It’s not easy to say and it’s not an easy thing to admit, but the bottom line of what is happening in this nation is that we are in a pitched battle with the death cult that has taken over the GOP and the government, with Donald John Trump at its head.
The recent decision by USCIS to deny legal Visa to children suffering for deadly and potentially terminal diseases makes that eminently clear.
The Trump administration abruptly changed its program for granting medical deferral requests to undocumented immigrants this month, sending letters to several families rejecting their requests.
The letters from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency informed families that USCIS would no longer consider their requests for medical deferral, which protected seriously ill undocumented immigrants from deportation while undergoing treatment in the U.S.
The letters warned that the families will be deported if they don’t leave the country within 33 days.
This decision will affect thousands of people within the next month and thousands of these people will, in fact, die as a direct result of this decision. It would be bad enough if this was an isolated case, but sadly, it is most definitely not.
Putting this in simple human terms, we can look at the single case of Jonathan Sanchez, who has been allowed to stay in the U.S. while being treated for cystic fibrosis and will certainly die if he’s forced to return to Honduras.
According to the apparent form letters, USCIS field offices “no longer consider deferred action requests, except those made according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies for certain military members, enlistees, and their families.”
The dated letters notified families they must leave the country within 33 days of the government's writing. Otherwise, they face removal and exclusion from the U.S. for several years. Legal advocates across the country have reported clients receiving similar denial letters.
“This attack on children and their families is inhumane and unjust,” said Ronnie Millar, executive director of IIIC, in a press release. “These families are all here receiving treatment that is unavailable in their home countries, and our government has issued them a death sentence.”
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"If they deny the program, then I need to go back to my country, and I'll probably die because in my country, there's no treatment for CF [cystic fibrosis] ... The only ones who can help me are here in the United States." — Jonathan Sanchez
You have to ask: What exactly is the point of this? How exactly are these couple thousand people some kind of economic threat, or cultural social threat to anyone? Why would anyone with even a single ounce of human empathy do this?
Well, because they don’t have any basic human empathy. If they did, they wouldn’t be arresting and caging children by the thousands at the border for supposedly committing a “crime” when it is completely legal to enter the U.S. from any point in order to request under 8 U.S. Code § 1158.
(a)Authority to apply for asylum
This is the law. It has always been the law, since former Attorney General Jeff Sessions started his “zero tolerance” policy which led to the arrest of every asylum seeker as they were in the process of surrendering themselves to place their asylum request more than a year ago. Hundreds of thousands of people have been detained in conditions that literally do match concentration camps.
Ruth Bloch was 17 years old when she was separated from her family. While living in Holland in 1942, her father, mother, and brother were arrested and sent to concentration camps, where they were eventually killed. Bloch remained in Holland working as a seamstress at a fur factory, sewing fur-lined coats for German troops. She was eventually sent to Vught concentration camp in Holland in 1943, before being eventually transported to Auschwitz.
Now, at 93, she told The Daily Beast that she looks back at that time and can relate to the thousands of migrants, including small children, being held at camps after crossing the border into the U.S. to seek refuge.
“I feel because I have been in a concentration camp, I do understand that this is beyond human behavior. It’s because I know from my own experience what it means,www.humanrightsfirst.org/...” she said. “It means you are not allowed to think, and you’re always under the thumb of the authorities, the ones in power.”
This simple fact is that these facilities wouldn't be dangerously overcrowded if the Trump administration wasn't trying to arrest everyone as if they were likely to otherwise abandon their asylum requests and disappear into the hinterlands. But the truth is that 80-90% of asylum seekers make all their court dates.
Despite statistics showing that asylum seekers appear in immigration court at high rates, President Trump Administration has repeatedly falsely claimed that only 3 percent of asylum seekers and 2 percent of immigrants attend immigration court. Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen stated that asylum seekers “more than not” fail to appear in immigration court.
The Trump Administration erroneously claims asylum seekers skip court hearings in an attempt to further their deceptive narrative of the asylum system as a “loophole” exploited by individuals with meritless claims to enter the United States and “disappear into the economy.” Indeed, the administration’s so-called Migration Protection Protocols plan, also known as ‘Remain in Mexico,’ is premised upon the idea that asylum seekers do not show up to court. These false claims ignore the political repression and violence that forces people to flee their countries amidst the world’s worst refugee crisis.
92 percent of individuals who filed asylum claims attended their court hearings between fiscal years 2013 and 2017
According to DOJ statistics, between 2013 and 2017, 92 percent of asylum seekers appeared in court to receive a final decision on their claims. In FY 2018, 89.4 percent of those who applied for asylum complied with their court hearing obligations. Out of 66,592 final asylum decisions, 7,072 denials were the result of the asylum seeker failing to appear in court.
