Last Call For The GOP Mask Slips Again...

 ..and Republicans finally admit that their "cure" for the antisemitism wave that they started is increased Islamophobia and collective punishment of Palestinians in the US.

 

Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) introduced a bill Thursday that could ban Palestinians from entering the U.S. and possibly expel those who are already here.

Zinke, who served as secretary of the Interior Department under former President Trump, introduced legislation called the Safeguarding Americans from Extremism Act.

The legislation would require the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt granting visas, asylum and refuge for people who have a Palestinian Authority-issued passport. The bill would revoke the entrance or visa for individuals who came to the U.S. after Oct. 1.

“This legislation keeps America safe,” Zinke said. “I don’t trust the Biden Administration any more than I do the Palestinian Authority to screen who is allowed to come into the United States. This is the most anti-Hamas immigration legislation I have seen and it’s well deserved. Given the circumstances, the threats to our immigration system and the history of terrorists abusing refugee, asylum and visa processes all over the world, the requirements in this bill are necessary to keep Americans safe. This bill does exactly that.”

Zinke’s bill would bar DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas from granting Temporary Protected Status to people with the passport, along with refugee status and asylum. It would direct DHS to work with Customs Enforcement and United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to “identify” and remove individuals “without lawful status, including newly revoked status.”

The legislation comes after GOP lawmakers issued a letter earlier in October to Mayorkas and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to revoke and deport students on temporary student visas who “have expressed support for Hamas” in the aftermath of the deadly Oct. 7 attack on Israel that left more than 1,400 people dead.

Zinke’s bill has 10 co-sponsors — Reps. Andy Harris (R-Md.), Aaron Bean (R-Fla.), Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), Clay Higgins (R-La.), Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), Bill Posey (R-Fla.), Barry Moore (R-Ala.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).

 

Of course, that's nothing compared to all the Republicans running for the White House, who all want to deport millions already in the country no matter where they are from, including Nikki Haley. 

OK, of the six to seven million that have come over since Biden did this — this is going to sound harsh — but you send them back. And the reason you send them back, the reason you send them back is because, my parents, they came here legally. They put in the time, they put in the price. I take care of my parents. They live with us. They’re 87 and 89. There’s not a time I’ve had dinner with my mom when she doesn’t say, ‘Are those people still crossing the border?’ And the reason is, they are offended by what’s happening on the border. And when you allow those six or seven million to come, to all those people who’ve done it the right way, you’re letting them jump the line.

 

So yeah, national immigration raids, mass deportations, families ripped apart. You may not like Biden. You should see the other guys, though...

Did Nazi That Coming, Con't

The good thing about Germany is that they actually arrest their neo-Nazi politicians. Here in the states, we agonize over their rights to be antisemitic assholes and occasionally elect one to the White House.

 

A legislator with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party was arrested on Monday on charges including displaying forbidden totalitarian symbols, with neighbours of his fraternity complaining of often hearing the Nazi “Sieg Heil” victory salute.

Newly elected Daniel Halemba, 22, was due to take up his seat in the Bavarian regional parliament later on Monday. He is a member of the Teutonia Prague student fraternity, whose premises were raided by police in September.

During the raid, officials said, they found forbidden symbols – Germany’s constitution forbids the display of symbols of totalitarian regimes such as the swastika – and neighbours complained of hearing “Sieg Heil” (Hail Victory) from inside.

A prosecution spokesperson said Halemba would be brought before court later on Monday or Tuesday. Charges include inciting racist abuse.

A national conversation that is increasingly dominated by discussion of migration has helped the AfD to a series of strong electoral showings far beyond its old heartlands in the post-industrial east, with voters seemingly unperturbed by its rightward drift.

The party, second in polls in several eastern states, achieved record results in the western states of Bavaria and Hesse on 8 October.

The party and its youth wing are under observation in several states, with prominent figures such as the lead European parliament candidate Maximilian Krah comparing immigration to colonialism and stating that “oriental landgrabs” lead to “sexual abuse of European girls”.

Halemba, who joined the fraternity as a law student in Würzburg, has named Björn Höcke, leader of the AfD’s far-right wing, as his political role model.

“They want to arrest me, an elected state parliament member, three days before I take my seat, using a totally lawless arrest warrant,” said Halemba in a video shared on his lawyer’s Telegram channel.

 

"Maybe the Nazis were on to something" is certainly a political position you could take, but so it "Maybe neo-Nazis should be punched in the junk and arrested."

 

I'm a fan of the latter.

Immigration Nation, Con't

In a battle 100% certain to be headed to the Supreme Court, Texas lawmakers have voted to allow state and local law enforcement to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants in contravention of, you know, federal law and the Constitution.

 

In a direct challenge to federal power over immigration, the Texas House on Thursday approved the creation of a state-level crime for entering the country from Mexico between ports of entry, allowing local police agencies to arrest and jail unauthorized migrants or order them back to Mexico.

The legislation had been called for by Gov. Greg Abbott in what would be a sharp escalation of his multibillion-dollar border security program, known as Operation Lone Star. The Texas House also approved an additional $1.5 billion for the state to use to construct its own barriers near the international boundary.

The arrest measure now returns to the Senate, which has already approved its own version, and then head to Mr. Abbott’s desk for his signature.

“It is a humane, logical and efficient approach,” Representative David Spiller, a Republican from west of Fort Worth, said in introducing his arrest bill before the vote. “There is nothing unfair about ordering someone back from where they came if they arrived here illegally.”

Emotions ran high during hours of arguments and motions on the House floor that stretched through the night and into Thursday morning, with Democrats objecting to what they said would be a new criminal enforcement regime that could end up inadvertently targeting Hispanic Texans. At one point, tempers flared as Republicans moved to halt amendments to the bill.

“My community is being attacked,” one Latino representative, Armando Walle, a Houston Democrat, told his Republican colleagues. “Y’all don’t understand,” he said. “It hurts us personally.”

For more than two years, Mr. Abbott and Republican lawmakers have been testing the boundaries of the state’s power to enact its own aggressive law enforcement policies in response to the surging number of migrants crossing into the state from Mexico.

But the creation of a criminal offense under state law — empowering Texas officers to arrest migrants, including those seeking asylum — went a step further into a realm of immigration enforcement that is typically reserved to the federal government.

The legislative move is likely to set up a consequential court fight over immigration and, for opponents of President Biden’s immigration policies, create a chance to revisit a 2012 Supreme Court case, originating in Arizona, that was decided 5 to 4 in favor of the federal government’s primary role in setting immigration policy.

 

Needless to say, GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP are picking this fight on purpose. They want the ruling against Arizona's 2021 "Papers, please" law overturned so they can start arresting Latinos left and right in the state.

 

You'd also better believe that Arizona, Florida, Georgia, NC and other big red states will follow suit should the Roberts Court allow them to, with the goal of filling as many detention centers as possible.

This is going to get bad, folks. It may not end up in front of SCOTUS before the 2024 election, but it's still potentially a horrific situation, and the GOP does not care one bit.

GOP Goes Down Mexico Way

At this point multiple GOP candidates for President are promising to commit acts of outright war in Mexico in order to try to stop the flow of drugs and migrants into the US, and even if somehow Trump isn't the candidate by some miracle, the also-rans are more than willing to run on invading our southern neighbor.

Ron DeSantis wants suspected drug smugglers at the U.S.-Mexico border to be shot dead. Nikki Haley promises to send American special forces into Mexico. Vivek Ramaswamy has accused Mexico's leader of treating drug cartels as his "sugar daddy" and says that if he is elected president, "there will be a new daddy in town."

Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the 2024 nomination and long the person who has shaped his party's rhetoric on the border, has often blamed Mexico for problems in the United States and promises new uses of military force and covert action if he returns to the White House.

Many of the GOP presidential candidates say they would carry out potential acts of war against Mexico in response to the trafficking of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. More than 75,000 people in the U.S. died last year from overdoses of synthetic opioids, an annual figure more than 20 times higher than a decade ago.

