‘Zero’ Immigration Hurts Economy

“We are desperate” for immigrants was part of the message by Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff for Dictator Donald Trump (DDT), in a speech at Oxford Union while Mulvaney was in England. (That was after he said that Republicans care only about huge deficits when there is a Democratic president. Mulvaney and DDT have managed to increase the national deficit by $3 trillion in three years.)  About the U.S. need for immigrants, Mulvaney said:

“We are running out of people to fuel the economic growth that we’ve had in our nation over the last four years. We need more immigrants.”

Immigrants contributed 15 percent of U.S. economic growth between 1990 and 2014. They provide taxes to support domestic programs for U.S. children and seniors as well as tending to be better educated. They founded 30 percent of U.S. firms that have gone public and more than 50 percent of startups valued at over $1 billion that have yet to go public. They generally do not speak English as well as native-born citizens so they don’t compete for jobs in communication, concentrating more on scientific and technical employment. Others work in fields sometimes rejected by native-born citizens; immigrants comprise 36 percent of workers in the farming, fishing, forestry, building and grounds cleaning, and maintenance workers; 27 percent of hotel workers; and 21 percent of home health care industry workers. Their mobility fills in gaps for labor market efficiency.

As DDT does in the U.S., Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson (nicknamed BoJo), with the help of his home secretary Priti Patel, is imposing a rigid points-based system to deny most immigrants the right to live and work in Britain. They get their points by proving they speak English, are educated, and have a job offer paying a middle-class wage. BoJo hopes his white nationalism will appeal to older and wealthier conservative voters.  Like in the United States, BoJo’s system will result in a massive shortage of workers in healthcare, home care, lodgings, restaurants, farming, and other areas relying on low-paid employees. The government estimates that 70 percent of immigrants from the EU since 2004 would not have qualified.

DDT is going to be more desperate to find immigrants after his conservative Supreme Court ruled to lift stays on the wealth test—that immigrants even on the path to citizenship will be deported if they receive public benefits for 12 of 36 months. Justice Sonia Sotomayor stated the court was violating its own rules about when to step into the legal process. Until DDT’s election, the Court did not typically grant stays while cases were in the lower courts. Sotomayor pointed out that this “extraordinary act” now seems to be the “new normal.” Of the 23+ applications for “extraordinary” stays since DDT’s inauguration, 12 were this year compared to a total of eight requests during the 16 years of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. DDT’s government also wins two-thirds of the requests, showing that his Supreme Court bends the law in his favor.

“It is hard to say what is more troubling: that the government would seek this extraordinary relief seemingly as a matter of course, or that the court would grant it.”

Sotomayor also argued that “this Court is partly to blame for the breakdown in the appellate process … because the Court … been all too quick to grant the Government’s ‘reflexiv[e]’ requests.”

Immigrants already in the U.S. use public benefit programs less than U.S.-born citizens. In 2013, 32.5 percent of the latter received SNAP benefits compared to 25.4 percent of naturalized citizens and 29 percent of noncitizens. Immigrants also receive lower benefit values. Having jobs such as child care, home care, and fast food employment doesn’t keep people from needing these benefits

The Supreme Court decision impacts millions of immigrants; at least 69 percent of the over 5 million people receiving green cards during the past five years have at least one “negative” factor that could deport them. Even applying for a green card is counted against applicants. Other factors counting against applicants:

• Not having an income that is 250% of the poverty line ($76,700 for a family of five).
• Being unemployed.
• Dropping out of high school.
• Lacking English fluency.
• Being older than 61 or younger than 18.
• Having medical issues, especially if uninsured.
• Not having private health insurance.
• Having a mortgage, car loan, or credit card debt.

A missing piece in DDT’s budget, however, seems to reinforce the hiring of undocumented immigrants, perhaps again at his own businesses. The use of E-Verify, a program that checks new hires for undocumented immigrants, is no longer mandatory although it was part of his campaign promises. Jared Kushner, DDT’s son-in-law and adviser, has been working on a 600-page immigration proposal that makes immigration more business friendly, and the budget cuts $3.7 million from E-Verify’s funding.

Big employers don’t use E-Verify “Because I don’t have to,” according to their interviews with Jessica Vaughan, policy studies director at the Center for Immigration Studies.  The Trump Organization didn’t use E-Verify until a scandal about DDT’s undocumented workers erupted over two years after his inauguration. In May 2019, DDT told Fox that his business tried to use E-Verify while building his hotel in Washington, D.C. but the program blocked them from hiring “qualified” people. Florida’s biggest businesses—including agriculture, tourism, and construction—opposed the mandatory use of E-Verify because it was a threat to their workforce. Twenty-four states, including Florida, require E-Verify only for some government employers, but only eight states mandate the program’s use for all businesses.

The shortage of immigrants comes from far-right, racist, anti-immigrant Stephen Miller who persuaded DDT that a white country is a good country. In The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer wrote a profile of Miller and his steps to turn the United States white.  

After 9/11, Congress created the Department of Homeland Security, the third largest federal department with a $50 billion budget and a staff of about 200,000 employees, combined a number of protective agencies for disaster recovery, cybersecurity, infrastructure, the Coast Guard, and immigration. Miller’s focus was only on the last one: he ignored policy-making and requires lower-level officials to answer directly to him without the knowledge of their high-up’s.

Under the auspices of Director of Domestic Policy Council, Miller eliminated decades of immigration policies and precedent while using law to reduce legal immigration. His ten-point list includes an “end to catch and release,” “zero tolerance for criminal aliens,” penalties for sanctuary cities, a vow to reverse Obama’s executive orders, and a “big-picture” vision for reforming the immigration system “to serve the best interests of America and its workers”—meaning no one but white. Because of Miller, DDT revoked DACA to rid the U.S. of a “foreign-born” workforce before Miller guaranteed that Congress wouldn’t find a bipartisan solution for its reinstatement.  

Miller led a meeting with DOJ officials to push them into prosecuting border crossers as criminals so that families could be separated. Parents received criminal charges; children were considered unaccompanied minors. DHS wasn’t ready to implement the program and had no system for reuniting families, but Miller forced the agency into taking 2,500 children, including 102 under the age of five, from their parents. Hundreds of parents were deported without their children.  

Almost a year ago, DHS began the great DHS purge, beginning with firing Kristjen Nielsen and moving on to dumping the head of ICE and the DHS top lawyer. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said that DDT “pulling the rug out from the very people that are trying to help him accomplish his goal.” Miller moved in his own loyalists such as Matthew Albence as head of ICE who compared detention facilities to “summer camp.” But Kevin McAleenan, DHS fourth DHS head under DDT quit. He said:

“What I don’t have control over is the tone, the message, the public face and approach of the department in an increasingly polarized time.”

Miller refused to accept the resignation, but McAleenan left anyway. His replacement, Chad Wolf, is another acting appointee not confirmed by the Senate for that position. To get Wolf into that position, DDT pushed him through as Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Strategy, Policy, and Plans. Wolf could not be an agency director without being Senate-confirmed for another agency position.

Although he denied involvement in the “zero tolerance” immigration policy, Wolf helped develop the concept of separating families at the southern border as punishment and said, “My job wasn’t to determine whether it was the right or wrong policy.” He is also architect of the “Remain in Mexico” policy which forces almost 50,000 migrants caught in dangerous conditions while awaiting refugee asylum.

Last fall, hundreds of Miller’s emails exchanged between 2015 and 2016 with Breitbart were made public. They included links to articles on the white-supremacist Web site vdare, as well as an enthusiastic reference to The Camp of Saints, a racist anti-immigration French novel. One email forwards an article arguing that the U.S. should deport immigrants on trains “to scare out the people who want to undo our country.” Miller’s policies have almost completely sealed the southern border and has moved on to ordering DHS to send armed agents from Border Patrol swat teams to so-called “sanctuary cities” such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. He also wans ICE officers to pull children out of school. A senior DHS official told Blitzer that “there’s no one left at DHS to say ‘No’ to Miller anymore.” With Miller, DDT and the United States won’t have the workers they need to grow the economy.

Dems Begin Impeachment Case

As the impeachment trial started yesterday with an exhausting 13-hour session, Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) crowed about the way that his Senate minions also obstructed justice. His most revealing statement—thus far—was when he bragged:

“Honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

DDT couldn’t have been talking about the “material” that his legal team had because they had no defense to the evidence presented by the House managers as they passed motions, including requests for “first-hand” documents and witnesses. All ten motions were tabled, nine of them by 53 votes, the number of GOP senators. One motion, the one to have live testimony instead of videotaped depositions, received one GOP vote, that from Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), but was still tabled.

The lack of materials on DDT’s legal team table [top center] compared to the piles of papers in front of House managers [center] indicates the lack of evidence. These are some of the lies told by Pat Cipollone, Jay Sekolow, and minor DDT team members:

False Claim: Republicans didn’t have access to key information during House impeachment inquiry because they weren’t allowed into the secure facility where congressional member review classified information about the impeachment inquiry. Fact: GOP House members not only had access to the area, but many of them also used it. The dozens of House Republicans who stormed the area were among 48 members of one of the three committees taking part in the process of inquiry. 

False Claim: Rep. Adam Schiff “manufactured” DDT’s comments during the July 25 call to Zelensky. Fact: For dramatic effect, Schiff was clearly paraphrasing the call transcript that had already been made public and said that his summary was “shorn of its rambling character and in not so many words.”

