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.

First They Came for the Migrants; Who Will Be Next?

“We simply follow the orders from above.”  That is the excuse/explanation given by border security workers engaged in the force separation of parents from their children, some still infants along America's borders.  The excuse is chillingly similar to that given by Nazi officials and even death camp workers after the fall of Germany in 1945. Simply because one is given an illegal or immoral order doesn't absolve one from responsibility. Decent, moral people say "no" and refuse to act. What is happening at America's borders is an indictment of every American who does nothing to stop these horrible and inhuman actions.  Silence is not an option, because silence and inaction amount to complicity. Guilt by association, if you will.  What's even more frightening is the reality that what is being done to is only the beginning of a campaign by the Trump/Pence regime to dehumanize those deemed "other" and thereby set the stage for legal repressions and others heinous acts.  The immediate targets of such immoral actions are brown skinned Spanish speakers, but the list of those Trump's white Christofascist and white supremacist base deems as "other" is lengthy. They hate gays, they hate non-Christians, to name a few potential future targets, and they see only themselves as "real Americans" worthy of full civil rights.  A column in the New York Times looks at the dying of American morality - to the extent it ever existed give the nation's ugly past - and the specter of things likely yet to come.  Be very afraid. Here are column excerpts:

The sci-fi writer William Gibson once said, “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” In America in 2018, the same could be said of authoritarianism.

Since Donald Trump was elected, there’s been a boom in best-selling books about the fragility of liberal democracy, including Madeleine Albright’s “Fascism: A Warning,” and Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” Many have noted that [Trump's] the president’s rhetoric abounds in classic fascist tropes, including the demonization of minorities and attempts to paint the press as treasonous. Trump is obviously more comfortable with despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin than democrats like Canada’s Justin Trudeau.

We still talk about American fascism as a looming threat, something that could happen if we’re not vigilant. But for undocumented immigrants, it’s already here.

There are countless horror stories about what’s happening to immigrants under Trump. Just last week, we learned that a teenager from Iowa who had lived in America since he was 3 was killed shortly after his forced return to Mexico. This month, an Ecuadorean immigrant with an American citizen wife and a pending green card application was detained at a Brooklyn military base where he’d gone to deliver a pizza; a judge has temporarily halted his deportation, but he remains locked up. Immigration officers are boarding trains and buses and demanding that passengers show them their papers. On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions decreed that most people fleeing domestic abuse or gang violence would no longer be eligible for asylum.

But what really makes Trump’s America feel like a rogue state is the administration’s policy of taking children from migrants caught crossing the border unlawfully, even if the parents immediately present themselves to the authorities to make asylum claims. “This is as bad as I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing this work,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told me. “The little kids are literally being terrorized.”

Family separations began last year — immigrant advocates aren’t sure exactly when — and have ramped up with the administration’s new “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting everyone who crosses the border without authorization. Over two weeks in May, more than 650 children were snatched from their parents.

The human consequences have been horrific. Last week, The New York Times described a 5-year-old boy from Honduras who had been separated from his father and cried himself to sleep at night with a stick-figure drawing of his family under his pillow. The Washington Post reported that Marco Antonio Muñoz, a 39-year-old who is also from Honduras, killed himself in a padded cell after his 3-year-old was wrenched from his arms.

Pramila Jayapal, a Democratic congresswoman from Washington State, recently met with migrant women being held in a federal prison, many of whom, she said, were forcibly separated from children as young as 1. Some had their kids physically torn from them. Others were told that they had to go have their photograph taken; when they returned, their children were gone. . . . “Many of them were told by Border Patrol that they would never see their children again,” she told me.

Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, recently visited an immigrant processing center in McAllen, Tex. Describing how men, women, boys and girls were separated and kept in chain-linked enclosures, . . .

These kids are being used as pawns to persuade parents to give up their asylum claims and to warn others against coming to America. The administration, Merkley told me, has “decided that treating kids in this fashion would influence the adults not to seek asylum. They would hurt children to influence the parents.”

There are still mechanisms in American government that can stop this evil. Last Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, proposed a bill that would keep most families detained at the border together. The A.C.L.U. has filed a lawsuit on behalf of parents whose children were taken from them and is asking a federal court for a nationwide injunction to stop family separations.

But for now, what is happening is the sort of moral enormity that once seemed unthinkable in contemporary America . . . . There is no reason to believe that undocumented immigrants will be the last group of people deemed beyond the law’s protection.

Senator Merkley told me he asked people working in the detention center if they were concerned about the impact that family separation would have on the children who had been put under their authority. The answer, he said, was, “We simply follow the orders from above.”

The full nightmare of Hitler's Germany did not happen over night.  It started slowly and targeted powerless groups.  Most Germans simply looked the other way refusing to believe where things were headed.  Other Germans - much like today's white Christofascists and white supremacists who make up the core base of the Republican Party - cheered on the horrors.  Each of must decide which group we will fall into.  I refuse to be silent and complicity in moral evils.  Meanwhile, think about this: the "godly folk" evangelicals find same sex love disgusting and sinful and worry about pre-marital sex, but support this Trump/Pence policy. They are utterly evil in my view -  just like Trump/Pence/Sessions. No amount of feigned piety in church pews absolves them from such inhumanity to others. 

