"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals PAUL WICKHAM SCHMIDT and DR. ALICIA TRICHE, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
President Donald Trump has ramped up his inflammatory racist rhetoric in the final days before the pivotal midterm elections that will determine if his corrupt administration will face any oversight from Congress.
Betting that fears of racial minorities will drive Republican voters to the polls, he has centered his closing pitch on a caravan of Central American migrants fleeing violence and poor crop yields in their home countries. He said, without evidence, that the caravan is filled with “many gang members” and “unknown Middle Easterners,” dropping the previous pretense (“terrorists”) to reveal a fear of all members of a minority group. “Women don’t want them in our country,” he added, a not-so-subtle suggestion that the migrants are rapists (similar to a claim he made upon launching his presidential campaign).
Guests on Fox News have speculated that migrants are carrying diseases like leprosy and that the caravan is a plot conceived of by rootless Jewish financiers seeking global domination like George Soros — the latter a paranoid conspiracy the president has also entertained. The president followed this up with a blatantly racist advertisement blaming Democrats for murders committed by an undocumented immigrant.
President Donald Trump rallies his fans in Columbia, Missouri, by blaming unknown forces for organizing the migrant caravan that he deems “an invasion.”
In all of this, Trump has emulated the outrageous, bigoted and violence-encouraging campaign waged by President Andrew Johnson in the 1866 midterms. In his “Swing Around the Circle,” the first time a sitting president campaigned around the country for candidates, Johnson made the election a referendum on himself, with unprecedented barnstorming speeches featuring paranoid conspiracy theories, racist demagoguery and incitement to violence.
Johnson, an accidental president who came to power after an assassin killed President Abraham Lincoln and another failed to kill him, was a boorish drunk, a former slaveowner and a racist who held sympathies with the now-defeated Confederates. He vetoed legislation establishing the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, opposed the 14th Amendment, opposed giving freed black people voting rights in the South and mass-pardoned most Confederate soldiers and officials and offered them property while denying it to freed black people. All of this brought the ire of the Republican Congress, which overrode his many vetoes and passed the 14th Amendment.
And so Johnson took to the campaign trail to defeat congressional Republicans and replace them with proponents of white supremacy. Johnson’s tour began on the East Coast. As he moved westward and faced Republican-heavy districts in the Midwest that opposed his policies, he became increasingly unhinged.
He began by comparing himself to Jesus Christ and Thaddeus Stevens, the anti-slavery leader of the Republicans in Congress, to Judas Iscariot. He attacked Sen. Charles Sumner and Wendell Phillips, two abolitionists turned advocates for black suffrage. Then, at a stop in Cleveland, a heckler yelled out, “Hang Jeff Davis!,” a call to execute the former president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis. Johnson could not resist a reply, “Why not hang Thad Stevens and Wendell Phillips? … Having fought traitors at the South, I am prepared to fight traitors at the North.”
The “Swing Around the Circle” degenerated from there. Johnson continued to call for the execution of his political opponents Stevens, Phillips and Sumner. He defended recent riots in Memphis and New Orleans where white mobs killed dozens of black Americans in a racist fury by claiming that his political opponents had radicalized black Americans. They had it coming, essentially.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States, was a white supremacist drunk who called for the execution of his political enemies.
“If you will take up the riot at New Orleans and trace it back to the radical Congress, you will find that the riot at New Orleans was substantially planned,” Johnson said at a stop in St. Louis.
Johnson roped in the famed and beloved Gen. Ulysses S. Grant to support him on his “Swing Around the Circle.” Grant, disgusted by Johnson’s speeches, fell ill and excused himself from the tour. According to a biography of Grant written by his aide Adam Badeau, the general believed the president “fostered a spirit that engendered massacre, and afterward protected the evil-doers.”
President Johnson’s defense of white massacres of black people as the product of his opponents supporting black civil rights only encouraged more violence — violence that would ultimately overtake the country and re-establish official white supremacy over the former Confederate states until the 1960s.
Much as Johnson’s rhetorical leniency toward white mobs killing black Americans inspired further violence, Trump’s racist midterm campaign has done the same.
The constant drumbeat of fear-mongering news about the Central American migrant caravan from the president’s mouth and amplified by conservative media triggered a virulent anti-Semite, who believed that Jews like Soros and the refugee resettlement nonprofit HIAS were funding the caravan, to take up arms and attack a synagogue, killing 11 people. It was the worst anti-Semitic attack in the history of the United States.
That same week, police arrested a Florida man for mailing bombs to a litany of political figures that Trump claims as his enemies and, in some cases, promised to jail, including former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and, of course, Soros.
The president and his supporters claim to be outraged by assertions that their rhetoric and policies have in any way incited violence from right-wing terrorists. That same week, the lawyers for a Trump-loving right-wing terrorist who planned to bomb mosques in 2016 filed a brief asking for leniency from the court because their client was seduced into terrorism by Trump’s bigoted rantings.
GUILLERMO ARIAS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Two children who are part of the migrant caravan of Central American refugees that the president claims are attempting to invade the U.S. The caravan is currently stuck in southern Mexico.
“Trump’s brand of rough-and-tumble verbal pummeling heightened the rhetorical stakes for people of all political persuasions,” the lawyers wrote. “A personal normally at a 3 on a scale of political talk might have found themselves at a 7 during the election. A person, like Patrick, who would often be at a 7 during a normal day, might ‘go to 11.’ See SPINAL TAP. That climate should be taken into account when evaluating the rhetoric that formed the basis of the government’s case.”
None of this is pushing Republicans away from Trump. If anything, they are drawing closer to his brand of paranoid racist incitement. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) declared on Friday that his Democratic opponent Rep. Beto O’Rourke may be funding the caravan with his campaign funds. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is running campaign ads fear-mongering about the “invasion” of migrants in an election in Tennessee, which is further away from the U.S.-Mexico border than the migrant caravan is currently.
Johnson’s campaign of racist incitement didn’t work in 1866. Instead, it became a referendum on the president’s reactionary encouragement of white supremacists in the South and the passage of the 14th Amendment. The Republican Party increased its congressional majorities and, having seen the worst of the president, impeached him after further fights over the future of black civil rights in 1868.
But Johnson survived impeachment, and the white supremacist regimes he helped foster in the South ultimately won full control and acceptance from the national government after a wave of terrorism and murder. “You will not replace us!” the white supremacists promised. A century and a half later, they marched on Charlottesville chanting the same thing. The president of the United States must’ve thought it sounded nice and decided to run on it.
******************************************
Donald Trump, the ugliest of Americans, and the leader of the kakistocracy, has brought out all the worst in contemporary America. He diminishes each of us and our country every day he is in office.
Start the democratic process for regime change by voting the GOP out of every office on Tuesday!
RUCKER AND FELICIA SONMEZ report for the Washington Post:
COLUMBIA, Mo. — President Trump, joined by many Republican candidates, is dramatically escalating his efforts to take advantage of racial divisions and cultural fears in the final days of the midterm campaign, part of an overt attempt to rally white supporters to the polls and preserve the GOP’s congressional majorities.
On Thursday, Trump ratcheted up the anti-immigrant rhetoric that has been the centerpiece of his midterm push by portraying a slow-moving migrant caravan, consisting mostly of families traveling on foot through Mexico, as a dangerous “invasion” and suggesting that if any migrants throw rocks they could be shot by the troops that he has deployed at the border. The president also vowed to take action next week to construct “massive tent cities” aimed at holding migrants indefinitely and making it more difficult for them to remain in the country.
“If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said at a rally here Thursday evening.
The remarks capped weeks of incendiary rhetoric from Trump, and they come just five days after a gunman reportedly steeped in anti-Jewish conspiracy theories about the migrant caravan slaughtered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue in what is believed to be the worst anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
Trump has repeatedly cast the migrants as “bad thugs” and criminals while asserting without evidence that the caravan contains “unknown Middle Easterners” — apparently meant to suggest there are terrorists mixed in with the families fleeing violence in Honduras and other Central American nations and seeking asylum in the United States. The president also said Wednesday that he “wouldn’t be surprised” if liberal donor George Soros had funded the migrant groups — echoing the conspiracy theory that is thought to have influenced the accused Pittsburgh shooter.
Trump questioned again at Thursday night’s rally whether it was really “just by accident” that the caravans were forming.
“Somebody was involved, not on our side of the ledger,” Trump told the crowd. “Somebody was involved, and then somebody else told him, ‘You made a big mistake.’ ”
He also called birthright citizenship a “crazy, lunatic policy,” warning that it could allow people such as “a dictator who we hate and who’s against us” to have a baby on American soil, and “congratulations, your son or daughter is now an American citizen.”
Many of Trump’s Republican acolytes, from Connecticut to California, have followed his lead in the use of inflammatory messages, including an ad branding a minority Democratic candidate as a national security threat and a mailer visually depicting a Jewish Democrat as a crazed person with a wad of money in his hand.
Trump and his supporters argue that the media and the president’s political opponents call racism or anti-Semitism where none exists as a way to demean him and divide Americans. At a campaign rally Wednesday night in Estero, Fla., Trump sought to link his supporters to the accusations.
The daily must-reads, delivered to your inbox every morning.
“We have forcefully condemned hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice in all of its ugly forms, but the media doesn’t want you to hear your story,” Trump said. “It’s not my story. It’s your story. And that’s why 33 percent of the people in this country believe the fake news is, in fact — and I hate to say this — in fact, the enemy of the people.”
Meanwhile, an online campaign video personally promoted by Trump this week was denounced by Democrats and some Republicans on Thursday as toxic or even racist.
The footage focuses on Luis Bracamontes, a twice-deported Mexican immigrant who was given a death sentence in April for killing two California law enforcement officers in 2014. The recording portrays him as the face of the current migrant caravan, when in fact he has been in prison for four years.
The 53-second video is filled with audible expletives and shows Bracamontes smiling as he declares, “I killed f—— cops.” With a shaved head, a mustache and long chin hair, Bracamontes shows no remorse for his crimes and vows, “I’m going to kill more cops soon.”
Trump shared the video Wednesday afternoon with his 55.5 million followers on Twitter, and it remained pinned atop his Twitter page the next day. As of late Thursday afternoon, the video had been viewed 3.5 million times.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R), a potential 2020 challenger to the president, said Trump crossed a new Rubicon by posting the video.
“We all go through periods where we’re in a tough race and we’ve got to figure out what we should do, but at some point there’s just an ethical line that you should not cross, and I think it’s been crossed here,” Kasich said in an interview. “This latest ad is an all-time low. It’s a terrible ad, it’s designed to frighten people and it’s wrong.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sounded a similar note, saying in a statement Thursday that Trump and Republicans “are so desperate to distract voters from their failures on everything from health care to foreign policy, they have sunk to new lows with hateful rhetoric and racist campaign ads.”
Five days from Election Day, the video underscored the dilemma facing Democrats as they work to calibrate their response to the president’s increasingly incendiary language on race and immigration.
Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said leaders of her party have two schools of thought about Trump’s video and his caravan rhetoric in general. She said they fear that reacting to it only allows the president to dictate the terms of the debate and “spread the toxins into the bloodstream of the electorate,” but that the tone is so appalling — especially coming from the president himself — that they feel compelled to speak out.
“Trump has opened up a whole new playbook to sow discord and to weaponize hate,” Brazile said. “Everyone has seen low politics. We’ve all done low politics. But Lee Atwater would be shocked at the vitriol we’re seeing today — and, man, Lee was scrappy. This is virulent. It’s bone-chilling. It’s like a toxin.”