False Claim: House Democrats delayed the delivery of articles of impeachment longer than they did. Fact: McConnell postponed the trial until January.

False Claim: DDT “was denied the right to cross-examine witnesses” during the House inquiry. Fact: DDT was invited to himself or assign lawyers question witnesses during the open hearing of the impeachment inquiry. The person who made this false claim was invited to question House witnesses.

False Claim: DDT denied all subpoenas because of executive privilege, his right that he can keep his sensitive conversations with staff secret. Fact: DDT has never invoked executive privilege. 

False Claim: The transcript for DDT’s phone call to Zelensky was released. Fact: DDT’s version of the transcript was released; the real transcript is hidden in a highly secure computer server.

False Claim: Security assistance funds were not mentioned in the July 25 call between DDT and President Zelensky. Fact: Zelensky thanked DDT for the Javelin antitank weapons and wants to order more. DDT responded, “I have a favor to ask, though.”

False Claim: House Democrats have done nothing but attack DDT. Fact: The House has sent over 400 bills, 275 of them bipartisan, to the Senate, bills that Majority Leader McConnell refused to forward to the floor of the Senate. It has also passed a budget and a trade deal with Mexico and Canada.

False Claim: House Democrats started trying to impeach DDT from the day that they came to Congress in 2018. Fact: A few Democrats talked about impeachment last year, but the impeachment inquiry did not start until a whistleblower reported that people reported DDT was trying to extort Ukraine for his personal election gain.

False Claim: Other presidents have withheld aid for foreign countries just as DDT did. Fact: DDT withheld aid for his personal political benefit not for the good of the country.

As Schiff pointed out, DDT’s legal team has no argument on the merits so they “attack the House managers” for distraction. Regarding the GOP vote against demanding that DDT comply with subpoenas, Schiff pointed out that a vote for DDT means that Congress can never again demand subpoenas from any president for any issue.

Even the lawyer called by Republicans to defend their case in the House Judiciary Committee won’t support DDT’s current legal team’s statements. Jonathan Turley refused to swallow the myth that “abuse of power” is not actually an impeachable offense. He said that DDT and his defenders are making a “mistake by reducing the definition of impeachable conduct to the criminal code. It is an argument that is as politically unwise as it is constitutionally shortsighted.”

Despite her accusation that impeachment is a conflict of interest for senators running for president, Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) illegally left the Senate trial to appear on the Fox network. One of the rules, set by Republicans, is that “Senators should plan to be in attendance at all times during the proceedings.” Breaking the rules is “punishable by imprisonment.” Blackburn said that the House should have heard from more witnesses in its proceedings if they wanted, ignoring the fact that DDT blocked their appearances even when some of them were subpoenaed.

To show how warped Blackburn’s reasoning is, DDT refuses to release 20 emails between Mick Mulvaney’s top aide Robert Blair and member of the OMB Michael Duffey about the freeze on the Ukrainian military aid package despite a court order that he do so. Blair and Duffey are two key witnesses with first-hand knowledge of the extortion along with chief-of-staff Mulvaney and former national security adviser John Bolton.

Today, even more GOP Senators broke McConnell’s rules: about 21, one-third of the total, wandered in and out walked out of the chamber during Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) presented arguments, and others chatted during Rep. Jason Crow’s (D-CO) arguments. Some GOP senators, all jurors, said they left because they were bored. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) disagreed with how much his colleague know, saying that they are “hearing the prosecution’s case for the first time.” Not only can they not “do impartial justice,” they can’t even be courteous enough to stay to hear the information. Meanwhile 11 million people in the U.S. are watching the trial. 

Adding to the GOP arguments against impeachment such as “no crime,” so what, and “things happen,” law professors Richard W. Painter and Bandy X. Lee listed a fourth reason in an op-ed for Law & Crime:

“We believe that Donald John Trump should not, and cannot, be tried for impeachable offenses, as set forth by the House of Representatives, because of his apparent mental incapacities.” 

Lee is a Yale University professor in law and forensic psychiatry; Painter, who teaches law at the University of Minnesota, was the chief White House ethics counsel for George W. Bush. They cited DDT’s saying he didn’t know Lev Parnas when “mountains of evidence” show that he does and “Sharpiegate,” in which invented erroneous information on the path of Hurricane Dorian instead of admitting he made a mistake.

According to the authors, DDT’s “Twitter storms” demonstrate a “serious level of dysfunction.” The data shows that DDT’s state of mind makes it “unfathomably dangerous” for him to be “authorized to order the use of nuclear weapons.” In that mental state, he should be “temporarily removed from office under the 25th Amendment”—not subjected to an impeachment trial, “unless he is found to be mentally competent to stand trial under the principles of justice well established in the United States…. Until there is an evaluation, the determination that he is competent to stand trial cannot be made nor assumed.”

A CNN survey shows that 69 percent of respondents want witnesses who did not testify before the House impeachment inquiry in the Senate trial. A plurality of Republicans, 48 percent, agree. Seventy percent think that DDT acted unethically, and 63 percent believe he probably broke the law. Of voters, 58 percent say DDT abused the powers of his office to benefit himself politically, and 57 percent say he obstructed the House impeachment inquiry. And 22 GOP senators are up for re-election this year.

DDT’s anxiety ratcheted up as he left the cocoon at Davos (Switzerland) and returned to non-stop media attention on his impeachment trial. His reason for preventing John Bolton from testifying is fear. Before he flew home, DDT said, “You don’t like people testifying when they didn’t leave on good terms.” Trump said at a news conference before departing from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And that was due to me, not him.” DDT’s 140 tweets today was a record for one day. The Republicans will acquit the man who Schiff compared to a “despot,” meaning the mentally-imbalanced George III, but the impeachment process has already damaged DDT’s legacy.

Immigration in the U.S.: The Center of Cruelty

Public opinion—aka outrage—about deporting approximately 1,000 seriously ill migrants, primarily children, by denying them any deferred status drew attention before Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) moved Hurricane Dorian to Alabama. Families who must renew their medical deferred status every two years were notified in August that they would be automatically forced to leave the country within 33 days. After a backlash, DDT said he would reconsider the new policy that sends all these migrants to their certain death because they would lack health care, but he hasn’t provided a resolution.

Ken Cuccinelli, acting director for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, failed to appear for an emergency House hearing about the travesty, and Daniel Renaud, the associate director for field operations, said that he just follows orders. USCIS, formerly responsible for processing the deferral requests, handed all non-military requests over to ICE. ICE said it knew nothing about the change, and recipients of the deportation letters were not notified. Now ICE won’t address deferral requests until the subjects have an order of removal. The most recent information comes from American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Those people aren’t the only ones who DDT is killing. Last Thursday, ICE rushed the deportation to Cuba of Yoel Alonso Leal, an asylum-seeker with several serious medical conditions including a lung tumor. Over 100 physicians argued that he stay in the U.S. and warned that he might not even survive the flight. No matter—ICE refused to release him to his U.S. citizen wife and family for more tests and treatment. Leal said that Cuban authorities detained and assaulted him in 2016 and 2018 before he sought asylum. 

DDT already killed a man born in Greece 41 years ago, who legally came to the U.S. at less than a year of age, by deporting him to Iraq where he died without insulin for his diabetes. Jimmy Aldaoud never learned Arabic and was part of Detroit’s Chaldean Catholic community, targeted in Iraq by extremists. He was sent to Iraq because Greece doesn’t recognize birthright citizenship. Other Chaldeans, a conservative group, are also targeted for deportation, one of them for a years-old marijuana conviction that was dropped from his criminal record.

ICE also plans to kill detain immigrants by not vaccinating children for the flu. Despite the claim that detainees are held for only 72 hours, they can remain in detention for over a month. At least three people in government “care” have already died of the flu.

DDT also wants to terminate a program protecting undocumented family members of active-duty troops from deportation. Currently the program allows military family members illegally entering the U.S.—for example, overstaying a visa—who cannot adjust their immigration status to temporarily stay in the U.S. The program avoids distractions coming from worries about a spouse being deported and allows the spouse to apply for a green card. Already ICE doesn’t follow its own policies by deporting former service members and breaking the tradition of giving a path to citizenships for those who serve in the military—almost 130,000 since 2001. Last year, the Pentagon discharged immigrants with special skills recruited under George W. Bush’s program.

A lawsuit against Cuccinelli purports that all his directives are “invalid” because he “lacks the authority to serve as acting director.” Cuccinelli is also unqualified to serve in this position because he describes immigrants as rats although his job is to facilitate legal immigration. His new policies include fast-tracking initial screenings of asylum-seekers from 48 hours to a “full calendar day,” blocking them from preparing for interviews of seeing legal help. Cuccinelli is serving as “acting director” because GOP senators have doubted his appointment.

In another cruel form of current government bureaucracy, 37 asylum seekers accused of illegal entry were all processed at one time and expected to answer questions in unison. Public defendants had under two hours to talk with 41 defendants in one case. Unlike other courts under the judicial branch, immigration courts are under the control of DOJ AG Bill Barr. [Right: “Justice” under the reign of Barr and DDT.]

