - like everything he utters - a deliberate lie.  Here are article highlights that include meaningful methods to improve the actual border situation: 

America is only a year removed from a December 2017 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report that hailed the agency’s great success in achieving “the lowest level of illegal cross-border migration on record.” A fresh look at current and historical data shows that despite the attention paid to the dueling televised addresses delivered on January 8, 2019, there is no crisis at the border.

“In FY 2017, CBP [Customs and Border Protection] recorded the lowest level of illegal cross-border migration on record, as measured by apprehensions along the border and inadmissible encounters at U.S. ports of entry,” according to the Trump administration’s DHS report released in December 2017. Did the situation at the border change dramatically over the next 13 months and go from an historic “lowest level of illegal cross-border migration” to a national crisis? The answer is, “No.”

Digging deeper into the data, in the first three months of FY 2019, the number of apprehensions and inadmissible encounters at ports of entry was higher than during the first three months of FY 2018. However, the number of apprehensions and people deemed inadmissible at ports of entry the first three months of FY 2019 was actually lower than during those same three months in FY 2017 (the year DHS referred to as the “lowest level…on record”). . . . this indicates there is not a national crisis, but rather developments that should be monitored and addressed with reasonable measures (see below). The data show the problem is concentrated on family units and unaccompanied minors from Honduras and Guatemala. The number of unaccompanied minors from these two countries did not change a great deal between FY 2016 and FY 2018. For Honduras, apprehensions of unaccompanied minors were 10,468 in FY 2016, similar to the 10,913 total in FY 2018. For Guatemala, the FY 2016 number was 18,913, compared to 22,327 in FY 2018. A multi-pronged approach is needed to address the problem. First, the administration should reinstate the Central American Minors (CAM) program to permit people to apply for protection from their home countries. “The CAM program was established in 2014 to provide certain minors in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras the opportunity to be considered, while still in their home country, for refugee resettlement in the United States,” according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. As part of its opposition to refugee admissions, Trump administration officials made a significant error in judgment by abolishing the program, when instead they should have been expanding the program as a way to discourage dangerous treks to the border. Second, not everyone coming to the border is seeking asylum. Many simply want better economic opportunities free of shakedowns (or worse) by gang members. Donald Trump was a businessman and should be adopting a practical businessman’s approach by giving more people a chance to work legally in the United States so they will not enter the U.S. illegally. Negotiating bilateral agreements with Central American countries is one way to accomplish this straightforward solution.

Third, hire more immigration judges and give people a chance to apply for asylum. Blocking people at ports of entry through “metering” encourages people to use smugglers to enter the U.S. unlawfully. For those who apply for asylum, use alternatives to detention, a number of which have a good track record in ensuring people appear for their hearings. That would eliminate the need for more long-term detention facilities.

Fourth, work with Mexico and Central American governments to eliminate the conditions that drive people north in search of safety and economic salvation.

Fifth, tone down the rhetoric to seek more rational solutions. Arguing, as the administration has, that a wall is needed to prevent murderers and terrorists from overrunning the United States does little to promote a bipartisan compromise.

Establishing more ways for people to apply for refugee status in their home countries and allowing individuals to enter the U.S. and work legally is the best approach. A wall will not solve the problem at the border, and it’s a problem, not a crisis.

The Cascade of False Claims by Trump/Pence to Support Trump's Wall

There's still 20 minutes before Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, a/k/a the liar-in-chief, commences his Oval Office address to the nation stunt, and a piece in CNN looks at the lies and falsehoods floated to date to support Trump's wall which is only wanted by Trump's racist, ignorant, white supremacist base.  It's worth a read so that you will be prepared for the lies that Trump may likely repeat (assuming you watch it and don't simply wait for the Democrat response before tuning in). Here are article excerpts:

Donald Trump and his allies have launched a full-court press to convince Americans, and skeptical lawmakers, that there is a crisis on the Southern border, and the only way to fix it is to approve billions of dollars for Trump's signature border wall.

But senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have relied on misleading statements to make their case. Trump, who is also prone to repeating debunked talking points about immigration, is set to deliver his Oval Office address about the topic on Tuesday night. Here's a breakdown of the most recent misleading claims, the half-truths and everything in between, along with the fuller picture, based on official statistics and reporting from CNN.

