Trump Thread

[Montmorency]

More grateful than if I never receive anything until I die of starvation. That doesn't mean however, that my gratefulness meter would be in the positive...



But aren't child camps just another form of detention? If I understand it correctly, the ruling says they can be held for up to 20 days and then they have to be released from detention. Putting them into a different detention is not a release, or is it? Does it count as some form of child care center? And in that case, wouldn't putting them there actually be required by the law since placing them in detention (with their parents) would be against the law?

God-cosplayer giveth, God-cosplayer taketh away.

You have to look at this bureaucratically.

First of all, the court standard is an ideal. After 20 days, it's not like the court sends officers to extract the kids and deliver them to Never Never Land. And the government isn't automatically punished AFAIK for any given violation. What it does, is theoretically create an opening for the conduct to be challenged in court by a victim with standing - which could itself take many weeks or months to resolve. This is how our system works more generally too, the relationship between the judicial process and subsequent action.

Then, consider that if, deliberately or otherwise, the government does not know who next-of-kin are, or is aggressive about putting and keeping those on trial - you can't just release children to roam around the country backroads alone. And it doesn't even appear that Mexico and other countries are cooperative or being cooperated with such that kids could be quickly released to their national custody. So they have to be placed with selected families somewhere in the US.

Add it up, and my prediction under Flores is:

1. For 20 days, full resort package for adult and child at government-sponsored Family Fun Kamp.
(It used to be, then, that after 20 days the families would be released with tracking. Not confirming it with sources, but IIRC fathers were heavily biased against here; mother-child was treated as a standard unit.)
2. Cases can't be resolved because there are thousands of them, so vacation is extended for extra fun times.
(So far, this will definitely happen because it already has and must given the operation of the government.)
3. Going out on a limb, I wonder if the admin, given it's publicly-stated desire to create a deterrent effect - by using children to punish adults, etc. - might not devise an argument to ""temporarily"" transfer long-detained children to all-child Survival Camps
4. They might also do this if they intensify their bizarre practice (so far only known in a few cases) of deporting the adult, but, uh, 'hanging on' to the child and keeping them in the US for distribution in the foster care system.
4.a. Many thousands of kids added to the foster system would probably overwhelm it, creating a massive backlog that again causes a situation where children will be held indefinitely. This also has the side effect of screwing a subclass of citizen children, who will have a much longer wait to be placed in a foster family after having been removed from their biological/original families for reasons of abuse, neglect, death or disability of caretaker... but those kids are almost always from poor and/or minority families, so call it a bonus.
5. Why stop at people detained at the border? Why not move on to raiding established unauthorized communities - over 10 million people in the US - and placing them in camps essentially forever until they can be 'processed'?

But everything after (2) is just my speculation on how they could make the process as nightmarish as possible. The bureaucratic default is just to keep all the captured immigrants in consolidated camps and leave 'em to rot in a slow-walked and underequipped apparatus.


EDIT: Of course if Flores is watered down or superseded, the only protections remaining may be the basic constitutional ones esp. according to 5th and 6th Amendments and habeas corpus - which the government will definitely violate with impunity.

Has been known for years, happens here as well tranquilisers and all that

USA has an ugly dillema, they could be aiding human traffickers if they don't seperate the children from those they have no idea are actually their parents, they could just as well be trafickers and organ harvisters

There is no dilemma in arbitrarily separating adults and children. This is totalitarian logic, a pure pretext, and it is exactly the backup used by Hitler and Stalin and every kind of mass murderer, that the target population is somehow contaminated and any hypothetical number of "bad elements" justifies its eradication.

Stop to think about what you are saying. If one believes there is a chance of trafficking, one should assign social workers and trained personnel to evaluate each case, erring on the side of non-separation. Your suggestion is even less wise than shutting down an airport and shipping the thousands of people therein to black sites on the possibility that one of them could be, or eventually could be, a terrorist bomber.

[Montmorency]

Further notes:


1. We've been referring to criminal process because under Trump's zero-tolerance policy, everyone crossing the border at unauthorized points is potentially being subjected to charges of misdemeanor illegal entry (usually treated as a civil infraction before), but somehow this should conflict with international and domestic law on asylum seekers given that by law it is not illegal for an asylum seeker to cross the border anywhere. I suppose it comes down again to bureaucratic tricks, and refusing to process asylum claims properly. As we know, in the last few months even asylum seekers at designated crossings were being separated from their children. It's indisputable that the objective of this government is mass internment of a whole class of people, even at great expense and great harm. At some point I wonder if "deterrence" will become a secondary motivation to the inertia of internment.

2. As far as Constitutional rights: If I'm reading this correctly, the SCOTUS decided a few months ago (indirectly, by avoiding the issue of constitutionality) that detained aliens of any category in effect do not have a constitutional or statutory right to due process or bail. This Supreme Court might seriously rule, if the government fed it the right cases or appeals, that aliens "apprehended at the border" can be detained literally forever. If the government can obtain this result (or Congress passes a bad law lol), the situation will get much worse than it is now. Think Guantanamo Bay x 1000. Then, think Abu Ghraib x 10. Pretty soon, we'll be blowing way past the Japanese-American camps...