New tent courts recently established at the southern border will hear thousands of cases for asylum-seekers in closed hearings with no court observers unlike open immigration court proceedings. Attorneys are not allowed to participate although most asylum-seekers can’t get legal representation. Over 42,000 asylum-seekers are forced to wait in Mexico where they have been assaulted, kidnapped, and extorted. Others have let Mexico bus them to the middle of the country or the border of Guatemala. The hearings in the tent court facilities are via video teleconference, a serious problem from faulty equipment with poor video and sound quality that prevent due process. 

Last week, people believing in justice breathed a sigh of relief when a federal judge ruled that DDT cannot require asylum seekers to ask another country for shelter before seeking refuge in the U.S. According to DDT’s coerced agreement with Guatemala, people coming from Central America into Mexico must try and fail to obtain asylum in Guatemala before moving on to go through the same process in Mexico before seeking asylum in the U.S. Mexico had refused DDT’s negotiations, but he still forces the “third-country” asylum rule on that country. A 9^th Circuit Court ruling against DDT’s new restriction had been only for the ten states in its jurisdiction, but Jon S. Tigar made that ruling consistent for the entire country to prevent “uneven enforcement.”

The relief ended when DDT’s U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay to that judge’s ruling until the courts settled the cases, a process taking and leaving the Supreme Court as the final decider—or “fixer” for DDT. The lower courts determined that DDT’s policy conflicts with existing immigration statutes, violates the requirements of administrative rulemaking, and completely blocks all asylum for people on the southern border unless they come from Mexico. The decision was not explained.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginzberg submitted a dissent stating that lower court decisions should be respected and a stay overturning a lower court is “extraordinary.” The Supreme Court should not be used for the government to ignore lower court litigation. DDT’s administration has made an “extraordinary” number of requests—20—to bypass normal procedures or lower court actions. In addition to procedural anomalies, the dissent pointed out that the goal of DDT’s asylum policy is acting in bad faith. Facts do not support their arguments and illustrated that the policy puts untold numbers of people in serious danger—which DDT and his co-authors know. The decision overturns a longstanding offer of safe refuge to the persecuted with no input before DDT loses on the case’s merits. The lower court determined that DDT’s new policy broke government rules, violated the law, and lacks justification by being arbitrary and capricious.

One group of immigrants that DDT wants to protect are Venezuelans. He thinks that it might help him win the state of Florida in the 2020 election.

Perhaps the worst part of immigration court is control by the DOJ instead of the judicial branch. DDT’s fixer AG, Bill Barr, promoted the six judges with higher rates of denying immigrants’ asylum to the immigration appeals court that can overturn lower court decisions. Two of them came from courts drawing complaints of unfair proceedings from attorneys and advocates, and a third denies asylum to domestic violence victims. The six comprise over one-fourth of the appellate board, and four are on the DDT-created Board of Immigration Appeals. Barr established a regulation giving himself the ability to make any appellate decision binding. DOJ sent an email to all immigration court employees with a link to an article from the white nationalist website VDare that “directly attacks sitting immigration judges with racial and ethnically tinged slurs.”

The DOJ also filed a petition to decertify the union of immigration judges with the claim that they are “management officials.” The Federal Labor Relations Authority refused this tactic over 20 years ago, but the new FLRA members mostly belong to DDT. Last year, the union fought the new DOJ quota system of completing 700 cases a year and “efficiency” procedures that could damage due process in court. DDT has appointed at least 43 percent of the 440 immigration judges; changing them to “management” would allow him to fire them at his whim.

While DDT torments and kills migrants, the asylum law is now at the center of his immigration battle. The law says: “Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States, whether or not at a designated port of arrival … may apply for asylum.”

Not satisfied with detaining only immigrants, DDT wants to incarcerate the homeless in a federal facility, starting his roundup in California to rile up his base for the 2020 election.

At his speech in Baltimore, DDT used a favorite term, “goddamn,” which the evangelical community hates. Texas megachurch leader and DDT supporter Rev. Robert Jeffress said, “I can take just about everything else, except [taking the Lord’s name in vain.” For evangelicals, cruelty, corruption, killing, abuse, lying, racism all okay, but “goddamn” crosses the line.

Epstein’s Death May Cover for DDT’s Undocumented Workers

Last week, ICE arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants at seven Mississippi plants on the first day of school, leaving their children homeless and at the mercy of townspeople’s charity. One question raised by ICE’s actions is why employers aren’t arrested. Only five companies have been prosecuted for hiring undocumented immigrants in the past 30 months despite ICE’s fervent attacks on their workers. None of these cases occurred from April 2018 to March 2019 although Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) said that making employers comply with immigration and labor laws is a top priority. In 2017, the DOJ began settlements from prosecution with seven, recently a $60,000 civil fine against a strawberry farm in Florida.

One current reason for reluctance in charging companies might be that DDT’s company hires undocumented workers. The investigation from the Washington Post found no evidence of ICE audits or raids at DDT’s properties in the recent past, either before or after he ran for president. The drop in corporate immigration cases has coincided with an overall drop in white-collar enforcement. White-collar crime prosecutions hit a historic low in January and are on track to be down six percent this year than fiscal 2018 and 30 percent below five years ago.

DDT’s company has relied in private on workers without legal immigration status even as Trump denounced such immigrants in public. For almost 20 years, workers who came into the United States illegally have built rock walls, waterfalls, fountains, and other features at his winery and golf courses from New York to Florida. And they are still employed for this work; supervisors tell them how to get false identity documents. Once the word got out last year about how permanent employees at golf courses were undocumented, 18 of them were fired. But the construction crew has stayed the same. The Trump Organization is still not listed for E-Verify for new hires.

According to industry officials, the Trump Organization has an advantage over competitors at a time of low employment because they are less likely to complain or change jobs if they are treated poorly. Some of them are sent hundreds of miles away from their homes for months to different jobs. DDT’s undocumented construction crew was started by stonemason Frank Sanzo when DDT’s bought a country club in foreclosure that required extensive masonry work. Sanzo told the crew to buy false Social Security numbers and green cards to put into the Trump Organization files. When labor union officials visited the construction site, Sanzo told the immigrant crew to hide until they left. 

During DDT’s campaign, one of his executives registered the construction crew under a new legal name, Mobile Payroll Construction. Nothing changed except for the name signing the paychecks. Mobile never scrutinized the workers’ immigration status. The company accepted an “individual Tax Identification Number” from the IRS for proof of legal status, although employers are told that these are insufficient. The government requires immigration and identity documents that “reasonably appear to be genuine.” DDT used in-house workers to avoid permitting costs for projects. Employees also did not receive health insurance, overtime wages, and other benefits.

DDT’s employment of undocumented workers:

• They have been employed at a minimum of five golf courses, for 17 years at one club.
• Despite denial, supervisors knew about the workers’ undocumented status.
• know about their status?
• DDT may have known about the undocumented status, but the Trump Organization and the White House refuse to answer questions about what he knows. He did say that “probably every club in the United States has [undocumented workers because it’s] a way that people did business.”
• DDT claims his company is using E-Verify, a voluntary federal system that allows employers to quickly check the immigration status of new hires. Only three of his golf courses were listed as enrolled in E-Verify as of 2019; now all 12 of his golf courses are listed.

The New York state attorney general’s office is collecting information on DDT’s undocumented employees through interviews with a focus on wage-and-labor-law violations. New Jersey is doing the same thing. A wall might not have stopped DDT’s undocumented workers from coming into the country.

Mar-a-Lago‘s large number of foreign cooks, wait people, and housekeepers are legal. DDT claims no one in the United States will do the work, but he fights immigrants coming into the country because they take jobs from U.S. citizens. The fault lies not with the people who come to the country but with the wealthy business owners who exploit workers.

For the second year, farm workers and their supporters marched 14 miles in 90-degree heat through Washington state berry fields in protest to widespread abuse of agricultural labor. DDT is deporting laborers who have lived and worked here for years—like the ones in Mississippi—and replacing them with H-2A visa guest workers in another form of exploitation. That program was popular in 1954 when growers brought in 450,000 temporary workers and the country deported over a million people. It was abolished in 1964, but the H-2A visa was never eliminated.

Workers who can’t pick enough crops to satisfy the ever-needy corporations are threatened with deportation and sometimes don’t receive wages. Marchers held a moment of silence for Honesto Sila Ibarra, an H-2A guest worker who died after he was forced to return to work in the fields after he collapsed. A lawsuit against Ibarra’s employer, Sarbanand Farms, quoted a supervisor as saying that workers were told to work “unless they were on their death bed.”

By law, growers can bring in guest workers only if no local workers are available after the company advertisers. Another lawsuit against a Washington labor recruiter and a large winery charges that H-2A programs replaced local farmworkers after horrible working conditions discouraged locals from employment. Mercer Canyons, the company, settled by paying workers $545,000 and attorneys’ fees.

DDT claims that illegal immigration is a national crisis and lowers wages for people in the U.S. In his State of the Union speech this year, he said:

“Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate. It is cruel.”

DDT’s Labor Department proposed rule changes on July 26 to make the H-2A program cheaper and easier for growers to use because employers would not need to offer jobs to local farmworkers. Proposed rules also allow multiple growers to move workers from job to job in crews that help contractors to avoid local workers. Another advantage for employers—and disadvantage for workers—is for growers to self-inspect housing, which can be terrible. Ten percent of farm workers who are Washington residents live outdoors in a car or tent, and another 20 percent live in garages, shacks, or “in places not intended to serve as bedrooms.”