Sure, everyone should be vetted and have a background check to eliminate criminals on the loose, but you don’t need to hold these people in detention. It’s simply not necessary to spend the money on privately run detention centers just so that people show up for court. They were already doing that because they were trying to follow the completely legal asylum process.
USCIS, which handles the immigration process, has recently decided on its own to change the 1997 Flores settlement that limits the detention of families to just 20 days. On top of denying the provision of vaccines for the flu (even though they’ve had at least a half dozen children in CBP custody die from the flu), they have further called for all regulation and state oversight of these facilities to be nullified in the process.
Ur Jaddou, Director of DHS Watch and former USCIS Chief Counsel, said:“This regulation is being finalized after multiple government, media, and eyewitness reports have shown that DHS has failed to safely handle the short-term detention of children in their custody, let-alone long-term, indefinite detention that would result from this regulation. Because the regulation allows DHS to set the standards for conditions and essentially self-review, there will be little transparency and accountability to ensure children are appropriately cared for. Don’t forget – this is the same administration that vigorously argued all the way to a court of appeals that soap, toothbrushes, clean water, and blankets are not necessary for safe and sanitary detention of children. With the availability of more effective, cost-efficient, and humane alternatives, this regulation makes no sense, especially given the plethora of reports on the psychological harm of detention of children, even in family detention.”
This means that the conditions we’ve already seen in the existing camps, as horrific as they are, are likely to become considerably worse in these newly planned camps, while attorneys for the detained, the media, state regulators, and Congress will have no access or right to review those conditions.
That’s an absolute recipe for disaster.
And yet, it gets worse. The Trump administration has deliberately skewed the asylum system by claiming that someone who says that their life is at risk due to criminal gangs is “not qualified.” This has led to thousands of people being wrongfully denied and deported.
Not surprisingly, many of them have been killed.
They knew and agreed that he would likely be killed if he returned, but they denied his asylum anyway. Then he was returned, and he was killed. Again, this is not an isolated case—not hardly.
These conversations have been largely theoretical, devoid of names and faces. No U.S. government body monitors the fate of deportees, and immigrant-aid groups typically lack the resources to document what happens to those who have been sent back. Fear of retribution keeps most grieving families from speaking publicly. In early 2016, as the director of the Global Migration Project, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, I set out, with a dozen graduate students, to create a record of people who had been deported to their deaths or to other harms—a sort of shadow database of the one that the Trump Administration later compiled to track the crimes of “alien offenders.” We contacted more than two hundred local legal-aid organizations, domestic-violence shelters, and immigrants’-rights groups nationwide, as well as migrant shelters, humanitarian operations, law offices, and mortuaries across Central America. We spoke to families of the deceased. And we gathered the stories of immigrants who had endured other harms—including kidnapping, extortion, and sexual assault—as a result of deportations under Obama and Trump.
As the database grew to include more than sixty cases, patterns emerged. Often, immigrants or their families had warned U.S. officials that they were in danger if sent back. Ana Lopez, the mother of a twenty-year-old gay asylum seeker named Nelson Avila-Lopez, wrote a letter to the U.S. government during Christmas week in 2011, two months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement accidentally deported him to Honduras. Nelson had fled the country at seventeen, after receiving gang threats. He’d entered the U.S. unauthorized and been ordered removed, but an immigration judge then granted him an emergency stay of his deportation so that he could reopen his case for asylum. An ice agent told his family’s legal team that Nelson was deported because “someone screwed up,” and ice alleges that the proper office had not been notified of the judge’s stay.
There is also the example of Trump attempting to deport recipients of Temporary Protective Status, which is granted when a natural disaster or war may be taking place in someone’s native country. —Fortunately, a federal judge blocked this mass deportation attempt, which could have affected as many as 300,000 people who have been here long enough to have 100,000 U.S.-born children.
On Wednesday night, a federal judge in California put a hold on the administration’s plans to stop renewing the legal status of 300,000 people living in the US from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan.
All four countries were set to lose Temporary Protected Status over the next year — meaning that immigrants who’d lived in the US for years and often decades would be forced to leave or risk deportation. The more than 1,000 Sudanese living in the US with TPS, for example, were set to lose their legal status on November 2, 2018 — less than a month from the ruling granting them a reprieve.
The ruling is a preliminary injunction — it holds the status quo in place until the courts have issued a final ruling in the case Ramos v. Nielsen, on whether the Trump administration violated the law in ending TPS for these countries. But in Wednesday’s ruling, Judge Edward Chen of the Northern District of California indicated that he’s likely to rule against the administration in his final analysis, too.