The candidates' antagonism toward Mexico is welcomed by some families who have lost loved ones to fentanyl and have argued that Washington has not done enough to address the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. However, analysts and nonpartisan experts warn that military force is not the answer and instead fuels the racism and xenophobia that undermine efforts to stop drug trafficking.

"You've got politicking on this side. And then on the Mexican side of the border, you've got a president who is turning a blind eye to what's going on in Mexico and who has completely gutted bilateral collaboration with the United States," said Arturo Sarukhan, Mexico's ambassador to the U.S. from 2007 to 2013. "That's a very combustible mixture."

Andrea Thomas' daughter died at age 32 after taking half of a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl that looked like her prescription pills for abdominal pain. Thomas started the foundation Voices for Awareness in Grand Junction, Colorado, to raise the alarm about fentanyl.

Thomas says people she knows are interested in what the candidates are proposing and feel that President Joe Biden's administration has not properly responded to the crisis. In a letter to the presidential candidates, Thomas and an assembly of other groups urge the politicians to do "all that can be done" to stop the manufacturing and smuggling of the drug.

"This drug is like no drug we have ever seen before," she said. "We need some strong measures. We have no more time to waste."

Democrats also face immense political pressure on border issues heading into next year's election. The White House has funded national programs to reduce fentanyl overdoses and sanctioned Chinese companies blamed for importing the chemicals used to make the drug.

Mexico has failed to address its problem with fentanyl production and trafficking. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador repeatedly denies his country is producing the synthetic opioid despite enormous evidence to the contrary.

Border agents seized nearly 13 tons (12,000 kilograms) of fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico border between September 2022 and August, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

At the second GOP primary debate late last month, candidates reiterated that they would use military forces to go after drug gangs in Mexico.

"As commander in chief, I'm going to use the U.S. military to go after the Mexican drug cartels," said DeSantis, the Florida governor. He has promised that people suspected of smuggling drugs across the southern border would end up "stone cold dead." That raises the prospect of border agents being authorized to shoot people on sight before any investigation into whether those people were carrying drugs.

Of course if DeSantis, Trump, Haley and the rest really want to stop drugs from Mexico, we need to go after Americans, not Mexicans...

U.S. government data undercuts the claim that people seeking asylum and other border crossers are responsible for drug trafficking. About 90% of fentanyl seizures were made at official land crossings, not between crossings where people entered illegally. At a hearing in July, James Mandryck, a CBP deputy assistant commissioner, said 73% of fentanyl seizures at the border since the previous October were smuggling attempts carried out by U.S. citizens, with the rest being done by Mexican citizens.

Something tells me that the next Republican administration really will shoot first and ignore questions, or at least ignore answers that questions might raise. 

Hizzonerless, Mayor Adams

This should be the immediate end of NYC Mayor Eric Adams's career.

 

In a sharp escalation over the migrant crisis, Mayor Eric Adams claimed in stark terms that New York City was being destroyed by an influx of 110,000 asylum seekers from the southern border and said that he did not see a way to fix the issue.

“Let me tell you something New Yorkers, never in my life have I had a problem that I did not see an ending to — I don’t see an ending to this,” the mayor said on Wednesday night in his opening remarks at a town hall-style gathering in Manhattan. “This issue will destroy New York City.”

Mr. Adams, a Democrat in his second year in office, has clashed with leading members of his party as New York City has struggled to provide housing and services to the migrants. For months, Mr. Adams has criticized President Biden and Gov. Kathy Hochul for failing to help the city handle the asylum seekers and pleaded for additional funding and expedited work permits.

But the mayor’s comments on Wednesday were his most ominous yet. He pointed to new projections that the city’s budget gap could grow to nearly $12 billion — the same amount that city officials estimate that the migrants could cost the city over three years.

“Every community in this city is going to be impacted,” Mr. Adams said at the meeting. “We have a $12 billion deficit that we’re going to have to cut — every service in this city is going to be impacted. All of us.”

The surge of migrants crossing the southern border has overwhelmed the city, with nearly 60,000 occupying beds in traditional city shelters and in more than 200 emergency sites. As New York City students returned to school on Thursday, city officials said that about 20,000 migrant children were expected to join them.

The financial and logistical burden has caused the mayor to repeatedly press Mr. Biden for help this summer, saying last week that the city’s requests were still mostly “unaddressed” and calling for a federal emergency and a national “decompression strategy at the border.”

 

To recap, the Democratic mayor of the largest, most populous, most diverse city in America sounds precisely like a Republican politician and blames President Biden for having too many migrants coming to the Big Apple, and blames him for yet another round of social services cuts that will "have to happen."

As much of a bonehead that de Blasio was, as much as a corrupt asshole that Bloomberg was, Eric Adams is the most anti-New Yorker that ever got into Gracie Mansion in my lifetime (yes, even Rudy didn't go this far) and NYC cannot get rid of this guy quickly enough.

Ron's Gone Wrong, Con't

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis is in hot water with both Texas and California for his immigration "relocation" stunts, as officials in both states are considering his practice of taking loads of undocumented immigrants and dumping them in other states as human trafficking.

 

A Texas sheriff’s department has recommended that the district attorney in Bexar County bring criminal charges over the first iteration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called migrant relocation program. Those flights last September sent 49 asylum seekers, most of them Venezuelans, from San Antonio to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

According to a statement provided to the Miami Herald, the Bexar County sheriff completed its criminal investigation into the on-the-ground operation that allegedly lured migrants onto the flights with false promises of jobs and opportunities on the other end.

“The case filed includes both felony and misdemeanor charges of Unlawful Restraint,” according to the statement. “At this time, the case is being reviewed by the DA’s office. Once an update is available, it will be provided to the public.”

Now it’s up to prosecutors in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, to decide whether to follow the sheriff’s recommendation. The district attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Last fall, Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar issued special certifications to all of the migrants flown to Martha’s Vineyard declaring them to be official victims of a crime and paving the way for them to stay in the United States under a special visa for those helpful to law enforcement. Unlawful restraint is a misdemeanor unless the victim is younger than 17 — as was the case for five of the migrants.

Handing the case over to prosecutors is a critical juncture in a criminal probe that could snare some of DeSantis’ top aides. The migrant relocation program, using Florida tax dollars, was overseen by DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, and public safety czar Larry Keefe.

The sheriff announced its charging recommendation in a statement to the Herald Monday as news broke of several dozen migrants transported from El Paso to Sacramento, California, using a playbook similar to the one DeSantis used to send asylum seekers to Massachusetts last year.

 

Meanwhile, with DeSantis sending a second planeload of undocumented immigrants to Sacramento, Gov. Gavin Newsom has a few choice words for DeSantis himself.

Gov. Gavin Newsom took his feud with Gov. Ron DeSantis to new heights on Monday, seemingly threatening him with kidnapping charges after California officials say South American migrants were sent to Sacramento by the state of Florida as a political stunt.

Newsom, a Democrat, cited state kidnapping laws in a tweet to the Florida governor and Republican presidential hopeful, whom he called a “small, pathetic man.”

“This isn’t Martha’s Vineyard. Kidnapping charges?” Newsom said in the tweet, referencing DeSantis’ action last year to send a group of Venezuelan migrants to the wealthy liberal vacation spot in Massachusetts.


Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were transported from Texas to New Mexico and flown on a chartered jet to Sacramento, where they were dropped off Friday at a church, Newsom said.

On Monday, a plane carrying 20 migrants arrived in Sacramento. Both groups were flown by the same contractor and were carrying documents indicating that their transportation involved the state of Florida, according to officials with the California Department of Justice.

Newsom said that his administration is working with the agency to “investigate the circumstances around” who paid for the plane trips, whether migrants were misled and whether laws were violated, including kidnapping.