The new rule would also allow employers to save $80 million a year by forcing H-2A workers to pay for transportation costs from their homes to where they work instead of from the U.S. border. Growers also save millions with a complicated change in calculating minimum wages to not undercut wages of resident farm labor by eliminating standards for piece rates cuts hourly wages by $6.  

Once again the media has been diverted from DDT’s possible crimes with the death of Jeffrey Epstein, 66, in his jail cell. He was incarcerated on charges of sexually abusing dozens of young girls—many of them underage—in the early 2000s, crimes that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta covered up to stop an FBI investigation. Law enforcement said Epstein was found hanging in his cell in what the Bureau of Prisons called an “apparent suicide.” The New York City ME is investigating the death.

Two weeks ago, Epstein was found unconscious in his cell with marks around his neck, but he was taken off suicide watch after a week. People close to Epstein consider a homicide because he had been in good spirits. The death came less than a day after the court unsealed a large number of documents about his activities and people who may have observed them. The lawyer representing two alleged victims plans to file a civil lawsuit against Epstein’s estate and called for his executors to freeze the estate assets. Epstein stayed in the same federal facility as Paul Manafort, drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, and the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef while they waited for trials.

AG Bill Barr has promised an investigation by his inspector general, in addition to the FBI investigation, into Epstein’s death, guaranteeing more media distraction from DDT’s crimes. At the same time, conspiracy theories are rolling: DDT retweeted a post blaming the death on Hillary Clinton and her husband, President Bill Clinton. The tweeter has no evidence, but these theories trended today.

Another man who preyed on underage girls,  self-described anarchist Cody Wilson, escaped a charge of felony sexual assault by pleading guilty to injury to a child. He stays out of prison but must register as a sex offender for seven years. During that time, he cannot own a firearm. Wilson had downloaded gun designs for 3-D printers to give criminals untraceable weapons. A judge had blocked Wilson from uploading the blueprints, but Wilson distributed his blueprints in other ways such as selling the files with the consumer determining the price. 

DDT’s Failures—Citizenship Question, Environment

“We are not backing down,” Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) announced in the Rose Garden yesterday when he backed down from putting a citizenship question into the 2020 census. This morning, he declared that he would sign an executive order to include the question, despite the Supreme Court and three lower courts ruling against it. This afternoon, he issued an executive order requiring federal departments to provide records about resident noncitizens to the Commerce Department, an action easily done without one of his “executive orders.” Although the monthly American Community Survey, which asks the citizen question, is sent to about one percent of the population each year, but this data cannot be used for legislative and congressional redistricting.

Earlier this week, the DOJ tried to trade out its legal team to argue the case, a first for the DOJ. The judge rejected a new team, calling the request “patently deficient” because the government had provided “no reasons, let alone ’satisfactory reasons,’ for the substitution of counsel.” He required the government to show that replacing the team won’t add further delay to the suit and mandated each of the 11 lawyers now on the case to submit a signed and sworn affidavit giving “satisfactory reasons” for the request. The plaintiffs also have a pending motion to sanction the government for false testimony for the motivation behind the question. New York Attorney General Letitia James said:

“Despite the president attempting to fire his lawyers, this is not an episode of The Apprentice.”

AG Bill Barr, DDT’s fixer, gave an impressive speech declaring victory for DDT after they both backed down. Barr said that they would win if they kept fighting but that they had too little time.  DDT’s “victory” means taking the option that he rejected over a year ago. Earlier this week, Barr had said that he had a way to put the question on the census forms but wouldn’t tell anyone. Before the House leaves for its August recess, members plan to vote to hold both AG William P. Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas tied to the citizenship question.

DDT’s kerfuffle about the citizenship question eclipsed today’s social media summit with conservative online commentators to complain about what they perceive as censorship from big tech companies. DDT tweeted that topics will be “the tremendous dishonesty, bias, discrimination and suppression practiced by certain companies.” Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were not invited. DDT’s goal was to distract the media and his supporters from his and his Labor Secretary Alex Acosta’s involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein child sex-trafficking scandal. At his meeting in the East Room, DDT attacked Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rather than Joe Biden, indicating that he sees Warren as a greater opponent than Biden.

A few special guests DDT invited to his “troll party”:

James O’Keefe, who doctors videos to embarrass progressives including faking negative accounts of ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and Medicaid, got caught trying to pull a sting on Washington Post’s reporting about child molester Roy Moore during his last run for U.S. Senate.

Carpe Donktum publishes doctored videos to support DDT that sometimes cause him to be blocked from Twitter.  

Ali Alexander (aka Akbar) tried to start a racist birther-like campaign by tweeting that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is not an “American Black,” a post quote-tweeted by Donald Trump, Jr. Alexander’s earlier Twitter ban this year came after he lied to followers about buying bitcoin, ammo, and guns because of a non-existent impending civil war.

Jim Hoft created the blog Gateway Pundit with such falsehoods as Hillary Clinton having a serious gum disease, E. Jean Carroll getting her DDT rape allegation for Law & Order, and Parkland shooting survivors being “crisis actors.”

Tim Pool claims to support progressive causes and policies but promotes right-wing rumors.

Benny Johnson, once a BuzzFeed writer, moved up the conspiracy chain to Daily Caller to complete DDT obsession after a series of plagiarism accusations.

Minds, an “anti-Facebook” and “Crypto social network,” rewards contributors in bitcoins, giving haven to violent neo-Nazi groups such as Atomwaffen, which has been linked to several murders in the U.S., and Feuerkrieg Division, which has made death threats against tech CEOs and politicians. Those two groups were banned, but other white supremacist accounts remain.

Bill Mitchell, a promoter of the bizarre conspiracy movement QAnon, tells his radio show listener that “Q is trying to do is motivate and encourage the base” by opposing media coverage critical of Trump.  

Michael Morrison was recently suspended from Twitter for closely copying Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez’s Twitter account in what he called a parody.

Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), under ethics charges for threatening witness Michael Cohen, praised Infowars, castigated the “deep state,” and introduced a resolution to force investigator Robert Mueller to resign.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) blocked a bill requiring political campaigns to report offers of foreign assistance to the FBI. DDT has already said he would welcome negative information about opponents in the 2020 election. Accepting help from a foreign entity or power is already illegal, but the bill would mandate reporting any offers. Blackburn said that mandatory reporting would pose an “overbroad” burden. At a recent conference, Israeli government minister Gilad Erdan bragged that Israel was responsible for laws in 27 U.S. states that blocked free speech supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign targeting Israel. Russia isn’t the only country controlling U.S. elections.

Plus a few more GOP members of Congress and Cabinet members. Despite DDT’s refusal to include the major tech companies, he must have faith in them. His campaign spent over $5 million on Facebook ads just this year.

DDT declared himself an environmental president this week came after polls showed him week in this area with millennials and suburban women. He repeated his bizarre statement that forest fires can be blocked by cleaning “dirty floors.” Yet he allowed timber companies to cut more trees, usually the big, more fire-resistant trees while leaving combustible piles of low-value tinder that exacerbate forest fires and bragged about “being good stewards of our public land,” reducing carbon emissions, and promoting the “cleanest air” and “crystal clean” water. In truth, DDT opened up public lands to drilling, signed off on the biggest rollback of federal land protection, and lifted a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public lands. The EPA is rolling back clean-water regulation of pollution in streams and wetlands, and DDT proposed opening up the U.S. coastline to offshore oil and gas drilling. Carbon emissions have declined in the U.S. but only half that of a dozen other country. DDT falsely cited the high cost of the Dems’ Green New Deal, not yet determined, and omitted the 3.1 percent increase in 2018 when taking credit for the decline in carbn emissions since 2000. DDT left out the part that he pushes coal plants that increase carbon dioxide emissions. Joining DDT for his speech were two Cabinet secretaries, former lobbyists for the coal and oil industries who oversee energy and environment issues.

Shortly before the speech, Washington, DC floods [left] from rain shut down part of a nearby subway station and created pools of water in the White House basement. New Orleans [right] faces an unprecedented problem, possibly worse than the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, with the Mississippi River at record flooding, 16 feet instead of the usual six to eight feet in midsummer. Tropical Storm Barry, the season’s first tropical system, could cause a storm surge of two to three feet at the river mouth for a crest of 20 feet, not seen since February 1950 and 2.3 feet short of the April 1922 record. Evacuations of almost 200 offshore oil facilities has cut off more than half the region’s oil output. An EPA report had warned of effects from the climate crisis, but DDT buried the information.

DDT’s White House pastor preaches that environmentalism is radical and foolish, because God put natural resources on earth for people to use up. EPA director Andrew Wheeler took credit for falling air pollution from 1970 to cover up the 3.1 percent increase in carbon emissions in 2018. DDT called himself “a believer in solar energy,” but he put huge tariffs on solar panels in 2018, eliminating thousands of solar installation jobs, and made deep cuts in solar funding. Although claiming credit for fighting Florida’s toxic algae problem, he failed to allocate sufficient funds to restore the Everglades and reduce polluted water discharges from Lake Okeechobee.