Illegal border-crossings. In each of his three television interviews Tuesday morning, Pence led his argument that there is a crisis on the southern border with one figure: 60,000. . . . Pence's use of that statistic is misleading at best because it gives the impression that 60,000 people are caught trying to sneak in every month. He is lumping in people who presented themselves at ports of entry in addition to those who were apprehended illegally crossing the border.

Official statistics from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tell the fuller story.

Of the 62,456 individuals who were apprehended or deemed inadmissible at the southern border in November, 10,600 presented themselves at legal US ports of entry and were ultimately deemed inadmissible. [W]hile border apprehensions increased in those months, they didn't surge in an unprecedented fashion as the administration is claiming.  Even including the number of individuals denied admission at designated ports of entry, there were comparable increases and decreases in previous years. The numbers surged to similar levels in late 2016 only to drop again in early 2017, according to CBP numbers.

Terrorists entering the US from Mexico.For months, Trump has raised the specter of "terrorists" crossing the US-Mexico border. He brought this up repeatedly before the 2018 midterms when a caravan of migrants, primarily from impoverished Central American countries, marched through Mexico toward the US border. These claims were debunked at the time as exaggerations and speculation. Though they've made a comeback this year. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was fact-checked live on Fox News when she said Sunday "nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border." Recent reporting revealed that the actual number encountered on the southern border is nowhere near the staggering 4,000 figure. An administration official told CNN that only about a dozen non-citizens on the terrorism watch list who were stopped at the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2018. That is a tiny fraction of all known or suspected terrorists who tried to enter or travel to the US in that timeframe. Additionally, a State Department report from 2016 said there was "no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico" to sneak into the United States. 'Special interest alien' semantics.
In a fact sheet released Monday, DHS reiterated claims that last year, the agency "encountered more than 3,000 'special interest aliens'" at the southern border. Nielsen touted this number last week from the Rose Garden after Trump publicly pressed lawmakers to fund his wall proposal. There's no uniform definition of the term "special interest alien," but DHS defines a "special interest alien" as a non-US person "who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially pose a national security risk to the United States or its interests."  Someone might be flagged for additional vetting because of where they're traveling from or how they arrived in the US.  That doesn't mean, however, that all "special interest aliens" are terrorists, according to DHS. . . . a Syrian Christian who asks for asylum, for example, would be classified as a "special interest alien" simply because he/she is from Syria. According to a report from the libertarian think tank, no "special interest alien" has produced a terrorist attack on US soil.

Drugs coming across the border.The influx of illegal drugs is another key element of the Trump administration's case for building a wall to address what they describe as a crisis at the border. Pence said Tuesday that "90% of all the heroin that comes into this country, that claims the lives of 300 Americans every week, comes through our southern border."

The majority of hard narcotics seized by Customs and Border Protection come through ports of entry either in packages, cargo or with people who attempt to enter the US legally. . . . the majority of the heroin flow on the southern border into the US is through privately owned vehicles at legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods, according to the DEA's 2018 annual drug threat assessment.

A closer look at the numbers shows that in fiscal year 2018, Customs and Border Protection seized 67,292 pounds of methamphetamine at legal ports of entry, compared with 10,382 pounds by Border Patrol agents in between ports, based on available data.

Americans Should Fear What America is Becoming Under Trump/Pence

Refugee children being warehoused compliments of Trump/Pence.

One of America's shameful episodes - one of many that include genocide of Native Americans and slavery and then Jim Crow - is the manner in which Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler's Germany and areas it had conquered were refused admission to the United States.  Many went back to Europe to their deaths in death camps or other forms of mass murder.  Why were they refused entry?  Simple.  They were Jewish and "different."  Fast forward to today and a similar cruelty is taking place along the U.S./Mexico border.  Some who have been refused entry or deported have returned to their home countries and, like European Jews before them, have met their deaths - precisely what they said would happen to them and why they sought asylum in this country.  Der Trumpenführer depicts them all as terrorists and criminals, a claim that like most things flowing from his mouth, is a lie.  America and Americans are losing their souls and decent moral people (sorry, but that excludes evangelicals) should be very upset.  A column at NBC News looks at the steady loss of America's soul.  Here are highlights:  

A bleak irony is emerging in Tijuana's border zone. For all the raging conservative rhetoric about how Central American migrants are lawbreakers who refuse to just “get in line” and enter the “legal” way, the asylum seekers are actually "getting in line” — or what passes for a line — by forming an ad hoc queue that Mexican authorities have improvised to maintain some social order.

