The Trump Policy of Separating Families at the US Border

[smitcompton]

Hi,

I am putting down the address for the Migration Policy Institute that has the info on who's coming in the country at the Mexican border.(and elsewhere). One of my takeaways is that most illegals have entered the country legally and over stayed their visa(66%). There has been an increase in migration from El Salvadore, Guatamala and Nicaragua for asylum. Mexico and China come next. I haven't studied this long enough to see how many illegal Mexicans are crossing the border. Much less than I thought.

I also forgot to put in my other thread that the Gov't is sending people to El Salvador to find out what is happening there.

We have 20 % of the worlds refuges.

I wish I knew how to do this properly. I will just do what I can. [email protected]

Annette

 

[AGBF]

I attended a good rally this morning. Senator Richard Blumenthal, one of Connecticut's senators, was there and spoke. An on-line newspaper report about the event was out by early this evening. The paper estimated that about 400 people were at the rally. That's not too bad for a town our size. Who else went to an event?

 

[Madam Bijoux]

.

 

[partgypsy]

"All these are little country with small populations it will not work in the US."
Regarding having a socialist, more egalitarian democracy.

I have heard people say this before, but why? Can you explain why, for example a universal healthcare system would work for many other countries, but not work for the US, simply because the US is larger? Generally universalized healthcare becomes more cost effective the larger the insured pool is. Besides, we are the US. We as a country have fixed and addressed other big problems before, such as world wars.

 

[Calliecake]

On June 26 Alex Azar HHS Secretary stated during congressional testimony that children who were separated from their parents at the border could be matched up with a keystroke. According to Mr Azar there was no reason any parent would not know within seconds where their children are being held. Now we have 3,000 children who are separated from their parents and it’s obvious that this administration does not have a plan in place to reunite these families. Instead of this administration being ashamed of how they have handled this, they continue to LIE.

Todays deadline to reunite children under 5 who were separated from their parents was missed. What are the ramifications of this administration not meeting these legal deadlines? They take no responsibility for the human rights violations that have occurred as a result of their actions and practices.

Sorry for the rant. I just can’t believe this is who we are as a country.

 

[lovedogs]

Sorry for the rant. I just can’t believe this is who we are as a country.

ugh, you and me both. I'm disgusted.

 

[AGBF]

This article addresses some of the damage that has been done to children by separating them from their parents. Even when reunited with their parents, now, some of the younger ones fail to recognize their parents and cry for their caretakers. Some are angry at their parents for abandoning them when they needed their parents, for failing to protect them. (We all think our parents are omnipotent when we are children.)

The bonds of love have been broken more than once. These children have been spending their young lives crying for the only caretakers they know to no avail.

The child picture below is Darly Pablo, age 3. She had been toilet trained prior to being separated from her mother, but regressed to using diapers while in detention. When she was reunited with her mother, 35 year-old Milka Pablo, she "screamed and tried to wiggle free from her mother’s embrace. 'I want Miss. I want Miss,' Darly cried, calling for the social worker at the shelter where she had been living since mother and daughter were separated by federal agents at the southwestern border."




Milka Pablo, 35, and her 3-year-old daughter, Darly, were reunited in Phoenix on Tuesday after four months apart.


Link to article...https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/10/us/politics/trump-administration-catch-and-release-migrants.html

 

[AGBF]

This is the by far the best piece yet written about the way the Trump administration has failed to allow would-be immigrants to ask for asylum. It not only points out again and again that the policy is designed to deny asylum, a right allowed by US and international law, but it details the horrors from which these immigrants are fleeing and to which President Trump would like to return them without hearing their requests for asylum. It is great!

Link to article...https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/opinion/asylum-immigration-trump.html

 

[Dancing Fire]

Sorry for the rant. I just can’t believe this is who we are as a country.

CC
Why would the liberals wanna see these innocent childrens grow up in a evil country like the US?

 

[Calliecake]

@Dancing Fire , You know that the things we have witnessed these 18 months are not what our country has always stood for. You and I both live in parts of the country where we interact with many people of different race and nationalities on a daily basis. I can only speak for myself but doing so has enriched my life immensely.

The company I worked for over 30 years had offices and plants in Mexico, Germany, France, Poland, India, Singapore and had a few vendors in China. I spoke to many people from these countries daily, I made frequent trips to our plant in Mexico. People from all these locations made frequent trips to our office and many worked as expats in our office. They were all warm kind people. We all worked together and we all looked out for one another.

There were more than a few times over the years someone would get sick while in the US. I took them to a doctor and got their prescriptions filled. I was more than happy to do so and know if I ever found myself ill in their country they would have taken care of me.

Many people were very supportive of me after I was attacked. I helped a young man who was having breakdown get back home quickly to his family, he was hospitalized for a month in France and another young man who had tried to commit suicide in Mexico. The kindness of others (no matter their race or country they come from) is what makes the difficult times in life much more bearable. Very few of us leave this world without going thru difficult times at some point in life. There are days I feel you and I view life very differently.

 

[JPie]

The right has done a good job of deflecting any conversation about the cruelty of Trump's immigration policy by making it sound as though it were the only solution to the problem of illegal immigration. What's even more disheartening is how many people have bought into it, hook, line, and sinker.

This op-ed from The Irish Times does a pretty good job of explaining what's at stake here.

https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-trial-runs-for-fascism-are-in-full-flow-1.3543375

To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.

It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities. Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about 40 per cent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your 40 per cent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too. And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.

Moral boundaries
But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

‘Devious’ infants
And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.

This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.