Richard Wolffe at The Guardian writes—Trump's cruel border policies created a needless crisis. It's far from over:
Was it the “tender age” inmates, the rare sight of all the Senate’s Republicans growing a spine, or the even rarer sight of intervention from every one of the nation’s first ladies?
We’ll never know the truth behind Donald Trump’s humiliating reversal of his own brutal policy of separating thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border.
But we do know that Trump will lie about his actions, and will be utterly incompetent about fixing the crisis he created.
First, the most glaring lies. This is not a humane policy replacing an inhumane one. Instead of imprisoning children separately, the United States will now imprison them together with their parents indefinitely. That’s for the misdemeanor of crossing the border illegally, even though it is perfectly legal to claim asylum at the border or after crossing the border.
Julianna Hing at The Nation writes—Trump’s Executive Order Turns Family Separation Into Family Incarceration:
On Wednesday, Trump [...] caved to an overwhelming outcry from a widespread group of critics that came to include the pope and former first lady Laura Bush and announced that his administration would end the policy of separating children from parents at the border. “Anybody with a heart feels very strongly about it,” Trump said shortly after signing the executive order. “At the same time, we don’t want people coming in illegally. This takes care of the problem.”
But like so much else in Trumpland, there is how something appears, and how something actually operates in reality. In the hours between the announcement of the order and its actual release, many hailed the change as an about-face—a stunning and rare pivot for a president who has little capacity to admit error. But now that the executive order is out, what is clear is that this document offers no fix at all. The Trump administration intends to trade the practice of separating children while it prosecutes parents for another kind of horror: locking up parents and children together. And, according to the executive order, this new incarceration of families could well be indefinite.
Sarah Lazare at In These Times writes—Trump’s Order Says Immigrant Families Can Be Jailed Together, But What They Deserve Is Freedom:
Following nationwide protests against immigrant detention and child separation—including a blockade of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in Portland, Ore.—on June 20 President Donald Trump signed an executive order to incarcerate families together in immigrant prisons. While the decree allows children to be jailed with their parents, it still greenlights the incarceration of entire families, calls for more immigrant detention centers and reinforces the institutions that oversaw child separation: the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE.
For this reason, Tania Unzueta, an organizer with the immigrant justice group Mijente, responded to Trump’s announcement with caution. “We need to be talking about Jeff Sessions and his role criminalizing parents, and the role of ICE in putting people in detention to begin with,” she told In These Times. “People need to shift from saying keep families together to talking about dismantling ICE.”
Dana Milbank at The Washington Post writes—Trump says trade wars are ‘easy.’ Here come the first American casualties:
President Trump believes that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” So he started one.
Now the casualties are beginning to return home from the battlefield, and on Capitol Hill Wednesday, the people’s representatives presented some of them to Wilbur Ross, the president’s billionaire commerce secretary.
“Corn, wheat, beef and pork are all suffering market price declines . . . due to current trade policies,” complained Sen. John Thune (S.D.). “With every passing day, the United States loses market share to other countries.” [...]
Asked whether he believed, as several of the senators did, that the United States is in a trade war, Ross was breezy: “As the president has often said, we’ve been at a trade war forever. The difference is that now our troops are coming to the ramparts.”
And they are beginning to take heavy casualties.s
Matthew L. Kolken at The Guardian writes—Defense contractors shouldn't be in the childcare business. Must that be said?
According to a report by the Daily Beast, the US federal government has engaged the services of the defense industry to facilitate its strategy of tearing migrant children from the arms of their mothers as a deterrent to improper entry to country. Defense contractors’ intended role in this madness? Childcare providers.
I took the opportunity to review the website of one such contractor, Virginia-based MVM, Inc. The website includes an impressive list of services and expertise – not including childcare. As an immigration lawyer who frequently represents unaccompanied minors in immigration court, and as a father of two, I find it unconscionable that an industry that principally serves the needs of the military and federal law enforcement agencies would be charged with overseeing the health and wellbeing of children.