3. The government (Jeff Sessions) has just raised the bar significantly for the asylum process, so many more people can be quickly rejected, or even facially dismissed on "credible fear" before they are even allowed to make their cases.

4. Here is a pretty good synopsis of what the standard standard detention/asylum process was up to the point of hearing the cases:

First, let’s talk about how border enforcement has operated since the Obama years. Since the so-called “migrant surge” in 2014, these were the possible things that might happen to you if you were apprehended at or near the border without papers.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

1. Unaccompanied minors from “non-contiguous countries” would be screened by the Department of Health and Human Services for possible trafficking, and placed in formal immigration court proceedings. At this point they would be placed into the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, who would usually find a relative or other sponsor inside the U.S. to release them to, pending their court date.

2. Unaccompanied minors from Mexico (and, uh, I guess theoretically Canada) would be screened by Border Patrol for trafficking and possible asylum claims. If CBP didn’t think they had a claim, they could be summarily deported.

3. Adults would be immediately deported without a hearing under a process known as “expedited removal.” If they had a child with them, the child would be deported with them. HOWEVER, they might manage to halt or pause this deportation process if they stated they were afraid to return to their country. At this point, one of several things might happen:

a. Border Patrol might pressure them to sign their own deportation order anyway. It’s pretty well-known that this occurred on a regular basis. People who survive to the later phrase of the asylum determination process have often had to be adamant about their claim.

b. Border Patrol might release them (with their child, if they had one) into the U.S. with a notice to appear in court on a particular day. Speaking from my own observation, this seems to have been done with some frequency for dads crossing alone with kids, because there weren’t facilities equipped to detain dads and kids together. There was some reluctance—partly logistical, perhaps partly moral—to split kids from their only parent, when there was reason to believe they were asylum-seekers. (That said, lots of dads were separated from their kids; it just depended what Border Patrol officer you got that day.)

c. Border Patrol might send the adult into immigration detention. If they were an adult without a child, they could be sent to any number of the many immigration prisons scattered along the border and interior of the U.S. If they had a child, however, things got more complicated.

i. Dads and other non-parent relatives would be split from kids, with the kids going to ORR custody and the adult going to an adult detention facility.

ii. Moms and kids would be sent together to so-called “family detention centers,” where they would be kept in custody preparatory to a “credible fear interview.”

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Now, group 3(c)(ii) on my list, asylum-seeking moms with kids, is the one that primarily interests us here. The practice of releasing people into the country from the border with notices to appear in court—what Trump has derisively called “catch and release”—has always been a totally discretionary policy on the part of the government, and all the Trump administration had to do was tell Border Patrol to stop doing it. But things were more complicated when it came to moms with kids.

Per a 1997 legal consent decree, the Flores Settlement, issued by a federal judge, the government is forbidden from keeping children in more restrictive custody than absolutely necessary. Specifically, if a child is placed in a detention center, the government must decide within 20 days whether they are going to deport the child or release them from detention. This provision was intended to prevent the government from keeping kids locked up for long stretches of time, which is known to be dangerous for their mental and emotional well-being. In 2016, the federal judge responsible for monitoring the government’s compliance with the decree, Judge Dolly Gee, issued a follow-up ruling stating that when children are detained alongside their parent, their parent must be released with them, if their cases are linked.

So, basically, if a mom passes her credible fear interview—which she does by demonstrating to an asylum officer that she has a “significant possibility” of being able to win an asylum case in a full hearing before a judge—she and her child are both legally required to be released into the country. (Usually, moms are released with GPS ankle monitors so that the government can track their movements and come after them if they try to flee.) If she fails her credible fear interview, she and her child would be deported immediately, unless the child has an independent claim that they opt to pursue separate from their mother’s.

I want to stress that this form of family detention, and the interview process that accompanies it, is profoundly cruel. It is a hostile and traumatizing process for the women and children who pass through it. Under a moral immigration regime, it would be done away with entirely. The only reason it has half-functioned up until now is because some lawyers devised a highly resource- and labor-intensive system for providing legal representation to detained mothers. Before that, women were rushed through the process and rapidly deported, despite having good asylum claims.

That said, the Trump administration has hated having to comply even with this minimally protective process, because the moms and kids who do pass their interviews are released at the end. And the overwhelming majority of them—in the 90 percent range, up until quite recently—do pass their interviews. (I can confirm, having seen hundreds of these cases, that this high success rate is not because asylum officers are lenient, but because the actual facts of the cases are pretty goddamn upsetting.) It’s the one form of “catch and release” that the administration—supposedly—can’t do away with by fiat, because the Flores Settlement blocks them from detaining children and their mothers for more than 20 days, and asylum-seekers can’t just be summarily deported until they’ve at least been granted an interview.

This left the Trump administration with two options to avoid releasing moms and kids:

1. Separate the moms from their kids and detain them separately; under this plan, kids would get released to sponsors or youth shelters, per Flores, but their moms could be kept in detention as long as the government wished, or

2. Get rid of the Flores Settlement so that the moms and kids could be detained together indefinitely.

With this executive order, Trump is apparently abandoning option 1 in favor of option 2, proposing to detain whole families together for the duration of their immigration proceedings. (Incidentally, the executive order authorizing this detention doesn’t distinguish at all between families who present themselves at ports of entry to ask for asylum and families who cross the border “illegally” to ask for asylum, so the administration is evidently done pretending this was a distinction that ever mattered to them.)