Every day, migrants line up to be “processed” with a black number scrawled onto their arms — an informal label used to secure a “spot” on a theoretical waiting list. Yet, as they wait indefinitely for their number to be called, the basic institutions of due process they hope to invoke are disintegrating in a dysfunctional, backlogged immigration court system.

The White House remains hell bent on keeping them out, however, and the plan appears to be to warehouse asylum seekers in Mexico with the underlying aim of discouraging them from trying to cross at all. So a ragged encampment in Tijuana is slowly sinking into chaos as heavily militarized American border authorities block and repel refugees.

The situation is not “immigration enforcement” in any meaningful sense. Instead, it's a reprise of historical pattern of exclusion, displacement and oppression that has always surrounded the nation’s southern boundary — lines of class, race, gender and culture are deliberately drawn to police a social gateway to the country. And to President Trump, these refugees are the wrong kind of people.

Whether or not the migrants are ultimately admitted, the crisis at the border is not about who is coming, but who we are; their transgression of an arbitrarily-drawn border is dwarfed by the savagery the U.S. government commits in the name of “security.” The plight of asylum seekers reflects the flagging promise of America as a land of refuge; their suffering is our own self-sabotage.

[M]igrant rights advocates on the other side of the border see a side of crisis that Trump seems incapable understanding: They are desperate families fleeing for safety, they are survivors, they are refugees of social catastrophe. And Trump is right that they're unstoppable, but only because they are following international law and the basic moral principles enshrined in the constitution.

[R]ights advocates say this is a crisis of Trump’s own making.  Michelle Brané, an advocate with the Women’s Refugee Commission, notes that, compared to Mexico, the U.S. asylum system has adequate resources for dealing with the influx of Central American migrants, but refuses to honor its obligations under domestic and international law to process their claims in U.S. courts.

Migrant women and youth are often the most excluded. Women are typically vulnerable to sexual violence, human trafficking, and other forms of gendered coercion and violence. So-called “unaccompanied minors” — young people who migrate alone — are exposed to gang violence and trafficking. Now Brané worries that desperate asylum seekers might eventually be forced to pay bribes, or to trade sex to secure a slot in line, and youth could get roped into trafficking rings.

Though they have narrowly escaped their hells to seek refuge at the border, Trump’s answer to their humanitarian appeal is to make America as inhumane as possible. The migrants escaping Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are not only connected to diaspora communities in the U.S. but, in many ways, their mass exodus stems from generations of U.S. military and political intervention. From Cold War-era political domination, to destabilizing “free trade” deals, to the violent policies of the War on Drugs, social disruption, fueled in large part by U.S. policy, has unraveled Central American societies, unleashing economic deprivation, crime, corruption and gender-based violence. And now Trump is actively deploying state brutality as a deterrence tactic, imprisoning migrants in detention centers, and even systematically ripping children from their parents and leaving countless families traumatized. The administration has argued that systematic violence against women and children is a mere private “misfortune,” too personal to merit humanitarian reprieve. Foreclosing those claims would keep countless women and youth from invoking well-established legal precedents for granting humanitarian protection.

Here during the Christmas season, the irony is that as evangelicals blather about the "war on Christmas," the real war on the values of Christmas and the gospel message is being waged by a foul regime that evangelicals strongly support (and, indeed, put in office).  All they see is brown skin and refuse to see common humanity.  Meanwhile, the real Jesus, if he existed, was a brown skinned man from Palestine, not the white Jesus of the evangelicals. America is losing its soul and the loss is being spearheaded by the false pious "godly folk" and the politicians they support.   

