If I’m not watching a specific show on Netflix, Hulu, FX or BBC America I usually have CNN or MSNBC playing in the background, so yesterday I was awakened to this horrible, disgusting live event they were carrying involving Trump and a series of family members of people who had been killed by undocumented immigrants claiming they were "Permanently Separated”, and who were loudly and stridently complaining that the media never covered or told their stories.
It was also covered live the ABC News.
Now, I’m certain that these families deserve every bit of sympathy we can all muster — but during this event, the claim was maid multiple times that 63,000 people have been killed by undocumented immigrants since 2001.
If that figure seems to be a bit off to you that’s because — it is.
“We’re gathered today to hear from the American victims of illegal immigration. You know, you hear the other side,” Trump said. “You never hear this side. You don’t know what’s going on. These are the American citizens permanently separated from their loved ones.”
“Sixty-three thousand. That number that they say is very low because things aren’t reported,” Trump said. “Sixty-three thousand. You don’t hear about that.”
But as The Washington Times details, that figure — which was tossed around during a roundtable discussion Trump had in March to fear-monger about immigrants — is unverified. Statistics from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) indicate that less than half that many undocumented immigrants have been arrested for homicides during that time frame.
And that’s what the Moony Times says, if you actually go to a reputable source it’s even worse.
Admittedly Trumptarians tend to play this card quite often. Corey Lewandowski used it with Chris Cuomo on Thursday arguing in distraction from his “Waah waah” taunt about a 10-year-old down syndrome child who was separated from their parents that there was somehow some equivalence or alack of sympathy in the media for the shooting of Kate Steinle.
Kellyanne Conway also went into a similar rant when challenged by Cuomo - although I won't force that video upon you.
For the record the immigrant who fired the shot that killed Steinle — who Lewandoski calls “an Animal” — didn’t have a violent record, he had been jailed and deported repeatedly for drug offenses, not violence. In the Steinle case he was found not guilty because the forensic data indicated that his claim that he had found the gun discarded and wrapped in fabric on the San Francisco pier and that it had fired accidentally with he picked it up was consistent with the lack of gunshot residue (GSR) on his hand and also the fact that the fatal bullet ricocheted off the ground before hitting Steinle.
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. (KTVU/BCN) - A bullet that struck Kate Steinle on San Francisco's Pier 14 ricocheted off the ground first but appeared to have traveled in a straight line from where the man charged in her death was sitting to where she stood, a prosecution witness testified today.
However, retired police Inspector Jim Evans also said he could not be certain where either the defendant, Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, or Steinle were located at the time of the July 1, 2015 shooting, making it impossible to conduct an exact trajectory analysis.
Evans, a former crime scene investigator, today testified in the trial of Garcia Zarate, a 45-year-old Mexican citizen who is charged with second-degree murder in Steinle's death.
Evans said crime scene investigators initially found no shell casings or bullet strike marks at the pier. However, they went back to the scene several days after the shooting for another look after an examination of the bullet showed that it had struck something hard before it hit Steinle.
Despite how animated and worked up Conway or Lewandowski may get over the subject — while going “waah waah” over a panicked down syndrome kid — there’s literally no way that Zarate could have deliberately made that deadly shot.
It was an accident, just — if you listen closely — as are many of the deaths noted by the Trump’s “Angel Families” as a result of traffic accidents and DUIs more often than violent deliberate murder.
Little facty details like that seem to usually illude the Trumptarians, unless it’s a minor factoid to their benefit. For example, the separated child with down syndrome hadn't been taken into custody as part of Trump’s “Zero Tolerance” strategy, because his mother was actually in custody because she was a witness in a human trafficking case. Which still begs the question: If she's a witness and not a suspect, why was she separated from her child at all?
Similarly, the picture used by Time Magazine which had been shot by Getty Images John Moore of the distressed Honduran girl while her mother was searched was not separated after her mother was taken into CBP custody, not that Moore even claimed that she was. For one thing, separation was not being carried out immediately, most persons apprehended by CBP were being held for several days at the local border patrol stations for several days — longer than the 72 hour maximum requirement — before parents were typically remanded to DOJ while the children were sent to HHS, so it’s actually not surprising that even several days later they hadn’t been separated, yet.
It might still happen for all we know. We’ll have to wait and see.