[Fragony]

God-cosplayer giveth, God-cosplayer taketh away.

You have to look at this bureaucratically.

First of all, the court standard is an ideal. After 20 days, it's not like the court sends officers to extract the kids and deliver them to Never Never Land. And the government isn't automatically punished AFAIK for any given violation. What it does, is theoretically create an opening for the conduct to be challenged in court by a victim with standing - which could itself take many weeks or months to resolve. This is how our system works more generally too, the relationship between the judicial process and subsequent action.

Then, consider that if, deliberately or otherwise, the government does not know who next-of-kin are, or is aggressive about putting and keeping those on trial - you can't just release children to roam around the country backroads alone. And it doesn't even appear that Mexico and other countries are cooperative or being cooperated with such that kids could be quickly released to their national custody. So they have to be placed with selected families somewhere in the US.

Add it up, and my prediction under Flores is:

1. For 20 days, full resort package for adult and child at government-sponsored Family Fun Kamp.
(It used to be, then, that after 20 days the families would be released with tracking. Not confirming it with sources, but IIRC fathers were heavily biased against here; mother-child was treated as a standard unit.)
2. Cases can't be resolved because there are thousands of them, so vacation is extended for extra fun times.
(So far, this will definitely happen because it already has and must given the operation of the government.)
3. Going out on a limb, I wonder if the admin, given it's publicly-stated desire to create a deterrent effect - by using children to punish adults, etc. - might not devise an argument to ""temporarily"" transfer long-detained children to all-child Survival Camps
4. They might also do this if they intensify their bizarre practice (so far only known in a few cases) of deporting the adult, but, uh, 'hanging on' to the child and keeping them in the US for distribution in the foster care system.
4.a. Many thousands of kids added to the foster system would probably overwhelm it, creating a massive backlog that again causes a situation where children will be held indefinitely. This also has the side effect of screwing a subclass of citizen children, who will have a much longer wait to be placed in a foster family after having been removed from their biological/original families for reasons of abuse, neglect, death or disability of caretaker... but those kids are almost always from poor and/or minority families, so call it a bonus.
5. Why stop at people detained at the border? Why not move on to raiding established unauthorized communities - over 10 million people in the US - and placing them in camps essentially forever until they can be 'processed'?

But everything after (2) is just my speculation on how they could make the process as nightmarish as possible. The bureaucratic default is just to keep all the captured immigrants in consolidated camps and leave 'em to rot in a slow-walked and underequipped apparatus.


EDIT: Of course if Flores is watered down or superseded, the only protections remaining may be the basic constitutional ones esp. according to 5th and 6th Amendments and habeas corpus - which the government will definitely violate with impunity.



There is no dilemma in arbitrarily separating adults and children. This is totalitarian logic, a pure pretext, and it is exactly the backup used by Hitler and Stalin and every kind of mass murderer, that the target population is somehow contaminated and any hypothetical number of "bad elements" justifies its eradication.

Stop to think about what you are saying. If one believes there is a chance of trafficking, one should assign social workers and trained personnel to evaluate each case, erring on the side of non-separation. Your suggestion is even less wise than shutting down an airport and shipping the thousands of people therein to black sites on the possibility that one of them could be, or eventually could be, a terrorist bomber.

I understand what I am saying, and what's wrong with it. It wouldn't surprise me if it aren't evil people asking for this though, if it is only a deterrant it's atrocious but there might be more to it.

No need to shut down airports by the way, too late they are already here

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I know, it's just that detaining them together is still a little less evil than detaining them separated. Sometimes you have to take what you can get. Although it says they will have to release the children after 20 days. What happens to them then?

Lone children roaming the desert?

I think they keep them longer then, if I recall the reports, unless they can be released TO someone. Not sure if this is working well.

[Fragony]

I think they keep them longer then, if I recall the reports, unless they can be released TO someone. Not sure if this is working well.

Who would that someone be, and who is watching them after them when they are released to 'someone'. As harsh as this all may sounds, there are so many possibilities for truly cynical people. I reckon that parents prefer to be with their children in the not so bad Mexico rather than be seperated from them. As atrocious as it all may sound at first glance it's defendable if you look at what is possible, I just hope it's for the right reasons

[Husar]

Who would that someone be, and who is watching them after them when they are released to 'someone'. As harsh as this all may sounds, there are so many possibilities for truly cynical people. I reckon that parents prefer to be with their children in the not so bad Mexico rather than be seperated from them. As atrocious as it all may sound at first glance it's defendable if you look at what is possible, I just hope it's for the right reasons

So in your world, all the people who do cynical things all day are harmless and all the people who do relatively harmless things all day are the cynical ones we have to watch? You're basically driving towards a cliff telling the driver to go faster because the earth could open up behind the car and swallow it, you never know, it could happen any time.

[Fragony]

So in your world, all the people who do cynical things all day are harmless and all the people who do relatively harmless things all day are the cynical ones we have to watch? You're basically driving towards a cliff telling the driver to go faster because the earth could open up behind the car and swallow it, you never know, it could happen any time.