Immigration Storm Bears Down on Republicans

Many of the Republican Party's problems are self-created and many stem from the party's self-prostitution to Christofascists and white supremacists (typically, the two groups overlap each other by a wide margin).  Other than perhaps abortion and gay marriage, nowhere is the toxicity of this self-prostitution worse than in the realm of immigration and immigration reform.   Despite the Bible passages on welcoming strangers and norms of common decency, nothing sets off the Christofascists and white supremacists more than the prospect of non-whites entering American, a nation stolen from Native Americans by force of arms and genocide. Insanely, one "friend" who supports Trump and his inhumane policies has lamented being called a racist even though she is, in fact a racist, given the hideous Trump/Pence agenda that she supports.  A piece in Politico looks at the no-win situation in which the GOP has placed itself on immigration.  Here are excerpts:

House Republicans left Washington last week relieved that their ugly, months-long fight over immigration was behind them. The reality? It’s far from over.

Donald Trump has been pestering Congress to send him big money for his border wall with Mexico, a demand that could lead to a government shutdown just weeks before Election Day.

And lawmakers might not even have that long to ignore the issue. A series of court rulings expected in the coming weeks on Dreamers as well as separated migrant families will crank up the heat up on GOP lawmakers and underscore their inability to govern when it comes to immigration.

Trump may enjoy campaigning on immigration, but it’s far from what Republican leaders want to highlight as they battle to keep their majorities this fall. GOP lawmakers have repeatedly shown an inability to unite behind any sort of immigration plan, and Trump has failed to lead on the matter as well — creating a constant whiplash as he changes his positions from day to day. Trump’s reversals are one of the major reasons House Republicans were unable to pass a pair of GOP immigration bills addressing the fates of Dreamers just before the July Fourth recess — even though they’d spent months negotiating among themselves. . . . It went down in a whopping defeat, 121-301, as conservatives panned the bill as “amnesty.” The vote was a rebuke to both GOP leadership, which tried and failed to reach a consensus in the conference, and the president, who endorsed the legislation in an all-caps tweet hours before the vote. The Senate, meanwhile, has been trying to come up with a bipartisan bill to keep families united. Lawmakers fear that a federal court will strike Trump’s executive order intended to ease the firestorm engulfing his administration by allowing children to be detained with their parents beyond a 20-day limit. And the Senate wants to have legislation ready if the problem boils over in July.  But even if the Senate strikes a deal, House Republicans say they won’t take up anything unless the White House fully endorses the plan.

Even as Republicans struggle to pass a modest package on immigrant families, they could face pressure to go broader. A conservative-leaning federal court in Texas is expected to rule on the constitutionality of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as early as mid-July, pushing the issue to the fore again.

The case, brought by Texas and several other Republican-dominated southern states, could contradict a previous court’s decision that halted Trump’s move to end DACA. The result could be that Dreamers again face the risk of deportation unless the Supreme Court — or Congress — weighs in.

Should GOP leaders somehow dodge a thorny DACA and family-separation debate this summer, Republicans are still unlikely to wriggle out of an immigration fight before the election. The federal government runs out of money on Sept. 28, and Trump has made no secret of his demand for border wall funding in any spending legislation he signs. In fact, during a meeting with appropriators last week, Trump pressed Republicans to give him $5 billion as a down payment on his wall — well over the $1.6 billion senators had proposed and the $2.2 billion the House had planned.

But GOP leaders know that Senate Democrats will reject the request without relief for Dreamers, and Republicans can’t pass a single appropriations bill in the Senate without them.

It’s possible that Trump allows Congress to pass a stopgap bill that extends government funding into a lame-duck session. But Republicans know by now that it’s not easy to pin down the president. And then they could have a shutdown on their hands.