The one subject DDT left out of his speech on the environment? Climate change—or as it’s now called, climate crisis. He might want to reconsider this omission. He’s unpopular on a number of key issues such as health care, gun violence, foreign policy, immigration, and abortion, but his bottom rating—29 percent approval—is for his handling of climate change. In only one issue, the economy, is he over 50 percent approval—at 51 percent.

How to Create More Problems with Immigration

When Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) purged the Department of Homeland Security, many people blamed his aide, neo-Nazi Stephen Miller, for the firings. Even GOP senators were upset about Miller’s ascension in DDT Land: Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) called Miller the “guy behind the curtain.” Miller was behind DDT’s executive order banning Muslims from the United States and the family separation policy at the southern border. He crafted DDT’s anti-immigrant speeches, and his ideas mesh well with DDT’s bigotry toward people of color in an excuse of “law and order.”

During Miller’s high school at Santa Monica High School and college days at Duke University, he spread his philosophy of “Americanism,” especially in his push for English-speaking first. In a column for the college newspaper, he argued that multiculturalism threatens U.S. identity. In Washington, D.C., he worked for congressional members, such as then-Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) before he became senior policy adviser for DDT’s presidential campaign. Richard Painter, a White House ethics lawyer during President George W. Bush’s administration, called Miller “the most notorious racist in the Trump White House.”

According to former DHS officials, Miller got rid of DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen by leaking information about asylum seekers at the southern border to the Washington Examiner and then giving copies of the newspaper reports to DDT. Nielsen was joined in April DHS departures by Randolph Alles, director of the Secret Service, and the White House withdrawal of Ron Vitiello’s nomination for head of ICE. On June 1, Miller dumped Lee Cissna, Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-IA) former staffer as head of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Pushing out Cissna irritates Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) because he, along with other establishment senators, hates DDT’s replacement, Ken Cuccinelli. Cissna is a knowledgeable immigration hawk; Cuccinelli has only loyalty to DDT. Under Cissna, his department created systems to delay approvals and increase denials for immigrants, participating in DDT’s attempt to get rid of DACA and sunset Temporary Protected Status designations for several countries. Cissna was in charge of cracking down on asylum-seekers that returned thousands of them to Mexico where they remain in danger.

DDT needs Republican senators, including McConnell, to get Cuccinelli confirmed, but the former Virginia AG has no experience in immigration law and regulation. He also leads the Senate Conservatives Fund with the goal of defeating incumbent Republicans in primaries. Two years ago, Cuccinelli signed a letter calling for McConnell to step down.

Cuccinelli does have experience in persecuting immigrants by restricting them access to public services, employment, and citizenship. In 2010, he supported the Arizona law permitting police to investigate the immigration status of any person stopped by law enforcement and issued a legal opinion expanding a policy to include any suspected undocumented immigrant in Virginia. In the state senate, Cuccinelli proposed a law allowing employers to fire employees who didn’t speak English in the workplace and deny them unemployment compensation. Another of his bills would permit businesses to sue competitors for economic damages if they believed the employers hired undocumented immigrants plus $500 “for each such illegal alien employed by the defendant.” In 2008, he encouraged Congress to call a constitutional convention for the purpose of amending the 14^th Amendment of the constitution by excluding citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants.

After trying to hide his anti-immigrant past during his lost run for governor, he appeared on conservative media advocating the militarization of the border and prevention of all immigrants from Central America. He also wrote an op-ed for the Washington Examiner to support the deployment of troops to the southern border.  

As AG, Cuccinelli crusaded against the Affordable Care Act and fought to keep Virginia’s sodomy law, struck down by the Supreme Court a decade earlier. Equating being gay with pedophilia, he started the website VAChildPredators and listed the names of everyoneone convicted of sodomy. Despite his claim to protect children, the anti-sodomy law was only for consensual oral or anal sex between adults—no matter what gender. The Supreme Court struck down his attempts.

In other attacks on LGBTQ people, he fought to keep same-gender couples from adopting and tried to eliminate nondiscrimination protections in colleges and universities. If he heads immigration and citizenship, he can continue to block children born overseas to same-gender parents from becoming citizens. His appointment will be the destruction of same-gender families and death sentences for LGBTQ asylum seekers.

Cucinelli also opposes all abortion, even in cases of rape, incest, and the mother’s health. To Cuccinelli, any information about sexuality—even in higher education—is symptomatic of the “moral depravity that has crept across this commonwealth and this country.” The Catholic Church creates a “culture of dependency on government, not God,” according to Cuccinelli, because they want to care for the poor, immigrants, and uninsured. He ridiculed a Catholic diocese newspaper for putting these issues in its voter guides.

A vehement climate change denier, Cuccinelli frequently tells audiences to exhale carbon dioxide together to “annoy the EPA.” He investigated former University of Virginia climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann for fraud because Mann sought government funding for climate change research. Much of Cuccinelli’s funding came from fossil fuel companies that he inappropriately helped in coalbed methane extraction rights, according to a state judge and Virginia’s inspector general. He followed the “birther” conspiracy about President Obama’s birth place falsely being in Kenya and then asserted that the president was re-elected through voter fraud. At the site of the Virginia Tech mass shooting where 32 people were killed, he bragged about his NRA “A” rating.

In addition to Cuccinelli being a truly awful nominee, his appointment may be illegal. The 1998 Federal Vacancies Reform Act requires that nominees to lead agencies must have had another federal government position in the executive branch, G-15 or above, for at least 90 days before the vacancy or in another Senate-confirmed role. DDT slipped Cuccinelli into a newly invented “principal deputy director” position to carry out his nefarious activities for at least two years as “acting” and not requiring confirmation.

Cuccinelli’s competitor, Kris Kobach, is even crazier than Cuccinelli. A few weeks ago, Kobach was a media joke for the demands he made for being “immigration czar”: access to a government jet 24 hours a day; an office in the West Wing; a staff of seven; walk-in privileges with DDT; Assistant to the President rank with commensurate high pay; security detail; face of DDT’s immigration policy; guaranteed weekends off for family time; orders that secretaries of DHS, Defense, Justice Ag, Interior, and Commerce immediately follow his directives without question; and the promise that he would be appointed DHS Secretary by November. Kobach wrote anti-immigration laws, used faulty computer software to suppress the vote, and acted as adviser to the even crazier former Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

To suppress the U.S. vote, Kobach led DDT’s “election” commission, disbanded in 2018. The same year, Kobach lost his run for Kansas governor to a female Democrat—in Kansas! Now he’s considering a run for U.S. senator after Pat Roberts plans to not run again. Republicans are so unhappy about the possibility that National Republicans said they will “make sure he doesn’t make it past the primary.”

DDT seems to be bringing undocumented immigrants to the southern border in far greater numbers than President Obama. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) holds DDT responsible. In April, he said:

“I called up all the folks I’ve been working with on this, what’s going on. They said, well, there’s a couple of small reasons and one big reason. The small reasons are the elections in Guatemala and better bus travel from southern Mexico to northern Mexico. But the big reason? As Trump rants about the border, so many people are saying, ‘I’m in this terrible situation; if I’m going to go, I’d better go now.’ It’s all Trump-generated.”

Numbers at the southern border have increased since then. DDT advertises his wall and announces elimination of aid to Central America to improve the political and economic conditions. In 2014, U.S. aid to El Salvador drove down violent crime in the country, and migration dropped. Since then, climate warming and rainfall decrease eradicates corn crops in Honduras and loss of agriculture in Guatemala. DDT’s rejection of climate change and its problems will mean more “climate refugees.” He also may be causing worsening economic conditions in Central America forcing refugees as a rallying point for his 2020 election. Illegal immigration fell for eight years under a Democratic president before it steadily rose after the Republicans took over all three branches of government.

In DHS’ and privatization’s latest failure, photos of airport passengers and other personal data including license plate information collected by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol have been stolen in computer hacking. The surveillance facial-recognition program, sold by Amazon, has thus far been proved to be faulty, especially for women and people of color. The private firm Perceptics, most likely the target of the attack, is part of an initiative to verify identities of all travelers at the border. Just another evidence of encroaching authoritarianism in the United States.  

Rep. Walden: These Are ‘Americans’

“It underscores the sanctity of life.”—AL Gov. Kay Ivey about the new draconian anti-choice law that she signed

 “We value life. That is what makes us unique.”—Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders about the immigration crisis

These statements honor fetuses and white people. As for the rest of humanity, here is their treatment from Dictator Donald Trump’s (DDT):

Not only is DDT still separating children from their parents at the southern border, he is separating mothers from their newborn children.

Medications for migrants, including for issues such as high blood pressure and diabetes, are taken at the border. Other medications they lose are for prenatal vitamins, seizures, and asthma, but these medications are not replaced. ICE has tried to suppress information about an epidemic of mumps sweeping throughout the migrants. Not one case was reported last year. Migrant children are dying in federal custody because of no health care for the first time in a decade.

Border Patrol agents cage asylum seeking families who wait for processing and give them only Mylar sheets while migrants are forced them to sleep on rocky terrain where temperatures drop into the 30s. Every three hours they are awakened and forced to stand in a “sleep deprivation tactic.” Migrants also suffer from lack of food, water, and medical care, and agents spray them with water from water bottles. One El Paso (TX) facility meant to hold 125 people contained 900 people.  

