I don’t think I’ve started a thread in this forum in over 10 years, but I think this really deserves its own thread.

In a six week period based upon a shift in policy by the Trump administration, the United States has forcibly separated 2000 children from their parents. Some of these people are guilty of nothing more than crossing the border illegally. Some of these are people who have done nothing wrong and presented themselves at a port of entry requesting asylum (which is completely legal). In some cases immigration officers are lying to children and parents and telling them they are taking the children to “bathe them” when they are really kidnapping them from their parents. For anyone with any sense of history and of how familiar that sounds, to hear that happenning in the United States of America is ****ing awful. There is a report of at least one mother who was separated from her infant while breastfeeding. This is happenning to children who are toddlers.

Sources:

https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/174431...arated-parents

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/u...ion-trump.html

The president of the United States has indicated, in interviews and by tweet, that he is doing this as a “negotiating tool” to force democrats to give him what he wants. Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...e99_story.html


Interviews with officials involved in this indicate the system is chaotic, with no good mechanism to eventually or ever reunite these children with their parents. It is inevitable that children will be lost in this system.

Would anyone like to defend the current inhumanity of our administration? Would anyone like to justify how they still support this abortion of an administration with something like this going on?

https://twitter.com/tripgabriel/stat...65806067003393

I fell like this is where the LAG pushes with 95os. He has to lose this time, right?

It's been a couple of years now, but I recall some Trumper here telling me to calm down because it wasn't as though Stephen Miller was a Nazi. Wha' d'ya know, turns out it's kind of like that after all.

https://twitter.com/cnn/status/1008073746643550209

An absolute disgrace.

Pretty ****ing sick of hearing any version of "this is not who we are," or worse "this is not the Republican Party."

This is what GOP voters want.

Not a single Republican opposing this. **** em all, they’re all Nazis, the whole party.

Jeff Flake,

Get ****ed, buddy.

Susan Collins,

**** you.

Bob Corker,

Choke on your own ****.

Trump rips Democrats for allowing MS-13 'animals' into country

President Trump attacked Democrats in Congress over immigration in his weekly address Saturday, blaming the party for refusing to close "loopholes" that allow gang members, including MS-13 members, into the United States.

"MS-13 gang members are truly, and you’ve heard me say it, animals — and yet Nancy Pelosi and Washington Democrats continue to protect them and to push for open borders," Trump said.

Susan Collins, Republican moderate, has sent private letters out defending it

Doctors Concerned About 'Irreparable Harm' To Separated Migrant Children

The concerned pediatricians contacted Colleen Kraft, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and she flew to Texas and visited a shelter for migrant children in the Rio Grande Valley. There, she saw a young girl in tears. "She couldn't have been more than 2 years old," Kraft says. "Just crying and pounding and having a huge, huge temper tantrum. This child was just screaming, and nobody could help her. And we know why she was crying. She didn't have her mother. She didn't have her parent who could soothe her and take care of her."

...

Pediatricians and immigrant advocates are warning that separating migrant children from their families can cause "toxic stress" that disrupts a child's brain development and harms long-term health.

At the facility in South Texas, Kraft says, the staff told her that federal regulations prevented them from touching or holding the child to soothe her.

While shelter managers and other experts say there is no such rule, Kraft says the confusion underscores why these shelters are not the right place for young children — especially kids who have fled dangerous countries and who have just been separated from their parents. "By separating parents and children, we are doing irreparable harm to these children. The long-term concern of what we call toxic stress is that brains are not developed efficiently or effectively," Kraft says. "And these children go on to have behavior problems, to have long-term medical problems."

...

"Kids started appearing at the shelter who didn't 'know the drill.' They had just been separated from their parents, so they were experiencing an increased amount of trauma," says Antar Davidson, who worked for Southwest Key, a nonprofit that operates more than two dozen shelters for migrant children from Texas to California.

Davidson quit this week because the shelter where he worked in Tucson, Ariz., didn't have the trained staffing to handle the influx of younger, more traumatized children, he says.

The breaking point for Davidson came, he says, when he was asked to tell two siblings, ages 6 and 10, that they couldn't hug each other. "They called me over the radio. And they wanted to translate to these kids that the rule of the shelter is that they are not allowed to hug," he says. "And these are kids that had just been separated from their mom — basically just huddling and hugging each other in a desperate attempt to remain together." Southwest Key says it has a clear policy that allows touching and hugging in certain circumstances.

And **** our worse than useless media for letting them simultaneously argue:

1. It's because Democrats

and

2. The policy isn't bad

How Trump Came to Enforce a Practice of Separating Migrant Families

Almost immediately after President Trump took office, his administration began weighing what for years had been regarded as the nuclear option in the effort to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the United States.

Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally, John F. Kelly, then the homeland security secretary, said in March 2017, “in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.”