It is unclear what legal action the state plans to take. After Newsom tweeted the threat of kidnapping charges, his spokesperson deferred questions to Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office. Bonta said over the weekend that he was “evaluating potential criminal or civil action” but did not release additional details Monday.

 

At some point, DeSantis has to answer for this.

 

Who will actually make him do that, well...

The GOP Mask Slips Again...

...and we see that they will do anything to service the cause of white supremacy.

Seven homeless men have come forward to say they were part of a group of men recruited at a Poughkeepsie homeless shelter to act as veterans that had been displaced from a Newburgh hotel in order for a non-profit organization to perpetrate a fraud on the public.

The men told Mid-Hudson News on Thursday night that they were part of a group of 15 men that were supposed to pretend they were veterans that had been kicked out of the Crossroads Hotel in the Town of Newburgh last Friday, in advance of the arrival of migrants brought up from New York City.

The saga of the displaced veterans received national attention when Assemblyman Brian Maher stepped in to denounce the hotel’s actions and grabbed headlines along with an appearance on a conservative tv network to raise money for the YIT Foundation, which claims had housed the homeless veterans at the hotel.

The foundation and its director, Sharon Toney-Finch, appear to have fabricated the entire story, causing Maher to admit yesterday that he had been duped by Finch and her lies.

“When Sharon and sevceral veterans explained to me their situation, I believed them at their word,” Maher said Friday. “I had absolutely no knowledge of any wrongdoing and believed that their stories were real until a phone conversation with Sharon yesterday afternoon when she explained to me that this did not happen the way she purported it to.”

Finch’s story began to unravel last Monday after Mid-Hudson News began looking into the plight of the displaced veterans. An investigation by Mid-Hudson News uncovered a series of lies that led to the belief that the veterans Finch claimed were displaced, did not even exist.

On Thursday night he met with a group of seven men at a homeless shelter. The men said that on Wednesday, two people came into the shelter saying they had work and needed 15 men between the ages of 40 and 60, to take a trip to meet with an elected official for a discussion on homelessness. They were each promised $200 along with food and alcohol. They were familiar with one of the recruiters, Diana, claiming she had previously stayed at the shelter.

Andrew O’Grady, president and CEO of Mental Health America of Dutchess County (MHA Dutchess) also attended the roundtable conversation. O’Grady said “It was brought to my attention that two people came to the homeless shelter in Poughkeepsie and recruited 15 of our homeless guests under the guise of meeting a politician in Connecticut about homeless issues.” He was summoned there to offer assistance to the group and said he attended because the incident “concerned me greatly as vulnerable homeless individuals were bribed to pretend to be Veterans. I was asked to speak to them because they were distraught that they never received payment.”

Once recruited, the men were loaded in vehicles and transported to the Daily Planet Diner in LaGrange where they were joined by a third person, now identified as Sharon Toney-Finch. Finch told the men they could order anything they wanted from the menu and their drinks were also being paid for.

“We ate like kings,” said one of the men who asked to remain nameless. “Sharon introduced herself and told us we could have whatever we wanted and she would pick up the tab.” After eating and drinking, Finch gathered the men in the parking lot to explain the actual “work” they were about to perform.

One of the men said Finch told them they were going to a meeting where she would be explaining how they had been kicked out of a hotel to make room for migrants. “She told us to act like we were the veterans that had been displaced. And she told us that if asked, we were supposed to say we had been kicked out and Sharon found us rooms in Fishkill.” He also noted that men who were unwilling to answer were told to respond with “I am too traumatized to talk about it,” if asked.

 

This is why Republicans want to dismantle local news outlets, or drown them in fake local news outlets controlled by right-wing outfits. This is why they attack local, investigative journalists, so they can manufacture lies like this, and make them go national to feed the perpetual right-wing noise machine, to keep white voters hating immigrants, Black folk, Asian folk, LGBTQ+ folk, and everyone who isn't a white voter. They did this to make military vets hate immigrants.

They did this because they fully expected to get away with this, without being challenged in any way. They did this to use this "event" as propaganda for months and years to come. They did this to keep the population misinformed and angry, and to not think for themselves. They did this to keep the few remaining local news sources silent and afraid until they are eliminated.

This is what authoritarian fascism looks like, folks.

Border Line Insanity, Con't

At least eight people are dead after an SUV plowed into a group of migrant workers waiting at a bus stop in Brownsville, Texas, and indications are the act could very well have been deliberate.

 

Brownsville police investigator Martin Sandoval said the crash happened about 8:30 a.m. local time. The driver, Sandoval said, is a Hispanic male who was hospitalized for treatment of injuries before being taken in to police custody on charges of reckless driving. More charges are expected soon, he said.

Sandoval said the cause of the crash has not been determined, but that police are awaiting results from a blood sample taken from the driver to see if he was under the influence. The driver, apparently injured when his silver Range Rover overturned in the crash, is not cooperating with officers and had not yet been identified, he said.

The death toll climbed by one Sunday after a victim succumbed to their injuries at the hospital, Mayor Trey Mendez said Sunday evening in a statement. “We have had one more casualty as one of the injured tragically passed away from their injuries at the hospital,” Mendez said. “The total lives lost is currently 8 and several more remain critical.”

Luis Herrera, who was among those hit by the SUV, said in an interview that many of the victims already had tickets out of Brownsville, some to reunite with their families. Herrera, 33, who suffered a broken arm and was released from the hospital Sunday afternoon, said the driver was taunting people standing at the bus stop, driving past them and yelling insults.

“He crossed the street and he hit the gas and he drove by my legs, and hurt my arm,” he said in Spanish. “The others, he killed almost all of them.”

He recalled the driver yelling: “You’re invading my property!”

Sandoval said the driver allegedly ran a red light and plowed into a group of people standing at a local bus stop in this border city in southeastern Texas. The victims were standing outside the Bishop Enrique San Pedro Ozanam Center, a migrant and homeless shelter in the border town.

Those injured were taken to hospitals, Sandoval said, including one who was airlifted.

“He just hit the people,” he said.

Police were still trying to confirm the names and ages of the victims. Sandoval said some were migrants from Venezuela who recently crossed the border. The bus stop serves migrants and U.S. citizens in this city of 190,000 residents.

“This is a public bus stop,” he said. “So we don’t know if some residents of ours were there.”

Police are awaiting help from the U.S. Border Patrol to identify the victims, since some may have been recently processed at the border. “Definitely, there were some migrants there,” Sandoval said.

The homeless shelter had been housing several recent border crossers. Brownsville is one of the areas receiving large numbers of migrants as the federal government prepares to lift pandemic travel restrictions Thursday and reopen the border to asylum seekers.

Video obtained by The Washington Post showed the driver running the red light about 100 feet away from where the victims were waiting for a bus.

Witnesses said the driver tried to run away afterward, Victor Maldonado, director of the Ozanam center, told The Post. But the witnesses stopped him from leaving the scene, Maldonado added. Some witnesses said he appeared to be driving under the influence, Maldonado said.

 

Maybe the driver was drunk, maybe he wasn't, but eight people are dead, several of them migrant workers. We still have a gun problem for sure, but yeah, there are other ways to commit mass killings in America.

Ron's Gone Completely Fucking Wrong

Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed law one of arguably the most horrific, dystopian fascist decrees in the country right now, and understand that no matter who the GOP candidate for the White House in 2024 is, they will run on bringing this fascism to every corner of America.

First, how bad does your abortion ban have to be in order to make it into People Magazine? 

 

On Thursday, DeSantis announced that he signed the Heartbeat Protection Act into law, which will now require a woman to provide proof that the pregnancy was a result of rape, incest or human trafficking in order to receive an abortion up until 15 weeks of gestation.

Documentation can include a restraining order, police report, medical record or other evidence.

This restriction is an exception to the new law, which states that otherwise, abortions will be banned after six weeks unless done to save a pregnant person's life.

 

Read that again. Go on, I'll wait. 

You have to have documented proof of your rape, or you have to bear the rapist's child. The burden of proof is on the victim.