So you say that *&()*&(*⁽⁽(⁽%%*%((

Reminds me of an interview posyed earlier here

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Who would that someone be, and who is watching them after them when they are released to 'someone'. As harsh as this all may sounds, there are so many possibilities for truly cynical people. I reckon that parents prefer to be with their children in the not so bad Mexico rather than be seperated from them. As atrocious as it all may sound at first glance it's defendable if you look at what is possible, I just hope it's for the right reasons

The separation of minors from parents while processing refugees/attempted immigrants has been occurring, at a low level, since at least the middle of the Clinton administration.


We already HAD folks walking up to the border with kids, being separated from them, and then having those kids picked up by relatives in the States....and the adults on both ends were merely transporting the kids for sex-work. They passed laws during Bush 43 to try to curtail this, and now those guidelines are, in some cases, adding confusion to the proper treatment of such persons now.


USA border/immigration/refugee/illegals practices and procedures are a patchwork quilt of band-aids with no comprehensive efforts to rationalize or resolve the whole thing. In part, sadly, that is because the current chaos serves some political and economic interests to a number of different "players" on both sides of the border.

[HopAlongBunny]

Donald Trump
Opiate of the masses?:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...upport-in-2016

So is opioid use and Trump support a symptom or a cause

[Husar]

Donald Trump
Opiate of the masses?:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...upport-in-2016

So is opioid use and Trump support a symptom or a cause

They're both symptoms of the same cause.

The neoliberal capitalist system and the inability or unwillingness of the democrats to do anything about it while they focus on minority issues (identity politics).
I'm not saying socialism is the only answer, because some of these unemployed opioid former coal miners still believe that full on capitalism will bring them the american dream from coal miner to millionaire or have archaic views about manhood being derived from the amount of coal dust or exhaust gasses a man can swallow before dropping dead.
Sanders could still have won though since he also promised radical change and to look out for the small man.

edit: should read the full article before replying, it's actually mentioned.

[Montmorency]

believe that full on capitalism will bring them the american dream from coal miner to millionaire

Building off the comparisons to pre-modern aristocracy, I have a new catch-phrase brewing for the trope of poor-to-rich socioeconomic mobility:

Nobility mobility is debility

Comments and suggestions?

[Gilrandir]

Building off the comparisons to pre-modern aristocracy, I have a new catch-phrase brewing for the trope of poor-to-rich socioeconomic mobility:

Nobility mobility is debility

Comments and suggestions?

I suggest

She sells sea shells on the sea shore.

[rory_20_uk]

We don't know that.

Obama had zero executive experience before he became President but relatively few people seemed worried about that.

People just don't like Trump.

Obama was a lawyer for a long time before he was President, and by all accounts continued to act like one - very detailed focused, generally cautious and slow to act.
Trump is a... "personality" of little substance. And by all accounts he is continuing to act like one - views life as a reflection of TV, decisions should be decisive and made quickly; ratings = "winning" and detail = loosers.

Some genuinely prefer the second way of behaviour. They think government is too slow, are xenophobic and are anxious about how their life is not improving and blame this on everyone that is not them.

Obama did many things that were wrong - but he did it in a "normal" manner so most things happened behind the scenes or at the very least in a lawful way. Trump prefers to do things as gestures with little interest in whether things are lawful since no one will follow the boooooring case through the courts - least of all his supporters.

There are many things structurally wrong with the political system in the USA - many because things haven't been altered in over 100 years when the country was much more rural; others such as the electoral colleges are no longer required - direct voting with a decent AV system would be more likely to get a candidate that more people liked or a more balanced system of votes in at least the House if not the Senate as well.

But comparing it to other large bodies - which only the EU, India (and arguably China) exist it is the best by a country mile. Which itself is rather depressing.

[Pannonian]

Obama was a lawyer for a long time before he was President, and by all accounts continued to act like one - very detailed focused, generally cautious and slow to act.
Trump is a... "personality" of little substance. And by all accounts he is continuing to act like one - views life as a reflection of TV, decisions should be decisive and made quickly; ratings = "winning" and detail = loosers.

Some genuinely prefer the second way of behaviour. They think government is too slow, are xenophobic and are anxious about how their life is not improving and blame this on everyone that is not them.

Obama did many things that were wrong - but he did it in a "normal" manner so most things happened behind the scenes or at the very least in a lawful way. Trump prefers to do things as gestures with little interest in whether things are lawful since no one will follow the boooooring case through the courts - least of all his supporters.

There are many things structurally wrong with the political system in the USA - many because things haven't been altered in over 100 years when the country was much more rural; others such as the electoral colleges are no longer required - direct voting with a decent AV system would be more likely to get a candidate that more people liked or a more balanced system of votes in at least the House if not the Senate as well.

But comparing it to other large bodies - which only the EU, India (and arguably China) exist it is the best by a country mile. Which itself is rather depressing.

The UK system has the potential to be much better. However, the most important and powerful component in the UK system, the Commons, is currently at its worst I've ever seen. Another of its components, meant to hold it to account, the press, is also atrocious. They are institutionally good, but the individuals currently populating and driving them are awful.