For more than a decade, even as illegal immigration levels fell overall, seasonal spikes in unauthorized border crossings had bedeviled American presidents in both political parties, prompting them to cast about for increasingly aggressive ways to discourage migrants from making the trek.

Yet for George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the idea of crying children torn from their parents’ arms was simply too inhumane — and too politically perilous — to embrace as policy, and Mr. Trump, though he had made an immigration crackdown one of the central issues of his campaign, succumbed to the same reality, publicly dropping the idea after Mr. Kelly’s comments touched off a swift backlash.

But advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea. Last month, facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully — with few exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children.

And now Mr. Trump faces the consequences. With thousands of children detained in makeshift shelters, his spokesmen this past week had to deny accusations that the administration was acting like Nazis. Even evangelical supporters like Franklin Graham said its policy was “disgraceful.”

Among those who have professed objections to the policy is the president himself, who despite his tough rhetoric on immigration and his clear directive to show no mercy in enforcing the law, has searched publicly for someone else to blame for dividing families. He has falsely claimed that Democrats are responsible for the practice. But the kind of pictures so feared by Mr. Trump’s predecessors could end up defining a major domestic policy issue of his term.

Inside the Trump administration, current and former officials say, there is considerable unease about the policy, which is regarded by some charged with carrying it out as unfeasible in practice and questionable morally. Kirstjen Nielsen, the current homeland security secretary, has clashed privately with Mr. Trump over the practice, sometimes inviting furious lectures from the president that have pushed her to the brink of resignation.

But Mr. Miller has expressed none of the president’s misgivings. “No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement,” he said during an interview in his West Wing office this past week. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry, period. The message is that no one is exempt from immigration law.”

There's gotta be a class action lawsuit to file here.

Session's and Kelly's version of the lie is to say that it's to discourage illegal immigration. But obviously they want to discourage asylum seekers and other legal immigration too. It must give Miller great pleasure to watch this happening. His fondest dreams are coming true.


https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/sta...10201394880513

Lotta tweets about Miller.

What are the legislative proposals? My understanding is dems and moderate republicans want a clean bill that codifies what past presidents have chosen to do and other republicans want a bill with a ton of restrictions to legal immigration, Wall funding and possibly doesn’t even end the family separation?

I still have to wonder what goes through the head of the ICE official right before he tells the mother that he’s taking her daughter to give her a “bath.” I can’t fathom how a person, in this day and age, in a western democracy, can do a job like that and live with themselves.

they said they were looking at a moderate proposal and a far-right proposal and before hearing anything about either of them trump threw out any consideration of the moderate proposal

Yeah, in that moment, who knows. I'm sure they go home to their own kids and play with them, feed them, bathe them and the contradiction never crosses their minds. I guess it's about compartmentalizing.

I'm sure you know this, but humans generally are almost unbelievably obedient and deferential to authority.

This is probably even more true for people willing to work for ICE.

Don't get me wrong, they are scumbags. But this is in no way surprising. Also people are SUPER racist, almost unbelievably so to non racists. But you know this.

Ingraham defends migrant kid camps: ‘Criminals are separated from their children all the time’

“You just saw the former head of the GOP, who I know I’m really disappointed in you Michael Steele,” she began, “accusing the president of running concentration camps?”

“To describe what we are doing at our border, where people cross the border illegally or present themselves and say, ‘I want asylum,’ as ‘concentration camps’ is both, I think, dismissive in minimizing the Holocaust and it’s just wrong,” the Fox News host continued, adding that the children were being treated "as well as we can treat them under the circumstances.”

Ingraham's comments come amid reports of breastfeeding mothers having their children taken away and reports that vast facilities are housing roughly 1,400 children.

“As long as we have one veteran on a street tonight, we shouldn’t be spending money on illegal immigrants in the United States. I’m sorry. We’ve got to catch them and take them back to their home country," Ingraham concluded.

refugee family: "gimme asylum, you white *****."

laura ingraham: "i'm sorry, but i just have a strong feeling that you're lying about wanting asylum. my feeling is that you want to steal my husband's job and rape me. so i'm gonna have to send you back. again, sorry."

The "moderate" proposal was the proposal supported by the discharge petition, which failed by two votes. Now, there's an ultra-extreme freedom caucus proposal and the merely extreme right-wing proposal, which the WH came out saying they wouldn't support, but then backed off and apparently said they would. It will continue to hold dreamers and asylum seekers hostage and will fully fund the wall and won't get dem votes. So really, with the failure of the discharge petition, it's just more play acting prior to the mid-terms. Polls say it's unpopular and it's pretty dangerous for Republicans to be pushing it, imo, but when has that ever hurt them?

They're off the reservation. Forget about high on their own supply, they are continuously ingesting fentanyl. The wheels are off.