"We are proud to support life and family in the state of Florida," DeSantis, 44, said in a news release.

"I applaud the Legislature for passing the Heartbeat Protection Act that expands pro-life protections and provides additional resources for young mothers and families," he added.

The legislation comes exactly one year after the Florida governor signed a bill prohibiting abortions after 15 weeks. That law is currently being challenged before the Florida State Supreme Court. The new law would only go into effect if the previous 15-week law is upheld.

On Thursday, The White House issued its own rebuttal to the news that the bill had passed in Florida.

"This ban would prevent four million Florida women of reproductive age from accessing abortion care after six weeks — before many women even know they're pregnant," White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement issued Thursday.

The statement added, "This ban would also impact the nearly 15 million women of reproductive age who live in abortion-banning states throughout the South, many of whom have previously relied on travel to Florida as an option to access care."

 

And yet, it potentially gets worse. Much worse.

Florida’s Senate Bill 1718 is much worse than even Arizona’s notorious SB 1070 in 2010, which turned every police officer in that state into an immigration agent. The wide-ranging assault would make it a felony for anyone to give someone they know or should “reasonably” know to be an undocumented immigrant a ride, a job or shelter, punishable by up to five years in prison — and up to 15 years if the immigrant is a minor.

In addition, the bill would ban out-of-state tuition waivers at colleges and universities for undocumented students; invalidate out-of-state licenses given to undocumented immigrants, such as those issued by California; prevent undocumented immigrants from becoming attorneys; require hospitals to collect data about the immigration status of patients and the costs they incur; and require that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. The bill would also make it a felony for someone to use false identification to obtain a job and punish employers who don’t use the federal E-verify program to check immigrants’ documents.

Such changes would have a chilling effect on immigrant communities in Florida and turn good Samaritans or even family members into criminals. Clergy members who minister to undocumented immigrants would be forced to choose between helping those in need and their concern about potential criminal penalties. People who employ undocumented gardeners, nannies or housekeepers would have to fire them or face criminal charges.

Immigrants and immigrant advocacy organizations worry that the bill is so vague it could apply to mixed-status households, meaning U.S.-born children couldn’t give their undocumented parents a ride or allow them to stay overnight. And with a Republican supermajority in both houses of the Florida Legislature, the bill is likely to pass.

DeSantis said the crackdown is necessary “to protect” Florida residents from what he claims are President Biden’s open-border policies. That’s ridiculous. Of the 4.5 million immigrants in Florida, slightly more than 900,000 are undocumented. And they pay taxes — about $1.6 billion a year, according to the American Immigration Council.

Furthermore, the border is not open, and certainly not friendly to immigrants. Biden has continued and expanded the Trump-era policies of expelling migrants to Mexico or deporting them to their home countries, partly due to court challenges and pressure from Republicans.

Florida legislators eager to climb aboard the DeSantis hate train may laud him as a bold visionary, but this tired political ploy is just as likely to come back to bite them. That’s what happened more than a quarter-century ago after California Gov. Pete Wilson and the state Republican Party supported the rabidly anti-immigrant Proposition 187, which would have barred undocumented immigrants from receiving healthcare, public education and other services. The measure was declared unconstitutional and solidified Democratic control in the state. 

 

I'm hoping that the courts find both to be unconstitutional and that these laws cost DeSantis his political career. I'm probably wrong on the latter part, but if these stay as laws in Florida, thousands of regular people are going to go to prison for a very long time for helping women and undocumented immigrants, and it's going to make both categories of living, breathing human beings into subhuman pariahs.

Ron DeSantis is an absolute fucking monster, and I no longer hesitate to use that exact term to describe him.

 

 

 

Border Line Insanity, Con't

Republicans got the judge and the ruling they wanted on President Biden's immigration policies as the White House's "catch and release" program has now been blocked by a Trump judge.

 

A federal judge on Wednesday handed a victory to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Attorney General Ashley Moody as he delivered a blistering rebuke to the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

U.S. District Judge T. Kent Wetherell ordered federal immigration authorities to revamp one key policy that he says runs counter to federal law while at the same time castigated the Biden administration for its handling of what he called an “unsustainable” crisis on the nation’s southern border.

“For the most part, the court finds in favor of Florida because, as detailed below, the evidence establishes that defendants have effectively turned the Southwest border into a meaningless line in the sand and little more than a speedbump for aliens flooding into the country,” wrote Wetherell, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump.

Wetherell added that the Biden immigration policies were “akin to posting a flashing ‘Come In, We’re Open’ sign on the southern border. The unprecedented ‘surge’ of aliens that started arriving at the Southwest Border almost immediately after President Biden took office and that has continued unabated over the past two years was a predictable consequence of these actions.”

The ruling comes amid reports that the Biden administration is considering reopening previously shuttered detention centers to house migrant families.

Moody, whose office first filed the lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other federal officials in March 2021, hailed the ruling.

“Today’s ruling affirms what we have known all along, President Biden is responsible for the border crisis and his unlawful immigration policies make this country less safe,” Moody said in a statement. “A federal judge is now ordering Biden to follow the law, and his administration should immediately begin securing the border to protect the American people.”

Jeremy Redfern, deputy press secretary for DeSantis, said in an email that “Judge Wetherell vindicated the governor’s actions and ruled that the Biden Administration is breaking federal immigration law by failing to fulfill the duties of his office and secure the nation’s border.”

The Department of Justice declined to comment on the ruling.

Florida, along with other Republican-led states such as Texas, has been sharply critical of immigration policies pursued by the Biden administration. DeSantis, who is expected to run for president, pushed for the creation of a contentious migrant relocation program that resulted in the state flying nearly 50 migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard last September.

The state’s lawsuit took aim at immigration policies put in place right after Biden entered office, asserting that federal authorities were ignoring a federal law that requires those entering the country illegally to be detained and that undocumented migrants coming into Florida were costing the state.

 

Republicans don't want any immigration. Corporate interests who fund Republicans need cheap labor. Increasingly, the "solution" to the problem pushed by both groups is eliminating child labor laws in states.

 

But most of all, Republicans are trying to make immigration impossible, and they're winning.  Can't have a white supremacist theocracy if America keeps accepting the tired, poor huddled masses from those places.

Have A Koch And A Vile

Billionaire right-wing corporate magnate Charles Koch is willing to buy the remaining souls of any Republican who isn't Donald Trump in order to get his agenda into power in 2024, which I find deeply weird because Trump gave Koch and his ilk the largest corporate tax cut in history four years ago, but there you are.

The deep-pocketed network associated with billionaire Charles Koch is preparing to throw its money and weight behind a single Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential primary – in a move that could significantly reshape the GOP field.

Americans for Prosperity Action, the main political arm of the Koch network, “is prepared to support a candidate in the Republican presidential primary who can lead our country forward, and who can win,” Emily Seidel, the CEO of Americans for Prosperity and a top adviser at AFP Action, wrote in a memo released Sunday.

The memo does not mention Donald Trump, but an official with AFP Action confirmed to CNN that the network is not planning to support the former president’s White House bid.

“To write a new chapter for our county, we need to turn the page on the past,” Seidel wrote to AFP’s staff and activists. “So the best thing for the country would be to have a president in 2025 who represents a new chapter.”

The Koch decision to engage in the GOP primary – after sitting on the sidelines for the two most recent White House nomination fights – is likely to set off a scramble among Republican presidential contenders to win over the Kansas-based industrialist and the hundreds of wealthy donors who help finance his influential, free-market network.

During his White House tenure, Trump, often sparred with Koch officials, who sharply criticized his administration’s trade and hard-line immigration policies.

AFP Action has not announced a budget for its 2024 political activity, but the network has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in previous election cycles, rivaling the financial reach of the Republican National Committee. Americans for Prosperity has permanent staff in 36 states and touts millions of grassroots activists across the country.