Atwater, who died in 1991, was a Republican consultant who was known for crafting culturally divisive messages.
Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) described the video as a “horribly racist” attempt by Trump to “prey on people’s fears and lack of information about how the immigration system works.”
Some conservatives, meanwhile, cheered the president for ramping up his focus on an issue that helped push him to victory in 2016. “The clip of convicted cop murderer Luis Bracamontes laughing in a Calif. court is something every American should see,” Fox News host Laura Ingraham wrote in a tweet.
Republican strategists say Trump’s immigration push is helping the party here in Missouri, where state Attorney General Josh Hawley is trying to unseat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill. Race has been a sensitive issue in the state, which was rocked by unrest in 2014 after an unarmed 18-year-old African American man was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo.
Ahead of his rally here Thursday in Columbia, the speakers blared “We Are The World,” Michael Jackson’s ode to peace and inclusiveness. Several white supporters interviewed at the event rejected the notion that the president is racially divisive — and they said they resented the very suggestion.
“He’s not a racist president and I’m not a racist,” said Meredith Leon, 65, a retired small-business owner from Columbia. “We want law and order and justice for all people. I’m fed up with everything being race, race, race. Fed up!”
David Ewing, 59, a farmer in Tebbetts, Mo., said he supports Trump’s immigration agenda “100 percent.”
“I don’t think he’s racist,” Ewing said. “It’s just the far left trying to do anything they can to stop him. I ignore them, really.”
As Trump has intensified his rhetoric, a growing number of Republican candidates across the country have followed suit. Some feature graphic anti-immigrant messages and images in their campaign ads, while others have been accused of inciting anti- Semitic or anti-Muslim sentiment.
In Tennessee, a recent ad for Republican Senate nominee Marsha Blackburn features footage of the caravan and warns that it includes “gang members, known criminals, people from the Middle East, possibly even terrorists.” The ad also slams Blackburn’s Democratic opponent, Phil Bredesen, for stating that the caravan is “not a threat to our security.”
An ad released Thursday by Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Wagner features ominous music along with footage of the caravan. “A dangerous caravan of illegals careens to the border, two more behind it, and liberal Tom Wolf is laying out the welcome mat,” the ad declares, referring to the state’s Democratic governor.
A Facebook ad being run by the campaign of Rep. Rob Woodall (R-Ga.) features a photo of three heavily tattooed Latino men with the message, “I will protect Georgia from violent criminal gangs.”
And in California, the campaign of Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.), who has been indicted on charges of alleged misuse of campaign funds, has called his opponent, Ammar Campa-Najjar, a “national security threat” with “close family connections” to Islamist militant groups. The 29-year-old Democrat’s grandfather, who died 16 years before he was born, was a key planner of the 1972 attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Campa-Najjar has condemned the attack.
“Instead of making an affirmative case for his own record, he’s trying to disparage the character of a fellow American,” Campa- Najjar said in an interview. “I think that speaks volumes about his policy record.”
The messaging has filtered down to local races as well. In Connecticut, a mailer recently sent out by Republican state Senate nominee Ed Charamut’s campaign depicts Democrat Matthew Lesser as holding a wad of money with a crazed look in his eyes. Lesser is Jewish, and the ad has been denounced for promoting anti-Semitic stereotypes.
After first defending the ad, Charamut’s campaign later issued an apology to Lesser, acknowledging that “the imagery could be interpreted as anti-Semitic.”
Some candidates who have long made inflammatory remarks on immigration and race have found themselves facing a backlash in recent days. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who met in August with representatives of a far-right Austrian party and declared that “Western civilization is on the decline,” was publicly rebuked Tuesday by Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee. King, who previously retweeted a self-described “Nazi sympathizer” and endorsed a Toronto mayoral candidate who appeared on a neo-Nazi podcast, has also seen companies such as Land O’Lakes withdraw their support for his campaign.
Trump’s rhetoric also has prompted outrage from a handful of lawmakers from his party, particularly those who are departing Congress or are in Democratic-leaning districts. Republican leadership has largely remained silent.
Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a frequent critic of Trump who is retiring at the end of his current term, said in a tweet Thursday that the ad featuring Bracamontes was “sickening” and that “Republicans everywhere should denounce it.”
Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-Fla.), whose district was won by Hillary Clinton by 16 points in 2016, said on CNN that while he hadn’t seen the ad, it was “definitely part of a divide-and-conquer strategy that a lot of politicians, including the president, have used successfully in the past.”
“I hope this doesn’t work,” Curbelo said. “I hope that type of strategy starts failing in our country, but that’s up to the American people.”
Sonmez reported from Washington. Sean Sullivan, Matt Viser and Eli Rosenberg in Washington contributed to this report.
Philip Rucker is the White House Bureau Chief for The Washington Post. He previously has covered Congress, the Obama White House, and the 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns. Rucker also is a Political Analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He joined The Post in 2005 as a local news reporter.
Felicia Sonmez is a national political reporter covering breaking news from the White House, Congress and the campaign trail. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for Agence France-Presse and The Wall Street Journal.
***********************************************
I always find it interesting when individuals who support, promote, and enable racist agendas “bristle” when confronted with the truth about their actions. Jeff Sessions is one great example of that phenomenon. But, it is what it is. Trump and his brand of GOP are running on an overtly racist platform; support for Trump simply can’t be detached from the reality of what he promotes and stands for — hate, dishonesty, intolerance, and frankly, a very grim future for a country that can’t get its act together and celebrate and use the skills, creativity, dedication, and humanity of all of its inhabitants. Whether you are conservative or liberal, the Trump platform of racism and hate can’t possibly be the keys to success as a nation. We need responsible moral leadership in American. It certainly can’t come from Trump or the GOP at this time in our history.
Get out the vote! Start the long, methodical, democratic process for regime change and restoration of true American values! Before it’s too late for all of us!
As immigrants and their families continue to grapple with Donald Trump’s intent to end birthright citizenship, one Chinese-American’s 1898 case makes the prospect of such a move not so simple.
Wong Kim Ark, a restaurant cook who was born in San Francisco, was barred from reentering the U.S. after a trip to visit his parents in China. Ark was arrested, and his case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, where judges ruled that under the 14th Amendment, anyone born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen.
Though Trump claimed he could sign an executive order to revoke the current birthright citizenship policy, Ark’s case set a precedent that’s remained the law of the land for more than a century. In fact, the policy could likely only be changed through a constitutional amendment.
“The bigger issue for us as a country is how do we create more pathways to citizenship, not whether we should cut it off,” Aarti Kohli, executive director of Advancing Justice ― Asian Law Caucus, told HuffPost. We have a lot of people who already call America home who should have the opportunity to become citizens.
DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Wong Kim Ark, a cook born in San Francisco, was barred from reentering the U.S. after visiting his parents in China.
Ark’s parents had arrived in the U.S. from China during a time of fierce anti-Chinese sentiment. The era had birthed the Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that put a 10-year moratorium on Chinese labor immigration. The act also barred courts from granting Chinese immigrants citizenship.
Ark’s parents came to the country seeking U.S. citizenship but eventually left after the act had cut off any pathway to citizenship status. They had also feared the vigilante violence that often targeted Chinese immigrants at the time. In fact, the largest lynching in American history occurred in 1871. Hundreds had descended upon Los Angeles’ Chinatown, and the mob lynched an estimated 17 to 20 Chinese immigrants.
But Ark himself had a life in the United States, and, though he had traveled to China before and had been readmitted into the U.S. without any issues, his 1895 trip presented a host of problems. Authorities ordered the Chinese-American to return to the ship.
Chinese immigrant aid organization Six Companies stepped in to provide Wong legal help. Wong’s lawyer, Thomas D. Riordan, argued that the cook’s reentry into the U.S. was protected under the 14th Amendment. As the case escalated to federal court, immigration hard-liners fought back, claiming Ark’s “accident of birth” didn’t mean citizenship.
In the end, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ark.
“If the Trump administration issued an executive order, it would be immediately challenged in the courts, and judges would likely rely on Wong Kim Ark to find the executive order unconstitutional,” Kohli said.
Many conservatives and even officials appointed by Trump himself disagree with the president’s stance on birthright citizenship.
“The plain meaning of this language is clear,” James Ho, whom Trump appointed as a federal appeals court judge, wrote in 2011 of the 14th Amendment.
Ho, then a solicitor general of Texas, wrote that “a foreign national living in the United States is ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ because he is legally required to obey US law.”
House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) addressed Trump’s comments, telling a Kentucky radio station earlier this week that “you cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order” ― to which Trump responded that Ryan “knows nothing about” birthright citizenship.
Kohli pointed out that those who oppose birthright citizenship are in the minority.
“It’s clear that most Americans have embraced birthright citizenship and believe that anyone who is born here should have the right to be a citizen. A few political leaders are trying to further a white supremacist agenda and create a ‘fix’ to a problem that doesn’t exist,” she said.
What’s more, “Many scholars have noted that birthright citizenship has helped the U.S. integrate each new wave of immigrants as their children are recognized as U.S. citizens.”
*********************************************
While some have made the specious argument that Wong Kim Ark didn’t resolve the question for all time because his Chinese parents were legally residing in the U.S. at the time of his birth, that particular fact was not found to be significant or determinative by the Court. The sole exception they carved out was for foreign diplomatic officials and occupying enemy aliens in time of war, neither of whom were subject to the jurisdiction of the US. But, as former DOJ immigration litigator Leon Fresco has pointed out elsewhere, undocumented residents of the U.S. are subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. legal system in the numerous ways — most notably, they can be arrested, detained, removed, convicted, imprisoned, and are required to comply with all other laws applicable to persons in America. Indeed, most of them pay taxes in some form or another. Moreover, the absurdist arguments advanced by Trump and his White Nationalist restrictionists would effectively deprive the U.S. of jurisdiction to enforce immigration and criminal laws against undocumented residents!
“I am sick and tired of this administration. I’m sick and tired of what’s going on. I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I hope you are, too.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who pretends that a caravan of impoverished refugees is an “invasion” by “unknown Middle Easterners” and “bad thugs” — and whose followers on Fox News pretend the refugees are bringing leprosy and smallpox to the United States. (Smallpox was eliminated about 40 years ago.)
I’m sick and tired of a president who misuses his office to demagogue on immigration — by unnecessarily sending 5,200 troops to the border and by threatening to rescind by executive order the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
I’m sick and tired of a president who is so self-absorbed that he thinkshe is the real victim of mail-bomb attacks on his political opponents — and who, after visiting Pittsburgh despite being asked by local leaders to stay away, tweeted about how he was treated, not about the victims of the synagogue massacre.
Opinion | Trump owns the Republican Party, and there’s no going back
Donald Trump has irreversibly changed the Republican Party. The upheaval might seem unusual, but political transformations crop up throughout U.S. history.(Adriana Usero, Danielle Kunitz, Robert Gebelhoff/The Washington Post)
I’m sick and tired of a president who cheers a congressman for his physical assault of a reporter, calls the press the “enemy of the people” and won’t stop or apologize even after bombs were sent to CNN in the mail.
I’m sick and tired of a president who employs the language of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish financier George Soros and “globalists,” and won’t apologize or retract even after what is believed to be the worst attack on Jews in U.S. history.