“Every part of separation is deliberately designed to make a buck,” Bridget Cambria, an immigration lawyer who works with detained children, told me. And to protect that business, the government and private contractors make it as difficult as possible for those affected to seek legal recourse.
Calling the process an “administrative monstrosity”, Cambria explained that the ultimate goal of separating parents and children is deportation of both parent and child, while generating money in the meantime. “Each day, moment, and second a child or parent is in this crazy custody chain – people profit, and they profit a lot.”
Matt Ford at The New Republic writes—Trump’s Astonishing Reversal Is No Solution:
President Donald Trump rarely caves to his critics, especially when it comes to the anti-immigration policies that form the core of his agenda. [...]
But the uproar caused by his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and locking them in cages, proved too much for the famously stubborn president. Even congressional Republicans, who rarely offer substantive pushback to Trump, began working on legislation to reverse it. So on Wednesday he signed a new executive order, passive-aggressively titled “Affording Congress an Opportunity to Address Family Separation,” which instructs immigration officials to “maintain family unity, including by detaining alien families together where appropriate and consistent with law and available resources.”
In theory, that means families who are apprehended after crossing the border illegally will now be detained together instead of separately. However, the order does not outline efforts to reunite the thousands of families who have been broken apart recently, nor does it indicate how long migrant families going forward will be detained. It appears the administration is seeking the right to detain them indefinitely.
Natalie Nougayrède at The Guardian writes—Europe’s democrats must unite to prevent a far-right takeover:
The battle lines are now drawn for Europe’s ultimate test: the May 2019 elections for the European parliament. That’s when far-right and populist parties will attempt to complete their power grab in the EU. In the elections of 2014, they made gains. Next year, they’ll seek to dominate. The dramatic events we’ve witnessed over the past fortnight, in Germany and Italy have been a mere foretaste of the showdown that lies ahead.
It’s often said that anti-establishment and nationalist parties want to dismantle the European project altogether. But what’s at stake is more likely to be a full-on effort to redraw it to their liking. [...]
[F]or the democratic-minded across Europe, now is the time to make a clear choice. There’s no need to be obsessed with history to know that, when the “rough beast” slouches, “its hour come round at last” (Yeats again), surely anti-far-right forces must unite.
Given the context, hard-left clashes with centrists become something of a distraction. And criticism of the EU’s institutional “democratic deficit” is currently a sideshow. Let’s protect what we have. On 14 June, in the European parliament, the far left and the far right voted together against a resolution calling for the release of political prisoners in Russia. Would they likewise have voted together against a call for the release of migrant children held in cages by Trump’s America? Some people need to get their priorities right, before it’s too late.
Chauncey DeVega at Salon writes—Why won’t the mainstream media tell the truth about racist ghoul Stephen Miller?
When the news media provides facts without context it does the public a disservice. This is one of the core principles captured by the dictate of the five W's -- who, what, where, when and why -- taught in every high school-level journalism class. It would seem that the New York Times has neglected that basic rule.
Last Saturday, the flagship newspaper of establishment journalism focused on White House senior adviser Stephen Miller's role in the Trump administration's decision to hold thousands of refugee and immigrant children as de facto political hostages in prison camps and warehouses.
Nowhere in the New York Times story was there any explanation or discussion of Stephen Miller's background, his values or what other motivations could drive him to be so enthusiastically cruel toward nonwhite children and their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.
This information is readily available: The Times made a choice not to include it.
Stephen Miller -- like other Trump advisers such as Michael Anton, Sebastian Gorka and Steve Bannon -- is a white supremacist. Like other members of the so-called alt-right (a collection of far-right extremists that includes neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other racists) Miller hides behind Trumpian slogans about making America great again and neutral-sounding terms such as "nationalism" and "populism" to advance a policy agenda where nonwhites are treated as second-class citizens and white people are empowered above all other groups.