We have literally hundreds of thousands of people and their children that Trump is deliberately trying to throw out of the country for simply no. good. reason. He and his underlings know that due to their own health, or conditions and threats against them in their previous countries, they are highly likely to die. Many of them have already died.
It could be argued that much of this is part of a bigoted white supremacist agenda that has been implemented by Trump, particularly since it appears that links to neo-Nazi propaganda were being transmitted by a contractor at the Department of Justice to immigration court employees.
The Department of Justice sent immigration court employees a link to a white nationalist website in an email this week, sparking an outraged response from an immigration judges’ union that was mentioned in the article.
The email, a morning news briefing, contained a link to a story about the National Association of Immigration Judges (NAIJ) on the website VDare, which frequently publishes nativist and white nationalist material
It should be noted that this happened at least partially because the immigration courts are actually a part of the DOJ, and not an independent judicial body. Unlike every other court in the nation they don’t have the option to make independent decisions on immigration cases: they have to follow the rules set by the DOJ, which can be decidedly biased. Just imagine, the prosecutor is the Judge’s boss, ok? Their union is trying to correct this problem by having them moved into becoming a branch of the judiciary. However, Trump opposes this and is trying to decertify the union.
This sits on top of Trump’s complete inaction on gun violence, and his complete inaction and his denial of the threat of white nationalist domestic terrorism.
This week, Puerto Rico again faced a hurricane just two years after Hurricane Maria, which ultimately killed more than 3,000 American citizens due to neglect and incompetence. Trump’s response has been to taunt and shit talk them, even as he transferred $155 million in funds from FEMA disaster relief to fund his ICE detention centers.
With so many examples, it becomes harder and harder to assume that this is all a coincidence. This can’t all be an accident. The bottom line is that Trump and his sycophants don't see and don’t care about the damage that they are doing to these people’s lives. The bodies are piling up, out of sight and out of mind, and its fairly obvious why. Adam Serwer of The Atlantic has been given quite a bit of credit for his piece titled “The Cruelty is the Point.” I had written a similar piece four months prior to that, titled “It’s now fairly obvious that the cruelty is on purpose.” Both of us have a point. Deliberately causing pain, suffering, and death for immigrants is exactly what Trump is doing in order to try and scare them away. In short, he's trying to use terrorism to frighten them, but when death is on the line, they have little choice but to continue to try and reach refuge. They will not be deterred or frightened off.
The question is: What can be done about it? Of course, filing lawsuits to block these actions, congressional investigations, potential impeachment, and/or defeating Drumpf in 2020 are on the agenda.
I sometimes wonder if there’s any virtue in constantly complaining about it. Frankly, a small fraction of Trump’s actions should be enough to send millions of Americans into the street with pitchforks in hand, ready to storm the halls of power. But while we have had some pretty big rallies, what I’ve seen much more than that is apathy.
As I questioned last week, it’s not enough to simply not be a neo-Nazi. Don’t we all have a moral responsibility to step up and fight against hate, totalitarianism, and white supremacist neo-Nazism everywhere and anywhere we find it?
To that point, I’m including this amazingly eloquent video from my favorite YouTube content provider Steve Shives, who normally does simple comment and review videos about genre TV and movies such as Star Trek. In the course of those videos, he will discuss current events and sometimes political issues in context to a particular element of Star Trek as they come up. However, he’s been getting comments from people who object to his mixing his fantasy talk with reality—and he’s more than a little PO’d about it. If you have 11 minutes, watch and listen to this carefully.
Take any pressing social or environmental concern and there’ll be people on one side saying “This is important, we need to do something,” and people on the other side saying “Don’t worry about it this is nothing.” Doing nothing is presented as a viable option. Doing nothing is okay!
And what I want you to understand, if you don't already, is that the second group of people, the "let’s just do nothing” gang, are not neutral. That’s another root cause I could point to, by the way: the fetishization of neutrality. It's not that I think a neutral position is always necessarily bad, it’s that in many situations, the neutral position doesn't actually exist. It's an illusion in which we indulge to soother our consciences when we don't want to think of ourselves as doing harm, but we don't want to actually go to the trying to help either.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said that someone who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it. He also wrote, in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Donald Trump is President of the United States today not only because of those who voted for him, but because of those who would have voted against him, but decided they’d rather just sit that one out.
Climate change is wreaking potentially irreversible havoc on our planet and our civilization. The blame for that rests not only with the polluters who wounded our planet to swell their own fortunes or the deniers who spread disinformation and propaganda but also with everyone else, from leaders on down to ordinary citizens who are aware of the threat but decided they just rather not think about it.