How to Respond to Those Supporting Trump's Cruelty to Children

Like many I suspect, I continue to struggle to get my head around the mindset of Trump/Pence supporters who see nothing wrong with the forced family separation policy currently in effect along America's southwest border.  A policy that is based on a lie by Trump and which treats brown skinned children in some regards as little better than animals and certainly displays a sinister effort to dehumanize them and undocumented immigrants in general.  Beyond this, there is the issue of how does one try to have discourse with individuals who seemingly are incapable of seeing common humanity in others.  One of my cousins, Jess Charles, from the far north of New York State wrote a Facebook post that to me is remarkable in how it addresses these issues.  Here it is in its entirety:

I try really hard to be open-minded and tolerant of views that are different from mine, but I cannot stay silent on this immigration issue any longer. I am saddened, angered and shocked at the ignorance and lack of compassion so many of my acquaintances have recently shown. Since I don’t have endless hours to debate this topic, I’m going to try to summarize my thoughts in this post. Let me preface it by saying: if you don’t like what I have to say, you have a few options: scroll on, unfollow me or unfriend me. I don’t need comments negating or debating me.

First. For those saying that if you are a legal US resident and commit a crime, you’ll be separated from your children and immigrants are no different, I say this. In the majority of the US citizen cases, children are kept with their families, and if they aren’t, generally CPS keeps the family informed of where their children are. Most/generally, not always. And up until the current administration, immigrant families were NOT separated.

Second. Committing a crime (let’s say possession of heroin with intent to use) is mighty different than fleeing a country because you are in ABSOLUTE fear for your safety and the safety of your family. Some crimes are committed out of necessity, I understand that, and again, GENERALLY, the system will try to work with people (like petty larceny for diapers, again doing what you need to do for your family). I ask so many of you who sit in the comfort of your own home what you would do if your neighborhoods became drug dens, filled with slaughter and you were too afraid to walk out the door or even go to sleep. What would you do to escape that? I know I would do anything to protect my son.

Third. Unless you are 100% Native American, who are YOU to turn your back on someone from another country?! Almost every single person I know, with very few exceptions, is a descendant of someone who immigrated here. Imagine if your great-great grandparents had come over on a boat, their families ripped apart the moment they stepped foot on the soil, and then they were just shipped back?

Fourth. I suggest you study the origins of The Holocaust. Many of us learned of it in junior high or early high school and seem to forget the basis of how it came to be. Once you visit a Nazi concentration camp, you will be forever changed. Study that period of time, and the ignorance and indifference that people displayed. Then take a look around and ask what is so different today from that time period.

Fifth. Let’s take a look at the Declaration of Independence. Direct excerpt: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Or how about this one: “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” Let that sink in for a moment.

I honestly could go on, but chances are if you are reading this, you are someone like-minded who I have already had conversations with, or someone who wholly disagrees with me and is already fuming and not willing to discuss things rationally. So again, I will say, if you don’t like what I have to say: scroll on, unfollow me or unfriend me.

Sprinkle kindness everywhere, people, and don’t limit it to only those who are US citizens. Pray for those less fortunate, fleeing from terrors we are lucky enough to never know. Donate your time, energy, patience, whatever you can to make the WORLD a better place, not just your backyard.

Mexico’s Revenge on Trump - and His Supporters

While Donald Trump's attacks on Hispanics and non-whites in general has played well with the most most ignorant - evangelical Christians are the least educated of any religious group in America - and racist/xenophobic elements of his base, the economic results could prove catastrophic if Mexico decides to exact revenge against Trump's America.  Already, talk of Mexico shifting its agricultural purchases to Argentina and Brazil has Mid-West farmers sweating bullets at the prospect of severe economic and financial damage.  Indeed, the repeal of NAFTA, one of Trump's favorite whipping boys, does not play well in these farming states. But Mexico's revenge could prove even more damaging.  In addition to Mexican intelligence services ending their cooperation with their American counterparts - something that could increase illegal immigration into America - Mexico could tilt toward China as its new found favorite trading partner.  Needless to say, the ignorant, loud mouthed, bullying, narcissist in the White House has never thought of these types of  consequences.  A long piece in The Atlantic looks at the Mexican revenge Trump may be setting into motion. Here are highlights:

When donald trump first made sport of thumping Mexico—when he accused America’s neighbor of exporting rapists and “bad hombres,” when he deemed the country such a threat that it should be contained by a wall and so clueless that it could be suckered into paying for its own encasement—its president responded with strange equilibrium. 