Lee Camp at TruthDig writes—Trump’s Military Drops a Bomb Every 12 Minutes, and No One Is Talking About It:
We live in a state of perpetual war, and we never feel it. While you get your gelato at the hip place where they put those cute little mint leaves on the side, someone is being bombed in your name. While you argue with the 17-year-old at the movie theater who gave you a small popcorn when you paid for a large, someone is being obliterated in your name. While we sleep and eat and make love and shield our eyes on a sunny day, someone’s home, family, life and body are being blown into a thousand pieces in our names.
Once every 12 minutes.
The United States military drops an explosive with a strength you can hardly comprehend once every 12 minutes. And that’s odd, because we’re technically at war with—let me think—zero countries. So that should mean zero bombs are being dropped, right?
Christina Fialho at the Los Angeles Times writes—Don't stop with family separation. End the whole immigration prison system:
I have been working with families and individuals in our immigrant prison system for about a decade, including people arrested in ICE raids, victims of human trafficking and those who arrive at the border seeking asylum. There are, on any given day, approximately 34,000 to 40,000 such people being held in immigration detention. [...]
This is a form of civil, administrative confinement, which means people held in these prisons are not afforded the safeguards of the criminal justice system, such as legal counsel. The conditions are just as inhumane too. We have documented widespread abuse in immigrant prisons, including physical and sexual assault, medical neglect, bacterial infections from mold, and maggots in food.
The idea of imprisoning immigrants and asylum seekers while they await the outcome of their requests to stay in the United States is a relatively new phenomenon. It wasn’t until 1981 that the Reagan administration opened the McAllen Detention Center on a former U.S. Navy Base in Puerto Rico to detain Haitians. The next year, as Reagan warned of a “tidal wave of refugees” fleeing civil wars in Central America, the administration established its Mass Migration Emergency Plan, requiring that 10,000 immigrant prison beds be ready for use at any given time.
This gave rise to the formation of the world’s first private prison company, Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), which changed its name in 2016 to CoreCivic. CCA/CoreCivic got its first federal government contract for an immigrant prison in Texas in 1983. And the publicly traded corporation has been lobbying to expand our immigrant prison system ever since. In the 1980s, there were anywhere from 30 to 3,000 people being held at a time; today it’s 10 times that, and 73% of them are in facilities operated by private companies.
The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board concludes—Here's one way to protect endangered species: Don't let their trophy heads and skins into California:
A bill in the California Senate would prohibit the possession of trophies — including heads, parts or skin — of some of the most captivating and exotic animals in Africa. The bill, SB 1487, would cover the possession of 11 species considered endangered, threatened or vulnerable.
The state of California can't stop a misguided African government from allowing the hunting of endangered animals in its country. Nor can it stop the U.S. government from permitting the importation of these trophies. But it can discourage such hunting by barring hunters from bringing new trophies to California and keeping them in their homes or elsewhere. This bill would mean no new elephant heads mounted on walls should it be approved.
Sponsored by Social Compassion in Legislation and introduced by Sen. Henry Stern (D-Canoga Park), the bill affects trophies of African elephants, lions, leopards and giraffes, as well as the black rhinoceros and the white rhinoceros, among other species. Most of those are listed as endangered or threatened under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. The status of the giraffe is under review by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Sarah Jones at The New Republic writes—Why Tyrants Dehumanize the Powerless:
“Infest” is not a word customarily used in reference to humans. We fear infestations of cockroaches or bedbugs or lice. To accuse people of infesting America is to dehumanize them.
This is not the first time Trump has referred to migrants in this way. Sanctuary cities, Trump once complained, are “crime-infested,” as if the presence of immigrants guarantees an outbreak of violence. He is also worried about their “breeding,” a word usually reserved for animal or insect mating: “Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept,” he tweeted in April.
Trump did not invent this language from whole cloth. Modern history is full of examples of political regimes that has described certain populations as subhuman—often to justify treating them as such. In the most extreme cases, that rhetoric preceded mass killing.
“One of the common threads of any genocide is its justification. In order to be able to execute it on a mass scale, a lot of people have to buy into it and agree that it’s the appropriate thing to do. And so any any genocide begins with the dehumanization process,” explained William Donohue, a professor of communication at Michigan State University who has studied the function of dehumanizing language in the Rwandan genocide.