[a completely inoffensive name]

There are many things structurally wrong with the political system in the USA - many because things haven't been altered in over 100 years when the country was much more rural; others such as the electoral colleges are no longer required - direct voting with a decent AV system would be more likely to get a candidate that more people liked or a more balanced system of votes in at least the House if not the Senate as well.

But comparing it to other large bodies - which only the EU, India (and arguably China) exist it is the best by a country mile. Which itself is rather depressing.

We were able to start from scratch. I have been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolution's podcast, most recently the series on the (failed?) 1848 Revolutions. It seems that even post-WW2, the legacy of nobility and elitist power structures weighs on current European political structures. For instance, why hasn't the UK gone full Republic? The PM is clearly the one running the show, the royal family is just a tourist trap that prints money for the state by luring us curious Americans to come over.

[rory_20_uk]

We were able to start from scratch. I have been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolution's podcast, most recently the series on the (failed?) 1848 Revolutions. It seems that even post-WW2, the legacy of nobility and elitist power structures weighs on current European political structures. For instance, why hasn't the UK gone full Republic? The PM is clearly the one running the show, the royal family is just a tourist trap that prints money for the state by luring us curious Americans to come over.

At this moment in time, the USA / France and Turkey are the best reasons why keeping the Monarchy is better than the alternative: a weak structure with technically all the power helps prevent a strong structure from grabbing all the power. And the UK needs every method of getting in revenue - if this is one I'm all for it!

Elitist power tends to be in power since whoever has power is called the elites. So, yes they've remained and I imagine always will. If the UK were to become a Republic what would be gained exactly?

[Husar]

Elitist power tends to be in power since whoever has power is called the elites.

Sounds like you've been missing out on recent developments, this isn't universally the case anymore:

[rory_20_uk]

Sounds like you've been missing out on recent developments, this isn't universally the case anymore:

Very droll...

By almost every metric I measure the value of a human being the man is worthless, but in terms of most metrics of power he is in the top fraction of a percentage point, and therefore is one of the "Nuveau Riche" Elite.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Elitist power tends to be in power since whoever has power is called the elites. So, yes they've remained and I imagine always will. If the UK were to become a Republic what would be gained exactly?

Not sure how accurate that statement is. I wouldn't define elites simply as the ones who have power in government. Decision making powers are delegatable, easy to imagine that through an aristocracy that bribes the politicians (a legitimate worry among the left in the US under citizens united). In the other extreme who are the elites in a theoretical democratic body picked by random among the population every four years? Unless you are just making a tautological argument that the elite have 'power' in any form, thus those who have power are elites.

As far as what the UK would gain, it depends on what you put into it. The political process shapes the culture and vice versa. What are the expectations of the house of lords under the current system? To be the detached, conservative element of land owners able to check the passions of the commons? Does that class even exist in 21st century capitalism? Over here, captains of industry are often just as impassioned and active in the world around them as the public.

If the remnants of the Kingdom were thrown off and the UK went full republic, how would the perception of the house of lords in this new political context change and adapt? Could this new perception bring about new public expectations and thus higher accountability to the upper chamber? This isn't so far fetched, the US has this exact conversation with our own Senate, which used to be selected by state legislatures, now by popular vote.

[rory_20_uk]

Not sure how accurate that statement is. I wouldn't define elites simply as the ones who have power in government. Decision making powers are delegatable, easy to imagine that through an aristocracy that bribes the politicians (a legitimate worry among the left in the US under citizens united). In the other extreme who are the elites in a theoretical democratic body picked by random among the population every four years? Unless you are just making a tautological argument that the elite have 'power' in any form, thus those who have power are elites.

As far as what the UK would gain, it depends on what you put into it. The political process shapes the culture and vice versa. What are the expectations of the house of lords under the current system? To be the detached, conservative element of land owners able to check the passions of the commons? Does that class even exist in 21st century capitalism? Over here, captains of industry are often just as impassioned and active in the world around them as the public.

If the remnants of the Kingdom were thrown off and the UK went full republic, how would the perception of the house of lords in this new political context change and adapt? Could this new perception bring about new public expectations and thus higher accountability to the upper chamber? This isn't so far fetched, the US has this exact conversation with our own Senate, which used to be selected by state legislatures, now by popular vote.

In the reality most live, politicians are bought by the wealthy. Sure, there are exceptions such as Theodore Roosevelt, but they are generally hated by those who rather like the status-quo.

The House of Lords shouldn't work. All the ingredients are utterly wrong. Yet somehow it seems to do a much better job and at less of a cost than most alternatives. The Lords is mainly not the landed gentry. Sadly there are a fair number of ex-politicians who have been kicked upstairs but there are also people who are genuinely competent and able to properly review legislation.

If one is holding up the Senate as a great example of a better second chamber I'd really rather stick to the Lords, thanks - copying that gridlocked mess of a Federal Government would be a disaster.

If we were to have a President, if we are lucky we go the way of the Nordics and Germany (so many sentences seem to end up like that). Or we might go the way of France / the USA / Turkey. There is definitely a small theoretical upside - but there is a massive theoretical downside: Tony Blair as President anyone with the two houses stacked with his yes-men? He did enough damage as it was!