As a result Trump has claimed that Democrats stories of "sadness and grief” at the border are phony, but the quibbling issues in these two cases doesn’t change the panic and stress on this children at the time of being stopped by CBP one iota and it doesn’t change the fact that about 2,600 children have been forcibly separated one bit.
Trump has also claimed that it's "not true" that immigrants have a lower crime rate than citizens but he’s quite wrong as the Washington Post proved when it did a deep dive into the claims of “63,000 illegal immigrant murders.”
Trump first came across the figure in March. He was hosting a roundtable on sanctuary cities at the White House that included, among other guests, Mary Ann Mendoza.
Mendoza is the mother of Sgt. Brandon Mendoza, killed in 2014 by a drunk driver, an immigrant in the country illegally who had had previous charges against him dismissed. At that roundtable, Mary Ann Mendoza presented Trump with the 63,000 number.
“Over 63,000 Americans have been killed since 9/11 by illegal aliens,” she said. “It’s a crime spree that is being left unchecked, and these sanctuary city officials — state and city officials — they’re putting American lives into harm every single day.”
Then they went out to point out step by step where that number came from.
We traced that number back to its source. On May 5, 2006, [Steve] King posted an article on his official website in response to national pro-immigration protests held that month. The post is a catalogue of anti-immigrant scaremongering. Here’s the key paragraph, with emphasis added:
“What would that May 1st look like without illegal immigration? There would be no one to smuggle across our southern border the heroin, marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamines that plague the United States, reducing the U.S. supply of meth that day by 80%. The lives of 12 U.S. citizens would be saved who otherwise die a violent death at the hands of murderous illegal aliens each day. Another 13 Americans would survive who are otherwise killed each day by uninsured drunk driving illegals. Our hospital emergency rooms would not be flooded with everything from gunshot wounds, to anchor babies, to imported diseases to hangnails, giving American citizens the day off from standing in line behind illegals. Eight American children would not suffer the horror as a victim of a sex crime.”
It was an expansion of an argument he had made from the House floor two days after the May Day protests. (In that speech, the abused American children were “at least eight little girls.”)
There, he explained the math behind his numbers.
“The crimes that are committed by those who enter this country illegally are in significantly greater numbers than the crimes that are committed by American citizens,” King said, “to the extent that 28 percent of the inmates in our prisons in the United States are criminal aliens, 28 percent.”
That figure he got from a Government Accountability Office report issued in April 2005. It read:
“At the federal level, the number of criminal aliens incarcerated increased from about 42,000 at the end of calendar year 2001 to about 49,000 at the end of calendar year 2004 — a 15 percent increase. The percentage of all federal prisoners who are criminal aliens has remained the same over the last 3 years — about 27 percent.”
So, King figured (admitting that the number would go up or down a percentage point or two):
” That means then that criminal aliens are committing 28 percent of the crimes in the United States. And so that means 28 percent of the murders, 28 percent of the rapes, 28 percent of the violence and the assaults and battery, first- and second-degree murder and also manslaughter attacks are committed by criminal aliens.”
In other words, since 28 percent of the prisoners were immigrants in the country illegally, they must also therefore have committed 28 percent of each and every crime! Quod erat demonstratum. Recognizing that this sounded like a lot even at the time, King rationalized it by asserting that for every undocumented immigrant in the country we know about, two or three sneak in without our knowing it. Here’s how we know that’s not true.
There is an almost impossibly large number of problems with King’s argument.
This is exactly how bad statistics can lead directly to bad policy.
28% of the prison population does not equate to 28% of the crimes committed simply because law enforcement doesn’t catch everyone who commits every crime, they don’t prosecute everyone who commits every crime with equal zeal or equal sentencing, and parole isn’t assigned in an exactly uniform manner. In this case of about half of immigrants who are arrested and jailed are there just for immigration violations, not murder.
Also, the GAO report was focused on “criminal aliens” who may have entered either illegally or legally, it was not limited just to the undocumented. The WaPo summarized it this way:
Put simply, King seems to have basically made the number up more than a decade ago and, since there isn’t good data on the number of crimes committed by people who immigrated illegally, it was embraced by those looking to put a number to it. There’s simply no credible reason to believe that there have been 63,000 killings committed by undocumented immigrants since 9/11, and plenty of reason to think that the homicide rate among members of that group is lower than for native-born Americans.