Hatred and intolerance are normalized, fascists and white supremacists and rape apologists and actual rapists are allowed access to mainstream media outlets because we perpetuate this conceit that, you know, not everything has to be political.
The reason Trump’s various atrocities keep piling up with minimal reaction is at least partially related to the fact that there are vast swaths of Americans who are actively not paying attention. Further, many of them object when other people bother to pay attention and attack them for it, as they have Mr. Shives.
It’s not just that they’re sitting idle on the sidelines. As I discussed last week, they’re actually endorsing false neutrality, which acts to shut down comment and dissent. This has moved from InfoWars into the gaming community, and now into the genre film area. A good example of this can be seen with this “review” of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine documentary titled What We Left Behind.
The reviewers spend more than half of their commentary complaining about the progressive and social commentary arguments made by the cast and crew, claiming that such content is unnecessary and gratuitous. Shocker: Lots of people in Hollywood are progressive, and although their job is to be creative and to invent, what they invent is often directly informed by real-life subjects and issues. There are also many conservatives in Hollywood, including Clint Eastwood, Robert Duval, John Voight, Gary Sinise, Clint Howard, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. I wouldn’t say they shouldn’t express themselves, even politically, through their artistry. They certainly should, and they do.
Yet the reviewers claim that the DS9 cast is lying when they say that having a black lead character was a legitimate issue in the same era as the Rodney King riots. They falsely argue that Avery Brooks’ Commander Sisko’s hairstyle, which was changed from the bald head and goatee he wore on his previous show A Man called Hawk, wasn't based on any bigotry or racial fear by the execs. They claim that it “makes more sense” that they didn’t want Sisko to be bald because Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation had been bald. They completely ignore that when you actually watch the real documentary, the answer to the question about changing Avery Brooks’ hair was “We didn't want to go street.” Picard’s hairstyle isn't mentioned. Two seasons later, they went street and Brooks returned to his normal look. The truth is they were initially afraid he would scare the white people, so they gave him a look that was less aggressive. It’s just that simple.
The DS9 actors and crew talk about how they made strides in having strong female characters on the show. This is true, if you compare Major Kira and Lt. Jadzia Dax to Counselor Troi and Dr. Crusher from Star Trek:The Next Generation. The former are both action heroes who are just as strong and capable as anyone else on the ship, and the latter pair are not. I’ve even heard Marina Sirtis (Troi) recently say at a Las Vegas Star Trek convention that if Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar) hadn’t quit the show in the first season, she would have been fired because the producer's attitude was "we have too many women,” and they also really didn't know what to do with her character. When the DS9 documentary does a short 120-second montage of the women of DS9, with Meredith Brook's 90’s female empowerment song Bitch playing in the background, the reviewers react to this with the claim that this is “total cringe,” which is the go-to statement for people who just don’t like too much feminism in their fantasy, like there's supposed to be a limit or a quota or something.
Showing that they are far from “neutral,” the reviewers actually used a video clip from Prager U to argue with the DS9 cast that Trump never meant the neo-Nazis when he was talking about “very fine people.” They argued that The New York Times reported there were a few people who were there that demonstrated in support of the monuments and weren’t necessarily part of the alt-right gathering in Charlottesville. Okay, sure, but Trump said he saw these people “on the videos.” He didn't say he read about these people in The New York Times, especially since that story wasn’t even written until the day after his initial comments. Still, I absolutely double-dog dare you to pick those “good" people out among the crowd, because even in the Prager U video, they didn't actually show any pictures of these so-called "very fine [non-Nazi] people.” They used cartoons to represent them. This is how lies and propaganda get spread and repeated, in a nice and shiny digestible package.
It’s silly, but it’s important. The people Shives is talking about are the people who enable Trump. They’re the ones who are actively trying to twist the conversation away from what’s really happening to their “what about-ism” and McGuffins of bullshit. They are deluded liars and propagandists, and it’s because of these people—the willfully ignorant who go out of their way to spread their ignorance to others—that we find ourselves in the current situation where the lives of thousands of immigrants are being treated as something you’d throw away with a dirty Kleenex, and most people, particularly Republicans, seem to clearly not give a shit. They don’t care about anything and anyone unless their own ass is on the line, and unless their own finances and livelihood are being impacted.
We will eventually defeat Trump, one way or another. But we also need to be prepared and ready to fight and defeat these people who enable him because they are the death cult. They are not only standing on the sidelines: They are cheering the damage, destruction, and death, and they aren’t going away.