I’m sick and tired of a president who won’t stop engaging in crazed partisanship, denouncing Democrats as “evil,” “un-American” and “treasonous” subversives who are in league with criminals.
I’m sick and tired of a president who cares so little about right-wing terrorism that, on the very day of the synagogue shooting, he proceeded with a campaign rally, telling his supporters, “Let’s have a good time.”
I’m sick and tired of a president who presides over one of the most unethical administrations in U.S. history — with three Cabinet members resigning for reported ethical infractions and the secretary of the interior the subject of at least 18 federal investigations.
I’m sick and tired of a president who flouts norms of accountability by refusing to release his tax returns or place his business holdings in a blind trust.
I’m sick and tired of a president who can’t be bothered to work hardand instead prefers to spend his time watching Fox News and acting like a Twitter troll.
And I’m sick and tired of Republicans who go along with Trump — defending, abetting and imitating his egregious excesses.
I’m sick and tired of Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) acting like a caddie for the man he once denounced as a “kook” — just this week, Graham endorsed Trump’s call for rescinding “birthright citizenship,” a kooky idea if ever there was one.
I’m sick and tired of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who got his start in politics as a protege of the “bleeding-heart conservative” Jack Kemp, refusing to call out Trump’s race-baiting.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once complained about the federal debt adding $113 billion to the debt just in fiscal year 2018.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who once championed free trade refusing to stop Trump as he launches trade wars with all of our major trade partners.
I’m sick and tired of Republicans who not only refuse to investigate Trump’s alleged ethical violations but who also help him to obstruct justice by maligning the FBI, the special counsel and the Justice Department.
Most of all, I’m sick and tired of Republicans who feel that Trump’s blatant bigotry gives them license to do the same — with Rep. Pete Olson (R-Tex.) denouncing his opponent as an “Indo-American carpetbagger,” Florida gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis warning voters not to “monkey this up” by electing his African American opponent, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (R-Calif.) labeling his “Palestinian Mexican” opponent a “security risk” who is “working to infiltrate Congress,” and Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) accusing his opponent, who is of Indian Tibetan heritage, of “selling out Americans” because he once worked at a law firm that settled terrorism-related cases against Libya.
If you’re sick and tired, too, here is what you can do. Vote for Democrats on Tuesday. For every office. Regardless of who they are. And I say that as a former Republican. Some Republicans in suburban districts may claim they aren’t for Trump. Don’t believe them. Whatever their private qualms, no Republicans have consistently held Trump to account. They are too scared that doing so will hurt their chances of reelection. If you’re as sick and tired as I am of being sick and tired about what’s going on, vote against all Republicans. Every single one. That’s the only message they will understand.
Migrants arriving at the U.S. border to seek asylum are routinely subjected to tactics that immigration rights advocates say are designed to drive them away in violation of their rights under federal law.
The tactics include forcing them to wait at the border indefinitely or sending them back into Mexico to join a backlogged list maintained by Mexican immigration officials.
The Trump administration says such measures are necessary because it is not equipped to deal with a large increase in the number of asylum seekers, many of them from Central America. Last year, U.S. immigration courts handled 120,000 asylum requests, a fourfold increase since 2013.
But immigrant advocates contend the government is violating the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, which says any foreigner who reaches the U.S. has the right to apply for asylum.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection “is violating the law and turning away asylum seekers on Texas bridges,” said Shaw Drake, an El Paso-based attorney with the Texas ACLU’s Border Rights Center.
He said forcing immigrants to join a long waiting list is tantamount to turning them away.
“To turn them away with some amorphous instructions is illegal,” he said.
The issue is likely to come to a head when a caravan of several thousand Central Americans now heading north through Mexico arrives at the U.S. border. Many are expected to claim asylum, which they can do based on fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, social group or political opinion.
Trump, who has vowed to close the border, said in an interview Monday with conservative TV and radio host Laura Ingraham that the U.S. would allow migrants to file asylum claims but that they would be forced to live in “tent cities” while they await court rulings, a process that can take years.
“We’re not going to build structures and spend all of this, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Trump said. “We’re going to have tents. They’re going to be very nice and they’re going to wait and if they don’t get asylum, they get out… They don’t usually get asylum.”
Edgar Hernandez Gonzalez, right, his daughter Sherly and girlfriend Sofia Alvarez Favela wait to request asylum on the Santa Fe International Bridge in Ciudad Juarez. Gonzalez said he and his family were being threatened and were fleeing crime in Juarez. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Last week, after 20 immigrants from Cuba, Honduras, Mexico and Russia arrived at the border bridge in El Paso, U.S. officers stationed in the middle of the bridge — the “limit line” — told them to wait. And so they did, some for days in the cold and rain. Others stayed at a nearby shelter.
“We’ll wait and see, night and day, because I don’t have anywhere to go,” said Alexander Narzilloev, 35, who was with his wife and sons, ages 3 and 6.
Narzilloev ran a construction supply business in Moscow but fled after he was extorted by local mafia and received death threats, including one from a man who called and said he knew where Narzilloev’s son attended kindergarten, he Narzilloev said.
The family had originally gone to the crossing in Calexico, Calif., where officers told them they didn’t have space. After waiting a week and spending what remained of their $8,000 savings on a hotel, Narzilloev and his family caught a bus to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in hopes of entering El Paso.
“I heard in the news Trump said close all the borders. Has it happened yet?” he said. “That’s supposed to be for illegals. We are legal.”
Last week, several House Democrats sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen requesting a briefing on why and how asylum seekers were being turned away. Sen. Tom Udall, a New Mexico Democrat, issued a statement calling for “fair and orderly processing of asylum seekers.”
“Any attempts to deny these families and individuals their right to seek asylum are wrong,” he said.
The Trump administration has tried a variety of approaches to deter people from trying to reach the United States — most controversially a “zero tolerance” policy of criminally charging every adult migrant who crosses the border illegally, separating parents from their children.
The policy resulted in 2,654 children being separated and widespread outrage before Trump canceled it in June.
The administration still wants to detain families indefinitely and has been battling immigrant advocates in hopes of overturning a federal judge’s 1997 order that requires children be held for no longer than 20 days. Federal prosecutors have also fought to narrow the definition of political asylum.
But the government has been flummoxed by what Kevin McAleenan, commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, calls the “asylum gap”: the inability to stop people from making false claims for asylum and living legally in the U.S. for years while their cases proceed.
Immigrant advocates say the new tactics at the border are aimed at discouraging asylum claims. The ACLU of Texas noted Tuesday that Customs and Border Protection, the largest federal law enforcement agency, with a staff and budget doubled in the last 20 years, processed 1.1 million fewer people at the southern border last year than it did in 2000.
Instead of expanding capacity to process asylum seekers at border crossings, officials have forced them to wait. The method varies from crossing to crossing.
Cuban migrant Yunier Reyes, 35, waits with other migrants from Honduras and Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
In El Paso, customs officers have told immigrants to return in a few hours, or simply “later.” The San Ysidro crossing in San Diego has been using a process called “metering,” in which asylum seekers have had to make appointments through Mexican immigration officials.
In a federal class-action lawsuit filed last year that’s still pending, Los Angeles- and Tijuana-based Al Otro Lado and other advocacy groups argued on behalf of more than a dozen immigrants that the policy violates international law and the right to due process.
During a visit to San Ysidro last week, McAleenan praised metering and said it’s likely to expand to other crossings if there’s a “significant increase in arrivals” in coming weeks.
He said the process didn’t amount to turning away immigrants because “they can stay in line if they want.”
“If somebody arrives and they have a claim, we are providing access,” he said, adding that some officers have been investigated, disciplined and retrained after turning away asylum seekers.
Other allegations were unsubstantiated, he said.
Edith Tapia, a policy research analyst with the Hope Border Institute, center, talks with a Mexican couple and their children who hope to request asylum in the U.S. at the foot of an international Bridge in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Workers from the nonprofit Hope Border Institute visit El Paso bridges to document cases of asylum seekers being turned away. On Oct. 24, they found Pedro Morales, 21, and girlfriend Janet Macola, 19.
The two said they fled Cuba after authorities halted their attempt to open a beauty salon and threatened to throw Morales in jail. Now they were seeking asylum.
So was a family of four from the southern Mexican state of Guerrero. They said that their area had become a ghost town, controlled by a mayor in league with organized crime, and that they were too scared to be quoted by name.
The Cuban couple and the Mexican family approached U.S. officers at the center of the bridge and were told the same thing: “It’s full right now.”
It’s all a ridiculous political stunt that Secretary Mattis has shamefully gone along with. Talk about someone forgetting his oath — allowing the US Military to be used as a “political prop” for “White Nationalist Nation.” Presumably historians and biographers will remember “Mad Dog’s” dereliction of duty at a critical point in our country’s existence.
The real point is that for much less money than Trump is wasting on his “military stunt” he could place enough USCIS Asylum Officers at or near ports of entry on the Mexican border to promptly, professionally, and humanely process applicants in accordance with our laws. That would also encourage and reward individuals for appearing for orderly processing and security screening at the proper places, rather than entering the country surreptitiously. It would also reduce the strain on the Border Patrol by reducing incentives for illegal crossings of asylum seekers between ports of entry.
But, this isn’t about sensible or lawful border and asylum policy. It’s about a White Nationalist demagogue putting on a “show” for his “base.”
Lost in last month’s heroic drama rescuing the Thai youth soccer team is that three of the boys and their coach are stateless individuals; that is, they have no citizenship papers from any country. While they were trapped in the cave, it was the least of their problems. As their lives begin to return to a new normal, the obstacles of their statelessness are compounding their challenges.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a stateless child is born every 10 minutes somewhere in the world. UNHCR estimates that at least 10 million people in the world are stateless and subject to severe consequences. Stateless people typically are denied the protections of the laws of the nation, limited in their access to labor markets, and restricted from the social safety net. Jacqueline Bhabha, professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, concludes that being stateless as a child can stunt opportunity, erode ambition and destroy the sense of self-worth.
In this context of an emerging crisis of stateless children, why would anyone propose legal and policy changes that would exacerbate statelessness?Those who argue that the United States should end birthright citizenship are doing just that. Recently, Michael Anton, who had been a national security adviser to President Trump, published an editorial arguing against birthright citizenship. Grounded in the Constitution, birthright citizenship is automatically granted to any individual born within and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. As a candidate, Donald Trump suggested ending birthright citizenship, labeling it the “biggest magnet for illegal immigration.” An excellent series of editorials debating the matter has ensued, largely centered on legal issues.
Beyond the legal debate lies the policy crisis that would unfold if the United States abandoned birthright citizenship: Ending birthright citizenship would place an undue burden on U.S. citizens as they scramble to obtain appropriate government documents to establish that they are U.S. citizens. Children of citizens as well as children of foreign nationals would run the risk of becoming stateless.
As respected immigration attorney Margaret Stock has noted, most U.S. citizens rely on the birthright citizenship rule to establish their citizenship. A birth certificate from a jurisdiction in the United States is all one needs currently. Each U.S. state has its own unique registry of births, and most vital statistic records are kept at the county level. These local birth registries do not verify the citizenship of the child’s parents.
Equally critical, a birth certificate is the linchpin of all other state and federal government identity documents. It is required for state-issued driver’s licenses and state ID cards, as well as federally-issued Social Security cards and passports. If a birth certificate issued by a local jurisdiction in the United States no longer establishes that the person is a U.S. citizen, what would be the qualifying document?
