For those who think this the Trump policy of torturing children by separating them from their parents is working politically, read on. It ain’t. Trump administration is being compared to Japanese WWII internment and early moves in Nazi Germany. And there is an election coming.
Independent:
Leading US Catholic bishops have escalated their criticism of the Trump administration's immigration policies, calling new asylum-limiting rules "immoral" and rhetorically comparing the crackdown to abortion by saying it is a "a right to life" issue.
One bishop from the US-Mexico border region reportedly suggested "canonical penalties" - which could refer to withholding the sacrament of Communion - for Catholics involved in implementing the Trump policies.
The biggest problem people have in their heads about Nazis is that they were some mythical super-evil, like Balrogs in the Lord of the Rings. They weren't. They were apparatchiks like Stephen Miller, banal enforcers of horrible policy. They were people like Susan Collins who don’t see enough wrong with it to stop it by supporting a Democratic bill.
There was a term used for non-members of the Nazi party in Germany who looked the other way and allowed things to happen. They were called Nazis. And no, it’s not hyperbole. It is exactly how it went down.
That’s why the Trump WH has to lie about the policy, claiming Democrats did it and that it would take legislation to fix, or that it, according to DHS Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, doesn’t even exist. Neither are true. Trump did it because he wants to. And Stephen Miller affirmed it was deliberate.
Do not capitulate on this.
Kirstjen Nielsen needs to resign and Stephen Miller needs to be fired. And the media needs to step up its coverage of both the lies and the practices (see Margaret Sullivan, below). Use this to realize how deeply they lie, and practice how to cover that.
As for the rest of us? Vote them out.
Axios:
Be smart: We know that Trump is responsive to traumatic images (including kids being gassed in Syria), and he's acutely attuned to how issues play in the media. So some well-wired Republicans think he may eventually find a way to change the policy announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
- Trump is expected to be personally confronted on the issue when he is the guest for a special meeting of House Republicans tomorrow evening.
- Multiple sources in close touch with the White House believe this issue is providing images that fuel the left's worst views of the administration.
- But sources say Trump views the issue as leverage, and will try to get funding for a border wall or other concessions for a rollback of the policy.
The outlook: Republicans tell us that with midterms approaching and the border kids becoming a transcendent story, administration efforts to blame Democrats and parse the policy could become unsustainable.
It’s not working for Trump.
NY Post (historically supportive of Trump):
Stop breaking up families at the border
We recognize that returning to the policy of two months back creates some perverse incentives: Bring kids along, and you’ll just be deported if you’re caught. But at least switching back avoids having the US government earning comparisons to the Nazis.
If the president doesn’t want to admit defeat, he can just add this to the long list of things he blames on Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trying to tough this one out is guaranteed disaster.
The Hill:
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) called the Trump administration's policy of separating families who cross the border illegally "unacceptable," and asserted that the White House has the ability to end the practice without waiting for Congress.
"To me it makes it very clear that in the home of the free and the land of the brave we should not be using kids as a deterrent policy. This is something I think is actually unacceptable and it’s something that as Americans we shouldn’t be doing," Hurd said on CNN late Saturday.
"And this really isn’t a Republican or Democratic issue," he continued. "This is an issue about how should you treat children.
WaPo:
Democrats intensify fight for immigrant children — and bludgeon Trump and Republicans ahead of midterms
Democrats expanded their campaign Sunday to spotlight the Trump administration’s forced separation of migrant children from their families at the U.S. border, trying to compel a change of policy and gain political advantage five months before midterm elections.
Against a notable silence on the part of many Republicans who usually defend President Trump, Democratic lawmakers fanned out across the country, visiting a detention center outside New York City and heading to Texas to inspect facilities where children have been detained.
In McAllen, Tex., where several Democratic lawmakers toured a facility, Rep. Vicente Gonzalez of Texas estimated that he saw about 100 children under age 6.
“It was orderly, but it was far from what I would call humane,” he said.
NPR:
Medical professionals, members of Congress and religious leaders are calling on the Trump administration to stop separating migrant families. They question whether these shelter facilities are appropriate for younger children.
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions say the administration is enforcing immigration law. But House Republicans plan to vote next week on a bill that they say would end the practice of separating children from their parents.
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.
Sanjeev K. Sriram, MD, MPHSanjeev K. Sriram, MD, MPH:
As a Pediatrician I’m legally required to call Child Protective Services on the Trump Regime
I called Child Protective Services in Washington, DC to report child abuse by the Trump regime. The law mandates that when pediatricians like me see or hear about children being abused, we report that abuse to authorities. Armed border guards are forcibly separating hundreds of immigrant children from their parents, many of whom are legally seeking asylum. In one instance, an infant was taken from a mother while breastfeeding. Another mother was forced to put her terrified toddler in a car seat and watch as border guards drove away with him. Other families are being told lies such as the guards are taking children to a nearby location for a photograph, food, clothing, and/or a shower. Then the parents are hauled to jail with zero information about if, how, or when they will be reunified with their children.
This is child abuse. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services are perpetrating terror upon children when they forcibly remove them from their parents who are not threats to anyone’s safety or health.