State Terror in Trump’s America

America - morally bankrupt. 

The international world order is not the only thing that Donald Trump, a/k/a Trumpenführer, is destroying.  He and his foul regime are destroying America's decency and basic morality.  True, America has some ugly history - e.g., slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, the Japanese internment camps during WWII - but one would have hoped that as a nation we would have moved past such inhumanity.  Not so under the Trump/Pence regime and its evangelical Christian base which is showing itself to be no better than the majority of German Christians who supported Hitler's rise to power.  When a nation has as official policy the mistreatment of children, some as young as infants and toddlers, national moral bankruptcy is complete. Yet this is what is happening along America's southern border where children are being forceably ripped from their parents and being warehoused like animals.  Even U.S. Senators have been barred from seeing the inside of these detention centers which certainly suggests that Trump/Pence/Sessions do not want images of the horrors being disseminated. Frighteningly, Trump's base sees nothing wrong with this.  They see brown skin and, thus, the victims of the policy are not deemed even human.  Disgusting!! Andrew Sullivan has a column that laments this violation of human rights and basic decency.  Here are excerpts:

Keep a list, they tell you. Notice the little landmarks that tell you that authoritarianism is making headway.

It’s worth making a note, then, when a president goes out of his way to declare he has an “absolute right” to pardon himself, and anyone else, if he so wants, for any reason, including protecting himself and others from possible charges of conspiracy against the United States.

And it’s also worth taking a note when a near-universal norm of human decency is thrown out of the window, with a sudden change in procedure. I’m talking about the idea of a government that reserves the right to separate children from their parents forcibly — and not for interests of rescuing the child from abuse. I’m talking about the 658 children taken from their parents at the border in the two weeks since a new policy was introduced, with the aim of prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. illegally immediately. In May alone, hundreds of children were subjected to this trauma, now counted alongside 11,000 children in government shelters across the U.S. Most are kept in huge detention centers, without their mothers or fathers, and outsiders are barred from entering. Hewitt is not a softy, he’s a hard-line Republican, reliably partisan, often ludicrously so. But even Hewitt was aghast at the sheer cruelty of this and the banality of [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions’s response to it. [T]he children are separated from their parents in order to send a message to future illegal immigrants. Come here, and we’ll take your kids away. This was not a panicked measure, taken quickly, to avert a crisis. It was months under due consideration, with plenty in the Trump administration balking at the inhumanity of it all. These children are being traumatized to send a message. They are being used as a form of deterrence for others.

When the government threatens to tear families apart in this way, it is inflicting what can only be called state terror. Masha Gessen notes how this tactic is deployed by Putin against the children of demonstrators, as a form of intimidation, and is straight out of the totalitarian playbook: “Putin and the system he has created have consistently, if not necessarily with conscious intent, restored key mechanisms of Soviet control. The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do.”

As for the facilities in which these kids are held, Sessions told Hewitt he has never been to one. Senator Merkley of Oregon tried to gain access recently to one in Brownsville, Texas. He was not allowed in, and the windows in the massive building holding the children are darkened. Why, one wonders? Senator Menendez was also barred from inspecting another holding center.

The Trump administration argues that if they are going to immediately detain all illegal immigrants, and they can’t house children in adult jails, they have no choice. Really? It seems perfectly possible to find a way to ensure that at least mothers and children are detained together, to ensure that some decency is possible in an otherwise callous process. If the resources are not there, right now, then it should be a matter of extreme urgency for the Congress to find them. Being detained in a foreign country, separated from family, unable to understand the language being spoken to them, is what can only be called profound trauma. . . . This is simply something the United States should never do.

I’m fine with tough enforcement, open to E-verify, lower future immigration levels, and even Trump’s fricking wall. But there are some core humane lines no civilized country should cross, some red lines, such as torture, or mistreatment of prisoners, or the wrenching of children from loving parents by agents of the state. This isn’t a completely isolated instance either. The ICE arrests that are happening every day just as mothers and fathers drop their kids off at school are particularly horrifying. They violate official policy, which is supposed to restrict arrests at “sensitive locations,” but the loopholes in this provision are legion. Children see their mom or dad suddenly subjected to force, shoved out of cars, handcuffed and then simply spirited away. No child should ever be subjected to this, period. The sheer trauma it will generate can last a lifetime. Yes, these are noncitizens. Yes, many have broken the law. But they are also children. Every day we numb ourselves to these core violations of decency, America dies a little. When challenged on this, of course, Trump simply lied and insisted that the Democrats came up with this “horrible law.” He has nothing to do with what his own ICE is doing, he tells us. Nothing.  The thing about this despicable man is that he doesn’t even have the courage of his own cruelty.

I am ashamed to be an American.  No doubt when we travel to Europe in September, the husband and I will have to repeatedly explain that we oppose such inhumanity and that we worked hard to stop Trump's election.