Lastly, King is making a colossal mistake by equating the number and percentage of inmates in Federal custody to all crimes and murders committed in the nation, which by the way, include state crimes. For example he says that there are about 47-49,000 “criminal aliens” — who again aren’t illegal aliens, just people of foreign birth who have been convicted of a Federal crime — are 28% of the prison population, but the that’s only among prisoners in the Federal system which includes about 215,000 inmates, the entire prison system includes over 2.2 Million prisoners, so these so-called criminal aliens are actually only 2.2% of those in our jails. And pretty much almost none of them are “murderers” — other than terrorists and serial killers -— because murder is a state crime.
Even if King’s reasoning were close to correct, he’s still off base by a factor of 10 to 1.
As the New York Times has documented, the image of the wild-eyed murderous criminal immigrant is a myth.
“Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities,” he said last week. “They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.”
As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not.
Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.
In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country.
Despite actual facts — “real facts” to be redundant — Trump and his “Angel Families” continued to claim that immigrants [whether undocumented or not] are somehow more dangerous and criminal than others.
He's claimed that immigrants are an “infestation” in the nation.
“Democrats are the problem,” Trump wrote. “They don’t care about crime and want illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and infest our Country, like MS-13. They can’t win on their terrible policies, so they view them as potential voters!”
The same day that Trump made this claim the head of the Border Patrol Council stated that about 80% of those who were stopped crossing the border illegal did not have any criminal record anywhere and were in often “polite and respectful.”
During an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Brandon Judd, president of National Border Patrol Council said that President Trump’s language is not true.
“The president said it again today, that these people trying to cross into the United States are all criminals, drug smugglers, gang members,” Blitzer said. “You men and women of the border patrol deal with them on a daily basis. Is that accurate?”
“The vast majority of the individuals encountered are very polite, respectful individuals. It is about 20% that we deal with that have criminal records,” he said.
So in summary Trump has been blowing the “criminal” issue completely out of proportion. And that’s not an accident since he still apparently thinks that all this will be a culture war “Win” for him just like his bashing of NFL players protesting police abuse.
Is there crime at the border? Yes. Of course, there is. There is drug and human trafficking going on and of course it should be addressed and CBP should be fully staffed and equiped, but one other thing brought up by Brandon Judd is the fact that it’s very likely that the cartel uses the migrants crossing between border points as decoys, drawing border patrol’s attention away while they do their own crossings at other points while their personnel are focused on arresting parents and children. Trump is falling hook, line, and sinker for their bait and into their trap.
As was pointed out last night by WaPo columnist Catherine Rampell when debating Stephen Moore [above] crossing the border in order to surrender yourself and call for asylum isn’t illegal — it is and has been the law under the 1951 Convention on the Rights of Refugees which was ratified by the U.S. in 1968.
The 1951 Convention protects refugees. It defines a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution (see Article 1A(2)). People who fulfill this definition are entitled to the rights and bound by the duties contained in the 1951 Convention.
Refugees are forced to flee because of a threat of persecution and because they lack the protection of their own country. A migrant, in comparison, may leave his or her country for many reasons that are not related to persecution, such as for the purposes of employment, family reunification or study. A migrant continues to enjoy the protection of his or her own government, even when abroad.
…
The cornerstone of the 1951 Convention is the principle of non-refoulement contained in Article 33. According to this principle, a refugee should not be returned to a country where he or she faces serious threats to his or her life or freedom. This protection may not be claimed by refugees who are reasonably regarded as a danger to the security of the country, or having been convicted of a particularly serious crime, are considered a danger to the community.
Refugees have the international right of non-refoulement, the right not to be returned to a country where they face a serious threat. This means they have a right not to be deported until after their refugee and asylum claim has been reasonably heard, which is why — until now -- there was no requirement to enter at an official “point of entry” before making a refugee or asylum claim.
Some asylum seekers, instead of coming to a port, cross the border between ports of entry and are caught by Border Patrol agents. Some purposefully cross where they see an agent stationed to ask for help requesting asylum. Agents call these “self-surrenders.”
Border Patrol agents, like their counterparts at ports of entry, are required to ask if people they encounter are afraid to go home.
“Border agents are required to ask if someone is afraid to go home.” That’s not just at a point of entry, it’s anytime they encounter an immigrant, documented or not. That’s the process.