Since then, the Mexican political elite has begun to ponder retaliatory measures that would reassert the country’s dignity, and perhaps even cause the Trump administration to reverse its hostile course. With a presidential election in just over a year—and Peña Nieto prevented by term limits from running again—vehement responses to Trump are considered an electoral necessity. Memos outlining policies that could wound the United States have begun flying around Mexico City. These show that Trump has committed the bully’s error of underestimating the target of his gibes. As it turns out, Mexico could hurt the United States very badly.

The Mexico–U.S. border is long, but the history of close cooperation across it is short. As recently as the 1980s, the countries barely contained their feelings of mutual contempt. Mexico didn’t care for the United States’ anticommunist policy in Central America, especially its support of Nicaraguan rebels. In 1983, President Miguel de la Madrid obliquely warned the Reagan administration against “shows of force which threaten to touch off a conflagration.” 

The grandiose promise of trade is that it binds countries together, breeding peace and cooperation. This is a risible overstatement when applied generally to the world. But in the case of the countries separated by the Rio Grande, it has proved wondrously true. A generation after the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the United States and Mexico couldn’t be more interdependent. Anti-Americanism, once a staple of Mexican politics, has largely faded. The flow of migrants from Mexico to the U.S. has, more or less, abated. Economic ties have fostered greater intimacy between intelligence services and security agencies, which are today deeply enmeshed in each other’s business. 

But the Trump administration has come dangerously close to trashing the relationship—and, in the process, unleashing a terrifying new reality.

The Chinese invested heavily in places like Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela, discreetly flexing soft power as they funded new roads, refineries, and railways. From 2000 to 2013, China’s bilateral trade with Latin America increased by 2,300 percent, according to one calculation. A raft of recently inked deals forms the architecture for China to double its annual trade with the region, to $500 billion, by the middle of the next decade. Mexico, however, has remained a grand exception to this grand strategy. 

Mexico also happens to be the one spot in Latin America where the United States would respond with alarm to a heavy Chinese presence.

That sort of alarm is just the thing some Mexicans would now like to provoke. What Mexican analysts have called the “China card”—a threat to align with America’s greatest competitor—is an extreme retaliatory option. Former Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda told me he considers it an implausible expression of “machismo.” Unfortunately, Trump has elevated machismo to foreign-policy doctrine . . . And while a tighter Chinese–Mexican relationship would fly in the face of recent economic history, Trump may have already set it in motion.

The painful early days of the Trump administration have reminded Mexico of a core economic weakness: The country depends far too heavily on the American market. “Mexico is realizing that it has been overexposed to the U.S., and it’s now trying to hedge its bets,” says Kevin Gallagher, an economist at Boston University who specializes in Latin America. “Any country where 80 percent of exports go to the U.S., it’s a danger.” . . . . The presence of Trump, with his brusque talk of tariffs and promises of economic nationalism, makes that an urgent task.

Until recently, a Mexican–Chinese rapprochement would have been unthinkable. . . . . But China has played the long game, and its patience has proved farsighted. The reason so many Chinese are ascending to the middle class is that wages have tripled over the past decade. The average hourly wage in Chinese manufacturing is now $3.60. Over that same period of time, hourly manufacturing wages in Mexico have fallen to $2.10. Even taking into account the extraordinary productivity of Chinese factories—not to mention the expense that comes with Mexico’s far greater fidelity to the rules of international trade—Mexico increasingly looks like a sensible place for Chinese firms to set up shop, particularly given its proximity to China’s biggest export market.

Let’s pause to consider the illogic. Trump says that China is a grave threat, both militarily and economically. He has accused China of “rap[ing] our country.” That’s not the way most analysts would put it, but a fairly broad bipartisan consensus holds that China’s expansionism should be contained and its mercantilism checked. Barack Obama’s vaunted “pivot” to Asia tried to keep China’s neighbors from succumbing to its gravitational pull. Thanks to Donald Trump, China is now better positioned to execute the most difficult maneuver in its own, North American pivot—pushing the U.S. and Mexico further apart.

What seems more likely is that relations between the security agencies will slowly decay, as trust between the two countries evaporates and warm feelings give way to tensions.