At this time, a passport is the only document the U.S. government issues that confirms both the individual’s identity and citizenship. Fewer than half (46 percent) of U.S. citizens have passports. A 2006 surveysponsored by the Brennan Center at New York University estimated that more than 13 million U.S. adults lacked readily available documentation of citizenship, and a birth certificate was one of the documents included as proof.
Imagine the steps new parents would have to go through to establish their child’s citizenship if birthright citizenship were abandoned. Expectant mothers would need to pack their passport or a bundle of identification documents in the overnight bag readied for the baby’s delivery.
These bureaucratic hurdles would be particularly onerous for low-income citizens or citizens living in rural or geographically underserved areas. The Brennan Center survey also found that citizens earning less than $25,000 per year are more than twice as likely to lack ready documentation of their citizenship as those earning more than $25,000. If a birth certificate no longer would be proof of citizenship, this disparity would rise substantially. Such citizens might find themselves stateless because they would not be able to acquire the documents needed to establish U.S. citizenship.
UNHCR cites three major causes of statelessness: discrimination, gaps in nationality laws, and lack of birth registrations. Would the political leaders who oppose birthright citizenship support the establishment and funding of a federal system of birth registration that provided citizenship documents to all U.S. citizen children?
Opponents of birthright citizenship may have their eyes set on the children of unauthorized migrants, but the impact would be equally acute on the children of U.S. citizens who do not have the wherewithal to maneuver the bureaucracy to acquire citizenship documents.
Ruth Ellen Wasem is a clinical professor of policy at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas in Austin. For more than 25 years, she was a domestic policy specialist at the U.S. Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. She has testified before Congress about asylum policy, legal immigration trends, human rights and the push-pull forces on unauthorized migration. She is writing a book about the legislative drive to end race- and nationality-based immigration.
*********************************************
Although this article originally was published in The Hill in July 2018, Ruth recently reminded me of its continuing relevance and timeliness.
The beauty of the 14th Amendment is that although Congress has been dilatory in resolving the status of millions of undocumented Americans who are significant contributors to our society and economy, because of the 14th Amendment, the issue is slowly but surely “self-resolving.”
As the “older generation” of undocumented Americans passes on, the overwhelming number of their offspring are full US citizens and are able to fully integrate into our society and have the advantages of belonging and full political rights that were denied to their parents. Rather than building generations of disenfranchised, underutilized, and likely disgruntled residents in our midst, the American citizenry automatically renews itself.
And, I’m sure that this new generation of Americans will give some careful thought to the hateful, wrong, and outright racist rhetoric being promoted by Trump, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other GOP White Nationalists. That’s why real national leadership would be wise to unite, rather than divide America and to promote a humane and inclusive solution to the issue of undocumented immigration.
The totally bogus and disingenuous argument being pushed by Trump and the racist right is that children of undocumented individuals aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US. That is of course, total BS — doesn’t even pass the “straight face” test!”If it were true, no undocumented individual could be removed from the US because they would not be “subject to the jurisdiction” of our courts and legal system. Nor could they be punished for crimes or required to comply with our traffic laws, etc., because they would not be “subject to our jurisdiction.” What would happen to Ol’ Gonzo’s “zero tolerance” policy then. Indeed, our whole system for regulating, admitting, excluding, and removing foreign nationals is based on the reality that regardless of their status, they are subject to our laws and legal system.
In other words, we have “jurisdiction” over them, unlike foreign diplomats and heads of state who, to a large extent, are “diplomatically immune” from many of our laws and regulations. That’s actually the very limited category to whom Congress intended the term “subject to the jurisdiction” to apply.
The role of President Donald Trump’s ominous warnings about the caravan of migrants headed toward the U.S. border from Central America in inspiring the virulent anti-Semite who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday highlights the destructive consequences of Fox News’ grip on the president.
While Robert D. Bowers, the man accused of carrying out the mass shooting, had criticized Trump for being insufficiently anti-Semitic, critics pointed out that president had “stoked the fears of the Bowerses among us,” deploying incendiary and false rhetoric about the migrant caravan in hopes of bolstering the Republican Party’s standing. “The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day,” Adam Serwer wrote for The Atlantic. “But he chose to act on Saturday, and he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the president himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify.”
Trump, in turn, came into contact with that fiction via Fox’s fearmongering. The president’s first public statements about the caravan came in response to a segment he watched on the Fox News morning show ”Fox & Friends,” and in the weeks that followed, his rhetoric and that of the conservative network escalated at pace.
For more than a year, I’ve been studying the Trump-Fox feedback loop, my term for the way Fox News at times is able to set the national media agenda because the president watches the network’s programming, tweets about it in real time and adopts its particular fixations. As the rest of the press scrambles to cover Trump’s comments, Fox’s right-wing obsessions consume the news cycle, whether or not they were originally newsworthy. In this case, Fox News urged him to whip his followers into a frenzy over the caravan, and he did it. There’s no indication that either Fox News or Donald Trump will cut off this campaign of fear.
The caravan formed in Honduras on Friday, Oct. 12. By Oct. 15, it was already receiving substantial coverage on Fox News. The next morning, in response to a report on ”Fox & Friends,” Trump issued his first public statement on the migrants, warning the Honduran government that he would cut its aid if the caravan was not stopped. Trump’s comment generated more coverage both on Fox News and at other media outlets. On Wednesday night, Oct. 17, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich appeared on Fox News and urged Republicans to make the caravan a key voting issue, claiming that “the left is eager” for the caravan to enter the United States.
The next morning, “Fox & Friends” repeatedly aired Gingrich’s comments and suggested that Republicans should take his advice. In response, Trump issued a series of tweets using the caravan’s advance to attack Democrats, saying they had “led (because they want Open Borders and existing weak laws)” an “assault on our country.”
The network and its most powerful viewer spent the next week raising the temperature, stoking fears about whether the migrants were criminals or terrorists, calling the caravan an “invasion” and describing its approach as a national emergency. Escalation bred response bred further escalation, with no sign of a line beyond which the president and his propagandists wouldn’t go.
Trump’s Fox-fueled commentary turned the caravan story into a major national news story as reporters sought to explain and contextualize what he was talking about. But the situation does not, on its face, justify the coverage the caravan has received. The migrants are currently in southern Mexico, their numbers are dwindling and, depending on whichroute the caravan chooses, they face a journey of 1,000 to 2,000 miles to the U.S. border that will take weeks or months. Those who make it to the border have the right to seek asylum, and those whose claims are rejected will be turned away. That’s what happened when a similar caravan ― which also drew vitriol from Fox News and then from Trump ― reached the U.S. border in May. The caravans have been going on for roughly a decade without issue. There is no crisis except for the one that Fox News and Trump have sought to create in order to get GOP voters to the polls.
I’ve written before of the perils of having a president who relies on conservative cable news hosts to help him understand current events. When federal policy and personnelshifts can be driven by a Fox-inspired presidential whim, the network’s influence is staggering. The greatest risk is that Trump could use his unilateral control of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in response to a Fox segment; Trump was reportedly unnerved by b-roll the network aired in March 2017 of a North Korean missile launch, convinced that it was happening live. But on a day-to-day basis, the major concern is that the president is a demagogue who constantly lashes out at his perceived enemies in order to secure his base’s support, and Fox News’ programming is providing him with targets for his ire, whether that’s protesting NFL players or recalcitrant Justice Department officials. That pattern has played out again and again since Trump ascended to the presidency.
“Ordinarily,” Serwer wrote, “a politician cannot be held responsible for the actions of a deranged follower.” So, too, it usually doesn’t make sense to attribute a president’s actions to a news network. But Trump is suggestible, he watches Fox News constantly, and the network’s commentators are aware of that. In lighter moments, the “Fox & Friends” hosts joke about the president’s tendency to watch the programs. In heavier ones, the program’s commentators openly offer him advice, telling him not to sit down with special counsel Robert Mueller or pull troops out of Syria.
But on the Monday after the synagogue murders, nothing had changed. The migrants were again drawing coverage on “Fox & Friends” (“Border Battle Rages as Caravan Heads to U.S.,” read one chyron). And hours later, Trump tweeted that the migrants were conducting “an invasion of our Country.”
******************************************
Thanks to Trump, the GOP, and their myriad of lies, distortions, false narratives, and hate rhetoric, our democracy is on the ropes. If we don’t start voting these misguided folks out of office, on all levels, we wont have any country left.
Trump administration considers travel ban-like order for Mexican border
By Tal Kopan
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering an executive action that could use travel ban-like authority to block certain asylum seekers at the Mexican border, sources familiar with the discussions said Thursday.
The proposal is not yet finalized and could ultimately be cast aside, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan is in the formative stages. If President Trump approved such a plan, it would represent a dramatic escalation in border enforcement as a migrant caravan works its way north through Mexico.
The administration is working rapidly to draft the possible executive action, which could effectively use the same legal authority that Trump invoked last year in imposing a ban against people from several mainly Muslim countries from traveling to the U.S., said a government source who has seen a working version of the plan and several sources who had it described to them.
“The administration is considering a wide range of administrative, legal and legislative options to address the Democrat-created crisis of mass illegal immigration,” a White House official said on condition of anonymity when asked about the effort. “No decisions have been made at this time. Nor will we forecast to smugglers or caravans what precise strategies will or will not be deployed.”
Forget Nukes, Star Wars, terrorist attacks, or cyber wars. All it takes to bring the “brave” leaders of the (formerly) most powerful nation on earth to their knees is a few thousand unarmed folks walking over a thousand miles desperately seeking justice under American law.
I knew we’d all live to regret it when the Supremes let Trump off the hook in the Travel Ban case. While some of the mealy-mouthed Justices who voted to unleash Trump from the Constitution might have thought that their spineless pleas for reason and prudence and their obsequious deference to the Executive would have a restraining effect, truth is it just emboldened him by showing that the GOP-Justices were afraid to cross him in a showdown case.
So, now Trump can just suspend any law that proves inconvenient for his White Nationalist agenda by invoking a transparently bogus “national security” rationale! Wonder whose rights will be next to go? Wonder what the Supremes will do when he comes to get them using their own misguided jurisprudence against them?
Donald Trump runs on fear. Once again, he’s closing out an election season with a direct appeal to the darkest impulses of the American psyche. “The Democrats don’t care what their extremist immigration agenda will do to your communities,” he said at a rally in Arizona last week, packing xenophobia into the false assertion that “Democrats want to throw your borders wide open to deadly drugs and endless gangs.” On Monday, he did the same when talking about the caravan of Honduran migrants heading for the United States, falsely saying that “Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the group.
Trump obviously believes his strategy of riling voters up with bigotry is effective. What’s striking is the political press agrees with him. “This pure brute force from Trump could work,” notes NBC News, “because there is no equal response from Democrats.” On Twitter, the New York Times’Maggie Haberman asserted similarly that this “controversial, race-baiting” rhetoric has been “effective for him politically.” And looking at these remarks in the context of the 2016 election, Axios asserts that “immigration and stoking fear about Mexican immigrants propelled Trump to the White House.”
But this conventional wisdom—that bigotry wins votes and elections—depends on imprecision around the idea of “effective.” The media has taken the fact that Trump became president aftermaking those appeals as evidence they broadly work; the fact that Republican primary voters endorsed Trump’s nativism and xenophobia has somehow become proof that it’s a viable election strategy whenever it’s deployed. But neither claim—and both are key assumptions made by political analysts in the Trump era—stands to serious scrutiny. And while Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric undoubtedly resonates with many Republicans, there’s no strong indication that it works on its own as an “effective” message among Americans writ large.