Media attention and the threat of a visit from congressional Democrats caused the Border Patrol to move migrants from a fenced area under an El Paso bridge to “more space and more shelter capability”—tents in a parking lot. With temperatures in the low 40s, children were forced to remove additional layers of clothing. Border patrol agents threw away their clothing and blankets. [visual migrants]

The DHS inspector general reported expired food—even raw chicken leaking blood on refrigeration units—and other insanitary conditions in bathrooms in a surprise visit to four privately-operated immigrant detention facilities last year. The IG’s report expressed concern about nooses in detainee cells, misuse of solitary confinement, and delayed medical care.

Last summer, migrant youth and families were housed at polluted military bases with contaminated water. Exposure to the toxic chemicals can cause cancer, neurological damage, developmental harm, and many other diseases.  The problem was hidden for six months.

A child with a broken nose had no medical assistance for over a month. Children cannot go to the bathroom without writing a request and then are blocked from the bathroom if they ask too many times. The law has a maximum of 20 days for children in restrictive government facilities, but at many children are there far longer—sometimes over a year. The average length is 35 days. Migrant children aren’t even permitted to “give a friend a hug.”

DDT has canceled English classes, recreational programs such as soccer, and legal aid for unaccompanied minors in his migrant “shelters” as of May 22 to blackmail Congress for more funding. The illegal move runs counter to a federal court settlement and state-licensing requirements mandating education and recreation for minors in federal custody.

Last July, 37 migrant children ages 5 to 12 were left in the Texas heat in vans for up to 39 hours while waiting for reunification with their parents. Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) expressed outrage, saying, “This is not who we are as Americans.” But government reports prove that it is.

Despite DDT’s “love” for the military, immigrant active service members migrants are denied citizenship at a higher rate than foreign-born civilians.

Last year, an investigation from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) discovered that over 500 of their employees were arrested on charges from bribery to domestic abuse in 2016 and 2017. Most of the crimes involved drugs or alcohol. CBP didn’t report the killings of five women by two different border agents in 2018. DHS found that corrupt border agents are so dangerous that they “pose a national security threat,” but the government pays tens of millions of dollars to settle wrongful death lawsuits involving border officials.

A jury is now deliberating in a trial against defendant Scott Warren, 36, in Tucson (AZ), who gave humanitarian aid—food, water, clean clothes, and beds—to two undocumented immigrants in Ajo (AZ). The prosecutors assert that they weren’t in distress and want to put him in prison for 20 years. The government accused Warren of telling the men how to avoid checkpoints because he “pointed north.” Warren volunteers for a humanitarian aid group, No More Deaths, that recovers bodies of migrants and provides water and other aid to the living. 

The International Red Cross code of conduct lists orientation—knowing location—as a basic human right along with food, water and shelter. A normal part of orientation is pointing out immoveable objects in the distance. Prosecutors also accused Warren of conspiring with aid worker Irineo Mujica, but they failed to present Warren’s email to other volunteers to touch base with the Mexican shelter operator before going there. Mujica was not asked about Warren in an interview with border patrol agents. The Border Patrol admits that no one is legally mandated to call police if they know someone is illegally in the U.S.

Arrests and treatment of asylum seekers isn’t the only area in which the United States comes in below countries according to an evaluation in 12 human rights categories from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative. Discrimination and safety from the state, including police shootings, were the other two with “strikingly poor results.” The U.S. scored 4.9 out of 10 in empowerment with three political and civil rights: the right to assembly and association; the right to opinion and expression; and the right to participate in government.

• Freedom of expression in the U.S. scored 5.2, and people of color are least likely to have the right to participate in government because of voter suppression.
• In “physical integrity rights”—the right to freedom from arbitrary arrest, disappearance, execution, and torture—the U.S. is only three places behind Saudi Arabia. Lethal force by police against blacks and other people of color puts the U.S. below Mexico and Brazil. The 992^nd police shooting resulting in death—that of a man with a gun but not fleeing—occurred on the last day of 2018. Included in this category is also the deaths of children at the southern border and prisoners denied necessary medical care. Eighty percent of the reports’ experts cited the risk of torture for refugees or asylum seekers, especially LGBTQ people seeking protection.
• Blacks were identified as being vulnerable to abuses of every measured right, and Native Americans were next in having rights violated.

HRMI co-founder Chad Clay said, “On civil and political rights, the United States is the worst performing high-income democracy in our sample.”

A new report shows what I’ve long believed—that privatization costs taxpayers money than government workers. DDT promised to shrink the government; instead he gave his business friends money by paying them to hire people who would do the work for government cheaper. The result is much higher cost and lower accountability. Private businesses get contracts with donations to politicians and then write the rules. In general, private workers outnumber “government” workers three to one.

A prime example of this abuse is private contractors detaining migrants. GEO received $480 million in federal funds, and CoreCivic got over $331 million since DDT was inaugurated. These contractors supposedly saves money for the U.S. with less staff, less training, and less programming—resulting in more abuse, illness, and deaths. The same companies make even more money by using heir “inmates” to carry out forced labor. GEO spent $1.56 million on lobbying in 2018 and contributed $275,000 to DDT’s super PAC Rebuilding America Now in 2016; CoreCivic gave $1.23 million lobying and $378,000 in campaign donations, 93 percent to Republicans, in 2018. 

John Kelly, former chief of staff and DHS director, has joined the board of Caliburn International, parent of the only private company operating migrant shelters. One of its facilities, located in Homestead (FL), is the only shelter not subject to state child-fare inspections. People have observed a number of abusive actions toward children in the facility. The Homestead “shelter” gets $750 a day for each child and currently has about 2,300 young people. (That’s $1,725,000—every day.) The average stay in 2019 is about 89 days. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) pointed out that Kelly is “cashing in” the same “cruel immigration policies” that he promoted and executed. Kelly backed DDT’s “zero tolerance” policy leading to forced separations of migrant children from their parents.

Other private contractors are being hired to transport hundreds of thousands of migrants throughout the United States.

Yes, Rep. Walden, that’s who “Americans” are.

How Long Will GOP Radicalize Conservatives

Republicans seem to have grown increasingly tired of pandering to Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) after he broke the law in giving Congress a report on the torture and dismemberment of U.S. resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi. After DDT said that he could refuse the demand under the Magnitsky Act to report on the responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last October, several GOP congressional members threatened to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led civil war in Yemen.

DDT’s cavalier attitude toward congressional and constitutional law may be part of the impetus for Republicans stating that they may have a compromise with Democrats to forestall this week’s impending government shutdown. The deal offers less money for DDT’s wall—only 55 miles in proscribed places—than what DDT turned down last year. The term is “border barrier” for “wall,” not DDT’s “beautiful” concrete wall.

Tonight, DDT went on the campaign trail to El Paso where he lied to his audience about how much safer they are with the wall and how he’s already building a wall in the middle of the Rio Grande River. Occasionally he wandered off to encourage chants about Hillary Clinton of “lock her up” and question whether he should have a dog in the White House. His accusations came after both the city of El Paso and El Paso County passed resolutions criticizing DDT for his claims about crime in the city. In 2005, before the government decided to build a wall in El Paso, the murder rate in the city across from drug violence-plagued Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, was one-half the national rate. Violence increased after the decision to create a wall between the two communities and continued to be worse for two years after a wall was installed. The city resolution stated that “Donald Trump has continuously made inaccurate claims about the United States’ southern border, including El Paso” and noted that data from Customs and Border Protection showed that “no crisis exists” on the border. DDT said that El Paso’s GOP  mayor, Dee Margo, is “full of crap.”

A counter-event led by former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) was attended by about 7,000 people, more than attendance at DDT’s rally.

DDT persistently inflates his immigration figures. A bizarre tweet from late January:

“We are not even into February and the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392. There are at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years, in our Country. So ridiculous! DHS”

After paying interest on the growing debt, mandatory expenditures on Social Security and health care, and the $700 billion for the military, the U.S. has less than $600 billion left–less than the money that DDT claimed was spent on “illegal immigration” in one day. Instead of using figures from the government, he got the tweet from watching television during his “Executive Time”—this time the far-right One America News Network. Acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said he doesn’t know where DDT gets his numbers.

Jonathan Blitzer cited the history of immigration for the past 40 years. In 1980, the U.S. accepted more than 200,000 refugees displaced by war and other violence. The number has greatly lessened since then, with President Obama’s 110,000 in 2017 because of Syrians fleeing civil war.

Despite objections from his advisers, DDT has dropped the cap on immigration to 45,000—objections from everyone except Stephen Miller, DDT’s neo-Nazi immigration adviser, who wanted the number to be far lower. Miller is suppressing studies showing that revenue from refugees through local, state, and federal taxes exceeded resettlement costs by $63 billion. According to witnesses, he told the Department of Health and Human Services:

“The President believes refugees cost more, and the results of this study shouldn’t embarrass the President.”

A State Department official said about Miller, “He shut down the U.S. government’s democratic approach to decision-making.” Miller cherry-picked statistics in studies, changed them and then wrote his own paper, often using falsehoods from the anti-immigration group Center for Immigration Studies. He successfully quashed Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner because he was the only one with government experience and found it easy to create his process because no established set of procedures existed. The conservative Cato Institute called DDT’s immigration reforms “the most severe restriction on legal immigrants since the 1920s.”