[Montmorency]

Meanwhile, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) visited a few of the internment facilities:

Sunday morning, I flew to McAllen, Texas to find out what's really happening to immigrant families ripped apart by the Trump administration.

There's one thing that's very clear: The crisis at our border isn't over.

I went straight from the airport to the McAllen Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing center that is the epicenter of Donald Trump's so-called "zero-tolerance" policy. This is where border patrol brings undocumented migrants for intake before they are either released, deported, turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), or, in the case of unaccompanied or separated children, placed in the custody of Health and Human Services.

From the outside, the CBP processing center looks like any other warehouse on a commercial street lined with warehouses. There's no clue about the horrors inside.

Before we could get in, CBP insisted we had to watch a government propaganda video. There's no other way to describe it – it's like a movie trailer. It was full of dramatic narration about the "illegals" crossing our border, complete with gory pictures about the threats that these immigrants bring to the United States, from gangs to skin rashes. The star of the show is CBP, which, according to the video, has done a great job driving down the numbers.

Then an employee described what we were about to see. "They have separate pods. I'll call them pods. I don't really know how they name them." Clearly they had gotten the memo not to call them what they are: cages. Every question I asked them had a complicated answer that led to two more questions – even the simple question about how long people were held there. "Nobody is here longer than 24 hours." "Well, maybe 24-48 hours." "72 hours max." And "no children are separated out." "Well, except older children."

The warehouse is enormous, with a solid concrete floor and a high roof. It is filled with cages. Cages for men. Cages for women. Cages for mamas with babies. Cages for girls. Cages for boys.

The stench – body odor and fear – hits the second the door is opened. The first cages are full of men. The chain link is about 12-15 feet high, and the men are tightly packed. I don't think they could all lie down at the same time. There's a toilet at the back of the cage behind a half-wall, but no place to shower or wash up. One man kept shouting, "A shower, please. Just a shower."

I asked the men held in cage after cage where they were from. Nearly all of them were from El Salvador, Guatemala, or Honduras.

Then I asked them how long they had been there – and the answers were all over the map, from a few days to nearly two weeks (72 hours max?). The CBP agents rushed to correct the detained men, claiming that their answers couldn't be right. My immigration specialist on the trip who speaks fluent Spanish made sure the men understood that the question was, "How long have you been in the building?" Their answers didn't change.

Cage after cage. Same questions, same answers.

Next we came into the area where the children were held. These cages were bigger with far more people. In the center of the cage, there's a freestanding guard tower probably a story or story-and-a-half taller to look down over the children. The girls are held separately in their own large cage. The children told us that they had come to the United States with family and didn't know where they had been taken. Eleven years old. Twelve. Locked in a cage with strangers. Many hadn't talked to their mothers or fathers. They didn't know where they were or what would happen to them next.
The children were quiet. Early afternoon, and they just sat. Some were on thin mats with foil blankets pulled over their heads. They had nothing – no books, no toys, no games. They looked shell shocked.

And then there were the large cages with women and small children. Women breast-feeding their young children.

When we went over to the mamas with babies, I asked them about why they had left their home countries. One young mother had a 4-year-old child. She said she had been threatened by the gangs in El Salvador. She had given a drink of water to a police officer, and the gang decided she must be in with the police. The longer she spoke, the more agitated she got – that she would never do that, that she understood the risk with the gangs, but that the gangs believed she did it. She sold everything she had and fled with her son to the United States.

One thing you won't see much of in the CBP processing center? Fathers caged with their children. After pressing the CBP agents, they explained that men traveling with children are automatically released from the facility. They just don't have the cages there to hold them. Women with small children, on the other hand, could be detained indefinitely. I pressed them on this again and again. The only answer: they claimed to be protecting "the safety of the mother and children."

CBP said that fathers with children, pregnant women, mothers of children with special needs, and other "lucky ones" who are released from the processing center are sent over to Catholic Charities' Humanitarian Respite Center for help. That was my next stop in McAllen. Sister Norma, her staff, and volunteers are truly doing God's work. Catholic Charities provides food, a shower, clean clothes, and medicine to those who need it. The center tries to explain the complicated process to the people, and the volunteers help them get on a bus to a family member in the United States.

Sister Norma introduced me to a father and his teenage son from Honduras. The father said that a gang had been after his son, determined that the boy would join the gang. The only way for the boy to escape was to run. The man left his wife and four daughters in Honduras to bring his son to the United States. His only plan is to find work here to send money home to his family. His cousin lives in New Jersey, so CBP sent their paperwork to the local ICE center in New Jersey, and they would soon begin the long bus ride there.

Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley provides a lifesaving service to people of all faiths and backgrounds, but with a humanitarian crisis in their backyard, they're clearly stretched as thin as it gets. With more money and volunteers, they would gladly help more people.

I asked Sister Norma about the women and babies who were in indefinite detention. She said her group would open their arms and take care of them, get them cleaned up and fed and on a bus to a family member – if only ICE would release them.

"This is a moral issue. We are all part of this human family," they say.

Next, I met with some of the legal experts on the frontlines of this crisis – lawyers from the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Border Rights Center of the Texas ACLU, and the federal public defenders.