Trump’s rush toward hard-line immigration policies could yield a grim bonanza of other unintended consequences. Mass deportations of Mexicans could uproot hundreds of thousands and deposit them on the other side of the border, forcing their reintegration into lives they left, many of them long ago. Perhaps the Mexican economy, the 15th-largest in the world, has the capacity to absorb these refugees from Trump’s America. But it’s equally easy to imagine a scenario in which they inundate the labor market. And even that possibility doesn’t begin to capture the likely economic costs of deportation. The Mexican economy would be deprived of the remittances that immigrants send back to their relatives. It’s hard to speak hyperbolically about the importance of these transfers—in 2016, Mexican Americans sent $27 billion back to their Mexican families, more than the value of the crude petroleum Mexico exports annually. 

[W]ith Trump’s angry talk and the Mexican resentment it stirs, the best hope for the persistence of this improved relationship is inertia—the interlocking supply chain that crosses the border and won’t easily pull apart, the agricultural exports that flow in both directions, all the bureaucratic cooperation. Unwinding this relationship would be ugly and painful, a strategic blunder of the highest order, a gift to America’s enemies, a gaping vulnerability for the homeland that Donald Trump professes to protect, a very messy divorce.

The perverse part of me would love to see Mexico shift its agricultural product purchases from Mid-West sources.  The cretins in these states who put Trump in office deserve to suffer greatly.  As for the rise of China-Mexico relations, if it happens, it will be the fault of Der Trumpenführer.

Will SCOTUS Throw Out the Right's Immigration Case?

Other than bashing and stigmatizing gays few things bring the far right closer to orgasm that mistreating and demonizing immigrants - correction, non-white immigrants.  The two activities, of course are related in that the far right, especially the "godly Christian" crowd cannot stand anything or anyone who does not conform to their cult and racial niche.  This hatred of the "other" is what is really fueling the challengers to Barack Obama's immigration rules in United States v. Texas regardless of what the anti-immigration forces may claim.  With the United States Supreme Court scheduled to he oral arguments in the case, some now wonder if the court will punt and find that Texas has no standing to bring the challenge.  A piece in The Daily Beast looks at the possibility.  Here are article highlights:

The great immigration showdown is finally here. Today, the Supreme Court hears ninety minutes’ worth of oral arguments in United States v. Texas, conservatives’ challenge to President Obama’s executive orders on immigration policy.

The Court may decide to dodge the bullet rather than bite it, though.

They have that choice because there are, at heart, two major issues at stake in the case: first, whether Obama exceeded his executive authority, and second, whether states can sue him if so.

Normally, that second question—whether a party has standing—is the kind of thing that only lawyers care about. Standing is a requirement for any lawsuit, and it is at issue in many of them. But standing rarely makes the headlines, because it’s boring to ask whether we should even be asking the question the case is asking. Most non-lawyers would say, Get to the substance, already.

In this case, though, standing is substance. Anyone who watches a Republican debate, knows that immigration policy is a hot issue, and a huge mess. In theory, according to the Immigration & Nationality Act (INA), all eleven million “undocumented immigrants”/ “illegal aliens” (you can usually tell what someone thinks based on which term they use) should be immediately deported from the United States.

In practice, however, only Donald Trump thinks that should really happen, and Trump, of course, is nuts. It would be enormously expensive, disruptive, and cruel to deport so many people at once. Families would be torn apart, and a massive system akin to a police state (internment camps included) would have to be set up, at a direct cost of an estimated $166 billion and an indirect cost of billions more in economic disruption.

As a result, for decades, the federal government has prioritized whom to deport and when. But who gets caught and who doesn’t is often arbitrary, with the government acting like a fisherman with a tiny net, grabbing a few fish at random but letting more slip away. Indeed, progressives have complained that deportations have actually increased under Obama, who is compelled to uphold the existing law.

Comprehensive immigration reform has stalled again and again, most recently in 2013, when a bill with support among conservatives and liberals died in the House due to Tea Party nativist fears.

That is why in 2012, and again in 2014, Obama put into place two administrative policies to attempt to rationalize and prioritize deportations actions. Those policies, DACA and DAPA, would effectively de-prioritize (“defer action” in their terms) about 1.2 million and 4 million people, respectively. For three years, they’d effectively be off the deportation list.