Republicans beyond Trump have made a similar gambit that racist insinuation will energize their supporters and move voters in their favor. In a predominantly white congressional district in upstate New York, GOP political groups have attacked Democrat Antonio Delgado, who is black, as a “big city rapper” who favors “handouts” from the government. In Florida, Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron DeSantis has attacked his black opponent, Andrew Gillum, in terms that evoke racist tropes. In California, Republican incumbent Rep. Duncan Hunter has attacked his Arab-American challenger, Ammar Campa-Najjar, as a “security risk” with potential ties to “radical Islam.”
The proof of concept behind this strategy is Trump’s successful election. Trump relied on racism and anti-immigrant sentiment to drive his message, the argument goes, and while it may have produced some defections among college-educated whites, it also attracted enough whites without degrees to win narrow victories in places where they formed a large share of the voting population, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But missing from this narrative is the critical influence of Trump’s extremely optimistic message on jumpstarting the economy, which co-opted and muddled Hillary Clinton’s rhetoric on issues like wages and infrastructure. To voters cross-pressured by cultural conservatism on one end and liberal economic views on the other, Trump promised a synthesis attuned to their identities as blue collar white Americans—they could have both.
It’s that synthesis which—along with Clinton’s stark unpopularity and extraordinary events like the FBI’s intervention—produced Trump’s victory. In its absence, Republicans have not fared nearly as well, even as they’ve tried to replicate the president’s strategy of open and explicit bigotry.
There’s concrete evidence of this. In the final weeks of the 2017 Virginia gubernatorial race, Republican Ed Gillespie remade himself as a demagogue by playing on white racial resentment with ads blasting Democrat Ralph Northam for “sanctuary cities” and the MS-13 gang. He promised to protect the state’s Confederate monuments and tried to tie Northam to professional football player Colin Kaepernick’s protest against police brutality. Gillespie lost by 9 percentage points, and Virginia Republicans came one seat from losing an almost 20-year majority in the House of Delegates.
The energy is so high, and the political environment so unique, that it’s difficult to project an outcome forNovember.
Alabama Republicans similarly chose an authentically Trump-like figure, Roy Moore, to replace Jeff Sessions in the Senate. He ran a Trump-like campaign of dishonesty, demagoguery, and casual bigotry. He was even accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women who alleged inappropriate behavior when they were teenagers and he was an attorney in his 30s. Despite this controversy, he was favored to win, running in an electorate that hadn’t chosen a Democrat for statewide office in more than a decade. But a Democratic surge, and Republican disenchantment, produced a surprise win for Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee.
Most recently, the Republican candidate in the special election for Pennsylvania’s 18thCongressional District, Rick Saccone, described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump.” He ran as an acolyte of the president in a district that politically and demographically favored the Republican Party. He lost by a slim margin to Democrat Conor Lamb.
The key difference between Trump and these candidates? Economic messaging. Trump rejected conservative economic wisdom on retirement spending and other social programs during his presidential campaign, but neither Gillespie nor Moore nor Saccone had an economic agenda distinct from the national Republican Party. (Saccone ran away from the president’s signature legislative accomplishment—the Tax Cut and Jobs Act—on account of its deep unpopularity.) So while they could mobilize core supporters with appeals to racial threat, they couldn’t reach those cross-pressured voters, compete with conventional Democratic candidates, or overcome an active and energized Democratic electorate.
For further evidence, you can look to Senate races in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin. As a candidate, Trump promised to tailor his economic policy to their needs; as president, he pursued large, upper-income tax cuts and pushed deep cuts to Medicaid and other social insurance programs. The result has been backlash against the GOP as Democrats recover lost groundeven in the face of the president’s racial demagoguery. Some of this is Democratic mobilization against the president and his constant presence in national life, and some of it reflects shifting partisan loyalties among white voters with college degrees. But some of the change is also Democratic improvement with voters who backed Trump two years ago.
Republican politicians wouldn’t be scrambling to announce their support for key parts of the Affordable Care Act—and President Trump wouldn’t have fabricated a middle-class tax cut—if the party weren’t aware of the necessity of a viable economic message. And the extent to which voters don’t believe Republican rhetoric on health care and taxes might actually explain the sudden increase in the intensity of the president’s attacks on undocumented immigrants and other marginalized groups, as well as his decision to embrace terms like “nationalist” to emphasize his commitment to a racialized vision of citizenship and belonging.
His economic bet is not working this time, so he’s leaning hard on what he perceives as his other strength.
The energy is so high and the political environment so unique that it’s difficult to project an outcome for November, even if polls continue to show a Democratic advantage in the race for the House and a Republican one in the race for the Senate. President Trump and his allies clearly hope that by stirring the demons of American life, they can create an electoral barrier high enough to stop any potential blue wave.
But the elements that rendered Trump effective in 2016—a heterodox economic message, an unpopular opponent, and outside influences—do not exist in 2018, and the media would do well to remember that. Republicans can still fan the flames of fear, but there’s no guarantee that won’t generate Democratic energy in opposition.
Racial hysteria has been a part of many winning campaigns in our country. But it’s rarely the only part. Trump is gambling that it, and it alone, can carry him and his party past the finish line for a second time. But this is a gamble, and one that is more likely to fail than they seem to realize.
**********************************************
Yup. Ultimately, White Nationalism, no matter how viscous, dishonest, and toxic, can’t halt the march of demographics. And, Trump and the GOP are working hard at offending, insulting, and disrespecting virtually every group in the U.S. except straight, right-wing Christian White Males and the (mostly White) women who support them. Even voter suppression and gerrymandering can only do so much. “Bought and paid for” Federal Judges won’t live forever. Eventually, the screw will turn.
Justice Dept. Rank-and-File Tell of Discontent Over Sessions’s Approach
Image
Justice Department lawyers have raised concerns about Attorney General Jeff Sessions pursuing legally indefensible cases and a lack of support when they tried to warn him.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
WASHINGTON — During his 20 months in office, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has swept in perhaps the most dramatic political shift in memory at the Justice Department, from the civil rights-centered agenda of the Obama era to one that favors his hard-line conservative views on immigration, civil rights and social issues.
Now, discontent and infighting have taken hold at the Justice Department, in part because Mr. Sessions was so determined to carry out that transformation that he ignored dissent, at times putting the Trump administration on track to lose in court and prompting high-level departures, according to interviews over several months with two dozen current and former career department lawyers who worked under Mr. Sessions. Most asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The people interviewed — many yearslong department veterans, and a third of whom worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations — said that their concerns extended beyond any political differences they might have had with Mr. Sessions, who is widely expected to leave his post after November’s midterm elections.
ADVERTISEMENT
“Since I’ve been a lawyer, going back to the late 1970s, I can’t recall a time when morale has been as low as I have heard from some former colleagues,” said Robert Litt, a former Justice Department official during the Clinton administration.
A department spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, said that Mr. Sessions and other senior law enforcement officials were committed to the department’s mission of upholding the rule of law, and that they had heard no complaints about that.
“We know of no department employee who is opposed to policies that uphold the rule of law and protect the American people — which are precisely the policies that this department has implemented and embraced,” Ms. Flores said in a statement.
Driven by Ideology
Mr. Sessions’s shift in the department’s priorities reflected Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to be tough on crime and crack down on illegal immigration, much as former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took office in 2009 with a mandate to realize President Barack Obama’s vision on civil rights.
Ms. Flores called Mr. Sessions’s changes “vital to reducing violent crime,” combating the opioid epidemic and securing borders.
Image
The Justice Department’s effort to crack down on sanctuary cities through the courts has been met with protests, here in Sacramento in June.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press
But Trump appointees ignored the legal advice of career lawyers in implementing their agenda, four current Justice Department employees said.
In one instance, Mr. Sessions directly questioned a career lawyer, Stephen Buckingham, who was asked to find ways to file a lawsuit to crack down on sanctuary laws protecting undocumented immigrants. Mr. Buckingham, who had worked at the Justice Department for about a decade, wrote in a brief that he could find no legal grounds for such a case.
Reminding Mr. Buckingham of the attorney general’s bona fides as an immigration hard-liner, Mr. Sessions asked him to come to a different conclusion, according to three people who worked alongside Mr. Buckingham in the federal programs division and were briefed on the exchange.
To Mr. Buckingham’s colleagues, the episode was an example of Mr. Sessions stifling dissent and opening the department to losses in court.
Mr. Buckingham resigned a few months later, and Mr. Sessions got his lawsuit. A federal judge dismissed most of the case, and the department has appealed. Both Mr. Buckingham and Ms. Flores declined to comment on the episode.
In stripping protections last year for transgender people under the Civil Rights Act, department leaders failed to consult Diana Flynn, the head of the civil rights appellate division who led the effort to add the protections in 2014, and many of her career staff.
The process left little room for debate. “Edicts came down, and it was up to us to try to implement them,” said Ms. Flynn, who has left the Justice Department for Lambda Legal, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender legal aid organization.
Similarly, a flare-up over the Affordable Care Act this summer occurred after the department’s political leaders urged a judge to find unconstitutional two of the law’s key elements, a reversal of the government’s longstanding position.
“This is a rare case where the proper course is to forgo defense” of existing law, Mr. Sessions said at the time, adding that Mr. Trump had approved the step. Three career lawyers withdrew from the case, including Joel McElvain, a 27-year department veteran, who made headlines by resigning in protest.
Image
To some career Justice Department lawyers, Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, represents a measure of independence because his office oversees the investigations into the president and his associates.CreditJim Lo Scalzo/EPA, via Shutterstock
The episode prompted an all-hands meeting in June to address lingering rancor, according to two people who attended and two others briefed on the gathering.
During the standing-room-only meeting, attendees pressed the head of the departmental branch. What were the brief’s legal flaws, they asked. Had political considerations edged out a sound legal opinion? Did department leaders consider them part of the bureaucratic “deep state” that Mr. Trump has accused of conspiring against him?
After more than an hour, the officials running the meeting said they understood the employees’ concerns and simply encouraged them to continue doing good work.
Attorneys general have long confronted resistance when they implement ideological initiatives that career lawyers view as outside the Justice Department’s mission.
During the Bush administration under Alberto R. Gonzales, the department formed a task force to crack down on pornography; investigators focused on only a small swath of the most egregious examples.
When political appointees under Mr. Holder wanted to abandon the government’s defense of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” Jody Hunt, a well-regarded career attorney, argued successfully that the department had a legal duty to defend it.
Mr. Sessions is not bound to follow the advice of career Justice Department lawyers, “and, if he doesn’t like recommendations, to ignore them,” Mr. Litt said. “But it would be inappropriate to ask people to tailor legal judgments to policy preferences.”
Mr. Trump has stoked much of the unease at the Justice Department. He assailed the prosecutors who won a conviction of his former campaign chairman, and he attacked the plea agreement struck with his longtime personal lawyer. He castigated Mr. Sessions for not investigating perceived White House enemies — drawing a rare rebuke from the attorney general — and for daring to pursue cases against Republican lawmakers.