Its political wing also plans to engage earlier and more aggressively in congressional and state-level primaries, both to influence more contests and to find new voters to participate in primaries, AFP Action officials said.

Seidel said the network is stepping up its activity to help address “the broken politics” that she said has created a “toxic situation” in the nation’s capital and blocked policy progress.

 

I certainly expect Koch's AFP network to back Ron DeSantis, meaning that while it will take billions to buy the kind of campaign advertising that Trump will get in kind (again) from the "liberal" media that absolutely wants him back in the White House to rule over the airwaves, DeSantis will have the money he needs to compete.

We'll see how the battle plays out. All the money in the world couldn't stop Trump in 2016, and didn't. Counting Trump out of 2024 is a mistake I won't make again.

Holidaze Week: Immigration Nation

As widely expected, the Roberts Court is keeping Trump-era Title 42 immigration and asylum limits in place until SCOTUS can decide on the case next summer.

 

The Supreme Court is keeping pandemic-era limits on immigration in place indefinitely, dashing hopes of immigration advocates who had been anticipating their end this week.

In a ruling Tuesday, the Supreme Court extended a temporary stay that Chief Justice John Roberts issued last week. Under the court’s order, the case will be argued in February and the stay will be maintained until the justices decide the case.

The limits were put in place under then-President Donald Trump at the beginning of the pandemic. Under the restrictions, officials have expelled asylum-seekers inside the United States 2.5 million times and turned away most people who requested asylum at the border on grounds of preventing the spread of COVID-19. The restrictions are often referred to as Title 42 in reference to a 1944 public health law.

Immigration advocates sued to end the use of Title 42. They said the policy goes against American and international obligations to people fleeing to the U.S. to escape persecution. They’ve also argued that the policy is outdated as coronavirus treatments improve.

A federal judge sided with them in November and set a Dec. 21 deadline to end the policy. Conservative-leaning states appealed to the Supreme Court, warning that an increase in migration would take a toll on public services and cause an “unprecedented calamity” that they said the federal government had no plan to deal with.

 

Needless to say, this is another bizarre and deleterious ruling that if it stands, could allow individual states to set individual immigration restrictions instead of the federal government, a direct violation of the Constitution that specifically names the federal government as being in charge of the nation's immigration status.

 

It would of course mean absolute chaos, with SCOTUS then being in charge of the nation's immigration policy and keeping Title 42 in place forever, or until Congress created a new immigration policy, which won't happen anytime in my lifetime.

At the best case the federal government would be forced to enforce Title 42 and reject nearly all asylum-seekers, at worst case states would be able to, as I've said, set their own immigration policies and red states would have free reign to enforce the violent removal of "illegals" themselves, a new Operation Wetback for the 21st century that would put tens of millions of Americans at direct risk of military force.

Sadly, there's at least five votes to keep Title 42 restrictions in place forever, meaning SCOTUS would be entirely in charge of immigration policy until further notice.

Border Line...Sanity?

WaPo's Greg Sargent opines on the lame-duck immigration deal struck between NC Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and Democratic Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Synema that would actually consist of helping to fix the border and immigration in general, and frankly, neither side seems happy with the bill at all.

Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) have reached an agreement on a draft framework of immigration reform compromises, sources familiar with the situation tell me. They involve issues such as the fate of “dreamers” brought here as children and the processing of asylum seekers at the southern border. Will the 10 Republican senators necessary to overcome a filibuster go along?

 

Short answer, no. Long answer:

 

A white paper laying out this Tillis-Sinema blueprint is circulating on Capitol Hill, congressional aides and advocates plugged into the talks tell me. Though the details are in flux, here’s a partial list of the major items it contains:

• Some form of path to citizenship for 2 million dreamers.
• A large boost in resources to speed up the processing of asylum seekers, including new processing centers and more asylum officers and judges.
• More resources to expedite the removal of migrants who don’t qualify for asylum.
• A continuation of the Title 42 covid-health-rule restriction on migrants applying for asylum, until the new processing centers are operational, with the aim of a one-year cutoff.
• More funding for border officers.

The idea behind this compromise is this: It gives Democrats protection for 2 million dreamers and strengthened defenses of the due process rights of some migrants. It gives Republicans faster removal from the country of migrants who fail to qualify for asylum, a continued restriction on applications for the next year and more border security.

The boost in resources would hopefully reduce the strain at the border by moving migrants through the asylum application process more quickly. The processing facilities would be temporary detention centers, but additional lawyers would be present, enabling more robust representation.

On the flip side, if migrants fail the initial interview determining whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if returned to their home countries, they’d be removed much more quickly. A “Title 42” health rationale, which is indefensible as a border-management tool, would be kept ostensibly to control flows while the reforms are implemented. The Government Accountability Office would have the authority to end it after one year if the processing centers are up and running.

It’s hard to say whether 10 Republican senators would back such a deal to get it past a GOP filibuster. This will become harder when former president Donald Trump and adviser Stephen Miller scream that it represents a massive betrayal by “elites,” as they undoubtedly will, and right-wing media propagandists such as Tucker Carlson amplify that toxic message to enrage the base.

If 10 GOP senators could support this, they’d be drawn from those who are retiring (Sens. Roy Blunt of Missouri and Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania) or those willing to challenge the Trump wing of the party (Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska).

A big question is whether these Republicans will see any advantage in genuinely trying to fix the problems at the border. They might decide that the GOP won’t get any credit even if the effort succeeds — that credit might go to President Biden — and that it’s better to retain the permanent “border crisis” as an issue.

But this is the last chance for these GOP senators to try to reach a bipartisan compromise. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who hopes to be the next speaker, has vowed not to pass any immigration reform legislation until he deems the border secured, which will never, ever happen. By backing this, retiring GOP senators could plausibly argue that they helped move the party on from Trump and add bipartisan reform on a brutal national problem to their legacy.

On the other side, however, it’s not clear whether 50 Democratic senators would support such a compromise. The continuation of Title 42, which has been a human rights disaster, and the beefed up removal process might make it a nonstarter among progressives in both chambers.

 

So yeah, like every other "bipartisan" immigration reform in the FOX Noise era, it will fail. Republicans don't want immigration reform because they don't want immigration, period. They want to yell racist nonsense about MS-13 and diseases coming across the border and drug cartels and they're taking our jobs, They want caravans on TV, and eventually M1 Abrams tanks on the damn border.

And even if all Democratic senators are willing to put up with Title 42 removals -- a huge "if" -- there just aren't 10 Republicans willing to go along. I don't think the legislation will even get 50 votes.

No, this one is going to crash and burn, folks.

Last Call For The Nice Italian Fascist, Con't

With a big win in Italian elections on Sunday, right-wing Italian nationalist Giorgia Meloni is expected to be named the country's next Prime Minister, and as I warned about last week, the first thing to go will be most of Italy's refugee and immigration policies.

For years, Giorgia Meloni has railed against Italy’s migration policies, calling them overly lenient and saying they risk turning the country into the “refugee camp of Europe.”

Now that she is Italy’s presumed next prime minister, migration is one of the areas where Meloni can most easily bring in sweeping change.

“The smart approach is: You come to my house according to my rules,” Meloni, of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, said earlier this month in an interview with The Washington Post.

Her ideas, taken together, figure to significantly tighten the doors to one of the European Union’s front-line destinations for undocumented immigrants.

While in other areas — like spending and foreign policy — Meloni would be more constrained by Europe, E.U. countries have plenty of leeway to handle their external borders, and she has long made it clear that halting flows of people across the Mediterranean is one of her priorities.

But that doesn’t mean it will be complication-free.

Efforts to block humanitarian rescue vessels from docking at Italian ports could prompt legal challenges. And if Meloni chokes off pathways to Italy, the volume of crossings would probably increase to other Mediterranean countries such as Spain — as happened three years ago when Italy was briefly led by an anti-immigration, populist government.

