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Donald Trump’s stupid border wall was never really more than an applause line he trotted out whenever his supporters started falling asleep during his rally ramblings, but now his bizarre obsession is threatening the real lives of 800,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients:
Trump is demanding that money for the wall be part of any deal to protect from deportation the young immigrants who were brought illegally to the United States as children. Those immigrants, known as dreamers, face an uncertain future after Trump set a March 5 deadline to end former President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
Trump wants almost $18 billion over a decade for more than 700 miles of physical border measures, according to a Department of Homeland Security letter to GOP senators detailed Friday by the Wall Street Journal.
But wait, I thought Mexico was supposed to pay for it? Who knows, because in the Trump administration, positions float around in the White House for as long as Anthony Scaramucci did. In fact, the day after the $18 billion ransom demand, Trump again claimed that Mexico would pay for the wall.
This is an unwell man, who along with the ghoulish Stephen Miller, is obsessed with this white supremacist fantasy that neither border residents nor Americans overall support. The wall has actually gotten less popular since Trump endorsed it—what do you call a reverse Midas touch where everything turns to caca?—while nearly 90 percent of Americans support letting undocumented immigrant youth stay.
There’s only one route to go here, and it’s going to require guts and backbone: Democrats must use all their leverage in the upcoming spending bill fight this month to stop this stupid wall in its tracks, stop Trump from using 800,000 lives as bargaining chips and finally get the DREAM Act passed. And because we can’t count on spineless Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to do the right thing on their own, Democrats need to be prepared to withhold their votes for Dreamers:
“We are laser-focused on January 19 as a do-or-die moment,” said Greisa Martinez, advocacy director for United We Dream, an immigrant advocacy group organizing protests on Capitol Hill against Republicans and Democrats who have voted for previous GOP spending bills.
Although the situation facing dreamers is “a crisis that was created by Donald Trump,” Martinez said Democrats “are not without power,” especially now that Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) has joined the caucus. “They have a closer margin now, and we expect them to meet their public and private commitment to us that they’ll use every leverage they have.”
Indivisible, the progressive grass-roots network of citizen groups, said it will focus its efforts on six Democratic senators from left-leaning states — Gary Peters and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall of New Mexico and Tim Kaine and Mark R. Warner of Virginia. Kaine, Stabenow and Heinrich face reelection this year.
And, it also means no fucking wall that has little support in Congress and is among the dumbest of Trump’s dumb ideas (and that includes Trump Vodka and Trump Steaks). It’s a bipartisan sentiment too—regarding his ransom demand last week, “Republican reaction was muted”:
Even many Republicans have deemed a physical wall along the entire border unnecessary and impractical, saying that more effective border security could be achieved through other means, including better surveillance and technology.
According to The Washington Post, “Trump has told confidants that a government shutdown could be good for him politically and is focusing on his hard-line immigration stance as a way to win back supporters.” But in reality, a shutdown could be disastrous for him and his party. And the fact is that our nation already spends more on federal immigration enforcement than on any other law enforcement agency. The undocumented population is stable, and border crossings are lower than they have been in decades. The only bad hombres running amok here are in the Trump administration.
We don’t need this stupid wall or more Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents. We need the DREAM Act, and we need it now. Let’s show some fucking backbone and get this done.