Trump changed this policy, which was very likely unconstitutional. Even though he’s rescinded his family separation policy — for now -— he’s changed a lot of things such lowering the refugee cap from 75,000 to just 45,000, he’s cut funding the refugee resettlement program by 25% causing over a dozen of their offices to close, cancelled the program that allowed unaccompanied minors to apply for asylum in their own country before reaching our borders and repeatedly had the points of entry closed to asylum seekers causing people to camp outside their doors sometimes for weeks before even being affording an interview to assess their eligibility.
All of that makes it more likely that — in desperation — they’ll make a run for the border between points of entry, not less. And there’s more.
in 2017 he ordered a pause the existing refugee family reunification program, in April he cut a non-profit legal aid program for immigrants, in May he cut programs that represented unaccompanied minors in court even when these programs had helped 95% of child immigrants to make their immigration hearings on time. He rails about “catch and release” when 75% percent of immigrants already show up for their hearings despite what people like Jeff Flake falsely claim. So he’s been methodically tearing a system that was largely working apart. He’s making things worse than they were before on all levels.
Since the 1951 Convention on Refugees is a treaty that has been ratified by the U.S. it is now - under the Supremacy clause — considered to be an official part of our Constitution.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution gives the President the power “to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.” And the Supremacy Clause provides that “treaties,” like statutes, count as “the supreme law of the land.”
THIS IS THE LAW.
Just another quick rebuttal to Stephen Moore, he claims that Obama didn’t do anything about immigration but his deportation numbers averaged over 150,000 people higher than Trump has.
Moore likes to claim that immigration has gone up “because the economy has improved” however as shown above during the Obama years CBP was stopping and deporting around 220,000-230,000 people at the border each year. That’s more than Trump’s total for border and interior removals combined at 226,119 for FY2017, which is the lowest it’s been in 40 years. If the growing economy is attracting more people why are Trump border deportation numbers so low?
Why has his deportation of those who may be undocumented but have no criminal record gone up 173% from 5,014 to 13,744 in FY2017? “Criminals” are obviously not his priority.
Obama did vastly more to protect our borders and our nation than Trump has or ever will do and he did it without demonizing people or terrorizing and traumatizing families by separating them from their children.
Yes, there are things that need to be fixed — but we don’t have a “criminal immigrant” problem. We don’t need to attack refugees or make it heartlessly more difficult for them to reach safety, we don’t have a problem with “chain migration” which is really family reunification for people who have become citizens or obtained green cards which takes years, we don’t have a problem with the “Visa Lottery” which only applies to potential migrants who are completely and fully vetted.
We already have 700 miles worth of physical wall and fences, natural barriers as well as an electronic wall on the rest of the border. It needs repairs in some places, but it’s not the sole or even the best solution here. For one thing, the existing fence has contributed to the thousands of deaths for people who’ve tried to cross the desert to avoid them.
No one wants “criminals and terrorist pouring over our borders” but none of these are legitimate problems, and they aren’t the fault of Democrats, not since the Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill in 2013 only to have it blocked in the House by John Boehner.
House Speaker John A. Boehner on Thursday flatly ruled out chances of the House passing the Senate’s immigration bill, saying his chamber will debate its own bill instead.
The Ohio Republican and his top lieutenants in the party issued a joint statement that seemed designed to tamp down some of the momentum behind the Senate bill, which emerged from a committee on a bipartisan 13-5 vote this week, and to stake out a House GOP position.
“While we applaud the progress made by our Senate colleagues, there are numerous ways in which the House will approach the issue differently,” the Republican leaders said in their statement. “The House remains committed to fixing our broken immigration system, but we will not simply take up and accept the bill that is emerging in the Senate if it passes. Rather, through regular order, the House will work its will and produce its own legislation.”
But the House didn’t come up with their own plan. They haven’t passed any immigration bills since then because they can’t make up their mind on how vicious and hateful it needs to be.
Trump is manipulating people, exploiting the grief of the Angel Families to attack and punish innocent immigrants and their children for his own bigoted mendacious purposes. He says it’s not about racism, but only about “illegal” immigration but then why’s he trying to cut legal immigration in half? If it’s not about his aversion to people from “shithole countries” what is the excuse for changing the rules for those who actually are following the law?
If you have a real proposal for improving our immigration system without using bogus racist non-facts to make your argument, then we should all be willing to listen.
But anyone who tries to pull off this neo-fascist authoritarian scam, from Trump to Lewandowski, Conway and Stephen Moore need to be called out for their fucking bullshit.
It’s sick, it’s disgusting. It’s unAmerican.
And it’s not the law.