“You can do stuff relatively quickly [on migration] that is draconian, symbolic and sends a clear message: We’re here, we’re doing something. But there’s trouble in store,” said Andrew Geddes, director of the Migration Policy Center at the European University Institute in Florence.

“When you stop the crossings and divert them [elsewhere], that is where you get into conflict with the E.U.,” he said. “It will breathe life into an old conflict.”

 

The previous conservative government tried this, and got sued to kingdom come and back. We'll see if Meloni is this dumb.

Doing The Immigration Shuffle

As Steve M. points out, the cruelty *is* the point in GOP governors like Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott illegally kidnapping undocumented immigrants from their states and shipping them to blue state sanctuary cities as a wildly awful MAGA campaign stunt version of "reverse freedom rides", it's just not directly being cruel to the immigrants.

 

DeSantis, and Greg Abbott before him, haven't been separating parents from children. They haven't been shooting or beating or caging the immigrants. (They aren't legally allowed to, obviously, but I'm not sure they're allowed to do what they're doing, either.) They haven't sent them to parts of the country that are full of armed white supremacists who might terrorize them and kill them.

I'm not saying that DeSantis and Abbott are nice people. They're terrible people. But while forcibly relocating the immigrants is cruel, it's not maximally cruel. And they're being sent to places where they're greeted with compassion and provided with some social services.

Why aren't DeSantis and Abbott being maximally cruel to these immigrants? Because to them, and to their national audience of right-wing rage monsters, this isn't about the immigrants.

It's about us.

Every time DeSantis, Abbott, and their rooting section talk about these stunt shipment of human beings, what makes them slaver is not the idea that the immigrants will suffer, but that we will suffer, in our posh liberal enclaves. They exult every time a mayor or governor expresses resentment or declares a state of emergency. We're the ones DeSantis and Abbott want to treat with cruelty. We're the ones they want to hear howl.

This means, obviously that the immigrants themselves are reduced to weapons used against us. DeSantis and Abbott care no more about them than a rock thrower cares about the feelings of a rock. This is sociopathic indifference to the humanity of the immigrants. But we're the enemy they really want to hurt right now.

 

You have to remember that MAGA jackasses like DeSantis and Abbott and the FOX News Cargo Cult believe that undocumented immigrants are the primary source of crime, drugs, and disease in their states. On top of all that, dealing with immigrants also cost gigantic amounts of state taxpayer dollars over decades, and that immigrants are a huge drain on resources.

There a few better wins in the MAGA playbook than shipping "filthy criminal junkie illegals" to "rich, liberal enclaves" in blue states.  Enough of these busloads and planeloads and these sanctuary cities will collapse into misery, you see. That's what the MAGA CHUDs want to see. Sending immigrants to blue states will eventually cause liberals to turn against immigrants and start adopting Republican immigration policies.

Enough of this, and they get blue states to agree to Build The Wall, and these states will become newly converted red states, and MAGA forever.

At the very least, FOX News will cover every bus, plane, train, dirigible, catapult, and caravan of this behavior where immigration is "weaponized" like this. So they'll keep doing it, with more immigrants, and more often.

"But isn't this illegal?"

Yes, it is. California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is leading that charge, and believe me, while it's necessary to do, it also means DeSantis and Abbott will have a national fight over immigration right before midterms, which is what they want. They want voters to focus on that, and not abortion, Trump's coming indictments, or Biden's rapidly improving numbers.

This is the plan to put Republicans in charge of Congress.

It may very well work.

The Nice Italian Fascist

Seeing the Washington Post treat far-right Italian fascist Giorgia Meloni's "meteoric rise" towards Prime Minister as a good thing is bad enough, but it's pretty obvious that like Virginia GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Meloni is lying about being an authoritarian, and the Post is falling for the lie yet another time. 

 

The favorite to be Italy’s next prime minister has rocketed almost from out of nowhere.

Her party, until recently, was on the fringes. She was overlooked for years by Italy’s male-dominated political class. She is an unmarried mother with a heavy Roman accent, always casual and blunt, gesturing with hands to the sky, lambasting “woke ideology” and cancel culture.

By any account, Giorgia Meloni’s rise is astonishing. In a matter of weeks, if all goes as expected, she stands to become Italy’s first female leader. She’s also set a benchmark for a far-right politician in Western Europe, earning a level of power that’s been out of reach for her counterparts in Germany and France, and doing so even after the forces propelling nationalism on the continent — a migration backlash and Euroskepticism — have waned.

But Meloni’s profile is distinctive, as is the path she’s found for political success.

Amid war in Europe, she has notably avoided the pitfalls of nationalist figures elsewhere. She’s a strong NATO supporter and shows no affinity for Russian President Vladimir Putin. She has pledged not to disrupt Italy’s stability and Atlantic alliances. The country, she says, won’t take some authoritarian turn.

What will surely change, though, is Italy’s tone. Meloni takes shots at the “LGBT lobby” and the “globalist” left. She highlights anecdotes about immigrant crime. She has said that “everything we stand for is under attack” — Christian values, gender norms. Some of her stances — like opposition to gay adoptions, for instance — don’t get much traction among Italian voters, but she cites them as evidence that she cares more about principles than popularity.

“In a political world where everyone’s saying one thing and doing another, our [party’s] system of values is pretty clear,” Meloni said in an interview with The Washington Post. “You may like it or not, but we aren’t misleading.”

If Meloni, 45, prevails, she’ll wind up with a hard job: running a country in a generation-long economic decline that is somewhat wary of her powers.

Those on the left have sounded the alarm, saying that Meloni could push Italy into Europe’s illiberal bloc, alongside Hungary and Poland, fighting against diversity and agitating against Brussels. Her opponents argue that her views can veer into the extreme. They cite past remarks — such as a speech from 2017 — in which Meloni said mass-scale illegal immigration to Italy was “planned and deliberate,” carried out by unnamed powerful forces to import low-wage labor and drive out Italians. “It’s called ethnic substitution,” Meloni said at the time, echoing the far-right “great replacement” conspiracy theory.

Her allies, on the other hand, say Meloni has the kind of serious plans her predecessors have lacked, and that she chiefly wants to address Italy’s economic woes. Her stump speech is theatrical, but it deals mostly with ideas about boosting investment and curbing welfare. Her party’s recently released platform has 25 proposals — everything from extending high-speed rail lines to jump-starting university research. Voters inclined toward Meloni tended to cite, in interviews with The Post, her perceived honesty and coherence as the reasons for their support.

For now, Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party — the Brothers of Italy, a name that echoes lyrics in the national anthem — is the most popular in the country, favored by roughly one-quarter of voters. It has a coalition agreement with other parties on the right, giving it overwhelming odds to prevail against a fractured and reeling left. The right-wing bloc has said that the premier job should go to the leader of the party with the most votes. Still, following the Sept. 25 general election, the president, Sergio Mattarella, has final say on who gets the mandate. 

 

The bad news, Italy is about to get a hell of a lot more hostile toward immigrants, Muslims, and of course, Jewish Italians. Meloni cozying up to Viktor Orban is inevitable if she takes power, and she's already letting everyone know her government is going to target LGBTQ+ folks from day one.

Sounds like every GOP politician in America, and the Post is like "But she's different!"

No, she's not.

Racist Bannon Meets His Match

Trump Regime Secretary of Racism Steve Bannon has beaten Mueller's federal charges after being pardoned by Trump, and beaten the January 6th Committee by stalling out his conviction on Contempt of Congress by tying it up in the courts until the Committee runs out of authority at the end of the year. He's currently a free man as a result...and all that changes tomorrow when Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg gets his hands on his dirty ass and tosses him in the slammer on state fraud charges.

 

Stephen K. Bannon is expected to surrender to state prosecutors on Thursday to face a new criminal indictment, people familiar with the matter said, weeks after he was convicted of contempt of Congress and nearly two years after he received a federal pardon from President Donald Trump in a federal fraud case.