While DDT talks about keeping undocumented immigrants, who he calls rapists and criminals, from endangering everyone’s life, he hired them for his businesses, including resorts, because he can pay them less and have more control over them. Many of his employees were illegally brought from one Costa Rica town where a person said, “Many of us helped him get what he has today.” DDT has a long history of employing undocumented immigrants: in 1998, he paid more than $1.3 million for his illegal hiring of undocumented workers to build Trump Tower in 1980.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Shelby (R-AL) echoed DDT’s call to be afraid of immigrants from Democrats who, DDT claims, “want a cap on convicted violent felons to be held in detention!” The senators ignored the rationale that ICE should concentrate on violent undocumented immigrants and keep the level of detentions in recent years.

In the time-honored tradition of bullies, DDT and Republicans want to terrorize anyone who disagree with them. According to a 2006 study, conservatives thinking about personal mortality increased their call for military intervention to kill thousands of civilians overseas. A 2017 study determined that encouraging death-related thoughts directly increased support for DDT. The same study found that these participants viewed immigrants moving into their neighborhood as a threat to their existence because the participants have been inculcated with fear.

Fear and aggression are circular: each creates the other with a feedback leading to mass hysteria and collective anger. From that manipulation of fear and aggression come bigotry and racism inflamed by the white supremacy movement. In that way, DDT radicalizes his loyalists into a fearful cult-like following, brainwashing victims much like the radicalized ISIS members by a fundamentalist ideology. DDT is continually radicalizing conservative people in the U.S. by describing immigrants as predatory creatures who threaten safety. Four academic studies disagree with his lies that undocumented immigration increases violent crime.

• Michael Light, University of Wisconsin, Madison in Criminology: “Increased undocumented immigration since 1990 has not increased violent crime over that same time period.”
• From the same researchers: The dramatic influx of undocumented immigrants did not increase rates of drug and alcohol arrests or the number of drug overdoses and DUI deaths.
• The libertarian Cato Institute: In 2015, criminal conviction and arrest rates in Texas for undocumented immigrants were lower than those of native-born Americans for murder, sexual assault, and larceny.
• U.K. journal Migration Letters: Youthful undocumented immigrants engage in less crime than do legal immigrants or U.S.-born peers.

The Texas side of the southern border has less crime than the state’s larger cities and is much safer than Washington, D.C. and Chicago. El Paso is the safest city in the United States for its size.

DDT stopped trying to radicalize his base with his graphic descriptions of women being silenced with duct tape—a fantasy taken directly from the movie called Sicario: Day of the Soldado, but not until a Border Patrol official, following orders from  Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, emailed agents urgently seeking “any information that you may have (in any format) regarding claims ‘that traffickers tie up and silence women with tape before illegally driving them through the desert from Mexico to the United States in the backs of cars and windowless vans.’” DDT has a pattern of looking for evidence to back up his fabrications.

Evidence of women and duct tape on the border exists, but DDT would probably not want to use it. Border Patrol agent Esteban Manzanares took three women seeking asylum to a wooded area outside McAllen (TX). Manzanares tied the 14-year-old girl to a tree and covered her mouth with silver duct tape before he sexually assaulted another girl. Then he twisted her neck and the neck of the girl’s mother before he slashed their wrists. Manzanares, father of two, was also a pedophile.

At least ten people in South Texas have been victims of murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, and/or rape by Border Patrol agents since DDT was inaugurated. One stabbed and killed his girlfriend and their one-year-old son. Another Border Patrol agent fatally shot four women working as prostitutes and tried to kidnap a fifth to kill her. While DDT wants to hire thousands more Border Patrol agents, records show hundreds of agents and CBP officers arrested or charged with corruption-related crimes—embezzlement, human smuggling, theft, bribery, breaking and entering, money laundering, providing false statements, and using firearms during drug-related crimes. Border Patrol agents Raul and Fidel Villarreal made $1 million for smuggling about 1,000 undocumented immigrants into the United States.

In radicalizing his base, DDT touts every violent crime of an undocumented immigrant as proof that Mexico needs to be walled off, but he never mentions the crimes of his own employees who cause a humanitarian crisis on the border.

DDT Lies, Destroys People’s Lies

“Birtherism is now federal policy. Anyone who is not white is suspected of not being a real American,” tweeted former Republican Max Boot. People with birth certificates are being denied passports because the government doesn’t “believe” that they are citizens—probably because they aren’t white. George W. Bush had sometimes done the same thing, but a 2009 government settlement stopped most of the passport denials. Now thousands of Hispanics along the border are accused of using fraudulent birth certificates. Even with official U.S. birth certificates passport applicants are being jailed in immigration detention centers and being entered into deportation proceedings. Others in Mexico with legal passports cannot reenter the U.S. because their passports are revoked. Passport applicants able to afford legal costs for suing the government typically win their cases, but many of this population cannot afford the fees and lawyers.

Charles Pierce wrote about passports in authoritarian countries:

“Back in the days of the Pinochet regime in Chile, over 20,000 Chilean exiles had their passports marked with an “L,” a designation that kept them out of the country…. In 1938, the German government invalidated all German passports belonging to Jewish citizens. By the fall, they were all issued new passports marked with a “J.” It was one of the first ways that German Jews were culled from the rest of the population and targeted. At about the same time, in the Soviet Union, passports were made mandatory as a means of internal control, as a means of keeping track of various elements of which the regime was not fond.”

Thousands of immigrants from Vietnam protected by a treaty are also being deported, facing danger because they supported the U.S.-backed state of South Vietnam. Most of them came to the U.S. before 1995 when diplomatic relations between Vietnam and the U.S. were resumed. Almost 2 million refugees left Vietnam after the war because they faced reprisals for working for the South Vietnamese government. Less than a year ago, Vietnam listed a U.S.-based group loyal to South Vietnam as a terrorist organization and jailed four people for 7-to-12 years for flying the South Vietnamese flag.

Stephen Miller, white supremacist aide to Dictator Donald Trump (DDT) created the policy that any noncitizen found guilty of a crime, even as small as a DUI, does not have immunity to deportation. Vietnam does not want the deportees, and they have no idea how to live in that country. Some of their crimes when they first arrived, bullied and growing up in poor neighborhoods.

DDT’s deportation of Mauritanians, another vulnerable population of people who have lived peacefully in the U.S. for many years, drives them into slavery and violence if they are forced to return to Mauritania.

Upset because he heard that most news on Google about him is negative, DDT is considering its regulation. Fox’s Lou Dobbs covered an unscientific report by PJ Media editor Paula Bolyward in which she titled, “96 Percent of Google Search Results for ‘Trump’ News Are from Liberal Media Outlets.” DDT’s predawn tweet read that search returns for “Trump News” were “RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD.” Asked if he wants to regulate Google and social media, DDT answered that he wants to make it “fair,” which might be another term for “regulation.”  Columnist Josh Rogin compares DDT’s threats with the censorship of the internet in China where people can be jailed for “publishing anything online that criticizes Xi directly, his government or anything the Communist Party deems improper, unharmonious or subversive.”

DDT has moved on to other diversions, but DDT’s top economic adviser Larry Kudlow said that an investigation into anti-conservative viewpoints will be “put through.” At the same time, Congress is looking into “bias” in “social media” and considering regulations for these private companies. At the same time, the U.S. government is using fake Facebook accounts in Cuba to clandestinely foment protest, according to the “Congressional Budget Justification[s]” from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The “non-branded local Facebook accounts to disseminate information … will be replicated on other preferred social media networks.” Last year’s report included a similar strategy with the rational that “native pages increase the chances of appearing on Cuban Facebook users newsfeeds.” Any success of this project could expand to foment clandestine protests in the U.S.  Congress might want to investigate that issue.

By assigning all his responsibilities to other people and being unable to attend events such as funerals because he is a pariah, DDT has time to travel the country and lie to people. The Associated Press tends to be very conservative, but it found these DDT lies last week, reporting that DDT “is living in an alternate reality when it comes to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and other controversies swirling around him.”

Some of last week’s falsehoods:

• A “perjury trap”: no one can make him lie in court unless he makes the decision to lie, and Mueller probably won’t indict a sitting president.
• Cohen’s crimes: yes, DDT, the campaign finance violations are crimes.
• Paul Manafort: DDT says that the man found guilty of eight counts—thus far—and not acquitted of the others should be considered innocent.
• Popularity among women: DDT says 52 percent, but that’s just white women; with all women, it’s 41 percent.
• Stealing political slogans: DDT complains that “Promises Made, Promises Kept” was taken by Bill DeBlasio, but DDT took it from Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and Michigan Gov. John Engler in 1994. Ronald Reagan’s slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) used “drain the swamp” in 2006.
• Tax cuts: no, they aren’t the biggest. The $1.5 trillion tax cut over 10 years ranks #12. (Maybe that’s why he’s pushing for more tax cuts this fall.) Thus far, the cuts are putting an extra $17 a month into take-home pay after factoring in higher state and local taxes while inflation has dropped wages in the past year.
• Environmental quality: the U.S. is definitely not #1; it ranks #27. The U.S. ranks #87, behind the Philippines, in dangerous soot exposure levels, and #66 in smog.
• Stealing political slogans: DDT complains that “Promises Made, Promises Kept” was taken by Bill DeBlasio, but DDT took it from Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and Michigan Gov. John Engler in 1994. Ronald Reagan’s slogan was “Let’s Make America Great Again.” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) used “drain the swamp” in 2006.
• Crime and immigration: Most of the MS-13 members caught are U.S. citizens, and there’s no indication that gang members “poured in” under President Obama. The total number of 10,000 in the U.S. is about the same as a decade ago. The DOJ stated that the Obama administration was especially successful in 2009 and 2010. Studies show that immigration doesn’t lead to increased crime. Foreign-born immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans.
• Clinton emails: DDT falsely claimed that the FBI ignored “675,000 Crooked Hillary Clinton Emails” that he knows are “really bad.” The lies came from the racist conspiracy-filled website produced by The Federalist. DDT threatened to “get involved.”   The FBI confirmed that DDT’s statements about China hacking Clinton’s emails were a lie, that there was no evidence of any breach in her server.