I gave them a rundown of everything I'd seen so far in McAllen, particularly when it comes to reuniting parents and children, and they raised some of my worst fears:

The Trump administration may be "reunifying" families, but their definition of a family is only a parent and a child. If, for example, a 9-year-old crosses with an 18-year-old sister – or an aunt or uncle, or a grandparent, or anyone who isn't the child's documented legal guardian – they are not counted as a family and they will be separated.

Mothers and children may be considered "together" if they're held in the same gigantic facility, even if they're locked in separate cages with no access to one another. (In the world of CBP and ICE, that's how the 10-year-old girls locked in a giant cage are "not separated" from their mothers who are in cages elsewhere in the facility.)

In the process of "reunifying" families, the government may possibly count a family as reunited by sending the child to a distant relative they've never met – not their parents. Some relatives may be unwilling to claim these children because it would be inviting ICE to investigate their own families.

Parents are so desperate to be reunited with their children that they may be trading in their legal right to asylum.

The system for tracking separated families is virtually unknown, if one exists at all. One expert worries that for some families, just a simple photo may be all the documentation that the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Health and Human Services have to reunite them. (I sincerely hope that's not true.)

The longer the day went on, the more questions I had about how the Trump administration plans to fix the crisis they've created at the border. So my last stop of the day was at the Port Isabel Detention Center, about an hour east of McAllen. It's one of the largest detention facilities in Texas.

The Department of Homeland Security had released some details on its plan to reunify families. The release noted that Port Isabel will be the "primary family reunification and removal center for adults in their custody."

Let's be clear: Port Isabel isn't a reunification center. It's a detention center. A prison.

There's no ambiguity on this point. I met with the head of the facility. He said several times that they had no space for children, no way to care for them, and no plans to bring any children to his locked-down complex. When I pressed on what was the plan for reunification of children with their parents, he speculated that HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services) would take the children somewhere, but it certainly wasn't going to be to his facility. When I asked how long HHS would take, he speculated that it would be weeks, but he said that was up to them. He had his job to do: He would hold these mothers and fathers until he received orders to send them somewhere else. Period.

So let me say it again. This is a prison – not a reunification center.

We toured the center. It is huge – multiple buildings isolated on a sun-baked expanse of land far from any town. We didn't go to the men's area, but the women are held in a large bunk-bed facility with a concrete outdoor exercise area. It's locked, double-locked, and triple locked. Tall fences topped with razor wire are everywhere, each backed up by a second row of fences also topped with razor wire.

An ICE official brought in a group of nine detained mothers who had volunteered to speak to us. I don't believe that ICE cherry-picked these women for the meeting, because everything they told me was horrifying.

Each mother told us her own story about crossing the border, being taken to a processing center, and the point that they were separated from their child or children. In every case, the government had lied to them about where their children were being taken. In every case, save one, no mother had spoken to her child in the days since the separation. And in every case, no mother knew where her child was.

At the time of separation, most of the mothers were told their children would be back. One woman had been held at "the icebox," a center that has earned its nickname for being extremely cold. When the agent came to take her child, she was told that it was just too cold for the child in the center, and that they were just going to keep the child warm until she was transferred. That was mid-June. She hasn't seen her child since.

One mother had been detained with her child. They were sleeping together on the floor of one of the cages, when, at 3:00am, the guards took her away. She last saw her 7-year-old son sleeping on the floor. She cried over and over, "I never got to say goodbye. I never got to say goodbye." That was early-June, and she hasn't seen him since.

Even though the CBP officials at the processing center told me that mothers with children that have special needs would be released, one of the mothers I spoke with had been separated from her special needs child. She talked about her child who doesn't have properly formed legs and feet and walks with great difficulty. One of the mothers spoke of another mother in the facility who is very worried because her separated child is deaf and doesn't speak at all.

The women I met were traumatized, weeping, and begging for help. They don't understand what is happening to them – and they're begging to be reunited with their kids.

Detainees can pay to make phone calls, but all of their possessions are taken from them at the processing center. The only way they can get money for a call is for someone to put money on their accounts. I asked if people or charities could donate money so that they'd be able to make phone calls to their family or lawyers, but they said no – a donor would need the individual ID number for every person detained at the center, and ICE obviously isn't going to release that information.

Three young lawyers were at Port Isabel at the same time we were. The lawyers told us that their clients – the people they've spoken to in the detention center – have strong and credible cases for asylum. But the entire process for being granted asylum depends on one phone call with an immigration official where they make the case for why they should be allowed to stay. One of the first questions a mother will be asked is, "Have you been separated from a child?" For some of the women, just asking that question makes them fall apart and weep.

The lawyers are worried that these women are in such a fragile and fractured state, they're in no shape to make the kind of detailed, credible case needed for themselves or their children. They had no chance in our system because they've lost their children and desperately want them back.

We stayed inside at Port Isabel for more than two hours – much longer than the 45 minutes we had been promised. When I finally went to bed that night, I thought about something the mothers had told me – something that will likely haunt me for a long time.

The mothers say that they can hear babies cry at night.

This isn't about politics. This isn't about Democrats or Republicans. This is about human beings. Children held in cages today. Babies scattered all over this country. And mamas who, in the dark of night, hear them cry.