The precise details of the state case could not be confirmed Tuesday evening. But people familiar with the situation, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sealed indictment, suggested the prosecution will likely mirror aspects of the federal case in which Bannon was pardoned.

In that indictment, prosecutors alleged that Bannon and several others defrauded contributors to a private, $25 million fundraising effort, called “We Build the Wall,” taking funds that donors were told would support construction of a barrier along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which handles state-level prosecutions, has been evaluating Bannon’s alleged involvement in that scheme since shortly after Trump pardoned him, The Washington Post reported in February, 2021.

Presidential pardons only apply to federal charges and cannot prohibit state prosecutions.

Bannon, a former top strategist for Trump who was briefly a White House aide, pleaded not guilty to the federal charges in August 2020, after authorities pulled him off a luxury yacht and brought him to court. He was accused of pocketing $1 million in the scheme.

Months later, in the last hours of his presidency, Trump included Bannon on a sweeping clemency list of about 140 people.

Two other men, including disabled veteran Brian Kolfage, pleaded guilty in federal court in connection with the fundraising scheme. A trial involving a third alleged participant, Timothy Shea, ended in a mistrial in June when the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict.

 

It took 18 months, but Bannon's going to finally face the music. No doubt Bannon is surrendering tomorrow because he wants to plea bargain his way out, and maybe, just maybe, Bragg's price will be for Bannon to give up info on Trump in time for next month's NY state trial against the Trump Organization. 

 

We'll see.

Sunday Long Read: Separation But Unequal

Make some time for this week's Sunday Long Read, The Atlantic's Caitlin Dickerson investigation of the Trump regime's vile family separation policy at the border, ripping away kids from families and caging them like animals. It was hell, a hell that the Biden administration is still struggling to fix, and a hell that will be exponentially worse if Trump or DeSantis or any Republican claims the White House in 2025.

As a therapist for children who are being processed through the American immigration system, Cynthia Quintana has a routine that she repeats each time she meets a new patient in her office in Grand Rapids, Michigan: She calls the parents or closest relatives to let them know the child is safe and well cared for, and provides 24-hour contact information.

This process usually plays out within hours of when the children arrive. Most are teens who have memorized or written down their relatives’ phone numbers in notebooks they carried with them across the border. By the time of that initial call, their families are typically worried, waiting anxiously for news after having—in an act of desperation—sent their children into another country alone in pursuit of safety and the hope of a future.

But in the summer of 2017, Quintana encountered a curious case. A 3-year-old Guatemalan boy with a toothy smile and bowl-cut black hair sat down at her desk. He was far too little to have made the journey on his own. He had no phone numbers with him, and when she asked where he was headed or whom he’d been with, the boy stared back blankly. Quintana scoured his file for more information but found nothing. She asked for help from an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, who came back several days later with something unusual: information indicating that the boy’s father was in federal custody.

At their next session, the boy squirmed in his chair as Quintana dialed the detention center, getting his father on the line. At first the dad was quiet, she told me. “Finally we said, ‘Your child is here. He can hear you. You can speak now.’ And you could just tell that his voice was breaking—he couldn’t.”

The boy cried out for his father. Suddenly, both of them were screaming and sobbing so loudly that several of Quintana’s colleagues ran to her office.

Eventually, the man calmed down enough to address Quintana directly. “I’m so sorry, who are you? Where is my child? They came in the middle of the night and took him,” he said. “What do I tell his mother?”

that same summer, Quintana was also assigned to work with a 3-year-old Honduran girl who gave no indication of how she’d gotten to the United States or where she was supposed to be going. During their first several sessions, the girl refused to speak at all. The muscles on her face were slack and expressionless. Quintana surmised that the girl had severe detachment disorder, often the result of a sudden and recent trauma.

Across her organization—Bethany Christian Services, one of several companies contracted by the American government to care for newly arrived immigrant children—Quintana’s colleagues were having similar experiences. Jennifer Leon, a teacher at Bethany, was at the office one day when the private company that transports children from the border delivered a baby girl “like an Amazon package.” The baby was wearing a dirty diaper; her face was crusted with mucus. “They gave the baby to the case manager with a diaper bag, we signed, that was it,” Leon recalled. (Leon rushed the baby to the hospital for an evaluation.)

Mateo Salazar, a Bethany therapist, went to his office in the middle of the night to meet a newly arrived 5-year-old Honduran girl. At first, the girl was stoic, but when the transportation-company employees started to leave, the girl ran after them, banging on the glass doors and crying as she fell to the ground. Salazar sat with her for two hours until she was calm enough to explain that her mother had made her promise—as Border Patrol agents were pulling them apart—to stay with the adults who took her no matter what, because they would keep her safe.

For more than a year, Quintana and her colleagues encountered cases like this repeatedly. To track down the parents of children in their care, they would scour American prisons and immigration detention centers, using clues from social media or tips from friends inside the government. They would struggle to explain to parents why their kids had been taken away or how to get them back. The therapists, teachers, and caseworkers would try to maintain their composure at work, but they would later break down in their cars and in front of their families. Many debated quitting their job. Though they were experts in caring for severely traumatized children, this was a challenge to which they did not know how to respond.

“I started questioning myself,” Quintana said. “Am I doing the correct thing by serving these kids, or am I contributing to the harm that’s being done?”

“It just seemed unreal to me,” she said of the moment she understood that these were not one-off cases. “Something that was not humane.”

during the year and a half in which the U.S. government separated thousands of children from their parents, the Trump administration’s explanations for what was happening were deeply confusing, and on many occasions—it was clear even then—patently untrue. I’m one of the many reporters who covered this story in real time. Despite the flurry of work that we produced to fill the void of information, we knew that the full truth about how our government had reached this point still eluded us.

Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer.

Over the past year and a half, I have conducted more than 150 interviews and reviewed thousands of pages of internal government documents, some of which were turned over to me only after a multiyear lawsuit. These records show that as officials were developing the policy that would ultimately tear thousands of families apart, they minimized its implications so as to obscure what they were doing. Many of these officials now insist that there had been no way to foresee all that would go wrong. But this is not true. The policy’s worst outcomes were all anticipated, and repeated internal and external warnings were ignored. Indeed, the records show that almost no logistical planning took place before the policy was initiated.

It’s been said of other Trump-era projects that the administration’s incompetence mitigated its malevolence; here, the opposite happened. A flagrant failure to prepare meant that courts, detention centers, and children’s shelters became dangerously overwhelmed; that parents and children were lost to each other, sometimes many states apart; that four years later, some families are still separated—and that even many of those who have been reunited have suffered irreparable harm.

 

Heartbreaking doesn't begin to describe this account, and those that follow.  These were human rights violations of the most hideous nature, and the people behind these policies need to rot in the hot sun in a metal box. But I believe we all have to face it, that this has to be taught to future generations the way we teach the Trail of Tears today.

Well, in most states, anyway. And should Trump and/or the GOP get hold of the country again, your kids won't learn about this, either.

Sunday Long Read: Border Line Insanity

Our Sunday Long Read comes to us from Gaby Del Valle at The Verge, with the story of how relentless surveillance of the Arizona-Mexico border by Homeland Security, the Border Patrol, Arizona police and the US Air Force isn't deterring migrants at all, the end results of billions in technology, equipment, materiel and trained agents mean it's just finding new and novel ways of the United States killing them in the desert.

 

It's unlikely the hikers knew they were being watched. They had tried to blend in: all 11 were wearing camouflage with the intention of vanishing into the desert scrub. They were on a remote mountain trail on the outskirts of Ajo, Arizona, a former mining town of about 3,000 people just a few dozen miles north of the Mexican border. It was a warm November morning, still early enough in the day that the sun must have felt good on their skin — the air is cold up in the mountains, colder still in the dry desert winter, though the heat always finds you eventually. The sky was bright and endless, punctuated by just a few clouds. But even if the migrants looked closely, there’s no way they could have noticed the MQ-9 Predator B drone stalking them from 20,000 feet above.