DDT even lies to Christian evangelicals. At his special dinner for evangelicals at the White House, DDT told attendees that he had gotten “rid of” a law forbidding churches and charitable organizations from endorsing political candidates. Congress was unable to kill the Johnson Amendment last year, and it’s still on the books. DDT told his audience to break the law before he said that the upcoming election is “a referendum on your religion.” I guess that he doesn’t find himself a part of evangelical Christianity.

After a man with an arsenal was arrested for threatening to murder reporters at the Boston Globe as “enemies of the people,” DDT ratcheted up the hatred by claiming that these “enemies” are connected to “left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals” of the Democratic party in some bizarre “deep-state” conspiracy against himself.

DDT thinks that the stripes in the U.S. flag might be blue and not red. That’s how he colored them when he was touring the Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus with First Lady Melania Trump and HHS Secretary Alex Azar. The flag of the Russian Federation (right) does have blue stripes. And no, the photo of him is not photoshopped. A few hours after he couldn’t remember the colors of the flag, he attacked CBS and ESPN over the NFL’s protest controversy about the police killing blacks, again bragging about his love for the U.S. flag.

Reunification: Government Fails

The U.S. government claimed it met the July 26 deadline to return migrant children to their parents by declaring that over 700 of them were “ineligible” out of the approximately 2,500 separated children. The judge who ordered reunification didn’t swallow the excuse. He ordered the feds to provide “detailed information” about each one and weekly status reports with telephonic conferences until resolutions.

Then DOJ decided it wouldn’t take responsibility for the crisis it caused. Instead, it wanted to dump their problems onto the ACLU who had sued the government for reunification. Last Thursday, the DOJ told a federal judge that they are not responsible for finding the 400+ parents who they deported and can’t be bothered to find. Instead, the DOJ claims, the court should require the ACLU to “fulfill their obligations to their clients.” And the DOJ wants the ACLU to tell them all information about the located parents. The ACLU had already found 12 deported parents but discovered that they were in contact with the government, which had not shared this information with the ACLU.

Yesterday, a judge called DDT’s plan to turn the work over to the ACLU “unacceptable.” The inability “to track and unite … is 100 percent the responsibility of the administration.” He gave the government an August 10 deadline to provide information on separated families to the ACLU. The judge also clearly stated that parents with minor criminal charges cannot be permanently ineligible for reunification. In addition, the judge ordered the government to “identify an individual or a team” to create and implement a procedure for those kids to be reunified with their families because it appears that the government has no plan for the remaining families.

Government officials in charge of the children are so cavalier or ignorant about the miserable conditions in their prisons that one of them, Matthew Albence, claimed that the centers were like “summer camps. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) asked, “You would send your child to these centers?” Jennifer Higgins, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, stammered, “I—I—it’s—that’s a—that’s a difficult question to answer.” It should be difficult to answer when one considers that the migrant children separated from their parents are physically, emotionally, and sexually abused; starved; dehydrated; underclothed in bitterly cold temperatures; drugged against their will; restrained; and lacking even the toys and other personal belongs that they had brought to the border. When Hirono asked Albence the same question, he sputtered “Again, I think we’re—we’re missing the point.”

At Albence’s “summer camps” in Arizona, two youth care workers were charged with sexually assaulting immigrant teenagers in the most recent claims of abuse at the privatized “shelters” for children taken from their parents at the Mexico border. One of the ex-workers, who is HIV positive, tried to get boys to anally penetrate him. Both centers are operated by the Texas company Southwest Key Programs that received almost $1 billion in taxpayer money to provide services to immigrant children. Allegations against the worker were first reported to Mesa Police Department over a year ago. The other man charged worked at a migrant center that Melania Trump visited.

Another federal contractor kept children in a Phoenix vacant office building until a neighbor reported that she saw ICE taking children into the building. The state failed to take any action about the children being kept in substandard conditions, claiming that the contractor MVM didn’t need a day care license, according to the Arizona Department of Health Services. The contractor canceled its lease after city inspectors tried to visit the building five times in one week. MVM, which does not contract for providing shelters, eventually admitted that it lied about not keeping children in the building as a short-term shelter but stated that it “provided notice to both ICE and Arizona officials about the use of this building” and that “ICE approved such use.”

A federal judge has ordered the federal government not to give psychotropic medication to migrant children at Shiloh Residential Treatment Center in Manvel (TX) without parents’ or guardians’ consent except in dire emergencies. She also ordered all children moved out of the facility except for those diagnosed as “risk of harm” to themselves or others by a licensed professional. Government officials denied that medications were only on “an emergency basis,” but children gave testimony that they were given pills “every morning and every night.” Some were forcibly injected with drugs. They suffered nausea, dizziness, depression, and weight gain. The doctor prescribing the drugs lacked board certification for child and adolescent treatment for almost ten years. Shiloh also has a history of other child abuse.

The families designated for reunification faced chaotic situations. Some children in New York were driven from one airport to another to find lights. Mayor Bill de Blasio said that about 100 children remain in New York, “with no end in sight.” Some parents defined as “released” stayed in custody for up to a week with no access to showers, phones, or religious services. Some returned children are sick and beaten, and one child even died soon after she was returned. Others were taken places with no one waiting because parents were deported. Volunteer groups frantically raised funds to help children and parents who were just dropped off with no food or ways to communicate with anyone. Families are afraid to line up for help because the separation happened after promises of assistance to them. Some parents waived rights to be reunified because they could not read the consent form and were told that they could see their children if they signed the form. Even with reunification, some children don’t recognize their parents because they were separated for so long, and others are terrified that the government will take them from their parents again.

The biggest dodge to claim “mission accomplished” for a federal judge were the parents who DHS regarded as “either not eligible, or not yet known to be eligible, for reunification.” Of these, 64 were considered criminals, an overly broad classification because some of them had not been convicted of a crime. Crimes might be a DUI or simply “wanted in El Salvador.” Another 463 parents were “not in the U.S.,” with 411 probably deported. As for the 260 parents requiring “further evaluation,” the government lawyer tried to explain that among those 260 parents, some had already been released from immigration detention and couldn’t be found. Others are children already released to non-parent families in the U.S.

Conservatives praised U.S. agencies for how hard they worked to reunify families. The only reason that they had to manually go through 12,000 records instead of “at the stroke of keystrokes … within seconds,” as HHS Secretary Alex Azar bragged about his ability to “find any child within our care for any parent,” is that not one of the three agencies in charge had any system for returning children to the parents. Azar made that statement in June; he’s been very quiet since then. DDT’s administration never intended to reunify families, and the court ruling requiring them to put migrant children back with their parents came as a shock to them. This article describes the problems and the processes.

Scott Lloyd, a DDT appointment to lead the Office of Refugee Resettlement, set up a roadblock to reunification with his demand that he personally review each request to release migrant children. He made that decision without any agency review and changed it only after the policy was stopped by an injunction last month after a lawsuit challenged Lloyd’s policy. Children are incarcerated for months waiting for him to personally sign releases. In one case, he claimed a 17-year-old boy was a gang member with no proof; the boy lacked the tattoos that Lloyd claimed he saw. He became infamous when he unconstitutionally blocked an abortion for a raped teenage girl and other undocumented teenage girls. His experience for the current job was as a policy worker with the Knights of Columbus that involved research and advocacy for Christians persecuted in Iraq.

To permanently conceal ICE crimes, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) approved ICE’s request to destroy its records related to in-custody deaths, sexual assault, and solitary confinement. ICE also lists only 112 facilities although 203 have been identified. Since January, ICE stripped away due process, privatized detention services to deadly companies, collaborated with local law enforcement to racially target people, gone after domestic abuse victims, doctored documents to detain protected immigrants, and used children as bait to arrest their parents.

Many conservatives, led by the Fox network, consistently minimize the pain of immigrants. Pundits such as Laura Ingraham talk about the “phony concern for the children” by the left. Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends, said, “These aren’t our kids…. It’s not like [DDT] is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas.” According to a recent study, people watching Fox and/or reading Breitbart are more likely to support child/family separation. On The Next Revolution with Steve Hilton, Ann Coulter accused separated migrant children of being “child actors weeping and crying …  being coached, … given scripts to read by liberals.” The same accusation was given for gun safety activists from Parkland (FL).

Conservatives are accused of having “no heart.” It’s not true: conservatives have heart but just for a highly limited number of people within their own small tribe that looks exactly like them—namely white for U.S. conservatives. That’s why they can subscribe to genocide. We’re up past Step 8 (above) in the United States.