John Cassidy at The New Yorker writes—Why a Rogue President Was Forced to Back Down on Family Separation:
Why did Donald Trump reverse himself on Wednesday and call an end to his policy of separating migrant families detained at the southern border? It was clear from the start that the policy was cruel, heartless, and unnecessary. Although there has been a spike in the number of asylum seekers in recent months, the overall number of undocumented immigrants coming into the United States from Mexico and other Latin American countries is significantly lower than it was a decade ago. There is no “crisis” at the southern border, except the humanitarian one of Trump’s own making. Trump’s picture of the United States being swamped—or, in his words, “infested”—by Latino migrants is a fantasy that he concocted to whip up the racial fears and antipathies of his core supporters.
Clearly, Trump didn’t make this U-turn because he had grown tired of fear-mongering and racial incitement, or because he had experienced a crisis of conscience. (It’s far from clear that he’s even capable of such a thing.) He reversed course because he had no choice politically. Although he often adopts the rhetoric and body language of an authoritarian strongman, he’s an elected politician. And in the face of mass outrage, bipartisan opposition, and condemnation from church groups and other civil-society institutions, the child-separation policy was no longer sustainable.
But Trump didn’t reverse the policy of “zero tolerance” that his Administration introduced in May, which obliges immigration agents to arrest and detain anybody who crosses the border outside an official entry point. The Times reported that the new executive order was designed “to get around an existing 1997 consent decree, known as the Flores settlement, that prohibits the federal government from keeping children in immigration detention—even if they are with their parents—for more than 20 days.” If Trump gets his way, families stopped at the border will now be detained indefinitely under the custody of ice. That is precisely the outcome that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit deemed illegal in a 2016 ruling about the Flores settlement [...]
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“To cheapen the lives of any group of men, cheapens the lives of all men, even our own. This is a law of human psychology, or human nature. And it will not be repealed by our wishes, nor will it be merciful to our blindness.”
~~William Pickens
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2006—Bush admin used phone record brokers to bypass search warrants:
Remember those online phone record brokers where you could buy anyone's records for a fee? Aravosis underscored how nefarious those services were by buying Wesley Clark's records and the subsequent attention led the House to unanimously pass a bill outlawing the practice.
Well, guess who was a big customer of those phone records? Yeah, I gave it away in the title of this post, but it still boggles my mind. The Bush Administration. Aravosis explains:
[T]oday we learn that the federal government and local police were using these questionably-legal online data brokers to get YOUR private phone records without the necessary search warrants. Yes, the Bush administration once again didn't go to courts of law to get search warrants when it was supposed to.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter round up the day’s outrages. President Baby Jails spends his day lying about Ivanka, fundraising & bashing reverse Canadian shoe smugglers. Are we all "just doing our jobs?" Flight attendants give us a heads up.
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