Jennifer Rubin:
A new majority against cruelty
Republicans will deservedly be painted as anti-family. In Texas, for example, Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee for the Senate, is leading a Father’s Day march to visit a just-opened tent camp in Tornillo for children taken from their parents. He’s already spoken out vigorously against the child separation policy, posting a much-discussed video describing his interaction with one mother. (“The mom was just desperate, she could not help but cry the entire time she was talking with us. She was anxious, she didn’t know what was next, she had just survived this many-weeks journey.”) And describing the detention facility. (“They were in essentially very large cages, pods, cyclone fences 10-feet high with netting on the top. Polished concrete floors, it’s just a gigantic warehouse where hundreds of kids and adults are kept divided by age, families no longer together.”)
Nicholas Kristof/NY Times:
Trump Immigration Policy Veers From Abhorrent to Evil
If you or I commit a misdemeanor, we might lose our kids for a few days while we’re in jail, and then we’d get them back. But border-crossers serve a few days in jail for illegal entry — and after emerging from criminal custody, they still don’t get their kids back soon, said Lee Gelernt, an A.C.L.U. lawyer. In one case, he said, it has been eight months and the child still has not been returned.
It’s true that immigration policy is a nightmare, we can’t take everyone and almost no one advocates open borders. Some immigrants bring small children with them and claim to be the parent in hopes that this will spare them from detention.
Yet none of that should be an excuse for brutalizing children by ripping them away from their parents. I was at times ferociously critical of President Barack Obama’s handling of Central American refugees, but past administrations managed these difficult trade-offs without gratuitously embracing cruelty. One fruitful step has been to work with countries to curb gang violence that forces people to flee.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly hails family separation as a “tough deterrent” and shrugs that “the children will be taken care of — put into foster care or whatever.”
So what’s next, Mr. President? Minefields at the border would be an even more effective deterrent. Or East German-style marksmen in watch towers to shoot those who cross?
The intersection of the abusive immigration policy and Trump's constant lies is a toxic sludge.media needs to adopt the George Lakoff approach:
1. context
2. trump statement
3. fact check, don't just be stenographers.
Margaret Sullivan/WaPo:
Instead of Trump’s propaganda, how about a nice ‘truth sandwich’?
Unlike those who insist that what the president says is news and therefore must be reported, Lakoff proposes a radical reimagining of how the news media reports on Trump.
Instead of treating the president’s every tweet and utterance — true or false — as newsworthy (and then perhaps fact-checking it later), Lakoff urges the use of what he calls a “truth sandwich.”
First, he says, get as close to the overall, big-picture truth as possible right away. (Thus the gist of the Trump-in-Singapore story: Little of substance was accomplished in the summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, despite the pageantry.) Then report what Trump is claiming about it: achievement of world peace. And then, in the same story or broadcast, fact-check his claims.
Will Bunch/Philly.com:
In America's moral civil war, whose side is God on, anyway?
On CNN on Saturday night, the 8 p.m. news hour began with these words from anchor Ana Cabrera: “Something disgraceful is happening…something that can be stopped.” At a White House briefing late last week, journalist Brian Karem gave up trying to get press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to explain the border policy to, instead, lash out, in exasperation, at whether at long last she had no sense of decency left. “You’re a parent.” Karem exclaimed. “Don’t you have any empathy? Come on, Sarah, you’re a parent! Don’t you have any empathy for what these people are going through?”
Just moments earlier, Sanders had turned to what struck many as an odd place to find a moral defense of taking children away from their parents: the Bible. “I can say that it is very biblical to enforce the law,” President Trump’s top press aide said in response to a question. “That is actually repeated a number of times throughout the Bible.”
Elizabeth Breunig/WaPo puts that one to rest:
If you had all the power in the world, maybe you would also hear a serpent dipping its smooth body down from some shadowy bough to say: God wants you to do whatever you like with your power, and whatever you do with it is good.
And what remains a huge story: the Russia probe.
NY Times:
Just the Fear of a Trade War Is Straining the Global Economy
Josh Kraushaar/National journal:
The GOP’s Rapid Retreat in the Midwest
Republicans have abandoned Senate races in states Trump carried, and could lose several key governorships as well. Trump’s boasting of crashing the blue wall is rapidly becoming ancient history.
There’s a reason Democrats are encouraging their candidates to focus on the economic anxieties many Americans still feel despite the macro-economic boom. Health care is now polling as the top issue among voters, driven by middle-class Americans worried about rising expenses for medical care. Trump may be shattering traditional Republican economic dogma, but his blunt-force approach to politics isn’t convincing his newfound fans to vote for his adopted party
Stan Greenberg/NY Times:
Riling Up the Base May Backfire on Trump
And then President Trump surprised nearly all political analysts with his decision to govern as a militant Tea Party and evangelical conservative and to make this the heart of his strategy for the midterm elections. Each provocation and each dog whistle — if we can even call them that anymore — make Democrats even more determined to vote and to register their rejection of Mr. Trump’s remade Republican Party. In our polling of registered voters nationally and in the Senate battleground states, a remarkable 79 percent of Democrats strongly disapprove of Mr. Trump, a number that rose to 87 percent in a survey completed last week. Mr. Trump is making Democratic base voters even angrier than you might expect.
But each provocation also produces a reaction in the non-Trump remnant of the Republican Party, and that is the political reaction most observers are missing. Moderate Republicans are much more likely than the rest of the party to be college graduates, to favor abortion rights, to be relaxed about gay marriage and Planned Parenthood, and to believe that climate change is a human-created problem. They were feeling homeless in the Republican Party even before Mr. Trump’s triumph.
If you lose R moderates on economic and social issues, you can’t win. And yes, there are R moderates, or, at least there were. They’re independents now, and Never Trumpers.
Welcome to the modern world.