Image
President Trump stokes much of the unease at the Justice Department.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times
ADVERTISEMENT
The president has also frequently targeted Rod J. Rosenstein, who as deputy attorney general oversees the day-to-day operations at the department as well as the special counsel investigation. In a turnabout this month, Mr. Trump declared his relationship with Mr. Rosenstein good, to the relief of some federal prosecutors. To them, Mr. Rosenstein’s office symbolizes the department’s independence because he oversees its inquiries into the president and his inner circle.
More unnerving, employees said, was the president’s threat to remove the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a civil servant who worked to combat Russian mobs and oligarchs. The message, said one lawyer in the criminal division: Doing your job can make you vulnerable to a career-ending attack.
Two former attorneys said that they stepped away from Russia-related work as a result.
“The underlying message from Trump is that department employees are either enemies of the White House or vassals doing its bidding,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel for ethics and government reform under Mr. Obama. Mr. Eisen is co-counsel for the plaintiffs in a lawsuit accusing Mr. Trump of violating the Constitution by maintaining a stake in his hotel in Washington.
As a target of Mr. Trump’s high-profile rebukes, Mr. Sessions has gained cautious support even from some rank-and-file lawyers who find his culture wars zeal distasteful. They cited instances where he pushed back on Mr. Trump’s broadsides and his simply enduring months of presidential invective.
Empty Spots
Internal events intended to boost morale have also proved tense. Guy Benson, a Fox News commentator, was chosen to speak at a gay pride event over the objections of the department’s L.G.B.T. affinity group, DOJ Pride, Justice Department lawyers said.
DOJ Pride members held a separate event, where one employee spoke about how progress for L.G.B.T. Americans had regressed under Mr. Trump. Department officials would not comment on the episode.
Some of the lawyers interviewed also said that departures of respected leaders and longtime career lawyers has weakened morale. Besides Ms. Flynn, Mr. McElvain and Mr. Buckingham, others who left included Doug Letter, the head of the civil appellate branch, and David Laufman, the chief of the counterintelligence section.
“Any given person wants to spend more time with his family,” said Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and critic of Mr. Trump’s attacks on law enforcement who has heard complaints from department lawyers. “But the sudden decision by large numbers of people to spend more time with their families is a creation of the atmosphere.”
Days after the health law brief was filed, a long-planned happy hour for former and current federal programs lawyers took on the feeling of a support group, according to people who attended. Gathered at an Irish pub near the Justice Department, colleagues told Mr. McElvain they were sorry that he was leaving but that they admired his decision.
Some maligned the Trump administration or poked fun at Mr. Sessions. But when political appointees joined the conversation, the career lawyers, worried about being pegged as dissenters, shifted the discussion to more neutral topics.
Correction:
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated who Justice Department leaders consulted in stripping protections for transgender people. They spoke to departmental experts, though not to the head of the civil rights appellate division and her team.
Sharon LaFraniere and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
I’ve commented numerous times on Sessions’s stunningly “law free approach” to his job as the nation’s top legal official. His positions never appear to be the product of any type of legitimate deliberation and reflection. Rather they essentially are lifted, sometimes almost verbatim, from “position papers” and screeds written by far-right groups, most of them driven by a White Nationalist, racially motivated, religiously intolerant views that have little appeal to the majority of Americans — even among “true conservatives” (as opposed to racists masquerading as “pseudo conservatives.”)
Low morale has often been a significant issue among the much maligned corps of U.S. Immigration Judges. But, I’ve heard the same things reflected in this article — that morale is by far the worst that it has ever been among U.S Immigration Judges who feel that their expertise and abilities have been disrespected, discretion virtually eliminated, and their positions reduced to basically “robed representatives of DHS Enforcement” under Sessions’s White Nationalist, openly xenophobic regime.
Sessions undoubtedly is the most glaringly unqualified Attorney General since the disgraced “John the Con” Mitchell under Nixon. But, in terms of long term damage to the entire system, Sessions probably has surpassed even “the Con.”
Considerable mythology has arisen about Watergate, and these myths are confusing the current discussion around why and how Nixon was driven from office—which in turn has muddled the conversation around the possible fate of Donald Trump, whom Democrats might move to impeach if they take control of the House in November. In any event, it’s worth separating myth from reality when it comes to Watergate and the impeachment proceedings against Richard Nixon.
One of the greatest misconceptions around Watergate is that it was the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, and the subsequent cover-up, that led to Nixon being forced to surrender the presidency. But, in fact, when Nixon returned to Washington from his vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida, three days after the break-in had been discovered, he and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman had another matter on their minds. The two men were worried that if the burglars—a group of “plumbers,” established ostensibly to ferret out the source of leaks that upset the Nixon White House led by E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. operative who’d participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, and G. Gordon Liddy, a former F.B.I. G-man—talked to federal investigators, their other activities on behalf of the White House might come to light. The real role of the plumbers was to “destroy” (Nixon talked that way) Nixon’s real and perceived “enemies,” meaning that, as Haldeman put it to the president when they met three days after the discovered break-in, “the problem is that there are all kinds of other involvements.” (This conversation was recorded on the tape of which 18 and a half minutes was later discovered to have been erased—a revelation that set off one of a number of explosions in the Watergate story. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s head of domestic policy, wrote in his memoir that Nixon had done the erasing at Camp David.)
The “other involvement” that Nixon and Haldeman were most worried about being discovered was a break-in on September 3, 1971, more than nine months before the famous Watergate intrusion. This earlier break-in occurred at the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the defense analyst who, in June 1971, leaked the Pentagon Papers, a Johnson-era analysis of the Vietnam War, to The New York Times,The Washington Post,and The Boston Globe. Although the report had nothing to do with the Nixon administration directly, it did raise serious questions about the rationale for the war. Nixon, egged on by national-security adviser Henry Kissinger, was enraged at the study’s leak, and wanted Ellsberg “crushed” and any further unwonted leaks stopped. And so the Office of Special Investigations—the plumbers unit—was established, and Nixon’s obliging top aides drew up “Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1,” the goal of which was to recover damaging intel on Ellsberg.
Once it was revealed, the break-in at the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding was considered by observers—as it had been by Nixon himself—to be far more serious than the Watergate break-in. Even conservative members of Congress were shocked. During hearings by a special Senate committee in the summer of 1973, Georgia’s conservative Democratic Senator Herman Talmadge (southern Democrats hadn’t yet gone red) asked Ehrlichman if he recalled the English principle in which “no matter how humble a man’s cottage is, even the king of England cannot enter without his consent.” Ehrlichman replied chillingly, “I am afraid that that has been considerably eroded over the years.”
As it happens, the burglars found no medical papers about Ellsberg in Dr. Fielding’s files. Nevertheless, that particular raid had far-reaching consequences. It remained secret until Ellsberg’s 1973 trial, when the Justice Department was obliged to disclose it. Citing this stunning news, the presiding judge dismissed the case against Ellsberg, saying that the administration’s behavior “offend[s] a sense of justice.” The Fielding break-in was incorporated into the articles of impeachment against Nixon.
Another oft-repeated Watergate myth, which arose from those Senate hearings, is that the committee vice-chair, Tennessee Republican Howard Baker, asked Nixon administration witnesses a particularly penetrating question: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” This question was considered so clever that it’s been applied to determine whether Trump played a direct role in collaborating with the Russians in the 2016 presidential election. In fact, Baker was working with the Nixon White House, and the point of the question was to narrow the grounds for holding Nixon to blame for the Watergate break-in; unless a witness could pinpoint precisely that Nixon knew, for example, about the Watergate break-in ahead of time, he was blameless and couldn’t be held accountable for the acts of his aides and hired thugs.
The question of whether to hold a president accountable for the acts of his aides was a critical question facing the House Judiciary Committee in the summer of 1974, as it considered articles of impeachment. The most important of the three that it adopted, which it approved on July 30, was Article II, which accused Nixon of various abuses of power—wiretapping, using government agencies against his “enemies”—and also suggested that the president could be held responsible for a given “pattern or practice” on the part of his aides, meaning that simply winking and nodding would not insulate him from their untoward acts. The president determines the climate of the White House, and his aides can often ascertain what he wants done without receiving specific instructions. In effect, it didn’t matter whether Nixon knew about the Watergate break-in beforehand—according to Article II, he was implicated in it regardless.
A third widely misunderstood and highly important event that occurred shortly before the end of the Nixon presidency was the discovery of an excerpt from three tapes that Nixon, under pressure from his staff and the public, released belatedly on August 5. The tapes captured conversations between Nixon and Haldeman on June 23, three days after their initial meeting following the discovery of the Watergate burglars. The president admitted that he had withheld the recordings from even his own lawyers and staff, though in a seeming contradiction, he added that he hadn’t realized the “implications” of their contents. An unusually contrite Nixon admitted that it is “clear that portions of the tapes of these June 23 conversations are at variance with certain of my previous statements.” In a key passage, Nixon could be heard instructing Haldeman to tell the C.I.A. to tell the F.B.I. to halt its investigation into the Watergate case, for the sake of protecting matters pertaining to national security—a well-worn excuse for all sorts of misuses of power.
Here was indisputable evidence that the president was obstructing justice. And this, the myth goes, is why Nixon was forced to resign. In fact, by the time the missing piece of tape was released, the House Judiciary Committee had already approved, on a bipartisan basis, its three articles of impeachment (one was about obstruction of justice), and Nixon’s political position was so weakened by now that it was widely assumed he would be impeached and convicted. The scrap of tape only hastened his departure.
Nixon, photographed departing in his helicopter after resigning as U.S. president in 1974.
By Bill Pierce/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images.
As it turns out, Trump isn’t the only president whose aides occasionally saved him from himself by disregarding his orders. Nixon was often drunk at night (a condition exacerbated by Dilantin, an anti-convulsant that he’d been erroneously advised would help with depression), and he’d telephone aides at all hours to bark out instructions, once ordering the firing of an entire floor of State Department officials the next day. Those who received the calls were forced to use their (questionable) judgment to determine which orders to carry out, and which to ignore. One of the most infamous examples of this phenomenon was when Nixon instructed the plumbers to firebomb the Brookings Institution, where two former Johnson administration officials who’d worked on the Pentagon Papers were believed to be keeping unreleased portions of the report. In the confusion that was to be caused by the fire, the plumbers were instructed to break into said files and retrieve the unpublished papers. But someone on Nixon’s staff headed off this harebrained scheme. As it happened, neither man’s office contained even a file cabinet.
The events involving the break-ins and Nixon’s attempts to avoid prosecution—milquetoast in contrast to Trump’s—were more than a series of simple criminal acts. They were, in essence, a constitutional crisis. For some time, the question was whether the president could be held accountable to the Congress or the courts, as intended by the Constitution. But the situation was still more alarming than that: the Watergate break-in, as well as other activities perpetrated by Nixon’s goon squad, were parts of an effort by a sitting president to affect—if not determine—his Democratic opponent in the next election. Faced with a slate of possible opponents, including Ted Kennedy and Edmund Muskie, Nixon and his aides concluded that these potentially formidable candidates should be knocked out of the race, and that by contrast, Nixon believed, George McGovern, an anti-Vietnam War liberal (though he was a World War II hero), would be easy pickings in the general election. Ultimately, McGovern was chosen as the Democratic nominee, thanks in part to the machinations of the current governing party—an effort that veered dangerously close to fascism.
