Well, this isn’t much of a surprise when you think about it, is it?
Jonathan Lemire, the White House correspondent for the Associated Press, told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that Trump enacted the policy — which he later blamed on Democrats — to intentionally ignite another political firestorm.
“In our reporting, he was telling people around him that he thought this would be a good cultural war, kind of victory here, akin to the NFL players kneeling for the national anthem,” Lemire said.
The president and attorney general Jeff Sessions admitted they hoped the detained children would force Democrats to agree to fund a border wall, along with other Trump immigration priorities, but instead he signed an executive order to end the separations.
“We had days of the president saying this couldn’t be done this way, that he would say, incorrectly, that it couldn’t be done by executive order, that it had to by Congress,” Lemire said. “It seemed like the White House was trying to pressure Capitol Hill so they would come up with some sort of solution so the president was not seen as having to reverse himself on this.”
So this was political bullshit from the beginning. Trump was yet again doing what Steven Bannon said, trying to “Trigger Liberals and make them irrational” only this time he walked himself off a plank that was too short.
He didn’t plan for the having enough facilities to handle the number of people, some of these kids have been beaten and shackled for days in some facilities, and then he and his people apparently made no plans what-so-ever to keep track of which children belonged to which adult so the ability to re-unify them is basically null and void.
And also he didn’t plan on some American’s actually having a heart, even some of those in the GOP.
Unfortunately, it’s certainly not all as these Trump fans display.
“I see you getting emotional,” an MSNBC reporter told the woman. “Why is that?”
“Because — I just — he just,” the woman said, struggling through her tears. “He just tries so hard and so many people are so down on him.”
One man who supports Trump pretended to cry to mock liberals who oppose the family separation policy.
“Won’t someone please care for the children?” he asked sarcastically. “Well, if I get arrested, my kids aren’t going to see me for a while either.”
Another Trump supporter compared immigrant parents to bank robbers.
“When a person goes, robs a bank, he’s separated from his family anyways,” the man opined. “The same as the people coming into this country. I’m an immigrant myself. I came here in 2000 and when we emigrated, we came here legally.”
Just for the record if you rob a bank you will not have your kids taken from you — You will be taken from your kids, which is entirely different. Felons still have custody rights until there is a judicial procedure to remove those rights for just cause. Here is the list of reasons that parental custody can be removed.
- Severe or chronic physical abuse of the child
- Any sexual abuse of the child
- Severe psychological abuse or torture of the child
- Extreme emotional damage to the child inflicted by the parent
- Child neglect by failing to provide shelter, food, or other needed care as is required by parental obligations
- Abuse or neglect of other children in the same household
- Abandonment of the child or extreme parental disinterest
- Long-term mental illness of the parent
- Long-term alcohol or drug induced incapacity of the parent
- Failure to support the child
- Failure to maintain contact with the child
- Failure to provide education
- Felony conviction of the parent for a violent crime against the child or another family member
- Felony conviction of the parent when the term of imprisonment is long enough to negatively impact the child and the only other source of care for the child is foster care
- The child has been in foster care for 15 of the most recent 22 months, and the parent is still not ready for reunification.
- Failure of reasonable efforts to rehabilitate the parent and reunite the family
- Failure of the parent to comply with a court ordered plan
- The child would be at risk if returned to the parent's home.
- Risk of substantial harm to the child
- Inducing the child to commit a crime or crimes
- Unreasonable withholding of consent to adoption by the non-custodial parent
- The child's need for continuity and care
- The identity or location of the father is unknown after a reasonable attempt to determine or find him
- The child was conceived as a result of rape or incest
- The putative or presumptive father is not the child's biological father
- A newborn child is addicted to alcohol or drugs
- Giving birth to three or more drug affected infants
- Other egregious conduct or heinous or abhorrent behavior by the parent either to the child or others in a way that affects the child
- The child has developed a strong and healthy relationship with his or her foster or other substitute family
- The preference of the child
- Voluntary relinquishment of rights by the parent
Being suspected of committing the misdemeanor of illegal entry is not on that list. This country went through a moral crisis or the indefinite detention of a hundred or so terrorism suspects without due process or a trial at Guantanamo, how exactly are we not going to react to the idea of the likely permanent separation and detention of children whose parents are at worse accused of a misdemeanor which can at worse lead to a $250 civil fine or 6 months in jail if convicted criminally.
Frankly, the deportation proceedings average up to 9 months so most people when they finally get to the court receive “time served.”
Also according to the Border Patrol, over 80% of the people that they stop crossing the border don’t have a criminal record — anywhere. Not here, not in Mexico and not in Central America.
We all know that the crime rate for immigrants is less than the crime rate for native-born Americans, but has anyone asked what it is for refugees?
Well, it turns out that bringing refugees into a community drives the crime rate down.
To examine this issue, we used refugee resettlement data from the U.S. Department of State’s Worldwide Refugee Processing System to calculate the 10 cities in the US that received the most refugees relative to the size of their population between 2006 and 2015. We then looked at what happened to both their overall crime rates over the same time period using detailed data available from the Federal Bureau of Investigations. This revealed a telling pattern: Rather than crime increasing, nine out of 10 of the communities actually became considerably more safe, both in terms of their levels of violent and property crime. This included places like Southfield, Michigan, a community just outside of Detroit, where violent crime dropped by 77.1 percent. Decatur, Georgia, a community outside Atlanta, experienced a 62.2 percent decline in violent crime.
As the table indicates, there is one city, West Springfield, Massachusetts, that saw an increase in crime between 2006 and 2015. That city and the surrounding area, however, was also impacted by another trend that swept across many parts of America during that time period—a ravaging opioid epidemic. Numerous news articles tie drug-related gangs to a rise in violence in the area.[1] This phenomenon was already well underway before the most recent wave of refugees began arriving. The FBI was leading large-scale raids in Springfield as early as 2005.[2]
Of the top ten cities which received literally thousands upon thousands of refugees in their community, with the exception of West Springfield which was also hit with an opioid epidemic, the crime rate has dramatically plummeted.
There is no good reason to put parents in jail and cause their children to be taken and held in detention centers that were initially intended for children who had arrived on the border all on their own.
Even the immigrants who do manage to survive the system and aren’t deported, which would cause a permanent separation from their kids, have no idea how to find their children again because they didn’t take down basic information about the parents and the kids.
So even though Trump didn’t include it in his executive order, the border patrol is now essentially backing off their ridiculous “zero tolerance” policy because it simply can’t work when you're dealing with parents and children traveling together because they don’t have any facilities to hold them together as the new order requires.
The Washington Post reported that Border Patrol was backing off the administration’s plans to criminally prosecute all parents who cross illegally into the United States because it does not have the resources needed to enact such a policy.
“We’re suspending prosecutions of adults who are members of family units until ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) can accelerate resource capability to allow us to maintain custody,” an unnamed official tells the publication.
With this latest reversal, the Border Patrol is essentially going back to the policies that were being followed toward the end of the Obama administration, in which families that crossed the border were released from custody and were outfitted with GPS trackers until the date of their immigration hearings, where they would be either allowed to stay in the country or ordered to leave.
That’s generally to the good, but it doesn't answer the question of what’s going to happen with the 2,600 separated kids that are now in Federal Custody, who may be moved to Tent Cities in military bases.
9/11 was 17 years ago — and there are still people being held indefinitely in Gitmo even though President Obama wanted to get them all out. Does anyone believe that Trump will put more effort into correcting this mess than Obama did with that one?
I don’t.