Republicans hate this. As evidenced by Trump’s rise, a significant portion of the Republican base really does want to deport 11 million people.

Here’s where standing comes in. Texas, joined by 24 other states, has said that it will suffer monetary harm if these policies are enacted—specifically, the cost of issuing driver’s licenses to all those now-quasi-legal illegal immigrants.

Of course, that monetary harm isn’t the real reason they’re suing. They’re suing because they’re Republican-led states (15 Democrat-led ones have filed an amicus brief on the other side) and they detest these policies. But this is how standing works all the time.

If Texas succeeds, then theoretically any state could sue the federal government to oppose a policy it doesn’t like: an environmental policy, a trade policy. All federal actions impose some costs on the states; is there anything that they couldn’t challenge?

Perhaps that’s why the district court’s opinion took 50 pages to grant standing to Texas, providing three separate bases for it in an opinion built out of right-wing talking points. But it’s easy to see the Supreme Court going the other way. Immigration is a political question, yet here it is at the Supreme Court, which is supposed to decide the law.

So the Supreme Court may well say “we don’t decide cases like these” both for reasons of Roberts Court judicial conservatism, and because if the Court does get to the merits of this case, we may end up with yet another 4-4 deadlock, and nothing resolved whatsoever.

On Obama’s side, the government has argued that DACA and DAPA are within the executive branch’s discretion. The government has to prioritize somehow, and this is no different from how previous administrations have prioritized for decades. 

If the Court reaches those questions, there will be ample law to guide it. But if the two sides are actually arguing politics while pretending to argue law, that’s a good sign that this is a political question after all, and not an actual case or controversy between parties with standing to sue. Maybe this debate belongs more on the courthouse steps than in the courtroom itself.

I hope Chief Justice John Roberts hands a defeat to the right wing hate merchants.

Trump South Carolina Rally Has Shades of Nazi Behavior

I and others have accused Donald Trump of fascist behavior and policies.  Now, at a rally in North Augusta, South Carolina yesterday, Trump brought on stage thugs in attendance at the rally who engaged in behavior reminiscent of what Nazi goons did to opponents at rallies early in the rise of the Nazi Party.  What happened?  Attendees at the Trump rally roughed up a young protester who had a handmade sign denouncing Trump’s stance on immigration.   Like Hitler and his brown shirts, Trump and his followers deal with critics by engaging in physical and verbal violence.  Don't like people and/or what they have to say, the solution is to beat them up physically.  I would remind readers that a third of Trump supporters would ban gays from entering America.  Are American gays a future target of Trumps goons?  Think Progress looks at this frightening behavior.  Here are highlights:

It’s become a familiar pattern at Donald Trump rallies: a protester or several interrupt the Republican front runner, angry Trump supporters physically and verbally attack, and the offenders are escorted out by security officers. 

Tuesday’s rowdy rally in North Augusta, South Carolina brought a twist to the formula. After Trump supporters ripped away a handmade sign denouncing Trump’s stance on immigration from young protester Thomas Hill, Trump honored the men by inviting them on stage.

“I saw fists start to fly,” Trump said, referring to the protester as a “rough cookie.”  He then praised the supporters who physically confronted him, saying, “I love people with courage.”

After the protester was escorted out by security, flipping his middle fingers to the crowd as he left, Trump asked those who “took action” against him to join him on stage. After hugging the men and praising them, Trump gave them the microphone. 

“Do not let them intimidate you,” the first supporter told the roaring crowd, referring to the lone protester. “They will say anything, they will do anything to keep in power. We don’t need who is in there now. We need to get some fresh bunch up there, some fresh blood.”

The second, an Richmond County police officer and Iraq War veteran, added: “If it wasn’t for Mr. Trump right here, I don’t think any of us would have the voice that we have. This is the only man who is really going to bring America back.”

Though in recent weeks the Trump has played a recorded warning at his rallies telling supporters not to “touch or harm” protesters, the candidate has previously praised those who have acted violently.
In August, after two men inspired by Trump’s rhetoric beat and urinated on a homeless Latino man, Trump told reporters that his supporters tend to be “passionate” and said, “They love this country and they want this country to be great again.” 

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.