What may ultimately have saved the country was the fact that the plumbers botched every operation they undertook. In an act of carelessness that came to define their leadership, Hunt and Liddy had their picture taken in front of Dr. Fielding’s office door using a C.I.A.-supplied camera. (They then asked the C.I.A. to develop the pictures when they returned to Washington, which meant the agency had a copy of the two men at the site of their first and most serious misdeed.) The famous Watergate break-in was actually the plumbers’ fourth attempt at, in Nixon’s terms, “getting the goods” on D.N.C. chairman Lawrence O’Brien, whose office was in the Watergate complex. During their first attempt, they staged a dinner in the building as a pretext for a raid, but somehow ended up locked in a closet overnight. On their second try, they reached the D.N.C. offices, but discovered that they lacked the right equipment for breaking the lock. After one of the burglars returned to Miami to acquire said tool, they managed to break into the D.N.C.’s Watergate offices on their third attempt, over Memorial Day weekend of 1972. There, they bugged phones and photographed certain documents. But the tap on O’Brien’s phone didn’t work, and John Mitchell, formerly Nixon’s attorney general and now the chairman of his re-election committee, was said to have denounced the fuzzy pictures as “junk.” (Though it’s doubtful that that’s the exact word he used.) He instructed the plumbers to return.
Finally, the details around why a group of Republican leaders urged Nixon to resign have been misrepresented. The widely held belief, then and now, has been that the G.O.P. eminences from Capitol Hill, who told Nixon that his support among their colleagues had evaporated, acted courageously, out of patriotism. In truth, Nixon still had pockets of support around the country. These supposed courageous statesmen were hoping to avoid an inconvenient vote against the president. Nixon, anxious to keep his pension and to be granted the staff accorded presidents after they leave office voluntarily, agreed. He needed to pay off his sizable legal bills, and he wanted a staff to help write his memoirs and plot a return to public life—a scheme in which he succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. And so, on August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in our lifetime to resign from office. Before long, we may find out whether he will be the last.
************************************
“Summer of ’73” — the Senate Watergate Hearings — when my wife Cathy and I arrived in Washington, D.C. and settled down across the river in Alexandria, VA. Alexandria was then home to the notorious Presidential Counsel John Dean who once testified that Nixon’s Chief Domestic Affairs Adviser, the equally notorious John Ehrlichman, suggested that he could use his short commute across the Potomac to “deep six” potentially incriminating evidence by throwing it in the river!
That led my cousin’s husband to (jokingly, of course) suggest that my job prospects in the Nixon Justice Department would be greatly improved by my Alexandria address!
Gotta give Trumpie credit for making “slimeballs of the past” like Ehrlichman & Dean “relevant” again.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) barked at female sex-crime victims, “Grow up!” He called Christine Blasey Ford a “pleasing” witness. He shooed women away with a flick of his wrist. Hatch also posted “an uncorroborated account from a Utah man questioning the legitimacy and sexual preferences” of Julie Swetnick, one of Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accusers. The Salt Lake Tribune editorial board raked him over the coals:
The despicable attack launched by Sen. Orrin Hatch and the Senate Judiciary Committee — more precisely, the Republicans on that committee — on one of the women who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault is a textbook example of why more victims do not come forward.
Worse, it betrays a positively medieval attitude toward all women as sex objects who cannot be believed or taken seriously.
Not a single Republican spoke up to criticize him. One would think someone would point out that he brought dishonor on himself, his party and the Senate. But clearly Republicans take no umbrage at such conduct.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley(R-Iowa) attempted to excuse the lack of a single Republican woman — ever — on the Judiciary Committee. “It’s a lot of work — maybe they don’t want to do it.”Kavanaugh snapped and sneered at female senators on the Judiciary Committee. Republicans didn’t bat an eye or hold it against him. He was just mad, you see.
President Trump repeated the calumny that if the attack was “as bad” as Ford said she’d have gone to the police. He declared it was a “scary time” for young men. He openly mocked Ford at a rally to gin up his base’s anger. Republican apologists said he was just explaining the facts. He actually misrepresented her testimony, falsely claiming she couldn’t recall many facts — the neighborhood of the house where she was attacked. William Saletan called out Trump and his defenders: “It’s true that Ford can’t recall important details about place and time. It’s true that she can’t recall how she got to the house or how she left. It’s true that every accused person is entitled to a presumption of innocence. But Trump’s portrayal of Ford’s testimony wasn’t true. It was a pack of lies. And people who defend it, like Lindsey Graham, are liars too.”
Trump and other Republicans accused sex-crime victims protesting Kavanaugh as protesters paid by George Soros (a Jewish left-wing billionaire whose name is routinely invoked in anti-Semitic attacks). The GOP Senate whip, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), called the victims a “mob” and echoed the bogus claim that they were paid protesters. They deny victims’ very existence; they are non-persons — props sent by opponents to ruin a man’s life.
Graham snorted that he’d hear what “the lady has to say” and then vote Kavanaugh in. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he’d “plow right through” (more like plow over) Ford’s testimony and confirm Kavanaugh. Republicans’ defense of Kavanaugh — that Ford and others were props of a left-wing plot and therefore lacked agency of their own — evidences the party’s attitude toward women.
You cannot say a party that embraces a deeply misogynistic president who bragged about sexually assaulting women and mocked and taunted a sex-crime victim; accepted a blatantly insufficient investigation of credible sex crimes against women in lieu of a serious one that the White House counsel knew would be disastrous; repeatedly insulted and dismissed sex-crime victims exercising their constitutional rights; has never put a single woman on the Judiciary Committee (and then blames its own female members for being too lazy); and whips up male resentment of female accusers is a party that respects women. Its members resent women. They scorn women. They exclude women. They use women to maintain their grip on power. But they do not respect them.
What’s worse is that Republicans who would never engage in this cruel and demeaning behavior themselves don’t bat an eye when their party’s leaders do so. Acceptance of Trump’s misogyny — like their rationalization of the president’s overt racism — becomes a necessity for loyal Republicans. If it bothers a Republican, he or she dare not say so. One either agrees or ignores or rationalizes such conduct, or one decide it’s a small price to pay (“it” being the humiliation of women) for tax cuts and judges. It’s just words, you know.
The Republican Party no longer bothers to conceal its loathing of immigrants, its contempt for a free press, its disdain for the rule of law or its views on women. Indeed, these things now define a party that survives by inflaming white male resentment. Without women to kick around, how would they get their judge on the court or their guys to the polls?
Women with this ordeal seared into the hippocampus of their brains will vote in November. Women are expected to forget or move on? I don’t think so.
*************************************
Yup! Need to vote!
The “Club” is in power because too many non-members failed to vote. And, those young men who DON’T aspire to grow up to be Trump, Sessions, Hatch, Kavanaugh, Graham, Grassley, Steve King, Kobach, or Stephen Miller had better unite with their “non-Club sisters” to vote the Good Old Boys (and their women supporters and enablers) out of office.
If nothing else, last week shows the futility of demonstrating, public opinion polls, writing op-Ed’s, running commercials, and protesting when you don’t have the votes. Put the energy into winning elections! That’s what the Club does. And, it might be the only thing they are right about.
The Museum of African-American History and Culture is in part a catalog of cruelty. Amid all the stories of perseverance, tragedy, and unlikely triumph are the artifacts of inhumanity and barbarism: the child-size slave shackles, the bright red robes of the wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, the recordings of civil-rights protesters being brutalized by police.
Make your conversation more interesting
Each weekday evening, get an overview of the day’s biggest news, along with fascinating ideas, images, and voices.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.
Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.
The cruelty of the Trump administration’s policies, and the ritual rhetorical flaying of his targets before his supporters, are intimately connected. As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!” The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.
This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.
A blockbusterNew York Times investigation on Tuesday reported that President Trump’s wealth was largely inherited through fraudulent schemes, that he became a millionaire while still a child, and that his fortune persists in spite of his fumbling entrepreneurship, not because of it. The stories are not unconnected. The president and his advisers have sought to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense; they have attempted to corrupt federal law-enforcement agencies to protect themselves and their cohorts, and they have exploited the nation’s darkest impulses in the pursuit of profit. But their ability to get away with this fraud is tied to cruelty.
Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.
*************************************************
I could see it in the mindless clapping, revolting laughter, and sickening glee in the eyes of the ugly, overwhelmingly White crowd (many of them women, although a few of the women didn’t seem amused) behind Trump as he denigrated and mocked Christine Blasey Ford this week.
Also in the angry, distorted snarl of Sen. Lindsey Graham as he absurdly called the Kavanaugh hearings “the most unethical” performance (LG, my man, where were you when Mitch, you, and your colleagues totally stiffed a much better qualified Obama appointment, , without even giving him the courtesy of a hearing?).
Also in the incredibly arrogant, partisan, rude, condescending, and openly misogynistic way that Kavanaugh treated Senator Amy Klobuchar’s totally reasonable inquiry. Would Senator Susan Collins still have voted for “BKavs” if he had treated her that way? I doubt it! But, I guess her women colleagues don’t matter. And, it appears that “Chairman Chuckie” Grassley doesn’t really need or want any GOP women on his “Old Boys Club” (a/k/a Senate Judiciary Committee.) Only Democrat women can hack the stress and workload of serving on a daily basis with the GOP misogynists.
What do you call a party whose “base” glories in the pain and suffering of others? The 21st Century GOP!
It’s an existential threat to the future of our country! If decent folks don’t start using the ballot box to remove the GOP from power at every level, it might be too late for the majority of us to take our country back from the misguided minority who have taken power! Get out the vote in November!
A federal judge’s ruling blocking a Trump administration order to end immigration benefits for nearly 300,000 foreign nationals is the latest in a series of judicial setbacks for the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Federal District Judge Edward Chen late Wednesday blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) order to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) that allows citizens of Sudan, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua to live and work in the United States, raising hopes for activists who have fought to make the program permanent.
The preliminary injunction granted by Chen, an appointee of President Obama, follows a trend of court reversals that have slowed the administration’s proposed overhaul of American immigration laws.
The administration’s first judicial setbacks on immigration came weeks into Trump’s presidency, as a New York court stopped in January of 2017 the application of the first version of a travel ban that blocked immigrants and visitors from seven majority-Muslim countries.
After a series of court battles, a third version of the travel ban — which includes non-Muslim countries North Korea and Venezuela — was eventually upheld by the Supreme Court in June of this year.
Trump’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program is still up in the air.
Because of court action, DHS is still receiving DACA renewal applications, which under Trump’s original order should have ended in October of 2017.
Both the travel ban and termination of DACA tied into Trump’s campaign promises on immigration, but TPS is a relatively obscure program that had been more or less summarily renewed by both Republican and Democratic administrations.
Under TPS, nationals of countries that undergo natural or man-made disasters are allowed to live and work in the United States until their home countries recover.
Chen’s decision only blocks the DHS orders while the lawsuit is in place, but he hinted in his decision that he’s unlikely to change his mind in the final ruling.
The decision came as a surprise, as TPS statute gives a wide berth to the secretary of Homeland Security to determine who receives its benefits.
DHS declined to comment on the case, but Department of Justice spokesman Devin O’Malley panned Chan’s decision, saying it “usurps the role of the executive branch in our constitutional order.”
Emi Maclean, an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), called it “an extraordinary decision.”
“This is the first time in the history of the TPS statute, a statute from 1990, that there has been a court order halt for any TPS determination,” said Maclean.
“It’s hugely important in what it says about the Trump administration making policies in the arena of immigration, and it’s obviously important for hundreds of thousands of people and their families and communities,” she added.
