When the White House told news networks Donald Trump planned to make an important policy announcement regarding asylum Thursday afternoon, CNN chose to take it live, while MSNBC decided to fact-check it first and run whatever news came out of Trump’s “announcement” later. MSNBC chose smart.
Trump repackaged his rant-filled stadium stump speech about the “invasion” of migrants weeks away from our southern border and delivered it from the White House. He issued no proclamation, no rule, no executive order, and what exactly the new policy would be wasn’t even clear. Bottom line: This was nothing but a midterm political stunt.
What he did say is that if you cross border illegally and apply for asylum, you will be "held"—which already happens in some cases when people turn themselves over to authorities. Perhaps the administration plans to increase the frequency and duration of holding asylum seekers, though that wasn’t exactly clear.
If there was one startling piece of news, it was this: Trump said the U.S. military would treat rock-throwing by the migrants—if that even happens—as though it was use of a firearm. Throwing of stones and rocks, Trump said, "We will consider that a firearm." (From the pool report: "They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle.") Again, it’s not even clear there will be any violence at the border, since individuals are coming to seek asylum, not stage an altercation.
But Trump delivered nothing so straightforward as a policy change. Instead, he promised an executive order “sometime next week.”
Honestly, he said something darn close to, It's going to be talking about everything we talked about here and it's going to be “quite comprehensive.” Great.
Other than that, Trump spewed lies:
- He said immigration is costing the U.S. “billions and billions and billions” of dollars
- He said asylum seekers who are released show up to immigration court about 3 percent of the time; actually, they show up around 76 percent of the time, per CNN
- He greatly inflated the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which is actually around 12 million
- He said they had started building his precious wall; they haven’t
- He said when asylum seekers “hear they're not going to be separated, they come”; there’s zero evidence of that, and, in fact, Trump’s failed family-separation policy has done nothing perceivable to curb new asylum seekers from coming
And this was one of my favorite lies: Trump said Republicans were in “unison” on immigration policy but couldn’t pass any laws because of Democrats. Actually, in 2013, a Democratic-led Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill, only to have the Republican-led House kill it by never giving it a vote (it almost certainly had the votes to pass.) But ever since Republicans have controlled all levers of government, two White House-backed immigration bills have stalled due to lack of GOP support.
Another dispatch from bizzaro world, where a mentally challenged man has infiltrated the White House, and we are at his mercy as long Republicans refuse to rein him in. #VOTE
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