Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats are heading to the U.S.-Mexico border next week to draw a sharp and distinctive contrast between them and House Republicans. While GOP Speaker Paul Ryan works diligently to kill any real chance of passing a fix for Dreamers, Pelosi and 15 of her colleagues are making clear they will not stand silently by while Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions execute a brutal policy of separating kids from their parents at any cost. Politico writes:
The group will visit at least one facility housing migrant children who have been separated from their families — the effect of a controversial “zero tolerance” prosecution policy blasted by Democrats and human rights advocates. Under the strategy, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security aims to prosecute all suspected border-crossers, including adults traveling with children.
House Democrats’ border trip to San Diego follows on the effort of Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon to raise awareness about kids being stripped from parents who are seeking U.S. asylum and then held in detention centers. Several weeks ago, Merkley attempted to visit two Texas detention facilities, one of which he later described as containing a series of cages that looked "like a dog kennel," only with bigger units.
It's horrific what Trump and Sessions are doing to kids and parents with their so-called "zero tolerance" policy, which they are explicitly using to deter future asylum seekers from seeking protection against violence in their own countries.
As Merkley told MSNBC Tuesday, just think about the administration’s core argument for a moment.
"The argument is: if we inflict trauma on children and word can get to where they came from, other families will not seek to come to the United States," Merkley explained to Beat host Ari Melber. "There is no moral code in the universe that supports being destructive to children to influence future decisions of other adults."
One hundred percent, Sen. Merkley—>>No moral code in the universe supports that.
In fact, that core argument is the stuff of murderous dictators and new reporting Wednesday night revealed what some of these "shelters" for children are like.
The shelter Soboroff visited, Casa Padre, “is the largest licensed childcare facility of its kind in the country. Nearly 1,500 boys 10-17 in here now. They’re supposed to sleep four to room. Nearly every room has 5.” And as Soboroff noted, that’s actually a licensed facility. Just think about how bad the “tent cities” will be that the administration is considering using to house migrant children.
The Trump administration is reportedly scouting land near the US-Mexico border where so-called "tent cities" could temporarily shelter between 1,000 and 5,000 migrant children.
Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will soon visit Fort Bliss in Texas to view the land, McClatchy reported on Tuesday, citing government officials and other sources familiar with the plans.
If there’s a silver lining in all this unthinkable news, it’s that Democrats are really starting to find their voice on an issue that has shocked the conscience of the nation. On Tuesday, nearly a dozen House Democrats protested the Trump administration’s family separation policy outside of Customs and Border Patrol in Washington.
In the meantime, House GOP leadership has gone out of its way to kill a bipartisan legislative push that could have provided deportation protections to Dreamers. As Buzzfeed reports:
House Speaker Paul Ryan barely managed to suppress a push from within his own party for a possible bipartisan fix to the DACA crisis…
That’s because Republicans have now sold whatever soul they had left to become the party of the racist, immigrant-bashing Trump. As one possible heir to the GOP speakership noted this week, passing a DACA fix for Dreamers is anathema to the present-day Republican party.
"I think it would be devastating if something like the DREAM Act passed,” Republican Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana told Bloomberg.
Where that leaves Republicans is catering to a virtual splinter of the electorate since providing deportation protections to Dreamers brought to the U.S. as minors consistently enjoys the support of nearly 90 percent of Americans.
Don’t be fooled by the immigration push of the so-called “moderate” Republicans. If you’re going to cast your vote for the likes of Paul Ryan or Steve Scalise as speaker, there’s nothing moderate about it.