In his decision, Chen referred to the “animus” behind the administration’s TPS strategy, echoing district and appeals courts decisions on the travel ban, which used Trump’s campaign rhetoric as evidence of discriminatory intent.
Chan said he found “evidence that this may have been done in order to implement and justify a pre-ordained result desired by the White House.”
“Plaintiffs have also raised serious questions whether the actions taken by the Acting Secretary or Secretary was influenced by the White House and based on animus against non-white, non-European immigrants in violation of Equal Protection guaranteed by the Constitution,” he added.
Justice took a different view.
“The Justice Department completely rejects the notion that the White House or the Department of Homeland Security did anything improper. We will continue to fight for the integrity of our immigration laws and our national security,” said O’Malley.
Although the decision is only a temporary setback for the administration, TPS activists — who want to turn their TPS benefits into permanent residency permits — say they’re encouraged to raise the political profile of the program and its beneficiaries.
“While this decision helps us to at least breathe and be comfortable that our friends with TPS are not going to lose immigration status, it also motivates us to continue organizing and hoping that Congress will understand the importance of this,” Jose Palma, the Massachusetts coordinator for the National TPS Alliance, said in a call with reporters.
Immigration causes have been front and center in U.S. politics during the Trump administration.
But TPS has received relatively little attention.
“We were doing some lobbying and some Congresspeople didn’t know what TPS was,” said Palma. “We were asking for support for TPS and they were asking, ‘What is TPS? We don’t know,’”
And while TPS recipients had been included in previous attempts at comprehensive immigration reform, most bills that got traction in 2018 focused solely on Dreamers.
The exception was a bipartisan bill proposed by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), which would have pulled immigrant visas from the diversity visa program to grant permanent residency to certain TPS holders, including some from Haiti.
That bill was shot down in January by Trump at a White House meeting with Graham and Durbin, where he allegedly called Haiti and some African countries “shithole countries.”
Still, TPS advocates say they’ve been able to raise awareness for the program since Haiti’s designation was terminated in November.
Palma pointed to seven legislative proposals in the current Congress that would either extend TPS benefits or give current beneficiaries permanent residency.
Another proposal from Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) would transfer the responsibility of designation from DHS to Congress and restrict access of undocumented immigrants to TPS.
Palma added that the ultimate goal of many TPS recipients, particularly those who have been in the United States for long periods of time, is to achieve permanent residency.
“If we’re going to take the future of this campaign based on what we have achieved from there to now, I feel confident that it’s not going to be easy but it’s something we can definitely achieve,” he said.
Chen’s order covers only El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan, which account for a majority of TPS holders.
The most numerically significant TPS countries not included in the lawsuit are Honduras, which has about 57,000 citizens in the program, and Nepal, which has about 9,000. They are not included because their terminations had not been announced at the time the lawsuit was filed.
*******************************************
What is missing here is decisive, bipartisan Congressional action to resolve some of these issues in a way that the Trump White Nationalists can’t easily undo. Barring that, various aspects of the White Nationalist anti-immigrant agenda will continue to “bop along” through the lower Federal Courts: sometimes winning, but often losing.
While the GOP right is obviously feeling a sense of invincibility with the likely advent of Justice Kavanaugh, Trump can’t necessarily count on the Supremes to bail him out by intervening in controversial immigration cases. It would be better for the Court, and particularly for Chief Justice Roberts, presumptive Justice Kavanaugh, and the other “GOP Justices” to take on some less controversial issues — ones where they might actually achieve unanimity or near-unanimity first, and save the inevitable, partisan “5-4s” for a later date. That might mean that he fate of many of Trump’s most controversial immigration schemes could remain in the hands of the lower Federal Courts until sometime after October 2019.
Of course, that isn’t necessarily good news for those opposing the Trump agenda: Trump is quickly turning the lower Federal Courts into bastions of right-wing doctrinaire jurisprudence, just as the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and other right-leaning legal groups have mapped it out.
The Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” crackdown at the border this spring was troubled from the outset by planning shortfalls, widespread communication failures and administrative indifference to the separation of small children from their parents, according to an unpublished report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog.
The report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the government’s first attempt to autopsy the chaos produced between May 5 and June 20, when President Trump abruptly halted the separations under mounting pressure from his party and members of his family.
The DHS Office of Inspector General’s review found at least 860 migrant children were left in Border Patrol holding cells longer than the 72-hour limit mandated by U.S. courts, with one minor confined for 12 days and another for 25.
Many of those children were put in chain-link holding pens in the Rio Grande Valley of southern Texas. The facilities were designed as short-term way stations, lacking beds and showers, while the children awaited transfer to shelters run by the Department of Health and Human Services.
U.S. border officials in the Rio Grande Valley sector, the busiest for illegal crossings along the nearly 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border, held at least 564 children longer than they were supposed to, according to the report. Officials in the El Paso sector held 297 children over the legal limit.
The investigators describe a poorly coordinated interagency process that left distraught parents with little or no knowledge of their children’s whereabouts. In other instances, U.S. officials were forced to share minors’ files on Microsoft Word documents sent as email attachments because the government’s internal systems couldn’t communicate.
“Each step of this manual process is vulnerable to human error, increasing the risk that a child could become lost in the system,” the report found.
Based on observations conducted by DHS inspectors at multiple facilities along the border in late June, agents separated children too young to talk from their parents in a way that courted disaster, the report says.
“Border Patrol does not provide pre-verbal children with wrist bracelets or other means of identification, nor does Border Patrol fingerprint or photograph most children during processing to ensure that they can be easily linked with the proper file,” the report said.
“It is a priority of our agency to process and transfer all individuals in our custody to the appropriate longer-term detention agency as soon as possible,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol, said in a statement. “The safety and well-being of unaccompanied alien children . . . is our highest responsibility, and we work closely with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Refugee Resettlement to ensure the timely and secure transfer of all unaccompanied minors in our custody as soon as placement is available from HHS.”
In its Sept. 14 response to the inspector general’s report, DHS acknowledged the “lack of information technology integration” across the key immigration systems and “sometimes” holding children beyond the 72-hour limit.
Jim Crumpacker, the DHS official who responded to the report, said the agency held children longer mainly because HHS shelter space was unavailable. But he said transferring children to less-restrictive settings is a priority.
On June 23, three days after the executive order halting the separations, DHS announced it had developed a “central database” with HHS containing location information for separated parents and minors that both departments could access to reunite families. The inspector general found no evidence of such a database, the report said.
“The OIG team asked several [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] employees, including those involved with DHS’ reunification efforts at ICE Headquarters, if they knew of such a database, and they did not,” it states. “DHS has since acknowledged to the OIG that there is no ‘direct electronic interface’ between DHS and HHS tracking systems.”
Inspectors said they continue to have doubts about the accuracy and reliability of information provided by DHS about the scope of the family separations.
In late June, a federal judge ordered the government to reunite more than 2,500 children taken from their parents, but three months later, more than 100 of those minors remain in federal custody.
The inspector general’s report also found that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) restricted the flow of asylum seekers at legal ports of entry and may have inadvertently prompted them to cross illegally. One woman said an officer had turned her away three times, so she crossed illegally.
At one border crossing, the inspection team saw CBP attempt to increase its detention space by “converting former offices into makeshift hold rooms.”
The observations were made by teams of lawyers, inspectors and criminal investigators sent to the border amid concerns raised by members of Congress and the public. They made unannounced visits to CBP and ICE facilities in the border cities of El Paso and McAllen, Tex.
*********************************************
Meanwhile, over at Vanity Fair, Isobel Thompson give us the “skinny” on how the self-created “Kiddie Gulag” that Sessions, Stevie Miller, and Nielsen love so much has turned into total chaos, with the most vulnerable kids among us as its victims. We’ll be feeling the effects of these cruel, inhuman, and unconstitutional policies for generations!
Three months after Donald Trump gave in to global opprobrium and discontinued his administration’s policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican border, the stark impact of his zero-tolerance directive continues to unfold, with reports emerging that, in the space of a year, the number of migrant children detained by the U.S. government has spiked from 2,400 to over 13,000—despite the number of monthly border crossings remaining relatively unchanged. The increase, along with the fact that the average detainment period has jumped from 34 to 59 days, has resulted in an accommodation crisis. As a result, hundreds of children—some wearing belts inscribed with their emergency-contact information—have been packed onto buses, transported for hours, and deposited at a tented city in a stretch of desert in Tornillo, West Texas. According to The New York Times, these journeys typically occur in the middle of the night and on short notice, to prevent children from fleeing.
The optics of the child-separation crisis have been some of the worst in history for the Trump administration, and the tent city in Tornillo is no exception. The facility is reportedly run according to “guidelines” provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, but access to legal aid is limited, and children—who sleep in bunks divided by gender into blocks of 20—are given academic workbooks, but no formal teaching. In theory, the hundreds of children being sent to Tornillo every week should be held for just a short period of time; the center first opened in June as a temporary space for about 400. Since then, however, it has been expanded to accommodate 3,800 occupants for an indefinite period.
Again, the lag time is largely thanks to the White House. Typically, children labeled “unaccompanied minors” are held in federal custody until they can be paired with sponsors, who house them as their immigration case filters through the courts. But thanks to the harsh rhetoric embraced by the White House, such sponsors are now in short supply. They’re often undocumented immigrants themselves, which means that in this environment, claiming a child would put them at risk for deportation. In June, that risk became even more acute when authorities announced that potential sponsors would have to submit their fingerprints, as well as those of any adults living in their household: data that would then be passed to immigration authorities. Matthew Albence, who works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, unwittingly illustrated the problem when he testified before Congress last week that I.C.E. had arrested multiple people who had applied to sponsor unaccompanied minors. Almost three-quarters had no criminal record.
Over time, the number of detained children is only expected to increase. According to The Washington Post, the flood of Central American immigrants moving north, driven by “hunger, joblessness, and the gravitational pull of the American economy,” shows no sign of abating. The number of men who cross the border with children has reportedly risen from 7,896 in 2016 to 16,667 this year, while instances of migrants falsely claiming children as their own have reportedly increased “threefold.” “Economic opportunity and governance play much larger roles in affecting the decision for migrants to take the trip north to the United States,” Kevin McAleenan, a border-security official, told the Post, adding that “a sustained campaign that addresses both push and pull factors” is “the only solution to this crisis.”
Given the attitude of the current administration, such a campaign seems unlikely to materialize. With Congress poorly positioned to pass comprehensive immigration reform, and a suddenly swamped detention system draining money and resources and damaging the mental health of thousands of children, the escalating crisis seems poised to become an ever more serious self-inflicted thorn in the president’s side. Although the White House is confident that, as hard-liner Stephen Miller boasts, it can’t lose on immigration, it will at some point be forced to acknowledge that its draconian strategy has morphed into chaos.
*****************************************
Wonder if any of these evil dudes who along with Sessions helped plan and implement the “Kiddie Gulag” knowing that it was likely in violation of the Constitution (in Federal court, DOJ lawyers didn’t even contest that a policy of intentional child separation would be unconstitutional) took out the “Bivens Insurance” offered to USG employees at relatively low-cost (I sure did!).
The only good news is that they are likely to be tied up in law suits seeking damages against them in their personal capacities for the rest of their lives!
So, perhaps there will eventually be some justice! But, that’s still won’t help traumatized kids whose lives have been screwed up forever as an illegal, immoral, and bogus, “deterrent” by a racist White Nationalist regime.