Nearly 150 miles away at the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona, the migrants were on display. Two Customs and Border Protection agents tracked the group from a cramped shipping container on base that was being used as a temporary ground control station. Each agent sat before five monitors: the pilot flew the drone while the camera operator focused on tracking the group’s movements. The 11 migrants appeared as small figures on a pair of screens, bright white smudges moving across a gray background. Their clothing may have helped them blend in with the cholla cacti and spiky ocotillo plants of the Sonoran Desert, but it couldn’t fool the Predator’s infrared camera. They had been betrayed by their own body heat.

The migrants must have noticed the helicopter first: an EC-120 Colibrí, Spanish for “hummingbird.” Then came a pair of Border Patrol agents on foot. “On your tail, there’s another group of two, probably about 50 yards behind you,” the camera operator in Tucson told one of the ground agents by radio.

Then he turned to me and explained what we were looking at. “That’s the agent,” he said, pointing at a vaguely person-shaped silhouette on one of the screens. He had to raise his voice so I could hear him over the endless hum of the servers that took up half the 16-by-20-foot room. “He just apprehended that guy, and that’s the group right there.” We watched as one member of the group tried to wrestle the Border Patrol agent. The others walked toward him, ready to give up.

From the shipping container, it was impossible to know anything about the group aside from what was visible on-screen. They could have been from Guatemala or El Salvador or Mexico or anywhere else. They could have been asylum seekers or drug runners or neither. Maybe it was their first time trekking through the desert; maybe it was their fifth. Maybe they were headed for Phoenix or Boston or for one of those tiny towns that have become Central American enclaves through the availability of agricultural jobs and word of mouth. These details were irrelevant to the CBP drone operators watching the migrants from Tucson, the Border Patrol agents tracking them through the mountains, and the crew following along in the helicopter. Their job was to find and apprehend anyone crossing the border illegally, no matter who they were.

The agents on the ground would get more details: names, ages, nationalities. After that, the specifics would matter a little. If the hikers were carrying drugs, they’d be prosecuted. If they had been deported before, they could be charged with illegal reentry. But if this was their first time — if they were crossing the border for work or to reunite with family on the other side or because they were in danger in their country — they’d likely be sent back to Mexico, regardless of where they had come from. There would be no hearing before an immigration judge, no chance to plead their case. And if the migrants were really desperate, they might try to cross again. Maybe they’d choose a different route. If they were with a smuggler, he’d know which trails to take to avoid the network of hidden cameras and underground sensors that CBP has scattered throughout the desert — but that route would likely be more remote and more treacherous than the one they were already on. All the surveillance technology in the world won’t stop people from trying to cross the border; it’s an obstacle, not, as Customs and Border Protection would have you believe, a deterrent.

Every unauthorized crossing is a justification for more drones in the air and boots on the ground, but none of that will stop people from coming. It just means more migrants are dying.

President Joe Biden promised that “not another foot of wall” would be built if he was elected president. Instead, his administration would use “high-tech capacity” to secure the border. Drones, cameras, and sensors would be more effective and more humane than a physical barrier, he claimed. What Biden’s promises ignored, however, is that the federal government has spent billions on border surveillance technology for the past three decades — and that despite these efforts and aside from a brief lull in crossings early in the pandemic, the number of unauthorized border crossings has gone up year after year. Since the ’90s, the question hasn’t been whether to fund border technology but how to get more of it. The fact that some migrants still make it across the border undetected — or that they attempt the journey at all — isn’t seen as a failure of technology or policy. Instead, it is used to justify more surveillance, more spending, and more manpower.

I first traveled to Arizona to meet with groups that wanted Biden to not only reverse Trump’s policies and halt construction but also to tear the wall down. The wall, they said, was an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe; leaving it up wasn’t an option. Early on in Biden’s presidency, it seemed like such things were possible: in his first few months in office, he had sent a comprehensive immigration reform bill to Congress and ended Trump-era policies like the Muslim ban and Remain in Mexico. His administration had created an exemption process to Title 42, a public health policy implemented in March 2020 that lets Border Patrol agents quickly send migrants back to Mexico without a hearing. It seemed like the Biden administration would end the policy altogether last summer.

When I first started reporting this story in the spring of 2021, there was a feeling of cautious optimism in the air — a feeling that, with the right prodding, Biden would usher in a more welcoming immigration system. By the time I first visited Arizona last summer, that feeling was mostly gone. Migrant deaths in the desert were on the rise for the second consecutive year, and no one in the federal government seemed to be doing anything about it. The previous summer had been the hottest and driest in the state’s history — and the deadliest for migrants in a decade. The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office recovered remains of 227 suspected border crossers in the desert in 2020, and the summer of 2021 was on track to be just as fatal. By the time I arrived in Tucson, there were 137 known migrant deaths that year. Another 10 sets of human remains were recovered in the nine days I spent in Arizona.

There were a few theories as to why migrant deaths in Arizona had reached the highest rate since 2010. Some speculated that the border wall had pushed border crossers into more isolated, dangerous terrain. Advocates suggested that Title 42 was encouraging repeat attempts across the border, often through more remote paths. Greg Hess, the chief medical examiner for Pima County, said two consecutive years of record-breaking summer heat was likely a contributing factor. Triple-digit temperatures made the difficult, often fatal journey through the Sonoran Desert that much more so. Maybe it was policy. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was both. The common denominator in all these explanations was the inhospitality of the desert, the ruggedness of the landscape.

 

The US border with Mexico has been a failure all of my life. Democrats have failed to build any sort of fair or humane system because they don't want to deal with it. But a humane immigration system in the US will never happen with Republicans able to stop it, either.

And as climate change gets worse, as the border region becomes more and more inhospitable and deadly, more people fleeing South and Central America will die.

Should Arizona Republican candidate Kari Lake win, she will put armed National Guard troops on the border with orders to shoot to kill, and dare Biden to stop her.

It will get worse before it gets any better.

Trump Cards, Con't

Why yes, the Trump plan to put a citizenship question on the 2020 Census was absolutely part of a larger effort to rob big blue states like California, New York, and Illinois of House districts and federal funding by not counting undocumented workers.

Former President Donald Trump's administration spent years trying to add a census citizenship question as part of a secret strategy for altering the population numbers used to divide up seats in Congress and the Electoral College, internal documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight and Reform Committee confirm.

Long kept from the public, the Trump administration memos and emails were disclosed by lawmakers following a more than two-year legal fight that began after Trump officials refused to turn them over for a congressional investigation. Citing the "exceptional circumstances" of the case, the Biden administration, which inherited the lawsuit last year, agreed to allow House oversight committee members and their staff to review the documents.

The hotly contested question — "Is this a person a citizen of the United States?" — ultimately did not end up on the 2020 census forms. In 2019, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration's unprecedented efforts after finding its use of the Voting Rights Act as the stated reasoning for the question "seems to have been contrived," as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

Before Trump eventually released a presidential memo in 2020 calling for the unprecedented exclusion of unauthorized immigrants from a key set of census numbers, earlier releases of internal documents and public statements by Trump officials signaled their interest in using citizenship data to try to break with more than two centuries of precedent in how congressional seats and Electoral College votes are redistributed among the states.

Still, the newly disclosed documents provide a detailed look into some of the early behind-the-scenes discussions at a time when Trump officials were focused on keeping their plans under wraps.

The documents' release, along with a new report by the House oversight committee, comes as Congress considers a House bill that could help shield upcoming national head counts from the kind of interference that saddled the 2020 census during the Trump administration.

"Today's Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump Administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals," says Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, who chairs the House oversight committee and introduced the bill, in a statement. "It is clear that legislative reforms are needed to prevent any future illegal or unconstitutional efforts to interfere with the census and chip away at our democracy."

 

Every action by Trump and his regime was designed to give him more power at the direct expense of the people who voted against him.

He cannot be allowed in public office again.

Hell, he cannot be allowed to walk the streets as a free man.