I'm still working through everything I saw, but I wanted you to know the full story. The fight for these children and families isn't over – not by a long shot.

[Montmorency]

So, socialist Latina ran against one of the top Democrats in the House of Reps in the D primary, the party boss in New York or somesuch, real Tammany Hall character, real cozy with Wall Street, major bursar and nexus of PAC money throughout the country for the Democratic epilektoi.


https://theintercept.com/2018/06/05/...ampaign-video/

She waaaann. She won decise.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 15,897 57%
Joseph Crowley 11,761 42%

Those numbers are hilarious. (New York has a uniquely restricted primary system, but that's a story for another day.)

Platform:

*Medicare for all (TBF her opponent was one of the first national Democrats to push this on the agenda)
*Tuition-free public college
*Federal jobs guarantee
*Federal Assault Weapons/Hi-Capacity Mag Ban
*Abolish ICE
*Housing as a human right
*Restore Glass Steagall
*Marshall Plan for Puerto Rico
*etc

All these socialist and social-democratic candidates surging across the country at least give us the opportunity for a testing bed, and hopefully a realization on the national level that a party needs a coherent agenda that persist beyond a single election cycle.

Since this is the Trump thread, here is what Trump had to say about Crowley's defeat:

Wow! Big Trump Hater Congressman Joe Crowley, who many expected was going to take Nancy Pelosi’s place, just LOST his primary election. In other words, he’s out! That is a big one that nobody saw happening. Perhaps he should have been nicer, and more respectful, to his President!

In other news, but check it on your own time, multiple-run failure and centrally-directed interloper Juanita Perez Williams was handily beaten by a technocrat lefty in an upstate primary. Syracuse has become more competitive in the past 15 years, so a good case study this November for the center >> left vs. center-right theory.

In a few months, look forward as well to the big matchup in state-level primary: Nixon v Cuomo.

[Husar]

Just came across the Ocasio story as well, she's only a small Bernie and hasn't won against the Republican yet I assume (or is that an auto-win in her district?), but I still consider it a win for America.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Vis-à-vis the compromise thread, polarization, and Trump, this primary is pretty indicative of how the polarization is increasing.

Trump's deplorables continue to back him avidly despite his being a misogynist grandstander BECAUSE he is combative and tries to reduce things to black/white confrontations.

The Dems, especially in the NE, are truly starting to crystalize in favor of out and out social democracy (which has never been mainstream for the USA before).


Both camps want the alternate camp obliterated (politically).



I now believe that we are more polarized than at any point in our history prior to 1840 and after the Civil War.



I am still not sure whether Trump is a cause, a symptom, or a bit of both.

[drone]

Bit of both, but he is an accelerant.

We'll see how much his deplorables support him when he kills their jobs. Badmouthing Harley for problems he caused, or badmouthing Germans and BMW in South Carolina seem like poor rhetorical choices.

[a completely inoffensive name]

The Dems, especially in the NE, are truly starting to crystalize in favor of out and out social democracy (which has never been mainstream for the USA before).

I now believe that we are more polarized than at any point in our history prior to 1840 and after the Civil War.

There was a growing Socialist party during the Progressive Era. Managed to make progress in local and state governments until the first red scare after WW1.
Third red scare incoming?

I've been saying polarization is at a scary level for a while. Even Monty is beating the drum of no compromise. Sadly, he may be right if the left is to survive past 2020.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Bit of both, but he is an accelerant.

We'll see how much his deplorables support him when he kills their jobs. Badmouthing Harley for problems he caused, or badmouthing Germans and BMW in South Carolina seem like poor rhetorical choices.

They already blame the companies, not Trump. Evidence of a cult of personality; We are far removed from economics driven politics here.
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/62364...ction-overseas

[Montmorency]

There was a growing Socialist party during the Progressive Era. Managed to make progress in local and state governments until the first red scare after WW1.
Third red scare incoming?

I've been saying polarization is at a scary level for a while. Even Monty is beating the drum of no compromise. Sadly, he may be right if the left is to survive past 2020.

Debs got <10% of the presidential vote, right? Then again, that's why Sanders didn't/won't run as an Independent.

Compromise is fine when goals overlap. Compromise for compromise's sake, decorum for decorum's sake: that's nothing but a destructive game for people who have no stake in the consequences of their actions. Why do almost all Democrats almost always vote for the admin's judge picks, when Republicans do not and would not extend this courtesy (wrong word)?. Is it advantageous toward ideals of "bipartisanship" or the integrity and legitimacy of the judicial institution, even on their own terms, to grease along nominees whose sole purpose in life is to eradicate a century of liberal jurisprudence?

Fight demotism with populism, I guess.

[a completely inoffensive name]

I've been saying polarization is at a scary level for a while.

But then again, I could be wrong and this is just normal for our democracy...

[Montmorency]

damn it

They already blame the companies, not Trump. Evidence of a cult of personality; We are far removed from economics driven politics here.
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/26/62364...ction-overseas

It's certainly scary to think the only way to discredit Trumpism is either massive one-on-one engagement with boots on the ground (i.e. neocolonialism), or the advent of extreme suffering and privation among the Trump-supporting population.